EARTH 2.0

Does anyone else find it alarming that there is now a back up plan for Planet Earth? In a Special Report in the 28 February 2009 edition of New Scientist, there was an article on the emergent field of Geoengineering that stopped me dead in my tracks. Here was a world of the future being described in terms of Artificial Trees, Space Mirrors, Cloud Seeding, Ocean Fertilization, Sunshades, Biochar, Carbonate Addition, and a host of other scientific remedies for what the article also described as our current stance “in the face of potentially catastrophic climate change.” Some methods are low tech like planting trees, others conjure sci-fi like placing mirrors in orbit. All address either taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or diverting solar energy from the Earth in order to dampen the greenhouse effect.

At a recent meeting about Geoengineering in London of British politicians and a selection of climate scientists, “the politicians and scientists all agreed that since cuts to carbon emissions will likely fall short we need to be exploring ‘Plan B’.” That said, there was agreement that “there is no single global thermostat which will bring about universal cooling.” While many of the above tactics are decades from realization, the really scary thing is that several have already been “field tested.” The good news is that they have inspired calls for international regulation.

Ocean fertilization, a technique which employs the “seeding” of the ocean with iron filings to stimulate CO2-eating plankton, has been tried by a firm called Planktos ironically enough off of the Galapagos Islands of Darwinian fame. The impact on ocean ecosystems is unknown at present and inspired protests by environmental groups including ETC. As a result of the protests, the London Convention on Marine Pollution acted to extend its agreement with 80 countries to include Geoengineering and also imposed a ban on commercial fertilization. It all conjures up the image of some “Greenfinger” individual mad scientist or nation acting single-handedly to combat climate change.

New Scientist reports that we came close in November 2005, when Yuri Izrael, former vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Head of the Russian Global Climate and Ecology Institute attempted to persuade Vladimir Putin to release 600,000 tons of sulphur aerosol particles into the atmosphere “immediately.” No one knows what the impact would have been, but David Santillo, a senior research scientist at Greenpeace Research Laboratories said that if a nation or individual decided to go it alone, “there would almost certainly be an international diplomatic incident.” The US is not without blame either having conducted “rain seeding” programs during the Vietnam War. Whether it is severe drought or the rising of temperatures of between 5 and 10 degrees centigrade within decades, from methane releases to thawing permafrost and even “the breakdown of entire ecosystems”, the forecast is not for cheap sunglasses.

Still, our approach to carbon emissions is leisurely in the face of the fact that the US and China combine to now produce 40% of all such pollution (according to The Nation). The most recent European studies indicate a rise in the ocean levels of between 2 and 4 meters at the very least by 2100 along with shortages of fresh water—regardless of what measures are taken “yesterday” to control carbon in the atmosphere. We have "a very short window of time," Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicated in remarks at a Worldwatch conference last January, adding that the Obama Administration's stated goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 "falls short of the response needed by world leaders." Alan Weisman takes the idea of humanity’s impact on the planet several steps further and envisions what the earth would be like starting two-hundred years from now when humans disappear entirely from the scene. In his riveting 2007 book, The World Without Us, he presents a picture of the New York subways becoming underground rivers causing the streets above to crumble under the weight of skyscrapers and where the “asphalt jungle becomes a real one”. His scenarios are not the stuff of B movies, but are based on hard science and current situations like the nightmare of polymer "atolls" that are already growing in the gyres of the Pacific Ocean.

When I visited the Amazon in the 1970’s, I saw the scale of seemingly everything there as prehistoric—from the fabled Victoria Regia lilies that are so large that their leaves can be up to 3 meters wide with stems 7-8 meters long—to the world’s largest serpent, the Anaconda, which can grow to 45-60 feet long. (I have a photo of one which is only about 40 feet).What I felt most of all was the grandeur and power of nature which gave me faith that no matter what we humans were capable of doing to our home world, that the Earth had the ability to rebound in its own time. Weisman’s book also reveals an elegiac element in what he calls “the earth’s capacity for self-healing.”

I always wanted to visit the Amazon ever since encountering a mysterious reference in a book that changed my life called “Morning of the Magicians". I read the book when I was 15, and it enthralled me with arcane knowledge from the strange worlds of Charles Fort and contemporary alchemists living in Europe to the occult forces at work in Hitler’s Germany and the Thule Project. The obscure reference that titillated me most was the example the authors, Ernst Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, used to describe their perspective that despite the pursuit of science, there were still many worlds as yet unknown and new lands to be discovered. An area they cited between two tributaries of the Amazon, the Xingu and the Rio Tapajos, were said to contain thousands of acres of still unexplored territory. Later, coming across a Pink Floyd soundtrack for “Obscured By Clouds”, I was equally inspired by finding a map of New Guinea that still had areas that were marked with the same title of the movie.

