Scale Independent Thought

The Way of Time ~ An Introduction

 

SynchroSentience I  & SynchroSentience II by Tony & Bonnie DeVarco

    Our understanding of the Universe is radically changing through a new generation of temporal and spatial visualization tools. The images of the cosmos brought back from NASA’s Hubble telescope, the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe (WMAP) and the Planck multi-frequency microwave all-sky survey  help us visualize space and time in ways we never thought possible. At the same time, tools such as x-ray tomography and x-ray fluorescence imaging allow researchers to to decode ancient artifacts such as the Antikythera Mechanism and the Archimedes Palimpsest manuscript. Through this research we can now identify important details that have been lost to history for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. New details gleaned from these technology enhanced micro views redefine the way we understand ancient thought.

 

Throughout countless generations, the way we visualized natural information about the universe around us has shaped our conceptions of time. Now it is becoming ever more important to pull back the veil to discover ways in which humans have visualized time rather than simply reviewing the text-based historical record to understand their world views. 

Exploring history through visual artifacts (i.e., the designs of pottery, textiles, architectures, manuscripts, instruments and their ornamental faces) can offer something valuable -  a condensed, almost alternative view of history. This visual record surprisingly reveals perspectives that humanity has lost or thrown away – some that are not adequately represented by the “official” histories we have passed down from century to century.

By applying a Shape of Thought approach (an approach that focuses on the patterns and meanings that link ancient artifacts, emergent technologies, Nature’s geometry, and human cognition) to explore the nature of time, we will find a vastly different story than that we have told ourselves thus far.  This new story of time is driven by visual language - thirteen carefully selected images of artifacts from specific periods in history. Each image is emblematic of specific ways in which humanity has understood the nature of time. We can re-vision history as we return to them once again with a set of new questions.

The word SynchroSentience captures the spirit of the “intersection” of time cycles. Each image in SynchroSentience I & II above unveils a story that crosses vast areas of the world and different periods in history. With this touchstone, we can think about time as a pulsing, overlapping, nested phenomenon. Imaging the dynamic moment where cycles intersect in longer scales of time can almost be called an art form. It allows us to see the intersections that create moments of potency. 

Some images in SynchroSentience convey the underside of the history of time – stories that we have not listened to enough. These stories convey how folk arts and women contributed some of the most important pieces of knowledge that led to similar discoveries using our scientific instruments. They demonstrate the ways in which indigenous cultures experience time with a larger sensibility – how they still have much to teach us if only we would listen.

Walking through these images, we may broaden our conceptual vista of time. Perhaps we can begin to intentionally use our new visual languages to more effectively experience humanity’s place in the tree of life, our role on the planet and our understanding of the dynamics of the Universe in which we live. Let’s begin with the dance of Kairos and Chronos…

The Dance of Kairos and Chronos

 

Kairos and Chronos, both ancient concepts, characterize two vastly different ways of experiencing time.  The ancient Greeks recognized two kinds of time - one is linear, quantitative - the other, a special temporal threshold that carries with it a profound experience. The Bible refers to Kairos time as  “God time” – on a threshold. In classical and medieval periods, Kairos was linked to Lady Fortuna (the Wheel of Fortune), the goddess whose wheels turn in a random fashion, sometimes bringing fortune, sometimes grief. In the quantum world, two different times, very resonant with these ancient concepts of Kairos and Chronos are used: synchronic and diachronic time. These two types of time scales are both needed to understand that time is a spatial construction.

The diachronic trajectory is the path an object takes over a period of time – an interval, a duration, where change or evolution is experienced.  Unlike diachronic time, synchronic time (like Kairos), is elusive – it’s a much more symbolic animal… a poignant overlap of two things at once, a potent time, a recurring cycle, like the date of Christmas, the month of Ramadan. Or for the Hindu Balinese, Kairos is expressed in their ritual calendar when the one-year, 10-year and 100-year cycles intersect and overlap, the Eka Dasa Rudra – when their most important pilgrimage to Mt. Besakih temple takes place – once every hundred years when the last generation has fully passed away the island spirit is reborn anew. When balance is restored.  

