GFI 02: Kim Stanley Robinson, Transcending the Climate Crisis

in kim stanley robinson's book ministry for the future the paris climate agreement and subsequent climate treaties play a large role in realizing a sustainable future for humanity the work being done at cop26 can either play a role in bringing a story to life or it could portend an even darker future for humanity on today's show we talk with kim stanley robinson and get a glimpse into what it might take to survive and transcend the climate crisis but before we get started click on the like button below and do subscribe and click on the alert button so you can get notified of any time we post new content now on with the show burning desire big ideas bold action ken stanley robinson is a hugo and nebula winning author of the mars trilogy he's known as a realistic science-based highly literary science fiction author with over 20 books published stan's work is often focused on themes of sustainability economic and social justice climate change and speculative futures stan is a world builder creative in his 2020 novel the ministry of the future stanley takes on our near future and builds a world-spanning vision of how we will be impacted by climate economic inequality and social justice crises in his book he sketches out a path forward for humanity this book is a must read for anyone interested in generative futurists and in my opinion one of the best ever examples of a generative future one that is both desirable and viable stan welcome to the show thank you michael good to be with you um uh i i'm i'm curious about all kinds of things about this uh work but the first thing that that i'm most curious about is you know what was your inspiration what was that kind of seed moment when you when you decided i've got to write a book about this about this near-term issue there wasn't really um well maybe there was but it be it was the end of a long process um i've been writing utopian novels for about 30 years several and that's not typical for someone to do serial utopian novels but they were always distanced from the here and now said on mars or in the past various displacements that meant that i kept trying to not just write about a utopia but about how we might get to a better society like the road to utopia as being the subject of the novel so that's been going on for years and i've been struggling with it for years for this book i thought let's dispense with all displacements and go right to the global present to climate change no distractions no metaphors and then what you might call what when you talked about a seed moment i was reading about wet bulb 35 temperatures i was coming to understand that this talk that was widespread in our culture that um we weren't going to be able to stop the global average temperature uh rise at 2 degrees celsius we were going to shoot up to 3 or point five or four and we were just gonna have to adapt to that that humans were adaptable this was a view that you would hear from people trained in economics or in the humanities etc and they were missing something that hadn't really been underlined by the medical or scientific community that humans can't survive uh above a wet bulb 35 temperature on us reading about that it's a heat index it's what we all understand very well that a combination of high heat and high humidity is more uncomfortable than a dry heat and that at a certain combination of high heat and high humidity that the world is now beginning to touch on for an hour to here or there around the world in thermometers and weather stations is fatal to human beings unless they're in air conditioning you get cooked in your own juices sweat sweating doesn't work hyperthermia is just as dangerous as hypothermia and within hours you overcook and die um because sweating doesn't work in high humidity so when i read that it was like a slap to the face i was thinking look all these eco-modernists all these philosophers and economists saying we just have to adapt they're not understanding that in the evolutionary sense we can't adapt that we would have to be living in air conditioning and air conditioning breaks down all of uh electrical goods break down especially when they're stressed by high demand so precisely when we'd be at the most danger of uh dying of heat strokes we also might have a electrical grid failures and that was the stimulus i thought we are in more of an emergency than we even thought we were and the whole adaptationist eco-modernist will just adapt to anything view is flatly wrong and i need to write a book about that so that was the start yeah and in the book you you describe in a very dramatic sense tell the story of one of these events happening in india and uh all but one uh individual from this town uh passing away from the heat and even getting in the lake wouldn't save them from uh the terrible heat over over the period of time they were exposed to it and then this starts off a whole series of of impacts inside of the the book that we'll go into a little bit later tell me a little bit about in this book there were there were it's in it's in chapters or sections um but there are there are pieces in the book that are just straight-up essays trying to help us understand economics and and other topics that's not a it's certainly not a typical writing style for a science fiction writer i mean science fiction tends to come in a pretty traditional packages um tell me how you decided to do that and and you know what is what's the experience you've had of the audience reaction to to that kind of essay writing inside of the book well it's been all over the map um and there is always a crowd of people who think they know how novels work and that novels can only be dramatized scenes you know 20 dramatized scenes and you have your novel and they're very rigid but i'm not that way um i'm an english major the canon shows you that the novel as a form is very capacious it's a baggy form it isn't even a genre it's called novel because it's new and a whole lot of material can be tossed into a novel and it's still function as a novel so i'm a novelist i believe in the novel and i could point to some quite famous novels that use interpolated essays plays pseudo-documents lists etc etc the one that i would point to because i've used it before is john dos pasos's usa trilogy a very famous book from the 30s that describes the 1920s globally better than any other novel and it was very famous in its time and it's still it's marginal in the canon because dos pasos was an intense left winger when he wrote the book and when he was young he was an intense right winger when he got older and right when english departments in the 50s were trending left he was trending right he's never really been uh taught but he has been read so if you look at the usa trilogy you'll see the model from my earlier novel 2312 the specific uh homage to dos paso's form and you know it's never really wise to refer to this book for multiple reasons but i'm going to do it anyway a moby dick one of the greatest of all novels in the history of the world is simply stuffed with various kinds of forms including these pseudo essays you have to regard them when they're in a novel as a chapter in which the protagonist is something not a human but an idea you have to regard them as prose poems they aren't going to function like ordinary essays they're under the service of the novel's larger purposes they're there to be games they might be wrong melville has a long chapter on the qualities of whiteness or the the whale regarded as a fish he keeps calling it a fish goes on and on like that so what's important when you have a novel is that all forms can fit in it and they're orchestrated to a larger cause in this case a global picture of like the next 30 years i mean in essence by certain criteria that's a crazy goal for a novel but since the novel can do anything and since i've already written novels that cover 700 years or 