This talk launches Brand's new book: Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.  His argument is that taking account of the emerging global forces of climate change, urbanization, and biotechnology forces a rethink of some traditional environmental positions.  Cities are Green, with huge room for improvement.  Nuclear power is Green, with better still to come.  Genetic engineering is Green and shows potentially revolutionary promise.  Direct intervention in the climate---geoengineering---may be necessary.  The classic environmental project of restoring natural systems has to step up in scale and deepen the quality of its science and engineering.

Arthur Ganson uses humble materials to create kinetic sculptures of humor, drama, and emotion.  His work has been shown around the world, and has been an ongoing inspiration for the 10,000 Year Clock project at Long Now.  His machinated gestures play with time spans that range from the epochal to the momentary. One of the touchstone pieces for the Clock project is the Machine with Concrete.  The input of the piece is a 200 revolution per minute motor, and after series of gear reductions it's output gear is cast in concrete.  Due to the multiplicative nature of the gear train it will take upwards of two trillion years to break the final gear.  Ganson will be discussing the theme of time in his work, and will be bringing a piece to show live at the event.

Wayne Clough is the 12th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.  In July 1998 he took the reins of the world's largest museum and research complex and has since initiated long-range planning for the Smithsonian that includes increasing its accessibility.  Many of the 137 million objects in the Institution's collection will be digitized and made available to the public along with curatorial content produced by Smithsonian experts.

She's the head of a plant genetics lab at UC Davis; he teaches organic farming there. They're married (with kids), and they coauthored Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food. In the book they wrote: "To meet the appetites of the world's population without drastically hurting the environment requires a visionary new approach: combining genetic engineering and organic farming. Genetic engineering can be used to develop seeds with enhanced resistance to pests and pathogens; organic farming can manage the overall spectrum of pests more effectively."Agriculture has been a revolutionary biological science for 10,000 years, husbanding soil, tweaking the genes of the food crops. This is the next stage.

Paul Romer is best known as the lead developer of New Growth Theory, which shows how societies can speed up the discovery and implementation of new technologies; essentially, ideas about how objects interact. However, to address the big problems we’ll face this century; insecurity, harm to the environment, and global poverty, new technologies will not be enough. His current focus is on mechanisms that can speed up the discovery and implementation of new rules - ideas about how people interact. For his work on the economics of ideas, Paul was named one of America’s 25 most influential people by TIME magazine.

Michael Pollan describes his program to transform American agriculture as a "sun food agenda." He is the author of two influential books---In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto; and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. He is the director the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at UC-Berkeley.

More than any other political entity, cities learn from each other. San Francisco's youthful mayor has traveled the world examining what works best in other cities. Now in his sixth year on the job, he has seen various ideas and programs bloom or wither, and has led the city's ambition to become one of the world's Greenest. In this talk we hear about lessons learned and plans in the making, in a world now mostly urban.

The Pirahã, a remote Amazonian tribe with little outside contact, have attracted the attention of mainstream media, scientists, zen buddhists, professors of religion, mathematicians, philosophers and others because of their unusual confluence of values, language, and culture. Now, after 20 years of high intellectual and physical adventure living among them, Dan Everett proposes a revolution in anthropology and linguistics: culture profoundly shapes language, even at the most fundamental level. What happens when a language-culture pairing like the Pirahãs' is lost? The Pirahãs are not alone in their lessons and knowledge for all of us -- there are hundreds of endangered languages in the world -- but their example provides a remarkably clear example of alternative knowledge and ways of talking of importance to all of us as we ponder how we should try to build future lives. Everett is author of Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazon Jungle (02008) and is Chair of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University.

A close student and observer of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe twenty years ago, engineer Dmitry Orlov finds a similar sequence of events taking shape in America. His savagely humorous presentation spells out how Russia was better prepared than the US is for the stages of collapse that begin with financial meltdown. Renewal awaits on the other side of collapse, and there are ways to hasten that process. Orlov is the author of Reinventing Collapse: Soviet Example and American Prospects (02008).

"It is not accurate to say we can still stop climate change," says Saul Griffith, the Bay Area inventor who received a MacArthur "genius" award in 2007.  "We are now working to stop worse climate change or much-worse-than-worse climate change." Griffith has done the research and the math to figure out exactly what it will take for humanity to soften the impact of climate change in the next 25 years, and he lays it out in a dazzling presentation.  It is horrifying news.  The politics and technologies we have now are not up to the task.