Surviving Progress Storyville

In defining progress, I think it's very important

to make a distinction between good progress and bad progress.

I mean, things progress in the sense that they change.

Both in nature and in human society, there appears to be a clear trend

towards increasing complexity as change proceeds.

We tend to delude ourselves that

these changes always result in improvements

from the human point of view.

THUNDERCLAPS

We're now reaching the point at which technological progress

and the increase in our economies and our numbers

threaten the very existence of humanity.

'We copy.'

What is progress? Uh...

I think...

That's too hard a question.

Um...

When I think of the word "progress"...

'Our flag is red, white and blue.

'But our nation is rainbow.'

THEY CHANT

'Progress will not come easy, It will not come quick.

'But today we had an opportunity to move forward.'

Hmm.

It seems like we're stuck in this trap for the last 200 years,

since the industrial revolution,

where we think progress is more of the same.

Like, we should make our machines better and get more machines.

But we've been doing that for 200 years,

so doing more of that is not progress. We're stuck like a record.

MACHINES THUD IN RHYTHM

TRAFFIC NOISES

CLANGING IN RHYTHM

NOISES INCREASE

ENGINE ROARS

NOISES QUIETEN DOWN

Things that start out to seem like improvements or progress,

these things are very seductive

and it seems like there's no downside to these.

But when they reach a certain scale,

they turn out to be dead ends or traps.

I came up with the term "progress trap" to define

human behaviours that sort of seem to be good things,

seem to provide benefits in the short-term, but which ultimately

lead to disaster because they're unsustainable.

One example would be going right back into the old Stone Age,

the time when our ancestors were hunting mammoths.

They reached a point where their weaponry and hunting techniques

got so good that they destroyed hunting as a way of life

throughout most of the world.

The people who discovered how to kill two mammoths instead of one

had made real progress, but the people who discovered that

they could eat really well by driving a whole herd over a cliff

and kill 200 at once had fallen into a progress trap.

They'd made too much progress.

Our physical bodies and our physical brains, as far as we can tell,

have changed very little in the past 50,000 years.

We've only been living in civilisation

for the last 5,000 years at the most,

which is less than 0.2% of our evolutionary history.

So, the other 99.8, we were hunters and gatherers.

And that is the kind of way of life that made us.

We are essentially the same people as those Stone Age hunters.

What makes our way of life different from theirs is culture has taken off

at an exponential rate and has really become completely detached

from the pace of natural evolution.

So, we are running 21st-century software, our knowledge,

on hardware that hasn't been upgraded for 50,000 years.

And this lies at the core of many of our problems.

All this is because our human nature is back in the hunting-gathering era

of the old Stone Age, whereas our knowledge and technology -

in other words, our ability to do both good and harm to ourselves

and to the world in general - has grown out of all proportion.

One thing, of course, to remember about the human mind is that

it's not that fundamentally different from, say, the brain of a chimpanzee.

Most of the human brain, the basic structure of the brain,

is much older than the human species.

Some of it goes back to bacteria, some of it goes back to worms,

some of it originated in the first mammals,

some of it in the first primates, some of it in the first human beings.

Very little of it, however, changed in the last 50,000 years.

And so most of what we do, we do with hardware components

that are much older than any of the problems that we face.

When I first began to study chimps,

I thought that the task was to just map out more and more similarities,

to find areas of cognition that hadn't been studied yet

and simply show that chimps were just like us.

CHIMP SQUEALS

If you can imagine teaching a small child to stand up a block upright,

and you can teach a chimp to do the same thing.

"Oh, I'll set up the block here, set up a block here,

"I can see everything, it's very clear.

"And I get a piece of fruit for doing it."

But what happens when you introduce

a small subtlety into this situation,

where you trick them and just make the block off-centre just enough

that it keeps falling over?

Well, the chimp will come in, set up the good block...

..set up the block that you've tricked him with,

but then it falls over.

Well, the chimp can see that it's not the way it's supposed to be,

so they try again. And they try again.

And they move it to one place and they move it to another place.

And they keep trying to get it to stand up

because they know what is supposed to happen,

but they have no understanding or no inclination to ask why.

What unobservable part of the situation

is causing that block to keep falling over?

The young child will enter, set up the good block,

try to set up a block that we've tricked them with,

but when it falls over -

well, first they'll try again and maybe try again.

But very quickly they'll turn it over, feel the bottom of it,

shake it, try to discern what unobservable property of that block

is causing it to fall over.

