Chris Anderson: OK, Stewart, in the '60s, you -- I think it was '68 -- you founded this magazine.
克里斯•安德森:好的,斯图尔德, 在60年代,我想那是68年, 你创立了这本杂志。
Stewart Brand: Bravo! It's the original one. That's hard to find.
斯图尔特·布兰德: 太棒了!这是原版。 现在很难找到了。
CA: Right. Issue One, right?
克:是的。这是第一版,对吧?
SB: Mm hmm.
斯:是的。
CA: Why did that make so much impact?
克:为什么它产生了那么大影响力?
SB: Counterculture was the main event that I was part of at the time, and it was made up of hippies and New Left. That was sort of my contemporaries, the people I was just slightly older than. And my mode is to look at where the interesting flow is and then look in the other direction.
斯:我参与了当时的 反主流文化运动, 它是由嬉皮士与新左翼分子组成。 这些人大多与我年纪相仿, 我比他们稍年长一些。 我的方法是观察有趣的趋势走向, 然后再从其他方向观察它。
CA: (Laughs)
(笑声)
SB: Partly, I was trained to do that as an army officer, but partly, it's just a cheap heuristic to find originalities: don't look where everybody else is looking, look the opposite way. So the deal with counterculture is, the hippies were very romantic and kind of against technology, except very good LSD from Sandoz, and the New Left was against technology because they thought it was a power device. Computers were: do not spindle, fold, or mutilate. Fight that. And so, the Whole Earth Catalog was kind of a counter-counterculture thing in the sense that I bought Buckminster Fuller's idea that tools of are of the essence. Science and engineers basically define the world in interesting ways. If all the politicians disappeared one week, it would be ... a nuisance. But if all the scientists and engineers disappeared one week, it would be way more than a nuisance.
斯:部分原因来自 我在当军队长官时所受的训练。 同时以一种简单经济的启发方式, 来寻找独创性: 别与其他人在相同视角看问题, 要从看另外一面。 所以,当时反主流文化是, 嬉皮士们很浪漫, 并且有点反对现代科技, 除了很棒的山度士牌致幻剂, 而新左翼分子抵制高科技, 因为在那时科技被视为权利的机器。 计算机甚至被看作是反人性的。 他们为此抗争。 所以,《全球目录》算是 反-反主流文化的东西, 在某种意义上,我借鉴了 巴克敏斯特·富勒的观点: 工具是至关重要的。 科学和工程师们 用有趣的方式来定义世界。 假设所以的政客在一周内都消失了, 那将会是一件麻烦事。 但如果所有科学家和工程师 在一周内消失了, 那就不止是一件麻烦了。
CA: We still believe that, I think.
克:我认为大家依然认同这个观点。
SB: So focus on that. And then the New Left was talking about power to the people. And people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak cut that and just said, power to people, tools that actually work. And so, where Fuller was saying don't try to change human nature, people have been trying for a long time and it does not even bend, but you can change tools very easily. So the efficient thing to do if you want to make the world better is not try to make people behave differently like the New Left was, but just give them tools that go in the right direction. That was the Whole Earth Catalog.
斯:所以我们把焦点放在那上面。 后来,新左翼主张权利属于人民。 像史蒂芬·乔布斯 和史蒂芬·沃兹尼亚克这些人, 截取为:让人民拥有权利, 工具能产生实际的效果。 所以,就像富勒说的 不要尝试去改变人性, 人们一直在尝试改变它, 可是并没起作用, 但是你可以轻易地改造工具。 所以如果你想让世界变得更好, 最有效的办法就是, 不要像新左翼分子那样 做些另类的行为, 而应该给予人们以正确的工具。 这就是《全球目录》在探讨的。
CA: And Stewart, the central image -- this is one of the first images, the first time people had seen Earth from outer space. That had an impact, too.
克:斯图尔德,中间的那幅图, 是人类第一次从外太空 看到的地球的影像。 这张图也带来了巨大的影响。
SB: It was kind of a chance that in the spring of '66, thanks to an LSD experience on a rooftop in San Francisco, I got thinking about, again, something that Fuller talked about, that a lot of people assume that the Earth is flat and kind of infinite in terms of its resources, but once you really grasp that it's a sphere and that there's only so much of it, then you start husbanding your resources and thinking about it as a finite system. "Spaceship Earth" was his metaphor. And I wanted that to be the case, but on LSD I was getting higher and higher on my hundred micrograms on the roof of San Francisco, and noticed that the downtown buildings which were right in front of me were not all parallel, they were sort of fanned out like this. And that's because they are on a curved surface. And if I were even higher, I would see that even more clearly, higher than that, more clearly still, higher enough, and it would close, and you would get the circle of Earth from space. And I thought, you know, we've been in space for 10 years -- at that time, this is '66 -- and the cameras had never looked back. They'd always been looking out or looking at just parts of the Earth.
斯:那是 1966 年春天的一次巧合, 我在旧金山屋顶, 在致幻剂的作用下, 我再一次思考起富勒的曾说过话, 许多人都假设地球是平的, 而且拥有无限的资源, 一旦当你发现其实它是一个球体, 而且资源有限, 你就会开始节约使用你的资源, 并把它看作是一个有限的系统。 富勒把它比喻为“地球号飞船”。 我也希望是这样的, 但我在一百毫克致幻剂的作用下, 在旧金山的一个屋顶上越来越嗨, 我注意到我眼前市中心的建筑, 不是平行的, 而是呈扇形散开状,就像这样。 那是因为它们 坐落在一个弧形的平面上。 如果我能站得更高, 就能看的更清晰。 再高一点,更加清晰, 足够高了之后,它会合拢, 然后你就可以从外太空 看到圆形的地球了。 然后我就想,你知道, 我们已经探索外太空十年了…… 那时是 1966 年…… 卫星的镜头 从来没有往回看过。 它们一直对着外太空 或者只看一部分的地球。
And so I said, why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet? And it went around and NASA got it and senators, secretaries got it, and various people in the Politburo got it, and it went around and around. And within two and a half years, about the time the Whole Earth Catalog came out, these images started to appear, and indeed, they did transform everything. And my idea of hacking civilization is that you try to do something lazy and ingenious and just sort of trick the situation. So all of these photographs that you see -- and then the march for science last week, they were carrying these Whole Earth banners and so on -- I did that with no work. I sold those buttons for 25 cents apiece. So, you know, tweaking the system is, I think, not only the most efficient way to make the system go in interesting ways, but in some ways, the safest way, because when you try to horse the whole system around in a big way, you can get into big horsing-around problems, but if you tweak it, it will adjust to the tweak.