200 years covering 30 years was not um too mind-boggling it's always problematic and i'm interested in the game of forms so say you're talking about climate change you start with a mass heat death it's pretty grim material it's real life it's the crisis that we're in now it's an emergency and we all know about it we're all living it why read a novel i mean a novels are for fun where's the fun and for me some of the fun can be in the orchestration of the material in the form of games in the form of different kinds of genres in this book much more important than the essays are the eyewitness accounts probably i don't know two or three dozen eyewitness accounts by anonymous narrators who tell you something they saw in first person well now that's not novelistic that's an eyewitness account works almost exactly the opposite of the novel in that it it tells rather than shows and nulls are supposedly about showing not telling i actually don't believe in any of the rules when it comes to novels i don't think there are rules you put together a big baggy prose narrative you make it work or you don't but there aren't rules so our culture's notion is very puritanical and and and rigid that they people seem to think they know what a novel is is oh well it's irritating to me because i i myself am a novelist and i don't know what the novel is but i know it's bigger than what they were thinking about yeah and it it seems to me that you're daring to educate in the middle of this book i mean and i don't want to get into this it's that the book is it it is at times fun to read but it's not fun to read in the way that a lot of your other work is or work that's you know displaced in time or location it's a it's a it's a um a v has a visceral impact because of its its nearness and its um and the likelihood of some of the the crisis events in it so uh i think there's a you're it's it's a bit shocking sometimes for people and then some of the the pieces of the you know essays or even the eyewitnesses they're they're they're daring to educate us um about things that maybe aren't widely known or spoken about um i think that takes some courage one but i'm interested in you know choosing to do that and what is the impact or effect that you're you were hoping the book would have or or maybe even not even a conscious hold but this is just something i must put out there um and now as you're standing and you're seeing it making this kind of uh impact into worlds like like our world uh with the generative futures initiative um you know just talk to me about that a little bit because novel as a way to transform culture in people's view of something is uh quite a revolutionary act if you ask me well thank you for that i i mean i think that's what the novel was made to do is to create a culture structure of feeling by um putting everything into it and talking about the meaning of the culture and so it creates meaning it doesn't it's not just reporting it's creating and when you opened up this our discussion you talked about a future that was both desirable and viable you said and now and that's one of the reasons that i pulled in all this wide variety of material um i was thinking of it in terms of a best case scenario of the future going well and us dodging the mass extinction event but in a narrative that you could still believe in a narrative where you could believe that it could happen it was crucial not to run off the rails of a believability of plausibility of of the reader going along reading it and testing it at every sentence like a reality test could that happen could that happen well everybody reads like that but in this case um the pressure was going to be hard on the novel to say do i still believe it and there's um there's places where i necessarily had to do some uh hand waving where um it isn't as believable as i would want where there's a stretch a leap of faith uh in science fiction uh norman spinrad made up this term i find very useful the strategic opacity you get to the crux of things and a new science fiction device a time travel machine or whatever and there's a strategic opacity right where you would have to explain how it really worked there's a some phrases that obscure the fact that you can't really make it work well in political science in history any time you write a future history you've got moments where you're skating over thin ice where you got little strategic opacities but for the most part i wanted to make it look like it was rock solid from from the very near future like three years from now to the year 2050 a feeling of solidity that would grow in the reader to where the suspension of disbelief would increase that more leeway would be given as the book established its credentials as oh yeah this is realistic this is how it would happen then more risks could be taken without um throwing the reader out saying well that just couldn't happen and slowly but surely you could create a believable but uh desirable future so in that sense you brought it up and i think it's very important entertainment versus education this is a question about art that goes right back to aristotle whose definitions of it are fundamental to our western culture it essentially art should both educate and entertain at the same time and they're not that much of a dichotomy uh brecht is also very good on this in his estrangement effect and in his theater theory um education can be highly entertaining entertaining entertainment can be highly educational it's not that much of an either or if you begin to regard the idea that hey new information that's kind of fun to know that and therefore the essays have to be well done they have to be um playful they have to maybe have a snarky or a supercilious or a indignant narrator who it's not just an essay it's somebody on a rant who's telling somebody about something and so most of the mini essay chapters in ministry for the future have an angle um some of them sound a lot like my citizen from my new york 2140 novel but i didn't want to go back to that cynical uh blasphemous citizen of new york that new yorker who was squawking so hard in my new york novel it wasn't really appropriate and only appears once or twice as a voice as a as a style in ministry for the future i wanted other things and i i think that by going at it that way the um a lot of the essay chapters people reading them they'll really already know that stuff anybody who's interested enough to pick up a novel by me make up ministry for the future there are some first-timers but a lot of them are already sophisticated experienced and educated uh citizens so when they read my novel i'm not in many cases i'm not really teaching so much as i'm rehearsing and and and by putting in little bricks of of um of essay-like material of supposed non-fiction material um although i think of these as short stories also they're like bricks in a wall and what they do is create that sense of oh yeah this is plausible this is realistic i knew that already but it's entertaining to see stan's take on it or this this narrator's take on it and it's short so i'm not um beating people over the head with stuff that they already know and then maybe sometimes i'm introducing a new angle um maybe because it's a leftist angle maybe because it's the latest thing maybe because it's a scientific angle that is new also to me so i'm like bringing the news and so that's how all those things come together but i think that's what's really effective about the book and uh you know other than the fact that it takes us on this journey and really takes us through all these steps of of dealing with the effects of the climate crisis and and you do deal with social justice and economic inequality in there as well i want to make sure that everybody knows that it's really taking on a whole portfolio of issues for humanity um and it walks us through there and i think the thing that gets me to to tell people to read the novel over and over again