Translator: Hiroko Kawano Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
You and I have an incredibly hard-working friend
who is completely underappreciated and is in serious trouble.
And there's something out in space that can significantly help our friend.
You're going to love it.
But first, let's take a moment
to appreciate the hard work that our friend does for us.
I'd like to tell the story of our friends hard work
through, of all things, a fruit salad.
Strawberries, blueberries, we'll throw in some sliced apple.
It's easy to taste each delicious bite.
You see, our friend is the relentless worker
that visited each plant for this fruit salad,
moving pollen between flowers to produce these specific fruits.
Pollinators -
honey bees, bumble bees, monarchs, birds, hoverflies,
and other beneficial insects -
provide an incredible service,
moving a sufficient amount of pollen between flowers
to produce the beautiful fruits and vegetables for our markets.
Because without their hard work, fruit doesn't grow,
or it ends up smaller and misshapen.
Evidence of poor pollination is easy to find.
In the United States, each year, bees provide more than 15 billion dollars
of pollination services to our agricultural sector.
And globally, their contribution is more than 200 billion.
Now, for this one, common fruit salad made with these ingredients,
bees had to make more than 1,000 individual visits to flowers.
That's two to three visits per blueberry,
two to four visits per apple,
five to six visits per raspberry
and, incredibly, twenty or more visits
for each and every market-ready strawberry.
Now, there's around 200 or so blueberries in a given pint.
So when you just eat the whole thing, the way my five-year-old did,
(Laughter)
after raiding the grocery bag,
that's 400 to 600 pollinator visits right there.
And it's not just our fruit salad.
One-third of every bite of our diets,
75% of crops globally rely on bees and wildlife
to move pollen between flowers.
Even milk.
You see, alfalfa and clover require pollination,
and they're the primary food stock for dairy cattle.
We and the livestock we raise -
I'm talking to you, carnivores -
rely on pollinators for our food.
OK, it's about to get real.
To maximize the yield of coffee, you need pollinators.
Twenty to forty visits for each and every coffee flower,
which gives you one of these coffee cherries,
which gives you two coffee beans.
The simple morning ritual of a single cup of coffee
is a harvest representing between more than -
between, excuse me -
representing between one and two thousand individual visits
from bees to flowers.
Billions of fruits,
trillions and trillions of visits to flowers.
Now, this topic is timely
because unfortunately, populations of pollinators are in crisis.
The story's not new.
It's just new to us.
You see, in southwest China,
farmers lash chicken feathers to bamboo rods
and then use those tools to pollinate crops by hand.
The bees there have been wiped out by insecticides.
They visit each flower of these pear trees.
Back in the United States, a single acre of blueberries
has around 10 million little blueberry flowers,
all blooming about the same time,
and if you don't get them pollinated within a few days,
no fruit.
Nationally, we cultivate 82,000 acres of blueberries.
So that's 820 billion blueberry flowers.
Yeah,
it sounds like an extraordinary amount of work.
But only until you compare it to the annual almond harvest,
an almond bloom,
which has three times as many flowers.
We're not pollinating our crops by hand.
We're not there yet.
But our fields are becoming quieter,
our gardens are becoming more still,
evidence of the eerie absence of natural wildlife
is coming with greater and greater regularity.
For example, the honeybee:
Since the 1950s we've lost nearly 50% of our honeybee population.
The Federal Pollinator Protection Plan established a goal
to maintain that annual loss at 15%.
Unfortunately, last year's annual loss was 33%,
representing nearly 900,000 dead beehives.
And then the rusty patched bumble bee:
Once common in 28 States from the Dakotas to Maine to Virginia
is now 90% population depleted.
And according to the Xerces Society, an organization, exclusively committed
to the conservation of insects and other invertebrates,
the rusty patched is one of a dozen species
of native U.S. and Canadian bumblebees at risk of extinction.
And while they're not doing much pollinating,
we see similar trends in other important and beloved species,
like birds.
Peer-reviewed science from Audubon
shows that half of the bird species on the continent are at risk.
You see, in order to manage the worst effects of a change in climate,
native birds need native plants
and the insects that have co-evolved with them.
No insects, no birds.
And finally, the monarch:
Since 1990 we've lost nearly one billion monarchs.
And if the current trends continue,
a viable population of the eastern monarch
could be wiped out by a single storm within our lifetimes.
Taken as a whole this is what one leading scientist refers to
as an all-hands-on-deck moment.
Now, pollinator protection is featured for the first time this year
on a US postage stamp,
and nationally, this issue is getting a lot of attention,
and it's easy to understand why.
Pollinators are important to us and other wildlife.
Pollinators are in decline.
And compared with some of the wicked problems we face as a society,
we can do something about it.
You see, habitat loss is a leading cause in the decline of these species,
but providing healthy sources of pollen and nectar free of insecticides
has not been simple.
Turfgrass lawns now cover an area
four times larger than the state of New Jersey,
40 million acres.
Suburbs are expanding.
Corporate campuses, mini-marts, urban and suburban homeowners
mostly aren't giving up their lawns.
And farmers face pressure to increase crop yields.
New practices have largely eliminated the pollinator-friendly plants
from the row crop fields that dominate production acreage.
So what can we do about it?
That's the kind of the way things are.
But we can plant backyard gardens.
In fact, the National 2015 Pollinator Protection Plan
encouraged each of us to plant a backyard garden of any size.
And that's important.
Yes, we should do this.
And also, we need to think creatively to bring in new capital, new partners
to push ourselves and see new opportunities.
And you know, in that mindset,
I want to tell you a story about back in 1993,
Entrepreneur Paul Hawken,
he challenged each of us, engineers, designers, everyone
to come up with a system, to create a system
that profitably nourishes and enriches life on Earth.