所以我说,为什么我们依旧 没有看过地球全景的照片呢? 后来这话传到了美国航天局, 参议员和部长们那里, 在政治局的人们也听说了, 接着传到更多的人耳朵里。 在两年半的时间里, 差不多在《全球目录》出版的时候, 这些图片出现了, 的确,它们改变了一切。 在我看来, 一个文明得以发展的秘诀是: 你无心而又巧妙的做一些事情, 这恰好改变了现状。 所以你现在看到的这些照片, 还有上周的科学游行抗议, 他们带着《全球目录》的横幅等—— 我毫不费力就做到了。 那些图章,我一个卖 25 美分。 所以,你知道,小幅度的调整系统, 在我看来,让系统以有趣的方式运作, 不仅是最有效的方式, 某个程度上来说,这是最安全的方式。 因为当你想大刀阔斧的去改变它, 那你会陷入大麻烦, 但如果你只是做微调, 系统本身就会自我调整。
CA: So since then, among many other things, you've been regarded as a leading voice in the environmental movement, but you are also a counterculturalist, and recently, you've been taking on a lot of, well, you've been declaring what a lot of environmentalists almost believe are heresies. I kind of want to explore a couple of those. I mean, tell me about this image here.
所以自那以后,在其他领域 克:你也被认为是环境运动的领导者, 但你又是一个反主流文化者, 最近,你受到了很多…… 好吧,你一直在声明的观点 被很多环保主义者认为是邪门歪教。 我想聊聊其中几个。 我的意思是,跟我说说这幅图。
SB: Ha-ha! That's a National Geographic image of what is called the mammoth steppe, what the far north, the sub-Arctic and Arctic region, used to look like. In fact, the whole world used to look like that. What we find in South Africa and the Serengeti now, lots of big animals, was the case in this part of Canada, throughout the US, throughout Eurasia, throughout the world. This was the norm and can be again. So in a sense, my long-term goal at this point is to not only bring back those animals and the grassland they made, which could be a climate stabilization system over the long run, but even the mammoths there in the background that are part of the story. And I think that's probably a 200-year goal. Maybe in 100, by the end of this century, we should be able to dial down the extinction rate to sort of what it's been in the background. Bringing back this amount of bio-abundance will take longer, but it's worth doing.
斯:哈哈! 这是国家地理杂志的图片, 叫猛犸象大草原, 在最北边,亚北极圈和北极圈地区, 以前看上去是这样的。 事实上,全世界曾经就是这个样子的。 我们目前已经在南非 和塞伦盖蒂平原发现的 那些大型动物, 也曾出现在在加拿大这个地区, 遍及美国,亚欧大陆,乃至全球。 这就是以前的常态, 也可能再次变成这样。 所以某种意义上说, 我目前的长期目标 不仅是把那些动物带回来, 还有曾经形成的草原。 长远来看,草原可能会 成为一个气候稳定系统。 还有图片背景中的猛犸象, 也是目标的一部分。 我认为,这个目标 可能需要200年来实现。 也许100年,在这个世纪末, 那时,我们就可以降低灭绝率, 变回图片中的样子。 想要恢复到过去的生物数量, 将会花费更长的时间, 但是这么做值得。
CA: We'll come back to the mammoths, but explain how we should think of extinctions. Obviously, one of the huge concerns right now is that extinction is happening at a faster rate than ever in history. That's the meme that's out there. How should we think of it?
克:我们继续谈谈猛犸象。 为我们解释一下 我们如何看待灭绝。 显然,目前最大关注点之一, 是现今生物灭绝的速度 要比以往任何时期都快。 这个是外界流传的一种看法。 我们该如何看待它呢?
SB: The story that's out there is that we're in the middle of the Sixth Extinction or maybe in the beginning of the Sixth Extinction. Because we're in the de-extinction business, the preventing-extinction business with Revive & Restore, we started looking at what's actually going on with extinction. And it turns out, there's a very confused set of data out there which gets oversimplified into the narrative of we're becoming ... Here are five mass extinctions that are indicated by the yellow triangles, and we're now next. The last one there on the far right was the meteor that struck 66 million years ago and did in the dinosaurs. And the story is, we're the next meteor.
斯:这个看法说的是, 我们正处于第六次灭绝的中期, 或是第六次灭绝的初期。 因为我们正在进行反灭绝生意 以及防止生物灭绝的工作, 于是我们开始研究 灭绝到底是怎么回事。 结果显示,数据复杂而混乱, 简单化了说,我们即将变成…… 这里,黄色的三角 标记出了五次大规模的灭绝。 我们现在正面临下一次大灭绝。 图片最右侧,是上一次大灭绝, 6600 万年前由于陨石撞击地球 造成了恐龙的灭亡。 外界盛传的说法是, 我们将会面临下一次陨石撞击灾难。
Well, here's the deal. I wound up researching this for a paper I wrote, that a mass extinction is when 75 percent of all the species in the world go extinct. Well, there's on the order of five-and-a-half-million species, of which we've identified one and a half million. Another 14,000 are being identified every year. There's a lot of biology going on out there. Since 1500, about 500 species have gone extinct, and you'll see the term "mass extinction" kind of used in strange ways.
