Are humans taking over the world | Danielle Hardy | TEDxTauntonSchool
[Music] [Applause] [Music] to most people this question would appear surprisingly easy to answer why of course humours are the most dominant species on the planet but is this necessarily a good thing somehow I'm not so sure one of my granddad's who lived in India during the 60s was a manager of various tea plantations in the Assam region which is just south of the Himalayas and close to the Bangladesh border he's told me many fascinating stories of his time there but tonight I want to focus on one in particular at the time he was living there there was an area called the North East frontier tract which is forbidden by the Indian government since it was home to many native tribes my granddad would enter that territory in order to go fishing and what he described was a beautiful idyllic and naturally intact place and what was most spectacular and what he remembers thinking when he was that at that place is that he could look at the soil beneath him and everything that encircled him and think to himself I'm probably the only person ever to have set foot in this spot and to me that's amazing but it's becoming increasingly rare in our world nowadays so over 50 years on my granddad who now lives in the UK decided to look up this place on Google Maps and it's no longer restricted by the Indian government and what he found was quite shocking all sorts of hotel resorts holiday complexes shops and the rest were popping up all along the Subin Seri River this place which was once so beautiful and this is sad humans had invaded this then led me to ask the question are humans taking over the world because just from looking at that example it would appear that we most certainly are trying our best to very few places remain unexplored nowadays and as our human population increased over time we realized our increasing potential to utilize a very dangerous weapon called power we are the only species on the planet to destroy its own habitat to reinvent our earth into skyscrapers roads buildings towns and that's shocking but what's even more shocking is the fact that we destroy the habitats of all other species on the planet I'm sure you've heard all about climate change it seems to loom over us everywhere we go like a bad smell the term is so loosely tucked around nowadays that many people actually fail to recognize the significance of its meaning and this is actually upsetting because despite it being talked about climate change is often neglected its muffled out by other political affairs which arguably are still important but at the same time I think Teresa May herself can only listen to so much about brexit so much of what we were exposed to in the media is money I'm sure you'll all agree that it's it consumes our lives it rules our lives but I want to draw your attention to something which maybe you've never considered or even questioned perhaps and that is that money isn't actually real I know it seems like quite a bold statement to make but we made it up humans made it up it's simply a humanized concept a measure of calculating one's wealth but it isn't real and it baffles me why so many people become so fixated on something that doesn't exist but climate change Israel it's actually happening to us and you might think well how do I know that I can't see any negative consequences in my life but that's where you're wrong we are the lucky ones we are so wrapped up in our tiny developed nation that we don't see the negative consequences that happen happening all over the world you only have to look at the recent cyclones in Mozambique to realize that climate change is happening we are burning I miss biodiverse rainforests drilling into the most fragile ecosystems on the planet for mining pumping toxic gases into our atmosphere dumping plastics into our oceans fighting wars with deadly explosives and this is a problem there is a limit to how much we can exploit the world and one day there will be nothing left is this really the world that you want to live in we can't make a change unless we know about it and that is one of the biggest problems we simply don't know we're not informed by the brands the companies which are feeding us our consumeristic lifestyles we don't know that everything in our world comes from places that we could couldn't even imagine but I hope to see this change I hope that we can educate our people to know what we are what we are using and where it comes from but I don't want to demonize the human species entirely because I truly believe we are good people it's simply the fact that we do not know and that is our downfall but perhaps all of this is of no concern to you anyway because maybe you won't be alive to see the consequences that's a common argument that I hear all over the place but I'm sorry to say it isn't true because at the rate that we are destroying our rainforests maybe you will at the rate that we are filling up our landfill sites with rubbish only to release methane gas into the atmosphere which is toxic maybe you will and at the rates that we are inventing the most technologically advanced lethal and dangerous weapon ever to have existed on the planet the atomic bomb maybe you will you see you don't have to believe in climate change to see that this is a problem the exploitation of our only planets our home is never the answer where I've digressed from my original question which is are humans taking over the world and to put it simply yes I do believe we are but notice how I haven't asked how humans humans already taken over the world because quite reassuringly I don't believe we have to put it in perspective the NOAA estimates that 95% of the world's oceans remain unexplored and that's a vast expanse so maybe we aren't quite as powerful as we think but this is why now is the perfect time to stop what we are doing and make a change the anthropocentric view of the world is outdated it's old the rest of the world is trying its best to keep this planet healthy and alive the plants which not only feed us but allow us to breathe good quality air the animals which roam the skies the Seas the lands the bacteria which are often underestimated an entire domain when actually they recycle our waste so that it doesn't stay in the ground forever but they cannot work miracles and the plastic carcasses which we so carelessly abandoned will stay I don't want to scare you into these apocalyptic visions some kind of living hell nor coerce you into acting out of fear we are free individuals and we make our own decisions but like I said we are also good people and I hope that you can see that the good and the right thing to do is to protect our planet we need to stop fighting against the rest of the world instead fight with it for a better future so if you take away anything from what I've said today I hope it is one thing that our planet is sacred however you believe we came into existence our planet is precious it is special it is unique and it is most certainly worth protecting because ultimately the world could survive without humans but humans could not survive without the world thank you for listening [Applause]