🔴Want to be an activist? Start with your toys

I'm McKenna Pope. I'm 14 years old, and when I was 13, I convinced one of the largest toy companies, toymakers, in the world, Hasbro, to change the way that they marketed one of their most best-selling products.
So allow me to tell you about it. So I have a brother, Gavin. When this whole shebang happened, he was four. He loved to cook. He was always getting ingredients out of the fridge and mixing them into these, needless to say, uneatable concoctions, or making invisible macaroni and cheese. He wanted to be a chef really badly. And so what better gift for a kid who wanted to be a chef than an Easy-Bake Oven. Right? I mean, we all had those when we were little. And he wanted one so badly.
But then he started to realize something. In the commercials, and on the boxes for the Easy-Bake Ovens, Hasbro marketed them specifically to girls. And the way that they did this was they would only feature girls on the boxes or in the commercials, and there would be flowery prints all over the ovens and it would be in bright pink and purple, very gender-specific colors to females, right? So it kind of was sending a message that only girls are supposed to cook; boys aren't. And this discouraged my brother a lot. He thought that he wasn't supposed to want to be a chef, because that was something that girls did. Girls cooked; boys didn't, or so was the message that Hasbro was sending.
And this got me thinking, God, I wish there was a way that I could change this, that could I have my voice heard by Hasbro so I could ask them and tell them what they were doing wrong and ask them to change it. And that got me thinking about a website that I had learned about a few months prior called Change org Change org is an online petition-sharing platform where you can create a petition and share it across all of these social media networks, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever you can think of. And so I created a petition along with the YouTube video that I added to the petition basically asking Hasbro to change the way that they marketed it, in featuring boys in the commercials, on the boxes, and most of all creating them in less gender-specific colors.
So this petition started to take off -- humongously fast, you have no idea. I was getting interviewed by all these national news outlets and press outlets, and it was amazing. In three weeks, maybe three and a half, I had 46,000 signatures on this petition.
Thank you.
So, needless to say, it was crazy. Eventually, Hasbro themselves invited me to their headquarters so they could go and unveil their new Easy-Bake Oven product to me in black, silver and blue. It was literally one of the best moments of my life. It was like "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." That thing was amazing.
What I didn't realize at the time, however, was that I had become an activist, I could change something, that even as a kid, or maybe even especially as a kid, my voice mattered, and your voice matters too. I want to let you know it's not going to be easy, and it wasn't easy for me, because I faced a lot of obstacles. People online, and sometimes even in real life, were disrespectful to me and my family, and talked about how the whole thing was a waste of time, and it really discouraged me. And actually, I have some examples, because what's better revenge than displaying their idiocy? So, let's see. From user name Liquidsore29 -- interesting user names we have here— "Disgusting liberal moms making their sons gay." Liquidsore29, really? Really? Okay. How about from Whiteboy77AGS: "People always need something to (female dog) about." From Jeffrey Gutierrez: "OMG, shut up. You just want money and attention."

So it was comments like these that really discouraged me from wanting to make change in the future because I thought, people don't care, people think it's a waste of time, and people are going to be disrespectful to me and my family. It hurt me, and it made me think, what's the point of making change in the future?
But then I started to realize something. Haters gonna hate. Come on, say it with me. One, two, three: Haters gonna hate. So let your haters hate, you know what, and make your change, because I know you can. I look out into this crowd, and I see 400 people who came out because they wanted to know how they could make a change, and I know that you can, and all of you watching at home can too because you have so much that you can do and that you believe in, and you can trade it across all these social media, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever else you can think of. And you can make that change. You can take what you believe in and turn it into a cause and change it. And that spark that you've been hearing about all day today, you can use that spark that you have within you and turn it into a fire.
Thank you.

