-
Not Synced
If you told me five years ago
-
Not Synced
that today's I'd be delivering a talk
-
Not Synced
about our individual power
to make a difference,
-
Not Synced
I would have cringed.
-
Not Synced
It was my job to study
huge global systems.
-
Not Synced
I was a researcher at NASA using
satellite data to study the big picture.
-
Not Synced
You can see a lot of things from space,
-
Not Synced
like every ecosystem on earth
being threatened
-
Not Synced
from pretty much every angle,
-
Not Synced
and global inequality in air
and water safety.
-
Not Synced
And these kinds of things
would keep me up at night.
-
Not Synced
And then outside of work
I'd use this bird's-eye view
-
Not Synced
while thinking about
our huge social structures
-
Not Synced
like education and media and health care,
-
Not Synced
and it looked to me like
they were all really struggling too.
-
Not Synced
So I felt like the world was just trapped
in this huge self-amplifying system
-
Not Synced
that was just spiraling
towards destruction.
-
Not Synced
And of course I wanted
to do something about this,
-
Not Synced
and I felt so small and utterly powerless.
-
Not Synced
But I started to feel a little differently
as my perspective shifted
-
Not Synced
from the macro towards the micro.
-
Not Synced
It began with bumblebees.
-
Not Synced
I was using satellite imagery
and field research
-
Not Synced
to study these amazing ?? pollinators
-
Not Synced
to see how they were doing in the midst
of their own environmental crisis
-
Not Synced
in Southern California.
-
Not Synced
And from the macro view,
I saw 22-lane freeways,
-
Not Synced
endless suburban sprawl,
-
Not Synced
and water being diverted
from parched rivers
-
Not Synced
to grow lawns in the desert.
-
Not Synced
It was pretty grim.
-
Not Synced
But on the ground,
-
Not Synced
there were actually some small
opportunities for optimism,
-
Not Synced
these tiny patches of resources
-
Not Synced
known as habitat fragments.
-
Not Synced
If the right kinds of plants for growing
along the edges of a Costco parking lot,
-
Not Synced
and if in the neighborhoods nearby
-
Not Synced
there were native plants
in people's gardens,
-
Not Synced
and in the canyons that were too steep
for people to put their suburbs in,
-
Not Synced
there were native plants
instead of grasses,
-
Not Synced
then all of these in between spaces
-
Not Synced
would actually add up to create
a network of habitat fragments.
-
Not Synced
And this network meant that the bees
could traverse through the concrete desert
-
Not Synced
feeding from and pollinating
the native plants.
-
Not Synced
And these plants that the bees depend on
and that the bees sustain are essential.
-
Not Synced
They stabilize our steep hillsides.
-
Not Synced
They provide food and homes to thousands
of amazing species of animals,
-
Not Synced
and, critically, they are helping
to curb our devastating cycle of wildfires
-
Not Synced
by preventing the growth
of those invasive grasses
-
Not Synced
that fuel the vicious flames
that we're all too familiar with.
-
Not Synced
It's a really vital
and interconnected system,
-
Not Synced
and some people could see
how they were a part of it,
-
Not Synced
and so they acted
-
Not Synced
as habitat fragment gardeners.
-
Not Synced
They planted native plants in their yards,
-
Not Synced
and they even were tending
to the land in corporate parks
-
Not Synced
and in public canyons.
-
Not Synced
In my research, I could
actually see the impact
-
Not Synced
that even one passionate
gardener could make.
-
Not Synced
And then, repeated across the region,
-
Not Synced
their habitat fragments were adding up
to make a more resilient ecosystem,
-
Not Synced
not a perfect system, not by a long shot,
-
Not Synced
but at least a system that was
less likely to totally collapse
-
Not Synced
under impending pressures
like further development and drought.
-
Not Synced
So I was looking at the world
through this lens
-
Not Synced
when I found myself in the waiting room
of a public hospital in Brooklyn
-
Not Synced
with my partner Charles,
-
Not Synced
and we were sitting across
from a group of teenagers
-
Not Synced
who were slumped in their chairs
-
Not Synced
and bored out of their minds
-
Not Synced
and just refreshing their phones
over and over again,
-
Not Synced
and in a neighborhood
-
Not Synced
with some of the lowest high school
graduation rates in the city,
-
Not Synced
this waiting room felt
like a social habitat fragment
-
Not Synced
just waiting to happen.
