A Story of Community and Climate | Explorers Fest

Magic, you are in the tire desert of India. We climb down from the dune, and he shows me this well. It's a hand-dug well that is giving water not even three feet under. And there's water there. There are several such wells peppered along the dunes. This is the desert. Now, the sand in the desert is a very tiny part of the desert. If you look around you, you see tons of different microhabitats - grasslands, rocky deserts, all kinds of habitats replete with flora and fauna.

Everywhere you look, even on a dune, you see signs of life. The desert is alive. This is also the most populated desert in the world, and it's home to desert nomads who walk their flocks, their sheep and goats through the desert. These are desert-hardy animals, and they also give some of the choicest lamb and mutton you can find in India. They call it their walking gold, but it is a land where living is tenuous. How do these people then build in drought resilience? They have a way, an old way.

Right about now, if you were to go into this desert, the Sun would be blazing down a hundred and twenty Fahrenheit, about fifty Celsius. But the people would be hard at work because they would be tilling their land, prepping for that maybe that one day of rain that will fall on the catchment. This is what a desert catchment looks like. No trees, just flat land, flat as a pancake and hard. It's slightly elevated and it slopes down over a kilometer, about one foot over a kilometer to a basin.

These people are hard at work collecting thorny acacia bushes and lining the far end of that basin and waiting, waiting for this. Come July, the winds are going to whip up the sands, and the sandstorms are going to block the Sun out of the skies. The sand is going to be thrown against the acacia bushes, and a Bund is going to begin to build itself. The desert nomads will wait some more for this, maybe that one day of rain in August which is going to dump not even four inches of rain onto the desert.

This place gets under four inches of rain the whole year, and sometimes it comes in a single day. The dune is going to drink deeply and hold the water in its belly like we saw earlier. The catchment is going to roll the water down, and it's going to come to rest at the Bund that was created by these people. This is going to be a rain-fed lake that will quench the thirst of this community for the next six to eight months.

Then the Sun is going to blaze again, and of course, as it must, the water will dry up or be sucked into the land. Then there's a reprieve. You see, this land has a layer of gypsum running underneath it so that it doesn't allow the sweet water of the rain to mix with the salty saline aquifers of the desert; it keeps it fresh. They have hand-dug wells that pull in the water as you pull up the water. For another eight to ten months, they are covered because they have wells.

I was walking through this desert with Paul Salopek on the Out of Eden walk, and we encountered tons of these rainwater harvesting structures. They sustained us just like they have sustained merchants and pastoralists along the Silk Route for years. Paul was at 46 Celsius, 115 Fahrenheit, and he pulled up some water and he dumped or doused his head with a little bit, and we had a Shepherd run out of his heart saying, "No, that's our drinking water. Please don't use it for this." So that's how they take care of their water, and they have water security.

Fine, that's what a security. What about food? This is another piece of magic. The water rolls down that same catchment and comes to stop at the Bund. I'm standing on a 700-year-old Bund, and Chatter Sing, my Shepherd friend, has revived an ancient method of desert agriculture which basically means they wait for this water to seep into the ground. They do not use it; they do not defile it; they just wait for the water to seep into the ground.

When it's all gone, the Shepherds become farmers for a day, and they sow their land. Then they wait again, and when November comes, come the crops, and it's a time of Plenty. You have wintering demoiselles cranes that come in. You have all kinds of wildlife that take shelter in these fields. These people have gone from being beggars to being rupee millionaires just after resurrecting this ancient method of desert agriculture.

So you see the desert; it's food and fodder. It supports wildlife and livelihoods all within nature. But here's the bad news. It had to come, right? Here's the bad news: the Indian government labels deserts as wastelands. Not just deserts. Scrub, desert scrub forests, peat bogs, wetlands, grasslands - they're all called wastelands to be better utilized. By better utilized, they mean all kinds of things.

For the desert, they're raising the desert, they're raising the grasslands, they're piping water in from the Himalayas all the way to the desert. The problem is, by the time that water gets to the desert, it's putrid. This part of the desert, of Chatter Sing's that had never seen a mosquito before, now has the highest incidence of malaria in Rajasthan. The water is what stinks with floating carcasses. The people refuse to consume it; they prefer to rely on their own rainwater harvesting.

This is the desert that we're losing. What's happening is it's being checkered with windmills and transmission lines. I walked down this row of windmills, twenty windmills, and at the base of nine of them, here's what I found: dead griffon vultures. This is also the home to the Great Indian Bustard, which is one of the most critically endangered species, of which there are about only a hundred and fifty individuals remaining. In the recent past, we've lost three of them to collisions with windmills and transmission lines. Three that we cannot afford to lose.

These are outside protected areas. These animals live outside protected areas. These are not protected areas; these are desert grassland commons. So the government has been disemboweling the desert. It labels it a wasteland, and then it disembowels it and creates from a living desert a Dust Bowl. I'm going to pause here and ask you to consider these two words: desert dust bowl. A desert is alive; a Dust Bowl is not. And yet, when we refer to a human-devastated landscape or a human-created Dust Bowl, why do we call it a desertification?

