From the Utne Reader, with global oil demand outpacing reserves, maybe it is time to find new ways to get around. 

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 Life After Oil

Jeremiah Creedon

Long after the oil age has burned itself out, the future will assign a date to when the flame first wavered. It might have been 30 years ago when the world´s great energy consumer, the United States, started using more oil than it produced. Or it might be tomorrow, if we end up drilling in Alaska´s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for what amounts to six months´ worth of fuel. In any case, the crucial point will not be when the end begins, but how long after that we´ll go on denying it. This lag will determine how well our country and the world move beyond the oil age; the longer we hesitate, the more brutal it will be.

We actually have a pretty good idea of when even car-loving Americans will have to face the truth. Certain energy experts have seen the moment coming for decades. They´re waiting for what a recent report from the U.S. Geological Survey calls the Big Rollover–the point when the world starts needing more oil than it supplies. These forecasts began with a guy named M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist who in 1956 correctly predicted the initial American rollover in 1970. In 1974 he estimated that the global peak would occur in 1995–not a bad guess. Current forecasts range from 2003 to 2020.

In other words, we won´t have to run completely out of oil to be rudely awakened. The panic starts once the world needs more oil than it gets.

To understand why, you´ve got to fathom how totally addicted to oil we´ve become. We know that petroleum is drawn from deep wells and distilled into gasoline, jet fuel, and countless other products that form the lifeblood of industry and the adrenaline of military might. It´s less well known that the world´s food is now nourished by oil; petroleum and natural gas are crucial at every step of modern agriculture, from making fertilizer to shipping crops. The implications are grim. For millions, the difference between an energy famine and a biblical famine could well be academic.

With a global oil crisis looming like the Doomsday Rock, why do so few political leaders seem to care? As independent policy analyst David Fleming writes in the British magazine Prospect (Nov. 2000), many experts refuse to take the problem seriously because it “falls outside the mind-set of market economics.” Thanks to the triumph of global capitalism, the free-market model now reigns almost everywhere. The trouble is, its principles “tend to break down when applied to natural resources like oil.” The result is both potentially catastrophic and all too human. Our high priests–the market economists–are blind to a reality that in their cosmology cannot exist.

Fleming offers several examples of this broken logic at work. Many cling to a belief that higher oil prices will spur more oil discoveries, but they ignore what earth scientists have been saying for years: There aren´t more big discoveries to make. Most of the oil reserves we tap today were actually identified by the mid-1960s. There´s a lot of oil left in the ground–perhaps more than half of the total recoverable supply. Fleming says that´s not the issue. The real concern is the point beyond which demand cannot be met. And with demand destined to grow by as much as 3 percent a year, the missing barrels will add up quickly. Once the pain becomes real, the Darwinian impulse kicks in and the orderly market gives way to chaos.

“The United States will fight hard and dirty,” Fleming warns, because we´ll have the money to feed our addiction. Other countries won´t. “The United States will export oil scarcity to the rest of the world,” adds Fleming, and he´s blunt about what happens after that: “There will be economic destabilization.”

Some insist that industrial societies are growing less dependent on oil. Fleming says they´re kidding themselves. They´re talking about oil use as a percentage of total energy use, not the actual amount of oil burned. Measured by the barrel, we´re burning more and more. In Britain, for instance, transportation needs have doubled in volume since 1973 and still rely almost entirely on oil. Transportation is the weak link in any modern economy; choke off the oil and a country quickly seizes.

This wouldn´t matter much, Fleming laments, “if the world had spent the last 25 years urgently preparing alternative energies, conservation technologies, and patterns of land use with a much lower dependence on transport.” (He figures 25 years to be the time it will take a country like Britain to break its habit.) Instead, “the long-expected shock finds us unprepared.”

Insuring food is a major concern, he says. We need to localize food production and return to using more human labor. Solar and wind power must be developed. Fuel must be rationed, on both a domestic and an international scale. We must resist the rising cry for more nuclear power, he says; it´s too pricey, and radioactive waste gets even more dangerous in times of political disarray. Fleming believes that burning more coal may be the “lesser evil.” Despite coal´s negative impact on the climate, we´ll have to burn something while we´re working on alternatives.

In any case, nothing will happen until political leaders and other social engineers accept the problem and get the public involved in solving it.

There are dissenting views. Some argue that the world´s immediate problem is too much oil. They believe that low oil prices over the next 20 years could trigger turmoil in Central Asia, the Middle East, and other oil-rich hot spots. On a different front, the astronomer Thomas Gold and others question whether we really know what oil is. The usual rap is that oil began as tiny dead plants and animals filtering down through ancient seas. These stagnant beds were then buried under sediments and pressure-cooked into the tarry goo that runs our world. But according to Gold, oil may actually be an inorganic substance created deep in the earth´s molten innards–not a fossil fuel at all. And depleted fields might just fill again as more oil oozes upward.

Sounds hopeful, until you factor in global warming. The only thing worse than running out of oil might be not running out of oil.

The carbon dioxide we create by burning oil continues to heat the planet, yet the economy and the environment are still usually discussed as separate issues. Again, this reveals the need for better models than the ones social engineers now rely on. We also need a better worldview than the militant market optimism that so often underlies them. Without such a shift, the tension between reality and ideology could resolve itself in tragic ways. Fleming implies that our governments should take the lead, which is probably true, but can we wait?

