I'm from Detroit.
(Applause) A city that in the 1950s was the world's industrial giant, with a population of 1.8 million people and 140 square miles of land and infrastructure, used to support this booming, Midwestern urban center.
And now today, just a half a century later, Detroit is the poster child for urban decay.
Currently in Detroit, our population is under 700,000, of which 84 percent are African American, and due to decades of disinvestment and capital flight from the city into the suburbs, there is a scarcity in Detroit.
There is a scarcity of retail, more specifically, fresh food retail, resulting in a city where 70 percent of Detroiters are obese and overweight, and they struggle.
They struggle to access nutritious food that they need, that they need to stay healthy, that they need to prevent premature illness and diet-related diseases.
Far too many Detroiters live closer to a fast food restaurant or to a convenience store, or to a gas station where they have to shop for food than they do a full-service supermarket.
And this is not good news about the city of Detroit, but this is the news and the story that Detroiters intend to change.
No, I'm going to take that back.
This is the story that Detroiters are changing, through urban agriculture and food entrepreneurship.
Here's the thing: because of Detroit's recent history, it now finds itself with some very unique assets, open land being one of them.
Experts say that the entire cities of Boston, San Francisco, and the borough of Manhattan will fit in the land area of the city of Detroit.
They further go on to say that 40 square miles of the city is vacant.
That's a quarter to a third of the city, and with that level of emptiness, it creates a landscape unlike any other big city.
So Detroit has this -- open land, fertile soil, proximity to water, willing labor and a desperate demand for healthy, fresh food.
All of this has created a people-powered grassroots movement of people in Detroit who are transforming this city from what was the capital of American industry into an agrarian paradise.
(Applause) You know, I think, out of all the cities in the world, Detroit, Michigan, is best positioned to serve as the world's urban exemplar of food security and sustainable development.
In Detroit, we have over 1,500, yes, 1,500 gardens and farms located all across the city today.
And these aren't plots of land where we're just growing tomatoes and carrots either.
You understand, urban agriculture in Detroit is all about community, because we grow together.
So these spaces are spaces of conviviality.
These spaces are places where we're building social cohesion as well as providing healthy, fresh food to our friends, our families and our neighbors.
Come walk with me.
I want to take you through a few Detroit neighborhoods, and I want you to see what it looks like when you empower local leadership, and when you support grassroots movements of folks who are moving the needle in low-income communities and people of color.
Our first stop, Oakland Avenue Farms.
Oakland Avenue Farms is located in Detroit's North End neighborhood.
Oakland Avenue Farms is transforming into a five-acre landscape combining art, architecture, sustainable ecologies and new market practices.
In the truest sense of the word, this is what agriculture looks like in the city of Detroit.
I've had the opportunity to work with Oakland Avenue Farms in hosting Detroit-grown and made farm-to-table dinners.
These are dinners where we bring folks onto the farm, we give them plenty of time and opportunity to meet and greet and talk to the grower, and then they're taken on a farm tour.
And then afterwards, they're treated to a farm-to-table meal prepared by a chef who showcases all the produce on the farm right at the peak of its freshness.
We do that.
We bring people onto the farm, we have folks sitting around a table, because we want to change people's relationship to food.
We want them to know exactly where their food comes from that is grown on that farm that's on the plate.
My second stop, I'm going to take you on the west side of Detroit, to the Brightmoor neighborhood.
Now, Brightmoor is a lower-income community in Detroit.
There's about 13,000 residents in Brightmoor.
They decided to take a block-by-block-by-block strategy.
So within the neighborhood of Brightmoor, you'll find a 21-block microneighborhood called Brightmoor Farmway.
Now, what was a notorious, unsafe, underserved community has transformed into a welcoming, beautiful, safe farmway, lush with parks and gardens and farms and greenhouses.
This tight-knit community also came together recently, and they purchased an abandoned building, an abandoned building that was in disrepair and in foreclosure.
And with the help of friends and families and volunteers, they were able to take down the bulletproof glass, they were able to clean up the grounds and they transformed that building into a community kitchen, into a cafe, into a storefront.
Now the farmers and the food artisans who live in Brightmoor, they have a place where they can make and sell their product.
And the people in the community have some place where they can buy healthy, fresh food.
Urban agriculture -- and this is my third example -- can be used as a way to lift up the business cooperative model.
The 1,500 farms and gardens I told you about earlier?
