Searching for paradise

We often view paradise as a place of safety, beauty, tranquility. It's an ideal we long for, but one we can rarely find. This hour, TED speakers search for utopia and come to terms with reality. Guests include wildfire expert George Whitesides, author Pico Iyer, physicist Ramón Méndez Galain, and tech entrepreneur Ramona Pierson. We also hear from two residents of Paradise, California, Richard and Zetta Gore. Original broadcast date: November 10, 2023 TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted. http://plus.npr.org/ted See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current so you can win more deals. Learn more at hubspot.com. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Our job now is to dream big.

• 0:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Delivered at TED conferences.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  To bring about the future we want to see.

• 0:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  Around the world.

• 0:30Speaker 03

  To understand who we are.

• 0:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

• 0:37Speaker 04

  You just don't know what you're gonna find.

• 0:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  Challenge you.

• 0:40Speaker 05

  We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

• 0:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  And even change you.

• 0:43Speaker 06

  I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way?

• 0:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And on the show today, Paradise Lost and Found. And for Richard and Zetta Gore, Paradise is a real place. They found it, and they moved there in 2018.

• 1:12Speaker 06

  We enjoyed the small town, lots of trees, and, you know, fresh air up above the valley.

• 1:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  We loved the house we had just picked out. We remodeled a few things on it and it had just become the house of our dreams. Paradise is Paradise, California, a town that, at the time, had about 26,000 people, surrounded by dense, forest-covered canyon in the Sierra Nevada foothills, and with a name like Paradise.

• 1:44Speaker 06

  There's a lot of jokes about it. You're now ascending into paradise. And when we go to our sons, we tell them we're now descending out of paradise to come down to the valley.

• 1:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  But then, in November 2018, just seven months after the Gores moved into town, they got a phone call. We'll never hear.

• 2:03Speaker 06

  To this day, I remember looking out the window of our bedroom and noticing that it looked kind of overcast. And I said, "That's strange. I don't recall it, you know, being any clouds," but I didn't pay any attention. And then at about 7:45, our son called and said, "Did you know your town is on fire?"

• 2:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Just west, a faulty electrical line had started a small fire. That, combined with the bone-dry brush from California's ongoing drought, coaxed that small fire into a massive blaze that quickly descended on Paradise. But of course, the Gores didn't know any of this at the time.

• 2:46Speaker 06

  We saw the sky. We saw the ashes. We were told that we should leave, but we didn't think it was urgent because we didn't see any flames at that time. And we said, "Okay, we need to evacuate, but we'll be coming back. Our home will be fine."

• 3:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  Zeta and Richard packed up a few clothes and drove off. But they quickly hit gridlock, and things got serious.

• 3:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, then the wind started kicking up. That's when ashes are flying around and embers, hard to breathe, explosions are happening all every minute or two. And then people were saying, "There's a house on fire just up the road." And we're then hitting us, "Wow, this is gonna be bad." In a matter of a few hours, the entire town was inundated, and it was absolutely that feeling in our guts. We absolutely thought we were gonna die, and we're both praying. And I said, "Look, we're not gonna die sitting in our car in the road."

• 3:49Manoush Zomorodi?

  They pulled over and hiked down into a canyon. They ended up walking over a dozen miles to another town where their son could finally come and pick them up. Richard and Zeta were exhausted, but fine. Their house, however, was not.

• 4:06Speaker 06

  Nothing, no feeling compares to the feeling about a week later when the sheriff escorted us up there to our property, and we pulled up and got out of the cars and stood there at our burned-out remains.

• 4:23Speaker 06

  Hold back the tears. Yeah, that was, that was very emotional.

• 4:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  Paradise, the word evokes lush, abundant beauty, a refuge from harm. But is it futile to search for anything idyllic when we live on a warming planet that feels less at peace than ever? Today on the show, paradise lost and found, ideas about looking for utopia and coming to terms with reality.

• 4:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  So, back to Paradise, California. 18,000 structures were destroyed in 2018. Eighty-five people died. At the time, it was the deadliest fire in modern US history. That is, until the most recent fires in Maui.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  This risk is increasing, and if we don't get our act together, we're going to have more paradises. We're going to have more Santa Roses. We're going to have more Mahinas. We're going to have more Marshall fires like the one they had in Colorado.