#Activism #Youth #Toys

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📙درس پانزدهم کتاب 504 لغت ضروری بر روی وب سایت ما قابل دسترسی می باشد.
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♦️تمامی معانی هر لغت به همراه تلفظ و مثالهای آن آورده شده است👇👇

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🔴How climate change could make our food less nutritious?

#Climate_Change #Food #Future #Sustainability #Agriculture #Science #Anthropocene #Environment #Plants #Biology #Nature

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🔴 How climate change could make our food less nutritious?

Yogi Berra, a US baseball player and philosopher, said, "If we don't know where we're going, we might not get there." Accumulating scientific knowledge is giving us greater insights, greater clarity, into what our future might look like in a changing climate and what that could mean for our health. I'm here to talk about a related aspect, on how our emissions of greenhouse gases from burning of fossil fuels is reducing the nutritional quality of our food.
We'll start with the food pyramid. You all know the food pyramid. We all need to eat a balanced diet. We need to get proteins, we need to get micronutrients, we need to get vitamins. And so, this is a way for us to think about how to make sure we get what we need every day so we can grow and thrive.
But we eat not just because we need to, we also eat for enjoyment. Bread, pasta, pizza -- there's a whole range of foods that are culturally important. We enjoy eating these. And so they're important for our diet, but they're also important for our cultures.
Carbon dioxide has been increasing since the start of the Industrial Revolution, increasing from about 280 parts per million to over 410 today, and it continues to increase. The carbon that plants need to grow comes from this carbon dioxide. They bring it into the plant, they break it apart into the carbon itself, and they use that to grow. They also need nutrients from the soil. And so yes, carbon dioxide is plant food.
And this should be good news, of rising carbon dioxide concentrations, for food security around the world, making sure that people get enough to eat every day. About 820 million people in the world don't get enough to eat every day. So there's a fair amount written about how higher CO2 is going to help with our food security problem. We need to accelerate our progress in agricultural productivity to feed the nine to 10 billion people who will be alive in 2050 and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly the Goal Number 2, that is on reducing food insecurity, increasing nutrition, increasing access to the foods that we need for everyone. We know that climate change is affecting agricultural productivity. The earth has warmed about one degree centigrade since preindustrial times. That is changing local temperature and precipitation patterns, and that has consequences for the agricultural productivity in many parts of the world. And it's not just local changes in temperature and precipitation, it's the extremes. Extremes in terms of heat waves, floods and droughts are significantly affecting productivity.
And that carbon dioxide, besides making plants grow, has other consequences as well, that plants, when they have higher carbon dioxide, increase the synthesis of carbohydrates, sugars and starches, and they decrease the concentrations of protein and critical nutrients. And this is very important for how we think about food security going forward.
A couple of nights ago in the table talks on climate change, someone said that they're a five-sevenths optimist: that they're an optimist five days of the week, and this is a topic for the other two days.
When we think about micronutrients, almost all of them are affected by higher CO2 concentrations. Two in particular are iron and zinc. When you don't have enough iron, you can develop iron deficiency anemia. It's associated with fatigue, shortness of breath and some fairly serious consequences as well. When you don't have enough zinc, you can have a loss of appetite. It is a significant problem around the world. There's about one billion people who are zinc deficient. It's very important for maternal and child health. It affects development. The B vitamins are critical for a whole range of reasons. They help convert our food into energy. They're important for the functions of many of the physiologic activities in our bodies. And when you have higher carbon in a plant, you have less nitrogen, and you have less B vitamins.

