In preparation for our discussion of Island starting next week, I went looking on Youtube for interviews with Aldous Huxley. In this snippet, you can hear him talk about problems that we are still facing today, 50 years later, as well as his ideas on how we can solve these problems using “all our goodwill, all our intelligence, and all our knowledge.”

What I find most interesting is that he considers problems of politics unsolvable, and problems of ecology possibly solvable, and so advocates shifting our attention from one to the other: “It’s high time we started thinking not merely in terms of politics and ideology but in terms of biology and the relationship of man to his environment.”

You can watch the full interview (around 20 minutes long) after the jump. Huxley’s ideas reverberate today as much as or even moreso than in his own time.

Part 1

Part 2