Beyond the Now

[calm music] ♪ Man: We're in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, just over 11,000 feet, home to some of the oldest trees on planet Earth.

The trees in this forest that are surrounding me right now are older than the pyramids in Egypt.

They were alive when Jesus Christ was born.

Some of these trees were already 4,000 years old when the United States was born.

They go back further than almost all recorded history.

♪ When you're at a place like this, it changes your perspective because these trees are truly the great ancestors of life on Earth.

They have been here for so long and will more than likely be here long after I'm gone.

And it's very rare to be in a place where you have that sense of time.

It changes your perspective on not only where we are and what we've done as a species on this planet, but where we might be able to go.

Woman: Set one Ari, take one.

Man: Name and describe yourself.

What are you?

Who are you?

Ha ha!

My name is Ari Wallach.

I am a father, a husband, and during the day, when I'm not doing those two probably most important things, I am a futurist.

[Grimes' "Oblivion" playing] ♪ Grimes: ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ I never walk about after dark ♪ ♪ It's my point of view ♪ ♪ 'Cause someone could break your neck ♪ ♪ Coming up behind you ♪ ♪ Always coming, an d 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 ♪ Wallach: Growing up, I remember feeling so excited about the future, impatient, actually because I couldn't wait for it to arrive.

[dramatic music] Beam me aboard.

["The Jetsons" theme song] Wallach: I watched movies and TV shows that told stories of what felt like inevitable human progress, filling me with a sense of hope and possibility.

[engines roaring] And it wasn't just on TV.

We were launching rockets.

Markets were booming.

And the Internet was coming online.

Bill Clinton: Hope is back in America.

We are on the right track to the 21st century.

Dick Clark: 3, 2, 1.

Happy 2000!

William McRaven: The next generation and the generations that follow will live in a world far better than the one we have today.

Wallach: I went to work as a futurist, helping governments and major companies around the world better think about and plan for the future, not working to predict the future, but looking at long-term trends and the impacts they were go ing to have across society.

It was an exciting time.

And it really did feel like we were on the brink of something extraordinary.

New technology was poised to bring about unprecedented prosperity and connection.

Less poverty, more peace, and shorter work weeks were all right around the corner.

But then something happened, or didn't happen.

And that future never really showed up.

We are now working more, not less.

We have become more technologically connected and yet more deeply divided.

The consequences of long-overlooked environmental destruction are showing up in terrifying ways.

And the stories we tell ourselves about tomorrow are now stories of dystopia where everything falls apart.

Our feelings about tomorrow have shifted from excitement to dread.

And the future has become something to avoid rather than to build.

But over the years, my work has convinced me the future is not set in stone.

We have the power to shape it.

That's what's led me here to making this show.

I'm looking for the people wh o are building better futures for themselves, for their kids, and for the world around them.

Because the truth is, we have choices to make right now.

And these choices are going to have major, long-lasting effects.

So I'm headed out on a journey to meet the brilliant minds and brave pioneers changing our world and reinventing tomorrow, people who believe that we have everything we need to create better futures-- not perfect, but better-- and something each generation can build on, those challenging the status quo, expanding our ideas of what's at stake and what's still possible, from food to education, from the cities we live in to the ways in which we organize our societies, people using new tools and ancient wisdom to restore our relationship with each other, to ourselves, and to this be autiful place we call home, a journey to rediscover how far we've come, and where we could take this whole thing moving forward.

What I'm really mo st interested in doing here is trying to find the people and the ideas that are going to kind of show us what futures could be and from there figure out which ones we want.

Man: So this is great.

So let's talk a little bit about the science of motivation.

What do we think-- Wallach: As my journey begins, I'm interested in why, even with all these tools and technologies available, so many of us find it difficult to think about the future.

That's brought me here to sit down with a behavioral psychologist named Hal Hershfield.

Hershfield: Our future selves often feel like strangers to us.

They feel like sort of different people altogether.

One of the big findings in the early days of what's called "social neuroscience" is that the brain can tell what's me and what's not me, which makes sense in a way.

If I'm sitting in a scanner, and I think about myself, I see more activity in what's called my medial prefrontal cortex and certain parts of the brain there than if I, say, think about you.