• 5:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is George Whitesides. He's the founder of a new organization that's working to help local governments in California manage fires better and stop mega fires, like the one in Paradise, from happening in the first place.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Eight of the 10 largest mega fires in California history have happened over the last five or six years. Partly, that's due to global warming, but it's also due to how we've been managing the forests. And I think that's kind of a crucial piece that, over suppression, over the course of many decades, has created conditions akin to almost a bomb in our forests. And we really need to defuse that bomb by managing our forests and our wildlands in fundamentally different ways. Many people feel overwhelmed by the situation. I know I did.

• 6:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  George Whitesides continues from the TED stage.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  So, two years ago, I closed a chapter of my life in aerospace, and I started a new journey to see if I could understand the wildfire crisis better and what could be done about it. I started working with leaders from firefighting, entrepreneurship, science, tribal communities. And together, we co-founded an organization called Mega Fire Action, whose sole purpose is to solve- Solve the megafire crisis. The path forward has three solutions. The first is fire-adapted communities. The second is resilient landscapes. And the third is innovative fire management.

• 7:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, we have seen these really dramatic scenes of wildfire just ravaging towns. But you say that the first steps people need to take to protect their homes, it's actually pretty straightforward.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. In fact, it could be as simple as individual homeowners doing the work that is required to make their home more resilient to wildfire. So like on the cheaper side, you know, everyone can clear out the five or 10 feet immediately around their home from brush and shrubs and plants, basically. That makes a big difference. Everyone can put metal screens in their eaves and vents around their home so that when a big fire comes through and embers start blowing, you know, at high speed, they don't blow through into your attic and burn your home down from the inside out. Other things are more expensive. Like, it's really great if you can have a roof that is made of something that's fire resistant.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Those make a huge difference, arguably up to 50% of your risk is, you know, what those materials are. And we have a huge interest to having everybody in that community take these steps, particularly those around the perimeter. Because if you can protect some of those outer boundaries, then you have a way of reducing the risk that that fire penetrates deeply into the city.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  The second solution is resilient landscapes. And if you take one lesson from this talk, it's this. In order to solve the megafire crisis, we need to bring our Western landscapes back into a healthy balance by reducing the overgrown brush and trees in the wildlands and the forest. Here, we're finally starting to take to heart the wisdom of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, who knew that fire was a natural part of the landscape and who introduced low-intensity fire, good fire, on a regular basis at the right times. When this is done well, as around the communities of South Lake Tahoe, then it can actually divert a megafire

• 9:11Speaker 01

  as bad as the one that they experienced in 2021.

• 9:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, there might be some indigenous people who hear you say that and think, yeah, no kidding that you need to be having prescribed burns, I think is what they call it, right? Like, this is something that's some populations have been doing for centuries.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, thousands of years. And there are now, you know, many places that are working on this stuff. And, you know, a great example is the area immediately around South Lake Tahoe, you know, which spent on the order of over $100 million on forest treatments. And that's a hopeful example of a situation with the Caldor Fire where you had this terrible huge mega fire bearing down on South Lake Tahoe. But those forest treatments were credited by some as sort of giving the firefighters enough pause, bringing the fire intensity down enough, they were able to keep it from tearing through South Lake Tahoe. You know, where you don't do that work, and actually, as part of that same fire, some of those treatments weren't done.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  And actually, there were communities that were lost in that fire tragically. What we need is innovation and technology that can rapidly detect and assess fire, and then quickly put it out when it gets bad. Here, we need to look at the example of the Quick Reaction Force of Southern California, which is really designed in some ways for these toughest days. The QRF is a public-private partnership, which now has three Chinook helicopters. These are the big ones with the two rotors on the top. And each of them can drop up to 3,000 gallons of water on a fire, day or night, and they can do it very precisely. They can also refill up to six times an hour, so they can bring a lot of mass to the problem. Over the

• 10:56Speaker 01

  course of two years of demonstrations, the QRF has demonstrated that this model has great potential, that in fact, if you can bring a lot of fire management resource to a fire very quickly, you can get on top of fires before they get big and unmanageable. We can build a world in which communities are resilient to wildfire and in which forests are brought back into a healthy balance. So let's get to work, let's learn from fire, and let's build a resilient, sustainable future.

• 11:28Speaker 06

  We were not going to go back to Paradise at all. It actually took us, oh, I'd say almost about a year to decide.

• 11:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  Again, Richard and Zetta Gore.

• 11:40Speaker 06

  We had a clean slate. We were starting from scratch. We could virtually move anywhere.

