We find ourselves, as I wrote a bit ago in an essay called The Empire of Crime, without a contemporary sense of our immediate surroundings or much of a model for a working future.

This lends an air of surreality to our thinking. Like the hero of William Gibson’s story The Gernsback Continuum, we are shadowed by visions of a future not our own:

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot.

Indeed, we’re irrationally hung up on the past’s visions of the future. Check out Gareth Branwyn’s photo tour of steampunk hobbyist artifacts:

Retro-futurism is all the rage these days: antique computers, 8-bit game art, classic cases for modern gear, anything to make the onslaught of new technology less disposable. The yearning for timelessness in a constantly renewing tech culture has led to a spike in interest in the steam-powered, brass-encrusted world of steampunk.

Henry Jenkins, echoing William Gibson, calls this sphere of anachronistic futurism “The Tomorrow That Never Was”:

Amateur archivists have assembled digital reproductions of the covers of pulp science fiction or popular science magazines, cataloging the various technological wonders or predictions by which an earlier generation sought to understand the directions their society was taking. Others have gathered together home movies, post cards, and every other available media artifact to construct detailed tours of the 1939 fair, showing every building inside and out. Such activities blur the line between private collections and shared archives as hobbyists become curators to show off their own holdings and to educate others into the lore of retro culture. Some of these experts will go on to construct beautifully illustrated coffee table books (of the kind that Gibson described in his short story) which in turn can be sold to niche publics of consumers via sites like Amazon. And small companies will use the web to sell lower-cost reproductions of historical toys and souvenirs for those who lack the resources to purchase the original: the digital tour of the 1939 World’s Fair, for example, has its own gift shop where one can buy a whole range of retro goods.

It is well known that the baby boom generation uses sites like eBay to reassemble stuff their mothers threw away when they left for college (old toys, comics, baseball cards, and other junk). But these same web 2.0 platforms allow us to collect together information or accumulate artifacts from our parent’s and grandparent’s generation. Relatively few of the people who are trading in memorabilia for the 1939 World’s Fair are old enough to have actually attended the event. Rather, they are fascinated with images of a future that had already started to fade from consciousness before they were even born, suggesting a variation on Stephen Greenbelt’s claim that history writing involves a fascination with speaking with the dead.

Of course, the dead with whom we are speaking when we engage in this nostalgic futurism are the dead visions of an earlier age, and they compel us so strongly precisely because our own visions elude us, offering as yet only terrifying glimpses of a ruined planet. When we look ahead, the skies darken, and we see not aluminum cities of flying cars, but a “global Somalia.”

No wonder, then, that we cling like a monkey with a wire-brush mama to the idea of a future in which engineering conquers the human condition, where we can leave off serious worrying about the planet until the godlike AIs get here, and in which, in any case, we can always jump ship and scuttle off to another planet if things get too hot.

Unfortunately, wishing doesn’t make it so. Indeed, more and more of our best futurists, science fiction writers and big thinkers are trying to get us to dump our threadbare inherited tomorrows into the recycler, if only so we can start to think seriously about the real challenges we face today. A great example is Charlie Stross’ brilliant post The High Frontier, Redux, in which he eviscerates the whole idea of space colonization:

Historically, crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of indigenous inhabitants by disease has been a cost-effective proposition. But the scale factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive.

Here’s a handy metaphor: let’s approximate one astronomical unit — the distance between the Earth and the sun, roughly 150 million kilometres, or 600 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon — to one centimetre. Got that? 1AU = 1cm. (You may want to get hold of a ruler to follow through with this one.)

The solar system is conveniently small. Neptune, the outermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun at a distance of almost exactly 30AU, or 30 centimetres — one foot (in imperial units). Giant Jupiter is 5.46 AU out from the sun, almost exactly two inches (in old money).

We’ve sent space probes to Jupiter; they take two and a half years to get there if we send them on a straight Hohmann transfer orbit, but we can get there a bit faster using some fancy orbital mechanics…

The Kuiper belt, domain of icy wandering dwarf planets like Pluto and Eris, extends perhaps another 30AU, before merging into the much more tenuous Hills cloud and Oort cloud, domain of loosely coupled long-period comets.