Hershfield: I was more interested because I thought that that finding held the clue for maybe why we start thinking about our future selves as different, other people.

In other words, if I can distinguish between me and you in my brain, would I see a same sort of disconnect between me and my future self in my brain?

So here's what we did.

We had our research participants go into the scanner.

They see a little screen in front of them.

It's a really boring, basic screen.

And they see a word at the top.

And the word represents a person they need to think about.

So they say, "OK.

Think about current self or think about your future self."

And what we saw was that the brain activity from thinking about your future self was more similar to the brain activity when people thought about another person.

Wallach: What are the implications of that?

It suggests that on some deeper level, we really do think about our future selves as if they are other people.

When you take that perspective, if our future self is some other person, then the consequences of my decisions right now are going to befall some other person.

All right.

So why don't you look at me?

All right.

That's good.

All right.

Now keep that face.

All right.

And let's try this one more time.

We're going to do something funny here.

All right.

So let's pull these up here.

And then here's the... Oh!

older ver-- Wow.

All right.

So what do you think when you see that?

I mean, I'm sure people have a somewhat similar reaction.

That looks shockingly like my dad.

Yeah.

It seems like I don't totally know who that is.

Right.

Right.

Right.

But it also doesn't seem that far from now.

Right.

Which is, in a way, true to form, right?

Like, when we think about our future selves, you know, they may not be that far from now.

We don't totally know who they are, but-- When I first see that, like, it's jarring.

And then now you think, "OK." Once you get over the initial kind of shock of where things could go, you think, like, "OK. "Well, like, if these are still the same individual, "like, how does this one now, "like, befriend and best-friend this one.

And what would you do for a best friend?"

I think that's, like, the exact right perspective there.

Because they're not the same.

Yeah.

But it is that same sort of relationship of a best friend.

In some ways, the work that you're doing, it's like a wormhole, right?

It's like the "Star Trek" wormhole to the future and lets us kind of see ahead.

But, like you said, it's not just about vision.

It's actually about the emotions that pull us through.

And I think this is a key insight here.

This is really a conversation about empathy.

This is a vision that's really hard to conjure up.

I can't picture my grandkids.

I can barely picture my own kids when they're older because I'm so stuck on what they look like right now.

But I have a really easy time knowing how I want them to feel and knowing how I want their kids to feel and on and on and on.

And so, like you said, that's the empathy through line.

That's the sort of empathy freeway that we want to consider.

Wallach: It's powerful to consider how we want life to be for the generations yet to be born.

And it forces us to think beyond our own lifetime.

Man: Today, we live in a world in which we're ill-adapted to inhabit.

That wasn't the world, the space and time, the environment that we evolved in.

So a natural consequence of that is some of our cognitive abilities aren't necessarily tuned for the world that we've miraculously managed to construct, a world in which we have a vast amount of information and an amazing ability to address future problems, to invest in the future.

And that ability is something that perhaps we don't use to the extent that we would like.

Woman: I like to think of the future as a story.

It's really a set of ideas that we all engage in.

And so in some sense, th e future is very malleable.

And in other ways, it kind of doesn't exist.

And so it's open terrain for lots of new ideas and new ways of being in the world.

Wallach: So when most people ask me what's my story, I actually start back in 1922.

Woman: This is the Holocaust Oral History Project interview of Rachmiel Wolochwianski, April 28, 1993.

Wolochwianski: I am born in the city Baranowicze, East Poland.

Wallach: 1922 was the year my father was born in a small town called Baranowicze in Poland.

Around the time of his 18th birthday was when the Nazis invaded Poland.

Narrator: These were the only pictures made in the city during the siege.

Many of the middle-aged were sullen and angry.

Youngsters were half-resentful, half-resigned, while their elders turned to prayer.

Wallach: All the Jews were pushed into a small ghetto.

Eventually, his mother and sister were sent to Auschwitz, and that's where they perished.

Now, my father and his brother and dad were still in the ghetto.

And at one point, they actually escaped.

And in the kind of escape of leaving the ghetto, my grandfather wa s actually shot and killed.