There are several respected estimates as to when the Big Rollover will occur. They all fall within the next 20 years. If you average them out, it doesn´t take much voodoo to end up on 2012. The winter solstice that year is said to mark the end of a 5,125-year cycle in the Mayan calendar. Decades ago, the late thinker Terence McKenna landed on the same date when he plotted out his “Time Wave Zero” theory. He did so before he knew of its significance among the Mayans, he claimed, though he was just enough of a showman to make you wonder.

McKenna predicted modern society would descend at that moment into a “soft dark age,” followed a few years later by a major mind shift that will lift us out of the dead-end thinking that shaped the angry, smoggy, smoldering 20th century. Some modern Mayans have interpreted it as a moment of cultural rebirth, stressing its positive aspects. Whatever led their star-gazing ancestors to pick that date, it is a good reminder that cultural patterns do change, and that other peoples have tried hard to anticipate why and when.

We should do the same–if for no other reason than to keep from being caught in traffic when it happens.

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Originally posted at the Utne Reader

Thirty-two years ago yesterday on April 22, 1970, twenty million Americans came together to celebrate the first Earth Day.

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All About Earth Day

Senator Gaylord Nelson 

What was the purpose of Earth Day? How did it start? These are the questions I am most frequently asked.

Actually, the idea for Earth Day evolved over a period of seven years starting in 1962. For several years, it had been troubling me that the state of our environment was simply a non-issue in the politics of the country. Finally, in November 1962, an idea occurred to me that was, I thought, a virtual cinch to put the environment into the political “limelight” once and for all. The idea was to persuade President Kennedy to give visibility to this issue by going on a national conservation tour. I flew to Washington to discuss the proposal with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who liked the idea. So did the President. The President began his five-day, eleven-state conservation tour in September 1963. For many reasons the tour did not succeed in putting the issue onto the national political agenda. However, it was the germ of the idea that ultimately flowered into Earth Day.

I continued to speak on environmental issues to a variety of audiences in some twenty-five states. All across the country, evidence of environmental degradation was appearing everywhere, and everyone noticed except the political establishment. The environmental issue simply was not to be found on the nation’s political agenda. The people were concerned, but the politicians were not.

After President Kennedy’s tour, I still hoped for some idea that would thrust the environment into the political mainstream. Six years would pass before the idea that became Earth Day occurred to me while on a conservation speaking tour out West in the summer of 1969. At the time, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, called “teach-ins,” had spread to college campuses all across the nation. Suddenly, the idea occurred to me – why not organize a huge grassroots protest over what was happening to our environment?

I was satisfied that if we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force this issue onto the political agenda. It was a big gamble, but worth a try.

At a conference in Seattle in September 1969, I announced that in the spring of 1970 there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment and invited everyone to participate. The wire services carried the story from coast to coast. The response was electric. It took off like gangbusters. Telegrams, letters, and telephone inquiries poured in from all across the country. The American people finally had a forum to express its concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes, and air – and they did so with spectacular exuberance. For the next four months, two members of my Senate staff, Linda Billings and John Heritage, managed Earth Day affairs out of my Senate office.

Five months before Earth Day, on Sunday, November 30, 1969, The New York Times carried a lengthy article by Gladwin Hill reporting on the astonishing proliferation of environmental events:

“Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation’s campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in VietnamÖa national day of observance of environmental problemsÖis being planned for next springÖwhen a nationwide environmental ‘teach-in’Öcoordinated from the office of Senator Gaylord Nelson is plannedÖ.”

It was obvious that we were headed for a spectacular success on Earth Day. It was also obvious that grassroots activities had ballooned beyond the capacity of my U.S. Senate office staff to keep up with the telephone calls, paper work, inquiries, etc. In mid-January, three months before Earth Day, John Gardner, Founder of Common Cause, provided temporary space for a Washington, D.C. headquarters. I staffed the office with college students and selected Denis Hayes as coordinator of activities.

Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.

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Originally posted at The Wilderness Society

Those readers sensitive to our human predicament might wonder how could the “knowing” of humanity survive a major crash of civilization. I came across this article at KurzweilAI.net.

In such a crash, much of the information of the past–as well as the present–is endangered and could be lost forever. Stewart Brand explores some ideas such as underground rock vaults, “time mail,” and a museum built around a 10,000 year clock as possibilities for assuring that vital information survives.

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Avoiding a Dark Age

Stewart Brand

Taking ten thousand years of future seriously is an interesting undertaking. For instance, what on Earth would something aspiring to be a 10,000-Year Library be good for? One answer might be that it would provide, and even embody, the long view of things, where responsibility is said to reside. Another would be that such a library could conserve the information that is needed from time to time for the deep renewals of renaissance. These are traditional library justifications. The added element is that ten thousand years is an extremely long view, a period in which there are likely to be profound cataclysms requiring many-leveled renewal. Building real value into a 10,000-Year Library could be an intellectual adventure as challenging as space travel.

