My Big Fat Ecological Wedding

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• Tim Flannery
• Long Now Foundation

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Any therapist will tell you that to make a relationship work, you have to look at both sides. You have to consider each person’s history, tendencies, willingness to change, and how one person’s actions affect the other. Now scale that up. Way way up. To, say, species and planet. Tonight the marriage counselor is Tim Flannery and the therapy session is Here on Earth, put on by the Long Now Foundation. “Humans now engage the Earth at Gaian scale,” says Flannery, an Australian biologist. What does that mean? A simplified view is that we humans are a great big thing that has a great big effect on the planet, which is the other part in the relationship. The sum of those parts — the relationship itself — is a self-regulating system. And if the system can’t handle what one part is doing, the relationship fails. Thing is, it’s not like the Earth can ask for our keys and wish us luck with our next rental agreement. It will kill us in order to survive. So to avoid this evolutionary “breakup,” we should consider how we got here and what we can do, ecologically speaking, to make the relationship work for both sides. Because the alternative? It ain’t good.
Tue., May 3, 7:30 p.m., 2011