Jay Keasling is a pioneer
synthetic biology, the process of hacking microbial DNA to produce ultra-low cost fuel and drugs. His talk, in part, is about just how difficult this hacking process is.

In building computers, we can go to Fry’s, buy some components and plug them in together. They work because we’ve got standard connectors, standard protocols. These devices function independently, and we choose to put them together in new configurations.

The same thing, he tells us, is true in the chemical industry. If you want to synthesize styrene, it’s possible to build a factory from “off-the-shelf” evaporators and fermenters, connected with pipes. Those pipes work together because someone took the time to set the pitch on pipe threads, establishing a protocol.

This is not how we manufacture biologicals, unfortunately.

Keasling is interested in manufacturing Artemisinin. Artemisinin is the latest weapon in the battle against malaria, a disease that effects 300 to 500 million people a year, killing 1-3 million of them. 90% of the people the disease kills are children under five years old. The economic impact of malaria is profound – nations effected are estimated to lose up to 50% of their GDP due to productivity losses from the disease.

For 400 years, quinine drugs have been how we combatted malaria. Wars have been fought over quinine supplies, and crazy plans have been put into place to put quinine in table salt. (We’ve settled for putting it in tonic water instead.) But the widespread use of quinine means it’s no longer effective in most of the world. The successor drug, chloroquine, now also experiences widespread resistance.

Artemisinin is a compound that comes from sweet wormwood, or Artemisia Annua, a plan that literally grows like a weed. It’s been used in China from 168 BC to cure hemorrhoids, and since 300AD to cure fevers connected to malaria. It was largely forgotten until the Chinese found themselves involved in Vietnam, and searched their ancient medical literature for malarial treatments.

Artemisinin is incredibly effective against drug-resistant malaria, but it’s not cheap – it might cost $20 for a traveller to malarial areas. In negotiation with manufacturers, some developing nations have gotten access to combination therapies at $1-2.50 per dose, which is still very expensive for a developing world government. There are wild price fluctuations in the product – as growers have seen the market, they control the supply very tightly. And some rogue manufacturers sell artemesinin with little or no active compounds in it.

Keasling’s plan is to destroy the market for fake artemisinin by selling high quality products at the lowest possible cost. This involves synthesizing the drug not via chemical synthesis – which is inefficient and expensive – but by coaxing microbes into growing it. If you have a microbe that can produce the substance, you just feed it sugar and it gives you the drug.

But making that microbe isn’t that easy. You need about 12 genes to make Artemisinin, and about 40 compounds in total to make it possible. You’ve love to go to Fry’s Biologicals and buy what you need, but that’s not how it works. Instead, you write to your colleagues and say, “Hey, I read your paper, please send me your gene.”

Your colleague responds in a couple of weeks, sends you a vial and says, “Please use as described in my paper.” You do, and it doesn’t work. You write him back and say so. He says, “Well, it worked for me. Did you follow my instructions exactly?” It’s not an efficient process. To produce Artemisnin, you need to isolate some genes, model some others mathematically, and learn how to put these genes together without having the genes kill the cells. But his lab is getting much better at doing this, improving seven orders of magnitude in producing this compound in six years. He points out that, if there were the biological Fry’s, it would have taken about six months.

Keasling is now partnering with Amyris Biotech and Institute for OneWorld Health to scale up production, get the drug manufactured and distributed. The most radical aspect of the work is the intellectual property part. These biological components are generally patented, and you need to license each of them – usually for huge fees – to build something out of components. Keasling is patenting his components – defensively – but making them available in an open license. You can use his technology to produce artemisinin on a nonprofit basis, or to produce something that contains artemisnin on a for-profit basis. This is an amazing step forward towards a world in which scientists are able to put components together and produce new solutions without entering into a legal nightmare.

He hopes to have cheap Artemisinin in people’s hands in two years. But some of this other projects are even more impressive. He’s looking at Taxol, a chemical found in the bark of Pacific Yew trees which is an effective cancer drug. The bark of one hundred-year old tree equals one dose, and there are fewer trees in the world than cancer patients. What if we could use biological synthesis to produce Taxol? Or Prostratin, a compound found in the Mamala tree from Samoa, which can be used to treat hepatitis, or to inhibit HIV infection? We could mow down rainforests, or we could synthesize this compound from sugar and microbes.

