I am Bill Grant with the Environment and Natural Resources Forum here at the CommonWealth Club. And I want to welcome you to the night's event with Stewart Brand. This event is cosponsored by INFORUM a division of a club for people in the 20's and 30's. Over the past 4 decades invincible rabble-rouser Stewart Brand has spent time anticipating cultural revolutions and launching a medley of new ideas, movements, organizations, and communities. He is the founder and publisher of "The Whole Earth Catalog", cofounder of "The Well" and founder of "The Long Now Foundation" among other ventures. In the process, he has turned conventional thinking upside down. Today, Brand spends considerable time talking about the "City Planet" a term used to describe the eventual urbanization of the world and what the implication will be for human innovation. Stewart. Thank you. How is our sound, is that okay, raise your hand if there is a problem. Really I am going to talk cities, mostly cities growing on now. But the good way to understand cities is to go back to the basics. We need the sound up quite a lot higher. Ladies and gentlemen you've just witnessed history. That is in fact the history of cities. Cities are constantly training themselves over and constantly renewing themselves. I am going to make a slight switch in my program here so that I can see my notes, this we've newering on, and that is now which be the case turn off newering and now lets see if all this going to be well. Oh its trying isn't it, sorry about this. You know problem is setting this up at the very beginning, so we are seeing a bit of that now. Okay that's looking better, that's going to take minute to, fine material here. Okay, so these are the oldest things around, the way you find all the city in the mid east does you look for a flat top mountain and that mountain was not there before the city was, the mountain was made by the city. They call them Tellos in that part of the world. And if you look in one of it tells Jerko, you find basically the oldest continuously inhabitant city on the world on the order of 20,000 years. Oh my goodness, we've lost the scope of he image again. I will go back to mirroring and try to remember what we are talking about here. Now here is a weird misfit between the computer and the, bad again how did you do that? You know what this is very mysterious. Yes here is an illusion problem and it keeps loosing its proper frame reference and we had it for a while and it lost itself. Anyway inside the Tello Jericho, so we go back in this archaeologies there is this amazing thing, from the very beginning of Jericho there is a stub of a tower, that's, the stub is 30 feet highest, 30 feet across, nobody has a faintest idea what they were doing. But this is a typical city activity and could say that many bigets later this thing beget the Transamerica Pyramid among the other city buildings. It's the case that cities, when they last well, last very well, Jerusalem has been an important city for over 2000 years and its been concurred, this happens to be an illustration of about 6 over the burnings of the city. Is been destroyed 36 times has been running by practically every religion in the world. And is an important city now as it was then, that keeps happening. This happens to be a case of rapid physical turnover of Boston where you see that the circle on the left shows The Old South Church, same circle on the right shows The Old South Church. That's the only building that lasted over that period of the time. All the others are new buildings. Streets stay the same but this is typical turnover in the cities, they renew their fabric totally about every 50 years in Europe, probably faster than that year and certainly faster than that in the developing world. So let's get to what's going in the developing world. What you have now everywhere is a huge transitions, basically the rural population is dropping and the Urban population is sky rocketing. So just now this year according to UN figures getting to 50% Urban in the world. Just 200 years ago its 3% Urban, a 100 years ago it was 14%, its expected to go up to 61% by 2030 and nobody knows by the middle or end of the century but chances are to level of it about 80%. That's typically what developed nations do. Because the pattern is the developed countries are the ones that have gone urban first as you can see by 1950, they were already 50% urban and the less developed countries are coming along pretty down quickly, in fact much more rapidly than the developed countries did. And so the urbanization that we are used to was pretty dramatic anyway, that's a way more dramatic now elsewhere in the world. Now here is a thing I just picked up from the Internet the other day and is showing what happened over the last 50 years of urbanization. Each of these circles is a city of 5 million and they are increasing allover the world. You can that South Asia and China is growing rapidly, Latin America started early and got very big very fast. This is also something I found recently, cities are famously urbane, famously rural cities and this is a measure of that, you've got the purple on this here are the cities with the million or more foreign born in them. And the green dots are the cities with 500,000 or more foreign born in them. When you go to a big city and you hear lots of languages and see lots of different kinds of people, that let you know you are in the, a big and important city. Big and important cities are pretty much, how we think about the history of any particular time. And the history that we are most used to are just guided by the dominant cities of 100 years ago London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Chicago, Vietnam, Tokyo interestingly. But you look 50 years later by the middle of the century it was already starting to shift. And then you know this by the way that all the cities have grown double basically in that 50 years. The next 50 years they tripled from what they were in 1950, so they were six times bigger than at the beginning of the century and you will notice there is a