[The Pied Pipers' "Dream" playing] ♪ Dream ♪ ♪ When you're feeling blue ♪ ♪ ♪ Dream ♪ ♪ That's the thing to do ♪ Ari Wallach, voice-over: The way humans make sense of the world is through stories.
They help us figure out what happened in the past and give us a sense of place and community and belonging.
It can totally expand our imagination and guide our future actions.
The Pied Pipers: ♪ You'll find your... ♪ Wallach: There's a reason the hippocampus, at the base of our brain, is both responsible for emotions and memory and images, because the two work hand in hand to help us move throughout the world.
This has been part of who we are, and most importantly, how we transmit knowledge from generation to generation.
Narrator: It is cold and growing colder as the world slowly dies.
One in 12 people on the planet will contract the disease.
Man: Even if they discovered the cure for infertility, doesn't matter.
Too late.
[Helicopter rotors thrumming] Wallach: Here's the thing.
Almost every movie that takes place in the future is a story about the world gone bad.
Announcer: In the future, the polar ice caps have melted, and the Earth lies beneath a watery grave.
Wallach: There's a "Mad Max" way of thinking about tomorrow.
Announcer: A man reduced to a single instinct--survive.
Wallach: What happens when all we see, all the stories of tomorrow, are dystopian, you start forgetting what it is that you actually do want.
Are the stories that we're putting out circumscribing, and in some ways, creating artificial boundaries in terms of what kind of futures and worlds that we want?
Voice: Good morning.
This is your wake-up call.
[Grimes' "Oblivion" playing] ♪ [Vocalizing] ♪ ♪ I never walk about after dark ♪ ♪ It's my point of view ♪ ♪ 'Cause someone could break your neck ♪ ♪ Coming up behind you ♪ ♪ Always coming, and you'd never have a clue ♪ ♪ I never look behind all the time ♪ ♪ I will wait forever ♪ ♪ Always looking straight ♪ ♪ Thinking, counting all the hours you wait ♪ [Horns honking] ♪ Sharon Wallach: Just punch it in all the way.
-Oh.
-Like that.
All right, so we're gonna spread this out and split it into four even pieces.
I know it's hard.
Sharon, I feel like you're gonna have to, like-- -Yeah, you're gonna have to... -Help us.
-Ha ha!
-No, you--what do you mean?
Yours is-- yours is a little fat.
It's OK. Don't redo it too much.
Wallach, voice-over: Our lives are a collection of stories, stories about who we are and where we come from, stories that help us make sense of today, and stories about what comes next, but how do our stories about the past shape our future?
What stories do we need to hold on to, and which ones should we leave behind?
What stories will lead us to create better tomorrows for our kids and grandkids, and which ones are simply holding us back?
There we go.
All right.
Wallach: Wherever I go, I always enjoy talking to people about the stories they love, and today, stopping by my son's classroom, I'm reminded just how foundational these stories really are.
Teacher: I wanted to introduce you guys to my friend Ari.
Girl: I love your purple shoes.
Wallach: Oh, thank you.
Girl: You're welcome.
Wallach: Here's a question.
Who here likes to watch movies?
Raise your hand.
OK. All right.
I'm just--what's a movie that you saw lately that you really liked?
"Lyle, Lyle Crocodile."
-"Lyle, Lyle Crocodile."
Yeah?
-"Harry Potter."
"Harry Potter."
Girl: Um, I watched "It."
You watched "It"?
-Oh, my gosh!
How?
-Horror movie!
Boy: I honestly liked "Wall-E," because it shows, like, emotion in a robot, which is kind of like AI.
What do you love about movies?
-Yes?
-Um, I like how they're scary.
The actors show feelings.
Sometimes they're very sad, and I cry.
Wallach: What makes a great story?
-Yes?
-The emotions.
Wallach: Emotions.
Yes?
The connection to reality.
Teacher: Charlotte?
Charlotte: Um, like, if it has a good plot and there are things that, like, change it up in the story, and it's not just one thing where you can predict what's gonna happen.
Beautiful.
When you think about a movie that takes place in the future, what does it, what does it have to have in it for it to be a great movie?
Um, I kind of think, if I was making a movie in the future, I would kind of, um, add, like, things that we're planning on trying to make.
Like what?
-Like flying cars.
-Flying cars.
[Laughter] Get in.
Let's play it hard.
Pull up, Anakin!
-Pull up!
-Ha ha ha!
Ooh!
Nice shot, Doc!
Man: Stories are the shortcut we use to navigate the world, and the world is just too complicated to understand.
There's too much data coming at us, and we can't notice and process all that data.