The Xingu area is where a real Indiana Jones figure, explorer Colonel Percy H. Fawcett, disappeared without a trace. His story is now examined in a thrilling new biography by David Grann who retraced Fawcett’s final expedition in “The Lost City of Z". I was warned not to go to Xingu, but it was the humans that I was told about and not the native flora, fauna or tribal peoples. It was 1976 and the first leg of the Trans-Amazonica Highway had opened up the region to an influx of prospectors, cattlemen, farmers, rogues, mercenaries, and other characters straight out of our own historical Wild West. During my own “expedition”, I was warned that as a “gringo”, it would be unwise to stray far into the Interior.

What I found were t-shirts with logos, beer bottles, and communal TV sets that signaled the arrival of so-called Western culture and civilization, but what looked like the beginning of the end to me. It reminds me now of a hilarious incident described by Tony Horwitz in his 2008 book, “A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World". When the Mayflower Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock, they were met by Squanto, the chief of the Patuxet Indians who had already encountered enough white men to greet the Pilgrims in their own tongue. His first word of greeting to them was more like a question when he said, “Beer.” It’s not reported by history whether the Pilgrims were able to accommodate him, but no matter—his word set the karmic destiny of a nation, but that is a subject for a future post…or two.

My visit to the Amazon occurred before the martyrdom of Amazonian activist, Chico Mendes, and the real firestorm in the rain forest, but the jungle was already burning. I met one mercenary pilot who worked for an oil company and was just letting loose bombs over clearings in the vast jungle canopy wherever there was an opening that betrayed the existence of a tribal village. Lawlessness was the rule of the day and many of the towns in the Amazon looked like tropical, if very downscale versions of the typical frontier town of American Westerns.

It is well-known that the trees of the Amazon recycle carbon dioxide and generate at least 20% of the Earth’s oxygen. Yet, the fires that continue to burn the forest to clear it to make room for cattle grazing are so widespread that their plumes of smoke can be seen from outer space. But like the melting of ice shelves in the polar regions and many other situations that are either contributing to or the result of climate change, the Amazon is remote from our everyday life and like the statistics of climate models, is a concept that disempowers those of us who want to make a difference.

There are emerging ideas that might contribute to the kind of realignment of thinking that could enable corporations and individuals to a change of values. In a conversation last week with Kevin Henry of Bazzeo, we spoke about the concept of a Social ROI or Return On Investment. “What if, we asked each other, there was an index that guided companies and consumers to measure the potential social benefit—including sustainability—that projects, products, ventures and other commercial enterprises produced?” What effect would such an expansion of the traditional commercial value expressed by ROI have on the way that people not only invested, but also had on consumer choices? What if we could choose between companies that demonstrated an ROI for their shareholders and one whose SROI showed a commitment to giving something back? Clearly, we need to go beyond Corporate Social Responsibility and the current trends of “greenwashing” and bandwagon effects. It makes me crazy when I see an ad from a major oil corporation showboating what they are doing to improve the environment, alternative energy solutions, and my future.

The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility first appeared in the US several decades ago, but did not truly arrive as a field of management expertise until the turn of the 21st century. Originally, advocates from outside the business sector began pressuring corporations to adhere to more socially conscious principles. In short, the three areas where a need for change in corporate behavior was called for were in its social, economic, and environmental impacts. Recently, a stewardship ethics position has arisen within the business sector in response to CSR. The stewardship ethics orientation seeks to find ways to ensure that profitability and other economic criteria are met by practices that also serve to support social values and is a logical forerunner of SROI.

In today’s global economy, CSR has not experienced anything approaching universal acceptance. In the US, a majority of companies still have given only token acknowledgement of the need to appear socially responsible. No less than the Bible of the capital markets, The Economist, is still critical of stewardship ethics and environmentalism, and remains a steadfast supporter of globalization even in the face of very mixed results in emerging markets and the global meltdown. The conflict between dominant world economic powers and poorer nations continues to grow as the latter resist sustainability, which they view as a luxury that only grown economies can afford.

In another discussion last week with USC, UCLA Professor and Architect, Michael Hricak, he mentioned that the current LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards for sustainable building fall short because they can’t quantify such components of the Green home as natural heating or passive ventilation. This leads to a second opportunity which is to augment such Green standards with those that go beyond the abstraction of carbon credits to innovations that will enable us to quantify nature’s contribution as a market. In other words, what if we placed a monetary value on the trees in the Amazon or the disappearing coral reefs of the world? The creation of a Green Stock Exchange model of valuation for nature would displace our current model which has us on a course set to create nature as a museum in the future.