One very contemporary reason is to make the world safe for rapid change. A conspicuously durable Library gives assurance: Fear not. Everything that might need to be remembered is being collected and stashed, easily accessible but out of your way. Innovate as intensely as you want. If we head down a blind alley, or get lost, we can pick up the prior path. And we’re always free to mine the past for good ideas. The U.S. Library of Congress is referred to as a “strategic information reserve” by its current head, James Billington. In an increasingly knowledge-oriented world economy that’s valid. Beyond these reasons, another glimmers; I’ll come back to it.

Thus far The Long Now Foundation’s 10,000-Year Library has been an occasion for brainstorming. I’ll float here some of the ideas that have turned up in the early pondering, looking first at long-view issues and then at deep record keeping. You’re invited to add to these ideas, or even better, forge ahead and implement any that appeal to you via the Net, some existing library, or whatever else is handy. A cultural Darwinian once declared, “What has been done, thought, written, or spoken is not culture; culture is only that fraction that is remembered.” Such formal remembering used to be the province strictly of elites. No longer.

In terms of stepping bodily into the long view the 10,000-Year Library should be a physical place. Fantasy immediately calls up a refuge from the present, a place of weathered stone walls and labyrinthine stacks of books, at a remote location with far horizons. It is a place for contemplative research and small, immersive conferences on topics of centenary and millennial scope. In a timeless reading room it would be wonderful to have a collection in which every volume you lay your hand on, on any subject, is superb–selected by committees of specializts of great probity and judgment. You should be able to easily buy or have personally printed a copy of any book that wins your interest.

The fantasy continues: What might be the best time-spanning, future-engaging categories to collect? History, obviously, and historiography: the history of the idea of history. Archeology and paleontology, for the long human perspective. Environmental books, for their reach into the future. Science fiction, for the same reason, organized by date rather than author, so the browser could scan the progress of the zeitgeist about the future. (The world’s best in science fiction is the Eaton Collection of some four hundred thousand volumes at the University of California Riverside Library.) Likewise, nonfiction books about the future. Science and technology books, because their subject has become a major driver of history and is likely to remain so. Demographic and epidemiological texts, for trend analysis. And sundry Long Now special interests: texts on libraries, clocks, and durable institutions. A library such as this, in token form, produced the book you are now reading.

Another image of the 10,000-Year Library is of a vast underground complex hewn out of rock–preferably a mountain, so some of the tunnels have a view. There the Library might be somewhat safe from increasing surface land values, earthquakes, erosion, cosmic rays (harmful to digital media), and the random destruction of warfare. An underground Library offers great mythic potential as well. Such places usually are secret (government) or dangerous (mines, caves), but they have no reason to be either. They can be extremely delightful–for example, the old underground limestone quarry at Les Baux, France, now a tourist attraction. In recent years underground excavation and construction have become as cheap as surface construction.

Escape from the present is also escape from relevance. The emergence of the Net is so much the dominant event of our time that an ambitious new library has no choice but to either try to get out in front of it or utterly turn away from it. I think Long Now’s Library should do both: ride the shock wave front and its bounce. It is said that the structure of archives always mirrors the structure of power. With the Net this formula is reversed; power is now defined by the grassroots-driven Net structure of archives. Citizens can decide to cross-correlate databases of atrocity victims and military service records to track down specific government-sanctioned torturers and assassins, as Patrick Ball has done with archives in Salvador, Guatemala, and South Africa, working from his base in Washington, D.C. Citizens soon will be able to directly access government records, such as the five billion documents stored with the U.S. National Archives. Via the Net, citizens now correlate the voting records of senators and members of Congress with the sources of their campaign funding, and publicize what they find.

The structure of power used to be the structure of successful lying. In a hierarchy you can lie and make it stick, because higher authority will back up the lie and punish whistle-blowers. Lying is far more flagrant on the Net, but no one can make it stick, because anyone can challenge the lie directly and make their case with multiple links to corroborating sources. One such man, Ken McVay, undermined all the online Holocaust-denying discussion groups in this fashion, connecting them to a linked distributed archive of documentation proving that the Holocaust indeed took place.

Metcalfe’s Law of exponential growth of the Net is proving to be even more significant than Moore’s Law of exponential growth of microchip capability. The chip is an individual’s tool; the Net is society’s tool. It may even become its own tool. As the science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge has suggested, the Net is supplied with so much computer power and is gaining so much massively parallel amplification of that power by its burgeoning connectivity that it might one day “wake up.” Brewster Kahle, of the Internet Archive, asks, “What happens when the library of human knowledge can process what it knows and provide advice?”

At the same time Long Now is contemplating a timeless desert retreat it has to explore how it can foster on the Net the types of services monasteries provided to deurbanized Europe after the fall of Rome and that universities provided to cities after the twelfth century. Every potential service of the Library therefore should be examined in terms of how it might develop at Net velocity and how it might be something timelessly physical–and how both forms might enhance one another.

For instance, as a way for people to take the future personally, Doug Carlston has suggested that the Library provide mail service through time. According to futurist Richard Slaughter, “It is an unusually moving thing to initiate a message which will not be read until long after one’s death. It concentrates the mind effectively. In such a message, one speaks from the heart, is keenly aware of passing time and is also deeply aware of the implicit presence of future people.”

