TED Talks Daily - What does it take to create change? An artist and a conservationist answer | TED Intersections

Episode Date: September 7, 2024

What does it actually take to make meaningful change? Conservationist Kristine McDivitt Tompkins and playwright and theater director Amir Nizar Zuabi reflect on the deep connection between human suffering and environmental degradation and the community-building power of art to raise awareness. With equal parts hope and concern for the future, they speak to the urgent need to act now — and emphasize the transcendent power of compassion-fueled collaboration. (This conversation is part of “TED Intersections,” a new series featuring thought-provoking conversations between experts exploring ideas at the intersection of their experience.)

TED Audio Collective TED Intersections. It features speakers and experts taking on subjects at the intersection of their expertise. On this episode, conservationist Christine McDivitt-Tomkins and theater director Amir Nazar Zouabi. The two of them come from divergent disciplines but overlap when it comes to the ways they think about the changing planet and living creatures,

the possibility of systems-level change, and how to start a movement after the break. and vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. AI keeping you up at night?

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Amal, which is my first project, was a refugee child that traveled. She was a puppet, but she was a refugee child. One of the most beautiful moments from my point of view was recently on the border of Mexico and the United States, there was a big line of immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees. I don't want to get into the political titles, but people that are leaving a country in order to find a better life. They were standing in the sun in the Sonora Desert, and Amal arrived out of nowhere because we were walking there and there was a beautiful moment where the border police the American border police

and the children of the immigrants and the immigrants themselves all had the same look on their face and the look was full of love yeah and and i think that moment suddenly they all became one thing for a brief second it only lasts a second but i wouldn't i wouldn't have actually understood that except i've seen amal and this really had a tremendous impact on me because you're taking you're taking all the feelings and expressions that we have standing on the ground and we all know what they are but then you elevate this even though she's a puppet she's she transcends everything that we really the only languages we have on the ground and transcends that and walks straight over the top of how we behave day to day. That moment was a huge moment of optimism for me.

Yeah. Well, I can see that. Will you talk a little bit about the herd? Do you mind? The herds. Herds. We're creating a big migration of life-size puppet animals made from recycled materials, mainly cardboard. And we're going to start in Central Africa in the Congo Basin, which is in many ways the cradle of civilization.

And we're going to journey from Congo, from Kinshasa, all the way to Tromsø in the north of Norway. In a long, slow journey of migration. The animals are leaving because the world is becoming too hot, so they're going to... The animals leave because they are early warning signs of a systematic collapse. And the animals leave and walk through our cities to remind us, remind us of beauty.

I think beauty is a big word, an important word. They remind us of what happens when we work together because this project is obviously about a huge network of collaborations between people and that we can achieve impossible things, even ridiculously impossible things. But you know a lot even ridiculously impossible things. But you know a lot about ridiculously impossible, right? So that's the idea behind the herds. And we're starting in the spring of 25, so it's quite close.

And yeah, come and walk with me. I'm going to. With lots of puppet animals. No, I'm going to. I'm going to take one of the gazelles. And I want to walk. I want to do the stint where they get far enough into the Sahara that they can't go any farther. And then they appear on the northern side. I can't wait.

My thumb is out. I'm going to hitchhike on it. Hitchhiking on a paper camera. That's right. Wow. Amal was very, very powerful, not was to create a perfect storm of vulnerability and fierceness. She's completely vulnerable as a structure. She's a stilt walker hanging above and can collapse at any second,

and that's visible. People see that she's not stable, but she's also huge and fierce, which leads me to my next question to you in a way because you are in many ways of a mixture of vulnerability and fierceness right you i think you took your personal pain and flipped it into this huge power to change things. And I think that opens up so many interesting points for me in questions I want to ask you of how do you do that? How do you take loss and pain and grief and turn it into this all-consuming positive power to change the world? Because you are changing the world.

