Transcriber: Keira White Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
Hello, I’m Tim Smit from the Eden Project in the Wild West of Cornwall.
If you ask me what my greatest hobbies in life are, there is really only one.
I am a kisser of frogs.
I love the idea of putting things back into good-heart places,
that hope has left.
Places where there is a pull on the land,
where fertility is dead.
Here, in front of me is soil, this most magical stuff.
The 34 acres of what comprises the Eden Project, were completely dead.
I’d had this ambition to create life inside the bowl, a crater, if you like,
of a volcano.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s lost worlds.
I imagined that there would be this place that was rebuilt,
full to burgeoning life, and in that burgeoning life, we would offer hope.
There is no advertising here.
There is only growing, learning from the weft and weave of nature.
It is absolutely extraordinary.
This is the greatest collection, anywhere in the world of plants
economically useful to human beings.
But that’s just the start of it.
People, men predominantly, talk about solutions to climate change.
I’d rather not talk about the whole world,
if you don’t mind. I want to create a world which is here.
Imagine, if you like Asterix the Gaul,
that you’re that little village on the front
of the cover, where all of Rome rules the France.
Except there’s this tiny village.
We are that tiny village for sustainability
and the battle against climate change.
We created soil, 90,000 tonnes of soil,
the biggest contract ever made for the growing of soil and we created life.
We gathered all the plants together.
We propagated them. We’ve grown them.
We’re now building a revolutionary number of greenhouses at the back.
And what’s powering them? You know what’s powering them?
Is geothermal energy.
Ten years ago when everybody told us that we couldn’t do it,
we knew that we had to become carbon positive.
By carbon positive, which is really confusing
because some people use carbon negative,
what we mean is that we absorb a hell of a lot more carbon
than we kick out.
And what we’re doing here is, with, beneath my feet,
5,387 meters down,
a drill has opened up towards the core of the Earth
and the heat that we found there is 187 degrees centigrade,
so hot that it can drive turbines,
that it can give us enough energy to heat 34,000 homes around our edge
and provide all the energy we need, here at Eden.
And with the solar arrays that are going up in our car parks,
we will be so carbon positive that if we decided that only visitors from Eden,
from, not Eden, from Venus were allowed,
they could all, 1.1 million come from there.
So we’ve got energy under control,
we’ve got soil under control, we’ve manufactured it,
we’ve enriched it with vegetative material.
And you can just see the carbon absorption levels.
At the moment,
what we’re doing with our degree group that is here
is seeing whether we can measure every square inch of Eden to determine
how much carbon can we absorb in the soil, how much fertility can be put in the soil,
how much biomass can we grow in the soil,
how much biodiversity can we encourage in the soil,
as well as how much carbon can we sequestrate in that soil.
Because the future is to do with what is called the circular economy.
The circular economy, in case you’re confused by that phrase,
does not mean that everything is just recycled,
you’ve got to take the bad stuff out.
The journey for all of us who are interested in sustainability is actually,
not about doing less bad.
That’s where all this ESG stuff is so, damned annoying.
It’s about doing good. It is an absolute.
If you telling your children
we’re going to do less bad for the next 20 years, well, gee, thanks mum or dad.
The future is about believing that you can create those circular economies,
that you can create the society around you, which is localized and muscular.
That is energy rich, so that everybody can afford to have it.
That is food rich, so that everybody can afford to have it.
What this means is nothing less than a revolution.
Most people keep talking about “stuff”, as if we were consumers to be sold to.
We are not consumers to be sold to.
That is another person’s story.
The story we need to populate is that of the citizen.
We are the active citizens.
We belong together, we have purpose, we have meaning,
we’re rooted in this place and there’s no reason
why we cannot have our education,
our manufacturing, our lives as a whole.
The poetry, the joy of a schooling system,
which is actually from Day 2,
to the day you die, and we can do that locally with systems change.
As I speak to you, right now, all over the world,
people are gearing up, it’s not yet in the newspapers,
to 3D printing at a level you’ve never seen before.
So actually, all this supply chain nonsense
will start to become produced where you are
using materials which can actually create stuff like carbon fibre
from all the materials around you that rot and are then compressed with lignin.
Everything is going to be local.
All of that stuff, which used to be called hippy dippy,
is suddenly going to be muscular. It's going to be strong.
And the only threat, the only threat is that people who believe
that power should just be in the centre, reject it.
Because, I believe that within 15 years of this day,
you’ll be in a position where we will have city states,
all around the country, all around Europe, all around Africa,
all around the USA and beyond.
Where people are taking their futures into their own hands
and philosophically, the reason why this is so powerful,
so, so powerful, is that it means that we can see the territory over which we want,
to throw a protecting arm. Are you with me?
It’s to do with the only successful example
of sustainable living anywhere in the world is on the island of Tikopia
and in one particular tribe in the highlands of New Guinea. Why?
Because everybody in that community, knew all of their land
and knew the impact that their actions would directly have
on the land around them.
That is why the fracturing of the nation state
to lots and lots of federal areas of management is so exciting to me.
Because I think within the next 15 to 20 years,
the change is going to be bigger than between the year 1910 and the year 1927.
Just imagine what our children
and our children’s children are going to live through.
A revolution in agriculture,
a revolution in cleaning up our rivers and our ocean.
A revolution in making our air cleaner.
And we're going to create strong,
strong laws to make it treasonous to betray that.
So, as you’ve listened to me with my rant for 10 minutes
based here at the Eden Project in Cornwall,
we have an Eden project now coming out of the ground in China.
We’ve got one in Australia.
We’ve got one in New Zealand. We’ve got one in Dubai.
We are nurturing two wild sites, one in Aldabra,
in the Seychelles, one in Costa Rica, in Central America.
These places are beacons of hope.
All we do is make friends and say “let’s do this thing”,
because actually the most important thing of all is to let go.
Humans are extraordinarily clever and generous people.
If you stop telling them what to do
and create, if you like, a canvas on which to paint a new world
where the future remains ours to make.
Thank you for listening.