Session 10: Land, Sea and Stillness

The second session of the day immersed us in many diverse ideas, taking us from the depths of the oceans to the chaos of cities to the stillness in the mind. Andrew Sharpless discussed his work on ocean conservation, and presented us with the idea of the tension between feeding people and protecting life, between the concern for biodiversity and the concern for agriculture. The good news from Sharpless was that there are only 25 countries that control 75% of the world’s fish catch, thus making the problem manageable. Sharpless gave some simple guidelines for how to overcome the tension and feed the world while protecting ocean habitats. Fish is the healthiest protein and the most cost-effective and least harmful way to feed people, so this should be a big part of the solution to the major food crisis facing the world today.

Edith Widder began with more alarming data, to be sure, somewhat dampening the good news message Sharpless brought. She outlined the many ways in which we are destroying our own life support systems at an alarming rate. In fact, she suggested that we are in the middle of the 6th planetary mass extinction, and it’s going faster than any other. Once again, however, optimism won out, and Widder showed that the answer lies in education. We are bequeathing to the next generation ecosystems that are spinning out of control yet we are not giving them the tools to address these problems. The answer, she reasons, is in education – in teaching science like we teach hockey, where kids actually get to play the game.

Back to land where Taras Grescoe, a self-proclaimed “Straphanger”, talked about the post-automobile future. Private automobiles no longer work as a form of transit and represent a tragedy of the commons. Grescoe then gave us a glimpse of some of his favourite examples of glamourous transit from his world travels, including modern European trams, the high speed trains in Shanghai, and the spectacular metro stations of Moscow. He also pointed out some examples of bad transit choices, emphasizing the point that a city needs to think about what forms of public transit best fits their own urban mode. He ended with the observation that before cars, streets were places where kids played, where life was lived, and wondered why we are building cities that we want to escape from rather than linger in.

To round out the day and the theme of exploration the charming and eloquent Pico Iyer spoke about stillness. We take in today, he told us, as many images in a single day as a Victorian would have in an entire lifetime. Our technology has given us astonishing amounts of content, but no structure, Iyer said. We need stillness and isolation in order to sort out and make sense of all that our information age throws at us at lightening speed, and in order to “appreciate the wonder of the non-virtual world around us”. Humans, Iyer suggested, are not able to live in infinite space, thus it is now more than ever necessary for us to spend some time in stillness, meditation, quiet reflection.