Stewart Brand's Blog, page 4

Inheriting My Grandmother's James Michener Collection

In autumn 02021, I visited my hometown in Maryland for the first time in years after living across the country in New Mexico. I determined that the first stop on my trip would be a visit with my grandmother on the Eastern Shore. In Maryland, especially if one lives in proximity to the Bay, there is a delineation between the Western Shore and the Eastern Shore. The two coasts are connected by the Bay Bridge, but they’re quite different: The east is rural. Farmland is dotted with cows and the fields are filled to the brim with soybeans. Hunting for ducks is popular. There are no large cities and, instead, small, historic towns. The pace is slow. Many make their living by the water, whether that is via the tourism industry that booms in the summertime when families in cities flock to the quiet waterways, or through manning and repairing the boats that wander throughout rivers, streams, and the Bay proper. Others choose to drop crab traps and lines into the waters and cross their fingers as they yank them from the depths.

The Western Shore, on the other hand, is wrapped in highways. The land, if it wasn’t so developed, would be just as beautiful as the east. When I was growing up, most commuted into Annapolis, Washington D.C., or Baltimore for work. Because of that, the main conversation between adults was complaining about omnipresent, nerve-shredding traffic. My grandmother was born in the mountains of western Maryland, raised her family on the Western Shore, and retired to the Eastern Shore. I can’t help but correlate her with the waterways, the breeze, and the idle pace of the town, perhaps better called a village a hundred years ago, that she has called home for decades now.

Once I arrived at my grandmother’s, I was confronted by a simple fact: Even though I had been warned, her eyes were deteriorating. Prior to retirement, she had been a preschool teacher. She loved to read novels, play the piano, and paint. I spent a week with her each summer as I was growing up and savored the lazy, quiet days spent lounging across the fluffy comforters on her bed talking about books. I was a voracious reader, which grew into wanting to become a writer. Members of my nuclear family didn’t understand how anyone could find anything but drowsiness in a book, but my grandmother did. She was a creature with the same quiet habits.

My grandmother also had a rare, remarkable quality, even then: She spoke to me like I was an adult. She asked a lot of questions not because she needed to, but because she wanted to, and listened attentively to my reply. She was curious. At eight years old, I remember sitting on her bed and talking to her about World War II and what it was like for her to be a child during that era. She showed me ration stamps she kept from the 01940s and described the women of her life huddled around the family porch in the mountains, weaving and chatting about where their men could be right then in Europe. The resounding themes from my conversations with her always seemed to be about tolerance, despite differences in faith, color, or creed. Growing up in a time when intolerance defined her world left an enormous impression on her. Maybe she talked to me like an adult because she recalled understanding very adult things when she was just as small.

During my autumn visit, I realized that the sole figure in my life who had always mirrored my bookishness couldn’t hold one up and see it anymore. Thus, one afternoon we stood in front of her bookshelf and she plucked a paperback from the cherry-hued shelves and passed it to me. It was a copy of Chesapeake (01978) by James Michener, which was based on the Eastern Shore. I packed the weathered paperback and flew it to New Mexico. From the desert I seeped into a tale of my homeland I had never heard before: the Bay was the central character, except the narrative also featured Indigenous people seeing Europeans on their waterways for the first time. It featured Catholics fleeing England, Quakers running from Boston, pirates, ship-builders, slave-traders, fisherman, and the view of both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars from the Eastern Shore. When I visited Maryland again a few months later, my grandmother passed along more of her James Michener collection: Caribbean (01989), Poland (01983), Hawaii (01959), and Alaska (01988).

James Michener was born in Pennsylvania and raised a Quaker. He was decades older than my grandmother, yet they had a core fact in common: They were deeply touched by World War II. Michener was in his late thirties at the time with religious exemption but volunteered to go to the Pacific anyway. The experience of seeing the worst of humanity had everything to do with what came next: When he returned, he was staunch in his commitment to become a writer. It was like after the profundity of the war, there was no turning back:

“I never said I was going to be a great man because I had no idea what my capacities were. I had no great confidence; nothing in my background gave me a reason to think so. But I was not forestalled from acting as if I were. That is, deal with big subjects… Associate with people who are brighter than you are. Grapple with the problems of your time. And it was as clear to me as if a voice were telling me to do this: “This is the choosing-up point, kiddo, from here on.” I had no idea that life was as short as it is. That concept comes very late in any human life, I think. I thought life was immeasurable, extensive to the horizon and beyond. But I did know that my capacities were not unlimited. I had only so much to spend, and let’s do it in a big way. And I think that was all the difference.”

Throughout his career, Michener wrote dozens of books. The novels that my grandmother passed along to me rest at about a thousand pages apiece. Hawaii opens millions of years ago by describing how tectonic plates shifted to unleash the magma that formed the islands. A few million more years pass before a single, brave bird lands upon the rocky shore, empties its bowels, and releases the first seed onto the island. Caribbean opens similarly to Chesapeake in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the Indigenous peoples whose civilizations were intertwined with the respective lands. Poland opens with the Taters of Mongolia rushing an attack on Krakow with a stop in Kyiv that resulted in ancient violences. Looking at news coverage today, it reminds the reader that history keeps repeating itself.

