Stewart Brand's Blog, page 79

Global Trends 2030: Applying Long Term Thinking to Global Questions

In December, the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative hosted a conference entitled Global Trends 2030: US Leadership in a Post-Western World. Organized to coincide with the release of the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds report, the conference brought policy makers together with futurists to discuss the global “megatrends” that might shape the next two decades. Attendees included Chuck Hagel, the current nominee for Secretary of Defense, as well as Long Now Board member Paul Saffo.

Examining different areas of inquiry, speakers applied long-term thinking to economic and political questions of global concern: from the role of the USA in global politics to the relationship between individual and state. A panel discussion on the potential impact of emerging technologies explored the revolutionary potential of 3D printing and robotics, and analyzed the role of technology in creating economic opportunity.

Conference participant Marriette DiChristina has written up a summary of the conference in Scientific American; to read more about what was discussed at the conference, you can download the SFI and NIC report.

Civilization versus Forestation: Bristlecone Pines in the Anthropocene

“Trees and forests are repositories of time; to destroy them is to destroy an irreplaceable record of the Earth’s past.”

Whether we’ve grown up in the big city, a small town, or in the middle of the woods, most of us are familiar with the concept of tree rings. As children, we were taught that a tree is a kind of natural clock: count its rings, and find out how old it is. But what we may not all have learned, is that tree rings can tell a larger story.

Dendrochronology, or the science of tree-ring dating, has discovered that the rings on a tree not only record the number of years a tree has lived; they also preserve the memory of what those years were like. The thickness and coloration of tree rings speak of droughts and storms, unusual heat, excessive cold – even of sunspots. Trees are a living record of long-term climate change, geological evolution, and of life on earth in general.

Unfortunately, Ross Andersen recently wrote in Aeon magazine, human civilization has a long history of wiping out that record. In fact, the practice of deforestation may be as old as civilization itself. We felled trees for practical purposes: because we needed wood to build houses, fires, and weapons, or because we needed open space to cultivate our crops. But Andersen suggests we might be driven by a deeper motivation, as well:

“…a suspicion of forests as dark, shadowy places is written into the basic texts of Western culture. In Greek mythology, Dionysus, the ivy-wreathed god of the ‘wooded glens’, threatens civilization with a return to animalistic primitivism. In the Old Testament, Yahweh commands Hebrews to burn down sacred groves wherever they find them. Christian culture has traditionally identified the forests as a pagan stronghold, a gloomy haven for witches and outlaws. In Dante the forest is demon-haunted and evil, the underworld out of which the hero must ascend. For Descartes the forest is the precursor to enlightenment, the physical embodiment of confusion, the maze that the light beams of reason must penetrate.”

Early on in human history, Andersen writes, our small numbers and limited technology kept our resentment relatively contained. But as civilization expanded, we developed the capacity to destroy trees on an ever faster and larger scale. We’ve now managed to overpower the forests we so resented: our rate of destruction has become greater than their rate of growth.

Our powers of deforestation have grown to such heights, Andersen writes, that they now threaten to affect a particularly remote and hardy species: bristlecone pines.

Among the oldest living creatures on earth, bristlecone pines have a particularly significant story to tell about the history of time on Earth. Preferring cool and dry climates, bristlecones have thrived for millennia in remote areas beyond the reach of pests, parasites, and predators. Its particular biological properties allow it to continually regenerate itself; provided it is left alone in a comfortable, alpine environment, bristlecones could – hypothetically – live forever.

Unfortunately, however, the changes of the Anthropocene seem to be catching up with the bristlecones.

“In 2005, a researcher from Arizona’s tree-ring lab named Matthew Salzer noticed an unusual trend in the most recent stretch of bristlecone tree rings. Over the past half century, bristlecones near the tree line have grown faster than in any 50-year period of the past 3,700 years, a shift that portends ‘an environmental change unprecedented in millennia,’ according to Salzer. As temperatures along the peaks warm, the bristlecones are fattening up, adding thick rings in every spring season. … This might sound like good news for the trees, but it most assuredly is not. Indeed, the thick new rings might be a prophecy of sorts, a foretelling of the trees’ extinction.”

As climate change gradually warms the Earth, bristlecones have been climbing ever higher up their mountain ranges in search of the isolation they prefer. Eventually, however, there will be no place left for them to go. As their surroundings warm up, pests, parasites, and other effects of global warming will invade their habitat, threatening these trees with extinction. Salzer’s finding is, indeed, a warning sign.

