Richard Powers & Bill McKibben Discuss The Overstory | JCCSF

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] well now this is a this is a great occasion for me I got to read the overstory a year or so before it came out and I got to read it a couple of Tiran at a couple of times in that year and I and and I just could not wait for its publication because I knew the effect that it would have on readers around the world and because um I knew the moment I read it that there was something very very special and different about it as a book and I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you impose on you a few questions just to kind of try and get at that I mean it is a book filled with wonderful human characters of nine or ten really memorable central characters a kind of Dickensian profusion but and some of them with great Dickensian names to match but the new characters in this book that people hadn't that I can't think of anyone ever trying were were trees I mean and there are trees as memorable as any of the humans in this book maybe even more so just talk about that talk about I mean that's a literary that attempt to let the more than human world become a part of that story is a remarkable remarkable attempt carried off with incredible success but just talk about how it came to you huh well bless you for that start and I need to take a small detour okay why do backs out a question which is you all have to know that well while bill and I have corresponded for a while I didn't actually meet him face to face until 40 minutes ago so this is a lovely thing for me to sit onstage just to sit onstage with him with a man who has done more for us and for our future or whatever shape it takes then almost anyone and it's it's such a warm I've Ramat shirt as a special marker the occasion our our correspondence it's been intermittent and coloured for a while in a kind of friendly rivalry between the Smokies and the Adirondacks and which offers the superior pathway into the universe and I think it's great that we've been forced to meet on neutral territory in this shadow of muir woods where they have a tree or two that's actually where the land of the redwoods and the Sequoias and the Bristlecone pines and other creatures that put ours - it's a shame in some ways as for this question of promoting non-human entities to true characters - to focal participants who have agency and will in an in narrative arc to them you're kind to say that this is an innovation but it's not it's a return to something that actually dominated most of world literature for most human human existence and what it is it's an attempt to to bring the bell letter you know literary fiction tradition of the last hundred and eighty two hundred years back into the fold back home it's really only the West and only relatively recently that we fell out of that you know up to up until that sort of I don't even want to put a precise date on it but we we certainly see a lot less of it by the the 1870s and 1880s in this country and in Europe probably in Europe we see a lot less of it before that those decades but before that time it would have been unthinkable to tell any kind of story about who we are and how we got here and where we're going without making the neighbors a big part of that story and so that's all that this book is it's an attempt to take the form you know this this this aesthetic that's so been so refined and and and it's now so sophisticated in its exploration of the personal experience or the small group experience and simply say there's we there's a part of the story that we've externalized and ignored for too long let's see what happens when they come back into this form so talk about trees themselves yeah I mean and in my own conversion not just as a as a teller of tales not just as a maker of literature but in my life I mean that same that same alienation that same exclusion that characterizes the literary tradition that I inherited characterizes our everyday life again in an in a sense in a in a nutshell that process of of alienation that process of human exceptionalism that that accreting myth that says we did this all ourselves and you know we are the masters of what is happening and what is to come we are the only interesting game in town that sensibility is so deeply ingrained in us now that it's a shock to step out of it and say I've I've internalized this it's you know it's not actually true so what not killing the head yeah tell the story he a very large very blunt instrument about 20 feet wide and 300 feet tall and yeah and that's why it's nice to be back in California they have the conversation because it was it was a large escapee redwood in the Santa Cruz Mountains one of the very few that wasn't cut in the central Peninsula that you know that I stumbled upon by accident as in the you know in an in an afternoon's attempt to escape Silicon Valley and and the present that they've made in the future that they're very rapidly making the a long hike in the in the second growth forests of other redwoods which is in itself a religious experience and coming across one of these creatures that operates on a scale of time and material dimension so extraordinary that you can no longer sustain that myth that somehow the real world is the one that we've made that's the yeah that's the right phrase in a way we convince ourselves constantly that reality is the thing that's directly in front of us at any moment yeah I'm kind of them but that's and and yet we're now being reminded in very fundamental ways the world I mean reality is impinging on what we've decided was reality and this is a part of the world where we where we turned off the power last week for several days because the world had gotten dry enough that we were worried the trees that had been therefore wouldn't would catch fire if we did right that's a sort of that feels like a new moment and yeah yeah and it that it is the moment in which that ethos that we've been talking about the one that's that that that became ascendant two centuries ago and has been unchallenged in a way the one that says we can have this in our terms you know the the world is not alive it's a it's a it's a simple set of resources for the realization of this other thing that we're making what we say is what we know what we're able to do is what we are morally allowed to do all of those things now you know we've reached the moment where that narrative inheritance is not working anymore I mean I've said it a number of ways and in one one formulation is is you know harkens back to something that I learned in in junior high school about the three kinds of drama where does where does narrative get its tension and you know we we know that psychological