The human mind does not have that capacity.
So we need shortcuts.
We need to be able to make leaps over the data.
We say, "What am I broadly seeing here?
How can I make sense of this?"
And the story is what makes sense of it.
Man: There's a quote by Alasdair MacIntyre, the great Catholic philosopher at Notre Dame University, who says, "I cannot tell you who I am "or what I'm going to do "until I tell you the story or stories that I am a part of."
Woman: All of us believe in a certain kind of the future that seems almost inevitable.
And actually, if we interrogate that, if we trace that thread back, the origins of those are in the first few very attractive, shiny images of the future that we witnessed, that we consumed.
And somehow, they end up shaping the boundary or the contours of what we think it's going to look like.
But who owns those images of the future?
Who shaped them?
Who's missing from this story, and why?
♪ Wallach: For years, Hollywood has attracted the best and brightest storytellers, yet only recently have we begun to understand just how limited our stories have been, in large part because of who's been able to tell them.
But what would it look like if more people began to see themselves as storytellers, helping to shape new narratives, new futures they can actually see themselves in?
That's led me here to meet Rafael Agustin, an award-winning screenwriter and author focused on broadening the boundaries of what stories are told and who gets to tell them.
Tell me a little bit more about you.
It's like a first date, right?
So, like, we just sat down.
I just-- Scorpio.
Long walks on the beach.
Long walks--I just ordered two glasses of pinot noir, and we're getting to know each other.
Please.
All right, so born in Ecuador, South America.
Came to the United States when I was, like, seven years old.
And it wasn't until high school, when I applied to go to college and I applied to get my driver's license that I discovered that we were undocumented.
Growing up, until that point, did you feel different in any way?
Did you always feel kind of aligned within the communities that you were in?
Well, the funny thing is, in Ecuador, we watched a lot of American movies and TV shows and pop culture.
Robin: Cuidado, Batman!
Joker: Ha ha ha Agustin: Hollywood is the greatest export we have.
And not only me-- I think it's influenced an entire globe.
I remember one of the first movies that I fell in love with was, like, this-- I don't want to say "bad," because I loved it, but it was a B action movie called "American Ninja"... -Yeah.
-Which starred-- I've watched all three "American Ninjas."
-Very influential.
-So you already know how important this movie is.
It's extremely important on many levels, but I'll let you go into why.
Heartthrob Michael Dudikoff changed my life, because since that moment, I wanted to be only two things in my life.
One was a ninja, and the other one was American.
I get to public school in the United States, when I show up to my first day of class, and I'm like, "Wait a minute.
"What are all these, like, Asian American kids?
"What are all these African American kids?
"Like, this doesn't look like the movies I watch.
This is too much diversity."
And then I saw, like, the Mexican American and Central American kids and realized that I look more like them than the white kids.
And then--so I was, like, seven years old when I realized, "Oh, my God, I'm--I'm not white."
Wallach: Rafael fell in love with storytelling at an early age, but after only seeing his community represented by cliché stereotypes, he decided to write himself into a future he didn't see around him, first as a screenwriter, and now by enabling others to do the same thing for themselves.
Girl: Scene five, cat, take two.
Agustin: Filmmaking has been around, so what we do is not, like, revolutionary.
It's the age that we do it at and the communities that we do it at that is so revolutionary.
[School bell rings] We essentially bring filmmaking mentors into the classroom twice a week for 90-minute blocks for an entire school year.
So we guide the students through the filmmaking process from the development of a concept all the way until their premieres, and we have their premieres at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival.
[Applause] If every student learns not only that they can tell their story, but that they should, what kind of self-advocacy and self-respect is built into them?
How empowered are they when they realize that they can actually tell their own stories?
That's what's so critical about the work.
It's the social-emotional empowerment that's being built.
I went to a historically marginalized, low-performing school, and I watched 9- and 10-year-olds who look like me do the work that I couldn't do, and I--I nearly started crying.
So tell me what it starts to look like on the other side.
I think the stories that we tell are gonna be limitless.
I think our imagination is gonna be even more exciting, because we're seeing one another for the first time, and we're seeing each other's humanities, finally.
♪ Wallach: We have an amazing opportunity in this moment to rewrite the stories that define our time, to be so much bigger and more inclusive for the world we actually live in and the one we want to create, but who wrote the stories that came before us, and how far back does this essential human trait of storytelling really go?
That's led me to Spain.
I'm here to visit the Cave of Ardales, where until recently it was believed to contain some of the world's oldest recordings ever made by humans.
Thanks to a new discovery here, some of the markings in this cave now date back much, much further.
[Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] OK. [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] Wallach, voice-over: Pedro led me further into the cave, explaining that while animal bones were discovered outside, human bones were buried deep inside the heart of the cave.
They believe these early burial sites were a way of marking this cave as belonging to a clan and connecting them to their ancestors who came before, but the most amazing thing is the discovery of markings on the walls that point to the very earliest forms of communication.
[Speaking Spanish] Wallach: [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] -[Speaking Spanish] -[Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] Wow.
[Speaking Spanish] -[Speaking Spanish] -[Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] Wallach, voice-over: What began as information, ways to communicate threats or danger, soon gave way to mythmaking-- art, early religion, and the very first recorded human stories.
♪ Over the many centuries since, our methods of storytelling have continued to evolve, but the primal importance they serve to our sense of knowing who we are, where we belong, and where we are going is as strong now as it's ever been.
In Los Angeles, a team of artists and engineers are continuing to push these methods forward using AI-enhanced gaming engines to create the digital worlds of tomorrow.
Man: We are at Lux.
Lux is one of the frontrunners in LED volume virtual production.
They were early developers, early adopters in this tech and this information.
Wallach: What exactly is this?
So this is called an "LED volume."
These are all motion-capture cameras that are used to track that camera in 3D space.
It's projecting in a 3D environment from a video-game engine.
Give me an idea of how you actually use this.
A good use case-- "Mandalorian" was a huge one.
That kind of brought it to the world, but there's been versions of this for the last 90 years.
[Ragtime music playing] Back in 1930, they started using rear projection.
"Just Imagine" and "Liliom" were the big ones.
Narrator: Just imagine the New York of 1980.
[Whistle blasting] Seibert: They just started pushing it forward.
And those were called "motion special effects" at that time.
From that process, they kept iterating on it.
Now, instead of shooting on a blue screen, you have that environment that you can see in camera.
So it limits the compositing, it limits all of those things that you need to do in post-production.
So what this does is you have unbelievable flexibility.
You're able to change this -in a matter of seconds.
-Absolutely.
We can do a time-of-day change, and we can make it early morning, dusk.
And there we are.
-So now it's dusk.
-Yeah.
You can put crews in a different location at any time.
You can also shoot in this all day long, and that's the beauty of it.
Wallach: When you were growing up, you obviously, you know, went to the movies, like most of us, but then something clicked.
What was it that-- that drew you in?
What was the thing that caused you to kind of fall in love?
I was always a big fan of the underdog story.
That was my thing, you know, "The Sandlot" and "Rudy."
Since when are you the quitting kind?
All: Rudy!
Rudy!
Seibert: There's something about good storytelling that connects with the soul.
There's nothing that moves you as a human as much as storytelling, and it goes back in history thousands of years.
It's to help unlock and understand the expression of emotions, and those are the things that open us up as humans.
Narrator: All day long, film races through the camera at 90 feet a minute in scene after scene.
Seibert: You know, in the beginning, you had directors and directors of photography that are finding new ways to tell the story, finding new ways to immerse the audience.
Stephen Spielberg: We configured the water box so it was easy to get the water lapping the lens.
I really wanted this movie to be just at water level, the way we are when we're treading water.
Seibert: We go from black and white to color.
We go from no sound to sound.
Man: If I'm a success in this show, well, we're gonna move from here.
We'll have to think of something else.
Seibert: And we start to see all these things build up to create what we know today, and so that's what we're seeing now, is all these tools are kind of working together and expanding this universe of content creation.
With the adoption of game engines, I think there's gonna be a wide adoption of the technology advances and giving opportunities for people to explore these worlds, and that makes it immersive.
How might AI change storytelling as we know it?
I think you can look at AI in storytelling as jet fuel.
It's something that can boost you to another level of creative thinking.
It unlocks potential.
We're now not thinking in this little box, but we're seeing what happens when you combine all these different things that have been made over time and put it into your story.
So it is actually tracking... Wallach, voice-over: As these tools continue to extend our capacity to create new worlds and immerse ourselves in alternate realities, the question of what kind of worlds we choose to build, what visions of tomorrow we show ourselves, is more important than ever because stories don't just entertain or inspire us.
They create the basis for what we see as possible moving forward.
Bisht: The mere act of people coming together and imagining the future that looks different from the conditions that they are born in is a deeply political act.
It questions the inherent biases and power imbalances that define the systems that govern our lives.
When you open up the future as a thing that we can all imagine and construct differently, you're essentially putting a lot of power and agency in the hands of people who are, in the traditional system, completely left out of the equation.
♪ Wallach: One of the dangerous things about the stories we're born into is that we often don't see them as stories at all.
