Translator: Theresa Ranft Reviewer: Denise RQ
I'm a filmmaker, and I love to tell stories about adversity.
When an animal or human being shares their story with you
about survival or resilience,
it's a really big responsibility,
because then you have to carry that story with you the rest of your life.
It's both a blessing and a burden.
But we really live, I think, in a very unique time right now.
We're going through what I think is called "breakdown or breakthrough".
The environment is being damaged,
but technology and creativity are offering really exciting solutions.
And I think we all chose to be born here at this particular time and place
in order to make a change.
And a change we need is a shift in consciousness
in order to change our behavior.
The big question I think is going to be: will it happen in time?
So let me share a journey with you through the lens of my camera.
["Live the actual moment.
Only this moment is life." - Thich Nhat Hanh]
(Video) (Soft music)
Louie Schwartzberg: Mindfulness:
it's like film inside of a camera,
sitting in the dark,
waiting for light to strike,
without judgment
and preconceived notions to any subject.
People who are mindful are more patient and willing to help others.
They look for greater life experiences over material products
and greater life satisfaction.
Whether you're a scientist, teacher, or artist, or child,
we need to develop the sense of wonder.
Curiosity in nature
makes us take risks,
go exploring,
take on new challenges to improve our skills.
We look back at these challenges as blessings in disguise.
It's these blessings that the heart remembers
that engenders gratitude.
["Mindfulness is about love and loving life.
When you cultivate this love,
it gives you clarity and compassion for life." - Jon Kabat-Zinn]
(Video ends)
LS: I learned a lot by observing nature.
But growing up, I observed gratitude from a whole different lens.
These are my parents.
They were born in Poland, and they were both Holocaust survivors.
They met in a relocation camp after the war in Germany,
and after knowing each other for two weeks,
they decided to get married.
And they had friends who'd only met for a couple of weeks, who they wrangled
to be their stand-in parents to walk them down the aisle.
They came to America with dreams and hopes of starting a family.
When we talk about resilience, from the ashes comes rebirth.
And this is me in New York.
I didn't get to experience nature
because when my parents were in camps, they didn't experience nature either.
But I did send popsicle sticks down the gutter,
which was an amazing white-water rafting experience for me.
(Laughter)
But I did learn to appreciate the little things in life,
like food on the table, a roof over your head,
the miracle to have children, a steady job.
That was heaven on earth to my parents.
So I went to UCLA, and I wanted to be involved as a lawyer
[to fight for] social justice.
There was a revolution going on right outside my door.
The police would sweep the campus, and they'd crack heads,
and the only way to fight back was to pick up a camera,
and I documented the police brutality that was occurring on campus.
And I found out that handing in a photo essay
was a lot easier than writing a term paper.
(Laughter)
And that's when I found my voice.
I fell in love with photography, I fell in love with filmmaking.
And I'm really attracted to stories of people who've overcome adversity,
both people and the nature.
So I got involved in doing a film about the bees, Colony Collapse Disorder,
I'm sure you all know about how the bees are disappearing.
Bees and their pollinating partners, the flowers, are responsible
for one-third of the food we eat:
fruits, nuts, vegetables, and seeds.
But why are they dying?
Well, it's got a lot to do with environmental factors
that affect us as well as them,
the spraying of pesticides and GMOs.
These chemicals are brought back to the hive,
and the EPA might test like one chemical, and say,
"Well, yeah, that's safe, you know, five parts per million."
But in the hive, they've got 16 different chemicals,
and it's killing the brood.
Loss of habitat, that's a big problem as well.
And imagine: living in a box, traveling on the back of a truck,
50,000 miles a year from one monoculture to another.
How would you feel?
This keystone event between flowers and pollinators
is really a mystical moment,
where the animal world and the plant world get together billions of times every day,
for DNA to move forward, and life to flourish.
So I'm super grateful for the bees and the flowers,
because they give us food, shelter, and medicine.
And after learning so much about the plants, I wondered,
"Well, what do plants need in order to survive?"
