Photo by Micah A. Ponce

As I write this, Hurricane Gustav is bearing down on the Louisiana coast, having forced nearly 2 million people to evacuate and rattling the nerves of a nation that still remembers the human suffering wrought by Katrina.

The threat is immediate. Anybody can see the massive vortex of wind and rain spinning its way toward the coast. Everyone knows that as it makes landfall, the storm will bring immediate destruction.

By now we all know the look of someone who has lost everything to a natural disaster. Television has taken care of that. We have seen the faces of those who found themselves in harm’s way. We feel a touch of their pain in the aftermath.

And in the case of Gustav, many people still feel a sense of moral outrage at the lack of government response following Katrina.

Triggering alarm

In short, Gustav has all the ingredients for triggering alarm. We humans are hard wired to respond to threats like Gustav. It is part of our evolutionary makeup.

Psychologist and book author Dan Gilbert, speaking at Pop!Tech 2007, identifies four factors that trigger what he calls cerebral alarm:

• It has a face. We humans are social animals and have an obsession with anything human.
• It violates our moral sensibilities and arouses our visceral emotions.
• It poses a threat now, not in the future.
• It threatens to cause abrupt changes.

Check out the video. It’s about 15 minutes long.

(I found this video on the blog A Few Things Ill Considered in the post Global Warming is Happening Too Slowly)

Changing tide

These cerebral alarm triggers have served us humans well over the last million or so years, giving us a chance to survive extremely difficult circumstances.

But we are no longer the vulnerable biped fending off starvation, predators and enemies on the African savannas. We have become the grand architects of our planet, shaping anything and everything around us.

My post on the danger of shifting baselines addresses one of the four triggers: abrupt change. When people lose track of the original conditions in an environment, the baseline for that environment shifts. People see only the changes since the new baseline. As a result, they fail to see the true magnitude of change. The change is too gradual to notice.

Photo by Tidewater Muse

This is consistent with the way our brains are wired to respond. We can recognize and respond to abrupt, absolute changes. If the wind knocks a tree through your roof, you take action.

Slower changes, however, often go undetected. If a warmer climate allows a beetle infestation to spread and destroy large stands of the same tree, it may take years for the magnitude of the change to be recognized.

We humans like to think we’re smarter than we are. We like to think that we’ve somehow transcended the reptilian part of our brain. But as it stands, we have plenty of room for improvement. Only a small part of our brains think about the future. We are still evolving in that regard.

Slow descent

As Gilbert observes in his Pop!Tech talk:

One day at a time we’ve transformed our world into an ecological nightmare that our grandparents would never have tolerated but that for most of us is simply business as usual because each day isn’t drastically different than the one before.

This goes back to what I was writing in my post on shifting baselines. As Gilbert points out, the impurity of our air, water and food has risen dramatically during our lifetimes but we tolerate it.

Our world today, with our bans on eating fish and smog alerts, was the stuff of science fiction 60 or 70 years ago, Gilbert said.

Photo by Taras Kalapun

Where’s the horizon?

We still lack cerebral alarms for climate change and other ecological crises. How do you put a human face on them? How do you attribute any one natural disaster to a larger pattern?

Should you even try? Doesn’t that just confuse the issue?

The sense of immediacy is growing. More people and institutions, of all political views, are beginning to agree that the time has come to address climate change.

But, does this mean we’re seeing further into the future or that the point of no return has moved perilously closer?

The blog Climate Progress noted last week that the Brookings Institution, a think tank known for its centrist policies, has joined the call for an immediate response to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It now says that we may have only seven years to begin cutting emissions or face global catastrophe.

Imagine the Brookings Institution saying such a thing four years ago. Who do you blame for the delay? Human nature?

New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin wrote last month in his blog Dot Earth about what he calls “dawdling in the face of looming risks.”

In Are We Stuck With ‘Blah, Blah, Blah, … Bang’?, he quotes David Ropeik, an expert in risk communications:

The very concept of sustainability is predicated on reason…that humans can see the collective harms their behaviors are doing, and, as rational actors, correct those behaviors. But there is overwhelming evidence from all sorts of fields that our behaviors are not so much a product of reason as they are the result of our overpowering animal instinct to survive.

Even the argument that “Behaving the way we are now is destructive, and hurts our chances for survival” is an argument based on reason. It requires individuals to think rationally and act in the name of the greater common good rather than instinctively in their own self-interests. We’re just not programmed that way.

In short, we respond to hurricanes, not the slower unfolding of planetary crises.

