HATCH Podcast Series – Episode 30: XPRIZE Rainforest
Maybe it’s all about where you look. Our current social landscape is rife with outlets, credible and otherwise, for every form of information — news stations, social media platforms, print and digital publications, radio, and television all offer a peek into the pot, the swirling cauldron of verifiable facts and blatant misinformation, covert agendas and inspired mayhem, abject disassociation and twinkly-eyed optimism. It’s all there, and there’s no impartial, equitable filter that isn’t its own contrivance. So, we look where we’re directed. Algorithms slow the flow of the gushing river to a palatable trickle while “news” agencies cater to niche political perspectives and the masses tune in to their respective drugs of choice.
But stories like those surrounding G20, XPRIZE, and many other global activism entities’ wide and varied impact on humanitarian, environmental, political, and economic concerns aren’t the fodder for anyone’s multimedia feed save those few that know enough to know. The algorithm — funded and finessed by stalwarts of the way things are remaining as they have always been — doesn’t want to inspire hope, particularly hope that, in turn, inspires action. And action that, at its best, inspires change.
The good news in a world that seems intent on devolving into the bleakest of outcomes is that it’s all a matter of perspective. And nothing inspires novel perspective like a new frontier. In a metaphor as eloquent as it is obvious, the exploration of the rainforest — to truly understand and assimilate the value of the secrets it holds — is the selfsame uncovering of the detritus we must engage in to find the life springing forth from death all around us. In redirecting our gaze from the forest floor to its canopy, we see all that has been hidden from our vision.
When diverse people gather to define that novel vision — as XPRIZE and the like encourage — they embrace the analog within advancement, developing interpersonal intimacy and collaborating across specialized silos to innovate in communion, igniting the home fires of hope, shedding light on possibility, and redirecting the gaze to a path forward and through. It is, in simple essence, all in where you look.
Stay tuned for the second installment of this special two-part Rio G20 series for my interview with XPRIZE Rainforest winner, Team Limelight, as we peer into a never-before-seen world kissed by the clouds.
