 As a school, we're always looking for new ways to be more environmentally responsible and with the help of Rob today, we're going to learn a few tips on how to be environmental leaders. So please, dear students and teachers, please welcome Rob Greenfield. Alright, cool. Thank you for introducing me and all the good work you're doing with the Green team. Hello everyone, nice to see you all. So today, I'm going to share with you some of the projects and the adventures that I've done to bring attention to important environmental and social issues. And I want to give you one little disclaimer and that's that I do things to the extreme. The idea is that I am catching mainstream media's attention, catching people's attention to get them to stop and think about a lot of the things that we take for granted that we don't think about on a daily basis. Food, our water, our energy, the way we deal with our waste, our transportation, how we get around. These are things that it's very easy to never think about our actions and how they affect the world around us. So I take extreme measures to get this conversation into the mainstream media and into people's minds and then bring it back to talking about solutions and how as individuals we can work together in our communities and our schools at work to make a positive difference in our communities and to the people around us. So again, some of the things I do are extreme, but the goal isn't that you walk out of here feeling like you need to do that, the goal is just thinking about your own lives and questioning are you living in a way that's bringing you health and happiness and what you can do in order to live with more happiness and health in a way that's beneficial to your community. So with that being said, I'm going to share some of my projects with you. One of the things that I've done over the last seven years is dumpster dives. So I've dived into thousands of grocery store dumpsters all across the United States and a few in Canada to take the perfectly good food out and show people what I find. So this is in Madison, Wisconsin and this is just two days worth of dumpster diving at the local grocery stores. So you can see all the perfectly good food and this is just a tiny, tiny sample of how much food is being wasted all across the United States and Canada. So today, if you watch mainstream media, the world is often portrayed as this very dangerous and violent place. It's portrayed as this world that you need to wake up in fear, but I actually believe that most people are good. So to put that to the test, I landed in a far off country in Panama with just the clothes on my back and passport and I had to travel through Central America home on the kindness of others. And when I got back after 37 days of traveling through Central America, I could only mutter three words out of my mouth and that was just people are good. Another one of my projects you might have seen is called Trash Me. So the average American creates four and a half pounds of trash per day or two kilos and it's about the same here in Canada. So about two kilos or four and a half pounds of trash per day. But most of us, we throw it in the garbage can and we never have to think about it again. The garbage truck comes and picks it up. It takes it to the landfill, puts it into a place where we don't have to see it. So I wanted to create a visual that would help us understand just how much one of us makes in a day. But I didn't want to have to tell anybody what to do or I don't want to tell people what's right or wrong because I don't necessarily think there is a right or wrong. I just want to show people a reality of our lives. So I just lived like the average American. I ate, I shopped, I consumed like the average American. But instead of throwing the garbage away, I had especially designed trash suit that I wore and every piece of garbage went onto that suit for the entire month. At the end I was wearing about 87 pounds of trash. Another thing that I've done is I've been simplifying my life. In 2011, that's when I started to want to make changes in my life and I have been downsizing my life for years. In 2016, I got my life down to just 111 possessions. So that picture was everything that I owned at the time and it all fit into my backpack. And currently, this is everything that I own right here on this stage and my water bottle. So this is currently everything in the entire world that I own. I don't have anything stored anywhere. I basically live at your school for a couple hours. And today you're actually all going to help me because I'm still trying to downsize my life and simplify. So today, half of the things that I own, I'm going to share with all of you and you're going to take home some really cool things. And while I lived in San Diego, this is the tiny house that I lived in. So this house is 50 square feet, which would be what? 10 square meters or 5 square meters? I don't have my meters down. Do you use feet here or meters? Okay. Let's see, 5 square... I don't know, 50 square feet. Someone will have to do the math. But it's 5 feet wide so it was not wide enough for me to be able to spread my arms and 10 feet long so not more than 2 of me long. And it was... I'm 5'10 and it was only 5'6 so I couldn't quite stand it and I could kind of stand in it. So this is extreme. Today, over the last few decades, house sizes have doubled from 1,500 square feet to 3,000 square feet. So we see house sizes doubling and we see people with more and more possessions. The average person in the United States or Canada has over 10,000 possessions. So the question is, do these bigger houses, does more stuff actually make us happier and healthier and feel more fulfilled and full? And there's actually a lot of studies that show