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Wrapping up a jam-packed day at the Ceres Conference, Robert Redford took the stage Wednesday night in conversation with Sally Osberg, CEO of the Skoll Foundation. Redford opened by praising Ceres President Mindy Lubber and went on to tell many a captivating story, some related to climate change, some not.

“It’s all evolutionary,” Redford explained, “I started as an actor, acting led to producing my own movies, producing led to directing and success led to new opportunities” to work in the broader world towards greater environmental sustainability.

When asked about his mentors, Redford described a grade school teacher. As a kid he would draw stories during class, and couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. In anger, the teacher made Redford show the class what he was drawing (cowboys chasing Indians over a cliff while being bombed). That teacher realized his story-telling was a talent that should be nurtured and once a week she would let him show the class his drawings.

The most memorable story conveyed Redford’s humility and sense of humor. Redford had been asked to speak to a group of bankers in Utah. He wasn’t sure why he was there and ended up delivering an angry harangue. At the end, there was dead silence and everyone filed out. Redford was doubting himself and thinking he’d made a mistake.

As he was leaving, someone approached Redford and said “Appreciate your comments. I have one question — did you really jump off cliff in ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?’ ”

“That’s when I realized that what I say doesn’t matter,” he told the audience at the conference.

Osberg referred to Redford as “the quintessential social entrepreneur” given his work with the Sundance Festival, Channel and Catalog. “You must be proud” of your accomplishments, Osberg said. Redford laughed and said “I put my money where my mouth is, and I’m not a good businessman. Risk is a big part of my life.” Redford said his central interests are art, commerce and conservation — “Sundance is a triangle of this.”

Redford received applause when referring to the new administration in Washington, “Thank God we now have a change — we were desperately needing one.” But he sees change as more grassroots and community driven than administration-driven.

“I’d been beat up good for speaking about the environment. I’ve been considered a treehugger, granola, and worst of all an actor. People wonder, ‘what does he know?’ ” In the mid ’80s, Redford heard leaders in both the Soviet Union and the U.S. talking about global warming, clearly ahead of their time. So he brought the two groups together to discuss at a three-day conference at Sundance in 1989. He sent a document that came out of that conference to George Bush Sr., and it never saw the light of day. No one knew about it. “It was a good idea, but not at the right time.”

Continue reading on GreenBiz.com.

Denis Hayes, President and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation, kicked off today’s Ceres Conference in San Francisco with a reminder that no nation can solve climate problems on its own – we must come together as a species because everything is connected. North African dust has been correlated to hurricanes. We have all breathed an atom that was exhaled by Julius Caesar when he said “Et tu Brutus?”

Economic bubbles and ecological bubbles
Globalization has raised the stakes for both economic and ecological bubbles. “In America bubbles have to do with…delusions that mouse clicks can be monetized, and that my house can double in value every three years,” Hayes explained. But economic bubbles and today’s crisis will end – illiquidity is not irreversible.

Ecological bubbles on the other hand are not reversible. Ecological bubbles don’t bounce back. Today’s prices do not reflect ecological realities. We are undermining values of ecosystem services and not including it in our accounting. These costs that are treated as external are larger and more important than internal factors, and they have grown to awesome proportions. “Sooner or later, mother nature will break our kneecaps,” Hayes warned.

What should we do?

Hayes had three suggestions:

1) We need to reproduce within the planet’s carrying capacity.
We are overshooting our carrying capacity and we need to scale back population growth dramatically. Nature will do it for us in catastrophic ways.

2) Substitute craftsmanship for throughput.
We’ve created an economy which values consumption, rather value, quality and endurance. Today’s products are not designed to last. “My parents never used a credit card, nor did they have a mortgage. They didn’t buy much, but when they did they always bought the best that they could get,” Hayes told us. Today we are buying junk, “sawdust and glue furniture, which disintegrates quickly.” And the sad truth is that the faster wood moves from trees in the forest to the dump, the faster the global economy grows and prospers. Our economy is based on the willingness of Americans to buy junk they don’t need that they can’t afford. “In a world where we’ve run past resource limits, we need to place highest economic value on quality and endurance, not planned obsolescence.”

3) We need to temper the extremes of wealth and poverty.
Hayes explained: “I had dinner with Jared Diamond, author of Collapse, and I asked him ‘What is most important thing we need to do to postpone collapse?’ He said collapses most commonly occur when rich shield themselves from the consequences of their actions.” Until we can redistribute wealth more evenly, we will bounce from one bubble to another.

Originally posted to TriplePundit.