And it's not just us. Cattle are already being affected because the quality of their forage is declining. In fact, this affects every consumer of plants. And give a thought to, for example, our pet cats and dogs. If you look on the label of most of the pet and dog food, there's a significant amount of grain in those foods. So this affects everyone.
How do we know that this is a problem? We know from field studies and we know from experimental studies in laboratories. In the field studies -- and I'll focus primarily on wheat and on rice -- there's fields, for example, of rice that are divided into different plots. And the plots are all the same: the soil's the same, the precipitation's the same -- everything's the same. Except carbon dioxide is blown over some of the plots. And so you can compare what it looks like under today's conditions and under carbon dioxide conditions later in the century.
I was part of one of the few studies that have done this. We looked at 18 rice lines in China and in Japan and grew them under conditions that you would expect later in the century. And when you look at the results, the white bar is today's conditions, the red bar is conditions later in the century. So protein declines about 10 percent, iron about eight percent, zinc about five percent. These don't sound like really big changes, but when you start thinking about the poor in every country who primarily eat starch, that this will put people who are on the edge over the edge into frank deficiencies, creating all kinds of health problems.
The situation is more significant for the B vitamins. When you look at vitamin B1 and vitamin B2, there's about a 17 percent decline. Pantothenic acid, vitamin B5, is about a 13 percent decline. Folate is about a 30 percent decline. And these are averages over the various experiments that were done. Folate is critical for child development. Pregnant women who don't get enough folate are at much higher risk of having babies with birth defects. So these are very serious potential consequences for our health as CO2 continues to rise.
In another example, this is modeling work that was done by Chris Weyant and his colleagues, taking a look at this chain from higher CO2 to lower iron and zinc -- and they only looked at iron and zinc -- to various health outcomes. They looked at malaria, diarrheal disease, pneumonia, iron deficiency anemia, and looked at what the consequences could be in 2050. And the darker the color in this, the larger the consequences. So you can see the major impacts in Asia and in Africa, but also note that in countries such as the United States and countries in Europe, the populations also could be affected. They estimated about 125 million people could be affected. They also modeled what would be the most effective interventions, and their conclusion was reducing our greenhouse gases: getting our greenhouse gas emissions down by mid-century so we don't have to worry so much about these consequences later in the century.
These experiments, these modeling studies did not take climate change itself into account. They just focused on the carbon dioxide component. So when you put the two together, it's expected the impact is much larger than what I've told you.

I'd love to be able to tell you right now how much the food you had for breakfast, the food you're going to have for lunch, has shifted from what your grandparents ate in terms of its nutritional quality. But I can't. We don't have the research on that. I'd love to tell you how much current food insecurity is affected by these changes. But I can't. We don't have the research on that, either. There's a lot that needs to be known in this area, including what the possible solutions could be. We don't know exactly what those solutions are, but we've got a range of options. We've got advancements in technologies. We've got plant breeding. We've got biofortification. Soils could make a difference. And, of course, it will be very helpful to know how these changes could affect our future health and the health of our children and the health of our grandchildren. And these investments take time. It will take time to sort all of these issues out. There is no national entity or business group that is funding this research. We need these investments critically so that we do know where we're going.
In the meantime, what we can do is ensure that all people have access to a complete diet, not just those in the wealthy parts of the world but everywhere in the world. We also individually and collectively need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the challenges that will come later in the century.
It's been said that if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. Let's not. Let's invest in ourselves, in our children and in our planet.
Thank you.

#Climate_Change #Food #Future #Sustainability #Agriculture #Science #Anthropocene #Environment #Plants #Biology #Nature

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🔴How To Fix A Broken Heart?

#Addiction #Compassion #Humanity #Depression #Identity #Love #Personal_Growth #Social_Change

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🔴How To Fix A Broken Heart?