Michener’s process for writing a book started with meticulous research. For Chesapeake, he lived in St. Michaels on the eastern shore of Maryland. For Poland, he commissioned more than twenty leading academics in the nation to draft papers outlining what topics in Polish history were top-of-mind for scholars. Tonally, the books are patient. They are not arrogant. Most characters have heaps of goodness and wretchedness as real people do. This commitment to dive deep and take on complex topics caused his books to lean into the glories and shames of a place, and that didn’t come without repercussions. It took bravery. Poland was written while the USSR was still intact. Some books were temporarily banned in the precise countries they were based on.

In the introduction of Hawaii, writer Steve Berry noted that in one of Michener’s interviews later in life, he acknowledged that his books couldn’t have been written in the modern era. He knew he was lucky to write at a time when people had the attention spans to support dense, demanding works. It paid off. His fans were loyal, like my grandmother. Most of all, when I pick up Poland and read it now, I know that the depictions of various regional forces, even while fictionalized, contain central tendrils of truth that get me closer to understanding what I want to in the world around me. And understanding what I wish to isn’t about one narrative steamrolling over another: It’s the mess of what constitutes truth. I worry for a future where art is created that finds the search for multifaceted, complex, unpopular truths to be too arduous or controversial and, instead, simply ignores it.

A few years ago, I decided to go about becoming a writer by entering the freelance writing industry. As a contractor, I build my own schedule and balance creative pursuits alongside professional ones. Despite  that flexibility, I’m constantly confronted by the understanding  that how fast I can write a pitch, make phone calls, draft copy, write interview questions, and whip a story together defines my survival as a writer. But for a working creative, that’s the name of the game. You can’t survive without doing so. And on the purely literary end of the spectrum, there is an insatiable hunger to achieve everything I can as fast as possible to get the attention of an audience before they get distracted again. All of that goes against the grain of taking the concentrated time to see the big picture and create based on not the immediacy of right now, but on a human heritage much larger than that.

Yet James Michener’s books put forth the argument that thinking in the wider context of place and time doesn’t just benefit you as an artist; in the right hands, it has the capacity to make a lasting impact on the world. Doing so requires writers to train themselves to become more methodical and less reactionary. It requires patience with ourselves, one another, and the effort to understand that a single action is, more often than not, not an anomaly: It's likely a part of a pattern that may stretch across continents and cultures and only be visible for full examination in another fifty, hundred, or thousand years.

Once, a cousin noted that a character flaw of my grandmother was that she was not reactive. It’s not untrue—my grandmother avoids conflict. Yet my grandmother’s wisdom is that she can sit and watch the strangeness and the backwardness of modern times accumulate without having a knee-jerk reaction. Instead, she reflects, tries to make sense of things, and sees them in a wider context of now versus the world she was raised in. How did it change? What has improved? What did she dream would shift that hasn’t? On our visits, she answers all of these questions for me patiently. It's that quality of seeking a bird’s eye view that, funny enough, is why I think she adored James Michener’s books. It’s a brand of wisdom that I’ve always coveted in everyone I’ve ever met and rarely find. Even my fiancé regrets only meeting my grandmother later in her life because he wishes he could have seen these traits and been shaped by them, too.

Understanding all I wish to takes time. Every so often, I wonder if I, or anyone else, should put forth their best attempts at writing, painting, or creating any art that reflects the culture of our time if patience is such a virtue. And the answer is yes. There is so much mystery in our world and understanding any corner of it takes concentrated, sustained attention. It takes diligence. It takes bravery. And perhaps with a bit of bravery, more ambitious works that require commitment will become a trend once again. I’m waiting for it, preparing for it, thinking about where I should set my energies to create something meaningful. I don’t know how much longer my grandmother will be with me, but I try to think of her when I don’t know what to do: What would she tell me? What questions would she ask? What questions should I ask?

How DNA is Helping Black Brazilians Uncover Their Roots

In December 02019, a group of scientists from the University of São Paulo, in partnership with diagnostic medicine company Dasa and cloud computing platform Google Cloud, launched DNA do Brasil (DNA of Brazil), a project that aims to trace the country's genetic roots through mass genetic sequencing. Among the project’s main objectives is to create a genomic database of the Brazilian population that can help in the production of medicines and in the research of complex diseases. Led by geneticist Lygia da Veiga Pereira, the project has already analyzed thousands of genomes and sequenced 2,100 with funds to reach 4,400. Their ambitions are more expansive: they aim to sequence and analyze up to 200,000 genomes.

The DNA do Brasil project aims to sequence a wealth of DNA from Brazilian people, with a focus on historically underrepresented groups like Black and Indigenous Brazilians.

About 80% of the sequenced genomes in the world come from white people of European or North American origin, notes Pereira. In practice, this means that studies that rely on pre-existing genetic databases may not fully capture the world’s genetic diversity. In turn, the diagnostic tests derived from these studies — and future therapies targeting specific genes — may not be as effective on all population groups. The long-standing racial imbalances in access to medical treatment are thus recapitulated into future generations. In very racially-mixed societies like Brazil, where 43% of the population identifies as mixed-race, these imbalances add even more complexity to an already unequal situation.

The genomes analyzed by the project so far reveal a disproportionate European contribution to certain portions of Brazil’s gene pool when compared to the indigenous and African contribution — describing, in effect, a history of violence in the formation of the Brazilian nation. During the colonization of Brazil, starting in 01500, Portuguese imperial governments used forced labor — first of Brazil’s indigenous people violently captured by Portuguese bandeirantes, and then of African slaves imported from across the Atlantic — to build an economy based around sugar plantations and precious metal mines with harsh, often-deadly conditions.

