b l a s t u l a reblog++

This article was written by Worldchanging Canada writer Karl Schroeder in August 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

If our civilization requires the resource equivalent of three earths to be sustainable, then we have to stop drawing on ecosystem services that are overstretched. In fact, maybe we should start acting like there are no ecosystem services available to us at all.

What’s an ecosystem service? Here’s Wikipedia’s definition:

Ecosystem services are distinct from other ecosystem products and functions because there is human demand for these natural assets. Services can be subdivided into five categories: provisioning such as the production of food and water; regulating, such as the control of climate and disease; supporting, such as nutrient cycles and crop pollination; cultural, such as spiritual and recreational benefits; and preserving, which includes guarding against uncertainty through the maintenance of diversity.

Economically, ecosystem services provide us with assets that we would otherwise have to produce ourselves. The simplest example is water treatment, which is done for free by our aquifers. It’s possible to directly measure the equivalent cost of a water treatment plant for a given set of wetlands or aquifer, which means you can exactly quantify the value of many ecosystem services. Pollination is another hugely important ecosystem service, which is provided largely for free by bees.

There’s a lot of discussion about ecosystem services these days, and about our ecological footprint. The usual line is this: we’re using three earths worth of resources, so we have to find a way to cut back or we’re all sunk. This is true, but as I’ve pointed out before, there’s a dramatic difference in terms of motivating people, between framing something as a positive, or as a negative. The “three earths” metaphor is good for scaring people, but it’s a negative: it evokes images of austerity and sacrifice. If we want to motivate people to change things, it’s always better to frame the change in terms of opportunity.

Charles Stross recently yanked the collective chains of the space advocacy movement with a little article entitled “The High Frontier, Redux.” In this article he questions the practicality, and ultimately the value, of human colonization of other worlds. To make the point that there’s “no there there” when it comes to space colonization, Charlie quotes Bruce Sterling:

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.

…And this is where I break ranks with Charlie and Bruce. Because the assumption both of them are making is that the only places worth settling are those that provide us with good ecosystem services. Quite apart from being a spectacularly lazy point of view, this stance takes for granted that alternatives to the Gobi desert (or Mars) are still available to us. But as the “three earths” metaphor makes clear, they aren’t. In fact, if you ask where we should have been building our cities over the last century or so, the answer is in the Gobi desert, and the Sahara, and the barest and emptiest rocky plains we could find. (Even those have thriving ecosystems, of course.)

We should have been colonizing Earth as though it were a planet with no ecosystem resources to exploit.

Look at the difference between what we do when we settle a new area on Earth, compared to what we’d do on a planet like Mars. On Earth we’d take advantage of the free air and water, ready-made soils provided by local fauna, pollination provided by the local bees, all to minimize the costs of building and maintaining our colonies. This process is documented expertly by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel; he points out that the conquest of the Americas was really the invasion of one ecosystem by another, rather than a simple matter of moving human populations. North America is the greatest success story of European expansionism because its ecology was most similar to that of Europe, more than for any political or social factors.

On Mars most of those services are unavailable. Mars is the most attractive local planet precisely because it does have some services, most notably a 24 (and-a-half) hour day, potentially fertile soil, and ready water from underground sources. Still, that’s not much compared with even the Gobi desert. Our assumption on landing there has to be that the 24-hour day is about the only service we’re going to get. Everything else–from air to agricultural production–has to be provided by us.

If we knew how to live on Mars, we’d know how to reduce our footprint on Earth. Space colonization is the Rosetta stone for earthly sustainability because it’s entirely about living in the absence of ecosystem services. The Moon, Mars and the asteroids are a great experimental laboratory that we’re ignoring at our own peril.

Back to the idea of framing something as a positive rather than a negative: we have the historic opportunity to colonize planet Earth, and do the same to our neighbouring planets at the same time. The effort to do one may necessarily involve the other. And doing this no longer has to be reactive, but can be a positive goal for our whole civilization.

