Jim Brumm: Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World

Nature is often resilient, not fragile. There is no wilderness unspoiled by man. Thoreau was a townie. Conservation, by many measures, is failing. If it is to survive, it has to change.

Environment & Energy Publishing recently featured an article on former SALT speaker Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy who argues that conservation work is in need of a new direction and philosophy. The “horror stories” ecologists love to tell about how humanity is singlehandedly (or better said, too-many-handedly) destroying nature are, he claims, not corroborated by research data. They are also a “strategy failure,” because they fail to connect the importance of conservation to the everyday lives and concerns of ordinary citizens.

The old ways aren’t working. Inch by inch, for better or worse, conservation must, he says, enter the Anthropocene Epoch – the Age of Man.

Kareiva argues that we must accept the irreversibility of the Anthropocene. Our impact on the environment can be traced back even further than we always thought – and nature itself has been continually changing since long before we came around. It is neither tenable nor desirable to protect nature from our influence. Rather, Kareiva tells us, conservation efforts must be structured around human life and our influential place in the larger ecosystem.

This means taking steps that ‘traditional’ ecologists might consider blasphemous. Conservation decisions must be based on value judgments – evaluations of value to human life – rather than on the a priori assumption that all human life is naturally destructive to the thriving of ecosystems.

“It’s not about biodiversity,” [Kareiva] said. “It’s about having a forest so you don’t get what happened in Haiti. It’s about having vegetation so water doesn’t get overloaded with nutrients. Having oyster reefs to reduce hurricane storm surges.”

E&E Publishing reports that the Nature Conservancy has indeed begun to shift its focus, with plans for precisely such an oyster reef on the Gulf Coast. In deciding its location, the Conservancy looked for a place that was not just ecologically vulnerable, but socio-economically vulnerable as well: the reef now protects a low-income region that could suffer disproportionately from storm damage.

This approach means having to make some difficult decisions. Our own Stewart Brand calls Kareiva a courageous man.

The Nature Conservancy is no longer in the business of “saving the last great places on Earth.” Its new slogan? “Protecting nature. Preserving life.” It’s a mind-boggling and welcome shift, said Brand, the environmentalist and author.

For Kareiva, it simply makes scientific sense – and it gets the message out to a wider public. For conservation to really work, everyone must be on board: not just Conservancy scientists, but also big corporations, inner-city kids, and the loggers and salmon fishers whose livelihoods depend on natural resources. Only with such a joint effort can we hope to make a sustained effort to preserve nature – so that nature can, in turn, help us preserve our civilization.

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

Benjamin Barber on “If Mayors Ruled the World” TICKETS Tuesday June 5, 02012 at 7:30pm Cowell Theater at Fort Mason Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! &#8226 General Tickets $10

 

About this Seminar:

Democracy began in cities and works best in cities. Mayors are the most pragmatic and effective of all political leaders because they have to get things done. “The paramount aims of city-dwellers,” says Barber, “concern collecting garbage and collecting art rather than collecting votes or collecting foreign allies, the supply of water rather than the supply of arms, promoting cooperation rather than promoting exceptionalism, fostering education and culture rather than fostering national defense and patriotism.”

Most of humanity now lives in cities, and cities worldwide connect with each other more readily than any other political entity. By expanding on that capability, Barber suggests, “Cities can make themselves global guarantors of social justice and equality against the depredations of fractious states. And they can become, as the polis once was, new incubators of democracy, this time in a global form.“

A much-honored political theorist, Barber is author of Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age and of Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World.

“Eternal Plastic: A Toxic Love Story”

Tuesday May 22, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

Susan Freinkel has used both chestnuts and toothbrushes as stand-ins for American culture’s relationship with the environment and technology. Her two well-received books of science journalism serve, in some ways, as foils to one another. The first, American Chestnut: The Life, Death and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree, is a study of how we lost something great, while the more recent Plastic: A Toxic Love Story explores how we’ve found ourselves overly-dependent on something that isn’t the cure-all we’d hoped. Fortunately, both books also delve into what’s next: how we may get the American Chestnut back and how we can mitigate some of the more damaging effects of plastic.