O jantar. Passatempos depois do jantar, an 01829 painting by Jean-Baptiste Debret depicting domestic life in Brazil, with Black slaves waiting on white masters.

Even after the decline of these industries, slave labor was central to Brazilian domestic life, and Brazilian-born slaves and freed Black people, often the product of a white father and an enslaved Black mother, became an increasing part of Brazilian society. To Tábita Hünemeier, biologist and geneticist at the Biosciences Institute of the University of São Paulo who’s also a member of the DNA do Brasil research group, “the scars of Brazil’s colonization process are too deep to be forgotten” and are indeed embedded in the population’s DNA.

A few studies focused on the US have used 23andMe data to trace Black and Latino ancestry through genomic analysis. DNA do Brasil, however, is the most comprehensive study of its kind in Brazil and all of Latin America. Some of its unique findings help shed light on Brazil’s past. Yet the most powerful impacts of the study may be those that look towards the future, using science and technology to challenge established mainstream narratives and bring focus to the peripheries and those excluded throughout history. By understanding the past, and in this case the collective past of an entire nation, it’s possible to formulate policies to improve the lives of citizens, particularly minorities, and create a better future for all.

“Deep down, this myth still guides us.”

DNA do Brasil is more than a simple research initiative aimed at creating a Brazilian database of genomes as an idle scientific concern; it is a thread through which many Brazilians will learn more about the country's violent past and the complicated process of forming their identities. Through the genetic insights of the project, the Brazilian public may finally be able to grapple with a history of romanticization of the immense violence and brutality of 400 years of slavery, genocide of entire indigenous populations, rape, and inequality.

Brazil, as depicted by the Miller Atlas of 01519 

A persistent myth in the formation of Brazilian identity is the idea of 'racial democracy': that is, that Blacks, indigenous peoples, and white Europeans have mixed freely since the early 01530s, when Brazil was first divided into colonial ‘captaincies’ by the Portuguese crown. This myth has been disputed by sociologists, historians, and anthropologists for many years. Now, DNA do Brasil is mounting a distinct challenge to the country’s civic mythmaking, showing with scientific precision that the formation of Brazil was much more violent and complicated.

This challenge involves revisiting some of the cruelest episodes in the history of Brazilian colonization and slavery to expose the racial machinery behind them. As an example, Hilário Ferreira, a social scientist and historian at Centro Universitário Ateneu, explains that “in old newspapers it was possible to find advertisements offering rewards to those returning white slaves who ran away. Slavery was related to the womb, so if the child was white, it meant that the slave owner’s relationship with the slave was most of the times due to rape.”

These pieces of historical evidence are supported by tell-tale genetic markers indicating an imbalance in the ancestry of many Brazilians. For DNA do Brasil, the researchers analyzed both the ancestry of mitochondrial DNA (which tracks maternal inheritance) and Y chromosome (which does the same for paternal inheritance) and found that 75% of the paternal Y chromosome inheritance is of European and white origin, while only 14% of mitochondrial DNA, and thus maternal inheritance, is of European origin. Further, 36% of inherited mitochondrial DNA is African and 34% indigenous. Only 1% of the Y chromosome ancestry comes from indigenous men.

Put another way, European men occupy an outsize share of the Brazilian gene pool relative to both European women and Black/Indigenous men. While the presence of genetic markers connected to European heritage within the broader mixed Brazilian population can be explained through a natural process of intermarriage and other peaceful racial mixing, the greater proportion of European Y-chromosomal markers in the overall pool relative to the presence of European mitochondrial DNA markers indicates what the historical record already shows: Brazilian slavery was a system of rampant sexual exploitation and violence.

The first Brazilian Census of 01872 categorized people along a rigid racial divide – white or Black – despite the prevalence of mixed race people in Brazil from its inception as a colony.

“Although the Black movements have always confronted the fantasy of racial democracy and denounced racism in Brazil, this narrative is still very strong and present among us,” says Andréa Franco, a PhD candidate in sociology at the Federal University of Paraíba who studies racial relations and Black feminist thought. “This is why the results of the survey were received with such surprise by so many sectors of society, even among people who recognize Brazilian racism. Because, deep down, this myth still guides us.”

Franco, a self-described "Black woman born into a family made up of interracial relations," is one of several Black researchers and activists interviewed for this story who were not surprised by the study’s findings. “The Brazilian population has gone through an intense process of miscegenation,” she says. “And this process has occurred in an asymmetrical way.”

A Redenção de Cam (Redemption of Ham), an 01895 painting by Modesto Brocos, allegorically depicts racial mixing in Brazil through multiple generations, supporting the myth of Brazilian racial equity.

Over the course of Portuguese colonization of Brazil and the subsequent oppressive regimes, both Portuguese and Brazilian, that have ruled over the country, millions of indigenous people have been killed in massacres that lasted from the 01500s into the 01960s and the present day, with many ethnic groups disappearing completely. Today, there are just over 800,000 of them left in a country of more than 200 million, many living in reservations, others in cities, constantly struggling to preserve their customs and traditions.