Thinking ahead

Clearly we humans can think and plan for the future. We set goals for ourselves all the time and find ways to realize them. But those are individual pursuits that in one way or another enhance our personal survivability. It gets trickier as the goals and objectives expand to include larger numbers of people.

It may be tempting for those of us who do think about these things to pat ourselves on the back for overcoming our primitive nature and thinking ahead to future global problems. But how many of us actually do things now to address those problems?

It gets tricky. Our present needs so often consume us.

How do we change that? Can we change that?

+++++++

Photos by Micah A. Ponce, Tidewater Muse, Taras Kalapun

Baboon skull

Last year, May through July, I did field research in the Caprivi region of Namibia. The area is rather remote, smack dab in the middle of southern Africa.

For the people who live there, life proceeds at a walking pace. Electricity and running water don’t exist, except at the lodges, which use generators. Nearly all homes are made from poles, mud and thatching grass.

Family in Caprivi

As part of my research, I needed an informal census of my study area. I needed the name of each village, its GPS coordinates and its number of households. To do that I had to get permission from the headman of each one. Altogether there were 103 of them, though some villages were small and close together.

I hired a local man named Elvis to help me do it. He spoke four Caprivi languages and English fluently.

Elvis, my research assistant

White devil

The first day started late. We talked to 13 village headmen. In four of those villages, people asked Elvis whether I belonged to a satanic church. One teenage girl called me a white devil and grabbed a jagged piece of glass for protection.

Being accused as a Satanist unsettled me a bit. Couldn’t they tell I was one of the good guys?

As Elvis explained it, people were concerned about white Satanists from nearby Zambia. Rumor had it that these Satanists were in Caprivi recruiting new members for their church. They showed videos on the life of Jesus but later offered their followers large sums of money to murder a family member. The church leaders would then drink the blood. They also had a thing for kidnapping children.

Apparently members of the church were easy to identify. They were white and might try posing as researchers so they could get information on your family.

Oh great.

Much to Elvis’ credit, only one village headman that first day refused to have his village counted.

We faced this rumor each and every day. Someone always brought it up. In a brilliant case of a rumor run amok, one village headman told us in all seriousness that two of the church members had in fact been seen recently in a nearby village. They were posing as researchers taking a census.

That would be Elvis and I.

Overcoming the suspicion

I was flying blind. Without access to real information, I had no idea where this story originated.

Was it simply a deep-seated suspicion of white people following years of apartheid? Was it some over-zealous ministry that horribly botched its relationship with the locals?

Was it me?

I had no choice but press on. Otherwise, three months of research would be wasted.

I decided to divide and conquer. The less educated were the most likely to buy into the rumor. Others knew better. I would integrate myself into the community as best I could in the short time I was there.

• I bought my beer at the bottle stores, not at the lodge, and drank with the guys.

At the bottle store

• I attended the church closest to my campground where I stayed, after being invited to do so.

Church choir

• I went out of my way to give people rides. (This can be a dangerous practice, especially if you’re in South Africa.) In a place where maybe five locals own a car, that’s a big deal. One day Elvis and I managed to pack seven people into the 4×4 with us, saving them a three-hour walk through the bush. That was a crowded ride.

• We walked a lot. I didn’t always have the vehicle. Our record was 17km and 33 villages in one day. It gave me the chance to experience life the way many Caprivians do - on foot. It gave me a feel for the daily rhythm of their lives.

Long walk with Elvis

Finally the truth

As it turned out, the rumors were almost true. Almost. But I didn’t find out the real story until I got back to the States and could do some Internet research.

In November 2006, riots broke out in Lusaka, Zambia, after word spread that the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God had kidnapped two people and were about to sacrifice them. Thousands of Zambians rioted at the church, causing hundreds of thousands of US dollars in damage.

The Zambian government temporarily closed down the church and deported two of its pastors. The US Department of State’s Web page for Zambia even mentions it. The Universal Church denied the rumors. And it sued a Namibian government-run newspaper for libel for running a story headlined State bans ‘satanic’ sect.

So the rumor had legs, and strong ones at that. As it turned out, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God is Namibia’s fastest-growing denomination.

Maybe their missionaries really were crawling around the bush.

What can you take from this?

Hopefully you won’t find yourself in exactly this kind of predicament, but people do tend to be suspicious of outsiders. Rumors and past experiences can fuel that suspicion. So what do you do when you feel the heat of being wrongly accused?

• Don’t give up - Don’t push back too hard but stand up for yourself.

• Look for allies - Not everyone will share those suspicions.

