The Future of Our Planet
I cannot think of a better place to confront the problems we face today than here at the intersection of science and faith. Because of the problems that we face are so great, because their solutions are so essential, the journey. Oh, sir. That's one of the problems we face.
It's, somewhat easier, somewhat easier to solve. The journey we're on to solve them is gonna require the best of science and leadership, and even that won't be enough. It will also require audacity and innovation.
It requires a belief that we are here on Earth for a purpose. It requires that we act today for immediate needs, but also that we have our eyes on a further horizon, a horizon much longer than our time here on Earth. The task ahead is daunting.
Some might even say impossible. But today, with the humility scaled to the proportion of the challenge, I would like to offer a few words of advice, and even a couple of words of encouragement. Before we sit in on the problems of today, I'd like to offer some encouragement from the challenges of the past, a recognition of the remarkable progress that we've already made.
When people wish for the good old days, when they glamorize the past, they fail to appreciate that life has improved drastically in many ways, even over the past few decades. When I was born in nineteen sixty-four, the average person lived to only fifty-three. Today, they would live to seventy-three.
In the same time period, world poverty rates have fallen by seventy-five percent, and adult literacy has doubled. And even though world population has grown greatly in that time, food production has risen even more rapidly. And of course, our progress isn't constrained to a single lifetime.
If you go back to eighteen twenty-two, just two hundred years ago, the average lifespan was twenty-nine. And two hundred years ago, only twelve percent of people could read. Today, only twelve percent can't.
In more recent years, technology has helped us make leaps and bounds. The energy efficiency of our transportation has improved fourfold in just the past fifty years. Computation efficiency has improved by a factor of many millions.
And the cost of solar power, it has fallen ninety-nine percent since nineteen seventy-nine when President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof for the first time. If we look back on our past with a watchful eye, what we see is a message of hope. We have been confronting challenges since we have been writing history, and we have always found the faith to rise above them.
Nevertheless, once again, it is time to sit down, find our faith, and get to work. Because despite everything that those who came before us have already done, we still find ourselves in a world with astronomical need. Our past achievements must be used to inform today's problems, but not mask their reality.
It is time, once again, to do what many will say is impossible. As we all know, in twenty fifteen, the world agreed to seventeen sustainable development goals for twenty thirty. We gave ourselves fifteen years.
One would hope that we would find ourselves on track. Unfortunately, we are falling short on almost every goal. This year, the rising cost of food and fuel and fertilizer has been estimated to push another one hundred million people below the poverty line.
It's estimated that by, that by the time we reach our twenty thirty deadline, half of the children graduating from school will do so without the skills that they need to succeed. Why is this happening? Why are we falling short?
It's in part because we as a species, have now grown to occupy every corner of our world, every crevice and peak explored and exploited. The pressure that we're placing on our natural world can no longer be ignored. Compared to the planet, humanity used to be small.
Our impact was minor. But for some time now, we've wielded the power to cause significant impact to the planet. Consider the resources we use.
Over the past one hundred years, our use of natural resources has increased twenty-fold. If we continue as we are, the next one hundred years will be the same, another twenty-fold increase in our tax on this planet.
Just think, by the end of this short century, we will be using four hundred times more natural resources and energy than we did in the year nineteen hundred A year when we had already begun to fill our atmosphere with the byproducts of an industrial age. The Earth is a fragile thing, more fragile perhaps than it appears.
I saw this firsthand last year when I had the privilege to see our home from space for the first time. I had been warned that the experience would change the lens through which I viewed the world, but I was not prepared for just how true that would be.
Looking back at our home from up there, the atmosphere is so obviously tiny, finite, and at the same time, it was also the most beautiful sight that I had ever seen. That moment only deepened my faith that we must do everything we can to protect this place and preserve its beauty. My experience reminded me of something that the astronaut Jim Lovell said when the crew of Apollo 8 was circling the moon.
Lovell looked back at the Earth and realized something important. "I'd been hoping to go to heaven when I die," he said. "Now I realize you go to heaven when you are born."
