Photographer Frans Lanting returns to TED for a short reminder of what’s happening outside the walls of our beautiful glass box. “Humanity,” he says, “takes center stage at TED, but I’d like to add a voice for the animals.” Lanting retells a story he once heard from a tribal elder not far from Vancouver, about […]
Louie Schwartzberg is fascinated with exposing the world’s wonders through photography. Three years ago, his talk, “Nature. Beauty. Gratitude,” demonstrated his uncanny ability to capture the captivating beauty of our natural world — the tiniest shake of a flower petal, the stirring complexity of a bee’s wing. At TED2014, he shows a portion of his […]
Wolves will travel to drink from a river. But could the presence of wolves lead a river to change its behavior? In his TED Talk, George Monbiot poetically explains how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone National Park after a 70-year absence set off a “trophic cascade” that altered the movement of deer, sent trees soaring to […]
Take a step back and consider the exquisite network of systems that sustain life on Planet Earth. The air we breathe, the food we eat and the ground we walk on are all carefully regulated by natural systems in an intertwined dance — which means that any change we make in our environment can set […]
In 1945, there were 4.5 million hives of bees in the United States. Today, there are just about 2 million. It’s been a subtle decline over time, but one that has dramatically accelerated over the past seven years. And this should be extremely alarming, given that bees pollinate one-third of the world’s crops. In today’s […]
George Monbiot begins today’s talk by recalling a time he was “ecologically bored.” “We evolved in rather more challenging times than these, in the world of horns and tusks and fangs and claws,” explains Monbiot, an investigative journalist who found himself deeply dissatisfied returning to the United Kingdom after years reporting in the tropics. “We […]
“That is a part of you up there. That’s your water that helps to make the cloud, that becomes the rain, that feeds the plants, that feeds the animals.” These were the words Camlile Seaman’s grandfather said to her on a hot summer day when she was young. Inspired by her Shinnecock Indian heritage, and […]
The Cloud Appreciation Society may be the first official organization to celebrate the beauty of clouds, but these fluffy pillows in the sky have been a source of fascination since 3,000 B.C., when they were first discussed in the Upanishads. Aristotle poetically described cloud formation in his 350 B.C. work Meteorology as the process by […]
When recording music, it can take days or weeks to get the perfect performances for an album. But when it comes to recording the symphony of nature, the process can take even longer. According to Bernie Krause, a legend in the field of natural soundscapes, it can take 1,000 hours of recording to get just […]
Bernie Krause is here to talk about soundscapes, the unique sound signatures he says are the foundation of every habitat, if only you know what you’re listening for. He certainly knows; the sound engineer has been recording in the wild for the past 45 years. “There was a time when I considered natural soundscapes to be […]
At TEDGlobal 2013 environmental systems researcher Lian Pin Koh presents a new and unexpectedly benign use for drones: nature conservation. Nepal has natural landscapes that are beautiful — and in danger. But wildlife conservation is costly, and time- and labor-consuming. Behold: Conservation drones, a new tool being used in Nepal to combat wildlife crime. These […]
Anyone who lives in a major city, where pollen-thick summer air seems incompatible with the dearth of trees, it can be easy to forget the fact that plants make the world go round. Here to remind you is a playlist of 10 TED Talks on the majesty and awesomeness of plants. Hear from not one […]
By Daniel Colón-Ramos I could not have designed a better experiment if I had tried. I am a neuroscientist and I am the father of two-year old triplets—two identical and one fraternal. As a professor at Yale University, I spend most of my time designing experiments, researching or teaching about the brain and the nervous […]
Most people rarely feel compelled to stare at grains of sand. But when those same grains are magnified hundreds of times and rendered in three dimensions, they appear like individual pieces of colored glass crafted by a skilled artist — no two pieces the same. In today’s TEDTalk, photographer turned microbiologist turned inventor Gary Greenberg […]