- [Announcer] "Sacred Ground" with Tim Daly is made possible by Patricia and Edwin Matthews through the New York Community Trust Progress Fund, by Glenmede Private Wealth, by the Murray & Susan Haber Charitable Foundation and by the following funders.

- Climate change is such an existential crisis that most us of us are stunned into silence, immobilized by the scale of what confronts us.

We look at the horrifying headlines and throw up our hands in resignation.

But "Sacred Ground" is here to bring you the good news.

We'll introduce you to climate champions, ordinary people who have become heroes by addressing the needs of a shifting landscape.

There are no quick solutions, but there are remarkable people creating new possibilities, a new path forward.

(upbeat music) (inquisitive music) We start our story with the first Earth Day in 1970 and the birth of the modern environmental movement.

- A unique day in American history is ending, a day set aside for a nationwide outpouring of mankind seeking its own survival.

Perhaps for a generation or more, it will be frighteningly costly to each of us to clean up the mess each of us has made, but the cost of not doing so is more frightening.

- [Tim] This was a declaration of a global problem.

We were damaging our own environment.

Activists believed we could do better.

The world was watching.

The movement began with both grassroots momentum and government support.

- We have passed new laws to protect the environment, and we have mobilized the power of public concern.

- [Tim] These high-minded ideals were soon challenged by global realities.

- The Middle East War produced developments all over the world today.

The oil-producing countries of the Arab world decided to use their oil as a political weapon.

- [Tim] Everyday living on a planet with four billion people was complicated.

Every solution introduced a new problem.

- We will also stress development of our rich coal reserves in an environmentally sound way.

We'll emphasize research on solar energy.

- [Tim] And the world continued to turn.

- Mr.

Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

(audience cheering and clapping) - [Tim] And as time marched on, the true scale of the crisis was revealed.

- The evidence that the Earth is warming by an amount which is too large to be a chance fluctuation represents a very strong case, in my opinion, that the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.

- [Tim] The words global warming entered the debate.

And while environmental disasters made the news, the world's attention was mainly focused elsewhere.

- Our objectives are clear.

Saddam Hussein's forces will leave Kuwait.

- [Tim] Years went by, elections were fought, and the problem remained.

(storm raging) Then, in 2005, Americans watched as Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

- [Reporter] Now a Category 5 storm with maximum sustained winds of 175 miles per hour.

- [Tim] The images broke open the climate debate, moving it beyond arguments over messaging toward the real human consequences already unfolding.

Just a few months after Katrina, Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," made Americans sit up and pay attention.

- Look how far above the natural cycle this is, and we've done that.

- [Tim] The climate policy ping-pong continued.

- Today we're announcing the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration.

- [Tim] More disasters followed.

- [Reporter] It started as a fiery accident, but when the Deepwater Horizon rig collapsed into the Gulf on April 22nd, it ruptured a pipe, allowing oil to begin flowing into the Gulf.

(upbeat music) - [Tim] Despite the wars and disasters, the movement was quietly working behind the scenes, building the foundation for change.

Rival countries were cooperating.

Possibility began to emerge.

And in 2015, nearly every nation on Earth gathered in Paris to face the climate crisis head on.

(birds singing) (light music) The story of that moment begins with its architect who was born to fight against remarkable odds.

- I'm Christiana Figueres.

I come from the wild and wonderful country of Costa Rica.

I have been in the struggle against the advance of climate change for four decades.

My father, Jose Figueres Ferrer, is considered the father of modern Costa Rica.

He was a simple farmer up in the mountains.

In the mid-'40s, the government that was in power in Costa Rica decided that they would not respect the result of democratic elections.

And my father went on to the radio to publicly warn the government that if they did that again, he would call for a revolution.

He was exiled.

He led the revolution, won the armed revolution.

He then immediately decided to disband two armies.

He asked his own revolutionary army to turn in the arms, and he disbanded the national army.

The second amazing thing that my father did is to take the budget that had been assigned to the army and allocate it to education and to the protection of our natural resources.

(birds singing) (light music) One of the places where I went with my parents was the rainforest of Monteverde, high up in the northern mountains in Costa Rica.

We happened to visit at the time in which the golden toad was in mating season.