Decisions people made long before we got here can make the world as it is today seem certain, even inevitable, but what stories have we taken for granted today that are holding us back from building better tomorrows, and what does it mean to examine these stories from new perspectives?
I came to Chicago to meet Ytasha Womack, a world-renowned author, Afrofuturist, and dancer, working to challenge our relationship to the past as well as to the futures we can create.
Wallach: So, Ytasha, a lot of your work takes place in this space called "Afrofuturism."
What does that mean?
Afrofuturism is a way of looking at futures or alternate realities, but you're doing so through these Black cultural lenses.
It's both an aesthetic-- you've seen a lot of the space imagery reflected in our architecture-- dance, music, storytelling, how people gather.
It's also a perspective, a way of knowing oneself, and it's, I think, a good way to facilitate healing for people who have issues around the imagination.
It's very different than how we tell stories, like, in the West.
Sometimes I see stories where they act as if, in order to have a new beginning, you have to have this incredible apocalypse and begin anew.
A lot of Afrofuturists kind of acknowledge that some of those apocalyptic things have already happened.
Hmm.
When you think about moments like the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, people had to think about liberating themselves or think about claiming their own humanity.
We're all kind of at an intersection of these histories and decisions that a lot of people made before we even showed up.
Mm-hmm.
There are certain philosophies and ideas that shape us, but it's not about them.
It's about you and the decisions you're gonna make now and the kind of future, you know, that you ultimately want.
Womack: Thank you for being here and coming out today.
The purpose of this class is to think about our futures, think about our relationships to dance, and become these joy generators.
Wallach, voice-over: Ytasha uses the ideas of Afrofuturism and her love of dance to help people come to see themselves as a part of creating better futures, bigger than and beyond their personal past.
She believes that our own stories, often formed by the stories we are told, too often hold us back from the futures we want to see unfold.
Womack: So what we're gonna do quickly-- I'm gonna give you each a sheet of paper.
I want you to think about the things that you want in your life, in your personal futures, and just jot them down.
Womack, voice-over: It's fun to challenge ourselves to think of other kinds of worlds.
If you're a person of African descent and you're navigating society, you contend with perspectives about who people feel you are.
You contend with perspectives of where they think you came from, perspectives of what people feel you can achieve or not achieve, where being yourself, you're told that that's problematic.
There are people who turn to dance as that space of resilience.
It's a little moment where you escape, and it shifts your perspective enough, maybe, to come out of it and see things a little differently.
[Oladapo's "Isakaba" playing] [Vocalizing] ♪ ♪ Isakaba yesa kasa ♪ ♪ Dance like a yesa kasa ♪ ♪ He knows you know ♪ ♪ He knows I know ♪ ♪ That you've been giving him on a low ♪ ♪ Isakaba yesa kasa ♪ ♪ Dance like a yesa kasa ♪ ♪ He knows you know ♪ ♪ He knows I know ♪ ♪ That you've been giving him on a low ♪ ♪ Wallach: What's your hope in terms of the impact?
How does it start to change things, and what do you want to see it do in the world?
There are things in our society that say, "Oh, that's not a story to tell," or, "Oh, that story doesn't fit."
So I think for some people, you know, you have to almost reimagine a past to connect with the past that you hadn't been told about, and then you have to also imagine a future.
The more we engage with that, the more we can sort of create futures together that benefit humanity.
Wallach, voice-over: Imagining a future doesn't just happen on an individual level, and what begins as simply a story can often go on to inform the kind of world we choose to create.
[March playing] ♪ Announcer: Gateway to the $155-million wonderland.
From far and near come countless visitors.
By every mode of travel, every means of transportation, they arrive to view the marvels of the greatest exposition in history.
Wallach: So in 1939, at the World's Fair, General Motors sponsored what was probably the most amazing and biggest exhibit in World's Fair history: Futurama.
Announcer: Outstanding exhibits by leaders of the auto industry.
Sensational is the Futurama that projects you into 1960.
Wallach: Now, when you went to go visit Futurama, you saw scenes of the future.
Announcer: An automobile whose body is made of a transparent plastic is a surefire attraction for the mechanically minded.
Wallach: Of kitchens and family rooms and the workplace and of parks and buildings where they basically laid out what the future would be.
Announcer: This world of tomorrow is a world of beauty.
Below us lies a superb one-direction highway, bearing streams of traffic at varying speeds in separate lanes.
Wallach: Now, there is one thing in this exhibit that, in hindsight, is totally obvious.
Everywhere you went in the Futurama exhibit, there was a four- or an eight-lane highway, so embedded within the story of the future was a lot of cars.