Now for the first scale shock: using our handy metaphor the Kuiper belt is perhaps a metre in diameter. The Oort cloud, in contrast, is as much as 50,000 AU in radius — its outer edge lies half a kilometre away.

Got that? Our planetary solar system is 30 centimetres, roughly a foot, in radius. But to get to the edge of the Oort cloud, you have to go half a kilometre, roughly a third of a mile.

Next on our tour is Proxima Centauri, our nearest star. …But Proxima Centauri is a poor choice, if we’re looking for habitable real estate. While exoplanets are apparently common as muck, terrestrial planets are harder to find; Gliese 581c, the first such to be detected (and it looks like a pretty weird one, at that), is roughly 20.4 light years away, or using our metaphor, about ten miles.

Try to get a handle on this: it takes us 2-5 years to travel two inches. But the proponents of interstellar travel are talking about journeys of ten miles.

Charlie goes on to quote Ally #1 Bruce Sterling’s comments on space colonization:

I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.

To which Charlie responds, “Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter — then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!”

Space ain’t the final frontier. The physical frontier is closed — as Norman Mailer puts it “shut, damn shut, shut like a boulder on a rabbit burrow” — and we live now, and probably forever (at least in culturally meaningful terms) in a world of physical limits. And despite promises of medical immortality, it looks like we may not live forever after all, while the smart robots don’t seem to be coming to save us.

Some see, in the loss of this Machine Age dream of the conquest of nature and all natural limits, the loss of possibility. That seems silly to me: the possible still lies stretched out all before us. I believe, in the core of my being, that H.G. Wells was right when he said “”All the past is but the beginning of the beginning: all that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening” If we survive this crisis, humanity has ahead of it vast seas of time to create and grow and deepen. We may even one day find the technological equivalent of the alchemist’s stone, and bend the physical stuff of the universe to our purposes (hopefully without destroying ourselves in the process) — but in the meantime, we’re at home on Earth and staying here, and all good work needs to respect the limitations a single planet places upon our endeavors.

There is still plenty of room for heroic ingenuity. Just because we disdain the possibility of magical, consequence-free technofixes doesn’t mean we don’t admire and seek good tools (in fact, quite the opposite, if we’re sensible — realizing that the task is much harder than thought by the technofixers, we realize we’ll need every tool we can get our hands on). Similarly, recognizing that space colonization is no answer to our planetary problems doesn’t mean that we don’t want to explore space, and learn as much about our planet and its surroundings as possible (the whole Greens in Space argument). Indeed, with the explosion of private space tourism efforts, we need to begin thinking seriously about space law. A sustainable civilization will be even more technologically advanced than our own, and remarkably more sophisticated in its thinking about science, technology and progress.

And that’s just the point: change has accelerated, just not in the direction our grandparents and great-grandparents expected. We still need to think ahead. Learning to see the shortcomings in these antique tomorrows we’re still dragging around with us may make us more intelligent creators of new visions. If we can let go of the way the past saw the future, we may be able to think anew about what is to come.

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We carry its marks, but the machine age is dead to us — oh, the assembly lines roll on in Mexico, the coal stacks still smoke in China, giant container ships still ply the seas bringing cars and appliances and laptops and clothes, but the ability to shock and disorient that the machine age once possessed is gone from the world of pretty much everyone with the hardware to read this.

We feel no more historical vertigo considering the Machine than we do the Dawn of Agriculture, and few if any of us wake up in the morning with a sense of deep angst about the move from hunting and gathering to sowing and reaping. There may be, as Gary Snyder says, no such thing as a post-agricultural civilization, but we already live in societies that take agriculture so much for granted that we feel those who live by any other means to be nearly alien. The same will very soon be just as true for industrialization.

To see this new reality, one need only look backwards. The other night it rained hard here in Seattle — in big warm drops that pinged off the skylight and drummed on the roof and lifted a metallic smell off the blacktop outside — and I took the night off, cooked some pasta and watched Fritz Lang’s classic 1933 film, The Testament of Doctor Mabuse.

I absolutely loved Mabuse! At first glance, it’s a straight detective story, with Inspector Lohmann (Otto Wernicke, playing one of the greatest cops ever caught on film) trying to crack a criminal conspiracy. But the conspiracy turns out to be anything but the usual organized crime syndicate: instead it is the evil cabal of the mad Doctor Mabuse, whose intellect is so powerfully twisted that even locked in an asylum in a catatonic state he can sway others to his cause through his insane scribblings.