That's the fundamental core difference, I believe,

between humans and chimps. That humans ask "Why?"

We're constantly probing for unobservable phenomenon

to explain the observable.

It's what's driven us to discover gravity,

it's what's driven us to probe into the mysteries of quasars,

and it's the same thing that drives us

to probe into the mysteries of each other in our everyday lives.

"Why does she keep doing that?

"Why does he keep behaving like that?

"He must think this, he must believe this.

"I don't understand. Why, why, why, why, why?"

So, the upside of the human capacity to ask why,

to continually probe behind appearances and to try to find out

how the world really works is we develop fabulous new medicines,

we develop fabulous new therapeutic techniques to take care of people.

We invent the whole cascade of modern technology.

But the downside is that

we invent the whole cascade of modern technology.

Arguably, we are the most intellectual creature

that ever walked on Planet Earth.

So, how come, then, that this so intellectual being

is destroying its only home? Because we only have the one home.

Maybe one day people will be on Mars,

but, for the moment, we've got Planet Earth.

And we are destroying, we are polluting,

we are damaging the future of our own species,

which is very counter-productive from an evolutionary perspective.

This capacity that seems so wonderful to us,

the ability to ask why, the very ability

that undergirds modern science as a double edged sword.

If humans go extinct on this planet,

I think what's going to be our epitaph on our gravestone is, "Why?"

'I'm getting a light drive on this machine.

'I think I overdid that one.'

'That was clean out of sight.'

-HE LAUGHS

-'Oh, you think you're so clever!

'OK...'

We have the ability to think into the future,

but most of our mechanisms, most of our brain mechanisms,

evolved before we had any ability to think forward to the future

and when it made some sense for decisions to be short-term.

And so a lot of our brain mechanisms,

what I call our ancestral mechanisms or our reflexive mechanisms,

are tuned to making snap decisions right away, like fight or flight.

You see the lion, either you're going to fight or you're going to run.

No time to think about the long-term consequences.

And that's good when we're stressed about

something immediate that we can deal with, for example.

But those very systems that work by reflex

are not so good at cooperating with these more modern systems,

the deliberative systems that allow us to make long-term decisions

and say, "Well, is this good for me,

"is it good for my society, for my planet?"

Between the fall of the Roman Empire and Columbus sailing,

it took 13 centuries to add 200 million people

to the world's population. Now it takes only three years.

A simple thing like pasteurisation,

the warming of milk so that the bacteria are killed,

and the control of smallpox,

things like that, have led to a great boom in human numbers.

So, overpopulation, which nobody really wants to talk about

because it cuts at things like religious beliefs

and the freedom of the individual and the autonomy of the family

and so forth, is something that we're going to have to deal with.

We probably have to work towards

a much smaller worldwide population than 6 or 7 billion.

We probably need to go down to half that or possibly even a third of that

if everybody is going to live comfortably and decently.

The other side of this problem,

and perhaps the more dangerous side, is the footprint of the individuals

at the top of the social pyramid who are consuming the most.

Somebody in the United States or Europe

is consuming about 50 times more resources

than a poor person in a place like Bangladesh.

If China were to reach the level of consumption of, say,

the United States or Europe, it's very unlikely that the world

could support the addition of a billion consumers at that level.

BIKE BELL RINGS

I would say, in China, maybe 200, 300 million people are "affluent",

they could afford, relatively speaking, what we can in the West.

In India, another 200 million.

So, you add up these affluent segments of population

in these developing countries,

but still you come up with no more than maybe 2 billion people.

So, there is still 5 billion people waiting to tap into

these bonanzas of plentiful food, cars, decent housing,

higher education for their children.

So the potential demand for resources is immense.

For thousands of years, you know,

China has the longest continuous civilisation in the world.

And it is only during the recent period of time when the European

countries started to industrialise that China started to lag behind.

And therefore, you know, between the first Opium War in around 1840,

all the way to about 1978, China went through

a rollercoaster of great humiliations - wars of aggression

by foreign nations, Japanese aggression against China,

civil war, collapse of the Qing dynasty,

Great Cultural Revolution, chaos in China -

that when Deng Xiaoping re-emerged in 1978,

he basically pointed out the only correct path.

We need to go onto a path of growth and China needs to modernise and

industrialise, and I think that's, you know, the beginning of China's

correct development onto a right path.

DISCO MUSIC

Some people have written about natural capital,

the capital that nature provides,

which is the clean air, the clean water,

the uncut forests, the rich farmland and the minerals,

the oil, the metals.

All of these things are the capital that nature has provided.

