In all my many wanderings and travelings, it has recently come to my attention that I’ve been leaving y’all floundering here by yourselves just a little too long around our friendly noospheric campfire.
Now that you mention it, I’m surprised to see any of you still hanging around here at all. I’m touched. I really am. And I hope you’ll find it in your hearts to forgive me. These days, things here at WIE mission control are as busy & exciting as ever, and with a little luck, a lot more posting, and a little less World of Warcraft, well, maybe I can help us get some things dusted off and kicked up again out here on the frontier.
The Future.
It has a certain haze. It sparkles with motes of light like the moon on hardpack snow. It’s hard to predict like sand dunes, the way they always shift and move beneath you. But like I wrote just the other day to my new friend Thom at the TV show Quarterlife, if you want to play a role in the future you better not wait for it to happen all by its lonesome self. You have to make it happen. To put it the way Thom put it, you’re surely better off creating a miracle than expecting one.
That’s what the future’s all about. It’s demanding, exacting, and gosh darn interesting. “Prediction is very hard, especially when it’s about the future,” quotes Jamais Cascio in Twelve Things Journalists Need To Know to be Good Futurist/Foresight Reporters. I’ve been keeping this little gem here in my saddlebags for a moment like this one, and I hope you find it as interesting as I did. What is our future going to be like, and what will it be like to live there? How is the rapid evolution of science, technology, and society shifting the subterranean landscapes of culture and consciousness in all of us–and vice versa–in a neverending feedback loop?
This passage from Charles Reich’sThe Greening of America (New York:
Random House, 1970), written 37 years ago, still seems eerily prescient for today:
Technology demands of man a new mind — a higher, transcendent reason — if it is to be controlled and guided rather than to become an unthinking monster. It demands a new individual responsibility for values, or it will dictate all values. And it promises a life that is more liberated and more beautiful than any man has known, if man has the courage and the imagination to seize that life.
The transformation that is coming invites us to reexamine our own lives. It confronts us with a personal and individual choice: are we satisfied with how we have lived; how would we live differently? It offers us a recovery of self. It faces us with the fact that this choice cannot be evaded, for as the freedom is already there, so must the responsibility be there.
At the heart of everything is what we shall call a change of consciousness. This means a “new head” — a new way of living — a new man. This is what the new generation has been searching for, and what it has started achieving. Industrialism produced a new man, too — one adapted to the demands of the machine. In contrast, today’s emerging consciousness seeks a new knowledge of what it means to be human, in order that the machine, having been built, may now be turned to human ends; in order that man once more can become a creative force, renewing and creating his own
life and thus giving life back to his society.
More like the monthly roundup, methinks. But I’m back from the brink of editorial obscurity, folks! And very glad to see you. See, that’s me up there rejoicing in a job, well, done.
Newsflash: We have BRIGHT GREEN liftoff. Repeat: BRIGHT GREEN liftoff. You’ll have to wait another month or two, depending on whether or not you subscribe to WIE, to read my articulate masterpiece, but I’ll be blogging about the topic a good bit before then so stay tuned…
A brief smattering of strange news from the last few weeks that somehow made it through the collation machine:
How to solve global warming by playing a fun game with small colored wedges. Flash movie. Article.
Let’s not forget the supercool worldclock. Until I figure out how to embed this baby on my website, you’ll have to enjoy it here.
Three recent radio interviews featuring yours truly:
With my colleague Carol Raphael, a tag-team interview with Mary Evelyn Tucker on WIE Unbound. She’s the founder of the Harvard Forum on Religion and Ecology, and we grilled her on Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, the word “anthropocosmic,” the current state of environmental consciousness on the planet, and of course the bright green movement. She rocked.
The only way Africa will develop and create wealth is if it can attract foreign capital and trade its goods on the world market like every other economically successful country does. But investors are jittery. And considering what we think we know about Africa, who would blame them?
We make Africa glamorous, plastering billboards with sultry images of Gwenyth Paltrow proclaiming “I am an African.” We throw billions of dollars at Africa and hope for its salvation. We buy Vanity Fair and read about “Madonna’s Malawi” and “Jeffrey Sachs’s $200 Billon Dream.” Branding Africa as barbaric and hopeless or glamorous and chic may sell magazines and get us to open our purse strings once in awhile. But neither myth is true or useful.
Here’s a radical idea: if we really want to help, why not ask Africans, not their governments, how they perceive the challenges before them, the dreams they have for the future, and the resources they think they need to realize them? Instead, we let a well-intentioned Irish rock star, a Jewish-American economist, and their Hollywood cohort become the voice and face of Africa.
And in the process, the story of the other Africa, the Africa that is dynamic, creative, and wants to work as a partner and the leader of its own future, is being drowned out by the clarion cry of the anti-poverty glitterati–and our own appetites for gripping, salacious headlines of war, poverty, and grief.
Howdy, all you loyal Frontier Mentality heads out there. I’m sticking my head above the horizon again here to let you know I haven’t died. It’s going to be a bit longer before I have the chance to show my face in these parts and disclose all my frontier thoughts & feelings again… a “few days” on my first draft of the bright green story turned into, well, a month and a half on a finished one. But that’s the name of the game here at WIE.
In the interim, I’ve learned all about Stewart Brand and nineteen sixties pro-technology counterculture environmentalism, fallen hopelessly in love with Buckminster Fuller, and been more thoroughly converted to the Worldchanging worldview than I could possibly hope (or want) to come back from. There’s a hell of a lot to share, some of which I’ll do in this feature story out in the fall, much more of which I’ll do right here.