completely different makeup, now if you call out the cities that are from the developing world in red, that's what you see. And if you expand out say another to 2015 this is the expectation of what will be the dominant cities then, Tokyo with 36 million, Mumbai in the over 22 million et cetera. And as far as who is in what used to be called the West and now the This pattern is actually little bit familiar, if you go back a 1000 years these were the North, pretty much all you have left is New York. dominant cities a 1000 years ago. Cordova in Spain, Kaifeng in China and so on down the line. Who is the West then, you have to bend it, you could see there maybe Cordova and Constantinople. In other words the rise of the west is over, this whole thing of Europe and North America dominating history with its cities is basically passed changed the world and we are now into something much more medieval feeling. The next few decades this is a map which is showing the circles in the red, are showing where the expected growth is and you have to see, see it's in the south. This is a big event, demographics is destiny, we say in the futures business and right now 1.3 million new people in cities every week, some of them are being born there, most of them are moving there. Added up at 70 million a year, its not just this year, not just this decades, its several decades in the past and everybody expects it to be several decades in the future. This is a huge event going on around us. One of the things that's driving in and that it drives back is the whole question of globalization. Basically nations are softened and cities are strengthened by globalization. And even NGO's now grow increasingly straight to the big cities where the need are where they can efficiently prevail what they have to offer. The difference is that nations are defined very much by boundaries and cities are defined very much by their economic activity which is like I know it's like a center. And so the planet that I grow up thinking about was one it was pretty much defined by its national boundaries. Then we had the power program and then we started to see the world this way where the boundaries dropped away. And then with military satellite photography you got what they city looks like on the dark side and the planet looks like, it looks like the city. You see the cities growing right back at the start and that's the shape of civilization now. Actually you could do one more transition and say how it looks from the perspective of the internet. This is one of the many maps that the internet established to be a appearing map that shows very strong connections between main frames in the connectivity and appearing between bottom right triangle there is between Europe and North America and somewhat between North America and Asia. Not much connection between Asia and Europe yet but its building fast. And so for the time being the North America is the center of the internet world but that's probably temporary. Important thing to realize that I haven't caught on to until I started looking into this is, the cities have always been in population sinks. And there is a reason for that basically its, the more kids you have when you live in a country the better its insurance, they can work, high school, its about a million dollars. The equivalence of that are the same of lower not much else do and that's what people have lots of children. Once they get in town, they get to the situation that any urban American has now which is when you are thinking about having a child it's a choice of what, would you whether have a children or a million dollars and the time to enjoy it. Because that's actually probably a low figure on between lost wages and the share of cost, this is not college, this is just getting a kid up through high school, its about a million dollars. The equivalence of that are the same of lower figures elsewhere in the world, so people get to town and the replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per women. Over the last decades rapidly now the birth rate has people moved to the cities, women moving to the cities, get liberated decide they want to have fewer kids and educate them, knew they've all got jobs and they are running various organizations. Their birth rate goes right down to 2.1 replacement and then to the demographers astonishment, keep right on dropping and so in parts the world now like in the developed world in Italy, Spain, Germany certainly Russia, certainly Japan. Italy I think the replacement, the birth rate is now 1.3 children per women. That's radical, but among the other things it means a problem that we use to care about rightly, the world population. That's bomb has been diffused as we speak and not for any of the reasons we expect, it is basically urbanization which is driving them. So we get to 8 or 9 billion over the next couple of decades. And by then it will be slowing, its already slowing conspicuously, deliberately going off and already Russia and Japan are loosing total population and lot of people where following that direction. So there is a very good book called "The Empty Cradle" by Phillip Longman and this is one slide that I borrowed. This is the UN projection, one of the moderates ones suggest that the world fertility rate stabilize at 1.85 children per women by 2300 will be back again to two point something billion we had in 1960. But the fertility rate in developed world already is down to 1.56. So we maybe looking at a population problem that is the opposite of one that we've been experiencing for last few decades. We maybe looking at serious economic dislocations caused by population plummeting in this century. Because the next 2 billion people that are coming along are almost all in cities and those are the ones who are busy and not having a lot of kids. This also means that there is some pretty interesting demographic thing going on with age pyramids and so this is the empty cradle we are running out of bambinos is the Italy and babies everywhere else. And one more old folks, so Florida may well be the fore runner of