Time mail could be started on the Net, but it would be more impressive as a physical experience. At a Clock site you could peruse other people’s messages to the future (those that they have okayed for public reading), ponder what you want to say, to when, and perhaps to whom. Then have your message inscribed on titanium (or whatever), pay postage proportionate to the time you want to span, deposit your message in the appropriate mail slot, and watch it slide into the appropriate time capsule.

Time capsules, by the way, are a splendid and common future-oriented practice–hundreds of thousands have been buried–yet some 70 percent are completely lost track of almost immediately. The Library might offer a registry service for time capsules, remembering when they are supposed to be opened and providing maps to people currently at the site. According to Kevin Kelly, who studies time capsules, the most effective are opened periodically, enjoyed, then sealed again with new artifacts added each time.

The most impressive time capsule project I know of is headquartered in Tokyo. The Biological and Environmental Specimen Time Capsule 2001 team hopes to bury a number of large ceramic capsules sixty-five feet deep in Antarctic ice, where the temperature is -60∞ C. In the capsules would be “seeds, spores, human and other reproductive cells, human mother’s milk, DNA, rainwater, sea water, air, and soil” kept perfectly intact for analysis by scientists in centuries to come. Once the Antarctic cache is established, the team would like to place capsules on the Moon, where the temperature is -230∞ C. and there is neither air nor moisture to foster rot.

(Come to think of it, if human beings do become a spacefaring species, Earth’s Moon might be an ideal eventual location for the 10,000-Year Library. Over that time frame humanity’s main story would be of global convergence followed by a massive diaspora into space. The diaspora’s point of origin would be a prime candidate for record keeping, and the Moon offers a stable, durable site, easily accessible from space, with a good view of grandmother Earth.)

Even in the short term the Library could provide a number of time-release services. Secrets that are meant to be kept for a certain time, or until certain people have died, could be held physically or crytographically sequestered until their time is ripe. Property deeds, contracts, wills, directions to caches could be securely stashed with appropriate wake-up directions built in. Danny Hillis points out that “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence programs need this. By the time any sort of extra-terrestrial life is likely to answer, we will have forgotten what we asked.”

The Library could offer personalized I-Told-You-So! services. Register your prediction, your hunch, your wild scheme, your strong argument about the future course of events, set the wake-up date, pay the fee, and relax, knowing that history will be given irrefutable notice of how right you were. A sufficient mass of such material over time could give researchers data for insight into the nature of future telling and its progress, if any, over time.

The same dynamic is behind the idea of a Responsibility Record. Suppose we wanted to improve the quality of decisions that have long-term consequences. What would make decision makers feel accountable to posterity as well as to their present constituents? What would shift the terms of debate from the immediate consequences to the delayed consequences, where the real impact is? It might help to have the debate put on the record in a way that invites serious review.

One side of such a debate could file (for a fee) its arguments, facts, media reports, major players, and predictions with the Library’s Responsibility Record, along with desired times in the future for the record to “wake up” for review. The Library would then of course contact the opposition to see if they would like to do the same. The record is public; each side could attach corrections and rebuttals to the other side’s file.

Years later, at the wake-up times, those living with the consequences of the decision will be able to see what both sides registered, will compare the two versions with what actually happened in the world, will assign blame and credit accordingly, and will by the way notice whether the terms of the original debate had anything whatever to do with what actually happened. This is where the real payoff lies. By harnessing the power of contention, the Library can accumulate detailed records of countless sequences of debate-decision-consequence, on a growing range of subjects, spanning ever-longer periods of time.

A well-managed Responsibility Record would be both trove and warning. The warning is to policy makers and issue debaters that they will be held accountable by posterity. The trove is for delvers in lessons to ponder and explore ever-better terms of debate for issues with long-term consequences, and to frame current debates in the context of relevant past debates. We can stop reinventing the square wheel.

The Responsibility Record fosters slow, direct-feedback loops in policy. This is a new and perhaps crucial service, because up to now civilization’s feedback loops have been either direct but quick (win the election), or slow but indirect (suffer a gradually degraded environment). The urgent always had a louder, clearer voice than the background rumble of the important. The Responsibility Record doesn’t try to change the voices; all it does is retune our hearing.

Another long-view service has been suggested by Esther Dyson. Every so often the public is gripped by a great mystery. Who kidnapped the Lindbergh baby? Who was behind the killing of President Kennedy? Did Dr. Sam Sheppard murder his wife? Who was the Unabomber? Time has solved two of these. Math instructor Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber; and the convicted Dr. Sheppard was innocent back in 01954.* DNA analysis forty-four years later proved that a window washer, Richard Eberling, not only killed Mrs. Sheppard but raped her first (something never mentioned in the celebrated trial). The Long Now Library could preserve rich archives of such mysteries so that they can be relived in light of what eventually is discovered. As new mysteries emerge, people can expect the Library to stay on the case. They will be able to experience their contemporary mysteries simultaneously in the present and in terms of how they might look in the future, when they have been solved. The ability to live both in the present and in a handful of imagined but uncertain futures is the basic skill of foresight, planning, and responsibility. It is worth encouraging.

