Why We Need to Think Differently About Sustainability: Leyla Acaroglu at TEDxMelbourne

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: In 1989, something absolutely fundamental happened. I was seven years old. And it didn't just affect me, it affected the entire planet. And I remember, when I first heard about this, I was sitting in the back seat of my friend's mom's car. She's driving along and she's explaining to me that there's this giant bubble that covers the Earth, and it protects us from the harmful UV rays of the sun. And then she pretends to tell me about how humans created this stuff called CFCs. It was creating these big holes and we were all going to die. Now, as you can tell from my cute photo, I was petrified. I literally had thought I could imagine myself withering into a crisp. And so I, being seven, decided to suggest some solutions to the problem. Firstly, I said we could erect giant sunshades, you know, like they have in primary schools. We could just maneuver ourselves underneath those. Apparently, that wasn't going to work. And so then, I put up the offer of all hiding under blankets. No, that wasn't going to work either. We were all going to die, according to her. Thankfully, though, after I went home, bawled my eyes out and had nightmares for weeks, I discovered that something was already in action. Two years earlier, in 1987, all of the leaders of the world came together and they signed the Montreal Protocol. In 1989, it came into effect. And it meant that CFCs basically were eradicated from production by '95. And now, scientists say that the hole in the ozone layer will recover by the end of the century. I think this is absolutely amazing. And the Montreal Protocol has been claimed to be one of the most important and actually effective, given that people actually signed it and stuck to it, international regulation ever. But the story of how we got to the hole in the ozone layer to begin with is even more fascinating. And it starts with this man, Thomas Midgley. Now, he was quite well-known in the early part of last century. Engineer and chemist, he had two major inventions that had profound impacts on absolutely everything that exists on this planet. The first thing that Thomas did was that he put lead in petrol. Good old Thomas, what a great idea. He fixed this thing called engine knocking, accidentally discovered lead was the solution, and was really, really famous for a while. So much so that they put him in charge of another very, very important issue of the day, and that was that refrigerators kept killing people. Up until 1920, refrigeration gases were totally toxic. And because people had these in their homes, and they had a habit of leaking, people were literally gassed to death in their houses. So, Thomas was called in, and he was put in charge of solving this problem. And apparently, he did it in three days. And what he came up with was Freon. Freon is an inert, colourless, odourless, non-toxic gas that he believed in so much that he got up at the American Chemical Association's annual event to demonstrate just how non-toxic Freon was. He inhaled a massive breath of the gas and held it for 30 seconds. And then, he blew out a candle to prove that it was also non-flammable. Freon was the first ever chlorofluorocarbon, or otherwise known as CFC. And he was quite the salesman, Thomas, so much so that CFCs ended up in hair sprays, refrigerators, and a number of other consumer goods. And I think about this story now, and I wonder if Thomas had had a crystal ball, or a time machine, or that thing that Doctor Who uses. I don't know, that thing. Anyway, thank you, the Tartus. I didn't want to say it, because I could have said it wrong. Then it would have been bad. Anyway, so, if Thomas had had one of those types of machines, which I'm sure we'd all like, then perhaps he would have done things differently. Because when these guys came along in the 1970s, they discovered that Thomas' invention of CFCs was causing these holes in the ozone layer, which were threatening all life on Earth, as my friend's mum chose to tell me in no child-appropriate ways. And essentially, they went on to win the Nobel Prize, and Thomas, well, let's just say he doesn't appear in history books that much. And what this teaches us, or what this shows us now, is that hindsight's brilliant. And we look back and go, "How could he have done that?" But also, that we need to be very careful of the law of unintended consequences. And this is, basically, when any action, decision, or choice is made, there is the possibility of either a positive, negative, or perverse unintended outcome. And the history is riddled with the story of unintended consequences. Cane toads in Australia is a brilliant one. 1935, these 101, just 101, now there's a quarter of a billion. Anyway, 101 cane toads were introduced to Australia in order to try and eradicate or fix the cane beetle, which was decimating sugar cane in far north Queensland. Now, these guys decided they really didn't like cane beetles, and they much preferred cute little native frogs. So they ate all of those, and that's the negative consequence. And the perverse outcome is that they also have these really poisonous glands that nothing else in Australia had ever encountered. And so when larger animals chose to eat them for dinner, they died. In fact, they've been known to kill crocodiles. And because of this, they have no known predator. Their population has exploded. And as we speak right now, there is literally an army of cane toads marching from the top of Australia down, and soon they'll be here in Victoria. Hopefully not. Anyway, French