WEBVTT

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Tonight, I want to have a conversation about

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this incredible global issue

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that's at the intersection of land use, food and environment,

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something we can all relate to,

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and what I've been calling the other inconvenient truth.

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But first, I want to take you on a little journey.

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Let's first visit our planet, but at night,

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and from space.

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This is what our planet looks like from outer space

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at nighttime, if you were to take a satellite and travel

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around the planet. And the thing you would notice first,

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of course, is how dominant the human presence

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on our planet is.

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We see cities, we see oil fields,

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you can even make out fishing fleets in the sea,

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that we are dominating much of our planet,

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and mostly through the use of energy

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that we see here at night.

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But let's go back and drop it a little deeper

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and look during the daytime.

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What we see during the day is our landscapes.

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This is part of the Amazon Basin, a place called Rondônia

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in the south-center part of the Brazilian Amazon.

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If you look really carefully in the upper right-hand corner,

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you're going to see a thin white line,

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which is a road that was built in the 1970s.

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If we come back to the same place in 2001,

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what we're going to find is that these roads

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spurt off more roads, and more roads after that,

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at the end of which is a small clearing in the rainforest

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where there are going to be a few cows.

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These cows are used for beef. We're going to eat these cows.

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And these cows are eaten basically in South America,

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in Brazil and Argentina. They're not being shipped up here.

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But this kind of fishbone pattern of deforestation

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is something we notice a lot of around the tropics,

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especially in this part of the world.

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If we go a little bit further south in our little tour of the world,

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we can go to the Bolivian edge of the Amazon,

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here also in 1975, and if you look really carefully,

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there's a thin white line through that kind of seam,

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and there's a lone farmer out there

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in the middle of the primeval jungle.

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Let's come back again a few years later, here in 2003,

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and we'll see that that landscape actually looks

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a lot more like Iowa than it does like a rainforest.

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In fact, what you're seeing here are soybean fields.

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These soybeans are being shipped to Europe and to China

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as animal feed, especially after the mad cow disease scare

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about a decade ago, where we don't want to feed animals

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animal protein anymore, because that can transmit disease.

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Instead, we want to feed them more vegetable proteins.

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So soybeans have really exploded,

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showing how trade and globalization are

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really responsible for the connections to rainforests

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and the Amazon -- an incredibly strange

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and interconnected world that we have today.

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Well, again and again, what we find as we look

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around the world in our little tour of the world

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is that landscape after landscape after landscape

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have been cleared and altered for growing food

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and other crops.

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So one of the questions we've been asking is,

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how much of the world is used to grow food,

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and where is it exactly, and how can we change that

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into the future, and what does it mean?

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Well, our team has been looking at this on a global scale,

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using satellite data and ground-based data kind of to track

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farming on a global scale.

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And this is what we found, and it's startling.

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This map shows the presence of agriculture

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on planet Earth.

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The green areas are the areas we use to grow crops,

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like wheat or soybeans or corn or rice or whatever.

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That's 16 million square kilometers' worth of land.

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If you put it all together in one place,

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it'd be the size of South America.

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The second area, in brown, is the world's pastures

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and rangelands, where our animals live.

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That area's about 30 million square kilometers,

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or about an Africa's worth of land,

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a huge amount of land, and it's the best land, of course,

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is what you see. And what's left is, like,

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the middle of the Sahara Desert, or Siberia,

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or the middle of a rain forest.

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We're using a planet's worth of land already.

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If we look at this carefully, we find it's about 40 percent

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of the Earth's land surface is devoted to agriculture,

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and it's 60 times larger

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than all the areas we complain about,

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our suburban sprawl and our cities where we mostly live.

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Half of humanity lives in cities today,

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but a 60-times-larger area is used to grow food.

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So this is an amazing kind of result,

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and it really shocked us when we looked at that.

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So we're using an enormous amount of land for agriculture,

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but also we're using a lot of water.

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This is a photograph flying into Arizona,

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and when you look at it, you're like,

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"What are they growing here?" It turns out

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they're growing lettuce in the middle of the desert

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using water sprayed on top.

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Now, the irony is, it's probably sold

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in our supermarket shelves in the Twin Cities.

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But what's really interesting is, this water's got to come

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from some place, and it comes from here,

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the Colorado River in North America.

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Well, the Colorado on a typical day in the 1950s,

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this is just, you know, not a flood, not a drought,

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kind of an average day, it looks something like this.

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But if we come back today, during a normal condition

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to the exact same location, this is what's left.

