Tracking Plastic Sea to Source | Explorers Fest

The session all of you are able to stand up here and give a talk about why we need three by three. Yeah, and to get that we need to. The emotional component was beautifully put forward by a hundred ways. Now let's talk about the brain for a little bit—the rationale. So why do we need to protect anything, right? And then how much, and then where, and how? And then the final question, of course, how much is it going to cost, right?

So this is what we're going to try to do in the next twenty minutes. Somebody shaved five minutes out of our session. Wonderful! Okay, I start with why. So you guys know we have to be concise. Why? What? What is there any problem? What's the problem? What are the drivers of this global loss of nature that we hear about?

Please, thanks very much. We all were probably aware of a recent UN report which said that a million species are threatened with extinction, and this includes 60% of all large mammals, which includes elephants, rhinos, great apes. Imagine a world without them. It could 60% of all turtles and tortoises. And there was the report that came out just last week that said that in fact, plants are becoming extinct at an even greater rate than animals, with about 600 species of plants that have gone extinct in the last 250 years.

And why is it happening? Well, one of the core reasons that it's happening is there's a lot more of us than there were. So where National Geographic was founded in 1888, there were about 1.5 billion people on the planet; now there's more than 7.7 billion. So that means we need land for agriculture, and about three-quarters of the world's land area and most of the world's oceans are now impacted in some way by human activities. We only have 15 percent of the original tropical forests remaining and only about 5% of the world's natural grasslands remaining.

On top of that, we overexploitation individual species by overlogging, overhunting, overfishing, which means that's the greatest threat to certain species, such as elephants, tigers—a lot of the ones that we really care about. And it matters! And why should we care about it? Partly because, as we've heard in a lot of talks this week so far, these species have intrinsic value if they’re really special, and that's the basis of the Endangered Species Act, lots of other national legislations, and international treaties because we believe these species have a right to exist.

They also have huge cultural value; they're bound into the cultures of people around the world. They're also extremely important for local livelihoods. So local people are very particularly indigenous and traditional communities are very dependent on wild species for their livelihoods. About a billion people worldwide depend on wild fish for their basic protein supply. And perhaps in some ways, most important of all, they provide essential ecosystem services in these biodiverse systems which keep us alive by mitigating climate change, by controlling the climate, by controlling water supplies.

So for all those reasons, we're losing things, and it really matters. You must be like me—I’ve never invited back to a party! It's a lot of stats, and it’s very depressing, but that’s the truth right now. That’s the truth. We have transformed. We are like that meteorite that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, right? And we’re transforming. Apply that at a geological scale.

The good news, because I don’t want you guys to walk out of this auditorium depressed, is that we can reverse that, right? And this is what we’re going to focus on: protected areas that provide… as Hansjörg can and many other people here have been working on. In the ocean, we see this very clearly. You know, when you stop killing the fish, what happens? They take a longer time to die, they grow larger, they have more sex and produce lots of babies. And these protected areas in the ocean bring back life spectacularly.

You know, with my colleague and explorer Octavio Aburto here in Mexico in 1999, we went to a place called Cabo Pulmo in Baja California. That place was part of a study we did across the Gulf of California, Mexico, and it was not nothing remarkable about that place. It was as degraded as the rest of the Gulf of California, and the fishermen were so upset with not having enough fish to catch that they decided to do something that nobody expected—they stopped fishing completely. They created, they convinced the Mexican government to create a national park: Cabo Pulmo National Park.

We returned ten years later, and you probably have seen this photo that Octavio took of a little diver, David and Goliath, with a humongous school of thousands of jacks. What had been a desert was now a kaleidoscope of life and color. The sharks were back, the jacks, the groupers. We saw it go from degraded to pristine in only ten years. So when we give space to nature, nature comes back, you know, spectacularly!

And same thing on the land, and we know that these protected areas are the best way to bring back all that nature and that biodiversity. But how do we create the product area? And allow your Steve to tell us about, you know, in a place as unknown to most people as Angola, right? How do you go about creating a national park near a protected area?

Well, first we must acknowledge that, I mean, our planet's last wild places are those places that for whatever reason our modern society never settled or developed. Places that we hardly ever go, places protected by their remoteness and inaccessibility. But now, as I said, we have almost 8 billion people on the planet. We are entering these lost Edens, and we are going there to destroy them. I’m not sure, but I do know that it's our cities and not the local communities, not the bushmeat hunters themselves, that are eating and wearing our last wildlife.

Now before I go into the house, I just want to take a moment for us all to acknowledge the indigenous local communities that live in these last wild places—the stewards and custodians who are too often underrepresented in meetings and conferences like this around the world. [Applause] They are the guardians of the central banks of global biodiversity—these last wild sanctuaries for the plants and animals we depend on, so they are the key!