And soon thereafter, my father joined the Jewish underground, the resistance, and for several years, basically he lived in the forests of Poland fighting the Nazis day in and day out.

When I thought about what I want to do with my life I decided to choose a path that would allow me to kind of apply the way I think we should be morally operating as a species, no t so much to just push back against the Nazis of today, wh ich is unbelievably important, but in many ways to think about what was happening in the late 1920s and late 1930s before the Nazis came to power, thinking about how the world was in so much flux, and why weren't there people around to help steer us towards a better path?

In many ways, that greatly influences the work that I do.

I'm thinking about where can we take this in a positive way, right?

I'm not a futurist who's saying, "Look out for these different icebergs on the Titanic."

I'm saying there are icebergs out there.

We should navigate through them.

But what is the harbor that we're trying to get to?

♪ There's a phrase called "cathedral thinking."

And what that means is, how do we go about making decisions in the same ways that those who build ancient cathedrals thought?

Because when they were building cathedrals, I mean, more often than not, the architect and the initial builders of the cathedral wouldn't even be around to see it actually completed.

It wouldn't happen in their lifetime.

So they had to make these decisions in a way where they were literally laying the cornerstone for something that they would never actually see completed, but they were doing it for the next generation.

I came to Cordoba to see firsthand a project that has been many, many generations in the making.

[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] Wallach: It's awe-inspiring to experience something that those who started never lived to see completed built as a gift to those yet to be born, a reminder that the future is being built on our actions right now.

The future is a verb.

It's something we do.

We can become great ancestors.

And that is what the future needs us to do right now, to think in a way that places us in their shoes.

♪ [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] ♪ Wallach: This idea of stepping back to see ourselves and the work we do in this moment as a piece of something larger is so powerful, and it has the potential to unlock bigger, better ideas worth working towards in the years to come.

♪ It's my first time in Morocco, and I've read about this massive solar power plant for a while now.

And to be able to come and visit it is kind of like a dream come true.

It's a little bit, you know, solar, alternative, renewable energy geek in me.

But to see a plant kind of come up in the middle of the desert using the latest technology that can power a huge part of the country is amazing for me.

So tell me, where are we right now?

Wallach: So in this area right here just alone, how many of these mirrors are there?

Two million?

Two million.

2 million of these panels?

Yeah, in NOOR I. Wallach: The complex here is the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world, generating enough power to supply a million homes in Morocco with renewable electricity.

And in a country that doesn't ha ve a natural supply of oil, natural gas, or coal, they believe this is the start of something even bigger.

Wallach: What is kind of your hope and your dream for Morocco in terms of the raw resources that are coming to your land from the sky?

Wallach: What could an energy-independent future look like, not just here, but everywhere?

What impact will it have on our politics, our health care, and the well-being of the natural world when we create a future independent from fossil fuels?

Solar technology is just one piece of making that future a reality.

But as large-scale facilities are popping up in countries all over the world, the goal of powering major cities and entire countries is getting closer every day.

♪ In Northern California, scientists are taking a similar approach by applying long-term thinking to the challenges facing us today, pursuing a long-held dream of limitless clean energy.

Kritcher: I'm Annie Kritcher.

I was a lead designer for the Ignition experiment.

We are at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California.

What we do here is, we take two atoms, and we smash them together, and we make a heavier atom.

And that process releases energy.

And so you're literally for 90 trillionths of a second creating a mini sun.

That's correct.

Kritcher: The reason that we ne ed to generate stars on Earth is to reach the extreme conditions that are required to get two atoms to fuse together.

So you need tens of millions of degrees to do that.

We have 192 laser beams which enter the ends of a hollow cylinder.

And then they hit the hollow cylinder on the inside.

And that creates an oven, a very hot X-ray oven, which is 3 million degrees.

And inside of the cylinder sits a little, tiny capsule the size of a BB.

Kritcher: And inside of that little, tiny BB sits the deuterium and tritium that we want to fuse together.

And so this intense X-ray oven heats the outside of the capsule, ex plodes that material outward, and just like a rocket, where the rocket fuel goes out and that pushes a rocket up, we're squeezing the material down to half the size of a human hair from the size of a BB.