today that people... that our happiness is not at an all-time high and that our happiness is actually decreasing. You see life expectancy possibly decreasing for the first time. So my guess is that up to a certain point, meeting your basic needs and then some does bring you more health and happiness. But once you have, say, 6 shirts or 10 shirts and that's enough, does the 30th or the 40th shirt bring you more health and happiness? My thought is no. So these are extreme things but the idea is to create a counter narrative to what is actually already extreme. Because in the United States and Canada, we have only 5% of the world's population but use over 25% of the world's resources. So our lives might seem normal but compared to the global perspective, we actually live very extreme lives. So what I do with these projects is I go to the other end of the extreme to stand out and create this conversation. So again, my goal isn't that at the end of the time that we have together that you walk out of here and say, I'm going to dive into every dumpster I find or wear my garbage or live in the tiniest house. But if you decide you want to do those things, then I support you. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. The point is what is it that we can do in our communities, in our schools, in our city to make the world around us a happier, healthier place? So don't get caught up on those bigger extreme things. It's all about what you can do to live with more happiness, health, and sustainability. So to go backwards a little bit, I wasn't always an environmental activist, didn't really for a long time think about environmental or social issues at all. I grew up in northern Wisconsin in a similar environment to this except a very small town of only 8,000 people. And I actually grew up very low income. My mom and me and my three siblings all lived together in a two-bedroom house and my mom made only about $15,000 a year. So we didn't have a lot of money. We did get a lot of help from the government and people helped us, so I did have what I needed. But I grew up always feeling very poor. When I was younger my passions were the outdoors. I just loved to be outside fishing, catching frogs and turtles. At home I was always studying the animals of the world. And my passion was just really the environment and nature. And the thing though that happened was as I felt very different from other people because I was poor. And so my goal became really just to be what I saw as normal. I looked at my friends that had a lot of money, whose parents had a lot of money. And then my goal really became, I just wanted the American dream which at the time what I saw on mainstream media and the movies and such was to have a nice car, a big house, a nuclear family with the mom and dad and kids. And so that became largely my focus and then I kind of moved away from the things that I had originally cared about. So then in 2011 I left Wisconsin and I moved out to California and that was the time when I started to really want to change my life. And what happened was I actually just started to watch a lot of documentaries and read a lot of books and I realized that most of the actions that I was taking were causing destruction to the world that I loved. I learned the food that I was eating was being shipped halfway across the world guzzling fossil fuels and depleting our soils and our land. I learned that all this trash I was creating was going to go sit in a landfill for hundreds of years or possibly make it out into the woods and into the ocean and into the rivers. I learned that the car I was driving was contributing to war through our need for fossil fuels. And in San Diego I learned that even the water that I was drinking was detrimental because it was being pumped across the desert from the Colorado River that didn't even make it to the ocean anymore and was running dry. So I learned that almost everything that I was doing was causing destruction to the world. And at that point a lot of people would feel maybe pretty depressed, maybe doom and gloom and I'm sure all of you have probably experienced some days of that doom and gloom with knowing what we have to deal with in the world today, the environmental and the human problems. So I did feel some of that, but actually for the most part I felt excited and I felt empowered because I was learning that there's actually solutions to these problems and I was learning that I could change my life to live in a way where I could feel good about it, where I could change my actions and be a part of the solution rather than the problem. So that's what I set out to do. And my goal was that I was just going to make one positive change per week and if I did that for two years, that'd be over a hundred positive changes. So I made a long list of changes that I wanted to make and I hung it up in my kitchen, I got a pen and tied a piece of string to it and taped that up right next to the list and my goal was just each week to make one positive change. And so that's what I did for about two years and I started with small things, you know, at the time everything that I was buying was coming from the big box store and I was putting in double plastic bags. So I started with really small things like using a reusable shopping bag. And I started to shop at local farmers markets rather than going to the big box store in the first place and buy local food. I started to ride my bike more and drive the car less. I started to figure out, I started to ask myself when I was going to buy something, do I really need this? Is this going to bring value to my life or is this just a momentary desire? And so this is what I did for a period of two years I just consistently kept making changes and then I had these big grand ideas