Just as new information can be applied to old situations, uninvited but important old information might be applied to new situations. A few centuries from now the Library might send a message: To the government of the region formerly known as New Mexico. Upon periodic review of the long-term hazards file for your area, it has been determined that a very large–an extremely large–quantity of radioactive waste was buried in salt structures a short distance east of what used to be called Carlsbad Caverns. In the event that this comes as news to you, we can furnish the exact location of this hazard, which is expected to be potentially harmful for another nine thousand years. Your next notification will be delivered three hundred years from now.

Better still might be messages in time bottles. Hide forest-losing statistics and reforestry advice inside virgin forests. Bury information on global warming inside glaciers. Seed uncleared minefields with data on who exactly planted the mines.

The Library should specialize in trends too slow to notice but that gradually dominate everything as they accumulate: these are the genuine megatrends in economics, demographics, and environmental data. Our civilization is skilled at focusing on content, Esther Dyson points out, but we have not developed good peripheral vision for gradual shifts in context. The Library should take an active role in supporting extremely long-term scientific studies (the subject of an upcoming chapter).

One of the best ideas I have heard for a library of the future is not a library at all, but a museum. Let Richard Benson, dean of the Yale School of Art, make the case:

Embed the Clock, as a centerpiece, in a new museum of the history of technology. If technology is to be the future of the living world, then we have to admit that it is at its starting block. We are at the Cambrian explosion of technology, and we are at the perfect point in time to gather the fossils as they are being made and discarded. The point at which technology really took off is with the invention of the heat engine, and the bits and pieces of this brief period are still around to be preserved. Engines, locomotives, cars, planes and all the pieces of the great transportation revolution are also still around. The brand new electronic revolution is taking place in our midst, and we could easily gather up the detritus of this great step’s beginning. There are unthinkable things ready to happen, and they will occur at a dizzying pace; we could build an institution around the recording of these changes. The very nature of the institution could be to persist over time so the record is made as complete as possible. We also are living in a fat time, with great wealth and stability, and it would seem reasonable that those making fortunes with technology would be interested in preserving a record of their achievements. Without institutional and financial long-term support, the Clock will disappear as quickly as the small group who are trying to make it. Such a museum could, if necessary, be not just a collection of curiosities but a template for renewal. When civilizations truly crash, no one at the time can imagine the depth of the fall, nor how labored and long the revival, if it ever happens. After Rome fell, “Europe went unwashed for a thousand years.” Cities emptied; literacy vanished. All the Roman achievements of engineering, culture, and government simply ceased to be. Population in some areas dropped by nine-tenths. Even with the heroic continuity of the Catholic Church, the skein of culture was reduced to fragile wisps: Only one copy of Lucretius made it through the Dark Ages, only one copy of five books of Livy, one copy of nine plays of Euripides, one copy of Tacitus, one copy of Beowulf.

Of the fifteen to twenty thousand distinct languages once spoken two-thirds are extinct, and the pace of loss is increasing. “The death of a language,” writes George Steiner, “be it whispered by the merest handful on some parcel of condemned ground, is the death of a world.”

Civilization now is global. It is ever more tightly linked and ever more leveraged out over the abyss on an elaborate superstructure of highly sophisticated technology, every part of which depends on the success of every other part. All this may make it more robust against catastrophe, or more frail, we don’t know yet. What we do know is that a global collapse cannot count on some other civilization coming to the rescue, since by then there will be no other. It is strange to contemplate, except in light of thousands of years and the demise of twenty-some previous civilizations.

Perhaps the 10,000-Year Library should be thought of as an insurance provider. It offers detailed risk assessment of the chances civilization is taking (which might be enlightening in its own right) and promises resources for recovery if, God forbid (as insurance agents say), the worst should happen.

The scientist James Lovelock, best known for his Gaia theory of life-mediated regulation of the atmosphere, has proposed compiling a start-up manual for civilization, beginning with how to make fire, moving on through all of science and technology, from subjects such as ancient genetic design (domesticating plants and animals by selective breeding) to current genetic design (cloning). “Who would guard such a book?” Lovelock asks. “A book of science written with authority and as splendid a read as Tyndale’s Bible might need no guardians. It would earn the respect needed to ensure it a place in every home, school, library, and place of worship. It would then be on hand whatever happened.”

Lovelock worries about science skills being lost because they have become so widely scattered into countless narrow specialties. His civilization primer would be the great cross-disciplinary reference work. Doug Carlston lists other categories of endangered information: “information that was important to many but held by few, old information (Dead Sea Scrolls), restricted information (Stasi files), information of importance over long periods of time (gene structures, seismic records, weather, seeds!), information held largely in highly degradable form (‘Technicolor movies).”

What do historians want preserved? I asked William McNeill, author of The Rise of the West and Plagues and Peoples, about the kinds of things his fellow historians wish had been saved from the past. Well, he said, there was the census of the entire Roman Empire, which the parents of Jesus were avoiding. Caesar delivered the document to the Roman Senate, and that’s all we know of its priceless contents. Then, there are delicate points in history, like when Alexander the Great failed in India and headed back. Some historians think that he was planning to conquer North Africa, which would have made the Mediterranean an Alexandrian lake and changed history. Some personal diaries of his generals would be helpful to have.

The problem everyone has is that you never know what will be treasured later. When we look at old magazines, the ads are far more fascinating and informative than the articles. The U.S. Weather Service receives considerable income from selling old weather reports. To whom? To lawyers, who want to know if it was raining on the night in question. The BBC, on a housecleaning binge a few years back, tossed out some of its video archives considered trivial and has been gnashing its teeth over that cultural loss ever since.