I'd like us to think about language because language is what has led to a lot of these policies. When we lay waste to an agricultural farm and the soil becomes saline and the wind whips up white sand and nothing grows there, we call it a desert. No, it's a Dust Bowl. When we call predators and the herbivores grazed on a mountainside and the topsoil is washed away, we call it desertification. No, that is a Dust Bowl. When we bottom-trawl an ocean and make it devoid of all life, that is not an ocean desert; it's a Dust Bowl.

When governments label vital ecosystems as wastelands, it is a dire and dangerous mistake. But when we storytellers, educators, editors, scientists, communicators, confuse the terms, we are perpetuating that mistake, and we are not cutting these vital and very maligned ecosystems any slack. If we want the next generation—if we want our kids to understand, care about, and act to conserve these vital ecosystems, we need to role model it with language.

Let us then jettison old, tired, inaccurate similes and metaphors like as barren as a desert, or drain the swamp, or big bad wolf, or as Patricia was saying yesterday, as dumb as a tape here or jackass. I've walked 600 kilometers with a jackass, and not Paul Salopek, I mean a real jackass. I know that this is an intelligent creature, a hard-working creature. We just malign ecosystems and animals with language.

Language matters. Words are powerful because as we think, so are our words, as are our words, so is our intent; as our intent, so is our action; and as is our action, so is our destiny. Thank you. Thank you, Artie. Thank you, Artie. Some beautiful images there. Now we all know that technology plays a big part in all of this. To kick things off, I'd like to welcome Senior Director of Graphic Visualization Lab at National Geographic Society, Steve Brumby.

[Applause]

Hey there, I'm Steve Brumby, and what we've been talking about here now is data-driven conservation. So we've been—let me—okay, so we've been collecting data about conservation for a very long time. The issue is how do we know we have enough data? If we have data, how do we know that it's actually being helpful, right? How do we actually engage with the technology communities that create new sensors, the folks who have to assemble data into useful systems, and then the folks who have to actually communicate that the results of all that work to local communities to achieve change?

Okay, when I was on this stage a year ago, I announced that National Geographic was looking to build a new data platform to help supply the tools to enable data-driven conservation. The Earth Pulse platform that we're actually announcing right now is the combination of that last year of work.

So Earth Pulse is a system that's designed to bring together all of this best data, but not just produce a big vat of data. There are a number of systems already that have large amounts of data. We want to curate that data that goes from the bottoms of the oceans to space and beyond. We want to bring all that together, and we want to put it to the use of understanding.

Let’s see, next one. Okay, to understand our species, the habitats, the impacts that our actions are having on species and habitats, and the impacts that we're having on ourselves. And then to assess the impact of our responses to those pressures, which we do through protected areas.

So we have a system of information summary dashboards that are automated and provide a continually updated view of every protected area in the world and of all of the, you know, species extents and all sorts of stuff up to countries that can help inform essentially a dashboard for the planet, right? So as we move towards trying to move the international community to achieve 30 percent protection of the world by 2030, we want to give them the tools to do that.

So right now, we're going to be joined by a series of very distinguished panelists, folks who are going to help us talk through these issues of how you achieve real, practical data-driven conservation. So I'm going to be joined by Katie Croft-Bill, who's an oceanographer and National Geographic Fellow; Naphtali Hoenig, director of research and development at Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo with the African Parks Network; also a National Geographic Fellow; Bronwen Egg Rios, a space entrepreneur and National Geographic Fellow in Africa; and Flores Anderson, research scientist at the University of Alabama and National Geographic Explorer.

Please welcome to the panel. [Applause]

Okay, thanks for joining us. So, first question is to Katie: so 95 percent of the oceans are still essentially unexplored. All right? How do we evolve beyond having very expensive crewed missions to try—crew-ed missions to explore the rest of the volume? And if we explore the rest of the volume, what do we do with all that data?

Excellent questions. So I think that it's a really exciting time for oceanography and exploration and discovery in general because there have been so many advances being made in other industries with low-cost electronics and sensors and robotics. Think about the supercomputer that's in every pocket in this room right now that has more computing power than every computer combined that put people on the moon, right? So there's so much possibility in terms of the low-cost robotics to be able to create a truly distributed, more efficient system than we've ever had before.

As you mentioned, the big ships, the big robots cost tens of million dollars a year to operate, and they really only look at a very small fraction of the seafloor. Very, very well, mind you, with incredible detail, but we really need to cover a much, much larger area and get a sense of the lay of the land and then send those very detailed assets back there.

But as you mentioned, what we didn't do with the data, and before I go on there, a couple of projects have been working on in the sort of low-cost robotics space. One is with the Exploration Technology Lab, the guys in the basement, and that is to use the drop camera, as you can see just sort of a screen here, to work with communities in small island developing states to be able to explore their own deep seas.

So, in addition to the technologies, you also need to look at who is going to be deploying these different kinds of assets and expanding what it means to be an ocean explorer. You can't just have a handful of PhDs, oceanographers, you also need to have a much bigger community.

