Headlines warn of a world in collapse, but solutions journalist Angus Hervey finds the overlooked triumphs that never make the news — from the rollout of malaria vaccines to the recovery of sea turtles. With hard data and stories from the frontlines, he reveals the hidden progress that perseveres even as it feels like the world is falling apart, and challenges us to decide which future we'll help write.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Solutions journalist Angus Harvey has been reporting on stories of progress for years. In his talk, he wonders if he's been wrong for reporting only on the good things, but not in the way you might think.
He puts a spotlight on overlooked breakthroughs in a world teetering between collapse and progress, all while asking us, what is the narrative we should be telling about our times? Coming up.
I'm a solutions journalist. For over a decade, I've been reporting on stories of progress. But in the last few months, I've started to think that maybe I was wrong. Almost a century ago, the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, thrown into prison by Mussolini, wrote, The old world is dying. The new world struggles to be born. Now is a time of monsters. Those words are haunting.
It feels like he could be speaking to us today. A great unraveling is underway. And you know this story, because it is everywhere. The end of the international rules-based order, power over principle, aid budgets obliterated, science under attack. Putin, Zelensky, Trump, Gaza, hospitals, hostages. Sudan, famine, DRC, rebels, Yemen, Venezuela, Turkey, Hungary, Taiwan.
The United States of America, the economic vandalism, the contempt for the rule of law, the casual cruelty, the measles, All of the values that we assumed were universal, truth, decency, common sense, face not just reversal but violent backlash. Beneath the surface, deeper, more menacing undercurrents. The digital platforms that were supposed to connect us now do the opposite.
Algorithms breed paranoia. manufacturing division, drowning truth in deliberate falsehoods. Carl Sagan warned us about this, an era where people, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what is true, slide almost unnoticed back into superstition and darkness. And as we argue online, planetary crisis, firestorms in our cities, plastic in our blood,
the pollinators, the permafrost, the coral reefs and ice-free Arctic within our lifetimes. The tipping points loom, and Gramsci's monsters are at the gates, precisely at the moment that we seem least equipped to deal with them. This is the story of collapse. It is on the front page of all the news sites. It is at the top of all our news feeds. We are intimately familiar with its graphic details.
You can tune it out, you can turn it off, but you cannot ignore it. There is something missing, though, from this story. There's no room in it for the words of people like Helen Awuro, a nurse from Kenya,
What I can say is that the deaths that we used to see from the severe forms of malaria in children under five have greatly gone down. And I think this is being attributed to the presence of this vaccine. The mere fact that we can now reduce these deaths is really great for our community because no one should lose a child.
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