Aubrey Of course you can add my name. Best Tim Tim Smit CEO The EDEN Project "How appropriate that in the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin that I should be standing here in front of the Eden domes, itself a monument to high technological achievement, talking about why it is important that everybody in the world gets behind Contraction and Convergence [C&C]. I don’t say things like this lightly. I am not really one for hyperbole or strange religious motivations. What I find is important is that my whole life experience has taught me that things that have proportionality to them, that have melody to them, that are profoundly simple, usually have something right going for them. And secondly that you can judge an idea by the quality of the enemies it gets and there have been some profound enemies for C&C, which is based on an understanding that perhaps there is something of the night about it there is something not properly scientific. Well actually it is, it is totally scientific and more important than that it has blended something the age of reason was never able totally to do which is blending the empiricism of it with ‘soul’; the quite obvious rightness of a system that apportions to every person on earth a carbon contract that it theirs to dispose of over a period of time to create a parity that enables us to live one with another in a way that enables us to be connected to the earth itself in terms of being able to make us live with the grain of nature and not apart from it. I have yet to hear anyone provide an argument that makes it ethically unsound, however uncomfortable they may feel about it. I have yet to find someone who can scientifically disprove the work of Aubrey Meyer. All I have heard is male testosterone-led vanity . . . and I would ask anybody watching this to ask yourself whether you are not actually standing at the moment where we are going to have to reduce carbon by a phenomenal amount over the next forty years. 80% is some poeple's guess. But if you look at the figures it could be far less tha forty years. We're going to have to have tactics in place to deal with it otherwise we're not going to worthy of the name 'homo sapiens' - what a joke, the wise hominid. Are we? If we were truly wise we would realize the rightness of this, the mathematics of this; the rightness of the ethics of it and actually understand that even if it is slightly flawed - which I don't think it is - even if it is, its so far better than anything else that has been put on offer, that we should actually go with it simply on a precautionary basis because at least along the path towards it, those little glitches that need to be ironed out, can be. But the first thing is a statement of commitment and conviction that we truly are worthy of the name that we gave ourselves. And that is why I return to Charles Darwin. Evolution was the most unpopular theory there was. The amount of people who came out on the streets and said, "we're not descended from apes you know"; adaptation . . . then they suddenly realized that adaptation was rather clever - the survival of the fittest . . . that actually makes us top-chaps, actually in authority worthy of it - there's biological reason . . . Well let me tell you if we can't sort this out, if we can't embrace C&C, the biologicval reason will have shown why we are redundant. Wake up, support this, be excited, know you are living in a time in history which is about as important, if not more so, as the dawning of the Renairssance." Tim Smit Chief Executive and Co-Founder of the EDEN Project