Now, that totally made sense.
It was General Motors' exhibit, after all, but it allows us to see the power of stories dictating what you think is a normal progress or a normal way of being.
Bisht: Unfortunately, when it comes to the future, I think most of the discourse and stories are ones that inspired fear.
Ava!
Bisht: And the problem with fear is that it prohibits transformative action, and so our capacity to imagine anything beyond what keeps us safe and what we're familiar with is extremely diminished.
It locks us in the short term.
Hope inspires action.
We urgently need more stories that can bring us to that mind space.
Monibot: When I think of the future, there are so many forks in the road.
There are so many good paths we could take, so many bad paths we could take.
We could commit ourselves to extinction, or we could commit ourselves to an ecological civilization, one in which human beings can continue to thrive while the living planet is allowed to sustain itself, and we have all the tools necessary to do that.
♪ Wallach: When it comes to the biggest stories of our time, the challenge we face is in finding ways to communicate that can cut through the differences that divide us, and in a moment when these divides seem to only be growing, the role of storytelling is more important than ever.
I came to Texas to meet Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian and climate scientist who's focused on building bridges to change the story around climate action to be a whole lot bigger and more inclusive than the one we've been telling.
Hayhoe: According to Pew Research, the United States is more politically divided today than it's been since the Civil War.
Our political ideology is often the number-one predictor of what we hold as our identity, and in this type of divisiveness, what we see is that people start to view others who vote differently than themselves as not even human, as enemies, rather than fellow citizens.
So how do we start bridging these divides that are tearing our country apart?
Only if we start with what we have in common, not if we begin with what divides us, and storytelling is a huge part of that.
So neuroscientists have found that when we tell a story, that people's brainwaves actually synchronize with each other, and we empathize much more strongly, because we can see ourselves in that situation, in that story.
And I'm just trying to share this information.
Wallach, voice-over: Katharine spends a lot of her time these days speaking to people who don't traditionally see themselves as a part of the climate movement.
For her, it's about telling a story that people can actually see themselves in.
Hayhoe: All of us--almost all of us, I should say-- have two big problems when it comes to climate change.
We don't understand why it matters to me here and now, and we don't know what we can do to fix it, or we think we do know, and we don't want to do it.
There's names for these two things.
The first one's called "psychological distance," and the second one is called "solution aversion."
"You can't eat meat.
You can't drive a truck.
"You can't travel.
You can't have kids.
Everybody has to sacrifice to fix climate change," and I'm like, "Well, if that's your only solution, we're never gonna do it."
We've been told that all climate solutions involve loss, sacrifice, suffering, something being taken away from us, rather than gaining anything, and our human brains are wired to be more fearful of loss than we appreciate gain, and so we're working against the wiring of our brains.
We need the best choice to also be the easiest choice and the most affordable choice, the default choice, the natural choice, and to make that happen, we need system change.
I was in the studio, recording the audio version of my book.
So I went into the booth, and I recorded the first few hours, and then I came out to take a break, and the sound engineer said, "I didn't realize your book is about climate change.
I have some questions."
Ha ha ha!
So I said, "All right, here we go."
So we sat down, but instead of him asking me questions, I started by asking him questions.
"How long have you lived here?
Do you have family?"
"Yes, kids and grandchildren."
You know, "What are the types of things you enjoy doing here?"
Pretty soon, he was telling me about how he grew up going to this lake to go fishing, how he wants to take his grandchildren there, but how the lake has been getting warmer, and it's clogged with algae now, and there's not nearly as many fish, and there's so much development around it.
I was listening to his experiences, not him listening to mine.
And so when it got to the point where he had questions, at that point, his questions were, "Well, but what are we supposed to do about this?
"Because the only solutions I've heard are these liberal solutions, and I'm not a liberal."
So I got a chance to talk about how there are conservative and bipartisan solutions that people do agree on and give him some resources where he could find out more about that.
The story we're missing is that of a better future.
Climate change stands between us and a better future.
It's not just about avoiding the apocalypse.
It's about implementing changes that will clean up our air and our water and give us a safer place to live and ensure abundant food for all and improve our health and give us that safe world that we all want.
If we don't visualize and imagine and tell ourselves stories of what we want that world to look like, how are we ever gonna get there?
Monibot: One story we tell ourselves, which is perhaps the biggest fairy tale of all, is the story of infinite growth on a finite planet, that we can just keep growing and growing and growing the economy, and somehow, the world will accommodate that, and people say, "Well, we're not asking for the Earth.
We only want 3% growth a year."
Well, 3% growth means a doubling of all economic activity every 24 years.