And until about 1980, human civilisation was able to

live on what we might term the interest of that capital -

the surplus that nature is able to produce.

The food that farmland can grow without actually degrading

the farmland, or the number of fish you can pull out of the sea

without causing fish stocks to crash.

But since 1980, we've been using more than the interest,

so we are in effect like somebody who thinks he is rich because

he's spending the money that has been left in his inheritance,

not spending the interest, but eating into the capital.

The last time I visited the New York Stock Exchange was in 1980,

and the mood sure was different then.

Government, with its high taxes, excessive spending and

overregulation, had thrown a wrench in the works of our free markets.

APPLAUSE

With tax reform and budget control,

our economy will be free to expand to its full potential,

driving the bears back into permanent hibernation -

that is our economic programme for the next four years.

We are going to turn the bull loose.

CHEERING

BELL CHIMES

TRANSLATION:

The world is this big.

It's not this big and it can't be this big.

It's just this big. It's a finite sum.

Instead of thinking that nature is this huge bank that we can just...

this endless credit card that we can just keep drawing on,

we have to think about the finite nature of the planet,

and how to keep it alive so that we, too, may remain alive.

Unless we conserve the planet, there isn't going to be any "the economy".

The ice-age hunter is still us, it's still in us.

Those ancient hunters who thought there would always be another

herd of mammoth over the next hill shared

the optimism of the stock trader, that there's always going to be

another big killing on the stock market in the next week or two.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.

FAIRGROUND MUSIC

COINS CLINKING

FAIRGROUND NOISES

If you are watching the Earth, say, over the last 5-6,000 years,

and you're speeding up your film, what you see is civilisations

breaking out like forest fires

in one pristine environment after another.

And after a civilisation has arisen and sort of burned out

the natural resources in that area,

then it dies down and another fire breaks out somewhere else.

And now of course we have one huge civilisation around the world,

which we have to confront the possibility that the entire

experiment of civilisation is in itself a progress trap.

REPORTERS: The Dow plunged more than 500 points yesterday...

..It was the biggest Dow decline ever...

..La crise financiere Americaine...

..And our economy seemingly on the brink of collapse...

..And while banks have failed and shares have plummeted,

the effects are working their way down to all of us.

..The economy will get worse before it gets better...

..Credit ratings are down...

SHOUTING AND GLASS SMASHING

When will the economy turn around? I'm not an economist.

But I do believe that we are growing.

And I can remember at this press conference, people are shouting

recession this, recession that, as if you are economists.

And I'm an optimist.

I believe there is a lot of positive things for the economy.

Faith in progress has become a kind of religious faith,

a sort of fundamentalism, rather like the market fundamentalism

that has just recently crashed and burned.

The idea that you can let markets rip is a delusion,

just as the idea that you can let technology rip and it will

solve the problems created by itself in a slightly earlier phase.

That has become a belief very similar to the religious delusions

that caused some societies to crash and burn in the past.

Written records go back about 4,000 years, and from 2,000 BC

to the time of Jesus, it was normal for all of the countries in the world

to periodically cancel the debts when they became too large to pay.

So you have Sumer, Babylonia, Egypt, other regions,

all proclaiming these debt cancellations.

And the effect was to make a clean slate so that society would

begin all over again.

This was easy to do in a society where most debts

were owed to the state. It became much harder to do

when enterprise and credit passed out of the hands of the state

into private hands and into the hands of an oligarchy.

And the last thing they wanted was to have a king that would

actually cancel the debts and restore equality.

Rome was the first country of the world not to cancel the debts.

It went to war in Sparta, in Greece, to overthrow the governments

and the kings that wanted to cancel the debts.

The wars of the first century BC ended up stripping these countries

of everything they had - not only did it strip

the temples of gold, it stripped the public buildings,

it stripped the economies of their reproductive capacity,

it stripped them of their waterworks, it made a desert out of the land.

And it said, "A debt is a debt."

The collapse seems to have been closely linked to ecological

devastation which led to all sorts of social and economic

and military problems.

In the early stages of the Roman Republic, you had fairly egalitarian

landowning system, the peasants had access to public land.

But as the Roman state became more powerful and the lords

and the generals began to appropriate public land

for their own private estates, more and more peasants became landless.

At the same time, erosion was a serious problem -

so bad that some of the Roman ports silted up with all

the topsoil that got washed down from the fields into the river.

Archaeologists have been able to establish how badly degraded

much of Italy was by the fall of the Roman Empire,

and how it took 1,000 years of much reduced population

during the Middle Ages for fertility in Italy to rebuild.