Because of that outward expansion, we get an implosion.

What is the goal of this work in the big picture?

Nuclear fusion could provide clean, limitless, abundant energy for mankind.

Fusion is really the Holy Grail of energy.

Wallach: That dream reached a major milestone here recently as Annie's team led an experiment that successfully created ignition for the first time.

This is the target bay.

Here we have the target chamber, which is in blue.

It's a spherical chamber.

It's about 10 meters in diameter.

And here, the laser beams come into the chamber.

The laser beams are what drives our experiments.

Wallach: If it's a 10-chapter book, what chapter are we in right now in this room?

I'd say we're not in Chapter 1, because we've been working on this for quite a long while.

And we just had the breakthrough.

I guess, maybe Chapter 3.

The person that came up with the concept to do this did so before I was born.

So it is really a passing-the-torch, multi-generation problem, big-science problem.

Wallach: How should we be thinking about challenges like this?

Kritcher: I think it's really important to consider the long-term benefits and also the generations coming after us to create a clean world for them and to give them the necessary means to be able to generate energy in the future.

So it's a really important grand challenge.

And it's just so important for our future generations.

Wallach: One of the most exciting things about this moment is that we have the tools and potential to shape the future in ways that have never been possible before.

The choices we make around ho w we develop our technologies here and now will set a path for future generations to build on.

In the great arc of human history, we are living in the midst of an extraordinary time.

Neil Degrasse Tyson: Deep time, like, what is that?

How could the universe have been here without us?

What does it mean that we've only been around for the tiniest sliver of time relative to the universe?

This is a humbling revelation.

Buonomano: All animals have clocks in our brains, going back to a circadian clock, because it's very important to tell time and to predict what's going to happen.

But humans have been obsessed with time, in many ways, throughout-- since the beginning of civilization.

And if you go back through human history, it's been one long quest to measure time with more and more and more precision.

E.G.

Marshall: Time-- our story is about men who are attempting to defeat it.

Time is their enemy in the search for the ultimate origins of man.

Tyson: If you take a football field, 100 yards, and that's the timeline of the universe, cave dwellers to the present on a timeline that begins in one end zone and ends in the other, the thickness of a blade of grass at the end of that timeline is from present day back to cave paintings.

Buonomano: In many ways, one of the cognitive abilities that makes Homo sapiens sapien--or wise, if you will-- is our ability to conceptualize time.

And this ability to engage in mental time travel seems to be pretty unique to humans.

Wallach: Over the years, I've worked to help various organizations think about and plan for the future.

But recently, something strange has started to happen.

Long-term plans that were 20 or 30 years out are now only focused on the next 6 months.

As the pace of the world gets faster, our perspective is getting smaller.

What does it take to step back and develop a long-term perspective?

How does our past impact the future?

And what can we learn from those who have faced moments like these before?

[Men chanting in Kanienkeha] Wallach: I'm here to speak with someone who spent her life working to ensure her community holds on to the best parts of their past as they look towards the future.

Woman: Hi, Ari.

Do not get up.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you for your invitation.

And thank you for joining us here.

Thank you so much for having us.

Thank you.

This is my husband Tom.

Oh, hey.

I'm just going to go around really fast.

Yes.

Grandson.

Hey.

Ari.

Pleasure.

Woman: My English name is Antonia Loretta Afraid of Bear Cook.

When I go in the nation's house and I address the nation, I am Anpetu Luta Win.

I'm called Red Day Woman.

Wallach: Loretta's work began here with her own tribe, where she works to pass on the ancient ways of her people to the next generation.

But that work quickly grew as leaders around the world recognized the wisdom that these ideas held for looking at today's challenges through a much wider lens.

Wallach: When we think about the future, why is it so important that we remember the past?

I think that the most important thing about that question is, we have to have interconnectedness.

I have to know where I came from in order for me to teach my grandchildren so that we can move forward.

This idea of time as an entity, how would you say it's separate than the way time is practiced today, kind of-- It's very different.

Afraid: You practice time according to a schedule and according to, "Oh, I got to get over here.

