Transcriber: Silvia Rivera Reviewer: Denise RQ
My name is Ben Randall and I'm here to talk about "The Human, Earth Project"
and some of the ideas that led to its development.
In 2009,
I was managing a custom-sportswear business
on a tropical island in southern Thailand.
I was earning a lot of money by Thai standards,
and I had all the things that we're supposed to want in life,
you know, beautiful house, a car, a motorbike, a gorgeous fiancee;
all the things that are supposed to make us happy, but they didn't...
because it was a very selfish life
it was a life that was based around
taking, taking everything I could take from the world and holding onto it.
And everything I took
became part of a wall between me and the rest of the world,
and that wall just kept growing and growing
and I was spending all my time, all my energy
collecting all these things that I didn't need and I didn't want.
So, I left Thailand and came out from behind my little wall,
I left all those beautiful things behind
and I went traveling looking for... I don't know what, for something else.
And my travels led me
- Slide please! Oh, that's Thailand. Next one! -
here, to a national park
known as the Dragon's Backbone in southern China,
beautiful place, magnificent place,
full of trash.
People were coming
from all over China and all over the world
to this amazing place and filling it up with trash.
At first, I tried to ignore it, like everybody else did.
Yeah! I got a little bit upset about it, sure, but it wasn't my problem,
at the end of the day, you know, I'm only one person, what can I do anyway?
And then I saw, by the path, a plastic bag
and I picked it up and I began to fill it,
and I filled another one, another one;
in two days I picked up the rubbish of a thousand people
who knows how many people,
and it felt wonderful!
To come to a beautiful place and to know that I was leaving it
even more beautiful than when I first found it.
To look back where I'd walked and to see what a difference I'd made.
And so, I made it a habit,
and everywhere I went I started picking up garbage,
- kind of became the thing that I did -
and what was wonderful was to see the reactions of the local people.
I'd walk in the villages with my bags of garbage...
- Oh, can we flick over? Next one! -
There is me and my garbage.
I'd walk into villages with my bags of garbage,
people would greet me with great big grins and two thumbs up;
some villages greeted me with applause.
The best reaction of all was when they didn't say a word
they simply picked up a bag, and started picking up trash.
- Let's flip over the slide, thanks Ed! -
I was also joined by other travelers,
there were many people quick to grab a bag and pick garbage,
and some of them were even walking with me for a couple of days
wherever I happened to be,
and then, they wanted to talk about the environment,
and the question on everyone's lips was:
"Why didn't we think of this sooner?"
Because it wasn't hard what we were doing,
it was the easiest thing in the world; it wasn't a brilliant idea,
looking back it's the most obvious thing there is,
but none of us thought of it.
And I'll tell you why.
Because we're raised to look at the world a certain way,
we're raised to look and see in every situation
what can we take from the world,
what's in it for us?
And we think that's what going to make us happy,
to take and to take and to built our little walls
and whatever is outside those walls is somebody else's problem.
Who cares about that? We're just taking, taking.
Does it make us happy?
There is a certain shallow, fleeting happiness
in having more stuff than somebody else, having a new toy,
but there is a much deeper, much more profound contentment
in knowing that you made a difference
in knowing that you've changed something meaningful,
and all it takes is that slight shift in prospective
from what can I take from this situation to what can I give back?
Let me tell you another story.
Let's flip over to the next slide.
Let's go one more.
Before I ever went to China,
I was living in the mountains in the north of Vietnam,
I was living here, it was a beautiful place,
it was very closed to the Chinese border
and it was one of the most wonderful times in my life.
And what made it so special were the people I met there,
I met some amazing, truly beautiful people.
And one of those people was (beep) a 15 year old girl, named (beep)
- can we flip over the next slide? -
there she is,
she is a wonderful person.
She is a loud mouth, she is a smart ass
she has a quick smile and a sharp sense of humor
and a big heart.
She is the kind of person, if she saw you walking in the rain
she'd come across the street and give you her umbrella,
this is the kind of person we're talking about here; amazing person.
After I left Vietnam,
I heard through some mutual friends that (beep) had been abducted.
She was offered a ride by a local man on the back of his motorcycle
back to her village,
but he didn't take her to her village
he took her to the Chinese border instead, 20 kms away.
(beep) managed to call a friend from the back of the motorbike,
and that was the last that anybody ever heard of her,
that was two years ago.