 

 

 

Balinese “Mother Temple” Besakih at the foot of Gunung Agung, Central Bali

    We mustn’t mess with synchronic time – it is the province of Gods, the sacred. It is luminous, diaphanous.  It fleets.  It never ends.  It is spontaneous, enduring. It is inside moments of ultimate paradox – both embraced and revered, and mostly unexpected. One never plans for Kairos time, yet the context for its emergence can be carefully cultivated through the ritual process or in the act of poeisis. Kairos sings in the overtones of the pentatonic hues of the gamelan, holds the first light of sunrise in the vernal equinox, imbues the rapture of your first kiss, the brilliant visage in your newborn’s gaze, carries the endless weight of one last good-bye. Kairos is the infinite moment your life would never be the same.

    Kronos… well, Chronos is the punch card, the alarm bells, the daily march – chronos belongs to computus, reckons the calendar, unwinds the cycles and lays them out in neat rows or gridlines, straightening them with a clean edged knife. Chronos is the alpha and omega, our religions’ linear path to end time scenarios, our scientists’ endless search to pinpoint the beginning of the universe, the first shudder of the Big Bang.

    How can we once again return to Kairos time, write with a “kairos hand,” speak with a “kairos voice” – can we once again view time as a cosmic reenchantment? Visualizing time on grander scales is one way. But to get there we need to return and remember the importance of what ancient civilizations already knew. One threshold between the very ancient and classical worlds was the philosopher Plato, who codified the first Western geometric cosmology in Timaeus, a philosophy of time in The Republic, and a doctrine of recollection in Meno and Phaedo. As a diffusionist of ideas coming down from the Orphics and Pythagoreans, Plato was passing down a much more ancient understanding of Kairos time.

    Anamnesis, a word first coined by Plato, is to remember “that which lies deep in the soul.” Plato’s philosophy was grounded in “metempsychosis”  - the transmigration of the soul. He assumed we had many more memories deep beneath our everyday consciousness, that the soul carried with it these innate memories. Recalling Hesiod and Pythagoreans, Plato emphasized how the soul memory was washed out and forgotten in the rivers of Lethe before we enter a new life.

    This concept of anamnesis could also be considered a great remembering of a generational soul, which allows us to retain our genetic memory: what generations before us have lived, learned and recorded. We have gained and lost huge chunks of history through wars, religious fanatacism and the systematic destruction of our hard-won knowledge. Through this, we built an edifice of chronos time and reckoned our calendars to fit the needs of the powers that be. The dogmatic adherence to chronos ushered in the amnesia of much that came before.

    In an article titled “Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting,” the late Mircea Eliade takes us through the ancient art of memory to a new form of anamnesis – remembering and documenting our myriad histories. Eliade provocatively points out that our contemporary globalized world is beginning to open up to a new way of looking at the past -  “historiography” - where we now have a new type of access to all cultures, across all time periods. He suggests we are immersed in a new project of anamnesis – that is, trying to piece together a much larger human mosaic of sorts, to “revive the entire past of humanity.”

    Eliade’s assertion was made in the early 1960s before the singularity curve defined the way we use our communication technologies. However, Eliade sensed where we have come to, now that anybody can have access to any perspective of time. An average 10-year old has immediate access to the margins of history through the emerging linked data web. 

    From X-ray tomography to microblogs to Wikipedia, our indigenous histories, ancient scripts and reports from the leading edge of science are now laid out side by side, illuminated by our computer screens, handhelds, touch tables, IPads and augmented environments. A new lens widens the scope of our more expansive present moment. Hyperlinked and mashed up, new movies and image montages capture vintage futurism juxtaposed with our newest histories of the past.

    Eliade described anamnesis as a tool for today. He encouraged us to return to ancient understandings in order to link them to the most our pressing contemporary problems. How can we effectively recover this lost history? We can do this by re-visioning humanity’s confluent histories. With SynchroSentience the stories behind these artifacts can be introduced in order to intuitively grasp the patterned memories within. In retelling time, let’s visually link our latest technologies and scientific understandings with a seamless thread, spinning this story from future to the past and back again to remember what we already know that has been forgotten.

I. Scaling Time

    Today our scientists explore deep, cosmic time - the birth of stars, the geologic record and paleoclimate cycles. Our current nanoscale resonances are captured in the vibrations and microwave signals of today’s atomic clocks. But these clocks must still be continuously balanced for the lack of infinite precision that is the essential nature of universal time.

    The fleeting incommensurability of time woos us, yet precision remains elusive. We remain confounded by the fact that time’s perfect measure cannot be captured by our instruments, however precise. Like the dichotomies of motion in Zeno’s paradox, even the next generation of quantum and optical clocks will not capture the paradoxical quality of perfect time without adding leap seconds and making adjustments on a regular basis. Such is the way of time.

