how to save the world

In one sense this is bad news. We cannot expect the government or the market to fix the colossal mess we’ve made of this planet. And technology has always created more problems than it’s solved, and that’s not going to change. And if you believe in the Rapture, or any other salvationist cult, well, give your head a shake.

In another sense this is good news. We each star in our own movie, and no one writes the script for us, though many may refuse to play the part you write for them. And although we have a hand in the unfolding story, much of the plot is outside our conscious direction. We are, after all, figments of reality, and though we can fight our cultural conditioning we cannot overcome the storyline dictated by our body and our genes. We are who we are, and we do what we do for a reason, though that reason is often unfathomable. We do what we must. If we must, we can do anything. If there is no imperative, we do what’s easy, or what’s fun. What’s merely good, or right, or possible, doesn’t enter into it. There is no time for matters beyond the needs, the musts of the moment. If you want to change the world, make it world a better place, prepare to be unhappy with the world and with yourself. If you must change the world, and only if you must, if for you there is no other choice, then you will do it. I salute you for having the convictions of your courage.

In response to my recent post on “making love last” (Tom Robbins’ mantra) my insightful and perceptive friend Siona sent me a long article on rescuing failing marriages by psychologist David Schnarch. For the impatient, here are the key points (emphasis and square-bracketed comment mine):

He goes on to tell the story of one couple: After a long, supposedly intimate marriage, he had lost interest in sex because he no longer found his wife’s aging body attractive, but didn’t say so for fear of hurting her feelings. Schnarch suggested to him “if she was so unaware of his emotional state now, maybe the sex hadn’t been so intimate after all. On the other hand, perhaps she did know how he felt, and just didn’t care–she was not nearly as interested in intimacy with him as she was in being serviced by him, and would put up with his distaste as long as he kept it to himself and performed the job adequately”.

When the patient, distraught at this possibility, later fights with his wife and confesses all, the tumultuous intimacy they then share leads to bouts of intense sex, yet at the same time “the greater the intimacy (which they claimed they wanted), the greater the anger, distress and anxiety” — having to face the risk of being individual, separate selves, fear of loving and wanting more than the other, and hiding behind the pretense of not caring very much about the other so it isn’t so terrible to lose that love.

These two people are each trying to write each other out of their movies. And while Schnarch’s counsel may be illuminating, my guess would be that, for most, it changes nothing. Realizing you’re afraid of intimacy doesn’t lessen your fear. Your fear has a reason, probably long-standing and well-founded. It’s the same among those who go through 12-step programs to overcome addictions. Addicts are who they are, for a reason, physical or emotional, a reason that is likely deep-seated. We are all addicted to something.

That’s not to say that our fears and addictions and personal failings are impossible to overcome, just that therapy and counseling and self-help books and good intentions won’t get you there. You will overcome them only if and when you must. That decision rests with ‘you’, the script-writer of your movie, but it is not entirely in your control. ‘You’ are who ‘you’ are, and, as the authors of Figments of Reality explain, ‘you’ are the emergent properties of your body’s semi-autonomous processes — You are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in your body organized for their mutual benefit i.e. you are an organism. And your brain, your intelligence, awareness, consciousness and free-will, are nothing more than an evolved, shared, feature-detection system jointly developed to advise these creatures’ actions for their mutual benefit. Your brain, and your mind (the processes that our neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their information-processing system, not ‘yours’. You are a collective of creatures, all banded together, complicit for mutual benefit, with ‘your’ brain their humble servant.

So while there is no larger power preventing us from having free reign in writing our own movie, there are many tiny powers fighting with us (usually successfully) for control of the script. You are therefore just one of the directors, but if the movie of your life turns out to be a miserable tragedy, a critical flop, you have no one but ‘yourself’ to blame.

You just have to laugh at this. Such a paradox, responsibility without authority. And what alesson for each of us on what has to be done! On what we, you, must do.

The problem is, we tend to gravitate towards like minds, people who think like we do, have the values we have, and to some extent have developed the skills and capacities we have. That doesn’t bode well for diversity.

The Jungian model of knowledge identifies four orientations for learning, understanding and seeing the world:

• sensual (through the senses), 
• emotional (through the heart), 
• intellectual (through the mind) and 
• instinctual (through the body/genes)

None of us is purely aligned with any one of these four orientations, but most of us lean towards one or two. Hedonists lean to the sensual, artists to the sensual and emotional, philosophers to the emotional and intellectual, scientists to the sensual and intellectual, primitivists to the instinctual, naturalists to the sensual and instinctual. As a lifelong philosopher, the intellectual and the emotional orientations (in that order) remain my fortÈ, though as I’ve grown older I’ve refocused on the sensual and the instinctual, though I remain poor at learning and seeing the world through these orientations.

