Alex Honnold Explores Sustainability at Epcot | ourHOME | National Geographic

[Music] Hey, I'm Alex Honald and I'm here at Walt Disney World Resort learning a little bit about what the park has done with solar energy to power the park through solar and also learning about the interplay with nature and the park. [Music]

Here, hello! Hey Alex, so nice to finally meet you! I'm so excited you're here.

Nice to meet you too! Tell me about solar in the park.

I would love to tell you about it. You know, we really want to do the best job we can to make sure that we're providing an awesome experience and also doing right by nature. Solar is one of the best opportunities that we have to try to have a renewable source of energy for everything that you see going on around us.

I feel the same way! I've spent, uh, yeah—more than 10 years supporting a solar nonprofit, supporting some solar projects around the world. I definitely think that it's one of the best solutions that humanity has for so many different issues. There is work going on all around the world to try to do the best job that we can having fully renewable energy. Disneyland Paris is putting in the largest solar canopy in Europe. Here in Florida, we have lots of sun and we want to make use of it. We've got four theme parks and guest areas all throughout Walt Disney World, which is about two times as big as Manhattan—it's huge!

Currently, there are about 300 acres of solar arrays that are providing energy. [Music]

Here, looking at the solar array, because you have to have a gap around the outside, there's a surprising amount of space outside of the array. I'm always looking for places where we can put in a habitat for wildlife. We put these different flowering plants in and we figured out what has the biggest impact on biodiversity. Looking at the pollinator patch and just seeing how vibrant it is and how much life there is, I think it's important to remember when we look at something like this that it's alive and healthy and doing great.

If you're used to a super manicured area, used to perfect flowers everywhere, you look at this and think like someone should mow this, like there's something wrong with this—this is the point! This is a whole city with tons and tons of life doing different things. This is the whole [Applause] idea.

One of the great things about Epcot is it's basically a giant pollinator garden! Totally! Especially this time of year, there's flowers absolutely everywhere. If there's room, we're going to see if we can make it beautiful. You know, there's never a bad time to be inspired by nature. You can see caterpillars feeding on plants, you can hear the insects flying around, and you can even hear the birds up top—probably these are the purple martins.

Hey, I'd love you to meet Martin; he can tell us all about these purple martins!

Hey, nice to meet you!

Nice to meet you! So these here are purple martins. They are the largest swallow in North America, and we have 22 of these nest structures here across the property. This is especially cool! These guys are part of a guild called long-distance migrants—they came actually all the way up from Brazil! So these ones had a 3,000-mile journey. Last year here on property, we had over 1,000 purple martin chicks hatch.

Oh wow! Yeah, that's cool! We also use some GPS units as well as radio telemetry tracking devices to look at the behavior of our martins. Some of those tags actually have solar panels on them—they actually all have on because they're so small, they don't have internal batteries. Pretty incredible, right? We used them for a year and then during that health assessment when we collect all the adults, this one we actually take it off. [Music]

Thanks so much for showing me the nest! It's really inspiring to see what you guys are doing.

Yeah, it was great to meet you! It was great to have someone else crank down the nest for me so I didn't have to get my arm beat today.

Oh no, my pleasure! My pleasure.

Well, thank you so much for the tour today! It's incredible to see what you guys are doing.

My pleasure! Thank you for coming out. [Music] [Music]