Now in our work in the Angolan highlands, in a landscape that we call the Okavango-Zambezi Water Tower, they have guided us in finding 70 new species to science, currently being described, 93 new species of Franco, hundreds of species not known to be there. They've guided us to 19 source lakes surrounded by stratified peat deposits, peatlands that were not known to be there—undocumented fundamentally changing our understanding of the functioning of incredibly important river systems like the Okavango, Kwando, and the Zambezi.

Now, in our interactions with government—which is incredibly important, that’s where the policy is going to come from, that’s when your protected areas are going to come from—early on, they said, “What is the name of this landscape?” Now note this landscape is the size of the state of Wisconsin. It’s about 10,000 people living in it. There was no name for it in government; no one in government had been there for 50 years. So our team, going in to view the local communities, asked them, “What is the name of this place?” And there are many names for small parts of it, but they wanted a name for the whole thing.

And the name they come up with and promoted was the Simuliyama-Wanna, which means “the source of life” in the language of the vendor. Now, it took our 57 scientists working on the project for years to figure that out—something they had known all that time! They will be our guides in building this new future and steady by 30. But now we have this incredible scientific foundation that we’ve created in the Okavango Wilderness Project: 60 publications are coming out into scientific journals, but that’s often where they stay.

What brings National Geographic into a place where it has so much impact is we can do conservation media. We can translate that science into inspiration at all levels in society—from those policymakers to the general public to those local communities on the ground. That is the magic of this. We need to catalyze this process. Those scientific papers sitting in a journal will take 20 years to create a protected area, and then that landscape has been degraded on the trajectory run right now.

So now we have to create platforms for these discussions in these countries. We’re not just working in Angola; it’s with Botswana and Namibia, sharing information between those countries, conferences, stakeholder meetings, meetings at all levels. We’re constantly meeting with people there, building capacity, building knowledge, inspiring them to take this on for themselves. We can’t be prescriptive. I don’t come from Angola, I don’t come from Namibia, I don’t come from Botswana.

So my position is simply to explore, to illuminate, and to activate, and that is what we do in the Okavango Wilderness Project, and that is what we’re gonna do in the Lost World Places Program. Protect Nature—it has to happen as a global movement. We can start with banning plastic straws, but we have to get to the point where we’re welcoming biodiversity and wildlife into our cities and creating protected areas and landscapes and sanctuaries for global biodiversity because we all depend on it.

Thank you Steve! And you mentioned the science, you mentioned the media, but alone science and the media are just tools, right? And it's all about people. And we conducted a survey around the world—12 countries—and other institutions have conducted similar surveys around the world, and when people are asked how much of the planet you think is protected now or you think, they say, “Oh, 30% is already protected at least.” They say that only 15% of the land is protected, and then also only 5% of the ocean is protected.

And when you ask people how much do you want of the planet protected, they say overwhelmingly half. You know, 50%. People want a balance, and actually what people want is what the science is telling us we need—half of the planet in a natural state with functioning forests, grasslands, wetlands, peat bogs, mangrove forests, seagrass beds, healthy ocean habitats, so nature can continue providing all these wonderful benefits like oxygen, flood protection, coastal protection, food, pollination, etc., etc., to provide for us and for the rest of life on the planet.

And this 30% of the planet in protected areas by 2030 is the necessary milestone. We need more! We need half of the planet in a natural functioning state, but this 30% by 2030 is why we have partnered with the Wyss Foundation and this campaign for nature. And it's very easy—we only need to convince 196 countries by October next year. Next year in China, in October, there’s going to be a meeting which is going to be the equivalent of the Paris climate meeting but for nature, and this is what we want to do.

But then the next question is where? We’re talking about 30 percent, but where that 30 percent should be? And Steve, you’ve been thinking a lot about how to prioritize the areas where should we prioritize placing the protected areas now before it's too late?

Yeah, I’m more on the terrestrial side, and you can chip in on the marine side, but in terms of where on the terrestrial side, it’s these last great strongholds for biodiversity. It’s not the sort of degraded places on the outside; it’s got to be these last great strongholds, and that, in a lot of places, is in intact forests. Intact forests on land contain 80 percent of terrestrial biodiversity, and so that's clearly a focus that we’ve got to go for.

In addition, intact forests are really important in mitigating climate change; they absorb about twenty percent of all human-produced carbon every year. And so keeping them in that intact state is really important as a tool. We’re not going to reach the Paris goals without keeping our intact forests, and they’re clearly also home to a large number of traditional and indigenous peoples around the world—fitting into what Steve said that they’re going to be the last guardians of these forests in many ways.

And the other places on land which are really critically important to these areas with very high biomass of animals, of wildlife, which tend to be the big natural grasslands, which have been lost even more than forests have. And so those are the places of the last great migrations and the last great pastoralists in those areas. So if we can focus on those, and I’m sure you can say where we should be focusing on in the sea that’s another panel.