We need the artists to help us imagine and perceive and create, the scientists to help us understand and realize, the naturalists and the hedonists to keep us joyful and connected, and the philosophers to help make sense of it all.

If you were to look at the collective capacities of those in my communities, or at least, say, the 150 I am closest to and love the most, you’d find a decided lack of diversity: too many philosophers and not enough artists, too many scientists and not enough intuiters, too many dreamers and not enough pragmatists, and far too many disconnected from their senses and instincts and the Earth, and (the males especially) disconnected from their emotions as well, living inside their heads and in their dreamworlds. Or, as Neil Young put it, living in our sleep. If I were not very careful, my ideal Intentional Community would be, collectively, brilliant and imaginative and utterly incompetent at living in the real world.

I am strongly attracted to artists and hedonists and naturalists, but I tend to drive them to distraction with my inability to see the world the way they do, despite extraordinary efforts. My relationships with them tend to be fiery and short-lived.

Here’s a very rough and highly judgemental mapping from the four Jungian orientations to some of the capacities we need:

none are particularly good at capacities needing patience: suspending, letting come/go, seeing other perspectives

So as someone with (if I were to be honest with myself) a primary intellectual orientation and a secondary emotional orientation, I think I’m pretty good at the capacities in the blue and white columns, so-so at the capacities in the pink column, and still awful at the capacities in the yellow and green columns. What’s worse, appreciating capacities we lack doesn’t make it any easier to acquire them.

I don’t know enough artists and hedonists and naturalists, but more than that, I don’t know how to love them and get them to love me well enough to live with them in Intentional Communities and make a living with them in Natural Enterprises. I just keep gravitating to others of the same orientations and away from those with different orientations, and these tendencies seem to be mutual. It’s just easier and more fun to spend time and love and work with people who ‘get’ you, who you ‘get’ too.

How does this work in indigenous cultures? Are they just more tolerant or more well-rounded in their capacities? Or when it comes to love, does chemistry finally trump everything else? And if not, what can we do to find, and keep together, people of different orientations and diverse skills, to build Intentional Communities and Natural Enterprises thatare collectively competent and resilient?

How do I put this delicately? Most of the activists I know just don’t have much of a personal life. Just as work/life balance is such a big deal in the corporate workplace, so is the challenge for the attention of activists between their public causes and private passions. And the greater these private passions, one might expect, the less time left for activism.

To the extent activism is Let-Self-Change activity, and is a family affair, it might actually be enhanced by love. But if that love manifests itself in indulgence of someone who is complacent or acquisitive, it can be exhausting and leave no time for progressive pursuits. There are only so many hours in a day.

Once again it comes down, I think, to doing what we must, then what’s easy, and then what’s fun. Finding and pursuing love is an imperative for the vast majority of us. It’s hard to make love last, and when we find it we dedicate an inordinate amount of time and energy to nurturing it. When we lose it, we become preoccupied with its absence and rediscovering it. It is a lifelong imperative.

How can philosophical or political passion compete with that? If we have to spend much of our waking hours as wage slaves, in a job unrelated to our real passion, and then we dedicate an additional block of time to those we love, how much time can be left? My guess would be that for many, the cost of putting activism first is putting both job and family second, and sometimes losing both in the process. And for even more, the risk of that happening is too great, so activism gets relegated to the back burner, and becomes one of those ‘do when I have have time’ tasks that never get done.

My observations about love:

• Most people are capable of loving a lot of different people in their lives, and would if it were socially acceptable to do so. We are not by nature monogamous, IMO.
• Most people have great difficulty making love last, perhaps for the same reason. It’s great while it lasts, but it often doesn’t. 
• Most people don’t have any real conscious choice about whom they fall in love with. It’s chemistry. 

All of this would seem to mitigate against us having many cycles left over to make the world a better place, beyond Let-Self-Change and our own small circles of loved ones. That’s just the way we are, obsessed with the personal needs of the moment.