好吧,事情是这样。 我曾经写论文时查到这样的信息, 大灭绝指的是当 75% 的物种 从地球上消失。 在 550 万个种类里面, 已知物种有 150 万种。 每年新发现物种为 1.4 万种。 许多生物变化 还在持续不断地发生。 自从 1500 年, 大约 500 种已经灭绝, 所以当你看到 “大灭绝”这个词的时候 可能会感到奇怪。
So there was, about a year and a half ago, a front-page story by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times, "Mass Extinction in the Oceans, Broad Studies Show." And then you read into the article, and it mentions that since 1500, 15 species -- one, five -- have gone extinct in the oceans, and, oh, by the way, none in the last 50 years. And you read further into the story, and it's saying, the horrifying thing that's going on is that the fisheries are so overfishing the wild fishes, that it is taking down the fish populations in the oceans by 38 percent. That's the serious thing. None of those species are probably going to go extinct. So you've just put, that headline writer put a panic button on the top of the story. It's clickbait kind of stuff, but it's basically saying, "Oh my God, start panicking, we're going to lose all the species in the oceans." Nothing like that is in prospect. And in fact, what I then started looking into in a little more detail, the Red List shows about 23,000 species that are considered threatened at one level or another, coming from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the IUCN. And Nature Magazine had a piece surveying the loss of wildlife, and it said, "If all of those 23,000 went extinct in the next century or so, and that rate of extinction carried on for more centuries and millennia, then we might be at the beginning of a sixth extinction. So the exaggeration is way out of hand. But environmentalists always exaggerate. That's a problem.
在大概一年半前, 纽约时报头条上, 卡尔·齐默写的一篇文章, “学术研究表明, 海洋中存在大规模灭绝” 文章内容提到:从 1500 年开始, 15 个物种,消失在海洋中, 随便说一下,近 50 年中没发生过。 继续往下读,文章上写道: 可怕的事情正在发生, 渔民过度捕捞野生鱼类, 导致海洋里鱼类数量减少了 38%。 这是很严重的事。 但是这些鱼类不一定会灭绝。 所以,写标题的作者 在文章上方写了一个 容易引起恐慌的标题, 用来吸引读者。 但是这标题实际在传达: “我的天,开始恐慌吧, 我们即将失去所有的海洋生物。” 根本没有这样的事会发生。 事实上,当我开始 读更多细节的时候, 濒危物种红色名录上显示, 大约 2.3 万物种面临 相同或不同程度的威胁, 数据资料来源于 国际自然保护联盟(IUCN) 《自然》杂志也对野生动物灭绝做了调查, 杂志中写道: “如果所有 2.3 万物种在下个世纪 或者以后灭绝, 灭绝速率还能持续几世纪、几千年, 那么我们就处于第六次大灭绝初期。” 这有点过分夸张。 但是环境主义者经常夸大事实。 这是一个问题。
CA: I mean, they probably feel a moral responsibility to, because they care so much about the thing that they are looking at, and unless you bang the drum for it, maybe no one listens.
克:我认为,他们可能觉得 有义务这么做。 因为他们那么在意 他们所看到的问题, 如果不造成恐慌, 无法引起人们的重视。
SB: Every time somebody says moral this or moral that -- "moral hazard," "precautionary principle" -- these are terms that are used to basically say no to things.
每次人们都说 这样道德,那样道德, 这是“道德危机”,“防范原则”…… 这些话基本是人们想要 拒绝什么的时候说的。 (笑)
CA: So the problem isn't so much fish extinction, animal extinction, it's fish flourishing, animal flourishing, that we're crowding them to some extent?
克:所以问题并不是 鱼类灭绝,动物灭绝, 而是鱼类和和动物数量增加, 是因为我们在某些程度上 促进它们生长吗?
SB: Yeah, and I think we are crowding, and there is losses going on. The major losses are caused by agriculture, and so anything that improves agriculture and basically makes it more condensed, more highly productive, including GMOs, please, but even if you want to do vertical farms in town, including inside farms, all the things that have been learned about how to grow pot in basements, is now being applied to growing vegetables inside containers -- that's great, that's all good stuff, because land sparing is the main thing we can do for nature. People moving to cities is good. Making agriculture less of a destruction of the landscape is good.
斯:是的,我们促进它们生长, 同时造成了损失。 主要损失是农业生产造成的, 所有可以提生农业生产, 带来高密度,以及高产量的东西, 包括转基因产物,拜托, 即使你想在城镇里做垂直农场, 包括室内农场, 我们学会在地下室种大麻的方法, 现在被运用于 在容器中种植蔬菜。 这很好,都是很好的事, 因为土地节约是我们能 为自然做的最主要的事。 人们搬到城市是很好。 减少农业对风景的破坏很好。
CA: There people talking about bringing back species, rewilding ... Well, first of all, rewilding species: What's the story with these guys?
克:人们讨论关于让动物回归野性…… 好的,首先,动物野生化: 这些家伙有什么故事?
SB: Ha-ha! Wolves. Europe, connecting to the previous point, we're now at probably peak farmland, and, by the way, in terms of population, we are already at peak children being alive. Henceforth, there will be fewer and fewer children. We are in the last doubling of human population, and it will get to nine, maybe nine and a half billion, and then start not just leveling off, but probably going down. Likewise, farmland has now peaked, and one of the ways that plays out in Europe is there's a lot of abandoned farmland now, which immediately reforests. They don't do wildlife corridors in Europe. They don't need to, because so many of these farms are connected that they've made reforested wildlife corridors, that the wolves are coming back, in this case, to Spain. They've gotten all the way to the Netherlands. There's bears coming back. There's lynx coming back. There's the European jackal. I had no idea such a thing existed. They're coming back from Italy to the rest of Europe. And unlike here, these are all predators, which is kind of interesting. They are being welcomed by Europeans. They've been missed.
