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What if everything we thought we knew about the relationship between the economy and the environment was wrong?
In this talk, impact investor Tom Chi explores the paradox of a world that says it loves the nature around us and yet systematically destroys it.
He suggests a new way to think about our place on this planet, challenges what he views as the false trade-offs between economic growth and ecological health, and shows how innovation can become a force for restoration rather than extraction.
So, over the last decade, I've been working on resolving a profound paradox.
And simply stated.
It's that if you go and talk with any person, actually you could go grab 100 random people off the street and you were to go ask them.
You know how do they feel about nature.
You're going to end up with extremely positive answers, ranging from you know nature is inspiring.
You know nature is the most beautiful thing that exists and you'll see it everywhere.
They'll put it as the backdrop of their desktop and their phones, like every little thing absolutely.
Every single person you ask, you're going to get a pretty positive response.
And even though, if you ask all these individuals how they feel about nature, they're really positive about it somehow, as a collective civilization, we've come together and we are destroying nature at a planetary scale.
And therein lies the paradox.
How did this happen?
How did a group of individuals that all love nature somehow create a civilization, create an industrial economy that is out there, effectively planetary-level assault on nature.
Well, I think it actually stems from a broken mental model that we've kind of unconsciously adopted, and I'd like to start dissolving that right now.
That's a mental model that, whenever you get economic wins, they are traded off against the ecology.
And if you really care about the ecology and you really want to make that healthier.
Unfortunately, you're going to have to trade off economic wins, right.
It's one or the other.
It's kind of a balancing act and depending on how much we care about the economy or how much we care about the ecology at any given time, the pendulum swings one way, the scale swings one way or it swings the other.
And I'm going to tell you that sure, that is a psychological position that you can take, but it's actually not one that is particularly physically true.
I'm formally trained as a physicist, so I do think about what is physically true.
And what is actually much more true about the economy is the economy is not versus ecology.
The economy is a subset of the ecology.
And maybe this is a new idea to you guys, but I can prove it to you very quickly.
Actually, you could prove it to yourself, even just with the clothes on your body or the things immediately around you, because if you think about and you look at everything that the economy has produced, everything in the economy is either mined or grown, which means it comes directly from nature, no abstractions.
You guys might be wearing some cotton, obviously grown.
You'll be sitting on a chair that's got some metal underneath it.
That was mined.
Everything in the economy is mined or grown full stop.
And some of you guys might be thinking well, aren't we moving to a digital economy, a virtual economy?
Well, not really.
Like, every line of code that is ever run runs on a substrate that was mined or grown.
Every single service you've ever used is using server architectures that are mined or grown.
When I say the entire economy is mined or grown, I mean it literally.
There's literally nothing that doesn't come directly from nature.
And to the extent that you damage the ecology, you actually start to create problems for the economy.
And this is what we're experiencing right now.
And if you think about it in this balancing act type way, you're going to miss the right way to actually fix these problems.
Now, Let's talk about exactly how much we are mining and growing.
At this point in history, it's over 90 billion tons per year.
It comes out to about 11.5 tons per person per year.
And if you guys feel like you don't do that much well, I'll shock you to say that 115 is the average in Asia, but Europe is about 2x that and America is 3x that.
Yay.
Now there's two billion people that live on less than five dollars a day, that are doing substantially less than that.
That's why it all balances out.
This is exactly how much we're mining and exactly how much we're growing.
Now in the process of mining and growing this much and using it to power everything in the economy because, like I said, literally everything in the economy is mined or grown we've been using really old industrial ideas and industrial processes.
Most of how we're growing today was invented about 50 years ago.
Most of the ways that we've been mining, refining metals, all that sort of thing was invented about 100 years ago, 150 years ago.
These are not technologies that we've updated recently.
And with the arrival of new robotic and AI tools, I think it's the right time to go ask new questions about whether we could be mining and growing differently, in a way that starts to honor this idea that the economy is a subset of the ecology.
Now this is where it overlaps into my world, because My entire career has been built off of doing new inventions in robotics, artificial intelligence, advanced algorithms, and I've shipped everything from Microsoft Office sorry about that, you know to web search I think that one was fine to self-driving cars.
So I've worked on relatively sophisticated things and, given that, have an interesting background, perhaps to be able to go look at these problems and see if we can take a different swing at them, and I'm going to share a number of examples with you today.
Now, these examples fall into three major shifts.
Remember, everything is mining or growing and they're represented by these three images.
Here we have a bunch of mined materials and what we need to be doing is we need to figure out more and more ecological ways to be able to go mine materials and get the most of the ores that we extract, so we do the least disturbance of earth and watersheds in the process of mining.
