c.Figallo

Archive for July, 2009

…but this pessimist is very likely to be right.

Somewhere in your life or lifestyle, you’ve probably come across the term Gaia. Like zen, it’s been appropriated for marketing and commercial naming convenience, but it came into my consciousness through the  Whole Earth Catalog, which in 1980 positively reviewed a book titled Gaia: A new look at life on Earth by James Lovelock, a British scientist who had invented – among other things – an instrument for measuring CFCs (which are responsible for blowing a hole in the ozone layer of our atmosphere.)

The Gaia Theory – named after the Greek goddess of the Earth – proposes (in the words of Stewart Brand) that the entire life of Earth, through its atmosphere and ocean, functions effectively as one self-regulated organism.

Observing the Earth in that way for the past three decades has been a painful experience for Lovelock because he sees our planet from a perspective that the rest of us manage to ignore. And based on that perspective, Sir James has a dismal view of our global warming future, which he describes in his new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: a Final Warning.

Not to bum your day (or your life), but here are some excerpts from a recent article on AlterNet describing the contents of the new book:

“Most of the ‘green’ stuff is verging on a gigantic scam,” Lovelock told the New Scientist shortly before the release of his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. “Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It’s not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it’ll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning.”

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Lovelock argues that Gaia Theory offers a more holistic understanding of what’s happening to the climate than does mainstream climate science, stuck as it is in reductionist thinking and fractured into its constituent fields. Using the Gaia lens, he maintains, allows for a more comprehensive, intuitive, and ultimately more predictive approach. He spends much of Vanishing explaining why he thinks our attempts to accurately model climate change with computers is akin to the blind efforts of a 19th century doctor trying to treat diabetes.

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Of all the indicators of climate change, Lovelock maintains sea-level rise is the most important. Given the complexity of the millions of interactions within the Gaia system, Lovelock argues it is best to ignore year-to-year temperature fluctuations and instead watch the oceans. The seas, he says, are the lone trustworthy indicator of the earth’s heat balance. “Sea level rise is the best available measure of the heat absorbed by the earth because it comes from only two things,” he writes. “[These are] the melting of glaciers and the expansion of water as it warms. Sea level is the thermometer that indicates true global heating.”

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A quarter century ago, Carl Sagan issued a strange and compelling plea for nuclear disarmament. He urged the superpowers to abolish their thermonuclear arsenals for the sake of mankind’s future evolution and eventual colonization of the galaxy. Echoing Sagan, Lovelock believes it is our duty as an intelligent race, the only one in the cosmic neighborhod, to survive. Only by carrying the flame of civilization into the next century will we have a chance to evolve beyond our current tribal-carnivore brains, which are dominated by short-term thinking and thus responsible for our current predicament. Whereas Sagan dreamed of alien contact, Lovelock’s promised land is more humble: an evolved species capable of living in balance with Gaia.

Though my father was a subscriber to Organic Farming magazine in the Sixties, the practice was till pretty exotic until just a few years ago when most chain grocery stores began carrying organic produce. Now organic farms have become so popular that housing developers are beginning to incorporate them in their planning. Localized food growing – where it’s practical – offers a lot of advantages to long distance shipping. And the organic approach is much more sustainable in terms of preserving good soil and preventing damaging runoff into streams, rivers, lakes and oceans.

The following from an article in the New York Times:

Increasingly, subdivisions, usually master-planned developments at which buyers buy home sites or raw land, have been treating farms as an amenity. “There are currently at least 200 projects that include agriculture as a key community component,” said Ed McMahon, a senior fellow with the Urban Land Institute.

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Here in South Burlington, David Scheuer, a developer, runs a firm called Retrovest that specializes in pedestrian-friendly subdivisions. He is adapting the Prairie Crossing model with a 220-acre project called South Village, where he eventually hopes to sell 334 homes at prices of $200,000 to nearly $700,000.

A 16-acre segment of the property, which was not previously used for farming, is now producing lettuce, garlic and other crops, which are harvested for sale to homeowners and others from the area who have joined a local community-supported agriculture group. “Agriculture can be the caboose on the train,” Mr. Scheuer said, “and housing can be the engine.” Once he is selling 20 homes a year, he said, he hopes to pay the salary of a full-time farmer.

Part of my vision for a locally-based global network that works to build climate change resilience is the establishment of good tools and habits that reinforce local community activities and consciousness.

If you live in a place, it behooves you to know the people there, what’s going on, how it’s supported, and how its services work. It’s healthy to understand the local politics and environment.

One service that seems to be doing a good job of developing the Web infrastructure at the local level is Outside.in. Their software pulls in and aggregates news items based on zip codes and other location data. This forms a reasonably good foundation upon which other local information and interaction can build.

