from Brian Eno . . ."The Long Now" . . .

[OneBlueSky]

Transcript of a talk given by Brian Eno as part of the Long Now Foundation's series of Seminars About Long Term Thinking
Fort Mason, San Francisco
14th November, 2003

http://www.enoshop.co.uk/enolog.php?logid=10

(snip)

Q:What’s the most useful thing someone could do to alleviate human suffering?

That takes us back to American politics doesn’t it.

Well that’s a very hard question I’d like to know if anybody has an answer to that. Well actually I’d like to solicit some help from the audience. I had an idea, while I was talking to some young art students in London, talking about the state of the world and what could be done for the future and I realised that they felt absolutely helpless. They felt that the world was pretty much sewn up by big corporations and unlistening governments. This was just after Tony Blair had ignored the biggest demonstration in British history, and gone to war anyway. We had two million people in London – that’s 4% of our population. So there was sort of a feeling of powerlessness after that. And this feeling, this powerlessness was really quite paralysing to these kids. I think there were two problems here, they didn’t really know which issues to grapple with and they didn’t have any idea how to go about it, or any confidence at all that it would have any effect. So I had an idea for a book, which would be called something like ‘250 projects for a better future’.

And each page would have one project on it and it could be a very big project like, for example, Desalination. One of the big issues of the future is going to be water, water for irrigation, for human use, and if we could find a better way of creating fresh water from sea water that would be a big step forward. So one page might say Desalination, the next paragraph would say ‘desalination is the process of converting saltwater to drinkable water’, the next paragraph would say who’s been working on it and how far they’ve got, probably refer you to various books and websites and the final one would say ‘And here’s what you could do’.

Or it could be very local problems like ‘How do we help old people in our community?’ or ‘Can I contribute to the local school in some way?’

I thought that having a book of 250 projects like that you could sit on the lavatory and flick through, and you’d come across one and think ‘Oh! That’s a good one, I could do that’

And I thought it would be a recipe book for people looking for a place to put their idealistic energy, so anyway my invitation is I now need to find 250 projects, so if anyone has anything to contribute to this book, I promise you’ll be credited, in due course receive a copy.

- much more . . . quite entertaining, imo . . .

http://www.enoshop.co.uk/enolog.php?logid=10