And this is, perhaps, the Achilles’ heel in my idea to create a world of self-sufficient intentional communities of people of like minds that we love. In pre-civilization times we were limited in our choice of who to love to those in our tribe. But now we have such vast choice, and so many perfect, idealized, larger-than-life models to dream about, that (in every sense of the word) we are no longer willing to settle. So even a polyamory community of self-selected people is likely to leave us unsatisfied, restless to know what we’re missing. We’ve let the genie out of the bottle and s/he won’t go back in.

In his book, The Upside of Down, Thomas Homer-Dixon says the determinant of whether we will rise to the occasion and overcome panarchy (the cascading crises that result when a whole series of related systems become overextended and collapse) through catagenesis (building resilience and healthy renewal following collapse) is whether we have the moral and existential values needed to care enough, to transcend our utilitarian preoccupations. Homer-Dixon sees the majority of the world sliding into automatic behaviours, becoming less than human, mere consumers. He may have a point, though I think the growing anomie of our society is more complex (a consequence of learned helplessness etc.) than this. But in any case our moral and existentialvalues cannot compete for our time with the needs of the moment.

We are who we are.

Rob Paterson Creates a Trusted Space to Save the World: “My intent is to Host a space where you can read about the stories of people who are making progress in the Great Work that has to be done if we are to have a chance of getting though this century.” Photo above is from Rob’s collaborator, Fred First.

Being What We Dare: Great article by Jeremy Heigh on enabling and encouraging greatness. Excerpt: “Maybe my purpose will be to grab the bullhorn and find the soapbox – I donít know. Maybe my life will be spent finding those few people who miraculously made it through with the ability to walk through walls. If I canít play, at least I could protect those that can.”

A Real Natural Enterprise: An amazing, inspiring story from the CBC about a bakery in my former home town of Winnipeg reveals how Natural Enterprises emerge to meet urgent human needs. This is the model we need to follow. Thanks to Evelyn at Linsomniac for the link.

How the World Really Works

A Nation of Children: Incisive ranter Joe Bageant tells us who we really are. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link. Excerpt:

Calling Greens Together: Grist’s David Roberts says it’s now or never for Greens to get political traction in the US, and to do that we need to get our act and message together. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link. Excerpt:

Help Protect the Polar Bear: Another petition, and only for Americans, alas, but for an important cause.

Working Smarter

First, Does It Fill a Need?: Kathy Sierra explains the seven levels in the hierarchy of customer needs. Enchantment is the seventh, but first a product or service needs to meet the first six: Fills a need, Does it effectively, East to learn,Efficient, User-friendly, and Intuitive.

More Great Info on How to Make Open Space Work: From Peggy Holman’s Open Circle Company.

It seems to me that one way of thinking differently would be thinking without language.

A lot of academics argue that language is a precondition to thought. Anyone observing babies or ‘wild’ children (those brought up in the wild without exposure to language) or animals knows this is ludicrous. Anthropologists and students of history can tell you that language is a product of thought, and its invention was primarily to allow us to communicate our thoughts (fuzzily, alas) to others. Language is a kind of shorthand representation of our thoughts. But if you spend enough time using that shorthand as your means of thinking, you can start to get the two (language and thinking) confused. Whatís worse, your ability to think without or outside of the symbolic representational shorthand of language can atrophy from disuse.

Thinking is the act of processing information to create knowledge (=ability or capacity, from the German word that also means cunning). Watch a bird or squirrel figure out how to extract food from a feeder, or watch dogs corner their prey or herd sheep, and youíll see how to think without language. The learning process is one of trial and error, but the result is knowledge, a superior, acquired ability born from practice.

Not surprisingly, this is also how humans learn best, by doing or observation or being shown, rather than by reading or being told. Such learning and knowledge is ëinformedí by both intuition (the coding in our DNA that suggests some experiments to try) and perception — paying attention with all our senses, not just the five best-known, and appreciating these perceptions). It is partly an unconscious or subconscious process (ësleeping on ití or just giving it time, will often transform information into knowledge in profound ways we are not consciously aware of). Because of the vast amount of detailed information that is needed to thrive in a complex environment, people in indigenous cultures do not depend as heavily as we do on the conscious mind to process that information — they appreciate how the subconscious, dreams, and instincts play into and enrich our understanding, and allow these elements to play an important part in their decision-making process.

Indigenous cultures have other lessons to teach us about thinking without language. They let their children learn principally by trial and error, and by suggestion rather than instruction. Exchange of knowledge in these cultures is expected, automatic, urgent and completely candid, and deceit and hoarding knowledge is extremely disreputable behaviour (because it can expose others to danger).