North America and lots of other places increasingly looking like that. Even Mexico is aging faster than the US and so you could see a reversal of, you may have to sell our fence to them at some point because they will be in greater need of young employees from here than we are from there. So the next 30 years what you are seeing is these megacities and hypercities in the south, they are full of young people, that is where the last part of the population momentum as its called as playing out the last new 2 billion babies are growing up there. So new cities full of young people and in Europe and North America and elsewhere in the north old cities full of old people. In any case they are moving; people are moving to the cities and away from the country side which means country side itself emptying now and there will be more visitor than lived in. I wanted to give a brief kind of review on how I think civilization works. My notion is that a good way to think about any robust dynamic system is to take it apart in terms of piece layering of it. Some parts move very quickly, some parts move slowly, some parts would move really slowly. And one way to think about the healthy civilization is to move in the slowest parts, nature, climate change, biodiversity change things like that up through culture, religion, language groups which move by centuries sometimes millennium. Governance rather than government which changes pretty slowly up through the infrastructure of 5 year plans and 60 years buildings and so on, rapid commerce and even rapid fashion in art. An example of that breaking is here if you look what happened earthquake in Turkey back in 1999, the quicker building codes in this part of Turkey but the commercial interest we are able to buy off building inspectors and basically put governance at the rate of commerce and not be able to think for ahead, not be able to think infrastructurally and so another earthquake came along and this building were not ready for and they came down and killed lot of people. Now its interesting in this image is what is the strongest looking building in there? It's the mosque, here is an organization, its 1200 years old and apparently they know about earthquakes. And the building seems to know about these long terms natural events. I got this image from National Geographic and okay, that's pretty cute, makes your point but you know that happened anywhere else. Well if you go to Sumatra, right after the earthquake and tsunami there this image was one, you say okay fine, good one. Lets fly the helicopter around little bit, you see anything else like that. There are some parts of our culture, in this case building which actually are aware of natural system timeframes and respond well to them and interact well with them and that's probably the way on the civilization. So a way to think about these kinds of diagrams is that the fast parts are doing learning and proposing, they are observing the shocks, commerce, is always trying new stuff. Most businesses go out of business, nobody cares. The things that are remembering, the libraries and codes and regulations, they are integrating a lot of stuff, they are making sense of the shocks, they are ready for the next one. Their focus is on continuity whereas this fast ones fashion is constantly telling you what's out of fashion, we got to get rid of it. And unfortunately here or not, I don't know, keeps me on business, most of our newspapers and magazines and web stuff is focusing on the fast moving stuffs, you know this weeks news, today's news is 5 minutes news, political cycle is driven by that which maybe too bad because the real juice is in the slow stuff. That's the power, that's the culture, that's the governance, that's the infrastructure. And we are trying to figure out how to get our political process back into engaging those where the power really is. Now few years ago I did a book called how building is learn and I keep getting ask to do a talk on how cities learn, so I felt okay well, maybe I will, how can I think about that, maybe I can use that diagram of civilization and figure out how to change it so that it will work for cities. So I looked into what cities really are and there are a lot of books with titles like this, basically Civitas citizen, civilization cities, it's all a same word. And so when you look back at the history of the cities starting for us with Athens and the cities stayed and then on up to the city state of Florence in the 14th century and then Venice and contemporary city state in Singapore, cities have often been more dominate than the nations even the think off and they are often the ones that drove history and we would say that was were civilization was happening. So I wanted saying okay, since cities and civilizations are close enough I can use the same diagram to talk about how cities learn, except that the thing that the whole idea of the hot New York when the cities move really, really quickly and that's parts of their function, my suggestion is it that cities basically distorted this diagram to emphasize the fast stuff, this is where fashion is going on, this is where commerce is jamming and we keep not nature at a certain distance. And as a process then the, what the cities are doing is teaching the society around them. Okay, here is a classic case, San Francisco bay area. This is not a down story. Little bit of cable car is down there. It's an up story, a rapid growth is what cities do and for last at least we think its pretty much okay and how can we say its not okay somewhere else. That's my friend Lou talking about where are the people came from to moving to San Francisco and Chicago and Seattle and Los Angeles. Phoenix and all other places have been growing like mad, the American country side in emptying out and where they are going is an interesting concept referring to this make a plenary, we're here in NorCal, we got three major ones on the west coast south land and Cascadian and trans out if you overlap the inner states and these things, you get a sense of how there major congregations came to pass, this