Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Mile Živković
I'm very happy to be with you here and now,
on our journey to design the future
that we'll be sharing going forward,
into the next year and into Rio+40.
We have an amazing opportunity
to be able to fix some of the things that we've heard about today,
but we have to look inward and act outward for that to happen.
But before I start, I'd like to really thank the people
who've made this possible.
First, I don't know if you know how difficult it is
to do simultaneous translations. It's a very difficult job.
So, I'd like to thank the people doing the simultaneous translations for us,
(Applause)
the signing for us,
(Applause)
and the amazing TEDx team
that has created this fantastic experience for us
in the most loving and gracious way that we can imagine,
with calm, professionalism and care,
in a smoothe, perfect way.
They think it's not so perfect. I think it's completely perfect.
Thank you very much.
(Cheers) (Applause)
OK, a journey,
a journey we'll take in the next few minutes, together,
and a story about my personal journey,
developing things, trying to make things happen
with everything that I had and what I learned,
and now what we bring you to take on to the next step.
We start, each of us, looking out the window
and listening.
(Harp)
Because within, there was a song, our song;
without is the outer world, and we sit.
Each one of us still has this young person inside of us,
wondering what's out there, wondering what to do,
wondering how to find courage,
and wondering what their own, what your own,
what my own destiny, and voice, and action shall be.
And this is where we start.
This is where we are every day.
And it was very interesting,
if you looked at what happens from yesterday through today,
the marvelous stories that we heard,
and I think they share a theme
that was from this young person within ourselves,
whether it was the story of soccer ball as a mini generator;
whether it was the story about putting bottles filled with water
through roofs to bring light into dark rooms;
whether it was the story of bringing enlightenment to villages
so that they could understand that a live whale shark
was much more important to their well-being
than a dead shark;
whether it was a deep and diligent data gathering and analysis
of the carbon footprint of projects and activities
that led to companies, corporations, campuses, and cities
adapting, not changing what they do, but changing how they do it,
in a better way.
And this morning, to see things so small,
being able to sequence the genes of plankton
and see them in three dimensions,
we're learning more about our world and about the inside of life
than we have ever known,
and if we pay attention to this and apply it to our journey,
it will make a true difference.
The challenge is this:
as you saw in the beginning,
the theme of this section is "From Chaos to Order."
My proposition to you is that what we think of as order
is somewhat defining, constraining, oppressive,
and the wrong order.
It's the order that exists,
not the order that we must bring into being.
So, we look out the window, and this is often what we see:
we see a world that doesn't have enough life,
that's unfriendly to humanity and the environment,
and our job is to say, what can we do in response to this?
How can we go inside of ourselves
and find the inspiration, the courage, the creativity,
the action and the fortitude to bring this into something different?
So, my promise to you is that it's not a question From Chaos to Order.
It's a question of not being comfortable with the order
that we're usually comfortable with,
because, from our order, our comfort zones,
it's really important to go back into the chaos,
because, as scientists have told us,
and I think they only know a little bit so far,
there's a deeper order in the chaos.
So, inspiration comes from taking order,
not accepting it as your only reality,
going into the chaos, finding the order that speaks to you,
coming back out into our life,
and putting that into practice with full determination.
So, this is part of what I'm going to try to flip through today.
I'm taking you back into the future.
This is my journey, 1984.
I think some of you may have been around then.
There was this thing called a Macintosh;
it was seven years after the beginning of commercial personal computing.
It was a long time ago, but it was a short time ago.
It brought up this question,
so, myself, I went into my chaos, I went into my process.
I said, "What can I do with this? What does it mean for me?
What am I called to do?"
And, from the question mark comes an affirmation, comes an idea.
The idea was one of the first products for the Macintosh.
It was a very ambitious relational database for the Macintosh,
the idea that Macintosh was for the rest of us.
So, the idea was, "We'll make it possible to create applications,
without you having to be a programmer."
And that's why you see this fantastic visual programming language there.
So, a regular person could actually create a program
just out of graphical things.
This is 1984.
And it allowed a person to get information and do things with it,
but we realized that we could do more than that.
We realized that, by joining computers together,
we could give people access to more information,
and we could get the beginnings of what collaboration was.
That was what they called "local area networks" at the time.
It was just within organizations.
You jump ten years: things have happened, thank goodness.
We have the internet now. We can go beyond the organization.
We can take the idea of flattening the hierarchy of organizations
with communications,
we can take collaboration across organizations,
and we can start to really create a connected world.
So, is there a question mark, then,
with the internet as something that we worked with?
"What can you do? Are you satisfied with where you are?" No, not really.
"Can you do more?" Absolutely. "What did you try to do?"
What we tried to do is we took our product, in 1996, to Istanbul,
to the Habitat II Conference,
and we gave it, basically, to the UN, we tried to,
and said, "Here's a way for NGOs, companies, governments,
to actually start to work together and create value, more cooperation,
more progress.
It was a great idea.
It was ahead of its time, as we do this,
because, in 1996,
we didn't have fiber optics, we didn't have Google,
we didn't have portable, little computers that we call phones,
and we didn't have connectivity or accessibility
for most of the people in the world to this new internet.
So, it wasn't time for that, but we didn't stop, we kept going,
and, if you fast-forward then to 2006 - now we're ten years later again -
things have happened, things have happened in the internet
where now we have introduced something new,
and that's the factor of money.