What was absolutely new in the Roman Empire was irreversible

concentration of wealth at the top of the economic pyramid,

and that's what progress has meant ever since.

Progress has meant, "You will never get back what we take from you."

That's what brought on the Dark Age and that's what's threatening

to bring in the Dark Age again

if society does not realise that if it lets the wealth

concentrate in the hands of the financial class,

this class is not going to be any more intelligent

and long-term in disposing of the wealth than its predecessors

were in Rome or in other countries.

The term "oligarchy" obviously sounds a little esoteric -

it just means a small group of people who've got a lot of political power based on their economic power.

We like to think of the United States as being much more democratic,

much more spread out in terms of who has the power, and oligarchy is

something that is usually associated with relatively poor countries,

but that view has to be updated, because we've got an essential part

of that problem, that structure, in the United States today.

People who got all this economic power were in the financial sector.

It was Wall Street, if you can use that shorthand expression.

Wall Street became really powerful,

they used that power to buy influence in Washington,

get more deregulation,

so to get more of the playing field shaped in the way they wanted,

which was no government intervention, no restrictions on what they were going to do.

That enabled them to make a lot more money,

which bought them more political power,

and this went on for a considerable period of time,

until of course there was an enormous crash.

Basically, you come to us today on your bicycles after buying

Girl Scout cookies and helping out Mother Teresa, telling us,

"We're sorry, we didn't mean it, we won't do it again.

"Trust us."

Well, I have some people in my constituency who actually

robbed some of your banks. And they say the same thing!

They're sorry, they didn't mean it, they won't do it again.

Just let them out.

Do you understand that this is a little difficult for most of my constituents to take?

That you learned your lesson?

The bankers can't stop themselves.

It's in their DNA, in the DNA of their organisations.

To take massive risks, to pay themselves ridiculous salaries,

and to collapse. And the more that reasonable,

responsible people at the centre and left and right see this,

the closer we'll get to finally constraining the power

of these out-of-control financial oligarchs.

It's not a mystery, it's not a surprise.

We know we have crises every few years.

My daughter called me from school one day and said,

"Dad, what's a financial crisis?" And without trying to be funny,

I said it's the type of thing that happens every five to seven years.

And she said, "Why is everybody so surprised?"

So we shouldn't be surprised.

I read scrawled on a wall somewhere

that every time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

If you look at the increasing complexity of civilisation,

what you can see towards the end of the classic Maya period

is the enormous amount of effort being put in to build palaces

and temple precincts that are controlled entirely by the nobility

and from which, one imagines, the peasantry was excluded,

just as the ordinary folk are excluded from gated communities

in many countries today.

And one imagines also that therefore the people at the bottom

were becoming more and more disenchanted with the rulers

as they felt that the social contract that had once existed -

that the rulers were the mediators between the gods

and themselves and would help them get good weather and good crops

and all that - as they saw that beginning to break down,

and the rulers in effect losing touch

with the people whom they claimed to represent,

that's the pattern I think we can see a lot in the modern world now.

Every society in history for the last 4,000 years has found

that the debts grow more rapidly than people can pay.

And the problem is a small oligarchy of 10 percent of the population

at the top to whom all of these net debts are owed to.

You want to annul the debts to the top 10 percent.

That's what they're not going to do. The oligarchy is running things.

They would rather annul the bottom 90 percent's right to live

and to annul the money that is due to them.

They would rather strip the planet and shrink the population

and be paid, rather than give up their claims.

That is the political fight of the 21st century.

My job on Wall Street was to be balance of payments economist

for the Chase Manhattan Bank in the 1960s.

My first job there was to calculate how much debt

could Third World countries pay,

and the answer was, well, how much do they earn?

And whatever they earn, that's what they can afford to pay in interest.

Our objective was to take the entire earnings of a Third World

country and say, ideally, that would be all paid as interest to us.

Look, don't give me a hard luck story, I hear them every day.

And quite frankly, they bore me. The facts are simple.

In 1973, this bank gave you a loan. And you still haven't paid it back.

Admittedly, you paid back the initial sum. But not the interest.

Which to date amounts to nine times the amount originally borrowed.

Nine times.

So you'd better get your act together.

Times are tough and we're all having to clamp down.

And don't look at me like that.

This is a bank, not a charity.

The number one cost for foreign lending

through some of the multilateral institutions such as IMF

and World Bank is the death toll on the continent.