is because even if they've not been in this conversation if they can read the book they will they will suddenly be in the conversation they'll have enough information about different um topics and ideas not just a story there but i actually have some information that that's actionable for them things they can go research more on or maybe they're really fascinated in economics part or the governance part and they can they can dig in a bit farther in fact i think one of the most impressive things about the book is how many of those ideas you're able to to weave into one um one work that it is really a broad spectrum of different uh not only different uh understandings of our current systems as play but so many many many of the kind of theoretical ideas of how we might work our way out of those systems into new systems that might serve better for uh the planet and humanities place in it so uh chapeau for for um doing that um i want to talk for a minute about economics because in the book you you bring you know capitalism and it by the end of the story it's not it's not capitalism like we would recognize it today but you bring capitalism along to the future as well as as traditional governance forms i'm curious about the decision to do that was that the case from the very beginning you knew you were going to look at capital as being a an important intrinsic part of this thing or did you consider other approaches and then ultimately why did you decide to to keep capitalism you know going along for the next 30 years well it was on a question and it's part of this i desire it's part of this desire to make it a realistic novel a plausible novel and we are in the nation-state system and we're in a global capitalist system now the global capitalist system is one name for the climate problem it creates the climate problem by mispricing everything so it needs to be solved cured changed the nation-state system well it's unwieldy but it's what we've got and it's not automatic that it's part of the problem in other words if you imagine some world governance and in some science fictional form that that tells everybody what to do and then everybody does it and then we're all okay well maybe but maybe that's not necessary and it's also incredibly um uh one world-ish and cuts against language culture diversity and difference in ways that are a they're maybe a little inhuman and unnatural and b we don't got it now and we're not going to get it so in terms of making a plausible future getting to a better place i needed the nation-state system yeah and then you need international treaties to coordinate nation-states and get them all working more or less on the same page rather than a zero-sum game that's why i focused on the paris agreement every nation signed it they've agreed to do certain things and if they were to stick to their agreement then the paris agreement will become one of the great actions in world history it will be remembered as long as human history is written if we live up to it if we don't then it becomes like league of nations which is well remembered amongst people who were thinking of failures but not well remembered if you're thinking about uh world history as a success so i'm trying to describe to you my decision-making process as into making a fictional future that was both positive and you could believe in it nation-state system paris agreement but capitalism okay that's going to the highest rate of return the name of the capitalism is the name for a system of power it's a and a financial arrangement by which the few control the many and the work of lots of people accrues to the ownership of a few people and that's intrinsic to capitalism it's not an accidental side effect it's not a hijacking of the system it's intrinsic i'm an anti-capitalist i'm an american leftist capitalism is one name for the problem but it's the law it's what we start with so then how do you get out of that how do you morph that into a system that properly prices and the world people and the biosphere price it properly which is means in many cases infinity so already your system begins to blow up economics doesn't value things because its prices are always artificial and concocted but they've been made too low and then how do you morph that around to a better treatment of people better treatment of planet where you get more justice you get more biosphere health um you will have to break that central law of going to the highest rate of return as it currently exists so that's how i came to i'm by seeking around well who talks about this amongst political economy well it's kind of um [Music] sparse it's not of uh active discussion despite the crucial need for it you don't see a lot of speculative economy and what that would be is political economy not just economics but political economy so i think modern monetary theory has to be given props as a group of economists trying to think back to keynes and using keynesianism to get into a better pricing of the of our relationship to the biosphere and also what i like about mmt is the insistence on a job guarantee and full employment and justice and people's welfare uh is included in the climate equation as well so in other words you pay yourself for doing the right work and and effectively it's almost just keynesianism which um it sounds that sounds a little bit uh timid or old-fashioned but on the other hand um it would be a huge step forward to get from austerity and neoliberalism back to keynes and then go forward from there and what i mean by keynes is government making up new money and spending it for good carbon reduction projects first and controlling the spend not just giving it to the private banks to consistently blow it by going to the highest rated return which is fictionalized and wrong and bad but actually spending the first creation of new money on it's called carbon quantitative easing so this is a long way of running you through my thinking uh process as i actually ended up writing a novel about carbon and quantitative easing i mean that's that's crazy unless you explain the the process of thinking that got me there i mean central bankers i don't know of many novels that are about central bankers changing the world and it feels foolish to say so because they are not really the drivers but they are the clutch right uh and so as the clutch i thought i could play the game there yeah and you know keynes you know i think going back to you know the banker and the bretton woods meetings and this kind of decision point for our global economics when we went to hey let's just take as much and extract as much wealth from everybody we can as the model instead of saying hey let's intrinsically tie the value of all our economies together which is keynes's argument and um and and then you go a step further and introduce uh you know this this carbon coin so you know looking towards some of the you know what emerging tools we might have in in uh in cryptocurrency and and uh blockchain driven uh economics which are still nascent i mean many of those people keynes is like the top level of their thinking you know like going beyond that right now is really difficult mostly because we just don't have any prototypes for how to manage other forms of value other than than the one that's tied to uh you know the world's um uh fiat currencies so i i definitely again you know hats off to you for for going that direction and demonstrating they're again giving us a viable picture and i think over and over what is helpful for those who would like to seek out systemic change is having examples even even fiction examples of how this might work and how this might carry out because it creates a blueprint for action you know obviously just a blueprint without any action doesn't create any change but all action you know around around achieving uh nebulous ames we know where where those end up you can you can take a look at the occupy movement for example great amount