| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Stewart Brand | ||||
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Stewart Brand has good values, and he asks good questions, and looks hard for intelligent answers. He is a national resource unto himself, and someone I have followed, off and on, for about 35 years. The Last Whole Earth Catalogue is still on my shelf -- and I click through it for a few hours every year.
Stewart is an old hippie. He (literally) drove the bus for the Electric Koolaid Acid Test, and if you have ever heard of Wendell Berry, then it is only because of Stewart Brand, who first gave him a platform for his "small is beautiful" theories of farming.
Stewart Brand has spent the last 40 years as a die-hard environmentalist. He has always put the Planet First, and he still does.
Watch this video and learn why Stewart is: 1) pro-city; 2) pro-nuke; 3) pro-genetically modified crops, and; 4) pro-geoengineering.
He is right on every point, whether that makes you happy or not.
Buy a copy of his latest: Whole Earth Discipline.
This is a complete lift (that means outright bold and brazen thievery) from Kevin Kelly over at Cool Tools . . . who stole it from Peter Warshall who is a very interesting and smart fellow who was a section editor at The Whole Earth Review . . . which itself was the brain child of Stewart Brand . . . who drove the bus for Ken Kesey and who also changed a lot of us with The Whole Earth Catalogue . . . which was, no lie, the internet before there was the internet."You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. (See the world eco-region map ). At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital.
"The following exercise in watershed awareness was hatched 30 years ago by Peter Warshall, naturalist extraordinaire." >> More here, but the essential (and humbling) questions are below.
1) Point north. [Recommendations for answer methods]
2) What time is sunset today? [Recommendations]
3) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap. [Recommendations]
4) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water? [Recommendations]
5) How many feet above sea level are you? [Recommendations]
6) What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here? [Recommendations]
7) How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours? [Recommendations]
8) Is the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt? [Recommendations]
9) Before your tribe lived here, what did the previous inhabitants eat and how did they sustain themselves? [Recommendations]
10) Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available. [Recommendations]
11) From what direction do storms generally come? [Recommendations]
12) Where does your garbage go? [Recommendations]
13) How many people live in your watershed? [Recommendations]
14) Who uses the paper/plastic you recycle from your neighborhood? [Recommendations]
15) Point to where the sun sets on the equinox. How about sunrise on the summer solstice? [Recommendations]
16) Where is the nearest earthquake fault? When did it last move? [Recommendations]
17) Right here, how deep do you have to drill before you reach water? [Recommendations]
18) Which (if any) geological features in your watershed are, or were, especially respected by your community, or considered sacred, now or in the past? [Recommendations]
19) How many days is the growing season here (from frost to frost)? [Recommendations]
20) Name five birds that live here. Which are migratory and which stay put? [Recommendations]21) What was the total rainfall here last year? [Recommendations]
22) Where does the pollution in your air come from? [Recommendations]
23) If you live near the ocean, when is high tide today? [Recommendations]
24) What primary geological processes or events shaped the land here? [Recommendations]
25) Name three wild species that were not found here 500 years ago. Name one exotic species that has appeared in the last 5 years. [Recommendations]
26) What minerals are found in the ground here that are (or were) economically valuable? [Recommendations]
27) Where does your electric power come from and how is it generated? [Recommendations]
28) After the rain runs off your roof, where does it go? [Recommendations]
29) Where is the nearest wilderness? When was the last time a fire burned through it? [Recommendations]
30) How many days till the moon is full? [Recommendations]
The Bigger Here Bonus Questions:
31) What species once found here are known to have gone extinct? [Recommendations]
32) What other cities or landscape features on the planet share your latitude? [Recommendations]
33) What was the dominant land cover plant here 10,000 years ago? [Recommendations]
34) Name two places on different continents that have similar sunshine/rainfall/wind and temperature patterns to here..
For the 40th Anniversary of the Summer of Love I read The Electric Koolaid Acid Test. A bummer; there are much better books. Still, I think Stewart Brand is a small God, and that Wavy Gravy is a very good ice cream, and that Cherry Garcia is the best damn ice cream in the world. For the record, Jerry Greenfield (of Ben & Jerry's) went to Oberlin College (me too). Owsley Stanley attended my high school (Unlike Owsley, I actually graduated from there). Mountain Girl is the name of my dog. Pearl is named after Janis. 'Nuff said.
Better books recently finished: Two by Annie Proulx (Close Range and Bad Dirt) and Norman Mcleans' A River Runs Through It. All very good, and highly recommended. Proulx is an inspiration and a find. Yes, I realize I am late to this fair.
Better books recently started and liking very much: Truck, a Love Story by Michael Perry. Another of his books: Population 485 is next. Perry is a smoking writer, and funny-smart. Another good find.