Part of the colonization process also took place through the slave trade. Millions of Black people were brought from Africa for centuries and enslaved until complete abolition, signed into law on 13 May 01888. The scars of this period remain extremely current, both in Brazilian social and economic inequality — with a majority of Blacks still subjected to violence, prejudice and exclusion — and, as the study points out, indicated in the population's DNA.

After the abolition of slavery until the 01940s, invited thousands of immigrants exclusively from Europe to settle in the country. Decree 528, passed by the Brazilian Republic’s Provisional Government on June 28, 01890, just two years after the final abolition of slavery, legalized and encouraged immigration from all peoples “exceptuados os indigenas da Asia, ou da Africa” [except those indigenous to Asia or to Africa.] In effect, this law implemented in Brazil an official policy of whitening the population. This demographic white-washing of the population via immigration restrictions was coupled with a more tacit whitewashing of Brazilian history. “Brazil had a policy of forgetting there was slavery, even if 70% of the population descended from these individuals,” Hünemeier says.

Piecing Together A Fragmented History

A few years ago, with the popularization of home DNA tests, more people were able to trace their genetic ancestry and learn more about their past. Some results seemed so surprising that they caught the media’s attention, as was the case with the singer Neguinho da Beija Flor, whose Black identity was core to his stage name— Neguinho literally means “little Black.” Yet Neguinho discovered in 02007 that 67.1% of his genes are of European origin and only 31.5% from Africa.

In 02013, data scientist Marco Gomes wrote a long post on his blog about his experience with the 23andMe service. When I contacted him to discuss DNA do Brasil’s findings, he immediately made it clear that he was not surprised by the results of the research. “Black women, the victims of violence, have been complaining about it for many centuries,” he wrote. Yet for many Brazilians, these testimonies were not enough — it was necessary “to wait for genetic studies: 100, 150, 300 years of evolution of science” in order to verify a long chain of history.

The research relates to Gomes' own life: His mother is white, and his father is Black. He said that "it is even difficult to comment" on the process of erasing Black people and the historical violence they have suffered.

The consequences of the attempt at erasure and whitewashing of Brazil’s history and population are still with us today. Franco, the PhD candidate in sociology at the Federal University of Paraíba, tells me that when she sought out the origins of her family, she found plenty of material on the European-white side, but only barriers and uncertainties when researching her Black roots.

Franco explains that she has a white grandmother who came from Portugal to Brazil in the beginning of the 20th century. It was relatively easy to find information about this side of her family. But “as for my Black origins, I need to access their stories in another way. There are no records, no papers. There is memory, loose threads that we sew in conversations with the elders.”

She recalls that “one of my maternal great-grandfathers, it is said, was the son of a landowner and slave owner of a well-known, traditional and important family from Minas Gerais, who had a son with a Black woman (probably a slave woman) and who gave him his surname.”

Franco says that “the desire to know my ancestry by DNA was replaced by the curiosity to gradually reconstruct this story.” She already knows the name of the slave owner, and that “in the middle of the 19th century he had a white wife, 200 slaves from the regions that today are Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and that among these slaves inventoried, only one was registered by name.”

Emilio Moreno, a journalist from the state of Ceará, says that while his Black friends were not surprised by the DNA do Brasil findings, many white journalists were. Moreno’s own heritage is involved in this complex debate.

"Until recently I did not see myself completely Black, because I am lighter-skinned. Only by reading, I was able to understand myself better".

Moreno tells me that he comes from a poor family from the countryside of Ceará and that "we have little record of our origins, we were a farming family and were extremely poor.”

The mid-nineteenth century photographs of Alberto Henschel display the diversity of Brazil's Black and mixed-race communities.

Moreno notes, much as Franco did, that “there is no way to investigate, because it is very common in Brazil that people of Black origin cannot make the connections, unlike those who have a family that comes from Europe, who know the whole origin of their family; we cannot do this research.” The disregard paid to Black Brazilians for centuries is reflected back in their absence from the archives.

The potential result of the research, explains Anna Claudia Evangelista, a medical geneticist and Black woman, "is yet another confirmation – this time through the molecular tool – of the history and the way in which Brazilian colonization took place."

In her medical practice, working in an oncogenetics clinic, "it is very important to ask about family history and ancestry. It is not uncommon for patients to say that their grandmother or great-grandmother, who was an enslaved Black or indigenous, was 'lassoed' by an immigrant of European origin."

Journalist Carlos Alberto Ferreira is one of those who has in his family stories of women who were "lassoed,” and his mother “lived with a grandfather who was enslaved and may have been begotten of a rape.”

He explains that he did two DNA tests (Genera and My Heritage) and "both served to prove several old stories in my family.”

His family story is one quite common in Brazil. He grew up in a very multiracial family, with white, lighter skinned Black and dark skinned Black people all intermixed. “I remember people not believing me and my cousins belonged to the same family because I was Black and some of them white.”

He continues by saying that “I can clearly see that the lighter-skinned part of my family has had access to better education, lives in better neighborhoods and has progressed better in life. On the other hand, the part of the family with darker skin have not completed higher education, live in more peripheral neighborhoods and have a lower quality of life. It's subtle, it's not spoken about, but it exists and it's open. Racism in Brazil is inside the house with people hiding it with shame, even if it is with the same DNA.”

The role of the new studies into Brazil’s DNA is key here. Scientific research can shed light on what Black people have always known and felt.

