Translator: Amanda Chu Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
In the early 1970s, the Beatles broke up,
and nine months later, I was born.
(Laughter)
To this day, I still kind of harbor some resentment
because I think my mother's to blame.
I think she's somehow involved in that.
But I grew up within walking distance of here, actually, in West Philadelphia,
and it was a little wood house, called a row house,
with fake brick and fake shutters that were glued to the side.
And in that context, I started designing buildings.
That's me, by the way.
I'm a cherry hot fudge sundae.
(Laughter)
And in this context - this is what I grew up in, right? -
so as a kid,
I remember distinctly McDonald's released the first Happy Meal in 1979,
and three days later, Three Mile Island exploded.
And somehow, I always thought that they were connected.
(Laughter)
And right around that same time, my mother took me to see this building.
This is the Beth Shalom Synagogue by Frank Lloyd Wright.
It's his only building in Philadelphia,
and I encourage you all to see it if you can,
but it was the first time
that I realized that a building could be more than just a box.
And I remember distinctly this memory of sitting inside that atrium
and watching birds fly overhead and seeing their shadows trail along the floor.
And I realized that buildings could be about something,
they could be bigger than us,
so I spent the rest of my life, essentially,
studying Mr. Wright and studying the designs of nature,
and realized that nature has a wealth of opportunities for us
if we just open our eyes to it.
But when I went to architecture school
and I started learning about real construction,
I had these questions, and I didn't like the answers I was getting.
When I said, "Why would we knowingly build that way
when we know that it's toxic?
Why would we do that when we know it's wrong?"
And the answer always was,
"Because that's the way we've always done it."
So nature was just this kind of casualty on the path to progress,
and it didn't really work.
This is my daughter.
I know she's cute. You don't need to make noise.
(Laughter)
And I took her to see this NetZero energy project that we did -
meaning that this building generates more energy than it consumes -
and this project was a little unusual
because the solar panels
weren't on the roof, they were on the ground
because it was a government project and a mess.
But anyway, they're on the ground,
(Laughter)
but you could play on them and climb on them.
And she said "Daddy, what are these?"
I said, "Oh, honey, those are solar panels.
They produce energy from the sun for free."
And with the mind of a child, of course she says,
"Well, daddy, why not all buildings have this? Daddy, why?"
And so I leaned down and I looked in her cute little face,
and I said, "Oh, honey, that's because most people are poopy heads."
(Laughter)
What am I going to tell her? The truth?
(Laughter)
"Well, you see, honey,
there's this oil and coal cartel that controls all of energy policy;
they're haunting you in your dreams."
She'll have nightmares. I can't tell her that.
Poopy heads. That's what it's got to be.
If you look at the modern environmental movement,
we have failed, we're the losers here.
We're the good guys and we're losing
because it seems that environmentalism
is trying to lead you to one inevitable conclusion,
which doesn't work for me.
This one doesn't help. This is not a good idea.
(Laughter)
And I realized that we're dumb - I'm dumb, you're dumb, you're all dumb.
We think we're smart, but we're not.
And if you don't believe me,
remember that we share 50% of our DNA with bananas.
(Laughter)
That'll humble you down a little bit.
I was driving the other day and I saw this bumper sticker,
and I was going to run him off the road,
but I didn't.
(Laughter)
And then I realized
you never see this bumper sticker shared with this bumper sticker;
you never see the two together.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
I know causation is not correlation, but you get it.
So the problem that we're facing
is that we knowingly put cancer-causing chemicals in our building.
We do this knowingly, so we're clearly idiots.
And to set the context for how dumb we are,
I want to show you this video just to kind of start the afternoon off right.
[The unchained goddess]
(Video) … extremely dangerous questions
because with our present knowledge, we have no idea what would happen.
Even now, man may be unwittingly changing the world's climate
through the waste products of his civilization.
Due to our release through factories and automobiles every year
of more than six billion tons of carbon dioxide,
which helps air absorb heat from the sun,
our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer.
Eric Corey Freed: Now this video was directed by Frank Capra,
who did "It's a Wonderful Life," which is kind of neat,
and it stars a very young, very handsome Dick Cheney,
which is weird.
That's just weird to me.