Mabuse’s aim? A “reign of terror” brought on by “the empire of crime” — the destruction of society through terrorism. Mabuse’s writings direct his henchmen to rob jewelry stores, commit assassinations, destabilize currencies, and blow up a chemical factory, poisoning the city’s inhabitants. His testament — a mix of handwritten words and drawings which resemble the kind of freehand journal kept by the more sensitive type of disturbed 13-year-old girl — is so potent that the evil Doctor is able through his mad writings to exert powers of hypnosis and turn a formerly good psychiatrist into an insane agent of evil who channels his personality. It’s great stuff, which despite the gulfs of seven decades and a foreign language, kept me totally riveted and smiling.

But after the film ended, I was left with a strange feeling, more akin to watching a really good and trippy science fiction movie than an old detective film, and after a couple of days thinking about it, I think I know why: Lang’s sensibility in making Mabuse is every bit as alien as some outlandish futuristic world.

When life seems daily to be out-pacing the speculative fiction which is meant to induce a sense of wondrous future shock in our lives, the mindsets of 1930s modernists are as distant as colonies on Mars.

And Mabuse echoes in profound ways the concerns of its day: the pace, sophistication and industrialization of urban life. From its camera work and its use of sound (still novel for its time) to it expressionist graphics and modernist design fetishism (at one point, the heroine actually begins caressing a lampshade, in a way that marks her perfectly as the future target market for Dwell), the film alludes to the rise of a new mechanized city culture. Technologies (what were, in their day, the red-hot emerging technologies) are raised almost to the status of characters in the film: recording devices, scientific equipment for crime scene forensics and ballistics, cars and pistols and telephones (and thus car chases, gun fights and the tracing of mysterious calls) all play prominent roles.

All of this, though, builds to the film’s prime question: “Who will use these incredible new technologies and capabilities, and to what end?” Lohmann uses them, in a sardonic style that can’t hide his essential decency and bravery, to defend the public good, democracy and justice; Mabuse wants to use them to exert his power over the course of history. Indeed, Mabuse’s testament reads much like the transcript of a bin Laden cave video. Here is a man who does not hesitate to destroy the innocent to make room for the promise of a vague, “purified” new order.

The resemblance to Nazism was intentional. Mabuse — which tangentially was produced at UFA, where I stayed when last in Berlin — was censored by Goebbels himself and banned throughout the Reich. Lang fled Germany almost immediately afterwards, with the film’s premier being held in Budapest. The idea that a madman might use the force of personality and modern technologies to wreak havoc on the world unless good people stopped him was not, apparently, a welcome cinematic theme.

Of course, the same fear of technologically empowered madmen cuts both ways. Despite much clear evidence that fundamentalist crazies, while dangerous, are not our greatest concern as a civilization, politicians unburdened by scruples have, the world over, taken these old fears, these worn-out puppets, dressed them in new outfits, called them by new names, and used them to frighten and distract the people. Frighten them into giving away their liberties. Distract them from the naked greed of the puppet masters. What a boring old game.

Just how old these fears are is really best demonstrated by the degree to which nostalgia is actually our primary attitude towards the era which spawned them. From steampunk and the vogue in old industrial design to retro politics and “greatest generation” propaganda about Pearl Harbor, the Spanish Civil War and the nobility of fighting the Fascists (implying our current struggles are the same), our societies are riddled with longing for and distance from the realities of those days. We are not our grandparents, though, and their world is as extinct as the Tasmanian tiger.

Really, what we ought to worry about (and hunger for) are those new facets of our time that we’re just now gaining the insight to both fear and desire.

Emerging technologies, like nanotechnology and biotechnology, ought to worry us in their potential to be used stupidly, carelessly or with evil intent, yes.

But more importantly, all that we believe to be solid is melting into air, again. The world in which we live will no more last out our lives than the ice box, buggy whip or telegraph delivery boy outlasted theirs.

We live in a deeply networked, interconnected world, a world where the leapfrogging of technology is mingling with the annihilation of distance to produce a future which not only feels different, but runs by different rules.

