The long narrative poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was published in 1798 during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Even by this time, however, the devastating consequence of burning coal to fuel the proliferation of factories was evident. Once pristine valleys were transformed into darkened wastelands of smoke and soot, bucolic streams and rivers were turned toxic black, quaint villages were converted to slums of indentured labourers, and the maw of multiple machines was making people into consumable and disposable objects. The artistic reaction to this perceived travesty was Romanticism, an effort to save humanity and nature from a revolution that was perceived to be destroying both.
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The Quadra Project: Taking our temperature
In February 2022, our planet was 1.19°C warmer than the pre-industrial temperature of 13.7°C calculated from the collected global records in the 1880s. The Industrial Revolution technically began about 100 years earlier, but no extensive measurements exist to verify the combined surface temperature of both land and water during those years. Between 1920 and 1940, the global temperature rose 0.1°C per decade, 0.2°C during the 1980s, and 0.61°C per decade since 2000. This ascending trajectory corresponds to a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from about 280 parts per million to about 420 ppm, and ends the 10,000 years of relative climate stability that has allowed human civilization to flourish.
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The Quadra Project: the Social Game
In the 300,000 years that Homo sapiens has existed as a distinctive species, we have done very well. During this time we have outlived at least five other hominids, including Homo neanderthalensis, which became extinct a mere 40,000 years ago—depending on ancestry, we actually carry traces of Neanderthal genes as a result of interbreeding. We have also managed to populate the entire planet, an accomplishment that has puzzled those who have tried to explain our unprecedented success. Luck was obviously a factor. But an another is now emerging from the genomic analysis of a rare disorder known as Williams Syndrome. (see “The Last Human” by Kate Ravilious, NewScientist, 29 Nov. 2021.)
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The Quadra Project: Passenger or Crew
The famous Canadian media guru, Marshall McLuhan, when commenting on Buckminster Fuller’s seminal 1969 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, said, “There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth—everyone is crew.” Like so many of his insightful comments, McLuhan managed to encapsulate a complex and comprehensive understanding in a few simple words.
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The Quadra Project: The War Years
The 20th century did not begin well. After the warm-ups of the Crimean and Boer Wars, Europe stumbled into World War I in 1914, a fatal combination of hubris and stupidity that killed about 17 million people. The trauma inspired an unflinching examination of the dark recesses of the human psyche in an effort to understand what happened. Dada, the mindless artistic expression of absurdity, was not a satisfactory answer. The philosophical loneliness of existentialism was arguably a nihilistic consequence of the monumental blunder of the First World War—a loss of any remnant of idealism and collective human wisdom.
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