But this video's from 1958.
Everything he says is true; in fact, all the numbers are much worse.
So what have we done since 1958?
The answer is, really,
we've lost our window, we've lost our time.
If you think that climate change
is this abstract thing that will happen sometime in the future,
it's happening now.
Last year, we had 400,000 people that died due to climate change,
and I don't mean in an indirect way.
I'm talking in a very direct way,
from drought and malaria and food disruption.
So, 400,000 people.
And I didn't know 400,000 people was a lot of people.
I mean, it sounds like a lot to me,
but I also know that we lose 8,000 a day to AIDS, right?
So in the grand scheme of things, maybe it's not.
Well, turns out 400,000 people is a lot of people:
400,000 people is two and a half times the amount of people
we're going to lose to lung cancer in the US this year;
it's 10 times the amount of people
we're going to lose to breast cancer this year.
So where's our ribbon? Can I design it?
These are the kind of questions I have: Can it be polka-dotted?
This is what I want to know, right?
And it just led me to this inevitable conclusion
that just by design, we're just, ugh, the worst mammals ever.
We're just, like, awful -
that one person likes that joke -
(Laughter)
400,000 is more than what we're going to lose
to strokes, accidents, Alzheimer's, and diabetes combined this year.
You need to realize something -
everything you've ever bought, everything you've ever owned,
it's still here.
We didn't jettison it into space; it's here.
Remember in the '90s
when you're really into Nirvana and bought that flannel shirt?
That shirt's here somewhere.
It's probably in New Jersey.
I don't know where it is,
(Laughter)
but it's here.
Remember when you were getting into shape
and bought those roller blades you needed for a week
and you were like, "My knees hurt"?
They're here.
They're probably bobbing in the ocean.
Because it's all still here.
Tonight, you're going out for dinner, and maybe you'll get some nice sushi,
and you'll be like,
"What's this in my sushi? Oh, it's little bits of rollerblade."
That's why. That's basically why. It's your fault. (Laughter)
And it doesn't help that we brag about our dominion over a mat.
We're sore winners. That's what we are, basically.
And just by design, we're just awful creatures
because first of all, we get tired at the drop of a hat,
we cry for no reason,
(Laughter)
we're easily trippable, I mean, easily - you never see a zebra trip, do you? -
and we just die in just the dumbest ways possible.
It's just so annoying.
And this is why your cat looks at you the way it does -
it's just, "Ugh," it's just fed up.
(Laughter) (Applause)
And we're not getting better;
we're not learning from experience.
I'll give you an example:
This was the world's largest man in 1903,
and this was just some cop I saw in Newark.
Do you see what I'm saying? (Laughter)
We're not learning.
The warning signs had been there,
louder and louder, closer and closer together,
and we're not hearing them.
These last few years have also been a key moment
because it's the first time ever
we spent more in dealing with the cost of extreme weather
than on the federal education budget -
2.6 billion on federal education,
three billion dealing with things like hurricane Sandy.
And as much as that seems like just an obscene amount of money,
it's nothing compared to the 8 billion we spent
subsidizing the oil and coal companies.
Maybe we could just move the money from one pile to the other.
Maybe that's not a big deal.
Because the act of building is disruptive:
Every year,
we produce 3 tons of concrete for every single person on Earth;
every year, we cut down two trees for every single person on Earth;
and every year,
we produced 600 pounds of steel for every single person just in the US.
Empowering all this is not good vibes
but fossil fuels, and just an immense amount of fossil fuels.
One company, Exxon, is sucking 4 million barrels of oil a day
out of the ground -
every single day.
And as much as that just seems like an absurd amount of anything,
it's nothing compared to the 92 million
that all the oil companies are sucking constantly out of the ground
every single day.
Shea Kimani famously said,
"The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones."
The oil age won't end because we run out of oil;
it's just going to get harder and harder to get.
And that's what you've been experiencing.
So far, we've been the proverbial frog in the boiling pot of water.
It's kind of snuck up on us a little bit.
But now that you're aware of it, now that you know about it,
now it's just going to get uncomfortable.
You know,
(Laughter)
it's just going to be an awkward conversation, basically.
