The Niesen History of Activism
1968 was the year Dr. Aurelio Pecci brought together a group of scientists from all over the world to a meeting in Rome, to start studying the environment and humanity’s impact on it on a global scale. In 1987, Dr. Ervin Laszlo brought together another group of scientists from all over the world to meeting in Budapest, to start studying the evolutionary origins of human consciousness, to try to figure out what it was about Homo sapiens’ brains that was making the environmental crisis and the threat of a global nuclear holocaust seem like such good ideas to so many people. The field of science that has built up around those two projects—which I call planetary biology—is basically the Manhattan Project of the peace, environmental, and human rights movements. But as we all know, Capitalism is opposed to all of those things, which is why this scientific movement hasn’t gone very far, in spite of all the discoveries the scientists have made.
Luckily, in my family we’ve been working on a parallel project for three generations—so we got a generation’s head start over all these official scientists. My dad could’ve been a member of the Club of Rome easily enough, but 1968 was the year Dr. King was assassinated. On the one hand these scientists were saying that radical social change would be necessary to adapt humanity to living within the physical limitations of the Earth. On the other hand, the greatest American activist of the 20th century had just made a whole bunch of radical social change happen. My dad realized then what these ivory tower academics are discovering the hard way now: That radical social change happens in the streets. It happens because someone figures out how to explain to a lot of people—and hopefully a majority of people—why the old way of doing things doesn’t work anymore, how things are going to have to be done differently now, and why doing things differently is going to benefit them.
So my dad set out on a life of adventure—which is to say, he carried on the life of adventure my grandparents had started. He kept up with advances in science over the years, and raised my brother and me the same way. From the time I first learned to talk, I was raised on physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, mathematics, statistics, and systems theory. I don’t work as a scientist, because by the time I graduated from high school at the age of 16, I already had 14 years of scientific background. So I set out on a life of adventure too.
In all I have eight years of post-secondary education, and I’ve compiled the products of my education into a 1.2 million word thesis—the three volumes of my book 42—Evolutionary Science and its uses in Everyday Life, Civil Rights, and World Peace. The only reason I’m not a doctor of what I do is because when you pioneer your own field of study, there’s no one waiting at the end of it to award you a Ph.D. for it.
So all my not being an official scientist really means is that Capitalists can’t use my professional reputation to hold me hostage, and I don’t depend on them to fund my research.
If you read books from the early days of the Peace, Environmental, and Human Rights Manhattan Project, you can see the scientists who were writing them were optimistic. Although it would be a lot of hard work, we could solve all the major problems facing our planet and our species. But if you read the books they’re writing these days, you can see they’re getting increasingly desperate to get people to listen to them. We can still solve all the major problems facing our planet and our species, but it’s going to be a lot harder now, and our window of opportunity is closing fast.
Luckily, in my family we’ve been anti-authoritarian do-it-yourselfer peace, environmental, and human rights activists for three generations also. We support governments to the extent that they’re social structures that make peace, human rights, and environmental sustainability possible. But if they don’t, well then, we’ll just have to think of something else.