is the urban landscape of North America. The North America is a time event, or here is where the action is, all over the world here in Togo, Africa, the countryside is emptying out, the villages are emptying out in South Africa, in Saudi, in Oman, in Syria and Turkey. Central Russia when the central economy collapsed a whole lot of the subsidiary cities are in the middle for the Soviet Union are basically emptied out right away. The same thing happened in East Germany. Spain has empty places, Newfoundland, you can't tell by the bright buildings but there is nobody in them. Likewise in the fair islands, Bolivia, China 300 million people move from the country side to the cities in the last 40 or 50 years, they expect another 300 million people to move from the country side to the cities. And so you are seeing this all over china. What's going on, what converged me on this was a statement I heard 8 years ago, in the village all there is for a women is to obey her husband and family elder, pound grain, and sing. If she moves to town she can get a job, start a business and get education for her children. Her independence goes up and her traditional constrains go down, this was Kavita Ramdas, what's just south here and global funding for women. Here is the unromantic truth of life in the country especially in the developing world. It is rough, it is dangerous, it is unpaid, it is fragile, and will people get a chance to move somewhere else and they go and visit their uncle in town and they see the things were exciting and actually get paid for you work there, you're a lot freer than you were in the village, you are lot more private, its actually safer, its not banded in the same sense there is not vulnerability to weather, those of the things and you got a chance to improve your life. So people move to city, lucky ones go to Shanghai, most folks go to places like this, squatter cities or like this Hosinia and Rio. This happens to be a book I recommend to you called "Shadow Cities", "A Billion Squatters", "A New Urban World" by Robert Neuwirth. And its part of what put me on to the track of all of this, so just recommend few other books I mentioned Phillip Longman's "The Empty Cradle", there is a good one on Mumbai called "Maximum City" and the fantastic one in Mumbai which is a novel on the lower right there "Shantaram" by Gregory David Roberts. The one on the lower left I just added, cell phones are absolutely transforming the urban developing world, they are doing things with it far beyond Japanese school girls, far beyond anybody else they have turned their self in the ATM machines making cash, they are standing in job lines on their cell phones, they are absolutely in turbine innovation, if you want to see what's going on go to the squatter cities. And then the one that all corporations read is C. K Prahalad's the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. Okay, we will take a quick slide show of some of these places where billion people live, Turkey has some, Cairo, this is, its not like the stop being esthetic when they get to these places, in fact it probably increase. Of course there are satellite dishes everywhere; this is the famous, now famous Kibera, a million strong squatter city, right outside Nairobi. A lot's of action there. This is typical squatter city Favela in Rio, all of those buildings are really good, this is a whole squatter high raise city and in fact got a couple of citations on this, if you add up the aggregate of all this squatter buildings going on squatters are the dominant city builders in the world today, decade after decade this where the physical action is and as well as everything else. And what you see is they gradually go from a (indiscernible) the paper return to motor and then they keep on building motor higher and higher. They have busy streets they have markets, they have schools, they have everything going on them, these are the cities. They are often on foot cities, cell phone cities because they don't have their own infrastructure they steal it, in Latin America called Gotos guys go out and just basically grabbing electricity and waters, it going by, string it up through these things, hook it into the various building where they live and that's the nature of infrastructure. Places like Caracas, Venezuella this is a slide I borrowed AES, that is 4 people die a month from electrocution looking these lamp cords together and so corporation is doing a process of figuring out how these people can go from being. They think they want, that these are privates who want to be customers, in the right. So one of the transitions it's going on with the government help, corporate help and NGO help, is going from stolen electricity and water to cheep electricity and water. Economic are very strange, Mumbai absolutely smothered by slums, you think would be the dead weight economically. But just in the formal economy its one sixth of India's gross domestic product, never mind what's going on the informal economy down there in the street, which is you see look medieval, feel medieval but not dark age at all, this is renaissance stuff. Remember the German phrase that came out of the residence and renaissance was the style of the market fry. See here makes it free and that's what people doing when they moved to these places and they are having renaissance. I showed places like was Kibera was huge slum by next to the city but in fact the slums are all meshed right in. And so the informal economy of the lower part of these pictures is smack right up against the formal economy and is making possible to large extent. So here is Dhaka, the slum clusters are scattered all over and they are completely blended into the whole operation and there is a lot of change going there. And one of the things it goes on is you get places like this and then something political happens and they tear it all down. There is a lot of this going on Zimbabwe. And sometimes it's understandable and justified and they get some better places to live, but often it's just a horrible destructive thing to do. So squatters care