Editor’s Note: This essay emerged from conversations at Helena’s 2025 Summit in Valle de Bravo, Mexico — a gathering of leaders from technology, policy, science, and the arts convened to collaborate on a subset of pressing societal challenges. It is not a summary of the Summit or a consensus statement; it reflects the author’s own exploration of ideas shaped by those discussions.
\nAcross much of the world today, public institutions appear increasingly fragile. Elections are contested, political authority is questioned, and public discourse is shaped more by distrust than by shared purpose. In many places the instinctive response to this erosion has been institutional repair, redesign the rules, strengthen the systems, update governance frameworks.
\nYet the deeper problem often lies elsewhere. Institutions do not generate legitimacy on their own. They inherit it from the social worlds beneath them, from the networks of trust, responsibility, and recognition that allow authority to be accepted in the first place. When those social foundations erode, institutional reform alone cannot restore stability. Governance becomes procedural rather than relational, and compliance begins to replace consent.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"Governance becomes procedural rather than relational, and compliance begins to replace consent."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"This distinction becomes clearer in places where institutions have already fractured. In contexts of prolonged conflict, communities are often forced to rebuild forms of authority and accountability long before formal governance structures return. The mechanisms that emerge are rarely codified in law or policy, yet they function as practical systems of order. They rely on relationships rather than bureaucracy, and on shared expectations rather than enforcement.
\nConsider this one example from my own work at the Elman Peace and Human Rights Centre facilitating community-based reintegration of former combatants in Somalia. When young men leave armed groups and seek to return home, the process does not begin with a court or an administrative decision. Instead, it begins with negotiation within the community itself.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Renewal begins with community. ","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"ilwad-elman-10","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/18222434/ilwad-elman-10.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Elders, families, and local leaders gather to determine whether the individual can return, under what conditions, and who will assume responsibility for ensuring that reintegration holds.
\nThe agreement that follows is rarely written. Its authority comes from recognition rather than regulation. Those who endorse the return place their own standing behind it. If the agreement is broken, the consequences extend beyond the individual to those who vouched for him. Responsibility is distributed, visible, and socially enforced. From the outside such arrangements may appear informal. Yet they perform functions that formal institutions often struggle to achieve. They restore accountability, repair fractured relationships, and re-establish a shared understanding of belonging.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Distributed responsibility is a pathway to co-created communities of belonging.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"ilwad-elman-12","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/18223105/ilwad-elman-12.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"What matters is not the specific form these systems take. Similar dynamics exist in different ways across societies, through civic associations, local leadership, religious communities, and informal systems of mutual obligation. What differs is the extent to which they remain active and visible.
\nIn societies where institutional structures have long provided stability, these relational foundations can become less visible over time. Governance appears to function through procedures and regulations alone. The social infrastructure that once sustained legitimacy becomes background rather than practice. But when institutions falter, the absence of that infrastructure becomes immediately apparent.
\nThe challenges confronting many societies today, political polarization, fragmented public discourse, the destabilizing effects of technological change, and the strain of climate and economic transitions, are often described as institutional crises. In reality they are equally crises of social cohesion. Authority is questioned not only because systems fail, but because the relationships that once made those systems credible have weakened. This is where the experience of societies navigating fragility may hold unexpected insight. Where institutions have already broken down, communities are compelled to practice forms of relational governance that other societies often take for granted.
\nLegitimacy must be rebuilt through recognition and participation. Responsibility must be shared. Authority must be earned and continuously reinforced.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"To build resiliency, societies must practice forms of relational governance. ","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"ilwad-elman-9","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/18221629/ilwad-elman-9.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"ilwad-elman-2-2-scaled","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/18224704/ilwad-elman-2-2-scaled-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"These practices are neither easily transferable nor something to romanticize because they emerged from necessity rather than design. Yet they do reveal something essential; governance ultimately depends less on institutional architecture than on the social relationships that sustain it. Ironically, many of the principles now widely discussed in policy and academic literature, trust-building, collective responsibility, civic participation, and social infrastructure, have long been central to how communities survive and rebuild under conditions of uncertainty. The language may be new, but the underlying practices are not. What remains striking, however, is how rarely these lessons travel in the opposite direction.
\nRebuilding in these contexts does not begin with institutional overhaul, but with the slow reactivation of the social conditions that make authority credible. It can look deceptively simple at first; restoring spaces where disagreement can be held and mediated before it hardens. Re-establishing forms of shared responsibility so that risk is not experienced as individually borne but collectively carried and relying on figures who are socially legible and accountable in ways that formal systems often are not. In different forms, many of these dynamics already exist within societies where institutions remain intact, though often weakened, informal, or overlooked. It means creating pathways for participation that move beyond consultation toward co-ownership, where decisions about sacrifice, security, and belonging are not only administered but recognized. These are not abstract ideals, they are practices that shape whether people accept authority, exercise restraint, and remain invested in collective outcomes. None of this replaces institutions, but it determines whether institutions can still be trusted to function. In societies where legitimacy is thinning but not yet broken, these practices are often the earliest signals of repair, and the difference between systems that quietly hollow out and those capable of renewal.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Repair begins with shared acts of renewal.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"pexels-fiifi-boateng-3570312-5344765","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/18230342/pexels-fiifi-boateng-3570312-5344765-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"For decades governance knowledge has largely flowed from stable institutions outward, from established systems toward societies considered fragile or transitional. Yet the current moment suggests that the exchange of insight must become more reciprocal. The question is not whether strong institutions remain essential, they clearly do. The question is whether societies that still possess them are investing enough in the social foundations that allow those institutions to endure. Resilient governance does not emerge from systems alone. It emerges from cultures of responsibility, participation, and mutual accountability that make authority legitimate and cooperation possible. When those relational foundations weaken, even the most sophisticated institutions struggle to function.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"Resilient governance does not emerge from systems alone. It emerges from cultures of responsibility, participation, and mutual accountability that make authority legitimate and cooperation possible."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The most important task ahead may therefore be less about inventing new governance models than about rediscovering the social infrastructures that have always made governance possible. In places rebuilding from crisis those infrastructures are practiced daily because survival depends on them. In more stable societies they are often assumed rather than maintained.
\nThe difference may prove decisive. If institutions ultimately inherit their legitimacy from the communities that sustain them, then rebuilding trust cannot begin with institutions alone. It must begin with the relationships, responsibilities, and shared commitments that give those institutions meaning. And in a world where many systems now appear increasingly fragile, the societies most practiced in rebuilding under pressure may have lessons the rest of us can learn from.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"About the Author
\nIlwad Elman is a peace and development practitioner and Chief Operating Officer of the Elman Peace and Human Rights Centre in Somalia, where she has led pioneering work in disarmament, reintegration, and peacebuilding. She works at the intersection of conflict resolution, human rights, and security sector reform, with a focus on ensuring women and youth have a seat at the table. Ilwad co-founded the Peace by Africa Network, connecting grassroots peacebuilders across nine African countries, and serves as an advisor or board member to the Every Woman Treaty to End Violence Against Women, the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Trafficking, and UNESCO’s Expert Group on Culture for Peace. She is a member of Helena, the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Alumni, and sits on the WEF’s Global Future Council on Nature and Security. Her work has been recognized with the Gleitsman International Activist Award from Harvard University, the Hessian Peace Prize, the Right Livelihood Award, and the Aurora Humanitarian Prize.
\n"}],"sidePopups":{"popups":null}}},{"id":"cG9zdDo0MDgw","databaseId":4080,"title":"Seeing the Signal Before the Storm","slug":"seeing-the-signal-before-the-storm","link":"https://www.helena.org/seeing-the-signal-before-the-storm/","date":"2026-04-21T19:57:14","isSticky":false,"author":{"node":{"name":"Erika Yorio"}},"excerpt":"From Biological Surveillance to Biological Intelligence in the Age of AI
\n","featuredImage":{"node":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09194422/AdobeStock_1591441365-scaled.jpeg","title":"Emergency Room Chaos: Doctors and Nurses Rush to Save a Patient"}},"acfArticleDetails":{"seo":{"title":"Seeing the Signal Before the Storm","metaDescription":null,"metaImage":null},"truncatedArticleTitle":"Seeing the Signal Before the Storm","magazineArticleHero":{"text":"","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Emergency Room Chaos: Doctors and Nurses Rush to Save a Patient","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09194422/AdobeStock_1591441365-scaled.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},"articleIntro":{"title":"","subtitle":null,"authorText":"Saheer Gharbia, Lalitha Sundaram & Wilmot James","author":[]},"detailBlocks":[{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Editor’s Note: This paper builds on discussions at Helena’s Mexico Summit and ongoing conversations within our community about AI, biological risk, and governance. It reflects a growing recognition that preventing catastrophic biological harm will depend not only on norms and safeguards, but on our collective ability to detect and interpret early signals across fragmented systems — before crises escalate.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Over the past two decades, we have grown accustomed to describing pandemics and biological emergencies as “once-in-a-generation” events. That framing no longer holds. What we are facing is not a sequence of rare shocks, but a structural shift in risk—one driven by climate disruption, ecological pressure, global mobility, and the accelerating convergence of artificial intelligence with the life sciences.
\nRecent debates about AI and biosecurity often frame the challenge as a stark choice: either a tightly controlled surveillance state, or a future of chaotic misuse enabled by rapidly diffusing technologies. This is a false binary. The real vulnerability lies elsewhere—in our inability to see emerging biological threats early enough to act with restraint, proportionality, and confidence.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Pandemics are no longer rare shocks. They are symptoms of a structural shift in risk we have yet to fully reckon with.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"chris-mclay-362ErvpEOfw-unsplash-scaled","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/21211913/chris-mclay-362ErvpEOfw-unsplash-scaled-2.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"At the Helena Summit in Mexico, a recurring theme surfaced across otherwise diverse conversations: our capacity to respond to biological crises now outpaces our ability to anticipate them. We have become better at mobilizing countermeasures once a threat is recognized. Yet we remain dangerously weak at detecting early signals, connecting fragmented data across borders and sectors, and equipping policymakers with usable intelligence before crises escalate.
\nThis gap is not primarily a failure of science or goodwill. It is a failure of system design.
\nThe question before us, then, is not simply how to prepare better for the next pandemic, but how to design an integrated biosurveillance apparatus that can detect emerging biological threats early, translate weak signals into actionable insight, and do so in a way that is ethically governed and politically usable.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Bio-risk is exacerbated by silo'd data streams; the world needs an anticipatory and integrated biosurveillance apparatus.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Global business concept of connections and information transfer in the world 3d illustration","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09161859/AdobeStock_195749821-scaled.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
Despite unprecedented investment since COVID-19, the global biosurveillance landscape remains siloed and fragmented. Clinical surveillance detects outbreaks only once illness is widespread. Genomic surveillance has expanded rapidly, but remains uneven, pathogen-specific, and poorly integrated with other data streams. Environmental monitoring—of wastewater, air, or water—is increasingly feasible but rarely linked systematically to clinical or epidemiological intelligence. Data systems remain siloed by discipline, institution, and jurisdiction.
\nThese shortcomings reflect surveillance systems designed for a slower, more linear world—one in which outbreaks were expected to be local, attribution relatively straightforward, and response windows measured in weeks rather than days.
\nThat world has changed. Zoonotic spillover is accelerating as climate change reshapes ecosystems and increases contact between wildlife, livestock, and humans. Global mobility compresses detection windows, allowing pathogens to cross continents before alarms are raised. At the same time, advances in synthetic biology and AI-enabled protein design are lowering barriers to engineering biological systems in ways that challenge long-standing assumptions about origin, intent, and attribution. Analyses in Nature and Nature Climate Change suggest that emerging infectious disease events are increasing in frequency and diversity, driven by precisely these anthropogenic pressures.
\nIn this context, surveillance that relies primarily on confirmed diagnoses is surveillance that arrives too late.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Pandemic risk is increasing, underscoring the imperative for advanced detection and response","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"image (7)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/13231845/image-7.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
Required now is a shift from disease-specific monitoring toward biological intelligence: the ability to detect, interpret, and contextualize weak signals across multiple domains before they converge into crisis, a bio-shield in a manner of speaking.
\nAn effective biosurveillance system for the current era must integrate at least five streams: clinical anomaly detection; community sentinel surveillance; environmental monitoring at points of aggregation such as cities and transport hubs; One Health and veterinary surveillance at human–animal interfaces; and carefully governed contextual data, including mobility patterns.
\nCrucially, these streams must not merely coexist. They must be analytically fused, with pre-defined escalation pathways that determine when a weak signal becomes actionable intelligence. This is the distinction between collecting more data and building surveillance that genuinely informs decisions.
\nThe design logic behind a bio-shield—a biosurveillance architecture developed in response to these gaps—is that early warning emerges not from any single technology, but from the integration of multiple imperfect signals into a coherent system of intelligence.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"AdobeStock_1739507928_Preview","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09194709/AdobeStock_1739507928_Preview.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
We do conceive of a bio-shield as an entity with a global command centre or having a monolithic platform. It is a distributed architecture designed to work with, rather than replace, existing institutions. Its core innovation lies in how it structures escalation.
\nAt baseline, systems rely on routine diagnostics and targeted sequencing, which provide speed and scale. When anomalies appear — unusual clinical clusters, unexpected genetic signatures, unexplained severity — analysis escalates to metagenomic sequencing, capable of detecting novel or unexpected biological material without prior assumptions. In rare but high-consequence cases, deeper investigation is triggered, including engineered-feature analysis to assess whether observed patterns are consistent with natural evolution or suggest artificial modification.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Advances in meta genomic sequencing have dramatically increased our capacity to detect novel biological threats","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"DNA/RNA Health Threat Detection Software Background","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09164823/AdobeStock_756523184-scaled.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"This tiered approach is both operationally feasible and politically stabilizing. Resources are concentrated only when risk justifies depth, and not every signal trigger maximal scrutiny. The result is a system that reduces both false reassurance and unnecessary escalation.
\nThe technical components already exist. Aircraft wastewater surveillance has detected viral lineages before clinical systems. Traveller-based genomic surveillance has identified variants of concern weeks ahead of domestic reporting. Distributed genomic networks—from South Africa to India to the UK—have demonstrated that high-resolution sequencing can operate at scale. The challenge is not feasibility; it is integration.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"Integrating existing systems provides a skeleton key for anticipatory pandemic preparedness","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Wastewater treatment plant in operation with multiple tanks and processing areas during daytime","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09170348/AdobeStock_1914940466-scaled.jpeg"},"tabletImage":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09170359/AdobeStock_1914940466-1-scaled.jpeg"},"laptopImage":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09170359/AdobeStock_1914940466-1-scaled.jpeg"},"desktopImage":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09170359/AdobeStock_1914940466-1-scaled.jpeg"},"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"passenger In the Malaysia airport","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09170829/AdobeStock_70330670-scaled.jpeg"},"tabletImage":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09170829/AdobeStock_70330670-scaled.jpeg"},"laptopImage":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09170829/AdobeStock_70330670-scaled.jpeg"},"desktopImage":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09170829/AdobeStock_70330670-scaled.jpeg"},"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
The convergence of AI and biosurveillance raises a deeper question—one that sits at the heart of Helena’s work: how to build systems that protect without becoming surveillance states, and that deter misuse without amplifying it.
\nAdvanced analytics make early detection possible, but they also raise legitimate concerns about misattribution, over-reaction, and loss of trust. Tools that assess engineered features are essential in an era of AI-enabled biology, yet they must be governed carefully to avoid misuse or geopolitical misinterpretation.
\nThe answer is not to avoid these tools, but to constrain them with ethically-informed guardrails—through proportionality, transparency, and human-in-the-loop decision-making. BioShield’s design embeds governance at every stage: tiered data-sharing models that preserve sovereignty, dual-use risk gates that control access to sensitive analyses, and benefit-sharing mechanisms that ensure contributors are partners rather than sources.
\nSurveillance should inform policy, not automate it. The goal is not prediction with certainty, but decision advantage under uncertainty.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
One of the least acknowledged realities of global health security is that many of the earliest signals of future global threats emerge in regions with the least analytic capacity to act on them (which is why defunding the developing world is shortsighted). Africa sits at the intersection of high biodiversity, rapid urbanization, climate vulnerability, and expanding scientific capability.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Strengthening analytic capacity where early signals often emerge: African researchers advancing the detection and interpretation of biological threats are often at the front lines of global health security.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"image-from-rawpixel-id-2282498-jpeg","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09195821/image-from-rawpixel-id-2282498-jpeg-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Over the past decade, African institutions have demonstrated global leadership in genomic surveillance, often detecting variants of concern earlier than wealthier regions. Yet environmental and multisectoral surveillance remain under-resourced, and analytic integration is limited.
\nA distributed biosurveillance network anchored in Africa—coordinated, for example, from South Africa but spanning multiple ecological and epidemiological contexts—offers not only technical advantage, but strategic wisdom. It strengthens global protection by improving visibility where emergence is most likely, while reinforcing scientific sovereignty and equity.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
Why has such an integrated biosurveillance system not already been built? The answer lies less in technology than in incentives. Multilateral institutions move cautiously. Governments invest primarily in response, not anticipation. Markets undervalue prevention because its success is invisible.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Institutional responses are insufficient for addressing emerging bio threats","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"frederic-koberl-x_0hW-KaCgI-unsplash","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09201222/frederic-koberl-x_0hW-KaCgI-unsplash-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"This creates a design gap—one that philanthropy is uniquely positioned to fill. Philanthropic actors can invest in infrastructure that precedes consensus, demonstrate feasibility, and de-risk models that others can later adopt. An 18-month pilot can show that integrated detection works. A three-year distributed network can demonstrate scalability. A five-year platform can establish sustainability.
\nThe costs are modest compared to the trillions lost to pandemics. The returns are largely invisible—until the moment they are needed.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
The lesson of recent decades is not that we lack expertise or goodwill. It is that we consistently wait for clarity that arrives only after options have narrowed. By the time signals are obvious, trust is eroded, choices are constrained, and costs multiply.
\nDesigning an integrated biosurveillance apparatus is therefore not a technical luxury. It is a strategic necessity for an age in which biological risk is shaped as much by human systems as by microbes.
\nIf Helena’s convening power can help shift the conversation—from response to visibility, from fragmented monitoring to biological intelligence, and from abstract risk to actionable design—it will have contributed something enduring: the capacity to see the storm before it breaks.
\n\n
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"
About the authors:
\nSaheer Gharbia is Professor of Pathogen Genomics and Chief Scientific Officer of Genomics Surveillance, The Wellcome Sanger Institute, Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridgeshire, UK.
\nLalitha Sundaram is Assistant Research Professor at the Centre for Pandemic Risk Management at the University of Cambridge, UK.
\nWilmot James is Professor and Senior Advisor to the Pandemic Center in the School of Public Health, Brown University, Rhode Island, USA.
\n"}],"sidePopups":{"popups":null}}},{"id":"cG9zdDo0MTA3","databaseId":4107,"title":"Charting a Third Way for AI","slug":"charting-a-third-way-for-ai","link":"https://www.helena.org/charting-a-third-way-for-ai/","date":"2026-04-21T19:56:54","isSticky":false,"author":{"node":{"name":"Erika Yorio"}},"excerpt":"","featuredImage":{"node":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09210359/anvesh-uppunuthula-NZAH9ZT1gd4-unsplash-scaled.jpg","title":"anvesh-uppunuthula-NZAH9ZT1gd4-unsplash"}},"acfArticleDetails":{"seo":{"title":"Charting a Third Way for AI","metaDescription":null,"metaImage":null},"truncatedArticleTitle":null,"magazineArticleHero":{"text":"","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"anvesh-uppunuthula-NZAH9ZT1gd4-unsplash","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09210359/anvesh-uppunuthula-NZAH9ZT1gd4-unsplash-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},"articleIntro":{"title":"","subtitle":null,"authorText":"Tomicah Tillemann","author":[]},"detailBlocks":[{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Editor’s Note: This essay emerged from conversations at Helena’s 2025 Summit in Valle de Bravo, Mexico — a gathering of leaders from technology, policy, science, and the arts convened to collaborate on a subset of pressing societal challenges. It is not a summary of the Summit or a consensus statement; it reflects the author’s own exploration of ideas shaped by those discussions.
\nIn 1864, as train tracks started spreading across Europe, King William I of Prussia predicted: “No one will pay good money to get from Berlin to Potsdam in one hour when he can ride his horse there in one day for free.”
\nIn 1977, Ken Olsen, the president of Digital Equipment Corporation, a computer company, confidently said, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
\nIn 1998, Paul Krugman, the MIT economist and New York Times columnist, boldly declared: “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
\nPredictions about the future offer a lighthearted chastening for those of us attempting to imagine and build the next generation of technology. It is easy to misjudge the trajectory of new innovations.
\nAs the first stages of an AI-driven revolution begin reverberating across society, it is time to start asking: 1) what predictions are we making today that won’t age well? And 2) how are we failing to imagine the technology’s potential impact?
\n
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Technological revolutions rarely arrive on the trajectory we expect","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IBM’s_$10_Billion_Machine","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09210919/IBMs_10_Billion_Machine.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Unlike the examples above, the failure of imagination surrounding AI is not that we are discounting its revolutionary potential (the hype is real), but instead that we believe it can only go one of two ways.
\nTo date, the public conversation around AI has been dominated by two camps.
\nOn one hand, accelerationists see AI as an unadulterated boon for humankind, arguing that we must charge forward unencumbered by concern about potential risks.
\nOn the other hand, AI doomers often suggest that human extinction is the almost inevitable outcome if the technology advances further.
\nBuying into either mindset, or believing that these are the only two options, will ensure that we look back on this moment with regret, having failed to imagine – and then build – a third way centered on human flourishing and agency.
\nI want to outline the basic architecture of this third way – and share how a coalition of technologists, investors, activists, and governments are already working together to build it.
\n
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
The accelerationists’ failure of imagination is a failure to understand history. They believe that “this time is different.”
\nTheir attitude is grounded in a belief that what AI can unlock – from breakthroughs in biology and medicine to autonomous vehicles and safer roads – is so important that we should not interrupt the technology’s relentless advance with regulations or externally mandated guardrails.
\nIn 2024, Sam Altman wrote about the expanding frontier of AI development, “With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has become one of the most influential advocates for rapid AI development","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"48838377432_c9c02afc40_k","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09211648/48838377432_c9c02afc40_k.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Even if accelerationists pay lip service to the need for some safeguards, that sentiment isn’t showing up in the vast resources they are deploying to shape the politics of AI. Leading the Future, a PAC that backs candidates opposed to the regulation of AI, has raised over $100M. While OpenAI hasn’t funded it directly, several of its leaders and investors are donors, including Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s co-founder and president.
\nThis isn’t the first time technologists have couched their agenda in the gauzy sentiment that “everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now.” In its early days, social media was destined to democratize access to the public square.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"A protester in Cairo’s Tahrir Square holds a sign referencing Facebook and Twitter, symbols of social media’s role in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"1280px-Facebook-jan26","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09212636/1280px-Facebook-jan26.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"It had the potential to topple dictators and serve as a tool for democracy. But instead of people using the product to exercise their voice and agency, they became the product. And surveillance capitalism became the business model.
\nThat model is built on making content as addictive as possible, using that addiction to harvest our personal data, and then using that data to manipulate behavior. It’s hard to argue that it has been an unqualified win for society.
\nAccelerationists also claim that if we don’t race ahead in developing more powerful AI systems, others will. However, the United States’ only credible competitor in the AI race, China, has already adopted one of the most detailed, rigorous regulatory frameworks for AI safety, and imposes severe punishments on technologists and companies that create unsafe systems.
\nThese inconvenient truths betray the accelerationists’ argument. We’ve seen this movie before. Everything will not go right. It is delusional to suggest that letting the downside risks sort themselves out will yield the optimal outcome for humanity, especially when those downside risks include people becoming co-opted by a technology with far more manipulative potential than social media.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
A different mistake comes from those who focus exclusively on the dangers of AI. They see the (very real) potential challenges ahead, but in many cases cross the line dividing helpful concern from despondent fatalism.
\nMany AI opponents now speak of human extinction as an almost inevitability. Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prominent AI researcher, gave voice to this sentiment in his vividly titled book, If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies. His colleague, Nate Soares, an otherwise cheerful person, revealed recently that he no longer sets aside money for retirement. “I just don’t expect the world to be around,” he said.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of the book, In Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Eliezer Yudkowsky presentation.","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09213110/Eliezer_Yudkowsky_Stanford_2006_square_crop.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"It is reasonable to be fearful of misaligned superintelligence, but the current dialog leaves little room for meaningful solutions that could redirect AI onto a better trajectory. Increasingly, AI opponents are treating the future of the technology as something that happens to us rather than something that, at least at this stage, is still shaped by us. This approach risks devaluing the critical role of human decisions, institutions, and incentives in shaping what emerges from this inflection point.
\nClaims that the final trajectory of AI is already set also miss a more immediate danger than extinction: extraction. Today, the value of AI systems accrues to the companies building them, even though those systems are trained on the accumulated knowledge, expression, and data of society as a whole. Creators, small businesses, and individual users risk being disintermediated from the very intelligence they helped produce.
\nThe challenge, then, is not simply to prevent catastrophe. It is to reject the assumption that the concentration of power, loss of agency, or even existential risk are foregone conclusions. However grave the dangers, humans have not yet fully surrendered their ability to shape how this technology develops.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
These two perspectives can’t be our only options. The choice between unrestricted acceleration or complete shutdown is a false dichotomy.
\nThere is a third way to build AI responsibly and ambitiously—an approach that advances human flourishing and agency, protects personal data instead of harvesting it for profit, and creates an economy where voice and economic participation are shared.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"The false binary of the AI debate obscures a broader spectrum of futures.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"michael-dziedzic-isg2R8l4XxM-unsplash","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/09234626/michael-dziedzic-isg2R8l4XxM-unsplash-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The moral imagination behind this vision is not mine alone. Project Liberty has been forging a pro-human coalition of like-minded policymakers, technologists, organizations, and researchers united by the belief that we can forge an alternative path forward.
\nWhat has emerged is a three-part interconnected strategy: an alternative tech stack, an ambitious policy agenda, and a broad coalition of people and organizations. Together, they are anchored in the conviction that people deserve a voice, choice, and stake in the future of AI.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
Our interactions with AI are increasingly defined by agents. But consider what the word “agent” has always meant. In real estate, your agent works for you—bound by fiduciary duty to protect your interests. In sports or entertainment, your agent negotiates on your behalf. The job of an agent is to serve the principal.
\nAI agents are something different. They conduct tasks on your behalf, yes, but they ultimately work for Sam Altman, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg. Much of the value generated by AI agents—data, revenue, and network effects—accrues to their digital masters, not to you.
\nAn alternative AI stack would provide foundational infrastructure for a different type of agentic ecosystem built around core principles including:
\n\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"A coalition of policymakers, technologists, researchers, and institutions are imagining an AI that preserves human flourishing rather than diminishing it.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"53746453017_00be984c5c_h","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/10001854/53746453017_00be984c5c_h.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"
Project Liberty has highlighted the need for alternative AI tech to center on the “secret sauce” of the internet: interoperability. At every stage of the internet’s history, interoperability was a precondition for digital sovereignty. And AI is no different.
\nWhat would alternative technology look like in practice? To catch a glimpse of the future, we can look to the past. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, digital architecture called the LAMP stack emerged from a combination of open source technologies that were foundational to the explosion of web development.
\n\n
Together, these free, open source layers gave developers everything they needed to build and deploy web applications—no proprietary software required.
\n\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"At every stage of the internet’s history, interoperability was a precondition for digital sovereignty. And AI is no different."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"
The LAMP stack kept the web from being owned by a single company, which was a very real danger early in its history. An alternative AI stack should be grounded in the same ideas: open layers with safety built in; interoperable digital infrastructure; and democratized access that provides a basis for true individual digital sovereignty.
\n\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"lukas-ktmQBr5hNd8-unsplash","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/10002202/lukas-ktmQBr5hNd8-unsplash-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"
Along with many other partners, Project Liberty is building this alternative AI stack. We’re creating technology that gives people genuine control over their data, facilitates interoperability between AI systems, and treats people as citizens with rights – not users to be monetized.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
Technology alone won’t get us to an AI that enables greater human agency. But neither will regulation by itself. What’s needed is smart strategy that aligns legal code with technical code. We need data sovereignty, transparency, and democratic accountability to be built into the system itself, so business models allow value to be shared rather than extracted.
\nThe clearest example of what that policy looks like has emerged not from Washington, but from legislatures across the United States. With support from Project Liberty, Utah passed the Digital Choice Act in 2025, establishing landmark portability and interoperability requirements for social media. South Dakota just adopted the same law. Virginia’s version of the bill, which recently passed the State Senate 40-0, extends those same principles to AI.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"From Utah’s Digital Choice Act to similar bills now spreading, policymakers are translating “agency” into enforceable rights","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"image (8)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/13232101/image-8.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
Public opinion research from Project Liberty Institute has shown widespread appetite for an alternative vision of human flourishing in the age of AI. People want control over their data, transparency in AI systems, and technology that enhances democratic institutions. The public will is there. What’s needed now is the coalition to act on it.
\nMore than thirty major organizations from across the political spectrum and around the world are working together to build an AI strategy grounded in human agency and human flourishing. At the 2026 Munich Security Conference, leaders from this coalition convened to design the political and institutional architecture for this third way.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Members of the Project Liberty coalition attended the Munich Security Conference to design the political and institutional architecture for human-centered AI.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"csm_20260213_14-41-19_MSC2026_th__8b86afdd0e","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/10010641/csm_20260213_14-41-19_MSC2026_th__8b86afdd0e-scaled.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"This coalition is not an anti-technology movement, nor is it united against any single country. It is a values-based coalition—of red states and blue states, of governments large and small—committed to the principle that we must align our technology stack, policy stack, and values stack for maximum efficacy.
\nNext year, the Global AI Impact Summit will be held in Geneva, Switzerland. What happens there will help determine whether AI becomes a technology that extracts from people or one that expands what’s possible for them.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
King William couldn’t imagine trains would reshape Europe. Ken Olsen couldn’t see computers in every home. Each failed because they projected current constraints onto future possibilities.
\nToday’s debate about AI repeats this error—but in reverse. Accelerationists project unlimited possibilities while ignoring the patterns that have governed every previous technology. Doomers project inevitable dystopia or extinction while ignoring how human agency has steered technology before.
\nBoth miss what’s actually at stake. This is not so much a debate about technology as it is a debate about us.
\nIf we deploy good AI systems with strong guardrails to protect against misuse, the benefits could be profound. Freed from the friction and drudgery of administrative life, we could invest more deeply in our relationships, our families, our communities, and the work that is most distinctly human. The third way is a future where technology, policy, and human values align.
\nThis future almost certainly won’t happen if we continue down the technology’s current trajectory. But it isn’t hypothetical either.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":null},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"If we deploy good AI systems with strong guardrails to protect against misuse, the benefits could be profound. Freed from the friction and drudgery of administrative life, we could invest more deeply in our relationships, our families, our communities, and the work that is most distinctly human."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"We can design AI systems that give us control over our data, access to more trusted agentic systems, and safer, interoperable solutions that make it far harder for bad actors to use tech as a tool of coercion. Or not.
\nThe predictions we make about tomorrow depend on the engineering and policy decisions made today. We can accept the terms and conditions of the technology being built for us. Or we can build a new, better paradigm.
\nWe get to choose. And that choice—more than any model release, PAC, or prediction—will shape the future of AI.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"About the author:
\nDr. Tomicah Tillemann is President of Project Liberty, where his work focuses on policy solutions that enable human agency and human flourishing in an AI-powered world. He previously led policy for Andreessen Horowitz and Haun Ventures, and served as Senior Advisor to two Secretaries of State. He joined the State Department in 2009 as Hillary Clinton’s speechwriter and spent four years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee alongside Biden, Blinken, Obama, and Kerry. Tomicah also served as the Executive Director of the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative at New America, where he built and oversaw programs on asset allocation, technology, and democratic governance. He led teams that built and deployed technology solutions focused on strengthening democratic institutions and private sector accountability worldwide. A co-holder of four patents, Tomicah has served on advisory councils at the World Economic Forum and UN World Food Program. He holds a B.A. magna cum laude from Yale and a Ph.D. with distinction from Johns Hopkins SAIS, and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
\n"}],"sidePopups":{"popups":null}}},{"id":"cG9zdDo0MTI1","databaseId":4125,"title":"Naming the Machine","slug":"naming-the-machine","link":"https://www.helena.org/naming-the-machine/","date":"2026-04-21T19:53:35","isSticky":false,"author":{"node":{"name":"Erika Yorio"}},"excerpt":"Language, Power, and the Centering of Human Value in the Age of AI
\n","featuredImage":{"node":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/21211248/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-5.11.51-PM.png","title":"Screenshot 2026-04-21 at 5.11.51 PM"}},"acfArticleDetails":{"seo":{"title":"Naming the Machine: Language, Power, and the Centering of Human Value in the Ae of AI","metaDescription":null,"metaImage":null},"truncatedArticleTitle":null,"magazineArticleHero":{"text":"","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Screenshot 2026-04-21 at 5.11.51 PM","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/21211248/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-5.11.51-PM.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},"articleIntro":{"title":"","subtitle":null,"authorText":null,"author":[{"title":"Gilbert N. Morris","slug":"gilbert-n-morris","contentType":{"node":{"uri":"/members/"}}}]},"detailBlocks":[{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Editor’s Note: This essay emerged from conversations at Helena’s 2025 Summit in Valle de Bravo, Mexico — a gathering of leaders from technology, policy, science, and the arts convened to collaborate on a subset of pressing societal challenges. It is not a summary of the Summit or a consensus statement; it reflects the author’s own exploration of ideas shaped by those discussions.
\n“You can’t [change] paradigms through instructions or incentives or data flows or rules of the system. You need to learn to see the world differently, to generate different mental models, to populate your mind with different ideas. You do that through exposure to patterns, stories, numbers, and words that repeatedly hit the heart and the gut… One way is to keep pointing at the anomalies and failures of the old paradigm. Another is to keep speaking louder and louder – even joyfully, with assurance – from the new one.” –Donella Meadows, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” (1997)
\nIn her landmark 1997 essay on the architecture of structural intervention, Meadows identified paradigm change among the highest-order leverage points in any complex system. This paper offers a preliminary interrogation of the system currently being erected through the convergence of artificial intelligence, social media, and enterprise technology into an infrastructure of unprecedented reach with minimal accountability. Humanity is now beset by a limbic-colonizing social media, exacerbated by the rise of “digital Leviathans” – dominance seeking companies – allied with governments. In pursuit of dominance or avoidance of being dominated, these forces have set for themselves the task of attaining Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In their lurch toward this fetish, they risk, and seem willing to risk, the rise of neuratrophies, the destruction of the social order, the undermining of democratic root systems, and worse: the replacement or extinction of humankind.
\nIf Meadows is right that paradigms shift through stories, patterns, and language reaching into the heart and gut, then I propose three points of narrative reorientation for the shift we require.