So we have this thing going on called My Deep-Sea, My Backyard, and we also have another, if we can go to the next slide, which is developing underwater LEGO robots, which has been very, very fun, and we did a National Geographic student expedition last summer with these little vehicles. We're continuing to develop them and see what we can do to really bring these kinds of assets to students, to really everyone. But then you get to what do you do with the data, right? All right, I'll let Naphtali.

Okay, thank you. So Neftali, science and exploration lead to new senses. When you are trying to protect areas—conservation areas in very remote and often very troubled regions of the world, what are you thinking about in addition to the sensors so that you can actually build it into a system that actually has impacted?

What you're seeing on the screen here is doing some aerial mapping. We had our friends from Virtual Wonders Corps, just called Skin Chris Milburn come through a few months ago. You can see how huge Garamba is, and so obviously it's a very vast, remote landscape. This is just an example here of some imagery that was taken with those flights.

Not only is it fast, but it's also a conflict area. We have conflict in neighboring Central African Republic and South Sudan. This is a refugee settlement in South Sudan, and just an example here is... I mean, this is how we can conduct change detection over time, and you could imagine we would want to do that for refugee settlements or for illegal mines. But here you can see even a small path if you look closely.

You could imagine also wanting to have wildlife collars. That's a pretty typical sensor in protected areas. Then you can imagine if you identified paths using this imagery that you might want to place a camera there. So then you have to figure out, okay, what do we need in terms of a camera or anything to detect poachers? And you have to think of the testing, right? Has it been tested before it's come out? You can't go to the hardware store if you're in the DRC, so we probably have one, maybe a few hundred kilometers away, so not really ideal.

You have to think of timetables. So if somebody is designing a camera for conservation or a product for conservation, we can't just wait forever for these things to come out. You know, the pace of technological development is fast, so we need people who are interested in developing technology to respect timetables. And we also have to think about transmission. So how do you get a signal from a sensor?

A lot of these places don't have mobile phone access, so we have to think of a satellite solution or a LoRa solution or something like that, right? And so that brings up Bronwen, who sits out in Silicon Valley, and a lot of the technology—not so much the science sensor, but the rest of the chain that Naphtali just described, the comms and the computing and the power systems that can work in remote areas.

A lot of those are really dual-use technology that industry is developing, and Silicon Valley is at the center of that type of development. Where do you see the big opportunities for conservation to sort of leverage that progress that’s happening without getting eaten alive by the scale of the industrial investments that are being made?

Yeah, for sure. Last week, a pair reported on a press perspective from Hurricane Michael, this Category 5 storm that ripped through Florida last year. A hundred sixty miles per hour winds, and they quoted a local mayor saying, "Had we known sooner that the storm was going to be so severe, everyone would have left."

Accurate, timely forecasting of hurricane wind speeds can absolutely change the way we address impact. For the past fifty years, it’s really been meteorologists that look at the imagery, look at the clouds, and now make a wind speed forecast every six hours.

So this might sound a little funny, but if you look at every storm every year every six hours, those meteorologists know a lot. Now the world has a record of all of those storms, and in our current age of AI, having a scientifically validated dataset that describes Earth's systems is absolute gold. So, in addition to a scientist or meteorologist looking at a single image, you now have computer vision looking at an image and thousands of historical curated validated images that can provide accurate, timely wind speeds.

So my friends at Development Seed with NASA did exactly this last year. They built an AI that detected an uptick in wind speeds for Hurricane Florence from Category Two to Category Three a full day before the National Hurricane Center advisory came out. That's the difference between limbs falling off of trees and the trees being completely uprooted, right?

So they’re using the new NOAA set of satellites called GOES that observe the entire western hemisphere every five minutes. Case if we tack on an extra minute to downlink that data from 35,000 kilometers above the planet, run it through the AI, process the image, and send that forecast off to the API in six minutes, we're now forecasting storms like never before. So again, we just went from six hours to six minutes. That is a step function change.

Okay, so after you've done all this fancy tech and you've brought in the latest and greatest commercial off-the-shelf, right? Somebody still needs to actually use the result, right? So Africa, you've been out in Guatemala working with the local communities, helping them understand toxic algal blooms. What do you see as the biggest challenges to the sort of capacity-building that's needed at the community level or the government, local governmental level, to help with the adoption of these technologies so that they're actually used?

Yeah, so government instability—that's the biggest challenge we have faced. This is Lake Atitlán, as you can see, one of the most beautiful places on Earth, and no bios from there. But it is, and we are using satellite remote sensing to monitor the algal blooms that have been appearing since 2009. But with SERVIR, which is a partnership between NASA and USAID, we work with government to build the capacity to use our observation data for improved decision-making.

We work with governments because they are the ones who have the mandate to monitor and protect their own country resources. We develop systems and tools that are very useful, and then there is a high turnover of technical people and officials. So we had to address this in different ways. One of that is involving academia more and more, so we are empowering the next generation of professionals that are going to take those positions.

The other, I think, has been the success of SERVIR; it's partnering with local experts. In SERVIR, we work in Africa, in Asia, and in Latin America. We just are working in the Amazon right now. In these regions, SERVIR is not a bunch of scientists back here in NASA, but they are local experts.