No, that’s great! And so, you know, we know that especially tropical forests harbor most of the biodiversity, most of the species on the planet, right? Because biodiversity—there is no place that is better for biodiversity than others. Biodiversity is the variety of life on Earth; it’s just represented in different trends and patterns, right?

That place with a thousand species per hectare in the tropical forest is as valuable as a place with only ten species in the Arctic. It's just different manifestations of life. But you know, before going to that place in Angola Steve, before the sixty research papers, there was not much information there, right? Actually, that was like a black hole in the knowledge of biodiversity in Africa. So why did you decide to go there? How do you prioritize without having that information?

Oh, I try personally first, and that was a lot to do with National Geographic. For about 2001 through until 2015-14, my entire world was just this Okavango Delta in twenty thousand square kilometers in northern Botswana—this incredible wilderness. And I would explore it in my macaw or across that every three hundred and forty kilometers, about 200 miles. It took us eighteen days and have these incredible experiences documenting its biodiversity.

And then I came here. I became an emerging explorer in 2013, and it was—I didn’t really realize what was going on then. I was so overawed by it. But then in 14, I got to know Inari and many other explorers, and I suddenly broke us of the Okavango Delta. My brain opened, and I came back mid-year in June from the symposium, the festival, and within a few months, team members were up in Angola. We were making contact with governors. I followed them a month later, and four or five months later, we were in armored vehicles driving to the source of the creature that had not been documented.

All the information that we had… it was—we saw these lakes, these wetlands. They were said to be wetlands filled with rainwater seasonally. We get that; we find these ancient specific source lakes surrounded by these vedos. The government—I sat with this governor, a very powerful man, powerful men in the country, in his palace in Malanje, the capital of that province, and I explained over 45 minutes with my translator exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to explore these rivers; I'm going to look for new species. I mean, do all these things, and he stops me. It's a big man with a kind of ivory cane, and he says, “Stop! I have one big problem with this project.” He said, “You National Geographic—I wanted you in 2002 to come to Angola and see the new Angola. You are welcome! I will give you anything you need!”

And there was this unique opening—I was talking to Carter Roberts from WWF—naturally called it—these are one of these unique openings that we have to grasp onto and come in. We’re talking about a landscape that is the size of the state of Wisconsin. We're talking about the primary water supply for the calving Goose-MBZ Transfrontier Conservation Area—the largest such conservation area in the world, home to more than half of the elephants remaining on the planet. It’s an incredibly important landscape.

But I’m the kind of person that is so focused on what I’m doing, my brain starts to open up on these expeditions. It was one of our photographers—he asked me, “Steve, we’re sitting on the Cuango River. What is to the east of us?” It’s just four hundred kilometers of baldness. And he asked me, he said to me, “Well, why don’t you try and protect it? It’ll help this government protect it.” And again, it happened, and I started to try and think about that, and that's been our mission for the rest of this time culminating in signing this protocol of cooperation on the 4th of December 2018.

It’s a five-year agreement with the Angolan government; we can work with those communities to build a system of clocks that they to protect this landscape, and I hope that there is the being going on in the minds of many young explorers now. And I'll talk a little bit about the ocean. Okay, so the last ten years with the project Pristine Seas, we have been going to the wildest places in the ocean—places where we are still, you know, you jump in the water, and you are immediately surrounded by sharks. And this is something that made the Chinese laugh last week—it’s a whole—you like sharks, and I say, "Well, the different way that you like them".

And so we have been working with partners and governments using this combination of exploration, research, and media to inspire governments around the world to create 21 of the largest marine reserves covering an area of over 5 million square kilometers—the size of Canada. And I’d like to thank our friend John Podesta, who’s here today because he won in his latest years at the White House—he was instrumental in expanding our national marine monuments in the Pacific. So thank you, John, and we will continue working not only on the ocean but also on these new last wild places to try to help to protect some of these key areas on the land that contain such important biodiversity.

And the last question is: how much is it going to cost? So you have the Minister of the Environment after we've convinced the Minister of Environment or the president of the country, “All we have to protect this, right?” You have the emotional connection with the media—wonderful! “Yeah, I'm going to protect it, and here’s all the science: 60 papers. You’re not going to read them, but believe me, they’re great.” And then the Minister of Finance says, “Okay, how much is it going to cost?”

And this is where we have the problem. How much does it cost to manage the product area? It depends on how remote it is. It depends on the pressures on it because, broadly, as I heard Mister were saying in the previous section, we’ve got to maintain them—not just establish them because otherwise, it’s like leaving with all these species that people value for all the wrong reasons inside them; it's like leaving a bank without a guard.