斯:好,哈哈。 狼。 欧洲,联系到刚刚提到的观点, 我们现在大概处于农耕顶峰时期。 顺便一提,在人口方面, 儿童占比已经达到峰值。 从此以后,儿童会越来越少。 人口将最后一次翻倍, 可能会达到 90 亿,或 95 亿, 然后人口走势趋于平稳, 更加可能呈下滑趋势。 同样地,农地占比已经到达峰值, 欧洲处理这类问题其中一种方法是, 在许多废弃的农田上重新造林。 欧洲不做野生动物生态走廊。 他们不需要做, 因为许多农田是相连的, 在这些农场上造林, 便直接形成了生态走廊, 狼群就会重新回到西班牙。 它们已经一路走到了荷兰。 熊和山猫都会回来。 还有欧洲豺。 我之前都不知道有这个物种。 它们将从意大利 回到欧洲其他地区。 与这里不同, 很有趣的是,这些动物都是食肉动物。 欧洲人很想念它们 也很欢迎它们回来。
CA: And counterintuitively, when you bring back the predators, it actually increases rather than reduces the diversity of the underlying ecosystem often.
克:与我们想象的不一样的是, 当你把这些食肉动物带回来, 它们事实上会增加而不是减少 基础生态的多样性。
SB: Yeah, generally predators and large animals -- large animals and large animals with sharp teeth and claws -- are turning out to be highly important for a really rich ecosystem.
斯:是的,通常来说食肉动物 和大型动物…… 大型动物和有尖牙利爪的大型动物 对一个丰富的生态系统非常重要。
CA: Which maybe brings us to this rather more dramatic rewilding project that you've got yourself involved in. Why would someone want to bring back these terrifying woolly mammoths?
克:这就谈到了你所参与的, 激动人心的野生化的项目。 为什么会有人想要把 恐怖又毛绒绒的的猛犸象带回来?
SB: Hmm. Asian elephants are the closest relative to the woolly mammoth, and they're about the same size, genetically very close. They diverged quite recently in evolutionary history. The Asian elephants are closer to woolly mammoths than they are to African elephants, but they're close enough to African elephants that they have successfully hybridized. So we're working with George Church at Harvard, who has already moved the genes for four major traits from the now well-preserved, well-studied genome of the woolly mammoth, thanks to so-called "ancient DNA analysis." And in the lab, he has moved those genes into living Asian elephant cell lines, where they're taking up their proper place thanks to CRISPR. I mean, they're not shooting the genes in like you did with genetic engineering. Now with CRISPR you're editing, basically, one allele, and replacing it in the place of another allele. So you're now getting basically Asian elephant germline cells that are effectively in terms of the traits that you're going for to be comfortable in the Arctic, you're getting them in there.
亚洲象与猛犸象是近亲。 它们体型一样大, 基因上非常相近, 它们在进化史上 很近期才分化为不同物种。 相比非洲象, 亚洲象与猛犸象更为相近。 但猛犸象与非洲象也足够相似, 它们可以成功杂交。 所有,我们正在 与哈佛大学的乔治·丘奇一起工作, 他已经提取出 四个主要特征的基因, 从被保存完好的, 研究充分的猛犸象基因组中, 这要感谢所谓的“事前基因分析”。 在实验室里,他将这些基因 转移到活的亚洲象的细胞株中, 感谢基因编辑技术, 让这些基因找到了合适的地方。 我指的是,不用像基因工程 那样把基因注射进去。 现在有了基因编辑技术, 你基本上能编辑一个等位基因, 并替换掉另一个等位基因。 所以,你现在基本上 可以通过亚洲象的生殖细胞 来得到你想要得到的特征, 让它们能舒适的生活在北极圈, 然后,再把它们送到那里去。
So we go through the process of getting that through a surrogate mother, an Asian elephant mother. You can get a proxy, as it's being called by conservation biologists, of the woolly mammoth, that is effectively a hairy, curly-trunked, Asian elephant that is perfectly comfortable in the sub-Arctic. Now, it's the case, so many people say, "Well, how are you going to get them there? And Asian elephants, they don't like snow, right?" Well, it turns out, they do like snow. There's some in an Ontario zoo that have made snowballs bigger than people. They just love -- you know, with a trunk, you can start a little thing, roll it and make it bigger. And then people say, "Yeah, but it's 22 months of gestation. This kind of cross-species cloning is tricky business, anyway. Are you going to lose some of the surrogate Asian elephant mothers?" And then George Church says, "That's all right. We'll do an artificial uterus and grow them that way." Then people say, "Yeah, next century, maybe," except the news came out this week in Nature that there's now an artificial uterus in which they've grown a lamb to four weeks. That's halfway through its gestation period. So this stuff is moving right along.
所以,我们整个过程 需要一个代孕母体, 一只亚洲象母体。 保育生物学家们称之为代理孕母, 猛犸象的代理孕母 实际上是一只长毛卷鼻的亚洲象, 可以完全适应在亚北极圈的生活。 现在的情况是,很多人说: “好吧,你们如何把它们弄到那边去? 而且,亚洲象 好像不喜欢雪,对吧?” 但事实是,它们喜欢雪。 安大略湖动物园的亚洲象, 会做比人还大的雪球。 它们很喜欢……你知道, 用象鼻,从小雪球开始, 一点点滚成一个大雪球。 然后,人们说: “是啊,但是22个月的妊娠期, 不管怎么说, 这种跨物种克隆是很复杂的。 你代孕的亚洲象会死吗?” 乔治·丘奇说:“没关系, 我们可以用人造子宫培育它们。” 人们又说:“是啊,可能下个世纪吧。” 然后《自然》这周登出一则新闻, 关于用人造子宫 成功培育了一只小羊, 已经长达四周的时间了。 这已经是孕期的一半了。 所以,这项技术 还在持续不断的进步。
CA: But why should we want a world where -- Picture a world where there are thousands of these things thundering across Siberia. Is that a better world?
