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Regardless of your faith, it feels safe to say we need systemic change at all levels to work towards a better future for ourselves, our communities and this planet.
In this beautiful talk, ecological futurist Tarek Al-Olaimi shares how he helps people rise to their best selves by turning to spiritual wisdom.
He explores how faith communities, often overlooked in the climate movement, offer powerful tools for navigating environmental collapse with moral courage, resilience and a spiritual compass.
There is a sound the planet makes when it asks a species to grow up.
Can you hear it inside of you?
Many faith traditions teach that at thresholds two paths appear one of contraction and one of evolution.
Today, eight billion of us stand at humanity's most consequential threshold yet.
And these moments arrive in many different forms.
It's the families forced to abandon coastal homes because of sea level rise.
It's communities watching decades of memories reduced to ash.
It's elderly couples choosing between cooling or eating because of rising bills.
These are real experiences I've witnessed in the past year.
And as political leaders make climate decisions that arbitrarily mark billions of lives as disposable, perhaps you've also felt that catch in your chest when wondering will the future still want me?
This is what thresholds can feel like.
Loss resonating on one side, yet luminous possibility on the other.
And these climate thresholds do mirror our personal ones.
It's the unexpected diagnosis.
It's the loss of a loved one.
It's the path that suddenly closes.
Each and every single time, they ask us, who will we become when everything we know unravels?
And this is what I want to explore with you today.
Not just an environmental challenge, but an invitation.
Can we all still rise to our best selves, even when collapse tempts us towards self-preservation?
Now.
For years, I believed the climate emergency was primarily about technical and systemic solutions.
But in devastated communities I found that those demonstrating the deepest resilience drew on something more fundamental.
It was spiritual wisdom cultivated across generations.
In each disaster zone, I found a pattern the charts had missed.
It was the spiritual infrastructure all around us.
Church basements, mosque courtyards, Sikh gurdwaras cooking tons of free dal.
That kept communities together until formal aid arrived.
Yes, water pumps are vital.
But someone must believe that strangers deserve that water.
Faith, as I've come to learn and realize, is actually about the logistics of the heart.
These traditions aren't relics, but living laboratories of resilience.
Their rituals aren't superstition, but social circuitry routing courage when normal circuits fail.
Science can give us the numbers.
Policy can give us the laws.
But you know that the numbers don't comfort frightened children in a storm.
And laws aren't the prayers that we speak at funerals.
For the past decade, I've been very fortunate enough to work with global coalitions of faith communities confronting climate change and restoring ecosystems from land to ocean.
And today, I'd like to share just a few of these insights of what I learned from these traditions about how we might rise to our best selves.
And I've actually already shared the first one with you.
It's that faith functions as a collapsed navigation system.
These traditions that are sometimes dismissed as archaic actually hold the key to civilization's continuity.
Think about it.
These traditions survived multiple plagues empires, endless wars and even many ages, serving as civilizational black boxes for these uncertain times.
Times like these, when we face different interpretations about what this moment means and who it calls us to become, and faith traditions can offer us some guidance through this uncertainty.
So I invite you to think about those moments when you practice in something that is actually older than markets and older than nations.
Those daily practices etched into human muscle memory long before borders and currencies defined our exchanges.
These traditions aren't just relics.
They are your navigation technologies, tested through collapse after collapse.
So ask yourself, what ancient algorithm of survival am I carrying?
Because the wisdom we now need is not just waiting for us in new inventions, but it's also encoded in these daily practices that have sustained human dignity across history's hardest passages.
Yet we also know that even the most sophisticated navigation technologies require accurate data about where we truly stand.
And this brings me to the next insight.
It's radical honesty.
A truth that is always surprising about climate action is that it begins with a paradox.
We must look inwards before we can effectively act outwards.
I love how the tradition of Hazrat al-Niatan in the Sufi tradition teaches that our true work involves reconciling the irreconcilable.
And climate action needs that same reconciliation.
Now, let's be real.
We've all become experts at identifying external obstacles.
Political gridlock, corporate interests, colonial legacies, all very real.
But faith traditions invite us to look at a more subtle barrier.
Our own contradictions.
Hypocrisy isn't just a sin.
It's a GPS pin that can point us to deeper transformation.
Islam calls this Mahasabha.
Hinduism, Svadhyaya.
Whatever the language, the practice is constant.
Hold up a mirror and name the gap between the world we dream about and the ones our actions create.
Whether it's the climate activist always flying to summits or the congregation putring stewardship while their endowment funds fossil fuel expansion.
These aren't necessarily disqualifications, but they're doorways to deeper authenticity.