    Time, it seems, still has a greater story to tell. This story can now be told in the language of light and sound. As we look for beginnings, even our quantum physicists cannot agree on whether time is truly asymmetrical or whether there is symmetry to be found.  Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara from the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics suggests that we need to get rid of space to have time. The arrow of time leads us to find that even our views of the Universe are too limited. 

 

    With the huge challenges faced by the planet, we as stewards need to conceptually expand our notion of time at this critical juncture in our history. We can do this with a confluence of new calendars, clocks and timelines such as NASA’s updated version of Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar and Cesare Emiliani’s proposed 10,000 year “Holocene Calendar”. But how quickly can we adopt these new tools and take the approach of the Long Now Foundation’s  “Clock of the Long Now”?  These represent a few ways we can quickly reframe our understanding of humanity’s tiny slice of time in a larger, cosmic framework.

 

    Expanding our clocks, calendars and timelines in this way allows us to expand our contemporary dialogues around climate change, biodiversity, cultural exchange and globalization as we rapidly become planetary humans.

 

    Visualizing longer historical arcs encourage us to create broader global narratives. Professor David Christian of the University of California, San Diego has developed a course called “Big History.” Christian’s Big History presents perhaps one of best frameworks that apply this thinking to the way we teach history.  After over 20 years honing his interdisciplinary course at UCSD with physists, biologists, astronomers and ecologists, his Big History course has now been adopted in numerous universities throughout America and is available as a packaged video course. 

    Christian’s premise in Big History is to look at these larger timescales to understand the history of civilization in a more realistic landscape of time and space. The driving evolutionary forces that link humanity with the cosmos are complexity and emergence – both important dynamics behind the birth of a star to the birth of a cell.  He identifies Eight Thresholds from the Big Bang to the modern revolution.

 

    New visualizations of the geologic spiral (released in 2006) and the Geologic timescale “clock” (released in 2010) help us look at stratigraphic “deep time” in the history of Earth. Geologist James Hutton pioneered the scientific concept of deep time in the 18^th century. Hutton observed a more expansive history in the layering of geologic strata and was the first offer proof that humans needed to think in geologic scales. Yet prior to Hutton, geologic time was recognized and discussed in the works of Leonardo da Vinci in the 15^th century and even earlier by 11^th century, Arab polymath Avicenna and Chinese Naturalist Shen Kuo. 

 

    Now we have new visualizations of deep time that show scales in which the 2-million year quaternary period, the era where recognizable humans appear, is almost too small to be visible. In turn, these “maps” of deep time allow us to see humanity as a much smaller part of a larger evolutionary force. They engender a self-reflexive dose of humility as we step off our pedestal to accept a role of stewardship as part of a larger superorganism - Earth in a galactic community.

 The USGS Geologic Time Spiral 2006

    To see these larger arcs of time requires more dynamic visual media environments such as planetariums and immersive dome theatres. Some of the newest collaborations between artists, visualization technologists and scientists have enabled us to have new views of time as a matter of scale, moving from the astro to the quantum scale with seamless ease.

    This has unleashed a new generation of animated visualizations of time: the newest version of the Digital Universe Atlas by Carter Emmart, AMNH and the Hayden Planetarium is the best example and the most updated version can now be experienced in planetaria all over the world.

 Carter Emmart demonstrates the new Digital Universe Atlas at TED, 2010

    Media artist David McConville, whose easily deployed inflatable GeoDomes by ELumenati dot the Earth, employs a unique approach in his rendition of the Digital Universe. Inside of his immersive media environments David’s artful narrative brings contemporary cosmologies together with ancient and indigenous understandings of space and time. Called “The Transcalar Imaginary” David’s ancient stories are immersed in powerful Universe imagery using the most recent Hubble data. Through this unique blend of immersive artistry, technology and narrative, David weaves his story of the birth and evolution of the cosmos with the birth of human cosmologies.

 David McConville's "Transcalar Imaginary" in the GeoDome

    Another emergent visualization environment animates Earth, the solar system and the galaxy in long time spans. Infinitaas™ newly launched by Kevin Kelley, Rachel Bagby and the Metanoiaa Foundation evokes the music of the spheres in a luminous journey through time and space. It is new kind of “universal clock” – as Earth spins through space and time a new sensibility of a cyclic, nested system emerges.  Viewers watch the calendar days and years tick away on spinning Earth as the moon’s orbit is speeded up. Infinitaas™ allows us to envision our planet’s path in space as luminous tendrils leave spiral trails, much like the unraveling of threads from a cosmic spindle.

