Reinventing Industry And Technology To Regenerate Nature

Photo: Tom Chi, Co-Founder of Google X. Article by Lorin Fries.

There are precious few people who can inspire a mindset shift amidst the climate crisis, articulating a practical new paradigm for society and industry. Tom Chi is among them. A former tech executive who co-founded Google X, backing efforts like Glass, self-driving cars and Project Loon, may seem an unlikely champion for nature. Yet he is a source of deep wisdom and nuanced inspiration, offering practical pathways to reprioritize our focus, redesign incentives and reengineer unit economics toward regeneration. As Chi says, we’re the last generation that will have the opportunity.
Lorin Fries: You’ve described today’s industries as net negative for humanity, and you advocate for transformational shifts. What constitutes being net positive, and how does this relate to carbon drawdown?
Tom Chi: Humanity needs to become a net positive to nature — to actively regenerate and restore through our actions. That sounds radical. But flip it around; what happens if we keep being net negative to nature? Even if we were only 0.1% negative, there’d be a 1,000-year death date on civilization. At 1%, we’re gone in 100 years. That’s the way of the Roman Empire and Easter Island: geopolitical forces led to an unsustainable extraction of resources and, next thing you know, the civilization collapses.  […]

Click here to view original web page at www.forbes.com