drama comes from people at war with themselves you know individuals that hold inside their own heads in comments or beloved values and that's a great story you know to have a person who's wrestling with with two values that are so essential to them but they're it's simply impossible to maintain at the same moment in in a certain moral crisis you know I'm I'm your friend I am always going to be loyal to you there's something horrible that you don't want to hear what do I owe you as your friend do I owe you loyalty or do I owe you honesty and when they're not the same thing anymore that's a story good strats a tremendous story we've told it a lot and we've told it very very well and we know how to read it that's the other thing our powers of literacy depend upon recognizing that as a central linchpin you know as a way of decoding what's important in the world as we go beyond that I mean that now that the next classic way of telling a drama is you have a value then I have different and they're both defensible and they both make you know they're both laudable and and palatable and attractive to the reader but they come into conjunction in a way where you where we simply can't hold them at the same time you know you are absolutely committed to Liberty I am absolutely committed to equality now we have the American political novel right and we have to figure out whether there's a quid pro quo or not so no good problem forget what I said two hours ago inoperative so that's a story and in the the psychological novel and the social political novel are things we do exceptionally well what we've stopped telling is this third form of drama namely the human race wants things life beyond human has a very different sense of what's appropriate what's feasible what's desirable that tension how do we live here with the neighbors who want and need very different things that what we want to need that fell away and it fell away because of what you're saying earlier we thought we'd won right right that war was there was no other character the last one standing we're not answerable to them anymore and so that becomes a less interesting kind of drama in fact it just sound it it felt for a while is sort of nostalgic exercise when anybody would it would be a sort of like air sots Jacklyn right it's like I say go go read Jack London quite fangers like yeah exactly call of the wild you know until we managed to build the world where it rains 58 inches in Houston or it you know you have to turn off the power for because I see your city called Paradise turned into hell and right half an hour you know yes all of a sudden were back in an old story not only did we not win that war but we're about to have our posterior is handed to us in the most in the most undeniable way and now you see literature starting to change and starting to bring that drama of course you know I have to say the the science fiction writers never gave up that story right well science fiction writers have always had to UM I mean it's been very interesting because they they also had the I mean I had a whole series of insights because they were the only people who were trying to measure the scale of human characters against the sort of scale of the technologies and enforces that we know Unleashed yeah and and sort of begun to conclude that human characters didn't stand a chance against it's exactly like those forces the other place where you see this as a continuous tradition is in indigenous literature's Klan in non-western literature so it's really just us right you know us aging white guys look back on the world but back to Greece you know back to some of their really old white guys but so you see the to tell that drama to reintroduce that drama as a as a central component of literary fiction is a central you know source of advancing the plot is to tell the conflict between two states of mind one that might be characterized as a commodity Dervin straight it's the state of mind and the other that could be characterized as a community-driven state of mind well talk for a minute though about diem because there really are trees that are amazing characters in this book right what was it like to try and get inside the I mean I I was I was thinking the other day III the last time I was down in Monterey to give a talk they took me behind the scenes at the aquarium which is a great place obviously and so I spent an hour a couple hours happily wandering around until I got to the octopus room and there was a tank with octopus and and we spent a good half hour just tentacle in each other you know it was it was just like an arrival right when you mark with your hand on the glass there and it just could not have been more and and and you had very much that sense of a different intelligence coming from a different place that wasn't like here's what were the and it was an intelligence that we were relatively late in tweaking you know because we are so ant thorough centric to the idea that an invertebrate might have that much going on it just wasn't in our paradigm that's it and it's taken us a long time to come around to which is my setup for the intelligence of plants that's great at least an octopus is something that we sort of think of it an animal we see it moving around making choices we see you know the these incredible individuals like the one that's been filmed and immortalized that carries the jar around with opens its yes and then and then it gets in the jar when things are threatening you know and in its it's created its own little mobile safe environment yeah I mean that's that's demas well we can see it we can make analogies to our own kinds of intelligence but it has taken us a huge amount of extremely tight datasets to convince the world that there's a whole lot more going on in the plant kingdom than we ever expected you know over-the-air signaling underground resource sharing complex and supple behaviors involving things that are absolutely rightly described as memory and you know flexible behavior in the in the face of environmental change and challenge and all and in the assembly of data to illustrate that these things that until very recently we had pretty much trivialized or considered as fairly low-level automatons are actually deeply social deeply complicated and it's it's that it's that recovery program that it's that that's at the heart of this novel to get from commodity back to community it does not hurt to look out into a forest and realize nothing is there by virtue of itself and that's sort of the common denominator between what we've been working on from separate directions I mean not just in your own novel now I really want to hear about your fiction experiences and and the choices the affordances of the one form