Last week, on March 10th, I gave a lecture at McGill on the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, about my assessment and my participation in it. Prior to my talk I was interviewed by the McGill Reporter, McGill’s offical newspaper, which published an article on my talk.
The storyline we choose has yet to be written, but Peterson hopes that it will reflect the lessons of the Millennium Assessment. “Ecological decisions have both local and global impact,” he cautioned. “And all scenarios have associated benefits and risks.” Scenarios that are based on a proactive strategy, such as the technological strategy, tended to do well under changing environmental conditions, while more reactive strategies, such as the one told by the “global orchestration strategy,” can do better, but only under stable conditions.
Brand, whose current lecture is titled “The Future of Cities as if the Past Mattered,” makes a distinction between long-term planning and long-term thinking, favoring the latter because we can’t know the future.
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“Institutions max out at 40 to 50 years; some universities have lasted a thousand years. Religions — some poop out pretty quickly — while cities vary enormously, such as capitals of dynasties. Jerusalem has been an important town for 2,000 years.”
He compares aerial photos of earthquake-devastated Turkey from the 1990s with those of recently tsunami-ravaged Asia.
“All the buildings went down except the mosques,” he says. “This is because some parts of civilization move faster than others.” Islam is ancient, but modern businesses bought off the government to get around building codes, he says.