Environmentalism for THIS Century

A Summary by Stewart Brand

Kareiva began by recalling the environmental “golden decade” of 1965-75, set in motion by the scientist Rachel Carson. In quick succession Congress created the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act—which passed the Senate unanimously.

Green influence has been dwindling ever since. A series of polls in the US asked how many agreed with the statement, “Most environmentalists are extremists, not reasonable people.” In 1996, 32% agreed. In 2004, 43% agreed. Now…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary here.

In his post earlier today, Bryan Campen mentioned Kevin Kelly’s 02019 Unthinkables – a set of predictions he made in 1999 that were specifically meant to be outlandish or – eponymously – unthinkable.

With 12 years of perspective on the predictions, Kelly concludes his post by saying that he doesn’t think any of them will come true.

As it turns out, however, one of them isn’t too far off the mark:

The fertility rate in China drops below the replacement level, and nothing the government can do can get Chinese couples to have more than 1.5 kids each. For the first time China encourages immigration to keep its huge economy going.

The first part of this prediction has happened. On China’s latest census, The Economist reports:

The data imply that the total fertility rate, which is the number of children a woman of child-bearing age can expect to have, on average, during her lifetime, may now be just 1.4, far below the “replacement rate” of 2.1, which eventually leads to the population stabilising.

The Chinese government, despite calls by many academic demographers, continues to stand firm on the one-child policy enacted in 1980.

Impact Lab points out that this demographic trend will lead to China’s workforce – the country’s primary economic advantage – beginning to shrink within 5 years. In order to mitigate potential economic problems from this change, the government is trying, “to develop technology- and innovation-driven industries that need fewer workers.”

If those industries don’t develop quickly enough, the government may have to look to immigration to supply the labor China’s economy needs and the second part of Kelly’s prediction won’t seem so unthinkable, either.

Jesse Schell interviews gaming legend Bob Bates, who predicts that we will be having emotional vocal conversations with game characters by 2021.

There’s really no one more fun to watch predict the future than Jesse Schell,  so it’s our good fortune that he just launched The Crystal Ball Society as a space to place predictions on the future.

(From his SALT talk): “…The prediction threshold is creeping in, it’s made a lot of people give up on prediction. They’ve become future blind. That’s ridiculous because if you put some energy into it you can make some predictions about the future. *You can look into your crystal ball and you can figure it out.* But it takes practice… If you practice predicting you will get better and you’re going to get feedback fast. But if you’re future blind and you don’t bother, you’re going to continue to suck at predicting the future.”

Practice sucking less by sending predictions here: crystalballsociety[at]gmail{dot}com

Also of note, an exceptionally relevant post on 2019 Unthinkables by board member Kevin Kelly, that made me daydream this afternoon about an Amazon Bookstore by 2015.

Check out lots more debatably-thinkables at Long Bets.

Help us record 50 languages in a single day!

Did you know…

• UNESCO considers the use of one’s native language to be a basic human right?
• Half of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered and may become extinct this century?
• Over 100 languages are spoken right here in the San Francisco Bay area?

There is something you can do to help document and promote the languages used in your own community! We need your help to meet our goal of recording 50 languages in a single day! How many languages can you help us document? Bring yourself and your multilingual friends and be the stars of your own grassroots language documentation project!

Professional linguists and videographers will be on site to document you and your friends speaking word lists, reading texts, and telling stories. You can also document your language using tools you probably have in your purse or back pocket — a mobile phone, digital camera, or laptop — just bring your device and our team will guide you through the documentation process.

How do your words and stories make a difference? An important part of language documentation is building a corpus — creating collections of vocabulary words, as well as conversations and stories that demonstrate language in use. From a corpus, linguists and speech technologists can build grammars, dictionaries, and tools that enable a language to be used online. The bigger the corpus, the better the tools!

The recordings you make during the event will be added to The Rosetta Project’s open collection of all human language in The Internet Archive. And, you can compete for cool prizes, including an iPad 2 for the participant who records and uploads the most languages during the event!

Please RSVP below and let us know if you plan to attend, and what language or languages you are thinking of recording. Can’t make it to the Record-a-thon? Join us online the day of the event for the virtual Record-a-thon, where you’ll be able to interact with event staff, monitor event progress, listen live to lectures and talks, and submit your own recordings remotely.

We will be in touch soon with more information about the day’s events, and how you can participate! For questions or more information please contact rosetta@longnow.org.

Historic photographs can show us what people used to wear, what tools they utilized, what their cities, countryside and wilderness looked like. But the details are often difficult to discern, simply because the resolution of the images is so limited. Imagine a digital photograph of Thomas Edison’s workshop with such high resolution that you could zoom in, and zoom in, and zoom in, until you could read the notes scrawled on the papers on his desk, name the books on his shelves, and identify what brand of tea he had been drinking.

Gigapixel technology, originally developed for exploring the surface of Mars, uses a swiveling robotic camera mount to take a large number of pictures in multiple directions which are then stitched together with software, resulting in a single, wonderfully high-resolution panorama. Illah Nourbakhsh of Carnegie Mellon University led the robotics team at NASA that designed the technology. He and his team, along with other individuals and organizations, have thought of all sorts of applications for the gigapan.

Conservation Magazine recently reprinted part of an article from Science that described how the collaborative team responsible for the invention worked to make it more widely accessible, and how it is being used in the service of environmental conservation.

That experience led directly to a technology that has become a powerful tool for teaching and public engagement with science and the natural world. Scientists are also using it for projects as diverse as analyzing Middle Eastern petroglyphs, monitoring an urban forest, archiving a museum insect collection, studying a collapsed honeybee colony, keeping tabs on glaciers, examining erosion in a jaguar reserve, and viewing Galápagos fish clustered into a bait ball.