of action no no aim and no destination it was it was you know coherently driving towards and then it all falls apart um now in the book in in you you use a very very um strong lever to deal with um the excesses of capital and capitalism in that uh uh there is an element of echo terrorism in there and that the you know the top one percent or the top climate abusers um actually are the targets of this very sophisticated terrorism i i'm curious about that as both the storytelling device which i found as a reader very engaging and in some way some way gratifying and satisfying but as a kind of an architect of the future um is is that like is that a necessary ingredient or is that like just one way that we might actually have the worst of our our um climate abusers if you would if you would call that or the ones that are at the the most excessive extremes of of economic inequality to rejoin a more wide middle humanity well i mean you put your finger on one of the more vexing troubling and important questions and i can't answer it um because the world's going to answer it when writing the novel i was fearful that if we didn't cope with the climate change and also inequality uh problems as a as a combined problem in the properly in the next few years by legal means by democratic means by by agreeing as a society and a civilization to do it that way violence was going to erupt and really the kind of targeted asymmetrical and effective violence that is sometimes described in my book is a little fantasy land and typically violence is more spasmodic more chaotic and less effective in um its collateral damage and its blowback and it's in its suffering and in in other words it's a bad tool and so in my novel um i was sort of thinking through these issues and i don't think that uh i did a particularly good job and one in this sense probably i could have made it clearer the differences between sabotage and murder as political tools and that maybe there are reasons for and justifications for sabotage for breaking of machinery as opposed to hurting people but but my defense is that history itself is completely chaotic and so as a representation of what it's going to feel like and what it might look like i think my novel is okay as a blue plant or a plan or a suggestion no i don't think it works that way and i'm i'm i'm frightened that the book when you say you know architect of the future that it begins to look like a necessary beam um uh political violence i keep thinking that say you're in the one percent you've been well educated you and and you're up to date in terms of education you know how the world works if the democracies of the world gave you a big haircut and progressive taxation came in and also uh trackable digital money came in so that you couldn't hide your wealth and that the taxation was going to give you a big haircut and probably your heirs your immediate errors in terms of passing along inherited wealth but even in the immediate present for you if you were said look you only get to keep 10 million and the rest is going to the common good and and to necessary causes and has become part of the public rather than the private wealth um wouldn't you rationally take the haircut and walk if you were given a sufficiently good deal for protecting your private privilege well if if everybody was homo economicus and the one percent is closer to it than anyone else maybe they would they know perfectly well that 10 million isn't enough to protect um your life that you will live a good life that you have social security you'll have health care and your kids will probably be okay to a limited extent you can never protect them um not by money so um and yet power is a drug and wealth is power and i don't notice too many of the one percent advocating of really harsh progressive tax rate advocating their own haircut you don't see that happen very often um and in a future and and here i want to move into a fantasy space if there were a future in which if you were in the one percent you knew that you had a chance that you were just going to be killed on the street one day or have a drone blow up your house one day and you were offered a safer world and this is almost like parallel worlds fantasies rather than actual world situations wouldn't you be feeling calmer healthier and and like a better citizen if you took the haircut and so this is a political position taking the haircut um i don't see it it's you don't see um uh the one percent being uh radical and progressive leftists you see them often supporting the status quo even though the status quo has taken us all down so these are the kind of questions that come up that to come up to all of us for being oriented being anti-government we can look at the the you know the the capitalists behind the brexit move you know they really just wanted deregulating uh deregulated trade uh the capacity to make more money without any kind of oversight um so there's there's definitely a a common theme amongst uh a libertarian you know radical libertarian form of capitalism which is get your hands off me and let me make the money i want to make let me operate as i want to wait which is kind of like saying to the great white shark yeah we'll just throw as much food in the water as you'd like and let you eat and i think that's that's something that you know it's often been said that capitalism without strong governance is is toxic and i think that that what we've seen in the past you know 25 years uh and and hopefully you know like beginning to be curved is this notion that government should continue to to create more opportunity for um the the uh accumulation of capital um and i think i think you're saying about uh taking a haircut you know that could be moved to a more aggressive stance and saying that hey governments could could privatize people's businesses and things like that which we definitely saw um in the socialist revolutions obviously something that's very distasteful to most americans especially but but within the the toolkit of a governor a government we we could actually do things like that well i wanna i wanna um um make something clear that i know that you already know but just so that we are making it clear to all our listeners neoliberal capitalism is strong governance it is a system of governance it is not hands off it's not this myth of private contracts between individuals that get to make private agreements amongst themselves it's a set of regulations and laws that allows for monopolies to take place and and then once they have the state and finance government and business are two aspects of the same system of civilizational controls and so um one doesn't want to get caught up in the idea that capitalism is less government and uh what would you call it socialism is more government they are both highly government they are both forms of governance so what would be interesting would be to apply apply um a hugely uh progressive tax basis but also taxes are so powerful if you said that a big company gets taxed at five times the rate of a small company the lawyers the tax lawyers would go to that big company and say you need now to become um ten small companies cooperating with each other we'll fix it behind the scenes but you are now breaking down into 10 small companies to reduce your tax rate well 10 small companies could then begin to deviate in terms of their own internal governances as city-states and then you begin to drive towards it with the tax law said cooperatives where the employees owe the company get taxed at 10 whereas um um the old-style uh owner-driven when capital owns the the profit and the labor rather than labor owning the capital and the profit profit being a kind of a weird index anyway at different tax rates suddenly we would all become mondragon in order to uh read make more money uh and conform within a governance system that taxes differentially to make push towards justice and um the the rights of the the