Mark Hertsgaard first proposed a Global Green Deal in his 1992 book, "Earth Odyssey" and has outlined the plan once again in the March 16 issue of The Nation. He mentions that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Al Gore urged world governments in February to address the global economic crisis with spending that "launches a new green global economy." They noted that channeling Germany, Britain, Japan, and the US's planned $2.25 trillion stimulus in spending into "carbon-based infrastructure and fossil-fuel subsidies would be like investing in subprime real estate all over again."

Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, a fifth century B.C. text which became the standard operating manual for Mao Tse Tung’s revolutionary army in the 1940’s as well American business management in the 70’s said: “The considerations of the intelligent always include both benefit and harm.” Arthur C. Clarke said on a similar wavelength: “The proper study of mankind is not merely Man, but Intelligence.”

Looking at the current state of affairs of our environment, it might be better if we pointed the Arecibo receiving dish that is wired to SETI@home in search of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and pointed it back looking for it on Earth. If Earthlings as a species were to receive a cosmic report card, we would certainly merit a “F”. But, we are very small in the cosmic state of things as the Charles and Ray Eames classic short film, Powers of Ten, artfully demonstrates in its portrayal of the voyage from the human microcosm to intergalactic macrocosm and back again to quantum microcosm.

There are scientists like Hans Moravec at Carnegie Mellon who see a future where we will be able to dispense with the natural world altogether and download human consciousness to machines, no longer necessitating the hardware of our bodies. Others like Gerard O’Neil and his kindred spirits forecast Space Colonies and altogether abandoning what Buckminster Fuller called Spaceship Earth. Another scenario, in some riff out of Erik Van Daniken’s “Chariot of the Gods”, has the Space Brothers showing mercy on our little world by coming to save us in the future. The statistics on all of the above occurring in the near future are less likely than the planting of the artificial trees discussed in the New Scientist article about Geoengineering.

Books like Michael A.G. Michaud’s Contact With Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears About Encountering Extraterrestrials have looked the pros and cons of what we might expect in such an encounter with what might be advanced intelligent or microbial life forms. There have been protocols developed for such an eventuality, but my favorite was tendered from a distinctly unofficial source. As a junior high school student, I worked for several summers in the mailroom of a New York publishing house. I remember that the subject of UFOs came up one day and my brother, Jeff, and I discussed what it would be like with our then mailroom boss, Herb, a brother from Uptown in Harlem. “What would you say to an alien if you met up with one?” I asked. After pondering the question for a moment, Herb’s eyes lit up and he replied matter-of-factly, “I’d just say, ‘what you got for the head?’”

One would hope that if we eventually meet up with an extraterrestrial, that they will see a paradisical home world and resident, conscious species that merit being rewarded by an intergalactic peace pipe and not vaporization.

THE BIG NOTE OR HOW TO APPEASE YOUR LOCAL ANCESTRAL SPIRITS

Words have a strange power over us. Anyone can appreciate this who has been to a Death Metal concert or an opera, major sporting event, heard an orator like Martin Luther King, Jr. or witnessed Tibetan monks chanting “Om Mani Padme Hum”. Though most religious beliefs and scientific theories about the origins of the universe favor light at the beginning, there are some that don’t see, but hear the beginning in the form of the First Sound.

The science of Hindu “mantras” or sounds of power is one living example from the Sanskrit tradition that is thousands of years old. This tradition which also figures in Buddhism is based on the ancient development of certain words, syllables, sounds or groups of word that are distinguished by having the ability to create transformation as tools of power. The respect that the specific use of sound had in these Eastern traditions is no better borne witness to than in the early use of music and sound as a weapon that was regarded as capable of being terminal—a feature, perhaps, that some Death Metal fans secretly wish for.

Marshall McLuhan observed that Hitler’s rise can be attributed in large part not only to the dire economic circumstances of 30’s Germany, but to his absolute command of the radio. Had he lived during the Age of Television, McLuhan points out, his frenzied, frothing at the mouth, mad-eyed delivery wouldn’t have lasted a second.

Given the unique power of sound, it’s no wonder that the notion of its connection to the origin of the cosmos entered the realm of modern music as well. Pete Townshend incorporated the idea at core of The Who’s “Lifehouse” project with the song “Pure and Easy” which proclaimed, “There once was a note, pure and easy…” Maestro and 20th century classical composer, Frank Zappa, was more expansive in his expostulating of “The Big Note” in his early masterwork, “Lumpy Gravy”: "Everything in the universe is ... is ... is made of one element, which is a note, a single note. Atoms are really vibrations, you know, which are extensions of THE BIG NOTE...Everything's one note. Everything—even the ponies. The Note, however, is the ultimate power, but see, the pigs don't know that, the ponies don't know that..."