Money is a reality in our world and, by including money in the internet,
we got things like e-commerce,
we got things like crowdsourcing and crowdfunding,
and a whole explosion of things, community building, social media.
So, now we've included money in the equation,
with people, information, computing resources,
and this then created a lot of things that you're now starting to do yourself,
and I would encourage you to do for yourselves,
for the ideas that you have. Here are some examples.
I'm just giving these, these are people I know, things I know about.
This is the first ISP in Canada, that formed in 1987,
and they're using this technology now at web networks
to create remote literacy programs all over the world,
in a program they called Yo Digo,
where people can create their own programs and learn languages in remote villages.
And they've done the same thing for endangered indigenous languages,
for the Inuit,
where they've actually created web pages
and had people be able to work together and create their own curriculum
with this distributed environment.
Another example.
Caroline Pfister did a film that she's now working to finish.
See, she's using Kickstarter. Do you know what Kickstarter is?
It's an amazing way to break the stranglehold
of the usual way that economics works in our commerce,
and let you tap capital from other people.
So, if you have a project that you think is an interesting project,
you put it up on Kickstarter
and you invite people to invest in your project,
and this has been extremely successful for thousands of projects,
and it's a whole new way of creating things,
doing business, going into market.
So, her film is about the punk movement in São Paulo
and one of the first DIY experiments, with do-it-yourself culture,
and it's going to be a fantastic film when it's released.
CrumplePop in Minneapolis,
a small group of people creating things they're marketing globally
for effects for film and video for Final Cut Pro.
This would not have been possible
without this 2006-and-beyond view of the internet,
with beautiful effects and other things that they're able to do.
The last thing is really interesting,
and that is a growth of a difference in the way
finance and capital are flowing in the world,
so that you have more innovation
investing in things that are really interesting,
not following the same kinds of patterns that we've seen.
I've seen the venture capitalist and private equity people for a long time.
This is a whole other generation of people
really funding innovation and new technologies.
These folks happen to be in Rio.
OK, following the thing: did we stop? No.
What do we do when we see all of these things coming together,
creating a new opportunity?
We look inside of ourselves,
we look at that lousy building in the beginning,
we say, "What can we do now?",
we say, "Here, buildings."
They might look nice, but guess what? Buildings are not so nice.
They consume a huge amount of our energy, 40%.
They're responsible for about a third of our greenhouse gases.
The global energy market is 6 -
José says 8 trillion dollars a year.
I'm not going to leave the US out of this picture.
With a small percentage of the population of the world,
it consumes the biggest bubble of energy.
So, obviously, that's why we have to do a lot of focus
and not point our fingers at everybody else
until we've solved that problem, or at least made some progress.
So, what do we do now?
If you think about buildings the way we thought about personal computers.
Personal computers became much more valuable and much more effective
by connecting them.
So, what if we connected buildings to this new internet,
and made them more intelligent, made them more responsive,
made them more energy-efficient,
made them more friendly to humans and the environment?
And that's what we're doing now with the Building Energy Commons in 2012.
We're adding buildings to this global network,
to create social buildings to participate in this new ecosystem
of finance, information, computing and people,
and we'll have millions of buildings and tens of millions of people
to basically change our built environment,
so that it can become a designed environment,
which is really what we need.
It will give you all sorts of nice things that you see here.
I'm not going to go into that anymore,
but wouldn't it be nice to have a decentralized grid?
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to change the nature of commuting,
and work better to radically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels
and save a lot of that 6 to 8 trillion dollars?
Of course it would, but it only makes sense,
and we can do it by connecting buildings
to the connections that we're starting to find among ourselves, outside,
and what we're starting to be aware of as our connection inside.
Here's an example of how this is working.
There's a business improvement district in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
These are public-private partnerships.
There are about a thousand of them in the US and there are many in the world,
where people come together,
and this is about two miles in a corridor
of very underserved, oppressed economic area of Milwaukee,
and the businesses, the residents, some of the NGO-type people,
come together and work to create better economic development there.
They're plugging their corridor into the Building Energy Commons,
and by doing that, they'll be able to create a sustainable energy corridor
that will give them more benefits,
but also provide, with the internet, examples that other people can emulate,
and this is the bigger goal.
We want sharing on these systems,
so that, when people are able to figure out better ways to do things,
when one rural hospital figures out a better way to use energy,
another rural hospital in another country can use that same example,
can learn from what they have done.
So, we've seen this picture now three times in the last two days,
because it really represents us.
We won't have just a bunch of lights burning bad energy;
we'll have a bunch of lights that really reflect our lives in a sustainable way.
Oh, one more thing: two days ago,
the mayor of Rio said that there was going to be an attempt
to make sustainability measures,
tax-incentive measures for the city.
This means that, if you invest in something
that makes a building more energy-efficient,
you can take that off of, for instance, your property taxes.
So, it makes it something much more affordable
and much more attractive to people who own buildings.
So, this is another example of how things can move with new technologies,
with the connections now that we have.
It's a way to respond to the opportunities, the urgency,
who we are individually.
And, of course, the question I now have for you is -
This is an example of one journey, of me, and the other people you've seen here.
Now, I would just ask you to ask yourself, as you leave this event:
what is your person inside seing?
What is your person inside telling you?
What is your exclamation point?
That means action, so that, together, we can see "Rio+Now".
(Portuguese) Thank You.
(Applause) (Cheers)