So in the whole of human history, that then gets doubled.
Then 24 years later, it gets doubled again and again and again, but of course, we very quickly start to bump into environmental limits.
♪ Wallach, voice-over: These limits raise all kinds of questions about the stories on which much of the modern world has been built, and as it becomes clear just how unsustainable this all really is, what kind of alternative story can we begin writing in this moment?
That's led me to London, where a former sailor turned economist named Ellen MacArthur is working to prove that a new story is not only needed, but possible.
Take me on the journey from a world record-holding sailor to circular economics.
How did you get to this point?
First of all, I never thought I would be at this point.
You know, when I sailed when I was four years old, that was all I ever wanted to do.
I loved being at sea.
I loved watching all around me.
I loved being connected to everything around me, and it was like a drug.
I just wanted to do more and more, and that very quickly, actually, led me to sail around the world for the first time when I was 23 years old.
MacArthur, voice-over: I am looking forward to getting out there on my own, and it's been a great year racing with the crew and also racing on different boats, but no, I still love sailing on my own.
This is a massive challenge.
This is the ultimate record, the fastest around the world record.
MacArthur: When you sail around the world on a boat, you take with you what you need for your survival for three months, and when you start, you watch those resources go down every single day.
There is no more.
What you have is all you have, and you develop this overwhelming understanding of what it is to have finite resources.
You know what it means to have no more, and I suddenly translated that to the global economy.
We tend to take something out of the ground, make something out of it, and then throw it away, so that needs a continuous flow of resources.
That can't run in the long term, when we have a growing world population and a growing economy.
The more I thought about it, the more I was fascinated by it.
I asked a lot of really dumb questions to lots and lots of people in the early days, just saying, "So how does this work, and what's the solution?"
What place are we trying to get to?
If we know we can't do this, then we need to do something different, so what is that thing?
I don't think linear economics ever happened because people were trying to use up all our resources.
It was a natural progression from the Industrial Revolution.
Now we know, in order to satisfy the needs of ourselves today and in the future, the whole economy has to operate in that circular way.
What is circular economics?
If you think about that linear straight line, if you, by design, turn that straight line into a circle, then you look at eliminating waste and pollution, you circulate products and materials, and you regenerate natural systems.
So it's not something you think about at the end, but as you build the economy, you design that into the economy so that it can run in the long term.
Some of the best circular examples are of carpet manufacturers.
They were completely tied to buying new raw materials to make their carpets with, and those prices were going up and up and up.
And they said, "Why do we need to buy "new raw materials when we can design our carpets in a circular way?"
So they redesigned the carpet.
They designed it so the base could be melted down and turned into the base for the next carpet.
The yarn could be extracted, re-spun, turned into the yarn of the next carpet, and actually, they offered it not to be sold, but leased.
So when those trucks come in to make the carpet, rather than being filled with raw materials from a mine or from an oil well, they're your carpets coming back in to be reprocessed, and you designed them, so you know what sits in them, and you designed them, so you know how to get that out of it, and that would be that perfect circular example.
What are some of the challenges facing us in shifting from linear to circular economics?
I'd say one of the biggest challenges is mindset, because we've all come through a linear education system, and we've inherited a linear economy.
It's easy to get buried in the problem, but we need to lift our heads out of the sand and say, "Where are we going?
Where do we want to get to?"
Because life is about opportunity.
Life is about those goals.
You want to know what you can do, and you want to be part of that.
♪ Wallach, voice-over: I really do believe we all want to be a part of the solution, but it can be hard to know where to begin, but what happens when we start to see problems as opportunities, old stories waiting to be rewritten?
In San Diego, Lou Cooperhouse is using his love of seafood to create new forms of cell-based fish as one way of helping to build a more sustainable relationship with the natural world.
We're right on the coast, so in theory, we just go out in some boats and catch a bunch of fish and bring it in.
Why--why do it this way?
San Diego was actually considered, at one time, the tuna capital of the world.
Announcer: Up out of the hold come the tuna by the crateful, on their way to make a lot of tasty tuna dishes.
Cooperhouse: During the '30s and '40s, much seafood was, in fact, caught off these coasts.
What's happened in the last, you know, 100 years or so is the total supply chain of seafood has been really compromised.
We have an issue of microplastics and toxins and pollutants and mercury.
Wild-capture fisheries have been flat for three to four decades.
You know, many fishing communities around the world really rely on fishing as a means of their economic growth and prosperity, so we need a new solution to feed the planet.
So give me a sense of how this actually works, right?
You're basically growing fish?
