Translator: Reiko Bovee Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
I've been walking this land for 35 years
making photographs of Colorado.
Three of those years I walked into sunrises like this one
in Yankee Boy Basin.
This is the beautiful Colorado that I live with and know
and write about and photograph.
But I've seen a change, a big change in just that short time.
Amazingly as Colorado is, she's crying out;
the climate crisis is taking a toll.
155 years ago, 200,000 Native Americans walked this land.
Today 155 years later, 5.35 million of us inhabit this place.
Globally speaking, population is moving towards 9 billion of us.
Glaciers are Colorado water stores,
but the winters are shorter and warmer,
and there's less snow falling in the mountains,
the glaciers are disappearing, and they're threatening our water supplies
up and down the Front Range.
In the Colorado's Southeast Plains, and great farm land,
the drought is 3 times worse than the Dust-Bowl era in the 1930s.
No surprise that this is happening.
It's a travesty that water is at the core of this issue,
and we don't even know what's happening some place else,
when there's an abundance of snow here.
Millions of trees are dying and being decimated
by pine and spruce beetles.
Fortunate for them and unfortunate for us and the trees,
global temperatures are rising.
These bugs are growing exponentially
and they have two life cycles in one season.
With all the dead and dying trees we have more wild fires,
and wild land fires that burns hotter
and more thorough and they're more dangerous,
and almost impossible to contain, and threatening our own lives.
The floods from the rain waters in 2013 in Boulder, out along the Plains,
not only caused billions of dollars of damage
but they also clogged the rivers with sediment and debris
Here's the untold story,
the new story that you didn't hear: out along the South Platte River,
the damage to the gas and oil fracked wells
that leeched chemicals into our drinking water
and into our irrigated agriculture lands.
That is the story that we shoved under the rug.
You know something?
We have solutions and all the pieces to the puzzle;
we have all the tools and its affordable;
it's something that's accessible to us;
it's an amazing thing that all those tools are available,
and each one of us can make a difference
in how we can solve the climate crisis.
Imagine if Coloradans started working together, pulling their resources,
their knowledge and their skills and their can-do spirits
to solve the climate crisis.
Just imagine, this is how it might happen, by Rapid Prototyping Change.
It's an engineering concept created by Tom Chi at Google.
They created the concept of Google Glass as well as a driverless vehicle.
What's rapid?
Rapid is creating Google Glass in one day.
What's prototyping?
Prototyping is taking the best idea, testing it, getting feedback,
reiterating it and testing it again.
So what if we took this concept of Rapid Prototyping
and applied it to climate crisis problems and challenges,
that are stymied by politics and economics and social stratification?
Rapid Prototyping might lead us to something
that we didn't know and a lot quicker.
Last year we applied the Rapid Prototyping concept at the Climate Summit.
We invited 60 people from 16 sectors to engage in the process
of solving Colorado's climate crisis.
Amazingly they learned how to engage in the process of making this change.
What happened was we had the game master
that led them through the process of how to get started.
Rapid Prototyping is not being in your comfort zone;
it's about leaving your ego at the door
and working within a structured idea process.
It has 8 steps to it.
They happen in 20 minutes at the longest.
A challenge round takes only 60 minutes.
Rapid Prototyping is the way that we can address these challenges.
We broke up into teams, and in those teams,
we came across these challenges that were presented by the guides,
those challenges included
our communities living at Net Zero in Colorado,
and Latinos engaging in the climate movement.
The solutions were varied, and they were exquisite,
and they were prototyped, eliminating things
that didn't make sense.
Our goal is to build an interactive map
that's a resource bank with knowledge and tools
that people like you can get started with today
and then track into the future.
Our aim is to take and move Colorado off burning fossil fuels,
and reduce our water footprint by 50% by the year 2020.
As the rapid prototyping processing ends, the presenters present their solutions;
the audience then can ask for clarification with questions
as well as offer their suggestions to help move the project forward.
Imagine what could happen.
Imagine working in 64 counties, 354 cities and towns
with 5.35 [million] people moving to stop the climate crisis
here in Colorado by the year 2020.
This all adds up to something amazing.
If Colorado led the way and all other states followed,
we might be able to solve the climate crisis together.
Looking at this beautiful image of the Back Bowls of Vail
out into the Holly Cross Wildness -
probably many of you've seen this vista -
you can feel the sunlight on your face at the end of the day
as a reminder what's so important to you,
the vitality of life that we have here in Colorado.
So I ask you to take a leap with me.
Together we can solve this problem.
(Applause)