"I got to catch a plane.

I got to do this.

I got to do that."

And it's very stressful.

But if you were to set it up in that spirit time, OK, what are you setting it up for?

There's definitive ways in wh ich you approach that time.

If you're living in a spiritual way, then you have time to pay attention to the plants, the trees, the animals, the fish in the ocean.

And when you're doing all of these things, you begin to steward what's around you.

But that's not how we live today.

Today we live by that time that's running on a clock, and how much money can we make, you know, doing this?

So you put profit over people.

Wallach: Spending time with Loretta and her family, it's obvious that these concepts are not just ideas, but rather principles that inform how she lives and works to pass on the ancient ways of their people to the next generation.

For her, these ways are not just about the past, but about a way of being in the present that recognizes the impact that our lives will have on future generations.

What is seventh-generation thinking, and why is it so important today?

Do you have children?

Yes.

OK.

So can you recount back to your beginning?

I can probably go back two or three generations.

OK.

It's a concept.

And it's a loving concept that we talk about to our loved ones.

So you make it your business to know what it is about yourself that you're going to engage in so you can get to that seventh-generation thinking.

So 7-generation thinking is making decisions as if you think about the impact they will have on 7 generations from now?

Exactly.

Every decision that I make in this moment, I should think about the impact that it will have 7 generations from now.

But people are-- they love convenience.

They don't want to think about, oh, 7 generations, you know?

But we have so many social ills all over the nation, all over the country.

And those are the things that we're trying our best, I think, in this generation, to make a difference.

♪ What's your hope for the future?

That we can all si t together at a spiritual table and all of us be to gether truly.

That's my prayer.

That's my prayer.

♪ Tyson: When we saw Earth over our shoulders, having visited the moon, it was a firmware upgrade in our sense of awareness.

Our first images from the moon were 1968, taken by astronauts.

That was the first mission to the moon--Apollo 8.

They went to the moon, orbited a dozen or so times, and then came back.

One of those orbits, they lifted the Hasselblad, and there was Earth rising over the lunar landscape, just the way the moon rises over the Earth's landscape.

Why do I call it a firmware upgrade?

Because if you ask any one of those people, they're not consciously thinking, "I saw Earth from space," but they're feeling it.

Psychoemotionally, they are reacting to a cosmic perspective.

♪ Wallach: Humans are at their be st when we're thinking bigger than just ourselves, when we look up and see beyond this moment to remember that we are part of everything that came before us and we're also laying the foundation for generations yet to come.

♪ But why do so many of the systems that govern our world today seem so locked into short-term thinking?

I've come to Japan to meet an economist named Dr. Saijo who's challenging this way of thinking with remarkable results.

So we know we have this problem of shortsightedness, and we want to kind of solve for intergenerational justice and how we think about time differently.

Tell me about your work.

Wallach: Rather than just writing about the problems with short-term thinking, Dr .

Saijo started something here called the Future Design Center to test the impacts of long-term thinking in real-life situations, bringing together everyday people from the town to take part in creating the future of their community.

[Speaking Japanese] [Speaking English] [Speaking Japanese] Wallach: Community members put on these robes to signify themselves as representatives of future generations.

With this in mind, they work to address the needs of today, but bearing in mind the impact these actions will have on those yet to be born.

The results have been incredible, like when they achieved together what traditional policymaking had failed to address for years, reaching an agreement to raise the community's water tax by 6% in order to address the town's decaying infrastructure.

Today, more than 80% of the town's policies are created by citizens who ha ve become what they proudly refer to as future designers.

I'm not even from Yahaba, but already I feel-- Quick.

That's right.

It's a quick shift.

That's right.

See in there.

Wallach: The work that you've designed takes people from being kind of an individual by themselves but instead starts to make it like a chain.

You see yourself as part of something that came.

Saijo: Yeah.

Wallach: Then you you're here.

But then you're connected to something that will be.

Saito: That's right.

♪ Wallach: This idea of taking a longer-term perspective to the challenges facing us today is beginning to take shape around the world, like in Wales, where they recently turned this thinking into actual legislation, appointing a new role known as the future generations commissioner.