At some point in our lives, almost every one of us will have our heart broken.
My patient Kathy planned her wedding when she was in middle school. She would meet her future husband by age 27, get engaged a year later and get married a year after that. But when Kathy turned 27, she didn't find a husband. She found a lump in her breast. She went through many months of harsh chemotherapy and painful surgeries, and then just as she was ready to jump back into the dating world, she found a lump in her other breast and had to do it all over again. Kathy recovered, though, and she was eager to resume her search for a husband as soon as her eyebrows grew back in. When you're going on first dates in New York City, you need to be able to express a wide range of emotions.
Soon afterwards, she met Rich and fell in love. The relationship was everything she hoped it would be. Six months later, after a lovely weekend in New England, Rich made reservations at their favorite romantic restaurant. Kathy knew he was going to propose, and she could barely contain her excitement.
But Rich did not propose to Kathy that night. He broke up with her. As deeply as he cared for Kathy -- and he did -- he simply wasn't in love.
Kathy was shattered. Her heart was truly broken, and she now faced yet another recovery. But five months after the breakup, Kathy still couldn't stop thinking about Rich. Her heart was still very much broken. The question is: Why? Why was this incredibly strong and determined woman unable to marshal the same emotional resources that got her through four years of cancer treatments? Why do so many of us flounder when we're trying to recover from heartbreak? Why do the same coping mechanisms that get us through all kinds of life challenges fail us so miserably when our heart gets broken?
In over 20 years of private practice, I have seen people of every age and background face every manner of heartbreak, and what I've learned is this: when your heart is broken, the same instincts you ordinarily rely on will time and again lead you down the wrong path. You simply cannot trust what your mind is telling you.
For example, we know from studies of heartbroken people that having a clear understanding of why the relationship ended is really important for our ability to move on. Yet time and again, when we are offered a simple and honest explanation like the one Rich offered Kathy, we reject it. Heartbreak creates such dramatic emotional pain, our mind tells us the cause must be equally dramatic. And that gut instinct is so powerful, it can make even the most reasonable and measured of us come up with mysteries and conspiracy theories where none exist. Kathy became convinced something must have happened during her romantic getaway with Rich that soured him on the relationship, and she became obsessed with figuring out what that was. And so she spent countless hours going through every minute of that weekend in her mind, searching her memory for clues that were not there. Kathy's mind tricked her into initiating this wild goose chase. But what compelled her to commit to it for so many months?

Heartbreak is far more insidious than we realize. There is a reason we keep going down one rabbit hole after another, even when we know it's going to make us feel worse. Brain studies have shown that the withdrawal of romantic love activates the same mechanisms in our brain that get activated when addicts are withdrawing from substances like cocaine or opioids. Kathy was going through withdrawal. And since she could not have the heroin of actually being with Rich, her unconscious mind chose the methadone of her memories with him. Her instincts told her she was trying to solve a mystery, but what she was actually doing was getting her fix. This is what makes heartbreak so difficult to heal. Addicts know they're addicted. They know when they're shooting up. But heartbroken people do not. But you do now. And if your heart is broken, you cannot ignore that. You have to recognize that, as compelling as the urge is, with every trip down memory lane, every text you send, every second you spend stalking your ex on social media, you are just feeding your addiction, deepening your emotional pain and complicating your recovery.
Getting over heartbreak is not a journey. It's a fight, and your reason is your strongest weapon. There is no breakup explanation that's going to feel satisfying. No rationale can take away the pain you feel. So don't search for one, don't wait for one, just accept the one you were offered or make up one yourself and then put the question to rest, because you need that closure to resist the addiction. And you need something else as well: you have to be willing to let go, to accept that it's over. Otherwise, your mind will feed on your hope and set you back. Hope can be incredibly destructive when your heart is broken.
Heartbreak is a master manipulator. The ease with which it gets our mind to do the absolute opposite of what we need in order to recover is remarkable. One of the most common tendencies we have when our heart is broken is to idealize the person who broke it. We spend hours remembering their smile, how great they made us feel, that time we hiked up the mountain and made love under the stars. All that does is make our loss feel more painful. We know that. Yet we still allow our mind to cycle through one greatest hit after another, like we were being held hostage by our own passive-aggressive Spotify playlist.
Heartbreak will make those thoughts pop into your mind. And so to avoid idealizing, you have to balance them out by remembering their frown, not just their smile, how bad they made you feel, the fact that after the lovemaking, you got lost coming down the mountain, argued like crazy and didn't speak for two days. What I tell my patients is to compile an exhaustive list of all the ways the person was wrong for you, all the bad qualities, all the pet peeves, and then keep it on your phone.
And once you have your list, you have to use it. When I hear even a hint of idealizing or the faintest whiff of nostalgia in a session, I go, "Phone, please."
Your mind will try to tell you they were perfect. But they were not, and neither was the relationship. And if you want to get over them, you have to remind yourself of that, frequently.
None of us is immune to heartbreak. My patient Miguel was a 56-year-old senior executive in a software company. Five years after his wife died, he finally felt ready to start dating again. He soon met Sharon, and a whirlwind romance ensued. They introduced each other to their adult children after one month, and they moved in together after two. When middle-aged people date, they don't mess around. It's like "Love, Actually" meets "The Fast and the Furious."