So for example, in Eastern Africa, we partner with the Regional Center of Mapping of Resources for Development, who are from Kenya and from the countries in Eastern Africa. They are the ones who are providing the backstopping and working with governments. Even with this high turnover of government officials, we have a stable science and knowledge, and we co-develop these tools together.

So what are the real tricks to achieving impactful data-driven conservation is to open the links between different folks on this table on this panel. So Naphtali, what would you say is the biggest opportunity you have to learn from one of the others?

I think that there is a whole new field now with mapping to do it in an integrated fashion. I think that bringing in other people's data has never been easier, and sending out your own data has never been easier. So I think there's a ton of opportunity there to share more easily.

It's a problem; there's a lot of wrong about that.

Yeah, definitely. To me, I think that one of the big opportunities to collaborate comes from this shared DNA that I felt the past couple of days between entrepreneurs and explorers, right? Everybody in this room is obsessed with going into the unknown, and tech entrepreneurs share the same thing. We're all looking for the best tools and I mean, I'm working on a program right now with National Geographic Labs to bring a tighter connection between the explorers and the entrepreneurial investment community in Silicon Valley that I think will help to bridge those gaps, allowing for a lot of things that Naphtali were just talking about as well.

I personally think could learn a lot from Africa. I'm certainly guilty of the sort of parachute science model, where you bring a ship in, you do a thing, you maybe hand some people locally a hard drive and then you go away. That's definitely one of the things that I would like to work on personally. How can we bring deep-sea science to more people who have not been engaged in it? I would love to learn more from Africa about their community building and how to engage with local communities in science.

Yeah, and that's what we do at SERVIR. We bring the science; we are that bridge between science and application. We are working with a lot of scientists; we are scientists ourselves. We also respect and know that there is wisdom and information that we need. Everything that we generate with satellite remote sensing needs to be validated and calibrated; we need in situ observations, we need data from the field, and there is a lot of local knowledge.

For me, sometimes it's even funny to see that there are scientists working in Colombia, Peru that are using, making better use of satellite data than scientists down here because they are actually using it to take action to identify deforestation. So, we're always open, and we like to work together. That's how SERVIR has come about—working together.

What would you say is the biggest myth about your piece of this? What do you think is the biggest thing the rest of the conservation community misunderstands, for example, about Silicon Valley?

Yeah, you know, one of the things that Africa and I were talking about yesterday is that she's having trouble acquiring imagery for one of her programs, right? And she can't afford it; the license isn't available. It really just brings to light that even for academic programs or nonprofit programs, especially for commercial programs, that the economics and the business model of Earth observation aren't really very well defined, and they're still very much in flux, which I think has an impact on the community as we’ve seen over the past couple of days, because there have been so many references to satellite imagery.

So, I think the myth is that maybe space is figured out, right? And I will say for anybody who's an explorer in the audience that there are specific programs. Any explorer wants to get some satellite imagery, come talk to me.

Okay, okay, state. Steve has it figured out. Everybody else, what's your biggest myth about Naphtali? I mean, people give you a sensor and say, "Hey, you must have saved all the animals by now."

Certainly. Certainly, that's one myth. That is that you can look at sensors in isolation and not see the fact that you need a sensor, you need a method to transmit that, and that you need a system to integrate that data and to analyze it.

I think another big myth is that those systems, I mean, we built out a system with a lot of help from National Geographic and from ESRI. And I think a big myth there is that you need some sort of super specialization in mapping to be able to implement that in a park, when in fact you can actually— you can actually train capacity locally, and you can sort of have a specialist pretty easily in each park.

And nowadays the tools that are available are easy enough to learn that this type of location intelligence and sort of better, more in-depth analytics is possible in every park.

Definitely. I will think that this thinking that data and technology itself is going to solve the biggest environmental issues that we have today, and we forget about the people that are at the core of these environmental issues. So integrating that analogy, that I think that scientists have to be humble enough to recognize that we have to work together, that there is knowledge out there, and that we need it.

So for me, that's one of the biggest myths.

JD, I think one, maybe it's not a myth, but rather a misconception. Like you hear all the stats about 95 percent haven't been explored, all this stuff, then you go to Google Earth and then you see there's the bottom of the ocean right there.

Yet the data that's there is very, very low resolution. You see the big bumps; you see the mid-ocean ridge but you really don't know what is there. So, that's I think, you know, when you look at all these beautiful maps, they make you feel like you know what's there, but really there's so much left to explore.

Yeah, I'm originally from Australia, which was terra incognito for a long time for Westerners.

Okay, so final question in just thirty seconds like lightning around: what is your most optimistic view of where we're going to be like five years from now?

Africa?

I think it's already happening. I see this room; I see the explorers; I see so much diversity, and that brings so much hope. I really want to applaud Maggio's efforts or work to really be diverse and giving a voice to those that have been here for so long. I think that we still need to do more, for example, being indigenous peoples that have been said here on this stage several times, but I see a change that is about the first time, so this is very positive.

