Earthshot
Recently, I watched Sir David Attenborough's 'A Life on Our Planet' [1] and found the way he tied his personal observations of bio-diversity loss into the developing scientific understanding of what has been happening to our planet over his lifetime very compelling. He made a strong emotional and scientific case that human’s have been responsible for significant changes to our planet over the last 100 years and this has, is and will continue to have increasingly negative effects for all life on this planet.
However, I was most impressed by the way he followed this up by getting to the root cause of the problem, something I have prevously been frustrated that sustainable design thinking does not do (a chair that uses less glue does not excite me). Sir David said "We live in a finite world" and "anything that we can't do forever is by definition unsustainable. If we do things that are unsustainable then the damage accumulates ultimately to the point where it all collapses". With this clarity of thourght, outlining our biggest unsustainable behaviours and suggesting pragmatic solutions was one logical step away. These he presented as:
1. Slow our population growth
2. Shift to renewable energy
3. Restore biodiversity
4. Reduce the space we use for farmland
5. Stop deforestation
Seeing number 4 on the list, and a specific segment on greenhouses in the film, makes me incredibly proud to be developing technology at Ecoation that can help increase farm yield while reducing resource usage including energy and land as well as pesticides. I hope we can continue to improve and scale this appraoch; If we get good at it, perhaps we can ultimatly start tackling number 3. Today, we only eat “200 of the 300,000 edible plants“ according to John Warren in his book, ‘The Nature of Crops: How we came to eat the plants we do’ [2]; technology could help us farm many more tomorow with equal or greater efficiency as we farm our monocultures today.
Shortly after the realase of the film, Sir David and Prince William announced they have joined forces to launch the Earthshot Prize [3] to incentivise change and repair our planet. Described as “Taking inspiration from President John F. Kennedy’s Moonshot which united millions of people around an organising goal to put man on the moon and catalysed the development of new technology in the 1960s”, the Earthshot Prize is centred around five simple but ambitious goals. For each goal, a one million-pound prize will be awarded each year until 2030. The goals are:
Protect and Restore Nature - ensuring that the natural world is growing not shrinking
Clean Our Air - so everyone breaths clean air at World Health Orginisation standards or better
Revive our Oceans - repairing and preserving them for future generations
Build a Waste-Free World - where the leftovers of one process become the raw materials for the next
Fix our Climate - by cutting out carbon
Clear objectives like this are often the start of high quality design thinking and I look forward to seeing some of the solutions in these catagories as well as thinking further about how I can help as a designer, engineer, researcher and human. ‘A Life on Our Planet’ ends with the line “This is David Attenborough's Witness Statement. Who else needs to see it?“. Pass it on and lets build a better future together.