You know, I grew up in a family where our father was super clear. All of his kids, he didn't care what we did, but make sure you're great at it. So I had that kind of firepower drilled into me when I was little. And then Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, who wanted to start making clothes, he just said, oh, here, invent this company. So I like starting things at zero. I like things that are difficult. I like, I don't know if that's a personality trait or something,

but the work that Tompkins Conservation does today is essentially supporting our legacy groups, rewilding Chile in that country and rewilding Argentina and expanding the work we've done for the last 30 years out into the rest of the continent in terms of rewilding and land and sea conservation. Doug and I worked in all these projects for 25 years, and then when he died suddenly, it's no secret I just wanted to go with him, not kill myself, but just walk into the same lake and vanish. And yet, we have all of these people, these team members, they're like family. You have been through wars with them. You're living in these very isolated places and you're building schools so the kids of the team members can go to school locally. And, you know, you're creating these villages and the power of a village, as I'm sure you know, is I think perhaps one of the great strengths of human bonding. And so I finally thought, what am I doing? I have to turn this

into something else. And then it was just like that. Just get up and you just don't stop. I don't know. Skin is so burned that you are in communication with a part of yourself that is almost never called upon. But you have it. And in many ways, you're on autopilot at first. You just start doing. And pretty soon, the doing becomes a form in itself. And the loss, it doesn't retract itself, but somehow it starts to add in to the doing. And so that, you know, grief is like learning to speak a second, third, fourth language, and eventually acting on things that you believe in

and you're relentless about, that begins to take the same power that this grief had at one point. Something like that. And now back to the episode. How do you deal with no? Not well. I'm sure in creating these huge parks, there were many no's. There's many walls to bash your head against and they don't always crack. You know, we haven't had so many no's. We've worked with 12 different presidents

and I think we've created a national park with every one of them. But we have had very difficult times when people thought we were creating new Jewish states even though we were raised as Anglicans, or a new military base for Argentina, or a nuclear waste dump for the United States. So we had years when it was quite dangerous and a lot of death threats. Phones were tapped for years and years and things like that. But I think you just keep your shoulder to the ground

and keep doing exactly what you said you're doing. And eventually, eventually, people begin to understand that maybe what they've been talking about is what they're actually doing. And you have to earn people's trust. You have to, I think that's a huge part of the job, is showing up and doing exactly what you say you're going to do. And you do it year after year after year after year and pretty soon you're starting to change culture you're

starting to change how society looks at their own jewels of their country and goes something like that. Are you an optimist now after, you know? I'm not an optimist for this century because I think what's already begun is in terms of climate impacts, the great extinction crisis. I get asked this a lot, and it's usually couched in a, do you think climate, the fear of climate chaos is real? And I'm so in shock by that question, because if people really understand that hundreds of millions of people today are affected by the change in their climate, whether it's drought, it's monsoon, it's all these swinging extremes going back and forth. And if you're on an island in the Southern Pacific, or if you're in the Sudan, the South Sudan, Northern Kenya, these things are happening. and it's very hard to slow this train down. And so in the short term, I'm very concerned.

As David Attenborough says, the vast majority of people who are influenced and affected by climate change are the very people who have no say in it, and they're the very people who can't get out of the way. And so, yeah, I already have this sense of tremendous pain that these things are underway. And I think this is going to be a very difficult next 50 years, 80 years. And I think somehow I'm more optimistic about the next century because we will have gone through this calamity as a world people and and i hope that humans finally figure out that they have no choice they have to live within the confines and boundaries of natural systems that's how i I see it. I'm actually very hopeful. I know this

coming from, I'm an optimist. I'm an optimistic pessimist. Obviously, coming from where I come, there's no reason to be optimistic. But I do believe in mankind. I think we will come to our senses. We usually do it too late, a bit too late, but somehow we do it on the brink, and we pay a price, and I think we are paying a price. It's not theoretical. Walking with a mile through Europe, you see people that have left because of climate change.

This is not theoretical. And it will also, and I think that's part of the reason why I'm, I don't know if optimistic is the right word, but we don't know what the effects are. That's right. There is a bit of, we're protected, it will happen to the global south, which is not necessarily true. It's happening now in the global south because these are weaker communities. The infrastructure is weaker. There's not enough fat on the body. That's right.