“If global warming drives these trees to extinction it will signal an evolution in the technology of deforestation. In the past we have menaced trees with axes and torches, but now it will be the hot, aggregated exhaust of our civilizations. Deforestation once arose out of our animosity towards particular forests, those that stood in the way of our future homes and crops. But deforestation is becoming delocalized; it is becoming an unavoidable byproduct of our existence, a diffuse, Earth-spanning emanation no tree can escape – even those that take root at the far reaches of the bio-inhabitable world.”

Read: The Vanishing Groves by Ross Anderson in Aeon Magazine

Slow Journalism and A Long Walk: Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden

On January 10th, 02013, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Paul Salopek will begin a seven year journey on foot from Ethiopia to Patagonia, following the footsteps of the first migration of humans across the planet 60,000 years ago. The journey will not be an easy one. It consists of 21,000 miles of wildly varying terrain and environments, with only what Salopek can fit in his backpack. Salopek will be writing “narrative core samples” every hundred miles to get an embedded, on-the-ground look at the issues that are defining our age.

The concept behind this journey is “Slow Journalism”, which Salopek describes best:

The sheer volume of news being generated from professional journalists, citizen journalists, from tweets and blogs or what have you, is nearly self-defeating. It’s a tsunami of information. It’s almost unprocessable. We don’t need more information. We need more meaning. … It takes great slowing down to see how the great global stories of our day, whether they be climate change, conflict, poverty, or mass migration, are interconnected. The world isn’t flat. It’s deeply corrugated. And some of the best stories lie hidden in the corrugations.

Salopek will be posting updates here, as well as on Twitter @PaulSalopek.

Salopek also created a short interactive media introduction to the project with the help of Long Now volunteer Ahmed Kabil.

Terry Hunt & Carl Lipo Seminar Primer

“The Statues Walked — What Really Happened on Easter Island”

Thursday January 17, 02013 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

Archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo study cultural evolution and diversity. Their research tries to answer questions about how small communities develop into complex societies, and how cultures change and spread over time. They’ve focused much of their work on the Southern Pacific, a big stretch of ocean, dotted by tiny islands, that poses somewhat of a conundrum to archaeologists and anthropologists: how did human populations ever manage to spread out across these isolated locales?

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is a particularly intriguing case. More than 2,000 miles removed from its nearest (inhabited) neighbor, the island is small and relatively poor in natural resources. Nevertheless, Rapa Nui was home – for a while at least – to an industrious society most known for its construction of nearly 900 giant statues, or moai. Scholars and researchers have pored over the mystery of how a small community was able to build such impressive statues, and why the population ultimately perished in the 18th century.

According to conventional theories, the answers to those questions serve as a warning to our modern global population. Many scholars believe that the population depleted what little natural resources their island had in order to satisfy an ever-growing obsession with their society’s statue-building cult, thereby causing their own “ecocide.” In order to move these massive stone figures, people felled the palm trees that were once abundant on the island and turned them into logs. But with the disappearance of these trees, other species quickly went extinct as well. No longer able to sustain itself, Rapa Nui society collapsed into chaos and ultimately perished.

“It seemed obvious to researchers that Rapa Nui was a clear case of human recklessness, over-population, over-exploitation, and cultural collapse. Given contemporary concerns about our own environmental future, Rapa Nui offered the quintessential case of “ecocide,” as Jared Diamond (2005) dubbed it. The case for “ecocide” seemed consistent with some accounts from early European visitors, some of the oral traditions, Heyerdahl’s views of pervasive warfare and cultural replacement, and the emerging palaeo-ecological evidence. Rapa Nui provided a compelling story and environmental message that held relevance in today’s urgent global crisis (e.g. Kirch 1997, 2004).” (Hunt & Lipo 2007:85)

Nevertheless, Lipo and Hunt found reason in the archaeological record to question that theory. They traveled to Easter Island, where they ran a creative, hands-on experiment that put one simple assumption to the test: did the islanders really use logs to move their statues?

“When people are asked, how did your ancestors move the statues, the answer was always, ‘they walked’. … For the Rapa Nui, that was the answer, and … the foreigners asking the question, they thought, ‘oh, well that’s silly, you know, how crazy.’”

Hunt and Lipo built a precise, 15-ton replica of a moai from concrete, and asked a small group of people to see if they could make it “walk”: to move it forward in an upright position, using only ropes. A PBS feature documents their process of trial and error – and eventual success.

