Long Now

### Artibodies Art, like the antibodies in our immune system, creates alien forces in service of the whole. It anticipates threats and models them. It is a diversity agent. Two forms of that process were explained and shown by Ippolito and Blais: perversion, and execution. One example of the perverse is the software called "Shredder" that takes any Web page and turns it inside out, making obvious what is hidden (the code) and small what is large (the surface images). You can try it [here](http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/) \- give it a web page URL. Another example is works of the Yes Men, a group of culture jammers whose art consists of what they call "identity correction." One successful hoax was taking the guise of a Dow Chemical spokesman and announcing on BBC World that Dow was going to liquidate Union Carbide and use the 12 billion dollars to compensate everyone who had been harmed by the Bhopal disaster in India 20 years before. Dow's stock plummeted, and the company had to announce it had no apology or payment to offer for Bhopal. With the coming of code and the Web, art moves beyond being representational to something that can execute, can make things happen. For example, when the algorithm protecting DVDs was reverse engineered and offered publicly, the magazine 2600 was sued by the film industry. The defense that code was a form of speech protected by the First Amendment was unsuccessful in court. But on the Web the descrambling code was distributed in a variety of speech-like forms that may be seen on the "Gallery of CSS Descramblers" [site](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Edst/DeCSS/Gallery/) including a dramatic reading, a haiku, a T-shirt, a tie, a movie, and a version of the DVD logo containing the descrambling code.

### Principles against panic "Everything looks like a failure in the middle." Any new enterprise, Kanter explained, encounters roadblocks. As the obstacles multiply, the situation looks hopeless. That's when deeply held principles and the long view are most needed to get you past the panic. To characterize America's current winter of discontent she quoted Woody Allen: "One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." Panic leads to abandoning principles, and that is how successes end. Kanter commends three principles in particular for renewal of the faltering American enterprise… * Open minds. In the clash between orthodoxy and creativity, opt for the spirit of discovery and progress. * Higher purpose and sense of meaning. Kanter noted the emergence of "values-based capitalism." One example she knows from her own consulting work is IBM. Shortly after the new CEO Sam Palmisano took over in 2002, he instituted an online "ValuesJam" with 300,000 employees. The result was a declaration that IBM stands for "Innovation that matters-- for our company and for the world." She has seen that value played out in IBM public service activities such as the World Community Grid, which engages idle CPU time on computers connected to the Internet (740,000 so far) to solve scientific problems in HIV-AIDS, cancer, muscular dystrophy, and human genomics. * Common ground. Inclusiveness and shared responsibility is a particularly American principle first noted and celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville. It is reflected in Bill Clinton's observation, "Big government is being replaced by big citizens." There's been enough panic and winter in America, Kanter concluded. It's time for some endless summer. Get out and connect with the street, with nature, with the world.

### Mapping Life "All life is imperfectly transmitted code," Enriquez began, "and it is promiscuous." Thus discoveries like the one last month of an entire bacterial genome inside the DNA of a fruitfly is exploding the old tree-of-life models of evolution. The emerging map replaces gene lineages with gene webs. "There is a whole genomic continent to discover, and we've just mapped part of the coastline so far." Noting that his friend Craig Venter has just transplanted the DNA from one microbe into a different one, and booted it up there, Enriquez said that humans are going to be increasingly designing and controlling the code of life. "We'll do with bacteria what we do with our pets." Likewise new maps of brain function are raising questions such as, "Can we model the brain, can we download it, can we transplant it, can we reboot it?" Prostheses such as robotic arms used to be driven by muscle signals, but now they are being controlled directly from the brain. Enriquez noted that some nations are charging ahead with such technology and the education that drives it while others cripple themselves by holding back. Portugal had colonies throughout the world, he said, but they never respected the natives enough to help educate them, and so left intellectual blight behind them and at home. London and Paris are full of Indian and Chinese restaurants, but there are none in Portugal. He showed a photo of a billboard that read: "Portugal-- We were a world power for about 15 minutes." The new maps of life, he said, will profoundly affect countries, business, religion and ethics. Being alive in the midst a scientific renaissance like this is Christmas every day. During Q&A Enriquez lamented that the pharmacology industry has retreated to doing just marketing now instead of discovery, haven been driven into a defensive crouch by public misapplication of the "Precautionary Principle" that all new technologies are guilty until proven innocent, and innocence is impossible to prove. Thus the potential death of tens is used to head off treatments that could save tens of thousands. I asked him, "What would you call the opposite of the Precautionary Principle?" Kevin Kelly offered from the audience, "How about the Pro-actionary Principle?"

