The Earth is 4.5 billion years old,
and its history is recorded in the rocks.
Since 2009, a group of scientists
has been investigating whether our 12,000-year-old
geological epoch, the Holocene, has ended.
After nine years of research,
the evidence shows that we have left the Holocene
and entered the Anthropocene epoch,
because humans now change the Earth and its systems
more than all natural processes combined.
Six, seven, eight... nine.
Ten.
I can confirm that this ivory here is exactly 105 tons.
Ten thousand or so elephants...
Four, five.
I have seen estimates of 150 million dollars...
Seven, eight, nine, ten.
The street value.
But can you imagine 10,000 elephants.
Two, three, four...
five.
Seven, eight.
We did the inventory: three months,
to look at every piece of ivory,
measure the weight, try and pair them.
Every day the smell of death.
On one of the tusks was written "Amboseli Elephant".
I've had the privilege of working in Amboseli National Park for a long time.
And I thought this tusk
represents an elephant I probably knew.
This tusk will never hit the market.
It will never make a trinket,
it will never become a mantlepiece.
I was not able to stop this elephant from dying,
but I'm certainly able to stop it from being desecrated further.
Norilsk is 320km north of the Arctic Circle,
and home to the largest coloured metal mine
and heavy metals smelting complex in the world.
It is the most polluted city in Russia.
Every year, humans extract between
60 and 100 billion tons of material from the Earth,
and move more sediment than all the rivers of the world combined.
We are here
in the middle of Salar de Atacama,
right in the heart of the driest desert of the world.
We are producing here, lithium,
and we have a lot of lithium under our feet.
Lithium has been used for many years in pharmaceuticals, and aluminum,
glass, and many other appliances,
but the recent increase on lithium demands
comes from electric vehicle batteries.
As you see we have sun everyday
and so we have a really good evaporation rate here.
And that's what makes most of the work.
The energy comes from the sun.
And we are proud of how we contribute to the world,
in the technology industry
with batteries for electric cars,
for cellphones, for all the appliances that we use nowadays.
Last Thursday, I think there was the last house here.
Since Hambach coal mine opened in 1978,
four towns have been destroyed to make way for its expansion,
and two more are facing relocation.
It is the largest open-pit mine in Germany.
Terraforming is the act of altering the Earth's surface for human needs.
Humans now dominate over 75 percent of ice-free land
because of mining, agriculture,
industrialization, and urban growth.
The Earth's forests are home to 80 percent
of terrestrial biodiversity,
and annually absorb 30 percent of anthropogenic carbon emissions.
Less than 10 percent of old growth forest remains on Vancouver Island,
and raw log exports have increased exponentially since 2014.
85 percent of the Earth's forests have been cleared
fragmented or degraded for human use.
This business, it starts from the bush,
from the forest.
We sponsor some people in the forest,
to cut the wood for us, the logs.
From Bayelsa State, Rivers,
Edo, Delta, Ondo, Ogun.
The population of Lagos has grown from 200,000
to 20 million in only two generations.
The world's population could reach 10 billion by 2050,
with most people migrating to, and living in,
large urban centers.
♪ My childhood life ♪
♪ When I spend half, When I spend half ♪
♪ When I spend half ♪
♪ I was born in Pumwani I grew up in Dandora City ♪
♪ Ah, nobody by my side ♪
♪ Life is to hustle ♪
♪ Education is the key To success ♪
♪ When I make my future So bright ♪
♪ I get a B in form 4 I dunno what I do ♪
♪ Opportunity first ♪
♪ My childhood life ♪
♪ When I spend half ♪
♪ When I spend half When I spend half ♪
Peace all the time when you know. I and I Shakur!
Dandora dump, east side.
This is the biggest dumpsite in Nairobi.
Even in Kenya, it's the biggest. Even in East Africa.
And I'm proud to be in it.
Some people collect bottles,
and they weigh them in kilos.
They buy for us one shilling per kilo.
When the bottles have no market, we just collect plastics.
A quarter of a million people
live in or around Dandora Landfill Site,
and 6,000 people mine and work its grounds every day.
Technofossils are human-created objects,
such as plastic, concrete and aluminium,
that persist in the biosphere and eventually end up
in the rock layers of the Earth.
The technosphere, which is the entire aggregate
of human created or altered material,
is estimated at 30 trillion tons.
Ladies and gentlemen,
we will soon be entering the Gotthard Base Tunnel.
With a length of 57 kilometers,
this is the longest railway tunnel in the world.
The journey through the tunnel
is approximately 20 minutes long.
Humans have created thousands of kilometers
of underground tunnels
for everything from railways, roads, and subways
to mines, sewers, parking lots, and reservoirs.
We need to create new lands,
and we need to establish these new lands wherever they may be.
Small plots, smallholdings.
And intensifying yields by doing it
in an environment that we control.
