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Maps that show us who we are (not just where we are) | Danny Dorling | TEDxExeter

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    I'd like you to imagine the world anew.
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    I'd like to share some ideas with you,
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    that I first shared with my friend
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    Carl Lee, and which we've got
    for many other people
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    about how you can look at the world
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    in very different ways.
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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.
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    I want to talk about
    how everything is connected
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    to everything else.
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    The phrase is normally attributed
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    to Lenin,
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    but it was used recently
    by my friend George Monbiot,
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    when he was trying to explain
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    the importance of whale poo
    in the oceans.
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    If we kill the whales,
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    we don't get the whale poo
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    if the oceans don't get the whale poo
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    things go badly wrong.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 up.
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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.
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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.
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    Thank you very much.
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    (Applause)
Title:
Maps that show us who we are (not just where we are) | Danny Dorling | TEDxExeter
Description:

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDxTalks
Duration:
14:46

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