economic rights of a much larger group of people i guess what i'm saying here is the instrumentation already exists called rule of law legislation tax law regulation that instrumentation exists and can be applied to make a much flatter uh more biosphere-friendly more adjust socially just political economy the tools could be applied in ways that make for a much better system yeah again i think you made this case in the book quite well that um governance or laws and agreements between governance governments uh treaties could be used to great effect to to uh um take us off the course of of you know climate extinction and put us on the course to to course correction as best we can although the book makes it very clear that it's not going to be a comfortable journey regardless of of whether we do well to work our way out of it and it seems to me that just recently over the past year or two we've seen some examples uh i'm thinking specifically in europe some of the the uh there's a new law that that says that any part of supply chain has to be responsible for the fact that there wouldn't be uh slave labor for example in any part of that supply chain it used to be that hey as long as the people that are supplying me the gene say they're not using slave labor i'm i'm off the hook or europe is now saying no you're on the hook you actually need to um ensure that no place in your supply chain would have that kind of of labor and so we're starting to see some moves like that and it seems to me nation in terms of the kinds of of uh governance changes that you're speaking about in the book but do you see kind of some hope and i know you you based your book in switzerland and in in in the european world do you see some hope in that in that part of the the world for leadership in this regard um what is what is our way out well i i see some hope and and i've seen more since i finished the book as people come to me and say stan why were you so pessimistic or why were you talking about these good things happening in the 2030s or 2040s when actually they're already started and so i've been educated in ways that i would love to retroject into the novel but i can't um on the other hand there's always uh resistance opposition the the attempt by people in power to stay in power no matter the costs so it's a mixed picture but um the one of the things you're you're talking about is legal standing um that all people need to have legal standings such that indeed slave economic the equivalent of slave labor or wage slavery or enforced labor etc that you still see around the world big it gets made illegally uh to the whole supply chain as you talked about this is great then also the rights of non-speaking uh entities like animals like watersheds like rivers like um biospheres um the the problem is you bring a court a case to court does the claimant have standing so legal standing is a crucial matter in in our rule of law system and it's been historically expanding over time from a very small group of privileged men to more and more people and then to these other entities so like i did an event with the minister for the future of the country of wales jane davidson got laws passed such that the land of wales has legal standing in the courts of wales and all decisions made for the political economy in wales need to take into account its effect on the landscape that might spread to the whole uk you you spoke of these examples in europe and um all the talk of of 30 by 30 that 30 percent of the land be reserved for the animals by the year 2030 this movement is is growing fast and it's new and it and it actually quite uh surprises me that it's doing so well so fast because it sounded radical just 15 years ago when i first ran into it and now it's um a platform it'll have to be struggled for and and made real but the fact that these are actually on the table now amongst uh places like european union the united states federal government and in weird ways and and ways that are obviously problematical but also they're happening in china and in india uh very contested worldwide and and it's a nasty moment in world history because the reactionary business as usual let capital exploit us to death there are advocates of that that are going to go down fighting they won't change their minds you can't talk them out of it unfortunately persuasion and reason only goes so far i would like it if the discursive battle were the only battle but in fact the discursive battle is just one aspect of a larger political and physical battle that we're in yeah this notion of rewilding and in a book you did just some amazing you make some made some amazing leaps of imagining very uh uh very large um um corridors for wildlife to to travel and move and california big pieces of the central valley being turned over to to rewilding um you know is that one of those essential ingredients is it is it not just that we have to stop extracting you know resources that have toxicity when we extract them and toxicity when we when we use them but this notion of turning over parts of the planet back to um to truly wild environments not managed well but but but really left alone is that is that one of those those kind of key components of us moving to the next 30 to 50 years well that's a good question too i want to say yes but i think that it is a question of your value system the citizenry that you are hoping to achieve adequacy for do those citizens include the wild animals or not so if you're anthropocentric and it's all about humans only i suppose there's a future you could imagine where we have a mass extinction event and yet we still have adequacy for humans for a few centuries um but i'm going to say that these are fellow citizens they have moral standing but also they're part of our bodies they are extensions of our bodies and that if we that dodgy to me dodging the mass extinction event is a critical component of it morally and perhaps practically in the sense of our body's biosphere function that we'll be sick if we go through a mass extinction event in ways that will ultimately be killing us and also we can never get back from extinction is indeed final and you can't de-extinct and a mass extinction event would be a moral and practical failure so the the habitat corridors are crucial for dodging that mass extinction event that helps in the climate crisis perhaps a little indirectly it helps in human justice perhaps a little indirectly but if you want to take the argument to its largest scale holistically as a as a biosphere and a question of biosphere health then um diverse bio biological diversity is easily as important as human cultural diversity i'm gonna i'm gonna state that as a as a axiom that isn't proven that needs discussion uh but but uh for me it seems uh important and evident but i i don't think it's obvious i think a lot of people they've seldom seen a wild animal in their lives and maybe it's a seagull or a crow or a coyote these are wild animals too or deer you know since we killed the predators deers are pretty much everywhere you see them occasionally but comprehending the the the web the weave of of life on this planet that's almost a kind of a religious moment of understanding and i i tried to talk a little bit about the gaia religion earth religion one planet religion in my book but it's a much more technocratic i have other novels that are more religious than ministry for the future which is more of a technocratic approach to things but i think it takes almost a religious comprehension of the biosphere as our body uh and it's easy to say mother gaia mother is a is a good analogy but it's not quite right it's more than that it's our body so so these things need to be brought into play and they need to become part of the political economy too we have to pay ourselves as humans to take care of in a steward way the rest of the biosphere yeah i think that that fundamental dualism between human and animal worlds uh that that