Stewart Brand

It was the first continental animal of great abundance to go extinct.

And basically the extinction of the passenger pigeons was what made Teddy Roosevelt and others realize that they were about to lose the bison, the American bison buffalo.

And so the death of the passenger pigeons arranged for the survival and revival of the buffalo.

That's the kind of knowledge that this global civilization has.

that it has fragilities, but that we are in the process of learning what it takes to maintain a global civilization.

We don't know exactly how to do that yet.

We've only had it for a while.

We've only thought about it for a while.

We've only had parts of it suffer badly.

And so we're still learning what it means to have that in mind.

But one of the quotes I wound up using was from Pete Seeger when he was 85.

And you may remember he was involved in a Hudson River sloop that they built to sort of go up and down the Hudson River, busting industrial waste where it was coming out.

And basically the hippies that built it lost track of taking care of it, maintaining it, a wooden boat, a very traditional gaff rig and all that.

And Pete Seeger saw that and he said, because then they had to raise hundreds of thousands to completely refit the boat, basically rebuild it and get it back on the river in working condition.

And Pete Seeger, who is behind all of this, said you have to consider that one of the major arts of civilization is maintenance.

And that is, I think, an emergent...

perspective that will help us get through these turbulences that occur politically and militarily and so on is that um maintenance is profoundly is more essential than any of these other things that are flipping it around um and so i think it will be honored

increasingly engaged in a widely understood way.

In Pinker's terms, everybody will not only know, but know how all of the maintenance of the issues and systems that we care about can go forward.

And that can become a civilizational habit more