\n\n
\n
In hopes of frustrating or preventing human conscription into a “Stepford” reality (as Bill Joy described in his 2000 Wired magazine article: “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”), we seem to be awaiting AGI, superintelligence, or quantum computing as the moment when the threat becomes real.
\nBut this is folly.
\nThe cascading deployment of social media, infused now with AI, is a distortive life-field that dislodges us from natural temporalities, accelerates dissociation of the cultural and spiritual scaffolding our social world, then in the absence of these stabilizing factors, pits us against each other unrestrained, and excavating human and humane interiority, undermines our social modes. This is happening now, without AGI, without superintelligence, and in spite of Large Language Model limitations.
\nOne tires of warning that social media and enterprise technologies need not be sentient to enact their often inscrutabledamage. Social media is fairly stupid and predictably self-cannibalizing through its bot armies, which undermine its own demographic market claims, yet it has managed to corrupt nearly two generations of Western minds, and centered rage in the public square, whilst fueling public anxiety as never before. It does this whilst aggregating datasets on humanity that no known entity has ever possessed – a process uncontemplated in our legal traditions or religious systems, operating at the speed of light, beyond the adaptive capacities of our social or psychological modes.
\nIn practical terms, labor is being disintermediated from productivity and capital. To wit, Salesforce has replaced 4,000 customer service workers with its own AI agents – its CEO boasting he “needed less heads” – while PwC shed thousands of positions in the very year it invested $1.5 billion in AI capabilities. Across the technology sector, nearly 37,000 jobs were cut in the first quarter of 2026 alone. As “dumb” as today’s technology is, still, it can aggregate biometric data, generate digital gulags, cultivate a surveillance canopy, undermine educational assessments, and corrupt the last eddies of democracy, all without achieving superintelligence.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"AI is already displacing workers en masse. ","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"1280px-澎湖縣文化局書庫_(37)二樓：視聽室","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/10015308/1280px-%E6%BE%8E%E6%B9%96%E7%B8%A3%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96%E5%B1%80%E6%9B%B8%E5%BA%AB_37%E4%BA%8C%E6%A8%93%EF%BC%9A%E8%A6%96%E8%81%BD%E5%AE%A4.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Awaiting AGI as the coming or imminent danger has deceived us into thinking the threat is ahead of us, when in fact we are living through its effects in this moment.
\n\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"
\n
The menace is upon us, (though not at full strength), and whilst technical and regulatory responses may take years, there is something each of us can and should do now: we must refuse the language that has already begun to cede human standing to machines. Too often, even in the most benign ways, we speak of these technologies in equivalence with human beings: we say the AI thinks, the model understands, the system decided, thus performing a soft ontological promotion. Each such concession, however small, redraws the boundary between tool and agent in the wrong direction. To counteract this erosion, I propose we adopt an agential hygiene: the disciplined insistence that language must always trace accountability back to living decision-makers.
\nThe following terms and phrases, categorized here by the rhetorical danger they pose, must be resisted:
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"image (9)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/13232833/image-9.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The chart below enumerates functional alternatives that preserve human agency:
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"image (10)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/13232908/image-10.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The examples above represent a small subset of the ways in which authority and agency are conscripted by the predominant rhetoric of the techno-industrial complex. The nodes of conscription are myriad. Taken together, they do not describe a worldview, they construct one, until we find ourselves enclosed within these citadels of language: structures of our own making that wall us off from the life world.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Language doesn't just describe a worldview, it builds one, enclosing us in constructs of our own making.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"declan-sun-5UE7ys23P34-unsplash","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/10020256/declan-sun-5UE7ys23P34-unsplash-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"We must resist the euphemistic life cycle by which a technical term (“neural network”) drifts into metaphor (“the network learned”), hardens into reification (“the AI’s knowledge”), and arrives at false agency (“the AI concluded”), becoming resolution.
\nTo arrest this drift, a set of core syntactic commitments must govern how we speak and write about these technologies and the processes into which we embed them:
\nAlways:
\n\n
Institutionally, this demands cross-domain enforcement: mandating compliant terminology in publications, grants, and press releases; requiring vendors to describe products in functional, non-anthropomorphic terms; training staff to recognize and correct “creeping personifications” whilst cultivating metalinguistic vigilance, (the habit of self-correction when one catches oneself saying “the AI thinks”).
\nIn our pursuit of the technologically ambitious, we must be linguistically austere, ensuring that the words we use preserve a core truth: tools serve.
\nThey do not share; they function.
\nThey extend human capacity, as they do not possess capacity of their own.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"In our pursuit of the technologically ambitious, we must be linguistically austere, ensuring that the words we use preserve a core truth: tools serve."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Technology may be maximally deployed but minimally credited. Invariably, it should be referenced as a sophisticated instrument; never a partner, never a peer, never possessing standing in the community of moral consideration.
\nThe resistance to techno-susceptibility is not Luddite; it is hierarchical. Technology serves diagnostic and coordination functions for living beings, who remain the sole locus of value and the sole bearers of situational grace and responsibility. What we resist is not technology but categorization confusions that hide the leverage points, which induce paradigm shifts – metaphysical errors that, often by stealth, place pattern-matching algorithms in the same ontological and moral space as sentient, suffering, striving living beings.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
On February 20th, 2026, Sam Altman of OpenAI gave an interview to the Indian Express in which he said: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model… But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”
\n\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Sam-Altman-At-Express-Adda-1","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/10021902/Sam-Altman-At-Express-Adda-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"
If you are asking why we must be vigilant in our language as demanded at Point II, take note: we are in a narrative war in which human beings are being compared to automata and defined by an investment-utility equation. A competitive nexus is being fashioned in which human beings and human life are being rendered commensurable with the things humans create.
\nBut even on these grounds, Altman is wrong. Consider the arithmetic: humans consume roughly 2,000 calories per day. Over twenty years, that amounts to approximately 17,000 kilowatt-hours of total food energy. Training GPT-4 consumed an estimated 50 gigawatt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of 3,000 human lifetimes of “training energy” for a single model run. Altman’s comparison collapses on its own terms. Yet its attraction persists within a sector that monetizes its users and repeatedly construes human life in the idiom of optimization and return
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Screenshot 2026-04-09 at 10.23.48 PM","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/13220253/Screenshot-2026-04-09-at-10.23.48-PM.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Put simply: there is not enough energy on earth to power the systems being curated by the digital Leviathans at scale. Should we then breathe sighs of relief that the limit boundaries of power generation have saved humanity?
\nNo.
\nHistory is replete with examples of what happens when resource scarcity constrains power: those who seek dominance do not moderate their aims. They narrow the circle of who benefits. They invent “in” and “out” groups. They stratify, exclude, and cull.
\nAs I argued in recent lectures for the AI Governance Caravan (2025), in association with the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), universal connectivity is thermodynamically unviable. And the constraints compound, for even where energy might suffice, the decoupling of labor from income would engender social and economic chaos on a scale never before seen. Continuous digital immersion severs humans from circadian and seasonal rhythms essential to biological regulation, whilst degrading cognitive capacities, rendering people not merely unproductive, but almost childlike and nearly completely socially and politically malleable.
\nYet even to enumerate these harms is to remain on Altman’s terms; arguing about efficiency, capacity, and output. The deepest objection to his comparison is not mathematical, its moral. A child’s twenty years of growth – of suffering, curiosity, love, failure, wonder – are not an investment cycle, awaiting a return. Human value is not to be cashiered,; a life is not optimizable as a training run and does not require justification by output.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
If we are to shift the current paradigm, we must become aware of its stages of human decentering. We must enter a program of narrative discipline, recognizing that the operational demands of the Leviathans, now a quotidian hegemon, do not represent limits of their power, but rather a reordering of who that power is willing to include. Facing this reordering, we are called upon to defend what cannot be computed: that human life is of ultimate value; dignity is not output and that no measure of technological ambition absolves us of the obligation to ask whom it serves and at once, discards. If all we imagined for the future, we experienced at Helena’s Summit in Valle de Bravo, Mexico – a human commonwealth in nature – we are now compelled to radiate it outward with the urgency of those who understand that what diminishes any life diminishes the possibility of life itself.
\n\n
“Do not send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"A conversation unfolding at Helena's Valle de Bravo Summit.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"914AFE44-A41C-46D0-A3D8-ACC2A4D2EEED-scaled","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2026/04/10160530/914AFE44-A41C-46D0-A3D8-ACC2A4D2EEED-scaled-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"About the Author:
\nAmbassador Professor Gilbert Morris is Bahamas National Public Reader and Vice Chancellor, Bahamas Alrae Ramsey Institute for Foreign Affairs (BARIFA). He was Professor at George Mason University, where he taught in four faculties. A leading thinker on global finance, he was advisor to Swiss Private Bankers Association, and completed a landmark study on China-Caribbean Sea Trade for China’s Vice Premier. Morris also served as Economic Advisor, Ministry of Finance, and was Special Envoy, House of Lords All Party Committee, U.K., from The Office of the Premier of Turks & Caicos Islands.
\nMost recently Morris headlined the “AI Governance Caravan” at Beijing Institute of Technology, China. His current research focuses on cognitive neuropsychological impacts of scaled technologies. He is an author of the NYT bestseller Rescue America.His forthcoming book Friston’s Ontology (2027) advances a decades-long philosophical project rooted in neuroscience and ontological ethics. In July 2026, he will release a landmark peer review of Sebastian Mallaby’s intellectual biography of DeepMind’s Demiss Hassabis, The Infinity Machine, for the University Bookman.
\n"}],"sidePopups":{"popups":null}}},{"id":"cG9zdDozNTU5","databaseId":3559,"title":"On a Psychedelic Future","slug":"on-a-psychedelic-future","link":"https://www.helena.org/on-a-psychedelic-future/","date":"2024-01-07T03:20:37","isSticky":false,"author":{"node":{"name":"Henry Elkus"}},"excerpt":"We we are making contact with a technology that can treat some of the most intractable problems we face in mental health, and so much more.
\n","featuredImage":{"node":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2024/01/07031130/evie-s-9vUg7s50CDo-unsplash-scaled.jpg","title":"evie-s-9vUg7s50CDo-unsplash"}},"acfArticleDetails":{"seo":{"title":"On a Psychedelic Future","metaDescription":null,"metaImage":null},"truncatedArticleTitle":"On a Psychedelic Future","magazineArticleHero":{"text":"We are making contact with a technology that can treat some of the most intractable problems we face in mental health. That's just the beginning.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"evie-s-9vUg7s50CDo-unsplash","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2024/01/07031130/evie-s-9vUg7s50CDo-unsplash-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},"articleIntro":{"title":"","subtitle":null,"authorText":null,"author":[{"title":"Henry Elkus","slug":"henry-elkus","contentType":{"node":{"uri":"/team/"}}}]},"detailBlocks":[{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Note: The views expressed here are my own.
\nOver the last year, Helena has undergone a deep-dive in the space of psychedelics. That journey has culminated in the opportunity to partner with Lykos, formerly known as MAPS PBC. We announced on January 5th, 2024 that Helena is the lead investor of Lykos’ oversubscribed Series A funding round. The round marks a capital infusion of more than $100m over the last 12 months, arriving on the heels of the company’s official submission of MDMA-assisted therapy to the FDA for approval.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Helena MAPS Media links-Web-V2.006","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/11/15195411/Helena-MAPS-Media-links-Web-V2.006.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Screen Shot 2024-01-05 at 11.29.59 AM","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2024/01/07023020/Screen-Shot-2024-01-05-at-11.29.59-AM-e1704594820961.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"This experience has been one of the most profound things I have been involved with. As with every effort we take on at Helena, our work with Lykos goes beyond just an investment. While much of our diligence process excavated the promising path forward for financing, developing, and deploying psychedelic therapies, Helena’s decision to partner with Lykos was rooted in a profound belief in the powerful societal-scale benefits psychedelic medicine will unlock. The more nuanced “why” behind Helena’s investment, which I intend to explore here, exemplifies core philosophical elements of Helena’s thesis and mission.
\nWe are living though a species-defining moment where multiple Manhattan Projects are running in parallel. The development of AI, biological engineering, and other technology platforms absolutely deserve the attention and scrutiny they receive. Their impact today has already reshaped daily life, and their Nth order effects are far out of reach of human cognition.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Helena team and members meeting on the subject of exponential technology risk","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"71E8D0FD-785C-4975-8B94-D152C05B31D3","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2024/01/07023639/71E8D0FD-785C-4975-8B94-D152C05B31D3.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"What is clear to me as well, however, is that we are making contact with another, very different, technology with the potential to create ripple effects at a similar order of magnitude. Yet in this case, the R&D has been taking place over billions of years, in the evolution of botanical compounds harboring incalculable healing potential. That technology stack in its complete form has been sitting in plain sight on our planet. And unlike other exponential technologies, some of Earth’s oldest and wisest cultures have been perfecting how to safely and effectively administer it for thousands of years, only to be marginalized and ignored.
\nPsychedelic compounds encompass a wide array of substances that, when interacting with the human body under the correct protocols, can treat some of the most intractable problems we face in mental health. Peel away the next layer, and the applications go far beyond that. Psychedelics could serve as a needed “OS update” for our inward selves during a time in which other technologies create unprecedented transformation in the world around us. My hope is that Helena can play a small role in the needed advocacy, research, capital allocation, and policy work necessary to shepherd the safe and effective implementation of this technology on a global scale.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"\n
Helena’s narrow function is to identify potential solutions to societal problems, conduct the best diligence we can to ascertain whether a given solution could be effective and whether we can meaningfully help, and then implement that solution. Our exploration of the psychedelic space began from that vector. PTSD is an inarguably critical societal problem exacting an enormous quantitative economic and human toll. Its qualitative effect on humanity is perhaps more dire — listen to a patient talk about what they were prevented from doing, from feeling, from experiencing, due to this condition. Now scale that up to devastating global effect.
\nThe legacy treatment paradigm of PTSD is insufficiently effective and driven by flawed incentives. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are the only medications approved by the FDA to treat PTSD. While it would be wrong to attack them in a binary, it’s also clear they are in no way a systemic solution. Among a host of other salient problems, an estimated 40-60% of patients do not respond to SSRIs.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"A helpful graphic on the function of SSRIS | Credit: OCD UK","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"howSSRIwork2","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2024/01/07024035/howSSRIwork2.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"It is fair to say that a therapeutic which primarily increases serotonin is not an optimal counterpunch to the highly complex, and still not understood, functions of the human brain and body represented in PTSD. Complicating this, patients must often rely on SSRIs indefinitely, which obviously creates a troubling economic relationship between the pharmaceutical industry, our healthcare system, and its constituents.
\nTalk therapy, still critically undervalued in our society, is one of the strongest tools we have in addressing PTSD. But it alone is not a panacea. Mitchell, J.M., Bogenschutz, M., Lilienstein, A. et al. summarized it best in Nature Medicine: “Although evidenced-based trauma-focused psychotherapies such as prolonged exposure and cognitive behavioral therapy are considered to be the gold standard treatments for PTSD, many participants fail to respond or continue to have significant symptoms, and dropout rates are high. Novel cost-effective therapeutics are therefore desperately needed.”
\nMDMA-assisted therapy promises to be that desperately needed therapeutic. Pioneered by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research for nearly 40 years – culminating in the establishment of its public benefit corporation Lykos – MAPS doggedly pursued its goal of shepherding the treatment through regulatory channels against insurmountable odds.
\nIt is hard to overstate the barriers to entry MAPS Founder Rick Doblin (and the countless leaders that paved this path forward) faced in the service of creating greater legal access to psychedelic medicine. Getting a single drug through the FDA pipeline costs north of hundreds of millions of dollars, and it is exceptionally rare to do so if you are not an existing pharmaceutical giant or directly affiliated with one. That MAPS was none of these things was politely noted to us by detractors as “the kiss of death.” Another complication: from a regulatory standpoint, the treatment is the first-of-its-kind. No psychedelic-assisted therapy has ever gone through the FDA process. To make matters even more challenging, and up until the creation of Lykos, the for-profit entity taking MDMA-assisted therapy through Phase 3 trials and commercialization, MAPS was marshaling resources through a non-profit, donation by donation.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"MAPS Founder Rick Doblin","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"rickdoblin_2019-embed-1ab4a40e1c21cea04660a2ce1292bd2646ec2455","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/11/14210639/rickdoblin_2019-embed-1ab4a40e1c21cea04660a2ce1292bd2646ec2455.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"But these obstacles still pale in comparison to the biggest barrier MAPS and the psychedelic community had to overcome over the last half century: culture. For decades, institutional actors within media, government, academia, regulatory agencies, and law enforcement bodies mounted a concerted effort to disorient, discredit, and even at times manipulate data to oppose psychedelic research. Thanks in no small part to Doblin and his colleagues, we now live in a vastly more curious and accepting environment for this work, with bipartisan coalitions across the FDA, VA, White House, and Congress championing the medical and societal benefits of psychedelics. Especially for members of my generation, we forget this was not the case until recently.
\nThe prevailing view of MDMA for much of the last 30 years was that it was a dangerous drug causing neurotoxicity, among other severe health effects. While the science has now debunked the neurotoxicity claim, the ability to even produce the research to demonstrate that falsehood was discouraged and at times illegal.
\nThe history of America’s “War on Drugs” is tragic, fascinating and deeply complex. One of its many detrimental consequences has been a structural bias that curtailed deep investigation into the mechanisms and effects of psychoactive substances.
\nSuch bias was codified through legislation, including a long-enforced federal policy prohibiting government funding of “any activity that promotes the legalization of any drug or other substance in Schedule I” of the Controlled Substances Act. (Psychedelics including LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline were classified as Schedule 1 by the DEA in 1970.) Today, bipartisan efforts, spearheaded by the unlikeliest of allies —including legislation recently submitted by Representatives AOC and Dan Crenshaw — are focused on reversing such policy. But while in place, it significantly impeded scientific advancement in the field, stigmatizing researchers and forcing them to risk their careers in order to take part in the work.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"The Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act of 2003 | Also referred to as \"The Rave Act\"","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"1520633669742","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2024/01/07025132/1520633669742.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"In 2002, an existential event nearly wiped out public support and funding for MDMA-assisted therapy research, delighting detractors. A scientific study titled “Severe Dopaminergic Neurotoxicity in Primates after a Common Recreational Dose Regimen of MDMA” was peer-reviewed and published in one of the world’s top academic journals, Science. The paper claimed that monkeys injected with MDMA demonstrated severe neuron death in their dopamine pathways. What’s more, the researched contended that as little as one session of MDMA could cause severe brain damage and potentially leave subjects susceptible to Parkinson’s disease.
\nThe repercussions were immediate. Organizations like MAPS experienced an influx of funding withdrawals from key donors and legislative pushes aimed at curbing MDMA research, including the RAVE Act of 2003, were ratified. Referencing the study, former Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Alan Leshner asserted in The Washington Post that “even a single evening’s use [of MDMA] is playing Russian roulette with your own brain.”
\nMeanwhile, trouble was brewing at Science, the journal that had first published the study. After letters to the publication from MAPS and other researchers questioned the findings and asked for them to be re-tested, lead researcher and author George A. Ricaurte doubled down, adding claims that undergoing lab-grade clinical MDMA research risked brain injury on subjects.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"\"One of the more bizarre episodes in the history of drug research\""},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Nevertheless, under pressure from the scientific community, the research team did attempt to run the study again and reproduce the same results. They couldn’t. An investigation into the original study’s methodology ensued – revealing an extraordinary falsification at its center. Instead of MDMA, researchers had administered methamphetamine (yes, meth) to its subjects. In what was dubbed “the great retraction,” Science issued a formal withdrawal of the paper in September 2003, almost exactly a year after its original publish date. It was a shocking outcome that completely invalidated the study, but the reputational damage to MDMA research had been solidified.
\nIf you are party to the view that American political incentives influence academia and the peer-review system, so much of this situation is worth scrutinizing. Remember Alan Leshner, former director of NIDA and then-head of AAAS? It’s worth noting that Science is AAAS’ own journal. Nature, another world-class academic publication, wrote an excellent 2003 analysis of this episode and its political undertones. Calling the saga “one of the more bizarre episodes in the history of drug research,” Nature noted that “Some observers have in the past questioned NIDA‘s ability to maintain its independence in the face of the immense pressures brought to bear by those who stand behind America’s interminable ‘war on drugs.” On Leshner and the curious timing of his comments, the report pressed on: “Another remarkable aspect of this episode is the public endorsement of the study, at the time of its publication, by Alan Leshner, chief executive of the AAAS and former director of NIDA. It isn’t clear why an officer of the AAAS should be involved at all in publicly promoting a particular result published in its journal, least of all one whose outcome was questioned at the outset by several experts. The AAAS issued the retraction late in the afternoon on Friday 5 September, resulting in low-key media coverage, which contrasts sharply with the hype surrounding the initial paper.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Images from the retracted study: “Severe Dopaminergic Neurotoxicity in Primates after a Common Recreational Dose Regimen of MDMA\"","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"se3820883001","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2024/01/07025634/se3820883001.gif"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"This is the environment in which MAPS and other research organizations were fighting within for much of their lives. The Great Retraction took precious years off the timeline of MDMA-assisted therapy and related research, leading to some of the darker moments in the movement. During this period, the treatment became increasingly difficult for those in need to access. A tragic story involving involving a Florida resident named Zulfi Riza is reflective of the era. Riza had been suffering from severe PTSD, depression, anxiety, and anger-management issues, and had tried multiple therapeutic treatment options to no avail. In 2006, he reached out to MAPS founder Rick Doblin to enlist his help in accessing MDMA-assisted therapy. His symptoms were severe and he described MDMA-assisted therapy as his last hope. At the time, Doblin was performing a high wire act to advance government-approved research trials under intense scrutiny. Riza had a history of seizures that Doblin worried would expose a therapist to liability should an episode occur during treatment. He also worried about intensified public criticism in the wake of such an incident. Doblin wrote back saying he sadly couldn’t help. Riza ended his life the same morning, noting in his suicide letter that he granted permission to use his story if it helped advance the cause.
\nVenture capitalists love to talk about audacious founders and moonshot projects that change the world. I don’t want to diminish the achievements of others. But if you want to be real about audacity, this is it. Over the course of decades and against layers upon layers of resistance, MAPS, Lykos and its peers simply refused to let this research die. That’s a big reason why we are partnering with them.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Helena’s decision to lead Lykos’ landmark Series A financing reflects not just our desire to advance the puck on providing meaningful treatment to the millions affected by PTSD, but also our belief in the wider unearthed potential of psychedelic science. We hope that this key moment for MDMA-assisted therapy will usher in a new “golden era” of psychedelics and their myriad applications.
\nThis chart should scare you.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Credit: USAFacts","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_5216","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2024/01/07025834/IMG_5216.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"In only 20 years, the leading causes of death of the most economically vital population segment of the most important country on the planet have completed shifted from transportation accidents to opioid addiction and suicide. And we haven’t gotten much better at preventing car crashes.
\nThis is a “metacrisis” — a symptom of an underlying problem with unfortunately far wider implications. Its causes are complex and multitudinous; reducing the issue to a single explanation both exacerbates the issue and doesn’t do it justice. But when we look at the severity of death and suffering in the world’s richest society emanating from two places —opioids and mental health — certain throughlines emerge.
\nOur system is one of sick-care rather than preventative care, and mental health is the frontline. Nearly 1/5th of the US GDP is spent on healthcare, yet it is a system in which capital allocation structurally prioritizes reaction over prevention, amongst other critical issues.
\nPsychedelics can play a role in changing this. This scientific field represents an incredibly powerful new way of approaching treatment of the complex adaptive system that is the human brain. Across the highly diverse array of psychedelic compounds and treatments currently known, not all of them will, or should, progress toward approval for use at societal scale. But many should, and it is imperative that we continue to advance efforts to safely shepherd these treatments through the necessary channels.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Helena MAPS Media links-Web-V2.003","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/11/15195645/Helena-MAPS-Media-links-Web-V2.003.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Think about it this way: a treasure-trove of highly advanced and potentially effective treatments to some of the most critical ailments we face already exists, but thus far they have failed to be thoroughly researched. For reasons political, cultural and economic, an arbitrary slow down has been placed on the investigation into and development of these compounds for the betterment of humanity.
\nWe feel this paradigm is finally changing, and we want to do whatever we can to responsibly accelerate that change. MDMA-assisted therapy represents a “here and now” project that could affect millions, but right behind it are a multitude of deeply exciting developments.
\nIbogaine is an example.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"The Tabernanthe iboga shrub","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"may-2011-ibogaine__ScaleMaxWidthWzE2MDBd","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2024/01/07030503/may-2011-ibogaine__ScaleMaxWidthWzE2MDBd.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"It is one of those origin stories you just can’t make up. Extracted from the root bark of a shrub plant called iboga native to Central and West African countries like Gabon, this psychoactive substance has been shown as an astoundingly effective treatment for those addicted to heroine and cocaine. Like MDMA-assisted therapy, the history of ibogaine research stretches more than 100 years into the past, with heavy institutional resistance that is finally giving way.
\nUsed for centuries as a sacred indigenous ceremonial and healing modality, the Iboga plant was embraced by psychonauts like Howard and Norman Lotsof in the 20th century. Like Doblin, the Lotsof’s labored relentlessly for decades in an attempt to legitimize and fund scientific trials. Weathering setback after setback, the small community they and others fostered gradually began to treat those facing severe cases of opioid addiction and PTSD in treatment centers outside of the United States. The staggeringly effective outcomes these sessions yielded are now coinciding with research generating from elite academic institutions. A study by Alan K. Davis et al., demonstrated significant reductions in suicidal ideation, depression, and PTSD symptoms amongst US Special Forces Combat Veterans, who have become a core and vocal constituency for further ibogaine research. In a pioneering first program in the United States, the State of Kentucky plans to allocate $42m to ibogaine research for opioid addiction treatment. The funds come via the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, which is tasked with effectively utilizing the nearly $850m the state has received from landmark settlements with major pharmaceutical corporations over their roles in the American opioid epidemic.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"W. Bryan Hubbard, Chair and Executive Director of the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"image-1024×510","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2024/01/07030713/image-1024x510-1.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Dr. Nolan Williams, who leads Stanford’s Brain Stimulation Lab and is triple-board certified in general and behavioral neurology, psychiatry and neuropsychiatry, has recently published a new study that confirms and further expounds upon ibogaine’s effectiveness in treating one of the most severe indications in neuroscience: traumatic brain injury. The study, published in Nature Science, was conducted with Special Operations veterans, who began the course of treatment with an average disability assessment scale rating of 30.2 —equivalent to mind to moderate disability. After one ibogaine treatment, their rating decreased to 5.1 — equivalent to no disability. Their PTSD symptoms in the same time frame? 88% decrease. Suicidal ideation? Plummeted from 47% to 7%. Anxiety and depression? Down 81% and 87% respectively. All of this occurred while cognitive factors ranging from concentration to memory to information processing increased. Williams summarized it plainly: “No other drug has ever been able to alleviate the functional and neuropsychiatric symptoms of traumatic brain injury.”
\nResearch into compounds like Ibogaine has produced staggering evidence suggesting that major treatments for opioid addiction and mental health, the two leading causes of death for the young adult population of the United States, exist. Considered through this lens, the dearth of funding for these treatments, when compared to far less effective pharmaceutical treatments, poses a dangerous reality.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"small","type":"Video","video":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4QE6t-MkYE&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hubermanlab.com%2F&feature=emb_title","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":null,"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"To the extent that psychedelic treatments are being researched and commercialized, however, another key problem has arisen. The discovery and understanding of most of these compounds derive from indigenous communities dating back thousands of years. In large part, these communities are being marginalized and harmed by the Western psychedelic awakening. In the case of ibogaine, for example, the iboga plant is already gravely over-harvested from the land of indigenous nations and communities by Western actors in pursuit of profit.
\nThis is not a sideline issue for psychedelics; it is an existential one. For years, indigenous knowledge has been the portal through which the western world has encountered and understood the transformative power of psychedelic compounds. It is therefore imperative that these communities share in the economic windfall of the commercialization of psychedelic therapies. Representatives from these groups must also be deeply integrated at a leadership level – not pushed aside. Beyond the moral obligation to ensure that the burgeoning field includes, rather than exploits, those with whom the underlying practices and methodologies originated, the involvement of indigenous peoples in the scaling and dissemination of psychedelics will help safeguard foundational knowledge around how to effectively administer them.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"This is not a sideline issue for psychedelics; it is an existential one."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The “set and setting” in which psychedelic therapy takes place, as well as the “integration” component that takes place after treatment, are both integral to its effectiveness. Pharmaceutical capitalism does not understand this very well. The economic model in which the lowest cap-ex solution — “sell the pill” — is perceived to yield the highest shareholder value disincentivizes the holistic framework psychedelic therapy requires. Those leading the movement forward must act as a standard-bearer in the scaling of these treatments – ensuring that holistic criteria are met and appropriate representation is achieved. MAPS and its public benefit company Lykos, have demonstrated just such a commitment to the values that must accompany the ethical and safe deployment of psychedelic therapy.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The short and medium term applications of psychedelic compounds in a medical context will furnish profound societal-scale benefits. But the as-yet-unknown future applications may be even more exciting.
\nWe now laugh at the idea that the mid 19th century invention of the telephone was regarded by most as a device for elocution lessons and an aid for the deaf. 100+ years from now, I think that we will laugh at the notion that compounds from MDMA to psilocybin or ibogaine were once viewed in isolation as party drugs or therapeutic answers to individual medical questions. It is possible that existing use cases will be the least impactful, and the least impressive, ways in which psychedelics affect our species.
\nThe untapped potential of ibogaine is a prime example. We simply do not understand how it works. Affecting and interacting with a multitude of neurotransmitters in parallel, the compound is a masterclass in complexity science. Biologists, chemists, and computational computer scientists who don’t even study health or neuroscience are captivated by the compound because it presents one of the most fascinating enigmas in modern science.
\nI’m optimistic that continued research into psychedelics, paired with future breakthroughs in computation and artificial intelligence will decode the underlying functions of these incredibly complex agents. At Helena, we hope that our support of Lykos and future work in psychedelics helps catalyze the chain reaction necessary to reach these outcomes. The results could be a generational benefit to humanity.
\n"}],"sidePopups":{"popups":null}}},{"id":"cG9zdDozMjEx","databaseId":3211,"title":"A Life Subaquatic","slug":"a-life-subaquatic","link":"https://www.helena.org/a-life-subaquatic/","date":"2023-08-11T15:43:50","isSticky":false,"author":{"node":{"name":"Lauren Porsella"}},"excerpt":"","featuredImage":{"node":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02182400/Fabien-Wired-UK.jpg","title":"Fabien-Wired-UK"}},"acfArticleDetails":{"seo":{"title":"A Life Subaquatic","metaDescription":null,"metaImage":null},"truncatedArticleTitle":"A Life Subaquatic","magazineArticleHero":{"text":"","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Fabien-Wired-UK","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02182400/Fabien-Wired-UK.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},"articleIntro":{"title":"","subtitle":null,"authorText":null,"author":[{"title":"Peter Schiavelli","slug":"peter-schiavelli","contentType":{"node":{"uri":"/team/"}}}]},"detailBlocks":[{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"One of the more underwhelming questions in literature is asked early in Jules Verne’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Professor Pierre Arronax, the protagonist and narrator, has just been abducted and taken aboard the Nautilus, the glittering behemoth of a submarine piloted by Captain Nemo. Arronax is sitting in the vessel’s dining room, ensconced in opulence (“high oaken sideboards” and “exquisite paintings”); he has been housed, underwater, in luxurious accommodations that suggested he was “in the Adelphi Hotel at Liverpool, or at the Grand Hotel in Paris”; and he has listened to his host describe, ingredient by ingredient, how each dish is prepared from the sea, how “the sea supplies all [his] wants” and his “exquisite stories.” At the end of all of this, the most incisive query the good Professor could muster was, “You like the sea, Captain?”
\nVerne, a French author, is known as much for the science in his works as the prose, and the idea of living underwater that was teased by the Nautilus—which happened to be a modest 230 feet long, with a drawing room bedecked by Renaissance masterpieces and a 12,000-volume, two-level library—has captured imaginations since its conception. (Or, in Nemo’s case, the idea of living underwater with the extravagance of a Victorian monarch.)
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Jules Verne","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02171912/ALifeSubaquatic-Image.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"But it was another Frenchman, almost exactly one hundred years later, that took the first few steps toward making it a possibility, and his grandson is now working to make it a reality.
\nIn 1963, Jacques-Yves Cousteau—the most famous ocean explorer of our time; aquanaut, conservationist, and documentarian; inventor of the Aqua-lung; and wearer of red knit caps—spent a then-record 30 days below the surface of the Red Sea, in a facility off the Sudanese coast referred to as Conshelf II. The name is short for Continental Shelf Station II, so called because its main cabin was located on the edge of a ridge, 30 feet down, with a separate, smaller cabin farther along, at a depth of 100ft. (He constructed a Conshelf I and III, as well: the former near Marseilles, the latter near Monaco.) The interior of the facility would never be confused with that of the Nautilus, but there was space enough for the six-man team to live, work, and play chess, as well as a detached garage to hold the two-seated submarine—the famous yellow “diving saucer”—in which they explored. And although Cousteau may not have had Titians on the walls, he had plenty of tobacco, and there is an undeniable elegance, upon emerging from the depths into the cabin, in being handed a cigarette with your towel, and having it lit before standing fully upright, or having a chance to consider wearing a shirt.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"IN THE 1960'S, JACQUES COUSTEAU AND HIS TEAM CONDUCTED SEVERAL EXPEDITIONS FROM THE CONSHELF STATIONS. CONSHELF I PICTURED.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Conshelf_I_-_Diogenes","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02172049/Conshelf_I_-_Diogenes.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"CONSHELF II","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Conshelf_II_-_Garage_Wiki","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02172111/Conshelf_II_-_Garage_Wiki.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"CONSHELF III","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Conshelf_III","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02172127/Conshelf_III.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"He memorialized the experience in the documentary World Without Sun, which later won him his second Academy Award for Feature Documentary. His calm, authoritative narration—seeped equal parts in knowledge, empathy, and wonder, with his French accent adding that bit of grace—was the aquatic forebear to Carl Sagan’s stargazing in Cosmos and David Attenborough’s terrestrial timbre in Planet Earth.
\nNow, Jacques’s grandson Fabien, an accomplished aquanaut himself—in 2014, he broke his grandfather’s record by spending 31 consecutive days underwater in the Aquarius, an underwater habitat off of the Florida Keys—has plans to evolve the Conshelf II experiment to a more Vernian scale. He calls the project Proteus, and he likens it to an underwater version of the International Space Station. It promises the world its first true underwater habitat.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"PROTEUS WILL BE THE WORLD'S FIRST PERMANENT, MULTI-PERSON HABITAT, LABORATORY, AND OBSERVATORY ONT HE OCEAN FLOOR.","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Proteus_Full-View_logo copy","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02172324/Proteus_Full-View_logo-copy-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The Aquanaut
\n\n
When I first met Fabien Cousteau, it was on a Google Hangout, and he was positioned in front of a large green sheet, presumably for the sake of a sharp virtual background, but he didn’t have one up for our interview. He has his grandfather’s chiseled features and toothy, waxing-crescent smile, but his hair is thicker, his face fuller, his jawline broader, and his nose less Roman. In 2002, People magazine named him “the world’s sexiest explorer.”
