-
I'd like you to imagine the world anew.
-
I'd like to show you some maps
-
which have been drawn by Ben Hennig
-
of the planet in a way that most of you
will never have seen the planet
-
depicted before.
-
Here's an image that you're
very familiar with.
-
I'm old enough that I was actually born
before we saw this image.
-
Apparently some of my first words
words were "Moona, moona,"
-
but I think that's my mom
-
having a particular fantasy about
-
what her baby boy could see
on the flickering black and white
-
TV screen.
-
It's only been a few centuries
-
since we've actually, most of us,
thought of our planet as spherical.
-
When we first saw these images
in the 1960s,
-
the world was changing
at an incredible rate.
-
In my own little discipline
-
of human geography,
-
a cartographer called Waldo Tobler
-
was drawing new maps of the planet,
-
and these maps have now spread,
-
and I'm going to show you
one of them now.
-
This map is a map of the world,
-
but it's a map which looks to you
-
a little bit strange.
-
It's a map in which we stretched places
-
so that those areas which contain
many people are drawn larger,
-
and those areas, like the Sahara
and the Himalayas,
-
in which there are few people,
have been shrunk away.
-
Everybody on the planet is given
an equal amount of space.
-
The cities are shown shining bright.
-
The lines are showing you
submarine cables and trade routes.
-
And there's one particular line
that goes from the Chinese port of Dalian
-
through past Singapore,
-
through the Suez Canal,
-
through the Mediterranean,
and round to Rotterdam.
-
And it's showing you the route
-
of what was the world's largest ship
just a year ago,
-
a ship which was taking
-
so many containers of goods
-
that when they were unloaded,
-
if the lorries had all gone in convoy,
they would have been 100 kilometers long.
-
This is how our world is now connected.
-
This is the quantity of stuff
we are now moving around the world,
-
just on one ship, on one voyage,
-
in five weeks.
-
We've lived in cities
for a very long time,
-
but most of us didn't live in cities.
-
This is Çatalhöyük, one of
the world's first cities.
-
At its peak 9,000 years ago,
-
people had to walk over the roofs
-
of other's houses to get to their home.
-
If you look carefully
of the map of the city,
-
you'll see it has no streets,
-
because streets are something we invented.
-
The world changes.
-
It changes by trial and error.
-
We work out slowly and gradually
-
how to live in better ways.
-
And the world has changed
incredibly quickly most recently.
-
It's only within the last six,
seven, or eight generations
-
that we have actually realized
that we are a species.
-
It's only within the last few decades
-
that the map like this could be drawn.
-
Again, the underlying map
is the map of world population,
-
but over it, you're seeing arrows
showing how we spread out of Africa
-
with dates showing you where
we think we arrived
-
at particular times.
-
I have to redraw this map
every few months,
-
because somebody makes a discovery
-
that a particular date was wrong.
-
We are learning about ourselves
at an incredible speed.
-
And we're changing.
-
A lot of change is gradual.
-
It's accretion.
-
We don't notice the change
-
because we only have short lives,
-
70, 80, if you're lucky 90 years.
-
This graph is showing you
-
the annual rate of population
growth in the world.
-
It was very low until around about 1850,
-
and then the rate of population growth
-
began to rise
-
so that around the time I was born,
-
when we first saw
those images from the Moon
-
of our planet,
-
our global population was growing
at two percent a year.
-
If it had carried on growing
at two percent a year
-
for just another couple of centuries,
-
the entire planet would be covered
-
with a seething mass of human bodies
-
all touching each other.
-
And people were scared.
-
They were scared at population growth,
-
and what they called
"the population bomb" in 1968.
-
But then, if you look
at the end of the graph,
-
the growth began to slow.
-
The decade the '70s, the '80s, the '90s,
the naughties, and in this decade,
-
even faster,
-
our population growth is slowing.
-
Our planet is stabilizing.
-
We are heading towards nine, 10,
or 11 billion people
-
by the end of the century.
-
Within that change, you can see tumult.
-
You can see the Second World War.
-
You can see the pandemic
in 1918 from influenza.
-
You can see the great Chinese famine.
-
These are the events
we tend to concentrate on.
-
We tend to concentrate
on the terrible events in the news.
-
We don't tend to concentrate on
the gradual change
-
and the good news stories.
-
We worry about people.
-
We worry about how many people there are.
-
We worry about how you can
get away from people.
-
But this is the map of the world
changed again to make area large,
-
the further away people are
from each area.
-
So if you want to know where to go
to get away from everybody,
-
here's the best places to go.
-
And every year, these areas get bigger,
-
because every year, we are
coming off the land globally.
-
We are moving into the cities.
-
We are packing in more densely.
-
There are wolves again in Europe,
-
and the wolves are moving west
-
across the continent.
-
Our world is changing.
-
You have worries.
