These 10 TED Talks May Reshape The Way You Think About The Environment

We've curated the best green TED talks, which put a new spin on environmental issues. From the fathoms below, to the skies above - there's always something new to learn.

10. Bertrand Piccard’s Solar Powered Adventure

"The most renewable energy we have is our own potential and our own passion."

9. Asha de Vos: Why You Should Care About Whale Poo

“Unfortunately, many people still think that whale conservationists like myself do what we do only because these creatures are charismatic and beautiful. This is actually a disservice because whales are ecosystem engineers. They help maintain the stability and health of the oceans, and even provide services to human society.”

8. Al Gore: Averting The Climate Crisis

"This is not a political issue. Again, the Republicans here — this shouldn't be partisan. You have more influence than some of us who are Democrats do. This is an opportunity. Not just this, but connected to the ideas that are here, to bring more coherence to them. We are one.”

7. Tristram Stuart: The Global Food Waste Scandal

"Where do those crusts go? This is the answer, unfortunately: 13,000 slices of fresh bread coming out of this one single factory every single day. Day-fresh bread. In the same year that I visited this factory, I went to Pakistan, where people in 2008 were going hungry as a result of a squeeze on global food supplies. We contribute to that squeeze by depositing food in bins here in Britain and elsewhere in the world. We take food off the market shelves that hungry people depend on.”

6. Shubhendu Sharma: How To Grow A Tiny Forest Anywhere

“By sharing, we can actually bring back our native forests. Now, when you go back home, if you see a barren piece of land, do remember that it can be a potential forest.”

5. Margaret Wertheim: The Beautiful Math Of Coral

“It turns out there is a very good reason why we are crocheting it because many organisms in coral reefs have a very particular kind of structure.The frilly crenulated forms that you see in corals, and kelps, and sponges and nudibranchs, is a form of geometry known as hyperbolic geometry. And the only way that mathematicians know how to model this structure is with crochet. It happens to be a fact. It's almost impossible to model this structure any other way, and it's almost impossible to do it on computers.“

4. Topher White: What Can Save The Rainforest? Your Used Cell Phone

"Deforestation accounts for more greenhouse gas than all of the world's planes, trains, cars, trucks and ships combined. It's the second highest contributor to climate change. Also, according to Interpol, as much as 90 percent of the logging that takes place in the rainforest is illegal logging.”

3. Mark Bittman: What’s Wrong With What We Eat

"Start with the notion that global warming is not only real, but dangerous. Since every scientist in the world now believes this, and even President Bush has seen the light, or pretends to, we can take this as a given.”

2. Sylvia Earle: My Wish: Protect Our Oceans

"The poet Auden said, ‘Thousands have lived without love; none without water.’ Ninety-seven percent of Earth's water is ocean. No blue, no green. If you think the ocean isn't important, imagine Earth without it.”

1. Elon Musk: The Mind Behind Tesla, Spacex, and SolarCity

“We've got this giant fusion generator in the sky called the sun, and we just need to tap a little bit of that energy for purposes of human civilization. What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.”