Keep Growing Detroit is a nonprofit organization that had a lot to do with those farms.
They distributed last year 70,000 packets of seeds and a quarter of a million transplants, and as a result of that last year, 550,000 pounds of produce was grown in the city of Detroit.
(Applause) But aside from all of that, they also manage and operate a cooperative.
It's called Grown in Detroit.
It consists of about 70 farmers, small farmers.
They all grow, and they sell together.
They grow fruits, they grow vegetables, they grow flowers, they grow herbs in healthy soil, free of chemicals, pesticides, fertilizers, genetically modified products -- healthy food.
And when their product is sold all over the city of Detroit in local markets, they get a hundred percent of the proceeds from the sale.
In a city like Detroit, where far too many, far too many African Americans are dying as a result of diet-related diseases, restaurants, they have a huge role to play in increasing healthy food access in the city of Detroit, culturally appropriate restaurants.
Enter Detroit Vegan Soul.
Yes, we have a vegan soul food restaurant in the city of Detroit.
(Applause) Yes, yes.
Detroit Vegan Soul is providing Detroiters the opportunity to eat more plant-based meals and they've received an overwhelming response from Detroiters.
Detroiters are hungry for culturally appropriate, fresh, delicious food.
That's why we built a nonprofit organization called FoodLab Detroit, to help small neighborhood burgeoning food entrepreneurs start and scale healthy food businesses.
FoodLab provides these entrepreneurs incubation, hands-on education, workshops, technical assistance, access to industry experts so that they can grow and scale.
They're very small businesses, but last year, they had a combined revenue of over 7.5 million dollars, and they provided 252 jobs.
Listen.
(Applause) These are just a few examples on how you expand opportunities so that everybody can participate and prosper, particularly those who come from neighborhoods that have been historically excluded from these types of opportunities.
I know, I know.
My city is a long way from succeeding.
We're still struggling, and I'm not going to stand here on this stage and tell you that all of Detroit's problems and all of Detroit's challenges are going to be solved through urban agriculture.
I'm not going to do that, but I will tell you this: urban agriculture has Detroit thinking about its city now in a different way, a city that can be both urban and rural.
And yes, I know, these stories are small, these stories are neighborhood-based stories, but these stories are powerful.
They're powerful because I'm showing you how we're creating a new society left vacant in the places and the spaces that was disintegration from the old.
They're powerful stories because they're stories about love, the love that Detroiters have for one another, the love that we have for our community, the love that we have for Mother Earth, but more importantly, these stories are stories on how devastation, despair, decay never ever get the last word in the city of Detroit.
When hundreds of thousands of people left Detroit, and they left us for dead, those who stayed had hope.
They held on to hope.
They never gave up.
They always kept fighting.
And listen, I know, transforming a big city like Detroit to one that is prosperous, one that's functional, one that's healthy, one that's inclusive, one that provides opportunities for all, I know it's tough, I know it's challenging, I know it's hard.
But I just believe that if we start strengthening the social fabric of our communities, and if we kickstart economic opportunities in our most vulnerable neighborhoods, it all starts with healthy, accessible, delicious, culturally appropriate food.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you.
Ever since I can remember, African elephants have filled me with a sense of complete awe.
They are the largest land mammal alive today on planet Earth, weighing up to seven tons, standing three and a half meters tall at the shoulder.
They can eat up to 400 kilos of food in a day, and they disperse vital plant seeds across thousands of kilometers during their 50-to-60-year life span.
Central to their compassionate and complex society are the matriarchs.
These female, strong leaders nurture the young and navigate their way through the challenges of the African bush to find food, water and security.
Their societies are so complex, we're yet to still fully tease apart how they communicate, how they verbalize to each other, how their dialects work.
And we don't really understand yet how they navigate the landscape, remembering the safest places to cross a river.
I'm pretty sure that like me, most of you in this room have a similar positive emotional response to these most magnificent of all animals.
It's really hard not to have watched a documentary, learned about their intelligence or, if you've been lucky, to see them for yourselves on safari in the wild.
But I wonder how many of you have been truly, utterly terrified by them.
I was lucky to be brought up in Southern Africa by two teacher parents who had long holidays but very short budgets.
And so we used to take our old Ford Cortina Estate, and with my sister, we'd pile in the back, take our tents and go camping in the different game reserves in Southern Africa.
It really was heaven for a young, budding zoologist like myself.
