Leon Murray

THE STORY

Building the Green Era: Leon Murray on Legacy, Community, and Why It's Not the AI Era

"Who doesn't want to build generational wealth, create a legacy, and make their mark on the world?"

That's the question Leon Murray wrote to us when he applied, and the one he's bringing to TEDxUnityPark 2026.

Leon works on sustainability at a scale most of us never think about; as a sustainability manager for a Fortune 500 company, he's tasked with cutting carbon emissions by 50% across more than 60 manufacturing facilities! He's also a Citadel grad of electrical engineering, a UCF MBA, a military veteran, an author, and an artist. At this year's TEDxUnityPark, his talk "The Most Vital Era of Mankind" makes a claim that's going to get people talking at the afterparty.

"We are living in the most vital era of mankind and it's not the AI Era!"

"I'm from Charleston, South Carolina. Born and raised," Leon said during TEDxUnityPark Media Day. Then came The Citadel. "I spent some time in the military. This is a place that teaches you discipline," he says. "Definitely a lot of discipline, I would say, is the biggest thing."

The pull toward creative work started early. "Even as a kid, I always had an interest in trying to build things from scratch," he says. Add a lot of travel and a real love for the outdoors, and you get an engineer who talks about nature like an artist would.

"My passion and interests are in art, nature and technology, which allowed me to really focus in on the sustainability industry, because I feel like that's a place where all three of those interests intersect."

For Leon, it's personal. Seeing other cultures showed him how much the land matters for "every group of people, including myself and my own family." If we want room to chase big things, the ground under us has to hold. "We need a stable ecosystem ... in order to do that," he says, "that's where my passion lies." So Leon made it his career.

Once inside the work, he kept running into the same misconception: people assume sustainability is a cost.

"If you're just looking at it as a straight number of return on investment, it doesn't show up on the balance sheet the same way as it would in other industries," he says. "But in actuality, the return on investment passes every other industry you can think of because every other industry survives off of sustainability."

It's a little like the utilities at a restaurant. Nobody puts it on the menu, but nothing comes out of the kitchen without it.

"Sustainability is community. It's culture. Of course we know it's technology, but I think a lot of people think that it's only technology, and they don't think that it's culture and they don't think it's community."

"It's a way of life," he said at Media Day, "... because the environment would in turn help the community."

When presenting, Leon is calm and measured. He doesn't oversell anything. He says what he means and lets it sit - you can still hear The Citadel in it. He'll tell you his range of experience is what qualifies him. His path has put him in rooms with veterans, skilled trade workers, parents, and communities at every income level. "It is due to this exposure that I have the emotional intelligence to craft a message for anyone to feel," as he puts it.

His talk lands at a moment when every few months somebody announces the next big thing.

"In a world where everything is the next greatest era," as he puts it, "the Green Era remains king of them all and now is the time to seize equity in it." Most of us hear about sustainability as a sacrifice. Leon talks about it as the opportunity of a lifetime.

TEDxUnityPark's 2026 theme is Multiply. Movement (’24) got us started, Momentum (’25) picked up speed, and this year, as our co-organizer Dr. Kaipo Sotelo puts it, "‘Multiply’ is leading to some level of exponential growth." Leon lives in that math. When he figures out how to save energy, water, or waste at one plant, the fix doesn't stay at one plant - it can run at 60 plants, and any more that keep coming. "I know Greenville has been a major, strong manufacturing hub," he says. That's exactly why it matters here, because, as he puts it, "without sustainability every industry on earth will fall."

What many don't know about Leon is that the engineer also writes poetry. Ask about his life and you get adventure, heights, travel, poetry, "and I try to build things as it relates to sustainability."

After one of the clearest interviews of the day, Leon wrapped up with, "I'm not media trained."

We'd beg to differ.

We think this one is going to surprise people. Leon's talk is more than a talk about carbon targets, it's an invitation to treat the green era as the one we'll be remembered for.

"My purpose in this talk is more to bring awareness that this era is just as important as anything from the past and anything that we're going through right now," he says.