If you read my Rewilding Canada entry, you might have figured out that I’m saying exactly the same thing here as I did there; I’m just using slightly different language. The ability to colonize other planets is the ability to rewild our ecosystems–to reforest our plains and mountains, and to restock our oceans. A mature vertical farming technology is precisely the technology needed to do agriculture on Mars, for instance. Grey-water and black-water recycling are necessary in exactly the same ways. Ditto for energy production and conservation.

I’m not suggesting that we all end up walking around our own planet in space suits–but I am suggesting that our industries and agriculture will ultimately need to do the equivalent. I don’t expect Buckminster Fuller’s domed cities to sprout up everywhere. I do think that chemical industries have to be closed-loop, taking nothing from the ecosystem and putting nothing into it. It would be fine for us to continue using coal and oil into the indefinite future, provided none of their byproducts ever enter the ecosystem. That would be equivalent to running industry under a dome.

Colonizing planet Earth–and therefore the rest of the solar system–is a recipe for a future of growth and opportunity that meets the exact same goals as programmes that emphasize austerity and conservation.

We don’t want restraint. We don’t want austerity. We want unlimited growth–just not at the expense of this glorious planet we live on. And we can have that, provided we start by reframing what we think of now as a crisis as, instead, an opportunity.

Colonizing Planet Earth is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 9:58 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

This article was written by Alex Steffen in August 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

No corner of the planet is so remote that it hasn’t felt humanity’s footprint. We have become a force of nature: influencing everything, accelerating destruction. And whether we admit it or not, we’re increasingly in the position of having to choose the fate of much (perhaps all) of life on Earth.

One of the most stunning scientific measurements of this fact is net primary productivity. Worldchanger David Zaks recently shared with me some of the papers arising from the research he and his colleagues have been doing on net primary productivity, and the results they came to are pretty awe-inspiring.

In short and simple terms, their work confirms that humans are now using a quarter of all of the Earth’s productivity (and in the process undermining the health of the rest). More than half of this impact is from direct harvest — reaping crops, catching fish, cutting trees. Forty percent is the result of land use changes. The remainder is the result of fires. As David himself puts it, “The importance of these studies lies in reframing previously benign numbers into a story that more effectively portrays our collective actions on the planet.”

[The three key papers are available as PDFs here, here and here (please respect David's bandwidth as you consider downloading them. -Ed.]

Also worth noting is the idea that we’re using more of a shrinking pie: that “background productivity” has decreased. We’ve discussed this effect before in relation to personal planets, but it’s really worth grabbing hold of — not only is the Earth finite, not only are we using an increasing portion of all of its systems, but those systems themselves are effectively shrinking as we overuse them.

When our impacts on the planet become so extreme that they’re visible at this level, of course, planetary thinking becomes not a quaint notion but a practical necessity. And as soon as the mind begins to grasp the implications of living on a small and seamless planet, it naturally jumps to looking — at least for a period of time — on the Earth as if it were a strange planet.

Fools jump to the wrong conclusion immediately: that Earth is merely our first planet. That we can destroy it, because our species soon to embark for Mars are from there launch ourselves across the whole universe, where habitable planets may be a dime a dozen. For a whole variety of reasons, this is idiocy. The best reasons have to do with distance. As Charlie Stross has written, the distances we’d need to travel to create an interstellar civilization are, at this point, only conquerable through the belief in non-existant magical technologies:

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. … 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.

(It should be noted that this is definitely not an argument against space exploration. We need more of that, and we need better agreements about how to do it right).

The next wrong conclusion is that we can be cavalier with the planet and its ecosystems, because we’ll soon be smart and powerful enough to undo whatever damage we’ve done. In the most ridiculous versions of this argument, you have people talking about ignoring all present-day problems in a headlong rush towards the Singularity, since after thinking machines arrive, we’ll be godlike in our powers.

