WEBVTT

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I'd like you to imagine the world anew.

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I'd like to show you some maps,

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which have been drawn by Ben Hennig,

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of the planet in a way

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that most of you will never
have seen the planet depicted before.

NOTE Paragraph

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Here's an image
that you're very familiar with.

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I'm old enough that I was actually born
before we saw this image.

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Apparently some of my first words
were "moona, moona,"

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but I think that's my mom
having a particular fantasy

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about what her baby boy could see

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on the flickering
black and white TV screen.

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It's only been a few centuries

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since we've actually, most of us,
thought of our planet as spherical.

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When we first saw
these images in the 1960s,

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the world was changing
at an incredible rate.

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In my own little discipline
of human geography,

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a cartographer called Waldo Tobler

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was drawing new maps of the planet,

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and these maps have now spread,

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and I'm going to show you one of them now.

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This map is a map of the world,

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but it's a map which looks to you

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a little bit strange.

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It's a map in which we stretched places,

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so that those areas which contain
many people are drawn larger,

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and those areas,
like the Sahara and the Himalayas,

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in which there are few people,
have been shrunk away.

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Everybody on the planet
is given an equal amount of space.

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The cities are shown shining bright.

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The lines are showing you
submarine cables and trade routes.

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And there's one particular line
that goes from the Chinese port of Dalian

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through past Singapore,

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through the Suez Canal,

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through the Mediterranean
and round to Rotterdam.

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And it's showing you the route

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of what was the world's
largest ship just a year ago,

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a ship which was taking
so many containers of goods

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that when they were unloaded,

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if the lorries had all gone in convoy,
they would have been 100 kilometers long.

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This is how our world is now connected.

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This is the quantity of stuff
we are now moving around the world,

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just on one ship, on one voyage,

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in five weeks.

NOTE Paragraph

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We've lived in cities
for a very long time,

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but most of us didn't live in cities.

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This is Çatalhöyük,
one of the world's first cities.

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At its peak 9,000 years ago,

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people had to walk over the roofs
of others' houses to get to their home.

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If you look carefully
at the map of the city,

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you'll see it has no streets,

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because streets are something we invented.

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The world changes.

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It changes by trial and error.

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We work out slowly and gradually

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how to live in better ways.

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And the world has changed
incredibly quickly most recently.

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It's only within the last six,
seven, or eight generations

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that we have actually realized
that we are a species.

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It's only within the last few decades

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that a map like this could be drawn.

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Again, the underlying map
is the map of world population,

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but over it, you're seeing arrows
showing how we spread out of Africa

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with dates showing you
where we think we arrived

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at particular times.

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I have to redraw this map
every few months,

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because somebody makes a discovery
that a particular date was wrong.

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We are learning about ourselves
at an incredible speed.

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And we're changing.

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A lot of change is gradual.

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It's accretion.

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We don't notice the change

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because we only have short lives,

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70, 80, if you're lucky 90 years.

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This graph is showing you

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the annual rate of population
growth in the world.

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It was very low until around about 1850,

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and then the rate of population growth

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began to rise

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so that around the time I was born,

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when we first saw those images
from the moon of our planet,

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our global population
was growing at two percent a year.

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If it had carried on growing
at two percent a year

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for just another couple of centuries,

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the entire planet would be covered

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with a seething mass of human bodies

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all touching each other.

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And people were scared.

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They were scared of population growth

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and what they called
"the population bomb" in 1968.

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But then, if you look
at the end of the graph,

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the growth began to slow.

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The decade --

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the '70s, the '80s,
the '90s, the noughties,

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and in this decade, even faster --

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our population growth is slowing.

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Our planet is stabilizing.

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We are heading towards nine,
10, or 11 billion people

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by the end of the century.

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Within that change, you can see tumult.

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You can see the Second World War.

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You can see the pandemic
in 1918 from influenza.

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You can see the great Chinese famine.

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These are the events
we tend to concentrate on.

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We tend to concentrate
on the terrible events in the news.

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We don't tend to concentrate
on the gradual change

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and the good news stories.

NOTE Paragraph

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We worry about people.

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We worry about how many people there are.

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We worry about how you can
get away from people.

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But this is the map of the world
changed again to make area large,

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the further away
people are from each area.

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So if you want to know
where to go to get away from everybody,

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here's the best places to go.

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And every year, these areas get bigger,

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because every year,
we are coming off the land globally.

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We are moving into the cities.

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We are packing in more densely.

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There are wolves again in Europe,

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and the wolves are moving west
across the continent.

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Our world is changing.

NOTE Paragraph

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You have worries.