Zappa continued the dialogue in “A Different Octave” in his “Civilization Phaze III”:

Spider: We are ... actually the same note, but ...
John: But different octave.
Spider: Right. We are 4,928 octaves below the big note.
Monica: Are ya ... are you trying to tell me that ... that this whole universe revolves around one note?
Spider: No, it doesn't revolve around it; that's what it is. It's one note.
Spider: Everybody knows that lights are notes. Light, light, is just a vibration of the note, too. Everything is.
Monica: That one note makes everything else so insignificant.

As a great American satirist and sociologist in the tradition of Lenny Bruce and Robert Crumb, it’s hard to separate Zappa’s work from its milieu and the hippie scene that was often subject of his mordant critique. Still, he also said famously: Remember, Information is not knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom; Wisdom is not Beauty, Beauty is not love; Love is not Music; Music is the best.”

Or as Germaine Greer said in a 2005 article in The Guardian, “In Frank's world, every sound had a value, and every action was part of the universal diapason, a colossal vibration that made energy rather than reflecting it.”

In our personal lives—as well as in the world of branding—sound is no more refined and focused than in names. "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet," says Juliet in Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy of “star-crossed lovers”. Unfortunately, these teenagers are from warring families, and she is telling poor Romeo that their family names don’t amount to a hill of beans compared with their love for one another. But, names do matter and harshly as they were to find out by play’s end. Fast forwarding to the 21st century, history surrounds us no matter where we live in the place names that we often ignore or are oblivious to. Names are key to understanding not only because they provide a clue to our own identity as individuals, but because place names can provide us a better sense of who we are by locating us in time and space.

After I first moved to LA, one of the things that amazed me was how close history was just in the passing freeway signs that beckoned in English, Spanish, and sometimes odd names like Malibu, Cahuenga, Azusa, and Cucamonga. Curious, I started trying to locate old maps and records to trace names that had this distinctly non-European flavor to them. I mean, growing up in New York, I knew that Manhattan was named after a tribe called the Mannahatta and that Wall Street was named after…well, the wall of a fort. But, maybe it’s just all the tall buildings and pavement that seem to have removed the past so entirely from the landscape—though there is now an interesting project called surprisingly enough, The Mannahatta Project, that was recently profiled in the New Yorker, and is recreating what the New York Island looked like prior to contact by Europeans.

But, it was so easy to squint my eyes somehow in the San Fernando Valley and look at the mountains, washes, and hillsides still intermittently decorated by chaparral and imagine what it was like only a century or less ago. History is close here relative to the Old World. The last full-blooded Chumash Indians died in the Santa Barbara area around 1900. I have a photo of an Indian village in Riverside (which is about half an hour from my house), that dates as recently as 1920. I say “recently” even though it’s almost 90 years ago, but the past seems more present here to me for some reason. Perhaps it’s just that Hollywood has made its mark by adding more ghosts even if they are frozen by artificial light to add a layer to the ancestral spirits and ghosts of the conquistadors, padres, prospectors, cattlemen, and railroad barons that seem to lie rustling just under the cover of the Santa Ana winds and coastal morning fogs. And I guess it was one of those coastal names that started a fascination and study that has lasted to this day with the Chumash people who lived here. I got hold of a Rosetta stone of sorts in the form of notes from an anthropologist named John Peabody Harrington who logged place names and other priceless ethnographic data from the few surviving Chumash during the early part of the 20th century. One such location was “Humaliwo” which in the original language meant to describe the place “where the surf crashes loudly”, a fact that would be appreciated by surfers at the same approximate location where 3000 villagers lived known today as “Malibu”.

The Chumash Indians of Southern California were extraordinary in many ways. They had the only ocean-going canoes in the Western hemisphere outside of the peoples of the Northwest Coast of the continent. They had a working knowledge of astronomy, a complex social system, trading culture, and were world class artists as evidenced by the rock art that still lies hidden to amaze the lucky beholder in sandstone outcrops, caves, and other secret places in their territory between Malibu and Morro Bay.

The Chumash believed that dolphins, a close aquatic relation of the porpoise, were guardian spirits who literally served to hold up the world. It’s no wonder that the Hollywood film industry found its center here for what better description of the artist? The dolphins accomplished this feat by swimming around the earth and weaving a web of salty spray in their looping up-and-down motion between the worlds of ocean and air.

According to local Indian legend, sympathetic spirit beings took pity on the lonely dwellers of the ancient Channel Islands and built a rainbow bridge to the mainland, thereby making way for the first pilgrimage of humans. Unfortunately, not all the humans in this exodus were able to maintain their balance on the bridge of colors; those were the “unlucky ones” who tumbled off before reaching land and transformed into dolphins when they hit the wild currents below.