  
 Copyright © 2006 - 2010 Kevin W. Kelley  All rights reserved - patent pending - a Metanoiaa Project

    With Infinitaas™ we are also able to envision the wobble of the Milankovitch cycles – precession, obliquity, and eccentricity, as they influence paleoclimate cycles through thousands of years. We watch the glacial advance and retreat near the poles of Earth in deep geological time. As Earth spirals outward, we see the tree of life grow and expand - branches of the tree bifurcate with new species, and shrivel as extinctions occur.

    The evolutionary process is synchronized with Earth’s movement through space. The pulsing life of Earth begins to look like the Superorganism that we are soon to embrace - a larger spherical lifeforce within a series of nested ecosystems. Time is speeded up, then slowed according to the viewer’s desire, as nested time frames are made as easy to scale through as flying down to one’s local home in Google Earth, yet beyond what can be experienced in Google Sky.

    Infinitaas™ evokes a brand new kind of experience of the cosmos in a dynamical framework, a new kind of Powers of Ten. The reference point of Earth in Infinitaas™ moves viewers into a larger galactic vision as the sun’s path in the spinning Milky Way is shown. Time frames widen and a new perspective is revealed. Kevin and Rachel describe the animated design conventions of Infinitaas™ as nothing less than a transformational tool - a way to:

… utilize the best contemporary science, poetic intelligence and interactive multi-sensory immersive technologies to create highly compelling art, products, services and experiences that will fundamentally transform human understanding of our place within the flow of existence and change our behavior on earth.

 

    All of the animations and visualization tools described above tell us a different, larger story about time. Will these new visualizations of the past help us adopt a mindset that we have lost along the way? They may offer us a beautiful opportunity to show how different cultures throughout different time periods understood time, space the Universe and our place in it, without compromising the exactitude made possible by our latest scientific technologies.

    Through the art of weaving science and myth, ancient cosmologies can be braided into an emergent multi-scaled story of life on Earth. These new forms of media will inspire us to become stewards within a much larger whole system of living systems. They will allow us to reach deeply back in history to go forward into a new perception of our place in the cosmos.

 

    The second visual story of The Way of Time will be on the cyclic nature of ancient time.

Visioning Sustainability

Given a choice between something messy or a beautiful solution, Nature invariably goes for beauty.                                                                

~ Marcus du Sautoy

“Synthetic Gyrus” by Tony DeVarco (dedicated to innovator, inspirator and astronomer Owen Durden)

Today’s world of increasing complexity and rapid globalization leaves us thirsting for new metaphors, analogies and emblems – those that can encapsulate the complex challenges we face into an image of clarity we can wrap our minds around.  As the stakes of our collective behavior rise, this new image must both shock our sensibilities and inspire us into action.  Such a fresh, contemporary archetype must quickly scale visibly into the heart of mass consciousness to encourage humans to become the stewards we were meant to be.  To find these new emblems, we can do what the ancients did before us – look to the dynamic processes, natural morphologies and behaviors of our planet to see how she creates dynamic equilibrium in response to upheaval and change. I suggest a scale free archetypal form for our own age of self-reflexivity – the gyre.

Nothing could be more emblematic of Earth’s own processes of homeostatic stewardship and the grand challenge for humanity to rise to this occasion than two compelling images from the World’s oceans – The powerful brilliance of miles-wide phytoplankton blooms and the infamous spectre of the Texas-sized Pacific Garbage Patch. To juxtapose these two representations of our ocean’s cyclic behaviors gets us to the heart our ecological dilemma.

  

Emiliania Huxleyi Bloom

These two images evoke an understanding of the dynamic power of Gaia at work. One illuminates the powerful force of the ocean gyre in the shapes taken on by coccolithopore blooms that Lynn Margulis, Stephan Harding and others hail as Earth’s most important temperature regulator, a "global air conditioner." The other, a frightening human artifact - where the powerful shape of the gyre is exemplified through a massive, condensed swirl of thoughtlessly discarded plastic.

A gyre is a large-scale swirling vortex in the ocean, caused by the Coriolis effect, the way that moving objects deflect when viewed from a rotating frame of reference.  There are five major natural vortices in Earth’s oceans and numerous small ones formed by the circulation of sea currents that bring water and silt from the lower depths upward and wind currents that move the water back outward from the center.