• Listen to people - The more you listen, the more people will trust you.

• Take part in the community - Obviously you can’t force yourself on people but you can find ways to connect.

• Don’t jump to conclusions - People might have legitimate reasons for feeling the way they do, even if those reasons are based on bad information.

I didn’t go back this year, but friends of mine did. They said that everywhere in my study area, people would ask about me. Even the little old ladies. They wanted to know when I was coming back.

I guess I passed the test.

I first crossed paths with Andre the Giant back in the bad old days of 1989 - before Web browsers, cell phones and digital cameras. A Category 4 hurricane named Hugo had just slammed into the South Carolina coast and wiped the slate clean on my hometown of Charleston. Ground zero.

My girlfriend and I had lost our downtown apartment after Hugo pulled the roof off. Fortunately we rode out the storm a few blocks away at the Omni Hotel, which let us stay free for five days. We found a flooded out two-story apartment to call our own and started scrubbing floors and walls. No lights, bad water, hot weather.

Everywhere people picked up the pieces and waited for the return to normal. It would be a long wait.

During those weeks I saw the sticker for the first time. Downtown on King Street, close to where the skateboarders hung out.

Photo by leiabox

Back then, Andre the Giant had something of a headlock on popular culture. But this was altogether different. Why did he have a posse? And why include his height and weight? Who did this?

In the weeks that followed, that sticker popped up on traffic signs and trash cans all over town. At first it annoyed me … some stupid prank. Then it perplexed me. Finally it amused me.

I still had no idea who was behind it, but it now occupied a part of my world. In the aftermath of the storm, it somehow made sense. It gave me hope.

Somewhere amid the rubble, Andre the Giant and his posse were ready for … something.

Photo by theopie

Three years later I saw it for the first time in a different place, this time on a stop sign on the east side of Providence, Rhode Island, where I had just moved. Someone there had the stickers too! I felt right at home.

By now, 2008, you must have seen this sticker yourself. If not, you have and just don’t know it.

Photo by pkdan

A pre-Internet meme

As it turned out, the artist behind the sticker was Shepard Fairey, a Charleston native who had just graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design when I arrived in Providence.

My first two exposures to the sticker were the result of geographic coincidence. But by then, 1992, the stickers were spreading fast.

Shep, as he’s known around Charleston, had released a meme.

Photo by vandalog

These days the term meme is most often associated with viral phenomena on the Internet. But a meme is simply a unit of cultural information that gets passed from one person to another. “Andre the Giant has a Posse” was that kind of meme: portable, unplugged and ready to rumble.

The stickers popped up in cities on the east coast, the west coast and in between. In a 1996 interview with the hometown newspaper, Shep said:

It’s strange how it spread and caught on. I wanted to make my mark somehow and so decided to do it through the repetitive use of a graphic image.

The sticker itself had no actual meaning, Shep said. Instead, he wanted to see how people reacted and interpreted the image, and what that said about who they were.

The Giant gets bigger

Andre the Giant eventually morphed into the Obey Giant. Perhaps it was a copyright issue. At first I was disappointed. The Obey stickers didn’t have the same prankster spirit as the original.

But Shep had the momentum. He turned his graphic designs into a powerhouse. These days his art can be found in galleries and museums across the US and worldwide. His designs continue to sell out regularly through his online company, Obey Giant.

As his Web site logo says, Obey Giant has been “manufacturing quality dissent since 1989.”

Photo by BERT ‘2332'

Plenty of people try to launch memes and for the most part they fail. Shep’s universe continues to expand.

He took what could have been a curious one-time fad and turned it into a social phenomenon. It helped that he had the talent to create memorable art and had an image that could be cheaply mass produced. But he also used social networks to unleash his art on the world.

Where’s your posse?

A meme has to hit at the right time with the right idea and connect with the right channels to spread.

Blogging is one such channel. But it takes more than playing with a digital medium to turn an idea into a force to be reckoned with. For that, you need to reach beyond the Internet and find a vision, a message, that others are willing to spread.

Photo by andy castro

Too often it seems that people confuse the medium with the message. People talk about content and marketing, but successful ideas like Shep’s don’t start there. They start as a joke between skateboarders. They lurk under the surface as half-formed thoughts and daydreams that slowly develop and wait to be discovered.

The moral of the story is dig deep. Your meme is in there somewhere. And that somewhere is not online.

Go find it. And don’t forget to bring your posse.

+++++++

This post is an entry in the Killer Titles - Group Writing Project

Photo credit links: BERT ‘2332’, theopie, leiabox, pkdan, vandalog, andy castro

(Click for better resolution)

What does nature mean to you?