An Incorrigible Optimism

DNA do Brasil offers more than just a reconsideration of national and personal histories. Beyond everything else, the findings of the study are providing a wealth of scientific knowledge that could lead to groundbreaking practical uses.

Pereira explains, without hiding the excitement, that "we are already seeing that by sequencing the genome of Brazilians we find a number of variants of unidentified sequences not yet found in other populations." These findings, according to Pereira, are “very significant” for a variety of reasons.

Besides the "enormous opportunity for us to get to know new genomic variants associated with phenotypic and genomic characteristics, we are also seeing the ancestry of an American population that no longer exists,” explains Pereira. “Sequences of extinct populations and mixture of African ancestry – we find mixtures of African populations that we don't even find in Africa, but that are found in Brazil.”

Hünemeier jumps in, saying that she’s “thinking of the number of indigenous people we had here, about 3 million, and this African contingent forced to come to Brazil," both with vast genetic and linguistic diversity. She notes that "We can map this out by working at the genomic level. And also, many Europeans, from various parts, with diverse histories – as fugitives, for example. There is all this mosaic represented in Brazil, with the largest Black population outside of Africa and, for the first time, we have included indigenous people in genomic studies.”

For those of African descent, the research sheds light on their past. If in many cases it does not bring surprising news, it does give them a tool with which they might change Brazil's racist mentality little by little. Moreno explains to me that this research "ends up being yet another indicator that the country structures its racism to maintain the privilege of white people and of those who have a more comfortable place [in society]. So perhaps I can tell you, from my incorrigible optimism, that it helps whites understand how they are part of this structural racism.” For those long left out of the upper echelons of Brazilian society, they can now hope to tell the story as it really happened, rather than the institutionally supported narrative that denies centuries of genocide, violence, and attempts to erase the country’s Black history.

Climate Fiction Storytellers

This event will take place the evenings of May 12th & May 13th at St. Joseph's Art Society.

The Long Now Foundation has teamed up with Anthropocene Magazine (a publication of Future Earth) and Back Pocket Media to take the magazine’s new fiction series “The Climate Parables,” from the page to the stage.

The series starts with the idea that survival in the Anthropocene depends on upgrading not just our technology, but also our collective imagination. From there, acclaimed storytellers will perform work from some of the most creative science fiction writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Eliot Peper, speculating on what life could be like after we’ve actually mitigated climate change and adapted to chronic environmental stresses.

Think of it as climate reporting from the future. Tales of how we succeeded in harnessing new technology and science to work with nature, rather than against it. It’s all wrapped up in an evening of performed journalism that blends science and technology, fiction and non-fiction, video, art, and music. What could possibly go right?

Kim Stanley Robinson and Eliot Peper

This event will take place the evenings of May 12th & May 13th at St. Joseph's Art Society.

The Long Now Foundation has teamed up with Anthropocene Magazine (a publication of Future Earth) and Back Pocket Media to take the magazine’s new fiction series “The Climate Parables,” from the page to the stage.

The series starts with the idea that survival in the Anthropocene depends on upgrading not just our technology, but also our collective imagination. From there, some of the most creative science fiction writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Eliot Peper, speculate on what life could be like after we’ve actually mitigated climate change and adapted to chronic environmental stresses.

Think of it as climate reporting from the future. Tales of how we succeeded in harnessing new technology and science to work with nature, rather than against it. It’s all wrapped up in an evening of performed journalism that blends science and technology, fiction and non-fiction, video, art, and music. What could possibly go right?

The First Digital Nation

The Pacific nation of Tuvalu is replicating itself in the metaverse in an innovative bid to safeguard its culture and sovereignty in the event of territory loss and displacement due to climate change.

The low-lying islands could become uninhabitable by 02100 due to rising sea levels, according to a study cited by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By migrating governance and administrative systems to the metaverse, Tuvalu hopes to continue functioning as a state, regardless of where its government or people are located in the world. This works alongside Tuvalu’s current efforts to legislate permanent statehood and maritime boundaries, which climate change threatens under current international law.

“Our hope is that we have a digital nation that exists alongside our physical territory, but in the event that we lose our physical territory, we will have a digital nation that is functioning well, and is recognized by the world as the representative of Tuvalu,” Simon Kofe, the leader of the project and Minister for Justice, Communication, and Foreign Affairs of Tuvalu, told Long Now.

Tuvalu’s physical landscapes will be preserved through virtual twins, beginning with the small islet of Te Afualiku, one of the first places in Tuvalu likely to be submerged due to rising sea levels. In efforts to preserve cultural heritage, stories, traditional songs, historical documents and recorded cultural practices will be cataloged and digitized.

Women dancers in Tuvalu (ca. 01919 – 01939). Photograph by Sylvester M. Lambert, courtesy of UC San Diego Library.

“We want to be able to take a snapshot of what culture is today, and allow my children and grandchildren to have that same experience wherever they are in the world,” Kofe said.

“So even if the physical territory is lost, we would never lose the knowledge, culture, and way of life that Tuvaluans have experienced and lived for many centuries.”

[Watch: Wade Davis’ 02010 Long Now Talk, “ The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World ,” which explores in part how Polynesian navigators mastered the Pacific Ocean without writing or chronometers.]

Guy Jackson, a human geographer and researcher specializing in climate-driven non-economic loss and damage, says that the biggest risks climate change poses to cultural heritage in Tuvalu are territory loss and changes in seasonality.