about more than anything else is security of tenure, that's what the UN calls it, but they can stay please. Location is huge, there is not much transportation, so they want to be able top walk to work and if they cant walk to work in the formal economy they will create work in their own world, water is a big event, sanitation is a big event, if they is any serious pandemics, people are so dense, 6 people who were roman some of these places, you could have your real runaway situation. Electricity they will steal and protection from crime often from people outside the slum, who rid them off because they don't have police protection. Now we often go to these places and think oh gosh, what they really need is housing and since our idealistic architect comes in and get some NGO money and works something out with the government, builds a wonderful cheep high raise for the people there and instantly becomes the worst part of the slum. Because nobody owns it, nobody cares about it, its not incrementally improving; it's just a dead loss. Phone service, thanks to cell phones, they are now; you can get a cell phone, new cell phone for $10 and most of these places it is so crucial that everybody gets one and so more than half humanity has cell phone connectivity now. Unemployment you look at some figures although was people in the, so bad they are unemployed, well completely employed is just in the informal economy, which doesn't count. And so the children are working, the old folks are working. Starvation which is a great problem in the country side, the cities do not have that any more. And thanks to NGO's, thanks to lots of things again in the country side you can't get medical care but in town you can. Sometime the government helps and say you can take a place like Indore and they worked out a program of getting help from the people lived there to do some of the infrastructure construction themselves, they got sort of class ideas from doing that and turned what had been the slum part of the city into now considered very popular part of the city. And the main thing is going on in places like that, is the education for kids. This is the future, education is having, it's often a mom and pop kind of stuff, but its education and it's happening for the children of the building in the squatter cities. We look at these places and look at that street in Mumbai, what's going on there. Well basically everything is going on there, everything you would find on Market Street only compressed in on forth and including, of course an internet cafe and all the rest of it. The informal economy is been very little studies yet. But what you've got is a lot of different ways, you go to the slums and you think, oh gosh these are poor people, they don't have money, there is quite a lot of money in the slums. It's coming from people renting stuff to each other, building stuff for each other, employing each other like man, providing all sorts of services and then the witness coming in from illegal workers and sometimes legal workers overseas. One rough guess in developing countries, this 60% of the employment is in the informal economy, we don't have number on, we are guessing. And so what that means is the economic theory has not caught up with the reality of the world just now, is very much like dark energy and physics where it always says okay the universe is now expanding, its accelerating, we don't understand why this is, we call it something constant or the dark energy and we don't know what it is but its huge and its accelerating, its expanding, that's the informal economy. So you it all over, this happens to be in the famous huge slum in Mumbai called Dharavi and you know you see everything cutting to people making matrices out of cloth scraps on the lower right there, the huge laundry area where the laundry is done for the entire city and economically very, very busy. Even in Kibera people are working, people are selling stuff to each other and to the formal economy. It stinks, now you can see this and oh gosh that's pretty great, a lot happening there. If you go there its rough, its smells awful, but people are smiling, they are doing lots of stuff, they are not a population crushed by poverty there, population busy getting out of poverty as fast as they can, it takes a while but they are doing it. And you see things like this; they are taking phone, possibilities of phones and moving them in all directions. This is a picture from Jan Chipchase; she has taken in Delhi, where there is an entire street where you know if we break our cell phone that's pretty much here we throw away. There are broken cell phones, everybody know how to repair every kind of cell phone there is, down at the chip level. And so that's why you can get cell phones for $10 in these places. And then people find various ways to share them and they are moving the chips in and out and turning them into money and so on and this happens to be one of Jan Chipchase's photographs. He has gotten to the point where peoples, street addresses as their cell phone number. They are way ahead of us and these are folks who live in cyber space physically. So there is a lot of action there and especially look at the lady on the right with, the main event I think that's going on is when people move to the city but women get liberated. As Kebede Ramadoss pointed out this is a major event for them and so the women are running things, they are ones who get the micr loans, in Kenya legally only women can get these kinds of loans because they are the reliable ones, they form these credits circles and they are the ones who can, will pay it back. In Some countries it's illegal for a woman to own property, but they are in fact the best keepers of property. So a billion people and they are in motion and they are being joined, 1 to 2 billion more are expected in these squatter cities. This event is not even beginning to be over. These places are where else so much action is because I think they are doing exactly what we did in the San Francisco in 1840's and 50's, we started as a shantytown. They are generating