Dave Coulter has spent his life in broadcast news and documentaries, as a cameraman, sound engineer, and editor. His work is broad, including magazine shows like 60 Minutes and 20/20, and documentaries such as Going Clear and Spielberg. Spending decades in the room during 2-3 hour interviews with politicians, philosophers, Nobel Prize winners, celebrities, and everyone in between turns your career into a masterclass about human life on Earth. Add to the mix a longstanding interest in anthropology and evolutionary science, and an urgent climate crisis threatening every one of these things, and before you know it you find yourself creating The Lizard Brain Project.
Lizard Brain is a conversation about the future of our species in the age of climate change. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, a billion years of instinct beats a million years of intellect every time. We believe that humans are directed, more than we want to believe, by survival instincts that predate us as primates. Those instincts have adapted as our intelligence has grown and now speak to our unconscious in its own ancient tongue. That is the heart of the Lizard Brain metaphor.
Humanity stands at the inflection point of a twelve-thousand-year experiment in civilization. Each of us has the privilege of bearing witness to this moment and the duty to decide if that civilization continues.
The Lizard Brain Project is a discussion about what stands in our way as we weigh our options. Our higher minds offer us all the tools we need to carry this civilization into the 22nd century and beyond. We’ve created a scientific infrastructure that allows us to measure and calculate what we’re doing to our habitat. That scientific tradition, built over centuries, leaves us unable to claim ignorance about our impacts or our responsibilities.
What fights against the higher mind is our fear and our competitive programing. Ironically, that programming is what helped us survive a hostile world in order to evolve into what we are. But it’s clear that no matter how far our higher mind has taken us, the roots of our primitive past run deep, and now that programming is threatening to kill us.
Science must have a stronger voice in this discussion. The Lizard Brain Project draws from evolutionary and biological anthropology, cognitive psychology, and the philosophy of science itself, to build a foundation on which to find the answers we need. But at the same time, science can’t be the solution on its own. The industrialization that built this unsustainable lifestyle was fueled by applied science in the service of comfort and convenience. Our lizard brains whisper to us that this ever-growing quality of life is natural and inevitable; a birthright of our intelligence. Any attempt to reverse that “progress” feels wrong. This is our challenge.
We’ve put off the hard decisions for too long. We know better, but we’re afraid to do what’s necessary, and we find it far too easy to equivocate and rationalize that we can still afford gradual measures. The math doesn’t lie. The time for gradual solutions was decades ago. The choice of how we approach our future will be made globally by all of us, whether actively or passively. In the words of the late philosopher-poet Neil Peart, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
We welcome outreach of any kind. Comment, write, contribute your ideas. We’ll engage and bring your thoughts, insights, and expertise into the mix. This requires everyone’s voice. Welcome to the conversation.