The holy grail of biological synthesis might be motor fuel. Keasling points out that we’ve increased energy consumption 85% from between 1970 and 1999, and that we’re literally running out of fuel. While it’s exciting that we’re starting to use ethanol – which is basically a process of biological synthesis, using microbes to produce ethanol from sugar – it’s a lousy fuel. “Ethanol is for drinking, not driving.” The chemical kills the microbes that produce it, which means you end up with 85% water and 15% ethanol. And most cars can use only 10% ethanol. What we really want to do is produce oil from microbes and simply skim it off the top of a vat. If Keasling can figure out how to do this, he’s likely to have a lot of money to play with to pursue drugs for all sorts of diseases.

Our morning’s session ends with a talk and performance by musician John Legend. Legend has begun using his music as a platform for social activism, trying to get his fans interested in an issue that he’s focused on: extreme poverty. Legend is trying to support the Millenium Promise Organization – he visited a Millenium Village in Ghana, and has been working since then to “put a face on extreme poverty.”

Legend acknowledges that most of his fans may not know or care about these issues, and that they may not know what to do even if they do care. He just shot a video for a song called “Show Me” in Tanzania – that video should drop in a few weeks and will help expose his fans to the reality of life in a developing world. He’s beginning “The Show Me Campaign”, which is his charitable project to raise awareness for this issue.

Whether or not you’re into Legend’s music – and you have to acknowledge the power of his voice no matter what – and whether or not you think that Jeff Sachs’s Millenium Villages are the right way to address global poverty, it’s incredibly exciting to see a prominent musician using his fame to introduce his fans to critical global issues.

Technorati tag: poptech2007

Dr. Victoria Hale is one of the founders of the US’s first non-profit drug company, One World Health. Her work focuses on diseases you’ve probably never heard of in places you’ve never been.

The first disease her firm focused on was Kala-azar, or black fever, or Leishmaniasis. It’s a parasitic disease that affects the desperately poor, some of the poorest people in the world. The parasite is spread by sandflies, and affects bone marrow, supressing white blood cell production. It presents in ways similar to anemia and HIV. It’s cureable, but the established treatment costs $300, which isn’t possible for families that earn under $1 a day.

Her firm is now running clinical trials in the Bihar state of India using Paromomycin, an antibiotic that had been heavily used the middle of last century, but became less popular when it went off patent and because it’s injectable, not oral. But it’s quite effective, and the medicine is now being tested in India, Bangladesh, Sudan, Brazil and Nepal. It’s manufactured by a firm in Hyderabad that specializes in producing generic medicines.

Geting this drug into trials and approval is part of a proof of concept for One World Health. Hale wants to demonstrate the possibility of drug discovery, clinical trials and manufacturing on a non-profit basis, not the traditional for-profit basis, supported by philanthropic money not by venture capital. She points out that generic medicine manufacturers can produce a known compound, but they don’t test the safety of compounds and get drugs approved. But the success of their Kala-azar cure – which costs $10, not $300 – is strong evidence that you can develop a nonprofit pharma company… or perhaps a nonprofit company in any industry.

Hale’s personal path to this work came from working for the FDA, then working for cancer drug firm Genentech. At some point, she was disturbed that the medicines she was working on were useful to fewer and fewer people because they were so expensive. Now her focus is on drugs that are cheap enough to address hugely widespread diseases like malaria and cholera.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funding her work on malaria, and has committed to elimination of malaria worldwide, a huge and astounding task. “It’s not just global health and making new medicines. It’s clean water, education, women’s rights.” The problem isn’t just health – it’s poverty, and we’ve got to focus on all these priorities. She closes by quoting the late Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop: “There is no more powerful institution in society than business. It is more important than ever before for business to assume moral leadership in society.” Hale wants to see pharma businesses doing what the employees within them want them to do – making people well.

Technorati tag: poptech2007

Bill Shannon takes the stage on crutches, though he can clearly walk on two legs. It’s disconcerting to see him – is he walking on crutches to make an artistic statement? To explore a four-legged dance style? Because he’s faking?