versus the other but also in falter I mean so much of that book I mean the ostensible organizing principle is here are various ways that the game might be playing now but there's a much narrower way in which all of the various you know seemingly diverse phenomena that you're exploring in that book that the common denominator of realizing that the the notion of a competitive individual commodity mediated private meaning has given nothing to a long-term prospect and in and and all of all of those explorations showing the ways in which that mentality that human Exceptionalist commodity mediated life needs to give way to some other form of meaning that's actually out there that's created in common well so the that's right the I mean the hyper individualism of the world in which we live which we've come to take for granted as the kind of water around us through which we swim in which we were projecting onto the natural world or justifying by a misapprehension of the natural world it turns out to be our great practical downfall yeah you know we're now in literal hot water yeah as we try to get out of it and get out of it isn't interesting I mean so do so I was an obvious sucker for this book because a I love trees and forests more than almost anything on earth and B I you know have stumbled into the second half of my life spending my time as an activist right so here's it also a crackerjack novel about activism and it's you know but that's the that's the if we're going to get back to some world where we think about our set where we behave and think about the world in some way other than as consumers and things it's going to take some kind of movement building and work to change the world enough that that's a possibility well shifting consciousness that in my story I characterize as moving from plant blindness to plant conscious that's right yeah so talk for a minute about them but just like I'm reluctant to let go just for a minute they'll see what's happening here the whole experience I'm reluctant to let go of the experience of I mean you're you're so good at character and now you're encountering a tree and of course we mean of course not a tree generic right you know I mean trees are there are young trees and more trees and deciduous trees and coniferous trees and diseased trees and whatever ailment but what is a to be inside the soul of a giant or a peaceful tree what is yeah what was that immersion that experience life is later I it was a it was the most beautiful part of the process of making this book for me to go from being more or less tree blind myself to realizing with a kind of visceral astonishment that there are sixty to a hundred thousand different species in a very loose taxonomy you know very distantly related doing profoundly different biochemical things and not only that but the incredible variation within a single species so to do this story and to to build a whole human narrative generational human narrative around an American chestnut for instance that that's planted by a Norwegian immigrant way outside of its native range what does it look like what does it feel like how what is its timeframe what its relationship you know how is it feeling to the passage of seasons in a place that it wasn't designed for and how is it relating to the the rising and falling generations almost like a budding bricks saga of these Iowa farmers into how to find a narrative form that can tell two stories like that that are so unfolding on such different timeframes and such different volitional frames and where where desire and agency look so profoundly different so I when I do that for that American chestnut in and you know I absolutely fell in love with that species and felt in in a way that I would never have expected devastated by the history of the demise of that tree America's perfect tree you know that ran from where you live all the way down to Georgia in such profusion you know why not worse for the forests so quite as if snow had yeah Crested every when they when they bloomed in the spring and you know the the the notorious squirrel that could get all the way across the the the width of the continent you know without leaving a chestnut tree you know one out of every four Eastern trees chestnut and then from 1904 to 1940 have every mature just not in that range disappear and now you see when you wander through your part of the world through the smoky sometimes the still the skeletons of yes ya know as hard trunks so what a tree that died in 1940 is still sending up basil sprouts around the trunk that will live for five or six years until the bark fissures and you know it starts to fruit and then the blight gets it and that's been going on for you know seventy years now you know right eighty years right yeah I mean it so that's an incredible drama but to inhabit that tree into and to try to smell the smell and to to hear the sound and to watch the spiraling of the bowl and to make that a drama you know while the people are you know writing this sort of stop action before drugs you know that's one story to come back to California and to send to activists 200 feet in the air in a tree sit to save this magnificent 1500 year old coastal redwood from a Texas financier who's selling off his inventory to pay off the debt that he acquires when he when he you know pirated the land that's an entirely different story and to to make visceral the the species that well that don't live anywhere else except a football field high up in the air you know it was an entirely different incredibly deeply pleasant and spiritual activity from me to try to realize and it bears saying that you know this attempt to to narrate the lives of human beings you know up and up in this canopy would have looked very different just a few decades ago when prevailing wisdom said there was nothing up there right right in you know and they're discovering six-foot-tall hemlocks growing out of a lateral branch of the redwood you know or a pool where there are vertebrates but you know salamanders that don't you know I mean I've kept thinking about it all summer reading the accounts of what's happening in the Amazon and these vast fires and just real I mean we've sort of said well some some acres in the Amazon burned but no I mean this this world that you so eloquently described is disappeared across vast swaths of so that's right so in telling this drama between commodity and community I mean what what propelled me into the story and what propelled me to to base it around this set of activists none of whom were actually political prior to the frame on the story right but these average ordinary people who suddenly have this road to Damascus moment and say I need to put my life on the line what could cause