Small island nations are deeply connected to their sense of place, and as seasonality changes due to climate impacts, knowledge of the availability of species, foods and migratory patterns change, which Jackson says leads to a massive loss and sense of grief.

He says that while a preservation project such as this cannot arrest the mental health impacts of losing one’s territory, for those displaced, knowing that there is a record of land, important sites, and stories, could come with positive benefits.

“I imagine within the metaverse there will be stories linked to particular places so you can imagine as a young person, being displaced from your home due to climate change, it would be a way to stay grounded in your particular culture while obviously, things will still change. Having this as a place that could probably evolve and grow will give people a sense of continuity, despite all of the changes and uncertainties,” Jackson said.

“For diaspora communities, and with Tuvalu having a lot of people living outside of the country, even for people like that who aren’t technically displaced by climate change, having a record like this will be a great place for people to go to and consider and enjoy their heritage, and then use that to help the next generations that might not have access to that land.”

The use of digital twins for cultural heritage has predominantly focused on capturing the visual appearance of objects, collections, and sites, with a suite of historical buildings and museums becoming digitized.

Horizon 2020, the European Union’s research and innovation program, cited a need for a more holistic approach to cultural heritage digitization, expanding beyond the recreation of visual and structural information to capture stories and experiences, and their broader ‘cultural and socio-historical context’.

In this way, Jackson sees Tuvalu as a forerunner, and believes that their approach will spark other countries to use similar methods to preserve their ‘important landscapes, memories, and stories.’

Simon Kofe, the leader of the project and Minister for Justice, Communication, and Foreign Affairs of Tuvalu. Photograph courtesy of Office of the President, Tuvalu (CC BY 2.0).

Kofe says that beyond its future applications, having a virtual copy of Tuvalu has immediate benefits that will help the government be more efficient for its people.

“Anything that you can think of in terms of data that is collected in Tuvalu, it can all be uploaded onto the digital twin,” he said. “We can track the impacts of climate change on the islands, entering data that we’ve collected for many decades, and make projections into the future. With a lot of commercial fishing activity in Tuvalu, you can have real-time data showing the vessels, the fishing locations, the amount of fish, and the species that are being caught.”

In the event that Tuvalu loses their islands, having a virtual copy could also assist them in reconstructing their land.

While unique in its scope and connection to climate mobility, Tuvalu is not the first nation to commence a digitization project within the metaverse. Barbados is building a virtual embassy with the development of infrastructure to provide services such as ‘e-visas’ and a ‘teleporter’ that will allow users to travel through all meta worlds. The South Korean capital of Seoul aims to have a metaverse environment for all of its administrative services by 02026.

James Cooper, an international law expert and Director of International Legal Studies at California Western School of Law in San Diego, says that these moves within the metaverse raise issues of jurisdiction, liability, sovereign immunity, and human rights.

He believes these should be answered and regulated before technology and events outpace lawyers' ability to do so.

“Whose laws apply?” Cooper asks. “How do you address the rights of a citizen from another country who might be in the metaverse on your government services platform or space within the metaverse?”

“What do you do for people who may be hearing or sight impaired and not able to fully access the metaverse or have the financial means or the connectivity? Are they being placed in a compromised role or limited in the same access that they would otherwise get?”

Cooper says that Tuvalu’s small population of 11,000 people will give them an advantage in addressing these issues compared to a larger nation.

The Niuoku Islet of Tuvalu pictured from the International Space Station. The low-lying islands of Tuvalu could become uninhabitable by 02100 due to rising sea levels. Photograph courtesy of NASA.

As the project enters its beginning stages, Kofe stresses that preparing for a worst-case scenario by no means indicates a reduction in the nation’s climate advocacy or fight for a just future. He says the government is and will continue to work to protect its islands by building sea walls, reclaiming land, raising the islands in different parts, and calling for international mitigation measures.

“You could say the project is a Plan B, because the ordinary Tuvaluan, if you talk to them on the streets, none of them want to actually leave the islands,” Kofe said. “My hope is that there’s a strong message that people can see when we are doing this. I’d like them to imagine if they had to plan for relocation because of climate change.”

According to Kausea Natano, the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Pacific Island nations contribute less than 0.03% of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions.

Kofe says that the primary solution to climate change is for bigger countries to reduce their emissions, and he hopes that this project will inspire the public to rise up and put pressure on their leaders to do exactly that. In his COP27 address he emphasized that while Tuvalu could be the first country in the world to exist solely in the metaverse, if global warming continues unchecked it won’t be the last.

Jenny Odell

"What first appears to be a wish for more time may turn out to be just one part of a simple, yet vast, desire for autonomy, meaning, and purpose."  - Jenny Odell

Join us for an evening on long-term thinking with a talk & reading from Jenny Odell and conversation with Long Now's Executive Director Alexander Rose.

Artist and writer Jenny Odell brings her acutely insightful observations to the dominant framework of time, based on industrial and colonial worldviews, that is embedded within our societies. Addressing the inability to reconcile the artificially constructed time pressures of modern culture with planetary-scale crisis, she offers a series of histories, concepts, and places as "provocations that can defamiliarize an old language of time, while pointing in the direction of something else."

Tickets are bundled with a copy of the new book. Long Now Members purchase the book but get their usual complimentary tickets for the in-person event.