I just fell in love with this toad because if you walk in the forest with moonlight and you see what you think are all of these little golden coins jumping, it is just a spectacle.

When I became a mother, I wanted to ensure that my two daughters would also fall in love with nature, and I wanted to take them to Monteverde.

I was never able to take them, because by the time my second daughter was born, that species had gone extinct.

And that is the reason why I dedicate my life to climate change, because I think that, as parents, we have the responsibility to turn over a better planet to future generations, not a diminished planet.

- [Tim] That perspective formed in the hills of Costa Rica would inspire her work on the global stage.

Christiana spent years working at the United Nations, building relationships with countries all over the world based on trust, transparency and a plan of shared responsibility.

When the world gathered in Paris in 2015, she led the ambitious negotiations.

- Dear friends, never before has a responsibility so great been in the hands of so few.

- Talks over the next two weeks are expected to become a turning point in the global debate over addressing the causes of a rapidly warming planet.

- My task was to invite governments to look at the destiny of each of their countries in a world of runaway climate change.

The world is looking to you.

The world is counting on you.

- The United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.

- [Reporter] And already positive signs, the most powerful attendees, China and the US, have negotiated joint climate action.

- [Tim] The Paris Agreement would become an unprecedented moment in the global effort to address climate change.

(president speaking in foreign language) (gavel banging) (attendees cheering) - The Paris Agreement is the first ever international environmental agreement that was adopted not by consensus, but by unanimity.

196 nations adopted, ratified, and then brought the agreement into legal standing.

Collectively, all nations of the world will decarbonize their individual economies, but also collectively the global economy, to reach what we call a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.

(attendees clapping) My father passed on in 1990, just as I was beginning to discover what I would dedicate my life to, and I have often asked myself, (crying) "What would my father say?"

I can't do it.

(laughing) Okay, I'm going to try again.

Because the lesson that was most important for him was that we be of service, that we dedicate our life to cultivating wellbeing for the great majority of people, dedicated to the common good, dedicated to justice, and especially dedicated to protecting the most vulnerable.

- [Tim] While the vote was passed unanimously, it was up to each nation to follow through on its commitments.

Those commitments would soon be tested.

- [Reporter] Donald J. Trump will become the 45th president of the United States, defeating Hillary Clinton in a campaign unlike anything we've seen in our lifetime.

- The United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.

- [Tim] A month later, "New York Magazine" published an article called "The Uninhabitable Earth" by author David Wallace-Wells, detailing the looming climate doomsday if governments around the world failed to take action.

The opening line reads, "It is, I promise, worse than you think."

- It struck me that a lot of what was baked into that research was much scarier than was being talked about in the mainstream media.

- Scientists in 2015, 2017, would talk about four or five degrees of warming as a business-as-usual scenario.

And that was quite alarming because they would also talk about that level of warming as potentially civilization ending.

If we look at those facts and become alarmed, we should allow ourselves to be alarmed and respond in kind.

- [Tim] This wake-up call echoed across a new generation of champions.

Despite political setbacks, the fight against climate change had global momentum.

- [Reporter] Millions walked out of classrooms today demanding action on the climate.

- Climate change is real.

- [Reporter] All following the lead of a shy Swedish teenager.

- We will do everything in our power to stop this crisis from getting worse.

(attendees cheering) - A lot more people out in the world, especially young people, really started to feel the incredible urgency of acting, and a mass movement grew up globally, basically to hold the world to account to the promises that it made during Paris.

And what followed was growing awareness that the future would be green.

(cymbals splashing) - [Tim] Then everything changed.

- The World Health Organization has declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.

- I think that our experience of that period really broke a lot of the commitment to climate as a first-order political priority, social priority.

- I want people to know that this is bad, people are dying.

- [Tim] As the pandemic dragged on, other crises demanded more immediate action.

(alarm blaring) Even as evidence of climate change mounted.

- 115 million Americans across 16 states tonight under hazardous air warnings and alerts, all of this from the Canadian wildfires.

- We're now living through a period in which once unthinkable climate disasters are happening quite regularly.

- [Reporter] Hurricane Helene has left in its wake a trail of death and destruction.

Officials in North Carolina say they were blinded by Helene's sheer intensity.

Homes swept away, restaurants and shops torn to pieces.