ruled Vietnam. During this time, there was a rat plague. And the French government of the day decided that they would put a bounty on rat tails as a way of trying to encourage people to kill them to eliminate the rat plague. This worked incredibly successfully at first. But very soon, people who were making money out of this ran out of rats. So, what did they do? Rat farms. Hey, I love ingenious thinking. This is brilliant, innovation. So basically, rat farms, and they kept collecting the money. Very quickly, the government figured this out. And so they stopped paying money for the rat's tails, which means economic incentive gone. What do you do? You let go of your rats. So rat population increased again. These kinds of interventions happen all the time. And recently, when governments are trying to tackle issues like air pollution from car emissions, they implement incentives to try and control or influence people's behavior. Mexico City, for example. They wanted to reduce the issues of air pollution from their over congestion. So what they did was they said, okay, cars can only drive on particular days. And so they were trying to encourage civilians to basically car share, public transport, possibly even bike. Didn't work at all. Because people just went and brought other cars that had the licenses for the days that they wanted to drive. So suddenly, you've got an increase in car ownership, increasing car driving, and increasing pollution. Because those second cars were pretty much bombs, to say the least. And so they didn't have the right catalytic converters. And the next thing you know, air pollution increases. This all shows us that good intentions can often result in far bigger problems. And this is a really big issue when we're trying to solve serious world issues. Whether it be poverty, deforestation, climate change. When we don't understand the consequences of the choices that we make, even in our own lives. I mean, I just think of all of the times I've been at family events, said that thing that's gotten to like four other people in Chinese whispers. By the time it gets back to me, I'm in trouble and someone's not talking to me. These kinds of unintended consequences of the just day-to-day choices that we make. But when we make big decisions, when governments and institutions make choices, they have dramatic flow-on effects. It's like a domino or a ripple effect. And there's one such case that happened just recently. And that was when the European Union was trying to address the issue of the over-dependence on oil. They decided to introduce a legislation to encourage the use of biofuels. Now biofuels are essentially fuels that can be used in cars like any other synthetic fuel. But they're made from biological resources. So usually from food crops, wheat and corn. And a few years in, this looks like it was really successful. So they increased the targets to 10%. But what actually happened was that researchers started to wonder why suddenly there wasn't much food available on the world food market. Basic food sources. And they realized that there was this thing happening called an indirect land use change. Technical term. But basically that meant that farmers who used to grow a large percentage of the base food for the world, that went to a lot of emerging economies where people were suffering from food shortages, suddenly dropped off the market. Because people realized that it was far more economically viable to sell your corn and maize for biofuel to Europe than it was to Africa for food. So we had a world food shortage. And that is the negative outcome. The perverse is that not only did people transfer their already farmed land, but they started clearing large tracks of rainforest because there was this incredible incentive. So we have lost thousands of acres. The amount is unknown. But basically this direct control had net environmental losses. And that is totally unsustainable. Which is the area that I work in. In case you hadn't figured that out by now. And then how I got to being like incredibly, almost annoyingly passionate about sustainability, was ten years ago. It wasn't when I was seven. That was just traumatizing. Gee and I could have some discussions about that. So ten years ago I was studying design, product design. I'm in design school and I'm in engineering 101. And my lovely old lecturer, he walks in and he says, "All right everybody. We're going to learn about this thing called the Gaia theory. And that is that everything in nature is interconnected. So as a designer you're probably going to make choices about materials or processes that will have major impacts on the planet that you probably won't know about." I was like, "Oh right. What? Nobody ever told me this before. How am I supposed to make decisions? I don't want to hurt people or the planet. Oh my gosh, this is just too much." Really, I had a major freak out. First of many. And I turned to the rest of my class as the lecturer just explained all these potential environmental decorative results of choices that I as a simple designer was going to make. I turned to my class and I said, "Oh my gosh, what are we going to do guys?" And I remember the boy sitting next to me. He was like, "Leyla, I don't know why you're freaking out." It happened a lot. And this is a direct quote. He said, "It's not like any of these catastrophic environmental impacts are going to affect us in our lifetime. So why should we care?" So anyway, I matched myself right out of design school and right into sustainability school because I felt the weight of not knowing. And even though I didn't know about the law of unintended