Miguel was happier than he had been in years. But the night before their first anniversary, Sharon left him. She had decided to move to the West Coast to be closer to her children, and she didn't want a long-distance relationship. Miguel was totally blindsided and utterly devastated. He barely functioned at work for many, many months, and he almost lost his job as a result. Another consequence of heartbreak is that feeling alone and in pain can significantly impair our intellectual functioning, especially when performing complex tasks involving logic and reasoning. It temporarily lowers our IQ.
But it wasn't just the intensity of Miguel's grief that confused his employers; it was the duration. Miguel was confused by this as well and really quite embarrassed by it. "What's wrong with me?" he asked me in our session. "What adult spends almost a year getting over a one-year relationship?" Actually, many do.
Heartbreak shares all the hallmarks of traditional loss and grief: insomnia, intrusive thoughts, immune system dysfunction. Forty percent of people experience clinically measurable depression. Heartbreak is a complex psychological injury. It impacts us in a multitude of ways. For example, Sharon was both very social and very active. She had dinners at the house every week. She and Miguel went on camping trips with other couples. Although Miguel was not religious, he accompanied Sharon to church every Sunday, where he was welcomed into the congregation. Miguel didn't just lose his girlfriend; he lost his entire social life, the supportive community of Sharon's church. He lost his identity as a couple. Now, Miguel recognized the breakup had left this huge void in his life, but what he failed to recognize is that it left far more than just one. And that is crucial, not just because it explains why heartbreak could be so devastating, but because it tells us how to heal. To fix your broken heart, you have to identify these voids in your life and fill them, and I mean all of them. The voids in your identity: you have to reestablish who you are and what your life is about. The voids in your social life, the missing activities, even the empty spaces on the wall where pictures used to hang. But none of that will do any good unless you prevent the mistakes that can set you back, the unnecessary searches for explanations, idealizing your ex instead of focusing on how they were wrong for you, indulging thoughts and behaviors that still give them a starring role in this next chapter of your life when they shouldn't be an extra.
Getting over heartbreak is hard, but if you refuse to be misled by your mind and you take steps to heal, you can significantly minimize your suffering. And it won't just be you who benefit from that. You'll be more present with your friends, more engaged with your family, not to mention the billions of dollars of compromised productivity in the workplace that could be avoided.
So if you know someone who is heartbroken, have compassion, because social support has been found to be important for their recovery. And have patience, because it's going to take them longer to move on than you think it should. And if you're hurting, know this: it's difficult, it is a battle within your own mind, and you have to be diligent to win. But you do have weapons. You can fight. And you will heal.
Thank you.

