Transcriber: Lauren Hornsey Reviewer: Denise RQ
They say there is a garbage patch
twice the size of Texas.
What I have to say is, "Go ahead.
Make my day, Bag Monster!"
Stop right there!
Have a ChicoBag.
(Applause)
Yeah, he is dead.
As a kid, like a lot of kids,
I dreamed about exploring the ocean.
I dreamed about being a marine biologist.
I had my childhood heroes
which were Jacques Cousteau, Evel Knievel, and Dr. J.
And when those were your childhood heroes,
the obvious conclusion is that you become a sea turtle biologist,
which is what I have done.
I have been fortunate enough to follow my childhood passion, my dream,
and tracked turtles around the world.
I am kind of a turtle geek,
I guess you could say that I see turtles where sometimes they aren't really there.
(Laughter)
Some of you actually look a little turtlely today.
This is a turtle that was there just for a split second,
and then it's gone.
Never ever coming back.
But to me, that's a sea turtle.
I told you. I am a turtle geek.
I love turtles, and I spent my time and my career,
following turtles and working to save them around the world,
our beautiful ocean planet.
Back in 1996,
we tracked the first animal ever across an ocean;
this was a turtle, a loggerhead turtle in Baja California, Mexico.
We named her Adelita after the daughter of the fisherman
that helped us put the transmitter on her.
She swam off into the distance.
We were really excited to see where she would go.
Lo and behold, she took off like a shot
and swam 12,000 kilometers across the Pacific Ocean.
Now, this was 1996.
Nobody had ever tracked an animal across an ocean before.
Amazing thing.
It took her 368 days to reach Japan.
We shared her track on the Internet with people all over the world.
Here is the bad news.
She swam right through an area, now commonly known as the Garbage Patch,
the Pacific Garbage Patch.
I learned about the Garbage Patch in 1996
while Adelita was swimming through it.
And I worried about her every single day.
I started calling oceanographers,
learning about the Garbage Patch, learning about the turtles out there;
what they might be doing, what's out there, about all these plastic.
I got very, very concerned about the plastic in the ocean
that could harm our beloved sea turtles.
It got worse.
I've traveled the world to see turtles nesting beaches,
and sometimes, on those beaches, what we find are piles of plastic.
The turtles literally have to claw their way
through the plastic to get to the sand.
They have to climb over the plastic to get to the places where they are nesting.
And once the baby turtles are born,
if they can get up through the sand, avoiding the plastics in the sand,
out into the ocean, they are very lucky.
But sometimes they get into the ocean, and their first meal is plastic.
That's wrong. But that's our reality.
Some turtles survive it.
They passed the plastic through their bodies.
We've saved countless turtles from plastic by just simply pulling it out of them.
That's not what I signed up for.
And most recently, I traveled to the Gulf of the Mexico
to join the sea turtle rescue team in response to the oil catastrophe.
Some of the worst days in my life.
Turtles covered with oil are some of the saddest moments of my life.
A devastating experience. It's just absolutely wrong.
So it turns out that my childhood dream translates to second worst job in science
right between hazardous-materials diver and elephant vasectomist
according to Popular Science Magazine.
And the reason why it ranks so poorly
is because there's some bad, bad news about the ocean.
And it comes out as relentlessly, daily, and is not just about plastic,
but plastic is the issue why we are here.
Oil and plastic together dominate our planet.
And that's the problem we face today, and right now,
at this point in our history.
We consume, and consume, and consume,
and we ship things back and forth across the oceans, and across our country.
A lot of that stuff is plastic.
A lot of things that we drink are inside plastic bottles.
We use plastic bottles all the time.
We've heard about that today.
We ship plastic bottles of water across the ocean,
and we ship it back to be recycled on the other side of the ocean.
It's kind of an insanity.
All of these plastics still exist, by and large, on our little blue planet.
And if we keep going in this way, you can see where we are headed:
exponential growth of plastic which is the dream of the industry:
it's not going well.
We will end up living in Plasticville, if we aren't already.
Is that what we want?
I don't think that's the future we want.
This is a moment of opportunity.
The opportunities facing us right now around this issue are enormous,
and frankly, exciting and invigorating if we choose to take them.
We need to rethink our ocean. And we are doing that.
We have an explosion of ocean science right now, coming from every direction.
In fact, the World Ocean Census
is finding new species all over our planet.
Very exciting.
Our new understanding of the ocean is absolutely exciting.
It's a very exciting time to be an oceanographer and a marine biologist.
We need to rethink our food. We need to think organic.
That's happening. But are in the midst of that revolution.
We need to rethink our relationship with the ocean and seafood,
and to make our choices very, very carefully
because the future depends on it.
We obviously need to rethink energy
and explore all of the options,
including wind, solar, and perhaps ocean energy.