Their expression “the land is made perfect by knowledge” implies that what is valued to them is knowledge and understanding of the environment, not control or ownership of it. They observe the land and the natural world much more attentively than we do, and they assign names to things and to places in order to help them memorize and cope with potential dangers (“words are as precise as they need to be”), not for taxonomic reasons. Language is a tool to aid the thought process. Stories, and listening, are profoundly important to them: A story takes as long as it needs to take to be told, and through practice storytelling becomes an art. It is valuable because it is context-rich enough to allow vicarious thinking and learning — it enables us to see and hear and think and learn through anotherís observation from another time.

Our purpose for thinking, like that of babies and animals without (symbolic, abstract) language, is to make decisions. It is not important that these decisions be logical, or intelligent, or rational. What is important is that they are effective, workable, successful. Not necessarily the best decisions, but good decisions. These decisions are the result of intellectual, emotional, sensory/somatic (body) and intuitive knowledge (to use the Jungian model) and integrate the conscious and unconscious. In ‘modern’ adult humans knowing is less integrated and more conflicted, because we are taught not to trust any kind of knowledge other than the conscious intellectual type.

Wild children, linguists tell us, can never learn language once they reach puberty ñ the neural pathways of their brains have by then formed in different ways from those of us who are taught to think as much as possible through language, and cannot be rewired, any more than ours can be rewired to be as profoundly perceptive and intuitive as they are, or to have the very different thinking capacities of indigenous cultures. Our brains have become dependent on language.

But there are ways to practice that can make them less dependent, and that is what we need now, to discover different ways of thinking. We need to learn to reconnect with and listen to our instincts, our emotions, our senses (synaesthetically), our bodies, and our unconscious dreams. And then we need to re-learn to integrate all this knowledge and apply it to thinking holistically about the complex problems we face in this century. This will not be easy. It will take an enormous amount of coaching, practice and patience. But Einstein was right: We aren’t going to be able to solve these problems with the same kind of thinking that created them. So we have no choice. Now what we need to do is find (modest, generous,patient) people who can show us how to do this re-learning.

Throughout history, the scientific community has often been in the vanguard of introducing and championing new ideas and new understandings, while leaving it to others to contend with the political, social and economic consequences and necessary actions that stem from them. Most recently, this has been true in the scientific community’s consciousness-raising about global warming: Scientists have provided the data about our species’ responsibility for this unprecedented occurrence, and raised the alarm about its ramifications and our imperative for addressing them. Indeed, many scientists speak both passionately and dispassionately about the Sixth Great Extinction being already upon us, and of this extinction being the first attributable to the actions of a single species.

But the scientists have been much slower in bringing to collective consciousness the fact that global warming is just one of a complex series of phenomena that, taken together, threaten to accelerate that extinction a thousand-fold and bring our current civilization to an abrupt end. This reluctance is perhaps understandable when most of these other phenomena are not principally scientific: The End of Oil is an economic phenomenon as much as a geological one. The availability of knowledge that allows small stateless extremist groups to manufacture and unleash devastating chemical, biological, genetic and nuclear weapons is a sociological phenomenon as much as it is a technological one. The threat of a second Great Depression due to reckless and unprecedented debt and trade deficit accumulation is a political and economic phenomenon.

The threat of epidemic diseases caused by the enormous concentration and global movement of human and animal bodies is a phenomenon that, if our response to SARS is any indication, is a phenomenon that no one is capable of grasping or addressing, since it is at once scientific, social, economic and political. The threat of massive famine due to grotesque exhaustion of our ecosystems, staggering overpopulation, fragile and unsustainable agricultural processes, and lack of diversity of agricultural ëproductsí is similarly multi-faceted.

We are so preoccupied with coping with impending oil shortages that we have not even begun grappling with the huge water and other resource shortages that our world faces in the coming decades, and the political and economic (and probably military) fallout they will probably produce. And meanwhile civil and regional wars of a more familiar sort grow ever larger and more dangerous as inequality of wealth, income, power and opportunity spiral ever higher and as technology gives us ever more effective ways to wreak havoc and enduring damage on each other and our environments.