If you were an astronomer
and you thought that the sun went around the Earth -
which by the way,
it totally doesn't do that, it's the other way around -
but if you thought that, you'd do some pretty bad astronomy, wouldn't you?
And that's basically what we've done.
We've done some basically pretty bad building.
It turns out, all the while,
we've essentially been building this kind of dead, lifeless skeleton.
What we should have been building is the whole creature
because the creature respirates,
it produces its own energy, it processes its own waste;
and a few of us, we're dabbling, we're playing with it,
but we're getting there, we're getting better at it.
But what I do know is that this is a dead end.
I mean, it's a pretty building, granted, but a metal building in Los Angeles?
You're telling me not one person at the meeting said,
"Hey, maybe that's a dumb idea."
Nobody said anything?
Plus I've seen how people react when we put them around living buildings,
natural buildings, buildings that grow out of their sight;
they actually reach out and pet them.
It's bizarre to me they touch them. (Laughter)
So that's what we need -
buildings rooted in the soil the same way nature does.
That's how nature builds.
As you're sitting here, seemingly idle, your bodies are a whirlwind of activity.
These big black things you see, those are called "leukocytes."
They're fighting off infection,
because frankly, half the people in this room are sick,
and those disgusting germs are attacking you as you sit here.
Your body just fights them off. It's amazing.
Those little shimmering things you see,
those are little energy packets your body's sending out;
it's called cholesterol.
By the way, some of you have too much energy packets;
you got to cut down on the cholesterol.
But it's amazing, right?
So, your body's very much this habitat, this incredible habitat.
As you sit here, there's one to two pounds of bacteria living on and in you.
It's actually kind of gross.
You got two pounds of bacteria on you.
It's disgusting.
But still, your body's very much this habitat,
but your body's also this incredible machine,
pumping, processing, filtering,
all the while you're just sitting there shifting in your chair.
It's incredible.
And it turns out John Mayer was right: your body's a wonderland.
It's this incredible Wonderland - I mean, some of you more than others -
but still, it's this Wonderland, it's incredible.
Every day, your body's producing 50 trillion new cells
to make up for the ones that have died.
Every day you're pumping 1,900 liters of liquid which you then pee out.
It's incredible.
Every day, you're breathing in 11,000 cubic liters of air.
You take the oxygen out and you expel carbon dioxide,
which the plants then take and then do the reverse in return.
It's wonderful.
As I'm telling you all this,
your big brains are processing this information
at 170 miles an hour,
faster than any known computer.
Holding up that big skeleton of yours is a structural system
that's four times the strength of concrete,
and half the weight, by the way.
You can even produce your own energy;
at your peak, like on a bike, you can produce -
you've seen The Matrix -
2,000 watts of energy.
It's incredible.
And powering all this is not fossil fuels but food, glorious food.
In your lifetime, you will eat about 50 tons of the stuff,
so every now and again, eat a salad - that's all I'm saying.
(Laughter)
And as a byproduct of all of this,
all of you, all of you are farting 14 times a day.
All of you - I'm telling you.
And you're like, "Not me." Yes, you. All of you.
And I know what else you're thinking -
it's like a balloon's worth, it's like this much.
So right now, I'm picturing a balloon over all your heads,
which just makes me happy.
Our buildings respond to none of this.
They ignore all of it. They're dead, lifeless spaces.
They're filled with known cancer-causing chemicals.
We put in windows and make sure they don't open,
and we put our kids in there for 8 hours a day
and make them learn how to read good,
and it doesn't work.
We then surround the site with more dead, lifeless materials.
We make hot places even hotter.
And then we just kind of crap these houses out
and ignore where is the sun and where is the wind.
And this is why the system doesn't work;
this is why the whole economic thing every eight years
is just teetering all the time:
because it's not sustainable.
So let's reverse this trend.
Let's build living buildings,
buildings that are teeming with aliveness,
with life just like your own bodies - not this fake life, real life.
(Laughter)
Because if you look at plants very closely and you pay attention to them,
it almost looks like they're alive.
(Laughter)
Because they're alive, they're plants.
It's a joke - they're alive, they're plants!
We're not the first creatures to build; lots of creatures build things.
This is the paper wasp. It builds its nest in a matter of days.