- [Reporter] This morning, the firestorm officials had feared becoming a reality with a third out-of-control wildfire exploding overnight in the Los Angeles area.

- We told ourselves not that long ago that we would never let disasters like this happen, that we would take action before the climate got so ragged.

And we watch them happen, we see the devastation and destruction, and then we choose to treat that as an acceptable level of disorder rather than see it as we did just a few years before, as a warning about how much we must do and how quickly.

(fire crackling) So that's all pretty bleak.

But there's a huge new set of effects on the ground too.

- [Tim] The old energy economy was beginning to crumble.

- The world is genuinely moving towards green energy at a pretty astonishing pace.

Last year, globally, 94% of all new power installed anywhere in the world was green.

But maybe the most exhilarating and exciting thing that's happened over the last few years is that green energy's gotten cheap enough that many of the world's poorest countries are moving quite, quite fast.

- [Tim] The seemingly unstoppable expansion of clean energy was driven in large part by cheap solar manufacturing from China.

- There was a kind of now famous story in Pakistan where, because of widespread blackouts, individual citizens bought solar panels from China, threw them on their roofs, and something like doubled the total electricity capacity of the country in a single year.

- Millions of citizens are abandoning the unreliable national grid in favor of cleaner, cheaper power.

Pakistan's solar contribution to the national energy mix now stands at a whooping 24% in the first five months of 2025, making it the country's largest energy source for the first time ever.

- Without any urging from the government, any spending from the government at all, millions of Pakistanis bought solar panels, installed them on their roofs, and brought themselves their own kind of energy independence and security.

(inquisitive music) (birds singing) - We're now solidly in the world of climate economics, and the economics of the clean technologies are winning hands down.

That means that the transition is irreversible, it is gaining speed and increasing in scale, not as fast as science would want it to, but it is definitely moving if not soon galloping in the right direction.

- And it's even true in a place like the United States, which remains a petrostate, we're the largest producer of oil and the largest producer of gas in the world.

And yet our investments in energy and our buildout here is dominated by green.

(birds singing) - We find ourselves at a very interesting (laughing) moment in which we are experiencing two realities that we have to hold in equal standing.

One reality is that, according to science, we should be already on a very decided descent of the greenhouse gas emissions, which cause climate change, and we are not there yet.

At the same time, we are today much farther ahead than we thought 10 years ago.

So we're both behind schedule and ahead of schedule.

(laughing) Change takes longer than you want, much longer than you intend, and then happens (finger snapping) much faster than you ever thought possible.

(rain pitter-pattering) - [Tim] The climate crisis is more dangerous than ever, but the work continues.

Recognizing that work, that positive momentum, may be critical to addressing the crisis.

Timon McPhearson is an educator who believes in emphasizing the good news.

- My name is Timon McPhearson.

- My name is Timon McPhearson.

I'm an urban ecologist, and I direct a research center here called the Urban Systems Lab at New York University.

One of the things I've seen with my students and I think we're seeing in the generation that my children are a part of is both an anxiety and an apathy.

- [Tim] Timon leads a team of scientists documenting bright spots for the Nature Record, a national report tracking the role of nature in the United States.

- Bright spots that can grow, scale, be replicated, and really blossom into a future that's more positive.

You know, more resilient, more equitable, all the things I think we want in our future.

It's absolutely fundamental that we tell positive stories.

I think we've got to be able to say, "Here's all the good stuff that's happening."

(inquisitive music) (traffic faintly whizzing) - [Tim] As an urban ecologist, he was quick to find examples in his own backyard.

- What a spot.

This is beautiful.

When I was in graduate school, I thought I was going to study some rare plant in Patagonia and be a hiker and kind of be happy like that for the rest of my life.

But it really hit me that the planetary challenges that we're facing are most relevant in urban places.

This is where people have the potential to change our relationship on the planet.

Just a couple of years ago, New York City passed a law to require every new building to either have a green roof or a solar roof.

These roofs can hold water.

That means when there's a heavy rainfall event, they're temporarily storing a certain amount of that water in the soils on this roof.

So stormwater absorption through green roof systems like this is an incredible climate adaptation benefit that green roofs provide.

They also cool the building, because incoming solar radiation that would normally penetrate through the roof require extra air conditioning, extra energy, extra potential carbon emissions, that is saved because this is providing cooling for the roof below it.

