by Liz Clift

One of the gifts of TED talks is that you can learn a lot about a concept, idea, or experience in a fairly short amount of time. This may spark your interest enough to do further research on your own, provide fodder for a dinner conversation, help you reimagine the world, or reconsider your own preconceptions and biases about a particular topic.

Every so often, we post a list of TED talks we’ve especially enjoyed that are (at least roughly) related to our line of work, which we think you may enjoy as well. Here are five more we think you’ll enjoy.

In The Magic Ingredient that Brings Pixar Movies to Life (Danielle Feinberg, ~12 minutes), Feinberg discusses how the movie Finding Nemo creates a believable world that an audience can immerse themselves in (and understand some more abstract concepts, such as evoking sadness because of pollution in the Sydney Harbor or creating a more visual East Australian Current). This discussion of color and lighting can be applied to how we communicate difficult concepts to audiences, and serves as a good reminder for how we can get strangled by science when we remove it from art. Feinberg says, “It’s this interweaving of art and science that elevates the world to a place of wonder, a place with soul, a place we can believe in.”

What would a symphony of barometric pressure, wind, and temperature sound like? If you watch Art Made of Storms (Nathalie Miebach, ~4 minutes), you’ll have the opportunity to find out. As you know, if you’re a long-time reader of our blog, we’re always interested in unusual ways to convey (often dry) data and this is another great example—and she also creates 3-D models that show behavior relationships that might not be evidentif you’re just studying graphs.

Have we limited our idea of nature too much? Emma Marris, in Nature is Everywhere – We Just Need to Learn to See It (~16 minutes) argues that all landscapes are humanized to some degree, and that the results of our altering ecosystems (and the pure fact of animal extinctions) has changed landscapes. Marris proposes that if we define nature by where life is thriving, then we can see nature all around us, including in urban landscapes—which is important since 71% of people in the US live within a 10-minute walk of a city park. If we redefine nature to include that which we can touch, including the nature right around us, then we can inspire people to care.

Why Wildfires Have Gotten Worse – And What We Can Do About It (Paul Hessberg, ~14 minutes) examines the reasons megafires have become more common and explores the ways that we might escape the current trajectory we’re on in terms of fire management and patterns of development. Hessberg argues for “patchy” forests, meaning multi-age forests, with a combination of closed and open canopies as well as meadows, and for greater awareness of where we build.

An Economic Case for Saving the Planet (Naoko Ishii, ~14 minutes) In this talk, Ishii discusses how to avoid the tragedy of the commons, by accepting that our economies are no longer local and that the earth does not have unlimited capacity to self-repair. Ishii argues for green cities, changing our energy systems, changing our consumption patterns, and reimagining our food systems.