05 June 2009

Q&A with Yann Arthus-Bertrand: The environmentalist behind the camera

Today, photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand launched his movie Home, an environmentally conscious tour of our planet through panoramic vistas that focuses on human impact -- our mistakes and possibilities for improvement. Yann took some time out of this busy day to answer a few questions for the TEDBlog by email, going beyond his recent TEDTalk to give us insight on his attempts to document and save our home and humanity.

How was your experience at TED? Did you enjoy giving a TEDTalk?

Wonderful experience, especially the audience and the people I met during the sessions. It would be great if we did something similar to TED in France.

As you can see and hear, even with a lot of rehearsals, I’m not a great speaker. I guess that’s why I take pictures and made a movie.

Have you seen your TEDTalk online? What did you think of it?

Not yet. The last few days have been hectic.

Today is Home’s world premiere. It’s happening in more than 100 countries, in 33 languages and on 65 TV channels from Nepal to Burkina Faso, from Russia to Argentina, and of course in the United States.

Is there anything you would have liked to say in your TEDTalk, but didn’t have time to?

Don’t tempt me. I never lose an opportunity to speak about my obsession: humankind and the environment.

Why the aerial photography? How did you come to decide that this was the perspective for you? Not scared of heights, we take it?

I learned to be a hot-air balloon pilot to take tourists over the Masaï Mara Reserve, in order to earn some money and finance the work I was doing with my wife Anne. We were studying the life of a family of lions for more than two years. Taking pictures was a way to capture information we could not put in words.

What are the mechanics behind getting your aerial shots? Your website says that helicopters are best, but what do use when one isn’t available? Do you use harnesses for safety?

I have the impression that I'm photographing life, not landscapes. For me an aerial picture is no different than a close-up portrait. It’s a question of framing and angle. Helicopters are great for that. But I’ve also used planes. Of course, I always have a harness.

Any close calls when leaning out of an aircraft to capture an amazing shot? Would you like to share the story?

After Hurricane Katrina, over New Orleans, my helicopter crashed and the pilot and I were only saved because we fell on the roof of a flooded house that absorbed the shock. When the helicopter was spiraling downward out of control, I didn’t expect to survive at all.

You’re a photographer, but also an environmentalist in many ways. Was there a particular experience or time in your life, maybe in your childhood, that sparked your commitment to building awareness of our environment and your fascination with nature?

My fondness for nature goes back to childhood, but it was as an adult that I became an advocate. Like a lot of people, it was in 1992, during the Earth Summit in Rio, that for the first time I heard expressions like climate change, biodiversity, sustainable development. I felt like an urgency to act -- or to put it in another way, to use my work for this cause.

READ MORE: Yann talks about more about Home and "6 billion Others," moving from photographs to film and projects still to come.

Posted by Shanna Carpenter | Permalink

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07 May 2009

Alarming new slides depict a worsening climate crisis: Al Gore on TED.com

At TED2009, Al Gore presents updated slides from around the globe to make the case that worrying climate trends are even worse than scientists predicted, and to make clear his stance on "clean coal". (Recorded at TED2009, February 2009, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 7:44.)

Watch Al Gore's talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 400+ TEDTalks.

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13 April 2009

From software exec to electric car revolutionary: Exclusive interview with Shai Agassi

Shai Agassi has a record of accomplishing huge tasks in record time -- from completing his college degree by 18 to founding several successful software companies before 30. In recent years, he has shifted his intense focus to the global problem of climate change.

He discusses his blow-by-blow plan to propagate the electric car in today's TEDTalk. It's a remarkable move for a highly successful young businessman, and in this interview with the TEDBlog he explains how his country and his children, with a little help from TED, pushed him to try to change the world.

Here's an excerpt:

"The first week my wife and I went to Costa Rica, and the second week to my first TED. I was awed and inspired by what I saw on stage. I sat back and watched 50-odd people, and 1,000 others in the crowd, applying themselves to serve humanity. When I came out of that TED, I knew for sure what I had to do. I wanted to be one of those people."

Read the full interview, after the jump >>

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04 March 2009

Nalini Nadkarni: 8 ways to bring the treetops to the world below

As many forms as outreach can take, it seems that today's new TEDTalk luminary, Nalini Nadkarni, has done them all and then invented several of her own. This tireless champion of the canopy has embarked on projects involving poets, dancers, rappers, prison inmates and even Barbie dolls to bring attention to the plight of our forests.

Giving a sense of the breadth of Nalini's work, here's a roundup of some of her most creative enterprises:

ICAN
Nalini is president of the International Canopy Network, a non-profit built in 1994 to support interaction between all people with a vested interest in the state of the canopy. Clearly, scientists aren't alone in the desire to preserve our environment and this project connects them with educators, activists and more.

Biome
After spending time exploring the treetops at Nalini's invitation in Costa Rica, choreographers for the innovative modern dance group Capacitor created a live show and video performance about their experience. Nalini was credited as Scientific Advisor.

Treetop Barbie
Showing little girls that they can be scientists and canopy researchers too, Nalini and her graduate students collect secondhand Barbie dolls and outfit them for a day in the field before distributing them to eager young minds.

The Moss Project
At the Cedar Creek Corrections Facility in Little Rock, Washington, Nalini has employed a team of prisoners turned botanists to grow mosses that would otherwise be harvested from the wild for the horticultural trade. The project has also been great for the inmates, teaching them skills that can earn money after their release.