The term coined to describe the confluence of these crises is ëthe perfect stormí. But that term suggests a million-to-one-shot, and fails to recognize that human and ecological systems are inherently complex, adaptive systems. As a result, these systems are largely unknowable ñ to the delight and consternation of scientists and other students of such systems they have more variables than can ever be quantified, analyzed or projected. All we can do is influence them in hopeful ways, try to understand them a little better, and marvel at the fact that they work in ways we can never fully grasp or control.

Recent ‘cultural studies’ of such systems, and of the lessons of history, have suggested to those who attempt to look at them holistically that the problem we face today is not the freakish ëperfect stormí but rather the cascading effect of crises as one system after another peaks and crashes, as such systems always and naturally do. At the dawn of this brave new century we are stretched to the limit in our ability to deal with all of the phenomena described above. These phenomena exert ‘tectonic stresses’ upon our social and ecological systems, and as these interconnected systems begin to peak, rupture and crash in this century, the result will be a series of cascading catastrophes, the combination of which will cause our culture to crumble. The award-winning University of Toronto professor Thomas Homer-Dixon, in his new book The Upside of Down, based on the work of Buzz Holling and Joe Tainter, calls this phenomenon of cascading catastrophes ëpanarchyí. The consequence for any civilization of panarchy is collapse, and for ours this collapse could occur quite conceivably in the latter part of this century.

A decade ago, such a view would have been considered extreme, even Malthusian. But hardly a week goes by now without the release of yet another book describing, in increasingly compelling terms, the fragility of our social and ecological systems, their lack of resilience, and, most importantly, the complex interrelationship between all of these systems, such that a breakdown of one can easily produce a breakdown of the others.

In his book Straw Dogs, philosopher John Gray says that we have long passed the point of being able to ësave the worldí and prevent our civilization from collapse:

This is indeed a grim picture, but Gray insists he is a realist, not a pessimist. He urges us to do nothing other than becoming more our animal selves — reconnecting with the rest of life on Earth and with our primeval senses and instincts, getting outside our heads, coping with contingencies, relearning to play, living in the moment, turning back to real, mortal things, and simply seeing what is.

I think Grayís diagnosis is probably as accurate as any diagnosis of a complex adaptive system can be. I would argue, however, that it is just not in our nature to accept the inevitability of the collapse of civilizations. More than that, I think it is our nature as human beings to accept and act on our responsibility to do what we can to rectify the harm we have done and to make life better for those who will survive the collapse of civilization and who will have to build the society that follows it. That sense of responsibility is, I believe, a universal human trait: Oren Lyons, the Onondaga Faithkeeper, whose culture predates the predominant one of today by centuries, says in a recent interview by Barry Lopez for Orion Magazine: ìOf, by, and for the people. You choose your own leaders. You put ’em up, and you take ’em down. But you, the people, are responsible. You’re responsible for your life; you’re responsible for everything.î

For most of my adult life, I have been a student of innovation, and innovation is the means by which I, and I think most scientists and entrepreneurs and technologists, seek to exercise that responsibility and make this world, now and for the future, a better place. This is why weíre here, and the task at hand has never been more challenging or more urgent.

So what do we do? In a world in which innovation is hemmed in by risk aversion, by intellectual property law, and by the human disinclination to change until there is no other choice, what can we do to bring innovation to bear to make the crash of civilization as soft as possible and to prepare those who will outlive it to start again with the best tools and models and knowledge our ingenuity can give them?

Back in 1999, Credit Suisse First Boston ran a New Economy Forum which produced a model of the innovation process in business, diagrammed above:

In a paper I wrote a few years ago I applied this model to the way in which innovation has addressed basic human needs in past ages of our civilization, and is in the process of doing so to address the pressing human issues of today: chronic and epidemic disease, crime and terrorism, waste and pollution (including global warming), urban decay, famine, overpopulation, biodegradation and ecosystem exhaustion, unemployment, inequity, scarcity of critical resources, loss of biodiversity, economic overextension and unsustainability, chronic violence and war:

In each age of our civilization, however, the scale, complexity and interconnectedness of these issues have grown exponentially. Innovations and interventions that address one of these issues are increasingly inadequate as each new focused solution ignores or even exacerbates (by introducing new threats, vulnerabilities, wastes and opportunities for misuse) other and new problems.