There is a bias toward business-related content (Outside.in is a profit-making venture), but it’s a good example of the networked locality model I’m thinking of, so I’ll be using it more now to help me think about how more collaborative tools could work in such a structure.

The ReadWriteWeb folks keep cranking out great stuff – reporting, analysis, practical instruction.

This is from their series guiding startups. I especially like this part:

Six Milestones from 30 Seconds to 3 Years

Here is what an insanely great Web product looks like to the average user right now and through the next 3 years:

• 30 seconds: “I get it.”
• 3 minutes: “I’ve used it and still get it, and it has not annoyed me yet.”
• 3 days: “I find this really useful or fun.”
• 3 weeks: “I am raving about this to other people.”
• 3 months: “I couldn’t imagine not having this, and I’m boring my friends telling them about it.”
• 3 years: “How weird to see this on Oprah.”

Both Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle have accumulated a lot of Web cred over the years, and you could say that they’re both pretty confident in their own visions of where things are headed in our increasingly collaborative and wired world. I admit, I tend to sit up and listen to them when they release a document like The Web Squared White Paper.

My concerns about global warming have, for a long time, kept me informed about sensors that report to us about changes and conditions in our environment. I’ve never been all that interested in more domestic applications, but as the White Paper describes, we’re well on our way to having ubiquitous sensing and reporting technologies in our offices, cars, roads, homes, bodies of water…you name it.

O’Reilly and Battelle write about information shadows and how, in the Internet of things every object has them. I find this concept to be fascinating.

What the Web 2.0 sensibility tells us is that we’ll get to the Internet of Things via a hodgepodge of sensor data contributing, bottom-up, to machine-learning applications that gradually make more and more sense of the data that is handed to them. A bottle of wine on your supermarket shelf (or any other object) needn’t have an RFID tag to join the “Internet of Things,” it simply needs you to take a picture of its label. Your mobile phone, image recognition, search, and the sentient web will do the rest. We don’t have to wait until each item in the supermarket has a unique machine-readable ID. Instead, we can make do with bar codes, tags on photos, and other “hacks” that are simply ways of brute-forcing identity out of reality.

Here’s the commentary on Web Squared from social web maven Dion Hinchcliffe.

On a couple of occasions during the late 90s I was the giddy recipient of stock options. All around me, it seemed, peers were becoming instant millionaires. So I figured I was in line for the same fortune. Not so.

By the year 2001 I began to understand just how destructive the headlong rush into IPOs had become, not only to the way we ran our businesses, but to the valuation of all businesses.

There may be shortcuts to wealth for a select minority – and for outright criminals – but for the rest of us, we need to produce products and services that deliver real value.

In an interview with Fast Company, accompanying the release of his new book Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (Random House), Rushkoff lays out some ideas that seem to fit the times.

Definitely don’t go public. Not until you are truly ready to leave your business. Going public means selling your business to disinterested shareholders. All they are going to care about is the short-term asset value of your shares. So if you care about any other aspect of your business–its customers, employees, industry, or even just its longevity and sustainability as a business–then don’t go public. Shareholders will demand growth at the business’s expense.

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The rest of the world is no longer going to respect the monopolies our governments declare. So it’s time to compete again. This means America learning how to do something instead of simply outsourcing and creating debt.

It won’t be easy, but it could actually be fun. Imagine competence as a viable alternative.

It’s half empty because it looks to me like the powers that be (in business, politics and big media) continue to underestimate the downside of today’s and tomorrow’s conditions.

It’s half empty not so much because there’s no reason for hope, but because there is so much obvious ignorance, superstition and unmitigated greed in influential places, sucking up the oxygen of attention that should be going to adaptive planning.

It’s half empty because there’s very little in the way of good news – that we’re actually finding solutions to our currently most vexing problems – the floundering world economy, looming threats from climate change, expanding resource shortages, inadequate healthcare, overgrown defense budgets.

And yet, that half-empty glass is, in itself, an inspiration for the half-full perspective.

The half-full view of the half-empty perspective is that humanity is now being forced to make use of the big brains, consciousness, compassion and intelligence that Nature has, for whatever reason, endowed us with. Through tens of thousands of years, going back to our ape-like ancestors we’ve had to learn and develop faculties to deal with dire situations. We learned enough to plan ahead and seek shelter in caves to avoid being attacked and eaten. We do have the capacity to think ahead and change our habits. We’ve just gotten lazy over the course of a few generations.

All of us who have experienced working selflessly with a group, a team, a community to accomplish a difficult and collectively valued goal understand the gift that such an experience can be. Individual attainment and success may be all that’s needed for some, but for most of us I have to believe that the greater feeling of gratification comes with being part of something bigger than ourselves.

As concerned as I am about the scale and degree of challenge we have ahead of us, I can’t help but be excited by the prospect that many more of us will – by choice or necessity – be in closer cahoots as we adapt in advance for 21st Century economy and climate.