Is nature something out there that you occasionally interact with? Is the food that you buy in the store part of nature? What about your computer?

We humans have evolved to a point at which it becomes difficult to determine where the natural world ends and we begin. We are highly adept at manipulating the raw materials the world provides us. We extract decayed plant material that has been locked underground for hundreds of millions of years and use its energy to create massive alterations to our environment and produce materials that would not otherwise exist.

We are so adept at this that we sometimes forget we are in fact a part of nature. We forget that despite our technological gains, we remain dependent on what the world provides us.

The physical laws that govern our planet and all the life on it, however, do not operate on memory and perception. As I mentioned in part 1 of this series, the ways in which we manipulate our world have pushed us closer to thresholds at which ecosystems switch to altered states of function.

From lakes to oceans, from wooded lots to vast tracts of forests, all of nature has its tipping points. Part 2 discussed the risk to our oceans as human activities push them toward these thresholds.

The maps below show how modern agriculture has altered nitrogen levels worldwide through the application of fertilizers. As mentioned in the previous posts, these increased nutrient loads can have devastating effects on marine and freshwater ecosystems. They also exhaust the productivity of soil faster than would organic methods of farming.

Clearly these practices have altered the chemical makeup of ecosystems worldwide.

We may not be able to identify exactly where the threshold lies for a given ecosystem, at least not until it has already been reached. But it is possible to develop scenarios based on how society will react to these changes.

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) does just that. But first, two definitions:

Ecosystem - a community of plants, animals (including humans) and micro-organisms that interact with the physical environment.

Ecosystem services - the benefits that people derive from the ecosystem, such as food, clean water, materials for shelter, flood control (e.g. marshes) and climate regulation.

The United Nations initiated the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) in 2001. Its objective:

To assess the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and the scientific basis for action needed to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of those systems.

More than 1,360 experts worldwide worked on the project, which produced five technical volumes and six synthesis reports. The assessment examines the conditions and trends of the world’s ecosystems and their services. It then suggests options for the sustainable use of those ecosystems.

The MA was released in phases during 2005. By March 2006, reaction to the assessment appeared mixed. Some countries and institutions embraced it while others ignored it.

Three years later, the report seems to have been shelved.

But that shouldn’t underscore the thinking that went into the report. Rather, it indicates the difficulty of initiating change on a global scale.

The MA found that human activities are straining the earth’s natural resources to the point that its ecosystems are likely to lose the ability to sustain future generations unless action is taken over the next 50 years to reverse this degradation. That will require substantial changes in policies and practices.

The report states that:

• Over the past 50 years, rapidly growing demand for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in diversity of life.
• Increased use of ecosystem services to meet these demands has resulted in substantial net gains in human well-being and economic development but at the expense of intensifying degradation of these ecosystems.
• The degradation of ecosystem services could grow significantly worse during the first half of this century.

The Scenarios

Whether the world actually implements the MA’s guidance in a meaningful way has little bearing on its four scenarios for our future.

Those scenarios are:

Global Orchestration

Worldwide connected society, well developed global markets. Institutions are in place to deal with global environmental problems such as climate change and depleted fish stocks. But they take a reactive approach and are vulnerable to surprises.

Order from Strength

A regionalized and fragmented world focused on security and protection. Regional markets are emphasized with little concern for global good. Characterized by an individualistic approach to ecosystem management.

Adapting Mosaic

A fragmented world with discredited global institutions. Rise of local ecosystem management. Investments into understanding ecosystem function and management at the local level.

Technogarden

A globally connected world that relies strongly on technology and on highly managed and engineered ecosystems to deliver goods and services. Overall eco-efficiency improves but large-scale engineered solutions are vulnerable to various risks.

The graphic below shows how each of the four scenarios is projected to respond in terms of ecosystem services. The MA divides ecosystem services into three categories:

Provisioning - Includes food, water, wood and fibers for clothes.

Regulating - Includes climate regulation, flood control and water purification.

Cultural - Includes aesthetic, spiritual, educational and recreational pursuits.

(Click for larger version)

What do you think?

Which of the four scenarios do you think is most likely? Do you think there might be an alternative scenario? How is it possible to bring these big picture issues into the spotlight in a way that people will actually pay attention?

Go back in time for a moment and think about the world as you experienced it when you were 10 years old. Where did you live? What did it look like? How has that landscape changed since then? What about the animal and plant life?

Now imagine that same place 50 years before you were born. What would it have looked like then? On the day you were born, how would somebody say it had changed?