Some don’t even think we need to wait for the brainy robots to arrive. There are those who argue already that we ought to be engaging in planetary engineering — large-scale interventions in the working of the planet’s natural processes themselves. One commonly cited example is the idea of seeding the oceans with iron to promote algal blooms that could suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. (This is not a good idea.) All of the ideas that fall into this camp share the essential characteristic of proposing to find a simple and massive answer to a set of complex and manifold problems. It’s been said that this is like hoping to find a technique for planetary liposuction.

Still, it’s important to remember that not all attempts to Terraform the Earth intend irresponsibility. Smart people can believe in the necessity of the Big Fix. And, if things get desperate enough, we may need to go all in on a set of Big Fixes. Jamais proposed a framework for evaluating the ethics of such efforts in his important essay on The Reversibility Principle, and we certainly hope that scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs evaluating whether to even undertake such efforts will consider the implications very, very carefully.

But the essential fact remains that we don’t understand the planet very well at all, and the rate at which our knowledge is growing — while impressive — doesn’t suggest that we’ll be up to the task of safely undertaking planetary engineering any time in the near future.

Instead, two approaches suggest themselves as both sane and bold.

The first is planetary management (or planetary gardening — the phrase that’s coming to be preferred [do you have a preference? a better suggestion? I'd love to hear it in the comments.]). The basic idea here is both acknowledging that we’ve had a profound and ubiquitous impact on the world’s ecosystems, and that no force other than humanity is now capable of preserving the functioning of those ecosystems. It’ll take the humility to keep learning, a commitment to creating a restorative economy, and a fair dose of luck, but a response to this crisis based on millions of informed, small-scale efforts to preserve and restore ecosystem function seems much less likely to fail catastrophically.

The second is “colonizing” Earth: treat the limited resources the Earth offers us (without destroying natural systems) as the same sort of environmental envelope space explorers would face, and then design an amazing civilization that can live within those limits in a dynamic, creative and prosperous way. As Karl Schroeder explains,

I’m not suggesting that we all end up walking around our own planet in space suits–but I am suggesting that our industries and agriculture will ultimately need to do the equivalent. I don’t expect Buckminster Fuller’s domed cities to sprout up everywhere. I do think that chemical industries have to be closed-loop, taking nothing from the ecosystem and putting nothing into it. It would be fine for us to continue using coal and oil into the indefinite future, provided none of their byproducts ever enter the ecosystem. That would be equivalent to running industry under a dome.

To believe in the possibility of colonizing the Earth is to recognize that we have the ability to dramatically shrink our ecological footprints, perhaps even to leave positive ecological handprints

Both of these approaches are going to take mental transformations entirely out of the scope of the sort of actions people are now being asked to take in the name of sustainability. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be done. Beginning to attempt them is, properly understood, one of the boldest adventures humanity has ever imagined.

Planetary Thinking is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 2:13 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

This article was written by Alex Steffen in May 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Our friends over at Grist have published a sharp little essay by Michael Tobis called My little world (and yours, too). Essentially, Tobis takes the concept of ecological footprinting, and helps it make sense by asking us to imagine living on our own tiny little planet.

But to know why I think this is cool, you have to know a little about ecological footprints. Ecological footprints give us a metaphor for understanding our impact on the planet and the meaning of sustainability: they boil that impact down to a single number and measure it in terms of land area, often in terms of global hectares. They then compare the metaphorical land area used to provide you and I with our communities, homes and lifestyles with what a globally fair share of the planet actually is.

Ecogeeks seem to argue a lot about whose footprint measurements offer the most accuracy. Their questions are sometimes difficult to parse — does the formula used incorporate the public-sector activity undertaken on our behalf? A thousand considerations bubble up, but I actually have a lot of confidence that the available formulae are pretty decent, and getting better.