like for me one of the ideas I wanted was to actually get rid of my car which was a big deal because for most of my life the idea was that a car brings you freedom and a car is your image it's how people perceive you. So this was a big step. Not something that I could do at first but after making dozens of changes what I found is that I had built the foundation towards a more sustainable and healthy life and then eventually I was able to do that. So as I built the foundation it helped me to create those bigger changes in the future. And so after a few years I felt like I was starting to become the change that I wished to see in the world. That was something that had stuck out to me from reading a biography about Gandhi and learning about his work, this idea of being the change you wish to see in the world. Because I felt like I could control myself. So after I had done that I felt like I had realized that I was a hypocrite. That means your actions are not in alignment with your beliefs. You're not doing what you say you're doing. And so after the few years of making changes I felt like I had gone from where I started which was maybe a level 10 or 9 hypocrite now down to maybe 5. I was still a hypocrite, my life wasn't completely in alignment with my beliefs but I was doing so much that I felt like I had drastically reduced it. Now my goal was to go out and inspire other people and show what's possible. So that's when I set out on my first bike ride across the country and the idea was to bike across the United States from San Francisco to Vermont off the grid and have no negative environmental impact. So I focused on the 5 key aspects of sustainable living that each one of us deals with every day. Food, water, energy, waste and transportation. So these are the ways that our lives interact with the world around us every single day whether we realize it or not. So for food my goal was to only eat local, organic, unpackaged food but if I couldn't find that I had one exception and that was that I could go dumpster diving. The first time that I ever went and the reason why is because this is food that was going to waste so there was no negative environmental impact by me eating it. So the first time that I did this I was very nervous. Imagine if today leaving here the only way that you could eat for the next 24 hours was out of a dumpster. Most of you would probably feel very nervous. Like what are people going to think about me if they see me eating something that was thrown away? And that's how I felt. I was very anxious about it. So I went around back to the grocery store and I looked and I was very nervous and I peered in and sure enough it was filled with perfectly good food and the first food that I ever ate from the dumpster was a still frozen half gallon of ice cream and I didn't have a spoon with me that day but I had my sunglasses so I used those and I dug right in and ate about half the box right in the parking lot. And from that point on I found that dumpster after dumpster after dumpster all across the United States was filled with perfectly good food. This was just a standard dumpster in Wisconsin for example. This is what I pulled out of a dumpster in about five minutes in Nebraska for example. And at first I was very quiet about this sort of. I didn't necessarily, I was okay with doing it but the idea of telling people about it what would people think. So at first I was very quiet about it and at the time there was actually someone that I was very much in love with. She was back in San Diego where I lived and where she lived and on the phone I told her, you know, there's all this food going to waste and I'm collecting it and I'm thinking about, you know, telling people about this and she said whatever you do just don't tell anybody you're dumpster diving. She was worried about how people would perceive it as well. So basically for a little while I listened. At the time I listened and there's a second half to that story and I'll get to that at the end. So on this trip for water, I could only use water from off the grid. So no using the shower, no turning on a faucet to fill my water bottle, no flush toilets, every bit of water that I used for the year either had to come from natural bodies of water like going to the lake and purifying it or I made another exception and that was that I could drink water that was going to waste. So this is a leaky fire hydrant in the Bronx for example. Now for energy, the entire trip across the country I couldn't use any electricity that I didn't generate with my own small solar panels. So no turning on the light when I walked into a house using air conditioning or a fan or heat, no plugging into outlets. So by doing this, this was an exercise in going back to the basics and what I learned as I was traveling across the country is how electrified my life was and how I was using it almost every minute of my waking day. And then when I got halfway across the country I went to a business who works with big companies that gets them to change over to renewable energy from fossil fuels and then I learned that even when I was using the computer that was powered by my solar panel behind that at the servers where all of this information is that was burning huge amounts of electricity and I learned that when I uploaded something online like a photo to Facebook or a video to YouTube or a blog, all of that was being stored somewhere that was using electricity at every second. So I learned that even while I didn't think I was I was using electricity. And so that was when I was learning about how globalized my life is and how all of my actions in the past life was far more simple. You could see how your actions affected the world but today in our globalized world no matter mostly everything