### Nuclear Footprint In the early 1980s Gwyneth Cravens was one of the protesters against the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, and also participated in ban-the-bomb rallies. After 15 years of deepening familiarity with nuclear power, she says she still would ban the bomb, but she now regrets that the Shoreham reactor was shut down. Who changed her mind was a nuclear expert at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque, D. Richard Anderson, known as "Rip." "Here was someone who thinks in thousands of years, about climate, about nuclear waste storage," she said. "He applies to nuclear issues the same probabilistic risk assessment that helps us understand what we're facing with climate change." One concept that altered Cravens' perspective was realizing what "baseload" requires. Rip Anderson, on the stage with her, explained that baseload is the fundamental currency of grid power. It is massive power constantly available 24/7. It comes from only three sources-- fossil fuels, hydro-electric dams, and nuclear. Hydro is maxed out. Fossil fuels have to be cut back to slow global warming. That leaves only nuclear growth to handle the expected doubling of energy demand in the world by 2030. Anderson added that his first scientific discipline was oceanography, so one of his greatest concerns about CO2 loading of the atmosphere is that the resulting carbonic acid in the oceans is dissolving the calcifying organisms and could effectively end the crucial carbon sink that oceans provide. Cravens went into detail about the harm brought by coal, which currently provides 51% of US electricity (while hydro is 7%, nuclear 20%). Estimates are that coal pollution causes 24,000 deaths a year in the US, 400,000 a year in China (not counting the 5,000 who die annually in Chinese coal mines). She also mentioned the still-incomplete science of the effects of low radiation-- the amounts below 10,000 millirems. People encounter much higher levels of natural radiation at higher elevations and in some radon-rich areas, but there is no indication of higher cancer rates in those places. The fears of long-lingering cancer effects in the Chernobyl region have not proven out. Comparing the environmental footprint of nuclear versus coal was the most persuasive mind-changer for Cravens. Coal involves vast quantities of mine spoil, vast quantities of fuel, vast quantities of pollution (including mercury and uranium), and vast quantities of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere. Nuclear, by contrast, uses the most concentrated form of energy in the world, the plants are small, and the waste amounts to one Coke can per person's lifetime of energy use. There is said to be no geological repository for nuclear waste yet, but Rip Anderson pointed out that the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) in a deep salt formation in New Mexico has been operating since 1999. It now handles only military waste, but there is no reason except political that it could not take all of our civilian spent fuel. Two questions from the audience addressed possible limitations on fast growth of nuclear energy in the world. One was, "Won't we quickly run out of uranium?" Anderson said that 10% of US electricity currently comes from recycled Soviet nuclear warheads, and we haven't begun to draw the energy from decommissioned US warheads. The price for uranium ore has been so low in recent decades that mines closed and discovery stopped. Now that the price is rising, mines are reopening and new reserves are being found. (They're mostly in Canada and Australia, some in the US.) Meanwhile, spent fuel in the US still has 98% of its energy in it. Once we reprocess the spent fuel the way the rest of the world does, we will extract more of that energy, and the final amount of waste will be drastically smaller. Second question: "Are there enough nuclear engineers in the pipeline to deal with a worldwide nuclear renaissance?" Answer: No. That's the most limiting resource at this point. Gwenyth Cravens is the author of [_Power to Save the World_.](http://www.amazon.com/Power-Save-World-Nuclear-Energy/dp/0307266567/ref=sr_1_1/102-7773207-6916907?