You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.

I'm your host, Elise Hugh. What if everything we thought we knew about the relationship between the economy and the environment was wrong?

In this talk, impact investor Tom Chi

explores the paradox of a world that says it loves the nature around us and yet systematically

destroys it. He suggests a new way to think about our place on this planet, challenges what he

views as the false tradeoffs between economic growth and ecological health, and shows how innovation

can become a force for restoration rather than extraction.

So over the last decade, I've been working on resolving a profound paradox, and simply stated,

it's that if you go and talk with any person,

actually you could go grab 100 random people off the street,

and you were to go ask them,

how do they feel about nature?

You're going to end up with extremely positive answers,

ranging from, you know, nature is inspiring,

you know, nature, you know, is the most beautiful thing that exists. And you'll see it everywhere.

They'll put it as the backdrop of their desktop and their phones, like every little thing, absolutely.

Every single person you ask,

you're going to get a pretty positive response.

And even though if you ask all these individuals how they feel about nature,

they're really positive about it,

somehow, as a collective civilization,

we've come together and we are destroying nature at a planetary scale.

...