It takes wood pulp from local trees, mixes it with saliva,
and makes a form of cement;
it can change the hydrology of the cement based on the humidity in the air;
and it does it on this cool hexagonal grid, by the way.
This is the weaver bird.
It builds its nest in a matter of hours.
It takes local grasses and uses its own body as a tape measure,
and it makes the opening big enough
so the bird can get in and out but none of its predators,
and it builds this on this cool tripod shape.
And what do we do?
We put the birdhouses everywhere.
It's insulting.
[birds already have houses]
(Laughter)
I mean, they're building out of tripods, and we're putting up Section 8 Housing.
(Laughter)
This is why they're pooping on your car, basically.
That's why.
(Laughter)
This is a butterfly egg.
This is an owl egg.
Just a wealth of color and form and geometry are awaiting us
if we just open our eyes and pay attention to it -
incredible mathematical formula's, just there for the taking,
all told about 3.8 billion years of research and development.
All we have to do is promote living buildings,
buildings that grow,
buildings that we feed and nourish
the same way we feed and nourish ourselves.
We're just scratching the surface, but we're getting better.
But what it takes is to put this in your mindset
as a priority and something important
so when you see this,
this should be your inspiration for what a skyscraper could be
because that's how nature builds - nature is strong.
(Laughter)
Nature will kick your butt every time.
And how do we build?
Just the exact opposite way.
Just "Whang," brute force, "Whang," shove it in.
It doesn't work.
And we look at nature as this obstacle like this -
ugh! - this thing we have to get around.
(Laughter)
And we do it badly.
We just don't do a good job of it.
(Laughter)
And the results are just absurd.
They're just weird.
You have to realize something:
no matter how many resources you have,
if you use them the wrong way, they will never be enough.
Our resources have a value, some of the resources even have a history,
and if we pay attention to the history, we can benefit, but we don't do that.
You've all seen developments like this, with these cute little names,
but you know that here, they've just decimated the creek
to build the nonsense they build here.
Here, they just drove out all the wild horses
to build the nonsense they build here,
and really, frankly,
I'm terrified to think of what they cut down here.
(Laughter)
So this has been my charge.
This has been what I've dedicated my career to for the last 25 years.
I'm an architect; I've been building buildings,
and that didn't go fast enough,
so then I started writing books and now I'm at the 11th book.
Last year, I joined my old friends at the International Living Future Institute.
What we do is we have a rating system called the Living Building Challenge,
and it says that most buildings are bad and green buildings are less bad.
We don't want to do that. We want to be good. How do we be good?
And we set that as a bar.
Now we have hundreds of living buildings in 30 countries all over the world
that are aiming to be good.
And what does good mean?
Well, good means really five things for us - simply, anyway.
First, that every building is going to generate its own energy
because that's what nature does.
Two, every building will grow a portion of its own food
because that's what's needed.
Three, every building will process its own waste -
this could be composting or bio-remediation or something else.
Four, every building's going to clean its own water;
it could be a living machine.
Number five we do automatically if you do the first four correctly -
we sequester our own carbon.
That's what nature does. That's how nature builds.
I was talking to a developer, and I said,
"Oh, my God. We're going to grow food on the outside of the building.
It'll be amazing and so beautiful."
And all I got was wave after wave of, like, excuse why we couldn't do that.
He said,
"You can't grow food on the building. Um, the homeless people will eat it.
Hah!
(Laughter)
Feeding homeless people fruits and vegetables!
What will they say? You'll be pilloried in the press."
I didn't know where he's going with this.
(Laughter)
And I said, "You know what? Calm down.
If you start to see this everywhere,
we'll take the food down.
[Will work for Balsamic Vinegar] (Laughter)
But in the meantime, let them eat. What's the big deal?
Besides, there's probably other crops you could grow
that'll make you more money anyway.
That's what we need to get to -
the point where this is just seen as an opportunity for what it is -
that's what's needed -
where developers start to realize how to sell this better.
Instead of telling you
about their fitness rooms and gyms and nonsense,
they could sell you on the fresh oxygen the building produces.
And I hope you all help join me
in establishing this as a new sense of victory for the 21st century.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Cheers)