I think that with a combination of low-cost tools, data analytics, and communities, it is very possible to have any community in the world with deep-sea waters to be able to explore and understand their own resources for themselves.

I think that in five years' time, with the faster-paced development of technology, I think it’s fair to say that animal tracking, so wildlife tracking, and other sensors, remote sensing, and various types of camera traps, I think that's going to become—and the systems that you analyze the data within, I think it's going to become much more ubiquitous and successful and useful over the next five years.

Right better and worse because you guys said all the things. You know, diversity, data analytics, ubiquitous use of technology. I'm gonna say hamburgers! I mean, hope everyone in this room is following the Beyond Meat IPO. This is, I hope that in five years, I start seeing satellite from satellite imagery and the rebirth of jungles and that the micro-satellites tracking methane emissions are detecting a reduction in emissions because of things like Beyond Meat, like plant-based meat products that are, you know, worth, you know, ten billion dollars on the market these days. So, an Impossible Burger to import.

Let's thank our panelists. [Applause]

Carefully go. Alright, now to finish up today, I'm looking forward to this last segment. It's about hope. Five reasons to hope. I don’t need to say much else than that. There are very few people in the National Geographic family who can make me more hopeful or energized than our host for this last segment, who’s a better closer to the day than Paul Rose. Come on out, Paul! Expedition leader for National Geographic.

Thank you, Sam! Thanks very much. Cheers! Thank you!

Well, thanks, Sam, and this has been a fantastic day. A day that's right up my street. You know, it's been billed as the headline of hope, but of course, we've carried with it everything else that goes with a successful project: you know, the ambition and commitment and technical brilliance and incredible successes. So we've celebrated that today in a brilliant way. This has really been quite something.

So now, let's focus our minds on why we have reasons to hope. We've got five representatives with their projects. Not many out of all the projects we have, we’ve managed to narrow it down to five. So we've got a conservation educator, and there's nothing more vital at the moment. Boy, do we need a conservation educator.

We've got someone from the very front line of that conflict that exists between wildlife and humanity. We've got the future of food, food security, which we all know has always been an issue and now it's become an absolute urgent crisis. We even got something called ruthless meat and finless fish, which when I say that, sounds a lot like the perfect name for a rock and roll band. I mean, if I was walking past the Lucky Bar this evening, and it said “Tonight: Ruthless Meat and the Finless Fish,” I'd be straight in there. Who could resist it?

But it isn't; it's two very separate cell-based food products. Very, very exciting business. So we're going to get it going. I'm going to use Carmen. Carmen Chavez, she's a tropical biologist, National Geographic Explorer. So come on out. Come and have fun!

Thank you, Paul. I come from a part of the world that is not only beautiful and rich, as we all know, the Amazon rainforest. It's home to many thousands of plant species, animals, and everything else that is waiting to be discovered. It is also home to many indigenous cultures and people and groups.

But what is a little bit not understood so well sometimes is that there are millions of people that are not originally from this area, and they are settled there. In the case of the Amazon region of Madre de Dios, for example, most of the people have arrived from the Andes; they have immigrated in the search of opportunities and looking for a better future for their families. Some are there for decades cutting down the forest, and in the most recent years, many are just coming lured by the gold that is found in their rivers and in the sediments.

Twenty years ago, I was very lucky to go to the Manu River. I was surrounded by many scientists, environmentalists, and researchers that told me so much about the forest, and I learned to appreciate this place and to love it. I made it my mission in life to help protect this environment along with the Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research, an organization known as the Aesir Foundation. We have been working tirelessly to educate the people that are actually living in this area already.

We provide with opportunities that they can learn to appreciate this area from the inside out. We meet with hundreds of schoolchildren and thousands of people in the Amazon in the Madre de Dios region. I want into the issue—Gloria Carrasco, the woman who is carefully examining these leaves. I was teaching a course in botany and restoration, and she came from the Andes to the Amazon 25 years before, and she's a dedicated teacher.

When we were working in the trail, I pointed out to this tree that is an important element in the area, the shade Inga tree, the rubber tree. I didn’t know what it meant for Gloria, but she chose to jump out of the trail, run to have this tree, and tears were coming down from her eyes. I didn’t know that she had 25 years living in the Amazon; she never had the opportunity to see this tree.

She knew about the importance of this species. She knew that this is me. She changed the way we live currently in modern times. Now, she's teaching her own students about this place, and I’m taking her class to see this very same tree. Thanks to the support of National Geographic, we are reaching even more people, and we believe that we are going to be able to save this place from the inside out.

Thank you.

Thanks very much, Carmen. And this is it—conservation education. You know, this gives us hope. Thank you very much. Next, it is a great pleasure to introduce Eric. Eric Schultz is the Vice President of Product and Regulation of Memphis Meats. I made the joke about "who's Phyllis meat?" So Eric, you're not in a rock band, are you?

No? Okay, we'll come out anyway and have some fun!

Thank you. Thank you! So Memphis Meats makes real animal meat directly from real animal cells in a process we call cell-based meat production. From a single rice grain-sized biopsy, we can produce an entire cow's worth of meat in the same time it takes to produce a cow.

