The day I visited a genius

Humanity lost one of its most incisive and foremost thinkers with the death of Dr James Martin on Monday.

A genius of our technological age, Dr Martin was a man of great depth and brilliance.

I had the privilege of meeting the futurist thinker and philanthropist in May 2007 while working as an Environment Reporter for The Royal Gazette.

As a newspaper journalist, it’s not every day you get the chance to walk into a scene from a James Bond film but my visit to the mysterious Agar’s Island was as close as it gets.

The interview that took place was equally ‘apocalyptic’ as I listened intently to Dr Martin’s predictions of a new Dark Age for our planet.

We met to discuss his book and documentary The Meaning of the 21st Century, in which he predicts wars over water, the destruction of the oceans, mass famine, future weapons of mass destruction and terrorism by atomic bomb.

The interview was arranged for a weekday morning and I was conveyed by boat to Dr Martin’s island home in the Great Sound.

I disembarked onto a small jetty bookended by two stone heads of ancient gods from a far eastern civilization, and stepped into another world.

As if whetting my appetite for my meeting with the multi-millionaire technological pioneer, my boat captain (Dr Martin’s caretaker) took me on a tour of the grounds.

We passed a pristine private beach, walked through beautiful floral gardens and then entered the belly of the island, an underground 19th century gunpowder magazine built by the British army.

Series of vaults

Built into the rock face were a series of vaults, one of which was transformed into a music room. Noting a raised eyebrow, my guide explained this was the venue for Dr Martin’s “many parties”.

The image of a reclusive scientist receded further on meeting the man himself at the main house. Surrounded by books and artefacts from exotic travels, he came across as a polite, friendly professor, keen to explain his concepts and ideas with an unassuming air. The interview itself took place at a glass table in the kitchen. We sat on chairs placed on a circular glass floor, below which loomed a deep well shaft.

As I peered down at the precarious drop, trying hard to avert feelings of vertigo, Dr Martin started to describe his visions of the future.

Earth was at a crucial tipping point, he said, and its survival lay in the hands of our children.

But what he described was a world you would not want to bring any child into — a dark place of famine, fear and conflict.

His book The Meaning of the 21st Century: An Urgent Plan for Ensuring Our Future identifies 12 ‘21st century nightmares’: Severe climate change; excessive population growth; water, soil and farm shortages; destruction of fisheries and the oceans; failed nations; mass famine; automated global triage; religious extremism; future weapons of mass destruction; terrorism with nuclear weapons; war; and existential risks.

Dr Martin predicted the explosion of the Internet in his 1978 Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, The Wired Society: A Challenge for Tomorrow, and also the 9/11 attacks in his 1987 book Technology’s Crucible.

This visionary was so passionate about finding solutions to his 21st century nightmare scenarios that in 2005 he donated £100 million to Oxford University.

The donation established the James Martin 21st Century School, which aims to bring scholars from around the world together to formulate answers to pressing global problems.

The real force for change however, Dr Martin told me, is dependent on the next generation, whom he referred to as the Transition, or T, Generation.

He believed that if young people can forge a path to global cooperation, then mankind may still have a chance.

To this end, he recommended educational classes on the perils the planet is facing in every school in every nation. 

We can only hope the T-Generation will meet the challenge of Dr Martin’s legacy.