We'll have a pre-show bar at SFJAZZ and additional copies of Odell's new book for sale. Afterwards, attendees can gather at The Madrigal for further drinks and conversation. This evening is in partnership with The Booksmith and City Arts & Lectures.

Ismail Ali

Psychedelics and other mind-altering substances have been used for thousands of years across the world in religious, spiritual, celebratory, and healing contexts. Despite a half century of a  "War on Drugs" in the United States, there has been a recent resurgence in public interest in ending drug prohibition and re-evaluating the roles these substances can play in modern society.

What can our several-thousand year history with these substances teach us about how they can be used in a modern society? What legal & cultural frameworks can be used to increase access to these substances, and what are the potential downsides of these frameworks? Ismail Ali works daily developing and implementing the legal and policy strategies that will define the next several decades of psychedelic access, and joins Long Now in an evening of exploring the deep history of psychedelics and what role they can play in our future.

This Present Moment in Motion

Alicia Eggert sculpts neon, steel, and time to make art that inspires awe at the finite nature of human life within a seemingly infinite universe. In September 02022, Alicia brought This Present Moment, a sculpture adapting the words of Stewart Brand, the co-founder of The Long Now Foundation and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, to Mount Washington. The neon sign was re-assembled among the mountain’s bristlecone pine trees (Pinus longaeva), some of the longest-lived trees in the world.

Now, we’re excited to share two original videos produced by Long Now’s video team that trace the sign’s journey to the mountaintop and explore the power art has in shaping the way we think about time. In these short pieces, the image of the sign amongst ancient trees serves as a provocation towards long-term thinking. In the words of Long Now Research Fellow Jonathon Keats, the juxtaposition of ancient landscape and neon sign “establishes a literal relationship between the present moment and the long term, and physically models the essential simultaneity of multiple time scales.”

The Unimaginable Future: Alicia Eggert & Long Now

8 minutes, 02022 Edited and directed by Justin Oliphant

This Present Moment at 11,000 Feet

5 minutes, 02022 Edited and directed by Shannon Breen

Five Poems

In the Beginning

(after Sandra Cisneros)

The world begins at a kitchen table.
—Joy Harjo, “Perhaps the World Ends Here"

Her kitchen table’s naked leaves
slope like the hills, want to fold like wings.
There’s no teacup, plate, napkin, or knife.
Bare, it waits, patient as prairie
or mesa with the endless parade
of weather through sky.
I rest my open palm against the grain
and listen for her voice in the overture
of silence. Her table serves no soup
or bread, instead, whispers
of a woman’s life. Of the generations
she bore, and from which she was born.
My other hand pressing
a sheet of paper against wood, I invoke
words with nothing but memory
of her invitation, her
provocation. Yes, this
is how the world is born.
Perhaps the world is saved here—
as it’s always been saved—
when a woman calls you to her table
and pulls out a chair for you.

Talking to God

Windows frame skeletal trees and the black river
just before its falls and bridge, the screen of its silver

surface flashing with each car passing and hawk’s dive.
Beyond the water, the old mill and little town

which worked it persist two centuries later—
the flood forgotten, factory closed and mansion

burned to the ground, workers and industrial royalty
sleep toward eternity in the same steep, terraced

hillside where teenagers gather at night to drink
cheap beer and curse through laughter

and we, two women holding hands, climb afternoons, chasing
the valley’s last light. At the top, from the shared grave

of Jozef and Octavia, we see our house—a yellow speck
just above the snaking thread of river

from which earth, root, and air drink—
just as we can make out the distant city of gravestones

from our windows. Come spring, infinite
shades of green will envelop us and we’ll only hear

the water as it crashes over the dam.
But for now, in this raw season of slowly growing

light, each time I glance out my window
the dark, shining river—that ancient vein,

its waters always new, once melting glaciers
carving a path through bedrock—

reminds me of all it outlives. Surely, each glance
is a kind of prayer.

Making History

Reading a new book—
a history of now—
we lower our faces,
smell the inside
of history’s spine.
The fresh ink of a young
millennium reminds
us of every book
that made us. But we
make this book.
Like no other, this history
holds all we did not do,
holds our silence,
all we let happen
while we lived
our difficult lives.
Yes, we yelled
until we lost
our voices, until
we could only whisper
our demands spelled in black
marker, our signs stiff flags
waging above our heads.
We say, we did what we could.
But the thick, hardbound
now, too heavy
for children to carry,
will outlive you and me
and spell our names correctly.

In the Small Hours

the dark, still waters
at river’s edge
throb with the bullfrogs’ song
like foghorns or an orchestra
of mournful tubas. Each
time their song stops,
silence swells.

Without a conductor,
the bullfrogs’ a cappella
song starts up again.
I try to make out the lyrics
in their foreign tongue,
something about chance
and the myth of fate, the history
of history, and the irony—
considering what’s at stake—
in saving their species
by singing a bluesy
love song in the vein
of, say, cows mooing.

I study their silences,
notice the present
tense of their lyrics.
Realize my translation
is all wrong. Like teenagers,
the survival of genes
is the last thing
on their minds.
They just want
what they want, now.

It is I, ironically,
who sings to save
something. As if
a song could. Genes—
the last thing on my mind.
Rather, soul, something
about the soul of a species
singing old love
songs to birth itself.