-
This is a map showing where
the water falls on our planet.
-
We now know that.
-
And you can look at where Çatalhöyük was,
-
where three continents meet,
Africa, Asia, and Europe,
-
and you can see there are
a large number of people living there
-
in areas with very little water.
-
And you can see areas in which
there is a great deal of rainfall as well.
-
And we can get a bit more sophisticated.
-
Instead of making
the map be shaped by people,
-
we can shape the map by water,
-
and then we can change it every month
-
to show the amount of water
-
falling on every small part of the globe.
-
And you see the monsoons moving
around the planet,
-
and the planet almost appears
to have a heartbeat.
-
And all of this only became possible
-
within my life,
-
to see this is where we are living.
-
We have enough water.
-
This is a map of where we grow
our food in the world.
-
This is the areas that we will rely on
most for rice and maize and corn.
-
People worry that there won't
be enough food, but we know,
-
if we just ate less meat and fed
less of the crops to animals,
-
there is enough food for everybody
-
as long as we think of ourselves
as one group of people.
-
And we also know
-
about what we do
-
so terribly badly nowadays.
-
You will have seen this map
-
of the world before.
-
This is the map
-
produced by taking satellite images,
-
if you remember those satellites
around the planet
-
in the very first slide I showed,
-
and producing an image of what
the Earth looks like at night.
-
When you normally see that map,
-
on a normal map, the kind of map
-
that most of you will be used to,
-
you think you are seeing
-
a map of where people live.
-
Where the lights are shining up
is where people live.
-
But here, on this image of the world,
-
remember we've stretched the map again.
-
Everywhere has the same density
of people on this map.
-
If an area doesn't have people,
-
we've shrunk it away
-
to make it disappear.
-
So we're showing everybody
-
with equal prominence.
-
Now, the lights no longer show you
where people are,
-
because people are everywhere.
-
Now the lights on the map,
-
the lights in London, the lights in Cairo,
the lights in Tokyo,
-
the lights on the Eastern Seaboard
of the United States,
-
the lights show you where people live
-
who are so profligate with energy
-
that they can afford
-
to spend money
-
powering lights to shine
up into the sky
-
so satellites can draw an image like this.
-
And the areas that are dark on the map
-
are either areas where people
do not have access to that much energy,
-
or areas where people do,
-
but they have learned to stop
shining the light up into the sky.
-
And if I could show you this map
animated over time,
-
you would see that Tokyo
has actually become darker,
-
because ever since the tsunami in Japan,
-
Japan has had to rely
on a quarter less electricity
-
because it turned
the nuclear power stations off.
-
And the world didn't end.
-
You just shown less light
-
up into the sky.
-
There are a huge number
-
of good news stories in the world.
-
Infant mortality is falling
-
and has been falling
at an incredible rate.
-
A few years ago,
-
the number of babies
dying in their first year
-
of life in the world
-
fell by five percent in just one year.
-
More children are going to school
-
and learning to read and write
-
and getting connected to the Internet
-
and going on to go to university
-
than ever before at an incredible rate,
-
and the highest number of young people
going to university in the world
-
are women, not men.
-
I can give you good news story
after good news story
-
about what is getting
better in the planet,
-
but we tend to concentrate
-
on the bad news that is immediate.
-
Rebecca Solnit, I think,
put it brilliantly,
-
when she explained: "the accretion
of incremental, imperceptible changes
-
which can constitute progress
and which render our era
-
dramatically different from the past" --
-
the past was much more stable --
-
"a contrast obscured by the undramatic
nature of gradual transformation,
-
punctuated by occasional tumult."
-
Occasionally, terrible things happen.
-
You are shown those terrible things
-
on the news every night of the week.
-
You are not told about
the population slowing down.
-
You are not told about the world
becoming more connected.
-
You are not told about the incredible
improvements in understanding.
-
You are not told about how
we are learning to begin
-
to waste less and consume less.
-
This is my last map.
-
On this map, we have taken the seas
-
and the oceans out.
-
Now you are just looking
-
at about 7.4 billion people
-
with the map drawn
in proportion to those people.
-
You're looking at over a billion in China,
-
and you can see the largest
city in the world in China,
-
but you do not know its name.
-
You can see that India
-
is in the center of this world.
-
You can see that Europe is on the edge,
-
and we in Exeter today
-
are on the far edge of the planet.
-
We are on a tiny scrap of rock
-
off Europe
-
which contains less than one percent
-
of the world's adults,
-
and less than half a percent
-
of the world's children.
-
We are living in a stabilizing world,
an urbanizing world,
-
an aging world,
-
a connecting world.
-
There are many, many things
to be frightened about,
-
but there is no need for us
to fear each other as much as we do,
-
and we need to see that we are now
living in a new world.
-
Thank you very much.
-
(Applause)