The largest and heaviest book in the world is inscribed on 14,300 large stone tablets concealed in caves near the Yunju monastery in Beijing Province, China. In a time of book burnings, 00605 C.E., a monk set about preserving the Buddhist scriptures on stone. The work continued for a thousand years, and then the entire trove was hidden in 01644 C.E. The hoard is indeed valuable for studying the history of Buddhist thought, but probably we would value the stones more if the monks had simply recorded the weather and what they were eating. Better still would have been a reverently preserved sequential archive of dried monk poop, which would yield no end of data on diet, agriculture, climate, health, and racial and family lineage. You never know what people will want preserved.

One of the great instruments of civilization is the idea of the canon: the select set of items deemed to represent the best of a genre and the main line of progress and transmission from generation to generation in that genre. A primary function of universities is the care and feeding of various canons–mainly literature, the arts, science, and the named academic disciplines. Other canons are strangely untended, such as technology, agriculture, business, and such nonacademic pursuits as gardening, furniture design, currencies, and pets.

One canon I would like to see established is that of the great textbooks. Just knowing the current list–The Cell in microbiology, The Art of Computer Programming, Renfrew’s Archeology–would enable anyone to pursue top-level education on their own. All the best textbooks in combination would nearly add up to Lovelock’s primer of civilization. Study of the evolution of the most influential textbooks over time would yield peerless insight into intellectual history. Comparative analysis of what makes the best contemporary textbooks so good might lead to even better textbooks being written.

Do such ideas justify setting in motion the building of a 10,000-Year Library? By themselves, perhaps not. The ultimate reason for initiating something ambitious is not to fulfill certain notions but to find out what surprises might emerge. The most remarkable results almost certainly cannot be anticipated. What would the existence of something thought of as a 10,000-Year Library bring into the world? “Boiling rocks” is what the novelist and provocateur Ken Kesey calls this kind of research. “If you don’t boil rocks and drink the water, how do you know it won’t make you drunk?”

Originally posted at KurzweilAI.net as The 10,000-Year Library

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From the book The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility–The Ideas Behind the World’s Slowest Computer. © 2000 by Stewart Brand.

This morning, I present Noam Chomsky’s most recent opinion about the Middle East Crises. This was just posted April 11, 2002.

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An Alternative View of the US-Israel-Palestine Relationship

Noam Chomsky

A year ago, Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling observed that “What we feared has come true.” Jews and Palestinians are “regressing to superstitious tribalism… War appears an unavoidable fate,” an “evil colonial” war. After Israel’s invasion of the refugee camps this year his colleague Ze’ev Sternhell wrote that “In colonial Israel…human life is cheap.” The leadership is “no longer ashamed to speak of war when what they are really engaged in is colonial policing, which recalls the takeover by the white police of the poor neighborhoods of the blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era.” Both stress the obvious: there is no symmetry between the “ethno-national groups” regressing to tribalism. The conflict is centered in territories that have been under harsh military occupation for 35 years. The conqueror is a major military power, acting with massive military, economic and diplomatic support from the global superpower. Its subjects are alone and defenseless, many barely surviving in miserable camps, currently suffering even more brutal terror of a kind familiar in “evil colonial wars” and now carrying out terrible atrocities of their own in revenge.

The Oslo “peace process” changed the modalities of the occupation, but not the basic concept. Shortly before joining the Ehud Barak government, historian Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that “the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever.” He soon became an architect of the US-Israel proposals at Camp David in Summer 2000, which kept to this condition. These were highly praised in US commentary. The Palestinians and their evil leader were blamed for their failure and the subsequent violence. But that is outright “fraud,” as Kimmerling reported, along with all other serious commentators.

True, Clinton-Barak advanced a few steps towards a Bantustan-style settlement. Just prior to Camp David, West Bank Palestinians were confined to over 200 scattered areas, and Clinton-Barak did propose an improvement: consolidation to three cantons, under Israeli control, virtually separated from one another and from the fourth enclave, a small area of East Jerusalem, the center of Palestinian life and of communications in the region. In the fifth canton, Gaza, the outcome was left unclear except that the population were also to remain virtually imprisoned. It is understandable that maps are not to be found in the US mainstream, or any of the details of the proposals.

No one can seriously doubt that the US role will continue to be decisive. It is therefore of crucial importance to understand what that role has been, and how it is internally perceived. The version of the doves is presented by the editors of the NY Times (7 April), praising the President’s “path-breaking speech” and the “emerging vision” he articulated. Its first element is “ending Palestinian terrorism,” immediately. Some time later comes “freezing, then rolling back, Jewish settlements and negotiating new borders” to end the occupation and allow the establishment of a Palestinian state. If Palestinian terror ends, Israelis will be encouraged to “take the Arab League’s historic offer of full peace and recognition in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal more seriously.” But first Palestinian leaders must demonstrate that they are “legitimate diplomatic partners.”