克:但是,我们为什么想要世界…… 想象一下世界上 有几千只硕大的长毛象, 几千只横穿西伯利亚。 这样的世界更好吗?
SB: Potentially. It's --
斯:有可能。它是……
(Laughter)
(笑)
There's three groups, basically, working on the woolly mammoth seriously: Revive & Restore, we're kind of in the middle; George Church and the group at Harvard that are doing the genetics in the lab; and then there's an amazing old scientist named Zimov who works in northern Siberia, and his son Nikita, who has bought into the system, and they are, Sergey and Nikita Zimov have been, for 25 years, creating what they call "Pleistocene Park," which is a place in a really tough part of Siberia that is pure tundra. And the research that's been done shows that there's probably one one-hundredth of the animals on the landscape there that there used to be. Like that earlier image, we saw lots of animals. Now there's almost none. The tundra is mostly moss, and then there's the boreal forest. And that's the way it is, folks. There's just a few animals there.
主要有三个团体 目前在认真的研究猛犸象: 重生和还原,我们算其中之一; 乔治·丘奇和哈佛大学实验室 研究遗传学的一群人; 还有一位了不起的老科学家齐莫夫, 他在西伯利亚北部工作, 他的儿子尼基塔也加入进来, 谢尔盖·齐莫夫和尼基塔·齐莫夫, 25 年来,他们一直在建造 所谓的“更新世公园”, 位于西伯利亚条件最艰苦的冻原。 研究显示, 可能只有百分之一的动物 居住在那片冻原, 曾经是这样。 像之前的图片中, 我们看到很多动物。 现在几乎没有了。 冻原上大部分覆盖苔藓, 还有北方针叶林。 就是这样的,各位。 那里只有少量的动物。
So they brought in a lot of grazing animals: musk ox, Yakutian horses, they're bringing in some bison, they're bringing in some more now, and put them in at the density that they used to be. And grasslands are made by grazers. So these animals are there, grazing away, and they're doing a couple of things. First of all, they're turning the tundra, the moss, back into grassland. Grassland fixes carbon. Tundra, in a warming world, is thawing and releasing a lot of carbon dioxide and also methane. So already in their little 25 square miles, they're doing a climate stabilization thing. Part of that story, though, is that the boreal forest is very absorbent to sunlight, even in the winter when snow is on the ground. And the way the mammoth steppe, which used to wrap all the way around the North Pole -- there's a lot of landmass around the North Pole -- that was all this grassland. And the steppe was magnificent, probably one of the most productive biomes in the world, the biggest biome in the world. The forest part of it, right now, Sergey Zimov and Nikita go out with this old military tank they got for nothing, and they knock down the trees. And that's a bore, and it's tiresome, and as Sergey says, "... and they make no dung!" which, by the way, these big animals do, including mammoths. So mammoths become what conservation biologists call an umbrella species. It's an exciting animal -- pandas in China or wherever -- that the excitement that goes on of making life good for that animal is making a habitat, an ecosystem, which is good for a whole lot of creatures and plants, and it ideally gets to the point of being self-managing, where the conservation biologists can back off and say, "All we have to do is keep out the destructive invasives, and this thing can just cook."
所以人们带去了很多食草动物: 麝牛,雅库特马,野牛, 人们现在要带更多过去, 帮助那里恢复到 原有的动物数量。 食草动物孕育了草地。 所以那些动物就在那里吃草。 还有一些其他事要做。 首先,要把冻原上的苔藓 变回原有的草地, 草地可以解决碳问题。 冻原,在全球变暖的时代, 会融化,释放很多二氧化碳, 还有甲烷。 所以,在仅有的 25 平方英里内, 依然要进行气候稳定的工作。 还有就是, 北方针叶林对阳光吸收力极强, 即使在冬, 白雪覆盖的时候也一样。 而猛犸象大草原, 在过去完全围绕着北极, 很多大陆在北极周边, 全部都覆盖着草原。 那时,大草原是非常壮丽的, 那可能是世界上 最高产的生物群落之一, 世界上最大的生物群落。 关于森林的部分, 谢尔盖·齐莫夫和尼基塔·齐莫夫 开着免费得来的破军用坦克 撞倒树木。 那工作既烦人又无聊, 就像谢尔盖所说: "这些树不能生产粪便(肥料)!” 但是,那些大型动物可以, 包括猛犸象。 所以猛犸象被保育生物学家 称之为保护伞物种。 它是令人激动的动物, 就像中国的熊猫,或其他什么…… 人们对这个动物的持续喜爱 会为它们带来更好的生活, 为它们建造栖息地, 也就是一个生态系统, 一大堆的动植物会受益于此, 理想化来说,这生态系统 最终可以自我管理, 之后,保育生物学家会退下来说: “我们现在必须要做的 是防止有害物入侵, 那件事就让它自己慢慢运作吧。”
CA: So there's many other species that you're dreaming of de-extincting at some point, but I think what I'd actually like to move on to is this idea you talked about how mammoths might help green Siberia in a sense, or at least, I'm not talking about tropical rainforest, but this question of greening the planet you've thought about a lot. And the traditional story is that deforestation is one of the most awful curses of modern times, and that it's a huge contributor to climate change. And then you went and sent me this graph here, or this map. What is this map?
克:所有你还梦想着, 在某一刻让更多其它物种反灭绝。 但是我其实想要继续…… 聊聊你说的关于猛犸象 如何有助于西伯利亚的绿化, 或者至少,我不是指热带雨林, 但在绿化的问题上,你有很多想法。 传统的说法是, 采伐森林,在现今时代, 是其中一个最可怕的诅咒。 这是造成气候变化的一个原因。 你发给了我一张地图。 这是什么地图?
SB: Global greening. The thing to do with any narrative that you get from headlines and from short news stories is to look for what else is going on, and look for what Marc Andreessen calls "narrative violation." So the narrative -- and Al Gore is master of putting it out there -- is that there's this civilization-threatening climate change coming on very rapidly. We have to cease all extra production of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, as soon as possible, otherwise, we're in deep, deep trouble. All of that is true, but it's not the whole story, and the whole story is more interesting than these fragmentary stories.