We need to rethink how we get around, we need to rethink our vehicles.
And that's happening. It's a very exciting time.
And I beg you: don't buy another car
until you can get one that doesn't run on gas.
Sign up for that pledge too.
We need to rethink how we think. And we are doing that.
Modern cognitive neuroscience is exploding.
We are in a revolutionary time.
We are understanding our own brain in ways we never have before.
We used to think about the brain as being a black box.
We don't anymore. We now can look inside our own brains.
Right down to the neuron level.
It's an amazing time to be alive.
We used to understand that emotion and reason fought with each other.
They are in a constant battle, pulling in opposite directions.
But we now know that emotion and reason work together.
And there is no other way to be: emotion and reason work together.
There is no reason without emotion, the neuroscientists tell us.
And we used to think about this epic battle between fear and love.
It's not fear against love. It's fear and love.
There is a reason why we are afraid of certain things.
Put it together.
Emotion, and reason, and fear, and love.
All at the same time. That's what it is to be human.
All of that together.
And if you need the scientific citation for these points
feel free to look it up.
It's there in the literature.
My childhood hero said if we were just logical, we will be in big trouble.
But we are not.
We are so much more than logical.
That's exciting.
Now we need to rethink our plastic.
We need to think from this philosophy of cradle to cradle.
You make something, you are responsible;
design needs to be convenient and responsible.
That's the essence of cradle to cradle.
You make it, you need to know where it's going,
you need to figure it out, and take responsibility for that stuff.
I consulted with my in-house design team named Grace and Julia.
They are available for hire. They are eight and five.
And they live with me.
And I said how would you solve the plastic pollution crisis?
And they thought about it a bit.
They said, "We would redesign the cup.
And we would make it out of an origami recycled wax paper."
And I said, "That's an amazing answer!" from the minds of children.
They just said, " We will redesign the cup out of a piece of paper."
Seven steps and you got a cup. Amazing.
My friends over at Monkey Business,
Mike Patton and team are redesigned skateboard parts.
And they are getting rid of the plastic components.
So these are called risers.
And you use those in your skateboard,
and if you are a skateboarder you know what I am talking about.
They are making them out of bamboo instead of plastic.
They are rethinking of skateboarding.
If you go into the supermarket, you find in every single aisle
mostly what they are selling is liquid wrapped in plastic.
The number one ingredient in most of the things
in most of the supermarkets in the world is water.
Then we take these bottles of basically water,
and we truck them around in diesel vehicles.
We put them in open face refrigerators, powered by coal.
And they sit there until you say, "I am thirsty.
I want orange soda pop."
Now, what a ridiculous design. Absolutely ridiculous.
You know why?
One of the reasons is, at least in the U.S.,
water is one of the best distributed substances we have.
You are never more than ten steps from a water tap
for almost your whole life.
Think about that as you go through the day:
water is never far away.
So we need to rethink our drinks.
And what does that mean?
That means we need to call "smart water" dumb water,
because it's dumb, because it's in a plastic bottle,
and shipped around in diesel trucks and refrigerated until we get thirsty.
There is nothing smart about that.
We need to understand happiness does not come in a bottle.
We need to rethink happiness.
Happiness comes from somewhere very, very different.
Don't let anybody convince you otherwise.
Universities around the country are banning plastic bottled water.
And you know what they are doing? They are not getting thirsty.
They are not walking around and say "Oh man, I am so parched."
They are coming up with a better design.
They are solving the problem in a responsible, convenient way.
The bulk food areas in our supermarkets are expanding.
Every time I go to a supermarket, the bulk food area is bigger.
Why? Because people want responsible design,
they want to refill their own containers.
Farmer's markets exploding around the country all over the place,
from the city to the country and everything in between.
So we understand that the solutions aren't necessarily
going to come from right in the middle of the problem.
We know solutions come from other places.
Solutions come from independence of mind and capital.
So we look for the innovators.
We are thinking independently
and have independent sources of funding that do not depend on the status quo.
So my challenge to the people who make stuff,
the manufacturers of the world,
is think carefully, think more, rethink what you are making.
If you want to make stuff,
think carefully about what you are going to make.
Think about where it's going.
Come up with a convenient responsible design
and employ it.
And I will tell you something.
There is a network of people, mostly women, a lot of moms,
they are ready to back you up.
They are ready to buy what you are selling,
they are ready to do free marketing for what you've got,
they are ready and waiting to catch that ball.
It's an exciting time.
We have got this global network of people who are completely activated.
They want your products.
So if you make things, this is your time.
We live on a beautiful planet.
Rethink our use of plastic.
Rethink it from the ground up. Cradle to cradle.
We need to rethink everything.
This is our time.