kind of mistaken view of separation which plagues us in our all of our uh you know spiritual pursuits as well you know individual human ego versus uh you know collective unity experience of of of consciousness or being is is you know one of the if you would say the the universally seen crux issue for human beings and likewise inside of understanding ourselves as part of a a planet-wide ecosystem it's very difficult to talk to human beings about like well you could have less so the animals could have more because it trafficks in the same dualism that got us in trouble in the first place more seeming that uh you know you're creating a place for your relatives for your children for your you know for the the other um parts of the body as you said and i do think that's a good i hadn't really thought about it before when you just said mother guy inside of that actually mother said now there's separation you know the child is born from the mother and then separates from other so we don't really want the mother as at least the western archetype of the mother there either we need to understand from cradle to grave that we are part of an ecosystem we are you know breathing in you know bacteria and and viruses which we are very familiar with this this in this uh calendar year and and that that that is a ongoing process you know even the fact that every one of our cells is replaced within a seven year period what did it get what does it get replaced with it's not like i'm in the background at night manufacturing cells for my next body it's a it's a part of my participation in the environment and ecosystem and it seems to me one of the fundamental um illnesses for modern uh especially modern western humankind is this ignorance of that this unknowingness of our place inside of the whole system and the last thing i want to say before i turn this back to you is that mass extinction events have happened you know five or maybe six times in the past depending on how you count and every time the number of of species declines incredibly and and the the the planetary environment goes into this churn most things don't make it through the churn which means if we have one more than likely we're not going to be one of the things that make it through the churn we're not going to be one of the ones that and if we were we wouldn't be what what came out the other side of that wouldn't be us it would be something significantly different and so there again to to say that there is no there's no success for humans without success for the whole biosphere and and and and that also by extension consciousness in general uh is is counting on us figuring some of these things out um are there any other i mean we've talked about economics and now about about biology uh ecosystems are there any other like basic minimums that we have got to get working on now uh to to to have this desirable viable future and we'd like to talk about a thriving a possibility of a thriving future for human beings on the planet are there any other kind of uh essential things that we have to attend to i'm sure there are um in in the end of the novel i have a big conference in zurich where the novel is centered uh where they have one day um touting up the successes of the previous decade's efforts and then another day to talk about outstanding problems um and that and that both lists could be endlessly extended and it's one measure of the of the craziness of my novel that i would even uh attempt to write such scenes because um um the totalizing effort can break the break the the brain um uh we one thing adequacy enough is as good as a feast so say we've got 8 billion people what you want to make clear from the the what the ecologists and scientists in general are telling us is that the 8 billion could be at enough enough and enough is as good as a feast if it was well distributed and we all owned it equally so eight billion now um every year the population goes up by like 75 million um it would be good if we were to get to a steady state women's rights do that so we've seen this historically demographically it is a proven thing and it's obvious on the face of it where women have their full set of um political legal moral rights education and empowerment and they're just the same as men the population rate levels and it even begins to drop a bit although what we can say for sure is that it levels off and and begins a mild drop i mean the replacement rate is 2.2 or 2.1 uh kids per woman on the planet the the global rate isn't much higher than that but it is higher than that slightly but it's in all the developed countries wherever the more power women have the lower that replacement rate is sometimes down to 1.5 in which case the population's dropping not the worst thing that one could have happen in other places it's still quite high and these are places where women don't have their rights they aren't educated they aren't given the rights that men are given in those cultures you see replacement rates that are up to three four five and these places are the places where suffering is going to happen in the in the near future and and one of the great solutions is just to um help the women of those countries who are already deeply interested in this project uh we we can be sure of that um to to increase their power citizens and and and uh with everybody on planet practically having a a smartphone and connected not by infrastructure so much as by information everybody knows this situation already education is is on the edge of a flash point where you could say that everybody on this planet knows this stuff and then it just has to be enacted and that's kind of a democratic push um a push for people power and people power being women's power we could get to a state where the it will never be a question of human welfare versus environmental or animal welfare they will be knitted together into one package and your point is good if we don't succeed at this humans might survive in some damaged post-traumatic state they won't be the same it will be a dark ages if we go into a mass extinction event if we don't succeed in these next couple decades the futures afterwards are so much dystopian as just plain ugly as post-traumatic disaster dark ages that we would have to recover from we would have the the few people that got through that bottleneck and then maybe begin to expand into a better smarter civilization afterwards would have to look back on the 21st century as a nightmare and the the um extinctions that happen won't be de-extincted that's right so you get back to a full ecology after a mass extinction event you things will be okay about 25 million years later things will be okay on that front so better to dodge that one now we live in an age that's you know not any anywhere near a million much less 25 million years of history on the planet so a fraction of of that time would encapsulate all of of you know of humans existence on the planet and distant cousins you know one of the things that that that i've read recently is talking about you know if we if we're able to um move to lower than the replacement rate um for humans on the planet that quite possibly within a hundred year time frame we actually break capitalism by that uh capitalism needs an ever expanding marketplace that are ever more hungary for more material goods and and uh or you know you could even be even now we can say soft material goods and entertainment et cetera et cetera um at a point where we stop doing replacement rate we actually have over time fewer and fewer consumers and this is a really interesting analysis uh for me and and really points out this thing that the uh our dear greta thornberg said that you know like uh you know uh infinite expansion is a fantasy and you we can even begin to look at human population being a test of this this notion that we can continue to expand and continue to have a continual growth i think probably be better to actually take on um