So there’s one that I can just give you one example of his newer Balian Doki National Park in northern Congo. It’s a fabulous national park; it was one of the parts founded as a result of Mike Fay's walk that we heard about earlier, and it’s about 4,000 square kilometers. It’s on very heavy poaching pressure because it’s got one of the best last remaining populations of African forest elephants in it, as well as gorillas and a whole bunch of other stuff. And that costs about $750 per square kilometer per year to protect—to do all the correct patrols and all that sort of stuff. So we’re talking about millions of dollars potentially for lives per day, and this is the problem.

The Minister of Finance only hears, “So, you know, we’re going to forego all these quick dollars for timber, right? Plus every year it’s going to cost us half a million, a million or whatever it is, right? So we don’t have money, right?” That’s the problem! But what these people don’t communicate, and the Ministry of Finance don’t know, is that protected areas produce enormous benefits. You know $750 per head per square kilometer in the U.S., every dollar that the U.S. government invests in the management of a National Park produces a return of ten dollars—a tenfold return that fits into the local economy.

It’s like, you know, you’d open a restaurant and expect to have a net profit on day one, right? Same thing with protected areas. They provide huge benefits, but we need to give them time—not only economic benefits. In Cabo Pulmo, those visionary fishermen are now much better off because they live off tourism, and the fishermen around that part are also catching more fish, and their incomes are higher.

And yesterday there was a new scientific paper coming out saying that marine protected areas that are fully protected provide well-being benefits to humans. Same thing for the land; protected areas in developing countries, kids are more likely to be in good health and to be taller for their age and do better—that's cool! So protected areas have benefits that extend well beyond the boundaries.

And you mentioned Greg Carr before, Tracy. Greg Carr is a conservationist who has been involved in the restoration of Gorongosa National Park in Africa. And he told us that during the last cyclone, Cyclone Idai, that killed a couple thousand people in Mozambique a few months ago, the natural grasslands of the park absorbed an amount of rain equivalent to eight hundred thousand Olympic swimming pools. The degraded grasslands, where the livestock has overgrazed, it is like asphalt—the waterfalls and it just goes downstream. You have these floods. So that park actually prevented greater floods and loss of life.

So there are all these benefits that come with protected areas. And so, what benefits do you expect for Angola if those projects they have created at the mouth of the rivers?

Well, they get their history back. I mean, the big elephant you see standing in the main rotunda at the Smithsonian here in DC is the fennec OB elephant. Now that elephant was shot by yourself Anak IV in 1955 in the part of Angola we’re working in. This was recognized as the largest ever land animal ever seen, and then shot.

Now that part of Angola was known as the living room of Africa in 1961 when the elephant was unveiled at the Museum. National Geographic in the September issue wrote an article: Angola: Unknown Africa, emphasizing the cultures, the landscapes, the fennec curvy elephant safari. This was way before we even knew about Botswana and Namibia, much less established industries. Now Angola was going to have that, but then in 1961, the civil war, the war of independence breaks out, and now the war in that country continues till 2002. They got independence in '75, and then civil war broke out. So these forty years were stolen from them.

Now, many of you know Watse sector Borgia from our firm is one of the leaders and up for our project. You'll see them tonight here somewhere, I think, where your water now. We’ve now made first contact with the communities—update these Lacaze communities at Longa. Lean, Hungry Ribbon. And we go and visit to see, look at their lives and the way they’re living. And what this is to me says, well, you know, my life before the Marae Game Reserve and Yako Vander was very similar to this. We were hunting, farming, fishing; we had similar homes. My dad had sandals like that; we made fishing traps—it's very similar! That's what that was our life.

But he saw his life changed with the Marina Game Reserve being established. He became a hunter for a while; he left that to become a safari guide for 14 years. He now has an iPhone, a land cruiser; it’s good to go into school. He has an incredible family life, and he said that was stolen from these Angolan people. He felt kinship with them, and he said, “Steve, we have to help them catch up these 40 years they have lost.” So that’s what they get back.

Thank you for that, Steve. Thank you! Okay, how many people now is ready to come up here and give a talk about 30 by 30? Oh man, nobody? No. Oh wait! Hansjörg! Thank you so much for your extraordinary commitment and leadership, and we are with you in this campaign to help to protect as much of our planet as possible. Thank you very much! [Applause]

Any up? No? Huh? Wow! Now, that’s a tough job—conserving 30 percent of the planet by 2030. But we have reason for hope! We have people like this working hard in the field, working to conserve our planet. Now, many of our own human nature, what we do affects the planet in very harmful ways, and that’s one of the things that we need to really think about—changing our everyday manners in order to lessen our impact on the natural world.