On Sweetheart Mountain

Raw garnet in the ancient rock beneath our feet,
we stand separate yet together—wordless,

witness to the vast valley, aching snow and silence.
Rare, stunning silence.

The kind that reminds us we’re bone
clothed in flesh, small creatures given breath

on top of a mountain, in a new century, balancing
on a ledge. A bird pierces silence.

We do not know what bird it is.
Then a Black-capped Chickadee stirs the air—

its small, plucking call leaves
an absence of sound

so penetrating
and complete

we can only whisper.

A Fusion Breakthrough & A Lesson On The Pace of Progress

When the U.S. Department of Energy announced on December 13, 02022 that researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had conducted the first ever controlled nuclear fusion experiment to achieve ignition, it marked a key milestone in the history of energy: the first time a human-caused fusion reaction had produced more energy than it consumed. The NIF’s fusion breakthrough was not a shocking, out-of-the-blue discovery, but the result of decades of diligent research and experimentation in the field.

In fact, the news of the NIF ignition came exactly two years to the month after Long Now Founder Danny Hillis forecasted it would in 02010. In Long Bet #605, Hillis predicted that “by December 31, 02020, synthetic solar energy (fusion) will have been shown to be technically feasible, by an experiment demonstrating a controlled fusion reaction producing more harnessable energy than was used to ignite it.” Hillis’ prediction, while premature in its timing, follows a long history of hope for human-harnessed fusion as a potent source of energy.

The earliest recorded scientific reference to fusion as a potential source of energy came more than a century ago. In 01920, Arthur Eddington, an early astrophysicist and popularizer of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, gave a speech at the British Association for the Advancement of Science on "The Internal Constitution of the Stars." While Eddington himself did not know for certain the mechanics of how nuclear fusion powered the stars — no one would for more than a decade after —  he speculated that “subatomic energy” must be the continual fuel for the sun and other stars. He even expressed that he and his fellow scientists “sometimes dream that man will one day learn how to release it and use it for his service,” noting that “the store is well-nigh inexhaustible, if only it could be tapped.”

As early as 01920, astrophysicists like Arthur Eddington dreamed of fusion as an energy source for humanity. Courtesy of Nature.

In the first half of the twentieth century, physicists sought to understand the basic mechanics of nuclear fusion, with the first patent for a fusion reactor being registered in 01946. In the 01950s, the search for nuclear fusion power began in earnest, with a number of promising experiments conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere. In 01954, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss gave a speech proclaiming “It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter,” among other grand expansions of human wellbeing brought about by nuclear energy.

Tokamak devices use powerful magnetic fields to catalyze fusion reactions. The T-1 (Left) became the first successful device of its kind in 01958 in the Soviet Union. The Joint European Torus (Right) is the most successful Tokamak, having produced record-breaking fusion results since its construction in the United Kingdom in 01983.

Yet the next few decades of fusion research were ones of slow progress and dead ends, with competing designs for fusion devices and international political rivalries dashing Strauss’ predictions of cheap energy within a generation’s time. The best results came from the Tokamak model, a design from the Soviet Union that used a powerful magnetic field to shape the fusion plasma into a torus with sufficient stability to sustain a reaction. Progress sped up once more starting in 01983, with the establishment of the Joint European Torus, a large Oxfordshire-based reactor that used a modified Tokamak design. The Joint European Torus achieved some of the most efficient results observed before the NIF ignition, achieving a peak ratio of .67 joules of energy produced for every joule consumed.

The NIF, constructed in 02009 in Livermore, a suburb on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay Area, opted for a different tack than the magnetic-based Tokamak designs. Whereas those designs derived their power input from strong magnetic fields that confine the fusion torus, the NIF’s Inertial Confinement method instead uses powerful lasers to at once confine and superheat the fusion mass, increasing its temperature and density to induce the fusion reaction. It’s a less energy-efficient approach when accounting for the inefficiency of the lasers themselves, but uses much less tritium fuel and requires the superheating of only a small portion of the mass relative to magnetic methods. Danny Hillis noted in his argument for his 02010 prediction that “the mostly likely way for me to win this bet is with a laser-ignited inertially-confined deuterium/tritium reaction.” NIF’s efforts with inertially-confined reactions have borne fruit: first in a 02021 experiment that achieved a .7 output/input ratio, and then, finally, the December 02022 Ignition event.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Principal Designer Annie Kritcher and Principal Experimentalist Alex Zylstra at the Department of Energy's December 13, 02023 press conference announcing the NIF ignition breakthrough.

In 02010, Long Now hosted then-NIF Director Ed Moses for a talk in which he proclaimed that the NIF’s laser inertial fusion engine could produce “clean fusion power this decade.” While Moses’ prediction, much like Hillis’, did not quite come to pass, steady progress towards nuclear fusion —  and the fast advancement of the past two years — indicates a hopeful future for the technology. In a statement to Long Now Ideas, Hillis noted that “while I often correctly project where technology is heading, I am often surprised how long it takes to get there.” Hillis further reflected “that progress in one area always has to compete with everything that is going on in the world, which almost always slows it down.”

Fusion has taken a long, winding path towards viability, breaking a century’s worth of predictions of its imminent arrival. Even now, it is far from being a feasible option for mass power generation. Yet even at slower than expected rates, research into nuclear fusion continues to progress, keeping the hope of cheap, near-inexhaustible energy alive.