Roughly two to three years in a facility the size of a brewery; we expect to produce our meat using fewer inputs, producing less waste, and producing no antibiotics whatsoever. I'm going to do a quick straw poll. There’s cell-based meat on here and there’s conventional chicken. Both are raw. With a quick show of hands, who thinks the one on the left-hand side of your screen is cell-based?

One on the right? You guess the one on the left? You’d be incorrect; the one on the right is cell-based chicken. It's a question I get asked the most: "What does your product look like?" Well, it looks like real meat because it is real meat made from the same things that meat is made from.

Now on the left-hand side of your screen, you have a cell-based meatball we debuted in 2016, and the world's first cell-based chicken in 2017. I can personally testify these products are delicious. I get to eat them every day; it’s my favorite part of my job.

So you might get to ask yourself, "Why do we even bother producing cell-based meat in this and poultry and seafood in this way?" Well, simply because Memphis Meats envisions a world of abundance. Too often, progress is pitted as a false choice against tradition versus innovation, past versus future.

But if you look at the history of civilization, all innovations start as an earnest attempt to preserve our most cherished human traditions. At the center of that is food and food innovation, and as we move forward to build ourselves into a sustainable planet—so species—and hopefully a sustainable interplanetary species, food must remain at the center of that innovation.

And we’re facing an innovative challenge right now. You see, by 2050, the world's population is expected to hit ten billion people, a little less than three billion more than today. Meat demand is expected to double in that time. To meet that demand, we're gonna have to produce an staggeringly large 140 billion animals and use most of the arable land to grow the plants to feed the animals to feed us.

Humanity has an interesting challenge facing it now. On the surface of that, it feels like an 'us versus them' choice. But it doesn't have to be. You see, we don’t have to either choose eating meat or having a sustainable planet. No, we can have our meat and eat it too.

You see, it’s gonna take innovation in all sectors—from conventional animal farming, small-scale sustainable farming, and cell-based methods—all putting innovation together to feed a growing world. If we're going to feed billions safe and delicious food, we'll have to work with more creativity, purposeful hope, and more technical discipline.

In doing so, feeding the world will allow us to have that safe and affordable food and do it in a way that preserves our most cherished human traditions and allows us to build a safe and sustainable planet. At Memphis Meats, we hope and believe we're building that world now.

Thank you.

Well, thank you, Eric. Sure! This is a revolution; you know, feeding us by revolution, you can’t go wrong. If you think about rock band, just get in there.

It gives me great pleasure now to introduce Lei Li. Is Lei Li listening? Is she? Lei Li is a conservationist, National Geographic Explorer, and she works at that incredibly dangerous and challenging frontline that exists, which is the conflict between humans and wildlife. Come on Lei Li, have fun!

[Applause]

Meet Lala, a magnificent young lion in northern Tanzania. He's banded together with two of his brothers to dominate a territory just outside of Tarangire National Park, a land that is also ruled by the Masai people. Lala might not be alive today if not for the story I'm about to tell you.

Now, Lala means sleep, and I often think of him lying around dreaming of becoming this beautiful boy. Just a wee bit of meaning? Busy perhaps? But Lala is a wonderful lion, and he's living in an area where there are a lot of people. We've got to keep him safe.

I remember a day when lions like this would roar nightly around our home in the bush, and then I remember a time when it all went silent, and lions were being killed rapidly for human-lion conflict, for killing livestock. As a result, we were losing the lion, and it was an age-old conflict. People were trading in their spears for poison and guns, new-age weapons.

But there was a sense among the people that something wasn't right, even among themselves. So we sat together, we decided under a tree to innovate together. Co-creation is at the foundation of our work at African People and Wildlife.

The result was living walls, environmentally friendly predator-proof cows that were co-designed with the Masai people. They keep lions safe from livestock and lions safe from people and livestock safe from lions. As a result, we've been able to reduce the killing dramatically.

Living walls are a mighty icon of the power of community engagement, of the importance of linking traditional knowledge with modern-day science. It's incredibly important to recognize the strength that happens when we come together for a local and balanced solution to the challenges our planet faces.

When we have a living wall, we have something that is with the community; it's done together in partnership and has been the catalyst in our work for a model of how we build community engagement, a global movement for community-driven conservation where rural people really are at the helm of the work that’s being done.

This is Rafael Syria. He says that living walls have transformed his life. From his own calculation, he used to lose twenty-five percent of most of his livestock to wild carnivores and his family were exhausted because they were protecting the livestock at night; they weren't sleeping. The area around their corral was denuded as they constantly went out to fortify the corrals.

He says that both the physical and the financial investments that he’s made in living walls have made a huge difference because now his livestock is safe, and now his family can rest at night, and the habitat is coming back.

This powerful innovation that came from working with local communities benefits men and I’m very proud to say also women because the women are often responsible for fortifying the corrals, and they say that living walls save them time. Also, with the livestock safe, that keeps the women from being blamed when an animal is killed or even potentially persecuted.

