dr. Ralf Bodelier

A warm plea for a positive and optimistic view of ourselves. For anyone who doubts or despairs about humanity.

• Never before have there been so many of us. And never before have so many lived in prosperity, peace, and good health. Yet we think gloomily about ourselves. We, humans, cause climate change. We deplete the earth of its resources and put biodiversity under pressure. ‘The earth has cancer and that cancer is humanity,’ believed the Club of Rome. In doing so, we sell ourselves short.

• Ralf Bodelier radically turns our gloomy image of humanity around. We, humans, also make the earth much richer, more colourful, and infinitely more interesting. We build beautiful cities, compose music, and commit to a sustainable future. We solve problems, increase our life expectancy, reduce health issues, combat poverty, and are busy reversing climate change and restoring biodiversity.

• We can also handle the growth from 7.9 billion people today to nearly 10 billion around 2060. After that, the world population will decrease again. In 1950, women had an average of 5 children; today, it’s an average of 2.3. We are even solving the problem of rapid population growth.

• Yes, we cause problems, but we also rediscover ourselves as creators, builders, and protectors. In this compelling narrative, you travel with Ralf Bodelier to the philosophical roots of our thinking about humanity. Because with an optimistic and colourful image of humanity, we can better face the future. On this subject, Bodelier’s book ‘Long Live Humanity. Can we manage with ten billion?’ was published in June 2022.

A powerful story about the progress we are making worldwide. For anyone who believes we are heading towards the abyss.

• A coronavirus pandemic, climate change, war in Ukraine, hunger in the Horn of Africa. Those who watch the news or read the newspaper daily will not believe it. But we continue to make progress. Our world is getting better by the day. We even seem to be becoming better people. On average, we are healthier, older, safer, smarter, kinder, and more tolerant. We suffer less pain, we are less often stolen from, robbed, or worse. The chance of dying from the climate has decreased by 98 percent over the past century. Moreover, our lives are more comfortable than ever before.

• It even seems, says Ralf Bodelier, that we have become better people. That we are making moral progress. In 1906, Germans still sent proud postcards from their colony Namibia, with gruesome photos of the genocide they committed against 60 thousand members of the Herero tribe. When IS does the same a hundred years later, it is met with worldwide horror. The world is not getting worse. On the contrary. It seems worse because we keep raising the bar.

• All this is evident from figures, data, and statistics, collected by thousands of institutions worldwide and compiled by the United Nations, among others. Data matters. They provide us with a much better picture of reality than our own perception or that of journalists.

• This progress does not come out of nowhere. We improve our lives because billions of people, day in and day out, seek concrete solutions to concrete problems. From caregivers to politicians, from entrepreneurs and scientists to activists. If we want to continue striving for a better world, we need to inspire ourselves with the progress we make daily.

• On behalf of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bodelier led the project ‘Worlds Best News’ from 2016 to 2019. It focused on journalists with the message to show not only the exceptions but also the rule. Not only the problems but also the solutions to these problems and the progress we make.

Clear argument about the successes of our efforts for a cleaner environment, more nature, and prosperity for everyone. For all pessimists about climate or biodiversity.

• It is possible: a clean and safe environment plus prosperity for ten billion people. The provisional recipe, developed by the environmental movement RePlanet: compact million cities, ultra-modern agriculture, and a lot of cheap, reliable, and CO2-free energy.

• RePlanet is a European movement of green thinkers and doers that started under the term ‘Ecomodernism’. Replaneteers are optimistic, pragmatic, and cosmopolitan. They continuously study the latest scientific insights on energy, agriculture and food, nature, poverty, and development.

• Based on these scientific insights, they believe in more, not less. They see little in living in harmony with nature but believe that humanity should withdraw from nature to give it plenty of space. They trust more in nuclear power plants, genetic engineering, prosperity, and urbanisation than in a return to windmills, organic farming, consuming less, and living in the countryside.

• With others, Ralf Bodelier published two books about this new movement. The first was ‘Ecomodernism. The new thinking about green and growth’, from 2017. In 2021, they published ‘More. How abundance makes the world more sustainable and prosperous’.

A captivating lecture about Bodelier’s ‘reverse crusade’ from Israel to the Ardennes. For anyone who needs depth and reflection but doesn’t know where to start.

• Starting in January 2020, he departed from Jerusalem. For his long walk from Jerusalem to Bouillon, Ralf Bodelier did not plan to take more than one year. But 2020 was not the most suitable year to walk more than 4200 kilometres across the Middle East, Turkey, the Balkans, and the German-speaking world. He had to interrupt his journey no less than three times. Including that one time in the Bulgarian Ruse when a rattling ambulance took him, deathly ill with corona, to the hospital.

• And so it became two years of walking. Or was it a pilgrimage? Bodelier himself speaks of a ‘Reverse Crusade’. In the opposite direction, he walked the same route that Godfrey of Bouillon took from 1096 to 1099 as the leader of the first crusade. Godfrey travelled with the sword, and during his journey, 1.5 million people died. Bodelier walked with nothing more than a backpack, a laptop, and an insatiable hunger for new stories and ideas.

• He reported on his experiences weekly for the Financieele Dagblad and the Groene Amsterdammer. He is currently working on a book about his walk. The lecture is already there. An exciting and captivating story from a born storyteller. Full of new insights, gained in countless conversations in Israel and the West Bank, in the refugee camps of Lebanon, and mosques in Turkey. Or the war-torn east of Croatia.