Racing Extinction Page #7

l mean, I thought, "Well,

there's enough out there.

"Somebody's gonna do something

to save this animal."

This animal, it wasn't just

the last of its species,

it was the last of

an entire family of cetaceans.

So l thought,

"Humans, somebody, somewhere,

"has got to go out

and save these animals.

"They have to,

because they're dying off."

They're all gone now.

They went extinct.

ln my lifetime

they went extinct. So...

We always think that

there's gonna be somebody else

around to save these animals.

This field is

one of the last places on Earth

where you can see

a Florida grasshopper sparrow.

And there's fewer males

singing every year.

We're roughly around

20 sparrows a year.

From 1 50 to 20,

so it's getting harder every

year to find the bird.

Did you hear something?

That's a grasshopper sparrow.

Phase-out is a term you hear

sometimes by zoo-keepers.

When a species is

no longer viable in captivity,

they think about phasing it out.

Just kind of slip off

into extinction.

There he is.

There, you got him, you got him.

Right there.

You'll never

phase out an elephant

or a panda or a rhino.

But, you know,

if it's a small, brown bird,

how are you ever gonna get

people excited about that?

My pictures of the sparrow ended

up on the cover ofAudubon.

And when the U.S. Fish

& Wildlife Service saw that,

they went from allocating

$30,000 a year

towards the grasshopper sparrow...

Looking good.

...to about $1 .3 million

this year to try to study it

and turn things around

for this bird.

There he goes.

To me, photography

isn't just about showing

somebody how beautiful

something is.

It's a weapon.

Remember what Ady Gil was able

to do with that little projector

in front of the Hump?

What he was able to achieve.

I thought, "Well,

how can we scale this up?"

When we dream,

we don't dream inside of a box.

We dream inside of worlds.

Early photographs were circular.

Even early TVs were circular.

But to make more

out of the medium,

there was a decision made

to crop it into a box.

And the box has a lot to do with

the way we think.

My way has always been

blowing up the medium

into a million pieces...

...and letting it become

something else.

Travis has done projections on

iconic buildings all over the world.

My fantasy would be

to take the work

of my photographer friends

at National Geographic

and amplify their message

by orders of magnitude.

If we would have just

had, like, a whale going by...

...and then it jumps off

into some other building.

It'd be beautiful.

I still love the idea

of sharks on Wall Street.

What do you think?

Yeah. No problem.

80% of the greenhouse gases

that are caused by cities

are caused

by commercial buildings.

Tony Malkin, the guy that owns

the Empire State Building,

probably the most iconic

building in the world,

and he's greened it.

Everyone had written off

the Empire State Building

as outmoded and obsolete.

We retrofitted

6,500 windows,

replaced all the lights

with LEDs,

redid the heating

and cooling systems.

From that, we actually

saved $4.4 million a year.

The best way to

move the needle,

when people are talking

about the environment,

is the bottom line.

l like to project

into the woods.

Try to see

the whole building?

Yeah, we'd see

the whole building.

And we could also, like,

the mobile idea,

where we can mount projectors

onto trucks

and just drive with them.

That would be cool.

Travis had

drawn up an illustration

of a mobile

projection vehicle.

Just looking at the plans,

it opened up a whole new world

of possibility.

It can't just be

the environmental activists

that care about

getting off of fossil fuels.

Everybody has to become

a part of it.

I heard that

there's this race car driver

that was an environmentalist

in a sport

that traditionally doesn't care

about the environment.

So, like,

a living contradiction.

When I go to

the sports-marketing companies

and l say,

"Can you help me find sponsors?"

And then l give them the list

of people I won't work with--

No fossil fuels, no oil,

no coal, no meat,

no people who tested on animals,

no fur, no leather.

They just look at me like...

"I don't know how you

want us to help you."

Leilani MUnter

has just passed five cars

in the last lap and a half,

and she is real impressive...

Sometimes,

I have an environmentalist say,

"Well, if you were really

an environmentalist, you know,

"you'd be racing a bike."

And the problem with that

is then I wouldn't have

75 million people paying

attention to my sport.

Thank you.

You look at a guy

like Elon Musk.

He builds reusable rocket ships

to supply the space station.

He's the biggest installer

of solar in America,

and he built the best-rated car

ever made, and it's electric.

Leilani knew Elon Musk.

l think we are currently doing

something very, very dumb,

which is to run this experiment

on how much CO2

the oceans and atmosphere

can hold.

In order to have a future

that does not result

in an environmental catastrophe,

followed by economic collapse,

which is what would occur

if we didn't get off oil.

That's why we have to have

electric cars.

I think we want to put in

an order for a car today.

Excellent. Well, take one.

All right. Go ahead.

Yeah.

It's pretty quick.

Is this gonna go that fast

with 1 05 pounds on it?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You know, I mean,

the focal length on it is crazy,

but you'll be able to

shoot really far with it.

You can zoom hundreds

of feet from something

or like 1 ,000 feet

and scale it.

Thousands of feet

with this?

Yeah.

About how far

will these project?

A mile.

Now, I'm building one

for you guys

that's three times

louder than this.

Suddenly, there's

just this amazing sound.

You can't hear that?

We've taken inspiration from

ocean creatures, like plankton,

cuttlefish, that use the light

as a communication device

or a camouflage, and added an

electro-luminescent paint job.

lncredible.

With the mobile projection,

we can go anywhere

we want with it.

We can take it to the highways.

We can take it to big buildings.

We can take it to the streets.

And we'll be able to project

CO2 emissions in real time

out of the projector

of the back of the vehicle

while Leilani's driving.

So, that's legal.

That's legal?

Until you push that.

That works, right?

That's legal.

Okay, it's ready to go, boss.

My feeling is that

by bringing nature to the city,

we're hopefully able

to inspire people

to actually help save

these creatures.

There's a lot of

species that need protection.

Most species that are deserving

never get listed.

After a four-year campaign,

we finally managed

to get mantas on the docket

at the 201 3 CITES meeting.

So, what l want to

show you here is a video

that shows what we're doing.

Most people say,

you can't beat money.

You can't beat politics.

You can't beat those things

with just hope and inspiration.

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