…The final image contains more data than most personal computers can handle, so Nourbakhsh and his team developed a massive server system and website, www.gigapan.org, for storing and accessing GigaPans. When viewers zoom in on an area of an image, they seem to fly into the image itself. The result is an immersive, interactive experience that can reveal surprising details—an ant on a leaf in a forest, or a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower in a backyard. It’s like viewing nature through a huge magnifying glass.

GigaPan was initially developed by computer scientist Randy Sargent, a member of Nourbakhsh’s NASA team, who was inspired by the experience of investigating the landscape of Mars through gigapixel imagery. The online platform represents an exciting opportunity for users (of what will likely become an increasingly affordable and efficient technology) to create and store images that could prove immensely useful in the future for archiving, documenting, scientific surveying, and even art and education. The organization’s website describes its goals and purpose:

GigaPan is the newest development of the Global Connection Project, which aims to help us meet our neighbors across the globe, and learn about our planet itself. GigaPan will help bring distant communities and peoples together through images that have so much detail that they are, themselves, the objects of exploration, discovery and wonder. We believe that enabling people to explore, experience, and share each other’s worlds can be a transforming experience.

This technology and service are a step towards deep-sightedness, an opportunity to capture the Big Here photographically, and examine it closely and carefully. You can dive into some gigapixel images, like this picture of downtown Beirut, at the Gigapan site.

WATCH

Carl Zimmer’s “Viral Time”

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

The Long Now Foundation has started excavations for our first 10,000 Year Clock in west Texas.

Though the date of completion of the 10,000 Year Clock has not been set, and it is still many years into the future, we’re very pleased to let you know that you can now sign up on our waiting list to visit the Clock!

Long Now Members will have priority to visit the Clock when it is completed and should check the Visit the Clock box in the Notifications tab in Member Settings when signed in as a member on the Long Now website.  We will also continue to post project updates on the members only Clock Blog.

Jeff Bezos’ team at Amazon have also created a new website at 10000YearClock.net with information for the public about the project as well as a public sign up page for learning about the eventual visiting opportunities there.

We’ve also updated the Clock section of our website; you can read Kevin Kelly’s new piece on the 10,000 Year Clock project, with diagrams of how the Clock will work.

Long Now remains committed to developing our site in Nevada as a 10,000 year installation in parallel with The 10,000 Year Clock in Texas.

All of us at Long Now who are working on the Clock project, the Board, Clock team and Foundation staff are very excited to see the work of the last two decades coming to fruition.  Thank you all for your support.

Our friend Scott Beale of Laughing Squid let us know this morning that Salon has a great slideshow of very old trees from around the world, including some Bristlecone Pines and the oldest tree with a recorded planting date.

Check it out:
Photo by Charleston’s TheDigitel

Reposted from The Rosetta Project blog, written by Colin Farlow:

In a new study published in the journal Language and Cognition “When Time is Not Space,” a team of researchers from University of Portsmouth and Federal University of Rondonia claim that the Amondawa, a small Amazonian tribe, speak a language with a very uncommon conceptualization of time. The story was recently picked up by BBC, revealing that the debate about whether language influences thought is very much alive and newsworthy.

According to researchers Sinha et al., the Amondawa have no words for talking abstractly about time (as in the English word ‘time’), or time periods (like ‘year’):

“What we don’t find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occurring; they don’t have a notion of time which is something the events occur in.”

The mapping of time to physical space is commonly found in human language, and its absence in Amondawa is perhaps the most surprising result of the study. Rather than having a time-space metaphor, the Amondawa conceptualization of time is based on “social activity, kinship and ecological regularity.”

Pierre Pica, a theoretical linguist at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, question the conclusions derived from this new research. Pica explains that just because Amondawa does not use cardinal chronology, does not mean they view themselves advancing through time any differently than the rest of us who use a cardinal chronological system.

Sinha et al. state that the tribe’s language in no way affects their cognitive ability to grasp temporal concepts — they talk about events, and sequences of events, and learn Portuguese which does have abstract time expressions. Rather, the Amondawa language provides a different way of construing and talking about temporal concepts in daily life.

This contention about whether the Amondawa language affects its speakers’ thought processes hearkens back to a famous study by Benjamin Lee Whorf on the Hopi Language in the first half of the 20th century. This study was a foundational example for Whorf’s “linguistic relativity hypothesis” – the idea that the language you speak influences the way you think. From his study of Hopi, Whorf concluded:

“The Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call TIME, or to past, present or future, or to enduring or lasting…the Hopi language contains no reference to TIME, either explicit or implicit.” [1]

Whorf’s ideas about Hopi have received a great deal of criticism over the years, and his data was critiqued as erroneous evidence resulting from deficient research practices. [2] Nevertheless, the idea that language influences thought has certainly stuck around, and is now being raised by a new generation of researchers like Sinha et al who are gathering new data from small and threatened languages around the world.

For more on the relationship of language and thought, listen to our podcasts of previous Long Now seminars by Lera Boroditsky as well as Daniel Everett who talks about Pirahã, a language also from the Amazon.

[1] Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1950. An American Indian Model of the Universe. The
International Journal of American Linguistics 16(2).

[2] In an interview by BBC, Guy Deutscher explains his ideas about language and thought in addition to describing Benjamin Whorf’s research on Hopi Language.

The author of this post, Colin Farlow, is a 02011 summer intern with the Rosetta Project. He recently graduated from Indiana University, where he studied East Asian Languages and Cultures and Philosophy.

LISTEN

Carl Zimmer’s “Viral Time”

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.