Some of those rules should scare us, within reason. John Robb, in his excellent new book Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, makes the point that it is the very nature of the systems upon which we currently depend — centralized, hierarchical, brittle and above all, closed, proprietary and secret — that makes us most vulnerable to the depredations of small bands of networked terrorists. Our industrial system is like one giant, opaque Windows operating system, just waiting for the next wave of attacks to bring it crashing down, and its very opacity is its biggest threat: “We are vulnerable because we don’t know, and our vulnerability is actually increased because we don’t know.”

The only sane response to these dangers is the opposite of our current approach (which Robb calls “Knee-Jerk Police States”): it is a society-wide shift to openness, transparency and planned resilience.

That sounds tedious and burdensome, but the reality could be dynamic and creative and prosperous — a million experiments in diversifying (and making more sustainable) the energy, food, water, materials and communications systems we depend on to supply our lives. The likelihood is that, for most of us, attention to these systems, and innovative thinking in our interactions with them, will become more and more a fact of daily life, from farmer’s markets to home water purification systems and solar panels, to the steps we take to increase neighborhood survivability. But that, too, can have its rewards.

The same is largely true in regards to the other dramatic issue of this new globalizing world: immigration and the melting of borders. The fact is, we here in the developed world need the labor and energy of young migrants, and with an international economy in which (as Cory Doctorow puts it), any job that can described can be outsourced, we need, now, to embrace the border-hopping multiculturalism which already defines our societies, and develop new ways of working together with folks in distant places, whether through community-supported trade or new models of migration. Such challenges shouldn’t be seen only as problems, though: there is every reason to believe that we can meet them by creating a fairer, more prosperous and more stable world.

In a similar way, though we’re used to thinking of cities as unusually artificial, dragging along behind them all the baggage of modernity, but the fact is we now live on a planet not only of cities, but of this new species, megacities… and this is a good thing — if we can learn to think about cities and their possibilities in new ways.

We’re used to thinking of humanity and nature as opposed, but again, the new reality is a paradigm rift in which we are both responsible for learning how to properly manage the planet (since we’re already engaged in planetary management, altering its climate and curating its biodiversity: we’re just doing it badly), and for bowing to natural forces, patterns and designs to grow a successor to the old model of industry which will now respect and work with and like nature. Or we can just drive the whole bus off the cliff.

Even that most central pillar of modernity — consumerism — is changing. The kinds of transformations that await us on the other side of one-planet living I suspect may feel unrecognizable when seen from the perspective of the Twentieth century: products delivered as services, producer responsibility, zero-waste standards, strategic consumption, reputation economics, supply-chain activism, even, possibly, the end of ownership as we know it. There is a very good chance, I suspect, that being a highly networked, affluent megacity dweller in the next decade will be as culturally distant from being a well-off suburban industrial manager as that was from being a prosperous village grain-miller operating his own windmill. Again, this will probably be a good thing.

For all the horrors that might await us, there exist an equal number of shimmering possibilities. We live at the twilight of the Industrial Era, and at the dawn of another. What sort of an era this will be depends, in many ways, on how well we dance what inspector Lohmann in Fritz Lang’s film calls “the fine line between genius and madness” and how many of us choose, in the end, to put the powers we are gaining to the service of all.

So who’s going to make that movie?

Photo Credit

Photo Credit

The babies born between 1965 and 1970 were historic. They were part of the highest global population growth rate ever achieved, 2.1 percent a year. As Joel Cohen writes,

Human population never grew with such speed before the 20th century and is never again likely to grow with such speed. Our descendants will look back on the late 1960s peak as the most significant demographic event in the history of the human population even though those of us who lived through it did not recognize it at the time.

Put another way, you might say that the birth of Generation X (which more or less book-ends those years) was the beginning of our planet’s era of peak human population.

It’s easy to get blase about demographics; big, abstract numbers thought about over numbing time-periods, and recounted by people who love statistics. It would be a mistake, however, to see peak population as unimportant. When we know that we are riding a wave of increasing numbers (and increasing longevity) that will crest sometime after the middle of this century, we can also see our path forward more clearly:

1) The longer population growth rates remain high, the more total people there will be on the planet when we reach peak population, so one of our biggest goals ought to be seeing to it by every ethical means possible that the wave of population growth crests sooner rather than later.

2) If we are successful in reaching peak population sooner, at a lower number of people, rather than later with more people, we will be much more able to confront the myriad interlocking crises we face — a comparatively less crowded planet is an easier planet on which to build a bright green future.