So National Geographic is deeply committed to researching solutions to prevent plastic from entering the oceans. So last year, National Geographic launched Planet or Plastic— a global multi-year initiative to raise awareness and help try to solve the devastating impacts of single-use plastic. And right now, my team is in India helping with the National Geographic team, and we're gonna get on a Skype call with Heather, and she’s going to tell us more about the project that they're working on to stop the flow of plastic into the ocean. So here to tell us more about our all-female expedition team working to track plastic from its source in India, marine biologist and National Geographic fellow, Heather Holloway. [Applause]

We just want to show a short video that highlights the plastic pollution problem. One million plastic water bottles are sold every minute. Millions of tons of plastic waste enter our ocean every year. Plastic can take lifetimes to decompose, leaving our planet drowning in waste. Our planet is in trouble. We're reaching a crisis point when it comes to plastic pollution, but it's also solvable. That’s why we at National Geographic are asking our global community of change-makers to join us in choosing planet or plastic.

From the pages of our magazine to the work of our scientists and explorers, we are using our voice to connect with millions and drive change. We’ve launched a global multi-year initiative to reduce plastic waste in our ocean. We're supporting research to answer key questions. We’re tracking this plastic from source to sea and fund innovative solutions. All the exterior facade is made from 100 percent recycled plastic bottles.

We’re empowering the next generation of leaders by supporting educators and engaging students. Whatever lesson that I’m teaching, I try to make connections to the real world, to the environment into their personal lives. It’s not something that’s a next generation problem; it’s a problem that we need to solve now. This starts with people caring, and when you care, then you make a difference.

We hope you'll join us and help turn the tide on plastic waste. We are the ones that can do something about it. I'm really excited to see how we can solve this massive plastic problem. Learn more at NatGeo.org/plastic. [Applause]

One month ago, I found myself with my team on this small blue boat. We were fighting waves that were crashing over us, a ridiculous current swirling us around, and we were gently baking in 40 degrees C—100 degrees Fahrenheit in old money heat. But this isn’t some ocean survival story. This is us at the start of the National Geographic Sea to Source expedition, going to our first site in the river Ganges to collect water samples from the middle of the river, that at that point just happens to be seven miles wide. The river movement is insane! We were on a proper adventure.

This river is immense; it’s one of the most iconic rivers on the planet culturally, economically, and incredibly important from a biodiversity perspective, stretching 1600 miles from the Bay of Bengal right up to the source in the Himalayas. And our job as Sea to Source expedition team was to work out how to track plastic from its source to sea—to work out where it was coming from and, more importantly, how to solve the plastic pollution problem.

So why rivers? We know from data that are based on models that rivers are one of the important contributors of plastic pollution to the ocean, and in those top three rivers, the Ganges is one of them. But these data are based on models just looking at population and waste management systems. So we were the first team ever to look at how we could go globally to develop a methodology and a comprehensive assessment system to work out how to look at plastic and how this is changing.

But first, let me take you to the team as a start point. We are the largest all-women team that National Geographic has put together. [Applause] We actually started to call this the expedition of firsts. Firstly, because I’m job-sharing expedition leadership with Jenna John Beck, professor at the University of Georgia, because we want to show not only can women succeed in science and conservation, but you can still be a mother and do so. So we’re changing the parameter of exploration to mean that we can really achieve.

We can demonstrate that it’s possible not to choose between a family and a career, but to deliver both at the same time. We also didn’t start off explicitly saying this would be all women; we set off choosing the best people for the job, and they just happened to be women. And you’ll see here that as we thought about it, we, of course, brought on our in-country partners, working with the University of Dhaka, Wild Team, and the Isabella Foundation in Bangladesh and the Wildlife Institute of India.

We felt there was a massive opportunity to show the capability and strength and build opportunities for women in science, technology, engineering, and maths and bring them on board to really create a united goal of making a difference and delivering this expedition together. So—back to being on the boat. Around this methodology, you’re traveling an enormous river system, you’re spending three to four days at each site, and you’re really trying to understand everything that’s going on.

So to do this, our team is very diverse—we’re biologists, we’re ecologists, we’re engineers, we’re technology experts, we’re anthropologists, we’re social scientists, and we are storytellers. And we are pulling together all of these methodologies at each site to make a difference. So on the water, we’re measuring microplastics in sediment and in water; we're looking at collecting plastic particles from the air to understand where plastic is in air pollution. We’re doing a threat assessment of plastics on wildlife in the river, particularly fish, which are so important for communities to eat.

And then the fourth dimension of our work is to look at the people component. Firstly, how do they generate waste? The University of Georgia team has developed a citizen science tool to measure plastic waste—Marine Debris Tracker—anybody can use that, and we're applying it to actually systematically document the waste that we see in these different systems. We’ve also taken methodologies from transects and quadrats, photo quadrats from coral reef science, and applied them to map and document and quantify complex systems of waste.

