Heeb

“Once upon a time, the first life forms—bacteria—came together and lived in communities. . .”

Howard Bloom is telling a story. It’s about creation but is not a myth. Long, long ago, bacteria multiplied and multiplied, building up tons of waste while doing all that multiplying. How did they get rid of the waste, you ask? “I just did it before I came down here,” Bloom says. “They farted it out.” And after two billion years of breaking wind, the atmosphere was full of these bacterial farts, and the farts were poisonous to the bacteria and killed lots of them. Then, some bacteria learned how to process the farts: eat them up and turn them into energy. “And those cells, the cells that worked out this new practice, are the ancestors of you and me,” Blooms tells us. “And the poison that had utterly devastated the atmosphere and that had utterly devastated all of life was oxygen.”

That thrilling, impossible feat of adaptation must seem normal to Bloom. After 20+ years as a PR man in pop music (he made Billy Joel, Joan Jett and Prince into stars), "the wrestling match for Michael Jackson’s soul" wore him out. He spent the next 15 years in bed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Too weak to talk, he wrote instead, turning into a visionary in the field of science writing. (Seriously, you couldn’t make this shit up.) Bloom’s that kind—the eccentric genius who jumps from world to world leaving big footprints in each while tying all the pieces together, seeing possibilities everywhere. While most of us wring our hands over the destruction of the planet, Bloom admires our microscopic bacterial predecessors. He believes, instead of trying to recycle our way back into the planet’s good graces, we should go forward and adapt —leap to something new and force our way into the future. That’s Nature’s primary desire: “Fuck me, screw me, rape me. Remake me in ways that utterly break my rules.”

An expert in practically everything, Bloom is the author of three books. His first, The Lucifer Principle, dissects genetics and culture, finding that Nature has woven evil into our biological fabric as a means of creation. The sequel, Global Brain, is even more mind-blowing: a 3.5-billionyear history of group selection—Darwinian thought writ large and imagined anew . He offers the kind of merciless, sweeping, epic and lusty prose that big brains can’t resist. Bloom is called a genius by CEO’s and academics alike. It’s summed up in his masterpiece: The Grand Unified Theory of the Universe Including the Human Soul, a project fifty years in the making.

Unfortunately, the man with the big vision, who sees how it all fits together, also sees it all coming to a close. “We’re overdue for the next big extinction," he says. Still, he doesn’t hold with the theory “that if only we had sacrificed our iPods to the great goddess of nature, who we have raped, then she [would] bring us back an Eden.” According to Bloom, you don’t appease Nature, you defeat her. He actually calls her "The Bloody Bitch!" She’s never been on our side! She gives us cyclones and earthquakes and Ice Ages that last a million years! Evolution is about breaking her rules, finding a way to win.

We have to stop looking down and become a culture that looks up,’‘ he declares. Like those “dinosaurs that dreamed of flying” and evolved into modern-day birds, man must literally search the sky for new answers. Howard Bloom is planning to launch solar panels into space for energy. And when those waters rise – (and they will, no matter how much you compost) and displace half of humanity, Blooms envisions us adapting and surviving in floating cities encased in cylinders made from rock we scrape off the moon! Seriously. In the world of Howard Bloom, it’s all very possible, and all very connected, and we can beat that Bitch.

Related Posts:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Future (But Were Afraid to Ask)

Grave New World: Douglas Rushkoff

Grave New World: Daniel Pinchbeck

Grave New World: Mitchell Joachim