We know they need water, and they need sunshine,
but most importantly, they need soil.
So where does soil come from?
What can decompose rock and organic matter?
It's the largest organism on the planet.
It can heal you, it can feed you,
it can clean up an oil spill, it can even shift your consciousness.
It's mycelium.
Mycelium is the root structure of budding mushrooms, and it's everywhere.
There's a patch in Oregon that's 2,000 acres and 2,400 years old.
I want to share a clip with you right now
from the film I'm working on called "Fantastic Fungi".
(Video starts) (Music)
Paul Stamets: Mushroom mycelium represents rebirth, rejuvenation, regeneration.
Fungi generate soil that gives life.
The task that we face today is to understand the language of nature.
My mission is to discover the language of nature
of the fungal networks that communicate with the ecosystem.
I believe nature is intelligent.
The fact that we lack the language skills to communicate with nature
does not impugn the concept that nature's intelligent,
it speaks to our inadequacy for communication.
If we don't get our act together and come in commonality and understanding
with the organisms that sustain us today,
not only will we destroy those organisms but we will destroy ourselves.
We need to have a paradigm shift in our consciousness.
What will it take to achieve that?
If I die trying, but I'm inadequate to the task
to make it a course change in the evolution of life on this planet,
OK, I tried.
The fact is I tried.
How many people are not trying?
If you knew that every breath you took could save hundreds of lives in the future
had you walked down this path of knowledge,
wouldn't you run down that path of knowledge as fast as you could?
I believe nature is a force of good.
Good is not only a concept, it is a spirit,
and so hopefully, this spirit of goodness will survive.
LS: So Paul is really an amazing scientist.
Right now, he's working with Washington State University
on an experiment where he discovered
that bees like to kind of, you know, burrow in rotting wood,
picking up the fungi which might be a cure for Colony Collapse Disorder.
And those same mushrooms are also being tested for herpes and Ebola,
so we'll wait to see what happens with that.
But what a miracle!
Fungi and people actually share a lot in common;
we evolved from fungi.
Mushrooms have protein that's even better than beans,
they can also build up your immune system.
They found out that Turkey Tail, for example, is a wonderful supplement
for women that are having breast cancer.
And Lion's Mane Mushroom helps eliminate the amyloid plaque on the brain,
so it's really beneficial for people with Alzheimer's and with memory loss.
There are great studies happening right now
at NYU, UCLA, and Johns Hopkins,
where psilocybin is being administered to patients with severe depression,
post-traumatic stress syndrome, as well as terminally ill cancer patients,
so they can enable themselves to feel connected,
perhaps having an epiphany experience
by stimulating the natural [serotonin] that is inside of all of our brains.
Mushrooms can also clean up toxic oil spills,
they're the great disassemblers of nature.
They can break down oil, toxic waste,
into their basic elements of carbon.
And guess what?
Scientists now believe
that perhaps the greatest natural solution to climate change could be mushrooms.
In cooperation with their plant partners and photosynthesis,
what we can do is take a natural solution,
which is let the plants and the trees take the CO2 out of the air,
give us the oxygen to breathe,
and the carbon that has been tested with radioisotopes
goes down through the roots, into the ground,
and touches the mycelium.
And the mycelium takes the carbon, sequesters it underground,
and gives the plants and the trees
the nutrients they need in order to flourish.
We share so much with fungi, which is very weird.
(Laughter)
There are more fungi in the world than there are plants.
Actually, they're only second to insects.
They're 25% of the biomass on our planet.
So, you might be wondering what's the connection
between mindfulness, and mushrooms, and my parents?
(Laughter)
I think that we all have a desire to be connected,
and maybe because I grew up realizing I had no family,
I'm looking for a connection.
I never even had photographs of grandparents or other relatives.
So I know we all yearn for that, we yearn to be connected to something
that celebrates life, that we can feel good about.
And I really believe that life wants to flourish.
We just need to get out of the way and make it unstoppable.
Thank you.
(Applause)