that we're doing is having ripples around the entire world. So for garbage I had to carry all of the waste that I created across the country with me. So like for example if I had a candy bar in Utah that plastic wrapper would have to come all the way to Vermont with me. And so by forcing myself if I created trash like the average person you saw what a month of trash looks like I wouldn't have been able to physically make it. So by doing this it forced me to create as little as I could and in the entire 104 days I created under one kilo of trash, about two pounds. So that's it right there, fit into my hands. And then lastly for transportation I had to bike the whole way across the country so no using fossil fuels to cross the country. So as you can imagine this was a powerful trip for myself. I learned, I hadn't done much cycling before and I learned wow I can actually bike across the whole United States. So that was a nice learning experience but for me it was the bigger picture about seeing how these things are applicable to everybody. So for example I met people that were a couple of women that were 70 years old that were biking all the way across the United States and they had their husbands following in a campus they'd have a warm place to sleep and food at the end of the night but still 70 years old and biking across the country. And I met people that at the time I thought were far too overweight to be able to ride bikes but I saw they were riding you know five miles to work and back and I met kids that were five years old that were biking the half mile to school with their parents every day. So I learned about how powerful of a tool the bicycle is and how most of these things are applicable to most people in one way or another. So then when I got back to San Diego I decided I wanted to try to take what I had done in this trip but put it into living in one place so I got rid of my apartment and I decided to live in a tiny house and this is a, I got this tiny house for $950 on Craigslist and you might be thinking wow $950 but the reason it's $950 is because this is how big it was so it's barely, it's designed to look like a house but for it's smaller than most of your closets it would be like a dog house or you know a doll house or a kid's play house or something like that but for me I thought this would be a great way to get people thinking about you know I like to do extreme things so it was smaller than I had originally hoped but I went with it and so here again I practiced sustainable living to the extreme I grew a little bit of my own food you can see the raised beds there but San Diego is a desert and we were also in a mega drought at the time so I didn't grow a lot of food but I was off the grid there so off the grid means you're not connected to the utilities municipal utilities for water or electricity and so as I mentioned it's a desert and a mega drought so a lot of people would think how can you get enough water and that's when I really learned that utilities and life are a matter of perspective so the average American and Canadian uses about 400 litres of water per day the average Western European uses about 200 litres of water per day and the average person in sub-Saharan Africa uses about 2 to 5 gallons which would be about 8 to 20 litres of water per day so to the average person over here in Canada and the United States it's just unfathomable to think about using as little as water to the average person in Africa and to that person over there they can't imagine using that amount of water and so for me one of the things that really helped me to break the boundaries that I wanted to in my life was realizing that just everything is a matter of perspective and once I realized that I saw, okay sure, what's happening around me appears normal say using 80 to 100 gallons of water per day but globally not normal and I realized that what normal is is just seeing the same thing over and over and over and it doesn't matter what it is if you're around the same thing all the time and it's what everybody is doing it can start to appear normal but once I realized that normalcy is basically an illusion and the reality is that the world is an extremely diverse place with 7 plus billion people doing things in thousands of different ways and it allowed me to be able to step outside of normal and do things in a way that worked for me one of the things that I did there since I only had 8 to 20 liters of water per day I doubled that by using the water that I washed my dishes and my hands with that's called gray water and I used that to grow food so now I could double the amount of water by using it twice so I had small solar panels there and another really important lesson is that most things are on a spectrum so when a lot of people think of sustainable living they think of electric cars they think of big solar panel systems on the roof and the reality is that that form of sustainable living is only accessible to the top few percentage of the wealthiest people in the world most people who live sustainably around the world do so by just having a lot less so I wouldn't have been able to meet I only had $15,000 to my name at the time so there was no way I could buy an electric car and have huge solar panels so instead what I did is I decreased the number of ways that I needed electricity and in doing so I could buy a system that only cost $1,000 to meet my electrical needs so that was just a really important lesson to me is that there's a whole spectrum of ways of doing things okay so this is what's called a compost toilet and so as I mentioned I didn't have any water for a lot of people around the world one flush of a toilet is their total amount of water they have for everything for an entire day and a lot of the times