The real world has little resemblance to this self-serving portrayal — virtually copied from the 1980s, when the US and Israel were desperately seeking to evade PLO offers of negotiation and political settlement while keeping to the demand that there will be no negotiations with the PLO, no “additional Palestinian state…” (Jordan already being a Palestinian state), and “no change in the status of Judea, Samaria and Gaza other than in accordance with the basic guidelines of the [Israeli] Government” (the May 1989 Peres-Shamir coalition plan, endorsed by Bush I in the Baker plan of Dec. 1989). All of this remained unpublished in the US mainstream, as regularly before, while commentary denounced the Palestinians for their single-minded commitment to terror, undermining the humanistic endeavors of the US and its allies.

In the real world, the primary barrier to the “emerging vision” has been, and remains, unilateral US rejectionism. There is little new in the “Arab League’s historic offer.” It repeats the basic terms of a Security Council Resolution of January 1976 backed by virtually the entire world, including the leading Arab states, the PLO, Europe, the Soviet bloc — in fact, everyone who mattered. It was opposed by Israel and vetoed by the US, thereby vetoing it from history. The Resolution called for a political settlement on the internationally-recognized borders “with appropriate arrangements…to guarantee…the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of all states in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized borders” — in effect, a modification of UN 242 (as officially interpreted by the US as well), amplified to include a Palestinian state. Similar initiatives from the Arab states, the PLO, and Europe have since been blocked by the US and mostly suppressed or denied in public commentary.

US rejectionism goes back 5 years earlier, to February 1971, when President Sadat of Egypt offered Israel a full peace treaty in return for Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian territory, with no mention of Palestinian national rights or the fate of the other occupied territories. Israel’s Labor government recognized this to be a genuine peace offer, but rejected it, intending to extend its settlements to northeastern Sinai; that it soon did, with extreme brutality, the immediate cause for the 1973 war. Israel and the US understood that peace was possible in accord with official US policy. But as Labor Party leader Ezer Weizmann (later President) explained, that outcome would not allow Israel to “exist according to the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies.” Israeli commentator Amos Elon wrote that Sadat caused “panic” among the Israeli political leadership when he announced his willingness “to enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and to respect its independence and sovereignty in `secure and recognized borders’.”

Kissinger succeeded in blocking peace, instituting his preference for what he called “stalemate”: no negotiations, only force. Jordanian peace offers were also dismissed. Since that time, official US policy has kept to the international consensus on withdrawal — until Clinton, who effectively rescinded UN resolutions and considerations of international law. But in practice, policy has followed the Kissinger guidelines, accepting negotiations only when compelled to do so, as Kissinger was after the near-debacle of the 1973 war for which he shares major responsibility, and under the conditions that Ben-Ami articulated.

Plans for Palestinians followed the guidelines formulated by Moshe Dayan, one of the Labor leaders more sympathetic to the Palestinian plight. He advised the Cabinet that Israel should make it clear to refugees that “we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads.” When challenged, he responded by citing Ben-Gurion, who “said that whoever approaches the Zionist problem from a moral aspect is not a Zionist.” He could have also cited Chaim Weizmann, who held that the fate of the “several hundred thousand negroes” in the Jewish homeland “is a matter of no consequence.”

Not surprisingly, the guiding principle of the occupation has been incessant and degrading humiliation, along with torture, terror, destruction of property, displacement and settlement, and takeover of basic resources, crucially water. That has, of course, required decisive US support, extending through the Clinton-Barak years. “The Barak government is leaving Sharon’s government a surprising legacy,” the Israeli press reported as the transition took place: “the highest number of housing starts in the territories since the time when Ariel Sharon was Minister of Construction and Settlement in 1992 before the Oslo agreements” — funding provided by the American taxpayer, deceived by fanciful tales of the “visions” and “magnanimity” of US leaders, foiled by terrorists like Arafat who have forfeited “our trust,” perhaps also by some Israeli extremists who are overreacting to their crimes.

How Arafat must act to regain our trust is explained succinctly by Edward Walker, the State Department official responsible for the region under Clinton. The devious Arafat must announce without ambiguity that “We put our future and fate in the hands of the US,” which has led the campaign to undermine Palestinian rights for 30 years.

More serious commentary recognized that the “historic offer” largely reiterated the Saudi Fahd Plan of 1981 — undermined, it was regularly claimed, by Arab refusal to accept the existence of Israel. The facts are again quite different. The 1981 plan was undermined by an Israeli reaction that even its mainstream press condemned as “hysterical.” Shimon Peres warned that the Fahd plan “threatened Israel’s very existence.” President Haim Herzog charged that the “real author” of the Fahd plan was the PLO, and that it was even more extreme than the January 1976 Security Council resolution that was “prepared by” the PLO when he was Israel’s UN Ambassador. These claims can hardly be true (though the PLO publicly backed both plans), but they are an indication of the desperate fear of a political settlement on the part of Israeli doves, with the unremitting and decisive support of the US.

The basic problem then, as now, traces back to Washington, which has persistently backed Israel’s rejection of a political settlement in terms of the broad international consensus, reiterated in essentials in “the Arab League’s historic offer.”