We can look at the support of dictators that took place

throughout the years from 1960 till 1997 of a brutal dictator.

TRANSLATION:

He was given humongous loans.

Everybody knew he wasn't using that for the population - he was propped

up as one of the biggest leaders in the whole African continent.

Your country is young, only 10 years of age.

But it has had a period of progress in that period which has been

an example for nations throughout the world.

You have moved forward economically,

you have established unity in your country,

and you have a vitality which impresses every visitor

when he comes to Congo.

What is interesting is all the money plundered from all

the international debt is found in Western banks.

So as he was removed from power,

the money never returned to the Congolese.

SHOUTING

The population didn't have access to medical services,

didn't have access to adequate education, living wages.

And it continues till today. Now, the Congo has a 14 billion debt.

It has been structured in a way where the people do not benefit

and the human cost is so high.

In the Congo, we have 6 million deaths since 1996.

Rich countries lend a so-called developing country

a big whack of money.

Debt is incurred on behalf of people who had nothing to do with it,

don't know anything about it.

Then they're expected to pay the price

by scraping off their livelihood, turning it into money

and giving it to somebody else.

How could the money given to the Congo benefit the people?

Use some of the funds to make sure there are strong institutions

within the country that will protect them

against human rights violations and so many other issues that we face.

But these funds are not used for that, because whenever it's given,

they tell you specifically what project you have to use it for.

And mainly it's usually mining projects to get access to resources.

SHOUTING

TRANSLATION:

You can relate the destruction of the rainforest in Brazil

directly to the Wall Street and London financial sector.

The story begins in 1982,

when countries couldn't pay their debt any more, and the result

is that the Latin American countries generally stopped paying,

because they said, "We're already paying all the balance

"of payment surplus we have to the banks."

"We don't have any money to import to sustain living standards,

"we don't have money to build new factories and pay the debt,"

so the International Monetary Fund at that point said,

"Don't go bankrupt, you have an option.

"You can begin to sell off the public domain.

"You have plenty of assets to sell to pay us.

"You can sell off your water rights, your forests,

"your sub-soil mineral resources, you can sell us your oil rights."

And so Brazil, Argentina and other countries

begin to sell off their resources to private investors

and the private investors bought these resources on credit.

EXPLOSION

LORRY BLOWS HORN

PEOPLE CHEER

SIREN WAILS

RAQUEL TAITSON-QUEIROZ SPEAKS:

They're cutting down the rainforest, they're emptying out the economy,

they are turning into a hole in the ground to repay the bankers.

That's the financial business plan.

That's how it ends up, because the bankers can always take their money

and begin digging holes in another country

and emptying out that country. That's the global financial system.

The economists say if you clear-cut the forest,

take the money and put it in the bank, you can make 6% or 7%.

If you clear-cut the forest, put it into Malaysia or Papua New Guinea,

you can make 30% or 40%. So who cares if you keep the forest?

Cut it down. Put the money somewhere else.

When those forests are gone, put it in fish.

When the fish are gone, put it in computers.

Money doesn't stand for anything

and money now grows faster than the real world.

Conventional economics is a form of brain damage.

Economics is so fundamentally disconnected from the real world,

it is destructive.

If you take an introductory course in economics,

the professor in the first lecture will show a slide of the economy

and it looks very impressive -

you know, raw materials, extraction process, manufacture,

wholesale retail with arrows going back and forth

and they try to impress you because they think,

they know damn well, economics is not a science

but they're trying to fool us into thinking it's a real science.

It's not. Economics is a set of values that they then try to use,

mathematical equations and all that stuff, and pretend it's a science,

but if you ask the economist,

"In that equation, where do you put the ozone layer?

"Where do you put the deep underground aquifers of fossil water?

"Where do you put topsoil or biodiversity?"

Their answer is, "Oh, those are externalities."

But then you might as well be on Mars.

That economy's not based in anything like the real world.

It's life, the web of life, that filters water in the hydrologic cycle.

It's micro-organisms in the soil that create the soil that we can grow our food in.

Nature performs all kinds of services. Insects fertilise all of the flowering plants.

These services are vital to the health of the planet.

Economists call these externalities. That's nuts!

Unlimited economic progress in a world of finite natural resources doesn't make sense.

It's a pattern that is bound to collapse.

We keep seeing it collapsing, but then we build it up because there are these strong vested interests.

We must have business as usual. You get the arms manufacturers, you get the petroleum industry,

you get the pharmaceutical industry, and all of this feeding into helping to create corrupt governments

who are putting the future of their own people at risk.