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The difference is mainly irrigating the desert for food,

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or maybe golf courses in Scottsdale, you take your pick.

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Well, this is a lot of water, and again, we're mining water

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and using it to grow food,

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and today, if you travel down further down the Colorado,

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it dries up completely and no longer flows into the ocean.

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We've literally consumed an entire river in North America

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for irrigation.

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Well, that's not even the worst example in the world.

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This probably is: the Aral Sea.

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Now, a lot you will remember this from your geography classes.

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This is in the former Soviet Union

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in between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan,

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one of the great inland seas of the world.

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But there's kind of a paradox here, because it looks like

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it's surrounded by desert. Why is this sea here?

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The reason it's here is because, on the right-hand side,

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you see two little rivers kind of coming down

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through the sand, feeding this basin with water.

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Those rivers are draining snowmelt from mountains

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far to the east, where snow melts, it travels down the river

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through the desert, and forms the great Aral Sea.

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Well, in the 1950s, the Soviets decided to divert that water

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to irrigate the desert to grow cotton, believe it or not,

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in Kazakhstan, to sell cotton to the international markets

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to bring foreign currency into the Soviet Union.

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They really needed the money.

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Well, you can imagine what happens. You turn off

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the water supply to the Aral Sea, what's going to happen?

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Here it is in 1973,

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1986,

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1999,

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2004,

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and about 11 months ago.

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It's pretty extraordinary.

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Now a lot of us in the audience here live in the Midwest.

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Imagine that was Lake Superior.

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Imagine that was Lake Huron.

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It's an extraordinary change.

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This is not only a change in water and

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where the shoreline is, this is a change in the fundamentals

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of the environment of this region.

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Let's start with this.

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The Soviet Union didn't really have a Sierra Club.

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Let's put it that way.

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So what you find in the bottom of the Aral Sea ain't pretty.

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There's a lot of toxic waste, a lot of things

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that were dumped there that are now becoming airborne.

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One of those small islands that was remote

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and impossible to get to was a site

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of Soviet biological weapons testing.

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You can walk there today.

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Weather patterns have changed.

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Nineteen of the unique 20 fish species found only

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in the Aral Sea are now wiped off the face of the Earth.

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This is an environmental disaster writ large.

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But let's bring it home.

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This is a picture that Al Gore gave me a few years ago

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that he took when he was in the Soviet Union

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a long, long time ago,

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showing the fishing fleets of the Aral Sea.

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You see the canal they dug?

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They were so desperate to try to, kind of, float the boats into

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the remaining pools of water, but they finally had to give up

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because the piers and the moorings simply couldn't

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keep up with the retreating shoreline.

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I don't know about you, but I'm terrified that future

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archaeologists will dig this up and write stories about

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our time in history, and wonder, "What were you thinking?"

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Well, that's the future we have to look forward to.

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We already use about 50 percent of the Earth's fresh water

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that's sustainable, and agriculture alone

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is 70 percent of that.

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So we use a lot of water, a lot of land for agriculture.

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We also use a lot of the atmosphere for agriculture.

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Usually when we think about the atmosphere,

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we think about climate change and greenhouse gases,

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and mostly around energy,

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but it turns out agriculture is one of the biggest emitters

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of greenhouse gases too.

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If you look at carbon dioxide from

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burning tropical rainforest,

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or methane coming from cows and rice,

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or nitrous oxide from too many fertilizers,

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it turns out agriculture is 30 percent of the greenhouse

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gases going into the atmosphere from human activity.

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That's more than all our transportation.

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It's more than all our electricity.

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It's more than all other manufacturing, in fact.

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It's the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases

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of any human activity in the world.

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And yet, we don't talk about it very much.

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So we have this incredible presence today of agriculture

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dominating our planet,

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whether it's 40 percent of our land surface,

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70 percent of the water we use,

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30 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions.

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We've doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus

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around the world simply by using fertilizers,

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causing huge problems of water quality from rivers,

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lakes, and even oceans, and it's also the single biggest

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driver of biodiversity loss.

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So without a doubt, agriculture is

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the single most powerful force unleashed on this planet

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since the end of the ice age. No question.

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And it rivals climate change in importance.

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And they're both happening at the same time.

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But what's really important here to remember is that

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it's not all bad. It's not that agriculture's a bad thing.

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In fact, we completely depend on it.

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It's not optional. It's not a luxury. It's an absolute necessity.

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We have to provide food and feed and, yeah,

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fiber and even biofuels to something like seven billion people

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in the world today, and if anything,

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we're going to have the demands on agriculture

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increase into the future. It's not going to go away.

