Stewart Brand

If you are concerned about the future of human life on this planet from an ecosystem point of view this is a key book to read. Stuart Brand brings up issues that will be controversial to ecologists, conservationists and lay people alike but approached pragmatically as contributors to ecosystem stability. Some of the key ideas and references in this text are the most well thought out, practical, internally consistent I have ever found collected in one place.
The biggest question is that we may need to rethink the idea of man vs. ecosystem in the sense that we may need to engineer it for our own long-term survival. That to assume that the environment is resilient enough to sort things out on its own might be a dangerous existential view.… (meer)

The idea itself of a clock designed to run 10,000 years is incredible: on the one hand preposterous, ridiculous, pharaonic even. My first reaction was to think that the idea was a bit crazy, and I could not see the point to such a construct. The process that took me from absurd to enthusiastic follows the words of this book.
Only if we seriously work on projects for our deep future, can we come to respect and care for it, like we would our personal descendants. And I do believe many of the most complicated problems we face today seem to transform and become less severe in the perspective of millennia ahead for our species. And new tricky classes of problems gain in importance, it is my running question whether humanity will manage to start paying attention to the threats that most endanger its long-term survival.
The clock of the long now, matters as an idea even before its real construction.… (meer)