The universe and a thriving rainforest share the same fundamental mechanism: feedback loops. From that starting point, ecologist Thomas Crowther (ETH Zurich) takes the audience on a journey from “the moments after the Big Bang” through the emergence of life to the environmental crises of today.
From climate change to biodiversity loss, much is the result of human feedback loops, Crowther argues. “The more we’ve grown, the more we extract, leading to more growth, leading to more extraction.”
This isn’t just an environmental problem, he makes clear, but a social problem, too, “because there’s not a single location on our planet where a degraded landscape is more valuable to the local people than a thriving one.”
Watch the video to explore this talk in detail.