\nEnergetic and playful, Cousteau seems to excite himself when he talks, bounding from message to anecdote to statistic with the enthusiasm of a hopscotching child. The first thing he did after I asked my opening question—on what it was like growing up a Cousteau—was tease me for “coming out with softballs.” (I was clearly Arronax to his Nemo.) Then he expounded on the experience for ten straight minutes. “In many ways,” he said, “I think this may sound trite, but it’s your typical family. And, at the same time, the best way to get together oftentimes was in the field. And by the field, I mean in the depths of the Amazon or in Papua New Guinea, or sometimes it was in the Mediterranean. Occasionally it was at home, but often times the best way to get together was somewhere else because most of the family’s on expedition.” For his fourth birthday, he learned to scuba dive. I told him we had different definitions of “typical.”
\nOceanography is a Cousteau family affair. Even the most truncated of lists of notable oceanautic Cousteaus would include not just Jacques, but Fabien’s father Jean-Michel, his sister Celine, uncle Phillippe-Pierre, and two cousins Phillippe-Pierre Jr. and Alexandra. But despite his upbringing and name—or, perhaps, because of them—Cousteau initially refused to go into what he calls “the family business.” A self-professed “terrible” student in school (though he still managed to earn a degree in Environmental Economics from Boston University), when he graduated, he took a run-of-the-mill internship for Seventh Generation before moving into sales for a friend’s retail company.
\nThat did not last long. As any Corleone will tell you, the family business is a siren song. “Ultimately, the ocean was calling,” he said. “No offense to people who are passionate about the business world and accounting. I think that’s a very noble thing, but I felt like I was slipping into a coma. For me, adventure, exploration, storytelling: bringing that to the world—a world that will most likely never get a chance to experience it firsthand—I felt was much more valuable and much more fulfilling than what I was doing.” So he accepted a position with National Geographic as their Explorer-at-Large.
\nOn June 1, 2014, Cousteau, along with six crew members, descended 62 feet into Aquarius, an underwater research base just off the Conch Reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. It was the first day of “Mission 31,” a project devised by Cousteau that would keep him in Aquarius for a record 31 consecutive days. By this time, he was no longer working under the National Geographic banner and was instead planning and financing his projects independently.
\n“Mission 31 was an experiment on two levels,” he told me. “It was an experiment on a selfish level: looking at that platform and saying, ‘is this a platform that could be useful in today’s world, both for ocean exploration and, more importantly, to help solve some of the mysteries—as well as some of the problems—that we’re facing as a global society.’” I should note that this didn’t sound very selfish to me, but I stayed quiet and let him continue. “And on a second level, and this is just as important: can this be a unifying platform that brings in the world’s curiosity to the ocean, on more of an education, science, conservation level?”
\nCousteau has an acute sense for the power of a narrative. He has spent much of his career in front of a camera. Early on, much of his work was with sharks, including documentaries like Attack of the Mystery Shark and Shark: Mind of a Demon, which was particularly notable because he spent much of it lying on his stomach in the belly of a shark-shaped submarine named Troy, maneuvering around a pack of great whites. (Cousteau was kind enough to give me advice for when I construct my own shark submarine. “Think hard about your buoyancy,” he said. “Troy was a 50/50 shot of whether you crashed at the bottom or skyrocketed to the surface, neither of which is good when you’re a diver inside because it’s a wet sub, especially in a shark feeding zone.”) He later spent four years working on a PBS series Ocean Adventures, with his father and sister.
\n“The adventure itself is oftentimes much more exciting than what you can conjure up in a boardroom,” he told me. “There’s a hunger out by the general public to understand, to know, to be on the adventure.”
\nOne does not have to search far for his inspiration. His grandfather was, at heart, a storyteller, and his most impactful contribution was also his most intangible: making the world as fascinated by the sea as he was. Between Conshelf I (built in 1961) and Aquarius (built in 1986), more than thirty underwater habitats were constructed around the world. Many of them were small, no more than single-person tests, but heavy-hitters also entered the arena. The U.S. Navy developed three versions of what it called a Sealab; NASA helped fund three Tektite habitats, from which Dr. Sylvia Earle conducted experiments throughout the 1970s (including the first all-female saturation dive team); and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) launched 180 missions using its Hydrolab.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"OCEANOGRAPHER AND HELENA MEMBER SYLVIA EARLE CONDUCTED EXPERIMENTS FROM THE NASA-FUNDED TEKTITE HABITATS IN THE 1970'S","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Sylvia Earle","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02174152/Sylvia-Earle.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"INTERIOR DRAWING OF A TEKTITE HABITAT","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_7247","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02174204/Tektite.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Attention, however, is fickle, and Cousteau also watched as people’s eyes began turning skyward. Where the eyes go, the money follows. Undersea expeditions were replaced by space exploration, visions of subaquatic living by dreams of colonizing Mars or terraforming Venus. In his 1984 State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan made quite clear the direction the United States was looking. “We can follow our dreams to distant stars,” he said, “living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain. Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade.”
\nWhat he directed NASA to do became the $160 billion International Space Station (ISS). Aquarius, meanwhile, is the only underwater research lab still functional today.
\nThe Great Unknown
\nThe conus magus is a predatory sea snail roughly the size of your thumb. It’s very common in warmer, tropical environments, and its description in George Washington Tryon’s 1884 The Manual of Conchology makes it sound more like a dessert than a mollusk: “white, clouded with bluish ash, orange-brown, chestnut or chocolate, everywhere encircled by narrow chocolate interrupted lines…spire tessellated with chestnut or chocolate.” It feeds on small fish, stinging them with a conotoxin deadly enough to fell an adult human; its relative, the conus geographus, is known as the “cigarette snail” because, should you be stung, your time left on this earth would be enough for one smoke. In the 1980s, the conotoxin from the conus magus was synthesized into ziconotide, a pain relief drug that was FDA approved in 2004. Ziconotide is 1,000 times as powerful as morphine, with no evidence that its use leads to addiction or tolerance.
\nHalichondria okadai is a sea-sponge that in no way resembles a dessert. It has been synthesized into the anticancer drug eribulin, which received FDA approval to treat late-term breast cancer in 2011 and liposarcoma in 2016. Laminaria ochroleuca is a macroalgae that shows promise as a source for actinobacteria, which are used as, among others, antibacterials, antifungals, antivirals, anti-inflammatories, and anticancers. The list goes on. And those are just the ones we know.
\nThe NOAA estimates that more than eighty percent of the ocean remains “unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored.” I would like to add “untapped” to that list. The ocean is the world’s largest biosphere; its living conditions range in temperature from basically freezing to over 600 degrees Fahrenheit, in pressure from one to over a thousand atmospheres, and in light from pitch black to dazzling sunshine. Its resultant microdiversity, the key element in pharmaceutical discovery, is unparalleled. Sea sponges alone account for over 5,000 new products and compounds every year.
\nOne word I would not add to the list, however, is “untouched.” The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that a third of all fish stocks are overfished. Half of all coral reefs are gone, with the remaining half unlikely to see the year 2100. Plastic pollution kills more than 100,000 marine animals per year; at its current rate of growth, the plastic in the ocean will outweigh the fish by 2050. A 2006 study in Science is even more dire. According to its projections, between overfishing and habitat destruction, all fish and seafood populations will collapse by the year 2048.
\nThe ocean is, by far, the world’s best climate change mitigator, but its effectiveness is dwindling. According to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, oceans have absorbed 93% of the excess heat emitted from greenhouse gases and take in roughly a third of our annual carbon emissions. But this cannot last. In the last 100 years, they have warmed 1.5 degrees Celsius and have become 30% more acidic. Neglecting the oceans is a dangerous game.
\nCousteau himself said it best. “We can’t make proper decisions if we don’t have the right information. In order for us to be an economically viable species—or a community that has a semblance of health—we must be able to caretake our oceanic ecosystem. It is our life support system.”
\nHe went on. ““There’s an understanding that plant or animal, land or sea, there’s an intrinsic value to our lives. And, by default, that gives us an underlying understanding that in order for us to thrive, in order for us to give back to our future generations what we’ve taken for granted, we must take care of this ecosystem, this beautiful little planet, and more importantly, the ocean in a way that we take care of our own children.”
\nBy the time they resurfaced, Cousteau and his Mission 31 team had accumulated, in 31 days, an amount of research that would have normally taken three years. Simply because they were actually living there. Mission 31, he told me, “anchored our understanding that undersea platforms, undersea habitats, marine laboratories, are the missing tools in the toolbox for oceanic exploration.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"MISSION 31 ALLOWED COUSTEAU AND HIS TEAM TO CONDUCT UNPRECEDENTED RESEARCH ON THE OCEAN FLOOR","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Allison-Matzelle","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02174436/Allison-Matzelle-setting-up-tripod-at-a-giant-barrel-sponge_by-Jessica-Torossian.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"THE TEAM INCLUDED SCIENTISTS FROM MIT, FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY, AND NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Liz Magee by Francis Choi","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02174515/Liz-Magee_by-Francis-Choi.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"RESEARCHERS MARK PATTERSON AND SARA WILLIAMS PROBING CORALS","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Mark-Patterson-and-Sara-Williams-probing-corals-at-Aquarius_by-Christopher-Marks","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02174621/Mark-Patterson-and-Sara-Williams-probing-corals-at-Aquarius_by-Christopher-Marks.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"TEAM MEMBER BRIAN HELMUTH COMPLETES A PLANKTON TOW","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Brian-Helmuth-doing-a-plankton-tow_by-Stephen-Price-scaled","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02174654/Brian-Helmuth-doing-a-plankton-tow_by-Stephen-Price-scaled-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"DIVERS CIRCLE A GIANT BARREL SPONGE REEF","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Giant-barrel-sponge-reef_by-Jessica-Torossian","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02174729/Giant-barrel-sponge-reef_by-Jessica-Torossian.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The Final Frontier
\nWhen compared to a spectrum of terrestrial habitats, Aquarius would probably best be described as a hut. The entire facility is only four hundred square feet divided into three compartments, and it (somehow) sleeps six people. Proteus would be a compound.
\nThe design is still mutable, but current plans have Proteus sprawling over 4000 square feet off the coast of Curacao, in the South Caribbean. There are wet and dry labs, a moon-pool for keeping a (hopefully yellow) submersible, room for a team of twelve, as well as a hydroponic garden, for growing fresh produce. (On the Aquarius, Cousteau had to subsist on salty, freeze-dried astronaut food—what he described as “torture for a French person.”) Being a Cousteau, he is also insistent that there be a state-of-the-art broadcasting room, in order to expose the world to the wonders of the deep. The plans were laid out with designer Yves Behar, founder and designer of Fuseproject, whom Cousteau met in a Helena meeting in 2018.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"DESIGNS FOR PROTEUS INCLUDE WET AND DRY LABORATORIES AND A STATE OF THE ART BROADCAST STUDIO","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Proteus-graphic-2","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2023/08/02174853/Proteus-graphic-2-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"There is also the possibility of expansion. When designing “the ISS of the sea,” Cousteau looked at the real ISS, and the defining characteristic of the real ISS is its modularity. Finally made habitable in the year 2000—President Reagan’s timeline was a bit ambitious—the ISS started with just three modules; for the first two years, it was little more than a suspended hotel room. Since then, it has grown to 16. It has six sleeping quarters, two bathrooms, and a gym. It has housed 241 astronauts from 19 different countries and is roughly the size of a football field, endzones included. It can host eight different space craft simultaneously, and over three thousand experiments have been conducted in its microgravity laboratory.
\nCousteau envisions something similar. “We need to build something that’s modern,” he said. “Something that leverages state of the art technologies, that is flexible and modular, that can cater to various types of research.” It seems relevant to note that Proteus was named for a Greek seagod, whom Homer called “the Old Man of the Sea,” that was most famous for being a shapechanger.
\nThe combination of modularity and size allows for Proteus to be used in myriad ways. The research opportunities are the most obvious. The reason Mission 31 was able to produce three years’ worth of research in a month is because of the amount of time the crew was able to spend actually on the ocean floor. A typical underwater research venture is incredibly inefficient. Due to obvious environmental constraints, divers generally get less than two hours of “bottom time” per day, and data and samples must be transported—which risks contamination—to be analyzed after-the-fact at separate facilities.
\nAn underwater habitat, however, streamlines the process. One of the reasons surface divers are so limited in bottom time is the dangers of changing pressures. When they descend into the water, they are entering an environment of increasingly high pressure. This causes gases—most notably nitrogen—to be dissolved in the body. This is normal and not in of itself dangerous. What becomes dangerous is the diver’s subsequent ascent, from high pressure to low, as those dissolved gases will bubble back out. When the process is slow, this happens safely in the lungs, but if done too quickly, the bubbles can appear almost anywhere in the body, including the blood stream and tissues. This is known as decompression sickness—or, colloquially, “the bends”—and its symptoms run the gamut from mildly annoying to fatal.
\nLiving in an underwater, pressurized environment negates this possibility. By never changing depths—which a scuba diver obviously has to do in order to resurface—researchers based underwater are able to “saturation dive,” which means that their tissues all reach equilibrium in the new environment. Ten hours per day? Twelve? Bottom time is suddenly limited only by a person’s tank capacity, and her need to sleep. And, with on-site laboratories, the resulting data, samples, and experiments can be conducted and collected in real-time, without risk of corruption in transit. There are even preliminary plans for a central hub of data collection, allowing all Proteus-connected researchers and scientists to collaborate.
\nThe idea behind these designs is to accelerate the process of discovery— be it a pharmaceutical company finding, testing, and analyzing new compounds, or an academic research team monitoring ocean salinity and the effects of climate change on species of coral— but Cousteau envisions the site being used for more than just hard science. NASA has been using underwater facilities for training their astronauts since the Gemini program in the 60’s. The Navy SEALs since their inception. Companies are always looking for ways to test products in extreme environments, both out of necessity (camera equipment, drones) and out of marketability. (Sportswear brand Adidas recently announced a partnership with the ISS National Lab. They will send their popular BOOST shoe sole material to be tested on the ISS in order to “understand what it takes to create truly out-of-this-world running technology.”) And Proteus is large enough to house a significant media crew, for purposes both entertaining and educational.
\nJacques Cousteau’s three Conshelf facilities were supposed to be the first three parts of a 5-station project, the goal of which was essentially to investigate how best to plumb the ocean for resources. (The main funder of the project was an oil company.) This mission was aborted after Conshelf III, as Jacques, through his research, had gained a greater understanding of the importance, and necessity, of conservationism. He canceled the rest of the project and devoted his life to preservation. (Helena Member Robert Swan’s 2041 Foundation was named for a promise he made to Jacques in 1991: that he would keep Antarctica pristine for 50 years.)
\nIf conservation was the primary environmental battlefield of Jacques’s era, climate change is the battlefield of Cousteau’s, and Cousteau will not make the same mistake his grandfather did. He envisions Proteus being powered by clean energy sources—the current plan is to use a hybrid approach of renewables. “Proteus came about in order to stand on the shoulders of past pioneers,” Cousteau said, “and bring in new technologies, new ways of thinking, new abilities.”
\nA Porthole to the Future
\nPerhaps the most controversial moment in Jacques’s World Without Sun occurs around the twelve-minute mark. We are in the cabin, at a table. It starts with just Jacques in his silver bodysuit, hood down, and one of his team, shirtless, with a pipe in his mouth. Another member is sitting in front of the camera, blocking the right edge. We see Jacques pull his hood up over his head and leave the table. The camera cuts to another pair, talking and eating. From there the camera begins retreating, and we realize that the entire crew is there—sans Jacques—all sitting around the same table, all shirtless, all talking, all eating. The feeling is warm, comfortable. But the camera keeps retreating. Suddenly, we’re outside the Conshelf, looking at the scene through a porthole. What was warm and engaging becomes detached and remote. We continue pulling away. The light from the porthole diminishes quickly. Soon, we’re too far away. The light is gone, swallowed by the depths, and the screen is black. It’s an arresting sequence, beautiful and unsettling—even more so, I’d imagine, for those watching when it was first released.
\nIn an otherwise glowing review, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther took issue with it. He wrote: “It is reasonable and permissible that some of the scenes should have been shot in a studio, in an aquarium and in a tank, as they evidently were. This sort of simulation was understandably necessary to assure control. For instance, a shot in which the camera moves from the interior of the underwater house through a window and away from it was obviously made in the studio. Otherwise water would have poured through the window and flooded everything.”
\nCrowther, despite his obvious assurance, was wrong. The shot was real. Jacques proved it after the review came out. But such was the magic of Jacques. Nobody understood better than he what is perhaps the most integral element in storytelling: the how is just as important as the what.
My conversation with Cousteau lasted two hours. He spoke at length about the necessity of Proteus, the science and statistics. He knows all the figures. Throughout the conversation, he was animated and eager; it’s something for which he clearly cares deeply. But the most excited he got, the most I saw him smile, was when he would talk about the stories. The time he saw a shark chasing after a goliath grouper, or when he got caught in an upswell of plankton so thick it was like being in a snowstorm. When he 3D printed coral in the shape of Mickey Mouse to help kids in his Ocean Learning Center understand our reefs. Proteus is as much about sharing as it is about science.
\nI was reminded, while he was talking, of that spectacularly mild question posed in the lavish dining hall of the Nautilus, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I was reminded of it because of Nemo’s answer.
“You like the sea, Captain?”
\n“Yes, I love it! The sea is everything…Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the `Living Infinite,’ as one of your poets has said…The sea is the vast reservoir of Nature…Ah! sir, live—live in the bosom of the waters!…There I am free!”
\nJust before midnight on September 1st, 1859, the clear night sky over the Rocky Mountains was suddenly set ablaze. Streams of color erupted from the horizon: long, glowing tendrils that slashed across the dark expanse and hung there, draped like a net over the sky, slowly shifting in color from red to orange, to yellow, to white, and back again.
\nAs the minutes passed, the aurorae grew brighter, and the tendrils were joined by a rolling, ruddy, flocculent haze. Soon the florid sky became so bright that camping miners awoke and began to make breakfast, convinced that they must have slept soundly through the night, and that they were witnessing the rise of an especially sanguine sun.
\nThe Cincinnati Daily Commercial described the firmamental display as “a glorious canopy”; The New York Times called it “a livid red flame…[that was] magnificent auroral glory.” The celestial conflagrations continued all through the night, until they were finally washed out by the dawn.
\nThe scene inside telegraph offices, on the other hand, was utter chaos. While the miners were outside, basking in the magnificence of a sky the likes of which hadn’t been seen in 500 years, the telegraphers were inside, dealing with machines so overcharged with electrical current that they were close to combustion.
\nThe machines acted as if possessed: they rained sparks, ignited telegraph paper, and even electrocuted an unlucky operator so severely that a visible spark shot out from his forehead.
\nNaturally, the telegraphers disconnected their systems from their power sources, only to discover that the lines somehow remained operable (if unpredictable), and the most adept of the operators were actually able to continue sending and receiving messages powered solely by the electricity in the air.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"The most adept of the operators were actually able to continue sending and receiving messages powered solely by the electricity in the air."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The event became known as the Carrington Event—named after Richard Carrington, a British amateur astronomer who had, earlier that day, observed “two patches of intensely bright and white light” on the sun’s surface that were eventually connected to the auroral display that night—and it was the most powerful geomagnetic storm to hit Earth on record. In 1859, few things were affected by electromagnetic surges—Thomas Edison wouldn’t demonstrate his light bulb for another twenty years—so the damage was relatively negligible. Today, a solar storm of that magnitude is one of the National Intelligence Council’s six “black swan” events, because it could mean the end of civilization as we know it.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"MAGNETIC READINGS THE DAY OF SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1859, TAKEN BY THE GREENWICH OBSERVATORY, LONDON.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-1","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03004638/dark-night-1.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"LONDON IN 1860.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-2","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03004637/dark-night-2.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"ASTRONOMER RICHARD CARRINGTON","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-3","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03004636/dark-night-3.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"THE LEGENDARY WHITE-LIGHT FLARE SKETCH OF RICHARD CARRINGTON AND RODGER HODGSON ON SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1859, WHICH CORRECTLY PREDICTED THE SECOND EARTHWIDE SOLAR FLARE OF THE CARRINGTON EVENT.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-4","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03004635/dark-night-4.gif"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"In 2015, Lloyd’s of London and the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Risk Studies issued a report called “Business Blackout” that examined the economic effects of a cyberattack on the United States’ electric grid. This report imagined a scenario in which a number of electrical substations were remotely deactivated, resulting in a 15-state blackout over the Northeast United States.
\nPower was restored to some areas in a matter of days, to others in a matter of weeks. The scenario was significant but not catastrophic—the impacted area was relatively limited, the blackout short-lived—but the estimated economic losses alone still topped $1tn.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"THE EASTERN SEABOARD OF THE UNITED STATES, AS SEEN FROM AN EXPEDITION 30 CREW MEMBER ABOARD THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION. (NASA)","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-5","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03004634/dark-night-5.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"A far grimmer scenario also exists. Instead of a cyber-attack temporarily deactivating a handful of substations, irreparable, structural damage is done to a number of extra-high voltage (EHV) transformers. Usually, when a transformer goes off-line, its electrical load is diverted to adjacent units, which bear the increased load until the transformer can be reactivated, but, this time, so many are disabled that too much power is diverted.
\nThe sudden influx overloads adjacent transformers, knocking them out as well. Transformers fall like dominoes, and soon the entire national grid succumbs to a massive cascading blackout. Because the transformers are broken and not just switched off, they must be physically replaced or repaired, processes that can take between six and eighteen months.
\nThe darkness persists. Gas stops pumping; transmitters stop relaying. Without fuel or signal, the country’s transportation, communication, and agricultural systems soon fail. Shops and markets are looted and stripped in days. What food there is spoils without refrigeration, and new supply is cut off. Without working treatment centers, raw sewage pours into our water. Police and military are overwhelmed and impotent. Lines for fuel and potable water are twelve hours long, and most of the supplies are hoarded by roving militias. As the weeks become months, people resort to drinking from contaminated pools and wells. Many starve. As the blackout continues, diseases—particularly waterborne ones like cholera—run rampant. Martial law prevails. The Congressional EMP Commission estimated in 2008 that within one year of societal breakdown, two-thirds of Americans would be dead.
\nThis scenario is extreme, yes, but not nearly as outlandish as we’d like to believe. The United States’ electrical grid, in its current state, is vulnerable. It is vulnerable to temporary deactivation, and—potentially far more devastating—it is vulnerable to a permanent crippling of its infrastructure.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"A GRID SUBSTATION","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-6","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03004630/dark-night-6-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"ILLUMINATED FROM ABOVE.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-7 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03005100/dark-night-7-1-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"AN AMERICAN POWER STATION, COMPLETE WITH EXTRA HIGH VOLTAGE TRANSFORMERS (EHVS)","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-8","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03005026/dark-night-8-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"FERC","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-10","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03005021/dark-night-10.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"THE METCALF SILICON VALLEY SUBSTATION","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-11","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03005020/dark-night-11.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"At its most fundamental, the structure of the electrical grid has three parts: the producers, the transmitters, and the distributors. In order for electricity to get from the producers (power plants) to your home, it must be transmitted long distances. And in order for it to be transmitted long distances, its voltage must be increased at the production source, then decreased at the distribution center. EHV transformers are in charge of increasing and decreasing the voltage at these two points, meaning that without them, almost none of the power the plants generate can be transmitted, distributed, or used, and the grid as a whole ceases to function. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimates that 90% of the country’s consumed power passes through an EHV transformer at some point.
\nOur national grid involves around 2,500 large transformers, many of them over 40 years old and nearing the ends of their working lifespans. But replacing them is tricky: for one thing, they are massive—some weigh over 400 tons—and for another, many of them are unique, so you can’t just grab a spare one from the transformer supply closet. Plus, we only have the facilities to domestically produce around 15% of our current demand, so we have to order and import most of our transformers from Germany and South Korea (the only two countries that are willing to manufacture and export them). What this means is that if a key transformer were to need replacing, it would likely take over a year for the new one to be constructed, shipped, and installed.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-9","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03005023/dark-night-9.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"This would not be such an issue if the grid were designed to compensate for extensive transformer failure. Unfortunately, it’s quite the opposite: the stability of our grid is so precarious that it suffers from what has been called “the nine substation problem.”
\nThe name comes from an internal study conducted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which found that the transformers at certain substations are like the electrical grid’s vital organs: if just nine specific substations fail, the entire system fails, and the country is plunged into a blackout that could last around eighteen months. (The particular combination of substations, thankfully, is not public knowledge.)
\nTo make matters worse, the transformers themselves, despite their size, are frighteningly fragile. In 2013, a small terrorist assault team attacked the Metcalf substation just outside San Jose. Armed only with basic assault rifles, the assailants destroyed seventeen of the station’s twenty-one transformers in less than twenty minutes.
\nAnd their method was not exactly complex: they simply planted themselves in the underbrush of the surrounding hills, just beyond the substation’s perimeter and outside the purview of security cameras, and unloaded a hail of bullets; they never even had to penetrate the compound. (The only obstacle they really had to surmount was the substation’s chain-link security fence, which unsurprisingly offered little resistance to gunfire.) The damage was largely fixable, but it still took almost a month for the station to be repaired and reactivated. The attackers were never identified.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"A WALL ST. JOURNAL GRAPHIC DETAILING THE 2013 METCALF SUBSTATION ATTACK","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-12","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03005018/dark-night-12.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"This was not an isolated incident. In 2016, a fifty-seven year-old man shot up the radiator of a transformer at the Buckskin substation in rural Utah, causing the transformer to overheat and fail. The repairs took six months. He fired a total of four bullets.
\nAccording to the Wall Street Journal, in just a three year period between 2011 and 2014, there were almost a thousand instances of “significant” physical damage done to transformers. Of those, two hundred seventy-four were “deliberate damage” done by humans, and another seven hundred were “weather-related” of the sort that caused the Northeast Blackout of 2003—the second biggest blackout in history—which started when three power lines near Akron, Ohio sagged into overgrown trees.
\nThe branches caused the lines to short-circuit, starting a cascade of power surges that overloaded systems from Cleveland to Ottawa and plunged over fifty million people into darkness. Three sagging power lines in rural Ohio blacked out Times Square.
\nThe threats get bigger than firearms or tree branches. Let’s look at nuclear weapons: if a one hundred kiloton warhead were detonated at a sufficiently high altitude above the mainland United States—let’s say two hundred ninety-four miles over Kansas—although the population would be safe from incineration or radiation, the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) released by the detonation would circumscribe the whole of the contiguous forty-eight states (not to mention a vast chunk of Canada and most of Mexico), overloading and destroying almost every transformer in the pulse radius. Two-hundred and ninety-four miles is roughly the height of low Earth-orbiting satellites: the International Space Station, for example, or the Hubble Space Telescope. Or, say, the test satellites North Korea decided to launch in 2012 and 2016.
\nAnd the HEMP (High-Altitude EMP) threat is not limited to nations with satellite-launching capabilities or a stolen SpaceX keycard.
\nA typical, short-range Scud missile—the kind produced by the thousands and seen in practically every major military engagement since the Cold War, from Iran-Iraq to the ongoing Yemeni Civil War—is still capable of traveling almost one hundred miles above the Earth’s surface. If a nuclear-tipped Scud were shot into the sky, the EMP would cover half of the country. Even the pulse from a warhead strapped to the back of a particularly robust mallard duck could take out Nebraska. And both scenarios could result in a nationwide grid failure due to cascading overloading from the downed transformers.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"And the HEMP (High-Altitude EMP) threat is not limited to nations with satellite-launching capabilities or a stolen SpaceX keycard."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"THE 1965 NORTHEAST BLACKOUT","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-13","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03014144/dark-night-13-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"THE 2003 NORTHEAST BLACKOUT","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Manhattan skyline is dark as the sun comes up on the morning","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03014143/dark-night-14.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"A SHORT-RANGE SCUD MISSLE","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-15","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03014141/dark-night-15.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"THE STUXNET VIRUS MAY HAVE PERMANENTLY DAMAGED OVER 1,000 URANIUM CENTRIFUGES","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-16","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03014141/dark-night-16.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Our vulnerabilities extend into the digital. Cyberwarfare, increasingly prevalent as the world becomes more computer-reliant, is also a risk. Cyberattacks are easier to coordinate than military ones and easier to execute, and there are more possible sources, from government-funded hacking programs to an isolated saboteur in a basement. Ukraine, for example, has been hit by cyberattacks twice since 2015— the first targeted its power grid, leaving hundreds of thousands without power (though for less than a day); the second, in 2017, hit financial institutions as well as utilities, not to mention various international companies in fields from advertising to shipping.
\nAnd although cyberattacks don’t always cause structural damage—which is a good thing, because power restoration is much faster when the damage isn’t physical—the financial costs can still be tremendous. The 2017 attack in Ukraine resulted in $1.2B in damages. The final total of the “Business Blackout” scenario depicted earlier came out in the trillions.
\nAlso, none of this implies that cyberattacks can’t inflict structural damage as well—after all, like the body by the brain, physical equipment is generally controlled by digital code.
\nIn the early 2000’s, Iran’s nuclear program was subtly sabotaged by Stuxnet, a computer worm that lurked in the circuitry of Natanz, an Iranian nuclear facility. The worm, likely though not definitely designed jointly by the U.S. and Israel, would increase the rotor speed of the facility’s uranium-enriching centrifuges until the centrifuges would break, while at the same time concealing its presence by projecting falsely stable readings onto technicians’ computers. Before it was discovered in 2010, Stuxnet was responsible for the destruction of almost 1,000 centrifuges.
\nBut of all the threats to the grid, the biggest one also happens to be the most certain, and the least open to negotiation: the sun. Even in a world with no satellite (or mallard duck) EMPs, with no colonies of hackers or covert assault teams, with taut power lines and well-manicured underbrush, our grid, in its current state, is still doomed. No matter how successful our diplomacy is, or how intimidating our arsenal, sooner or later, the sun will pummel us with another Carrington Event: a massive coronal mass ejection (CME)—what is essentially a burst of magnetized plasma released from the surface of the sun—that, when it hits our atmosphere, will act like a giant HEMP. (This burst is what Carrington the astronomer witnessed flashing on the sun’s surface; the plasma took roughly eighteen hours to travel ninety-three million miles.)
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"SATELLITE VISUALIZATION OF A CORONAL MASS EJECTION (CME) FROM THE SUN","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-17-compressed","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/13213745/dark-night-17-compressed-e1606077923996.gif"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"CME collisions are actually very common, but most of them are small enough to be harmless (not to mention pretty; they help create the northern lights); the large ones, though, are powerful enough to fry our electrical grid nationwide. The Carrington Event suffused the sky with aurorae visible from Japan to the Caribbean, while at the same time overloading telegraph systems across Europe and North America with so much current that they burst into flames. Our transformers would fare no better.
\nThe question, then, becomes: when? Predicting a solar super-storm is similar to predicting an earthquake, or a number on a roulette wheel: the timing is not exact, but the event is assured.
\nLloyd’s of London, in a 2013 study called “Solar Storm Risk to the North American Electric Grid,” summarized it like this: “while the probability of an extreme storm occurring is relatively low at any given time, it is almost inevitable that one will occur eventually.” (“Almost inevitable” in the same way that if you were to flip a coin a thousand times, it is “almost inevitable” that at some point the coin would land heads; yes, it is technically possible that you’d flip tails a thousand consecutive times, but you’d never bet that way.)
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"“while the probability of an extreme storm occurring is relatively low at any given time, it is almost inevitable that one will occur eventually.”"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"In a paper published in Space Weather in 2014, physicist Pete Riley of Predictive Sciences, Inc. determined that there is a twelve percent chance of a Carrington-level solar storm striking in the next ten years. Viewed another way, it’s widely accepted in the scientific community that, statistically, solar super-storms hit us about every 150 years. The Carrington Event struck in 1859, 159 years ago. We also know that, in 2012, a Carrington-level CME whizzed past us by astronomical inches. The bottom line is that no matter how the odds are explained, we’re living on borrowed time; almost everything eventually regresses to the mean.
\nProtecting the grid would seem to be an obvious proposition, and, technologically, it’s not even a particularly complex one. From installing modifications like faraday cages, capacitor banks, surge arresters, and EMP-hardened battery chargers and generator controls, to simply expanding the amount of spare parts kept on-site, there are plenty of ways to physically “harden” an existing transformer and significantly reduce the grid’s EMP-susceptibility. (And even if a transformer does go down, the technology exists to help contain the damage: manufacturing company ABB Inc. has developed a prototype “recovery” transformer that’s smaller, lighter, and more mobile than its EHV relative. The idea is that it acts like a spare tire for the electrical grid: it can be installed quickly in the event of an emergency and bear the electrical load until the full-scale EHV transformer can be repaired or replaced.)
\nThe complexity, it turns out, is political, and it arrives with the invoice. (The technology may be incontrovertible, but its costs are not.) The EMP Commission estimated in 2007 that physically hardening the national grid against EMP would run between $2.9 and $3.9 billion—$3.3 and $4.7 billion, adjusted for inflation. (For reference, $4.7 billion would be just 5% of the amount Congress recently earmarked for disaster relief funding, or the amount the government spends on defense every two and a half days.) The Edison Electrical Institute, however, disagrees with this number. In its 2015 report Electromagnetic Pulses (EMPs): Myths vs. Facts, the EEI puts forth that the EMP Commission’s estimates are “off by a factor ten or more.” (This was included as part of a “Fact” the EEI wrote that was paired with its rather suggestively-phrased “Myth” that “it would cost only $2 billion to protect the entire grid from any EMP attack.”) This toes the company line: the power industry and the North American Energy Reliability Corporation (the NERC, which is itself comprised primarily by large energy companies) have lobbied for years for less governmental regulation—including torpedoing proposed legislation like the GRID Act in 2010 or the SHIELD Act of 2011, which has been stalled for years in the House Energy and Commerce Committee—insisting instead that the EMP threat is less existential, the grid more secure, and the cost more prohibitive than is generally being reported.
\nThe trouble with these assertions is that they fly in the face of both widespread scientific opinion and the conclusions drawn in FERC’s own study, Electromagnetic Pulse: Effects on the U.S. Power Grid. Conducted in 2010 by Oak Ridge Laboratory on behalf of the FERC, the study opens with the statement that “the nation’s power grid is vulnerable to the effects of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP),” and then goes on to corroborate the “unacceptable societal burdens” associated with a long-term power outage, and to espouse extensive technological development in both system infrastructure and personnel training. Nevertheless, in 2016, the FERC—which regulates the NERC—still approved a new set of standards for grid resiliency that fell far below what even their own scientists and researchers recommended, essentially leaving the NERC and the electric utilities to police themselves.