Using those two numbers, our footprints and the footprint everyone could have without destroying our environment (often referred to as a one planet footprint), we can tell more or less how far off from sustainability we are. Generally, we find that if we living average lives in Europe, we need to shrink our footprints by 70 - 80%. If we’re Americans that number is more like 90%. If we’re wealthy, we may need to find even more hectares worth of ecological savings.

And here is where the metaphor goes screwy on us. I don’t think in hectares, and I’d bet you don’t either. I know that a hectare covers about the same area as two (American) football fields, and having spent a fair bit of my misspent youth on sports fields, I can more or less grasp how much real estate that is, but when it comes right down to it, lecturing me about hectares is like talking fashion with a dog.

Tobis takes a slightly different and pretty clever tack:

The Little Prince of the story is a child living alone on a small spherical asteroid, his only companion a single flower. He consoles himself by the fact that it is always a short walk to a sunrise or a sunset.

Let’s tell a slightly different story, with a similar asteroid, a per-capita world. Instead of being one of six billion people on a big planet, let’s suppose you were alone on a comparable asteroid. We’ll give you your six-billionth share of the surface area, your six-billionth share of each of the major landmasses and biomes, your own six-billionth scale Africa, your own little Australia. In other words, you will have exactly the average resource ownership of everyone else on earth.

Now we’re talking! Rampaging across my own little Earth like a super-sized Godzilla, that’s something I can understand.

What’s more, Tobis does a great job of taking us on a tour of our private planets:

Your little asteroid has a six-billionth of the earth’s total surface area. It is a sphere with a radius of 82 meters, and with a surface area of about 85,000 square meters. That, depending on how you prefer to think about it, is almost exactly 21 acres, or 8.5 hectares. …

Since the ocean covers fifteen acres, the land surface covers the remaining six acres. [T]he area under cultivation is … a bit over a third of an acre. If you push matters to less valuable soil, you might be able to grow things on as much as an acre, but most of your 6 acres are desert or tundra. You even have some substantial ice sheets on your land. There is also the problem that you have built your house, your workshop, your garage, your driveway and many of your industrial outbuildings on the best farmland.

About a third of your land under cultivation is irrigated, much of it using depletable groundwater. Some of the groundwater is being contaminated by some of your industrial processes. To a lesser extent, your soils are also being contaminated, but a bigger problem is that as you till them for food they erode much faster than the natural rate of replenishment.

You also like to eat fish, but most of your ocean does not naturally support large fish. From the few areas that do, you have been eating the fish faster than they reproduce. This would astonish your great-grandparents, but of course they lived on a larger world. (Their per capita share was bigger with a smaller population.)

So, there we are, on our personal Earths, spinning around the planet, having a good time but making a bit of a mess of things. So far so good.

But then things start to go a little wrong. Tobis wisely informs us that our ancestors had larger personal Earths than we do because there were fewer of them on the planet — but he neglects to mention another important reason why their personal planets were bigger than ours: they’re the same planets, and they burned through a lot of real estate before we ever inherited them. You and I, for instance, don’t have a sustainable share of time spent swimming with Chinese river dolphins, because there aren’t any more. They’re now extinct.

Indeed, if we do a little research (for instance, by reading WWF’s Living Planet Report), we quickly realize that we have already dramatically disrupted over a third of the planet’s ecosystems. Our personal planets are crumbling away, chunk after chunk flying out from under our feet and off into space.

And because our lives are so resource- and energy-intensive — the average American would need his or her own personal planet and four other people’s as well to feed his or her consumption — we’re breaking off bigger and bigger chunks every day. Every day that passes means our personal planets shrink a bit more.

What is to be done about this dire state of affairs? Pretty important question. And here, unfortunately, Tobis jumps a little wrong and goes hurtling off into space… because it is here that the metaphor of ecological footprints breaks down.

“There is no replacing your six acres, no frontier,” Tobis tells us. “No amount of human ingenuity will make your world’s surface bigger.”

and

“Increasing wealth won’t make your asteroid any bigger…” he says. “No matter how clever our advances, we will never have more than an acre to feed us.”