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190047587/lono0a-20)

### A Series of Information Explosions As usual, microbes led the way. Bacteria have swarmed in intense networks for 3.5 billion years. Then a hierarchical form emerged with the first nucleated cells that were made up of an enclosed society of formerly independent organisms. That's the pattern for the evolution of information, Alex Wright said. Networks coalesce into hierarchies, which then form a new level of networks, which coalesce again, and so on. Thus an unending series of information explosions is finessed. In humans, classification schemes emerged everywhere, defining how things are connected in larger contexts. Researchers into "folk taxonomies" have found that all cultures universally describe things they care about in hierarchical layers, and those hierarchies are usually five layers deep. Family tree hierarchies were accorded to the gods, who were human-like personalities but also represented various natural forces. Starting 30,000 years ago the "ice age information explosion" brought the transition to collaborative big game hunting, cave paintings, and elaborate decorative jewelry that carried status information. It was the beginning of information's "release from social proximity." 5,000 years ago in Sumer, accountants began the process toward writing, beginning with numbers, then labels and lists, which enabled bureaucracy. Scribes were just below kings in prestige. Finally came written narratives such as Gilgamesh. The move from oral culture to literate culture is profound. Oral is additive, aggregative, participatory, and situational, where literate is subordinate, analytic, objective, and abstract. (One phenomenon of current Net culture is re-emergence of oral forms in email, twittering, YouTube, etc.) Wright honored the sequence of information-ordering visionaries who brought us to our present state. In 1883 Charles Cutter devised a classification scheme that led in part to the Library of Congress system and devised an apparatus of keyboard and wires that would fetch the desired book. H.G. Wells proposed a "world brain" of data and imagined that it would one day wake up. Teilhard de Chardin anticipated an "etherization of human consciousness" into a global noosphere. The greatest unknown revolutionary was the Belgian Paul Otlet. In 1895 he set about freeing the information in books from their bindings. He built a universal decimal classification and then figured out how that organized data could be explored, via "links" and a "web." In 1910 Otlet created a "radiated library" called the Mundameum in Brussels that managed search queries in a massive way until the Nazis destroyed the service. Alex Wright showed an [astonishing video of how Otlet's distributed telephone-plus-screen system worked](https://youtube.com/watch?v=qwRN5m64I7Y). Wright concluded with the contributions of Vannevar Bush ("associative trails" in his Memex system), Eugene Garfield's Science Citation Index, the predecessor of page ranking. Doug Engelbart's working hypertext system in the "mother of all demos." And Ted Nelson who helped inspire Engelbart and Berners-Lee and who Wright considers "directly responsible for the generation of the World Wide Web."

