Sam Lakha, Manager, Volans Outreach.
Learning from the Lystrosaurs
While getting ready to head out to Heathrow and my first board meeting with the Global Reporting Initiative, due to take place in some sort of castle outside Leiden, my mind has been chewing away at the central issue of scaling solutions. Then I read in today’s Sunday Times about new thinking around a complete new class of animals, the pig-like Lystrosaurs, which were among the few survivors of the mass extinction event around 251 million years ago that wiped out 95% of all living species.
One link with the scale issue was the fact that before the volvanic eruptions that caused the extinctions the Lystrosaurs were simply one among a blizzard of species, but the cataclysmic events removed their predators - it is thought that the Lystrosaurs survived because they lived in burrows. They subsequently exploded out across the surface of the Earth, then a single continent, for a golden era of 1-2 million years.
Interestingly, two other small populations of diminutive animals were among the survivors: the cynodonts, that would eventually give rise to the mammals, and the diapsids, that later branched out into the dinosaurs, reptiles and birds.
The article, by Science Editor Jonathan Leake, concludes by quoting a scientist to the effect that: “The amounts of CO2 we are emitting [today] are roughly equivalent to those poured into the atmosphere during the Permian eruptions. Our climate is changing like theirs did.”
In thinking through the implications of the era of convulsive change now coming our way, Volans will need to keep a constant eye on where our team invests its efforts - particularly across our evolving portfolio of ‘Trailblazers‘, profiled elsewhere on this website. Choosing where to place our bets will be as much a matter of intuition and blind luck as of metrics, I suspect, but I am finding that new processes of calculation and weighting are beginning to operate in my brain.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2008/09/learning-from-the-lystrosaurs/.
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