"The Red Sox have had such bad luck in the 20th century, I have to believe that in the new millennium it can only get better. Besides, statistically, scoring goals is harder than hitting a home run, and in the World Cup, you have the whole WORLD against you, but in baseball, the Red Sox only really have to beat the Yankees."
The human ability to wreck things has expanded exponentially faster than our ability to consider the future.
Clovis points have been replaced by "Daisy Cutter" bombs, dams large enough to flood entire civilizations, and mountaintop removal.
And yet most people still have not planned for their own retirement, much less considered the ramifications of genetic engineering, or the building of entire cities on rapidly dwindling reservoirs of fossil water.
And so, in order to try to shift the time paradigm, Steward Brand, Danny Hillis and Brian Eno decided to build a clock -- a physical, visible thing that would run for 10,000 years. The clock would chime once every 1,000 years, and its very presence would require a different kind of thinking about the future.
What would power the clock? Solar power needs too much maintenance and so too does nuclear power. Could geothermal energy do the job? What power source would never run down and would never submit a bill? And thus was born the beginning of the struggle to answer the first great design question: what would power the clock?
Who would maintain the clock? Clearly not one person, so there would have to be an organizational structure -- and thus was born the Long Now Foundation.
Where would the clock be located? It had to be some spot free from destruction for 10,000 years. And so the Long Now Foundation purchased part of a mountain in Nevada where the clock will be situated deep inside a limetone cliff.
Who would explain the clock? Ten thousand years from now people will not be using any language we know today. And so was born the Rosetta Disk to serve as a translation tool for the future.
The 10,000 year clock being built by the Long Now Foundation.
Changing a paradigm is not easy. In fact, it is so hard, and so rarely done, that the very idea of it seems more than a little Quixotic.
And yet all important change comes from paradigm shifts, and a paradigm shift about time is, I think, exactly what humans need. Or, as Stewart Brand has put it, "we need to think slower and deeper, not faster."
But to tell the truth, a 10,000 year clock is a little abstract for most people. Never mind that it is physical and visible and magically corrects itself for the long-term global wobble that will result in a deviation in solar time.
People are simply unable to grasp 10,000 years. They have more immediate concerns. Like lunch.
In any case, the future is not built in a 10,000 year lump any more than a cathedral is forged from a single block of stone.
The future will be built like a cathedral, made up of thousands of blocks of action and consequence, each carefully cut and interlocked into place.
And so was born "Long Bets," to promote more robust short-term thinking. Better building blocks to make a better cathedral.
The Long Bets idea was forged when Paul Ehrlich said he would give even odds as to whether Great Britain existed in 2000. Ehrlich was prone to making such provocative apocalyptic statements. His most famous book, "The Population Bomb," predicted massive die-offs in the developing world due to a shortage of food and a "longage" of people.
In fact, such predictions started with Malthus who postulated that population grew exponentially and food arithmatically, and for that reason doom was inevitable and that aiding the poor was foolish and would only abet more misery.
Malthus's tract on population was written to justify land clearances for the Enclosure Movement. Without writing a long essay on Malthus, it is enough to say that he was quite wrong. Since Malthus' time, global food production has outpaced human population growth, life expectancy at birth has increased, and literacy has spread.
Those facts, of course, have not stopped a small parade of apocalyptic predictors from following Malthus, from William Vogt to Paul Ehrlich, Garrett Hardin and William Paddock.
On the other side of the coin have been a few people like Julian Simon -- a University of Maryland economics professor who claimed human ingenuity could solve ALL problems. I will not delve into Simon's intellectual mistakes, but they are as legion as any of those on the opposite side of the coin. My aim here is not to get trapped in the quagmore of Ehrlich and Simon. What we are talking about here is Long Bets -- let's get back to the Long Bet that was made.
Simon challenged Ehrlich to bet on the future price of any 10 commodities. The bet would last 10 years, and the winner would pocket the price differential in the commodities.
Ehrlich quickly accepted the challenge, picked a portfolio of 10 metals, and crowed that he would make out like a bandit.
Ten years later, however, when the value of the portfolio was added up, it turned out that every single metal had declined in value.
Simon pocketed Ehrlich's check with a wink and a nod.
Much has been written about this bet in the past, (google Simon Ehrlich bet). I will not delve into it too deeply other than to say that both men were overly simplistic in their analysis of both resource use, pricing and population.
That said, the idea of a financial bet between two parties intrigued Stewart Brand and his small band of talented brethren.
In their quest to promote "slower and better" thinking, a "Long Bet" seemed like an excellent mechanism to encourage both increased participation and better prognostication.
Money has a way of focusing the mind.
And so was born LongBets.org.