Lovell was telling us all something crucial. Earth is a paradise, and we must protect it. His Holiness Pope Francis has emphasized the same theme in his encyclical when he refers to Earth as our common home and describes the imperative to care for it.
So what do we do? How should we continue down this road of progress? Where should our priorities lie?
I ask these questions because many people already have a goal, they have a cause, they have a solution, and they're passionate about it. They're ready to take up that torch and sprint down the path of progress, take it as far as they can. I applaud those people.
It's important to be able to attack a problem with everything that you have in order to address the needs of others. But in order to make lasting independent change and redefine what is possible for our planet and everyone living on it, we also must look deeper. We must examine how the problems of our time intersect with each other, and sometimes we must step slowly down the path.
So I'll offer four ideas, four ideas that I use to guide my own work. First, remember that we must do work at both time scales, the short term and the long term. We must address immediate needs and also work on laying foundations for a better future.
Many people today are hungry. I know some of the people in this room are playing an important role in addressing that challenge. As you just heard, my friend Jose Andres is one of those people who serves urgent need.
Lauren and I have been so lucky to be able to support him in his journey to feed the people who need it. His World Central Kitchen has served hundreds of millions of meals to those most in need. And in Ukraine alone, he's worked with local chefs to quickly serve more than a million meals a day.
His work, and the work of many others, is a wonderful example of when we must run down the path. When people are in immediate danger, when crisis is looming, that is not the time to find the most sustainable solution, the one that will solve the problem not just in the moment, but forever after. That is the time to jump in, get to work, and to do whatever you can to provide short-term relief.
But with the same resolve, we must also work on the long term, fixing problems at the root, creating preconditions for permanent change that uplifts, change that creates empowerment and independence. Education is an important example. 60 million primary school-aged children are not attending school today, and the pandemic has only made this problem harder to address.
The Catholic Church itself has done so much to address this need. It remains the largest non-government provider of education in the world, educating 62 million children from preschool through high school. That gift has changed the lives of so many people, including my own.
When my father came to the United States from Cuba alone and speaking no English at the tender age of 16, the Catholic Church took him and 15 other Cuban boys under their care in a mission led by two priests in Wilmington, Delaware. They housed him and educated him and gave him opportunities he wouldn't have had otherwise. Later, the circle continued, and he passed those opportunities onto me.
Sitting here in the Vatican today, I would like to thank the church for that gift. My personal passion is for preschool education, where we've set up a $2 billion day one fund to provide early education to disadvantaged children. Providing for urgent needs and finding long-term solutions are both essential.
We can and must put energy into both, and both require iteration, planning, intentionality, and a lot of ingenuity. Okay, my second suggestion. Let's invest in our common home, the natural world that enriches life.
Our planet's surface is made of astonishingly thin, fragile layers that together enable us to live and thrive. I'm talking about our atmosphere, the vegetation, and water on the surface, and the soil beneath. This paper-thin lining provides all the oxygen we breathe, all the food we eat, and all of the water we drink.
They make life livable, and their beauty also makes life worth living. These skins are essential, and they are all threatened. The world is warming, the seas are rising, and storms are intensifying.
Our oceans are acidifying, and our fish stocks are declining. Soil is degrading, and deserts are encroaching. In almost all cases, it is the poor and vulnerable who are suffering the most from these disasters while they have done the least to cause them.
Caring for nature is caring for people. This message is one that we must continue to spread. It's worth remembering the commandment humans were given in the Garden of Eden to tend the garden, to be good stewards.
Faith groups have played a valuable role in spreading this message and can continue to do so. The passion and goal to care for our home must permeate our lives. At the Glasgow Climate Cop last November, the Bezos Earth Fund committed three billion dollars of grants to support nature in this decade.
The money is for three tasks. To help conserve what nature we have left, to restore the nature we have lost, and to find new ways to feed people that preserves nature rather than harms it. We're focusing on geographies that are rich in carbon and biodiversity, where threats are great, and where local communities can be a central part of the solution.