And here the whole Matrix-world of the metaphor comes crashing down in shards of mental glass. For neither statement is true.

It is manifestly possible for us to increase the biological health and capacity of the planet — not only to preserve what exists, but to add to it. Every time we practice ecological restoration — even being as clumsy a set of practitioners of that art as we are — we increase the vigor of a small patch of the Earth. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that we could not, eventually, get much wiser about restoring ecological function while we reduce our ecological impact, perhaps even eliminating our ecological footprints and beginning to leave instead ecological handprints where we have made the Earth healthier. We can rebuild the surface of our personal planets, replacing acres, perhaps even restoring acres lost before we were even born. It won’t be easy, and we still need to fight like hell to preserve what we have, but all is not lost.

More importantly, Tobis’ views on wealth and ingenuity fly far wide of the mark: while it is mostly true that we “will never have more than an acre to feed us” in the sense that there is a limited amount of tillable land in the world (though even there, I’d place bets that careful stewardship and agricultural innovation could restore much farmland now regarded as lost), it is false in that the yields that acre gives us can vary profoundly: clever advances can in fact offer us the same fruits of prosperity at a fraction of the footprint.

Many old-school environmentalists can’t wrap their heads around this fact. Based on a combination of historical observation (industrial prosperity has so far increased ecological damage, so it must always — a statement about as realistic as saying my niece has always, for the four years of her life, been less than three-and-a-half feet tall, therefore she will be always be a yardling) and a culturally inherited distaste for modernity (with, you know, its dark satanic mills and lack of bears), OSEs love to recite the PAT formula: that environmental impact is equal to the size of the population times its affluence times its technology.

But what we know now is that affluence is a complex concept, not (beyond the meeting of certain essential needs) easily bound to material consumption, because a great many of the things that make us prosperous are in fact intangible or offer ecologically negligible impact, including art, innovation and care.

What’s more, through efficiency and redesign, a great many products and services can, in theory if not current practice, be offered at ecologically meaningless impacts. If I own a bright green car, say one that runs efficiently off electricity from wind turbines, is built of completely non-toxic components, is designed to be disassembled with its materials reused and recycled in a closed loop, and I travel 300 miles to visit grandma, I am doing so at a minute fraction of the footprint that Wally Waster has when he drives his Ford Earthcrusher SUV on a similar journey. Yes, for all practical purposes, I am just as prosperous.

Which is why the “T” part of the PAT equation is also dumb. Products which are more technologically advanced offer us far greater possibilities for efficiency and ecological sanity. Think, for instance, of the ways in which technology enables us to car share, or design smart green homes which most effectively use natural airflow and light.

If each of us has a personal planet, and on that planet sit miniature personal cars and homes, cities and factories, one of the most encouraging facts I know is that by sharing better ideas with one another and working together to innovate new solutions, we are actually capable of building prosperous lives which leave us living on what feel like much roomier asteroids.

Personal Planets and the Little Prince is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:59 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

This article was written by Alex Steffen in June 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

I write this from the medieval town of Visby, in the shadow of the ruined church of Saint Clement, on Sweden’s Gotland island. I’ve stayed here for a few days on my way to the Tällberg Forum, hoping for a chance to catch my breath.

It’s a beautiful place, Visby, a UNESCO World Heritage site of old buildings, tiles roofs, cobblestones, ancient churches and a huge stone wall circling the city, and I’ve spent the last few days wandering the narrow winding streets, sitting in cafes overlooking the ocean, reading and relaxing and trying to catch up with the flow of ideas and information that rolls through my life in what sometimes seems an unstoppable flood.

There’s something wonderful about contemplating the future while bathing in history. To read about emerging technologies, new scientific research, innovative social programs — the whole cacophony of change — while standing on ground where Vikings raided, where Hanseatic merchants sold goods, where the piratical Victual Brothers made their base in the 14th Century; it gives one a sense of the long view. Tones things down.

