Tom Ray

I want to speak from a biological perspective about speeds. Within living systems speeds occur over a wide range from the micro second speed of a molecular reaction to the multimillion year processes of the accumulation of biological diversity. So there is a hierarchy of speeds in living systems that corresponds to the hierarchy of structure. And I want to mention some ways in which human activities alter the speeds of biological processes, looking particularly at where changing the speed of the ecological level of process runs over into speeds of the evolutionary level process.

Biological speeds usually result from a balance between processes and it is often the case that humans alter biological speeds by altering these balances. A simple example is population. Population size and growth is determined by a balance between birth and death. And the application of technology to reduce the speed of death without also reducing the speed of birth causes population growth. The present growth rate of the world's population is 1.5% per year. It sounds rather small, but it is not a speed, it is an acceleration. And this imbalance has gone on long enough that it is accelerating to a huge speed. The current world population of 5.7 billion grows at a speed of 88 million persons per year, more than the population of Germany. As human population grows, natural habitat is converted into human habitat. And by natural habitat I mean the space occupied by millions of other species that we share the planet with. So this acceleration of the speed of human population growth means that in our life times, or in a single life time, most of the earth's remaining natural habitat will be destroyed. And the destruction of natural habitat causes another imbalance in biological speeds, at the evolutionary level.

It is a balance between the rates of speciation and extinction that determines the diversity of species on earth. And the destruction of habitat has caused a sky-rocketing of the speed of extinction, causing a sudden crash on the diversity. So while it is a reality that we have increased the speed of extinction by a huge amount, there is nothing we can do to make a comparable increase in the speed of speciation. So in a single life time the earth may lose half of its living species. Yet it will take tens of millions of years for evolution to replace the lost diversity through the process of speciation. The destruction of habitat and species diversity is an undesigned result of technology that has been applied and designed for other purposes. But if we decide that we want to try to do something about these processes of habitat destruction and loss of species diversity, then we have to design solutions to halt or reverse these processes.

To directly address the issues of species diversity the best thing we can do is to design national parks and wildlife reserves to protect the habitat. As it turns out that this is very easy -- in Costa Rica where I have done a lot of work we have built a beautiful system of protecting actually 10% of Costa Rican territory. But that is the easiest part of the whole undertaking, the difficult part is keeping these reserves protected forever. How can we design something to last forever? We do not really know, but at the moment it is obvious that the long-term survival of these parks depends on a good relationship with the surrounding human community and for now we are developing a good relationship through the development of an eco-tourism industry, so that the people draw direct benefit from these lands that have been taken out of the agricultural arena.

Addressing the problem of population growth itself is much more difficult, but I did have an interesting experience designing a software in the Spanish version of the local language for Costa Rican school children and it was tested on sixth-grade students and the idea was that they were going to colonize a district and decide how many families to colonize and how many children each family should have and then go through generations and see the consequences and experiment with different choices about and to see the outcome. And in the end most of the children concluded that it would be best to have two children and when the Inner American Development Bank observed that result they told me that my software was too effective and that I had to fix it. But to me the most interesting thing I heard from the students was that they had never thought about it before.