So they're more proud, and they have more peace in their lives. So what does this mean? This is a reprieve; the roar of the lions has finally come back to this landscape. We are seeing signs of lion recovery. This is Lala's brother, just recently seen consorting with this lioness just two weeks ago. So very soon, the next generation will be trotting out on this landscape in a world where true partnerships and long-term partnerships with local communities make it possible to actually find the balance.

Thank you!

[Applause]

Thanks very much, Lei Li. I can't imagine the sense of working in such challenging conditions, seeing it through that perspective where success is measured by hearing the roar of the lions. You can’t go wrong!

Now, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Bryan. Bryan is from Finless Foods, and it's not a rock band, is it Bryan? Just to make sure. I'm Bryan Morris, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Finless Foods, so come on Bryan, have some fire!

Thank you! Thank you, Paul. Fish meat is some of the healthiest protein a person can consume; high amounts of Omega-3s, Omega-6s. Whether it's breakfast, lunch, or dinner, you know it's going to be a healthy meal.

But that has been changing. The world's ocean is getting more and more polluted, and unfortunately, these pollutants are entering the fish, fish’s body and affecting our health. So, mercury accumulation is something of a well-known fact, but unfortunately, this isn't a natural phenomenon.

Essentially, I'm sorry. This is because we as a species introduced mercury into the ocean's ecosystem all those years ago, so we're affecting the health of the fish as a species, we're also affecting the ocean's ecosystem. So, essentially, as we have more and more of these pollutants there and taking out tons and tons of fish from the sea, we are disrupting the delicate balance that we see in the ocean.

Just to add to this very, very depressing list of things, overfishing is also a social issue. Somali pirates, before they were pirates, were actually fishermen. International fishing fleets came into their waters and took all the fish out of their sea, so with hungry mouths to feed, they resorted to violence.

Now, despite all of this, the consumption of seafood is going nowhere but up. Essentially, we have a flat line on how much seafood we can take out of the oceans' ecosystem, and that's because we can't pump out any more efficiency.

So what comes into the second for the rescue? Aquaculture. Aquaculture does have also its slew of problems. A lot of the feed that has been introduced for aquaculture comes from the ocean. So you're not really circumventing a lot of those issues as well as the systems of inputs and outputs; it's not really efficient.

We're spending resources on feed that turns into skin, bone, muscle, and blood and other things. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could change 100 percent of this resource into 100 percent of the product?

At Finless Foods, we do exactly that. We take a high-quality fish stock, we isolate the cells that are responsible for meat production, mainly muscle, fat, and connective tissue, and we grow that out in huge, huge quantities. Then we blend these three elements together to create a structured product for people to enjoy, a fish filet.

I’m very happy to say that we succeeded in our project; we grew fish protein outside the body of the fish for human consumption for the first time on September 8th of 2017, and those cells were actually part of that project. What we're doing right now is scaling up our process so we could change the way we eat seafood forever.

Thank you!

Fantastic! Thanks very much, Bryan. And I like to spend my life working at sea to help create large marine protected areas to save the ocean. Bryan's work is going to do that; you're probably going to be a billionaire very soon, Bryan.

Next up is Caleb from Future Food Systems. We do see a lot in the press about food security for the future, but only in the last few months has it become an absolute crisis, and we need to act. What are we going to do? Well, luckily, we've got people like Caleb. Caleb is the director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at MIT Media Lab and the National Geographic Explorer. So come on, Caleb, finish it off for us!

Thank you! You proud audience dwellers, hello to the courtyard that's warm. I'm Caleb. When I arrived here in 2015, I was like a super misfit. I was a lonely food explorer, and all of my friends that have become family now were talking about all the coolest things, like oceans. They were like, "Oceans are the best! They're like, but harmful blooms, they suck!" And I was like, "I know what causes harmful blooms; it’s agriculture!"

And they're like, "Habitat destruction is the worst! We're losing all these animals. We're doing all these projects." And I was like, "I know what’s taking the habitat; it's agriculture!" The answer to almost all the things that the people care about in this room has a thread through the basic human endeavor of agriculture.

So if we're going to talk about these issues seriously, we have to be very much invested as National Geographic, and as explorers, and as a community in the future of food. You just heard about growing fish in lab environments. If this was your first time, then you're like, "Whoa, Craig! Crazy!" You're feeling a lot of emotions.

I would say that we're at the beginning of a new agricultural revolution. I just want to point that out because agricultural revolutions radically change human history. They are the bedrock of why we have to have societies to begin with. We stop chasing each other around; why we have all the technologies that we have.

So we're at the beginning of this next one, and it's going to be about the most boring thing you can imagine. It's going to be about accounting. If you're gonna do accounting for where things came from, what they're made of, you're going to need a machine.

So, people often see what I'm about to tell you about when I work side, and they always see the apps. They're like, "Oh, you can grow these in that place and over to go farming, and it's very cute." They miss the machine underneath.

So quickly, I'll show you the machine, and then I'll show you some of the apps that make it real. The first step in my process is called “encode.” I build boxes of all different sizes, and what they're really doing is turning atoms into bits. We’ve heard about this before. It was called the Internet; it was this cool thing.