That change in perspectives - seeing how the world has changed since you were 10 vs. seeing how the world has changed since 50 years before you were born - is known as a shifting baseline.

A baseline is a reference point from the past. When people lose track of the original conditions in an environment, the baseline for that environment shifts. We see only the changes that have occurred since the new reference point.

And that means we fail to comprehend the magnitude of the changes.

Back in the day

If your memories at age 10 are of driving down a four-lane highway with a handful of trees in the median on your way to the mall, then you will have one perspective on how your environment has changed. Someone 50 years older than you may remember the abundant fish found in the marsh where the mall’s parking lot now sits. That person would have a far greater sense of change.

Shifting baselines pose a real threat to our ability to perceive the changes taking place around us. And it explains a lot about why people can deny that these changes are taking place in any significant way.

How baselines shift: A look at Puget Sound

The first post in this series, Altered States: Your world on the brink, discussed widespread changes to our environment. These human-induced pressures threaten to force the natural world into altered ecological states that can be harmful to humans and the life forms we depend on for our survival.

Shifting baselines have everything to do with why you may not notice these changes.

For an example, take a look at this 5 min. 40 sec. video on shifting baselines in Puget Sound. Pearl Jam provides the soundtrack.

Shifting Baselines in the Sound

Oceans on the brink

The changes happening in Puget Sound are happening all over, even in our oceans. A study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that the world’s oceans are in a rapid downward spiral resulting from human activities.

Jeremy Jackson, a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, says these changes are laying the groundwork for mass extinctions that will rival other massive ecological upheavals in the planet’s past.

Check out the news release: Oceans on the Precipice: Scripps Scientist Warns of Mass Extinctions and ‘Rise of Slime’

Jackson identifies three major causes of the oceans’ decline:

• Overfishing
• Pollution, especially nutrient runoff, which creates low oxygen “dead zones”
• Increased green-house gases, which cause ocean waters to be warmer and more acidic

Jackson’s paper examines a range of studies looking at marine ecosystem health. In it he writes:

All of the different kinds of data and methods of analysis point in the same direction of drastic and increasingly rapid degradation of marine ecosystems.

In this video (about 4 min.) he talks about these changes: Jackson on oceans on the brink

Just another eco-freak liberal scientist

The scientific method is conservative by nature. It involves developing hypotheses based on empirically driven scientific theories and then testing those hypotheses through careful methods of data collection and analysis. Most things move incrementally in the world of science, step by step, with corrections along the way.

So I’m always amused - and somewhat alarmed - when uninformed skeptics immediately denounce certain observations by scientists as alarmist environmental propaganda by liberal whackos looking for more money to fund their research.

I can’t even type that with a straight face.

If anything, most scientists have been too slow to sound the alarm. Rarely do scientists want to be known as advocates for anything. Most people, including me, see that as a potential violation of scientific principles.

Up to a point.

In a talk that Jeremy Jackson gave last year at Middlebury College, he said:

It’s arguably the case that the ecological profession utterly failed to anticipate the environmental crisis as we recognize it today.

When Jackson’s career began more than 30 years ago, he thought that his studies of coral reefs were pure science that had no practical significance for anybody. After decades of work, he one day realized that every single ecosystem he had studied had either completely disappeared or changed so significantly as to be unrecognizable.

Those ecosystems include coral reefs in the Caribbean and Pacific and sea grass beds in Chesapeake Bay.

Is that the realization of a “coral-reef hugger” or a marine scientist who over time sees a larger, troubling picture emerge?

Here’s a link to a video of his talk. It’s more than an hour long, but it’s good. The State of the Oceans

Now what?

What can we do as individuals? In short, not much. Addressing the ocean’s problems requires a major undertaking. As Jackson writes in his most recent paper:

The challenges of bringing these threats under control are enormously complex and will require fundamental changes in fisheries, agricultural practices and the ways we obtain energy for everything we do.

That’s a tall order.

Whether we can reverse any of it remains a question, he says. To do so will require carving out pieces of the problem that can be addressed quickly and effectively.

Are we there yet? I don’t think so.

But just being aware that shifting baselines have contributed to our collective inability to perceive the magnitude of the problems we face is a step in the right direction.

So spread the word.

In my next post I’ll talk about possible future scenarios developed by more than 1,360 experts worldwide in a project known as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

Photo by NOAA

We live in an age when cataclysmic shifts are becoming an increasingly real possibility. The world is changing. Our biosphere, the thin sliver of our planet on which life can exist, is changing. And not for the better.