#Addiction #Compassion #Humanity #Depression #Identity #Love #Personal_Growth #Social_Change

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🔴The surprising solution to ocean plastic

#Plastic #Pollution #Poverty #Business #Innovation #Ocean

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🔴The surprising solution to ocean plastic

We've had it all wrong. Everybody. We've had it all wrong. The very last thing we need to do is clean the ocean. Very last. Yeah, there is a garbage truck of plastic entering the ocean every minute of every hour of every day. And countless birds and animals are dying just from encountering plastic. We are experiencing the fastest rate of extinction ever, and plastic is in the food chain. And I'm still here, standing in front of you, telling you the very last thing we need to do is clean the ocean. Very last.
If you were to walk into a kitchen, sink overflowing, water spilling all over the floor, soaking into the walls, you had to think fast, you're going to panic; you've got a bucket, a mop or a plunger. What do you do first? Why don't we turn off the tap? It would be pointless to mop or plunge or scoop up the water if we don't turn off the tap first. Why aren't we doing the same for the ocean? Even if the Ocean Cleanup project, beach plastic recycling programs or any well-meaning ocean plastic company was a hundred percent successful, it would still be too little, too late.
We're trending to produce over 300 million ton of plastic this year. Roughly eight million ton are racing to flow into the ocean to join the estimated 150 million ton already there. Reportedly, 80 percent of ocean plastic is coming from those countries that have extreme poverty. And if you live in the grips of poverty concerned, always, about food or shelter or a sense of security, recycling -- it's beyond your realm of imagination.
And that is exactly why I created the Plastic Bank. We are the world's largest chain of stores for the ultra-poor, where everything in the store is available to be purchased using plastic garbage. Everything. School tuition. Medical insurance. Wi-Fi, cell phone minutes, power. Sustainable cooking fuel, high-efficiency stoves. And we keep wanting to add everything else that the world may need and can't afford.
Our chain of stores in Haiti are more like community centers, where one of our collectors, Lise Nasis, has the opportunity to earn a living by collecting material from door to door, from the streets, from business to business. And at the end of her day, she gets to bring the material back to us, where we weigh it, we check it for quality, and we transfer the value into her account. Lise now has a steady, reliable source of income. And that value we transfer into an online account for her. And because it's a savings account, it becomes an asset that she can borrow against. And because it's online, she has security against robbery, and I think more importantly, she has a new sense of worth. And even the plastic has a new sense of value. Hm.
And that plastic we collect, and we add value to, we sort it, we remove labels, we remove caps. We either shred it or we pack it into bales and get it ready for export. Now, it's no different than walking over acres of diamonds. If Lise was to walk over acres of diamonds but there was no store, no bank, no way to use the diamonds, no way to exchange them, they'd be worthless, too. And Lise was widowed after the 2010 Haitian earthquake, left homeless without an income. And as a result of the program, Lise can afford her two daughters' school tuition and uniforms.
Now, that plastic we sell. We sell it to suppliers of great brands like Marks and Spencer, who have commissioned the use of social plastic in their products. Or like Henkel, the German consumer-goods company, who are using social plastic directly into their manufacturing. We've closed the loop in the circular economy. Now buy shampoo or laundry detergent that has social plastic packaging, and you are indirectly contributing to the extraction of plastic from ocean-bound waterways and alleviating poverty at the same time.