And so I want to share an unusual and unexpected way
that we can significantly help our pollinator friends.
And like I said, it starts way off in space,
but then it comes right back down to farmland
and what these species need to survive.
In the earliest days of the space race,
batteries were incredibly heavy and also only ran for a few days.
And the US was looking for ways to power satellites for years at a time.
So sure enough by the 1960s,
all satellites were equipped with solar panels.
Now since then,
a combination of public and private investments in research and development
paired with state-level policies have driven the cost of solar down
by more than 99%.
Solar is so cheap now,
in many areas it's cheaper to build a new giant scale solar array
than to continue to pay the millions of dollars for coal and maintenance costs
on those old smokestack power plants.
And just like the ones in space,
these are photovoltaic, or PV, solar panels.
They don't get hot,
because they're converting sunlight directly into electricity;
they're the common kind you see on rooftops
and built into some camping equipment.
And interest in solar is growing incredibly fast.
Here's the rate of growth for solar from 1992 to 2012.
And for comparison, that's roughly eight times faster
than the rate of growth for mobile phones and the Internet,
during the same period.
Now, working in the public interest,
economically and environmentally minded nonprofit groups, like the one I work for,
have been encouraging this energy transition:
clean air, clean water, economic development.
More and more businesses and municipalities,
homeowners and churches,
data centers and school districts
have been saving hundreds to thousands to millions of dollars
by getting more of their electricity from the Sun.
So solar is safe, and it helps people save a lot of money,
but some communities have expressed real concern
about how much land is used for some of these solar sites.
And I, too, am concerned
about the productive use of agricultural land.
Farmland.
Isn't that where our food comes from?
And so that's why in 2016,
a coalition of agricultural, conservation and energy groups came together,
leaders, here in Minnesota,
to propose a new vision for solar development in the north.
It looks like this.
(Laughter)
No, it looks ...
No.
(Laughter)
Okay, seriously, it looks like this.
We call it pollinator-friendly solar.
And I'm sorry, it's not new.
And it's not radical.
We imported it from Europe,
where it's been common for years and years.
The key questions remain, though:
Will it cost too much to do this in most places?
And then, if we do, will it make any difference?
Now, this could be a little bit of a complicated calculation.
So, let's see if I can get some help.
There, I have a supercomputer in my pocket ...
(Bling!)
Hi supercomputer,
could you calculate the cost difference for using a pollinator-friendly seed mix
on most solar arrays versus the current industry practice
of using turf grass or gravel?
Supercomuputer: Hello, Rob,
you don't need a supercomputer for this.
The costs of plant seeds are equal or less than using gravel.
Great, thanks, supercomputer, I appreciate your help on that.
(Laughter)
SP: It is important that we create more habitat for our pollinators.
Supercomputer, I had no idea you were so passionate about this issue.
SP: Yeah, let's just say that it's a kind of family thing.
(Laughter)
Family thing, got it.
OK,
practically, this is actually really straightforward.
Every solar array is going to have a vegetation management plan.
The engineers simply work with an ecologist
to design a pollinator-friendly seed mix
of low growing flowers and native vegetation
around and under the panels,
and then in the perimeter,
taller species like milkweed and flowering shrubs.
And it's not just good for pollinators.
Compared to turf grass or gravel, those deep-rooted native plants
capture the storm water coming off the panels,
channeling it right down into the aquifer,
breaking up compacted soils, adding organic matter
and improving the quality of agricultural soils over the life of the project.
Once a low growing meadow is established -
usually a period of one to three years -
there's less mowing,
and significantly less incidents of mowers kicking up rocks
or colliding directly with solar panels.
And standards encouraging pollinator-friendly solar practices
have been supported by overwhelming and bipartisan majorities
in Minnesota and Maryland,
and are being developed in a growing number of the States.
OK, but will it ...
will make any difference?
You know, beekeepers that manage
honey-producing hives on pollinator-friendly solar arrays
describe them as a perfect environment,
abundant and diverse nectar and pollen sources
throughout the growing season,
free of direct application of insecticides.
And several of the world's foremost entomologists and their PhD students
are enthusiastic about this approach.
But now compared to that backyard garden, which we should still plant,
solar sites can provide habitat at scale.
In fact, in 2016 alone,
solar developers and utilities and Rural Electric Cooperative's
in Minnesota and Wisconsin
developed around 2,500 acres of pollinator-friendly solar sites.
Now this is a ridiculously tiny fraction
of the more than 40 million acres of farmland in the United States.
But for pollinators,
it's habitat equivalent to 1.5 million homes
having a 6 foot by 12 foot pollinator garden.
And the land lease contracts that ensure maintenance of the vegetation
are for 25 years.
So for the more than 900 million acres of farmland that America has
and the tiny percentage of that
which farmers will choose to use for solar,
let's maximize that productivity.
We need to create spaces for bees and pollinators to thrive.
And solar sites can provide tens of thousands of new acres of habitat
each year.
So make a plan for your own pollinator garden.
Audubon has an online tool that makes it as easy as entering your zip code.
And also, importantly, make a plan to support and share
and advance this idea of pollinator-friendly solar.
With your help, this can maximize the productivity of farmland
and create habitat to benefit pollinators and other wildlife for a generation.
Now, I happen to be a father,
and we all have young people in our lives that we care about.
And when their children are the right age,
we'll be able to share a story
about a moment when we decided to support clean air,
and clean water, and clean energy.
We'll be able to share a story about a moment
when we all decided to help these important and beloved species.
We'll be able to make that fruit salad
and appreciate each bite with a new perspective
and give thanks
that we still have all of our hard-working pollinator friends.
Thank you.
(Applause)