Climate change is here, causing accelerating harm and hardship in communities across the world and making it increasingly difficult for people, especially young people, to live with hope for the future. While we often focus on the scale of our problems and on doom outcomes, I want to explore the tangible, positive benefits people can enact in their ecosystems and communities, building local resilience and combating global climate change and transforming despair to purpose in the process. By shifting environmental education and reporting toward actionable solutions and taking seriously the task of regeneration on an ecological, communal, and personal level, we can catalyze our collective planetary healing.
This talk focuses on ecosystem restoration and its power to cool the climate, sequester carbon, provide clean air and water, buffer against floods, drought, rising sea levels and extreme weather, and increase biodiversity, food security, nutrition, health, economic livelihood, and equity within communities. Moreover, I will highlight the actionable solutions that people are working on around the world at a grassroots level to protect and restore their ecosystems, respect their native ecology, and live in reciprocity with the land. I will discuss a few specific interventions people can implement in their own communities (particularly urban environments), including Miyawaki Forests, pollinator gardens, rainwater harvesting, urban farms, and rain gardens. I will share information and reflections on the benefits to physical and mental health that come from connecting to nature, and invite the audience to understand our interdependent well-being and claim their role as mindful, loving participants in our living Earth. Maya Dutta is an environmental advocate and aspiring ecosystem restorer working to spread understanding on the key role of biodiversity in shaping the climate and the water, carbon, nutrient and energy cycles we rely on. She is passionate about climate change adaptation and mitigation and the ways that community-led ecosystem restoration can fight global climate change while improving the livelihood and equity of human communities. She works on project management, Miyawaki forests, partnerships, research, outreach, and education and advocacy efforts at Biodiversity For a Livable Climate (bio4climate.org). Having grown up in New York City and lived in cities all her life, Maya is interested in creating more natural infrastructure, biodiversity, and access to nature and ecological connection in urban areas. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
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