Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog, The WELL) hosts a monthly seminar in San Francisco through his latest organization The Long Now Foundation. The seminars were started in “02003” to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking; to help nudge civilization toward our goal of making long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare. The day after each seminar Stewart posts a brief synopsis of the talk. Here is his synopsis of the talk from Tuesday, May 3, 02011 by Tim Flannery, whose latest book is “Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet.”
Stewart Brand’s synopsis:
The great insight of natural selection was published simultaneously
by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace in 1868, Flannery
pointed out, but their interpretations of the insight then diverged.
Darwin’s harsh view of “survival of the fittest” led too easily to
social Darwinism, eugenics societies, neo-classical economics, and an
overly reductionist focus on the “selfish gene.” Wallace, by
contrast, focussed on the tendency of evolution to generate a world
of complex co-dependence, and he became an activist for social
justice.
At the age of 80 in 1904 Wallace published a book titled Man’s Place
in the Universe, which proposed that Earth was the only living planet
in the Solar System. Flannery regards it as “the foundation text of
astrobiology” and, with its view that the atmosphere is an instrument
of life, a direct precursor of James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis and
Earth System Science. The study of Earth systems, in turn, revealed
that the atmosphere is 99 percent an artifact of life (minus only the
noble gases), that the makeup of the oceans is life-driven (toxic
heavy metals were concentrated into ore bodies), and that the whole,
in Flannery’s terms, constitutes a “commonwealth of virtue,” using
“geo-pheromones” such ozone, methane, atmospheric dust, and dimethyl
sulfide from algae to regulate the stability of a livable planet. It
acts like a loosely connected superorganism.
The first tightly connected superorganism came 100 million years ago
when cockroaches invented agriculture and the division of labor and
became termites, building complex skyscrapers with air-conditioning,
highways, and garbage dumps. Only 10,000 years ago, humans did the
same, inventing agriculture and the division of labor in cities,
becoming the most potent superorganism yet. One cause of that,
Flannery opined, may be our astonishing genetic uniformity, caused by
a near-extinction 70,000 years ago, when only 1,000 to 10,000
breeding pairs of humans survived. The 7 billlion of us now alive
have less genetic diversity than any random sample of 50 chimpanzees
in west Africa.
Flannery finds cause for hope in the increasing pace of global
agreements to manage the global commons. There was the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty in 1996, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent
Organic Pollutants in 2001, and worthy of an annual holiday on
September 16, the 1987 signing of the Montreal Protocol on Substances
that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Flannery, who now works full time on
climate issues, even takes hope from the last-minute Copenhagen
Accord that emerged from the UN climate meeting in 2009, because it
brought developing nations into the global project to reduce
greenhouse gases.
In Flannery’s view, Gaia is an infant still. Even if it is the only
Gaian planet in the galaxy, with growing skills and rudimentary space
travel, it could invest the whole galaxy with life in just 5 to 50
million years—an instant in light of Earth’s 4.5 billion years and
the universe’s 14 billion years.
–Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand — sb@gbn.org
The Long Now Foundation – www.longnow.org
Seminars & downloads: www.longnow.org/seminars/