### Democracy versus Culture Francis Fukuyama began by describing the four most significant challenges to the thesis in his famed 1992 book,_[The End of History and the Last Man](http://www.amazon.com/End-History-Last-Man/dp/0743284550/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-4300234-8355129?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183410555/lono0a-20)_. In the book he proposed that humanity's economic progress over the past 10,000 years was driven by the accumulation of science and technology over time. That connection is direct and reliable. Less direct and reliable, but very important, is the sequence from economic progress to the adoption of liberal democracy. Political modernization accompanies economic modernization. This is a deep force of history, the book claims. Fukuyama describes the rise of the idea of human rights in the West as a secularization of Christian doctrine. That led to accountability mechanisms-- "You can't have good governance without feedback loops." Once there is a propertied middle class, they demand political participation. The threshold for that demand appears to about $6,000 per capita per year. It's hard to get to, but hundreds of millions of people in the world are making that climb right now. China and Russia will be a test of his thesis, Fukuyama said. They are getting wealthier. If they democratize in the next twenty years, he's right. If they remain authoritarian, he's wrong. Fukuyama is most intrigued by a challenge that comes from his old teacher and continuing friend, Samuel Huntington, author of _The Clash of Civilizations_. Culture can trump modernization, says Huntington-- current radical Islam is an example. Fukuyama agrees that people at the fringe of modernization feel a sense of onslaught, and they can respond as Bolsheviks and Fascists did in the 20th century. "A Hitler or a Bin Laden proclaims, 'I can tell you who you are.'" A second challenge to the universalism of liberal democracy is that it does not yet work internationally. Fukuyama agrees, noting that the major current obstacle is America's overwhelming hegemony. He expects no solution from the UN, but an overlapping set of international institutions could eventually do the job. A third challenge is the continuing poverty trap for so many in the world. Fukuyama says it takes a national state with the rule of law and time to learn from mistakes before you get economic takeoff. He sees later colonialism, done on the cheap (instead of with the patient institution building that England did in India), as a major source of the world's current failed and crippled states. The final challenge that impresses Fukuyama is the possibility that technology may now be accelerating too fast to cure its own problems the way it has done in the past. Climate change could be an example of that. And Fukuyama particularly worries that biotechnology might so transform human nature that it will fragment humanity irreparably. While he sees meaning in history, Fukuyama said it's not a matter of iron law. Human agency counts. History swerves on who wins a battle or an election. We are responsible. Two further angles on Fukuyama's thesis emerged at dinner. One concerned how society's morality should express itself in dealing with the threat/promise of biotechnology. Conservative Fukuyama promoted strict government regulation while the liberals (and libertarians) in the room said the market and Internet should sort it out. Kevin Kelly asked Fukuyama, "Do you think human nature is as good as it can be?" I proposed to Washington-based Fukuyama that he was in the midst of a classic argument between the coasts. East Coast says, "Ready, aim, don't fire." West Coast says, "Fire, aim, ready." Then there's the European Union. In his talk Fukuyama praised it as the fullest realization of his theory. At dinner he acknowledged his concern that Europe may be headed toward permanent conflict with its growing immigrant populations, whose first allegiance continues to be to their own cultures.

### Humanity's immune system The title of Paul Hawken's talk, "The New Great Transformation," has two referents, he explained. Economist Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, _The Great Transformation_ , said that the "market society" and modern nation state emerged together in Europe after 1700 and divided society in ways that have yet to be healed. Karen Armstrong's 2006 book, _The Great Transformation_ , explores "the Axial Age" between 800 and 200 BC when the world's great religions and philosophies first took shape. They were all initially social movements, she says, acting on revulsion against the violence and injustice of their times. Both books describe conditions in which "the future is stolen and sold to the present," said Hawken-- a situation we are having to deal with yet again. His new book, [_Blessed Unrest_](http://www.amazon.com/Blessed-Unrest-Largest-Movement-Coming/dp/0670038520/lono0a-20), was inspired by the countless business cards that earnest environmentalists would hand him after his lectures all over the world. After a while he had 7,000, and he wondered, "How many environmental groups are there in the world?" He began actively building a now-public database, [WiserEarth.org](http://www.wiserearth.org/), which includes social justice and indigenous rights organizations because he found they indivisibly overlap in their values and activities. The database now has 105,000 such organizations. The still-emerging taxonomy of their "areas of focus" has 414 categories, amounting to a "curriculum of the 21st century"-- Acid Rain, Living Wages, Tropical Moist Forests, Peacemaking, Democratic Reform, Sustainable Cities, Environmental Toxicology, Watershed Management, Human Trafficking, Mountaintop Removal, Pesticides, Climate Change, Refugees, Women's Safety, Eco-villages, Fair Trade… Extrapolating from carefully inventoried regions to those yet to be tallied, he estimates there are over 1,000,000 such organizations in the world, adding up to the largest and fastest growing Movement in history. The phenomenon has been overlooked because it lacks the customary hallmarks of a movement-- no charismatic leaders, no grand theory or ideology, no "ism," no defining events. The new activist groups are about dispersing power rather than aggregating power. Their focus is on ideas rather than ideology-- ideologies are clung to, but ideas can be tried and tossed or improved. The point is to solve problems, usually from the bottom up. The movement can never be divided because it is already atomized. What's going on? Hawken wondered if humanity might have some collective intelligence that we don't yet understand. The metaphor he finds most useful is the immune system, which is the most complex system in our body-- more complex than the entire Internet-- massive, distributed, subtle, ingenious, and effective. The opposite of a hierarchical army, its power is in the density of its network. It deals with problems not through frontal attack but complex negotiation and rapprochement. Much of the new movement, Hawken said, was inspired, at root, by the slavery abolitionists and by the Transcendentalists Emerson and his student Thoreau. Emerson declared that "everything is connected," and Thoreau wound up going to jail (and making it cool) by taking that idea seriously in social-justice terms. Now, as in the Axial Age, activism comes from acting on the realization that "all life is sacred."