We're a constant 14 degrees all year round down here.
We don't use pesticides or herbicides.
Our water system - we use 70 percent less
than traditional open-field farming.
When it comes to other inputs, they are pretty much
traditional nutrients, used more effectively.
The only element of technology
is the light spectrum within the LEDs.
We can give the plants the exact environment that they require
24/7, 365 days a year.
What we have done is taken an old World War II air raid shelter,
that was used to protect Londoners during the Second World War.
We've got these beds to grow fresh produce,
where there used to be bunk beds
for people to sleep on down here.
Agriculture and animal husbandry
have transformed one third
of the Earth's ice-free land surface.
Humans have pushed or surpassed
correlatable boundaries for nitrogen,
phosphate and potash
because of their use in fertilizer.
Nitrogen and phosphorus levels in soil
have doubled in the last century,
representing the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle
in 2.5 billion years.
Camera, rec sound?
- Sound? - Yeah.
- Rec? - Yeah.
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are higher
than at any other time in the past 66 million years.
This has put our climate system into a state
that has no analog for future projections.
Climate change results in unstable global temperatures,
extreme weather events,
sea level rise and ocean acidification.
Coral reefs are home to more than 25 percent of all marine life,
and are considered one of the planet's most complex ecosystems.
Coral has existed for 450 million years,
but ocean warming and acidification
has caused widespread bleaching,
and could eliminate all coral from the oceans
before the end of the 21st century.
Now if you're standing a little bit further down
towards the other end of the paddock, we do all sorts
of different, what we call enrichments for our tigers.
Now that is just a term that covers everything we can do
for any of our animals here to encourage their natural behavior
and to keep them happy and stimulated here at the zoo.
Now they do still tend to spend lots of time sticking close to mum,
watching her, learning from her and also learning from play.
So if Melati had had these two out in the wild, out in Sumatra,
she would have been through a very difficult few months just now,
because, of course, as well as having to hunt enough food to feed herself with,
she would also have to cater for the rapidly growing appetites
of these two youngsters, Karis and Achilles, as well.
Now this is no mean feat, because out in the wild they are critically endangered.
However, just by coming along to the zoo today, you may not realize,
but you are supporting ZSL. We are a conservation charity
working in over 50 countries worldwide
to protect lots of animals and their habitats,
and this includes a lot of work that goes on
out in Sumatra with wild tigers.
So we are doing things like working very closely
with the Indonesian government,
to protect the remaining tiger population out there.
So thank you to each and every one of you for coming along today
and helping us out with that just by having a look
at Jae Jae, Melati, and our two cubs, Karis and Achilles.
We are part of the Kenyan National Police.
Most of the time we are deployed during the night
just to make sure that we deter any poaching activity.
My name is Paul Tereson.
My name is Paul Nderity.
We are allowed by the law to apprehend anyone
who enters or intrudes into our protected area.
But in case they pose a danger to our own lives,
that is the only time we can at least try to use firearms,
but not to kill, but to try and effect the arrest.
We are protecting wildlife, and at the same time we feel like we are the enemies.
Because we are humans and humans are the poachers.
The Earth has had five major extinctions.
We are now in the middle of the sixth great extinction,
this time because of human impact.
Extinction rates are up to 10,000 times higher than natural rates
from habitat loss, poaching, pollution,
climate change, and over-hunting.
One, two, go...
Happy, healthy living.
It is now my humble duty and pleasure, ladies and gentlemen,
to ask the President of the Republic of Kenya, Honourable Uhuru Kenyatta,
to make his remarks, and proceed with the burn.
Thank you very much.
We come from a truly blessed country.
Blessings however, come with duties,
and Kenya holds these great riches
in trust for all humanity.
It falls on us to protect and to preserve them.
That fundamentally is why we are here today.
The last decade or so has seen
catastrophic destruction of the African elephant.
A new generation of poachers, armed with new weapons
connected to vast new markets across the world,
threatens to exterminate them.
In destroying the ivory, we reject once and for all,
those who think that our natural heritage can be sold for money.
Before you, ladies and gentlemen,
the largest haul of ivory
ever to be destroyed in this manner.
Poaching and trafficking in wildlife,
is now a branch of international crime.
The fight against it will be won by alliances across nations and continents.
The principle is clear enough:
Ivory belongs to our elephants.
Kenya has decided that ivory is an evil commodity.
But Kenya's decision has to be backed by a global decision.
Let's kill this trade.
The opposite is unimaginable.
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old,
and its history can be read in the rocks.
Modern human civilization has developed within just 10,000 years,
yet our success as a species has tipped the planet's systems
outside their natural limits.
We are all implicated,
some far more profoundly than others.
But the tenacity and ingenuity that helped us thrive,
can also help us to pull these systems back
to a safe place for all life on Earth.
Recognizing and reimagining our dominant signal...
is the beginning of change.