Yet now the ocean’s natural processes have turned the North Pacific gyre into a dynamic monument to humanity’s excess, a floating wasteland of consumer driven culture – a tightly woven sea of plastic called “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” 

To get a sense of just how big this patch of trash is, Greenpeace features an animation of the trash in the Pacific Gyre showing the accumulation over the course of a 6-year period:

  

The Trash Vortex Animation from Greenpeace  

After World Oceans Day in June, Claudia Welss, sustainability leader and founder of the NextNow Collaboratory clarified the current situation with plastic pollution in our oceans and the work of leading scientist Charles Moore who founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation.  

 

Speaking visually, we have a scale issue with the Pacific Gyre -  we cannot view this garbage patch from Google Earth, or from satellite photos.  We must look at it from up close, in indelible images of plastic trash or animations of its oceanic scope.  Many sites on the web have already mistakenly used a satellite image of an Emiliania bloom to show the garbage patch – the irony is not lost on me, because Emiliania blooms, which we are actually able to see from a satellite view, are here to show us the ocean processes of gyre.  The same dynamics also whip up tons of discarded plastic into a tight mass, like a trash compactor - ready to be recognized, disposed of and used as a cautionary tale about the delicate balance needed in the closed system of Earth. Yet, as part of this cautionary tale, our human created trash patch is choking the life force from our most beloved creatures of the sea. So let's also look a one of these micro sea creatures up close - phytoplankton. 

The Sphere of Stewardship

Emiliania huxleyi is a spherical coccolithaporoid less than 4/1000ths of a millimeter in diameter (4 microns).  As the most abundant phytoplankton in the world’s seas, Emiliana is a major producer of three climate forcing substances: organic carbon, calcium carbonate and dimethyl sulphide (DMS). These coccolithopores close pack together in a swarming mass before they fall to the water’s floor, or rise to its surface. The role of this most prevalent phytoplankton in the world’s oceans is to reflect the sunlight, much like snow in the arctic. Miles-long blooms of Emiliania, sometimes as large as the country of England, swirl with the ocean gyres to form massive, brilliant white “creatures” on the ocean’s surface.

If we look closely at one single specimen of Emiliania, we can see our lovely steward up close.  When viewed from this vantage point, she is a masterwork of gentle geometry, more carefully wrought than the world’s finest lace, whose wheels are bound together through the same fivefold geometry as a geodesic sphere, or the carbon molecule, buckminsterfullerene. 

Emiliania is my favorite microscale archetype – she has been since 1992 when I first found in the archive Bucky’s handwritten note on a microscopic image of emiliania in an early report of the first international program carried out by the paleoclimatic community to assess the climatic state of surface oceans. CLIMAP (Climate: Long-Range Investigation, Mapping and Prediction) was a project funded by NSF and launched in 1976. Fuller's handwritten notes on the report were written shortly before he worked out the final mathematics for his Fly’s Eye Dome in the 1970s. This dome was Fuller’s last experimental geodesic design, where complex curvature inspired by images from the tiniest scale was applied to a modular design of his geodesic enclosures for a home that actually rotated with the sun. Fuller’s Fly’s Eye design was not just inspired by the hexapent morphology of the microscopic eye of a fly, but also from electron microscopic views of our most abundant spherical phytoplankton, Emiliania huxleyi.

Deep in the spherical geometry of each single Emiliania is a nugget, or kernel, of truth – symmetry is a tool of stewardship. The symmetry of the fluid dynamics in the Pacific gyre knits together into a swirling watery mesh almost 4 million tons of our thoughtlessly discarded plastic waste from across over 10 million miles.  There is something amazingly cool about this process. It is the same natural process brings together the Emiliania into blooms on the surface of the sea. But we need our micro and macro lenses for both space and time to see the beautiful power of Emiliania.  To do this we can turn to her namesake, Cesare Emiliani.

  Twentieth century renaissance scientist, Cesare Emiliani was the founder of the discipline of paleoceanography who pioneered the analysis of ancient sediments from the ocean floor as core samples to understand the longer cycles of temperature change on Earth. Emiliani’s work also proved that Earth’s climate cycles are a cosmological problem – demonstrating that we must look at the dynamics of Earth’s orbit in space to better understand our cyclic ice ages. 