Today, a curious vernacular adoption of the word “porpoise” employs the term as a verb to illustrate an up-and-down motion similar to the movement of these aquatic mammals. This particular usage is meant to describe periodicity in the life cycle of human beings, societies and even corporations. In this perspective, one’s life “porpoises” as we navigate the highs of comedy and lows or “slings and arrows” of tragedy. One role of drama and the arts is to provide human beings with a method to penetrate this mysterious cycle of time, and to create the absolute that is possible in the moment that time stops and we are part of the whole. “Porpoise” then can become twisted as a sound alike like a Marx Bros. routine to suit our agenda here to mean “purpose” at this intersection where the creative act defines space and time.

It is not recorded whether dolphins or porpoises accompanied the first European explorers who first sighted the area now known as Greater Los Angeles. What is known is that these earliest explorers who were part of the Spanish Cabrillo Expedition in 1542, recorded on Sunday, October 8, their arrival at “the mainland in a large bay” (most likely Los Alamitos or San Pedro Bay) which they named “Baia de los Fumos” or “the Bay of Smokes”. This namesake was given to commemorate the haze that even then covered the landscape in an unreal, mysterious curtain comprised of vapors from campfires of the several dozen Indian villages that dotted the region as far as the eye could see. On the approximate site of one these villages (belonging to the Gabrielino or as they called themselves, the Tongva or “people”), and immortalized in old maps of the desert padres as the town of “Puvungna”, now sits the sprawling campus of California State University at Long Beach.

Though the record of what the village name means is shrouded in haze like the Bay of Smokes, it said to have an association with the word for “crowd”. We do know that the suffix, “gna” means “place of”, for example, as used in other Los Angeles area place names like “Cahuenga” --“place of the mountain”--or “Tujunga” --“place of the owl.” Even so, if Puvungna or “the place where crowds gather” is of uncertain province, it is still regarded as the most significant village documented by one of the most famous missionaries, Father Boscana.

The village of “Puvu” or Puvungna was known as the place where, according to Tongva legend, a great gathering took place to commemorate the creation myth of these local Coastal Shoshonean people. It is said that so many people would show up to the council from afar, that they would have to sleep outside the village limits, keeping warm by crowding together “in a ball.”

Father Boscana documented the shamanic religion of the local Indians in dramatic detail and drew parallels between the Tongva Creation myth and Genesis, citing similarities in their descriptions of the formation of the elements. Other sources have spoken about links between the Tongva narrative and Greek creation story as related by Hesiod, where the archaic Greeks, like the Tongva ancestors, were “acorn eaters” and animals who could talk and came out of the darkness. So, in the same place that ancient ancestors celebrated their stories of creation, the Academy now stands.

California poet Robinson Jeffers’ poem “Hands” memorializes an Indian rock art site deep in the Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur where a ceremonial cave is decorated with several hundred white handprints. He describes the aboriginal artists as speaking to us through time: “Look: we also are human; we had hands, not paws. All hail you people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters in the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down and be supplanted, for you also are human.”

Tribal peoples recount that the ancestral spirits are pleased when they hear song and witness the dancing and dramatic performances of human beings who still wear bodies. Our hands differentiate us from the four-leggeds. We are described in dated anthropological texts as “man the tool maker.” When we use our hands to create art, music, dance and poetry, we recreate the world. We also have the opportunity to consciously pay homage to those who came before. If our lives are creative, then we can be driven by a purpose that honors the spirits of Puvungna, now known as Cal State, Long Beach or Yangna, as the place now known as the City of Los Angeles was called by the people who lived her first. For in all of these places, the creation story is ongoing.

According to ethnographic sources, there is now a worldwide crisis of native languages going extinct. Linguist Michael Krauss who has dedicated his career to making the public aware of how language is threatened, estimates that the number of oral languages assured of being around by 2100 is 600 or just 10% of the present number. He further cites that about half of the 6,000 languages spoken on earth today are “moribund” a status due to the fact that “they are spoken only by adults who no longer teach them to the next generation.” The loss of a language is as catastrophic as the disappearance of a species. With it, we lose a piece of the whole.

Like the ancient Indian languages that are disappearing with the death of elders who are often the only remaining speakers, there are many place names whose meaning is now completely lost in time. So, one purpose that we can find in our lives, then, is to define meaning once again for these places by making sure that we amuse, engage and serve the spirits who were here first. Only then, is there the possibility that they will take pity on us and return the gesture by answering with inspiration to light our unique moment in time.

WHO OWNS THE AIR?

The current “meltdown” as it is euphemistically labeled goes deeper than money and is really a question of values. As a recent article in The Economist called “Diagnosing Depression” said, “The word ‘depression’ is popping up more often than at any time in the past 60 years, but what exactly does it mean?”