These changes are occurring on multiple fronts, pushing us up against thresholds that lead to different ecological states. These different ecological states are almost always bad for humans and the life forms we depend on for our survival.

Other life forms - blue-green algae, parasites, cockroaches, jellyfish - will thrive.

To understand what’s involved in a shift in ecological states, consider a lake. Housing developments surround the lake. Streams that feed into the lake run through vast tracts of farmland to get there. The lake’s waters contain ever higher levels of fertilizers and livestock waste and septic tank leakage.

Nutrient overload

The lake can handle a certain amount of these so-called nutrients and still function as a lake. But once its nutrient load hits a certain level, the lake switches into a eutrophic state.

Eutrophic lakes are easy to identify. They get clogged with algae blooms. This in turn depletes the lake’s oxygen supply. Fish die as a result.

The photo above shows that kind of state. You’ve probably seen it yourself.

Switching the lake back to its previous natural state of function is extremely difficult. It takes a whole lot of money, time and energy. On the other hand, fixing the problems before the lake makes the switch is much easier and less expensive.

Unfortunately, that kind of preemptive fix rarely happens.

Widespread damage

Now think about a similar kind of change on a much broader scale. Think not just of a lake but an ocean. Not just the sky over a city but the entire atmosphere. Not just the plants and animals that once inhabited a bulldozered forest but entire species and habitats. Imagine all of these being knocked into different ecological states all at the same time.

That’s what we face today.

Climate change, deforestation, species extinctions, air and water pollution, human population growth… these are real threats that are pushing our planet toward a different ecological state. And we are the fish in the lake.

Reason or hysteria?

I am an optimist at heart. My thinking tends toward solutions rather than dire consequences. My personal belief is that we humans have the ability to save our own skins. But we don’t have much time.

At this point you may be thinking this sounds like something Al Gore might write. But Gore is simply an echo of the conversations taking place in science labs and field research stations across the planet.

The changes we are currently undergoing are like one grand experiment in which we have no idea of the outcome. What are the thresholds? How many species can go extinct, how many gases and pollutants can we pump into our atmosphere, how much can we alter our water supplies before we begin to see irreversible changes on a massive scale?

We don’t know.

But what scientists and other careful observers of our planet do know is that we are closer than ever to hitting those thresholds. And consequences that seemed unthinkable 30 years ago are now reality.

What now?

Problems of this magnitude tend to paralyze. The enormity of it can quash the will to develop and test meaningful solutions.

No one acting alone can arrive at an answer for how to solve these problems. Even defining the problems can be a challenge. Fixing them will take multiple actions on multiple fronts.

Global and national discussions quickly get bogged down in politics and economic interests, so it seems doubtful that any real solutions will be realized at those broad scales. But that’s the scale where the problems are occurring.

So what do we do?

Do we focus all of our efforts on collective actions and hope they gain traction? Accept these changes as inevitable and prepare individually for the worst? Find some middle ground where networks of people link and adapt?

I’ll continue the discussion in my next post, which will look at the problem of shifting baselines and the threats facing our oceans. In the meantime, what do you think?

Photo by Pensiero

Nearly 39 years ago, Jimi Hendrix waited his turn as the final act for what would become the most famous concert of a generation: Woodstock.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned. Logistical delays and bad weather plagued the concert, stretching its three day schedule into a fourth day.

Jimi Hendrix, scheduled for Sunday night, didn’t take the stage until 9 o’clock Monday morning. By then, more than half the crowd of 500,000 had already left. Many of those who remained stayed only long enough to say they had seen him. Footage of his performance shows maybe 50,000 people in the audience by the end.

Hendrix had other problems too. He was working with a new band who had a hard time keeping his tempo. And everyone was exhausted from having stayed up all night.

Show time

So what did Hendrix do? Did he throw a fit and refuse to play? Did he pass out from exhaustion (among other things) before he hit the first note? Did he simply go through the motions and vow to fire his manager after the show?

Not quite.

He delivered a searing guitar version of the Star Spangled Banner that would become a defining moment for the concert and a historic symbol for the Vietnam era.

In retrospect it might be tempting to say he knew this would happen. But nobody can ever know those things. He played for the muddy few who remained, but watch him perform and you would think he was playing for millions.

Ultimately, he was.

Sure, Hendrix was already famous, but that performance says less about his fame and more about how he got there to begin with. He pours his entire being into that solo and delivers a gutsy “vision” that only he could create.

And he did it despite having every excuse not to.