In addition, what is even better than mining more ecologically and mining less is to not mine at all.
And to the extent that we're able to go close the loop through really skillful mechanical or chemical recycling, we can have a larger and larger proportion of the feedstock for industry move over to closed-loop materials as opposed to virginally extracted materials.
The second major shift has to do with the way that we grow.
A lot of the way that we've been growing currently is very unsustainable.
It basically is damaging soil function And little by little we've been kind of wearing down topsoil in agricultural lands all across the world.
And Gabe Brown is a friend who's taught me a huge amount about regenerative agriculture and I've really learned from him that if you invest in soil function, you can actually make it easier to grow, cheaper to grow, higher margin to grow every single year and do so in a way that is regenerating soil function, giving more services to biodiversity and even healing the hydrological function of those soils.
And lastly, we need to be thinking about large-scale repair, because we've been at the Industrial Revolution for a couple hundred years now and there's a lot of landscapes that we've heavily degraded.
And if we are serious about the task of renewing the ecology in order to go support a vibrant economy going forward, then we're going to need better tools for large-scale repair.
So let's jump into all three of these.
So what is here is actually an image from inside the largest lithium NMC battery recycling plant in North America, a company I have the privilege to work with.
And they are a great example of moving closer to that closed-looped world.
And this is an advanced form of chemical recycling that is able to go bring all of these used battery materials, because most lithium batteries have a 10-year life.
They don't go too many years beyond that.
And after that's the case well, you can't use it in the car or you can't use it in the consumer electronic device anymore.
You want to be able to recover those materials.
The process that they do here is about two times cheaper than the next closest process and is able to return the material to complete virgin quality.
It's better than the stuff that you would have been able to mine out of the ground in the first place.
And if we get really skillful about closing these loops, and what's great is a car battery doesn't just evaporate and disappear.
It's a relatively large object that you can go handle and you can do a reverse logistics supply chain and pull these things together.
And whether it's robotics and AI to do advanced mechanical recycling or, in this case, advanced chemical recycling, then there are really skillful ways, with our new technologies, to be able to go close the loop and make it so that a higher and higher fraction comes from a post-consumer or post-industrial waste stream, as opposed to from the ground.
Now moving over into the regenerative growing side.
We're actually at a really compelling point in history because there's a mini-Renaissance in regenerative agriculture that's happening right now, with different farmers around the world discovering the benefits of agroforestry intercropping, no-till agriculture and a lot of other practices that really help to establish a healthy soil function and a healthy soil microbiome.
So effectively, they're able to go and measure all these compelling compounds from the soil.
So they're able to have the soil speak to them in ways that the soil can basically tell them hey, here's the next couple things that you should do to make me healthier.
Instead of it kind of being a black box that needs to get interpreted.
Now farmers can have a direct relationship with their soils and be really skillful in the management toward greater and greater health.
Fewer inputs and higher margins every single year.
Moving on into other ways that artificial intelligence and machine learning might be really useful for agriculture the development of corn or maize.
And it was an indigenous project that happened over the course of hundreds of years, and they started with basically an inedible bit of grass, because corn is actually a type of grass.
And by selective breeding over generations and generations.
They went through lots of different varieties until we got to the lots of calories per growth cycle version of corn that is now feeding a huge percentage of the calories around the world.
Now, this was an indigenous activity that happened over hundreds of years, and I'm really thankful for it, because most of the foods that we eat today were selectively bred to be as large and healthy and nutritious as we experienced them.
But using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
We've been working with a company that has been able to rapidly speed up this process.
And not through genetic modification.
What they do is they're able to take the sequence information from all the existing commercial crops, plus a bunch of native varietals that are not in current circulation, and work out what the different gene functions do, and then map out exactly the crossbreeding pathway in order to go get the desired traits.
So what we have is adaptive sugarcane which dramatically reduces the amount of deforestation required to get to the yield level that you want.
You also have heat-resistant tomatoes that are able to grow in way hotter, way drier conditions, which is really important because we're going to go through at least a 50-year period where we're going to be destabilizing a lot of the farmlands of the earth as the climate destabilizes.
Whether that's hotter, colder, wetter, drier, it's all going to happen.
And being able to have seed stock that is ready for that challenge is really powerful.
And lastly, cotton that basically is drought-tolerant as well, requires a fraction of the water, one-tenth the water, and much less pesticide and fertilizer input.
And all of these things are fantastic for the planet, but they're also fantastic for the future of us having viable food and materials in a destabilized growing environment.
