On Sept. 22, the gracious people at Polyplexus are hosting me for a 90 minute discussion about our planetary crisis and potential solutions to it that involve systems thinking--and, potentially, a turning-away from the linear, mechanistic industrial culture we currently have.

Go register on Eventbrite or Polyplexus.com to join the session. The session will be moderated by Laura Anne Edwards, NASA Datanaut and TED Resident.

I gave a keynote address on "the rewilding: a metaphor" at the O'Reilly Open Source 2009 convention last week.  It was recorded, and you can now watch it here:

The talk is notable for the number of times I go "um" and refer to my notes; that's mostly because I was called in at the very last minute, and was literally preparing the presentation on the plane.  I scrawled it on my iRex tablet, which you'll see me referring to as I talk. 

The key ideas--the central metaphor of "the rewilding" are part of a really big research program I'm in the middle of.  It's the capstone to all the ideas that went into two of my novels, Ventus and Lady of Mazes.  Those two books form a thematic whole, but their statement's not complete.  They need a final book, and The Rewilding will be that book--if I can pull it all together in my own mind.

O'Reilly was a bit of a testbed for that--to see if I could bring it all together into a fifteen minute talk that would make sense and be relevant.  You might think that's kind of like flying without an intellectual safety net, and it is; but life's too short, and as an SF writer, it's my job to point to new ideas, not necessarily to fully articulate them.

So try the talk, "um's" and all, and let me know what you thought.