And then we’re experimenting in that important transition between land and water—so we've created these eco plywood drift cards that we’re working as a community engagement tool to deploy in likely routes for plastics to go through storm drains, through side channels into the main river, and down into the ocean. These have a message on them asking people to communicate by SMS or WhatsApp when they find one, and we’re going to go back in the after the monsoon and see how these have moved through the system.

At the other end of the spectrum, from pieces of wood, we have really pioneering technology—satellite tracking mock-up plastic bottles using satellites and cellular—to see how they move through the system. And we’re drone mapping the transition between the riverbank and the river. But finally, it’s about the people. We have an amazing socio-economic team who are working with communities at each site.

We talk to focus groups: women, waste pickers, fishers, youth, and decision-makers. And we do have salsa. We know that the informal waste sector is a critical part of the solution, but often ignored, and that we have to create inclusive solutions if we are to make a difference. This, for me, is science with purpose. It’s exploration that matters. For us, it's not a choice; it's all about planet and not plastic, but it’s still an expedition underway. I rejoin it on Friday, but now I’d like you to take to my colleagues live in India in the field who are delivering this expedition right now on the ground.

Okay, is there any—aren’t they fabulous? So this has been an intense effort to show some of the challenges of delivering science and conservation in remote areas, and that’s around the technology involved in communicating what we’re trying to do. So these guys have just come in from the field today. It is actually festival in the Ganges celebrating the birth of a Ganga. We’ve delivered a community cleanup, and we’ve been out with a team have been out doing their scientific methodologies all day.

So this is what they look like. They are all amazing, honestly! And this is this awesome team. Jen is right there in the middle at the back waving. There we go! And she can't even hear me. This is how ever we work together, and I’ll wrap it up. So I’m really sorry that they had done it an awesome film; they’ve been working all night to try and do this live feed and live communications, but as ever to prove that it’s live, it doesn’t work!

Okay, thank you! Well, thank you, Heather, and I completely understand technological problems being based in India. It’s amazing we got that much! Yeah, so there’s a lot of problems out there in the field, and so we’ve spent this morning with some critical threats facing our planet, and our next segment focuses on how we define reality and inspire hope to move towards solutions. Storytellers and educators are some of the best at helping us define the realities we live in.

So I am especially happy to introduce you to two speakers: a storyteller and an educator. Pete Muller, there’s a photographer, multimedia reporter, and National Geographic fellow. Andrew Mapp is the CEO of Outdoor Afro, and also a National Geographic fellow. Welcome, Pete! [Applause]

Morning, everybody! I’d like to start this morning by asking you just to close your eyes, please. And when you do this, I’d like you to envision the place that you call home, wherever that may be. And I don’t necessarily mean the house that you live in, but a place—a place that gives you a sense of comfort and grounding and connection. I’d just like you to try to be there just for a moment.

I’d like you to imagine that a transformation happens in this environment. It starts to change the characteristics of this place that you’ve known and loved—that has given you a sense of comfort—such that you don’t quite recognize it; it doesn’t feel familiar to you any longer. Now, depending on what causes this transformation, this feeling might be difficult to articulate and express. It’s complicated.

You can open your eyes. I’d like you to take you to a place this morning where that’s not an imagined situation; it’s becoming a form of reality. This is the Upper Hunter Valley. It’s this beautiful, idyllic river valley about three hours north of the city of Sydney in Australia. And for most of its history, it’s been known for beautiful things—thoroughbred horse breeding, dairy farms, wine vineyards.

In the late 1990s, there was a discovery of high-quality coal underneath the valley floor. Big companies came in and started digging big holes to get at it—holes like this. This is the Mount Thorley Warkworth mine in Singleton Shire. It’s a massive, massive hole; it’s visible from space. They started opening mines like this all throughout the upper hunter, and with it came this sort of associated transformative physical attributes and this all in this quiet place.

This is Glenn Albrecht; he’s an environmental philosopher. And at the time, Glenn became interested in the emotional dimension of what was happening to communities that were living around these mines. And as the mines expanded, the word of Glenn’s interests in them and that experience started to spread, and his phone started to ring. And on the other end of the phone were people like Wendy Bowman. Wendy lived most of her adult life in the valley; she’s been involved with a dairy farming family, and she was beside herself.

She was fighting with mining companies that were trying to acquire parts of her property. She was serving as an informal counselor for all these other people who were going through a similar experience. She couldn’t sleep at night; she was carrying this sense of emotional weight day and night. Glenn got calls from people like John Lamb—the tough guy who was a former soldier—he thought issues of mental health and emotional well-being were fully in control of his experience through the energy of his mind.

But as these holes got bigger, something in John broke. No matter how hard he tried to keep his energies up, as soon as he’s confronted with these mines, his heart would just drop into his feet. He started driving 20, 30, 40 kilometers out of his way to avoid these confrontations. Glenn started to get a lot of these kinds of stories, and he started to notice this commonality among them—people knew that the mines were the source of their distress, but they had a very difficult time articulating this feeling.