斯:全球绿化。 当你从头条中得到一些信息时, 或是在简短的新闻报道中看到, 你需要做的就是 去查查发生了什么其他事, 找找马克•安德森 称之为“违背主旨”的内容。 说到故事…… 阿尔戈尔十分擅长于此…… 他说,威胁人类文明的 气候变化很快就会到来。 我们必须停止产出任何温室气体, 尤其是二氧化碳, 越快越好, 否则,我们会陷入 非常、非常大的麻烦之中。 这是事实, 但这只是片面的信息, 全部的内容 比这些片面信息更加有趣。
Plants love CO2. What plants are made of is CO2 plus water via sunshine. And so in many greenhouses, industrialized greenhouses, they add CO2 because the plants turn that into plant matter. So the studies have been done with satellites and other things, and what you're seeing here is a graph of, over the last 33 years or so, there's 14 percent more leaf action going on. There's that much more biomass. There's that much more what ecologists call "primary production." There's that much more life happening, thanks to climate change, thanks to all of our goddam coal plants. So -- whoa, what's going on here? By the way, crop production goes up with this. This is a partial counter to the increase of CO2, because there's that much more plant that is sucking it down into plant matter. Some of that then decays and goes right back up, but some of it is going down into roots and going into the soil and staying there. So these counter things are part of what you need to bear in mind, and the deeper story is that thinking about and dealing with and engineering climate is a pretty complex process. It's like medicine. You're always, again, tweaking around with the system to see what makes an improvement. Then you do more of that, see it's still getting better, then -- oop! -- that's enough, back off half a turn.
植物喜爱二氧化碳。 植物由二氧化碳 和水组成,加上日照。 这和很多温室一样, 工业化温室注入二氧化碳, 因为植物需要 将它转换为植物质。 一些用卫星和其他东西 完成的研究结果展示, 你现在看到这幅图 是过去 33 年的状况, 超过 14% 的叶子在工作。 那么多的生物质, 那么多生态学家称为 初级生产的工作在进行。 那么多的生命在继续, 感谢气候变化, 感谢所有该死的煤炭厂。 所以……到底发生了什么? 顺便一说,作物生产随之增加。 这是二氧化碳增长的部分坏处, 因为那么多植物在吸收二氧化碳, 并转换成植物质。 一些在衰退后会回升, 但还有一些进入根部, 然后进入土壤,留在那里。 所以这些副作用 是我们需要记得的, 深层次来说, 思考并处理气候 是个非常复杂的过程。 就像医学。 再说一次,你需要微调系统, 看看什么可以改善它。 然后,多次使用这种方式, 看看它会不会变得更好, 然后……哦!这足够了,后退半步。
CA: But might some people say, "Not all green is created equal." Possibly what we're doing is trading off the magnificence of the rainforest and all that diversity for, I don't know, green pond scum or grass or something like that.
但可能有些人会说: “不是所有绿植都能起相同的作用。” 可能我们所做的这些 是以牺牲壮丽的雨林 和多样性为代价 为了……我不知道, 大概像绿藻层和草地之类的。
SB: In this particular study, it turns out every form of plant is increasing. Now, what's interestingly left out of this study is what the hell is going on in the oceans. Primary production in the oceans, the biota of the oceans, mostly microbial, what they're up to is probably the most important thing. They're the ones that create the atmosphere that we're happily breathing, and they're not part of this study. This is one of the things James Lovelock has been insisting; basically, our knowledge of the oceans, especially of ocean life, is fundamentally vapor, in this sense. So we're in the process of finding out by inadvertent bad geoengineering of too much CO2 in the atmosphere, finding out, what is the ocean doing with that? Well, the ocean, with the extra heat, is swelling up. That's most of where we're getting the sea level rise, and there's a lot more coming with more global warming. We're getting terrible harm to some of the coral reefs, like off of Australia. The great reef there is just a lot of bleaching from overheating. And this is why I and Danny Hillis, in our previous session on the main stage, was saying, "Look, geoengineering is worth experimenting with enough to see that it works, to see if we can buy time in the warming aspect of all of this, tweak the system with small but usable research, and then see if we should do more than tweak.
某一研究结果显示, 所有形式的植物数量都在增长。 现在,这个研究没能涵盖的是 海洋中到底发生了什么。 海洋中的初级生产, 海洋中的生物群, 大部分是微生物, 它们所做的大概是最重要的事。 它们创造了大气, 让我们可以尽情的呼吸, 但这个研究并不包括它们。 这是詹姆斯•拉夫洛克 一直在坚持的事; 基本上,我们对海洋的认识, 尤其是对海洋生物, 可以说是空白的,从这个层面来说。 所以我们正在处于探索的过程中, 通过糟糕的地球工程无意中 排放到大气中大量的二氧化碳 来探究海洋是 如何应对的这一现象的? 好的,在温度升高的情况下, 海洋正在膨胀。 这就是为什么我们发现海平面上升, 并且随着全球温度升高, 海平面会继续上升。 珊瑚礁受到了严重的伤害, 比如,澳大利亚的珊瑚礁。 这些珊瑚由于海水温度升高而褪色。 这就是为什么我和丹尼•希利斯, 在之前主舞台上说的: “看,地球工程是非常值得实验的, 看看它是否有效, 看看,我们是否可以 在气候变暖方面争取时间, 以微小但可用的研究来调节系统, 然后看看我们除此之外 还可以多做些什么。
CA: OK, so this is what we're going to talk about for the last few minutes here because it's such an important discussion. First of all, this book was just published by Yuval Harari. He's basically saying the next evolution of humans is to become as gods. I think he --
克:好的,所以这就是我们 在最后几分钟即将讨论的 因为这是个非常重要的讨论。 首先,这本尤瓦尔•赫拉利刚出版的书, 他基本上在说人类 下一阶段的进化会变得像神一样。 我认为他……
SB: Now, you've talked to him. And you've probably finished the book. I haven't finished it yet. Where does he come out on --
斯:现在,你已经和他聊过了, 你应该已经读过这本书。 我还没读完。 他是从哪里得出……
CA: I mean, it's a pretty radical view. He thinks that we will completely remake ourselves using data, using bioengineering, to become completely new creatures that have, kind of, superpowers, and that there will be huge inequality. But we're about to write a very radical, brand-new chapter of history. That's what he believes.