Canopy Walkway
At the Evergreen State College, Nalini has been exploring the possibility of building a system of canopy-level forest walkways, giving students and the public the opportunity to see the ecosystem at work. There's also hope that it will initiate and inspire fresh ideas about conservation.

Trees and Spirituality
Nalini sees the spiritual value of trees as well as their practical value, and in this program she visits local churches and synagogues to speak about the relationship between trees and faith.

Canopy Rap
Critics have been calling for hip-hop with a positive message for some time, and now courtesy of Nalini and rapper Duke Brady, we can all enjoy the freestyle rap "Kindle your own fire." Click to listen.

Canopy Camoflauge
This project aims to produce clothes that remind us of the beauty of the natural world, and Nalini worked with designers to produce prototypes that depict mosses and trees. They hope to market the concept to outdoor-oriented retailers, exposing us all to images that remind us of the fragile ecosystems we stand to lose.

Nalini's efforts to bring the canopy to us all are an inspiration, and proof of how much one small voice can accomplish when it decides to shout its message from the treetops.

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01 October 2007

Gore's call for a carbon/jobs Marshall plan

Al Gore (TED2006 speech) at last week's Clinton Global Initiative:

"The key to fighting global poverty is to have the wealthy nations and the developing nations join together to reduce global warming ... What we need is a global Marshall plan to make the creation of jobs around the reduction of carbon the central principle for how we develop this." (From the FT)

Posted by Bruno Giussani | Permalink

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12 August 2007

Wired's Anderson on Lomborg's "Cool It"

Wired editor Chris Anderson got an advance copy of Bjorn Lomborg's upcoming book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, and his summary is: read it, but don't follow his advice.

Lomborg (watch his TED2005 speech) argues that although global warming is clearly happening and is human-caused, the debate over what to do about it has been polluted by way too much bad science, non-science, inflamed rhetoric and outright fibs.

In the book, the Danish political scientist offers numerous examples of how much of the rhetoric over the effects of climate change doesn't stand up to scrutiny (for example: the most likely effect of climate change would be to increase, not decrease, the amount of ice in Antarctica).

"It's time to put the debate over whether human-driven climate change is happening behind us and instead focus on technologies to decarbonize the economy," writes Anderson. But climate change is only one of three strong reasons to do this, he adds: the others are economics (rising direct and indirect costs of oil and carbon fuels) and geopolitics (oil revenues prop up bad governments around the world).

There is a fourth reason that Anderson forgets, and which has been convincingly put forth by Al Gore in his TED2006 speech: it's a moral imperative.

Posted by Bruno Giussani | Permalink

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29 July 2007

Ed Burtynsky's beautifully monstrous "Manufactured landscapes"

If you are planning (you should) to go see Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary "Manufactured landscapes", which opened last week in theaters across the US after spending a year mesmerizing film festivals audiences and will soon arrive in Europe, make sure you get there in time, for nothing describes the scale and essence of today's globalized industry more tellingly than the opening scene: a seven-minutes tracking shot of the floor of a boundless Chinese factory, row after row after row of disciplined workers and efficient repetition that Stanley Kubrick could have filmed.

"Manufactured landscapes" is based on the work of photographer -- and 2005 TED Prize winner (watch his speech) -- Ed Burtynsky, whose camera has captured stunning images of man-transformed landscapes around the world.

Burtynsky is not much interested in micro: his focus is on vastness, on the scale of the environmental scars and transformations brought forth by industry, energy production and transportation. The documentary (trailer) is a hybrid: it's a meditation that makes very little use of words, leaving it to images and situational sounds and noises to tell the story, and at the same time a convincing illustration of the monstrosity of today's global trade. Although Baichwal shows images from Canada, California and Bangladesh -- and makes generous use of Burtynsky's TEDPrize speech -- the movie's main character is China, the "manufacture to the world": there, Burtynsky, followed by Baichwal's cameras, has shot factories, huge container ports, quarries, the Three Gorges Dam, electronics graveyards, the rapid urbanization of Shanghai. (Another great movie, recently, has shown some of this within a fictional frame: Gianni Amelio's "The Missing Star").

Burtynsky's work (see his books) can be unsettling. He extracts beautiful, sometimes poetic images from outrageous alterations and destructions of the environment. He calls himself an artist -- not a reporter -- and refrains from judging what he photographs or from politicizing it, wanting, as he said at TED, to "make people think harder about our planet's future" without suggesting them a direction. As the film goes I find myself thinking of painters: Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Salvador Dalì because, respectively, Burtynsky's photos of a computer components dump, the stacks of containers in the port of Tianjin, and the lunar shipbreaking beach of Chittagong (Bangladesh) oddly remind of their artworks.

The photographer has a rationale for aestheticizing this devastation: that's a way to gain access. Most of what Burtynsky photographs is on private land: "My work is mostly negotiation, with some photography thrown in", he said half-jokingly at the premiere in San Francisco. There is a scene in the movie where he is shown with his assistants and an interpreter trying to talk Chinese officials into opening the gates to a neverending coal yard, and the key sentence is "we will make it beautiful". Asked how he convinced factory managers to gather all their thousands of employees on a street for the picture that makes the poster of the movie (see image), Burtynsky explained that what Westerners see as a robotization of workers, the Chinese proudly consider an organizational and industrial achievement.

This discrepancy echoes throughout the documentary. It powerfully reminds us that "stuff" doesn't just happen, that it comes from somewhere, although we tend to forget or ignore it (thought of the impact of the extraction industry lately?) And it illustrates how, as we transform nature, we redefine who we are and our relationship to the planet.

Posted by Bruno Giussani | Permalink

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