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- My name is David De Rothschild.

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I'm an environmentalist and explorer.

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(quiet playful music)

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I think my entry point to the environment

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was actually through the lens of health.

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I trained a naturopath

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and you start to quickly
realize we are what we breathe

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and we are what we eat.

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And then you start to look at the planet

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that we're living on

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and you start to realize
that the things we're eating

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and the air we're breathing

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is becoming more and more polluted

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and more and more processed

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and that's having an adverse
effect on our health.

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And so without a healthy environment,

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we basically don't have life as we know it

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on this planet.

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And so I think that was
kinda my entry point

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and I think we're now getting to a point

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where that conversation around health

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and the environment and
the health of nature

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is becoming more intrinsically linked

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and hopefully could be the tipping point,

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in terms of motivating us

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to act upon the messages
that nature's giving us.

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I built the Plastiki vessel
with a great team of people.

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It was a vessel that was built
from 12,500 plastic bottles

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taken from the trash, it
was a 60-foot catamaran,

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and we sailed from San Francisco

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all the way across the Pacific to Sydney

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to try and highlight anything is possible

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and that we can tackle this
plastic pollution issue.

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And so the Plastiki was
born out of this idea

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to show waste as a
misunderstanding of the material.

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We have this toxic love
affair with plastic.

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We have a love affair with
disposability and convenience.

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And those worlds are
all now coming together

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in a way that we have never imagined,

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which is this plastic fingerprint

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that now covers almost every
single part of our planet.

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It doesn't matter where you are.

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You could be in the furthest
reaches of the Himalayas

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or you could be at the
deepest depths of our ocean

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and there is always
gonna be, unfortunately,

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a very distinct human
signature, which is plastic,

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because the material
obviously lasts forever

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and it creates a sort of permanent

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nod back to our consumerism
and our disposability.

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So the Plastiki was built on an idea

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of could we take this
material that we misunderstand

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and design with it in a way

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that would not only elevate
and create a narrative

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that would inspire people to think about

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these out-of-sight,
out-of-mind environments,

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but would also think
about our relationship

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to how we design with this
material that doesn't disappear?

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How do we dispose of this
material that doesn't disappear?

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How do we reuse this material

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that could be reused many times over?

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I think there's a really interesting role

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for technology to play

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in the future of how
we as environmentalists

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and as a citizens on Spaceship Earth

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can operate and fly this great spaceship.

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It was Buckminster Fuller in the early 60s

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coined the phrase Spaceship Earth

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and he said it had to
be everybody or nobody.

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And I think there's a meeting point

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where technology can come in

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and help us to see the
world like never before,

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can help us understand the
world like never before,

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and can help us document
the world like never before.

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But I do get excited by the fact

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that we now have more information

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on the state of our
planet than every before.

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We can understand the rate of drip,

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the rate of melt, rather,
from a dripping glacier.

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We can understand the acidity

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of the deepest parts of our ocean.

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What we know is that we have dirty air.

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What we know is that we're losing forests

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at a rate like never before.

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We're losing species like never before.

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We're losing topsoil like never before.

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This interconnected system

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is allowing us to live and breathe

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and survive on Spaceship Earth.

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It's not going to stay around for us

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if we don't continue to
actually kind of work together.

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So the question now is

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because we've got all this information,

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how do we take that information

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and turn it into an actionable plan

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that's kind of like the instruction manual

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for flying on Spaceship Earth?

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Because I think if we are just purely

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looking down at our screens

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and we're purely just swiping
up and down the whole time

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and we're not looking up and around

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and having some more
emotional intelligence,

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figuring out how to connect
to each other as a species,

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figuring out what keeps us
together on this planet,

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then we're gonna run
the risk of sleepwalking

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into what will be eventually
the demise of humanity.