\nThere is debate, too, over who should even foot the bill to begin with. The resiliency of the country’s electrical grid is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Energy and the NERC, but bomb threats are clearly classified as matters of national security, bringing the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense into the conversation. The question partly revolves around whether EMP-proofing the national grid is an infrastructure standard or an add-on for defense. As it is, neither side seems particularly inclined to pull out its wallet. (And it should be noted that a handful of states, tired of waiting, have already passed and instituted measures to help protect their local substations and micro-grids.)
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"NOAA IMAGES OF PUERTO RICO BEFORE AND AFTER HURRICANE MARIA","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"dark-night-18","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03014140/dark-night-18.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico requested $17 billion in aid just for grid repairs. In February, five months after the disaster, over ten percent of the population was still without power, and, even now, a month away from the start of hurricane season, the country suffers intermittent, rolling blackouts. Four thousand more people died from a lack of food, clean water, and medical care in the aftermath of the hurricane than died in the hurricane itself, and the territory’s economic losses currently top $90 billion, almost 90% of its annual GDP. The United States has over 300 million people in it, and a 2017 GDP of $19.4 trillion; extrapolating even a fraction of Puerto Rico’s numbers would yield almost incomprehensibly disastrous results. No matter who is doing the math—no matter how the odds are calculated or the costs tallied or the damages estimated—this is a disaster we have the technological and financial means to avert. Neglecting to do so could be catastrophic.
\n"}],"sidePopups":{"popups":null}}},{"id":"cG9zdDoyMDY3","databaseId":2067,"title":"Building the Factory in the Sky","slug":"building-the-factory-in-the-sky","link":"https://www.helena.org/building-the-factory-in-the-sky/","date":"2020-11-11T11:51:48","isSticky":false,"author":{"node":{"name":"admin"}},"excerpt":"","featuredImage":{"node":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/16201737/fatory-in-the-sky-featured.jpg","title":"fatory-in-the-sky-featured"}},"acfArticleDetails":{"seo":{"title":null,"metaDescription":null,"metaImage":null},"truncatedArticleTitle":null,"magazineArticleHero":{"text":"“It has gone from science fiction to science.”","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-29","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215232/factory-sky-29.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215232/factory-sky-29.jpg"},"widescreenImage":null}},"articleIntro":{"title":"","subtitle":null,"authorText":null,"author":[{"title":"Peter Schiavelli","slug":"peter-schiavelli","contentType":{"node":{"uri":"/team/"}}}]},"detailBlocks":[{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"On November 19th, a sixty-one-year-old British explorer named Sir Robert Swan set out to complete, for the second time, a six hundred mile expedition on foot to the South Pole.
\nThe journey would take almost two months, in conditions that were some of the most inhospitable on earth, with snowstorms, little atmospheric UV protection, and temperatures dropping as low as negative-forty-degrees Celsius even though the Antarctic winter had not yet begun. Swan, his eyes scorched capri-blue and his cheeks permanently blushed from the sun exposure on his first trip to the Pole thirty years ago, prepared for the trek by hauling weights and tires up and down hills from Los Angeles to London and biking two hundred miles a week through the Sierra Mountains.
\nHe and his team would traverse much of the glacial terrain on skis, dragging their belongings—tents and heaters, ice picks and navigation equipment, as well as small, unmarked canisters of protective face cream—on two-hundred pound sleds with twin solar panels propped on top of them like little chrome gable roofs.
\nThe expedition was called SPEC, the South Pole Energy Challenge, and it was devised by Swan and his organization, the 2041 Foundation, as a way to demonstrate the effectiveness of renewable energy technologies, to publicize the impact of global warming on the Antarctic landscape, possibly to provide a metaphor for humanity’s struggle against climate change, and, presumably, to give him some quality time with his twenty-three-year-old son, Barney, who accompanied him. (Although the elder Swan would not complete the trek this time—he turned back early but rejoined his team for the last sixty kilometers to the Pole—his son took up the mantle and did.)
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"THE SWANS HAULING MOBILE SOLAR PANELS TO SERVICE NASA-DESIGNED ICE-MELTERS AND STOVES","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-1","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12032353/factory-1-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Everything they used that required energy—from the NASA-designed ice-melters to the stoves that cooked their bacon the last morning of the expedition—was powered entirely by Shell-developed biofuels and solar power, meaning that all of their energy sources were completely renewable. (The implication being that if they can survive Antarctica without a carbon footprint, you and I can probably survive the San Fernando Valley.)
\nSwan was particularly thorough. Although the trek itself only used renewables, transportation to and from the continent did not. (Antarctic cargo planes are not yet available in electric models.) So he calculated his total emitted carbon dioxide—in this case two hundred and thirty-eight tons—and, doing what would have very recently seemed impossible, simply paid to have it removed from the atmosphere. He accounted for most of the two hundred and thirty-eight tons with investments in reforestation and preservation (trees are very good at storing CO2), but twenty tons of it, in an atmospheric magic act, were whisked out of the air by a Swiss company called Climeworks.
\nThe magic act is Direct-Air Capture (DAC), and it is essentially the process of sucking CO2 out of the air and removing it from the atmosphere. Climeworks is the brainchild of Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher, a pair of German-born, Swiss-educated wunderkinds, and it represents what might prove to be a key part of humanity’s efforts to avoid environmental catastrophe.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"SWAN ON HIS MAIDEN TRIP TO THE SOUTH POLE, 1984, ANTARTICA","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-1","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03035122/factory-sky-1.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"ROBERT AND BARNEY SWAN, 2018, ANTARCTICA","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-2","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03035125/factory-sky-2-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"A PORTABLE ANTARCTIC KITCHEN","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-6","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03001951/antarctic-odyssey-6.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"ROBERT AND BARNEY SWAN RAISING THE CLIMEWORKS FLAG: SOUTH POLE, ANTARTICA, 2018","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-2","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12032559/factory-2-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"CHRISTOPH GEBALD IN ICELAND, 2018","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-6","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215227/factory-sky-6.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Gebald, when asked about the genesis of Climeworks, began with a line more apt to open a fairytale than a business partnership. “It sounds too romantic to be true.” His voice is soft, measured, slightly airy. We were sitting in a conference room at the top of Helena’s high-rise Downtown Los Angeles office space.
\nGebald and Wurzbacher, both just thirty-four, had arrived from Switzerland not three hours before. They had yet to check in to their hotel—their luggage and overcoats occupied the far corner—but their slim-cut suits didn’t bear so much as a wrinkle from their transatlantic flight. The two men are taller, leaner, and look younger than they do in pictures (though Wurzbacher is combating this with what is either heavy stubble or a thin beard), with high cheekbones and crisply-folded pocket squares. Both are thoughtful but quick to smile, and, even jet-lagged, they are spectacularly polite.
\nAs the tale goes, fourteen years ago, Gebald and Wurzbacher, both twenty years old, alone, and in a new country, met each other for the first time on their first day at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich, one of the top engineering universities in the world (and the alma mater of another German scientist, Albert Einstein). The conversation spanned somewhere between ten minutes and two hours, and, by the end of it, they had agreed to be business partners. A love story as written by Steve Jobs. In true millennial fashion, they consummated this arrangement with a high-five.
\nClimeworks, along with Carbon Engineering and Global Thermostat, is now one of just three DAC companies in the world, and it currently employs the largest team of experts in the field. Although all three use different technologies, the main idea is the same: take ambient air and suck the CO2 out of it.
\nTo accomplish this, a Climeworks plant (made up by what the company calls “CO2”), uses suction fans to pull air through a filter. The filter chemically “catches” the CO2 in the passing air, while the remaining, CO2-free air is let back out into the atmosphere. The filter, laden with CO2, is then heated in order to release the CO2 as a concentrated gas. Once released, the pure CO2 gas is collected and subsequently sold or stored, and the filter, now clean, is ready to be used again. The same filter can be used many thousands of times.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"COMPONENTS OF A CLIMEWORKS DIRECT AIR CARBON CAPTURE PLANT (1 OF 2)","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-7","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03035130/factory-sky-7.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"COMPONENTS OF A CLIMEWORKS DIRECT AIR CARBON CAPTURE PLANT (2 OF 2)","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-8","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03035131/factory-sky-8.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Gebald and Wurzbacher’s first “plant” was constructed in 2008 and was the size of a drinking glass. It captured a few milliliters of CO2, and they used it when they were starting their Masters programs to persuade their advisors at ETH Zurich that the technology worked. (Their advisors were impressed enough that they persuaded Gebald and Wurzbacher to stay on for their Doctorates in order to continue their research and accrue funding before starting their company.)
\nNine years later, in Hinwil, Switzerland, just outside Zurich, they introduced the world’s first commercial-scale DAC plant.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"AN ARIAL VIEW OF CLIMEWORKS' PLANT -- THE WORLD'S FIRST COMMERCIAL CARBON-CAPTURE FACTORY. HINWIL, SWITZERLAND, 2017.","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-20","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215220/antarctic-odyssey-20.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"VIDEO","size":"medium","type":"Video","video":"https://player.vimeo.com/video/277150864?html5=1&title=1&byline=0&portrait=0&autoplay=0","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":null,"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The plant captures almost a thousand tons of CO2 annually and takes up little land—less than one thousand square feet—because in shape it is more a scoreboard than a factory, a panel with three stacked rows of six gigantic fans (sitting neatly inside shipping containers) that in appearance could be mistaken for the jet engines of a particularly ambitious space shuttle. One could also make the case that the plant takes up no land, since it is situated not on the ground, but on the roof of a large waste-utilization center.
\nThe location was chosen not just to save on Swiss real estate. Instead of being forced to independently generate the heat required to release the CO2 gas from the filters (a CO2-generating process that would be counterproductive and inefficient), the Climeworks plant uses the heat already emanating from the waste facility’s incinerators. The whole complex also happens to be less than four hundred meters from a large greenhouse.
To complete the cradle-to-cradle cycle, the greenhouse buys the CO2 collected by Climeworks and uses it as an airborne fertilizer. Today, Gebald and Wurzbacher have six plants in circulation, with another eight in either the planning or construction phase and soon to be dispatched. This is ten times the output of either of their main competitors, despite the fact that they have only received about half the funding. “We have this modular approach,” Wurzbacher explains. He speaks faster than Gebald, and his voice is deeper. “So we can start at a small scale.
\nThat enabled us to become part of several individual projects.” Among those projects is a partnership with Audi to help make “e-fuels”: an automotive fuel, produced with Climeworks-captured CO2 and water, that has no carbon footprint. Climeworks CO2 has been used in soils, soft drinks, and meat-packing.
\nAt the beginning, their modular approach was necessary because they needed to be able to build small-scale plants at non-prohibitive costs. In the future, their approach may be necessary in order for us to squeeze in all of the CO2-sucking fans that we can.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"A CLOSER VIEW OF THE TECHNOLOGY.","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-29","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215232/factory-sky-29.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"“At the end of the day, there’s no magic to it.”
\nIt was an evening in the middle of December, and I was sitting in the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, talking with Dr. Julio Friedmann.
\nDr. Friedmann is a senior fellow at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy, at the Department of Energy. He has worked privately for Exxon Mobil and academically at the University of Maryland, and he is known online by the Twitter handle @CarbonWrangler. (He defines “carbon wrangling” in his Twitter biography as: “1) prevent CO2 sources from entering the atmosphere; 2) Close the carbon cycle; 3) pull CO2 from the air & oceans and return it to earth.”)
\nHe is also the self-appointed sheriff of the place he calls “Carbonville,” where payments are made and ledgers are kept not in dollars, but in tons of CO2. (We are all residents of Carbonville, because we all affect the global carbon footprint.) He is a carbon expert, and he is known in the climate community as both a clear-thinker and a straight-shooter. He also recently took on an advisory position with Climeworks. When I saw him, he was in a suit jacket and open-collared Oxford shirt that was the right level of rumpled to suggest that he prefers his sleeves rolled up; he would have been just as comfortable in a hard hat.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"THE LOS ANGELES CLEAN TECH INCUBATOR","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-11","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041436/factory-sky-11.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"FRIEDMANN DURING HIS DAYS AT THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-12","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041503/factory-sky-12.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"FRIEDMANN GESTURING DURING A HELENA MEETING, WHILE CHRISTOPH GEBALD AND JAN WURZBACHER LOOK ON.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-13","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041507/factory-sky-13-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"MATT PETERSON, CEO OF THE LOS ANGELES CLEAN TECH INCUBATOR.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-14","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041512/factory-sky-14-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"HELENA CEO HENRY ELKUS ANNOUNCING THE ORGANIZATION'S INTENTIONS TO ENGAGE IN CARBON-CAPTURE TECHNOLOGIES AT THE LOS ANGELES CLEAN TECH INCUBATOR.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-15","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041518/factory-sky-15-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"HEADS OF STATE AFTER SIGNING 2015 PARIS CLIMATE ACCORDS. PARIS, FRANCE.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-16","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041521/factory-sky-16.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"When I arrived, Friedmann was meeting with Matt Peterson, the CEO of LACI, so I wandered around. The LACI, one of the top incubators in the world for cleantech startups, is headquartered at the La Kretz Innovation Campus, which opened in October in the Arts District of Downtown Los Angeles. The Campus, now home to thirty-three different companies, is an Ikea showroom floor of offices, conference rooms, and laboratories, all ensconced in the industrial chic of exposed wooden I-beams and steel ventilation ducts.
\nThe day I was there, a woman was presenting in the open-floorplanned auditorium on handling typical marketing struggles, and reading materials in the reception area and break room included a buyer’s guide to wind turbines and a book on working out with kettlebells. A small group of employees in holiday sweaters were arranging themselves into a human “Christmas tree” (a “pyramid” were it an evening in June instead of December) for a picture, which I took.
\nThe crown jewel of La Kretz’s decoration—and the backdrop for the picture—is its “living wall,” a kind of crosshatched, swirling tapestry of actively growing leaves and plants that surrounds the reception area. (It connects through the ceiling to the roof, where the plants receive sunlight.) It reminded me of a child’s sand art if her palette were limited to Earth tones.
\nDr. Friedmann and I were supposed to talk outside in the garden, but it was getting late and the Santa Ana winds were gusting (fires in Ventura and Bel Air would erupt not long after), so we sequestered an empty conference room instead.
\n“It’s just a numbers game,” Friedmann continued.
\nWe were talking about what Friedmann refers to as “climate math.” He set down the basics of climate math in a recent post for the Center for Carbon Removal: “since we know about how much CO2 warms the atmosphere, and we know how much warming has already happened, we know how much more CO2 we can emit before we blow past the Paris Climate Accord targets – 1.5℃ and 2℃ of warming.” Essentially: this is how much CO2 the atmosphere can take (our “carbon budget”), this is how much we’ve already emitted, and, therefore, this is how much more CO2 we can emit. Climate math is arithmetic, not algebra; there are no unknowns.
\nFiguring out those numbers, though, took some effort. The Paris Climate Accord Friedmann refers to was negotiated in 2015 at COP21 (the Twenty-First Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and set the theoretical global warming limit. The signing nations—a hundred ninety-five of them, including the United States, though the current administration has since indicated its intentions to leave—pledged to do what is necessary to keep the increase in global temperature this century “well below” two degrees over pre-industrial levels, with an ideal goal of under one-and-a-half degrees. (That was as ambitious as they dared get since we have already crossed the one-degree threshold, and in September 2018 are set to blow the one-and-a-half degree budget too.) Not coincidentally, this Accord came on the heels of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report, released the year before.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":" The I.P.C.C.’s report was over a thousand pages long, had thousands of contributing scientists, and took seven years to construct. One of its main contributions was that it quantified our carbon budget: In order to keep global warming under two degrees, the carbon budget is one trillion tons."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"It concluded, too, that five hundred and fifteen billion tons (fifty-two percent) were already spoken for. At our current rate of emissions, according to the report, we will blow the rest of our two-degree carbon budget in less than thirty years.
\nIf this were not alarming enough, the I.P.C.C. then went a step further: armed with its numbers, it attempted to map our climate trajectories. It used emissions projections, policy possibilities, and trends in technological advancement to model the potential 21st century climate landscapes—called “scenarios”—in order to see how likely it is that we are able to reduce our emissions enough to stay within our carbon budget over the next eighty years. The odds projected to be daunting. The I.P.C.C. constructed and analyzed over a thousand scenarios, and in only fifteen of those thousand were we able to successfully stay within our budget solely by reducing our global emissions.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"AN IPCC PANEL ANNOUNCING FINDINGS.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-17","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041523/factory-sky-17.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"And in zero were we able to hold it under one-and-a-half degrees.
\n(Frighteningly, the I.P.C.C. found it more likely that we would cause the temperature to increase over four degrees than that we would be able to hold it under two. For reference, a four-degree-warming scenario yields a world with agricultural crop devastation, ecosystem collapse, and mass extinctions.) Scaling back our CO2 emissions to the level Paris would require looked to be practically impossible.
\nBringing negative emissions technologies into the equation, however, changed the math. With NETs (like direct-air capture) employed on some (generally large) degree, the rate at which we could scale back emissions and still come in under budget became more reasonable: the I.P.C.C. saw the number of successful under-two-degree scenarios jump from fifteen to one hundred and sixteen, a seven-fold increase. (These also included “overshoot” scenarios, when we temporarily surpass the trillion-ton carbon budget threshold but then use NETs to pull enough CO2 out of the air to return us to the black, like what Swan did with his two hundred and thirty-eight tons.) And, with NETs, the grander goal—the one-and-a-half degree goal—actually became mathematically possible.
\nThe math, it seems, is clear: If we want to stick to the carbon budget, NETs are a necessary piece of the equation.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"IN ADDITION TO CARBON-CAPTURE TECHNOLOGIES, OTHERS NETS (NEGATIVE EMISSIONS TECHNOLOGIES) INCLUDE REFORESTATION AND BIOCHAR.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-18 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041628/factory-sky-18-1-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The question, then, becomes: why don’t we just take it all out and not worry about emissions at all?
\nThere are a few reasons—cost, energy required, policy—but what lies underneath (or, I suppose, above) them is simply how much CO2 there is. The volumes are massive. The world emits around thirty-five billion tons of CO2 every year, with few signs of slowing down. (Emissions in 2017 were the highest on record, a statistic made particularly dispiriting by coming after a three-year plateau.)
\nAnd, even if we were to capture enough atmospheric CO2, where would we put it? There is only so much CO2 that greenhouses and soda companies need, so much sunscreen and renewable fuels that can be made, and – although these markets are huge and in the billion-ton range – they are not huge enough, and not in the hundreds of billions of tons range.
\nIn October, less than a year after opening their carbon capture plant in Hinwil, Gebald and Wurzbacher launched another first: the world’s first DAC carbon removal plant in Hellisheidi, Iceland. (Because their Hinwil plant recycles the captured CO2 rather than permanently removing it, it is considered a carbon capture plant but not a negative emissions plant. Though it still has a positive effect on the atmosphere by sending the CO2 it captures to the plants in the greenhouse, thereby repurposing it and closing the carbon cycle.)
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"NEARLY HALF OF THE WORLD'S MANMADE CARBON DIOXIDE IS TRAPPED IN THE OCEANS.","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-18-1","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215607/factory-sky-18-1-scaled.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"VIDEO OF ICELAND FACTORY","size":"medium","type":"Video","video":"https://player.vimeo.com/video/277150309?html5=1&title=1&byline=0&portrait=0&autoplay=0","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":null,"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Instead of perching on the roof of a waste-incineration plant, the Iceland DAC plant squats on the grounds of a geothermal power plant, so small and nondescript that it could be mistaken for a tool shed. It consists of just one CO2 collector and captures just fifty tons of CO2 annually (roughly five percent of the CO2 that the Hinwil plant does and enough to offset around ten cars); by itself it has a negligible effect on the atmosphere.
\nWhat makes it special—the first of its kind—is that the captured CO2 is not sold to another company in order to be reused or temporarily stored; it is injected 700m down into the ground, where it reacts with basaltic rock and mineralizes. (The long-term storage of captured CO2—in this case in basalt, but it doesn’t have to be—is called sequestering.) The CO2, once mineralized, becomes stuck in the rock, stable and unable to reenter the earth’s atmosphere for millions of years. An emissions fossil.
\nGreenhouses, soda companies, and fuel manufacturers have a finite amount of CO2 that they can use. The earth’s mantle, for all intents and purposes, does not. “Sequestering will be the biggest business case,” Gebald told me. “Followed by fuel. And the greenhouses and drinks will be minor in the future.”
\nThe “future” Gebald refers to, one in which DAC is implemented on a scale that eclipses commercial demand and requires sequestration, needs to happen soon. According to the I.P.C.C.’s scenarios, to give ourselves even a fighting chance of ending the century with less than one trillion tons of CO2 in the air, carbon removal has to offset emissions before the mid-century mark, and probably has to surpass it.
\nGebald and Wurzbacher are aware of the timeline. In the next ten years, Climeworks has a goal of annually offsetting one percent of global emissions, which would require them to capture and sequester somewhere between two hundred twenty-five and three hundred fifty million tons of CO2 per year.
\nTo put the magnitude of that number into perspective, it’s roughly equal to the volume of oil Royal Dutch Shell moves over the same time span.
\nSix years ago, this claim would have seemed ludicrous. Until recently, direct air capture was dismissed by many climate scientists as being too expensive to be useful. In 2011, the American Physical Society asserted that capturing one ton of CO2 using DAC would at its most advanced stage cost, at the absolute minimum, $600. A study conducted by scientists at M.I.T., Stanford, and UC-Berkeley put the cost closer to $1000. Both of these numbers were designed to be market floors—they assumed large, industrial plants with fully realized economies of scale—with no technological way to go cheaper. DAC appeared to be entirely cost-prohibitive.
\nThen Gebald and Wurzbacher—without industrialization, without economies of scale, in one of the most expensive countries in the world, with an operating budget less than half the size of their competitors’—did it for less. And they have the technology to go much lower.
\n“We have a very beautiful cost-development curve, an eight-generation model to reduce our costs and develop our technology,” Wurzbacher said. Simply by industrializing and optimizing the production processes they already use, Gebald and Wurzbacher estimate they can lower the cost of direct-air carbon capture by a factor of three or more, putting it somewhere between one hundred and two hundred dollars per ton.
\nFriedmann put it succinctly: “They have a clean line of sight in their cost reductions that requires no miracles.” Then he turned slightly poetic. “It has gone from science fiction to science.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"THE PLANT BY AIR. HELLISHEIÐI, ICELAND. (DRONE IMAGE)","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-19","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041633/factory-sky-19.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"PIPING TO AND FROM THE CLIMEWORKS ICELAND PALNT. (DRONE IMAGE).","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-20","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041640/factory-sky-20.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"THE SHELL DEER PARK MANUFACTURING CENTER IN TEXAS, SPANNING 2,300 ACRES AND 1,500 EMPLOYEES.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-21","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041646/factory-sky-21.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"A SHELL-PLANT IN ARKANSAS","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-22","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041650/factory-sky-22-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Perhaps no one straddles the line between science fiction and science better—or more consciously—than Elon Musk. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO created the highest-valued United States auto manufacturer entirely from emissions-free vehicles, designed and open-sourced a way to travel the length of California in thirty-five minutes, and recently launched a cherry red Roadster nearly into the asteroid belt. Yet, for all of his radical (skeptics would call them “theatrical”) accomplishments, he has an aim that is remarkably simple. In Neil Strauss’s excellent Rolling Stone article “Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow,” Musk distilled what drives him to: “I try to do useful things. That’s a nice aspiration. And useful means it is of value to the rest of society. Are they useful things that work and make people’s lives better, make the future seem better, and actually are better, too? I think we should try to make the future better.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"ELON MUSK","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-23","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041655/factory-sky-23.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Twenty-first century engineer-slash-entrepreneur geniuses apparently think alike. When I asked Gebald a similar question, his response echoed Musk’s. “We are intrinsically driven by entrepreneurship,” he said. “Followed by purpose: doing something which makes sense.”
\nAt the time of their conversation that first day at ETH Zurich, Gebald and Wurzbacher knew they wanted to start a company, but neither knew what kind of company they wanted to start. So they began exploring. “We designed our studies in a way that they were as disruptive as possible and as innovative as possible,” Gebald told me, “so they could potentially yield a start-up company.”
\nGradually, their focus narrowed, and they honed in on carbon capture once they started their masters programs. “I think we discovered that as the most impactful in the field of engineering,” Wurzbacher said.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"THE E-SCIENCE LAB, ETH ZÜRICH.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-24","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041656/factory-sky-24.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Despite the fact that Carbon Engineering and Global Thermostat, the other two main direct-air capture companies in the world, are both buoyed by billionaire investors (Bill Gates and Edgar Bronfman Jr., respectively) and have accrued twice the funding of Climeworks, Gebald and Wurzbacher have managed to be at the forefront of almost every major milestone in the industry.
\nTheir battery of engineers numbers almost fifty (approximately the number Carbon Engineering and Global Thermostat have combined) and they have already deployed six plants on some scale. And they are still just thirty-four years old. When I asked how they managed all of this, they attributed it to their upbringings.
\nBoth come from middle-class German families, with fathers and in Wurzbacher’s case a mother who—“like sixty percent of all German parents” joked Wurzbacher—were engineers. Entrepreneurship, too, runs in their blood—Wurzbacher characterized his half-brother, who runs a bevy of businesses in the Dominican Republic, as “a serial entrepreneur,” and Gebald said that his engineer father was practically the only non-entrepreneur in his family. And they both showed a proclivity for it at a young age, starting on a small scale with things like self-funding projects in high school. (Here was one point of personality-revealing dissimilarity: Wurzbacher funded his projects by arranging parties; Gebald by organizing outdoor expeditions.) As you speak with them, you realize that while their meeting that first day at ETH Zurich was serendipitous, their connection was practically inevitable.
\n“Our moms and dads needed to work to earn their livings,” said Gebald. “It’s something you experience as a kid, and it’s somehow burned into your DNA. You need to be disciplined. You need to work in order to get stuff done and earn your living. I think it’s good for us in the situation we’re in now.”
\nWurzbacher added, “What both of us value is that, since we started with little—we never personally lived in overflow, in wealth, in excess— we learned to value little things. And I think that’s what we kept.” (The use of “our” and “us” and “we” is very typical of Gebald and Wurzbacher, even when they’re talking about experiences from childhood, events pre-high-five-in-Zurich. Their upbringings were so similar, and they are both so polite and reserved when it comes to their personal lives, that you wonder at times if they hadn’t become so close over the past fourteen years that they’d simply decided to adopt a shared backstory.)
\n“Jan and Christoph have kind of a hard-bore work ethic about this stuff.” Friedmann told me. “They did the slow boring of hard boards around commercial engineering. Many cleantech companies break their spears on that—they know how to invent something, but they don’t know how to actually build a company. The discipline Jan and Christoph have shown is very impressive. They are in the pole position.”
\nPole position of an industry that, while still relatively nascent, is indisputably global in scope. “Energy and carbon,” Wurzbacher reminded me, “is a worldwide issue to solve.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"GEBALD AND WURZBACHER IN FRONT OF A CLIMEWORKS PLANT.","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-25","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215217/factory-sky-25-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"WURZBACHER AND GEBALD SPEAKING AT THE HELENA PRIZE AWARDING IN LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-26","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041701/factory-sky-26-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Direct air capture is by no means the only NET at our disposal, and even with a three-fold price reduction, it is still not immediately price-competitive with more organic, land-dependent technologies like forestation and Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). Planting trees is never a bad idea—they’re simple, they’re pretty, they store CO2, and they barely cost anything. (Sadly, they can also be cut down.)
\nBECCS is kind of a hybrid of forestation and Climeworks: in BECCS, production facilities are powered by biofuel, which is created by planting vast fields and burning the produce; their CO2 emissions they capture directly from their flues and sequester underground. (In flue gas, the CO2 is at higher concentrations, making it easier and cheaper to catch.) Since the facilities are powered by renewables (the biofuel), and since they sequester their emissions, they are operating net-negative, and at an operating cost less than Climeworks’. Of the little press that NETs have received, the lion’s share has gone to these methods, which is understandable: saving the environment with trees is a more romantic narrative than saving it with industrial suction fan-powered CO2 collectors.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"BIO-ENERGY WITH CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE (BECCS) TYPICALLY CONVERTS BIOMASS INTO A RANGE OF FUELS INCLUDING ETHANOL.","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-27","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215214/factory-sky-27.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"But, again, the volume. To remove the quantity of CO2 that Paris calls for using land-dependent NETs would require seeding an area larger than India, somewhere between a quarter and three-fifths of the arable land on Earth plus vast amounts of water. That is clearly not feasible, which means that even with heavy forestation and BECCS use, there would still be billions of tons of excess CO2 left sitting in the atmosphere that would need to be vacuumed up.
\n(And that’s assuming we are even capable of forestation at all. Gebald summarized the issue like this: “The challenge is that we, as humans, have failed at stopping deforestation. The only data point we have is that, as of 2017, humans have not been able to stop deforestation in times of climate change. So if now we bet everything in our fight against climate change on an experiment at which we already failed, that sounds a little imprudent. We as humans have shown that we are good at building machines, but we’re not good at stopping deforestation.”)
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"THE WORLD'S LARGEST CURRENT REFORESTATION PROJECT IS BEING UNDERTAKEN BY NGO CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL IN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON. THE PROJECT SEEKS TO RESTORE 73 MILLION TREES ACROSS 70,000 ACRES BY 2023.","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-28","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215229/factory-sky-28.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"When I brought up these other technologies with Gebald and Wurzbacher, Gebald handled the question first. “We do not say ‘don’t plant trees’; it’s the lowest cost solution. But you have to diversify your portfolio.” I noticed Wurzbacher was eyeing my notepad. Gebald continued. “Even if it is just to develop an additional solution, a safe solution, which might save us from ourselves.” When Gebald paused, Wurzbacher asked if he could borrow the pad. He turned to a blank page and drew on it a rough sketch of what looked like a classic graph of intersecting supply and demand curves, a big “X.”
\n“This is planting trees,” he said, pointing at the upward sloping curve—what I had thought was supply. Then he pointed at the downward sloping curve. “And this is direct air capture with machines.” He handed the notepad back to me. “If you want to invest in something, which one would you invest in?” I realized that they were the two cost structures. After trying to decide if I would offend him by not unequivocally answering “Climeworks,” I said that it would depend on where on the graph I was looking.
\nHe nodded. I breathed a sigh of relief. “You should invest in both. Right now you should invest in this”— he pointed at the BECCS / forestation curve—“it is much less, so you should plant trees.” Then he indicated the direct air capture curve. “But if you forget to also invest here at low volumes, you’re going to miss this point.” He was pointing at the intersection of the two lines; the point after which direct air capture would be the more cost-effective way to remove CO2.
\nAlthough forestation and BECCs might be cheaper at first, as their deployment expands, they would be competing for land with global food producers. The cost of that land—and, by extension, the cost of the carbon-removal technology that would need that land—would skyrocket. Direct air capture, on the other hand, would theoretically follow the model of other technological innovations: expensive at first, but incrementally cheaper with time, investment, scale, and further advancement.
\n“I believe they are able to drop the cost at the kind of rate that we’ve seen in batteries, in solar, in wind.” Friedmann told me. “These other technologies have also benefitted from innovations that were inconceivable when they started. I think of these guys very much like lithium-ion batteries in the ’70’s, where the only initial application space was the video camcorder.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"A British chemist named M. Stanley Whittingham first conceived of the lithium-ion battery in the 1970’s, when much of the world was in the grip of the energy crisis and scientists were searching for ways to extricate us from our oil-dependence. (Historical parallels abound.) Research continued, and Exxon, having hired Whittingham, filed for a patent in 1976; the problem was the batteries had a vexing penchant for exploding when overcharged.
\nThen, in 1980, John Bannister Goodeneh, an American physicist at Oxford University, invented the lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode, the basis for a rechargeable lithium-based battery cell that didn’t sporadically detonate. Little was heard about them for the next eleven years, until Sony released the first commercial lithium-ion battery in 1991 to be used with a new range of handheld video cameras.
\nCompetitors quickly flooded the market. The technology developed, the batteries became cheaper and more efficient, new markets were created. Today, forms of the batteries are used to power everything from smart-phones to the South Australian power grid. So what happened in those eleven years between 1980 and 1991? The batteries were revolutionary from the beginning, but, like many revolutionary technologies, they needed time and investment for the technology to mature and the markets to manifest.
\nThe batteries worked their way along a downward-sloping cost curve that mirrored the one Wurzbacher drew on my notepad, until they became viable for commercial use by Sony. It’s not an atypical story for innovative technologies, and it can currently be seen at different stages in solar panels and electric fuel cells. Market forecasters now predict that in the next six years—almost exactly thirty years after the first commercial battery was released—the lithium-ion battery market will grow to almost one hundred billion dollars, to say nothing of the trillions of dollars that the industries powered by the batteries are worth.
\nOne hundred billion dollars is large, but the carbon-capture market could potentially be far larger. In an interview with Newsweek, Graciela Chichilnisky, founder of Global Thermostat, said that the current demand for compressed CO2—the CO2 bubbled into soft drinks and injected into oil fields—already exceeds one trillion dollars per year. In the long-term, as the world warms—as oceans rise, fires spread, and ecosystems degrade—the removal of the gas will itself fuel the demand. In a research article in Earth System Dynamics last July, a team led by James Hansen, the director of the Program on Climate Science, Awareness, and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, estimated that we—or, more likely, our grandchildren—will be forced to spend between eight trillion and five hundred and thirty-eight trillion dollars (seriously) to scrub our atmosphere of CO2 in the latter half of the century. (A pretty wide range of values to be sure; the amount depends on how successful we are at curbing future emissions.)
\nSaving the world is an expensive proposition. The investment to even make that possible, though, is needed now
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"We—or, more likely, our grandchildren—will be forced to spend between eight trillion and five hundred and thirty-eight trillion dollars to scrub our atmosphere of CO2 in the latter half of the century."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"THE DRIVE-TRAIN OF A TESLA MODEL S SEDAN, POWERED BY LITHIUM-ION BATTERES. SINCE THEIR INCEPTION IN THE 1970'S, THESE BATTERIES HAVE VASTLY ASCENDED TO GEOPOLITICAL IMPORTANCE.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-30","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215935/factory-sky-30-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"JOHN BANNISTER GOODENEH WITH THE LITHIUM-ION BATTERY CELL","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-31","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215936/factory-sky-31-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"THE CURRENT GLOBAL MARKET FOR CO2, BUBBLED INTO SOFT DRINKS AND INJECTED INTO OIL FIELDS, ALREADY EXCEEDS ONE TRILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-32","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12220001/factory-sky-32-1-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"AT ITS CURRENT ADJUSTED PRICES, THE OIL INDUSTRY HAS A MARKET CAPITALIZATION OF $1.7T PER YEAR.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-33","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12220020/factory-sky-33-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Teslas are on the roads today because of investments made into lithium-ion batteries in the 1980’s. Governments, particularly heavily-partisan ones in a field as politically-charged as energy, are fickle. So far they have been slow to warm to direct air capture, which has left the door wide open for private investment.
