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I never thought that I would be giving 
my TED Talk somewhere like this.

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But, like half of humanity,

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I've spent the last
four weeks under lockdown

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due to the global pandemic
created by COVID-19.

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I am extremely fortunate
that during this time

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I've been able to come here to these woods
near my home in southern England.

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These woods have always inspired me,

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and as humanity now tries to think about
how we can find the inspiration

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to retake control of our actions

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so that terrible things
don't come down the road

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without us taking action to avert them,

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I thought this is a good place
for us to talk.

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And I'd like to begin
that story six years ago,

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when I had first joined
the United Nations.

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Now, I firmly believe
that the UN is of unparalleled importance

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in the world right now

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to promote collaboration and cooperation.

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But what they don't tell you when you join

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is that this essential work is delivered

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mainly in the form
of extremely boring meetings --

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extremely long, boring meetings.

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Now, you may feel that you have attended
some long, boring meetings in your life,

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and I'm sure you have.

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But these UN meetings are next-level,

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and everyone who works there
approaches them with a level of calm

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normally only achieved by Zen masters.

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But myself, I wasn't ready for that.

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I joined expecting drama
and tension and breakthrough.

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What I wasn't ready for

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was a process that seemed to move
at the speed of a glacier,

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at the speed that a glacier
used to move at.

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Now, in the middle
of one of these long meetings,

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I was handed a note.

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And it was handed to me
by my friend and colleague and coauthor,

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Christiana Figueres.

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Christiana was the Executive Secretary

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of the UN Framework Convention
on Climate Change,

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and as such, had overall responsibility

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for the UN reaching what would become
the Paris Agreement.

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I was running political strategy for her.

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So when she handed me this note,

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I assumed that it would contain
detailed political instructions

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about how we were going to get out of
this nightmare quagmire

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that we seemed to be trapped in.

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I took the note and looked at it.

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It said, "Painful.

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But let's approach with love!"

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Now, I love this note for lots of reasons.

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I love the way the little tendrils
are coming out from the word "painful."

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It was a really good visual depiction
of how I felt at that moment.

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But I particularly love it
because as I looked at it,

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I realized that it was
a political instruction,

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and that if we were going
to be successful,

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this was how we were going to do it.

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So let me explain that.

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What I'd been feeling in those meetings
was actually about control.

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I had moved my life from Brooklyn
in New York to Bonn in Germany

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with the extremely reluctant
support of my wife.

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My children were now in a school
where they couldn't speak the language,

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and I thought the deal
for all this disruption to my world

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was that I would have some degree
of control over what was going to happen.

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I felt for years that the climate crisis
is the defining challenge

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of our generation,

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and here I was, ready to play my part
and do something for humanity.

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But I put my hands on the levers
of control that I'd been given

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and pulled them,

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and nothing happened.

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I realized the things I could control
were menial day-to-day things.

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"Do I ride my bike to work?"
and "Where do I have lunch?",

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whereas the things
that were going to determine

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whether we were going to be successful

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were issues like, "Will Russia
wreck the negotiations?"

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"Will China take responsibility
for their emissions?"

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"Will the US help poorer countries
deal with their burden of climate change?"

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The differential felt so huge,

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I could see no way I could bridge the two.

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It felt futile.

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I began to feel that I'd made a mistake.

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I began to get depressed.

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But even in that moment,

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I realized that what I was feeling
had a lot of similarities

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to what I'd felt when I first found out
about the climate crisis years before.

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I'd spent many of my most
formative years as a Buddhist monk

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in my early 20s,

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but I left the monastic life,
because even then, 20 years ago,

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I felt that the climate crisis was already
a quickly unfolding emergency

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and I wanted to do my part.

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But once I'd left
and I rejoined the world,

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I looked at what I could control.

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It was the few tons of my own emissions
and that of my immediate family,

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which political party
I voted for every few years,

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whether I went on a march or two.

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And then I looked at the issues
that would determine the outcome,

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and they were big
geopolitical negotiations,

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massive infrastructure spending plans,

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what everybody else did.

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The differential again felt so huge

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that I couldn't see any way
that I could bridge it.

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I kept trying to take action,

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but it didn't really stick.

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It felt futile.

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Now, we know that this can be
a common experience for many people,

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and maybe you have had this experience.

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When faced with an enormous challenge

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that we don't feel we have
any agency or control over,

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our mind can do
a little trick to protect us.