### Consilience defeats miasma Steven Johnson began his long zoom survey with the "prior art" of Joyce's Stephen Daedalus locating himself in himself, his neighborhood, Dublin, on out to the universe. The value of a long zoom is in identifying and employing every scale between the very large and very small, noticing how they change each other when held in the mind at the same time. Johnson's core story (and current book) concerned London in 1854, when it was the largest city in the world and in history with 2.5 million people. London famously stank. Cesspools filled basements, slaughterhouses were anywhere, garbage piled up. Medicine at the time held that disease was caused by "miasma," foul air, noxious vapors. "All smell is disease," declared a Doctor Chadwick. The authorities decided that the way to cure the frequent cholera epidemics in London was to get rid of the bad odor-- pump the sewage into the Thames, which people drank. The cholera got worse. Johnson's goal with his book, [_The Ghost Map_](http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Map-Steven-Johnson/dp/1594489254/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-6115062-9930528?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179248667/lono0a-20), was to figure out why the wrong theory of disease lingered so long, and what it took to correct it. The answer, he proposes, is in the perspective of the long zoom. The celebrated story goes that John Snow discovered the polluted-water cause of cholera by drawing a "ghost map" of the cholera deaths concentrated around the Broad Street pump in Soho. What really happened is more interesting. Snow had been publishing his theory of water pollution causing cholera for five years. In August of 1854, a horrifying 10% of his neighborhood in Soho perished from the disease. Then he drew up the map, drawing on public statistics provided by the city, and on the street savvy of a popular vicar named Rev. Henry Whitehead. The map confirmed his theory and persuaded the medical establishment and city authorities. In just 12 years, cholera was completely eradicated from London. In Johnson's view, one long zoom had displaced another. The miasma theory of cholera embraced a nested set of scales ranging, from large to small:_cultural traditions - urban development - technology - contemporary politics - "great men" \- human sensory system_. Bad smell, bad people, bad disease. With John Snow's map, a different long zoom took over:_cities - data systems - neighborhood - humans - organs - microbes_. The combination of city density and open-source data about the epidemic made the ghost map possible and persuasive. Doctor Snow noticed that the bodily symptoms of cholera looked like they were caused by something swallowed rather than something inhaled. The data had to be extremely strong to overcome the bias of human sensory apparatus-- our alarm system of smell can detect minute amounts of contagion, but we cannot see them. It took a neighborhood map to defeat what the nose thought it knew. Johnson proposed that another word for the long zoom perspective is "consilience"-- a fine old word, revived by Edward O. Wilson, that links multiple disciplines and multiple levels into a whole body of knowledge with extra benefits the separate disciplines lack. Science and culture can blend rigorously. What is discovered in consilience is not just scales of distance or time but nested systems. Johnson moved on to contemporary popular culture, drawing on his research for his brain book ([_Emergence_](http://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Connected-Brains-Cities-Software/dp/0684868768/ref=sr_1_3/102-6115062-9930528?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179248720/lono0a-20)) and his book on video games and TV ([_Everything Bad Is Good For You_](http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-Steven-Johnson/dp/B000O17CYM/ref=sr_1_2/102-6115062-9930528?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179248720/lono0a-20)). Back in the three-network days of "Gilligan's Island," the guiding principle was "least objectionable programming." Now with DVDs and TiVo, the guideline is "most repeatable programming"-- material that will reward you if you study it again and again. Thus a current hit TV series about a very different island, "Lost," has a whole horde of characters and purveys many-leveled complexities and mysteries embracing _geography - economics - technology - sociology - biology - ontology_. Viewers are invited to wonder, among a great many other things, whether the whole damn thing is a dream, and, if so, whose? Our brain is wired with "seeking circuitry" and