By confirming this simple hypothesis – that the Rapa Nui did not need logs to move their moai – Hunt and Lipo are able to offer a new theory about how the islanders interacted with their environment, and what caused their eventual decline. In their book, The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island, they take their insight as the basis for a new view of cultural evolution in the Southeastern Pacific: rather than a symbol of reckless environmental destruction, the Easter Island statues are a testament to human innovation and creative use of the environment. Hunt and Lipo argue that the islanders were actually inventive ‘users’ of their island’s resources, and adept at maximizing its agricultural capacities. Rather than a dangerous, self-destructive obsession, the statues were in fact instrumental to a culture of sustainability. The eventual demise of the Easter Island population was caused by a confluence of complicated factors, with an important role played by European conquerors and the foreign pests and diseases they brought with them. Easter Island still serves as an object lesson – but now of the complex and globally interwoven dynamics of cultural and ecological change.

Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo discuss their findings and the lessons we might learn from the fate of Rapa Nui on January 17th at the Cowell Theatre. You can reserve tickets, get directions, and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

Report on the First De-Extinction Meeting and Other Revivalist News

36 scientists, 25 presentations, 5,000 words to cover them all.  Lots of news.

Also the first announcement of the TEDx DeExtinction conference in Washington DC on March 15.

Introducing our now-full-time reviver of passenger pigeons, Ben Novak, with Martha, the world’s last passenger pigeon, in the backrooms of The Smithsonian.

Ben Novak is going to be working with Beth Shapiro’s group at UC Santa Cruz on world-class ancient DNA analysis, bearing down on the passenger pigeon and band-tailed pigeon (closest living relative) genomes. Additionally, Kim Vassershteyn is now a Long Now employee, often at the office, working on Revive and Restore matters, mostly the TEDx currently.  A listserv we set up for all the scientists at the October meeting is showing rich traffic.

Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo Seminar Tickets

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly
Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo on “The Statues Walked — What Really Happened on Easter Island”
TICKETS
Thursday January 17, 02013 at 7:30pm Cowell Theater at Fort Mason
Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! General Tickets $10
About this Seminar:

Was it ecocide? The collapse of the mini-civilization on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) has long been considered one of the great Green morality tales. Once the people there cut down the last tree, story goes, they were doomed. Their famous statues were an arms race that completed the exhaustion of their all-too-finite resources. Moral of the story: Easter Island equals Earth Island: we must not repeat its tragedy with the planet.

It’s a satisfying tale, but apparently wrong. The reality is far more interesting.

In fact the lesson of Rapa Nui is how to get ecological caretaking right, not wrong. Its people appear to have worked out an astutely delicate relationship to each other and to the austere ecology of their tiny island and its poor soil. They were never violent. The astonishing statues appear to have been an inherent part of how they managed population and ecological balance on their desert island. (Their method of moving the huge statues was clever and surprisingly easy—they walked them upright. See the amazing demonstration video!) The famous collapse came from a familiar external source—European diseases and enslavement, the same as everywhere else in the Americas and the Pacific.

All this is in a thoroughly persuasive book by an archaeologist and an anthropologist who did extensive fieldwork and historical study on Easter Island— THE STATUES THAT WALKED: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island, by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo. The authors present their case live in January’s SALT talk.

Decelerator Helmet

Our increasingly digital culture seems to be following Moore’s law of exponential acceleration – but sometimes you need to slow things down to understand them a little better.

To that end, German artist Lorenz Potthast has built what he calls a Decelerator Helmet. It is what it sounds like: a helmet that allows you to experience the world in slow motion. It’s an aluminum sphere that fits snugly over your head; your only visual connection to the outside world is a small camera, mounted to its exterior, that transmits live, but slow-motion video to an interior display.

Potthast explains that the helmet is meant to “decouple … personal perception from … natural timing:” it’s an experiment in engaging differently with our fast-paced world. Playing around with the flow of time, the artist suggests, exposes its important role in mediating the relationship between our inner experience and the outside world:

The decelerator gives the user the possibility to reflect about the flow of time in general, and about the relation between sensory perception, environment, and corporality in particular. Also, it dramatically visualize[s] how slowing down can potentially cause a loss of presen[ce].

For more information about this and other projects, visit Potthast’s (German-language) website here.

The Decelerator Helmet – A slow motion for Real Life from Lorenz Potthast on Vimeo.

A taste of the mountain

Please join us for a special tasting of the Bristlecone Gin and help support the Salon project at the same time.  We have just received the first bottles of the hand crafted Bristlecone Gin from St George Spirits, and it is incredible.  My favorite quote from an early taster: “It tastes like I’m drinking the mountain.”