So from an individual fish, we are isolating the muscle, the fat, or the connective tissue cells, and we're growing those cells in large volumes in what looks like a stainless-steel vessel in a microbrewery.
Woman: Welcome to the BlueNalu labs.
This is where we do a lot of the research.
Wallach: So once you find, like, your--your perfect tuna cell, you just keep making more of them?
Exactly.
So once you have the cells, you don't have to go back to the animal.
They divide continuously.
They're actually in a food-safe, cell-culture media, and we don't have to use any animal components.
In nature, bluefin tuna has a 20% to 50% fat content.
That really is the target for us to get that nice, buttery mouthfeel, that melt-in-your-mouth texture that's very important from a sensory perspective.
Cooperhouse: The supply of seafood is so fragmented, so fragile, so vulnerable.
In fact, even America, we're importing 70% to 85% of our seafood.
So what we're able to create in the future is a secure supply of seafood, made locally.
This is just a unique opportunity in my life, really, in anybody's life, to do something that's so disruptive, so transformative, to really create something that can last for generations.
-Robin, Ari.
-Hey, Ari.
Pleasure.
So Chef Robin's with a sushi restaurant in downtown.
So part of this whole process for us has been looking at the conventional versus our product, and how we could ultimately replicate it.
So this, in fact, is the bluefin tuna otoro saku block.
So that saku block is something that the chef at the back of the house would actually utilize to make nigiri, sashimi, poke cubes, what have you.
So this creates flexibility for the chefs based on whatever your needs might be.
♪ Mmm.
Wallach, voice-over: Most of us know big changes are needed in order to create the futures we want to live in and leave behind, but how will that change affect our own lives, what we eat, and how we live?
Lou's work is just one example of how we can and must begin telling a new story about the future, one defined by creativity and possibility rather than fear, sacrifice, and loss.
-It's otoro.
-Awesome.
Ha ha ha!
Glad you enjoyed it.
♪ Wallach, voice-over: One of the most hopeful things about this moment is that the natural world around us still contains an extraordinary capacity to heal itself if given the opportunity.
That's led me to Scotland, where a small community is coming together to do just that as they rewrite a new future for themselves and this land.
Wallach: The idea of regeneration, what does that mean here in this area?
So Langholm has suffered, over the past few decades, a big economic decline.
The textiles industry was the biggest employer here.
As that industry declined, there's so many skilled people that have lost jobs, and there's been a lot of economic heartache and a lot of economic difficulties.
So there was an opportunity there to look at nature-based enterprises and how you could support.
Bringing that power back into community hands is an incredibly powerful symbol.
Wallach, voice-over: Here in Scotland, a vast amount of the land is owned by a small number of wealthy families, but recently when a large piece of land went up for sale, the people of Langholm decided to purchase it together and place it under community ownership.
Creating a crowdfunding effort, they chipped in everything they could, and soon, word spread as people who had never visited the town contributed, making it the South of Scotland's largest-ever community buyout.
The plan is to create a nature reserve to be a center for rewilding work while also creating much-needed jobs, and ecotourism opportunities here, as well.
Wallach: Give me some idea of the size and scope.
-It's 10,500 acres.
-Wow.
What's amazing about it is it's continuous.
We've got everything from globally important peatlands, ancient woodland, open moorland, and obviously, a beautiful river that runs all the way through it.
We also have a lot that's sort of damaged, modified, and needs restoration, so we've got a big job to do.
Wallach: So where are we now?
So we are at our community-run tree nursery.
So we have 50,000 trees, all growing in here, and these will all be used to create our new woodland.
Why is there such a need in Scotland to plant more trees?
So Scotland, like the rest of the UK, is one of the least-forested countries in the world and one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, so we've got all the kind of stages of a forest growing in here.
Those saplings right there quite possibly could be around in the year 3000.
Well, let's hope they will be.
If we grow them properly, keep watering them, and plant them in the right places, then that's what we really hope.
Really, this project is about rewilding.
What does it mean to rewild something like this?
It's been deforested.
It's been drained.
It's been burned.
So what we've got an opportunity to do now is rebalance our relationship with nature and show that we can get all of those sort of human benefits, but also give something back and heal the land, almost.
We're planting trees.
We're starting to rewet the land, put wetlands in, taking out non-native species, and we're already seeing nature coming back.
So it's kind of like giving it a helping hand.
Wallach, voice-over: You can't help but feel the new life in this community, the pride that people here feel getting to take part in shaping a new story about the future of this town today, tomorrow, and for generations yet to come.
While I was in town, I got to sit down with a few of the residents, who have big dreams for what this means for the people of Langholm.