You can imagine lilies growing in a pond. Lilies grow very rapidly. They double every day.

They're going to cover the whole surface and there won't be any way of the fish getting oxygen,

and all the life is going to die in the pond.

That's how rapidly things can grow. One day you're half full of lilies. The next day you're dead.

You could say that today we're in the point at which the lily pond is half full.

The life is being snuffed out of national economies and the debt goes on doubling.

How long can it do it?

It has one day to go.

All the civilisations of the past, and I think our own,

only seem to be doing well when they're expanding,

when the population is growing, when the industrial output is growing,

and when the cities are spreading outwards.

Eventually you reach the point at which the population has overrun everything.

The cities have expanded over the farmland.

The people at the bottom begin to starve and the people at the top lose their legitimacy.

And so you get hunger, you get revolution.

Now, one kind of scary thing about the moment we're in

is that for the first time, there's kind of only one system.

So if the whole thing goes down, you won't have what

you've had in previous eras of epic collapse,

which is that even as one civilisation goes down and may take a while to recover,

there are other robust civilisations that are kind of the guardians of progress.

In that sense, some of the things that have been reassuring in the past about progress

don't necessarily apply to the current situation,

because once you get to the global level, you've only got one experiment working.

That's just the inevitable culmination of its growth ever since the Stone Age,

And there were way stations along the way like the Roman Empire,

and now here we are, and more and more people are in the same boat

and they face problems and either they will solve them together or suffer together,

and possibly on a catastrophic scale.

We're entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history.

Our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts

that were of survival advantage in the past.

But I'm an optimist.

If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy,

we should make sure we survive and continue.

If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe.

We have made remarkable progress in the last 100 years.

Our only chance of long-term survival

is not to remain inward-looking on Planet Earth, but to spread out into space.

I was at a conference a few years back with George Lucas,

and he came up and said, you know, "There's only two hopes for humanity.

"Either we find another planet to colonise after we've destroyed this one,

"or perhaps your technology,"

meaning what we're doing with the genetic code,

"might be able to allow us to transform ourselves or other

"aspects of the planet where we could continue to live here."

We're here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome.

Without a doubt, this is the most important,

most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.

We're announcing today for the first time our species can read

the chemical letters of its genetic code.

For the last several years,

my team has been actually sailing around the world

collecting all the species in the ocean, the micro-species, on filters.

And we isolate all the DNA all at once from all of them.

I have a novel way of looking at these genes.

I view them as the design components of the future.

It's a mind-boggling concept,

even though we're doing it every day,

that we can simply start with four bottles of chemicals,

write the genetic code and change the genetic code of species,

basically developing new species.

We can try and find ways to make fuels that people haven't even imagined.

We can do this with novel sources of food.

We're limited only by our imagination and whatever biological reality is.

When we consider trying to replace oil -

we use billions of gallons of oil a year.

I can't even - I think I have a pretty good imagination -

envision what a billion gallons of oil is.

Making a billion gallons of oil from invisible microbes

is a certain leap of faith.

But in fact, that's how we proceed in science.

Instead of writing software for computers, we can now write software for life.

By changing and taking over evolution,

changing the time course of evolution

and going into deliberate design of species for our own survival

at least gives us some points of optimism that we have a chance to control our destiny.

We're here today to announce the first synthetic cell.

This is the first self-replicating species that we've had on the planet,

whose parent is a computer.

One of the challenges that faces the human species is

we are more and more in a position of acting like gods.

This has been true for a while because we've had the ability

to change the climate, for example.

This is going to be even more true with genetic technologies.

We'll be able to manipulate other species and eventually ourselves.

We'll be in a position of controlling our own fate in a way that no

creature has ever - in a billion years on the planet -

had an opportunity to do.

I once wrote a poem in which a mad bishop said,

"And man became God, became greater than God in the godhood of man."

I do not see anyone living in this materialistic society as being

anything like God.

I don't know what God is,

but, in my wildest dreams, I would never conceive of God or

a God as being like a modern human being in a materialistic society.

We're anything but godlike.

I think the challenges are so overwhelming to all of us,

that we're all trying to just use whatever new tools we can

to try and change the future.

Synthetic biology is a progress trap par excellence.

Biologists have pointed out that these engineering approaches

is all very well, and the engineers can try to treat

life as though it were some sort of computer or engineering substrate,

but ultimately the microbes are going to end up laughing at them.

That life doesn't work like that.