But I remember even at that young age that I found the tall electric fences blocking off the game parks quite divisive.
Sure, they were keeping elephants out of the communities, but they also kept communities out of their wild spaces.
It really was quite a challenge to me at that young age.
It was only when I moved to Kenya at the age of 14, when I got to connect to the vast, wild open spaces of East Africa.
And it is here now that I feel truly, instinctively, kayla30@example.org.
I spent many, many happy years studying elephant behavior in a tent, in Samburu National Reserve, under the guideship of professor Fritz Vollrath and Iain Douglas-Hamilton, studying for my PhD and understanding the complexities of elephant societies.
But now, in my role as head of the human-elephant coexistence program for Save the Elephants, we're seeing so much change happening so fast that it's urged a change in some of our research programs.
No longer can we just sit and understand elephant societies or study just how to stop the ivory trade, which is horrific and still ongoing.
We're having to change our resources more and more to look at this rising problem of human-elephant conflict, as people and pachyderms compete for space and resources.
It was only as recently as the 1970s that we used to have 1.2 million elephants roaming across Africa.
Today, we're edging closer to only having 400,000 left.
And at the same time period, the human population has quadrupled, and the land is being fragmented at such a pace that it's really hard to keep up with.
Too often, these migrating elephants end up stuck inside communities, looking for food and water but ending up breaking open water tanks, breaking pipes and, of course, breaking into food stores for food.
It's really a huge challenge.
Can you imagine the terror of an elephant literally ripping the roof off your mud hut in the middle of the night and having to hold your children away as the trunk reaches in, looking for food in the pitch dark?
These elephants also trample and eat crops, and this is traditionally eroding away that tolerance that people used to have for elephants.
And sadly, we're losing these animals by the day and, in some countries, by the hour -- to not only ivory poaching but this rapid rise in human-elephant conflict as they compete for space and resources.
It's a massive challenge.
I mean, how do you keep seven-ton pachyderms, that often come in groups of 10 or 12, out of these very small rural farms when you're dealing with people who are living on the very edge of poverty?
They don't have big budgets.
How do you resolve this issue?
Well, one issue is, you can just start to build electric fences, and this is happening across Africa, we're seeing this more and more.
But they are dividing up areas and blocking corridors.
And I'm telling you, these elephants don't think much of it either, particularly if they're blocking a really special water hole where they need water, or if there's a very attractive female on the other side.
It doesn't take long to knock down one of these poles.
And as soon as there's a gap in the fence, they go back, talk to their mates and suddenly they're all through, and now you have 12 elephants on the community side of the fence.
And now you're really in trouble.
People keep trying to come up with new designs for electric fences.
Well, these elephants don't think much of those either.
(Laughter) So rather than having these hard-line, straight, electric, really divisive migratory-blocking fences, there must be other ways to look at this challenge.
I'm much more interested in holistic and natural methods to keep elephants and people apart where necessary.
Simply talking to people, talking to rural pastoralists in northern Kenya who have so much knowledge about the bush, we discovered this story that they had that elephants would not feed on trees that had wild beehives in them.
Now this was an interesting story.
As the elephants were foraging on the tree, they would break branches and perhaps break open a wild beehive.
And those bees would fly out of their natural nests and sting the elephants.
Now if the elephants got stung, perhaps they would remember that this tree was dangerous and they wouldn't come back to that same site.
It seems impossible that they could be stung through their thick skin -- elephant skin is around two centimeters thick.
But it seems that they sting them around the watery areas, around the eyes, behind the ears, in the mouth, up the trunk.
You can imagine they would remember that very quickly.
And it's not really one sting that they're scared of.
African bees have a phenomenal ability: when they sting in one site, they release a pheromone that triggers the rest of the bees to come and sting the same site.
So it's not one beesting that they're scared of -- it's perhaps thousands of beestings, coming to sting in the same area -- that they're afraid of.
And of course, a good matriarch would always keep her young away from such a threat.
Young calves have much thinner skins, and it's potential that they could be stung through their thinner skins.
So for my PhD, I had this unusual challenge of trying to work out how African elephants and African bees would interact, when the theory was that they wouldn't kayla30@example.org.
How was I going to study this?
Well, what I did was I took the sound of disturbed African honey bees, and I played it back to elephants resting under trees through a wireless speaker system, so I could understand how they would react as if there were wild bees in the area.
And it turns out that they react quite dramatically to the sound of African wild bees.