I came across this web site five years ago when I was looking into what Stewart Brand was now up to. Brand had been the creater of The Whole Earth Catalogue -- a series of simple catalogue-like publications, assembled by a merry band of hippies, that were so sweeping in their interests that Steve Jobs (of Apple Computer fame) has credited Brand with creating the paper-and-print conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web.
All I know is that The Last Whole Earth Catalogue is still worth reading -- again and again -- even today.
When I checked out the Long Bets web site I found some real brainiacs making serious bets -- people like physicist Freeman Dyson, voice-synthesizer guru Ray Kurzweil, Vint Cerf (father of the internet) and Mitchell Kapor (inventor of Lotus software), to say nothing of Stewart Brand, Brian Eno and Danny Hillis themselves.
Very cool, but the bets were too steep for a nonprofit wage-slave like me. Two thousand dollars was the minimum bet, and all "winnings" were to go to charity. That was more than I could give away in a single stroke.
A while later, however, I was on a list-serv in which people were talking rather broadly about the energy crisis. I tried to explain the limits of M. King Hubbert's oil data, a well as the fungibility of energy types and other such thoughts.
As usual no one was convinced of the other person's point of view, and after a point the list drifted off to other topics.
A few months later, on the same list, I mentioned that Stewart Brand had sharply reduced the money limit on a "Long Bet," and that now it was just $200 on each side. Almost immediately, Steven B. Kurtz -- one of the previous energy debaters -- asked me if I wanted to make a "Long Bet" on future energy costs.
Sure, I said. Let's make it the price of a kilowatt hour of electrical power, and let's park the bet two years into the future.
In truth, I had in mind winning the first Long Bet. I bet Steve did too.
Steve took the bet. Now, three year later, it appears he has won it, though not before a serious bit of confusion occured over at the U.S. Department of Energy which initially published data suggesting the price of electrical energy had declined.
Apparently DOE had at least two or three years worth of data wrong (including the initial price of energy at the start of our bet) due to lies, deception and data confusion that grew out of the Enron energy fiasco. In the end, looking at the re-published data, it appears the price of electrial power has gone up very slightly due to the disastrous Middle East policy of George Bush which has (among other things) resulted in a very significant decline in Iraqi oil production. Score one for Steve!
Steve and I actually have a longer, more serious bet on the human condition, in which I argue that "Over the next ten years, we will make measurable global progress in all five areas of the human condition: food, access to clean water, health, education, and the price of energy."
I let Steve pick five data sets from a closed list of about 20 options, all of which are kept by the United Nations, and which therefore have (hopefully) some continuity of collection methodology. If Steve wins on any single point, he wins the entire bet. So far, I think he is losing on all points, but the wager is still young, and we shall see.
That said, I think both Steve and I thought we really would beat Ted Danson. What was the chance that the Boston Red Sox would win the World Series in the next three years?
And yet Danson won. Though the Danson-Elliot bet seems a trifle lightweight on the surface, it's actually a wager about probability and risk, and not mere sports.
With the World Cup played only once every four years, and with far fewer Major League Baseball teams than World Cup soccer teams, Ted Danson had about a 20:1 chance of winning over Mike Elliot.
But I figured I had at least 8:1 odds of beating Ted Danson to win the first Long Bet. After all, the Sox had been losers a long time, and the window for my success was a mere two and a half years.
Of course, luck does play a hand in all things, and on this roll of the dice I lost -- twice.
Such is life.
What does all this have to do with hunting and dogs? Well, not a lot, to tell the truth. But maybe a little. I did manage to work hunting and dogs into the beginning of this piece. Now let's see if I can work it in at the end as well.
There is the small point that Thomas Malthus had quite a lot to do with the Enclosure Movement, which in turn laid the foundation for the fox and terrier work that followed, as well as the speciation of terriers following Robert Bakewell's use of enclosures to improve livestock. To read more about that see this >> illustrated history of working terriers.
Finally, for those who dig in the Eastern and Midwestern United States, the legacy of the mammoth can be found in our hedges and forests. If you are in the right thicket you may find Osage Orange, Honey Locust or Kentucky Coffeetrees.
All three of these trees have large fruits and seed pods with thick protective coatings or thorns -- natural defenses designed to help protect them from over-grazing by mammoths that roamed through this area just 10,000 years ago. The mammoths are gone, but their ghosts remain in the form of these tough and defiant trees.
Hopefully, all this will make you think, just a little, about how fragile this earth is ... about how much damage humans can do if they do not plan ... about the mammoth responsibility that comes with the powers we now have to shape the natural world.
Let's not screw it up this time .... We cannot afford to bet the farm again.
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The last mammoth, a dwarf species, was killed on Wrangle Island about 3,800 years ago -- about the time the pyramids were being made.
