Climate Corner: Keep engaging on things that matter most

Everyone is disengaging. Not just around climate, but everywhere — with everything.

The fatigue is real. With so much negativity in the zeitgeist, it’s so much easier to hunker down, watch movies or sports from your own couch, and not have to worry about anyone else’s opinions or problems — or even their solutions. Extroverts be damned!

What is it going to take to get back to enjoyable conversations that include disagreeing, yet also learning? Or more importantly, being able to navigate an argument’s tone, tenor and texture while also knowing the difference between opinions and the ideas and speculations that built them? Can we lean in to random interactions with friends, neighbors and even strangers that help us laugh at ourselves and the world around us?

It’s a scary time, not only because we just had Halloween, but because federal government funding is highly uncertain, income inequality is becoming a societal plague, artificial intelligence has taken over many jobs and disrupted reality as we knew it (which is only getting worse), information is unreliable, and, to top it off, climate systems are changing right before our very eyes.

Well, I’m here to tell you that all hope is not lost.

One of my wild and wonderful volunteer jobs (in addition to my real job) is serving as a Global Brain Trust Member of the XPRIZE. Our cohort is described on the website as “Visionary innovators, pioneers and global experts uniting at XPRIZE to design the competitions that will ignite breakthrough solutions that can transform the future.” It’s a lofty goal, but it’s also inspiringly accurate.

There are about 100 Brain Trust members participating in any given year, and the breakthrough concepts on which XPRIZE asks us to ideate new solutions fall within five focus areas: 1) Deep Tech + Exploration; 2) Energy + Climate + Nature; 3) Food + Water + Waste; 4) Health; and 5) Learning + Society.

Jacquelyn Francis with Salome Agbaroji, the 7th National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, at the XPRIZE Visoneering Event.

XPRIZE has an illustrious history. The very first XPRIZE was designed to create vehicles that could withstand more than one trip to space (sparking commercial space travel) and the most recent prize awarded was back in April, called the XPRIZE Carbon Removal, with the overall prize purse at $100 million.

I just returned from this year’s annual visioneering event, where we formed teams that led to a top 10 breakthrough concepts (out of the original Brain Trust pool of close to 100 ideas). Each team’s ideas were pitched, evaluated, scored, re-pitched, scrutinized, cross-examined, re-evaluated, re-pitched and eventually sent out for bidding. The process was challenging, engaging, fascinating, hysterical at times and entirely exhilarating. My fellow participants brought a robot arm (Zaki) and a plasma-fusion globe (Phil) — and everybody brought their A-game.

My team’s pitch was around using rapidly improving high tech to create opportunities from waste, focusing on landfills. Imagine if sensors and advanced robots could turn landfills into Saturday marketplaces. Maybe not marketplaces exactly, but utilizing the value buried throughout the century within our landfills. For example, have you ever considered how many rare earth elements or precious metals are buried within landfills? Apparently it’s quite a lot. Could we also create value out of discarded plastics and textiles — and whatever else could be valorized?

Happily, my concept and my team made it to the podium (all three finalists became winners) and received the necessary half-million dollars in funding to become a real XPRIZE, alongside the prizes that transformed commercial space travel and carbon removal.

This is your encouragement to keep engaging. Engage your brains and your convictions, your friends and your foes. Life is too short to disengage.

Jacquelyn Francis (on left) on the XPRIZE Visoneering main stage.