 

Diagram of Milankovitch Cycles by D. Tasa, F. Pazzaglia, Tasa Graphic Arts/Lehigh University

Emiliani also proved that Milankovitch cycles of obliquity, eccentricity and precession, when combined, cause major temperature changes leading to dramatic variations in global ice volumes, and this confluence represents the driving force of climate cycles.  Emiliani’s work revolutionized our ideas about the history of the ocean and glaciation and became essential to our greater understanding of paleoclimate. It is indeed fitting that our ancient steward, Emiliania, whose compressed presence can also be seen above ground as the white limestone cliffs of the Seven Sisters of East Sussex and of Dover in England, is the key to understanding climate change and our archetype for planetary stewardship.

Seven Sisters Chalk Cliffs in East Sussex  [CC by Stephen Dawson]

It almost seems that Nature, as a great artist, uses beauty or symmetry as a teaching tool – a way to make us linger and marvel long enough on one scale or another to see the keystones linking everything together. Using this example, photographer and eco-artist Chris Jordan, creates famous scale free montages that draw from the powers of visualization at many scales to make impactful statements on humanity’s excess. As an artist, Chris moves through scale to capture “symmetry” in the chaotic arrangements of crushed cars or in the layout of thousands of Barbie dolls, to shift the way we look at the life cycles and detritus of mass consumerism.

In a new 2009 series titled “Gyre” from his “Running the Numbers II”, Chris draws from one of the most well known Japanese woodblock prints, “Behind the Great Wave of Kanagawa” with a counterpart montage created by 2.4 million pieces of plastic from the Pacific ocean.

In his compelling series of visual musings, Chris makes the image beautiful on one scale, while following with a laser focus the discarded plastic pieces up close. Through these penetrating images, Chris tries to help us visualize “…the social consequences ten thousand miles away of the daily decisions we make as consumers as we try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture.” 

We must assume that Earth is a system, like a spaceship, where everything must be reused, recycled, regenerated. Cautionary tales about this system have been heralded over and over again by grandfathers and grandmothers of the ecology movement, from Rachel Carlson’s 1962 book Silent Spring that looked at the impact of human pollution on bird populations to Buckminster Fuller’s 1970 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth that offered a blueprint for survival diagnosing the causes of the environmental crisis as a crisis of ignorance. And who can forget James Lovelock’s classic 1979 work, Gaia – A New Look at Life on Earth, that offered for the first time Lovelock and Lynn Margulis' hypothesis that Earth is a self-regulating meta-organism.

 

Very few of us are aware that James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis was almost titled the Gyre Hypothesis. By the time Lovelock’s original book made it in print, he opted for a more mythical, feminine name, “The Gaia Hypothesis” which for better or worse, has also kept at least a generation of scientists at bay because of the title’s quasi-religious connotations. Lovelock’s first book on Gaia has since spawned his series of works with similar titles that carry us through the decades to The Ages of Gaia in 1988,  The Vanishing Face of Gaia in 2007 and The Revenge of Gaia in 2009. Coming back to life, these old classics of early environmentalism arise again with hundreds of new ones with similar messages. They impact our consciousness now, because we are finally beginning to listen … and the title, Gaia now seems even more apropos.

In the past 20 years, these newer mainstream voices led by global Nobel laureate Al Gore and top climate change expert James Hansen take the baton and ground us further in the science behind the message, past the intentional censorship of the Bush administration into the popular press, the international stage and the Internet. They move our understanding forward, finally gaining traction only in the past couple years. 

Yet a new generation of eco-artists such as Chris Jordan bring with their images this deeper understanding into the domain of emotional intelligence. They know that aesthetic perspectives engage synthetic thought, and that we must viscerally “feel” the urgency of the shift that is needed. To elicit this emotional response requires more than simply visualizing the data or articulating the science. Of his own work to raise consciousness of these issues through scale free artworks that include millions of plastic bottles, items of trash or other remnants of humanity’s excess, Jordan notes: “What I am trying to do with my work is to take these numbers, these statistics from the raw language of data and to translate them into a more universal visual language that can be felt… My belief is, If we can feel these issues, if we can feel these things more deeply, then they’ll matter to us more than they do now.”

A tipping point was reached in early 2009 when sustainability burst out of the closet and green thinking finally not only became cool, but started to make good business sense.  Whew!  What a long, winding road to envision humanity’s ecological footprint through time and space, to begin to see the macro paths we have tread en masse over the centuries and now to reflect together on how to go forward – to act. According to the Global Footprint Network, this urgent activism must be swift, deep and global. It must involve every person on Earth.