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It's going to get a lot bigger, mainly because of

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growing population. We're seven billion people today

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heading towards at least nine,

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probably nine and a half before we're done.

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More importantly, changing diets.

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As the world becomes wealthier as well as more populous,

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we're seeing increases in dietary consumption of meat,

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which take a lot more resources than a vegetarian diet does.

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So more people, eating more stuff, and richer stuff,

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and of course having an energy crisis at the same time,

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where we have to replace oil with other energy sources

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that will ultimately have to include some kinds of biofuels

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and bio-energy sources.

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So you put these together. It's really hard to see

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how we're going to get to the rest of the century

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without at least doubling global agricultural production.

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Well, how are we going to do this? How are going to

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double global ag production around the world?

NOTE Paragraph

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Well, we could try to farm more land.

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This is an analysis we've done, where on the left is where

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the crops are today, on the right is where they could be

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based on soils and climate, assuming climate change

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doesn't disrupt too much of this,

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which is not a good assumption.

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We could farm more land, but the problem is

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the remaining lands are in sensitive areas.

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They have a lot of biodiversity, a lot of carbon,

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things we want to protect.

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So we could grow more food by expanding farmland,

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but we'd better not,

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because it's ecologically a very, very dangerous thing to do.

NOTE Paragraph

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Instead, we maybe want to freeze the footprint

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of agriculture and farm the lands we have better.

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This is work that we're doing to try to highlight places

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in the world where we could improve yields

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without harming the environment.

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The green areas here show where corn yields,

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just showing corn as an example,

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are already really high, probably the maximum you could

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find on Earth today for that climate and soil,

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but the brown areas and yellow areas are places where

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we're only getting maybe 20 or 30 percent of the yield

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you should be able to get.

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You see a lot of this in Africa, even Latin America,

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but interestingly, Eastern Europe, where Soviet Union

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and Eastern Bloc countries used to be,

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is still a mess agriculturally.

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Now, this would require nutrients and water.

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It's going to either be organic or conventional

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or some mix of the two to deliver that.

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Plants need water and nutrients.

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But we can do this, and there are opportunities to make this work.

NOTE Paragraph

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But we have to do it in a way that is sensitive

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to meeting the food security needs of the future

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and the environmental security needs of the future.

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We have to figure out how to make this tradeoff between

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growing food and having a healthy environment work better.

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:32.530 --> 00:12:35.060
Right now, it's kind of an all-or-nothing proposition.

00:12:35.060 --> 00:12:37.022
We can grow food in the background --

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that's a soybean field —

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and in this flower diagram, it shows we grow a lot of food,

00:12:41.610 --> 00:12:44.128
but we don't have a lot clean water, we're not storing

00:12:44.128 --> 00:12:47.125
a lot of carbon, we don't have a lot of biodiversity.

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In the foreground, we have this prairie

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that's wonderful from the environmental side,

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but you can't eat anything. What's there to eat?

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We need to figure out how to bring both of those together

00:12:56.432 --> 00:13:00.542
into a new kind of agriculture that brings them all together.

NOTE Paragraph

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Now, when I talk about this, people often tell me,

00:13:02.753 --> 00:13:05.985
"Well, isn't blank the answer?" -- organic food,

00:13:05.985 --> 00:13:10.733
local food, GMOs, new trade subsidies, new farm bills --

00:13:10.733 --> 00:13:13.500
and yeah, we have a lot of good ideas here,

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but not any one of these is a silver bullet.

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In fact, what I think they are is more like silver buckshot.

00:13:19.533 --> 00:13:22.045
And I love silver buckshot. You put it together

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and you've got something really powerful,

00:13:24.363 --> 00:13:26.763
but we need to put them together.

NOTE Paragraph

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So what we have to do, I think, is invent a new kind

00:13:29.296 --> 00:13:31.980
of agriculture that blends the best ideas

00:13:31.980 --> 00:13:35.085
of commercial agriculture and the green revolution

00:13:35.085 --> 00:13:38.637
with the best ideas of organic farming and local food

00:13:38.637 --> 00:13:42.045
and the best ideas of environmental conservation,

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not to have them fighting each other but to have them

00:13:43.850 --> 00:13:47.599
collaborating together to form a new kind of agriculture,

00:13:47.599 --> 00:13:52.317
something I call "terraculture," or farming for a whole planet.