But water, you know, who knows? Who knows how it will hit? I agree with you. You know, I study economics and petroleum futures and all kinds of strange things, trying to understand at what point are we going to really understand the real impacts of things. And you know what black swans are. They are these unanticipated consequences that have no, there's no warning. Like, for instance, if you look at the fall of the Berlin Wall,

and if you take yourself to mid-September 1989, nobody thought the Berlin Wall would come down. And early October, it's finished. And so these black swans exist. They're unanticipated consequences. So I agree with you. We can't know today how this is all going to unfold. And therefore, I think you and I work on things regardless of how we see the immediate mid-range and long-term outcomes, it's not going to change what you do when you get up at night because you don't actually know how it's going to unfold.

But, and I think, and that's true to war and nature. The minute it's over, life starts in all its vivacity and all its beauty. You see a fire and a second later, the forest starts again, kicks in again. In the midst of the terrible devastation that's happening in my homeland, there's children playing. And even in the rubble, I saw a beautiful video of children sliding down a slab of concrete of a demolished house. And the laughter and the joy was incredible. Inside all this misery. I think life is very powerful.

And that's what keeps me optimistic in these very, very frightening times. And I'm not talking only about my homeland. I'm talking about our faith as mankind, as humankind. What keeps you awake at night? What are you thinking about?

A lot of things keep me awake at night. I come from Palestine, so the year was especially tormenting. I've lost friends. The situation back home is very, very dire and very... That keeps me awake at night. But I think... dire and very that keeps me awake at night but i think i think the our lack of compassion is what drives me and in many ways drove me to become a theater practitioner

when i was a young kid in Palestine. And I chose the tool I know best, which is storytelling, to create compassion. And I think there's a lot of connection between the lack of compassion to our fellow man, but also to our climate, to our environment, to our spaces, to the other creatures that live with us on this ever-rotating planet. And I think they're very connected.

All these issues are connected for me. I can't separate the violence that has ensued now in my home from the violence that has ensued on climate. And of course they're also connected because the engine is very similar. Yeah, I completely agree. I think that the devastation of human communities through war or all sorts of injustice and inequity is exactly the same phenomenon that's happening with the non-human world as well. There are so few people who really pull the levers and run kind of the globalized economy

and so on and so forth. But if we believe that all life has intrinsic value, which I think we do believe that, then it's very painful, as you say, in human societies, and it's extremely painful in the non-human world as these species blink out. And some of them millions and millions of years on this planet, and in the blink of an eye in geologic time, they're gone. And of course, if you pull way back, species are rising and falling. But I have a lot of trouble staying so quite so understanding when we know what's taking place in the human and non-human world and the number of decisions within boardrooms around the world don't reflect the price that that life is having to pay for this lifestyle who very few enjoy what is the solution lifestyle who very few enjoy.

What is the solution? Good question. Or is it a mix of solutions? Yeah, I think it's always a mix of solutions. I think I study collapse of human civilizations as a hobby, not as my life's work. And I think we really change under crisis. I think humans tend to not do what's absolutely necessary until they have no choice but to act. And I'm talking about people who really have an impact, whether it's on the economic side, really any area.

And I think that we're not there yet, but I think that we'll be forced to change the way that we're behaving. And I think it will be swift, as these things often are. And that's just what I think. I think we won't change until we're forced to. I agree completely. And I think that both on the political level and on the... I think that all my work, from my point of view,

is prepping us to that, prepping us, prepping myself, my immediate community, my audience, that is preparing us to change, is preparing us to the expansion of the heart that has to come when change happens. Amir, thank you for talking to me. Chris, thank you very much. You're a true inspiration.

I am saying this with lots of friendship and love to what you do and who you are. I feel the same way. And I'm grateful. This is the first of what will be a thousand conversations. Inshallah. Inshallah. Inshallah. Support for this show comes from Airbnb.

If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host.

You were listening to Amir Nizar Zouabi in conversation with Christine McDivitt-Thompkins for TED Intersections. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Fazi-Bogan.

Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening. Looking for a fun challenge to share with your friends and family? Today, TED now has games designed to keep your mind sharp while having fun. Visit TED.com slash games to explore the joy and wonder of TED Games.