Humanity's increasingly permanent mark on the planet has spurred a new geological age in earth's history: the Anthropocene. Learn how we got to this point -- and what our footprint means to the future of the planet.

Imagine aliens land on Earth a million years from now. What will these curious searchers find of us? They will find what geologists, scientists, and other experts are increasingly calling the Anthropocene, or new age of mankind. David Biello explains how the impacts that humans have made have become so pervasive, profound, and permanent that som...

It takes an entire civilization to build a toaster. Designer Thomas Thwaites found out the hard way, by attempting to build one from scratch: mining ore for steel, deriving plastic from oil ... it's frankly amazing he got as far as he got. A parable of our interconnected society, for designers and consumers alike.

Per Espen Stoknes weaves together psychology and economics in imaginative ways, often revolving around our human relationships to the natural world and to each other.

Plastic is an incredible substance for the economy -- and the worst substance possible for the environment, says entrepreneur Andrew Forrest. In a conversation meant to spark debate, Forrest and head of TED Chris Anderson discuss an ambitious plan to get the world's biggest companies to fund an environmental revolution -- and transition industry...

Human growth has strained the earth's resources, but as Johan Rockström reminds us, our advances also give us the science to recognize this and change behavior. His research has found nine "planetary boundaries" that can guide us in protecting our planet's many overlapping ecosystems.

How can we begin to address the global, insidious problem of climate change — a problem that's too big for any one country to solve? Economist Nicholas Stern lays out a plan, presented to the UN's Climate Summit in 2014, showing how the world's countries can work together on climate. It's a big vision for cooperation, with a payoff that goes far...

India's big cities have some of the worst air quality in the world. How can we fix this public health crisis? In an actionable talk, social entrepreneur Arunabha Ghosh lays out a five-step plan to put India on the path to cleaner, safer air -- and shows how every citizen can play an active role in getting there.

The meta-crisis is so vast: climate change, exponential technology, addiction, polarization and more. How do we grasp it, let alone take steps to address it? One of the thinking tools we have at our disposal is science fiction. To the extent that we co-evolve with our stories, science fiction can prepare us for the impending future -- and empowe...

Vicki Arroyo uses environmental law and her background in biology and ecology to help prepare for global climate change.

Humanity now has incredible power to shape nature and the Earth: the power to destroy and the power to repair, says sustainability champion and UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner. In this action-oriented talk, Steiner shows how this power is putting our own survival at risk -- and takes us on a global tour of individuals and societies that are cho...

What if we could capture pollution in the air around us and turn it into something useful? Inventor Anirudh Sharma shares how he created AIR-INK, a deep black ink that's made from PM 2.5 pollution. See how he hacked together a clever way to capture these tiny particles -- and make the world just a little bit cleaner in the process.

In her book "Citizen Scientist," Mary Ellen Hannibal traces the origins of today’s tech-savvy citizen science movement back through centuries of amateur observations by writers and naturalists.

Product designer Eben Bayer reveals his recipe for a new, fungus-based packaging material that protects fragile stuff like furniture, plasma screens -- and the environment.

Humans produce 300 million tons of new plastic each year -- yet, despite our best efforts, less than 10 percent of it ends up being recycled. Is there a better way to deal with all this waste? Morgan Vague describes her research with microbiologist Jay Mellies on bacteria that have evolved the unexpected ability to eat plastic -- and how they co...

Artist Dianna Cohen shares some tough truths about plastic pollution in the ocean and in our lives -- and some thoughts on how to free ourselves from the plastic gyre.

The wheat, corn and rice we grow today may not thrive in a future threatened by climate change. Cary Fowler takes us inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a vast treasury buried within a frozen mountain in Norway, that stores a diverse group of food-crop seeds ... for whatever tomorrow may bring.

"For all that's ever been said about climate change, we haven't heard nearly enough about the psychological impacts of living in a warming world," says science writer Britt Wray. In this quick talk, she explores how climate change is threatening our well-being -- mental, social and spiritual -- and offers a starting point for what we can do abou...

The climate crisis is too vast and complicated to solve with a silver bullet, says author David Wallace-Wells. What we need is a shift in how we live. Follow along as he lays out some of the dramatic actions we could take to build a livable, prosperous world in the age of global warming.

When we throw away our plastic trash, where does it go? In this hard-hitting talk, Van Jones shows us how our throwaway culture hits poor people and poor countries "first and worst," with consequences we all share no matter where we live. He offers some ways to reclaim our planet from plastic garbage.

There's a farming crisis no one is talking about: The world is running out of phosphorus, an essential element that's a key component of DNA and the basis of cellular communication. As biologist Mohamed Hijri shows, all roads of this crisis lead back to how we farm -- with chemical fertilizers chock-full of the element, which plants are not effi...

As we recklessly warm the planet by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, some industrial emissions also produce particles that reflect sunshine back into space, putting a check on global warming that we're only starting to understand. Climate activist Kelly Wanser asks: Can we engineer ways to harness this effect and further reduce warm...

The biggest obstacle to dealing with climate disruptions lies between your ears, says psychologist and economist Per Espen Stoknes. He's spent years studying the defenses we use to avoid thinking about the demise of our planet -- and figuring out a new way of talking about global warming that keeps us from shutting down. Step away from the dooms...

In this perspective-shifting talk, Danny Hillis prompts us to approach global issues like climate change with creative scientific solutions. Taking a stand for solar geoengineering, he looks at controversial solutions with open-minded curiosity.

In this passionate call to action, 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg explains why, in August 2018, she walked out of school and organized a strike to raise awareness of global warming, protesting outside the Swedish parliament and grabbing the world's attention. "The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts...

Liam Young is a speculative architect, production designer and director who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures.

Stuart Kauffman's work on the origin of life on Earth posits that complex biological systems may have resulted as much from self-organization as from natural selection.

About this event: In our relatively brief existence, humankind has impacted ecological systems with disproportionate force. The permanent imprint we have made on the geologic record of Earth’s past is the demarcation point for the Anthropocene: a period defined by human intervention and a future that will be determined largely by how we reckon with and regulate o...

Climate change is real, case closed. But there's still a lot we don't understand about it, and the more we know the better chance we have to slow it down. One still-unknown factor: How might clouds play a part? There's a small hope that they could buy us some time to fix things ... or they could make global warming worse. Climate scientist Kate ...

We tend to think of evolution as a slow, gradual process playing out over millions of years. But evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton says nature is now changing at breakneck speed to keep up with the world humanity has built. From tuskless elephants who escape poachers to wolves living in the radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Campbe...