cultural and societal values of no longer continually expanding no longer having as much stuff as much space as many new gadgets as many new bits of information and entertainment i don't know how to talk about that i think you you think some of the echo terrorism stuff like that put a put a stamp on it in your work um you know is there anything that comes to mind that we can begin to say hey maybe the goal here is not to accumulate so much and not to experience so much but to have maybe a a slower more deeper quality of life well that's a interesting problematic and i i'm glad you brought it up i don't like the term degrowth although i know what it's gesturing towards and it's even gesturing towards some necessary things but let's say um that the the the notion of growth expansion should be translated to the level of quality rather than quantity so you get away from commodification and reification these classic leftist terms for um thinking that things can replace experiences so a growth experiences also don't need to be touristic or although that it can be interesting to see the world and you you don't want to be saying to young people well we lived large and now you have to be saints and and wear hair shirts and never go anywhere because we we blew it and i don't think it has to be that way if you do get into a steady state and then population begins to decline over time by natural desires of individuals making choices for their own families basically women in control of their lives then you begin to get a shrinking population then everybody's got a job then all the young people will be involved in taking care of the old who will be numerous and dying out of old age and and what you can talk about it there is growth of quality of life for everything that if the animals are in good shape the wild animals if the biosphere were balanced if humans were on the planet maybe the um steady-state biosphere health is best at a human population of i'm guessing here four billion and maybe over the next couple few centuries we um trend down to that and then realize the stress on the planet for um dealing with our waste products and also the resources of bringing out new products will be lessened by that amount we might have to deconstruct um some of the i don't know suburbias or the the least good of the built infrastructure deconstructing it and turning that back into nature and capturing carbon blah blah that might be part of the project of that time and yet there would be this stress taken off of the biosphere if we had fewer humans now this is controversial and i'm saying that this is a science fiction writer more than as a political citizen of my time because it's very important i think to acknowledge that family size is a very individual decision that people need to be free to make but that when women are free to make that decision we tend to have smaller families and we tend to have a population going down that is a disaster for your standard capitalism which wants expanding markets but capitalism is a disaster the market is a disaster and there those aren't part of of a viable future they will morph into something that i just call post-capitalism and for and for people who are really enamored of the psychological drives behind capitalism you just have growth of quality quality of everything more sophisticated and streamlined and more enjoyable the the fossil fuel the growth the commodity growth that was all stupid to begin with uh no not all stupid but it has a lot of stupidity built into it into to make profit margins so a more stylish life might be um a way to describe this better kind of growth growth of quality um thank you for that i you know i think certainly it's up to um our time to begin to define as every good philosopher of every age defined what is a good human life and what is a good collective life on the planet it it seems that we're due for a collective conversation about that and to really consider again uh what it means i think the the the the evolution from uh those who are in authority maybe academics or philosophers having a saying what a good human life is to first you know advertising uh telling us what a good human life is until now influencers and in quick you know micro burst on social media telling us what a good human life is is a regression from a well-considered point of view on that i think that we could we would do well to spend a lot of time in our evenings around dining room tables uh in novels like yours uh considering what is a good human life and how a good human life might uh impact the planet and each other would be a a well worthwhile conversation a good starting point we might say um i want to ask you one last question just because i'm dying to know because it doesn't come up in in ministry for the future what about human life and space and and where do you see that as uh you know now you know obviously you've written about it a lot in your your earlier work but as as we've come to this point in life you know are you still interested and excited about uh human civilization off planet um or has that been tempered somewhat oh it's been grown um stupendously tempered um i one of the findings that relates to the uh what we've been talking about earlier 50 of the dna inside your body is not human dna this is a relatively new finding and it's a complete game changer i don't think humans can prosper off earth over the long haul and so my novel aurora speaks to that directly um and i i like space science nasa has a phrase space science is an earth science and we need to know everything possible we can about this planet and because we're thrust unexpectedly into a sort of a uh stewardship situation where we need to take care of it and we don't know how so in that process space science is great and it should be earth focused the dream of the cosmicists that humanity is meant to spread through the stars i think was a fantasy and a miscalculation of the size of the universe and of what humans are we co-evolved with this planet everything from its magnetic field to the composition of its atmosphere is ingrained in us that we are embedded in it so in my my novel 2312 i have the humans that are living elsewhere in the solar system which is reachable which the stars are not um they have to come back every uh they have a sabbatical they come back to earth eat a little dirt live on earth it's mysterious why they need it they need it to go back out into space if they want to might just be gravity we're made for 1g so then thinking about mars i mean certainly my mars trilogy is still my most famous work it's 38 gravity it's got much the same volatiles one could imagine still as a long-term terraforming project that if we had an earthly civilization where everything was humming along well you could imagine mars as a kind of a um 10 000 year project to make it into a kind of a high arctic see if you could do that uh as a low low stakes thing never be a second home never be a a bolt hole there will never be an extinction event on earth where suddenly um all the humans on earth die and then there's 5 000 people on mars that will make it through and recolonize it that's a bad uh science fiction story in that it can't happen the real science fiction story would be we got things together so well on earth that we've got these antarctic stations and that's how to conceptualize them right now there's a station at the south pole there's a station at mcmurdo there's probably a dozen other little stations they're little towns like mining towns sort of um not sustainable on their own they're like space stations except they're on the ice of antarctica which is very otherworldly place i've been there twice and i'd like to go more i love it so much but those people they come back to they call it coming back to the world you they go back to the rest of the world so they do some work down there they fall in love with it they might even spend their whole careers down there