Lastly, let's get on to scalable restoration.
And what's really compelling about this company, a company, Chloris Geospatial is that they've done a really deep work on sensor fusion across a bunch of satellite feeds and they also paired that with over a decade in the jungles, meter by meter, doing ground-truthing data, to be able to go really verify how much terrestrial biomass is associated with signals that can be detected from satellites via remote sensing.
And, given this, they've been able to make the most accurate both historical and current assessment of above-ground biomass on planet Earth, and the data stretches all the way back to the beginning of the 21st century, so over 20 years of data on that front.
And that really allows us to see which landscapes we're hurting, which landscapes we're recovering, and if people are developing restoration projects or carbon projects.
This is a fantastic way to stay on top of how those are going.
Now, this is great technology and also uses really advanced algorithms and a lot of the things that I've been talking about, But in some ways it's a little bit passive.
This doesn't restore the forest itself.
This doesn't restore the grassland itself.
This just helps people monitor the changing of that.
But what if we were to get more ambitious and we were to say let's challenge this linkage between the industrial machines that run our economy and nature, and instead of it having to be an accidental relationship of damage, what would it look like if it was an intentional relationship of active repair?
And I'm going to show you Right now, with my last two examples.
This one's a short video and what you're going to hear?
You're going to hear these little ticks.
And every one of those ticks is a mangrove seed being planted.
The pace of these ticks is basically planting about 100 mangroves per minute from one drone.
And then two months later, we have over 90 percent that get to germination.
And 14 months later the landscape is fully established over 85 percent full establishing of the mangroves that were planted.
Now, the scale of this technology and the scale that it's capable of is incredible.
Just four people are able to go plant over 80 hectares of land, representing 120000 mangroves being planted and over 100000 being established in one day.
When you get to robotic scale on things all of a sudden, then human action, human intention, and if we have good intentions we can really multiply that in ways that can completely rewrite our landscapes.
And I've worked with this company for about a decade at this point and I got really inspired by them because they have not just restored mangroves but they've restored 20 different terrestrial ecosystems on four different continents dry land inland mountainous, near shore, all these sorts of things.
And I got inspired, like, could we also do this below the water?
And I'm going to show you something that I founded and was the original electrical engineer for.
And this is the ReefGen robot, which is basically its own kind of planting drone.
And this is the.
This robot line is the first in the world to plant live corals back into a coral reef.
It's the first in the world to plant live seagrasses back into seagrass meadows.
And it can also plant them in seed form as well.
And this robot has been able to plant 10,000 seagrass seeds in a single day, which covers an entire underwater acre with one robot in one day.
And the other thing that we did is we wanted to make sure that this robot was affordable enough that we could make a bunch of them.
Because when I went around and I talked to people about the underwater robot that I was going to go build to restore these ecosystems, they're like you should budget like two million dollars for the robot.
If you spent less than that, it's probably not going to do anything interesting.
And I remember sitting there thinking like, I was thinking more like $5,000.
And we're not quite there, but this is more like $10,000.
And in the grand scheme of things, way, way less than two million dollars.
And the whole point is, you want this to be an accessible technology to all the communities that have near-shore ecosystems to restore, whether they be coral, whether they be sea grasses.
You want something like this to be also scalable from the capex perspective, right?
Like a single billionaire, could spend 50 million dollars and have a fleet of 10000 of these, and that is actually meaningful scale in terms of ocean restoration of all different types.
I'll show you a little bit more here.
So right here is a stake because this is actually not a seed planting end effector.
That's a seedling planting end effector, because there's actually two ways to plant seagrasses as well.
You can plant it from seed, but then there's other types of seagrasses that actually want to be planted as a sapling and they want to grow rhizomically.
So they send out these little rhizomes laterally, and then the grasses grow up from the lateral rhizomes that are heading out.
And this is basically a stake that we go and put the seagrass seedlings into and then that feeds through a tube into a hopper and basically bit by bit.
This current layout is able to go and plant about half an acre of seedlings per day with just one robot and our next version of it is going to be able to do an acre to an acre and a half in a day per robot.
So we are really kind of moving into this space where, by really digging into that mental model in a different way,
Instead of economy versus ecology, we start taking the best tools that we're using in the current economy and robotics and AI and intentionally using them to support ecology so that we're able to go build both a healthy planet and a healthy economy for the future.
Thanks so much.
That was Tom Chi at a TED Countdown event in New York in partnership with the Bezos Earth Fund in 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong.
This episode was mixed by Christopher Fazi Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