3) Since we know the single best way of bringing down high birth rates is to empower women by giving them access to reproductive health choices (including contraception and abortion), education, economic opportunities, and legal protection of their rights, empowering women ought to be one of our highest priorities. (As Kim Stanley Robinson puts it, empowering women is the best climate change technology.)

4) Our other main task is to preserve natural systems and transform human economies in order to best withstand this wave of human beings, avoid catastrophe and leave behind as intact a world as we can — to save the parts (including not just biodiversity but also the diversity of human cultures and histories) so that future generations have as many options as possible.

5) Our best hopes for both avoiding catastrophe and preserving our heritage all hinge on our actions over roughly the next two decades. In that time we have enormous work to do: create at least the model of a zero-carbon, zero-waste civilization; begin deep and widespread impact reduction here in the developed world; sustainably raise the prospects of those (especially women) living in the developing world; and preserve as many working parts of our planetary heritage as we possibly can. After that time, all of these jobs will grow progressively harder, trending quickly towards impossibility.

Add all of this information together, and a generational imperative emerges. Generation X can be seen as the beginning of peak population; many of us (born between roughly 1960 and 1980) may live to see population peak in the middle of this century; and much of the most important work to be done to see us through to the other side of that watershed will need to be done in the next twenty years, when Generation X’ers are in their professional prime. We did not cause the crisis we face — unless you count us guilty at birth — but if the crisis is solved, it’ll have to be in large part through the leadership of people born in my generation. Our historic call is to save the planet during peak population.

I am optimistic that we can do this. We have our first Gen X U.S. president in Barack Obama. We have a rising network of brilliant and dedicated worldchanging leaders. We live, despite the financial crisis, at a moment of great wealth. We have the motive, means and opportunity.

None of this is to say that Gen X will do it alone. In particular, if you’re young today, you have a huge choice to make: this transition will be unfolding your entire career, and the role you choose to play in making it happen will be vitally important to your life, the planet and the future. You too are called.

At the same time, few 18 year-olds have the mix of experience, energy and resources for changing the world that, say, a 35 year-old has. Since the moment is now, it’s those of us at the height of our powers that will have to lead the way.

Contemplating this journey beyond peak population, and the duty we have to lead it — well, it can weigh on you. I find it useful to remember that by changing the world today, we’re building a better future beyond the crisis, that we work not only on our own behalf, but for children who will not be born within our lifetimes, and their children, and their’s: that we’ll make great ancestors.

But I also find it helpful to remember that these are our lives, and this is our adventure; and though times are tough and the planet demands our hard work, it also needs people who are happy, healthy and creatively energetic. The world needs our best-lived lives, not our martyrdom.

Or, as the great American poet Gary Snyder wrote, back in the early seventies, when we were just small,

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

Or, as you might say, “Keep climbing. Share tools. Have a good time on the way.”

But because many of the systems generating those profits run unsustainably, when younger generations’ turns finally arrive, those systems will be worth less than they are today. Some may be extremely expensive to maintain by then (like auto-dependent exurban developments). Others may be all cost and no benefit (like inheriting a barrel of nuclear waste). There’s even a potential danger that the whole system will produce less wealth than it costs to maintain, leading to a spiral of entropy and impoverishment known as “catabolic collapse.” But even without such a crash, it’s not hard to see that a great many economic choices being made today by older generations offer fewer options, not more wealth, to those coming later.

Climate change looms as the epitome of an intergenerational Ponzi scheme: for a limited benefit in this generation, we are burning dirty fuels that will present great difficulties for (if not wreak disasters on) many generations to come. A climate-destabilizing economy is sometimes presented as a net good by certain economists (on the supposition that wealth today is worth more than wealth tomorrow, and that people in the future will have more wealth with which to deal with the problems we create). It takes very little true-cost thinking, though, to see that many of the possible (even predicted) impacts of climate change (which, as externalities, are rarely and poorly accounted for in economic models) can easily outweigh the short-term economic benefits. As Paul Hawken says, we’re stealing the future, selling it in the present and calling it GDP.