NOTE Paragraph

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Now, having this conversation has been really hard,

00:13:55.301 --> 00:13:57.413
and we've been trying very hard to bring these key points

00:13:57.413 --> 00:13:59.716
to people to reduce the controversy,

00:13:59.716 --> 00:14:01.216
to increase the collaboration.

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I want to show you a short video that does kind of show

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our efforts right now to bring these sides together

00:14:06.093 --> 00:14:09.819
into a single conversation. So let me show you that.

00:14:09.819 --> 00:14:13.480
(Music)

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("Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota: Driven to Discover")

00:14:17.137 --> 00:14:18.578
(Music)

00:14:18.578 --> 00:14:20.226
("The world population is growing

00:14:20.226 --> 00:14:23.239
by 75 million people each year.

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That's almost the size of Germany.

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Today, we're nearing 7 billion people.

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At this rate, we'll reach 9 billion people by 2040.

00:14:31.305 --> 00:14:33.073
And we all need food.

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But how?

00:14:34.424 --> 00:14:37.312
How do we feed a growing world without destroying the planet?

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We already know climate change is a big problem.

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But it's not the only problem.

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We need to face 'the other inconvenient truth.'

00:14:44.729 --> 00:14:47.277
A global crisis in agriculture.

00:14:47.277 --> 00:14:53.536
Population growth + meat consumption + dairy consumption + energy costs + bioenergy production = stress on natural resources.

00:14:53.536 --> 00:14:56.985
More than 40% of Earth's land has been cleared for agriculture.

00:14:56.985 --> 00:14:58.991
Global croplands cover 16 million km².

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That's almost the size of South America.

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Global pastures cover 30 million km².

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That's the size of Africa.

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Agriculture uses 60 times more land than urban and suburban areas combined.

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Irrigation is the biggest use of water on the planet.

00:15:14.482 --> 00:15:18.856
We use 2,800 cubic kilometers of water on crops every year.

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That's enough to fill 7,305 Empire State Buildings every day.

00:15:22.638 --> 00:15:25.619
Today, many large rivers have reduced flows.

00:15:25.619 --> 00:15:27.643
Some dry up altogether.

00:15:27.643 --> 00:15:31.627
Look at the Aral Sea, now turned to desert.

00:15:31.627 --> 00:15:35.250
Or the Colorado River, which no longer flows to the ocean.

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Fertilizers have more than doubled the phosphorus and nitrogen in the environment.

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The consequence?

00:15:40.389 --> 00:15:42.373
Widespread water pollution

00:15:42.373 --> 00:15:44.535
and massive degradation of lakes and rivers.

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Surprisingly, agriculture is the biggest contributor to climate change.

00:15:48.909 --> 00:15:51.336
It generates 30% of greenhouse gas emissions.

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That's more than the emissions from all electricity and industry,

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or from all the world's planes, trains and automobiles.

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Most agricultural emissions come from tropical deforestation,

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methane from animals and rice fields,

00:16:00.749 --> 00:16:02.581
and nitrous oxide from over-fertilizing.

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There is nothing we do that transforms the world more than agriculture.

00:16:05.836 --> 00:16:09.367
And there's nothing we do that is more crucial to our survival.

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Here's the dilemma...

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As the world grows by several billion more people,

00:16:15.228 --> 00:16:19.812
We'll need to double, maybe even triple, global food production.

00:16:19.812 --> 00:16:21.208
So where do we go from here?

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We need a bigger conversation, an international dialogue.

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We need to invest in real solutions:

00:16:25.819 --> 00:16:30.157
incentives for farmers, precision agriculture, new crop varieties, drip irrigation,

00:16:30.157 --> 00:16:33.818
gray water recycling, better tillage practices, smarter diets.

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We need everyone at the table.

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Advocates of commercial agriculture,

00:16:37.974 --> 00:16:39.121
environmental conservation,

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and organic farming...

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must work together.

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There is no single solution.

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We need collaboration,

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imagination,

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determination,

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because failure is not an option.

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How do we feed the world without destroying it?

00:16:55.370 --> 00:16:58.236
Yeah, so we face one of the greatest grand challenges

00:16:58.236 --> 00:17:00.346
in all of human history today:

00:17:00.346 --> 00:17:03.020
the need to feed nine billion people

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and do so sustainably and equitably and justly,

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at the same time protecting our planet

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for this and future generations.

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This is going to be one of the hardest things

00:17:12.804 --> 00:17:14.675
we ever have done in human history,

00:17:14.675 --> 00:17:17.925
and we absolutely have to get it right,

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and we have to get it right on our first and only try.

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So thanks very much. (Applause)