And radical honesty should also apply to the continuous examination of the value systems that we hold most sacred.
I know that faith traditions that also birthed liberation movements, sanctified colonial conquest, and also today's climate activism, with all of its moral clarity, can still become rigid, dogmatic and blind to its own contradictions.
So tonight, let us ask ourselves where do our actions cast shadows on the very values that we hold most sacred?
Can you think of an example from your own life?
Now, this question isn't meant to shame us, but to free us.
For it's precisely when we stand in these tender spaces of contradiction that moral courage can emerge.
And when we apply the same radical honesty to our economic systems, we arrive at our next insight.
It's what I like to call the systemic sacred.
It's when our deepest values and our economic choices converge.
Now, if you look back throughout history, you'll see that both faith and commerce together have shaped civilizations.
When they diverge, cultures can tear.
But when they harmonize, cultures can bloom.
Judaism's Shemitah cycle embeds ecological rest and debt forgiveness into economic rhythms and life.
Buddhist economics emphasizes sufficiency over endless growth.
Catholic integral economics recognizes forests and rivers as kin rather than commodities.
Out of these traditions emerges a fundamentally different approach to economics, one that supports the three great restorations ecosystem restoration, healing our planet's wounded systems.
Economic restoration, reimagining how we exchange value without extraction.
And inner restoration, renewing our moral imagination when despair threatens to narrow our vision of what is actually possible.
Now, in my own work advising banks and NGOs on sustainable Islamic finance, I've actually seen how this can scale and it's pretty incredible.
If just five percent of the projected 8 trillion Islamic finance market by 2030 is invested in climate resilience, that represents 400 billion for regenerative infrastructure.
Now, that is not charity.
That's reciprocity restored.
So if you shape our economic future, especially those of us in boardrooms and institutions, try this.
Subject your next big decision to a spiritual audit.
Ask not just will this generate sustainable returns, but does this contribute to the three great restorations?
Because markets, like our souls, are also waiting for instructions worthy of the threshold moment that we face.
And while economics relates to our material exchanges, the final insight I'd like to share illuminates something a little bit more subtle.
It's the power of beauty to guide us when certainty fails.
If we read today's story of humanity backwards, it might actually just begin with us dismantling beauty.
We turn forests into lumber, animals into production units.
We extract wonder from children's eyes and break our relationship with the natural world.
But I wonder, wouldn't it be amazing if her descendants identified a different starting point for this story, when we rediscovered beauty as essential for survival?
Bahá'í teachings teach that beauty are divine attributes made visible.
Zen Buddhism's Wabi Sabi sees beauty in imperfection.
Shinto honors the spirit in everything from mountains to roadside stones, and all recognize a common lesson that we rarely protect what we haven't first learned to appreciate in its true beauty.
But this relationship between beauty and protection goes even deeper.
Many faith traditions teach that divine assistance in times of climate crisis arrives not from above, but as the presence of hope and beauty within the human heart.
Prophets didn't just predict better worlds.
They spoke and acted their hope into being.
Their imagination was practical, imagining paths invisible to rational thought alone.
So the next time you encounter a moment of beauty, it might just be divine assistance arriving in its purest form.
The eighth-century mystic Rabia al-Basri from Iraq really understood this when she said to God your hope in my heart is the rarest treasure.
So reflect on what if this moment of beauty is trying to show me a more hopeful future, but desperately needs my voice and words to bring it into being?
Now, None of this, let me tell you, is a distraction from our climate reality.
But it's a radical act of trust in uncertain times.
Because I truly believe our climate emergency is an examination of the soul.
The same forces behind ecological destruction arise from the same human heart that also houses mercy, justice and repair.
This isn't abstract spirituality.
It's about who we become at the edge of everything we know.
And some of you might also be wondering, must I be religious for any of this to matter?
No.
When despair is polluting the skies, borrowing courage from any wisdom tradition is not only permitted, but necessary.
Faith traditions are simply very old laboratories that kept the lights on long enough to record what worked.
I've seen temple communities restoring the same sacred rivers that contributed to the flooding of their own homes, and mothers planting olive trees under bombardment so that their children may know what peace tastes like.
So, here we stand at our most consequential threshold.
To borrow a lesson from the book of Genesis, the heart of our human challenge is to honor our promise to the earth, not to destroy the world.
And this threshold moment invites all of us to rise to that promise.
The door of destruction right now is very easy to find.
The door of renewal is quite.
So who will we become together as we cross this threshold?
Thank you for listening.
That was Tariq Al-Olaimi at the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya 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 Fasey-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.