He knows you’re asking this question, so starts his talk with medical validation, “Until I validate, you won’t really be looking at me. I have to tell you why I’m using crutches.” Shannnon has a bilateral hip deformity – his hips aren’t round, and puting pressure on them creates swelling. It’s possble to have hip surgery, but that requires new surgeries every ten years. Instead, Shannon has raised walking on crutches to an amazing art form.

He demonstrates what club dancing looks like on his rocker bottom crutches. As people in the club watch him, some end up saying, “I think he might be faking it.” His response, he tells us, is “the faker squared, faking to the second power, faking faking to show my reality.” He demonstrates, taking a big step on crutches, then four baby steps with his feed on the ground, so that people can say, I knew he was faking, man – busted!”

Shannon’s art form requires an amazing range of technique. He shows us the basics of a rocker-bottom crutch. With the crutch tops in his armpits, he’s “in saddle”. But he’s capable of a “highbar thread”, where he moves his weight onto a midbar support, which allows him to reach the floor. A “lowmid” involves the armpit supported by those middle suports. Moving through these positions, he’s able to move between standing up and working on the floor. But “you can have all the technique in the world, but if you ain’t got style…”

Shannon’s got style. He started using them at age five, and as a result, he considers them an extension of his body, something he thought was very cool when he was a kid. He got off them in his teens and took up skateboaring, but came back to them in his mid-twenties. But his fluidity and style are a product of years of experience and years of non-crutch movement as well.

Lately, Shannon has been performing publicly, challenging images of disability through performance art. He explains that people don’t rush in to rescue a skater who’s trying a trick and blows it. People watching him perform on crutches initially respond by seeing him “as a poor, crippled guy”. Over time, they start seeing him as “a crippled guy who’s having too much fun.”

People project narratives, he tells us – “this guy is in trouble, I’m here to save him.” This good samaritanism can be an obstacle. So Shannon performs his “disability-based utilitarianism” in public, doing amazing things like picking up bottles while being fully upright on the crutches. It’s important, he tells us to “retain neutral pallette” so he can see people’s authentic reactionsa to his movement.

Some of Shannon’s most amazing movement is on a skateboard – he uses one for mobility purposes, moving long distances through airports, for instance. “A skater’s relationship to architecture is different from the average pedestrian.” These surfaces of the urban environment can be pushed off of, tricked on. There are tricks Shannon can do that are impossible for conventional skaters because he’s capable of making one foot weightless with the crutches. He describes his style not as “extreme”, but as “extremely laidback skating.” Watch the video above and judge for yourself.

Technorati tag: poptech2007

Choreographer Elizabeth Streb is obsessed with action. “Action is about the now, the present tense.” She wants to see “extreme action out in the world”, but do so working in an artificial medium, the proscenium stage.

She reminds us that Tim Cahill tells us, “The explorer is the person who is lost.” She explores moves like diving through glass. “It’s emblematic of something very critical, which you can’t name.” She tells us that, ” Any of us could do this. Come to my studio and we’ll teach you.”

Human reference points are pretty simple – ground, water and air. “Given the minuteness of humans, I had to throw the bodies into this space,” to experience air. “I have always believed that humans could fly,” despite our solid bones and heavy musculature. “There’s another problem with flying – eventually you have to come down.” She reminds us a famous Evel Knievil quote: “I never had any trouble with the takeoff.”

Streb’s talk is deeply non-linear, punctuated by slides that layer aphoristic statements in colorful text, looking like powerpoint exploded. “If action is a verb, can it be the subject?” “What is action’s vanishing point?” She throws in a slide of the golden mean, some Richard Serra quotes, and tells us about the behavioral code of the theatre: “You can’t eat, talk, or have sex. So how do I make your experience purely physical?”

It’s required framing devices to show these sorts of movements. Streb talks about moving beyond “lights and tights” towards a form of dance that requires a 53-foot truck filled with box trusses and pads. It’s not a very economical way to run a dance company. But, “the first thing is the idea, then you figure out how to pay for it, and if you end up in a problem, then you figure it out.” She tells us, “I’m a present tense person. I can’t worry about the future.”

By changing the physical rules of the dance service, she asks questions about “body grammar – what is the grammar, the syntax, the declension. Are the knees and the hips similar?” A piece called “The Moon” is performed on a 20×20 frictionless surface, and is filmed from above, projected behind the dancers on stage. It twists how gravity works – support comes from the sizes of the stage rather than the floor. “You change your base of support, but dance normally. I have never been to the moon.”

Some of these pieces involve the ideas of danger and fear, “willingness to insert your body into harms way.” She shows us an image – “That’s a surfer, That’s a shark. That’s a bad situation.” Some of her pieces look a great deal like bad situations. “Ricochet” involves dancers launching themselves into a plexiglass wall, “target practice with your body.” To capture the sense of danger of a bull ride – “Eight seconds of hell” – she creates a stage punctuated by swinging concrete blocks. “There are places you can be on the stage and places you don’t want to be at certain times.” When dancers end up practicing in the space, they leave rehersals feeling exhilarated: “Guess what? I didn’t get hit by the block!” Putting pendulums onstage, she tells us, “was the first construction that was temporal first and visual second.”

The tools used onstage by her performing ensemble and her “Slam Lab” are astounding – one is a Newtonian lever device called “fly”. It’s a 400 pound counterweight on a lever, that allows dancers to fly in circles. She invites us to try this sort of flying. “Try this on the mattress in your hotel. Do this when no one’s looking. You can’t be travelling when you hit, otherwise you’ll scrape your kneecaps off. You’ve got to have air aim.”

Her work is all about this aim. “It’s basic research: shoot an arrow in the air. Where it lands, paint a bullseye.”

In questions after the presentation, someone asks Streb if she dreams of flying. “First of all, I don’t dream. Second, I’m not a lyrical person. I prefer the crash.”

Technorati tag: poptech2007

Anthropologist Nina Jablonski praises us as an audience for being, “an exceptional and alert group of primates.” (I will be more exceptional and alert with a bit more coffee.) She invites us to begin her talk by being quite primate and spend twenty seconds touching the skin of someone else in the room. She’s unsurprised when many people don’t participate in this activity – we’ve moved away from this behavior in human society, but it’s incredibly important to ourprimate ancestors.

Humans encounter the world primarily through our vision, folowed by our touch, hearing and, least, from our sense of smell. There’s a huge amount of our brain dedicated to processing touch information. She points out that our skin is quite remarkable – it’s very sensitive, mostly naked, comes in a range of colors, is often sweaty, can be decorated and adorned.

“We gather an enormous amount of information about our environment from our skin,” especially the skin of our hands. Hands are equipped with an amazing range of nerve endings that interpret pain, deep touch, temperature.

The sensory homunculus, above, shows us how sensitive our sense of touch is in different parts of the body. Our hands end up enormous, as do our lips and tongue, because they’re so sensitive and have such a complex range of sensory nerves.

Primates touch each other a great deal and that touch isn’t random. Mothers and children bond through touch. She reminds us of Harry Harlow‘s experiments with baby monkeys, who gravitated to warm cloth mothers that didn’t give them food rather than to wire mothers that provided food. Adult primates groom, as a form of social bonding. Jablonski suggests that we, as primates, groom as well – massages, facials, and other forms of touch.

The range of human skin color isn’t randomly distributed over the planet. We see more dark-skinned people near the equators, more light-skinned people near the poles. Skin color tends to be proportionate to the ultraviolet radiation our ancestors experienced. A dark-skinned person living in the north tends to have difficulty producing sufficient vitamin D, while light-skinned people transplanted to equatorial climes have a variety of problems dealing with the strength of radiation.

“Humans are self-decorating apes.” Humans use cosmetics to highlight certain features, most of which are sexually attractives. Tattoos tend to be affixed to signify life events. Neither of these phenomena is new – cosmetics are at least 4000 years old, while tattoos date as early as five thousand years ago. An “ice man” found in the Tyrolean Alps, where he’d been preserved for five thousand years, had several tattoos, which might have been decorative or theraputic.

“Stripped of the skin, we really are all alike,” she tells us. When we lived in bands, we touched constantly, and measured each other’s emotions and feelings through the skin that’s evolved over 40 million years. “Before you use that next emoticon… think about how important it is not to forfeit your primateness.” She urges us to hug someone before the day ends: “Humans, like our primate relatives, need to touch one another. This is truly what it means to be human.”

Technorati tag: poptech2007

• Cyberactivism in Russia: Gravikol 21 and the first anti-corporate rebellion | Daily EM
  Evgeny writes about a fascinating protest in Russia against a company that marketed fake drugs to senior citizens. The activists used an amazing round of techniques to harrass the company, including fake orders and creative use of Google ads
  (tags: activism blog bloggers russia protest telephony)
• California Magazine
  Barlow addresses his work on cyberutopianism and considers whether the brave new world he posited in his essay has come to pass.
  (tags: barlow cyberutopia cyberspace politics culture internet)
• Bloodbank
  Nathan Eagle’s very cool new project to use SMS to provide blood to hospitals throughout Kenya. Very cool use of mobile tech to address a resource and information problem
  (tags: nathaneagle mobile technology sms telephony)

Ted Ames is the only Maine lobsterman who’s received a MacArthur “genius grant”. Listen to him for a few minutes and the reason he’s been honored becomes very clear – he’s doing astounding work in using the knowledge of fishermen over generations to document and understand the collapse of Maine fish stocks.

Groundfish – species like cod, flounder and haddock – have seen their stock collapse three times in Maine since 1950. Twelve years ago, there were about 4,000 Maine fishermen making their money from groundfish on a few hundred vessels. None of those vessels fish for groundfish today – “we’ve all become lobstermen.” Ames explains that it isn’t an option for fishermen to stop fishing – “it’s a lifestyle.” The goal, instead, is to understand how groundfish live and breed to understand how stocks might be rebuilt.

Ames tells us that his grandfather was able to tow up 30,000 pounds of redfish in a single day in a 43 foot boat. Those sorts of stocks haven’t been seen for years – like orange roughy, those fish take 15 years to reach maturity, and it takes a long time to rebuild their stocks. “Isn’t it tragic what ignorance and a little greed could do?”

He points out that fishermen are the best resource for understanding what a healthy groundfish population looked like. His plan is to gather ecological data from when fishing was good and pool fine-scale data to figure out what populations look like now. “Fishermen know specifically where they fished, how they did, what species ended up in their nets.” By collecting this information and plotting them on maps, we can understand how fish used to spawn.

Ames’s conclusion is that the collapse of the Maine fishing stock is the product of two sub-populations of cod collapsing. He’s overlaid historic data with data from contemporary fish-tagging studies and can now identify where those missing fish were spawning. That, in turn, points to the possibility of a recovery strategy based on “area management”, closing off parts of the ocean to ground fishing to allow stocks to recover.

There’s reason to believe this can happen. In 1932, Maine’s lobster stock was completely depleted. Now that’s a $280 million a year industry, producing 60 million pounds of fish, supporting 14,000 fishermen. Groundfish is 5% of Maine’s total industry, while lobster is 76%.

How did lobster recover? Five strategies:

- protect habitat
- protect reproducing females
- protect juveniles with minimum size laws
- control the fishing effort with trap limits, licensing of boats and an apprentice program
- stewardship and area management

Oddly enough, area management is an unpopular idea with the National Marine Fisheries Service. Instead, you’ve got Ted and his fellow fishermen lobbying the US government to prevent them from fishing. If you’re interested in their battle, you can follow his work at Penobscot East. It’s really impressive work and a great demonstration that sometimes fishermen are the best stewards.

Technorati tag: poptech2007

Oceanographer Enric Sala studies coral reefs. But he studies ones that are very different from ones you’ve seen before. Sala is interested in studying pristine reefs, ones that have never been fished, and argues that they are profoundly different from the ones we generally understand.

He offers this analogy – imagine you’re an alien from outer space. You come down to earth and encounter a rusted, broken-down car. The engine doesn’t work, but there’s a slight charge left in the battery, and the wipers work. You’d conclude that the purpose of a car was to allow you to comfortably observe the outdoors, even in the rain. If someone told you this vehicle could be driven thousands of kilometers, you’d be amazed.

This, Sala argues, is how we’ve been studying coral reefs. We began studying them long after they were degraded. 99.9% of all studies are of reefs that are recovering. But Sala has been focusing on studying remote, uninhabited, unfished coral reefs. He’s recently been studying the Line Islands, which include the Christmas Atoll, discovered by Captain Cook on Christmas day in 1777. Cook was generally a very reliable narrator, and he declared that the Atoll was “filthy with sharks”. That atoll, which now houses 5,000 people, now features no sharks at all – Sala didn’t find a single one in 250 hours of diving.

What he found instead were tiny fish, most smaller than the size of a pencil. Many of these fish are sold to the global tropical fish market. The coral in these reefs is all dead – it’s covered with bacteria and algae. Once the algae covers the coral, it stops growing and dies.

Moving to a smaller, less inhabited atoll – Tabuaeran – he saw the classic coral reef: lots of small and midsize fish, but dying coral. That’s likely because there are 2500 people living on the atoll and they fish and dive, affecting the reef. Moving to a much less inhabited reef, Palmyra atoll, which hosts 10 wildlife management professionals, but historically has been fished, he saw sea turtles, large sharks, but dying corals, with a few small corals growing back.

What was most amazing was when he dove at Kingman reef, a reef that has never been fished. He discovered five hundred year old corals. The sea floor was paved with giant clams which filter the water, creating the lowest concentration of bacteria and viruses ever recorded at a coral reef. And you find an amazing number of predators – 10 to 25 sharks per reef, and huge numbers of red snapper. “The entire food web is upside down,” he tells us. On land, we assume that there are large numbers of prey species to support predators – one pound of lion needs ten pounds of wildebeest, each of which need ten pounds of vegetation. But in these reefs, 85% of the biomass is top predators.

We have destroyed coral reefs, he reports, by removing everything big and reducing the biomass. We’ve replaced coral with algae, enhanced domination of microbes, and reduced the resilience of the reefs. These dying reefs are more diverse, but they’re much more fragile than the healthy, pristine reefs.

Sala’s plan going forward is to discover the unexplored places in the ocean and work to protect them. His strategy is to document them, and invite a very small number of tourists. The money from tourism will compensate countries like Kiribati so they don’t sell fishing rights to people to destroy these ecosystems.

One of the questions put to Sala concerns the inversion of the food pyramid – how can a pyramid where 85% of biomass is predator? He explains that you need to consider time as well – those top predators have very long lifespans, while prey spawn again and again. At any moment in a healthy ecosystem, the predators are a huge majority… but over a long period of time, there’s much more prey than predators.

Technorati tag: poptech2007

Claire Nouvian is a journalist and filmmaker fascinated by the world’s oceans. She’s got a lot to be interested in – she points out that while 75% of the world’s surface is water, 99% of the world’s volume is water. We’ve explored only 0.5% of the ocean’s surface since the 1960s, and have barely explored the deep seas.

Nouvian is especially interested in the deep seas, locations thousands of meters below the surface. She fell in love in 2001 when she visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which had movies of strange and wonderful creates from far below the surface. Monterey is near a very deep cleft in the ocean, which allows researchers to study as deep as 4000 meters below the sea on a daily basis, which is a truly unique opportunity. She was astounded by the animals and dedicated several years to reporting on these creatures in a book and film called The Deep.

There are numerous potential threats to deep sea ecosystems. Many species depend on whale carcasses to support their ecosystems – as the whales die and drop to the floor, they feed hundreds of other species. If whales continue to die off, they’ll affect huge swaths of undersea ecosystems. Other threats include exploration for oil, which now occurs as deep as 2 kilometers, and will likely keep expanding until we’re seeking oil 7 kilometers below the surface. Deep sea mining and dumping have huge effects. CO2 sequestration, which we’re starting to experiment with, may have serious adverse effects on the deep seas, as might attempts to extract methane from the deep sea.

Bottom-trawling, on the other hand, is real and present danger for deep oceans right now, she argues. She’s talking about large trawl nets, 60 to 100 meter-wide openings, with heavy steel doors. They drag across the bottom of the floor and grab everything in their path. This has been a popular fishing technique for years on continental margins. However, we’re getting desperate to find large fish, and she’s concerned that we’ll begin seeing deep sea trawling far offshore.

She quotes Dr. Daniel Pauly, who says,
“We’ve declared war on fish… and we’ve won it.” Fishermen now use military techniques to catch fish, employing tools like GPS, sonar and satellite imaging to catch more efficiently. Our catches have increased fivefold between 1950 and 1990… but we’re also seeing a decline in fishing stock since the 1980s. Now 70% of global fishing stocks are overexploited.

She’s studied the orange roughy closely, travelling with research trawlers in New Zealand. Orange Roughy is especially vulnerable because fish aggregate to spawn. Her trawler accidently dragged in the midst of a roughy “plume”, and caught 7 tons within 20 seconds. Commercial fisherman fill their nets within two minutes, then spend a couple of days processing the catch. Restoring these fish stocks is very challenging – it takes 20 years for these fish to reach sexual maturity, and some of the fish caught are 200 years old. “It’s sort of cannibalistic, like eating my great-grandmother,” she tells us.

She’s at least as worried about sharks, who are routinely caught in these nets – the Atlantic shark population has dropped 95% in the past few decades. As a result, sharks are almost guaranteed to be the next major marine animal to become extinct.

The impact of deep sea trawling is even more dramatic on coral reefs. There is deep sea coral, and it was a major obstacle to deep sea trawling. But new nets destroy coral first, then sweep for species, so that nets don’t get damaged. Literally, nothing is left behind once these nets move through.

Nouvian argues that there’s no social benefit in allowing deep sea trawling. It’s only 0.5% of the worldwide catch, and doesn’t meaningfully impact the world supply of protein. There are only 300 or 400 ships engaged in the business, a $400 million dollar a year industry. “We are destroying a unique, unassessed planetary heritage at unprecedented speed and scale in a probably irreversible manner for no reason,” she says, referring to the phenomenon as an undersea Rwanda. “We could have lifted a finger and intervened but we couldn’t care less.”

Keeping the stage literally until Zolli chases her off, she urges us to visit The Sea Around Us, projects that focus on ecolabeling, and her own NGO, the Bloom Association.

Technorati tag: poptech2007

Designer Chris Luebkeman likes to ski. Recently, he went skiing in Dubai, enjoying the indoor slopes while it was 45C outside. He points out that the UAE government finally allowed construction workers to take a few hours off if temperatures outside exceed 142 degrees farenheight. Buildings – including Ski Dubai – produce 48% of the world’s greehouse gases and contribute to 71% of global electricity usage.

To put our current energy situation in perspective, he asks us to think back 100 years. At that point, there were only 144 miles of paved road in the US and 8,000 cars. The US army was 75,000 people, compared to Russia’s 13 million. “We’re only 80 years old as the world’s policepeople. Where will we be in a hundred years?” He invites us to help answer that question, voting on a set of factors about the future on a tool on his website.

One major change is guaranteed to be our use of energy. Luebkeman is a believer in peak oil, mentioning a recent conversation with an energy executive who said, “There’s lots and lots of $300 a barrel oil. There just isn’t much $100 a barrel oil left.” 90% of our transportation energy use is petroleum use, and it’s getting harder to find this fuel. He points to an “energy wealth ladder” – pictured above – which demonstrates that as societies become wealthier, they inevitably use more energy. As we watch countries like China become richer, you see them become more crowded with cars, and more hungry for power.

As a globetrotting businessman, Luebkeman admits that his lifestyle requires 42 planets (if everyone were to use as much energy as he did, you’d need 42 planets worth of energy to sustain it.) One of the reasons he’s spending so much time on airplanes is that he’s trying to build cities for the future that can be much more sustainable than our current ones. He points out that 600 million people are migrating from the countryside to the city in China. That’s the population of North America, Australia, and a big chunk of Europe. As they move, their environmental impact is going to massively increase.

Luebkeman is one of the main designers of Dongtan Eco City, a new development in the mouth of the Yangtzee river. It has been designed from the ground up to house 80,000 people in three high-density “villages”, built from three to eight story buildings. He explains that the density is intended to be similar to London or Barcelona. There’s been a great deal of thinking done about energy and waste in the community – water discharge is 88% lower than in a conventional city, while solid waste is down 83%. “Rice factories” will produce crops on two levels in a building, lit by LEDs powered by solar panels – burning rice husks will help generate power. The site has been designed to capture the prevailing winds, allowing micro and large-scale wind generation. The design should allow the average resident to live at 2.3 globes per human, rather than the 5.8 for the average urban dweller. That’s an impressive achievement, but shows just how difficult the problem is, Luebkeman believes. But thinking this way is part of a process of discovering that there’s a different way to build and a different way to live, if we’d make the decision to look for it.