relishes exercising "the regime of competence." TV shows like "Lost" and video games like "World of Warcraft" are addictive because they reward exploration. Instead of employing narrative arcs, they keep you in a state of being always challenged but not quite overwhelmed as you ascend from skill level to skill level. We are learning to master complexity, to revel in long zooms like Google Earth or the forthcoming Will Wright game, "Spore." A few years ago, Johnson was introducing his 7-year-old nephew to Wright's early video game, "Sim City"-- "Ooh, look at the big buildings!" Shortly, Johnson's factory district was failing. His nephew piped up. "Lower your industrial tax rate," said the child. Johnson ended the talk with another line from James Joyce: "It was very big to think about everything and everywhere." "It's never been easier," said Johnson. PS… Also announced at this talk is the [North American Premiere of Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings](https://longnow.org/77m/).

### The deep past in the remote present It began on a New Jersey beach. Frans Lanting was photographing horseshoe crabs for a story about how they are being ground up for eel bait and at the same time their blood is used for drug testing--a $100 million industry. The crabs have primordial eyesight, which they employ mainly for finding sex partners. Photographing the horseshoes having a spawning orgy one spooky twilight, Lanting felt like he was suddenly back in the Silurian, 430 million years ago… So Lanting and his wife Chris Eckstrom set out in search of "time capsules," places on the present Earth where he could find and photograph all the ancient stages of life. A two-year project expanded to seven years. On a live volcano in Hawaii he found the naked planet of 4.3 billion years ago-- molten rock flowing, zero life. "Your boots melt. You smell early Earth." On the western coast of Australia he shot a rare surviving living reef of stromatolites, made of the cyanobacteria that three billion years ago transformed the Earth by filling the atmosphere with oxygen. Lanting took pains to photograph without blue sky in the background, because the sky was not blue until the cyanobacteria had generated a planet's worth of oxygen. Life's journey through time is a story of innovations, Lanting said. Lichens were the first to colonize land, followed by shelled creatures that could carry ocean inside them-- crabs, turtles, and snails. In Australia Lanting photographed mudskippers--amphibious fish that use their pectoral fins to crawl around on mud and even climb trees. Dinosaurs once browsed on land plants that defended themselves with ferocious spiky leaves. A survivor of that battle is the Araucaria tree in Chile. Lanting planted one in his garden near Santa Cruz and photographed it there. Study of the first feathered reptile, the archaeopteryx, suggested that the contemporary bird with the most similar flight style is the frigate bird, and Lanting photographed one looking like an airborne fossil in the Galapagos Islands. Asteroids and climate change made new niches and new innovations. Following the Cretaceous extinction 65 million years ago, mammals deployed their toothed jaws. Drier climate 25 million years ago created grasslands. When the forests dried, some apes took to walking upright in the savannahs of Africa. And some of those got around to analyzing DNA and noticing that life's entire history is written there. Lanting ended his dazzling show with two demonstrations. One was an 8-minute segment of an hour-long orchestral version of "Life's Journey Through Time," composed by Philip Glass, with a brilliant multi-media version of Lanting's photos. The music and the image dynamics gain complexity stage by stage in synch with the growing complexity of life. (It would be glorious to see this performed locally with the San Francisco Symphony. The ideal occasion would be the opening of the new California Academy of Sciences building in Golden Gate Park next year.) Lanting also did a quick demo of the timeline version of his photos (and videos) on his website. The level of its sophistication drew cheers and applause from the Web-savvy San Francisco audience. See for yourself: The take home version of this talk is Lanting's book, [_Life: A Journey Through Time_](http://www.amazon.com/Life-Journey-Through-Frans-Lanting/dp/3822839949/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-8919416-0579929?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177966282/lono0a-20), and is a stunning oversized edition published by Taschen. P.S. Lanting's presentation in particular is worth seeing in high-quality video.