So the next time everything seems to be working against you, summon your inner Hendrix (preferably without the drugs). Find that inner spark. Feed it into a flame.

Check out the clip. You won’t be hearing this version at the Olympics.

Photo by jaffry of a Martin Sharp poster

This being hurricane and thunderstorm season in my corner of the world, I’m in blissful denial that my lights will ever go out ever again. This despite having gone as long as three weeks without electricity in the aftermath of a hurricane. Three weeks trying to sleep in a hot, stuffy room where you can practically hear the mildew crawling along the walls. Night after night after night.

But that’s in the past and who has time to dwell on that?

Four years has passed since my last long outage, that one for only five days. “Only” being a word you use only when your lights and AC are actually working.

But try just a few hours without electricity and it all comes rushing back. You’re quickly reminded of the horrors of life without the golden thread that keeps us connected to all that is good and modern and fun. Internet. TV. Did I mention AC?

It happened again yesterday, and for no apparent reason. The electricity went out. Judging by the number of utility trucks roaming the streets, the source of the outage wasn’t entirely clear. The occasional boom of a blown transformer showed they were trying to fix it, but no cigar.

What now?

The romantic notion is that once the lights go out, couples everywhere get naked and make the best of it. But reality says otherwise. For every two people making their own sparks fly, dozens of others pace the floor waiting for that magic surge of power that get their homes buzzing again.

We are dependent on technology in the most fundamental ways.

As if to prove my point, the power went out again today right after I finished that last sentence. Day Two of suddenly unreliable electricity. At least this time it took only a couple of hours to fix.

What if this became the norm? Not just for me but for all of us? What if higher oil prices and bigger storms and crumbling infrastructure and weak economies join forces to make the reliable suddenly unreliable? If blackouts and rolling brownouts become the rule, not the exception? What then?

Clearly we would have to adapt. But at what cost?

Dependent living

We live in a highly centralized world. So much of what we consume and drive and live in is designed to link to something larger than itself. We depend on that larger something always. When it fails, we suffer.

I’m not suggesting that the world is going to fall apart or that we’re doomed to slip into a more primitive state. Sure, it could happen, but hey, let’s stay optimistic here.

Still, I do wonder how we’ll adapt if the infrastructure we now take for granted starts to fall apart. How will we function? How will we preserve the computing gains made over the last 10 years? What will the Internet look like? How will I cool my house?

Does anyone have a Plan B? Anyone?

Photo by Roadsidepictures

You may not win a Nobel Prize or $1 million for a scientific discovery, but now you at least have the chance.

Web 2.0 has opened the doors for science to go open-source. Researchers on the edge of the movement are looking for bright minds and innovative ideas from other disciplines and specializations to help solve vexing problems.

Two such projects are especially noteworthy:

• Foldit, launched in May, is a computer game in which you fold proteins in an attempt to find cures for diseases. We’re talking Tetris here, not World of Warcraft. But that’s Tetris with a difference and with far greater challenges.
• InnoCentive, founded in 2001, has an Open Innovation Marketplace that brings together Seekers (of solutions to specific problems) with Solvers (often from entirely different fields). Cash rewards for solving these problems range from $5,000 to $1 million. Not exactly chump change.

Grid computing vs. grid thinking

At some point in the past you may have tried your hand at grid computing by donating your CPU’s downtime to help solve somebody’s else’s big question. The process usually involves downloading a dynamic screensaver that takes over during idle time. My choice was seti@home, which scans for possible radio signals among the noise of deep space.

Foldit began as a grid-computing program known as Rosetta@home, which linked more than 90,000 computers for predicting protein structures and designing new proteins in the hope of finding cures for diseases such as HIV/AIDS, cancer and Alzheimer’s.

But computers begin to fail when the proteins get too large (Foldit has a a good tutorial on what proteins do). And that’s where humans come in, namely humans who like to play computer games.

Science Daily quoted one of the game’s developers when it launched as saying:

We’re hopefully going to change the way science is done, and who it’s done by. Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize.

Check out how the game works here (3:45).

Solutions from anywhere

While lacking a computer game, InnoCentive has found that solutions to vexing problems in one field can be solved by people in another. According to the New York Times, InnoCentive has already solved 250 challenges, with most prizes ranging between $10,000 and $25,000.

One business school professor who has studied InnoCentive told the newspaper::

The further the problem was from the solver’s expertise, the more likely they were to solve it.

An electrical engineer, for example, might find a solution to a problem involving the brain that a neuroscientist would not have considered, or may not even have the tools to approach in the same way.