their own economy, they are organizing their own situation, they are building incrementally which means great debt activity. They are providing support for each other in terms of not the tribe, of the nuclear family that collects in town and by neighborhoods. And since governments are not stepping up, the religious groups are something like 10% of humanity is Pentecostal Christian now and they are taking care of business and the Islamic countries is Islamizes, places like Morocco and Shivaji culton places like Mumbai. The religious groups are taking care of business, this is a necessary missionary, these are those many are, its typically local groups. So besides being population sinks, cities are wealth creators, they all happy on what they do and as the result of this new city action this is where billions of people right now are busy climbing out of property, all poverty and not via property, its via this little thing. And so there is a lot of transformation and all the horror and prime and every other thing goes on with this process, I mean really is to Keynesian, this is London in the 1840's, its tough, but people are raising up and they are being inventive as hell and one of the things we can do for interest in innovation is to pay close attention. As a environmentalist I am interested in cities anyway is green events because they are so dense, but if you want density go to Mumbai, we've got a million people in a square mile, obviously using minimal amounts of material and energy that recycling everything and they coming up with new ideas, I will give a local example of that. The whole notion of urbanism rose out of my neighborhood, which is just across the bay, the Sausolito house boat area, like all, such places we have our own music. Otis Redding wrote "Sittin' by the Dock of the Bay" in the house boat community in Sausalito. Now (inaudible) right there in a tug boat is my wife and for a long time a couple of years our neighbor on the South dark was Peter Calthur. Peter had been a various neighborhoods in San Francisco trying to make them work as neighborhoods, failing and failing and failing and he gave up and came and lived on the dock and realized that there actually was a community there priorly because everybody saw each other face to face walking up and down the dock. And so he developed the idea Walkable Communities and rapid transit served Walkable Communities and so one whole wing of urbanism came out of Peter's experience with the local squatter city in the bay area. And so he is making paces to have the calm of the dock and then where people live with relatively high density and mixed use, we have mixed use in Sausalito because we didn't take coding serious, 400 house boards invaded in the 50's and 60's and then only later got gradually legalized and gentrified the typical sequence that goes on was squatter cities. I think there is something missing from the studies that are being made of the so called ecological foot print. And its this, that when looking at the ecological foot print of cities and worrying about how big it is and how to make it smaller and so on and that's great, but I don't think people are necessarily looking at it and contrast you how people are sitting on the foot print they make when they are living in the country side, driving around, using a lot of material, typically I think its not just suburbs that are relatively expensive but a lot of the way out there in the country side folks are keeping a larger foot print and they need to in that, maybe one of the reasons they are moving into the city, now lot of necessarily good will to the environment but because they wanted to be in a more economically dense action and part of that is a kind of environmental efficiency. When the people move out of the countryside, the natural systems move back, in the developing world what are replaced with shrubs and trees are being cut for firewood, people move why those this come back, places where they are killing wild life as bush meat, the people move away the wild life's comes back. And so I think that there are some prospects here that we can see more about. So that the, sort of summation is that cities are transformative and transformative for the individual especially for women, families develop of the process of having shared income from the variety of people in the family at various times. They get the advantages of fewer children and more education, to the society where this is happening, you are more wealth handling, your participation in the globalization in the world city, there is lower population pressure, thanks to this and lower environmental impact, what drives all this? People are not moving to town because they are being asked to, in fact they are usually being told not to in most of the developing world. Don't come here we can't take care of you, go back where, was you where and bother us anymore. Was driving then into town is the chance to get paid, to get a job, get some opportunity, get some education for the kids, to get out the static situation therein in the countryside. They see the actions in town and the bright lights and they go to the buried lights in the right to. So in terms of the green perspective on this is their environmental strategy, I think the first thing we need to do is get more sense of what's really going on, pay attention to it , collect the data and then do a couple of things. One would be to go out and increasingly preserve and prepare the natural systems in the now empty countryside, because people who have come back, I mean only visit but those start making impact again and what you want to start taking advantage of this time to protect it. And this is also because of all of this huge transition in the cities, even in the developed world like here this is the chance to use some of this wealth as being generated to make the cities themselves really green and really humane. And so you can start to see things like this. That's happens to be in New Zealand. I am going to give the last word to my friend Branny now, who has some perspective on all this.