The American Chestnut was all but lost early last century to a blight that nearly cleared the eastern part of the United States of the species. As it was an important source of timber and nuts, the loss of the Chestnut was a significant blow to the American economy. Freinkel’s book on the subject explores these effects as well as the recent proliferation of efforts to revive the species through a range of techniques, both high- and low-tech.

In exploring our relationship with plastic, Freinkel is careful to point out that it has many legitimate benefits to offer us as a material; problems arise however, when we treat it primarily as disposable. In a New York Times Op-Ed published last year, she explains that around half the plastic produced each year goes into single-use products, which not only significantly undervalues the time and energy that are required to produce those hydrocarbon molecules, but ignores how long they’ll last as well.

In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, she discusses the health concerns around the many different types of plastic, the sometimes-murky science supporting and refuting those concerns, and the complicated regulatory environment governing those debates. She’s also written a couple of articles for Fast Company, one recently exploring the costs and benefits of burning used plastic for energy.

Susan Freinkel will weave these many threads together on Tuesday, May 22nd at the Cowell Theater. You can reserve tickets, get directions and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

Subscribe to the Seminars About Long-term Thinking podcast for more thought-provoking programs.

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

Living in the Homogenocene: The First 500 Years

Monday April 23, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Mann Seminar page for Members.

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

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Bio-blender Earth - a summary by Stewart Brand

Tumultuous effects resulted and continue to result from the massive mixing of the world’s biota when European ships reconnected the American continent to the rest of the world. Mann traced several of the cascading consequences of “the biggest ecological convulsion since the death of the dinosaurs.”

The first momentous change came from microbial exchange—20 lethal diseases came from Europe to the Americas while only one (syphilis) went the other way. North America, which had been largely cleared by natives with fire and agriculture, reforested when two-thirds to 95% of the native inhabitants died from European diseases—”the greatest demographic catastrophe in human history.” That huge reforesting drew down atmospheric carbon dioxide and Europe’s “Little Ice Age” (1550-1800) apparently resulted.

Meanwhile the mountain of silver at Potosí, Bolivia, vastly enriched Europe, which “went shopping” worldwide. Trading ships coursed the world’s oceans. One artifact picked up from Peru was the potato—a single variety of the 6,000 available. When potatoes in Europe turned out to provide four times the amount of food per acre as wheat, the previously routine famines came to an end, population soared, governments became more stable, and they began building global empires. After 1843 guano shipped by the ton from coastal Peru for fertilizer introduced high-input agriculture. In Ireland 40% of the exploding population ate only potatoes. Around 1844 a potato blight arrived from Mexico, and a million Irish died in the Great Famine and a million more emigrated.

In China, which has no large lakes and only two major rivers, agriculture had been limited to two wet regions where rice could be grown. Two imports from America—maize and sweet potato—could be farmed in dry lands. As in Europe, population went up. Vast areas were terraced as Han farmers pushed westward as far as the Mongolian desert. In heavy rains the terraces melted into the streams, and silt built up in the lowlands, elevating the rivers as much as 40 feet above the surrounding terrain, so when they flooded, millions died. “A Katrina per month for 100 years,” as one Chinese meteorologist described it. The constant calamities weakened the government, and China became ripe for foreign colonial takeover.

In America two imported diseases—malaria and yellow fever—were selective in who they killed. Europeans died in huge numbers, but Africans were one-tenth as susceptible, and so slavery replaced traditional indentured servitude in all the warm regions that favored mosquito-borne diseases. As one result, four times as many Africans as Europeans crossed the Atlantic and began mixing with the remaining native Americans, giving rise to an endless variety of racial blends and accompanying vitality throughout the Americas.

During the Q & A, Mann described a potential fresh eco-convulsion-in-waiting. “There is an area in southeast Asia roughly the size of Great Britain that is a single giant rubber plantation.” Where rubber trees originally came from in the Amazon there is now a rubber tree leaf-blight that is starting to spread in Asia. “You could lose all the rubber trees in three to six months. It would be the biggest deforestation in a long time.” The entire auto industry, he added, depends on just-in-time delivery of rubber.

