Transcriber: Aya Gamal Reviewer: Amanda Zhu
This is my grandmother.
Born in 1911, a true Depression baby,
Mynona spent her nearly 109 years -
yeah, you heard that correctly, she lived to be 109 years old -
embracing behaviors of learned frugality and sometimes deviancy.
You see, growing up, we were regularly banned from buffet restaurants
because Nona would stuff dinner rolls in her pockets
and one time even put an entire piece of lasagna in her purse
and straight up walked out.
I mean, she was a spicy lady.
(Laughter)
But waste and excess were unthinkable to Nona.
And even though she really didn’t know much about climate change,
she was kind of an unlikely sustainability hero to me.
Now, I have spent the past two decades
working to make sustainable habits stick with the mainstream.
I’ve done over 250 TV segments.
I’ve been a policy adviser to two governors
and written countless pieces and even a book,
all on Eco-friendly living.
And what I found through my work
is that sustainable policies and practices,
they just don’t work,
unless one, individuals believe they are somewhat responsible for climate change -
that’s kind of an important one -
and two, people believe that their individual actions
can actually make a difference.
Now, something happened in the United States after World War II
that changed the trajectory of the planet, phoo! pretty much forever.
And I’m talking about the US specifically here
because I don't mean to brag,
but up until just a few years ago,
we were the biggest carbon polluter on the planet.
(Laughter)
And considering that we make up for less than 5%
of the world’s population.
That is, like, really bad, y’all.
Really bad.
And by 1945, we had four million troops coming home from war,
and those dudes needed jobs.
So “production” became the word of the day.
We started to see industry ramp up and pivot,
and we’d see factories that were making machine guns and propellers
start to make, whoo! peacetime pleasures like garbage disposals and dishwashers.
But here’s the challenge.
How do you make someone like my Nona,
who had been going without for many years,
suddenly want to buy all this crap?
Well, you start an advertising campaign, of course.
So this time, we don’t just see industry ramp up.
We see the advent of the modern-day advertising agency.
Yup, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryces
were popping up all over the dang place.
And their mission was clear:
create demand for items Americans had gone without
for basically ever or had never even seen before.
Like, what the heck is this thing, y’all.
(Laughter)
For real, is that a flying lawnmower?
I have zero idea.
So we start to see a shift from this,
wartime advertisements that are encouraging people
to live lightly to ration to carpool,
or else you’re going to be riding with Hitler -
that is frightening -
to this,
a post-war advertising campaign
emboldening Americans to go completely freaking ham.
And yeah, that’s a baby wrapped in cellophane.
That is a totally terrible idea.
(Laughter)
Always a bad idea.
This one’s my favorite:
“After total war can be total living.”
And what total living in this case meant
was off-the-rack fast fashion, meat at every meal, bigger homes
and a shiny new car in every garage.
And the rise of a material that so many consider disposable,
even though it is not: plastic.
And these advertisements were working.
Just look at the meteoric spike in attendant emissions during this time.
You see, Americans, we were consuming and producing ourselves
into a global climate catastrophe,
Isn’t that fun?
And what was supposed to be the antidote to total war
created, arguably, the biggest battle of our entire lives -
because we’re fighting it right now.
That’s why I’m up here, and that’s why you’re there.
And you would think that our consumption habits
would slow down from there,
but no, they just kept going up like some kind of phallus-shaped rocket
taking Jeff Bezos to space.
(Laughter)
Hey, Jeffy.
Space Cowboy.
I worked really hard on that graphic.
It took me like a whole evening.
But look, we are the cause of accelerated climate change.
And I truly believe that because we are the cause,
we can be the cure.
Now, how? you might ask.
Well, one, people are actually really powerful.
You are incredibly powerful as an individual.
Just look at the rise in plant-based food options and electric vehicles
over the past few decades.
These are classic cases of shifting supply and demand
because individual consumer habits shifted.
And what about the current campaign against plastic straws?
You all familiar?
Yeah, they suck, right?
Oh my God, I’ll see myself out.
I’m so sorry.
What a dead joke.
Whoo!
(Laughter)
A few years ago, I was in Texas, taking Nona to get a milkshake,
because that used to be our way to bribe her to hang out with us
because as she got older, she was just really over us.
Anyway.
So exhibit A, Nona
(Laughter)
and her milkshake.
And as we’re at this fast food joint,
a lady rolls up in a Hummer.
She orders a cheeseburger and a sweet tea to go.
And while the gentleman behind the counter
is stuffing her to-go bag
with enough ketchup packets and plastic cutlery
for like five gajillion people,
this woman says with such unironic conviction,
“Oh god, no straw.