we see the systems around us and we just think they kind of work flawlessly which is what I generally used to think now when I was in Florida I would read a local newspaper and in the newspaper on the top headline it said 3 million gallons of raw sewage which would be poop and pee and everything else leaks into the local river and I was like wow 3 million gallons that's a lot and then under that it said 4th largest spill in 2 years so then I started to realize wow this is actually extremely normal I realized okay our systems aren't as flawless as I had thought so that was one of the reasons that I decided to have the compost toilet the other really big thing that I learned through all of this is that I would constantly come back to our lives today and see how easy and convenient they are how so many things that in the past would have been a life's work to try to accomplish and we can do it pretty much just with the click of a button and so I started to ask myself how convenient and what I kept coming back to is that it's because someone else is paying the burden the burden is being placed elsewhere so for example if you're driving a car and you just get in you put your foot on the gas pedal and you simply go like that and now you're going from 0 to 100 kilometers an hour with basically no work whatsoever so where is the burden being placed for that convenience so just to give a couple examples there's a 10,000 oil spills that happen per year routinely not as big as the ones you hear about in the news but 10,000 per year so that's where the burden is being placed in the oceans and everything that lives there and then the people who live next to the oil refineries they often have this is a lot of this is in like New Orleans and Texas they often have 2 to 4 times higher rates of cancer and respiratory diseases and people are dying living next to these places so that is another example of where the burden is being placed so that's what I realized with the compost toilet it was that basically I was just shipping off my waste for someone else to deal with and it was creating a problem and instead of creating a problem I composted it turned it into nutrients that could then grow fruit on fruit trees and it wasn't waste at all in permaculture there's a saying that waste is just a resource out of place in nature there is no such thing as waste so we're going to have questions at the end and if you have questions about this I'm happy to answer them there's also a book you can read called the human newer handbook it's written by a guy whose nickname is the Pope of poop and the Duke of duty and you can learn more about that okay so I mentioned at the beginning that when I first started dumpster diving there was someone back home who told me not to tell anyone that I was dumpster diving so this is her and I a year later I did start to tell people I did raise awareness about food waste and then we were together for four years so we were partners for four years so this is proof that you can eat the trash and have the girl too and but this is like this is a perfect example of one of the most important lessons that I learned and this is a lesson that I wish I would have learned exactly in the moment that you are in right now and the age that you are in now is simply not worry so much about what people think when I was your age I would spend about an hour a day in front of the mirror gelling my hair maybe putting on one outfit and not liking it and putting on another one and all of this was because I wanted to impress the people around me it was all because I was self-conscious and I was worried about what people would think about me and so I started to do a little math I've always been someone that isn't a statistics and I'm a logically brain person so I started to do some math in my mid-twenties and I calculated if I spend one hour every single day worrying about what people will think about me and preparing myself to match what I think other people want that adds up to over three years of my entire life going into that and that's enough time to basically get a university education that's enough time to put into all the hobbies and the passions that I have three entire years including sleeping hours so not sleeping it's like five years of my life going into that so at that time I decided I'm not going to worry what people think about me anymore it's a complete waste of time it's a waste of my energy and it's not creating what I want so instead what I decided to do is look at life through the lens of is this beneficial to my community is this beneficial to the earth and is this beneficial to myself and what that did is it set me completely free I no longer had to walk around trying to be something that I wasn't and the amount of freedom that that creates to truly just be yourself changes the way that you're able to do everything I just it's it's pretty much for me been one of the ultimate freedoms but also it's what's allowed me to be able to accomplish what I want to accomplish because there is no need to pass it through all these different lenses just simply is this going to improve the world around me and help me live the life that I want to live so if I could pass just you know one thing on to my younger self that would absolutely be probably the most important thing so I've done these food waste demonstrations in about 15 cities across the United States and I just want to show you a few of them this is Detroit Michigan this is Cleveland Ohio that's seven hours of dumpster diving this is San Diego California the demonstration is designed to show how much perfectly good food is going to waste and my intentions was never to feed people with this food from dumpsters because at the time I was worried well what if somebody got sick