But what are the burdens of the twenty first century? They are also formidable. Global poverty - half the people on earth are not part of that new economy I talked about. Think about this when you go home tonight. Half the people on earth live on less than two dollars a day. A billion people, less than a dollar a day. A billion people go to bed hungry every night and a billion and a half people - one quarter of the people on earth - never get a clean glass of water. One woman dies every minute in childbirth. So you could say "don't tell me about the global economy, half the people aren't part of it, what kind of economy leaves half the people behind?"

Second big problem, the global environment. The oceans that provide most of our oxygen are deteriorating rapidly. There's a huge water shortage. I already said a quarter of the people never get any. It could change everything about how we grow food and where we live.

And finally global warming; if the climate warms for the next fifty years at the rate of the last ten, we'll lose whole island nations in the Pacific that will be flooded by the rising water table as the South Pole and the North Pole get smaller. We will lose the Everglades in America that I worked so hard to save, we will lose fifty feet of Manhattan island - prime real estate - gone. But more to the point there will be millions of food refugees created, more terror, more destabilisation.

But you could argue that long before we have to worry about global warming, we will be consumed by the rise of global epidemics accelerated by the breakdown of public health systems across the globe. This year, one in four of all the people on earth who die, will die of AIDS, TB, malaria and infections related to diarrhoea. Most of them, little kids that never get any clean water. If you just take AIDS alone we have forty million AIDS cases, that is 8,200 people a day dying. Thirteen million orphans. We're projected to have a hundred million AIDS cases by 2005. If that happens, it will be the biggest epidemic since the plague killed a quarter of Europe in the fourteenth century.

And it will destabilise countries and a whole lot of young people around the world will say "well, I'm HIV positive, I've got a year or two to live, why shouldn't I go out and shoot up a bunch of other people?" It'll look like one of those Mel Gibson road warrior movies in a lot of countries if we have a hundred million AIDS cases. And lest you think it's an African problem, the fastest growing rates of AIDS are in the former Soviet Union, on Europe's backdoor. The second fastest growing rates of AIDS in the Caribbean on America's front door. My wife represents a million people in New York state from the Dominican Republic alone. The third fastest growing rates of AIDS and the largest number of cases outside South Africa are in India, the world's biggest democracy. And China just admitted they have twice as many cases as they thought: they had a 67% increase last year, and only 4% of their adults know how AIDS is contracted and spread.

And finally, one of the big burdens of the modern world is high tech terrorism - and a lot of people knew it before September 11th. The marriage of modern weapons to ancient hatreds: Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Balkans, East Timor, the Middle East or - until, God bless them, the people of my ancestors, the Irish, did the right thing - Northern Ireland. Don't you think it's interesting that in the most modern of ages, the biggest problem is the oldest problem of human society - the fear of the other. And how quickly fear leads to distrust, to hatred, to dehumanisation, to death.