-
Not Synced
So, we did some research to see
what kinds of resources could we add
-
Not Synced
to spaces like this one
-
Not Synced
that would make an impact.
-
Not Synced
And we settled on museums.
-
Not Synced
Museums are the most trusted source
of public information,
-
Not Synced
more than the media
and more than the government,
-
Not Synced
but they also cluster
in wealthier neighborhoods.
-
Not Synced
New York has 85 museums in Manhattan
-
Not Synced
and the Bronx has eight,
-
Not Synced
even though these two boroughs
have almost the same size population.
-
Not Synced
And then expensive tickets mean
that a lot of people can't go to museums
-
Not Synced
even if they live nearby.
-
Not Synced
And these little injustices,
they just go on and on
-
Not Synced
and they add up to create
sweeping inequalities
-
Not Synced
in knowledge and empowerment.
-
Not Synced
Across the US,
-
Not Synced
almost 90 percent of visitors
to art museums are white,
-
Not Synced
and even at the Smithsonian's
network of free museums,
-
Not Synced
almost half of their adult visitors
have graduate degrees,
-
Not Synced
which 10 percent
of the broader population has.
-
Not Synced
So it became clear to us
that even though museums
-
Not Synced
are these amazing educational
and social resources,
-
Not Synced
they're not reaching everyone,
-
Not Synced
and a lot of museums are aware of this,
and they're trying to change it,
-
Not Synced
but there's all these structural hurdles
that are slowing them down.
-
Not Synced
So we set out to create
a distributed network
-
Not Synced
of museum habitat fragments.
-
Not Synced
Working from a donated shipping container
-
Not Synced
with the volunteer help of our friends
-
Not Synced
and dozens of very generous scientists
-
Not Synced
from all across the globe,
-
Not Synced
we built our first prototype,
-
Not Synced
the Smallest Mollusk Museum.
-
Not Synced
Mollusks are these tentacled,
slimy shape-shifters
-
Not Synced
like oysters and octopuses
and the giant squid,
-
Not Synced
and if you've ever seen
an alien in a movie,
-
Not Synced
then I'll bet you
it was inspired by a mollusk.
-
Not Synced
Their slimy sci-fi vibes
-
Not Synced
make them really fun tour guides
for a biology museum,
-
Not Synced
and they can teach us
about the systems that we all share,
-
Not Synced
with a wake-up call.
-
Not Synced
Of all the animal extinctions
documented since the 1500s,
-
Not Synced
more than 40 percent have been
our friends, the mollusks.
-
Not Synced
So we tested this museum across the city
-
Not Synced
to see if it resonated
with all kinds of visitors,
-
Not Synced
and it did.
-
Not Synced
People really liked learning from it.
-
Not Synced
So we built a fleet
of tiny science museums,
-
Not Synced
each one small enough to fit
into preexisting locations
-
Not Synced
with information dense enough
that they could still pack a punch,
-
Not Synced
and they're modular,
so they can be distributed
-
Not Synced
at a scale that can reach everyone.
-
Not Synced
And then we partnered with libraries
-
Not Synced
and community centers and transit hubs
-
Not Synced
and the public hospitals
-
Not Synced
so that we could transform
their in-between spaces
-
Not Synced
into habitat fragments
for social learning.
-
Not Synced
And, fittingly, we named
our fleet of museums "Micro."
-
Not Synced
Even though each
habitat fragment is small,
-
Not Synced
it provides the essentials.
-
Not Synced
It draws people in
so that they can explore
-
Not Synced
and learn together in a social way,
-
Not Synced
and then distributed across the landscape
we're able to invite people everywhere
-
Not Synced
into conversations around science.
-
Not Synced
When we partnered with
a public hospital in the South Bronx,
-
Not Synced
we became the Bronx's first
and only science museum.
-
Not Synced
Yeah, that's really weird.
-
Not Synced
And really quickly,
-
Not Synced
families started coming by with their kids
-
Not Synced
and schools started arranging field trips,
-
Not Synced
all to this tiny museum in the front lobby
of the public hospital.
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
And the museum became so popular
-
Not Synced
that we started hiring local students
to be museum docents