• 11:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  But after scouting out towns in Utah, Arizona, and Idaho, the Gores decided to go back to Paradise and rebuild. The area has new building codes. The town also has a new early warning system. And they say it feels good to be home.

• 12:02Speaker 06

  I did not feel there was any high risk of fire anymore. Everything was so burned. And I actually was proud to go back and rebuild the city, you know, try and heal. We actually enjoy the geography better now because it's not so overgrown with trees and underbrush. You know, a lot of that has been burned off. There's more open sky. We can actually see our neighbors across the way now. It seems, at least to us, that it's a lot more community and camaraderie now since the fire that those that have stayed on our rebuilding have, you know, really banded together and bonded. And it's really much more of our town feeling now

• 12:47Speaker 06

  than just a town before the fire.

• 12:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  Many thanks to Richard and Zeta Gore of Paradise, California. And that was George Whitesides. He's the co-founder of Mega Fire Action. And since we spoke, he's been elected to the US Congress representing California. You can see his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, paradise lost and found. You're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and we'll be right back.

• 13:31Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 14:14Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 14:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  Learn more at hubspot.com. Hey, it's Manoush. This past year, we have brought you stories about AI, relationships, climate change, neurotechnology, dinosaurs, privacy, human behavior, and even one about what it means to create thriving public spaces. All of these public spaces that we take for granted, you know, all of this social infrastructure. We work really hard to bring you all of these stories because that is our public service, kind of like a park or a public library. And libraries are these beautiful hubs that can take on The shape of whatever community that uses them really needs.

• 15:42Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 16:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  access to even more insights from TED speakers to help you kick off 2025 right. From making big life decisions to being more hopeful, to carving out time for what is important to you, we have got you covered. Just visit plus.npr.org. You can also find the link in our episode notes. And the other way you can give is to make a donation at donate.npr.org. Your gifts are tax deductible either way. Thank you so much for being here. And now let's get back to the show.

• 16:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, Paradise Lost and Found. Ideas about our search for utopia.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Now, I've been lucky enough to go to many of the idylls that we might think of as paradise, from the Seychelles to Tahiti to Bali.

• 17:21Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is writer Pico Iyer.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  And I remember when I was in my 20s, I flew through the day and through the night. And I arrived in Bali and I woke up and there was this golden morning all around me. And there were these smiling, kind people who were bringing me fresh fruit and tea to enjoy on the terrace of my bungalow.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Down this palmy little lane was a golden beach of my dreams. And I thought, this really is paradise.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  But then night fell, I heard the weird

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Jangly sound of the gamelan orchestras in the distance, wild dogs were barking. And apart from anything, I thought, even if this is paradise for me, it's probably not for the locals. They're working so hard to make me and other visitors comfortable. And it also made me think, because I was living in New York City, well, if the wonderful Balinese people around me were to arrive in Manhattan tomorrow, they'd probably think that's paradise, which it wasn't for me, working in midtown on 25th floor office. And so it was a nice way, at an early stage in my life, of realizing how much paradise is a projection and often an illusion. And then thinking about what lay on the other side of them.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  And not in the realm of fantasy, but very much in the heart of reality.

• 18:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  Pico is a novelist, essayist, and he's best known for writing about his travels. He thought often about this idea that paradise is just a fantasy. But it wasn't until he was stuck at home during the pandemic that he decided to explore it further.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  I think like pretty much everybody across the globe. I was in this state of uncertainty and close to grief, feeling death breathing around the corner, and wondering how I could find hope and light and inspiration, even in the middle of this difficulty. And I thought, if I can go to places of conflict and difficulty and find something that sustains me even there, maybe that will give me a hope that can take me even through a global pandemic and all the other challenges life is sure to throw up.

• 19:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, you write, after years of travel, I'd begun to wonder what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict and whether the very search for it might not simply aggravate our differences.

• 19:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  We are talking about a very sort of philosophical approach that you took, which led you all around the world.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  Exactly, from Iran to North Korea and war-torn Kashmir to war-torn Sri Lanka and Varanasi. And as you say, all the places that are not the ones that instantly come to mind.

• 20:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  Pico Ayer continues from his book, The Half-Known Life.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  The natural place to embark upon such an inquiry seemed to be the culture that had given us both our word for paradise and some of our most soulful images of it. The old Iranian term, paradigya, had been brought into Greek by Xenophon when he'd served as a mercenary in Persia. And for centuries, Persians, as most residents of Iran were then known, had cultivated detailed and ravishing visions of paradise in their walled gardens as emblems of enticements towards the higher garden that awaits the fortunate. But what gave particular power to the world's largest theocracy right now

• 21:08Speaker 03

  was that so many competing visions of paradise seemed to be crisscrossing every hour here with furious intensity.