Increasingly, too, the economic system that was designed to introduce and scale innovations has become antithetical to innovation: It is cheaper and less risky for a corporation to buy (or buy out and suppress) an innovation than to develop one itself. Many ëinnovativeí startups are conceived purely for an early sellout to a large corporation often disinclined to introduce it when it threatens its existing brand. Intellectual property laws in many countries allow and encourage the patenting of entire processes and the intimidation, by armies of lawyers, of entrepreneurs who encroach on any aspect of those processes. And corporations are rewarded for schemes that enable them to circumvent social and environmental laws to ëcompetitive advantageí, and now arguably spend more energy trying to defeat regulations that were designed for the public good than they spend on initiatives that serve the public good.

So it seems to me that the innovation model that worked in the industrial era is no longer serving us in this new and more complex era, and a new model is needed. What might this new model look like? I believe it must have the following attributes:

1. It needs to start with achieving as deep an understanding of the current problems as is humanly possible. Things are the way they are for a reason, and many organizations put too little effort into understanding those reasons because it is easier and cheaper to use marketing to ëmanufactureí the need and consent for a new product. We need to appreciate that  uninformed, myopic attempts to grapple with complex problems cannot work. Before we can make it right, we need to understand whatís wrong. This isnít completely possible in any complex system, but itís essential to grapple with appreciating how things got to where they are, to optimize the probability that the innovations we come up with will help rather than making things worse. This is where scientists come in: We need a lot more of you, we need to give you more resources to do research, we need to help you collaborate across geographies and disciplines more effectively, and we need to enable you to focus on issues that are critical to our speciesí survival, not issues that offer the greatest short-term ROI to some self-serving and indifferent corporation.

2. It needs to be holistic and multi-disciplinary. You canít solve a complex problem with a merely complicated solution. We need to look at the implications of our ideas and innovations across all areas of our society and our world. Cross-disciplinary teams that share a sense of urgency and purpose are the best means to achieve this broader understanding and skill-set.

3. It needs to be substantially voluntary. That means it must be freed from the for-short-term-profit constraints of the current economic system. The economy in which such efforts naturally belong is the Gift Economy, an economy that is already healthy and flourishing, as exemplified by open source and peer production, by scientific exchanges, libraries, weblogs, wikis, file sharing and other free exchanges of information, by philanthropy without strings attached, and by mentoring done by parents and other volunteers. Innovators must have the time, energy, and passion to pursue ideas regardless of their profitability. To do this we need to recruit the right people. I believe Open Space methodology, and specifically its process of invitation, offers the best mechanism for attracting precisely the people needed to appreciate and address all of the different aspects of complex problems. I also suspect that our greatest opportunity in this regard is to tap those who are retired or close to retirement or working only part-time, who can afford to volunteer their time and who bring a lifetime of valuable experience to the task.

4. It needs to be self-organized, non-hierarchical and collaborative. Hierarchical systems are inherently bureaucratic and frequently dysfunctional. As nature teaches us, self-organized systems are more adaptable, more flexible, more resilient. We are mostly inexperienced at working in such social structures, so we need to (re-)learn to do so. We have much to learn from indigenous cultures who have been doing this for millennia.

5. It needs to be experimental and evolutionary. We learn from our mistakes, and the modern corporation has reached the point where promotion and production costs so much that failure is intolerable. Our new innovation model has to not only tolerate, but encourage mistakes. It must try a lot of different things, in parallel (for there is no time to waste) through experimentation and fast learning and then trying something a little different based on that learning, the way nature does. Our main product must be ëworking modelsí ñ solutions that appear to work to solve some of our pressing global problems without exacerbating others. Then we must let them go, push them out of the nest. Some of these innovations may help us live better in the years before civilizationís collapse. Others may only be of use after that collapse, by the survivors who will know what didnít work and will be urgently looking for alternative models that might, models that will make sense given the terrible knowledge they will then possess.

6. It needs to involve new ways of thinking. Einstein famously said ìWe can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.î We need some radical, even crazy thinking. Innovation is not incremental change and it is not arrived at analytically. And we need not only radical innovations; we need radical ways of innovating, more holistic, more intuitive, more collaborative, more discontinuous, more imaginative, and more connected to the wisdom and understanding of all life on Earth.

So that is my challenge to you, representatives of the worldís brightest scientists and most accomplished and creative thinkers. Let us start now, with a sense of urgency and shared purpose, to invent the future, one that will reach beyond and outlive the collapse of our civilization. Ronald Wright, in his book A Short History of Progress, summarizes our human destiny by saying ìIt’s entirely up to us. If we fail — if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us — nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.î Letís show Mr. Wright and Mr. Gray that the apes still have a trick ortwo up their sleeves.