On almost every environmental issue I care about, in fact, I've been wrong at one point or another. I used to think that climate change was no big deal, that most environmental problems were massive exaggerations, that oil reserves were effectively unlimited, and more.

Often we need to use policy to level the playing field, or to be sure that a technology is managed in a responsible way.

Often an idea has impact far larger than the person who originated it.

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.

Today, our incentives aren't set up well - you can make a lot of money burning fossil fuels, digging up wetlands, pumping fossil water out of aquifers that will take 10,000 years to recharge, overfishing species in international waters that are close to collapse, and so on.

Whatever my current beliefs are, on any topic, they're all open to being changed by the right facts and the right evidence.

TNC was once limited by the resources it could directly marshal to buy land. But teaching people a new idea is incredibly more scalable.