One of my proudest moments as an environmentalist came when the Santa Monica Main Public Library answered my plea to install more bike racks. The racks were hard won: I photo-documented then blogged about the over-crowded racks at the LEED-certified building, wrote to the Library board members, then got fellow resident bicyclers to do the same. It all took a while, but in the end we got new racks and were able to park our bikes with ease — until gas prices shot up and the bicycling population doubled, filling up the new bike racks…

No, one bike rack won’t save the world. Some of you may in fact smirk at my celebration of this puny success. Even in California alone, we’ve got way bigger environmental problems: Water’s running out, wildfires keep flaring up, and pinot noir prices are about to go through the roof! Isn’t it time to stop merrily two-wheeling down the beach bike path and start grimly lobbying for the best cap-and-trade program?

         

One of the most important ways to work for a better future is to improve communications between and among people. With all the instant media available today, we could foresee a future in which we can reach out to anyone, any time, anywhere. But can people really communicate with other people appropriately anymore? I’m not so sure. I don’t know if this will eventually be a good or bad thing, or maybe the day will come when it won’t be important. What is important now, however, is that we are heading into a communications warp.

People are moving away from civic centers in which they lived with other people who held different views, and they are moving into neighborhoods where just about everyone has the same point of view as them on just about everything. So the lines drawn between political and religious beliefs seem to be thicker and darker, with less cordial conversation between belief groups. Newspaper readership has been declining, and people get most of their news on TV, or, if we consider the younger populations, from the Internet. So we don’t go deep, except in what interests us, and we don’t go broad, because we filter out what doesn’t interest us. Great. We only know what we want to know, and we’re not interested in what the other guy thinks.

         

Little things can have a surprising impact.

Take global warming. Increasingly, we’re being asked to think about our “carbon footprint,” the amount of greenhouse gas produced to do the things we do: emissions from our cars, emissions from the power plants used to generate electricity for our homes, emissions from our air travel, and so on. These kinds of activities all have the benefit of looking dirty, so it’s very easy to imagine that there’s a bunch of carbon dioxide coming out along with the soot and smoke from engines and furnaces. But the big, obvious sources of greenhouse gases aren’t the only ones out there; in fact, nearly everything we do has a carbon footprint. Take, for example, the humble cheeseburger.

If you’re like me, you occasionally wonder what the bigger story is behind everyday activities and products. A couple of years ago, I wondered aloud (in my blog, Open the Future) what the carbon footprint of the more prosaic parts of our lives might be — and I used, as an example, a cheeseburger. Now, I’m no enemy of the cheeseburger; I picked the cheeseburger as my example because I like them, and I wanted to know its impact. We’re not yet at the point where it’s easy to go Google up the carbon footprint of whatever you want, and nobody else had investigated the impact of something like a burger. I knew what my task would be.

         

In Grover Beach, California, nineteen-year-old Cameron Clapp trains for his next track meet — on battery-powered, robotic metal legs. Meanwhile, in Framingham, Mass. a pharmaceutical company is splicing human genes into cow and goat embryos, enabling the animals to produce milk that contains a therapeutic protein that’s used to treat deep-vein thrombosis.

This may sound like science fiction, but it is not. Biotechnology is surging forward at an unprecedented pace. In the future, parents will be able to ensure that their children are born with high IQs and more appealing physical traits.

But these discoveries are not without their baggage. Imagine, for instance, competing for jobs against genetically altered super-geniuses. Or, imagine trying to get a promotion when your boss, and his boss, and his boss will all live to be 120. For those who can afford biological enhancement technology, difficult tasks will become simple. But for those who can’t afford it, competition will be impossible, and they’ll find themselves in a genetic under-caste.

         

On the first day of February 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson had a phone conversation with Senator Eugene McCarthy in which he hoped to tone down McCarthy’s criticism of America’s escalating military involvement in Vietnam. Johnson, clearly frustrated by the deepening political quicksand of Southeast Asia, said with exasperation, “I know we oughtn’t to be there, but I can’t get out. I just can’t be the architect of surrender.”

At the time of Johnson’s confession, more than 90 percent of the 58,178 American troops who would ultimately die in Vietnam were still alive. Many would be killed in the ensuing three years. Most were younger than twenty. It took another nine years and two presidents before the United States extracted itself from Vietnam. By the time the last American grunts left Saigon at the end of April 1975, Johnson was two years dead.

We continue down ragged and wrong paths, whether they’re in flawed international relations or in public-education policy, because we are, for better or worse, creatures of habit and creatures of fear. We don’t want to rock the boat if there’s a chance the turbulence might send us overboard. We do things in our classroom or our school or our district because that’s the way they’ve been done before. We know they’re not perfect — some are even ludicrous or dead wrong — but we feel we can’t get out.