Here we are, playing the bee sounds back to this amazing group of elephants.
You can see the ears going up, going out, they're turning their heads from side to side, one elephant is flicking her trunk to try and smell.
There's another elephant that kicks one of calves on the ground to tell it to get up as if there is a threat.
And one elephant triggers a retreat, and soon the whole family of elephants are running after her across the savannah in a cloud of dust.
(Sound of bees buzzing) (Sound of bees ends) Now I've done this experiment many, many times, and the elephants almost always flee.
Not only do they run away, but they dust themselves as they're running, as if to knock bees out of the air.
And we placed infrasonic microphones around the elephants as we did these experiments.
And it turns out they're communicating to each other in infrasonic rumbles to warn each other of the threat of bees and to stay away from the area.
So these behavioral discoveries really helped us understand how elephants would react should they hear or see bee sounds.
This led me to invent a novel design for a beehive fence, which we are now building around small, one-to-two-acre farms on the most vulnerable frontline areas of Africa where humans and elephants are competing for space.
These beehive fences are very, very simple.
We use 12 beehives and 12 dummy hives to protect one acre of farmland.
Now a dummy hive is simply a piece of plywood which we cut into squares, paint yellow and hang in between the hives.
We're basically tricking the elephants into thinking there are more beehives than there really are.
And of course, it literally halves the cost of the fence.
So there's a hive and a dummy hive and a beehive and now dummy hive, every 10 meters around the outside boundary.
They're held up by posts with a shade roof to protect the bees, and they're interconnected with a simple piece of plain wire, which goes all the way around, connecting the hives.
So if an elephant tries to enter the farm, he will avoid the beehive at all cost, but he might try and push through between the hive and the dummy hive, causing all the beehives to swing as the wire hits his chest.
And as we know from our research work, this will cause the elephants to flee and run away -- and hopefully remember not to come back to that risky area.
The bees swarm out of the hive, and they really scare the elephants away.
These beehive fences we're studying using things like camera traps to help us understand how elephants are responding to them at night time, which is when most of the crop raiding occurs.
And we found in our study farms that we're keeping up to 80 percent of elephants outside of the boundaries of these farms.
And the bees and the beehive fences are also pollinating the fields.
So we're having a great reduction both in elephant crop raids and a boost in yield through the pollination services that the bees are giving to the crops themselves.
The strength of the beehive fences is really important -- the colonies have to be very strong.
So we're trying to help farmers grow pollinator-friendly crops to boost their hives, boost the strength of their bees and, of course, produce the most amazing honey.
This honey is so valuable as an extra livelihood income for the farmers.
It's a healthy alternative to sugar, and in our community, it's a very valuable present to give a mother-in-law, which makes it almost priceless.
(Laughter) We now bottle up this honey, and we've called this wild beautiful honey Elephant-Friendly Honey.
It is a fun name, but it also attracts attention to our project and helps people understand what we're trying to do to save elephants.
We're working now with so many women in over 60 human-elephant conflict sites in 19 countries in Africa and Asia to build these beehive fences, working very, very closely with so many farmers but particularly now with women farmers, helping them to live better in harmony with elephants.
One of the things we're trying to do is develop a toolbox of options to live in better harmony with these massive pachyderms.
One of those issues is to try and get farmers, and women in particular, to think different about what they're planting inside their farms as well.
So we're looking at planting crops that elephants don't particularly want to eat, like chillies, ginger, Moringa, sunflowers.
And of course, the bees and the beehive fences love these crops too, because they have beautiful flowers.
One of these plants is a spiky plant called sisal -- you may know this here as jute.
And this amazing plant can be stripped down and turned into a weaving product.
We're working with these amazing women now who live daily with the challenges of elephants to use this plant to weave into baskets to provide an alternative income for them.
We've just started construction only three weeks ago on a women's enterprise center where we're going to be working with these women not only as expert beekeepers but as amazing basket weavers; they're going to be processing chili oils, sunflower oils, making lip balms and honey, and we're somewhere on our way to helping these participating farmers live with better eco-generating projects that live and work better with living with elephants.
So whether it's matriarchs or mothers or researchers like myself, I do see more women coming to the forefront now to think differently and more boldly about the challenges that we face.
With more innovation, and perhaps with some more empathy towards each other, I do believe we can move from a state of conflict with elephants to true coexistence.
Thank you.
(Applause)