Carl Linnaeus spent time here as well. Locals proudly claim that the field research he did on Gotland in the 1740s gelled his ideas on taxonomy. Outsiders attribute a bit less importance to his trips here, but with his 300th birthday having just been celebrated here, and pictures of Linnaeus scattered around the town, it seems pointless to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm.

But if we’re uncertain about the impact of his Gotland field work on his theories, we are not at all uncertain about the impact of his theories themselves. Quite simply, Linnaeus contributed the tools we still use for classifying and understanding the diversity of nature.

Linnaean taxonomy uses hierarchical ranks to show the nature of — and relationship between, various living things.

We use them so frequently today that we tend to forget what a revolutionary tool taxonomies were, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, allowing people to order and structure the relationships between vastly disparate things: in the process, those things themselves were illuminated in new and telling ways. As an example, Wikipedia offers the Linnaean classification for human beings:

As an example, consider the Linnaean classification for modern humans:

• Kingdom: Animalia (with eukaryotic cells having cell membrane but lacking cell wall, multicellular, heterotrophic)

• Phylum: Chordata (animals with a notochord, dorsal nerve cord, and pharyngeal gill slits, which may be vestigial)

• Subphylum: Vertebrata (possessing a backbone, which may be cartilaginous, to protect the dorsal nerve cord)

• Class: Mammalia (warm-blooded vertebrates with hair and mammary glands which, in females, secrete milk to nourish young)

• Subclass: Placentalia (giving birth to live young after a full internal gestation period)

• Order: Primates (collar bone, eyes face forward, grasping hands with fingers, and two types of teeth: incisors and molars)

• Family: Hominidae (upright posture, large brain, stereoscopic vision, flat face, hands and feet have different specializations)

• Genus: Homo (s-curved spine, “man”)

• Species: Homo sapiens (high forehead, well-developed chin, skull bones thin)

Through this taxonomical placement of humanity, we learn all sorts of things about ourselves that we might not take notice of if we were merely to say “human” — all sorts of relationships and characteristics. Indeed, some have described Linnaean taxonomy as a tool for making mental order out of living profusion.

Of course, as scientific knowledge has advanced, certain problems have begun to crop up in the system Linnaeus first devised while hunting on horseback for unusual flowers to press into his notebooks.

First of all, biologists have found that the sheer variety and complexity of species (and evolutionary relationships) requires that a bewildering array of sub-classifications be added to Linnaeus’ originally simple system.

Second, as sampling and sequencing DNA has gotten easier and cheaper, the resulting wealth of insight into the evolutionary relationships between various creatures has upset enough applecarts that some scientists are proposing that a whole new way of describing the relatedness of species, an International Code of Phylogenetic Nomenclature, be added to the use of the Linnaean system (indeed, some very smart biologists are challenging the idea that classifying species, as we understand them, is the best way of understanding life, even reconsidering our current understanding of how evolution itself works).

But the third, and perhaps biggest, problem with using the Linnaean system to describe the world’s millions of unique plants and animals is that no one has ever seen most of those creatures. The number of species which have been described and classified by scientists represent some tiny fraction of the millions of species thought to exist. When it comes to biodiversity, we don’t know much.

One effort to address our ignorance may be the Encyclopedia of Life. The EoL is an emerging online reference and research tool, which aims to compile existing databases and efforts, mix their data with other content gathered from a variety of sources, and then have experts edit the resulting “mash up (their phrase) to produce and maintain the most comprehensive guide to all the species known to humanity.

It’s not quite open source science, as it brings in little in the way of either distributed collaboration or citizen science, but it still could represent a gargantuan leap forward in the way we keep track of what we know about life on earth.

It won’t, however, directly expand our knowledge. We’re still a long way from sequencing the planet: even the mere description of all the species on earth seems beyond our reach — the All Species Foundation, which aimed for “the complete inventory of all species of life on Earth within the next 25 years,” fizzled out with big ideas and small budgets. Nothing wrong with that, except that as far as I know no other similar efforts have gotten anywhere either.