So we’re taking real things, making them digital, so that we can understand them in this space of the 21st century. So that’s "encode." "Decode" becomes now we have all this data - metabolomic data, gas chromatography data, image-based data, sensor-based, they de-shions of data.

But how do we start to decode it? How do we find advanced relationships? This is where kind of machine learning and artificial intelligence enter the game. But then the next step, because all that means nothing if the information doesn't create knowledge. So we encode, we decode, and then we recode.

We have to work on bringing those things into the real world. So I'm gonna leave the abstract now and go to the tangible. When I was here in 2015, I had a weird little box that grew plants, and I've been on this journey since because when I went to school gardens, I was brokenhearted with Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign, and all that to find out that almost every school garden that opens closes within three years, despite having massive amounts of funding.

So I thought a climate in a classroom—that's what we need to build. And now I'm happy to say that we've actually launched a whole nonprofit that's been putting these things out into the world: maker kits for gathering data, doing coding, doing electronics, and doing climate science and doing plant science.

It's called the Personal Food. I have no time, so I'm gonna keep going fast. It's gone around the world. I've held National Geographic Hackathons with kids, making their own. These are people in Baltimore; I just randomly picked it out of our community. They're there all over the place.

The next one, so I build bigger boxes, and inside of these bigger boxes, I produce things like medicine. All medicine came from plants; then we synthesized it. Made…it’s all water, I won't go off into that land, but let's just say you can use climate science to decode a plant’s ability to express the chemistry that we're interested in.

We call that flavor; it’s also called medicine; it’s also called nutrition. And so I study how do you do that in these new advanced environments? But more than that, 80 percent of the world currently relies on plant-based medicine. Some of the medicines I work on are million dollars a kilo that you can grow in these containers that can now bring chemotherapy drugs to a lot of other places.

The next thing that I do in my boxes that's important to tell you is I work on what do I grow in a box that tells me where it grows in the world? How can I learn by experimenting with climates of the past, present, and future what I should plant in the face of adaptation and have made this real with Ferrero, one of my sponsors that makes Kinder and Nutella and a lot of other things you might like.

I actually look for places in the world—I climate prospect them. I use their weather data. I reenact those climates inside of boxes, and I grow trees. I see if I was to bring a tree into that place, would it produce an amazing nut? But more importantly than that, how could we effectively use our climate data so that we see the world as a catalogue of opportunity, a catalogue of climate stresses that can be planted in it, complaining it within and then say, “Oh, but what would it cost the environment if I did that? What would it create in terms of human nutrition, in terms of positive benefit? And if it doesn't win, we don’t go there.”

This is the world that's starting to come to life. So I’ll close with this. We put all of this out open-source; that’s the mission of my lab at MIT, and the mission of my nonprofit. When I was here on stage last, I showed this in 2015. To be truthful, it was like half dream, half reality.

I was like, “Steve Jobs moment!” Like, “Yeah, we're all over the place!” Made a lot of promises. People don't usually come back to the stage and like, keep promises. So I’m here from that time, 2015 to today. These are individuals within our network in sixty-five countries across cultural barriers, across language barriers, across skill level barriers—all the things that people told me were impossible. They were like, “You’ll never get these crazy weird little machines in the hands of all these different people, and you’re gonna have to build all these huge organizations.” And they were all wrong.

So as these people out there—makers, hackers, students, scientists, homebodies, it doesn’t matter—come online, and they’re looking for that digital interface to their agricultural future, we’re building it. Thank you!

Thank you very much, Katie! So there you go; technical genius and leadership is going to save us all from starving to death. And after a day like today and these last five presentations, I sort of like to dream just into the near future and just imagine with, you know, what's going on politically at the moment. If every time we came to vote for somebody on the card or on the screen, it said at the top whether or not that person attended National Geographic Explorers.

First of all, that would be great because we'll instantly know their priorities and their goals and the things that meant something to them, and when it wasn't there, it would be a big flash-up: “Big red card! Danger! Danger! This person has not come.” That's the sort of future I see, and we have to reflect now how lucky we are because we operate within National Geographic with all the sponsors. You know, we've got sponsors that support, and we've got political influence and we’ve got money, and we’ve got changemakers, and we can do all that while we do all of our work.

But if we imagine that all of that support was taken away—and I know you’re listening, so please, please don’t take it away—but if it was all taken away, we would still do what we do as nothing can stop us, and the five you just saw from doing what we do. It's in us; it's the way we live our life. It's a life well lived; we’re just unstoppable. We just can’t help ourselves, and that’s why we do this.

I just like to celebrate that at this moment. Thanks very much!

[Applause]

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, Paul. That was a great closing! That was incredible!

So we've—thank you to all the speakers and to all of you listening out there in the courtyard. I know you're enjoying it. We’re all coming there, so that brings us to the closure of our day today for all the explorers here in the room and for all of you out in the courtyard. There’s a photographic photo opportunity at the 16th Street stairs, so if all of you can assemble there.