Doom yourself to horrific climate change by burning all that carbon and releasing all that CO2. Or power down society, reducing total energy usage around the planet. One leads to ecological collapse. The other is a reversion, in many ways, to poverty.

When it comes to trying to manage how our entire planet-wide market and all the people and businesses in it deal with nature and our natural resources - we first and foremost need to change the incentives.

If the incentives are aligned right - towards better preservation and restoration of nature and natural resources - then you'll see a tremendous amount of activity in that direction.

If your incentives are set up wrong - if for some reason you reward people for behavior that's actually bad for your customers or your organization - then you're going to encourage that behavior.

The more widely you can spread this notion of achieving ROI by preserving and improving ecosystems, the better.

I decided five years ago that I wanted to truly understand, for myself, what the state of the planet was, and when I dug into it, what I found was quite different than I'd imagined.

In the food case in particular, one of the technologies that could help there - genetic technologies that could create better crops with higher yields and less need for water and fertilizer - is tremendously feared. Very little of that fear is scientifically grounded.