Howe: I'm Sophie Howe, and I was the first future generations commissioner for Wales and the first future generations commissioner in the world.

Back in 2015, our national parliament passed a law called the Well-Being of Future Generations Act.

What we need to do is take a systems approach to thinking about the impact of all of our actions, what impacts they have today, but crucially in the context of this bill, what impact they have in the future.

Howe: They held a national conversation with the citizens of Wales where they posed the question, what's the Wales you want to leave behind to your children, your grandchildren, an d future generations to come?

That dialogue led to the government identifying 7 long-term well-being goals, and all of our public institutions must set objectives which maximize their contribution to all 7 goals.

Are you seeing sufficient scale and pace of progress?

The guidance made no reference to the Future Generations Act at all.

And this is part of the challenge that we're seeing.

Howe: Built into ou r legislation, the government and our other public institutions have to take the advice of the commissioner or justify why not.

And they have to justify that publicly.

So in Wales, because we have this framework, we've completely transformed the way that we're thinking about transport planning, for example, building a new stretch of motorway to deal with the problem of congestion.

It's what we've always done.

But the commissioner's intervention really challenged the government because you've never shifted your investment to actually giving people other means of transportation--more walking, cycling, safe routes to those areas an d public transport investment to those areas.

We'll start to see air pollution reducing.

We'll start to see more people cycling, which is good for their health.

The long-term impact, of course, is that we want to see an increase in life expectancy.

So I think people are increasingly starting to see those connections.

If we can embrace models like we have in Wales, that has the potential to have a real trickle-down effect.

And imagine if we multiply that by every decision or every approach that a public institution or a government take to deciding how they're going to roll out policy and encourages them to-- well, not just encourages them, actually requires them to join the dots and think in a long-term way.

♪ Zaidi: We struggle a lot with long-term thinking, and we tend to default to short term-thinking quite often.

And so we've kind of set up multiple aspects of society to work in a short-term capacity.

One of the first questions I like to ask is, who's benefiting from the system being this way?

Our systems are not really broken.

That's a bit of a misconception to say that.

I think our systems are designed to work exactly the way they are.

They're just not necessarily designed to work for you and I. Narrator: Pollution is co ntamination of the environment that interferes with the processes of life.

In seeking a better life on Earth, man in the 20th century has created a great technology at the expense of the environment essential to life.

Tyson: We like identifying ourselves as an intelligent species.

But who made that measurement?

We did.

We are polluting our environment.

We are altering the very ecosystem that we need to survive.

We're creating a next wave of extinction across the tree of life without knowing what the long-term consequences of that might be.

I could define intelligence in such a way so that there is no sign of it here on Earth.

My biggest fear is that, though we call ourselves intelligent, that we might not be wise enough to be the shepherds we need to be to assure the survival of generations yet to be born.

Zaidi: Having anxiety about the future is not an unreasonable thing.

It's actually very logical in some ways when you look at the data around what we're seeing in the world.

But the important thing is that we have the opportunity to shape it.

And the hopeful part of that is that we actually have all the solutions we need to address the problems.

What we don't have is the context for those solutions to take hold.

♪ Wallach: I'm interested in exploring more of these new solutions and meeting the people who are creating them.

That led me here to New Haven, where a former fisherman-turned-ocean-farmer named Bren Smith has become a catalyst fo r change in this community.

So, Bren, I have no idea wh at a regenerative ocean farmer is.

So both, I want you to tell me what it is and how you got into it.

Sure.

Smith: I was born and raised in Newfoundland, Canada, the edge of North America.

All I wanted to be was a fisherman.

That was my dream.

I didn't want to be a politician, didn't want to be an astronaut.

So I dropped out of high school when I was 14 and headed out to sea and fished the globe.

Cod, crab, tuna-- you name it, I fished it.

As I moved through, the problem was, I was fishing at the height of the industrial fishery tearing up whole ecosystems, you know, the things that we know now.

But when I was in-- out in the Bering Sea, the cod stocks crashed in Newfoundland, Canada.

And that was such a wake-up call because I thought environmentalism was about birds and bees and bears.