Global Footprint Network’s World Footprint Projection

In a powerful essay, “Navigating a Sea Change” sustainable design guru, Lauralee Alben uses the profound movements of the oceans as a powerful analogy for personal and organizational transformation. Alben’s definition of gyres as “self-sustaining currents of influence, circular feedback loops that surface innovative solutions and new possibilities” has now propelled practical action into inspired activism within a mainstream business context for almost a decade. Alben Design’s newly launched Sea Change Consortium seeks to help reframe business practice on the personal, community and global level to heed this urgent call. Today the gyre is more than a metaphor, it is a model for sustainable collective action.

The Sea Change Design Consortium  

Toward a Scale Free Systems View of Sustainability

We need to build a new kind of world view… of the interconnection of things – the environmental footprints a thousand miles away of things that we buy... The social consequences ten thousand miles away of the daily decisions we make as consumers as we try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture.  Chris Jordan, TED 2009

So, let’s follow this visual story a bit further. In this Summer of 2009, eco footprints, carbon neutrality, sustainable design, and green business are becoming keywords as commonplace as youtube or IPhone. Almost overnight, new visual “systems thinking” models have propagated around the sustainability keyword with spiral views of the balance that must prevail for life on Earth, not just for our own species. On one site alone, Samuel Mann has collected a growing compilation of 179 sustainability visualizations with their links on his blog “Computing for Sustainability.” Samuel’s visual mashup of systems thinking schematics applied to sustainability include venn diagrams, flowcharts, color wheels, pathways and mindmaps. These diagrams have one thing in common – together they represent the first  interdisciplinary compendium of snapshots capturing the systemic nature of the problem, from multiple points of view, from psychology to business practice.

Together, these diagrams create a compelling case for collective stewardship as humanity’s modus operandi.  The kicker is this: Earth will survive as she has done for billions of years.  But unless we shift our point of view, our own species may not. This is not about humanity saving the world.  It is about changing our perception of the world and our place in it. 

New visualizations of Earth and new metaphors, icons and emblems, such as the ubiquitous “universal recycling symbol” first created in 1970 (which could be considered the first public domain symbol generated through design crowdsourcing) now work together to help us rapidly reframe our understanding of Earth toward a systems view and begin to modify our behavior accordingly. 

  Long before the Pacific Gyre, the climate crisis, the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Climate Council’s emerging Manifesto, Buckminster Fuller, one of the Grandfathers of the ecology movement was calling for a new approach to global stewardship.  His World Design Science Decade plan, first articulated in 1961, proposed that we would find ourselves with only one decade (set to launch 1965-1975) to “turn this ship around” and change our behavior as active stewards of life on Earth.  His modus operandi?  Comprehensive, Anticipatory Design Science. And who would lead the way?  A new generation of architecture students.

Fuller suggested that the solution will not be a top down phenomenon but rather something that must include everyone on Earth – that it was a crisis of ignorance addressed by intentional design spontaneously initiated and propagated by our youngest generations - not a decision to be made by a consortium of political leaders.  This would be an act of inspired, individual initiative - by millions. Now we know it must also be an act of collective, connected, distributed intelligence. And we must connect the dots. Perhaps Fuller’s Design Science approach, originally coined in the 1950s and remaining anonymous for over a half century, could now harness the zeitgeist of sustainable practice – “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science.” 

With the rise of social media, new global initiatives are rapidly rising to help create and network emergent sustainable design communities of practice who are actively and individually addressing the world’s most pressing problems. One such initiative is the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Prize – a program through the Buckminster Fuller Institute that offers each year a $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge from Buckminster Fuller Institute on Vimeo.

This program has resulted in a growing network of active solutions proposed by entrants who made it through the first two rounds of the Challenge prize. Now entering its third year, the Challenge has aggregated almost 300 proposals in a public “Idea Index” - a fully searchable database of these socially responsible initiatives that can offer each proposal more public support, discussion and interest to build momentum around them. As the Idea Index evolves, it will also leverage and support the internetworking of Design Science solution sets to amplify their effectiveness in the shortest amount of time.

Elizabeth Thompson, BFI's director and co-founder of the Challenge and Idea Index, noted: "The visionary solutions contained in the Idea Index are a demonstration of the intuition shared by many people that the solutions to our most pressing problems are 'out there' - designed by inspired and highly motivated individuals all over the planet. These are people who are not waiting for the mainstream institutions of the world to solve our problems for us!”