But let’s assume that somehow we bring enough minds to bear on the study of biodiversity (and, for that matter, all the other research fields involved in sustainability science) to generate the raw data, basic research and fundamental insights to more or less describe the natural world: what, really, would we have accomplished?

Well, for one thing, if we worked quickly enough, we would have gathered information about the world before the catastrophe we’ve unleashed had fully hit. The world today is already a biologically impoverished world, compared to that of even 1,000 years ago, but by the end of the century it’s likely that we’ll have lost up to half the diversity of life. A decent snapshot of how the world was put together before that disaster might well be one of the greatest gifts we could leave our descendants.

It may be possible to use such snapshots, in combination with new work creating sensor arrays, to give us an unparalleled ability to understand, visualize and communicate relationships in the natural world.

Consider the James Reserve, which has deployed hundreds of sensing devices in an effort to create the most comprehensive understanding of the functioning of a particular ecosystem yet forged:

The James Reserve, some 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles on a mountain flank that is home to 1,500 species of plants and animals, including the yellow-legged frog and willow flycatcher, now bristles with enough monitoring gear to make it one of the world’s most advanced tests of ecologic networking. Wireless motes, cameras and other sensors track the nesting habits of birds, the life cycles of moss and the carbon dioxide uptake of various soils. Robots move along wires strung from tree to tree, lowering sensors to take temperature, humidity and light-level readings at different levels.

Even such a detailed understanding is still primitive, and too expensive and labor-intensive for widespread replication (if you use Google Earth you can check out some of their data mapped here. But there’s every reason to believe that the hardware will continue to get cheaper and more sophisticated, the expertise more widespread and the modeling of ecosystem functions more advanced. There is, indeed, every reason to believe that the workings of the natural world around us will be made plainer and plainer to see.

Which raises some interesting possibilities. For one thing, it brings up the idea of being able to perceive the ecosystems in which we live on multiple scales of time and space. Theoretically, we might soon be people who know the natural systems around us more intimately than even our most attuned hunter-gatherer ancestors… if we find it interesting enough to pay attention to.

One way of making things interesting is turning them into a game. That the management of a natural area might make for a good game is the premise of my old piece on the EcoSystem Game. A host of new tools and games — from open source astronomy programs that let you explore 3D models of the universe to the game Spore — is rolling out, promising to make knowing the planet, the universe and the sorts of processes which run it more fun.

But increased knowledge and better techniques for visualizing and exploring data attached to real world places and flows needn’t be limited to purely scientific relationships. Very quickly, I expect, we’ll be seeing digital tools overlap physical space to reveal the backstories of our lives in ways that are difficult to now imagine. Think of the sorts of tools that we’ve described variously as Way New Urbanism, Walkshed Technologies and Future-Making Techniques, applied not only to making our lives easier but to making the impacts of our actions more transparent.

These tools are only getting more powerful. If you’re interested in a bit of futurism about where they might be going, take a look at the new Metaverse Roadmap (PDF) [disclosure: our own Jamais Cascio was one of the study's authors].

The Roadmap, though not an easy read, is an intriguing exploration of the ways in which information technology, physical space and social interaction are overlapping and influencing each other. It explores four futures:

Virtual Worlds, in which online 3D worlds (think Second Life or World of Warcraft) increasingly become the focus of community and economic life, essentially supplanting the web as we know it, with its orientation on text and video.

Mirror Worlds, in which geospatial information is use to create models of the physical world, which then in turn inform our understanding of the world: think Google Earth on steroids.

Augmented Reality, in which intelligent objects (think RFIDs) and participatory panopticon tools like heads-up displays create a world alive with information, and in which information about our physical surroundings is accessible in a myriad of ways.

