 We live in a remarkable time, the era of the Anthropocene. It's an era of dramatic human shaping of the planet. These figure depicts nine critical planetary boundaries, which we calculated to estimate a safe operating space for humanity. Inside these boundaries, Earth's critical systems are more likely to remain stable. Yet we've already crossed four of the nine planetary boundaries. This map of where we've crossed one of those boundaries for phosphorus shows that the global boundaries mask considerable regional heterogeneity. They also take a largely biophysical approach to problems that inherently are ecological, economic, social, and biophysical together. By contrast, solutions to these complex problems are often local or multi-scaler, and they inherently integrate across those complex economies, ecologies, and societies. And my work at McGill is based on the idea that by collecting examples of these success stories, which we call bright spots or seeds of a good Anthropocene, by understanding what makes them successful, we can help build better human-environment relationships that stay within planetary boundaries. So a good example of this is work that was done by Josh Sinner. He looked at bright spots and coral reefs. What he found was really interesting. The coral reefs that were bright spots and that they harbored healthier fish populations weren't ones that were remote or where fishing had been banned. Instead, they were ones where societies were integrated into the reefs and had built social norms and institutions to help manage them more efficiently. We're collecting these bright spots from around the world. They're existing initiatives. They have a variety of world views and approaches, values about what the world should look like. But they're all examples of success stories of human-environment relationships. For example, one of our bright spots is called Health and Harmony. It's a project in Indonesian Borneo that works to reconnect healthy forests with healthy people. And they do that by providing free health care to communities in exchange for commitments to reduce deforestation. And in the areas where they work, they've seen a 68% decrease in illegal logging and an improvement in all human health indicators. So far, we've collected about 500 of these bright spots from all around the world. We've built a database of information about those bright spots. And that database includes information about the issues that are being addressed, the novel solutions that are being applied, and what we think makes these bright spots so successful in the places where they're working. If we look at those bright spots in detail, we see that they take a number of different approaches. So some, for example, use novel design and technology to reduce ecological footprints. Other ones use local approaches to improve sustainable agriculture, work regionally to improve access to power or resources, or change worldviews through novel educational formats. They tend to cluster around six different critical ideas like green urbanism and agroecology. And when we look deeper at what makes them successful, we find a few things. For one thing, like health and harmony, they're reconnecting natural and human ecosystems that have been ruptured by global change. And for another, they're reconnecting people to people and helping build stronger communities. So we wondered whether we could take those seeds in addition to just understanding what makes transformation successful and think about as we move from the past through the present and into the future, could we use them collectively to envision more positive futures, better anthropocene. The scientific bodies and governing bodies that are responsible for critical global issues like climate change, which is the IPCC, or the ecological future of the planet, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, have spent decades building scenarios, trying to understand what the future of the planet is and how the kinds of decisions that we're making today are going to lead to different sorts of futures on the planet. Thus far, most of their attempts have led either to these sort of dystopian visions of hardship and collapse on the one hand or to these sort of utopian fantasies that overestimate the power of mainstream approaches to create the kind of real change that's needed to get to those visions of a better anthropocene. So if we want to build a world that stays within the planetary boundaries, it's going to require that we understand how these complex systems of economies, ecologies, and societies are interlinked and that we use that understanding to help shift them towards a better system that stays within these planetary boundaries. And that's going to require some pretty significant change. But that change is going to be based on the world of today. And we see our seeds of a better anthropocene, our bright spots, as a sort of pocket of a better future that's already in existence today. And as pockets of that better future, we think that we can use them to not only understand how transformation and change happens, but to build better visions of future pathways. So it's been said that we can't build a world that we can't even imagine. So what I want to know from you all today is what's your seed of a good anthropocene and how can our seeds collectively help us envision a better future? Thank you.