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We don't like to feel
like we're out of control

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facing big forces,

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so our mind will tell us,
"Maybe it's not that important.

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Maybe it's not happening
in the way that people say, anyway."

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Or, it plays down our own role.

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"There's nothing that you
individually can do, so why try?"

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But there's something odd going on here.

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Is it really true that humans will only
take sustained and dedicated action

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on an issue of paramount importance

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when they feel they have
a high degree of control?

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Look at these pictures.

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These people are caregivers and nurses

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who have been helping humanity
face the coronavirus COVID-19

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as it has swept around the world
as a pandemic in the last few months.

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Are these people able to prevent
the spread of the disease?

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No.

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Are they able to prevent
their patients from dying?

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Some, they will have been able to prevent,

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but others, it will have been
beyond their control.

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Does that make their contribution
futile and meaningless?

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Actually, it's offensive
even to suggest that.

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What they are doing is caring
for their fellow human beings

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at their moment of greatest vulnerability.

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And that work has huge meaning,

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to the point where I only
have to show you those pictures

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for it to become evident

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that the courage and humanity
those people are demonstrating

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makes their work
some of the most meaningful things

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that can be done as human beings,

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even though they can't
control the outcome.

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Now, that's interesting,

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because it shows us
that humans are capable

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of taking dedicated and sustained action,

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even when they can't control the outcome.

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But it leaves us with another challenge.

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With the climate crisis,

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the action that we take
is separated from the impact of it,

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whereas what is happening
with these images

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is these nurses are being sustained not
by the lofty goal of changing the world

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but by the day-to-day satisfaction
of caring for another human being

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through their moments of weakness.

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With the climate crisis,
we have this huge separation.

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It used to be that we were
separated by time.

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The impacts of the climate crisis
were supposed to be way off in the future.

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But right now, the future
has come to meet us.

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Continents are on fire.

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Cities are going underwater.

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Countries are going underwater.

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Hundreds of thousands of people are
on the move as a result of climate change.

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But even if those impacts are no longer
separated from us by time,

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they're still separated from us in a way
that makes it difficult to feel

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that direct connection.

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They happen somewhere else
to somebody else

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or to us in a different way
than we're used to experiencing it.

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So even though that story of the nurse
demonstrates something to us

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about human nature,

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we're going to have find a different way

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of dealing with the climate crisis
in a sustained manner.

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There is a way that we can do this,

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a powerful combination
of a deep and supporting attitude

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that when combined
with consistent action

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can enable whole societies to take
dedicated action in a sustained way

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towards a shared goal.

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It's been used to great effect
throughout history.

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So let me give you
a historical story to explain it.

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Right now, I am standing in the woods
near my home in southern England.

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And these particular woods
are not far from London.

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Eighty years ago,
that city was under attack.

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In the late 1930s,

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the people of Britain would do anything
to avoid facing the reality

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that Hitler would stop at nothing
to conquer Europe.

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Fresh with memories
from the First World War,

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they were terrified of Nazi aggression

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and would do anything to avoid
facing that reality.

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In the end, the reality broke through.

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Churchill is remembered for many things,
and not all of them positive,

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but what he did
in those early days of the war

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was he changed the story
the people of Britain told themselves

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about what they were doing
and what was to come.

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Where previously there had been
trepidation and nervousness and fear,

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there came a calm resolve,

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an island alone,

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a greatest hour,

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a greatest generation,

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a country that would fight them
on the beaches and in the hills

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and in the streets,

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a country that would never surrender.

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That change from fear and trepidation

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to facing the reality, whatever
it was and however dark it was,

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had nothing to do with the likelihood
of winning the war.

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There was no news from the front
that battles were going better

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or even at that point that
a powerful new ally had joined the fight

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and changed the odds in their favor.

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It was simply a choice.

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A deep, determined, stubborn
form of optimism emerged,

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not avoiding or denying the darkness
that was pressing in

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but refusing to be cowed by it.

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That stubborn optimism is powerful.

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It is not dependent on assuming
that the outcome is going to be good

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or having a form of wishful thinking
about the future.

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However, what it does is
it animates action

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and infuses it with meaning.

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We know that from that time,

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despite the risk
and despite the challenge,

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it was a meaningful time full of purpose,

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and multiple accounts have confirmed

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that actions that ranged
from pilots in the Battle of Britain

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to the simple act of pulling
potatoes from the soil

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became infused with meaning.

