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

Agriculture is the #1 source of deforestation. By some estimates it accounts for 80% of the forests chopped down in the tropics.

There are really two kinds of optimism. There's the complacent, Pollyanna optimism that says "don't worry - everything will be just fine" and that allows one to just lay back and do nothing about the problems around you. Then there's what we call dynamic optimism. That's an optimism based on action.

When you're managing a large number of people, you learn that incentives matter tremendously. You really want people to be rewarded for doing the right thing for the customers and the organization.

I was much more of a naïve techno-optimist than I am now. I still believe that technology can help us come out of this situation with a richer humanity with less impact on the planet, but now I think it has to be paired with effective policy in order to achieve that.

You have to be able to generate usable energy without greenhouse gas emissions and you have to be able to do it cheaply if you want people to choose that approach.

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.