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This is a map showing
where the water falls on our planet.

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We now know that.

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And you can look at where Çatalhöyük was,

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where three continents meet,
Africa, Asia, and Europe,

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and you can see there are
a large number of people living there

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in areas with very little water.

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And you can see areas in which
there is a great deal of rainfall as well.

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And we can get a bit more sophisticated.

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Instead of making
the map be shaped by people,

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we can shape the map by water,

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and then we can change it every month

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to show the amount of water

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falling on every small part of the globe.

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And you see the monsoons
moving around the planet,

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and the planet almost appears
to have a heartbeat.

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And all of this only became possible

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within my lifetime

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to see this is where we are living.

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We have enough water.

NOTE Paragraph

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This is a map of where
we grow our food in the world.

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This is the areas that we will rely on
most for rice and maize and corn.

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People worry that there won't
be enough food, but we know,

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if we just ate less meat
and fed less of the crops to animals,

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there is enough food for everybody

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as long as we think of ourselves
as one group of people.

NOTE Paragraph

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And we also know

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about what we do

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so terribly badly nowadays.

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You will have seen this map
of the world before.

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This is the map

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produced by taking satellite images,

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if you remember those satellites
around the planet

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in the very first slide I showed,

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and producing an image
of what the Earth looks like at night.

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When you normally see that map,

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on a normal map, the kind of map
that most of you will be used to,

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you think you are seeing
a map of where people live.

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Where the lights are shining up
is where people live.

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But here, on this image of the world,

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remember we've stretched the map again.

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Everywhere has the same density
of people on this map.

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If an area doesn't have people,

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we've shrunk it away

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to make it disappear.

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So we're showing everybody

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with equal prominence.

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Now, the lights no longer show you
where people are,

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because people are everywhere.

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Now the lights on the map,

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the lights in London,
the lights in Cairo, the lights in Tokyo,

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the lights on the Eastern Seaboard
of the United States,

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the lights show you where people live

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who are so profligate with energy

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that they can afford

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to spend money

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powering lights to shine up into the sky,

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so satellites can draw an image like this.

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And the areas that are dark on the map

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are either areas where people
do not have access to that much energy,

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or areas where people do,

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but they have learned to stop
shining the light up into the sky.

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And if I could show you this map
animated over time,

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you would see that Tokyo
has actually become darker,

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because ever since the tsunami in Japan,

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Japan has had to rely
on a quarter less electricity

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because it turned
the nuclear power stations off.

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And the world didn't end.

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You just shone less light

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up into the sky.

NOTE Paragraph

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There are a huge number

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of good news stories in the world.

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Infant mortality is falling

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and has been falling
at an incredible rate.

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A few years ago,

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the number of babies dying
in their first year of life in the world

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fell by five percent in just one year.

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More children are going to school

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and learning to read and write

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and getting connected to the Internet

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and going on to go to university

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than ever before at an incredible rate,

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and the highest number of young people
going to university in the world

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are women, not men.

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I can give you good news story
after good news story

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about what is getting
better in the planet,

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but we tend to concentrate

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on the bad news that is immediate.

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Rebecca Solnit, I think,
put it brilliantly,

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when she explained: "The accretion
of incremental, imperceptible changes

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which can constitute progress
and which render our era

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dramatically different from the past" --

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the past was much more stable --

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"a contrast obscured by the undramatic
nature of gradual transformation,

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punctuated by occasional tumult."

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Occasionally, terrible things happen.

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You are shown those terrible things

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on the news every night of the week.

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You are not told about
the population slowing down.

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You are not told about the world
becoming more connected.

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You are not told about the incredible
improvements in understanding.

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You are not told about
how we are learning to begin

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to waste less and consume less.

NOTE Paragraph

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This is my last map.

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On this map, we have taken the seas

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and the oceans out.

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Now you are just looking

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at about 7.4 billion people

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with the map drawn
in proportion to those people.

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You're looking at over a billion in China,

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and you can see the largest
city in the world in China,

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but you do not know its name.

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You can see that India

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is in the center of this world.

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You can see that Europe is on the edge.

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And we in Exeter today

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are on the far edge of the planet.

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We are on a tiny scrap of rock

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off Europe

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which contains less than one percent

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of the world's adults,

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and less than half a percent

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of the world's children.

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We are living in a stabilizing world,
an urbanizing world,

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an aging world,

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a connecting world.

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There are many, many things
to be frightened about,

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but there is no need for us
to fear each other as much as we do,

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and we need to see
that we are now living in a new world.

NOTE Paragraph

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Thank you very much.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Applause)