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They were animated towards
a shared purpose and a shared outcome.

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We have seen that throughout history.

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This coupling of a deep and determined
stubborn optimism with action,

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when the optimism leads
to a determined action,

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then they can become self-sustaining:

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without the stubborn optimism,
the action doesn't sustain itself;

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without the action, the stubborn optimism
is just an attitude.

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The two together can transform
an entire issue and change the world.

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We saw this at multiple other times.

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We saw it when Rosa Parks
refused to get up from the bus.

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We saw it in Gandhi's
long salt marches to the beach.

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We saw it when the suffragettes said that
"Courage calls to courage everywhere."

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And we saw it when Kennedy said
that within 10 years,

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he would put a man on the moon.

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That electrified a generation
and focused them on a shared goal

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against a dark and frightening adversary,

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even though they didn't know
how they would achieve it.

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In each of these cases,

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a realistic and gritty
but determined, stubborn optimism

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was not the result of success.

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It was the cause of it.

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That is also how
the transformation happened

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on the road to the Paris Agreement.

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Those challenging, difficult,
pessimistic meetings transformed

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as more and more people decided
that this was our moment to dig in

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and determine that we would not
drop the ball on our watch,

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and we would deliver the outcome
that we knew was possible.

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More and more people transformed
themselves to that perspective

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and began to work,

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and in the end, that worked its way
up into a wave of momentum

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that crashed over us

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and delivered many
of those challenging issues

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with a better outcome
than we could possibly have imagined.

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And even now, years later and with
a climate denier in the White House,

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much that was put in motion
in those days is still unfolding,

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and we have everything to play for
in the coming months and years

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on dealing with the climate crisis.

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So right now, we are coming through
one of the most challenging periods

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in the lives of most of us.

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The global pandemic has been frightening,

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whether personal tragedy
has been involved or not.

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But it has also shaken our belief
that we are powerless

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in the face of great change.

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In the space of a few weeks,

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we mobilized to the point where
half of humanity took drastic action

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to protect the most vulnerable.

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If we're capable of that,

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maybe we have not yet tested
the limits of what humanity can do

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when it rises to meet a shared challenge.

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We now need to move beyond
this narrative of powerlessness,

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because make no mistake --

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the climate crisis will be orders
of magnitude worse than the pandemic

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if we do not take the action
that we can still take

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to avert the tragedy that we see
coming towards us.

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We can no longer afford the luxury
of feeling powerless.

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The truth is that future generations

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will look back at this
precise moment with awe

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as we stand at the crossroads
between a regenerative future

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and one where we have thrown it all away.

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And the truth is that a lot is going
pretty well for us in this transition.

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Costs for clean energy are coming down.

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Cities are transforming.
Land is being regenerated.

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People are on the streets
calling for change

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with a verve and tenacity

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we have not seen for a generation.

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Genuine success is possible
in this transition,

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and genuine failure is possible, too,

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which makes this the most
exciting time to be alive.

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We can take a decision right now
that we will approach this challenge

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with a stubborn form of gritty,
realistic and determined optimism

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and do everything within our power
to ensure that we shape the path

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as we come out of this pandemic
towards a regenerative future.

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We can all decide that we will be
hopeful beacons for humanity

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even if there are dark days ahead,

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and we can decide
that we will be responsible,

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we will reduce our own emissions
by at least 50 percent

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in the next 10 years,

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and we will take action to engage
with governments and corporations

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to ensure they do what is necessary
coming out of the pandemic

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to rebuild the world that we want them to.

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Right now, all of these
things are possible.

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So let's go back
to that boring meeting room

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where I'm looking at that note
from Christiana.

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And looking at it took me back

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to some of the most transformative
experiences of my life.

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One of the many things I learned as a monk

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is that a bright mind and a joyful heart
is both the path and the goal in life.

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This stubborn optimism
is a form of applied love.

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It is both the world we want to create

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and the way in which
we can create that world.

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And it is a choice for all of us.

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Choosing to face this moment
with stubborn optimism

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can fill our lives
with meaning and purpose,

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and in doing so, we can put a hand
on the arc of history

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and bend it towards the future
that we choose.

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Yes, living now feels out of control.

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It feels frightening and scary and new.

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But let's not falter
at this most crucial of transitions

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that is coming at us right now.

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Let's face it with stubborn
and determined optimism.

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Yes, seeing the changes
in the world right now

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can be painful.

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But let's approach it with love.

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Thank you.