If you are looking for a great last minute holiday gift, please consider a couple tickets to what should be a really fun evening.

https://bristleconegin.eventbrite.com/

The evening will consist of a little education about gin, our new space, as well as several unique tastings that include the gin and a tasting of the pure bristlecone distillate itself.  We will also be doing tastings of one of the whiskeys from St George, as well as the Long Now wine. And to cleanse the palate there will be wine, beer, cheese and snacks available all evening.  Each guest will also get to take home a specially etched shotglass to remember the evening.

If you do choose to make a further donation by becoming a member of the bottle club, you can deduct the price of your tasting ticket from the bottle donation.  So if you are considering donating at a higher level, this is a great chance to come check out the gin.

All proceeds from these tastings go directly to the Salon project, so please let your friends know about it.  If there is enough interest we will open up more tasting dates.  The evening runs from 5:30-8:30 on Tuesday January 22nd at Long Now and you are welcome to show up anytime before 8pm as we do the tastings in small groups.  But the earlier you arrive, the longer we have to spend with you, so please come early and hang out!

If you are already a bottle donor, or would like to become one before this event, please contact us at donate@longnow.org and you will not have to purchase tickets.

(Please note this is a 21 and over event)

You can see more about the Salon Project here:

https://longnow.org/salon/

More about St George Spirits here:

http://www.stgeorgespirits.com/

Thanks!

Peter Warshall Seminar Media

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Enchanted by the Sun: The CoEvolution of Light, Life, and Color on Earth

Wednesday November 28, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Warshall Seminar page for Members.

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Audio is up on the Warshall Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Light and beauty – a summary by Stewart Brand

“The naturalist’s task,” Warshall began, “is to observe without human-centered thoughts and human-centered agendas, to observe with a Gaian perspective and with the perspective of the organisms you’re watching. The naturalist considers all species in space/time as equally beautiful.” There’s a connection between art and science—between the poetic organization of thought and the pragmatic organization of thought. Light operates at a distance. That inspires anticipation, which becomes yearning, which becomes desire, which becomes hope, which generates transcendence. When an image becomes transcendent for you, it becomes part of how you perceive. “The Sun is the initiator of all sugars.”

Starting 250 million years ago, life rebelled and began generating its own light. There are 40 different kinds of bioluminescence, used for mate attraction, for baiting prey, for deceit. “Danger and beauty always go together. Deceit—not truth—is beauty. A term some art critics use is ‘abject beauty.’” Humans began the second light rebellion by harnessing fire a million years ago. Then came electric lights in the 1880s, and we transformed the light regime and hence behavior of many species. Artists like James Turrell shifted art from reflected light to emitted light, and that is increasingly the norm as we spend our days with screens radiating information into our eyes.

Our eyes are pockets of ocean that let us perceive only a portion of the Sun’s spectrum of light. Bees, with their crystal eyes, see in the ultraviolet. Snakes perceive infrared, and so do some insects that can detect the heat of a forest fire from 40 miles away.

Bowerbird males create elaborate art galleries, even devising forced perspective, to impress females. Young male bowerbirds watch the process for four years to learn the art. Throughout nature, watch for bold patterns of white, black, and red, which usually signal danger.

Every day there is a brief time without danger. At twilight—as daylight shifts to night—all life pauses. “That moment has a contemplative beauty that we cherish. It is a moment of Gaian aesthetic.”

Warshall’s talk, and his life, have been a convergence of art and science. Asked about how scientists could learn more about art, Warshall suggested they go to an art class and learn how to draw. As for how artists can learn more of science, he had two words:

“Outdoors. Look.”

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

Aspirin: A 3,500-Year Old Remedy

Aspirin is not only a miraculous cure-all; it’s also an ancient one.

In its purified chemical form, aspirin (or salicylic acid) is only a little over 100 years old. But the compound is also found in several plants – and in this form, it has been used for over 3,500 years.

Its pain-reducing and anti-inflammatory properties were already known to Hippocrates, who found salicylic acid in the leaves and bark of willow trees and used it, among other things, to ease the pain of childbirth. He most likely learned of this medicine from ancient Egyptian and Sumerian medical texts, which recommend the use of willow leaves for treating inflammation (Mackowiak 2000).

The healing potential of willows was recognized the world over – from the Roman Empire to ancient China, and, in the new world, among Native American tribes as well. In Europe, too, willow leaves were used medicinally, until, in the late nineteenth century, the Bayer pharmaceutical company figured out how to manufacture salicylic acid in a laboratory and market it for mass consumption (The Naked Scientist).

Today, modern medical research may have given us renewed insight into the workings and benefits of this over-the-counter pill, but aspirin is ultimately the product of a history that spans several millennia.