One critical location is the forests of the Congo Basin. This region is sometimes called the heart of Africa and the lungs of the world. Lauren and I recently returned from Gabon, where we saw how leaders and community groups are finding ways to advance human progress while preserving our rainforests.
In every case, it's essential that indigenous groups and local communities play a central role in these discussions. So whatever your goal is, and however fast you're walking the path, please remember to consider our common home and keep it safe. My third suggestion, focus on the whole system and its interconnectedness.
It's good to have a clear goal, to walk the path with confidence and purpose. But it's also important to look around you and notice the goals of others who walk beside you because there are a lot of problems, and each one overlaps with the next. They all affect one another.
Let me give you one example. An important problem people focus on is overfishing. But to focus exclusively on fishermen or the companies that employ them underestimates the complexity and interconnectedness of the problem.
In fact, the depletion of fishing grounds is also affected by government subsidies given for industrial trawling, and it's affected by the destruction of coral reefs, which is in turn driven by ocean acidification, and there are many more aspects to this complex problem. If we wanna help fishing communities and make fishing sustainable, we must look at the whole web of problems and how they connect to each other, not just the individual challenges.
In real-world problems, very rarely is there a silver bullet. Pushing in just one place in a complex web of problems is unlikely to do much more than just move the problem around. At the Bezos Earth Fund, we're working with others to monitor 50 key transitions that need to happen in order for us to address climate, nature, and development.
These include phasing out the internal combustion engine, decarbonizing steel and cement, raising food crop yields as well as making them more resilient, reducing food loss, and empowering indigenous communities to manage their tropical forests. For each of these factors, we try to identify how close they are to positive tipping points and what are the barriers that we could perhaps help remove in order to cross these tipping points.
Whether that means investing in research or running a pilot project, doing public policy design or monitoring and transparency, these obstacles require new ways of thinking and acting. Some in policy circles call this systems thinking All aspects of the problem must make progress simultaneously. My final piece of advice: be curious, explore, invent, redefine the impossible.
Look at any breakthrough in human progress. Universal childhood immunization, the microchip, renewable energy. They all happened because a group of innovators refused to accept the status quo.
The path was rarely easy, and there were many obstacles along the way. Even well-meaning people would whisper, "This will never work," but work it did. Often you must not follow a path, but forge a new one.
Space exploration is an example of forging a brand new path. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the surface of the moon, he redefined the impossible. As a five-year-old boy, I was one of the many people who got to watch that moment.
I spent my childhood watching Star Trek, making models, and turning the garage into a laboratory for all kinds of contraptions. I was determined early on to build a path to space. Some people ask me why.
Why invest so much into space when there are so many problems to be solved on Earth? The reason is simple. Investing in space will help preserve the Earth.
Our motto at Blue Origin is, "For the benefit of Earth." We go to space not to abandon our home, but to protect it. Consider energy. In space, the sun always shines, and we can collect energy in almost unlimited amounts.
Energy and other resources can be harvested and used in space without harming the Earth. Earth is a garden that should be tended. Blue Origin's long-term goal is to move all polluting industry off Earth.
That path is long, and we won't see its end in my lifetime. Somebody else will have to pick up that torch. But for my part, I would like to do everything I can to build a road to space so that whoever comes next has an easier time than I did.
And as this journey progresses, we will find things that we do not expect. Curiosity is an invaluable trait. It allows us to make discoveries that we didn't even know were there to be discovered.
Curiosity enabled Copernicus to show us our place in the universe, Newton to explain gravity, Curie to open our eyes to the atom. They were dreamers and explorers. They forged a brand new path for builders to walk upon, builders who used the dreamers' discoveries to change the world.
To my final point, our human challenges are big, but walking side by side, working always together, our human capacity to solve them is even bigger. Don't lose faith, and never, ever let anyone tell you it's impossible. Thank you all so much.