         

Well, hello there! Smile. Good timing.

Yes, I have had lots of thoughts out here, most fantastical with occasional but incomplete reality testing.

There is a great deal of buzz these days over things combining, converging and emerging, and the implications, in science and technology. Networks of networks, complex adaptive systems of complex adaptive systems, scales, speeds, compositions and reach unimaginable, relentless descriptive processions analogous to meme-etic black holes and supernovas. An unending, though at times incomprehensible, cornucopia upon which to feast. If only it was available, and usable, to everyone. On the other hand, the deepest secrets of the universe, and even invisibility cloaks, have little chance of perceptual primacy if water, food and shelter are unavailable.

Fantastical thoughts aside, there is a need, unfortunately, even greater than the cognate to the never ending apocalyptic trinity of diseases, disaster and dislocations. The Humanitarian Technology Review and Humanitarian Technology Challenge are fantastic beginnings. Is it time for a Humanitarian Science and Technology entity (i.e., Foundation, Society), a network of networks focused with a Sci-Fi imagination and creativity, an ARPA-esque vision and urgency, a Burning Man self-reliance and self-expression as community, but with impact closer to Earth and on the least fortunate. Extraordinary potential patrons and participants abound. I wonder…

         

I think saving the world is important, but so far the world — at least as represented by the wealthy and the powerful in the less wealthy countries — seems to show no need to be saved. The wealthy keep throwing energy away, under pricing it, subsidizing it, proposing to fix the climate in a few decades. The middle class is groveling for more individual mobility — cars and, in Asia, two-wheelers — even though each additional “mobile” person is slowing everyone else down and most Asian and Latin American cities’ transport systems have collapsed. The price of road fuels today in industrialized nations is still slightly below its peak of the 1980-82 period, and because cars use 10-25% fuel/kilometer, the fuel cost of moving them is well below where it was during those dark years. Biofuels, while not the major reason for high fuel prices, are sending us a signal that they don’t work in the huge quantities needed to make a real dent on fossil fuel and oil use.

What are we doing to save ourselves? Clamoring for schemes to lower taxes, compensate people, punish the oil companies or the environmentalists, etc. In other words, we are trying to punish the messenger rather than reading and understanding the message.

         

How you can save the world, or more precisely, what I can do to save the world, has driven me full time for the past 7 years. As a former astronaut, sometime scientist, and dogged good public policy pusher, I’ve focused my efforts on preventing the largest natural hazard that we know of: asteroid impacts with Earth. One wiped out the dinosaurs (the polar bears of cosmic extinction) and may well, if we cannot ultimately get our act together, wipe us out one day.

The fascinating thing about asteroid impacts, the largest of natural hazards (albeit a cosmic one), is that we can actually prevent them. With current space technology we can slightly modify the solar system to help insure the survival of life on the planet. We can subtly modify the orbit of a threatening asteroid and thereby prevent it, and ultimately its millions of companions, from ever destroying life on Earth again. Will we? Or will we not? Are we? Or are we not still dinosaurs? Interestingly, technology and cost are not the issue. The answer will lie in whether or not we value ourselves as a species over ourselves as a collection of nations.

         

“Think globally, act locally” is a well-known approach to enabling change in the deep structure of our society. Perhaps the ultimate local action is what food we choose to place into our bodies. While deciding on a personal diet may seem very specific, in the aggregate, there are profound global consequences arising from such personal decisions. In particular, for our world to be capable of sustaining our civilization, humanity must live in balance with the resources available from our planet.

Food, water, and energy are fundamental resources that require our wise use for sustainable production practices. However, there are vast differences in how different types of food production draw upon these resources. Meat production is particularly profound: regularly eating meat results in an extremely high and unsustainable resource drain. In contrast, a vegetarian diet is far more sustainable on a global scale. Want to save the world? Become a vegetarian! There are many reasons to change your diet - including increasing the availability of freshwater, sustainable land use, clean air, and more optimal use of energy.

         

The grand myth of environmentalism is that it’s all about saving the Earth.

It’s not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves.

That may seem a bit counter-intuitive; after all, the Earth is certainly central to the rhetoric, the memetic of environmentalism. Most environmental discussions focus on ecological dynamics, with references to human beings typically limited to enumerations of the various insults we’ve visited upon the planet. Given the degree of culpability we bear for the current state of the planet, this is entirely appropriate.

But the rhetorical focus of environmentalism on the planet obscures the fact that what human beings have done to the Earth pales in comparison to past disasters hitting our world, from massive asteroid strikes to super-volcano eruptions killing off 90+% of the Earth’s species. And in every case, the Earth has recovered, and life has once again flourished.