Wallach: What has the buyout meant for the community and for the town, having this kind of mission, right, and vision for collective ownership?
Woman: You get an opportunity once in a lifetime to do something that is beyond yourself.
It's for the future, and when the land came up for sale, we recognized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
What we're hoping to do through the buyout of the land, that will provide a different offering, not only to our young people, but to people from outside to come and see what we have done, what we've managed to achieve.
We're regenerating the whole town and the whole community.
Everyone's galvanized.
There's a buzz about the town again.
People are starting to see results, and it's all the small wins, and the nature reserve's never gonna be a quick job.
It's a long term, but we want to secure a long-term future for people like Lewis that will be taking it on.
It gives me a lot of hope that Langholm, being as strong a community as it is, it will regenerate, it will open up new opportunities, and in 10, 20, 30, or even 50 years' time, it'll be a thriving town like it once was.
Wallach, voice-over: What's happening here in Scotland is part of a growing movement around the world as people discover the part they can play in healing the natural world around them through rewilding, a reminder of what's still possible when we come to see ourselves as authors rather than passive observers.
Patel: One of the things about understanding yourself as part of a story, whether it's a religion or a nation or a family, is you're profoundly aware of what other people have done for you.
We should appreciate that, and we should do better.
For centuries, a coherent ethnic group made a nation, a coherent religious group made a nation.
So what is an American?
"American" is somebody who believes in the ideals that were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and that believes in a nation that is working to achieve those ideals.
And what is that?
That's a story, and we absorb this story from the past, and we believe in it, and we work towards it.
We become a character in the story, and then we teach it to our children.
All: Shabbat Shalom.
[Indistinct chatter] Wallach: Who's doing the wine?
I will.
[All singing in Hebrew] -Amen.
-Amen.
Sharon: It is perfect, guys.
Perfect.
Enjoy, everybody.
-How's the salad?
-Perfect.
This is perfect.
Wallach, voice-over: Like a nation or a people, my family has a story that we're in the midst of writing, and just like us all, it's building on what came before while looking forward to what is still yet to come, a daily reminder that we are all links in a much larger chain, people playing a part in an unfinished story.
Go into my room... [Indistinct chatter] Wallach: So when we think about the future that we want, sometimes it's really difficult to think about, and one of the things that I've learned is we have to kind of use our imagination.
We have to use our artistry.
We have to kind of create that future, drawing it or writing it down and really thinking about it.
Wallach, voice-over: So much of the work before us in this moment is in finding ways to tell better stories about the futures we want to see unfold, not just those we wish to avoid because while dystopian visions of tomorrow can entertain, they leave us feeling small, passive, and powerless in the face of a darkening world up ahead.
The opportunity right now is in telling new stories that can unlock all the hope, imagination, and creativity we're going to need moving forward.
Agustin: I think stories give us meaning.
It gives us a sense of ourselves, and it's building community because we're all part of this race.
Who is getting allowed to tell the stories?
That's where I'm at.
I'm trying to fight to make sure there are more creators of this American and human tapestry at the table.
So we have to lead with the stories to get behind an idea to make a change.
Monibot: We are among the first generations to know what the consequences of our actions are, and we're among the last generations who can do anything about it.
We are called upon as no generations have ever been called upon before.
We have heroes from previous ages, the people who stood against Hitler, the slave revolts, the civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the campaign for women's suffrage, the independence movements in many parts of the world, and in all these cases, people were called upon to do something much bigger than themselves.
Now we are called upon to do something bigger than any of that, to prevent the collapse of our life-support systems.
This is a task that calls to us for the sake of all future populations as well as all people who are on Earth today.
Bisht: It's very important and urgent for all of us to get quite creative about this and roll up our sleeves and say, "OK, how do I apply my creativity, my intelligence, "my skills, my connections, my networks towards actually addressing these challenges?"
That is the call to action of our times.
Womack: We're as influenced by our ideas of the future as we are influenced by our ideas of the past.
We all have some story as to how we got here, which influences the things that we do.
Sometimes you have to step away from that, change your story.
If you want to imagine new futures, you have to entertain new possibilities.
Barlow: We always say in the office, "We'll know when we've succeeded "when the children that grow up here are like, 'This is ours, and this is ours to shape.'"
It's looking at a legacy for future generations.
It's looking beyond us.
Wallach, voice-over: What makes stories unbelievably powerful is they have the ability to connect us with one another, to connect us to the past, to connect us to the present, and to connect us to the future, and we have to remember that, when we tell these stories about who we are and where we want to go, they actually become a compass to guide our actions as individuals, as members of families, as nations, and as a species on planet Earth.
♪