\nWhen talking about his company’s growth potential, Gebald, normally so soft-spoken that I have to crank my computer’s volume all the way up to hear him on my recordings, became full-throated. “Climeworks enables us to build up a new industry with two hundred million dollars, period. The potential of this industry is as big as today’s oil industry.”
\nThere’s a popular saying among the townsfolk in Dr. Friedmann’s fictional town of Carbonville. It’s used when describing the solution to global warming, or at least how to regulate the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It has many versions, but it generally goes something like this: “there is no silver bullet, just silver buckshot.”
\nIt’s a cute line, meant to suggest (correctly) that no single technology or policy can solve the problem. But Friedmann has an issue with it. “I’ve always had a problem with the silver-anything metaphor. We’re not hunting werewolves.” He shook his head and looked out the conference room window. “If you want to use a metaphor of killing things, you need a bunch of Howitzer rounds to kill enough things to just take care of it.” Global warming isn’t a mythical beast; there isn’t one perfect combination of materials that can destroy it, and to wait for such a combination just leads to inaction. The practical solution, really, is to empty the proverbial silos.
\nBut convincing the world that direct-air capture should even be in the arsenal has been trickier than simply figuring out its economics; possibly the heaviest of all of its albatrosses has been philosophical: the perception, especially in the scientific community, that DAC is a classic moral hazard.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"SOME FEAR THAT GOVERNMENTAL STAGNATION TO ENGAGE IN CLIMATE MITIGATION IS DUE TO A BELIEF THAT TECHNOLOGIES, LIKE DIRECT AIR CARBON CAPTURE, WILL UNDO HARMFUL EMISSIONS IN THE FUTURE.","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-34","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041721/factory-sky-34-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"These critics contend that it is actually detrimental to global warming relief efforts, that its mere existence causes us to make bad decisions in the short-term, deprioritizing current carbon policy and de-incentivizing investment in other, more immediately impactful emissions-reducing technologies. (Why fight for environmental legislation or spend a bit more to use clean energy today when this will all be solved sometime in the future with a giant Hoover?) In short, that it leads to complacency now and catastrophe later. After all, you’re more likely to jump out of an airplane if you believe you have a parachute.
\nFrom a chemical engineering perspective, they certainly have a point—for example, as mentioned earlier, equipping all production plants with flue filters is incontrovertibly more immediately cost-effective than investing in DAC technology—but the total perspective risks short-sightedness. DAC will take time to develop, certainly, but controlling CO2 emissions is not a short-term fight. “If you’re not into a killing-things metaphor—if you’re into a building-things metaphor—we need all the bricks we can get,” Friedmann said. “Big bricks and small bricks are both a part of that mix.” The problem is so big, and will be fought over so many years, that to dismiss a technology that could prove crucially consequential—a “big brick”—ten or twenty or fifty years down the line seems imprudent, if not myopic.
\nTo Friedmann, it boils back down to carbon math. “You are only moral if you do the hard math and say ‘Yeah, we need it all.’” When you’re building a house—or perhaps rebuilding a damaged one—you’d much rather find yourself with too many bricks than too few.
\nWhich brings us back to the significance of Gebald and Wurzbacher’s one-percent-of-global-emissions goal. Wurzbacher described it like this: “One percent for a company is basically a statement that says ‘we are going to be a large-scale contributor to this problem in the world, and while we want to be the first and the leading one, there need to be others.’ It’ll never be one company doing one hundred percent of the work.” It’s not competition; it’s cooperation.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"“The only slippery slope,” Friedmann said, “is the righteousness to believe that you alone can do it.”"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"In the twenty-three year period between 1831 and 1854, the city of London, shining capital of the sprawling British Empire, was ravaged three separate times by cholera. The disease was fast-spreading and ambivalent to social class; by the end of the third outbreak, more than 30,000 people had died. The cause of the outbreaks was unknown, though it was thought to be miasmic, since all diseases were assumed to be airborne in those days.
\nIn 1849, a physician named Dr. John Snow, having noticed that the disease was particularly deadly in areas supplied by certain water companies, published a paper, largely ignored, hypothesizing that the disease was actually waterborne, that it was the result of the contamination of the once-beautiful River Thames.
\nThe Thames, whose clear waters had for centuries been panegyrized by British poets, was, by that time, an opaque cesspool. The city’s sewer system was old, poorly designed, and ill-equipped to handle both the city’s rapid rise in population and the sudden strain from the advent of the flushing toilet. As a result, much of the city’s waste flowed directly into the river. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Edmund Spenser’s “silver-streaming Thames” had become Charles Dickens’s “deadly sewer.”
\nThen came the summer of 1858. Rainfall, which had been light all year, was nonexistent, and temperatures soared to almost one hundred and twenty degrees. As the water level sank, the smell rose, and the city—the stench of which had been gradually getting more putrid over the years—became practically uninhabitable. Parliament, housed on the riverbank, was interrupted, and lawmakers were seen fleeing the building with handkerchiefs pressed to their faces. That summer became known as the Great Stink.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"MIASMA, PERSONIFIED AS DEATH TAKING A ROW ASTRIDE THE THAMES.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-35","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041726/factory-sky-35.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"JOHN SNOW'S FAMED CHOLERA MAP, 1858.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"L0063431 Map showing deaths from Cholera in Broad Street…","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041727/factory-sky-36.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"JOHN SNOW'S SEMINAL PAPER, 1858.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-37","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041728/factory-sky-37.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The pollution of the Thames was not new. In the years before the Great Stink, various governmental bodies had thrown small sums of money at scattered companies to fix it, but nothing impactful had been done. Finally, with the problem quite literally under their noses, Parliament was forced to act. By August of that summer, they authorized an enormous sum of money—almost one percent of their entire GDP—to be given to the Metropolitan Board of Works in order to break ground on a sewer reconstruction project. The project was led by Joseph Bazalgette, who by that time had been sitting on his reconstruction design for years without the funding to implement it. Cholera would appear in London just one more time—in 1866, centralized in a location unconnected to Bazalgette’s sewer system—and then never again.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"A CLOUDY SKY OVERLOOKING THE THAMES.","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"factory-sky-38","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03041732/factory-sky-38-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"In some ways, London was lucky. If that summer had been mild, or if Parliament hadn’t been seated right next to the river, who knows how long it would have been before a fix was authorized and adequately funded, how much worse the problem would have become, how much more prevalent the disease, how much more expensive the cure. We scrape by as a species by the skin of our teeth. Sometimes we need overwhelming evidence before we’re roused to action, but there are always those of us, waiting in the wings, with a way—a sewer system, a sunscreen, a CO2 collector—to help save us. They just need the opportunity to do so.
\n"}],"sidePopups":{"popups":null}}},{"id":"cG9zdDoyMDc2","databaseId":2076,"title":"The Next Seaweed Trail","slug":"the-next-seaweed-trail","link":"https://www.helena.org/the-next-seaweed-trail/","date":"2020-11-11T10:06:43","isSticky":false,"author":{"node":{"name":"admin"}},"excerpt":"","featuredImage":{"node":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03035800/seaweed-4.jpg","title":"seaweed-4"}},"acfArticleDetails":{"seo":{"title":null,"metaDescription":null,"metaImage":null},"truncatedArticleTitle":null,"magazineArticleHero":{"text":"\"That is what civilization is all about: \r\nfarming replacing hunting.\"","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-4","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03035800/seaweed-4.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},"articleIntro":{"title":"","subtitle":null,"authorText":null,"author":[{"title":"Peter Schiavelli","slug":"peter-schiavelli","contentType":{"node":{"uri":"/team/"}}}]},"detailBlocks":[{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"In the waning years of the last Ice Age, with mammoths still patrolling the tundra and much of the Northern Hemisphere still blanketed by sheets of ice a mile thick, humans first arrived in the Americas. What we know about this event is relatively little; archaeology is a field not celebrated for its certainty, and details of the past can be as murky as details of the future. We are pretty sure that the settlers came from Siberia, that their first American steps crunched down on the western tip of Alaska, and that this occurred sometime in a 25,000-year window, give or take a few millennia.
\nBeyond that, though, much of the story—how they got there, where they went next—remains unclear. It’s possible that they simply walked: with sea levels over a hundred meters lower than they are today, there was a swath of exposed terrain between Siberia and Alaska that would have been traversable. From there, picking their way through glacial gaps and cracks in the slowly-melting ice sheets, the migrants could have marched inland into Canada before plunging straight down into the heartland of the United States. Called the Ice-Free Corridor Hypothesis (or, alternately, the Clovis First Model), this has been the accepted theory for decades.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"BERINGIA, THE LANDMASS CONNECTING SIBERIA TO ALASKA, WAS MOSTLY GRASSLAND.","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-2","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03035653/seaweed-2-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Recently, though, a competing hypothesis has been offered. Humans had been seafaring for tens of thousands of years, so instead of taking a very cold walk, the settlers could have taken a very cold boat ride. They could have sailed from Eurasia to Alaska, then followed the Pacific shoreline south. In and out of watercraft, disembarking where the ice was low, they could have skipped like stones along the coast, from Alaska to Canada to Oregon, and then possibly all the way down to Central and South America. In recent years, this theory, the Pacific Coast Migration Model, has been gaining steam, bolstered especially from an unlikely source: seaweed.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"SIBERIAN SETTLERS TOOK THEIR FIRST STEPS ON THE WESTERN TIP OF ALASKA.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-1","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03035804/seaweed-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"THE FIRST SETTLERS TREKKED THROUGH CANADA OR SAILED ALONG THE COAST.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-3","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03035802/seaweed-3.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Macroalgae—seaweed—was one of Earth’s first multicellular organisms, appearing, in a very rudimentary form, around 1.5 billion years ago. Almost a billion years later, it helped catalyze the Cambrian Explosion. Today, there are three main types of macroalgae, known colloquially by their colors: green, red, and brown, with brown known more colloquially as kelp. Kelp is by far the largest algae—a single thallus of giant kelp can reach a length of more than two hundred feet. It grows by rooting itself to the ocean substrate and projecting up towards the sunlight in leafy, swaying columns—Jack’s underwater beanstalks. It prefers water relatively shallow and relatively chilly (cold water is more nutrient-rich), so it has a particular affinity for the North Pacific Coast. There, it blooms in dense forests, and its fronds lay thick on the water’s surface.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"MACROALGAE ANCHORS ITSELF IN THE OCEAN FLOOR, AND GROWS UP TOWARDS THE SUN.","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-4","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03035800/seaweed-4.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"In keeping with its name, a kelp forest is rich in ecological biodiversity. Small invertebrates like crabs and urchins scuttle along the seafloor; eels coil in fissures; schools of rockfish and giant sea bass swirl around shaggy stipes while sea lions dart through the canopy and otters float on frond beds. The various algae provide protection from roaming predators and help mollify turbulent seaswell. Some forests house more than a thousand different species.
\nIn 2007, University of Oregon archaeologist Jon M. Erlandson and colleagues published a paper in The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology titled “The Kelp Highway Hypothesis: Marine Ecology, the Coastal Migration Theory, and the Peopling of the Americas.” In it, he proposed that the first American settlers relied on kelp’s teeming ecosystems and calm waters to survive, and that the settlers’ route—often called the “Seaweed Trail”—was the result of following coastal kelp forestations like so many bread crumbs. If the Kelp Highway Hypothesis ends up being correct, it will provide a nice kind of symmetry, because the aspects of kelp that helped sustain our ancestors may yet do the same for us.
\nAccording to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the world is hurtling headlong towards a food crisis. In 2012, the FAO projected that, by the year 2050, the human population would approach ten billion people. To get a handle on what that number would mean, the FAO then analyzed how much more food the world would need to produce in order for its collective cupboards to not go bare. The amount was substantial. Seventy percent, it found. In order to feed a population of that size, global food production would need to increase by 70 percent. Although, in the years since, that exact number has been disputed to some degree, the main idea—that food production would need to increase drastically—is incontrovertible. The question is how.
\nLand would be the obvious solution. If global farmland expands, food production will as well, but its limits are as rigid as they are expensive. (“Buy land,” Mark Twain famously said. “They aren’t making it anymore.”) According to the FAO’s data, land allocated to arable production or permanent crops increased by 14.8% from 1961-2014. A significant amount, to be sure, but nowhere close to what would be required to feed a population of ten billion, and this rate is expected to dwindle: the FAO projects just a 4.8% increase from 2014-2050. (And there are scholars who argue we have already maximized our farmland potential. A paper published by the Rockefeller University in 2012 makes the case that it actually peaked in 2009.) Climate change is certainly not helping. A 2011 Stanford study in Science found, to no one’s surprise, that climate change is already crippling the yield and productivity numbers of the four main commodity crops (maize, rice, soybeans, and wheat), not to mention that our current climate trajectory has the well-documented potential to destroy some agricultural ecosystems altogether.
\nThis is especially alarming given the ruthless deforestation (to say nothing of the human displacement) that would have to occur to create the open farmland to begin with. Essentially, to even try to meet the food quota through arable land expansion would be futile at best, catastrophic at worst.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"ACCORDING TO THE WWF, 18.7 MILLION ACRES OF FORESTS ARE LOST ANNUALLY TO DEFORESTATION.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-5 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03040021/seaweed-5-1-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Water, on the other hand, presents an intriguing possibility. The quantifiable advantages to fish consumption are compelling. Compared with beef, finfish require fifteen times less feed and provide six times more protein for their body mass. Their emissions rate is three times lower, as is their rate of freshwater consumption, and they clearly don’t contribute to the erosion, desertification, and deforestation endemic to herds of grazing cattle. And bivalves—mussels, oysters, and the like—are practically perfect: not only do they not require additional food or water, but they are also emissions net-negative.
\nOceans currently provide two percent of global food production while accounting for seventy percent of global surface area, so expansion would seem to be obvious. The problem is that all that space is not exactly teeming with fish just waiting to be hooked. In fact, the scientific consensus is that we are already overfishing at a wildly unsustainable rate, and that the global fish supply per capita has actually been declining for decades.
\nThe response, just like on land, has been to build farms. Since 2001, aquaculture—the farming of aquatic plants and animals—has been the fastest growing food producer in the world, a phenomenon coined the “blue revolution.” Quantities of farmed fish have been outstripping those of farmed beef since 2013, and farming now accounts for more than half of all fish consumed. In 2016, Norway, which has a total population of less than six million people, harvested 1.18 million tons of salmon alone. The aquaculture market is currently valued at over $180 billion, and, with wild harvests unable to increase but demand for seafood expected to rise by as much as 35% over the next decade, the FAO predicts industry growth to accelerate from three to five percent every year. This would result in a market value north of $220 billion and total annual production above 100 million tons.
\nIf this all sounds too easy, that’s because it is. The blue revolution, however promising, has been plagued by many of the same problems that have afflicted its more verdant sibling. Almost all current fish farms consist of some form of cage or pen—or lattice of pens—in water along the shore. In commercial aquaculture’s infancy, this was logical, because the simplicity of the structures and their vicinity to land was convenient and minimized costs. However, as demand has exploded, inshore farming infrastructure has struggled to keep up. Dense honeycombs of hastily-constructed farming nets lace slow rivers and stagnant lakes. The pens themselves quickly become overcrowded and dirty. In these conditions, disease spreads fast: a quarter of a million salmon died from a sea lice outbreak in fisheries in New Brunswick, Canada in 2017, with another quarter of a million then euthanized in order to keep the epidemic from spreading; Chile, meanwhile, lost almost three quarters of its harvest to an anemia disease in 2009. In response, farmers, particularly in poorer countries, suffuse the water with antibiotics and pesticides which then seep into food supplies and ecosystems. Static water has low circulation, so farming areas become thick with chemicals, fish waste, and unconsumed feed, choking seafloor critters and inducing unseasonable algal blooms. (These algal blooms—consisting of microalgae, not macroalgae like kelp—can be practically genocidal; in 2016, they killed 25 million salmon in Chile.) And the pens are not particularly reliable either. In 2017 more than 300,000 Atlantic salmon escaped from a farm in Washington, while almost 900,000 escaped in Chile last July. Marine Harvest ASA, a Norway-based aquaculture company that maintains farms worldwide, reported fifteen escape incidents in 2017 alone. The escaped fish are often foreign to their farming areas, so not only do their breakouts frustrate the farmers, but they can also jeopardize native marine populations and disrupt local ecological equilibria.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"SALMON FARM IN NORWAY.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-6","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03040017/seaweed-6.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"These issues are certainly not new, and as aquaculture has matured, farming countries seem to be putting more (or at least some) effort into addressing them. Norway, for example, has taken measures of varying levels of unorthodoxy: from instituting governmental regulations on the amount of salmon a farm is allowed to supply, to trying to raise its salmon in futuristic, underwater pods that would be indistinguishable from chicken eggs except that they have the diameter of a commercial helipad. Chile, for its part, saw a cohort of locally-operating aquaculture companies launch the Pincoy Project in 2016, a project which aimed to halve the country’s use of antibiotics in its salmon industry by the end of 2018. (The jury is still out on its success, but considering that reports have calculated the country’s previous antibiotic use to have been between two thousand and five thousand times that of other countries’, even if the Project succeeds, the industry would still have a long way to go.)
\nBut while these measures are laudable, they have stunted farms’ supply growth, and with demand increasing and profits to be had, producers are getting impatient. The bottom line is that trying to increase fish harvests without sacrificing food safety or damaging ecosystems is exceedingly difficult, and that fish farms, as they have been generally conceived, seem to be rapidly approaching an upper limit on supply. But, with the food crisis impending, something has to be done. Perhaps the solution is to build a better farm.
\nIt’s a clear morning in late fall, and the Captain Jack sits expectantly in the waters of Berth 58 at the Port of Los Angeles, near Long Beach. A vessel seventy-five feet long with a twenty-two-foot beam, it has spent most of its working life as a shark boat—a purpose indicated less-than-subtly by the painting that used to sprawl across its bow of a great white shark’s gaping, cuspidated mouth. (Though the shark, perhaps aware of its fate, arguably looked more aghast than it did aggressive.) Now, recently restored with a clean white bridge and enough varnish on its deck to coat the fleet of Lord Nelson, the Captain Jack is about five years into its second career as the main research vessel for Catalina Sea Ranch, an aquaculture company that farms mussels on the edge of the San Pedro Shelf. Reflecting the ship’s new priorities, its bow has been repainted: designs of cerulean, hillocky waves now roll along its sides, and the shark mouth has been replaced by a scallop shell of a size suitable for bearing Venus.
\nThe Catalina Sea Ranch operates a hundred-acre plot about an hour and a half round-trip from the port. By the time we got there, the skies were dark and the waters restless. The farming area itself is a kind of coordinate system of plump, black, olive-shaped buoys systematically dotting the surface of the water like motion capture sensors. Heavy lines tether the buoys together, while the mussels collect on loops of rope draped along their lengths. The bivalves grow in thick, bristling clusters, and in the gray autumn light the obsidian shells gleam glossy and opaque. Twice a week, the lines are hauled in and harvested on the Ranch’s second vessel, the Enterprise—a boxy, low-slung converted riverboat that first took to water in World War II. All told, about 1500 pounds of mussels are collected per day.
\nWhat makes the Catalina Sea Ranch particularly notable is not what it farms, but where. Unlike the vast majority of fisheries, which operate close to shore, the Catalina Sea Ranch farms an area about six miles off the coast. It is one of the few domestic offshore aquaculture farms in the United States, and it is the only one permitted to operate in federal waters. It received its permit in 2012, after Phil Cruver, the Catalina Sea Ranch CEO, personally jumped through more than a million dollars’ worth of political, bureaucratic, and scientific hoops from a handful of agencies including the Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"CATALINA SEA RANCH'S MAIN RESEARCH VESSEL, THE CAPTAIN JACK.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-7","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03040016/seaweed-7.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"CATALINA SEA RANCH HARVESTS MUSSELS 6 MILES OFFSHORE.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-8","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03040015/seaweed-8.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"PHIL CRUVER, CEO OF THE CATALINA SEA RANCH","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-9","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03040012/seaweed-9.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Farming offshore minimizes many of the problems normally associated with aquaculture. The fisheries are large and uncramped since there is little competition for space. The constant flow of ocean currents flushes the area of waste and pumps in water clean and nutrient-filled, so the fish (or, in Catalina Sea Ranch’s case, mussels) are healthier and require less feed. Although there are oft-cited drawbacks to offshore farming—things like farm destruction and fish escapes, things generally related to the volatility of open water—they are far more solvable (or at least improvable) than what plagues nearshore farming. Creating a better fish pen is a lot easier than creating more shoreline, or cleaner water.
\nLocating the farm on the edge of the San Pedro Shelf was especially strategic. Mussels are called “filter-feeders” because they “eat” by catching microorganisms (phytoplankton, for example) free-floating in the water, which means that they can survive autonomously as long as water is flowing through their gills. Since the seafloor at the edge of the shelf drops almost instantaneously from a reasonable 150m to an abyssal 3000m, there is a continuous upwelling of deep, cold, phytoplankton-rich water onto the shelf. And expansion won’t be an issue; the Ranch is surrounded by 26,000 acres of U.S. Federal waters. Cruver is already finalizing plans to grow his operation tenfold.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"OPEN-WATER CAGES ARE SAFER, CLEANER, AND PROVIDE HIGHER QUALITY FISH.","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-10 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03040410/seaweed-10-1-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"But possibly Cruver’s most prescient move was his choice of partnerships. It was clear to him early on that the success of the Catalina Sea Ranch would be inextricably tied to its sustainability. In stark contrast to the historically lax oversight of most global fisheries, the Catalina Sea Ranch is watched intently. NOAA representatives accompany the Enterprise for every mussel harvest, and they inspect every bivalve.
\nOperations are monitored real-time by a souped-up NOMAD buoy, donated by the NOAA and outfitted with a bevy of customizations and add-ons, that tracks everything from ocean salinity and current patterns to phytoplankton concentrations and predator locations. There were so many inspections that had to be passed and boxes that had to be checked getting the farm off the ground that it took Cruver five years to collect his first harvest. (And even that was too soon: the entire crop was lost because the mussels could not be federally inspected in time for distribution. The inspectors found nothing wrong.) And so, in 2017, with one eye on expansion and the other on sustainability, he partnered with Primary Ocean Producers, a nascent seaweed company run by two brothers, Scotty and Brian Schmidt, to surround his farm with kelp.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"EXAMPLE OF A BUOY MONITORED BY THE NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION (NOAA).","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-11","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03040418/seaweed-11.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The earth’s oceans have, to this point, absorbed between thirty and forty percent of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. Although this has obviously been very beneficial in mitigating the terrestrial effects of global warming, as human emissions have risen, the oceans are paying a price: according to the NOAA, besides the obvious warming, ocean waters today are thirty percent more acidic than in the pre-Industrial era. Acidified seawater, among its panoply of environmentally-devastating effects, is particularly corrosive to shellfish like mussels because it weakens—even dissolves—their shells and limits the amount of available carbonate in the water. (Carbonate is a key ingredient in shell-making). Kelp, however, fights this. It de-acidifies local seawater by photosynthesizing carbon dioxide three to four times more efficiently than terrestrial plants can. It is also fully self-sufficient, thriving on a combination of sunlight, carbon dioxide, and, conveniently, the cocktail of nitrates and ammonias that mussels expel as waste. The result is mussels that are stronger, healthier, and safer than can be found almost anywhere else.
\nTogether, the Catalina Sea Ranch and Primary Ocean Producers represent the first steps of a much more ambitious plan for the San Pedro waters: the introduction of an integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA) farm, called the Oceans Operating System. The idea of IMTA is that it contains species of different trophic levels, so that one species feeds on the waste of another, like an arranged food chain, or ecological Rube Goldberg device. In the OceansOS model, for example, a pen of finfish is adjacent to a field of mussel lines, with macroalgae on both sides. Farmers feed the finfish, whose waste is then carried by the current first into the mussel lines, then into the macroalgae. The mussels extract the organic materials and the macroalgae extract the inorganic, along with the other mussel-produced nutrients. The environment is regulated and optimized both by the water flow and by the macroalgae, which keeps the area de-acidified for the bivalves and oxygen-rich for the finfish. The system is sustainable, productive, safe, and—particularly important with that FAO report still hanging over the industry’s heads—potentially expansive.
\nJacques Yves Cousteau—environmentalist, aquanaut, and inventor of the first scuba set—saw this coming back in 1971. “We must plant the sea and herd its animals,” he said, “using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about: farming replacing hunting.”
\nLast fall, Bill Gates posted a quiz on his website gatesnotes.com under the header “Can you beat my score on this climate change quiz?” It’s short, five questions, designed primarily to highlight some interesting—or at least lesser-known—facts about emissions. For example, avoiding one roundtrip transatlantic flight would apparently reduce a person’s greenhouse gas emissions this year more than switching to a hybrid car. (I missed that one.) The first question was particularly interesting: “if cattle were a country, where would they rank on emissions?” The answer is Jeffersonian: cattle would place third, just ahead of India and trailing only China and the United States.
\nEmissions associated with livestock exceeded seven billion tonnes last year. This was 14.5 percent of the world’s total and more than every sector save for electricity and industry. Livestock production occupies 70 percent of the planet’s agricultural land, 30 percent of all land total, and is a main driver of rampant deforestation, particularly in Latin America. The FAO itself is an outspoken proponent of livestock reform, releasing a report in 2006—“Livestock’s Long Shadow”—in which it claimed that the sector’s environmental impact is “so significant that it needs to be addressed with urgency.”
\nHow does this relate to seaweed? Almost half of all livestock emissions are in the form of methane (much of it is literally burped out), and there is a growing body of evidence that indicates that adding seaweed to a cow’s diet is preposterously effective at mitigating digestive methane production. In one study out of Australia’s James Cook University in 2017, researchers who replaced just two percent of a cow’s diet with a type of red algae eliminated the cow’s methane production by 99 percent. Of course, kelp’s use as a feed should already have been obvious. It has a protein content equivalent to soy and nutrient content equivalent to kale; it is the fastest growing organism on earth (up to 30 inches per day in ideal environments) and requires no arable land or fresh water, so it can be harvested in large quantities while easing the strain on existing land resources. (It should also be noted that this is not exactly a novel idea: livestock have been fed some form of seaweed for millennia, from cows in Ancient Greece to sheep in Neolithic Scotland.)
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"IN A 2017 STUDY, REPLACING 2% OF A COW'S DIET WITH RED ALGAE ELIMINATED THE COW'S METHANE PRODUCTION BY 99%.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-12","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03040416/seaweed-12-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"And its uses extend beyond the comestible. Seaweed is found in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals; it is injected into agricultural fields as a soil treatment and synthesized as a biofuel. The seaweed market, recently valued by Grand View Research at a little over 10 billion dollars, has a five year projection north of 22 billion, with one forecaster (perhaps slightly optimistically) placing it above 87 billion.
\nBut even without macroalgae’s usefulness as a product, without its value as a feed or a face cream or a fertilizer—even if all it did was sway in the ocean and clutch at the ankles of surfers—cultivating kelp fields would still be environmentally worthwhile. For years, macroalgae had been dismissed as a potential long-term carbon dioxide solution. (Scientists had found that macroalgae environments rarely contained a high volume of organic carbon, so they had largely concluded that macroalgae must be poor at storing it.) But in 2016, about a year before the James Cook study, an article appeared in Nature Geoscience titled “Substantial role of macroalgae in marine carbon sequestration.” The writers, professors Dorte Krause-Jensen and Carlos M. Duarte, had discovered that macroalgae’s effectiveness as a carbon sink had been vastly, vastly underestimated. According to their research, macroalgae was already sequestering about 634 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. For perspective, that number is roughly the equivalent of planting six million acres of trees and is enough to offset the emissions of the entire continent of Australia.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"seaweed-13 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03040442/seaweed-13-1-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"To the truly monumental issues—world hunger, climate change—there are no simple solutions, no easy answers. The future, like the past, is murky, and the problems we face, like massive sheets of ice, are so vast and all-encompassing that often all we can do is make an educated guess. But as we look to the future, as we scan the horizon for where to go next, following the seaweed would seem to be a pretty good place to start.
\n"}],"sidePopups":{"popups":null}}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxNjU=","databaseId":165,"title":"The Room Where It Happened","slug":"the-story-of-america-in-one-room","link":"https://www.helena.org/the-story-of-america-in-one-room/","date":"2020-11-11T09:06:06","isSticky":false,"author":{"node":{"name":"admin"}},"excerpt":"","featuredImage":{"node":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/20172522/america-in-one-room-featured.jpg","title":"america-in-one-room-featured"}},"acfArticleDetails":{"seo":{"title":null,"metaDescription":null,"metaImage":null},"truncatedArticleTitle":"The Story of America in One Room","magazineArticleHero":{"text":"“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.”","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"america-in-one-room","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/16194007/america-in-one-room-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},"articleIntro":{"title":"The Story of America in One Room","subtitle":null,"authorText":null,"author":[{"title":"Peter Schiavelli","slug":"peter-schiavelli","contentType":{"node":{"uri":"/team/"}}}]},"detailBlocks":[{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"According to Aristotle, early in 507BCE, the Athenian Cleisthenes found himself yet again in exile. This situation was not uncommon. Cleisthenes was a member of the Alcmaeonid family, a clan well known in Attica for two things: being politically progressive and being cursed. The curse, for its part, began in 632BCE, when Cleisthenes’s great-grandfather, an archon of Athens, neglected the one unbreakable rule of Classical Antiquity — don’t cross the gods — and slaughtered a group of men while they were tethered by a length of rope to a statue in the temple of Athena. (Some historians claim that the men were not literally tied, just under Athena’s protection, but I think the rope version adds a theatricality—not to mention an unambiguous symbolism that befits the Ancient Greek era.) As a result, the Alcmaeonidae spent much of the subsequent century traveling to and from Athens, either banished from the city or permitted an uneasy return, depending on the regime in power.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Sydney Herbert's 1881 \"A Dream of Athens\"","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Herbert, Sydney, 1854-1914; A Dream of Ancient Athens","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01180120/WYL_LMG_150697-001.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Cleisthenes was a proponent of revolutionary democratic reform, and his exile in 507 was notable because it would be the final time he would have to leave the city. Some eighty years before, the Alcmaeonidae had allied themselves with Solon, an archon famous for policies including debt forgiveness for the lowest classes and allowing the (wealthy) middle class a voice in government, and Cleisthenes was heavily influenced by Solonic principles.
\nUnfortunately for Solon, his policies went too far for the rich but not far enough for the poor, and he — along with the Alcmaeonidae, naturally — was ousted in the mid-century. Athens spent the next few decades tottering between tyrants (the Alcmaeonidae are exiled) and moderate aristocrats (the Alcmaeonidae return!), until Cleisthenes took control in 508 by launching a campaign aimed directly at the Athenian masses, promising them a direct voice in government. (The word “democracy” comes from the Greek demos, meaning “citizen,” and kratos, meaning “rule.”) As a last-ditch effort, Isagoras, Cleisthenes’s political rival and the favorite of the nobility, brought in a small Spartan army to install himself by force as archon. Cleisthenes left the city one last time, but the Spartans were no match for the will of the people, and Cleisthenes returned on a tide of public adulation a few days later, bringing with him the first iteration of Athenian democracy.
\nI say “the first” because the democracy did not last long. Cleisthenes’s system was simple. Decisions were made in the Assembly, which consisted of a congregation of about 6000 male citizens all clustered on a hill in central Athens called the Pnyx. Any of the members could speak, and voting was done by a show of hands; majority ruled. It was the quintessential example of what James Madison (much) later called a “pure democracy,” which he defined in his essay Federalist No. 10 as “a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"James Madison, as captured in portrait by Gilbert Stuart (circa 1805)","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"832px-James_Madison_by_Gilbert_Stuart","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01180559/832px-James_Madison_by_Gilbert_Stuart.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The simplicity of the system was seductive, but it hid two fatal problems. The first was that, for a “pure democracy,” it wasn’t very representative. Six thousand people was only ten to twenty percent of the Attican population, which meant that the vast majority of the eligible voting public was still without a voice, and the vast majority of the whole population was without representation at all, since women, slaves, and metics (legal residents, such as immigrants and freed slaves) were not even eligible to attend.
\nThe second was perhaps more insidious. The structure of the Athenian “pure” democracy meant that the Assembly, for the time they were on the Pnyx, had almost unchecked power to make decisions for the state. There was no oversight committee or advisory board, to say nothing of policy experts or even fact-checkers, and the most momentous decisions were made over the course of an afternoon. In his book The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, the historian Mogens Herman Hansen observed that “a skillful demagogue could win the citizens to his project irrespective of whether it was really in their interest.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"“A pure democracy can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole.” -- James Madison"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Madison, no doubt aided by the knowledge of history, put it like this: “a pure democracy can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole.” As a result, pure democracies are “as short in their lives as they [are] violent in their deaths.” Fewer than a hundred years after Cleisthenes returned from exile, the demagoguery and “mischiefs of faction” resulted in Athens voting to wage an ill-fated war with Sparta, and Cleisthenes’s democracy met its bloody end in the Peloponnesian Wars.
\nThey were fortunate, however, to be given a second chance. The second iteration of Athenian democracy featured a number of changes designed to, as Hansen described, “obviate a return to the political crises and military catastrophes of the Peloponnesian War.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"A physical piece of legislation passed by the Nomothetai circa 335 B.C., regarding an annual festival in celebration of the goddess Athena","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"I-5477","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01183757/I-5477.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The democracy was reinstated, but they also set up a system of oversight and checks, a system less vulnerable to bias, corruption, and impulsiveness, with a more inclusive electorate, decentralized political influence, and a structure that mandated careful consideration before final verdict.
\nThe main themes of the restructure: representation and deliberation. A group of 500 randomly selected citizens was created to choose the issues to be put forth in front of the Assembly; another group of 500 served as a special court to the Assembly, with the power to prosecute any members not acting in the public good. (This was, predictably, not exactly incorruptible.) Perhaps most significantly, a third group of 500 people, called the Nomothetai, served as overseers to the Assembly. For a decree passed by the Assembly to become a law, the Nomothetai would deliberate on the issue for a day, listening to arguments on either side, then would take a final vote to pass it as law.
\nMore than 2000 years later, history repeated itself.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"America in One Room: 2019","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_7850 (2)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01184407/IMG_7850-2-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Another group of 500 citizens, also randomly selected to represent a democratic nation’s diverse electorate, was brought together to discuss a society’s most pressing issues. For three full days, from September 19-21, 2019, a group of registered United States citizens spent a long, sultry weekend at the Gaylord Texan Resort in Dallas, Texas, where they dissected policy, shared experiences, grilled experts and presidential candidates, and engaged with one another on the main issues facing the country. The event was named America in One Room, and it was the largest experiment with what political scientists call deliberative democracy in the country’s history.