• 21:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  So you begin your search for paradise in Iran, where you say there are these competing visions of what that even is. What are those visions?

• 21:29Speaker 03

  Exactly. The ruling clerics in Iran currently have a very precise notion of paradise.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  They believe that paradise belongs only to the faithful and most of all, to those martyrs who give their lives to Islam. And of course, so many of the Iranian citizens have a very different notion of paradise.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  They think a much more worldly one, taking place behind closed doors of maybe sex and drugs and rock and roll and all the delights of the earth. And meanwhile...

• 22:11Speaker 03

  I think both the rulers and the regular citizens are quoting the great Sufi poets like Rumi and Hafiz, who remind us that paradise exists only within. So Iran seemed like the perfect convergence of many different ways of thinking about paradise and maybe a way of reminding me that sometimes it's notions of paradise that get in the way of our finding it.

• 22:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  Let's talk about the young man who you ended up spending time with.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 22:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  He had his own notion of paradise and it was a really surprising example. Can you share it?

• 22:48Speaker 03

  Yes, I mean, my very first night in Iran, in the great holy city of Mashhad, I had spent a wonderful day seeing the official sights with my guide and my driver. But I wanted to see the place unchaperoned.

• 23:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  To do so, Pico politely sent his guide and driver to dinner, saying he was going to turn in early. But instead...

• 23:13Speaker 03

  I slipped down to the taxi desk in the hotel of my lobby and I asked them if they could find somebody to take me into the heart of town. And very quickly, a young man, very friendly, in his late 20s, speaking pretty good English, led me off into his battered compact. You've come for the festival? He asked. Festival? This week, the driver explained. The anniversary of Imam Raisa. Five million people had gathered from every corner of the Shia world, he said, from Yemen and Pakistan and Beirut and Iraq, from all the provinces of Iran, to mark the auspicious occasion. As we pushed through a tiny entrance behind a wall of bodies,

• 23:57Speaker 03

  all we could make out was celebration.

• 24:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  This driver took Pico through busy streets to a mosque in the heart of Mashhad, which is actually the largest mosque in the world with seven huge marble courtyards. And at the center, a shrine to Imam Reza, the saint that was being celebrated.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  The crowds here were so intense that little boys were being passed from shoulder to shoulder so they could arrive at the front and kiss the golden grill behind which lay the saint. A man wailed and a great sound rose up around us. More than 13 million pieces of silver on the walls and chandeliers turned us all into a shiver of reflections.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  I was humbled as I moved among the sobbing bodies. Men were running their hands down their faces and weeping as at their mother's funeral. More people pressed in and the whole crowd seemed to sway and tremble as if we were truly part of a single massed body.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  I'd lost contact by now with my driver, but then I caught sight of him across the room.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  And I saw that there were tears in this young driver's eyes. His hand was on his heart and he was literally moving backwards, walking backwards, so he would never present his back to the long-dead saint. And I thought, my goodness, this is a perfect image of Islamic piety.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  But then, when we were out of the shrine and walking back towards his car, he started telling me about his wife, who was a blonde Yorkshirewoman waiting for him in England and expecting their first child. And then he told me that he had paid a human trafficker $2,500 to smuggle him into England in the back of a truck, breathing through a tube, so he wouldn't be detected.

• 26:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wow.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  And then he told me how the British government had very generously given him a court-appointed lawyer and translator, and they had worked night and day for three years in order to win him asylum in Britain.

• 26:14Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wow, so this taxi driver has this harrowing journey to start a new life, and yet he was back.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  Yes. In other words, he'd risked his life to flee Iran and to make a new life for himself in England. And yet, having done that, every single summer, he stole back into Iran to see the hometown and the mosque, and most of all, the mother that he loved so much. So having risked his life to flee Iran, he risked his life every single year to come back to Iran. And it made me think that as long as he'd been in Iran, everything outside Iran, such as Britain, seemed like the great paradise that he aspired to. But having made a lovely new family life for himself in England, suddenly he remembered all he was missing. A part of him and a part of paradise

• 27:04Speaker 03

  lay in the place that he'd run away from. And maybe the paradise that he was creating for himself was a collage. I suppose it was also reminded to me that for most of us, our full contentment and realization probably never comes from just one place. It comes from the many places that mean a lot to us and that we love.