It was almost like a sense of homesickness, but nobody left home. It was almost like their homes, or their some essence of their homes, had left them, and it wasn’t really nostalgia either, because it wasn’t purely looking back at golden days gone by. This was about something being lost or something kind of being taken in the present, and that had implications for the future.

Also, as far as Glenn could tell, there was no word to describe this experience, and without one, people in the valley couldn’t explain what they were feeling to other people, and they couldn’t really even make sense of it to themselves. So Glenn sat down with his wife and his intellectual partner, Jill, and they decided to name it. Enough of this! People are experiencing it; they can’t express it. We have to name it!

So they started thinking about what exactly was underway. What was this feeling that people were having? Well, there was a pain, a sort of longing, an algae—the pain to return. And this pain related to people’s homes. What are our homes really? They give us a sense of comfort.

So Glenn was thinking, “Okay, comfort—but how do I—how could I modify that word into a new word to describe this?” Well, he got out this book of synonyms and antonyms that Jill had had from her school days. Then they looked up the word comfort in there, and there they found a synonym: solace, to have a sense of peace. And Glenn thought, “I think that might work.” So in a paper in 2003, Glenn started to call this complex emotional experience of losing the sense of place—he started to call this solastalgia.

And it's since become known as this idea of an existential or psychic sense of distress that’s brought about by unwelcome or negative changes in a person’s home environment. People started talking about this; they started making art about it, writing poetry, having conferences, and I heard it years later in a film—a National Geographic documentary film—and my mother’s living room, tens of thousands of miles away from where it originated. I thought, “Wow! What an interesting idea!”

This is a new frontier in sort of examining and charting our experience in this changing world, and it wasn’t just about the physical changes outside of us; it was about how those changes were being mirrored back within us. But if we lack words and terminology and concepts to understand and identify those things and share them, perhaps we’re not seeing them for the prevalence at which they’re occurring, and maybe that is part of the problem.

So I started to travel with this idea in mind. I went to Paradise, California, where the campfire decimated that town last November. I spent time with people like Gwen Norgren. We see here sitting by the pool of her former home. She used to come out through these double doors, cut across the walkway, dive into the pool, float on her back, and look at this beautiful blue California sky.

I spent time with Don Criswell—a sixth-generation Parduchan deeply devoted to the town, deeply imbued with its sense of place. Don plays the piano and played all over town—the bars, restaurants, lodges. He used to play the Rocky Mountain Smokehouse here, you can see that on the left. Don and I talked a lot about what it was like to lose that place, what that stress and experience was like, what community meant, what rebuilding was going to mean.

I traveled high up into the Andes Mountains in Peru with members of the Q'icheua community during the cojourney festival, which is the snow star festival, with members of the Quechua community. There's an annual pilgrimage that occurs to worship the Lord of the Ice, the Lord of Cojourney. Trees, Ides in a series of glaciers that are melting at a rapid pace. Here we see Pablito, at the base of the glaciers before the ceremony at dawn, talked about the emotional role in the spiritual dimensions of seeing these changes.

I traveled to the far edge of the Russian Arctic, where coastal members of the Chuchi community are deeply reliant on a healthy marine ecosystem around them both for sustenance, like we see here—hunting of marine mammals like walruses—but also for a strong sense of identity. Those community eaters are noticing a cup of an inconsistent formation of sea ice these days, which has dire implications for the ecosystem—the health of the breeding grounds and resting grounds for Pacific walruses.

And I spent time on the coast of Louisiana, on Isle de Jean Charles. It's a small island that gets smaller each year. It's a place where coastal erosion and rising sea levels have conspired to take nearly 90% of this land—of this island—over the last 50 years. And there I met Chantal Comer-Dale. We see Chantal sitting with her father, Boyo, and her son in this picture—this is four generations of only a fifth represented in the pictures on the wall. Jen is 37, and she shared with me some really interesting observations about the sense of and the shape and contours of this loss and what it’s meant to her.

And I’d like to let her speak for herself here. Communities—and there’s a community in Alaska who’s had the same thing, and we were able to sit down and talk about things, and it was almost exactly the same feelings, the same emotion that they went through. It was like, “Okay, so I'm not alone! I don’t—this isn’t just something I make up in my mind.” You know, it was—it was real. It became real. And it became real in part because Chantal knew that other people were feeling it too, that she wasn’t alone.

We are social animals. We have a deep need to understand ourselves and others around us and connect over these things, and language is an important part of that. Chantal was able to close the physical distance between herself and that community in Newtok, Alaska, but where that’s not possible, words can build some of these bridges. And without them, perhaps we are arguably blind to the prevalence of these experiences and the possibilities of solutions to solve them.