but they live in the world and that's where their families their health etc are moon is going to be like that mars might be like that the asteroids may be like that you go out there you study you're a scientist or you're a support worker for the scientists which means you could be anything and maybe you're a poet sent on a program like i was sent to antarctica and then you go back to earth you go back to the world that's the way it's going to be and and all of these other fantasies and i say this as a science fiction writer i mean rated written about them um rated them as close as i can they are fantasies of escape they are transferences they are ways of not thinking about the problems here on earth they're all kinds of things but they're not really good plans and they're not necessary space isn't necessary to us in the next century except as scientific inquiry into the earth itself the resources out there are inadequ are ridiculously uh diffuse you can't make a profit out there which is why you're not seeing a viable moon colonies etc because it's never profitable in the usual capitals way so this is my feeling about space right now and i had to go on at some length here because it's a little it needs articulation um it's a complex picture it's not a simple notice space like i often hear on the left it's not a simple yes to space like you hear from the the space cadets um it's in between it's a it's an earth science that is useful right now and will always be attractive later on for people with growth fantasies or escape fantasies or humanity is destined for something greater than life on earth which i find absurd but it's a religious position it's a replacement for um a sense of immortality that if only humanity could go to the stars then we'd all be immortal well i i'm i don't suffer from that kind of religious urge and i don't think it's realistic but it's out there and the solar system is quite a beautiful neighborhood so you don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water the fact that we can't get to the stars does not make the solar system less beautiful and interesting um and i that again going back to our conversation about being part of the whole of the earth when you are speaking about you know all of space sciences earth science it just suddenly had this very very profound experience of you know we are earthlings we are of earth and inseparable from it we are an expression of of you know some self-aware consciousness event some uh complex life-form event that is is part of the entire biosphere it is not a we're not a separate entity on top of the earth we're of the earth and and even your sensible explora ideas about exploration of space would say we're still of the earth we're just a piece of the earth that's now on mars or a piece of the earth that's now on the moon and that in order to be able to be intrinsically whole we would have to return to to the whole um i would agree with that i think that's right and even my luckily in my mars novels these young martians that have never even been to earth they come down they get crushed by the gravity they recognize that are coming home and so i have not been i'm not renouncing i don't have to renounce the earlier half of my career but but um but your your main point is absolutely crucial we are bubbles of earth this is a flora thompson uh lark rise and candleford it's a 19th century landscape writing and john crowley the great american science fiction writer quoted it in his um a wonderful novel little big we are bubbles of earth bubbles of earth and as girls these these victorian girls would would uh um gamble around the english countryside saying that to each other as they bounced around like like young lambs and it's a beautiful thing crowley used it as an epigraph to his great novel and i i saw it there first and then went back to flora thompson um and and you've got to look at lark rise and candleford to um to to see that this feeling is um maybe a gaia feeling or whatever you want to call it this earth-centric feeling of connection with this planet is very common and indeed maybe that's what shamanism was always about um that there are other worlds but we are expressions of this world yeah yeah great and i think um you know as we kind of wind up the conversation here this kind of leaves for me and i hope for our audience um a little bit of an altered state of consciousness that you know we we started this conversation talking about the future uh for humanity and and a vision uh that you stand sen has have helped us to have and to become part of of the the body of society and we appreciate you for that but kind of where we've arrived is back to ourselves we've arrived back to um that we are this extraordinary expression of life and an extraordinary expression of complexity these amazing complex systems of you know co-evolved uh species inside of one thing that we call a body and that that quite possibly um the the biggest leap we could make to having a thriving future for humanity is actually just to be human it's actually just to be earthlings um and and to you know kind of embody that very simple reality i don't like to be too reductionist but there is definitely in this moment a feeling of the poet and me being uh uh uh you know enlivened and brought forth um so thank you for that i thank you for the the you know that as you call it the technocratic look at a very possible viable uh future for humanity um in some cases an architecture or a roadmap at least places for people to look if they're interested in in getting involved in inventing and creating new ways of doing things you you paint a very very complete picture of some of the most important things to focus on and then to arrive here at this kind of mythopoetic moment of um little bubbles of earth is quite a satisfying experience thank you so much stan well thank you michael i've really enjoyed it um you have conducted my violin plane in interesting directions and i really appreciate it it's been fun it's been a good conversation great i look forward to having you back again to talk about specific things especially as you know i think what we're starting to see is seeing through the lens of a viable future or a generative future towards things that are occurring and happening you know is as techno-utopia-ism has a lens and a view of of what certain advancement means we have a we have a digital magazine that that we've launched called proof of the thriving future and we we as well are looking at ways to be a lens to to be able to see into these um into the events in current day in a way that helps us to get to gain access to having some sense of of capacity to affect change some agency in the direction uh and future of humanity um and i think you are definitely a forerunner of that style of human being and that style of human thinking and and we're really excited to continue the conversation over time well thank you i would love to come back and i will be looking forward to the magazine um yeah it's a discursive battle but it's also an imaginative project and uh and i can see that we're we're doing it together this year is going to show us a whole lot about um whether we can collectively shape a good future well thank you stan and um we will be speaking again and uh that's it for now for our viewers and listeners uh thank you so much for joining us on the show the boldly now show igniting the world of burning desire big ideas and bold action only now is an initiative of the generative futures initiative generating a thriving future for humanity [Music]

Channel: The Boldly NOW Show

Views: 12,085

Rating: 4.9844961 out of 5

Keywords: kim stanely robinson, climate change, sustanability, regeneration, cop26, parris agreement, futurism, generative futurism, leadership, cimate action, ministry for the future, optimism, hope punk, interview

Id: MzswhaI-jNs

Length: 72min 27sec (4347 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021