And to see 30,000 people thrown out of work, fishermen walking the streets like hungry ghosts, an economy built up and a culture built up over hundreds of years around a fishery, you realize, like, "Oh, this isn't about the environment.

"This is about the economies, the kitchen-table issue.

This is that there will be no jobs on a dead ocean."

♪ Wallach: Bren's path led him to ocean farming, where he now grows kelp and trains hundreds of other fishermen just like him to look at the ocean in a whole new way.

In a time of growing concern around land-based agriculture, he sees untapped potential here at sea.

♪ Smith: I might come in again here.

Let's see, Ron.

So I've been farming this patch of water for almost 20 years.

And what you're looking here at is 10 acres of kelp farm.

So we have anchors on the side of the farm and then just rows of crop.

And the kelp is sitting about, you know, 6, 7 feet below the surface.

And our job as farmers is just to get the right amount of sunlight and nutrients in order to grow.

So we care about the depth and what time of year we're planting, what temperature.

So it's just simple as can be.

You know, I wish it was more complicated.

I'd seem smarter.

But the idea is, when you're working with the ocean, you need to be a willow, not an oak.

And you need to be something that you can remove and rebuild real easily.

Ron, now-- Hey, Ron, we got a lot of pressure right here.

Here we go.

Now let me clean it.

All right.

There we go.

So what we're going to do is, you're just going to grab a clump with your hand here and cut along.

But try to-- don't cut the rope.

So I'd rather you go below.

And just lift it on high.

OK. OK. Do some more here.

I'm just going to cut.

Smith: The power of kelp is that it has so many uses.

Like, yes, we can eat it, and we should eat it, and it's going to be the center of the plate, because it's going to be affordable.

We can make it delicious.

There's so much creativity in the food sector.

You can use it for biostimulants and fertilizer and land-based ag for feed, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals.

Bioplastics is a huge industry now.

The idea is really to break down this sea wall between land and sea farming.

Nutrients are in the waters--too much of it-- like phosphorus, nitrogen, carbon, all this sort of stuff.

It's collected, use plants to do it, bring it back, and use it for fertilizers, biostimulants, things like that because there are all these micronutrients that apple orchards need, flower farms, all this sort of stuff, that it just is very accessible to the land-based plants.

♪ Wallach: The old story, in terms of humans and the sea is, we go out there, we take what we want.

We take as much as we want as quickly as we want.

And then go back to land, and we consume it.

What's the new story?

I think it's a great question.

Like, we do need a story for the future, right?

The biggest thing-- and I think this gets missed in the climate discussion a lot-- is that there needs to be a cultural transition.

And you need to think about, like, what motivates people.

What fills their soul and gets them up in the morning?

This isn't necessarily about money.

And that moment, when I was a kid, and, like, wanted to be a fisherman because they had self-directed lives and the pride of feeding their communities, that's what we need to tap into.

That's what motivates folks.

And as a kelp farmer, yeah, I've had to say good-bye to rogue waves and chasing fish.

But what I can embrace-- I own my own boat.

I succeed and fail on my own terms.

I got to be, like, an engineer, a scientist, a farmer, all this sort of stuff at once.

And I get to feed the folks around me.

These are soul-filling jobs.

And that's the discussion we have with fishermen.

Like, yes, we all have to say good-bye to some things.

But do we get the core of what makes us wake up every morning?

And that's how you build an army of innovation at the end of the day, a blue-collar innovation.

And quite honestly, you get the politics right.

Like, if you can tap into that, where people see themselves as part of the solution, then the level of innovation and knowledge networks and sharing and stuff, I think that's where we transition to a better future.

Because you just want millions of minds trying to figure this out.

But you got to tap into the soul to do that.

[Gulls squawking] Zaidi: Sometimes it can feel like what we do doesn't really amount to anything or doesn't add to the bigger picture that is unfolding or that we don't have the ability to enact change in the real world.

But the fact is that every little action does add up.

The desire to talk about these wonderful things in the future that like, oh, we'll have sustainability, we'll have equity, we'll have justice, we'll have all of these things, what we need to do is borrow those ideas from the future and think about, like, how we're going to implement them today.