consequences then, I really, really didn't want to be responsible unintentionally, even if I didn't know about it, for causing damage somewhere else. For creating, making choices that had impacts that were far beyond my intention as a human being, as an individual. And I ended up studying lots about sustainability and getting a drinking problem. Just joking. And I discovered this incredible thing. And that is that the world is made up of incredibly complex and beautiful systems. In fact, systems are the underlying code to everything that exists on Earth. Just look at how David Attenborough has spent decades amusing us, amazing us, with how these intricate little ecosystems of ants and fungus and other stuff all interrelate. And they basically create the foundation for everything that we love and respect on this plant. Systems aren't just the big systems of how the climate is managed. It's not just the industrial systems of how we all get iPhones and other lovely technological inventions. It's not just these systems. It's every system. It's our relationships. It's the things that we hold dear. Our families and our friends. All of these systems interrelate. And unless we understand those systems and we work within the limitations of them, we have unintended consequences. Now, as I said, I work in sustainability, which is great because whenever I tell anyone that they tend to walk away or ignore me, or try and justify what they do because they're worried that I'm going to yell at them. Which I don't usually yell. I just speak loudly most of the time. Anyway, if I could say three things about sustainability, this is what I would say. Sustainability is about self-preservation. It's about understanding, and it's about doing more with less. Let me explain. Self-preservation, because if you break it down, we can't deny the fact that we need three things to survive, and that we need air, water, and food. And nature has this amazing ability of providing us those things, which is how we've managed to become so successful and how we managed to live on this planet. Now, I learned that at seven because of the hole in the ozone layer, and I learned that again at 20, and I spent the last 10 years finding out more and more and more about how we absolutely are interconnected with every system on this earth, whether we like it or not. And that we need to understand those systems in order to be able to sustain ourselves in a nourishment sense, but also sustain the things that we hold dear, our friends and our families, our communities, the beauty in this world. All of those things are directly related. And doing more with less is how we manage to achieve that. Basically, we have an ever-growing population, but not only that, in emerging economies people are starting to demand the same quality of life that we have experienced in Western cultures for years, and rightly so. So as more people demand the right to healthcare and access and all of these things, then we need to figure out really smart and innovative ways of doing more with less. But the coolest thing about sustainability is that it is the most amazing catalyst for innovation. You can't deny the fact that limitations are like honey for people's imaginations. I don't know why I said honey, but bees, you know, nature, I want to roll. So basically, just keep thinking about the systems, they're all related. Okay, so basically, if we use sustainability as a criteria for innovation, for innovative thinking, just as those farmers in French rule of Vietnam managed to cash in on that intervention, we have the capacity of really evolving and solving some of these critical issues that we face. But unfortunately, we're not really embracing this opportunity. Only 2.7% of all patents have anything to do with the environment. There's a big gaping hole in this opportunity. And as I said, you know, 10 years ago, I was in design school and I totally wanted to be an entrepreneur. I didn't barely say the word, but that was what I wanted to be. And I had that realization and that moment of understanding that I, as an individual, had this capacity to absolutely influence the world, but that it was going to be completely not what I knew about or intended if I didn't embrace learning more. If I didn't embrace challenging myself to understand the complexity and the beauty and the interrelationship of the things that we all love and respect on this planet. I think we desperately need to think differently about sustainability. I've spent the last 10 years working with designers and engineers and businesses and anybody who will bloody listen to me, essentially, about the opportunities that sustainability presents and seeing it as an opportunity and not a problem that everybody promotes it to be. I think we need to think differently about sustainability. As Einstein said, you can't solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that got you there in the beginning. And that's what we're doing now. We're constantly just using short-term thinking to layer upon simple solution to simple solution on complex problems. And at the end of the day, what we're actually doing is sustaining the unsustainable. So, it doesn't matter if you're, you know, a store clerk or a CEO or anything in between this amazing planet that we exist on. Sustainability is an opportunity. All we have to do is we have to see it differently. We have to think differently. We have to think differently. And we have to seek to understand how we can all make choices that have a positive consequence on the planet. Thank you. Thank you. [00:17:28] Speaker ?: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.