There are two main criteria it cites from an Internet based search that differentiate a depression from recession—a depression involves a decline in real GDP that exceeds 10% and/or is a recession that lasts longer than three years. The Great Depression qualified on both counts with GDP falling by approximately 30% between 1929 and 1933. While there may not be apple stands out on every street corner yet, soup lines have been expanding at a rate that may parallel the two banks that the FDIC is now seizing weekly.

Karl Marx, not a man known nearly for humor as say the American comedy team sharing his namesake, may be at least sporting a rictus smile as he spins in his grave. If we are at the beginning of a depression, it will certainly merit the name Depression 2.0 because like the financial engineered debacle we are drowning in, it will be distinguished by a feature set uniquely its own. Technicalities and definitions aside, the current global economic crisis is also as much about the nature of meaning or what might be called by “the meaning of meaning” as it is about values.

Nowhere is this better showcased than in Bernard Madoff’s ability to hide an unparalleled scam while avoiding oversight detection—amazingly even without a single trade for a decade and with a professed 10% return annually—behind a supposedly “proprietary system” he called “split-strike conversions”, which he obstinately refused to define when pressed by the curious. According to April’s Wired and Greg Hays, whose firm Hays Financial Consulting specializes in fraud detection, this critical element of how to run a scam can be summed up as, “There’s usually some cryptic angle.”

Mike Olson of Wired likens this approach to the kind of “marketing scams (that) often push products with secret compounds that say, “triple muscle mass, hair thickness, and brain cells.” Like it or not, Wall Street is now firmly situated in the realm of P.T. Barnum. The New York Times has recently gone so far in two articles to call the “performance bonuses” and “management fees” received by senior banking executives as “looting”. With AIG currently defending its post-bailout executive bonuses and with what the LA Times called the “grudging consent” of the Obama Administration, we clearly are looking at a divide in perspectives, if not values. There seems to be a semantic gap here between “bonus” and “theft” the size of a Black Hole.

The form that this maze of mirrors takes is nor more transparent than with the arcana of derivatives, credit default swaps, and other financial instruments that were developed by the financial engineers or as they came to be affectionately known “quants” starting in the 80’s. Like the equations they are founded on, notably David K. Li’s Gaussian copula function first published in 2000, these values are all theoretical “windows” with often what are only secondary or tertiary relationships to “the store” or collateral. When even “the experts” have professed to not understand these concepts, then we are in the realm of talking heads on CNBC, Bloomberg, and the Sunday morning network “political” talk shows nodding like bobble heads in the back of a repossessed American car being towed away into the sunset. Even a worthy on the frontlines like Elizabeth Warner of Harvard Law School and Head of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP offered to Terry Gross last week on Fresh Air that nobody knows yet where the bailout money has gone, but that the process of transparency has started. At this point, the vastness of the numbers involved now that they are in the multiple trillions are just plain numbing since there is no way for we non-quants to reference them.

As the crisis continues to reveal layers of the onion and falls like so many cards in the Wall Street Funhouse, it’s these kinds of expressions of “value” that are a long way from a monetary system based on the gold standard backed up by bullion at Fort Knox and Bretton Woods. We’re way beyond something that Auric Goldfinger would lust for here and the depths of how far the cards will fall can only be described as an endless maze where we’ve just wiped our dung-soiled shoes off on the welcome mat to Wall Street’s House of Mirrors attraction.

So, if the financial basis for the system has now proven shoddy, if not shaken to its core by virtue of not being based on any reality except for greed and probability formulas—both shaky as foundations at best—what then, is the reality we find ourselves in? Psychotherapist Robert J. Sardello and Randolph Severson in a masterwork called Money and the Soul of the World (a phrase coined by Norman O. Brown), provide a clear picture of how we got here: “Bottom line thinking makes money appear as the one solid reality left…money is the epistemology of our Age. Money makes things happen. It is the source of action in the world and perhaps the only power we invest in. Life seems to depend on it…Perhaps in every other respect, in every other value, bankruptcy has been declared giving money the power of some sacred deity, demanding to be recognized. Economics no longer persuades money how to behave. Numbers cannot make the beast lie down and be quiet or sit up and do tricks. Thus, as we suspected all along, economics falsely imitates science. At best, economics is a neurosis of money…it enables functioning in the world, and before long all functioning revolves around maintaining the neurosis.”

Maybe it can be argued that this is a Western neurosis and that a billion Muslims would not subscribe to this apostasy. But we’re not alone—in February, the nation once held as the standard for emerging economies of this century—Dubai—received an initial bail-out of $10 billion from the U.A.E. The crisis of values is clearly a global affair. Or maybe, as Tom Tomorrow mordantly observes in his most recent column in This Modern World, the “current turmoil” is based on the fact that “Tax cuts for the wealthy have never been properly implemented!” His current post features a cover for a periodical called "The Magazine of Wall Street" from July 27, 1929 with the headline "Ten Best Stocks To Buy Now" and Tom's caption, "Little did they know..."