would I be responsible and so I always just set it up as a demonstration also my goal was to change the system not just feed 50 or 100 people at a time I wanted to do something that could really have an impact on the system but time and time again people would ask well what are you doing with all the food can we eat it a lot of people you thought I was selling it and I would always say no it's from the dumpster I'm not selling it and so people would always say can we eat it and so at first I would always say sure take some and then the problem that I had was before I even finished setting up like a quarter of it was gone so the demonstrations weren't even as big so what I started to do is I would say wait until 3 o'clock and then at 3 o'clock you can come get the food so this is before 3 o'clock and then this is 3 o'clock at about 15 seconds same exact location and you can see all the people taking the food so over this all of these demonstrations about 80 to 90% of all the food got eaten and over probably a thousand people ate food that I had collected from grocery store dumpsters so if I needed proof that this food was still good this was the proof for me seeing people from all walks of life all across the United States eating it and occasionally I'd get messages from people and they were never messages of oh Rob I got sick instead they were messages of them holding their sandwich from the ingredients from the dumpster and saying this is the best sandwich I've had in a long time so just to say again my message isn't to go dumpster diving my message is let's not put any of this food in the dumpsters in the first place my goal would be for dumpster diving to go extinct in my lifetime and I know some dumpster divers would be very very unhappy to hear that but the goal is let's simply not put this food in the dumpsters in the first place so for the last two years I was living in Orlando Florida and I had learned that I could eat I could live off food that was wasted from our global industrial food system I wanted if I could actually step outside of that system and really connect with the land and go a year without grocery stores or restaurants a year of growing and foraging all of my food so this is the tiny house that I built in Orlando it's built out of 99% second hand materials for $1300 and it's 10 by 10 so twice the size of my first one I didn't own any land so I turned people's front yards into gardens this is an example of one of the front yards I started with just grass and this is actually just three and a half months later how much food within just three and a half months it went from grass to growing more vegetables than me and the other people in the house could eat so I spent an entire year without grocery stores restaurants nothing packaged or processed nothing shipped long distances and I even grew my own medicine for the entire year and that was a beautiful experience I made without getting sick once and the ironic thing is two months later after having done this I've already been sick twice going back to eating food from the grocery store so for me it was a beautiful testament that it is possible but it's not about anyone else growing and foraging 100% of their food again it was just an extreme project to get people to think about their food so in closing you know I think a lot of people they ask you know okay Rob that all makes sense but you know you're one in seven billion people each of you is one in seven billion people we've got a lot of problems in the world today so a lot of people say well what's the point in even trying you know can I even make a difference and my response to that is absolutely yes it's worth trying and absolutely yes you can make a difference now I don't think that as individuals or even all of us in this room that we're going to solve all the world's problems but it still makes sense to me to do something and the reason why is because I believe that life matters I believe that my life matters I believe that the life of each of you in this room matters I believe that each species of the four to 20 million species that are earth matters so for me it doesn't necessarily matter what's going to happen 100 years from now 1000 years from now because if I can live in a way that improves the quality of life around me now then to me that's meaningful and that matters so I can't clean up all the trash in the ocean but I can work together with my community to have a beautiful river a beautiful lake where we can enjoy and the next generation can enjoy and that the other species that live there can enjoy and there's a billion people around the world who are hungry I can't solve world hunger but I can grow a garden and share it with someone in my community who wouldn't otherwise have access to healthy food so I can't solve world hungry but hunger but I can make sure that someone else has enough food and that doesn't change the world but that literally can change their world and the way that they're living their life so my hopes today is that you don't feel overwhelmed but instead you feel excited maybe you've thought of one positive change that you can make whether it's in your personal life or something you can start doing at school because you're at an amazing school that really wants to make positive changes and they need to be led by you the students and so something you can do at home here at school in your personal lives in the community and my hopes is that you'll write that change you want to make down and then you'll make that change and then when you've made that change then you can make another change and then when you've made that one then you can make another one and you can keep doing that for years to come until you become the change that you wish to see in the world thank you