克:我是说,这是 一个非常激进的观点。 他认为我们以后完全可以 重新制造我们自己, 运用数据和生物工程, 使我们变成全新的物种。 就好像,拥有超能力。 这将存在非常大的不平等。 但是我们即将谱写一个 非常激进的、全新的历史篇章。 这是他所相信的。
SB: Is he nervous about that? I forget.
他对于这点很紧张吗? 我不记得了。
CA: He's nervous about it, but I think he also likes provoking people.
他对此很紧张, 但是我认为他也喜欢煽动群众。
SB: Are you nervous about that?
斯:你对此紧张吗?
CA: I'm nervous about that. But, you know, with so much at TED, I'm excited and nervous. And the optimist in me is trying hard to lean towards "This is awesome and really exciting," while the sort of responsible part of me is saying, "But, uh, maybe we should be a little bit careful as to how we think of it."
克:我对于这点感到紧张。 但是,你知道, 在TED上分享了这么多信息, 我对此感到激动和紧张。 我的乐天思想在努力地主导我, 让我乐观看待它, “这太棒了,非常令人激动,” 但我另一部分的想法是, “可能我们应该小心谨慎一些 去思考这些问题。” 斯:这是你在这个节目的秘诀,是吗?
SB: That's your secret sauce, isn't it, for TED? Staying nervous and excited.
保持紧张和激动。
CA: It's also the recipe for being a little bit schizophrenic. But he didn't quote you. What I thought was an astonishing statement that you made right back in the original Whole Earth Catalog, you ended it with this powerful phrase: "We are as gods, and might as well get good at it." And then more recently, you've upgraded that statement. I want you talk about this philosophy.
这也是变得精神分裂的秘方。 但他没有引用你的话。 我想到的是你的 一个令人惊讶的表述, 就在原版《全球目录》的后面, 你以这段强有力的话结尾: “我们像神一样,不妨好好成为他。” 然后,最近,你升级了这段话。 我想你谈谈这个哲学。
SB: Well, one of the things I'm learning is that documentation is better than memory -- by far. And one of the things I've learned from somebody -- I actually got on Twitter. It changed my life -- it hasn't forgiven me yet! And I took ownership of this phrase when somebody quoted it, and somebody else said, "Oh by the way, that isn't what you originally wrote in that first 1968 Whole Earth Catalog. You wrote, 'We are as gods and might as well get used to it.'" I'd forgotten that entirely. The stories -- these goddam stories -- the stories we tell ourselves become lies over time. So, documentation helps cut through that. It did move on to "We are as gods and might as well get good at it," and that was the Whole Earth Catalog. By the time I was doing a book called "Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto," and in light of climate change, basically saying that we are as gods and have to get good at it.
斯:好的,我意识到的其中一件事是 文档比记忆好, 到目前为止是这样。 我从其他人身上学到的一件事是…… 事实是,我在推特上看到的。 它改变了我的人生…… 它现在还对我有很大影响! 后来,这句话就成了我的, 当别人引用它,并说: “哦,顺便说一下,这不是你最初 在 1968 年初版《全球目录》上的原话。 你当时写的是, “我们像神一样,不妨去习惯它。” 我已经完全忘记了。 这些事……这些该死的故事…… 这些我们告诉自己的故事 随时间流逝变成了谎言。 所以,文档帮助我们解决了这个问题。 这句话确实变成了: “我们像神一样,不妨好好成为他。” 这就是《全球目录》所倡导的。 在我写这本书的时候: 《地球的法则:一个生态实用主义者的宣言》 鉴于气候变化,基本上就是说, 我们像神一样,不得不好好成为他。 克:我们像神一样, 不得不好好成为他。
CA: We are as gods and have to get good at it. So talk about that, because the psychological reaction from so many people as soon as you talk about geoengineering is that the last thing they believe is that humans should be gods -- some of them for religious reasons, but most just for humility reasons, that the systems are too complex, we should not be dabbling that way.
所以说到这个, 因为一旦当你说到地球工程, 很多人的心理反应是 他们不认为人类应该是神…… 一些人由于宗教原因, 但大多数由于谦卑的原因, 这系统太过于复杂, 我们不应该涉猎其中。
SB: Well, this is the Greek narrative about hubris. And once you start getting really sure of yourself, you wind up sleeping with your mother.
斯:这个嘛,是希腊人 对傲慢自大的看法。 一旦你开始非常自信, 结局就是你和你妈妈上床了。
(Laughter)
(笑声)
CA: I did not expect you would say that.
克:我没想到你会说这个。
(Laughter)
(笑声)
SB: That's the Oedipus story. Hubris is a really important cautionary tale to always have at hand. One of the guidelines I've kept for myself is: every day I ask myself how many things I am dead wrong about. And I'm a scientist by training and getting to work with scientists these days, which is pure joy. Science is organized skepticism. So you're always insisting that even when something looks pretty good, you maintain a full set of not only suspicions about whether it's as good as it looks, but: What else is going on? So this "What else is going?" on query, I think, is how you get away from fake news. It's not necessarily real news, but it's welcomely more complex news that you're trying to take on.