This past week, I was talking with Kevin Henry of Bazzeo, who has been an active voice in the environmental movement since 1974. As an early mover, he has now become a recognized arbiter of style, taste and innovation in the Green Home and especially the kitchen. We were discussing the history of how environmentalism has changed and in particular, how it’s experienced a sea-change in the last five years, in large part due to An Inconvenient Truth taking global warming into the mainstream.

We were discussing corporate “greenwashing” and the bandwagon effect, but Kevin elevated the conversation from my cynicism to his always infectious optimism. He said: “We’ve gone from consumers saying, ‘I’ve got to have that!’ to saying, “Why do I need that?’” Simply put, he spoke to a movement that is the subject of forthcoming lectures called "Consumerism To Consciousness".

This theme is at the root of our current economic crisis and holds the key to recovery. Weather expert and anthroposophical scholar, Dennis Klocek, has taken James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which posited the planet as a living entity one step further. Klocek offers a formula which advances that the Earth’s consciousness is directly equivalent during any given historical epoch to the level of human species consciousness. Or to put it another way, E∞=H∞/C (E=Earth, H=Homo sapiens, ∞=Consciousness, C=Time). It follows that the sooner we continue of our own volition—rather than as forced by economic disaster—on the path of course correction toward deeper values connected to the whole—the better our future will be.

To survive this crisis of what stands behind value, it is common sense to base our currency on the living system we all share and should sustain together. It’s not a gesture like cap and trade toward substantiating the market value of the natural world that we need now, though to value nature as the market is the right direction. But we need to be careful for as Chief Seattle once asked rhetorically and with some irony of the Great White Father in Washington: “Who owns the air?” A Green WPA, however, would be a great leap forward to start rebuilding our infrastructure and manufacturing around sustainability and renewable energy.

To inspire hope and start on the road to a new earth economy, we will need many more living, breathing formulas like Klocek’s to replace the vampire quant formulas of Wall Street—but Klocek’s equation is a miraculous, bold and auspicious way to formulate an Earth Standard to a eco-system of organic values based on every breath we take…

IT'S A SHORT FORM WORLD AFTER ALL

My eight-year-old son recently asked me when I started seeing in color. We were watching a black and white TV show on cable and had been talking about what some of my favorite shows were when I was growing up. This wasn’t my first close encounter with my children’s incredulity at my media shortcomings. Past incidents have included their disbelief that I grew up without videotape and DVDs. Vinyl recordings were also a revelation when I pulled some albums from my secret stash out of the garage and gently placed them on the altar of a new turntable.

Artifactual media can be a curio if not hold a talismanic power over newcomers. Sometimes new generations are beaten into submission through accidents of discovery or inter-generational wars of attrition. A major victory in my personal campaign in support of archaic media occurred last week when my teenager asked for advice on how to properly handle her new vinyl acquisition—an MGMT record. It was almost a cultural breakthrough until it was marred when I had to transfer the record to a digital file because my son had used my new record player to do some scratching—only without the benefit of having a disc on the turntable, thus shredding another hard-to-find needle and rubber platon.

When generational media worlds collide, minds are blown. In my case, I was captivated by my son’s perspective that before the advent of color televisions and what NBC called “living color”, we would all obviously only be seeing the world in black and white. Looking at the Wall Street quants maze of arcane derivatives and other financial instruments, I sometimes wish the world could still be deciphered in black and white. But what is interesting about my son’s comment is that we all seem to take the media we grow up with for granted.

There is now a generation that did not know life without the Internet and mass game changers like the iPhone and Wii. More important it seems than changes in technology and distribution are the generational shifts that change the way consumers use media. It also leads to questions about where the mass market and Main Street have gone and a conversation I had last week with the most brilliant marketer I know.

Fred Seibert is a self-proclaimed “serial entrepreneur” who among other things was largely responsible for branding MTV and currently has several of the top-rated animated TV shows. But, I don’t hold any of that against him especially since these accomplishments don’t always mean that he’s always right—even though visitors to his old office were warned by a large sign that they best leave their opinions outside the door because the person they would find inside was infallible.

Still, like the agent provocateur he is, Fred said, “The methodology to reach the mass market no longer exists.” Now, maybe I’m taking his observation out of context for the sake of this post, so I duly note that his comment originated with respect to the state of the music industry. But, we were also talking about how the television business was bound to follow suit sooner or later.

When I was watching an old episode of “The Honeymooners” on TV Land recently, the difference between the world of the long form, mass market universe of yesteryear and today’s short form, micro media markets was brought into high relief. The scene featuring a typical argument between Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows lasted for almost two minutes without interruption and only used one wide shot. The relationship of early television with stage performances is clear when watching this series as well as other fifties classics like “The Jack Benny Program” and “Amos and Andy”. It’s no accident that live drama like CBS’ “Playhouse 90” made up a lot of 50’s TV fare.