### Catastrophic drought is coming back There are two kinds of historians, Brian Fagan says, parachutists and truffle hunters. Parachutists command an overview of the landscape, while truffle hunters dig deeply to uncover marvelous treasures. Fagan is a parachutist. In his talk Fagan emphasized a wide view of human history as it unrolls in the landscape of climate. In our lookout from the parachute, we can see evidence from ice cores, tree rings, fossil pollen, and historical records, all pointing to the conclusion that people in the past have suffered through global warming periods before. So what happened? Using data from truffle-hunting historians, Fagan told of how vineyard harvest records in Europe show that England became so warm during the period between 800-1250 AD that England not only had vineyards in its central provinces but it also exported wine to France. The medieval warm period had repercussions throughout society. Iceland and Scandinavia warmed up enough to grow cereal crops, tree lines elevated in mountain areas, and there were longer growing seasons everywhere on the continent. This warming up of agriculture initiated the first vast clear-cutting of European forests. In the short 200 years between 1100 and 1300, from one-third to one-half of European wooded wilderness was deforested to make way for fields and pastures -- shaping the lovely farm scenes we now associate with Europe. (Today only Poland has any remaining virgin forests). Fagan says the myth of the medieval warm period is that it was warm. There were all kinds of weather extremes. In 1315 it started to rain for seven years. The newly cleared and naked hills eroded, dams burst, disease spread, and prolonged drought followed. And not just in Europe. Mesoamerica was jolted by long droughts. The Mayan pyramids at Tikal were engineered to act as water collection reservoirs. The collapse of their empire, and others in South America such as the Inca in Peru, are correlated to prolonged droughts. Indeed, says Fagan, the elephant in the climate room is drought. As recently as the 1800s, prolonged droughts killed 20-30 million people in India during the British Raj period. We have a tendency to believe that modern technology has alleviated our susceptibility to drought, and it has -- except for the billions of people on earth today who are living as subsistence farmers. It is upon these people that Fagan wanted us to focus our attention and care, because it is upon these people that the most serious consequences of global warming will fall. Referring to his own experience of many years as an archeologist in Africa, he painted a vivid image of what a severe drought entails and how a drought can act like a cascading disruption and rapidly destroy a vibrant culture to the point where it disappears completely. Forget the rocketing "hockey stick" of global warming, he urges. Even mild climate warming produces prolonged droughts, and we should expect more of them. There's already been a 25% increase in droughts globally since 1990. In the next 100 years, we can expect the number of people to be affected by droughts to rise from 3% of the world's population to 30%. The lesson Fagan wanted us to leave with was that the effects of global warming will be felt greatest on marginal land and marginal peoples -- many far from the sea and rising sea levels - and that because of their marginality, the consequences of prolonged drought will not just be inconvenient, but devastating. In the question and answer period, he was asked what the stricken people can do about it? "Move," he said, "is the only option." If the world is heating up, where would he move to? "Canada. It will be dryer, much warmer, and their politics are reasonable."