\nThe features that defined Athens’s second iteration of democracy—more equal representation; a more informed electorate; careful, thoughtful, unhurried deliberation—are the defining features of deliberative democracy today, and its lessons are no less necessary.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Conception
\n“All over the world democracy is in disarray.”
\nThis is the first line of a 2019 article published in the American Philosophical Society called Democracy When the People are Thinking: Deliberation and Democratic Renewal. Its author is James Fishkin, Helena Member, professor of communications and political science at Stanford University, and the director of its Center for Deliberative Democracy. Professor Fishkin has spent much of the last three decades working on deliberative democracy in some form and is widely considered the world’s foremost expert on the topic.
\nThe easiest way to understand deliberative democracy might be to compare it to its relatives. According to Fishkin, there are four forms of democratic practice: competitive democracy, elite deliberation, participatory democracy, and “deliberative democracy by the people themselves.” In a competitive democracy, the system is built around electoral competition, in which parties do not try to reflect “the will of the people,” but engage instead in what the political economist Joseph Schumpeter described as a “competitive struggle for the people’s vote.” (He went on to say, with perhaps a bit of disdain, that “the ways in which issues and the popular will are being manufactured is exactly analogous to the ways of commercial advertising.”)
\nElite deliberation is when issues are filtered through small exclusive entities, where they are discussed and considered but where there is little room for public influence. (It should be noted that this was quite close to how Madison envisioned the United States’ government operating.) And participatory democracy is what most of us think of when we hear the word “democracy”; mass participation, with equal value to every vote. (Athenian democracy version one, but on a wider scale.)
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Fishkin lecturing at Stanford University ","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"polling_fishkin_news","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01191318/polling_fishkin_news.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Almost every current democratic government is some amalgam of those three forms. The idea of the fourth form, deliberative democracy, is that it combines the strengths of each of the other three and mitigates their weaknesses. Its goal is to accurately reflect the will of the people (unlike competitive democracy) by engaging with the public themselves (unlike elite deliberation), while also ensuring that the voting public is informed on the issues and motivated to participate (unlike participatory democracy).
\nPhilosophically, this all sounds great, but how would something like this actually be realized? Fortunately, Fishkin has a Ph.D. in political science as well as philosophy, and he invented an answer: the Deliberate Poll. In the late 1980’s, Fishkin was already a decade into his academic career when he came across the book Presidential Primaries and The Dynamics of Public Choice by then-Princeton professor Larry Bartels. “It dramatized for me how stupid our primary system is,” Fishkin told me. “It’s unrepresentative and unthoughtful, and it’s arbitrary in the sequence of states. It’s a kind of sound bite campaign, where nobody can really think in any depth.”
\nHe continued, “So then I asked myself, as a sometime philosopher, ‘well how would you fix it?’ And this idea sprang into my head. That was the idea of the Deliberate Poll. The primary was just the occasion for me to think about it.”
\nThe structure Fishkin came up with is as follows. First, you take a random but representative sample of people from a given electorate. Then, you poll them on whatever issues you want to discuss in order to get a baseline opinion. Theoretically, this baseline is indicative of the general opinions of the country as a whole. After the initial poll, you give the people objective, balanced, evidence-based briefing materials to help educate them on the issues at hand, and arrange to bring the whole sample together in one place. Once there, the sample is split into smaller, moderated discussion groups, where they engage with each other and formulate questions for organized town halls with policy experts and political leaders. At the end of the event, the sample is given the exact same poll again. Theoretically, this final poll is indicative of what the country’s general opinions would be, were the entire electorate informed and engaged. Throughout the process, the media is given access, since the goal is to reach — and reflect — the widest possible audience.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"\"Well, how would you fix it?\""},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"“My idea is to create public spaces,” he said to me, “where we can have a microcosm of the electorate in a setting where we can actually have good materials and a good process to see what the people would think. Then we make it consequential through the media, so that the people involved can focus on the issues, because they feel like their opinion matters.”
\nFishkin conducted his first Deliberate Poll in Britain in 1994. Since then, he has refined his technique by conducting 110 more in 28 countries. (“I feel evangelical about spreading deliberative democracy wherever possible,” he told me.) Deliberate Polls are wonderfully scalable. They can be used with a community of almost any size and level of diversity, and they can deal with issues of almost any scale of specificity or significance.
\nFishkin conducted one in Japan to discuss post-Fukushima energy policy, in Bulgaria to gauge the public on the potential desegregation of Roma-only schools, and in China to examine government involvement in the regulation of the press. When I spoke with him over the phone earlier this year, he had just returned from Iceland, which had conducted a Deliberate Poll to discuss constitutional amendments. Prior to America in One Room, Mongolia was perhaps Deliberate Polling’s biggest success. After his work, the country passed a “Law on Deliberate Polling” in 2017, which mandates that, before Parliament can even consider a constitutional amendment, a representative sample of voters must be convened to discuss the proposals.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"The 669 participants of Mongolian Deliberation on Constitutional Amendments, a breakthrough implementation of deliberative polling into the fabric of governance ","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"mongolia-dp-participants-2","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01192007/mongolia-dp-participants-2.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The idea of Deliberate Polling was born out of a desire to improve the system in the United States, yet in over a quarter century of Deliberate Polling, Fishkin had yet to find an opportunity to bring the experiment to United States soil on a national scale. In 2017, purely by chance, he happened to be seated next to Henry Elkus, CEO of Helena, at the ceremony for the annual Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture at the New York Public Library.
\nAt the time, the country was coming off one of the most vicious, divisive presidential elections in its history. Political affiliations seemed as entrenched as they had ever been; new media had opened up accessible ideological echo chambers as well as unprecedented avenues for the spread of misinformation; and across the country the perception was that the electorate was becoming more hostile, more tribal, and less inclined to listen.
\nAt the heart of Deliberate Polling is the unshakeable belief that, with enough open and honest communication, it is possible for people to find common ground, that a “will of the people” as a whole can exist. After that dinner, Helena and Fishkin decided to put that belief to the test. And they had less than two years to do it.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"The Berggruen Prize is an annual $1M \"Nobel Prize for Philosophy\", founded and hosted by Helena member Nicolas Berggruen and his Berggruen Institute. Here, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg huddles with Berggruen and the award Jury after receiving the 2019 Prize. ","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Fourth Annual Berggruen Prize Gala Celebrates 2019 Laureate Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg In New York City – Inside","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01193717/1x-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"I first met Fishkin at the Helena office in Los Angeles late in 2018. He flew down from Palo Alto with Helena member Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, professor of political science and sociology, and author of a number of books, most recently Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency. By that point, America in One Room (which had until recently been called “The National Caucus”) was less than nine months away. It was time to nail down the logistics.
\nFishkin is an unmistakable academic. He has soft blue eyes and a hoary beard that creeps up to his cheekbones; he speaks with an earnest sincerity that makes it abundantly clear that he is not a native of downtown LA, and he’s a fan of nature metaphors. (“Polls are like shifting sands,” he said to me. When describing his first attempted Deliberate Poll: “Funders went away like snow on a summer’s day.”) Apart from his computer, he brought with him a new iPhone, which he was still getting the hang of, and a portable espresso maker, which he excitedly told us had accompanied him on Deliberate Polling trips to Africa and Mongolia, and which he made use of four times in the hour I spent with him. The boarding pass for his afternoon flight back to the Bay Area poked prominently out of the breast pocket of his Oxford shirt.
\nEarlier, I called Deliberate Polls “scalable”; well, America in One Room would be the real test. The goal of the project was to conduct a Deliberate Poll on a sample that represented the entire United States electorate, and it aimed to poll that sample on the five biggest, most divisive issues in American politics: the economy, the environment, foreign policy, healthcare, and immigration.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"From left to right: Larry Diamond, Helena COO and Executive Director Sam Feinburg and Helena Founder/CEO Henry Elkus","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_7480 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01194418/IMG_7480-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"To be successful, it would need to recruit a delegation that was ideologically and demographically representative of the American voting public; it would need to produce briefing materials carefully curated by a bipartisan committee of policy experts on all five of the issues at hand, as well as moderators trained to facilitate conversation on those issues; it would need scholars to engage with the citizens in plenary sessions; and it would need to coordinate travel for more than five hundred citizens hailing from all over the country and a place to fit them all. (Of course, “a place to fit them all” was undoubtedly the easiest; there’s always plenty of room in Texas.)
\nFishkin first conceived of the Deliberate Poll because he was looking for a better approach to American democracy. America in One Room was designed to be his answer. Somehow, in less than two years, a nationwide Deliberate Poll in the United States was going to become a reality. The question, though, was would it work?
\nVenue
\nIf you’re looking for a contemporary American equivalent for the Athenian Pnyx hill, you could do worse than the Gaylord Texan Resort in Dallas. Sprawled over 125 acres at the southern tip of Lake Grapevine and a lasso’s throw from Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, the Gaylord Texan is to the American frontier what Las Vegas’s Venetian Hotel is to the City of Canals. With one sweeping look over the climate-controlled, vegetation-suffused atrium, you can see an oil derrick, a bell tower affixed with a rather anachronistic video screen, the batwing doors of an old-timey Saloon, and a replica of the facade of the Alamo (with water feature).
\nThe employees who work the floor are referred to as “STARS.” (All caps; it’s an acronym for “Smiles, Teamwork, Attitude, Reliability, and Service with a lowercase-p-passion.”) There are roughly 1500 of them, and they are easily identifiable by their teal blazers a few shades too blue to grant them membership to Augusta. As befits a microcosmic America, there is a lot of floor to work. After a 120 million dollar upgrade a few years ago, the Gaylord has almost half a million square feet of meeting space and over 1,800 rooms. (For context, the Madrid Marriott, the largest hotel in Europe, has 869 rooms.) There are also ten restaurants, miles of running trails and waterways—the Venetian has gondolas; the Gaylord has flatboats—and a nightclub called “The Glass Cactus,” though I think they missed an opportunity by not making the Saloon a functional bar.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_6672","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01194838/IMG_6672-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_6758","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01194828/IMG_6758-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_7060","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01194816/IMG_7060-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_6852","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01194820/IMG_6852-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_6684","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01194834/IMG_6684-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_6735","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01194831/IMG_6735-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_6899","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01211520/IMG_6899-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The space was necessary. America in One Room brought together 526 citizens from around the country, each one chosen by the NORC at the University of Chicago to collectively form the most perfect statistical representation of the current electorate in the United States. (The academics attached to the project would undoubtedly bristle at my use of “chosen”; the delegates were selected by what is called stratified random sampling, meaning that each delegate happened to be picked from a group of people who shared a similar demographic profile. NORC had over forty metrics that they used to make sure that the group was as representative as possible.) For the experiment to work, there needed to be a ballroom with space for the whole sample, as well as enough meeting rooms for the delegation to break off into small, independent discussion groups. And, of course, at least 526 hotel rooms.
\nWhen the delegates arrived on Thursday, September 19th, the first thing they did after receiving their nametag (on which was simply their first name and their city of residence—Alan – Quitman, AR; Nadia – Long Beach, CA; Keyshuna – Sioux Falls, SD; Wilbert – Brunswick, OH) was get their picture taken. These portraits—over 500 of them—can be seen spread across October 2nd, 2019 issue of The New York Times.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"It’s an arresting collection, a kind of mosaic of the contemporary American electorate."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"It’s an arresting collection, a kind of mosaic of the contemporary American electorate. Up close, every face is unique— you can see the amused glint in Eric’s eyes, the turn of Thomas’s nose, Patricia’s budding smile, the “River State Farms” written across Jim Bob’s trucker hat. But take a few steps back, and the faces start to lose their distinction—is Kurt’s hair gray, or is he bald? Is Nathan smiling or grimacing? Are Nancy and Nancy sisters?
\nA few more steps and the portraits begin to resemble each other—you can generally make out where the frames begin and end, possibly hair color, skin color, gender if there’s a particularly pronounced beard, but little else. Continue backing up and eventually the pictures lose all individual distinction; they almost melt together. The collection becomes a continuous, flesh-toned swirl, and you have to squint really hard to pick out any differences.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"A captured moment during a small-group session of America in One Room","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_7021","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01195402/IMG_7021-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Over the following two and a half days, the delegates were steeped in policy. Each delegate was randomly assigned to a small group with around a dozen other delegates and one moderator. Over the course of the weekend, the small groups met seven times—a short introductory meeting, one long meeting for each of the five topics of discussion (the economy, the environment, foreign policy, healthcare, and immigration), and then a concluding meeting at which they took their exit polls. In total, each delegate had over ten hours dedicated entirely to discussing policy with people whose life experience and views they never would have been exposed to otherwise. In one room, I listened to a debate on the future of electric cars between a mechanic from Pennsylvania and a schoolteacher from central California; in another, a lawyer from Florida discussed illegal immigration employment with a housekeeper from Michigan.
\nBeyond the small groups, the sample came together — in the appropriately massive Texas Ballroom — for ten separate plenary sessions. Five of these were with pairs of ideologically competing policy experts (one pair for each of the topics) and five with presidential candidates hot on the campaign trail. The sessions were fully interactive and long-form, with each small group crafting detailed questions for each of the speakers.
\nThe way Fishkin sees it, there are three main problems with polls today, and America in One Room was designed to address all of them. The first is what he calls “rational ignorance”: the fact that much of the voting public is not informed on the issues because they (reasonably) have more pressing things to worry about. The second is “phantom opinions,” which describes the reticence of people to admit what they don’t know. And the third is “selectivity of sources,” which is the tendency for people to listen to the side they already agree with.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"An America in One Room plenary session, in which all participants deliberated in a single space","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_7452 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01195358/IMG_7452-1-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"By being a public event, America in One Room created an urgency in the participants to become informed. By supplying them with nonpartisan briefing documents and access to some of the most knowledgeable minds in policy, America in One Room ensured that their opinions would be supported by facts and reason. And by surrounding them with disparate opinions in an atmosphere conducive to open discussion, America in One Room exposed them to views and perspectives that were entirely new.
\nWhat flourished was empathy. Donnie from Colorado told me, “you found a lot of optimism, of open minds.” The country may be divided, but inside the Gaylord, the discussions were polite, the disagreements respectful, the environment—dare I say it—communal.
\n“There was one girl in our group who was so intimidated, it made her ill.” Donnie remembered. “To watch the camaraderie of the folks in our group understand that immediately and without looking down their nose at her. By the end of it, the tears came out, the hugs, the ‘thank you for helping me.’ It truly was the experience of a lifetime.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Legacy
\nPerhaps the purest distillation of the idea behind deliberative democracy was delivered by perhaps the most famous Alcmaeonid of all: Pericles, Cleisthenes’s grand-nephew and the archon during the Athenian Golden Age. “Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, we regard the citizen who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, and we are able to judge proposals even if we cannot originate them; instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.”
\n\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"3. obama tweet screenshot","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01195917/3.-obama-tweet-screenshot.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"cnn during a1r screenshot","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01195922/cnn-during-a1r-screenshot.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"nyt a1r portrait piece screenshot","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01195925/nyt-a1r-portrait-piece-screenshot.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"salon a1r rosenberg screenshot","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01195936/salon-a1r-rosenberg-screenshot.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"nyt a1r post-event oped screenshot","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01195928/nyt-a1r-post-event-oped-screenshot.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"nyt upshot portraits screenshot","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01195934/nyt-upshot-portraits-screenshot.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"nyt a1r pre-event oped1 screenthost","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01195931/nyt-a1r-pre-event-oped1-screenthost.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"
The results of the America in One Room exit polls saw tremendous quantitative impact from both sides, with swings of upwards of twenty to thirty points from those with the most extreme views. On immigration, support for DACA from Republicans who initially opposed it increased by 25%. Economically, support for raising the national minimum wage dropped 23% among Democrats. On healthcare, Republican support for repealing the Affordable Care Act dropped 20%. Foreign policy saw the largest jump, with Republican support for rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership increasing by 39%; while the environment saw more modest changes, including a 6% increase in support for rejoining the Paris Accord.
\nBut the most impactful lesson from America in One Room wasn’t statistical; it was interpersonal.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"\"Yes, I can see you.\""},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"When Barack Obama tweeted about the event, he didn’t mention the accuracy of the policy discussions or the reasons behind opinion shifts. His tweet read “Here’s an interesting read—a reminder that behind every opinion lies a human being with real experiences and a story to tell. Sometimes we’ll agree and sometimes we won’t, but if we want our democracy work, listening to each other isn’t optional.” Did we learn we can change our minds, that we’re not as intractable as so many would lead us to believe? Yes, we did. But we also learned how capable we are of honest, open, respectful discussion, and how willing we are to listen. Fishkin insists that Deliberate Polling “can become a part of our democratic life if the people are willing to go to the trouble. In my opinion, it’s needed.”
\nFor Sunday morning’s small group session, I sat in on Group 9. This was the last one, where everyone makes their final statements then takes the exit poll. Jodi from Iowa opened the proceedings with a spoken word poem. It was titled “My Superpower,” and she had written it over the course of the weekend.
\nThe poem, more than three minutes long, ends with this verse. “Invisible people are worthy to be known, to be seen, to be heard, and their stories matter. Therefore I have chosen to live my life with an open mind, open ears, and open heart, watching for them, listening for their unheard cries of, “Can you see me now?” And doing my best to answer, with my words and my smile, ‘Yes I see you.’
\n“And that, my friends, is a superpower.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"IMG_7064 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/01200337/IMG_7064-1-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}}],"sidePopups":{"popups":[{"popupId":null,"title":null,"content":null}]}}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxOTkz","databaseId":1993,"title":"Speaking Youth to Power","slug":"speaking-youth-to-power","link":"https://www.helena.org/speaking-youth-to-power/","date":"2020-11-11T08:50:43","isSticky":false,"author":{"node":{"name":"admin"}},"excerpt":"","featuredImage":{"node":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/16201940/speaking-youth-to-power-featured.jpg","title":"speaking-youth-to-power-featured"}},"acfArticleDetails":{"seo":{"title":null,"metaDescription":null,"metaImage":null},"truncatedArticleTitle":null,"magazineArticleHero":{"text":"\"Never before has such a high concentration of young leaders\r\ninhabited positions of influence in such a wide range of fields.\"","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"speaking-youth-to-power-m","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02235159/speaking-youth-to-power-m.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02235157/speaking-youth-to-power-scaled.jpg"},"widescreenImage":null}},"articleIntro":{"title":"","subtitle":"A new generation is wielding its influence","authorText":null,"author":[{"title":"Henry Elkus","slug":"henry-elkus","contentType":{"node":{"uri":"/team/"}}}]},"detailBlocks":[{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"This op-ed was first published in C-Suite Quarterly Magazine in 2016, during the beginning months of Helena’s development, by Helena CEO Henry Elkus.
\nOur newly connected world has brought us unprecedented opportunity. The digital age, manifested in the form of breakthrough technologies and platforms, has democratized information itself. More knowledge is available to more people, in more places, than at any time before in all of human history. Yet, spin the globe today and the problems we face – geopolitical, environmental and technological – are only a click away. Some seem intractable: incessant financial crises, hydra-headed terrorist organizations, looming ecological catastrophes. And they’re being handed to the Millennial generation to solve.
\nWe’re obsessed with “millennials.” They are the focal point of the world’s new digital reality, and if you aren’t one, chances are they confuse you. The media has asked every conceivable question: Why don’t millennials spend their money like we did? Do they care about God? Are they having more sex than us? Why can’t they like golf? The private sector has joined in on the frenzy as well. In an effort to “decode” millennial behavior, Fortune 500 companies are shelling out up to $20,000 an hour, and even Goldman Sachs is publishing infographics asking: “Who are they, exactly?”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"THE MILLENNIAL CONSULTANT -- A LEGITIMATE PRODUCT OF THE 21ST CENTURY THAT HAS INVITED THE OBLIGATORY \"LATE CAPITALISM\" MONICKER. (ANDREW GROSSMAN)","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"Boy consultant","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02234643/speak-youth-to-power-1-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Vast energy has been spent to understand the behavioral minutiae of this massive and diverse population. Mark Zuckerberg is a millennial; so is a fourteen year old. This demographic is too broad to group together. And even after thousands of years of trying, older generations have yet to make much progress in understanding the young. Armchair assertions that the younger generation is fundamentally “this” or “that” have a deep and amusing history.
\nA 2013 Time cover story said the “cold, hard data” proves that young people have high rates of “narcissistic personality disorder.” Perhaps they interviewed Horace, who was saying much the same in 23 BC.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"TIME MAGAZINE: MAY 2013","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"speak-youth-to-power-2","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02234641/speak-youth-to-power-2.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"A Shift Worth Making
\nOver the past year, I’ve been hard at work with a team of incredible partners to create Helena. It’s a small group of leaders that meet consistently to materialize ideas with the potential to create positive change. Every member of Helena is a leader from a different field.
\nWe’ve been fortunate enough to fill Helena with some amazing people: Fortune 500 executives, actors, technologists, explorers, geopoliticians, and a Nobel Laureate. Across the globe, Helena’s members meet to strengthen relationships and create ideas that improve the world.
\nThere is one element that stands out more than others, however. Half of the group begins their time in Helena under the age of 25. It’s not the image you might have in your head when you think of a “global leadership” network, but we believe it should be.
\nThe connected age has enabled representatives of the under-25 generation to become bonafide world leaders. They have built multibillion-dollar companies, influenced hundreds of millions of people through social media, become hyper-polyglots and tastemakers, pioneered decentralized currencies, and taken home the Nobel Peace Prize.
\nThis is truly unprecedented. Never before has such a high concentration of young leaders inhabited positions of influence in such a wide range of fields. These individuals are not “in development” or “on the rise.” Empowered by the networks of the digital age, they are current counterparts to the leaders of our time. Yet, when it comes to global summits and networks, they rarely find themselves with a serious voice.
\nThat model needs to be reconsidered. Over half of the world’s population is 25 years old or younger. If you are going to hold a discussion on a given global issue, chances are it will impact the youth more than any other demographic. The monumental global dilemmas of our age are being passed to the young today; they are a crucial part of our response to these threats. This is especially true in technology and science, where the under-25 crowd has played a deeply significant role. Cryptocurrency, pluripotent stem cell technology, virtual reality, artificial intelligence; all are fields where young leaders are integral.
\nAt Helena, we’re honored to talk with some of these leaders each day. They’ve quickly become the group’s core, showing a knack for combining ideas that don’t typically intersect. From the early development of artificially intelligent ‘avatars’ to the conceptualization of mind-reading ‘think-to-text’ machines, the process has been eye-opening. Often, these discussions represent the first time that a leader from one generation or field has seriously sat down with a younger counterpart to ideate.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"HELENA MEMBER ILWAD ELMAN AT THE UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"ilwad-elman-5","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/05000659/ilwad-elman-5.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"32 YEAR-OLD SAUDI CROWN PRINCE MUHAMMAD BIN SALMAN WITH UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF DEFENSE JAMES MATTIS IN WASHINGTON D.C.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"speak-youth-to-power-4 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02234715/speak-youth-to-power-4-1-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"HELENA MEMBER WILLIAM JACK, WHO BUILT A NUCLEAR REACTOR IN HIS BASEMENT AT 16, THEN WORKED IN PLASMA PHYSICS AND DEEP LEARNING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BEFORE CO-FOUNDING REMEDY MEDICAL AT AGE 21","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"speak-youth-to-power-5","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02234636/speak-youth-to-power-5-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"After dozens of Helena meetings, the power of this concept – leaders from different generations collaborating as peers – has become obvious. In order to develop the best ideas, we include bright and capable leaders from each generation in the room. Doing so allows us to pair insight with experience; creativity with wisdom.
\nEvery member of a Helena meeting has a deep knowledge of their own vertical. Providing the horizontal, connective tissue between those verticals means uniting previously unrelated concepts in all new ways. According to Yale Professor Jonathan Feinstein, this connection is the very essence of creativity.
\nIt is this remarkable fusion that drives the community we’ve created. The results have been exciting.
\nWhile we are not the only ones lucky enough to leverage youth in this way, the practice is uncommon. We hope this will change. To create long-lasting, positive work, other organizations – companies, governments, and NGOs alike – should bring young voices to the table.
\n"}],"sidePopups":{"popups":null}}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxOTUz","databaseId":1953,"title":"On the Helena Membership","slug":"on-the-helena-membership","link":"https://www.helena.org/on-the-helena-membership/","date":"2020-11-11T07:40:10","isSticky":false,"author":{"node":{"name":"admin"}},"excerpt":"","featuredImage":{"node":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/16202020/on-the-helena-membership-featured.jpg","title":"on-the-helena-membership-featured"}},"acfArticleDetails":{"seo":{"title":null,"metaDescription":null,"metaImage":null},"truncatedArticleTitle":null,"magazineArticleHero":{"text":"\"The membership would, therefore,\r\nbe a form of collective intelligence.\"","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"on-helena-membership-m","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02224647/on-helena-membership-m.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02224632/on-helena-membership-scaled.jpg"},"widescreenImage":null}},"articleIntro":{"title":"","subtitle":"Written August 20, 2019","authorText":null,"author":[{"title":"Henry Elkus","slug":"henry-elkus","contentType":{"node":{"uri":"/team/"}}}]},"detailBlocks":[{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"In its most simple and reduced form, the Helena Membership is a means to enact projects. It is a group of exceptional people. Those people represent different types of assets. Those assets are utilized to create and source potential projects, vet those potential projects, select the most appropriate of them to take on, and then execute those projects in the most effective and efficient manner possible.
\nFor those looking for the bare-bones description of our model, that’s it. But it doesn’t answer “why.” For those interested further in what we are building and why we have chosen to create our seemingly unique structure to do it, I’ve written this essay.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"What Are Social Institutions?
\nAs soon as society became large and connected enough to recognize the existence of shared problems, society created “institutions” to address those problems. In one form or another, we’ve relied on these institutions — groups of people constituted towards a (claimed) shared goal of social improvement — for thousands of years; governments, churches, universities, militaries, juntos, orders, societies, corporations, public charities, philanthropic foundations, think-tanks, agencies, task-forces, non-governmental organizations, inter-governmental organizations, supranational unions, and the like.
\nThese institutions have had varying levels of efficacy. As old as the human endeavor of attempting to solve collective problems is the human pastime of criticizing the bodies we create to do so. And criticize them we should.
\nSocial institutions, maleficent or benevolent in intent, have had their share of catastrophic failures. Our beloved governmental institutions of democracy have been besieged again and again, by lawful use of their own rules, to carry out unfathomable atrocities of world war and genocide; take your pick of examples from the Greeks and Romans to the 20th Century Germans and Chileans. Titanic public financial institutions, advertised as being for the benefit of public good, have been instead hijacked for privatized gain for millennia, from the Praetorian Guard’s 2nd Century sale of the Roman throne to Malaysia’s 21st century 1MDB scandal.
\nYet social institutions have also had their successes, however underreported. As historian Will Durant noted: “We think there is more violence in the world than before, but in truth there are only more newspapers.” We have the United Nations, for all of its flaws, to thank for the global eradication of smallpox, and for the impressively executed Montreal Protocol. And philanthropies provided the risk capital to catalyze the global decline or eradication of once major diseases like malaria and polio.
\nIn truth, though, the majority of the large, impactful actions taken by public institutions can’t be morally adjudicated in a binary. It is hard to place the incredibly complex decisions of these bodies solely into buckets labeled “good” or “bad.” The decision to form the UN Security Council was made primarily to prevent a future World War. Judging by that core dimension, it has so far succeeded. But the jury is out as to whether it will continue on that path. In the philanthropic space, some foundations that have enacted positive outcomes have been fairly criticized for operating in a manner that relies on ill-gotten-gains originating from businesses that have harmed society.
\nThis is unsurprising. Some social institutions have led to bad outcomes, some have led to good outcomes, and most have led to a complex mixture of both. But what has remained constant throughout modern history has been the obvious importance these organizations have, irrespective of their moral footprint. It is not a question of whether the world should have social institutions; they will exist in one form or another, good or evil, because they are a fundamental by-product of the social nature of the human race.
\nLooking to the future, then, it is incumbent on our next generation to build and contribute to institutions that fall on the “good” side of the spectrum. To do this, we must both learn from past examples while factoring in the radically new conditions of the 21st century. I firmly believe that spending one’s life thinking deeply about how social institutions should be structured, designing them with the best intentions, then proving their model in the real world is a worthwhile enterprise. It’s why we are doing what we are doing.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"A BUST OF EMPEROR DIDIUS JULIANUS (137-193 AD), WHO PURCHASED THE ROMAN THRONE FROM THE PRAETORIAN GUARD AFTER THEY ASSASSINATED HIS PREDECESSOR","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-1","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02225632/helena-membership-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"GENERAL AUGUSTO PINOCHET SHORTLY AFTER OVERTHROWING THE DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED CHILEAN GOVERNMENT IN THE 1973 COUP","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-2","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02225807/helena-membership-2.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"STRATOSPHERIC OZONE LAYER CONCENTRATION BEFORE AND AFTER THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL, WHICH EFFECTIVELY DIMINISHED THE GLOBAL USE OF CHEMICALS LIKE CHLOROFLUOROCARBONS (CFCS)","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-3","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02225837/helena-membership-3.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Helena: A New Entrant
\nHelena is an endeavor to construct an institution as best equipped as possible to address societal problems of our present and future times. It is, of course, a new and humble entrant into today’s ecosystem of many such organizations. And, looking through the hazy vantage point of history, it is just the next tyro of a long, flawed, successive human tradition.
\nOur goal is simple. Produce and execute individual projects, one by one, that address meaningful societal problems. Over time, construct an enduring social institution with the power to continue producing and executing these projects — and leave the world a little bit better in its wake.
\nWe have a long list of disadvantages. Unlike other great social institutions, say the Gates Foundation, we don’t have a central figure (that would be me) with billions of dollars of wealth to endow operations. We don’t have a formal constituency. We don’t have illustrious prior careers running G20 countries, Fortune 500 companies, or international NGOs to inform future decisions. Certainly those credentials and assets would be nice. Instead, we are college dropouts in our early 20’s.
\nYet it has become clear that many of these disadvantages are, in reality, unique advantages. We are forced to rely upon a decentralized and stable model of revenue that scales beyond a single source, and incentivizes operational success as a mode of survival over all else. We are encouraged to declare our own ignorance at the onset, and so we devise strategies from a wealth of outside knowledge rather than via our own narrow vantage points. We have an unprecedented age of technological connectivity as our theater of operations. And we have the history of thousands of years of social institutions to stand on the shoulders of as we construct our own.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"A PORTION OF THE HELENA MEMBERSHIP","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-4 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02231206/helena-membership-4-1.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"And so we begin. Helena, in order to effectively execute projects that effectively address societal problems, needs to first understand the world and its set of current and future problems, trends, and affairs with some degree of accuracy. It needs to attract a set of world-class ideas for potential projects. It needs to have the ability to dispassionately conduct criticism and diligence on the feasibility of such ideas to understand whether they could be successfully implemented in reality.
\nOnce those projects are selected, it needs to find talented leadership to faithfully operate them. It needs the capital to fund the projects (often enormously expensive efforts). It needs the ability to showcase those projects to the world to raise awareness, change behaviors, and work with the public. It needs the subject-matter expertise to take on projects in whatever domain is necessary to get the job done. Were Helena to be forced to turn down projects that are objectively the most effective route to solve a problem, but happen to require specialized knowledge, assets, or leadership that we do not have, Helena would be less effective.
\nAnyone seeking to achieve the above needs to start from somewhere. We start with people. People represent ideas and expertise. They represent monetary, intellectual and social power. They represent different lived experiences, values, and ideologies. And they possess and will continue to develop the technologies and code the machines that will surpass humans in many other essential domains.
\nWhat if we could harness the collective intelligence, asset bases, and colliding viewpoints of some of the most effective leaders in society? What if, instead of directing our own narrow set of ideas onto this body of people, we instead created a symbiotic relationship with them to come up with the best possible outcomes, in the form of tangible projects?
\nThat body of people is the Helena Membership. Our idea was simple and not new. Let’s intelligently construct a group of people, directly associated with Helena, who represent and are willing to leverage the different assets necessary for all aspects of identifying and addressing societal problems. Since each member would need to represent a set of core personality attributes and abilities that allow them to effectively contribute to solving global problems, the pool of potential members would be quite small.
\nIf we did this correctly over time, the membership would collectively cover as many of the capabilities needed to understand and take action on a wide set of global trends and issues. There would be no hierarchy in the status of members and no difference in how we value financial capital versus intellectual capital or social capital. There would be no monetization of the membership; the members would be treated as peers rather than clients or tools. The structure would be built and incentivized to align interests to the execution of projects that produce social good, creating as few negative externalities as possible.
\nThe membership would, therefore, be a form of collective intelligence. Helena would be flexible, able to act in groups when groups best serve the desired outcome, but also able to intentionally break into silos when silos were most efficient, “parallel processing” multiple projects at a time. Members would clash and disagree with one another (and us) vigorously, but those collisions would serve as a needed method of strengthening the overall system, yielding the emergent quality of superior project outcomes rather than inaction or stagnation.
\nAll things considered, the Helena membership is simple and highly minimalist. It is complex only in how it differs from so many other organizational models. It is the task of unlearning many of the major flawed assumptions that pervade past and present social institutions where we face complications, and where our own (numerous) mistakes have and will continue to derive. In what follows, I defend this framework. I dive into an explanation of the design strategy behind many of the major components of the membership. My intention is not to prove that our model is better. It is instead to share notes. My hope is that the iterative process we have undergone to construct the beginnings of our own social institution can in some way contribute to the larger school of thought.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"IDEATION AMONGST HELENA MEMBERS DURING THE BEGINNING STAGES OF THE \"FACTORY IN THE SKY\" PROJECT","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-5","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02232025/helena-membership-5-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"AN EARLY SKETCH DEPICTING BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S \"JUNTO\" CLUB, A FORM OF MEMBERSHIP INTENDING TO BRING TOGETHER CONSTITUENT MINDS COVERING MULTIPLE DIFFERENT CAPABILITIES","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-7","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02232616/helena-membership-7.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"USER NODES MAKING UP THE INTERNET, HOWEVER CHAOTIC AND OFTEN DISORGANIZED, FUNCTION AS A CASE STUDY OF COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-8","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02232640/helena-membership-8.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The Group vs. The Individual
\nWhy Helena has a membership at all and why that membership is decentralized with no hierarchy
\nOne of the classic, ancient disputes of history is that concerning the “Great Man” theory. On one side, the argument goes that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men” — that a string of individuals, the Lincolns, Caesars, Churchills, Gandhis, and Alexanders made such an important imprint that their existence was the decisive factor driving the direction of history. There are few pursuits as unfashionable today as being a serious proponent of the Great Man theory, and probably for good reason. Beyond its almost comic levels of sexism and revisionism, the theory faces formidable refutation.