Current modifications of US rejectionism are tactical and so far minor. With plans for an attack on Iraq endangered, the US permitted a UN resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from the newly-invaded territories “without delay” — meaning “as soon as possible,” Secretary of State Colin Powell explained at once. Palestinian terror is to end “immediately,” but far more extreme Israeli terror, going back 35 years, can take its time. Israel at once escalated its attack, leading Powell to say “I’m pleased to hear that the prime minister says he is expediting his operations.” There is much suspicion that Powell’s arrival in Israel is being delayed so that they can be “expedited” further. That US stance may well change, again for tactical reasons.

The US also allowed a UN Resolution calling for a “vision” of a Palestinian state. This forthcoming gesture, which received much acclaim, does not rise to the level of South Africa 40 years ago when the Apartheid regime actually implemented its “vision” of Black-run states that were at least as viable and legitimate as the neo-colonial dependency that the US and Israel have been planning for the occupied territories.

Meanwhile the US continues to “enhance terror,” to borrow the President’s words, by providing Israel with the means for terror and destruction, including a new shipment of the most advanced helicopters in the US arsenal (Robert Fisk, Independent, 7 April). These are standard reactions to atrocities by a client regime. To cite one instructive example, in the first days of the current Intifada, Israel used US helicopters to attack civilian targets, killing 10 Palestinians and wounding 35, hardly in “self-defense.” Clinton responded with an agreement for “the largest purchase of military helicopters by the Israeli Air Force in a decade” (Ha’aretz, 3 October, ’01), along with spare parts for Apache attack helicopters. The press helped out by refusing to report the facts. A few weeks later, Israel began to use US helicopters for assassinations as well. One of the first acts of the Bush administration was to send Apache Longbow helicopters, the most murderous available. That received some marginal notice under business news.

Washington’s commitment to “enhancing terror” was illustrated again in December, when it vetoed a Security Council Resolution calling for implementation of the Mitchell Plan and dispatch of international monitors to oversee reduction of violence, the most effective means as generally recognized, opposed by Israel and regularly blocked by Washington. The veto took place during a 21-day period of calm — meaning that only one Israeli soldier was killed, along with 21 Palestinians including 11 children, and 16 Israeli incursions into areas under Palestinian control (Graham Usher, Middle East International, 25 January ’02). Ten days before the veto, the US boycotted — thus undermined — an international conference in Geneva that once again concluded that the Fourth Geneva Convention applies to the occupied terrorities, so that virtually everything the US and Israel do there is a “grave breach”; a “war crime” in simple terms. The conference specifically declared the US-funded Israeli settlements to be illegal, and condemned the practice of “wilful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, wilful depriving of the rights of fair and regular trial, extensive destruction and appropriation of property…carried out unlawfully and wantonly.” As a High Contracting Party, the US is obligated by solemn treaty to prosecute those responsible for such crimes, including its own leadership. Accordingly, all of this passes in silence.

The US has not officially withdrawn its recognition of the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the occupied territories, or its censure of Israeli violations as the “occupying power” (affirmed, for example, by George Bush I when he was UN Ambassador). In October 2000 the Security Council reaffirmed the consensus on this matter, “call[ing] on Israel, the occupying power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention.” The vote was 14-0. Clinton abstained, presumably not wanting to veto one of the core principles of international humanitarian law, particularly in light of the circumstances in which it was enacted: to criminalize formally the atrocities of the Nazis. All of this too was consigned quickly to the memory hole, another contribution to “enhancing terror.”

Until such matters are permitted to enter discussion, and their implications understood, it is meaningless to call for “US engagement in the peace process,” and prospects for constructive action will remain grim.

Reposted from Z-Net

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Noam Chomsky’s The current crises in the Middle East: What can we do?

Noam Chomsky Archive

Last week, I posted a link to Noam Chomsky’s speech “The current crises in the Middle East: What can we do?“  A few days ago, I came across a documentary in my local video store about Noam Chomsky called Manufactuing Consent. I highly recommend it. 

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Manufacturing Consent

Noam Chomsky

Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilizations has been individual material gain which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation. Now its long been understood, very well, that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice that it entails as long as its possible to pretend that the destructive forces that human create are limited. that the world is an infinite resource and that the world is an infinite garbage can.

At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible. Either the general population will take control of it’s own destiny and concern itself with community interests guided by values of solidarity, sympathy and concern for others. Or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority its going to set policy in the special interest that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interest of community as a whole, and by now that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must. Namely to impose Necessary Illusions. To manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena. The question in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.

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MANUFACTURING CONSENT

NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE MEDIA

A Riveting Glimpse into the Mind of
One of the 20th Century’s Greatest Thinkers

“Watch out for this film. It can make you think”
-Ralph Nader

Manufacturing Consent explores the political life and times of the controversial author, linguist and radical philosopher, Noam Chomsky. As an outspoken critic of the press and one of America’s leading dissidents, he has unrelentingly dissected how our mu ch-acclaimed democratic freedoms often mask an irresponsible use of power. Shocking examples of media deception permeate Chomsky’s critique of the forces at work behind the daily news. He encourages his listeners to extricate themselves from this “web of deceit” by undertaking a course of “intellectual self-defense.”

Few people have produced a body of work more provocative than Noam Chomsky, whose bibliography contains over 700 entries. Whether you agree with him or not, he directly and tirelessly addresses some of the most important moral, ethical, political and soci al issues of our time, and raises questions that are essential for anyone living in our complex era.

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Noam Chomsky Archive