When a devastating flood destroyed much of the southwestern Netherlands in 01953, its government decided it was time for action. Over the next few decades, the nation poured research and financial resources into the construction of the Deltawerken, a massive network of dams and storm barriers that now protects the country’s lowest lying provinces. . .   Read More

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

The Nine Planetary Boundaries: Finessing the Anthropocene
Tuesday March 6, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Lynas Seminar page for Members.
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Audio is up on the Lynas Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our. . .   Read More

“The Nine Planetary Boundaries: Finessing the Anthropocene”
Tuesday March 6, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

Journalist and environmentalist Mark Lynas has a knack for getting deep down into the crux of problems and scraping out the science. Though we shouldn’t ever mistake a clear view for a short distance, this knack is. . .   Read More

The second season of FUTURESTATES has been released, a film series featuring visions and stories of the “not-too-distant future.” Participants imagined narratives based on scenarios such as extreme climate change with environmental refugees, gated communities that regulate the genetic makeup of their offspring, and the proliferation of software that charts our likes and. . .   Read More

Since the end of the last ice age a little over 10,000 years or so ago, human civilization has blossomed in a climatically friendly epoch known as the Holocene. The flowers are still blooming, but as climate change begins to mix things up some have been predicting that the story of recent and pending. . .   Read More

Climate change continues to demand solutions, but a unified global response remains elusive. Even among those who want to address the issue, debate about how rages on. We could cut consumption, increase alternative energy production, develop fusion power, implement population control, seed the atmosphere, block the sun… For every proposed solution, there is a counter. . .   Read More

One of the critical elements of the Clock of the Long Now to keep good time over ten millennia is the part of the clock that is synchronized to solar noon. We have several schemes that allow this mechanical synch from sunlight, but one of the questions that came up as we designed these systems. . .   Read More

Stewart Brand sent in this blog piece by Warren Senders about time scales.  A good read on how the human mind’s primary feature is now operating as a bug…
I’m not sanguine about our ability to solve the climate crisis — and it’s not because the monolithic forces of global capitalism won’t. . .   Read More

Global warming seems to be speeding up the growth of the longest living organisms we know of.  Bristlecone pines can live for almost 5,000 years and the information stored in the growth of their rings is a treasure trove of climate data.  Because their growth is a function of the weather, analyzing the size. . .   Read More

In his Seminar for the Long Now Foundation in January, Saul Griffith mentioned what he called the Rolex/Montblanc Pen approach to solving climate change.  As a way of cutting down on wasteful consumption (and the carbon embodied in consumer goods production), he suggests making and using fewer products.  The few products we do use. . .   Read More