\nYet oddly, many still love building social institutions around it. With notable exceptions, there is a clear bias towards the assumption that a single great leader, providing top-down vision and instruction to their staff, clergy, troops, or team should be the prevailing mode of enacting societal change. It shouldn’t be. It’s been the hero-worship based model of governance that has led to thousands of years of marginalization and neglect (at best) of those who don’t fit a leader’s interests.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"CHURCHILL AND LINCOLN, TWO OF THE MOST CITED INDIVIDUAL LEADERS FOR PROPONENTS OF THE \"GREAT MAN\" THEORY OF HISTORY","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-9","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02232659/helena-membership-9.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"An over-reliance on top-down hierarchical military leadership led to the coordination failures and lack of agility that plagued late 20th and early 21st-century American leadership against exponentially weaker and underfunded opposition who mastered insurgency and decentralization. Less than 60 firms represented in the 1955 Fortune 500 remain there today, a trend I would argue is in part due to a lack of willingness of legacy businesses to relinquish a centralized mode of operations.
\nContemporary philanthropy is perhaps the worst offender among social institutions biased towards the “Great Man” theory. Some who hold great wealth seek not to utilize it in a quantitative and measured pursuit to enact the greatest social change, but rather towards causes to which they emotionally subscribe. So long as they are honest about it, this is probably harmless.
\nBut some philanthropists set out with a bolder thesis; they profess to optimize net societal impact through the creation of a robust and dispassionate institution of social good. Often with the right intent, those institutions then in turn rely predominantly on the wisdom of their founder for their operations. It is not a surprise, then, when the institution proves ineffective in a domain in which the founder has utterly no expertise. Or when it plunges into an ill-fated project not after considered due diligence, but because of the mistaken belief that the founder’s skill in accumulating wealth by selling sugar water will in turn translate to success in nuclear de-proliferation. Rewarded by the press and buttressed by the founder’s echo-chamber of salaried yes-men, the cycle then persists.
\nTo be clear, the world of “doing good” does have outlier cases of philanthropists who have expertly constructed and operated social institutions to prolific effect. I’d like to think we’ve found some of those philanthropists; Ray Chambers and John Arnold are notable examples. It’s no mistake that both of these leaders operate highly decentralized and partnership-based institutions that constantly challenge their assumptions. Yet as a share of the whole, cases like this are found few and far between. In this sense, the “impact” world deserves its present stereotype of ineffectiveness.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"Whether or not the leaders we are inspired by are agents of their own fate or just puppets of determinism, the former is just better for our sanity."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"And now an admission; I am still somewhat a partisan of the “great [leader]” theory. I do think there are cases in which great individuals, aided by or in opposition to the winds of momentum, inertia, and luck, have been deciding factors in shaping history, and I think they will continue to be. There is a recent trend of academic study to support this notion; MIT and Northwestern University researchers, Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken, respectively, find in two robust studies that leaders “can play crucial roles in shaping the growth of nations” from their sample between 1875 and 2005. Although it’s clear that the overwhelming tides of change come from decentralized groups working with some degree of cohesion, dismissing the roles of great individuals entirely is dangerous. We are plagued with far too many “social good networks” devoid of leadership, infected with infighting, less powerful than the sum of their component parts, and producing little more than gatherings or conference discussions as an end product.
\nI also gladly fall victim to the romantic notion that the individual has the power to change the world for the better. Ever since Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth of the champion Marduk harnessing the forces of chaos to create mankind, humanity has fallen victim as well. I think this addiction is, in net terms, healthy. The fundamental optimism that comes with this story of human triumph is a powerful stimulant that pushes great entrepreneurs, activists, and leaders to embark against insurmountable odds towards social mobility, because others have done so before. Alexander the Great was inseparable from his copy of the Iliad, sleeping with it and a dagger under his pillow every night; he needed the story of Achilles for motivation. Whether or not the leaders we are inspired by are agents of their own fate or just puppets of determinism, the former is just better for our sanity. We therefore shouldn’t reject the notion of the great individual leader so completely that we design our organizations in rejection of them.
\nHere is the kicker: we can have the best of both worlds. Organizations can be based upon a decentralized model devoid of a single source of wisdom and operational assets, while also reaping the benefits of strong leadership when it arises advantageously. It just takes intelligent, minimalist design. Helena’s attempt at working toward this idea is as follows.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"MAX BOOT'S \"INVISIBLE ARMIES\" AND GEN. STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL'S \"TEAM OF TEAMS\" ARE TWO HELPFUL BOOKS FOR THOSE WITH INTEREST IN STUDYING MILITARY DECENTRALIZATION AND INSURGENCY","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-9 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02232800/helena-membership-9-1.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"A POSSIBLE DEPICTION FROM THE ENUMA ELISH, A SECOND MILLENNIUM BC BABYLONIAN POEM SOME CONSIDER THE FIRST RECORDED EXAMPLE OF WRITTEN MYTH","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-10","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02232834/helena-membership-10.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"GIUSEPPE CADES' 1792 DEPICTION OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT FAMOUSLY REFUSING WATER FROM HIS TROOPS IN THE GEDROSIAN DESERT","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-11","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02232854/helena-membership-11.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Choosing To Create A Membership
\nThe most basic component was our choice to create a membership in the first place, rather than relying on just one leader. This was less a shrewd rejection of hierarchical bureaucracy and the “Great Man” theory, than it was the fact that we had no such leader available. I could not serve as that person; I had no ability to provide the assets (monetary, social, political, or intellectual) necessary to address any societal problem myself. Nor was there anyone else available to play that role.
\nWhat followed was the creation of a membership. We decided that the membership would consist of a group of multiple people, and that each would have equal footing. There would be no “board” or “committee” that some members sit on with extra powers, as most social institutions have. There would be no promotion system that a member could climb if they did something helpful for Helena. The membership would be constant and organic, growing piecemeal, with no “time limits” that arbitrarily ended one’s tenure. A decentralized and equal body, it would (in theory) reward dispassionate deliberation and incentivize external action rather than infighting, because there would be little that could be achieved by competitiveness or “winning” an argument.
\nThere would also be no ceiling to what a member could do within Helena. If a member felt it necessary to be prolifically active — suggesting significant projects, leading them, aiding in the diligence process for other projects and providing significant assets to them, and meeting constantly with other members at a breakneck pace, all to great positive effect to the world — they could do so with no friction.
\nIf a member worked better in a self-imposed silo in order to develop an idea, but then required the collective minds of multiple members to battle-test it and ultimately implement it, the membership would facilitate this seamlessly. As philosopher Rachel Bespaloff brilliantly wrote: “Great common thoughts are disclosed to man only when he is alone: they are the revelation made by solitude in the thick of collective action.” What would matter instead would be that the ideas and work of the members were objective, dispassionate, and the best logical course of action to take. So long as those tests were passed, Helena would impose no bureaucratic barriers to slow them.
\nThis would allow for both a group-based model of operation while also affording equal opportunity for individual members to lead. Whether a given project was achieved predominantly through the actions of one member, whether it was achieved through the actions of a consortium, or whether it was achieved through some mixture of the two, would be purely a matter of what the most efficient route was for the project to be executed. We would set no arbitrary rules, like binding each project to a “governing board” of “x” members, an invariable incubation period of “x” months, a funding minimum of “x” dollars, or some other elaborate organizational contraption. How could we possibly be so intelligent as to know, in advance, a universal structure for how to address societal problems? There is no “standard model” for Helena, but there is a “standard maxim” — the best idea wins. We simply formatted the Helena membership to incentivize all involved to make the best idea win.
\nIn the short time Helena has operated, we’ve seen the fruits of this approach. In Helena’s first major project — our effort to further develop technologies capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (among much else) — we needed to, amongst much else, employ an economic and scientific advisory council to vet and choose the most compelling prospective models, convince governmental leaders to buy the resulting technology, and find and route capital and press attention to the most viable solutions. In Helena’s second project, it so happened that we needed to conduct heavy due diligence on the technical vulnerabilities of the North American electrical grid, write comprehensive legislation to protect its most critical elements, and find a way to pass the legislation — in partnership with the intelligence and military communities — and at the state, federal, and presidential levels. For every task, the most applicable Helena members were the ones that made it happen, and they did so by choice. We didn’t require them to engage in the projects, and there was no organizational bylaw or rule dictating that they do. They were simply passionate about fighting climate change or passionate about protecting our critical infrastructure, so they were motivated and incentivized to help get the job done. And they did. Those that weren’t just didn’t work on the two projects, finding value in other projects and in meeting with other members.
\nIn each Helena project, there has been a wide span of member involvement. In some cases, members have assumed the role of the heroic individual leader, working on the project full time with Herculean effort. In some cases, members have aided in the funding of a project without dedicating time operationally to it. In one case, a member already working significantly on one project called us to give strategic advice about another, just because she found it interesting; that advice led us to a fundamental shift in our approach. We had no way of knowing beforehand which member would be most effective for which project. It just didn’t matter. We had the confidence in our system design that the answer would reveal itself organically.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"COMPUTERS ARE ABLE TO PROCESS INFORMATION BOTH COLLECTIVELY AND IN PARALLEL FORMAT. HUMAN GROUPS, AT THEIR MOST AGILE, EMULATE THIS ABILITY, ALBEIT OFTEN LESS EFFICIENTLY.","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-12","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02232937/helena-membership-12-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"A VISUALIZATION OF THE LORENZ ATTRACTOR","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-14","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233024/helena-membership-14.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Membership Variance
\nWhy Helena’s membership represents a diversity of seemingly unconnected “fields,” and what set of qualities are sought in a Helena member
\nFields don’t exist. They are social constructions that at times effectively aid in the organization of society, academia, the workforce, and other domains. But that doesn’t make them “real.” They are sometimes helpful proxies to simplify the explanation of what someone, or some organization, “does.” But again, that doesn’t make them real.
\nWhat is real are the myriad negative repercussions that come from an over-reliance on delineated fields. More so than ever before, the 21st century demands that we overcome our addiction to simplification, segmentation, and silos; and that we treat the term “interdisciplinary” with its due respect rather than the customary eye-rolling.
\nOf the many legendary cases of bureaucracy slowing interdisciplinary thinking, my favorite is the story of chaos theory, or “nonlinear science.” Chaos theory, as many now know, is one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in contemporary history; in the words of the 1991 Kyoto Prize committee, it brought about one “of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton.” You would therefore think that its discovery sent an immediate shockwave through the scientific community. It didn’t. And that was in large part because chaos theory couldn’t be fit into a single field.
\nIt was a meteorologist who first discovered the underlying concepts that led to chaos theory. Edward Lorenz, at the time an M.I.T. meteorology researcher, began to notice that the prediction system he was using to simulate future weather patterns would be highly sensitive to tiny input metrics. An extremely small change in variables like temperature and wind speed in the present, for example, would yield enormous differences in medium and long term future weather outcomes. At the time, those small changes in variables, usually so minute that they ran into the 6th or 7th decimal place, were simply rounded to the nearest 3rd decimal place, because it was assumed that it would make no practical difference. This breakthrough finding, now known as “Lorenz Attractors”, became the basis of the 1962 paper Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, which itself became the starting point of chaos theory. We now popularly refer to chaos theory with a similar quip that references this finding: that the flapping of the wings of a butterfly could, for example, directly lead to a superstorm on the opposite corner of the world: hence, the “Butterfly Effect.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"“to call the study of chaos ‘nonlinear science’ was like calling zoology ‘the study of non-elephant animals.’"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Lorenz did not have an easy time sharing this finding with the scientific community, or even getting many to initially believe him. As author James Gleick outlines in his stellar book, Chaos, Lorenz first shared his findings inside of his M.I.T. department. Fellow M.I.T. professor and colleague Willem Malkus originally laughed off Lorenz’ finding as an aberration. Later, after being proven profoundly wrong, Malkus looked back on his mistake.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"EDWARD LORENZ","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-15","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233105/helena-membership-15.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"INABILITY TO PREDICT WEATHER IN THE MEDIUM AND LONG TERM HAS ALWAYS FRUSTRATED PLANNERS. ECONOMIST KENNETH ARROW TELLS A NUMEROUS STORY OF A STUBBORN ARMY GENERAL WHO EXCLAIMED: \"I AM AWARE THAT THE FORECASTS ARE NO GOOD. HOWEVER, I NEED THEM FOR PLANNING PURPOSES!\"","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-16","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233100/helena-membership-16-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"James Gleick's \"Chaos\"","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-17","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233054/helena-membership-17.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"“Of course, we completely missed the point. [Lorenz] wasn’t thinking in terms of our physics at all. He was thinking in terms of some sort of generalized or abstracted model which exhibited behavior that he intuitively felt was characteristic of some aspects of the external world. He couldn’t quite say that to us, though. It’s only after the fact that we perceived that he must have held those views.”
\nUnpacking the comedy of errors Malkus and colleagues committed is a bit depressing. Lorenz was thinking in terms of a “generalized model” characteristic of the “external world” because that is his job as a scientist. To begin one’s hypothesis by thinking “in terms of our physics” — some institutionalized and siloed, abstract model — rather than by aiming to represent the reality of the outside world, irrespective of what model one uses, is precisely the error. Further, and crucially, it is the base intention behind the concept of the university model, predicated on the Latin universus, or “whole,” to investigate the objective answer to a given question rather than to prioritize satisfying an existing school of thought. The fact that Lorenz “couldn’t quite say” to his colleagues that he felt this way only shows the presence of institutionalized social pressure exacerbating the problem.
\nA further layer of difficulty Lorenz faced was the classification of the academic field of “linear science” itself. Because of the solidified orthodoxy and infrastructure behind the study of linear science in the university system, challenging that system was an uphill battle. Instead of integrating Lorenz’s ideas horizontally into the existing community as a welcome contribution to all scientific domains, academia did what it does best, creating a new silo, or “field,” to stick non-linear science into, far away from everything else. This was, of course, not the appropriate move. As mathematician Stanislaw Ulan described it: “to call the study of chaos ‘nonlinear science’ was like calling zoology ‘the study of non-elephant animals.’
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"STANISLAW ULAM","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-18","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233136/helena-membership-18.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Yet another issue resulting from the institutionalization of fields is that of ego reinforcement. Imagine you are a tenured professor who has defined his career from theories that deeply rely on linear systems. You have spent decades climbing the hierarchy of seniority in your department by continually publishing highly-cited papers that assume linear systems. You have won awards for your work, you are invited to the right dinners and social events due to it, and that success has come to define your own self-worth and contribution to the scientific canon. You then meet Edward Lorenz, a bright-eyed meteorologist with a new theory of nonlinearity which could challenge some of the very assumptions you have based your career upon. In your gut, you realize his theories are correct. But to admit that requires you to go deeply against the grain. Pondering this dilemma, the physicist Joseph Ford found no one better than Tolstoy to quote:
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to other, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Chaos theory is not nearly the only expression of the problem of field designation. We see it, no joke intended, across many fields. Siloed away in the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, using only unclassified, publicly available material, researcher Rex Hudson identified “new breeds of increasingly dangerous religious terrorists” as the main enemy facing the United States homeland, years before 9/11. Testifying to Congress on September 10th, 2001, FBI officials told public officials that the most imminent terrorism threat to the United States was from animal-rights activists. We all wish that the investigative and intelligence community would have better shared insights between their “field” of study and that of academic research of the Library of Congress.
\nIn diplomacy, there is also a rich history of reliance on a narrow set of domain expertise to solve broad, interdisciplinary problems. At the close of WW1, President Woodrow Wilson was tasked with laying the groundwork for lasting post-war global strategy to maintain geopolitical order. To do it, he created the “The Inquiry,” a body of 126 academics, nearly all (white) men in the fields of political science, law, geology, economics, and diplomatic history.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"MEMBERS OF THE UNDERWHELMING \"INQUIRY\" GROUP IN 1919","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-19","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233134/helena-membership-19.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"As author John Gaddis writes in his On Grand Strategy, The Inquiry crucially underperformed in one predictable area: it provided mostly theory rather than practical courses of action. Suggesting laughably broad principles such as conducting diplomacy “always frankly and in public view,” reducing arms “to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety,” and giving “equal weight” to the “populations concerned” in colonial disputes, the 126 academics gave, shockingly, academic advice. Gaddis quotes a French diplomat present at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where The Inquiry’s materials were presented, who criticized the strategy as a “pursuit of theories which had little relation to the emergencies of the hour.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"Imagine if an interdisciplinary group of leaders, with foresight on the challenges of successfully implementing behavior change and messaging across ideological and political belief systems, were present then to help. Imagine if that group was also equally capable of addressing a host of other global issues due to the agility enabled by interdisciplinary design. That is the social institution we aspire to build with Helena."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Today’s global challenges are plagued by the same problem. A particularly painful case study is that of climate change, where I would argue that a well-intentioned over-reliance on academics as spokespeople has backfired. In an exhaustive compilation of scientific literature over last 20 years, it has been found that there exists a 97% consensus among scientists not only that climate change is real, but that it is human-caused.
\nAs Michael E. Mann noted in his 2017 Congressional Testimony, there are some theories of gravity that do not enjoy a 97% consensus among scientists. Sitting in a climate scientist’s shoes, it would be logical to assume that the public would respond with grave concern to near-unanimous certainty on the human effect on Earth’s changing climate. The reality was not so kind. Climate skeptics, some with duplicitous intent, and some simply gullible, instead attacked the figure itself through alternative interpretation: Why is it not 100%? If scientists can’t fully agree on climate change, why should we believe it? Some politicians seized upon this misleading narrative with marked success. To most, news of the unprecedented scientific census was simply drowned out by competing political misinformation. A 2018 Gallup poll found that the number of Republicans and Independents who believed the scientific consensus dropped in the year prior to 35% and 70%, respectively. The same poll showed that 42% of Republicans and 65% of Independents were aware of the consensus.
\nSome view it as the fault of the scientific community that the public has not been sufficiently convinced of their near-unanimous findings on climate change and what it means to reach a 97% consensus. That would be akin to telling an airline pilot that her job is not complete until she both safely lands the plane and teaches everyone onboard to land it too. Messaging is not their job. The scientific discipline is rightfully one of dispassion and lack of emotion. Public relations, politics, and behavior change requires the opposite skill.
\nThose who possess separate tools should have been present from the start. As we now see more effective messaging on climate change from the likes of political comedians like John Oliver, popular for-profit fiction movies, and the intelligent integration of economic and for-profit incentives to solve climate change in the political sphere, we are finally beginning to see the fruits of interdisciplinary thinking in addressing the problem. But those brilliant thinkers and operators outside of academia were sorely missed back when concern around climate change was far more siloed. As Nathaniel Rich writes in his brilliant essay Losing Earth, between 1979 and 1989 a brave group of scientists became maddeningly close to addressing climate change with significant policy implementation. The story unfolds like a Greek tragedy; the scientists narrowly missed the mark, falling just short of signing comprehensive treaties that could have solved the climate crisis.
\nImagine if an interdisciplinary group of leaders, with foresight on the challenges of successfully implementing behavior change and messaging across ideological and political belief systems, were present then to help. Imagine if that group was also equally capable of addressing a host of other global issues due to the agility enabled by interdisciplinary design. That is the social institution we aspire to build with Helena.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"A NASA-CREATED HEAT MAP OF THE WORLD IN 2100, GIVEN CURRENT CLIMATE TRENDS","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-20","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233133/helena-membership-20.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"INTERSTELLAR IS JUST ONE EXAMPLE OF A SURGE OF HOLLYWOOD MOVIES CONVINCINGLY AND ACCURATELY DEPICTING A FUTURE EARTH RAVAGED BY CLIMATE CHANGE","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-21","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233444/helena-membership-21.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"NATHANIEL RICH'S \"LOSING EARTH\"","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-22","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233441/helena-membership-22.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The Helena Membership Model
\nHere is how we’ve acted on this idea. The Helena membership is primarily constructed horizontally, and secondarily constructed vertically.
\nIn a primarily vertical design, before beginning, one first makes the judgement that they will seek to solve problems in field ‘x’. They then make the logical assumption that they should recruit as members those they or society deem to be leaders in field ‘x’ in consultation with the new members they have no recruited, the organization might also identify which other fields directly intersect with field ‘x,’ and recruit leaders representing those fields. Some stop there, and begin operations.
\nSome go a bit further, integrating a secondary design feature to their membership. They next identify a set of horizontal assets and skillsets that they predict will help them in their operations. Those could be, but aren’t limited to, the monetary capital they will need to fund their work, the social reach to promote their work, a network of relationships they will need to become influential in service of implementing their work, and highly intelligent strategists to help them think through critical organizational decisions. They then identify leaders who have those assets and skillsets, irrespective of whether those leaders at first glance represent field ‘x,’ and recruit them into their membership. This vertical model has worked brilliantly in the past, and it may very well continue to work for some in the future. But in our case, it was not at all a fit.
\nThe design of Helena’s model began with a declaration of our own ignorance, rather than a pre-emptive decision that we would focus on solving problems in a certain field. This was partially because we had no world-class expertise in any field. It was also partially because we felt we had no competitive ability to, alone, intelligently diligence the world’s state of affairs, then predict from that analysis that a field or set of fields were best placed for our organizational focus. I’m personally quite glad of this early recognition of our own incompetence, especially as I continue to meet those who have shuttered or pivoted organizations after realizing their valiant early assumptions didn’t correspond with the realities of their future capabilities.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"JFK AT HIS AMERICAN UNIVERSITY COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS, 1963","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-23","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233440/helena-membership-23.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"A NASA GRAPH CHARTING HISTORICAL ATMOSPHERIC CARBON LEVELS AS THEY TREND TOWARDS THE DREADED POTENTIAL \"POINT OF NO RETURN\"","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-24","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233616/helena-membership-24.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"We first began with the educated guess that many societal problems created by humans were thus created by tools and behaviors controlled or exhibited by humans. It would follow that some of those human-caused societal problems could be solved by utilizing those same tools and attributes. Climate change can be in part attributed to an excess of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases emitted into the atmosphere due to many years of human decisions through the utilization of political structures, technologies, businesses and other human-made systems. It would follow that addressing elements of climate change could then be enacted by utilizing political structures, technologies, businesses, and other human-made systems to extract those gases from the atmosphere, reduce their current and future emissions into the atmosphere, and incentivize current generations to take separate courses of action to prevent the problem from reestablishing.
\nWe also assumed that some problems can scale in severity to such a point that they cannot not be solved by utilizing human-centric tools alone. If we aren’t vigilant, climate change could unfortunately become a posterboy example. The United Nations warns that the compounding effects of greenhouse gas emissions after decades of inaction will lead to a “point of no return” after which likely no human policy, business, or technological change could bring us back to normal. In this sense, John F. Kennedy’s proclamation that “our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man” was probably too optimistic.
\nLet’s try not to make proving him wrong a habit. Happily, many societal problems have not yet progressed to this advanced stage, or by nature most likely won’t. Gerrymandering, for example, is clearly human-caused and human solvable. Hope remains.
\nAnd so we placed Helena’s design emphasis on primarily representing those horizontal human qualities. We would first identify the tools humans use to enact change. Then we would find and recruit the people we felt most represented those tools. Of course, no handbook besides logic exists for this task; there is clearly no agreed-upon set of horizontal qualities that make up human nature, but simple observation of history and the present world around you makes for an imperfect first step.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Core Elements of the Helena Membership
\nFour human “tools,” four horizontal human “qualities” and four horizontal human “behaviors” emerged as the initial horizontal elements to represent in the membership. Naturally, as we have grown, we have realized that these initial elements are far from comprehensive. Naïveté, though, works wonders for getting started.
\nThe human tools were politics, capital, behavior change and technology (in no order of importance). There is no rocket-science explanation needed. Backed by the weight of a government, decisions made in the political realm are a major channel for creating change globally. Thus, it would be important to recruit as members those who understand politics and have had success implementing change through its systems. Money also matters. Capital pays for things; it can be utilized to fund solutions to problems and the teams necessary to operate those solutions. Thus, it would be important to recruit members who understand capital and how to efficiently deploy it. Sometimes, though, no matter how much capital and legislative ability one has, a problem in the world can’t be solved without people changing their minds. For that, it would be important to recruit as members those with large social platforms and a willingness to use those platforms for a moral purpose. Finally, technology. Among so much else, technology is the master accelerant; it can implement a change in the world faster, cheaper, and more efficiently. It would be important for us to represent those who are playing a role in building, understanding, and utilizing powerful technologies that lead to changes in society. These four tools are crude approximations of the ways in which humans “operate.” They are also highly overlapping; most members in Helena represent more than one, and some represent all.
\nYet finding people who represent these four human “tools” is not nearly enough. Having the power to implement an idea says nothing about the strength of the idea itself. There also exist some very bad people who hold the tools of political power, capital, behavior change and technology. Thus, there are more essential layers of horizontal attributes to look for.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"RAPHAEL'S \"THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS\": YET ANOTHER REMINDER OF THE PERSISTENT HUMAN STRUGGLE TO DEFINE AND SETTLE UPON ETHICAL FRAMEWORKS","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-25","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233655/helena-membership-25.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The next set of those attributes were the four human “qualities” of moral vision, lived experience, artistic expression, and intelligence. Someone with moral vision has committed themselves to a conscious pursuit of utilizing power for a just end. It is no prerequisite that they settle exactly upon what their “end” is; humanity itself has been in collective disagreement over that question for more than 4,000 years. But one becomes directionless without having made an honest commitment to filter their decisions through a moral gauze.
\nLived experience is the essential data of social context. No book can transfer the experiential knowledge of life from someone else’s vantage point, and no amount of data intake (that we know of) can allow for one to inherit someone else’s experience of a certain event.
\nLived experience can’t supplant logic; it’s the union of both that proves optimal. Einstein, in his Ideas and Opinions, says it best: “Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.”
\nArtistic expression is, among so much else, an ability to understand and communicate the underlying basis of nature and emotion. It has often been the forms of art, not brute force, that catalyze significant change and disruption; take your pick from Da Vinci’s Studies of the Fetus in the Womb, Picasso’s Guernica, Angelou’s poetic activism, Douglass’ oration, The Rite of Sping’s shocking opening night, thousands of years of religious iconography, the unkillable ideas of Charlie Hebdo, and seemingly infinite more. Some go as far as to state that art is the act of looking at the world ”sub specie aeternitatis,” or from a universal, eternal perspective. In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein goes so far as to strike down the distance between art and moral philosophy in his statement that “ethics and aesthetics are one.” Clearly, leaving out representation of artistic expression would prove a mistake.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"MAYA ANGELOU","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-27","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233730/helena-membership-27.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"LEONARDO DA VINCI'S \"STUDIES OF THE FETUS IN THE WOMB\"","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-26","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233732/helena-membership-26.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"PICASSO'S GUERNICA","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-28","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233759/helena-membership-28.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The Vertical
\nEven with the membership well represented with the horizontal tools of politics, capital, behavior change, and technology, and even if those tools were modulated by the horizontal qualities of moral vision, lived experience, artistic expression, and intelligence, something significant is still missing: behavior. If the members don’t agree on how to conduct themselves when working collectively to develop a solution and implement it, no superhuman abilities matter. Just ask the Beatles. Or Destiny’s Child (that one was probably for the best).
\nThe four horizontal behaviors are first principle thinking, dispassionate analysis, willingness to collaborate, and process agnosticism. A first principle thinker seeks to find the most basic and fundamental premise that their argument is built upon, and makes sure that that premise, and all that is layered upon it, is sound. Without employing this underlying philosophy, one runs the almost certain risk of being deeply misguided in their actions. Utilizing first principle thinking still doesn’t mean you will be “right.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"“We humans do not need to be perfect, we just need to be flawed in offsetting ways.” Philip Tetlock"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Even the great Descartes, a major proponent of reasoning from first principles who wielded systematic doubt until he was left with “indubitable truths,” famously didn’t get some of his indubitable truths right. But it does mean your process is logical. Dispassionate analysis is the art of separating emotion from decision making when it can be corrupted by it. This is a deceptively challenging task, and one that often does not win friends. Those unwilling, when it is most advantageous, to work in teams and share information are better described as ineffective than merely selfish. And the same holds for those who care more about sticking to a given plan compared to sticking stubbornly to the end mission that plan services.
\nThese three core elements — tools, qualities, and behaviors — made up the primary strategy for constructing the Helena membership. A beginning group of exceptional people was found that exhibited most or all of these traits. As we continue to slowly grow Helena’s membership piecemeal, our goal is to never stray from these elements. Unsurprisingly, we’ve also added to them as we’ve learned from failures. We do have less of a concern over whether each member holds every one of the elements above. There are some that are non-negotiable, like moral vision. But it’s obviously not a prerequisite that every member is a world-class artist. The goal is simply that the membership balances out. If ultimately successful, we hope to have stolen well from Philip Tetlock, who said “we humans do not need to be perfect, we just need to be flawed in offsetting ways.”
\nWith the membership now exhibiting these horizontal qualities, it has its foundation. But it isn’t nearly constructed. A major task still remains: understanding which vertical qualities, or “fields,” the membership must represent and act upon. But we have an advantage now. Instead of having to make this extraordinarily important step at the onset, it can now be made by tapping into a powerful base of knowledge.
\nThe membership, at this point populated by a group of exceptional people who hold tools in politics, capital, behavior change, and technology, with qualities of moral vision, lived experience, artistic expression, and intelligence, while exhibiting the behaviors of first principle thinking, dispassionate analysis, collaborative will and process agnosticism, is developed enough to be consulted. This is an essential new development; it finally moves the core burden of knowledge.
\nPreviously, a weak set of only a few people (us creating and running Helena) could consult only our own brains to make decisions regarding Helena’s strategy. Shaping that strategy is a daunting task, requiring judgments on which global problems to focus on and why, and how to construct projects around those problems. Yet now, we can utilize the membership, a body optimized across the characteristics needed to better answer those questions, as an alternate computing system to our own individual brains. We can now garner essential advice from a source far more powerful and diverse than ourselves.
\nIn this sense, the membership is a rudimentary “collective intelligence.” It is comprised of individual nodes that, when combined, yield an emergent output exceeding the sum of its parts. Now, when tasked with making decisions regarding what to focus on, as well as when making decisions about how to add further capabilities (members) to itself, the membership can employ its own collective thinking power, which is far more competent than that of any one founder or executive.
\nThe best way to explain this strategy is through one of contemporary society’s most pressing challenges: how artificial intelligence engineers are grappling with the problem of ethics. Philosopher Nick Bostrom, in his seminal book Superintelligence, defines “collective intelligence” as a system of constituent intellects, or more simply a well-operated group of humans working together towards a united end. Being that this collective intelligence is made up of human minds, and being that human minds are not comparable in some types of processing abilities to that of their synthetic counterparts, Bostrom rightfully discounts the possibility that a human collective intelligence will achieve the “superintelligent” state. (In fact, of possible systems that could achieve superintelligence, collective intelligence ranks near the bottom.)
\nSo what will be the entity that becomes “superintelligent?” Most likely, Bostrom and others predict, that entity will be some form of a machine. Initially, that machine will be programmed by humans. As it develops toward superintelligence, the machine will transition to programming itself, and thus making decisions autonomously.
\nThus, one of the most ominous challenges that face developers of artificial intelligence is that of normativity. Humans don’t have a standard, agreed upon model of ethics. A middling record, to say it charitably, exists in humanity’s historic ability to act ethically toward one another. We also don’t understand much of the operations of our own brain that lead to our own ethical choices. So how are we going to program ethics into a machine? How can we make sure that the ethics we initially program into this machine lead it to help humanity rather than harm it once the machine becomes a superintelligent agent?
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"AN ETHICAL PROBLEM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ENGINEERS FACE TODAY: HOW SHOULD AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES MAKE CRITICAL DECISIONS IN POTENTIALLY DEADLY CRASHES?","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-29","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233823/helena-membership-29.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Bostrom writes of multiple potential solutions to this problem. One of his most famous is what he coins “indirect normativity” — in short, asking the AI. Instead of trusting ourselves, with thousands of years of our own flawed ethical precedent, to come up with the moral goals that the AI should pursue, we would utilize the AI’s superior intelligence to answer that question for us. In Bostrom’s words, instead of ordering the system to achieve a direct, human-made outcome, we would order the system to “achieve that which we would have wished the AI to achieve if we had thought about the matter long and hard.” The promise of indirect normativity, Bostrom writes, “lies in the fact that it could let us offload much of the difficult cognitive work required to carry out a direct specification of an appropriate final goal.”
\nIndirect normativity is absolutely not the consensus solution for this problem in artificial intelligence, nor did Bostrom intend it to be. It’s just a contender. But for the problem that Helena faces, a far more rudimentary one involving human collective intelligence, it is an obvious solution.
\nIn our case, we are building a social institution made up of a small membership of exceptional but flawed humans, and we wish to find the optimal areas for that institution to focus on in service of solving societal problems. What if we utilize a far more analog, far weaker application of indirect normativity? Is it not far superior to treat the membership as a collective intelligence, then ask it what to focus on? Plus, unlike that of artificial superintelligence, our choice isn’t a binary. Success in our model means combining the best insights of the larger membership group with the best insights that we, and the outside world, can come up with.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"AN EARLY (AND QUITE INEFFECTIVE) FORM OF HUMAN INDIRECT NORMATIVITY: ASKING THE ORACLE OF DELPHI","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"helena-membership-30","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02233838/helena-membership-30.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"And so we applied principles of indirect normativity, albeit in significantly more elementary fashion, as our next step in constructing the membership. Conducting an audit of the existing members recruited from the prior “horizontal” focus, we took stock of which “fields” already happened to be represented.
\nTwo parallel processes were then initiated. The first was a deep consultation with the members, asking them which trends, problems, and domains they would suggest focusing on during the next 50 years. These conversations make up a continuous process, which we call “Helena Meetings,” taking place around the world and throughout the year. In some cases meetings happen individually, between ourselves and a single Helena member. In most cases, the members meet each other in small combinations, usually just two or three at a time. And in some cases we bring larger numbers of the membership together, of course constrained by logistics and cost. We are obsessive about this process, writing down every insight from every communication we set up in service of better understanding which areas of knowledge we continue to lack, which “fields” we still don’t represent in the membership, and which potential projects we should consider taking on.
\nThe second is our internal process of attempting to become as educated as possible about the world, and to make our own strategic considerations as individuals. Even though the strategic abilities that can be ascertained from reading, conversational knowledge accumulation, and the gaining of experience from project operations pales in comparison to the collective intelligence of the membership, it is still invaluable. More importantly, it is essential for myself and our team in our pursuit to best lead the organization as it grows larger and more complex.
\nThe best insights from the first process of indirect normativity, supplemented by the insights of the individualistic internal process, yields the strategy we employ to construct the “vertical” elements of the Helena membership. So far, (as of early 2019) this process has led us to the educated guesses that certain “fields” are worth including more heavily in Helena’s membership than they were previously. They include artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, the future of clean energy technology, climate policy, criminal justice, misinformation, blindspots of America’s governance system, democratic elections, complexity science, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, healthcare systems, natural resources, rare earth metals, rapid prototyping. We only know two things for sure; one — this list is not nearly correct or complete, and two — it will constantly iterate.
