Characteristics of a Future City – Wilderness, Farms & Smart.

Thanks to Darragh O'Connor and Cormac Staunton, I recently fulfilled a cherished ambition of mine by getting the opportunity to give a TED talk. 
My TEDx Galway presentation was entitled Characteristics of a Future City – Wilderness, Farms & Smart.
Click here to view it.
 
The talk is based on my personal experiences of living and working in Galway. It is about the urgent need for humanity especially urban dwellers to bring the rest of Nature back into our everyday lives. We have allowed 'civilisation', urbanisation, industrial farming, mineral extraction, consumerism and technology to scar the planet and to destroy so much of its species and their habitats. 
But even now in a time of accelerating destructive man-made climate change, I see hope in what ordinary individuals and communities in Galway and elsewhere are doing in order to bring the 'Jungle' into the Cities. 

For the first time in our history we should judge and develop technologies primarily on how they improve the Earth, its countless fascinating lifeforms, our own wellbeing and not on such requirements as 'efficiency', 'speed' and 'profit'. Nature is in our genes, and for 99% of our species existence on this planet we were more or less a benign planetary force. It is only relatively recently when we became 'civilised', circa 10,000 years ago with the development of urban settlements, that we started to become a self-centred malign phenomena. 

But if used wisely our human intellect can undo the great harm we have caused.
I hope that my talk will go some way to inspiring people to ensure that the Cities of the Future will not only be Smart but will also contain forests, wetlands, rivers, lakes, wildflower meadows and organic farms.