If Trees Fight Crime and Whales Combat Climate Change, How Can We Amplify the Capacity of Other Species to Do Good?

Digital technology is profoundly changing what we know about plants and animals. Only recently, with the advent of miniature on-board tracking technologies, tiny enough to travel on the back of a bee, can scientists follow individual animals across the ocean floor, along sidewalks, or through the clouds, and with the astonishing precision required to witness the intimate insights of their everyday lives. This new wild world is not the passive, subservient, humans-at-the-top version we grew up with. It is a world where humpback whales use their social networks to improve their populations’ recoveries and mother trees distribute their energy across their root networks to improve the resilience of the forest. It is a world filled with the capacity to act and interact. And all that action and interaction creates resiliency in circumstances most of us never imagined.

Dr. Elin Kelsey is a leading spokesperson for hope and the environment. She co-created #OceanOptimism, a social media campaign to crowd source and share ocean solutions that has reached more than 90 million users since 2014. An award-winning author and environmental consultant, she currently serves as a Visiting Scholar in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and has been awarded prestigious fellowships, including a Rockefeller fellowship and a Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society fellowship, to explore intersections of hope and the environment in interdisciplinary think tanks devoted to world changing ideas.