• 27:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, it's an archetypal story convention, right? From Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz to what I think many of us experienced during the pandemic for those of us who were lucky enough to actually enjoy the stopping of the constant movement and just be home. And it felt like, oh, I neglected my own little corner of paradise that actually was right here in my living room.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Exactly. There's always this sense of a better world, a better life, a better self out there. And I think that's an exciting sense because that's what gives us the energy for aspiration and for not being complacent or too comfortable with the world we have. But I think we have to remember that, to some extent, it's an illusion.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  And I think, just as you suggested, I'm guessing quite a few people realized, wait a minute, there's beauty right down the street. And I think as much as anything, the thought of paradise is a way of reminding yourself how lucky you are, how little we want to take for granted.

• 28:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  That encounter with his taxi driver taught Pico that different and competing notions of paradise can exist even within one person.

• 28:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  He ends his journey with a trip to India, where his parents are from, and a place he knows well.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  I think a lot of India can be a shock to the system. It's so loud, it's so colorful, it's so crowded. It's this psychedelic intensity. It makes you feel that you've entered some other realm of consciousness.

• 29:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  Pico writes that one feels this especially in Varanasi, which is one of the oldest cities in the world and also among the most sacred.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Varanasi is India to the max as the holy center of Hinduism. And as you walk along the holy river, Ganges, that flows through Varanasi, night and day, there were these great fires burning to the north and burning to the south that are reducing dead bodies to ash. And as you walk through the narrow alleyways of the old city, people are constantly surging past, carrying their loved ones on stretchers as dead bodies to be committed to the flames or the holy waters.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  And one of the things that's so striking is that, of course, it's a city of death, but it's also a city of joy. The people who are racing past you are not mourning, they're not in grief. They're so grateful that they can come to the holy place and, I think, ensure Moksha, liberation for the loved one who has just passed. So it's a confounding place that really overturns all your simple ideas about the world.

• 30:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  You describe the river there being absolutely filthy and yet people drinking from it as though it was wine. You talk about men and children covered in ash, people carrying corpses around with them, fire being everywhere. And there's, to me, it almost felt like there was this... Porousness to it, you know, that this was the river Styx, the road to the afterlife here on earth. Is that how you think people see it?

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Yes, that's perfect. And I can't speak for a devout Hindu who'd probably put it differently. But I felt just as you. There aren't many places on the planet that have this kind of mythic intensity where you feel that one's walking along next to the river of life and on the far side of the river is whatever unknown awaits us all. And just as you said perfectly, the fact that the holy river, according to the WHO, contains 3,000 times the amount of bacteria deemed safe for consumption and that people are bathing in it and even drinking in it. For me, it was a very tonic and liberating idea that the holiest place doesn't have to be the purest place.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  That at some level, most of us can probably never find an immaculate place, a place that's absolutely pure, because we're human beings. And I think one of the memorable moments that comes to mind as we talk about it is that there was this whole cacophony. And even though I'm Indian, I was really freaked out by it. And I suddenly heard two people call my name. And I turned around and it were two Tibetan Buddhists I know from New York City. And my friend came up to me and he surveyed the scene of absolute chaos and intensity. And he said, isn't this glorious? This is the whole human pageant. This is life and death and everything in between. Basically, I think he was saying, this is the only paradise

• 32:27Speaker 03

  we can ever hope to find and to make our lives in. The paradises that our minds create are never going to come to fruition in real life. But here is real life to the hilt. And this is the place where we have to live and where we have to find our comfort and delight and warmth. And maybe because he was a monk, he seemed to be doing it. He was just rejoicing in the cacophony.

• 32:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  I want to end by asking you about a quote that you include at the end of your book. You write that, "I recalled how the Zen teacher, Ido Roshi, thinking of the cries of abandonment of Jesus upon the cross, had delivered a teaching that must have unsettled many of his students." It's really this line that I want to ask you about. The quote from Ido Roshi, the Zen teacher, is that "the struggle of your life," he'd said, "is your paradise." Oh, that's tough words, I think, Pico. Tell me how you interpret that.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  It's a very shocking sentence, and it's a harsh conclusion for the book. But, you know, I think the good times take care of themselves. I, as a traveler, know that it's not so difficult to find fun and wonder and beauty in the world. It's really the tough times in life, as with the pandemic, that ask difficult questions of us and force us to rise above ourselves. And that notion that it can be in the very struggle that you find your paradise is, to me, almost more encouraging and inspiring than to say you can find it on a sandy beach.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  You know, in Japan, when I first went there, I heard, I think it's a Buddhist notion, that life is about joyful participation in a world of sorrows, that sorrows are non-negotiable. Unfortunately, they come to all of us, but that doesn't preclude the possibility of joy and wonder and hope. And the older I've got, and the more I see that even when life is going smoothly, it's full of surprises. Your house suddenly burns down, and a pandemic closes down the world, and a loved one dies. And then happy surprises, too. I've come to think that I want and I have to find my paradise in the middle of my daily life, which is also reassuring, because I don't have to travel across the world to find it.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  I just have to open my eyes to reality and to see life as it really is.

• 34:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's writer Pico Iyer. His latest book is The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise. The excerpts you heard are courtesy of Riverhead Books. You can see all of Pico's talks at ted.com. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

• 35:29Speaker 01

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• 36:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? No catching up on manual edits, no more guesswork. HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current and helps you understand what to do next. So, marketing builds more demand, sales wins more deals, and customers keep coming back. Learn more at hubspot.com.

• 37:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And on today's show, paradise lost and found. And a new vision of what paradise can be on our rapidly changing planet. Yes, this is-

• 37:17Speaker 05

  What we need to do all over the world in order to face climate change, this is paradise, and we have to recognize it.

• 37:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Ramon Mendez-Galein, and he's referring to his home country, Uruguay. Three and a half million people live in this small country on the east coast of South America. But Uruguay has done something extraordinary. It's become a kind of renewables paradise. Ninety-eight percent of its electric grid runs on wind, solar, and water. It has so much renewable energy that it exports some to its neighbors, Argentina and Brazil. And the country managed to transform itself in just five years.

• 37:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  How? Well, like many stories, this one begins with a crisis.

• 38:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  About 15 years ago, Uruguay was in financial trouble. And Ramon was a self-described simple university physics professor.

• 38:14Speaker 05

  Our economy was growing too fast, and the demand was growing very fast.

• 38:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Ramon Mendez-Galein on the TED stage.

• 38:22Speaker 05

  15 years ago, the Uruguay energy sector was going to a deep crisis. Economy was growing at unprecedented rates, and poverty was increasing, which was so great, of course. But at the same time, energy demand was growing rapidly, which was not so great. Uruguay has no proven reserve of fossil fuels. We have already used our large rivers to start hydro power plants. And our two main neighbors were having their own difficulties to supply internal demand. So it was not easy for them to help us. In 10 years, when you have to import much more fossil fuels or we're forced to import electricity from our neighbors at extraordinary prices, cost of runs could be as high as $1 billion.

• 39:08Speaker 05

  And for a small economy like Uruguay, this is 2% of its GDP. And worse still, we're beginning to have blackouts. We're living the perfect storm. But crisis is also opportunity.

• 39:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  Can we go back to 15 years ago? The reality at the time was energy costs were soaring. There were blackouts. And you didn't see a way forward for the country.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  And what was your idea to change it to? Take me through what you thought needed to change.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  So I dramatically changed my work. And I began to be involved in the energy issue. This is what I did.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  After writing my thoughts in the paper, I ended up with a comprehensive proposal for what my country could do in order to be aware of these difficulties. And the surprise was that these proposals had reached my president of my country. And one day, me as a simple university professor, I received a phone call inviting me to be the political responsible of our energy agency. And well, I did something crazy. I accepted.

• 40:26Manoush Zomorodi?

  That is a little crazy. You get a call from the president and you became the country's National Director of Energy. And you made a plan to shift Uruguay from fossil fuels to renewables. But how did you explain it to people?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So renewables are the best option, not only for the global climate issue, but also at the national level. Because it reduces costs, it stabilizes costs, it has more sovereignty for your country, it creates a lot of jobs. So it's overall the best solution. So what I tried to do is just to fix a new narrative, national narrative. This is crucial. This is not just to fight against climate change. This is because it's the best solution. The most difficult point was not to convince that this was the best, but to make it work. This was a difficult point. And you know what? Many, many colleagues from the governments at that time, they're still saying, to be honest Ramon, we never believed what we were saying.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  We let you go because you didn't have any other option. So, okay, why not? Let's try it. Why not? But I knew that it was possible.

• 41:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  Do you remember the first time you went to visit a solar field and saw it for yourself, actually collecting energy?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yes, of course. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. The very first one was a very small solar farm of only two hectares. This means it was only about one megawatt, almost nothing. It's very close to the largest hydropower plant in the country. And it has a very beautiful park surrounding the dams. And I thought it was a very symbolic thing to have because hydropower is the best of our country and the future is solar.

• 42:18Speaker 05

  In just five years, we went to an almost completely decarbonized one that already in 2017 was 98% renewable. What makes Uruguayan cage unique is that almost half of that electricity is obtained from non-traditional renewable sources: wind, solar and sustainable biomass. Wind alone can produce up to 40% of the total electricity consumed in the country in a year, a percentage comparable to the other world wind champion Denmark. But also 15 or even 20% of our electricity is obtained with sustainable biomass. Of course, none of this was easy. We have to innovate.

• 43:02Speaker 05

  We have to understand that such a power system requires the planning and operation quite different than the traditional one. Our academics worked for years to design a groundbreaking software to handle any dispatch specifically designed to manage intermittent sources such as wind and solar, but also how to use water. This allows us, for example, to have a prediction of the amount of wind electricity and solar electricity that we're going to have in the grid with a week in advance. And this also allows us to know how and when we have to use water from the dams.

• 43:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  You are not in government anymore,

• 43:44Speaker 01

  No.

• 43:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  but you have kind of taken your message and what you've learned on the road. You're on the international stage, talking to all kinds of people. And they must ask you, what do you wish you knew? What do we need to know if we want to take some of the lessons from Uruguay and apply them to our own countries? What do you tell them?

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Well, the message is very simple. The message is, first, there is a solution right now, which is the best solution at our national level. There is a solution which creates jobs, which reduce costs, which makes you independent of fluctuation of the prices of energy commodities. And the second message is, it works.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  All our power systems had been designed having in mind fossil power plants. And this is not a problem. I mean, this is just history. This is what we have developed all over the world. So if we want to run a system which is driven by renewable sources, but intermittent sources, planning is absolutely crucial. Public policies are crucial. But we proved in Uruguay that it's the best solution and it works. That's it, nothing more than that.

• 45:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  So what does the future look like for you?

• 45:05Speaker 01

  It's not just having renewable electricity. It's much more than that. It's to ask ourselves every day, why am I buying something? Why am I consuming something? And what make me happy? And I'm very happy of living in this country and not consuming fossil fuels or impacting the climate. But this is not enough. This is just one part of our road. And we should focus much more on the way we consume and the way we transport ourselves. And once again, what make us happy in life?

• 45:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  What makes you happy, Ramon?

• 45:46Speaker 01

  What's making me happy is trying to be part of a global process to live a better world for our kids. I'm happy every morning when I see that what we have succeeded to do in Uruguay can be replicated elsewhere and is receiving such an important recognition. It's not just wishful thinking, it's real. And so, this makes me happy.

• 46:13Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Ramon Mendez-Galein. He's the executive director of Asociación Ivy, a nonprofit working on a sustainable future. You can see Ramon's full talk at ted.com.

• 46:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  On the show today, paradise lost and found. And sometimes paradise can be the right mix of people at the time you need them most.

• 46:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  After a near fatal accident, Ramona Pierson wasn't sure she would ever recover. But she ended up finding a safe haven where she least expected it: a senior citizens home. Here she is on the TED stage in 2011.

• 46:55Speaker 06

  When I was 22 years old, I came home from work, put a leash on my dog, and went for my usual run. While I was preparing my dog for the run, a man was finishing drinking at a bar, picked up his car keys, got into a car, and headed south or wherever he was.

• 47:16Speaker 06

  I was running across the street, and the only thing that I actually remember is feeling like a grenade went off in my head.

• 47:24Speaker 06

  What had happened is he ran a red light and hit me, my dog. She ended up underneath the car. I flew out in front of the car, and then he ran over my legs. I had no idea what was going on, but strangers intervened, kept my heart moving, beating. I say moving because it was quivering, and they were trying to put a beat back into it. Somebody was smart and put a big pen in my neck to open up my airway so that I could get some air in there. And somehow, I ended up... At the hospital, I was wrapped in ice and then eventually put into a drug-induced coma.

• 48:02Speaker 06

  Eighteen months later, I woke up. I was blind, I couldn't speak, and I couldn't walk. I was 64 pounds. I had more than 50 surgeries, but who's counting?

• 48:17Speaker 06

  Eventually, the hospital decided it was time for me to go. They needed to open up space for somebody else they thought could come back from whatever they were going through. Everybody lost faith in me being able to recover.

• 48:33Speaker 06

  So they basically put a map up on the wall, threw a dart, and it landed at a senior home here in Colorado. And I know all of you are scratching your head, a senior citizen's home? What in the world are you going to do there? But if you think about all of the skills and talent that are in this room right now, that's what a senior home has. The one advantage that they had over most of you is wisdom, because they had a long life. And I needed that wisdom at that moment in my life. But imagine what it was like for them when I showed up at their doorstep. At that point, I had gained four pounds, so I was 68 pounds. I was bald, wearing hospital scrubs,

• 49:15Speaker 06

  and I had a white cane in one hand and a suitcase full of medical records in another hand. And the senior citizens realized that they needed to have an emergency meeting.

• 49:27Speaker 06

  So they pulled back, and they were looking at each other, and they were going, "Okay, what skills do we have in this room? This kid needs a lot of work." They eventually started matching their talents and skills to all of my needs. But one of the first things they needed to do was assess what I needed right away, which I needed to figure out how to eat like a normal human being, since I'd been eating through a tube in my chest and then through my veins. And then they had to figure out, "Well, she needs furniture." So they went to their storage lockers and all gathered their extra furniture, gave me pots and pans, blankets, everything. The next thing that I needed was a makeover.

• 50:14Speaker 06

  So out went the green scrubs, and in came the polyester and floral prints.

• 50:23Speaker 06

  We're not going to talk about the hairstyles that they tried to force on me once my hair grew back. But I did say no to the blue hair. So eventually, they decided that, "Well, I need to learn to speak." And I had to learn how to coordinate my new throat with my tongue and my new teeth and my lips. And I was an adult, and it was embarrassing. So I acted like a two-year-old and refused to work. But the men, they were going to make it fun for me. So they were teaching me "cuss word scrapple" at night. And then secretly, "how to swear like a sailor." So I'm going to just leave it

• 51:08Speaker 06

  to your imagination as to what my first words were. And a former teacher, who happened to have Alzheimer's, took on the task of teaching me to write. The redundancy was actually good for me. So we'll just keep moving on. One of the pivotal times for me was actually learning to cross the street again as a blind person. So there were two obstacles I had to get through. One was post-traumatic stress disorder. Every time I approached the curb, I would panic. And the second one was was actually trying to figure out how to cross that street.

• 51:52Speaker 06

  So one of the seniors just came up to me, and she pushed me up to the corner, and she said, "When you think it's time to go, just stick the cane out there. If it's hit, don't cross the street." Made perfect sense. But by the third cane that went whizzing across the road, they realized that they needed to put their resources together, and they raised funds that I could gain the skills to be a blind person and also to go get a guide dog, who transformed my life. And I was able to return to college because of the senior citizens who invested in me and also the guide dog

• 52:36Speaker 06

  and the skills that I had gained. Ten years later, I gained my sight back, not magically. I opted in for three surgeries, and one of them was experimental.

• 52:49Speaker 06

  The biggest change for me was looking down at my hands and seeing that I'd lost 10 years of my life. I thought that time had stood still for some reason and moved on for family and friends, but when I looked down, I realized that time marched on for me, too. We didn't have words like crowdsourcing and radical collaboration when I had my accident, but the concept held true. People working with people to rebuild me, people working with people to re-educate me. I wouldn't be standing here today if it wasn't for extreme radical collaboration. Thank you so much.

• 53:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Ramona Pierson. She's the founder of several tech startups, and you can see her full talk at ted.com. Thanks so much for listening to our show, Paradise Lost and Found. Before we go, I want to let you know about my newsletter, which is about my own expertise: how to live better with our technology for our mental and physical health. The newsletter is called Body Electric, and it builds on the podcast series we did last year. Please join me and more than 40,000 other readers at npr.org/bodylelectricnewsletter. It means a lot, so thank you.

• 54:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  This episode was produced by James Delahoussaye, Matthew Cloutier, Andrea Gutierrez, and Harsha Nahada. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner White, Fiona Giran, and Katie Monteleone. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were Gilli Moon, Robert Rodriguez, Neil T. Valt, and Margaret Luthar. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

• 54:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.