governance—a couple of decades, per
haps. After that, it seemed clear that no
previous conflict or migration would com
pare to the hell to come. Feedback loops
would be set in motion that would trans
form the earth into an irradiated planet.
Already, humans are expected to force
more than a million species into extinc
tion, and, by 2050, to fill the oceans with
a greater mass of plastic than there is of
fish. In interviews, Ledgard started press
ing politicians, consultants, business
men—anyone with power—to devise
strategies for a more equitable, sustain
able future. “But I just wasn’t getting
any answers,” he told me.
The most exciting thinking about the
near future was taking place on the fringes
of the tech sector, among people who
worked on networks and artificial intel
ligence. “There is no room for techno
utopianism in our barefisted future,”
Ledgard wrote. But if there were a way
to counter the scale and pace of human
depredations, he thought, it would come
out of the laboratories and companies
whose creations were enabling it.
In 2012, Ledgard quit his job, moved
to Switzerland, and began a fellowship
at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de
Lausanne, one of Europe’s best research
institutes. “It was very important to me
to be in an almost autistically scientific
environment,” he said—not “hanging
around with political scientists or econ
omists or anthropologists and having
the usual conversations, learning noth
ing.” He pinned photographs of a Nokia
1100 and a Kalashnikov next to his desk,
as reminders of why he was there.
For the first two years, Ledgard sat
through hundreds of lectures by theo
retical physicists, computer scientists,
mathematicians, and engineers, and
forced himself to read abstracts of sci
entific and philosophical papers on sub
jects that he could barely grasp. “My
brain started moving in these com
pletely different and much richer di
rections,” he said, sparking “a series of
progressive realizations that the world
that I thought I understood is not at
all the world as it is.”
In time, Ledgard refashioned him
self as both an evangelist of radical think
ing and a prophet of specific doom. He
won’t tell you that the world is ending;
he’ll just present the charts that show
you how. “The only possible thing to do
is to go in an imaginative direction,” he
told me. “Imagination at scale is our only
recourse.” This approach has led him
into collaborations with an array of fa
mous partners—the British architect
Norman Foster, the DanishIcelandic
artist Olafur Eliasson—on projects that
range from practical and humanitarian
to fanciful and abstract. The world, ac
cording to Ledgard and his collabora
tors, might stand a chance if cargo drones
delivered goods in the roadless areas of
East Africa; if sentient robots were cu
rious about the natural world; if people
could immerse themselves in the sights
and sounds of the deepest parts of the
ocean; if plants and animals could paypeople for the cost of their preservation.
“I’m not sure if this is a real project or
I’m trying to write a novel in the natu
ral world,” Ledgard told me, referring
to the last of these ideas.
Ledgard knows how fantastical his
projects can sound. “You have to ac
knowledge that the probability of suc
cess is vanishingly small,” he said. “But
if just one of these ideas came off in the
next twenty years, in some form, and
in a really significant way—and it im
proved the lives of poor people, or helped
save other lifeforms from extinction—
then that would be really worth your
time.” He added, “My main point is to
move the conversation in a more imag
inative direction.”
“You get visionaries, you get dream
ers, but Jonathan is also a realist, and
intensely practical,” Norman Foster told
me. “Perhaps that’s why there has been
so much common ground between us.
In the end, architecture is projecting
imagination to realize a tangible proj
ect.” Each of Ledgard’s projects appears
to be animated by a single question:
What if human greed could be har
nessed as a kind of natural resource, and
redirected to mitigate its own effects?L
edgard was born in the Shetland Is
lands, off Scotland, in 1968. His fa
ther was a military chaplain, and, when
Ledgard was four, the family moved to
a base in Germany. But he spent his teen
age summers in the Shetlands, and came
to know a group of retired whalers there.
They would “sail to Antarctica, South
Georgia, Montevideo, San Francisco,
Cape Town, Valparaiso,” he recalled. “And
then they’d come back. They were amaz
ing, in that they had seen the world, but
also they were so comfortable with not
seeing the world. In a way, they were
global citizens before globalization kicked
into the jetliner age.” Ever since, he said,
“I’ve always been someone who just longs
to be everywhere and nowhere.”
Somewhere between boarding school
in London and journalism everywhere
else, he lost his Scottish accent. He is mar
ried to a Czech diplomat named Marta
Anna. Avvy, their Brittany spaniel, re
sponds to commands in English, French,
and Czech. So does their fourteen year
old son, Hamish, who has attended
schools in Nairobi, Lausanne, and Prague,
“ You want the news? Here it is. The cat’s a jerk.” and recently accompanied his father on PREVIOUS SPREAD: MAGNUM