And that model is completely replicable. In São Paulo, a church sermon encourages parishioners to not just bring offering on Sunday, but the recycling, too. We then match the church with the poor. Or, I believe more powerfully, we could match a mosque in London with an impoverished church in Cairo. Or like in Vancouver, with our bottle-deposit program: now any individual or any group can now return their deposit-refundable recyclables, and instead of taking back the cash, they have the opportunity to deposit that value into the account of the poor around the world.
We can now use our recycling to support and create recyclers. One bottle deposited at home could help extract hundreds around the world. Or, like Shell, the energy company, who's invested in our plastic-neutral program. Plastic neutrality is like carbon-neutral. But plastic neutrality invests in recycling infrastructure where it doesn't exist. And it provides an incentive for the poor by providing a price increase. Or -- like in the slums of Manila, where the smallest market with a simple scale and a phone can now accept social plastic as a new form of payment by weight, allowing them to serve more people and have their own greater social impact.
And what's common here is that social plastic is money. Social plastic is money, a globally recognizable and tradable currency that, when used, alleviates poverty and cleans the environment at the same time. It's not just plastic. It's not recycled plastic, it's social plastic, a material whose value is transferred through the lives of the people who encounter it, rich and poor.
Humans have produced over eight trillion kilograms of plastic, most of it still here as waste. Eight trillion kilograms. Worth roughly 50 cents a kilo, we're potentially unleashing a four-trillion-dollar value. See, I see social plastic as the Bitcoin for the earth --
and available for everyone.
Now the entire ecosystem is managed and supported through an online banking platform that provides for the safe, authentic transfer of value globally. You can now deposit your recyclables in Vancouver or Berlin, and a family could withdraw building bricks or cell phone minutes in the slums of Manila. Or Lise -- she could deposit recycling at a center in Port-au-Prince, and her mother could withdraw cooking fuel or cash across the city. And the app adds rewards, incentives, group prizes, user rating. We've gamified recycling. We add fun and formality into an informal industry. We're operating in Haiti and the Philippines. We've selected staff and partners for Brazil. And this year, we're committing to India and Ethiopia. We're collecting hundreds and hundreds of tons of material. We continue to add partners and customers, and we increase our collection volumes every day. Now as a result of our program with Henkel, they've committed to use over 100 million kilograms of material every year. That alone will put hundreds of millions of dollars into the hands of the poor in the emerging economies.
And so now, we can all be a part of the solution and not the pollution.
And so, OK, maybe cleaning the ocean is futile. It might be. But preventing ocean plastic could be humanity's richest opportunity.
Thank you.

#Plastic #Pollution #Poverty #Business #Innovation #Ocean

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🔴Possible futures from the intersection of nature, tech and society

#Biology #Science #Innovation #Future #Technology #Design #Collaboration

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🔴Possible futures from the intersection of nature, tech and society

In 1998, my friends and I won a national art competition. The prize was a week in Disneyland Paris, with hundreds of other children from across the world, as delegates to UNESCO's International Children's Summit. Now this was no ordinary trip to Disneyland. Between running riot in the park and making friends, we workshopped the future of this planet. How could we overcome the problems of pollution and their threats to human and environmental health? How could we guarantee universal human rights of equality, justice and dignity?
Towards the end of the summit, we created a 20-year time capsule, with each country planting a vision of the future they hoped for. But as I look around today, it's clear to me that those visions have not come true yet. We're confronted by the same crises, made infinitely worse through decades of geopolitical inaction. We now face global existential risks as a result of the climate emergency, with the world's least-resourced and most disenfranchised made more vulnerable despite having contributed least to the problem. That trip to Disneyland taught me that art and design had the power to imagine other possible futures. The question is: "How do we actually build them?"
Today, I lead a design agency called Faber Futures, and my team and I design at the intersection of biology, technology and society. Through research and development collaborations, partnerships, and other strategies, we model a future in which both people and planet can thrive and where the role that biotechnology plays is shaped through plural visions.
Our design work prototypes the future. We have developed toxin-free, water-efficient textile dye processes with a pigment-producing bacterium, pioneering new ways of thinking about circular design for the textile and fashion industries.
You've probably already heard of data surveillance, but what if it was biological? Using open-source data on the human microbiome, we’ve created experiential artworks that engage with the ethics of DNA mining. How can we embed a culture of multidisciplinary codesign from within the industry of biotechnology? To find out, we designed the Ginkgo Creative Residency, which invites creative practitioners to spend several months developing their own projects from within the Ginkgo Bioworks foundry. We also generate and publish unique and expansive dialogues between people with different types of knowledges -- Afrofuturists with astrobiologists, food researchers with Indigenous campaigners. The stories that they and others tell give us the tools we need to imagine other biological futures.
Design deeply permeates all of our lives, and yet we tend to recognize things and not the complex systems that actually produce them. My team and I explore these systems, connecting fields like culture and technology, ecology and economics. We identify problems, and where value and values can be created. We like to think about a design brief as an instruction manual, mapping the context of the problem, and where we might find solutions.
Getting there might involve establishing new networks, building new tools, and even infrastructure. How all of these pieces interact with one another can determine research and development, material specification, manufacturing and distribution. Who ultimately benefits, and at what environmental cost. So you can start to imagine the kinds of systems that might drive the design of your smartphone or even a rideshare service. But when it comes to the design of biology, things become a little bit more abstract.
Organism engineers design microbes to do industrially useful things, like bioremediate toxic waste sites or replace petroleum-based textiles with renewable ones. To architect this level of biological precision and performance at scale, tools like DNA sequencing, automation and machine learning are essential. They allow the organism engineers to really zoom in on biology, asking scientific questions to solve deep technical challenges.