I think the problems we're seeing now, whether we're talking about

hunger and massive inequity, or climate change or the loss of biodiversity,

have been driven over the last 200 years by a system of over-production of stuff

and over-consumption of stuff.

That's been inflated and inflated to the point where it really is not in any way reasonable.

Erm, the companies and those within governments who have

supported that approach, are now saying

they will provide new technologies to continue that consumption

of stuff, that level of production. It's just not realistic.

'ExxonMobil and Synthetic Genomics have built a new facility

'to identify the most productive strains of algae.

'Algae are amazing little critters.

'They secrete oil which we could turn into biofuels.

'They also absorb CO2.

'We're hoping to supplement the fuels that we use in our vehicles to

'someday help meet the world's energy demands.'

What is harder - mapping the entire genome set that makes up

the human being, or making algae produce energy?

Making algae produce energy is not hard,

but doing it on the scale required to have a major economic

and environmental impact is going to be a huge challenge.

But, erm, we've got a good partner with that with ExxonMobil to try and

get it to the scale that it needs to be - of billions of gallons a year.

A lot of engineering is required for facilities the size of San Francisco.

-Goodness!

-Erm, I think they're serious and we're serious.

What we're seeing alongside the development of synthetic biology

is a massive corporate grab of plant life.

Literally speaking, that means a grab on land.

And a grab on seas as well.

Where people are being moved off of land to make way for the growing

of plant life that can be transformed into plastics, chemicals, fuels and so forth.

What drives synthetic biology is not an attempt to save the planet

or help humanity, but an attempt to increase the bottom line

for certain very large corporations.

If we're going to feed the upcoming nine billion people,

we can't afford to use our prime crop land,

erm, for the trying to produce the billions of gallons of fuel we use.

We're writing the genetic code, changing the species allows us

to use desert land for...

We just need sunlight and CO2 for using these new engineered algae, for example.

Synthetic biology - you know, it's frightening

but I'm sympathetic to it in so many ways.

It'll be nice to get a more water-efficient plant.

But still, it would still need water.

Craig Venter cannot create a plant which needs no water and no nitrogen

or which totally fixes all its nitrogen by sucking it from the air.

It cannot go that far.

This doesn't fundamentally change the game.

What fundamentally changes the game,

and what people don't want to hear, and I'm coming to this all the time,

people say, "Don't talk to us like that because this is a non-starter."

But for me this is the only starter - we have to use less.

The poor people need more, there is no doubt or discussion there.

If you are average villager somewhere in Rajasthan or

Punjab or Nigeria, you need more. Period.

Basic human decency compels you to say these people need more -

more clean water, more basic food, more education for their children.

The discussion closes before it begins.

But as far as us is concerned,

we certainly could and should do with much, much less.

People have been conditioned that things have to always get better

and immediately you say limit something, people think this is not getting better.

But it would be.

It's even a non-starter saying to people, you should eat less.

You should eat less meat. Even that's a non-starter.

You should use less electricity. You should run smaller cars.

I saw the new Vice President of GM talking about the new GM, right.

One journalist asked him, "But your cars are still so heavy."

And he said, "Yes, we are working on it." What is there to work on it?

There are so many things which we could do.

Not to surrender our standard of living, not to live in a gutter,

but we do not need 1.5 tonne car to go red light to red light in a city.

People are not willing to go back on these things.

Most of them simply are not

because they've been totally hijacked by this material culture.

Let's not underestimate the persuasion,

the power of this material culture is immense, it's just immense.

And I've seen so many people being so genuinely unhappy that they

cannot afford a 50,000 square foot, sorry, 50,000 bathroom remodelling.

I mean, there's something wrong with that value set, really.

Cos bathroom is a place where you should spend 10 minutes to

take your shower, brush your teeth, so it doesn't have to be that.

But you know how much money people are...

Again, on my mind because we are thinking about re-doing

our bathroom, right, so it's on my mind.

It's very interesting, so for me it's a chore.

It has to be done really,

but for many people it's kind of a life-affirming thing.

People are renting storage spaces, right?

Which they will never access in 20 years to store the junk which

they cannot store in their 5,000 square foot homes.

So do we need that really?

It's just amazing so...

It's, it's, it's...

This is very difficult to put the genie in the bottle

so everything is defined in this material thing.

I could make it a lot more coherent,

but this is difficult because when you make it more coherent,

you make it proscriptive and proscriptions never work really.

I don't have the solution.

I can't sit here and say to you, we should follow this

and by 2030 everything click and we all live happy ever after.

