Mei Lin

10:00 - 11:00 The Music of the Spheres: Tuning Our Collective Heart Spark as Biosensors for Spaceship Earth: Mei Lin Fung (Vice Chair of the UN AI for Good Impact Steering Committee and Co-Founder of the People-Centered Internet)

Mei Lin Fung is a world-renowned orchestrator of ecosystems where technology, global policy, and financial innovation converge. As one of the last business partners of the legendary Douglas Engelbart, she was a primary catalyst for the Program for the Future, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the "Mother of All Demos." Today, she carries that legacy forward by architecting the "connective tissue" required for global economic resilience.

We are made of stardust, the heavy elements forged in the hearts of dying suns. This cosmic heritage makes every human being a "sensor" in a grand, universal symphony—the Music of the Spheres. While the field of biosensing often focuses on the hardware of detection, this interactive keynote invites us to explore the most sensitive instrument we possess: Our  Hearts & Minds. This internal signal is our compass for resonance, balance, and planetary health.

In this keynote for the Living Earth Initiative: Earth in Balance, Mei Lin Fung challenges us to develop our collective biosensing. How can we, as a species, tune our individual Hearts & Minds to become the Biosensors of Spaceship Earth? This is not a passive lecture, but a live experiment in collective intelligence and adaptive evolution in the AI era.

The Interactive Experience:

Participants are invited to have their favorite AI at hand (Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, CHATgpt, Meta etc.) as we navigate this 60-minute journey. Through a series of live "Heart Spark" prompts, we will use AI as a digital tuning fork to:

• Decode our origins: Mining our personal stardust stories to find where we first learned the rhythm of balance.

• Amplify our stewardship: Co-creating narratives with AI that bridge our professional expertise with the needs of the biosphere.

• Synchronize the symphony: Synthesizing our individual insights into a collective view.

By augmenting our human intuition with artificial intelligence, we will move from being mere observers of the "Living Earth" to active participants in future harmony.

Mike

11:15 - 12:00 The Global Chorus: Raising Voices for a Living Planet: Michael Sheldrick (Chief Policy, Impact and Government Relations Officer at Global Citizen)

Robin

13:00 - 13:45 Singing in the rain: Nursing and just relations for the Rights of Water: Robin Evans-Agnew, RN, PhD (Professor, UWT SNHCL)

Tom

13:45 - 14:30 The Rhythm of Cities: Thomas Fisher (Director GeoCommunities, director of the Minnesota Design Center, and Dayton Hudson Chair in Urban Design in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota)

Michael

14:30 - 15:15 Digital Water the New Currents of Life: Michael Wright (CEO Biomimetics International)

If we want to reduce tensions and build a viable, technologically driven future for humanity, we have to redirect our thinking. To redirect our thinking, we have to reshape our language. A harmonious, durable, equitable, enforceable digital world will not emerge from technology alone; it must be wrapped in foundational words that even our youngest children can reach for and understand. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine bits flowing as drops of water in a stream. What we usually call “data” now moves like water across the landscape of our lives. Every message, click, sensor reading, and transaction becomes part of a vast, invisible hydrology: Digital Water. Michael will be discussing what digital water is and how it should be treated.

BJ

15:15 - 16:00 Orchestrating Circularity in the Real World: Infrastructure, Governance, and the Work of Coordination: Björgvin Sævarsson (CEO Yorth Group)

 Despite growing consensus around the promise of the circular economy, implementation in real-world systems remains uneven, fragmented, and often reduced to isolated technical interventions. This presentation argues that circularity is not primarily a design challenge—it is an orchestration challenge.

Drawing on applied work across infrastructure, urban systems, and cross-sector partnerships, this session reframes circularity as a multi-scalar coordination problem spanning physical infrastructure, institutional governance, and stakeholder alignment. It explores how circular outcomes emerge not from individual innovations, but from the deliberate integration of systems that close loops, slow flows, and regenerate value across economic, ecological, and social domains.

The presentation focuses on three interdependent layers:

• Infrastructure as Enabler: Circularity requires more than better products—it depends on enabling systems such as reverse logistics networks, material recovery facilities, district-scale energy systems, and data infrastructures that make resource flows visible and actionable. Without these, circular strategies remain aspirational rather than operational.

• Stakeholder Roles and Coordination: Circular systems redistribute responsibility across actors—governments, industry, finance, and communities—requiring new forms of collaboration and accountability. The session outlines practical role architectures (e.g., lead, finance, support, benefit) and examines how misalignment across stakeholders creates systemic friction.

• Governance and Adaptive Feedback: Static policy frameworks are insufficient for dynamic systems. Circularity demands adaptive governance models that incorporate feedback loops, iterative learning, and cross-sector coordination—shifting from compliance-based regulation to systems stewardship.

Beyond these core pillars, the presentation invites a discussion around additional leverage points often underemphasized in practice:

• the role of narrative and framing in shaping adoption,

• the importance of measurement systems that capture multi-capital value, and

• the need to ground circular strategies in restorative development to address legacy inequities before pursuing regenerative outcomes.

 Participants will get insights into systems-level approaches for translating circular economy theory into actionable infrastructure and governance strategies, along with practical insights into why many circular initiatives stall—and how to design for coherence, scalability, and resilience.