coalition-building: food security
4 IGNITE TALKS @ 7 minutes, then an hour-long discussion (1.5 hours)
SPEAKERS
A Globally Distributed, Decentralized
Think Tank for Collaborative Intelligence
Jerome C. Glenn – Winner of a Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award 2022, Co-Founder and CEO, The Millennium Project, lead author for nineteen State of the Future Reports, publisher of Futures Research Methodology 3.0, host of World Futures Day, member of IEEE SA on AI Governance
Advancing Sustainable Global Community Science
Dr. Natasha Udu-gama – Director, Community Science Advancement and Sustainability in AGU’s Thriving Earth Exchange, a global community science program of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), which has 300,000+ members and affiliates in 147 countries. TEX connects communities with scientists for local challenges related to natural hazards, climate change, environmental justice, pollution, resilience and sustainability.
Closed Loop Farming for Food Security
Scot Bryson – CEO of Orbital Farm, which focuses on the link between climate change and food, founded, then sold a multi-million dollar digital advertising agency, Stone Canoe, named after a Native American story about the Great Peacemaker, who founded the Iroquois Confederacy after crossing Lake Ontario in a white stone canoe. Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation.
How We Share the Global Commons
Dr. Claire Nelson, Sustainability Engineer, Forbes Top 50 female futurist and Keynote speaker, is a board member of the World Futures Studies Federation and Editor-At-Large of its flagship Human Futures, an award-winning writer and storyteller, the architect of National Caribbean American Heritage Month; honored as a White House Champion of Change; Author, Smart Futures for a Flourishing World.
Co-Chairs: Zann Gill, Founder, earthDECKS and GAIL. Mike Simmons, Founder, Astronomy for Equity. Co-Hosts: Ulrike Zeshan, Game Lab Lead, GRC and Brock Hinzmann, Chair, Silicon Valley Node, The Millennium Project.
* This session will be recorded and edited. We may want to post short clips in the future. You agree to possible future posting of a clip in which you appear unless you let us know otherwise no later than one week following this forum.
KEY THEMES
- Collaborative Intelligence (human + A.I.): Millennium Project, AGU-TEX, GRC
- Food Systems (Agriculture, Aquaculture, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Pollution)
- Education & Innovation; Science & Technology + Arts
- Futures Scenario-building
- The Global Commons
- Interdisciplinarity
- Regional Pilots
- Human Rights
Food is a portal to many inter-linked global challenges. Food Security is not only an instance of scientific integrity, legal precedent, and national security but also addresses poverty, equity, and fair livelihood.
1. Food and Climate Change. The United Nations has recognized the impact of climate change on the human right to food. A Nature Climate Change editorial notes the importance of smallholder farms for global food production. Climate change has produced weather-related disasters that impact food security, also recognized by CSIS to have strategic security impacts.
2. Food and Water. Climate change has exacerbated the water crisis, but we are generally ignoring the global emergency that the world is running out of water. India shows how solar-powered farming can quickly deplete the world’s groundwater supply. See the Bioneers series on water.
3. Food and Health. That plastic pollution is a human health hazard is only one of the many ways that air, soil, and water (both freshwater and ocean) pollution impact the health of all life. Food insecurity doubled during COVID.
4. Food and Legal Precedent. Monsanto (now Bayer), and other companies that patent seeds, criminalize farmers who develop their own seeds, requiring them to purchase from corporate monopoly seed-owners. The criminalization of farmers threatens the food security of everyone. Legal precedent should establish that no company has the right to take from the genetic pool of nature that all life has inherited, tweak those seeds and then declare ownership of nature. Monsanto (now Bayer) has sued more than a hundred farmers who have used its seeds without licensing agreements and has settled over 700 cases outside of court. In each of these cases, Monsanto won the court battle. California laws give new freedoms to the cottage food-producing industry.
5. Food and Scientific Integrity. Today four companies – Monsanto (now Bayer), DowDupont/Corteva, ChemChina-Syngenta and BASF – control over 60% of the seed market worldwide. Scientific integrity can prove that nature is continually evolving, that patented seeds, which came from seeds that belonged to everyone, do not remain as they were when patented and continue to evolve. Commodification of seeds exploits the commons and manifests the Tragedy of the Commons.
6. Food and World Peace. The War in Israel–Gaza illustrates what is now known as “the starvation tactic” with ongoing updates from Al Jazeera. The War in the Ukraine has destabilized the breadbasket of Europe, since Russia and the Ukraine produce nearly 30% of the world’s traded wheat. However, Bayer’s $63 Billion investment in Monsanto seems now to be thriving as a result of the War in the Ukraine. The path to peace starts with food.
neXt network – collaborative intelligence pilots
Vernor Vinge, mathematician and science fiction author, saw the Singularity not just as the moment when computers exceed human intelligence (Ray Kurzweil’s view), but also as the moment when humans and A.I. collaborate to manifest collaborative intelligence.
What’s neXt?
- What is an antidote to X?
- How can we harness human–A.I. collaborative intelligence?
- How can we connect autonomous nodes to empower networks?
- How can we bridge art and science to collaborate across diverse disciplines?
The neXt forum meets online monthly to explore these questions, with four speakers giving 7 minute Ignite intro talks, or featuring one speaker/ topic for half an hour, followed by an hour long group brainstorm. These invitational forum sessions explore potential action projects. Let us know your background below if you’d like to be invited and also if you would like to speak.
The neXt forum uses different lenses to look at the great World Game challenge and the question: How must “human affairs” change for life on Earth to thrive? Buckminster Fuller conceived World Game (1961) as a way to raise individual human awareness to change “human affairs” so life on Earth could thrive. His big idea called for the public internet and technology that we now have.
Above. From 1961 until the public internet.
Below. What we might do with the tools we have now.
Tags for Topic Maps
Other badges?
With so much content online, it’s often hard to find the puzzle pieces to build a big picture. In the back room we’re working on this. Stay tuned.
Humans are herd animals. We follow the crowd, often not thinking for ourselves.
We need diverse points of view – many lenses – not censorship.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged by Hitler in 1945 for rejecting Nazism, wrote, “every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, . . . infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. . .
“Under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. . . one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused.”
The bandwagon effect, also referred to as the “contagion effect,” describes how people tend to behave like herd animals, adopting whatever behavior, style, or attitude seems currently popular, because everyone else is doing it, so it must be the safest option. More people join the bandwagon.
Three labyrinths, archetypal symbols for mind, huge challenges, and complex problem-solving.
Those who leave the bandwagon crowd to think for themselves remind us of Theseus, the archetypal hero who journeyed into the labyrinth, met his monster, and returned with his gift to the world.
Collaborators
earthDECKS.org shows ocean plastic as a distributed supply chain that collaborative intelligence could address. earthDECKS Network (Distributed Evolving Collaborative Knowledge System) hosts essays on environmental challenges. [free-range] and [science FOO] are private lists. GAIL.global focuses on beneficial A.I., complementing GAIL.world, which hosts the neXt forum. GRC [Global Regen CoLab] is a convening platform with a calendar and slack channel. The Lifeboat Foundation focuses on existential risk. The Millennium Project focuses on global challenges. The Ocean Foundation is a fiscal sponsor with the highest rating on Charity Navigator and Platinum Level on GuideStar, working across three grand challenges: climate change, equity, and saving our ocean. Power Our World develops impact media.
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