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Hungry for information, but bored by graphs and pie charts? Then pay a visit to Information is Beautiful, a site dedicated to all things informational – and all things pretty. Its pages showcase models and graphics that reveal what can happen when data presentation is combined with an eye for design and aesthetics.

The site is now hosting the first global award competition for data visualization, and recently announced that Long Now Board member Brian Eno has joined its panel of judges.

Along with his fellow evaluators, Eno will be reviewing submissions for awards in a variety of categories, ranging from “Interactive Visualisations” to “Data Journalism” and “Information Art.” The most prestigious award, however, is reserved – quite simply – for the “Most Beautiful” design.

Submissions are due by May 31st and they’ll announce winners at the end of July.

Check out the website for more (artfully rendered) information about the competition, and a look at the submissions; the general public gets to vote, too!

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

The Social Conquest of Earth

Friday April 20, 02012 – San Francisco

 

Video is up on the Wilson Seminar page.

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

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The Real Creation Story - a summary by Stewart Brand

“History makes no sense without prehistory,“ Wilson declared, “and prehistory makes no sense without biology.” He began by noting that every religion has a different creation story, all of them necessarily based on ignorance of what really happened in the past. Religions thus can’t give valid answers on the meaning of life—Gauguin’s questions: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” Philosophy gave up on the questions long ago. The task was left to science, and from science a valid, shareable creation story is now emerging.

For the last 65 million years Earth has been dominated by eusocial animals. Ants, termites, and bees in some areas make up half of all biomass. Yet only a few of the million known insect species made the jump to eusociality. One variety of mammal, a tiny set of primates, made a similar jump. Once they began to use their eusocial skills to fan out from Africa 60 thousand years ago, they gradually became far more dominant even than the social insects. “The term ‘eusocial,’“ Wilson said, “means a society based in part on a division of labor, in which individuals act altruistically, that covers two or more generations, and that cares for young cooperatively.”

That eusociality is so rare suggests how difficult it is for altruistic traits to evolve. The powerful evolutionary force to make individuals that successfully reproduce has to be overcome by some form of selective pressure which generates altruistic individuals who yield their interests to the interests of the group. How does that occur? Examining near-eusocial species like African wild dogs and snapping shrimp along with primitively eusocial species like sweat bees shows that a crucial step appears to be made when multiple generations linger to defend a constructed nest with valuable access to food. That step can be made with a simple change to a single behavioral gene, silencing the trait for normal dispersal of young to carry out their own independent reproduction. When the young linger to defend the nest and begin to provide for the next generation of young, eusociality begins.

All eusocial species appear to have arisen from multi-generational nest defense. Two million years ago our ancestors began using fire for campsites and cooking. At the same time hominid brain size began expanding dramatically. Social traits emerged that have characterized humanity ever since. We love joining groups, and we became geniuses at reading the intentions of each other, a skill we fine-tune incessantly with our enjoyment of gossip. In another distinctively human trait, like ants, we became highly adept at collaborative warfare.

Wilson had long been a proponent of William Hamilton’s theory of “kin selection” as an explanation for how altruistic traits could evolve. But as a naturalist he found it did not explain phenomena that he and others were discovering in eusocial species, and he began to favor “group selection” instead—a process where the “target” of evolution was sacrificially collaborative traits, because highly cooperative groups beat poorly cooperative groups, and the “units” of evolution (genes) adjusted accordingly. It is successful groups, more than successful families, that are being selected for. In 2010 Wilson, along with mathematician Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita formally challenged kin selection with a peer-reviewed paper in Nature. There was, as Wilson put it, “considerable blowback” from kin selection theorists and supporters.

Wilson’s alternative he calls “multi-level selection,” where individual selection and group selection proceed together (with kin selection a continuing bit player). In our eusocial species, that mix of traits makes us “permanently unstable, permanently conflicted” between selfish impulses and cooperative impulses. We negotiate these conflicts endlessly within ourselves and with each other. Wilson sees inherent adaptive value in that constant negotiation. Our vibrant cultural life may be driven in part by it.

In response to a question about what the next stages of human eusociality might be, Wilson said he hoped for a fading of interest in end-state ideologies and end-time religious creation stories because they so fervently deny negotiation.

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