Thanks very much. Narrative matters! Good morning, my name is Rue Mapp, founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, and yes, narrative matters! Thanks, Pete. I didn’t see people who looked like me represented in natural spaces as I was growing up in the same way that my family was enjoying the outdoors. My parents came from Texas and Louisiana in search of the warmth of other Suns to California, leaving behind Jim Crow but bringing with them a love of nature and importantly the desire and imperative to connect in nature with others.

So while we live most of the time in Oakland, California, we had this beautiful ranch about a hundred miles north in Lake County—in this beautiful savanna of oak rolling woodlands—and it was truly my laboratory. But it was also a place where we brought family together, just as you see depicted in this picture for all kinds of celebrations. But I can remember how excited I was to jump out of the car when we arrived at the ranch and head to our local creek to find out what was new—had the tadpole turned into a frog? Were the rushing rivers trickling down in the heat of summer?

And back at the ranch, I noticed what was in bloom, what was ready to be picked and eaten—and perhaps canned. And I had a very rich connection to environmental education through the Girl Scouts, and yeah, these are two pages from my diary—wow, right? In big loopy cursive, how much I loved the Girl Scouts and how much I loved camping. But everything came together for me several years later. I was an Outward Bound student, and I thought, “I could do mountaineering, since I had this long connection to the outdoors, why not try it?”

But I found myself starfish on the side of this mountain in Sequoia Kings, and I was about to give up when my instructor, who did not give up on me, and neither did that mountain. My instructor leaned over and said the magic words, “Rue, trust your feet.” And there was something magical about those words that empowered me to scramble up to the top, and that was the moment that I understood nature as a powerful teacher, there to teach me exactly the lesson I needed to learn at the precipice of adulthood. I needed to know that I had what I needed already inside of me to move forward, even if I didn’t know what was ahead of me or what just happened—that I could continue to move forward.

And I'm still trusting my feet. So things came together for me several years later. I wanted to do something different professionally, and I had a mentor ask me the question that I think everyone should ask or answer, and that is: “If time and money were not an issue, what would you be doing?” And I opened my mouth and my life fell out. I said, “Oh, I probably started a website to reconnect African Americans to the outdoors,” and Outdoor Afro was born!

And it was born at my kitchen table, and I just began to tell the story of growing up wild and how I was connecting my own children—my own three children—to wild places and the value that it provided for me. But not only was a blog born; a community of leadership was born! And I’m so proud that using social media, I was able to connect with people who had a narrative very similar to my own and wanted to do something about it.

And over the years, we learned from each other and we grew with each other. And I’m so proud by the ways that we have together shifted the visual representation of who gets outside, but importantly, who leads in the outdoors. And these are ordinary everyday men and women. I call them the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. They come from a wide tapestry of professional backgrounds, but they share this fire in their belly to connect others to nature.

And we now oversee a participation network spanning 30 states of over 36,000 people. And in a proud moment last year, a group of those leaders summited Mount Kilimanjaro—again teaching us that we can find a way to understand life through life’s climbs. We’re also taking a step back often in our work and remembering our very important history and the ways that we have persisted and overcame in nature, even when nature was hostile to us.

We can turn to the plaintive lyrics of Billie Holiday's “Strange Fruit” to understand that in the not-so-distant past, the outdoors, the wilderness, and trees did not always represent safety for black people. But we have a new testimony; we have a way today to tell a new narrative through this work. And we have the ability to, just like our foremothers did, lay down our burdens down by that riverside.

Outdoor Afro has decided this year that we are going to teach every child in our sphere of influence to learn to swim. Why? Because of Jim Crow! Because of decades of exclusion from public pools, from beaches and coastal areas, we have a public health crisis where African American children are drowning at five times the rate of their white counterparts. And because we've built this trust in this network, it's time for us to convert that into action.

And we know that if a child doesn't know how to swim, they’re not going to put a pole in a lazy lake; they're not going to take a ride in a canoe, and they’re certainly not going to care about plastic in the ocean. So we’re very thankful for all the ways that we can turn to nature for healing and community, just as my parents did, and take the time to get to know our species that surround us and our relationship with them.

And this picture here really touches me. This is a picture of Barbara and her daughter through Outdoor Afro experiencing snow for the very first time. People often ask me, “What will it look like when your work is done, Rue?” When our work is done, I don’t think it’s going to be a mainstream but Main Street parade with tickers falling from the sky. May not appear on the cover of a national magazine.

I think it’s going to be this quiet moment when we all look up and we see people outside recreating, protecting, healing in nature in proportion to their population and their opportunity—and it’s no big deal! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, Rue!

Okay, so I know we’ve had a long morning, but we’ve got a lot more to cover. It’s time for a super short break, so if you can, we’re already running behind time, so if you could go out, stretch your legs, and come back as quickly as possible, we’ll get the show started again. Thank you all! [Music]