It’s probably worth noting that even those present profits are highly inequitably distributed. Whatever you think about the Occupy movement, it has succeeded in shining a light on the degree to which the rewards generated by the economy are distributed to a very small number of hyper-wealthy older people. Most of those insanely rich people are insanely rich because they own large chunks of the older industries currently trashing the future. Very often, when we hear of the need to be economically “practical” in thinking about climate action, what is actually meant is that we need to protect their investments.

The corollary is too little noted: many of the kinds of changes we need to see in our economy in order to safe-guard the future have at least the potential for far more equitable distribution. If every home in the world was better designed and insulated, if every city was better served by transit and more walkable, if products were designed to last longer and be less toxic — if we saw a shift towards an economy that treated the real impacts of our systems as something no longer “external” to our economy — most people would be quickly better off. Most of the dirtiest industries are like giant vacuum hoses, sucking money out of people’s lives and local communities. Bright green solutions, on the other hand, can not only create profitable businesses but save people money on energy and circulate more of those savings in the local economy.

The public debate on sustainability and the economy is shifting. We are beginning to see the future put back in the room. In the meantime, it’s not at all inappropriate for young people, when presented with the claim that some future-trashing industry is creating needed wealth, to ask “Yeah? Who for?”

PS: I assume you’re well-educated enough not to need pointers to evidence that the rich are getting richer. If you want some hard evidence that profits from our current, unsustainable system accrue far more to old people than young, I have yet to find a better resource than the Pew study, The Rising Age Gap in Economic Well-Being. It’s a wealth of outrage-provoking data.

Among the findings are that while US households headed by people over 65 have grown wealthier, gained income and now see much less poverty compared to 1984, households headed by people under 35 have actually seen a median drop in the wealth of 68%, now having a median net worth of only $3,662 (37% either have no wealth or owe more than they own); 22% are in poverty. The economy, as currently structured, is a system where older people get wealthier while undermining the future, younger people get poorer and inherit planet in crisis. If that’s not a description of a generational scam, I don’t know what would be.

Gaming the Natural World to Save It

Okanogan County, WA — The hottest computer game of the year isn’t about blowing apart zombies with a shotgun, or trying to land a virtual lunar shuttle on the deck of an aircraft carrier in pitching seas. No, the latest sensation in the gaming world comes down to a 26 year-old biology PhD candidate standing up to her hips in a mountain stream, skimming bugs of the surface with a mesh net.

“I’m doing an aquatic insect count,” the biologist, Sarah Greene, explains. “This will give us a rough estimation of how healthy this habitat is, whether or not it’s providing sufficient food for wild salmon.”

By itself, counting bugs is not very exciting. It’s what happens to the count that has made this odd game a hit.

You see, in this game, “EcoSystem” the “board” is a real place — a three-hundred-fifty-thousand acre system of valleys here in rural Washington, in a county larger than the state of Connecticut. The actions of the”players” — tens of thousands of paying customers from around the planet — control all the management decisions for this vast tract of land.

It’s a real-world, real-time, high-tech videogame, where things are actually born and eaten, flourish or dwindle, based on the players’ mouse-clicks — and often
in front of their very eyes.

After identifying and counting the insect population, Greene feeds the information into a computer, which tabulates the data and puts it up on the game’s website. There, it is added to and cross-referenced with millions of other pieces of information to present a picture of how the EcoSystem is doing.

Some of the information is arcane, like Youst’s bug count. Some is more personal, like another grad student’s daily observations and video about the habits and behavior
of the valley’s only spotted owl brood. Members post thousands of queries about this data, make notes on GIS maps, make and debate motions about how to manage the
land, even plot coups and counter-coups in the management regime.

Debates often become quite heated, such as a recent quarrel over whether to introduce a pack of wolves into the valley (the wolf-fans won).

In exchange, the EcoSystem team is able to meet three of its goals: the preservation of a vast tract of land (ranging from logged-over scab-land to a few isolated patches of ancient forest) at a time when public money for wilderness preservation has all but dried up; the restoration of portions of the ecosystem using experimental techniques; and the chance to study the workings of an entire ecosystem in a level of detail never
before attempted.

This last is due largely to the availability of large numbers of grants through the company for graduate work in the area, but EcoSystem president Jack Muir says none of
the project would be possible without recent advances in computer and telecommunications technology.

“Not only do we have hundreds of employees and thousands of customers, all connected via networks,” Muir says, “but we also have thousands of remote sensing devices of all different kinds, all going 24-7, measuring a wealth of data which has never been practical to consider before.”