Lifelogging (an unfortunate coinage), in which the objects around us conspire to make records of our activities — from personal video recorders which are on for much of our lives to distributed monitoring of public spaces to car keys which wail plaintively when we get too far away from them.

Leaving aside the question of the validity of these scenarios, they do offer further insight into trends we’ve long looked at here, and, more importantly, suggest some of the ways in which tools like these may apply to sustainability.

1) Personal planets: one of the biggest sustainability challenges from a consumer/citizen point of view is getting an accurate read on the impacts of your choices. With new technologies, this might become dramatically easier: virtual environments might model our physical world lives, allowing us to play with the implications, say, of buying a new washing machine on our energy and water use; mirror world technologies could help us better navigate our lives in a more sustainable fashion, working in the form of walkshed technologies to substitute fine-grained local knowledge for lots of wasted drive-time; augmented reality tools might provide us with consumer-group ratings and other tools for practicing strategic consumption at the check-out stand, much as Japanese consumers are already using their mobile phones to find out more about products; while lifelogging technologies help us monitor indoor air, keep track of our energy usage and even make zero waste recycling systems more practical.

2) Bright green products: at the most crass level, these technologies will help companies design better products and processes, waste less, operate more efficiently and so on. But the real bang for the buck, I suspect, lies not in doing things better. It lies in doing different things: in substituting virtual storefronts for trips to the mall (think Netflix); in creating relationships with consumers where ongoing service contracts are substituted for the sale of goods (think product-service systems like car-sharing or carpet leasing) and where producer responsibility leads to design for disassembly and neobiological, closed loop manufacturing systems.

3) Networked activism: I suspect we will increasingly see activists using these sorts of tools to make visible the invisible flows and relationships which make up so much of the unsavory side of our personal backstories. Expect an explosion of activists using cheap videophones, hacked RFID tags and satellite maps to track supply chains back to unacceptable sources (think blood diamonds), reveal inhumane working conditions (think Witness) or capture environmental crimes as they unfold. Expect others to use these technologies to maintain free speech under repressive conditions. Expect others still to use the kind of data streams (and data visualization abilities) these technologies offer to mine public information and create new and more powerful versions of projects like FarmSubsidy.org. In short, expect a flood of information about the backstories of all sorts of objects, services, practices and programs, made increasingly more accessible and compelling for us, and forcing us to confront the unpleasant realities behind much of the surface of our lives.

4) Transparent organizations: Because most people want to live lives of guilt-free affluence — want to be able to live well without worrying that they are drowning polar bears or participating in the enslavement of child laborers, however indirectly — networked activism is going to blow a big hole in the standard operating procedures of many organizations. Up until now, it’s been good enough to simply not do obviously bad things (or, a cynic might say, at least not to get caught doing them); increasingly, however, it’s going to be necessary to demonstrate that what your organization is doing is good. Smart companies will increasingly be using these sorts of technologies to demonstrate transparency: even smarter ones will be figuring out how to use these technologies to tell compelling stories about the virtuous nature of the things they make and do. Think remote tours of factories, tagging of products to specific workers who make them, virtual supply chain flyovers (showing sustainability improvements), corporate sustainability reports turned into videogames.

In a million ways, we are going to be able to increasingly connect our growing knowledge of the natural world and sustainable practices to the direct stories (and backstories) of our lives.

It’ll be a strange world, but probably, in many ways not all that different from our own, just as in some profound ways, our own natures are not all that different from those of the people who built this church. In some things, there is a deep continuity. Perhaps that’s the proper note on which to end this letter then, wondering if, as a counterpoise to the rapidly changing, we might need as well to think more about the long-standing and deeply ingrained, about that part of ourselves that, as James wrote, “is a gift and not an acquisition,” and about how to serve that more fully in the world we are building. For ultimately, no matter how clever our tools, we won’t get far if they are merely faster ways of going nowhere.

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Letter from Visby: Linnaeus, the Encyclopedia of Life and the Metaverse is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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