斯:这就是俄狄浦斯的故事。 傲慢是一个很重要的警示故事, 非常常见的。 我的其中一个指导方针就是: 每天问自己,我弄错了多少事。 我是一个受过训练的科学家。 这些天与一些科学家一起工作, 非常愉悦。 科学家是有组织的怀疑主义。 所以你总是坚持, 即使当一些事 看上去非常好的时候, 你依然怀疑, 它是不是真的像看上去的那样好, 还会想,还有什么其他事在发生? 所以这个对 “还有什么事在发生”的疑问, 我认为,这是你远离假新闻的方式。 不一定是真的新闻, 但会伴随其他更复杂的新闻 你想要接受。
CA: But coming back to the application of this just for the environment: it seems like the philosophy of this is that, whether we like it or not, we are already dominating so many aspects of what happens on planets, and we're doing it unintentionally, so we really should start doing it intentionally. What would it look like to start getting good at being a god? How should we start doing that? Are there small-scale experiments or systems we can nudge and play with? How on earth do we think about it?
克:但是,说回到 把这一点应用于环境上, 这个哲学看起来是, 无论你喜欢与否, 我们已经主导了 很多地球上发生的事了, 而且我们是 无意识的在做这些事。 所以我们真的应该开始 有意的去做一些事。 如果我们像神一样做事会是怎样的? 我们如何开始这样做呢? 有小规模的实验或系统 能让我们先试行一下吗? 我们究竟该如何看待它?
SB: The mentor that sort of freed me from total allegiance to Buckminster Fuller was Gregory Bateson. And Gregory Bateson was an epistemologist and anthropologist and biologist and psychologist and many other things, and he looked at how systems basically look at themselves. And that is, I think, part of how you want to always be looking at things. And what I like about David Keith's approach to geoengineering is you don't just haul off and do it. David Keith's approach -- and this is what Danny Hillis was talking about earlier -- is that you do it really, really incrementally, you do some stuff to tweak the system, see how it responds, that tells you something about the system. That's responding to the fact that people say, quite rightly, "What are we talking about here? We don't understand how the climate system works. You can't engineer a system you don't understand." And David says, "Well, that certainly applies to the human body, and yet medicine goes ahead, and we're kind of glad that it has." The way you engineer a system that is so large and complex that you can't completely understand it is you tweak it, and this is kind of an anti-hubristic approach. This is: try a little bit here, back the hell off if it's an issue, expand it if it seems to go OK, meanwhile, have other paths going forward. This is the whole argument for diversity and dialogue and all these other things and the things we were hearing about earlier with Sebastian [Thrun].
斯:我的一位良师将我从 巴克明斯特·富勒的观点中解放出来, 这个人就是格雷戈里·贝特森。 格雷戈里·贝特森是一位 知识学家,人类学家,生物学家, 心理学家,和其他领域。 他站在系统的角度来观察它。 这是,我觉得, 这是你如何观察事物的一部分。 我喜欢大卫·基恩处理 地球工程的方式是, 你不是拖拖拉拉的去做, 大卫的方法是…… 这是丹尼•希利斯之前提到的…… 你循序渐进去做, 你做一些事去调节系统, 然后看看它会如何反应, 系统会反馈给你一些信息。 这就呼应了人们所说的, “我们正在说什么? 我们不明白气候系统是如何运作的。 如果你不了解,你是不能改变它的。” 然后大卫说: “那好吧,这一定适用于人体, 医药研发就发生在我们了解人体之前, 而我们很庆幸这样做了。” 你想要改变一个巨大且复杂的系统, 在你不完全了解它的时候, 你需要做的就是小幅度改变它, 这算是一种反傲慢的处理方式。 这是:一点点去尝试, 如果遇到问题就退回来, 如果情况顺利,就继续推进, 与其他方法一起,同时进行。 这就是我们今天 所谈论的内容提要,关于多样性, 以及之前塞巴斯蒂安所讲的一切。
So the non-hubristic approach is looking for social license, which is a terminology that I think is a good one, of including society enough in these interesting, problematic, deep issues that they get to have a pretty good idea and have people that they trust paying close attention to the sequence of experiments as it's going forward, the public dialogue as it's going forward -- which is more public than ever, which is fantastic -- and you feel your way, you just ooze your way along, and this is the muddle-through approach that has worked pretty well so far. The reason that Sebastian and I are optimistic is we read people like Steven Pinker, "The Better Angels of Our Nature," and so far, so good. Now, that can always change, but you can build a lot on that sense of: things are capable of getting better, figure out the tools that made that happen and apply those further. That's the story.
所以非傲慢的方式 是寻求社会许可, 我认为这是很好的一个术语, 涵盖足够多的这些, 有趣的、有问题、深刻的社会问题, 他们要有个很好的想法, 有可信任的人去密切关注 实验推进的结果, 随着逐步实施后的公众对话…… 这比以往要更公开,这非常好…… 你感觉摸索到正确的方向, 慢慢地随着这个方向前行, 目前为止,这是非常有效的, 且可以蒙混过关的方法。 塞巴斯蒂安和我能如此乐观是因为 我们读到像是史蒂文·平克的 《人性中的善良天使》, 到目前为止,一切顺利。 现在,我们总能改变, 但是你可以在这种感觉上 建立很多东西:事情可以变得更好, 找出实现这一点的工具, 并进一步应用它们。 就是这样。
CA: Stewart, I think on that optimistic note, we're actually going to wrap up. I am in awe of how you always are willing to challenge yourself and other people. I feel like this recipe for never allowing yourself to be too certain is so powerful. I want to learn it more for myself, and it's been very insightful and inspiring, actually, listening to you today. Stewart Brand, thank you so much.
克:斯图尔特,我对此持乐观态度, 事实上我们很快就要结束了。 我敬畏你…… 你总是愿意挑战自己和其他人。 我觉得这种永不让自己 过于肯定的方法 是非常强大的。 我希望自己能学到这一点, 事实上,今天你所讲的 是非常深刻而又令人振奋的。 斯图尔特·布兰德,非常感谢您。
SB: Thank you.
谢谢
(Applause)
(掌声)