In the 60’s, television scenes got shorter, influenced most likely by the tempo of rock and roll. With the introduction of MTV in the early 80’s, quick cutting and handheld techniques became the order of the day and “scenes” lasted a matter of seconds, serving up music cuts instead of video edits, and in turn, influencing highly stylized, network TV series like “Miami Vice”. Media critic and sci-fi writer, Paul Levinson, has offered a granular look in Digital McLuhan of the dwindling length of scenes for small screen time from earliest television through the 90’s. He also notes that, in a reversal of fortunes that Marshall McLuhan would have appreciated, many movies in the last two decades are remakes of classic TV shows—so many so, in my view, that one wonders how many are left to dredge up in the archives. As Frank Zappa once said to me, “The world will end in nostalgia”.

Last year’s introduction of long form downloads of its primetime hour dramas by ABC displayed a fascinating metric—Nielsen Digital measured that there were some 40 million total downloads. But, the average time viewed was—guess what? Three minutes. The consummation of this sea change movement to short form was realized with the one-second Miller High Life commercial in this year’s Super Bowl. At $3 million per 30-second spot, it was also a relative bargain.

Still, Fox’s American Idol is still reaching what is undeniably a huge mass audience even when compared with the former power of top-rated shows from broadcast TV’s height such as “MASH”, “Cosby” and “Seinfeld”, which characteristically reached scores of millions of TV viewers. According to Entertainment Weekly, last Thursday’s Idol show attracted 21.2 million viewers beating Survivor’s 12 million. If I’m a consumer brand trying to reach a mass market, then even a portion of the total TV universe on any given night still represents a viable methodology compared to the short form universe of the Internet. However, television advertising has never been proven to have a direct correspondence between commercials and purchase. In the television business, it’s all about growing brand awareness. Even so, Short Attention Span Theater has arrived even as just a relatively unmonetized consumer trend. While YouTube’s valuation is $1.5billion, its 2008 revenues were $150million, a paltry sum compared with the $65 billion TV ad business.

Despite this stark earnings contrast, Cynthia Turner reports in that the overall Internet video audience is now 135 million strong. But, a growing share of audience isn’t necessarily market share. It isn’t a question of size that matters, but of how this new online video medium works as discrete from others. Largely as a result of the Obama Inaugural, YouTube was up after a flat December to 5.86 billion video streams in January with over 100m uniques. Paidcontent.org reported a week ago that Yahoo, MySpace, MTV.com, and YouTube are all considering eventual upgrades to HD as a way to keep up with broadcast. But, the question presented by mass media is not a matter of how many streams but where is the mainstream? And what matters is not necessarily how people are watching at any given time, and not even what they are watching, but how and for how long?

Appointment, scheduled viewing was the original standard for broadcast television. Video and cable chipped away at this model, but it was the Internet and personalization that finally did it in. TV is literally background to my daughter’s generation and a complement to other multitasked media input. In the on demand, VOD, PVR, short form universe, video consumption is not tied to time in the same way that hit TV shows once defined an evening when families had to sit down together in front of the pixel campfire to catch their favorite show—or else miss it entirely.

Even though CBS’s March Madness is nearly sold out for online ads, it is unclear how the short form universe is reaching users in a meaningful way. Short form video may have the eventual power of narrowing the focus to very specific demographics. Consumer viewing habits will continue to morph. In a recent piece, Phil Swann asks whether Blockbuster will go away. Maybe, but my answer to Fred’s question is that TV is still the methodology to reach the mass market.

Audience share is transformed with the introduction of every new visual medium. But each medium has its own value proposition and attendant feature set that can vary in differentiation from others with respect to process and content. But movies didn’t replace radio and TV didn’t replace radio—and the Internet didn’t replace TV. The introduction of a new medium doesn’t replace extant forms, but displaces them by defining new audiences as well as cannibalizing old ones—and their power to do so is always based on how they increase value for the consumer.

The bigger question is what impact the generational shift of video consumers who have grown up in the short form universe will have on making the video stream the standard and long form an occasional luxury seen at the movies or as PVR saved fare of five or ten minute shows on future integrated online and offline "broadcast" networks. But in concentrating on the expanding video web, we are looking in the wrong direction. My prediction is that it’s going to be the mobile video web that is the definitive, disruptive platform to watch. Whatever happens, one thing is sure—it’s already a short form world after all and our children will inevitably be faced with tough questions from their own kids who won’t believe them when they roll out their saved iTunes playlists and talk about how cool HD and iPhones were.