(upbeat music) - [Tim] Timon's team found bright spots in the oceans.

- One of the really amazing things that we've been seeing over the last couple decades is the recovery of fish stocks that used to be in total decline.

I remember here on the East Coast when you weren't allowed to fish for striped bass.

They were protected, it was a complete moratorium because the populations had been so overfished.

- [Reporter] That moratorium lasted into the '90s and that allowed striper numbers to rebound to some of their highest levels ever.

- [Tim] They found bright spots in efforts to mitigate the damage of human development.

- When you think about the United States, it is completely crisscrossed with the road network that we've been developed over the last century and more.

And habitat fragmentation is the most important fundamental challenge for biodiversity.

Species need to move around to find mates, to find nesting habitat or safe places to live and reproduce.

They have to be able to move around in order to survive and thrive.

- [Tim] The solution?

Massive construction projects throughout the country providing safe passage for wildlife.

- [Reporter] In the US, there are now around 1,500 wildlife crossing structures in 43 states.

In Wyoming, pronghorn run across Highway 191.

In Florida, panthers and alligators creep under I-75.

- [Tim] Timon and his team are even seeing bright spots in places once synonymous with manmade disaster.

- [Reporter] The greatest oil spill in American history now covers 29,000 square miles.

- The 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill was a damaging event for the entire Gulf ecosystem.

You may remember some of these videos of the oil covering birds and, you know, coating the beaches and the sea grass beds.

And we now have thriving bird populations, we have wetlands that are now functioning like they used to before.

The money from the BP settlement was really key to driving that investment in restoration of those systems.

There's so much we need to do to reduce the carbon emissions and address the climate challenge.

There's also incredible bright spots where there is positive work happening on the ground by communities, by Indigenous groups, by city leaders, even by federal governments.

That is investing in nature, that is investing in adaptation and that is creating positive change.

If we can harness that power of all of these positive stories, thousands of examples all across the country, then I think we have an amazing opportunity to meet the challenge to deal with the scale of the problem as it is.

- [Tim] History suggests something important.

The environmental movement has never been a simple story of victory or defeat.

It has been uneven, contested, non-linear, but successes have been made on the basis of years of hidden work.

Progress has come gradually, then suddenly.

Today, many of the conditions for rapid change are once again lining up.

Whether it's enough and whether it happens fast enough depends on what happens next.

- Warming is not all of our destiny.

It just determines the shape of the landscape on which we will build our future.

- Climate change requires us to reset our relationship with nature, to remember that we are not apart from nature, but a part of nature, that we're not here to extract, use and discard, that we're here to regenerate and protect, because without nature, we don't survive.

- I have teenagers, and I think about what kind of world they're going to live in when they're 30.

And it is going to be a very different world.

That seems very clear.

The question is, different in what way?

Is the dystopian futures that we are told on the news or even in our climate projections that seem likely, is that the future that they're going to inherit, or can we do better?

And I think we can do so much better.

So I want to tell those stories of where positive change is happening so that my kids can be inspired, so I can be inspired.

- I certainly am more optimistic about the future than I was a few years ago, but mostly I think there's much more to be determined.

And the story of our climate future and our human future will be written in the decades to come, when we learn how to, I hope, deal with the consequences.

(siren blaring) (traffic faintly whizzing) I would like to think that the lesson of that is still that we share a planet with eight billion others and we share responsibility for the future of that planet with eight billion others.

And we should do what we can to make sure that the future of that planet is comfortable rather than something approaching uninhabitable.

(birds singing) - I'm often asked who should assume the responsibility of addressing climate change.

The answer to that is pretty simple, everyone.

- Anybody, anywhere in the world, no matter how impotent they feel in the face of this enormous challenge, does still have something that they could contribute, which is their voice.

- Climate change headlines are often axioms of doom, but as we've seen, they obscure signposts of progress, seeds of hope, evidence of change.

Thanks for joining us today.

For "Sacred Ground," I'm Tim Daly.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Sacred Ground" with Tim Daley is made possible by Patricia and Edwin Matthews through the New York Community Trust Progress Fund, by Glenmede Private Wealth, by the Murray & Susan Haber Charitable Foundation, and by the following funders.

(bright music) (upbeat music)