Just as soon as I get this bright green helmet off:
Peeking my head up from the land of the bright and the green… Here’s a good one from Bruce Sterling on the State of the World 2007:
Climate change is not gonna be combatted through voluntary acts of individual charity. It’s gonna be combatted through some kind of colossal, global-scaled, multilateral, hectic, catch-as-catch-can effort to stop burning stuff, suck the burnt smoke out of the sky, and put the smoke back into the ground. That’s not gonna get done a little green teacup at a time, because we’ve been doing it for two centuries and we don’t have two centuries to undo it.
“Reducing emissions” is a wrongheaded way to approach it. If “reducing emissions” is the goal, then the best technique available is to drop dead. The second-best technique is to go around killing a lot of people. Nobody’s got a lighter eco-footprint than a dead and buried guy. He’s not walking around leaving footprints: the Earth is
piled on top of him.
We’re past the point where reduction helps much; we will have to invent and deploy active means of remediation of the damage. But from another, deeper perspective: we shouldn’t involve outselves in lines of development where the ultimate victory condition is emulating dead people. There’s no appeal in that. It’s bad for us. That kind of inherent mournfulness is just not a good way to be human. We’re not footprint-generating organisms whose presence on the planet is inherently toxic and hurtful. We need better handprints, not lighter footprints. We need better stuff, not less stuff. We need to think it through and take effective action, not curl up in a corner stricken with guilt and breathe shallowly.
Find out how aliens from Atlantis built the pyramids with this sweet schematic;
And definitely watch this talk by biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus. Biomimicry is still relatively unknown, and this intro is a mesmerizing window on the future:
The next few days I’m going to be (carbon) sequestering myself more or less away from Frontier Mentality blogville to pound out a draft of a piece about the bright green movement for WIE. I may get up here occasionally with some juicy tidbits, but if I don’t, this video should tide you over for a little while. It’s a talk by a man named Alex Steffen, founder of the amazing Worldchanging blog and inspiring next-generation environmental activist-philosopher. I love this guy, and I think you will too:
From Billy The Kid (1958), by my all-time favorite poet Jack Spicer — creative genius, developer of a ‘poetics of ego death’ that has yet to be matched in contemporary art, and a man who liked to listen to the radio on the beach a lot:
I
The radio that told me about the death of Billy The Kid
(And the day, a hot summer day, with birds in the sky)
Let us fake out a frontier — a poem somebody could hide in with a sheriff’s posse after him — a thousand miles of it if it is necessary for him to go a thousand miles — a poem with no hard corners, no houses to get lost in, no underwebbing of customary magic, no New York Jew salesmen of amethyst pajamas, only a place where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people.
Torture gardens and scenic railways. The radio
That told me about the death of Billy The Kid
The day a hot summer day. The roads dusty in the summer. The roads going somewhere. You can almost see where they are going beyond the dark purple of the horizon. Not even the birds know where they are going.
The poem. In all that distance who could recognize his face.
Photo by Kent Bowker. Plum Island, Newbury, Massachusetts, ca. 1958.
Check out this story from today’s Guardian, in which author Oliver Burkeman manages to skewer, with pitch perfect British wit, Ms. Hilton, Mr. Tolle, Madonna, Tom Cruise (by association), and shoppers of New Age bookshelves everywhere.
Consciousness is one of my favorite subjects. It’s an all-star topic. It’s the most basic fact of our existence, so fundamental it slips by easily unnoticed yet so ineffable few of us have any idea what it is. Questions about the nature of consciousness have been confounding philosophers for thousands of years and scientists for the last several hundred or so, and these days — even with the burgeoning explanatory power of neuroscience and the growing sophistication of integral philosophies — discussions of consciousness and the ‘mind-body problem’ can still seem like a Wild West intellectual free-for-all.
These are the frontiers, after all, and I’d have a hard time coming up with a topic that better ties together much of what is exciting, promising, and doggedly mysterious in contemporary thought. So I’m going to be blogging about it a fair bit from here on out.
“We’ve really opened a can of worms here.”
So says John Horgan to his pal George Johnson in a recent episode of Bloggingheads’ “Science Saturdays,” which explores (well, glosses over at least) David Chalmers’ now classic hard problem, among other things. [Read more →]
Technology demands of man a new mind — a higher, transcendent reason — if it is to be controlled and guided rather than to become an unthinking monster. It demands a new individual responsibility for values, or it will dictate all values. And it promises a life that is more liberated and more beautiful than any man has known, if man has the courage and the imagination to seize that life.
The only way Africa will develop and create wealth is if it can attract foreign capital and trade its goods on the world market like every other economically successful country does. But investors are jittery. And considering what we think we know about Africa, who would blame them?
Climate change is not gonna be combatted through voluntary acts of individual charity. It’s gonna be combatted through some kind of colossal, global-scaled, multilateral, hectic, catch-as-catch-can effort to stop burning stuff, suck the burnt smoke out of the sky, and put the smoke back into the ground. That’s not gonna get done a little green teacup at a time, because we’ve been doing it for two centuries and we don’t have two centuries to undo it.
From Billy The Kid (1958), by my all-time favorite poet Jack Spicer — creative genius, developer of a ‘poetics of ego death’ that has yet to be matched in contemporary art, and a man who liked to listen to the radio on the beach a lot:
