Ecologically, the past is always present if you know where and how to look. Paleontologist-biologist-artist Laura Cunningham spent 20 years exploring California’s archives and relic lands to reconstruct exactly what life used to look like here over the past 10,000 years. Her beautiful images and her insights about long-period ecological change are collected in her […]
Laura Cunningham – Ten Millennia of California Ecology Read More »
As the times accelerate and we face ever more kaleidoscopic careers, a crucial meta-skill is the ability to learn new skills extremely rapidly, extremely well. That practice has no better exemplar and proponent than Timothy Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid-Fat Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman”. Not surprisingly, he
Timothy Ferriss – Accelerated Learning in Accelerated Times Read More »
As organisms, cities, and companies scale up, they all gain in efficiency, but then they vary. The bigger an organism, the slower. Yet the bigger a city is, the faster it runs. And cities are structurally immortal, while corporations are structurally doomed. Scaling up always creates new problems; cities can innovate faster than the problems
Geoffrey B. West – Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Read More »
As chief scientist of one of the most highly respected conservation organizations, The Nature Conservancy, Peter Kareiva is surprisingly radical. “Look,” he says, “we’re in nature. The deal is how to work with it and how to help it work for us. The better we are at ensuring that people get nature’s benefits, the better
Peter Kareiva – Conservation in the Real World Read More »
The frontier of biology these days is the genetics and ecology of bacteria, and the frontier of THAT is what’s being learned about viruses. “The science of virology is still in its early, wild days,” writes Carl Zimmer. “Scientists are discovering viruses faster than they can make sense of them.” The Earth’s atmosphere is determined
Carl Zimmer – Viral Time Read More »
Humans now engage the Earth at Gaian scale. How did Earth and humans get to this state? Given how we got here, how should we proceed? Tim Flannery finds that the evolutionary perspective of Alfred Russell Wallace offers better guidance than the more familiar Darwinian version of evolution. Australian biologist Tim Flannery is the renowned
Tim Flannery – Here on Earth Read More »
A Malaysian lawyer told a British journalist: “I am wearing your clothes, I speak your language, I watch your films, and today is whatever date it is because you say so.” Do chaps or maps drive history? Human brilliance and folly, or geography? Or maybe genes, or culture? Ian Morris goes a level deeper than
Ian Morris – Why the West Rules – For Now Read More »
Alexander Rose, Long Now Executive Director and project manager for the Clock of the Long Now, discussed lessons learned in multi-millennial site design.
Alexander Rose – Millennial Precedent Read More »
Via trade and other cultural activities, “ideas have sex,” and that drives human history in the direction of inconstant but accumulative improvement over time. The criers of havoc keep being proved wrong. A fundamental optimism about human affairs is deeply rational and can be reliably conjured with. Trained at Oxford as a zoologist and an
Matt Ridley – Deep Optimism Read More »
We’re not just living longer, we’re thriving longer, but so far we seem to be thinking shorter. Aging societies the world over can benefit from increased longevity because human lives have added a new stage—what Bateson calls “Adulthood II: the age of active wisdom.” People of grandparent age, finding themselves with more energy and health
Mary Catherine Bateson – Live Longer, Think Longer Read More »
