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Dogs are more than just pets. They're arguably the most important member of your family, so of course you'd do anything to keep them happy and healthy. Ollie delivers fresh, protein packed meals made with real human grade ingredients. Choose from five recipes with personalized plans tailored to your dog's needs. Meals come in perfectly portioned mess free packaging with a scoop for easy serving and a storage container to keep food fresh. Worried about transitioning your dog's food? Ollie offers in App Health Screenings where their experts will guide you every step of the way so you can feel good knowing you're doing what's best for your best friend. Visit ollie.com tedtalks and use code TEDTalks for 60% off your first box.
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This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, work rarely stops. When the day ends, your business is always on and when it's time to hire, you need a partner who's just as committed to. That's where LinkedIn jobs comes in. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes hiring simple. Post your job for free and share it with your network. Their new feature even helps write job descriptions and gets your posting in front of the right candidates with deep insights. Want more reach? Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. Here's what matters most. Quality. Based on LinkedIn data, 72% of small businesses using LinkedIn said that it's helped them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring and find your next great hire today. Post your job for free@LinkedIn.com TTD that's LinkedIn.com TTD to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is sponsored by Framer. Every creative project starts with an idea, but too often the tools we use get in the way. Framer is changing that. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites and and it's now redefining how we design for the web with the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas based design tool. Framer is more than a site builder. It's a true all in one design platform. From social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site. Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish and Framer is completely free. That means unlimited projects, unlimited pages, and unlimited collaborators with powerful features like vectors, gradients, 3D transforms and wireframes built right in, ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool. Start creating for free@framer.com design and use code TED for a free month of Framer Pro. That's Framer.com design promo code TED framer.com design promo code TED rules and restrictions may apply. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Many of us remember the Butterfly effect, which asks the question, can the flap of a butterfly's wings cause a storm elsewhere in the world? It's a beautiful thought experiment, but for ecosystem scientist Yadvinder Mali, it's much more than a question. It underpins life on Earth. In his talk, he shares how he and fellow scientists map and calculate the flow of energy that runs the natural world. He reminds us that the world isn't a series of disconnected parts, but rather one whole living biosphere.
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I'd like to start with a picture of a forest. And what do you think of when you see this forest? Maybe you think of ways a forest could be useful to us, maybe as a source of timber or of fuelwood, or maybe as a store of carbon with which we can tackle climate change. And all of these are useful and sometimes necessary ways of thinking about a forest or any ecosystem. Or maybe, just maybe, you feel something more mysterious and wondrous. Maybe you have an inkling of a world far more ancient than our young species, a world full of beings that communicate in languages of sound and chemistry and light that we barely understand, a world that needs to be approached with humidity. In this world, plants perform the everyday miracle of turning light and air into life. And that energy that captured sunshine then cascades from plant to animal to fungus to bacterium. And on the way, it carries great currents of carbon, nitrogen, and other essential nutrients that together build the web of life that is that ecosystem. And the same applies at the scale of the planet. The planet is the sum of the world's ecosystems, but it is so much more. It is an interconnected and shimmering web of flows of carbon and energy and nutrients that build up the ancient matrix that is our home, from which we have emerged as a species that nurtures us, on which we depend and utterly. I'm an ecosystem ecologist, and I study this world of flows and interactions. And together with a team of ecologists around the world, we measure and map the flows of energy, of carbon and nutrients that build up the ecosystem. Starting with the capture of sunshine by plants. We follow those flows of energy to build the biomass of trees. And we follow that energy down into the roots and fungi and into the soil. And then beyond plants and fungi, into the creatures of the soil, the worms, the invertebrates. By measuring the abundance of each creature, we can map and calculate these flows of energy. And we find every life form a miracle of evolution. Sometimes our approaches take the latest technologies, such as acoustic sensors or camera traps, coupled with artificial intelligence tools. Sometimes we use more traditional approaches, such as counting birds in a rainforest at dawn, that require training and expertise and dedication and passion. And with this type of work, we're able to build up a map of the flows that make up an ecosystem. So to take an example of this English woodland just outside of Oxford, we can calculate that 60% of that captured air sunshine pours down into the trunks of the trees. A smaller fraction pours down from the trees, through the roots, into the soil. Another pathway into the soil is falling leaves in the autumn or falling fruit. Of all that plant material, a fraction is consumed by plant eating animals, and a smaller fraction of that is consumed by animal eating animals. And so the web of life is built and maintained. And by doing this work in various ecosystems, we learn some things. One thing we learn is that the resilience and health of an ecosystem is determined both by the total amount of flow of energy, but also by how complex that flow of energy is, how many species it passes through. And I call this complex flow of energy, the spread of energy, the vibrancy of an ecosystem. In our current work, we're also trying to go from individual ecosystems to. To the scale of the whole living planet, the biosphere. And through this work, I can tell you some really interesting science. And I'm here to tell you some of those scientific stories, but I'm here to do more than that. I also want to argue that this vibrancy of the living world is something that we don't pay enough attention to when we think of how we work with nature to tackle the environmental challenges we face in conservation, we may focus excessively on particular charismatic species like elephants, or we may focus instead on what nature can do for us, its ecosystem services. And we don't pay enough attention to the webs of energy and life that hold everything together. So when we look at the world through these vibrancy eyes, some surprises can emerge. Vibrant ecosystems don't have to be places empty of people. Many cultures, traditional cultures, indigenous people, smallholder farmers, live in places fizzing with ecological energy. And many agricultural systems, regenerative systems, and others can also buzz with ecological energy. The absence of people is not the highest state of nature. We need it in some places, perhaps, but in many Places people can and do build vibrant nature, and we need to work with those energies. We have also learned what is not a vibrant ecosystem. Endless rows of trees, perhaps planted for timber or for carbon, capture the richness of life reduced to a single function, all that vibrant flow of energy channeled and canalized into a single species. This is not a forest. And yet, when we think of working with nature to tackle climate change, we're in danger, sometimes of focusing too much on the carbon value of nature. And carbon has a role. Certainly there are situations where it can help us mitigate climate change and at the same time raise finance that can help us protect or restore natural ecosystems. But if we go too far, if we focus on carbon, if we stop it being a tool and it starts becoming a worldview, then we're in danger of reducing the infinities of, of nature into some sort of carbon machine that we can dial up and down. Here's another example of this. This is a landscape. And you may look at this and see all of those open, treeless spaces and think, well, maybe this is an opportunity for tree planting. Trees are inherently good and they absorb carbon. And maybe you can offset your company's carbon emissions with an extensive tree planting program here. But this is a savannah, and the savanna is rich precisely because of the lack of trees. It's those grasses that grow in the open spaces that provide and nourish life, provide for life, regenerating fires, and support the unique and charismatic biodiversity that is the savanna. This should not be a focus for intensive tree planting, for carbon capture and climate mitigation. And so we need to work with vibrancy of the earth. But why does vibrancy matter? For many reasons. But I think one of the reasons is that it gives ecosystems, and all of us who depend on ecosystems, our best chance to adapt and cope with aspects of the tide of global change that is engulfing us, including from climate change. And I'd like to show one final example, which is the case of tropical atolls. And atolls are low lying islands less than 1 meter above sea level, and are often characterized as the first victims of climate change destined to drown under the rising seas in the next few decades. Or are they? We've just finished a project where we've examined these island systems, but rather than seeing them as islands in isolation, we've looked at them as integrated and interconnected island reef systems. And when we look at it that way, that view makes sense. All the difference. So what we did is compare wild islands with ghost islands and wild Islands are places where seabirds come in to nest on the soil or in the branches of a native vegetation. And ghost islands are places such as this, an ecologically depleted system. Now, this may look like your archetypal holiday paradise, or of swaying palm trees and white sand and turquoise waters, but its vibrancy is dimmed. Why is that, I hear some of you ask. It's because many of these places were once coconut plantations for an extensive coconut oil industry. On these islands, which has now largely collapsed, these plantations are abandoned, but the coconut is overgrowing and suppressing the return of native vegetation. And also, many of these islands are densely populated by rats brought in by sailors, which eat out the eggs of seabirds and prevent the seabirds from nesting. So in this project, we followed the flow of energy and nutrients from the seabirds through into the forest and then beyond the forest into the surrounding reef. And what we found is that on the wild islands, the seabirds harvested fish for hundreds of kilometers and brought in the nutrients in those fish to the islands, where they deposited those nutrients in their poop, their guano that fertilized the island. The poop and the guano then washed off into the surrounding reef and increased the rate of growth of the coral, and also the rate at which the coral bounced back from bleaching events linked to heat waves. And those higher nutrients also supported a higher abundance of fish. And of particular importance are the parrotfish, which, with their beaks, they eat away at the dead coral to get at the algae inside, and in the process, they poop out the coral sands. The poop features a lot in this talk, probably more than in most TED talks, I suspect, and that parrotfish poop, that sand then washes up to create the island. And what we found is that about up to 85% of the sand on these islands originated as parrotfish poop. And so if you're lucky enough to find yourself on a sandy, white tropical island beach, think about the parrotfish and be grateful. We also found the native vegetation doing extraordinary things that in just one square meter of soil, the plants produced 20 kilometers of fine roots. And those roots bound the sand together and turned that sand into nourishing soil. And so the forest was able to grow and the island to grow alongside it. So what we were able to do in this project is describe this flow of energy and sediment and nutrients from birds to island to reef, and then back to island. And when we put all our numbers together, we calculated that a wild island, a vibrant island full of seabirds, of native vegetation, and fish that aren't over harvested. Those islands were able to grow at rates that keep up with mid level scenarios of sea level rise. But a depleted island diminished in its vibrancy would struggle much more and is much more likely to drown under the rising tides. But there are limits to this adaptation. The extreme levels of sea level rise will be hard to cope with. So we shouldn't use signs of adaptation as an excuse to not tackle the urgency of tackling climate change and sea level rise. So the lesson that comes from this project is that we need to work with the vibrancy of these atoll systems to maintain and restore that vibrancy where we can, to give them their best chance of coping with climate change and for the communities that depend on them also to have the best chance of coping with rising sea level. And I think there's a wider principle that's being emerged here. It's just harder to see in most ecosystems, which are much more spatially entangled and much more complex, when it's really hard to predict the details of how ecosystems are going to respond to the tide of global change that is engulfing them, whether from climate change or from the other factors. What we do know is that the more we can work with the wild energies of these ecosystems, the more we can maintain and rebuild their vibrancy, the best chance they have to cope with the change that is coming and adapt to that change. And the best chance we have as all who are dependent on these ecosystems to adapt to that change. And that applies to wild and semi wild ecosystems, but I believe it also applies to our agricultural systems and our urban landscapes as well. And this applies at the scale of the planet, the living Earth. We need to work with the energies of the biosphere to regenerate and restore them, to have a world that is vibrant and as possible, not a biosphere that is commodified and packaged and industrialized to be subservient to human needs, but a resilient and regenerative planet where both humans and the rest of life on Earth can thrive and flourish. Thank you.
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That was Yadvinder Mali at the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more@ted.com curationguidelines 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 Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Songmanivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balarazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.
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Parle tu francais?
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Hablas espanol?
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Paris if you've used Babel, you would Babbel's conversation based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com acast speaking spelled b a B-B-E-L.com acast rules and restrictions may apply.
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Blood donation is now more inclusive. More people are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross through FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross. The Red Cross is committed to achieving an inclusive blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org LGBTQ that's redcrossblood.org LGBTQ.
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You know Hannah and I love a good bedrotting session. Reality TV snacks nearby and now I've leveled up with my self care with this Shark Beauty Cryoglow, the number one skincare facial device in the us.
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Wait, I'm obsessed with it. I've had it for a while actually and it's the only mask that combines high energy LEDs, infrared and under eye cooling. I really need this because nothing wakes me up in the morning. You could do four treatments in one better aging skin clearing skin sustain and my favorite the under eye revive with Instachill Coldtech. You put it on and it just feels so good under your eyes. Like I actually feel like I got eight hours of sleep.
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It's truly like a luxury spa moment while you're literally horizontal. It's perfect for post workout Sunday scaries or when you just want to glow while rotting.
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To treat yourself to the number one LED beauty mask this holiday season, go to SharkNinja.com and use promo code Giggly Squad for 10% off your cryo glow. That's SharkNinja.com and use Promo Code Giggly Squad for 10% OFF your cryoGLOW.