But technology has made the game possible in a more direct sense as well. Part of the $30,000 entry fee to play includes the interface screen and equipment, a large flat-display screen which receives a direct feed from the valley, allowing players to show off pictures from any number of robot cameras (the camera on the owls is
particularly popular), as well as track any number of information streams. The EcoSystem, many players say, is a part of their daily lives.

To some this might sound boring, but most of the players this writer spoke with claimed it was quite the opposite: some say they experience a deep connection to the EcoSystem which they feel for no other land. Others recount powerful on-line experiences, such as the time cameras captured the wolf pack bringing down an elk and thousands across the world stopped their lives for hours to watch as the wolves fed. Still others recount personal visits to the valleys, great parties with fellow players, and the intellectual gratification of a growing knowledge of environmental science.

There have even been some insurgencies to make it interesting, like the small group of players lead by a disgruntled former timber executive who received the game from his daughter. He decided to advocate clearcutting the EcoSystem. The rebels called their plan “Fresh Start.” The effort was eventually contained within a small patch of experimental sustainable forestry on the area’s fringes. Another effort, to allow limited hunting, was successful.

But it is the exclusivity of the EcoSystem (only researchers and players may visit, and then only under strict controls) which has helped make memberships in theGame a hot status item. Though a few players have “scholarships” based in large part on some past service to the EcoSystem, the vast majority are well-heeled, environmentally-aware professionals for whom membership is a badge of distinction.

As word has spread and membership grown, the EcoSystem has been able to increase the intensity of study and add more parcels of land, growing 250,000 acres in
four years.

Now the game is planning to branch out into surrounding more settled areas. New projects will work with the EcoSystem, such as the purchase of a ranch and
several farms, which (it is hoped) will be experiments in rural sustainability. Players will engage in a participatory design process to create a series of completely sustainable visitor centers to accommodate the growing membership. An old hydropower dam neaby will be purchased and removed to restore a wild river There is even development of a “green” retirement community for EcoSystem players, planned for a nearby town.

I wonder how much of this could actually be done, now. Certainly, starting a Kickstarter-like project where people “adopt” species and fund conservation in the real world would not be difficult. But even some of the wacky stuff doesn’t seem all that impractical now… and some of what seemed future-y then sounds quaint now, like “interface screen and equipment, a large flat-display screen which receives a direct feed.”

What Will Make Our Cities Truly Green?

I don’t have time for a detailed response, but here are a few quick thoughts. Some of the furor around the study seems to stem from a degree of people fitting the findings to their viewpoints. These views have merit, but they don’t tell us a lot about what the study actually says.

Atlantic Cities sums up the actual findings pretty well:

“[The study] looked at the climate plans and greenhouse gas emission reductions of cities in California to find that there doesn’t seem to be any causal connection between greenhouse gas reductions and climate action plans.

“That’s not to say that emissions aren’t going down, but that the plans aimed at bringing them down aren’t necessarily what’s driving the change. [The study's author] says it’s not so much that the climate plans are driving emissions reductions, but rather that environmentally conscious tendencies of the people in these cities are reducing emissions [my emphasis] – and creating an atmosphere in which the creation of a climate plan is politically viable.”

Which, I suspect, is probably largely true (I haven’t had a chance to dig into his numbers), though my take on the meaning of this finding is different than some other observers.

I think climate plans haven’t made much of a difference because in North America most of them aren’t designed to make much of a difference. To really drive down emissions in a city, you need to change its systems: you need to grow a much denser city, actively de-prioritize cars (not just build a few bike lanes), raise building standards across the board (not just encourage a few green buildings), make possible new forms of living and consumption and aggressively improve the climate performance of energy, water, waste and other infrastructure systems.

To do this, you have to get at the core of how a city works. You have to change things that really matter. Only a handful of climate plans in the US are integrated with bold land use, transportation and infrastructure plans. But that’s what it takes.

So, my take on this debate is not that climate plans don’t work, but that we haven’t yet seen the kinds of climate plan the planet needs. What kind of thinking might go into such plans? What kind of city might they aim at?

Well, I’m just finishing my own attempt to imagine what such a city might look like, my booklet Carbon Zero. Stay tuned!