\nOur model is not nearly perfect. In fact, it can’t be, because it is built from, run by, and structured to interact with, an imperfect medium — humans. But our process does represent the result of trying to formulate a more intelligent system of membership to support projects to address societal problems. The thinker Sam Harris wrote that “we need systems wiser than we are.” Hopefully our imperfect system, iterating and iterating as it continues to grow, proves able to honor that idea.
\nHelena will certainly in the future seek to harness, in partnership with that of the human intellect, the forces of artificial intelligence. But we must crawl before we walk. Further, if we do our job correctly, some of the “human” Helena members will be those who develop and implement artificial intelligence that exceeds our own, and we will have a chance to utilize it to noble ends. But that is the frontier of another essay I am as yet wholly unqualified to write.
\n"}],"sidePopups":{"popups":null}}},{"id":"cG9zdDox","databaseId":1,"title":"An Antarctic Odyssey","slug":"an-antarctic-odyssey","link":"https://www.helena.org/an-antarctic-odyssey/","date":"2020-11-11T06:50:28","isSticky":false,"author":{"node":{"name":"admin"}},"excerpt":"","featuredImage":{"node":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/20172521/artic-odessy-featured.jpg","title":"artic-odessy-featured"}},"acfArticleDetails":{"seo":{"title":null,"metaDescription":null,"metaImage":null},"truncatedArticleTitle":null,"magazineArticleHero":{"text":"Some fathers and sons bond over games of catch.\r\nThe Swans bond over expeditions through the most inhospitable conditions on Earth.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"an-arctic-odyssey-m","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/02224922/an-arctic-odyssey-m.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/02224933/an-arctic-odyssey-scaled.jpg"},"widescreenImage":null}},"articleIntro":{"title":"","subtitle":"Robert and Barney Swan's Record Breaking Walk to the South Pole","authorText":null,"author":[{"title":"Peter Schiavelli","slug":"peter-schiavelli","contentType":{"node":{"uri":"/team/"}}}]},"detailBlocks":[{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Barney Swan woke up as usual on the morning of January 5th, 2018; his feet, however, did not. This was not entirely unexpected. He was in Antarctica, on day 45 of his 600 nautical mile trek to the South Pole, and he had been going through the same ritual every day since his boots had cracked from the cold a little over two weeks before.
\n“After about day thirty my feet were pretty cold during the day, but they would warm up at night,” he said. (It was summer in Antarctica; there was no sunset.) “They would feel like pins and needles at first, and eventually like razors when they warmed up.”
\nOn day 45 though—even after trudging 10 nautical miles that day, uphill, on skis, with a 200-pound sled strapped to his torso—nothing. “They just didn’t wake up.” Swan was traversing those 600nm in order to complete the South Pole Energy Challenge (SPEC), which called for him and his team to walk to the geographic South Pole using only renewable energy sources.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"medium","type":"Video","video":"https://player.vimeo.com/video/285277650","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":null,"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Swan had created, planned, and undertaken the endeavor with his 61-year-old father, Robert Swan, OBE, who was himself a well-known adventurer—possibly the greatest living one—and an ideal travel companion, since he had already been there.
\nIn the mid-1980’s, guided only by “sun, sextant, and watch,” Robert completed a 900-mile trek, unaided, through the Antarctic terrain to reach the Pole. And then, a few years after that, in 1989, he turned around and made his way north to become the first person in history to walk to both geographic Poles.
\nFive years before SPEC, he and his son began to talk about making another trip. Some fathers and sons bond over games of catch or gray mornings on a fishing boat; the Swans bond over two-month expeditions through the most inhospitable conditions on Earth. Every family has its traditions.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"The spirit of the Foundation revolves around the idea that Earth’s environmental future is the product of our decisions, both small and large."},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"SPEC was the latest in a long line of projects and outreach efforts set up by Robert Swan’s 2041 Foundation, a company he launched to catalyze “effective solutions within lifestyle, business, and education to encourage autonomy in our carbon neutral future.” The spirit of the Foundation revolves around the idea that Earth’s environmental future is the product of our decisions, both small (food choices at the market, carpooling) and large (investment in ocean cleanup, forestation projects). Its goal is essentially to inspire us to make better ones.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"BARNEY SWAN, 23, AT THE START OF A PLEASANT ANTARCTIC MORNING.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-1","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215212/antarctic-odyssey-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"ROBERT SWAN, VICTORIOUS AFTER HIS FIRST 900 MILE WALK TO THE SOUTH POLE.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-2","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03002000/antarctic-odyssey-2.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"POLAR EXPLORER ROBERT SWAN","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-3","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03001958/antarctic-odyssey-3.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"THE INVITING SOUTH SEAS, EN ROUTE TO ANTARTICA, 1984. (COURTESY OF ROBERT SWAN)","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-4","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03001955/antarctic-odyssey-4.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"BARNEY AND ROB SWAN","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-5","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03001953/antarctic-odyssey-5.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"MULTINATIONAL SIGNATORIES OF THE ANTARCTIC TREATY, 1959.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-6","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03001951/antarctic-odyssey-6.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The Foundation got its name from the year that the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, which was signed in 1991 and prohibits drilling and mining in Antarctica for 50 years, can be renegotiated. Swan fears for the permanence of the ban, a fear that appears to be well-founded.
\nAs the date approaches, the race for Antarctic footholds is escalating: 29 nations have established or have plans to establish scientific research bases on the continent. (Conducting scientific research is a requirement for a seat at the renegotiation table.) China alone has four, along with plans for a fifth, to go along with a second ice-breaker ship and an air squadron (and accusations by other countries of “undeclared mineral resource exploration”). The United States has six.
\n“Antarctica really is the line in the snow,” Barney Swan told me. “If those ice caps around Antarctica start to melt it’s like pulling a cap on something—trillions of tons of ice just pouring into the ocean. It has the potential for catastrophic climate change on a scale that we can’t even imagine at a pace that we’ve never seen before.”
\nSPEC was the Swans’ proportional escalation in response: it is the most dangerous, dramatic, and, perhaps most importantly, well-publicized of 2041’s projects to date. It required two years of logistical planning, a year of physical training, and it received sponsorships from some of the world’s leading environment, technology, and energy companies, including Shell, Commvault, and the W-Foundation. Much to the Swans’ delight, it has also received almost 400 pieces of news coverage and reached an estimated audience of 570m people.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"HAZARDOUS MELTING ARCTIC ICE DURING ROBERT SWAN'S NORTH POLE WALK","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-10","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03002140/antarctic-odyssey-10-scaled.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"When the hole in the ozone layer was first reported in Nature in 1985, Robert Swan was far from the typical circulation routes for science journals. He was in Antarctica, hunkering down in the shelter he had built himself, waiting out the long winter before departing for the Pole the following summer.
\nIn a 2010 interview with Sabotage Times, he described the situation. “The only way you could do it back then, we had to buy a ship, sail it from London to Antarctica, build a hut… live in the bloody thing for nine-and-a-half months, five of us, and then three of us strike out for the Pole.” He was in Antarctica for almost a year; the march itself took 70 days.
\nThe findings in that issue of Nature would not have surprised him. He and his partners spent the majority of their walk directly under the hole he hadn’t been told was there, and their experience corroborated the research. “Our faces were burning off. We just had a really strong feeling that something wasn’t right.” He still bears the effects: the UV exposure was intense enough to permanently bleach Swan’s already-light eyes a frosty sky blue.
\nThe effects of climate change were even more manifest a few years later, on the other side of the globe. He set off for the North Pole in March, after the winter freeze but before the summer ice melt, only to find himself slipping and sliding over a crumbling Arctic ice sheet. “We were walking across ice that should not have been melting,” he said in the same interview. It was supposed to start melting in August. “We damn nearly all died.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"“We damn nearly all died.”"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"SATELLITE PHOTOS OF FURTHER ICE SHELF DAMAGE. (NASA)","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-7 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03002357/antarctic-odyssey-7-1-scaled.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"From that point on, environmental preservation and sustainability became Swan’s life pursuits. The idea of anthropogenic climate change was still nascent—the International Panel on Climate Change was founded only one year before Swan made it to the Arctic Pole—and the science behind it was not being widely disseminated. Swan immediately understood both the value and the urgency of the message, and he decided the most effective way for people to understand it was the way he had: through experience. (As his son put it, “to look people in the eye and connect with their senses.”) In the past 14 years, the 2041 Foundation has taken over 3500 people on 22 expeditions, from month-long South African yacht trips to cross-country bike rides.
\nAlthough the elder Swan had been back to Antarctica many times, that first expedition was still the only time he had made his way to the Pole entirely by foot. He and his son started talking seriously about recreating the march when Barney was eighteen. SPEC was announced three years later, and Barney, at just twenty-one years old, was in charge of logistics.
\nEver the showman, and keenly aware of the power of a compelling narrative, Robert had added a twist to each of his first two famous expeditions: his first jaunt to the South Pole had been the longest unassisted march in history; and for his trip to the North, he took with him seven team members, one from every continent. SPEC had the obvious one—father and son, the continuation of the fight, inter-generational commitment, etc.—but the Swans wanted to make a more tangible, emphatic, clima(c)tic statement as well. So they decided to make the trip solely powered by renewable energy sources. Shell provided advanced bio-fuels; NASA designed ice melters for warm water; they had lithium batteries, vacuum flasks for melting and storing liquids, and solar panels to prop over their sleds.
\nAfter all, if renewables could sustain someone in Antarctica, couldn’t they sustain someone anywhere? And, by extension (and in light of Antarctica specifically), if the world ran on renewables, why would anyone even need to drill?
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"After all, if renewables could sustain someone in Antarctica, couldn’t they sustain someone anywhere?"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"A LINE IN THE SNOW: FRACTURING OF THE LARSEN ICE SHEET, AS SEEN FROM AIR.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-8 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03002807/antarctic-odyssey-8-1-scaled.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"1986 NASA IMAGERY OF THE OZONE LAYER HOLE","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-9","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215231/antarctic-odyssey-9.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"ROBERT SWAN'S BRAND NEW ICE-BLUE EYE COLOR, COURTESY OF THE YET UNDISCOVERED OZONE HOLE. 1986","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-11","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03002138/antarctic-odyssey-11.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"A SOUVENIR FOR BARNEY'S TROUBLES.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-14","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03002755/antarctic-odyssey-14-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"ROB REPLENISHING ENERGY STORES, COURTESY OF SHELL BIOFUEL.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-13","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03002800/antarctic-odyssey-13.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"BARNEY REMAINING IN HIGH SPIRITS.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-15","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03002752/antarctic-odyssey-15.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"BARNEY FILLING HIS WATER CANISTER WITH A NASA DESIGNED SNOW MELTER.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-nasa-snow-melter","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/13034952/antarctic-odyssey-nasa-snow-melter.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"REUNITED FOR THE LAST DEGREE.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-16","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03002751/antarctic-odyssey-16.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"In Antarctica, around the time Barney’s boots cracked, Robert came to a realization: he wasn’t moving fast enough. They were averaging nine nautical miles per day, but in order to reach the Pole in their window, they would need to increase that to over 11, as well as climb 7000 feet of elevation. On day 26, Robert wrote an ominous post on the expedition blog: “I am slow, I recognize that and still fatigued from the travel already completed. My body has not recovered as well as I had hoped but my only concern is that I don’t slow the others down. This weighs heavy with me tonight. We must make good time and I hope I can keep pace.”
\nBarney could see Robert’s pain. “He was really hurting himself,” he said. Temperatures were reaching minus-40°F even without the harrowing Antarctic wind chill, and Robert was fatiguing quickly. He had frostbite on his face, frostnip on his fingers. His chafing was so bad that patches of skin “the size of a small child’s head” were peeling off his legs. Their friend Henry Worsley, OBE, a British explorer who had died in Chile two years before, was not far from their minds.
\nWorsley, who, like Swan, had spent much of his adventuring life in the Antarctic wilderness, had made it his mission to become the first person to walk across Antarctica entirely unassisted. He had mapped out a path that would take him from Berkner Island on the continent’s west coast, past the Pole, up and over a massive snow ridge called Titan Dome, and would ultimately finish at the Ross Ice Shelf in the south, more than 1000 miles from where he began. On November 13th, 2015, Worsley set off—alone—from Berkner. On January 2nd, just one day behind schedule, he reached the Pole, though his body was steadily weakening, and he was suffering from sharp, sporadic stomach pains. He forged ahead. On January 20th, after more than two weeks of relentless, ruthless climbing, he crested Titan Dome. He was less than one hundred miles away from the Ice Shelf, but his body was shutting down. For two days, he couldn’t leave his tent. Finally, on January 22nd, after 71 days and 800 miles, he relented and called for help. When the airlift picked him up, he was conscious and optimistic, and he spoke reassuringly with his wife on the phone that night. The next day, his organs began failing. Bacterial peritonitis was discovered in his abdomen, and bile was leaking into his abdominal cavity and blood stream. He was immediately flown from Antarctica to a hospital in Chile for surgery. The day after that, he was dead. He was 55.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"A SMALL ROADBLOCK ON THE WAY.","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-17 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03002850/antarctic-odyssey-17-1-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"By the time the next SPEC blog entry was posted—on day 29, by Martin Barnett, the team’s navigator—Robert had turned back.
\n“That first couple of days after leaving dad, it was just incredibly quiet,” Barney told me. “It was a relief because he was hurting himself during the day, but it was also hugely daunting—we had over halfway to go. I’d look behind in the hope that he was somewhere on the horizon trying to catch-up, and I’d kind of see a little mirage of him.” He paused. “It was just deadly quiet.” Their pace, though, picked up. Between days 29 and 31, the remaining three members of the team—the younger Swan, Barnett, and Kyle O’Donoghue, a documentary filmmaker—covered almost 38nm.
\nThe 2041 Foundation has always made it its mission to show people, in the most visceral way—that is, by actually taking them there—what is happening to our environment. SPEC, however, was far too long and far too intense to be opened up to the public, so 2041 set up the Ski Last Degree program.
\nParticipants in the program, called the Last Degree team, were flown in so that they could ski the last latitudinal degree (from 89°S to 90°S, 69nm of terrain) with the SPEC team.
\nWhen the Last Degree team arrived at Union Glacier base camp just after New Year’s Day, they had an unexpected addition to their group: a rested, recovered Robert Swan, their new expedition leader. He would accompany them—and his son—on the final leg of the expedition.
\nOn January 15, 2018, fifty-six days after they initially set out, Barney and Robert Swan arrived, together, at the South Pole.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"AT THE SOUTH POLE.","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-18 (1)","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03002859/antarctic-odyssey-18-1-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"In the months since they returned home, Robert and Barney have taken almost no respite. The message, not the expedition itself, was the real goal of SPEC, and they are, as Barney put it, “pushing as hard as we can to scale what we did.”
\nBarney flew from Antarctica to Davos, Switzerland, to speak at the World Economic Forum, and since then they have been on what amounts to a world tour of conferences and seminars, from London to Chicago, Australia to Vietnam. The intention, he said, was to “be a part of a group of people that actually want to make a tangible impact. To be a part of some good projects and good people that actually make a difference.”
\nBarney has taken the lead on formatting their message for the rising generation: in addition to internet blogs and videos, they have been working on a virtual reality program to play at eco-conferences and Burning Man, as well as a phone application that will track its user’s carbon footprint. The idea is that the app will motivate people to make environmentally-friendly life decisions, because those decisions will yield better scores on their phones—a Fitbit for greenhouse gas emissions. (Hopefully the 2041 app can capitalize on people’s competitiveness—or guilt—in much the same way.)
\nThe Foundation has a new long-term goal, too: the ClimateForce Challenge, which aims to remove 320m tons of carbon dioxide from the air by the year 2025. The Swans’ focus on carbon removal is recent, and it’s happening because they see the writing on the wall: although reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a necessary step in mitigating global warming, the total amount of emissions in the atmosphere is already perilously close to reaching the tipping point beyond which environmental disaster is all but certain.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"THE CLIMEWORKS SWITZERLAND CARBON-CAPTURE FACTORY","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-20","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/12215220/antarctic-odyssey-20.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The necessary step, then, is to find ways to remove existing CO2 from the air. The Swans used SPEC to demonstrate some of the technologies that make this possible. Between trip-planning, logistics, and flying themselves and their equipment to the continent, they estimated that SPEC came at a cost of 240 tons in CO2 emissions. (The march itself, obviously, emitted none.)
\nTo counteract this, they arranged to have that amount of CO2—plus another 50%, just to be sure—permanently removed from the atmosphere, a total of 360 tons. They used a combination of natural and man-made solutions: investment in afforestation, reforestation, and ocean-cleanup projects, and they financed a direct-air capture company in Switzerland called Climeworks to suck some of it out of the air and store it underground. This also made them the first—of many, hopefully—commercial customers for carbon dioxide capture and sequestration.
\nThe 2041 Foundation’s next expedition was also recently announced—ClimateForce: Arctic. In June of 2019, Robert and Barney will take, by boat, a team of professionals, industry leaders, and students to the Arctic, where the ravages of climate change are most evident, and most destructive.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"Robert Swan TED Talk","size":"medium","type":"Video","video":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIVSJYazE9s","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":null,"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"On day 45, when his feet refused to wake, Barney Swan still had almost 100nm left until he reached the Pole. His father had turned back two weeks before, and he was looking at feet that were indisputably frostbitten. “That was the hardest day. The reality of losing toes in that moment…” He trailed off. “I think what really got me through was remembering that I was there by choice, not by circumstance. There are so many people in the world who aren’t there by choice. I chose to put myself there, and I had an obligation to live up to what dad and I had been working towards, and to the story moving forward.” He managed to regain some feeling in his feet towards the end of day 46 and has, so far, escaped amputation. Even now, though, five months later, “they still feel a little numb.”
\nThe idea of choice being the tool by which Barney succeeded was symbolically fitting. SPEC, on the whole, was a success: it proved—in an exciting, public way—that the technologies necessary to live sustainably are out there already, that global warming does not have to be the inevitable cost of economic prosperity. Averting disaster is still, at least for now, a choice.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"A blank canvas. ","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"antarctic-odyssey-21","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/10/03002744/antarctic-odyssey-21-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"When I asked him to describe the Antarctic landscape, he was effusive, respectful, a little playful, like a boxer, bloodied and battered, after a match that had gone the distance. “The sky was just amazing. Like being on the ocean but standing on it, and just this buckling dome above you. In between the suffering and spitting blood out of your nose because it’s so cold, and ripping ice off your face where it’s been for eight hours”—he laughed—“moments of awe and moments of ecstasy.”
\n“It was like a canvas,” he said. A canvas that, at the moment, is still blank, its unblemished white face still an image of hope. But a canvas upon which, very soon, our decisions will be drawn.
\n"}],"sidePopups":{"popups":null}}},{"id":"cG9zdDoyMDA0","databaseId":2004,"title":"A Generation of Oppenheimers","slug":"a-generation-of-oppenheimers","link":"https://www.helena.org/a-generation-of-oppenheimers/","date":"2020-11-11T05:12:47","isSticky":false,"author":{"node":{"name":"admin"}},"excerpt":"","featuredImage":{"node":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/16201910/a-generation-of-oppenheimers-featured.jpg","title":"a-generation-of-oppenheimers-featured"}},"acfArticleDetails":{"seo":{"title":null,"metaDescription":null,"metaImage":null},"truncatedArticleTitle":null,"magazineArticleHero":{"text":"\"The physicists have known sin; \r\nand this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”\r\n\r\n","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"a-generation-of-oppenheimers-m","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02235523/a-generation-of-oppenheimers-m.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":{"sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02235519/a-generation-of-oppenheimers-scaled.jpg"},"widescreenImage":null}},"articleIntro":{"title":"","subtitle":"The 21st century will feature multiple decisions as impactful, or more, as the Manhattan Project. We're not ready.","authorText":null,"author":[{"title":"Henry Elkus","slug":"henry-elkus","contentType":{"node":{"uri":"/team/"}}}]},"detailBlocks":[{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"As J. Robert Oppenheimer sat back, absorbing the indescribable image of the first atomic bomb detonating in front of his eyes, he likened it to the Bhagavad Gita’s description of the divine — “the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky.” Infamously, coming to terms with the power of his creation, Oppenheimer remembered another line from the Gita, God Vishnu’s proclamation: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
\nThis has become the most enduring image of the Manhattan Project, the American creation of the first Nuclear Weapon. And for good reason — it encapsulates the monumental scale of impact the moment represented.
\nOppenheimer and his fellow physicists quite literally changed the world; only months later the United States dropped two nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An entirely new paradigm of geopolitics followed, reorienting humanity into the nuclear age of mutually assured destruction, where we remain today.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"A YOUNG ROBERT OPPENHEIMER","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"oppenheimer-1","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02235954/oppenheimer-1.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"ALBERT EINSTEIN AND ROBERT OPPENHEIMER MEETING IN 1947","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"oppenheimer-2","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02235953/oppenheimer-2.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Two years later, though, Oppenheimer said something far more consequential.
\nPacked into an MIT lecture hall in 1947, he told students: “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”
\nOppenheimer knew that there was further significance beyond the terrible, staggering impact that the nuclear weapon had unleashed. The technology could not be taken back. The Manhattan Project had brought into existence something irreversible, something that could not be undone to prevent future use. There once existed an age in which society knew no nuclear weapons, and that age was past. This is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_PullQuote","pullQuote":"“In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Every generation habitually claims they are the important generation yet. In today’s case, that might be true, or it might not. But to debate this is to miss a point far more crucial. Today’s generation is the first generation of Oppenheimers.
\nBeginning slowly, society has experienced an increasingly steep curve of change. And in recent human history, that curve has hit exponentiality.
\nAs philosopher Nick Bostrom notes, “a few hundred thousand years ago, growth was so slow that it took on the order of one million years for human productive capacity to increase sufficient to sustain an additional one million individuals living at subsistence level. By 5000 B.C., following the Agricultural Revolution, the rate of growth had increased to the point where the same amount of growth took just two centuries. Today, following the Industrial Revolution, the world economy grows on average by that amount every ninety minutes.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"NICK BOSTROM'S \"SUPERINTELLIGENCE\"","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"oppenheimer-3","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/02235952/oppenheimer-3.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"That segment of Bostrom’s example, where growth catches the wave of staggering exponentiality, is the contemporary world we are only beginning to live in.
\nThere are some domains of society that haven’t followed the trendline of exponential growth. But there are many crucial domains that have, and they have violently pushed us into a new and often unrecognizable age that is only just beginning.
\nMy favorite way to understand this shift is best described by futurist Ray Kurzweil (I used it as the basis of this talk). Imagine a chessboard. On the first square of the chessboard, we place just one grain of rice. Every subsequent day, we move to the next square, and we add double the number of grains of the day before. By day 8, the end of the first row, we only add 128 grains of rice. The numbers quickly grow, however.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":null,"size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"oppenheimer-4","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03000311/oppenheimer-4.png"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"By the final square of the first half of the chessboard, we place 2 billion grains of rice. Yet it’s the second half of the chessboard where the threshold of truly staggering exponential growth is crossed. Between the first square of the second half of the chessboard and the final square of the board, we go from placing 4 billion to 18 quintillion grains of rice. It’s hard to truly understand the scale of the number 18 quintillion, but as a reference, that is the combined weight of Manhattan, in rice.
\nWe exist at the beginning of the second half of the chessboard. Only each of the squares represents time, and the doubling grains of rice represent societal rate of change.
\nWhile an action made early on in the chessboard (the spread of a disease or an insidious idea) could create serious damage, it’s proliferation was limited by a lesser “push.” That same action made today, or in chess squares farther into the second half of the board, is often carried by an exponential current at a speed never seen before, and often not even understood. There are of course notable exceptions to this rule, but the rule proves far too prevalent to ignore.
\nFrom our generation’s vantage point at the proverbial beginning of the second half of the chessboard, we have an eventful next square. While the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th century comprised a host of epochally consequential decisions, only a small subset were irreversible. There were only a few Oppenheimers. That is about to change.
\nThink of the next 50 years as the next square of our chessboard. This crucial period will mark many more decisions, whether their outcomes will be felt immediately or not, that will seize exponentiality and prove final. And thus, alive today is a far higher population of individuals who will make those decisions than ever before. Collectively they will make moral judgments, build technologies, and execute business and political determinations, all at a speed that society has little to no experience with.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Gallery","gallery":{"galleryInitials":null,"galleryItems":[{"caption":"LONDON IN 1860, AROUND THE TIME A MAJOR SOLAR STORM LAST HIT EARTH, KNOWN AS THE \"CARRINGTON EVENT.\" BECAUSE OF GLOBAL SOCIETY'S RELATIVE LACK OF INTERCONNECTEDNESS AND DEPENDENCY ON ELECTRICITY, LITTLE DAMAGE WAS DONE.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"oppenheimer-5","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03000309/oppenheimer-5.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"THE WORLD TODAY, WHERE THE SAME SOLAR STORM COULD INFLICT UNTOLD DAMAGE ACROSS INTERDEPENDENT ELECTRIC GRIDS.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"oppenheimer-6","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03000308/oppenheimer-6.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"22-YEAR OLD ACTIVIST JOSHUA WONG, WHO ROSE TO PROMINENCE THROUGH HIS ORGANIZING LEADERSHIP DURING THE 2014 HONG KONG UMBRELLA MOVEMENT, EXEMPLIFIES THE INCREASING DIVERSIFICATION OF POWER AWAY FROM CENTRALIZED NODES.","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"oppenheimer-7","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03000307/oppenheimer-7.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}},{"caption":"18TH CENTURY BRITISH POLYMATH THOMAS YOUNG","image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"oppenheimer-8","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03000306/oppenheimer-8.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}]}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"To add more complexity, these decisions will often be made by a different group of people than that of decades and centuries past. Social power and access to knowledge have historically existed in centralized nodes.
\nA small cadre of public officials, dynastic families, state and church-backed philosophers, scientists and artists have historically taken advantage of this fact to consolidate the ability to make impactful decisions on a regional or global scale.
\nPartially as a result of exponential technological development, many modes of power and knowledge have since decentralized. This positive development in society has facilitated increased social mobility, near-ubiquitous access to encyclopedic information, and the ability to transmit an idea, movement, or even a technological product across the planet instantaneously. At one point, polymath and academic Thomas Young (1773 to 1829) was known as the “last man to know everything.” Today billions of people have free access to knowledge orders of magnitude greater than Young could dream of.
\nWith decentralization of power comes greater decentralization of powerful actions and decision making. This is both good and bad. A makeshift hospital in an active warzone can 3D print life-saving devices from across the world over the internet. Yet increasingly, those seeking to inflict harm can utilize the same technology to print weapons. From the groups of programmers creating the 3D printing software to the internet platforms hosting it, to the end product, none of these processes are centralized or controlled by any one government, company, family, or institution. It will often be these decentralized networks, with nodes comprised not only of Heads of State but of hackers, activists, and entrepreneurs who make the critical decisions of the 21st century.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"GENETIC ENGINEERING AND OTHER FORMS OF BIOTECHNOLOGY COULD PROVE TO BE AN ESSENTIAL THEME OF THE NEXT TIME “SQUARE” OF THE CHESSBOARD","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"oppenheimer-9","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03000503/oppenheimer-9.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"So what are those decisions? It’s not possible to know even a small percentage; an unfruitful path of study would be to predict the critical domains of the future, although it’s a road many nevertheless pursue. But there are three examples that one could strongly argue we are faced with now and in the near future: artificial general intelligence, genetic engineering, and climate.
\nSteven Hawking told a notorious Frankenstein-like story about the moment at which an artificial intelligence was created that exceeded the brainpower of the smartest human alive. Curious, the human walks up to the robot, secure in the knowledge that he can just unplug it in case of emergency, and asks the question: “is there a God?” The robot removes its own plug and replies “there is now.”
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"HAWKING’S STORY, IN CASES OF NARROW APPLICATION, IS NOT FAR OFF. CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MAKING LIFE AND DEATH DECISIONS WITHOUT HUMAN INTERFERENCE INCLUDE LETHAL AUTONOMOUS WEAPONS, A DOMAIN WELL SUMMARIZED BY AUTHOR PAUL SCHARRE IN HIS 2018 BOOK “ARMY OF NONE.”","size":"small","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"oppenheimer-10","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03000501/oppenheimer-10.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"The story reminds me of the 11th-century philosopher St. Anselm, who in his ontological argument, describes God as simply “that which nothing greater can be conceived.” Without venturing any further into judgements of religion, it is nonetheless the case that general artificial intelligence will most likely evolve into the domain that exists outside of that which the human mind can conceive.
\nBut it will be the human mind that initially programs it. Whether in a basement in Moscow or a corner office at Google, there are Oppenheimers alive today (and soon to be born) who will make some of the moral judgements that comprise the codebase of artificial general intelligence. As Bostrom and other thinkers write, there is a window of time in which those decisions will be made before they become irreversible. Today those decisions are meaningful: should the autonomous vehicle place a higher value on the life of five humans in its direct path, or swerve to instead hit the one adjacent human instead? But tomorrow and into the future, these judgments will scale exponentially, entering the realm of self-replication, where they cannot be taken back.
\nThere is, of course, vigorous disagreement about the timetable of the evolution from present-day narrow artificial intelligence to future general AI. But there is less disagreement that it will be achieved in the course of the next few generations. In the context of history, that is barely a blink; remember that many credit the birth of dedicated academic study of AI with Alan Turing’s 1950 Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and the legendary 1956 Dartmouth Summer Project. These are timescales measured in years, not millennia. But it will be more than millennia that will be irrevocably affected.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"THE LEGENDARY 1956 DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"oppenheimer-11","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03000457/oppenheimer-11.jpeg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Overlapping technologically with artificial intelligence will be the domain of genetic engineering, which shows yet another example of the uncertain potential of exponentiality. Bostrom, Yuval Harari and others postulate a future in which the 200,000 years of human evolution (and the many more of general evolution) could be recapitulated algorithmically, computing technology permitting. It didn’t take long after the recent development of CRISPR technology for a Chinese scientist to secretly (and illegally) engineer the first genetically modified babies, not only making them HIV immune but most likely inadvertently enhancing their cognitive capacity. Whether it’s via the decisions of a nation-state, non-state actor, or just a lone scientist, society is heading toward, or already in, its biological Oppenheimer moment.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"BIOPHYSICIST HE JIANKUI, WHO IN 2018 CONTROVERSIALLY USED GENE-EDITING TOOL CRISPR-CAS9 TO AUGMENT THE DNA OF HUMAN EMBRYOS TO “VACCINATE” THEM FROM FUTURE HIV INFECTION.","size":"medium","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"oppenheimer-12","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03000453/oppenheimer-12-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"And then there is climate. I remember sitting in the audience in 2017 as Swedish scientist Johan Rockström meticulously laid out his case that emissions decisions made (or not made) by major countries and businesses during the next 50 years will determine the conditions of human life for at least the next 10,000 years. If Rockström is to be believed, it has been the overwhelmingly human-made decisions during the last 50 years that have finally taken Earth’s climate out of the holocene, a 12,000 year period of relative stability, and intro the aptly named anthropocene.
\nThe International Panel on Climate Change, in its Fifth Assessment Report, concluded that we are not nearly on pace to reduce emissions during this next 50 year period, and could reach a catastrophic 2°C temperature increase in even the next 30 years. Counteracting this will thus require an urgent investment in the development of technologies that actively remove carbon already in the atmosphere, an effort Helena has focused on. Hopefully there are more than a few Oppenheimers who will prevail in this arena.
\nIt’s clear that the conditions of the 21st century, these next few squares of the chessboard, contain a level of complexity and speed society has never experienced before. We can feel it every day. So what is to be done?
\nThe answer lies not in the individual decisions that will be made. It instead lies in how those decisions are made.
\nSociety has relied on “problem-solving” institutions for thousands of years. And they’ve worked pretty well for the first half of the chessboard. But in many cases, they aren’t working now. We need new systems of decision making because our legacy systems were not built for today’s conditions. And thus we need new, supplemental, institutions.
\nVolumes could be (and have been) written about how these new institutions must be designed and operated in order to thrive in the 21st century. But if there is only one word that should define them, it is “proactive.”
\nWhen Oppenheimer and his colleagues were tasked with the Manhattan Project, $23 billion was poured into Los Alamos Laboratory over a 4 year period to create the deadliest weapon in human history. You could say the US was in a rush.
\nFuture decisions, especially those at such a moral scale, should not be made in a rush. We’ll never achieve this goal; the fog of war, inaccurate forecasting, and sheer randomness and complexity will probably make the majority of our “Oppenheimer” decisions take place in haste. But that doesn’t mean we should perpetuate the institutional design that makes reactivity, rather than proactivity, even more likely.
\nIn the 6th century BC, Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote about “deep knowledge” — the ability “to be aware of disturbance before disturbance, danger before danger, destruction before destruction, calamity before calamity.”
\nOur existing systems to solve big global problems, though, have little incentive to employ deep knowledge. While term limits in democractic government safeguard against tyrannical leadership and other threats, they also create a bias towards short term fixes that only temporarily satisfy a constituency. The quarterly reporting system of public companies satisfy the short term economic interests of shareholders, but disincentivize the most powerful businesses in the world to enact long term change that can address global dilemma. And while the philanthropic sector has often catalyzed large-scale change to address societal problems, it has also perpetuated some of the flawed systems that have created them in the first place.
\n"},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_ImagevideoContained","imagevideoContained":{"caption":"TIME MAGAZINE’S JUNE 2019 ISSUE HIGHLIGHTING SMALL ISLAND NATIONS LIKE TUVALU, KIRIBATI, AND THE COOK ISLANDS","size":"large","type":"Image","video":null,"image":{"altText":null,"mainImageMobile":{"altText":"","title":"oppenheimer-13","sourceUrl":"https://cdn.helena.org/wordpress/app/uploads/2020/11/03000448/oppenheimer-13-scaled.jpg"},"tabletImage":null,"laptopImage":null,"desktopImage":null,"widescreenImage":null}}},{"fieldGroupName":"post_Acfarticledetails_DetailBlocks_Paragraph","paragraph":"Our current, limited deep knowledge is screaming the warning signs at us. We know that humans will write the moral code for multiple uses of artificial intelligence that could fundamentally change the lives of present and future human generations. Yet human society has a notoriously bad track record, over thousands of years, when it comes to agreeing philosophically on a shared moral code. We know that genetic engineering, if implemented incorrectly, could exacerbate inequality to unconscionable levels and potentially incubate eugenic societies. We know that rising sea levels directly correlated to anthropomorphic climate change will lead to the sinking of small island nations in the present, and larger land-masses in the future. Which institutions are fully focused on solving these problems over the long term, without distraction and incentivization to instead satisfy immediate, and often conflicting concerns?
\nThere surely aren’t enough. Legacy institutions, governments, think-tanks, NGO’s, and corporations, even at their best and most moral, are overburdened and often designed insufficiently for the 21st century.
\nIt is essential to supplement these systems with separate, empowered institutions that can exclusively focus on looking at the set of problems requiring proactive and longer-term solutions.
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