The Idea Index includes projects by individuals and groups, some by well known fathers of sustainable practice such as Pliny Fisk or John Todd, as well as those of individuals or small groups of students such as this year’s winning group of MIT students who proposed the “Sustainable Personal Mobility and Mobility-on-Demand Systems.”  Just one of the hundreds of compelling projects to be found in the Idea Index is “The World Game Beta” a project by Katy Barkan, Alessandro Preda, Manuel Mansylla, and Jimena Leiva at the Harvard Graduate school of Design - an idea that concentrates on the importance of visualizing the influence of the Pacific Trash Patch and networking solutions around it.

World Game Beta shows the ocean gyres on Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map

Sustainability is part of a long road back to our collective senses. We are rapidly relearning how to synthesize, syncretize, indeed ecologize our perspectives back to a systems point of view from centuries of over-specialization.  Humanity has spent far too much time dividing up the disciplines, particularly in the sciences, in order to understand the grand sweeping vista of reality, only to discover that we need to find our way back to the indigenous understanding of Earth as living, breathing organism, a systemic whole in a cosmological context, in which humans play an essential, but not indispensable role. 

Ours is a humble task – to simply open our eyes to the systemic qualities of the whole -  perhaps, in so doing, to awaken to Gaia.

~Bonnie DeVarco

Envisioning Guinea Pig “B”

Before e-mail, blogging and IM, before Mind Mapping, Lifestreaming and MyLifeBits, before Web 2.0, InfoVis, Wikis, Flickr, Twitter and Twine, the “world’s friendly genius” was creating and documenting his life and the life of those around him in a way millions of people are just beginning to do today. Buckminster Fuller is, simply put, the most well documented human of the 20^th century

Life, Facts & Artifacts Word Cloud created in Wordle

In 1927 Fuller embarked upon a lifetime experiment as Guinea Pig “B”.  He would document his life in a most comprehensive manner in order to demonstrate and articulate what “one man could do on behalf of all humanity.” Thinking this experiment would last only about a decade, he actually lived much longer– finally leaving our planet just days short of 88 years. Now Bucky’s 56-years of self documentation is unparalleled in history - his collection was deemed by the Smithsonian in 1985 the “most extensive personal archive” and one of the most unique collections in existence. 

The fully documented life of any individual might be interesting to some - witness the rapid proliferation of personal blogs in cyberspace today. Yet Buckminster Fuller’s life was far from ordinary. He embarked on his experiment at a unique time in our history – a time of rapid industrialization, the birth of modernism and what Fuller himself called the transition from “a Newtonian to Einsteinian world.” He also played a role in the most interesting cultural intersections of American innovation, influencing the frontiers of vintage futurism, the emergent union of Nature and the arts, the illuminated shadows of transclassical architecture, the uncharted scientific territory of nanoscale design and the emergent future of communications technology. 

A glimpse of Bucky's social network in - what else? - a buckyball!

Known to his friends (who included everyone he knew and met) as “Bucky”, he was a dense node in a powerful network of leading edge thinkers every decade of his enormously prolific life. He was also an innovator, Renaissance man and one of the most notable figures of the 20th century. He utilized all forms of media available to him to document his life: wire recordings, audio & video tape, letters, transcripts, photos, slides, manuscripts, books, articles, clippings and a broad range of ephemera. As an inveterate writer, lecturer, world traveler, architect, mathematician and inventor, Fuller left thousands of articles, 28 published books, 25 U.S. patents, hundreds of architectural artifacts and models embodying the “universal principles” he discovered. 

Although he dropped out of Harvard twice, by 1983 Fuller taught at over 150 universities, received 47 honorary doctorates and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Yet perhaps only in the invisible architecture of information in the materials Bucky compiled during his lifetime experiment as Guinea Pig “B” can his methodology of planetary problem solving and scale independent thought be truly understood. Looking closely at his work and the extraordinary collection housed at Stanford University, there will be no doubt that Buckminster Fuller was the prototypical Planetary Citizen and a model for the mobile, connected human and global problem solver of today. 

If we could visualize the sweeping arcs and angles of this archival artifact - the collection of Guinea Pig “B” - we would see a beautiful series of intersecting patterns. We might even begin to hear a musical cadence, the sweeping symphony of the evolution of his thoughts and ideas. Fuller himself would have called this the frequency modulations of his partially overlapping scenario Universe. This is a vision worth exploring.