Successful solutions designed at a molecular scale eventually interact with those at a planetary one. But if all of the research and development focuses on the technical question alone, then what do we risk by excluding the broader context? We've all spent over a year now living at an unprecedented intersection between biology, technology and society. We've witnessed, with the rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine, that although techno-fixes offer us a critical remedy, they don't always provide a panaceum, and that’s because the real world is a complex social and economic one, where dominant systems determine the distribution of benefits.
It will be another two years before hundreds of millions across the world receive their emergency vaccines, which, in a globalized world, risks undermining its efficacy on all our communities.
Scientific endeavors have long been considered separate to real-world contexts, an idea that places profound limitations on the promises of biotechnology. By missing the full scope of design, we may think we’re solving problems and realize later that actually, not much has changed.
And a similar logic is emerging in biotechnology for consumer goods and industry. So far, it offers innovations for commodities markets, drop-in replacements that change problematic ingredients, and yet sustain prevailing mindsets and dynamics of power. Again, technically sound solutions that unwittingly reinforce social and ecological inequities.
Addressing these asymmetries requires us to take a more revolutionary approach, one that begins by asking "What kind of a world do we wish for?" So what if we could do both? What if we could design at the molecular scale, with the real world in mind? A more integrated approach to designing with biology requires us to ask more nuanced questions; not "What will people buy," but "What if we put communities, rather than commodities, first." "Could distributed biotechnology enable people to find local solutions to local problems?" "Can we move beyond a biotechnology that creates monocultures to one which, like nature itself, embraces a multiplicity of adaptations?" "How do we equip the next generation with the tools, spaces and communities they need to broaden their skills, knowledge and ideas?" An incredible amount of work that begins to address these questions is already underway.
The Open Bioeconomy Lab, which has nodes in the UK, Ghana and Cameroon, designs open-source research tools to expand geographies of innovation into resource-constrained contexts. Over thousands of years, we've domesticated plants to make them edible, creating nutrient-rich, diverse and delicious food cultures. MicroByre wants to do the same, but for microbes. The San Francisco based start-up assembles diverse microbial libraries for a more resilient biological toolkit. Imagine the expanded color palettes and different applications, from different types of pigment-producing bacteria. And from London's famed art school, Central Saint Martins, students from different disciplines are generating new sustainable design practices from biological medium. You'll find them at work in a wet lab, nested between historic fashion textiles and architecture departments, a radical reunification of the arts and sciences in education. Many examples of this type of systemic design work in biotechnology exist -- piece them together, and you start to glimpse different visions of our biological futures.

I don't know what happened to the time capsule we left behind in Paris, but I do remember wishing for a more just and meaningful world, where all of nature can thrive. In their own significant ways, technology and design have played their role in denying us this, but it's in our power to change that. Fundamentally, this means recognizing that the design of, with and from biology is designing systems and not stuff, and that with a truly ambitious design proposition, one that’s based on values that center flourishing, caretaking and equity. We have the opportunity to build truly transformative systems, systems that open up holistic measures of value and impact, and how we think about scaling innovation and doing business for the futures we now need.

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