So I'm making it deliberately incoherent.

I could be very doctrinaire but you see I live for 26 years in a Communist society,

I'm innoculated against any doctrinaire grand solutions,

saying this is the pattern, this is the must,

this is the paradigm which you have to follow, you know.

I'm just totally set against it.

So I'm making things deliberately kind of messy, inchoate,

uncoordinated, because that's how life it.

We don't know what pattern will emerge.

As long as we are living amidst this sea of affluence

and opportunities and material riches,

It is very difficult to make this individual, voluntary,

resolute step and say enough. Back. Limit. Very difficult.

I was walking around, pointing my finger at everybody.

You know, "You people," you know, blaming the culture

for its consumption. Finally, one day I came home,

and I had the air-conditioners were on,

even though there was no-one home.

And I was like, wait,

I'm going around blaming everyone else,

but the fact of the matter is that my lifestyle

requires a huge amount of resource, too.

So, how can I blame other people? And I realised that

before I go around trying to change other people,

maybe I should look at myself and change myself,

and keep my side of the street clean.

So, I came up with this idea that I would live as environmentally

as possible for a year, and see how that affected us.

So, we did this No Impact experiment. We live in New York,

we live in the middle of New York City,

which made it unusual, because most people

can think of environmental living as a back to the land thing.

But, of course, back to the land is not the right idea

when it comes to saving our habitat.

If all of us in New York were to go back to the land,

we would very much destroy the land.

We are not biologically consumptive.

This has not got to do with human nature.

Human nature is to do what everybody else does, that's human nature.

That we want, and it's wonderful, it's like, "I want to be with you.

"I want to be the same as you.

"I want to love you, and I want you to love me." That's not bad.

So, that's also part of the problem.

"I want to be the same as you, and you consume,

"so I'm not going to be the first not to consume."

But it also tells us that if we can

move from non-consumption to consumption,

we can also move from consumption back to non-consumption.

We need to begin by saying we are at the end of a failed experiment,

and it's time to say goodbye to it.

It's an economic experiment, it's a technological experiment,

it's been going on for a couple of hundred years, and it's not worked.

It's brought us to this point of crises.

Then we can start to sanely and intelligently say,

"How can we live within the real limits that our planet gives us,

"and create a safe operating space for humanity?"

Admittedly, we've used our brain in ways that are detrimental

to the environment and society, but brains are beginning to get together

around the planet to find solutions to some harm that we've inflicted.

You know, we humans are a problem solving species,

and we always do pretty well when our back's to the wall.

It's easy now to see kind of a giant social brain,

or a planetary brain,

because it's in the physical form of the Internet.

It looks so much like a nervous system,

you almost can't miss the analogy.

We might say that there have always been a lot of

little social brains around the planet, getting bigger,

starting to form little interconnections amongst themselves.

Now, more than ever, you can say there's a unified social brain.

Even if the overall arc of history is towards

an expanded moral horizon, more and more people acknowledging humanity,

more and more different kinds of people,

there's always the risk of backsliding,

and it can be catastrophic.

From a point of view of strict self-interest, it is imperative

that we make further moral progress,

that we get more and more people

to acknowledge the humanity of one another,

or it will be bad for pretty much all of them.

If we don't develop what you might call

the moral perspective of God, then we'll screw up the engineering

part of playing God, because the actual engineering solutions

depend on seeing things from the point of view of other people,

ensuring that their lives don't get too bad,

because if they do, it'll come back to haunt us.

So, you know, kind of, half of being God has just been handed to us,

and the question is whether

we'll master the other half of being God, the moral half.

The bad news is that

the enlightenment is sometimes hard to come by.

Because of human nature, in some cases,

because we've got these kind of animal minds,

designed for very different environments, facing novel problems,

so the enlightenment part is going to require some real education

and reflection and self-discipline, and may not come naturally.

I think what we're up against here is human nature.

We have to reform ourselves,

remake ourselves in a way that cuts against the grain

of our inner animal nature,

and transcend that ice age hunter that all of us are,

if you strip off the thin layer of civilisation.

We always have been the initiators of this experiment,

we've unleashed it,

but we've never controlled it, but now it's more likely

that we're going to come to grief because of environmental problems.

If we do, then that is really nature saying,

"The experiment of civilisation is a failed evolutionary experiment."

That making apes smarter is a dead-end.

So, it's up to us to prove nature wrong, in a sense,

to show that we can take control of our own destinies

and behave in a wise way, that will ensure

the continuation of the experiment of civilisation.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd