Observations

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 69 DAYS

Maura and I spent several hours at test community TC-013 today.  Located on one of Colorado’s mountains, this former commune has thirty full-time residents who live off the land, perform scientific investigations, and maintain a suite of environmental monitoring instruments whose data are transmitted via satellite to Boulder for analysis. Officially we were there to brief the residents about the field test development effort and recruit them to help verify the resulting approaches. Unofficially we were hoping to get some ideas of our own.

One of the oldest residents, Dr. Lei Kaleo, gave us a guided tour of the local flora and fauna with a focus on their adaptation to local soil and climate and the changes that have occurred in the thirty-three years since she moved there from Hawaii. “We’ve been lucky not to have any bad fires here,” she told us, “but it is getting warm and dry enough now to significantly stress the trees and the animals that depend on them. It doesn’t take a lot of technology to see that we’re in the middle of a crisis.”

“Do you still keep your observer log, Lei?” Maura asked.

“I’m up to volume twenty now,” Kaleo answered. “I still have my records from when you visited your cousin as a little sprout.” She took us to her tiny cabin and found a leather-bound notebook in a chest under her bed. “There’s a copy of this in a museum somewhere,” she added. “Writing things down is still the best way to track what’s happening, along with good drawings.” To prove it, she showed us multiple sketches done in pen or pencil.

“What about memory?” I asked, thinking about the most basic way to keep information, and remembering stories about so-called primitive cultures that kept extensive oral histories.

“I wouldn’t expect it to be very useful after thirty or forty years. That’s from my own experience, mind you,” she admitted.

“What was that about?” Maura asked me later as we drove to Colorado Springs to have dinner with her family. “Things won’t get so bad that oral history will be necessary.”

“Just wondering,” I replied as a new and even more radical idea began to take form.

Reality Check

Written log books are still being used by engineers (I kept several of them during my career until I transitioned into full-time writing, documenting information others didn’t want to lose). Recording technology is beginning to take their place, however.

Kaleo’s observations haven’t been verified in the real world, though they do generally match with what I’ve learned about the area.