But I’m just a blogger

So what does this mean for those of us who aren’t likely to provide solutions to complex scientific problems or learn to fold proteins faster than you can fold the laundry (which in my case isn’t very fast)?

The spirit of these projects - that you can join forces with others in distant fields and areas of interest - holds a lot of promise for nearly any kind of problem or exploration or innovation that you can think of.

Bloggers are especially well positioned to take advantage of this kind of spirit. We have an affinity for conveying ideas to as many people as possible through multiple channels. Perhaps the next step is to be aware of this potential and begin exploring corners of the Internet that you might otherwise neglect.

Maybe somewhere out there you will find that right combination of ideas that will lead to your own version of the big prize. And in the meantime, why not try your hand at folding proteins, or look through the Open Innovation Marketplace to get a feel for the kinds of problems being solved.

What do you think?

Have you ventured out beyond your comfort zone to look for new connections in surprising places? What would you like to see happen?

Screen capture by gedankenstuecke

This blogging world is full of solo ventures into the wild blue without a safety net of any kind. Is that a mixed metaphor? Not sure. Where’s my editor?

Certainly on the whole bloggers are a talented bunch of writers and thinkers. But the one thing that most of us don’t have is an editor. Some of you may have never worked with an editor before. Others may have been traumatized by a bad editor (you have my sympathies).

Others of us know that as maddening as it can be sometimes to work with an editor, the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.

To put it plainly, having an editor provides an essential filter between the blogger and the reader. In some cases, of course, editors can cause unnecessary delays to getting a story published.

For bloggers, I would venture to guess that having a good editor is the exception rather than the rule. In case you’re wondering what an editor might be good for, other than correcting typos, here are three functions that I think are most important. Certainly they’re the ones I miss most in the editor-less world of blogging:

1. Keeping the big picture in focus

An editor always has her eye on the big picture. That can really take a load off your shoulders, giving you the freedom to focus on the story (or blog post) at hand. The editor looks at each potential story and determines which stories to pursue based on whether it fulfills the publication’s editorial mission.

Some story ideas you pitch to the editor, other story ideas she assigns to you. In both cases, the editor is thinking about the publication’s relationship with its readers:

• How does this story (or blog post) contribute to the publication’s editorial mission?
• Which topics are readers responding to?
• What new ideas should be explored more deeply?

2. Keeping your stories and posts on track

Bouncing ideas off an editor can be a valuable exercise. Print publications may develop a story over weeks or months, in which case the writer and editor have numerous chances to talk about reporting and writing strategies.

Blog posts are a bit different, but the concept remains the same. Imagine discussing the development of a series of posts with an editor:

• Which subtopics are most important to address?
• In which order should they be presented?
• What sources of information or interviews should be included?

A good editor can help sharpen your thinking and improve your approach to reporting and writing. This holds true whether you’re writing a magazine-length piece, a thematic series or a single blog post.

3. Keeping your writing sharp and honest

Write for your readers, rewrite for your editor. That pretty much sums it up for me.

When writing a first draft, you don’t want to get too hung up on producing perfect copy. But once you’ve got that draft down on paper, it’s time to summon your inner editor.

The more you interact with a real editor, the stronger that inner editor becomes. Few things can give you greater joy as a writer than anticipating your editor’s reactions to something you’ve written and fixing it before he has a chance to read it.

Back and forth exchanges with an editor can have a lasting impression. I remember one heated argument I had with an editor over active vs. passive voice. He claimed I used too many passive verbs. I said I didn’t. He read my story aloud to me, emphasizing each passive verb. I talked louder, arguing why the passive voice was appropriate in each case.

This went on for about 15 minutes, much to the immense pleasure of our layout editor, who was caught in the crossfire. On deadline. The argument left me with a few temporary bruises to my ego and a lasting lesson on sentence structure. All of 14 years later, I still think about that argument nearly every time I write.

What’s a blogger to do?

How a blogger manages to find this kind of editor is anybody’s guess.

It would be nice if bloggers could do this for each other, but too often we are overextended already. It also pays to have an editor who isn’t involved in the day-to-day task of producing content.

I suppose this task could be outsourced, similar to the way that technical blogging issues can be outsourced. But you would have to find someone who has a vested interest in your writing and in the blog.

Maybe a blog’s readers ultimately become the collective editor, at least in terms of helping to shape a blog’s direction. Maybe some bloggers develop enough trust amongst themselves to conduct what amounts to editorial audits for each other.

How about you?

How do you fill this editorial void? What have you seen other blogs do that seems effective?

Photo by Cayusa