If you want a tree to grow 20 years from now, you have to plant a physical seed to get that tree.

What sort of future do you want?

And what's the action you can take right now to enable that future to become a reality?

♪ Wallach: This idea of planting seeds right now for better futures is an invitation to all of us, no matter where we are.

Here in the jungles of northeast India, I came to meet someone who is doing just that, leading a conservation effort to challenge how his community thinks about the futures they are building.

Wallach: For years, I read bout these extraordinary, natural-grown bridges, where ficus tree roots are trained to grow into living crossings, lasting for hundreds of years, connecting the villages throughout the jungle.

Morningstar leads the effort to preserve these bridges, and with them, an ancient way of thinking about modern progress and the past.

Khongthaw: Building a root bridge is, like, a 1,000-year-old traditional knowledge.

Wallach: Mm-hmm.

Wallach: So give me some facts about the root bridges.

How many of them are there?

What are the longest one?

What are the highest ones?

There are others who are coming in and saying, "That's nice, but we can make a bridge with concrete."

What's the threat to you, your way of life, and really your way of thinking when these bridges kind of go up in your community?

[All speaking Pynursia] How are you?

Sit down, please.

Please, sit down.

Yes, please sit down.

Wallach: In addition to his work on the bridges, Morningstar travels to speak with students in schools around the region, encouraging them to find and protect nature-based solutions to the problems facing the communities here today and in the years to come.

♪ There's so much we can learn from these traditions, as around the world, people are beginning to rediscover that natural solutions can have profound results.

There are projects under way around New York City to restore oyster reefs that offset erosion along the shorelines.

And in cities across China, there's work being done to enable mangroves to serve as natural seawalls, preventing flooding around major cities.

This is not a quick fix.

And the people who start these projects, these root bridges, know they are doing something that is not just for them, but it's going to be for their kids and even-- hundreds of years out.

So we're, in many ways, saying to both of our communities, "We're going to be in this together for a while."

♪ Wallach: When we started this, I was thinking that so many of the conversations would somehow revolve around technology.

And yet as I talk about what people are working on, what do they want to see happen in futures, they talk about being human again.

And what's most surprising to me is the desire to kind of start making some decisions about what do we want to leave behind and what do we want to start creating more of that we've lost.

♪ What, right now, gives you hope?

Hershfield: This is a wonderful question because it's so easy.

It's so easy to only see doom and gloom out there.

Even if we consider the doom and gloom, time still marches on.

There's no stopping the progress of time.

So it gives me hope to consider how we've done things in the past to make the present better and what we might be able to do now to make the future better, as well.

Tyson: We are small in time and in space, participating in a great unfolding of cosmic events, a reminder that civilization is precious, life is precious.

We should do everything we can to preserve it in this one moment we have to experience the glory of this universe.

♪ Nature give me hope because when you look at the things happening in the world, the legislative, the war, and the fighting, the clash, the rivalry, the protests, it's about, you know-- about human beings.

So, for me, the most important thing about nature give me hope because the way you see nature, you know, it's a good thing to learn from nature.

So just go to nature and sit there.

See the animals.

See the ants.

See the birds.

See the bees.

Just learn from them, and then come back.

It will change your life.

Smith: You know, we can build something from the bottom up that we're proud of that's beautiful that we can, like, point to this moment being, like, "Yeah, we built something to hand to you.

We started this for you.

Now you continue it."

Saijo: 10 centuries later, when we open up a kind of history book, imagine, then, are we the people who destroyed our entire Earth?

That's the reason wh y, see, we are short of food, we are short of energy.

We don't want to be that kind of ancestor, right?

Wallach: Uh-huh.

Saijo: Please think about embracing our future.

That's my message.

Wallach: For the first time in human history, we are now grappling with a set of issues, a set of decisions that we have to make that will have long-term consequences for Homo sapiens, for our species, and for this planet.

If we want to think about where we might be able to go tomorrow, what could happen, and what do we want to see happen, it's important for us to be able to kind of look back and see ourselves as part of something much larger.

If we really want to move forward, we have to be curious about what those different forwards and those futures could look like.

♪