They are so bad for the environment.”
(Laughter)
All right, I mean, it’s better than nothing.
But what I'll call the final straw actually started with one person,
a nine-year-old boy
and his well-intentioned but somewhat misguided statistic
that claimed that Americans use enough plastic straws every day
to fill 125 school buses.
One kid, one home-crunched statistic
launched thousands of news articles and government referendums
and even got Starbucks to swap straws for those way worse plastic lids.
One person started that movement.
Now, just since I’ve been standing up here,
Eight miles of the ozone layer have been restored,
a healing process that began some 40 plus years ago
when individuals,
not governments, not corporations -
individuals -
began to boycott items that used harmful CFCs,
chlorofluorocarbons.
It’s really hard to say when you’ve been talking this long
and your mouth gets dry.
Anyway.
Government eventually got on board with regulating those CFCs,
but it was many years after this individually sparked movement.
And just look.
Look at what we can accomplish,
what we can restore when the actions of powerful individuals,
that is you and me,
are met with the macro-actions of industry and government.
Now, another reason why you are essential
in the fight to save the planet.
Individuals, for better or worse, are actually very influential.
How many y’all grew up here,
and well, if so-and-so, jumped off a bridge?
Would you?
Yeah.
And for many people, actually,
an astonishing, staggering amount of people,
the answer to that question is actually yes.
It’s frightening.
And in a recent poll,
Eighty-one percent of respondents
said they were so influenced by their friends social media posts
they would be willing to change their own behaviors and values.
What?
And research shows us that our sphere of influence goes way, way beyond this,
that our behaviors are so powerful
they’re like a contagion through our networks,
influencing people three degrees removed from us.
So we don’t need any like TikTok dances and weird Instagram filters
to be climate influencers.
We just need to recognize that the impact of our behaviors
extends so far beyond ourselves.
And with that comes the responsibility
to make good choices that we actually want to have catch on.
I’m going to take a temperature check here.
How many y’all are feeling a little bit more powerful
and a little bit more influential,
you can lie to me, just make me feel good, yeah.
(Cheers) (Laughter)
TED Talk, it’s working.
Amazing.
All right, allow me to throw one more.
You can save the planet.
Iron on this fire, all right.
Taking care of the planet
is a powerful form of taking care of ourselves,
and of others.
How many of you experience some form of climate anxiety?
Show of hands.
That’s not enough hands.
Y’all are fibbin’.
Well, congratulations, you are like 68 percent of the population,
which I think is a pretty conservative estimate.
And what we know about climate anxiety
is that it doesn’t rally us around a solution.
No, it does the opposite.
It makes us want to grab a cheap box wine and a weighted blanket and give up.
And we see this so overwhelmingly in the younger generation.
A recent study had 75 percent of people aged 16 to 24
saying that their future feels frightening.
This isn’t some kind of Ashlee-Piper-smear-an-eyeliner,
listening-to-the-cure, slamming-her-door teenage angst.
This is young people feeling the very real and intense weight of a problem
created by prior generations who have since either peaced out
or worse - deny the problem all together.
The nerve! OK?
And then you couple that with a 24/7 news cycle
and the daily manifestations of climate change -
the wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding, rising temperatures.
And the problem feels inescapable.
So what do we do?
What do we do when an issue is so large, so persistent that it paralyzes us?
Well, after the Prozac and the bath bombs, we’re going to need to take action.
(Laughter)
Yeah, we’re going to take action
because taking action, no matter how small,
actually builds feelings of hope, and it eases anxiety.
And after all, anxiety is just energy,
and that energy can be channeled into anything, anywhere any time,
you can channel that anxiety into biking to work, starting a compost,
going meat-free for a week.
These micro-actions build hope like a muscle.
They help us leverage that sphere of influence I was just talking about.
And frankly, that just make us feel way better.
I tell this to people all the time:
Sustainability is a powerful and effective form of self-care.
Now, Mynona passed away last summer.
And up until her final days,
her pockets were still laced with pilfered mints and bingo chips
and even a wash-and-reused piece of tinfoil,
I’m pretty sure she was keeping at the ready
for the next time she went to the buffet.
But her legacy of living lightly continues to inspire me.
And after today, maybe you, too.
See, now is the time for us to meet the moment with courage.
To become reacquainted with our personal power to understand
that because we are the cause of accelerated climate change,
by golly, we can be the solution.
And because we are more anxious and influential than ever before.
We have to be.
It’s my hope that you now feel mightier,
that you truly believe you are an important part of saving this planet.
Because that’s just the truth.
You ,,,
and we ...
are the ones we have been waiting for.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)