It's just one story, it's just one person.
It happens a lot, it's a big industry, it's huge.
These girls disappear all the time, they're taken to China.
The more attractive ones are sold as wives,
the less attractive ones are sold as prostitutes.
In China they have the one child policy
and they have a cultural preference for male children,
and so that means, literally,
millions and millions of young girls are killed or aborted.
And it means that China has too many men
and not enough women by a matter of millions, tens of millions,
I don't know the precise numbers, I don't think anybody does.
It's huge, so that creates this industry,
they bring in women from wherever they can get them,
by whatever means possible
and that's what's happening here.
So I started looking into this sort of thing
and looked at the numbers, and the numbers are staggering;
the numbers of men, women, and children around the world
who are living in bondage today
is something like 27 million people.
To put that in perspective, that is something like
it is almost one in every ten people in the United States.
It's one of those numbers that's almost too big to think about
until, of course, one of those people is your friend.
And my first reaction when I heard that [beep] had been taken
was to throw my hands in the air and think:
the world is a terrible place, and there is nothing I can do about it.
And that's exactly why I did for a whole year,
I did absolutely nothing.
And then I thought:
Is that really the kind of person I am?
Is that really the kind of world I want to live in?
Am I really to give up before I try?
So, I started to break it down,
and to try to look at it in a more practical manner,
try to see exactly what is the problem,
try to see exactly what resources I had,
what could I give to try to help?
The problem, as far as I'm concerned, is awareness
because I was living in Vietnam.
Even while I was living there I was completely oblivious to this,
I had no idea!
The rest of the world, what do they know about it?
It doesn't bother them, it's somebody else's problem.
What did I have to give? What were my resources?
Very little; I was almost broke at the time,
I had my photography,
had my story-telling, and I knew my way around Asia,
so, I thought, how can I use this, what I have,
to help this what I care about?
I was in Asia for 3 years in the end
and I came back with a lot of photos.
So, I went back and I looked through all my photos
and I picked out 100 portraits of people in villages,
local people in villages,
made a collection of my 100 favorite portraits,
and I got them together, and I launched this
- slide, please -
The Human, Earth Project.
And what it involves essentially is we're going back next week,
- we're starting this -
September 6th, I fly out of LAX and this is when it starts.
We're going back to find these people, 100 people,
I have no idea where they are, I have no idea who they are.
We're going to find to them we have their photos,
I know where those photos were taken
it's going to be a six-month, 12, 000-mile journey
from Indonesia up to Nepal
to try to get as much attention as we can,
it's going to be the subject of a documentary
it's going to be a book of photography, an online photographic journal
so people can follow along with us and they can see exactly what we're doing.
Indonesia, up through southeast Asia, China,
across the Himalaya, Tibet, down into Nepal, six months.
And part of what is so exciting about this project is
I still don't know what we're capable of,
I still don't know what's going to happen,
there are so many unknown factors, but we're going to find out.
That's part of the process.
When I first announced this project five or six months ago,
I had people writing to me from all over the world,
and they have been ever since, telling me I'm a hero,
what a wonderful thing is it that I'm doing.
I'm not!, I'm not!
That's the point I want to make today:
I'm just a guy who sees something that he doesn't like in the world,
and he wants to find what he can do to change it.
About the same time I heard of (beep)'s disappearance,
I was reading Gandhi's autobiography, and what I took away from that is:
that the great men and women of history are just little people like us,
people who move mountains, just one handful of dirt at a time.
I think the best and the worst thing about us, as human beings
is our adaptability.
If we are born into a world full of garbage, we don't even see it anymore.
We get used to it, it becomes part of the landscape,
it is somebody else's problem,
but it's our world, it's our problem.
If we can come out from behind our little walls
and see just how much garbage there is
we can see how much potential there is
to make this world a better place for everyone.
And all you need to start
is an idea, that's it.
You start with an idea, you tell people your idea,
people get excited about your idea, people want to help out,
they give things, they give other ideas; it grows, it grows
and it branches in other directions that you never even imagined possible.
That's when you begin to find out what you are capable of, what you can do,
and it feels wonderful to know that you're doing something meaningful
to know that you're giving something back to the world
and making a change no matter how small it is
and you can all do this.
It's just a matter of getting started.
So, all you need to decide is
what do you want to give the world
because, if you're not going to make a difference, who is?
(Applause)