that what causes it is what caused me to begin the book which is the discovery that 95 to 98% of these original primary forests have been cut yet and only only you know two to five percent remain and that there is a complexity of species and interdependence and and interrelated processes there there are so many forms of life that exist in those ecosystems that do not ever appear again even in a recovering force that's been recovering for a long time it's some yes and and to watch those lives get turned around by that is remarkable and of course it reminds us that the people who are doing most of this work around the world remain indigenous people about protecting places that they never really lost that right connection more than 60% of the world's species and have her under that cover of under the protection of indigenous that's right and that's why when someone like balsa Nara basically opens war on indigenous people right the pain of right looks across so many levels to some extent you can you can almost excuse the narrative that unfolded on this continent with regard to those forests we thought our four great forests were gonna last forever they went a lot faster than we thought we also thought that they grow back and the reality is that no human has ever seen an old-growth ecosystem come back from a force that's been cut ever and you know people will give you a number they'll say oh it takes 200 years or it takes 500 oh really now yeah you know we're guessing because we haven't seen it happen yeah and even if it does come back it's not gonna come back in the same way and you you know that famous Aldo Leopold line about you know the first rule of Intel intelligent tinkering is don't throw away the parts we've we have thrown away most of all yes all right there are almost no places to go to to see those parts now you're thinking so we blew it because we were ignorant so therefore the rest of the world is you know should see that but it's our it's our pressures that are extending this sound to the rest I mean I in our in our banter about the superior ecosystems I would brag to build that you know well we in the Smokies you know we have we have more species of trees than there are in all of Europe from Portugal to the Baltic States which sounds great until you remember that you know that hundred and twenty species go to an acre of Ecuador 600 species in two hectares yeah and and they're going yeah and they're going in in real time yeah in the course of a decade or no and they're going because people are cutting them down but they're also we've also raised the temperature enough meds right the possibility of the Amazon becoming essentially as savanna is now well possibility yeah the UM well it's would you indulge me for me for me this has been a great literary day one of the one of the things that I gave up a little bit when I decided I needed to sort of take up activism was a little bit of the great pleasure of getting to think of myself mostly as a writer and living in a literary world but this morning I was always out of Bioneers in Marin and I turned around and there was my old and dear friend Terry tempest Williams who's written with lapidary beauty about the natural world for a very long time I think it's possible Terry and Brooker here someplace tonight I'm not sure my thing yeah they up there someplace good and then you know this afternoon out there I turned around and there on the panel was was Kim Stanley Robinson right or who I and I know you admire with for the incredible sweep of his imagination and insight and power so I've been for me just a great day of getting to think a little bit of so would you cap it a little bit by reading that passage hon a minute from from overstory because the words in this book are I mean look this is a really special book there are a few times in the course of literary the sort of progress of wit rich earth when something really really profound interrupts the kind of normal flow of things and useful for me so no reason so I'll establish shut this up yeah so the the for me the heart and soul of the book the character who kind of ties these nine stories together is a woman named Patricia West referred and she's born with a with a with a hearing impairment and her folks don't diagnose it very quickly it takes them awhile to realize what's going on and as often happens when when when a child doesn't hear well their their speeches is often difficult to understand and and that combination reduced hearing and altered speech seal her or alienate her from her fellow kids and and her classmates treat her rot roughly and and she's looked upon as a kind of monster and fortunately her father takes her under his wing he's an Agricultural Extension agent and he introduces her to the world of plants and here's a place where she can understand which way or she can she doesn't need those modalities to make their way of life intelligible to her and that high sensitivity to the green world she earns the nickname plant pati makes her able when she goes on to advanced study and graduate work it makes her capable of giving more credit to green things then her field is willing to give them at the time you know the sort of Alpha white male gatekeepers and and their view of forest as basically a set of commodities is challenged by a woman who goes out in the field and does the measurements and determines that there's this chemical signaling going across distances between trees you know when a given tree is attacked by insects starts producing its own sex aside and also sends these chemical pheromones across the air that alert trees at some distance to begin preemptively to produce the insecticides that that are appropriate for the the incursion so what's going on here and she dares to cross that threshold slightly that scientific prohibition against a morphism and says there might they might just be cooperating they might just be sending and receiving signals to each other and of course that prohibition against anthropomorphism which has done good and valuable scientific guardrail work over the years shades off pretty easily into anthro centrism how dare you say that they're doing something that is the proprietary domain of higher animals so she's she's humiliated for making these assertions she's drummed out of her field and goes underground begins a series of odd jobs and makes her way across the country and what I want to read to you was when as a as an older woman she ends up in this part of the country actually a little bit a little bit north of here and you'll you'll hear at the end of of this passage a formulation that she has known through her study of the indigenous people's relationship to the to the trees of the region in 1981 Patricia heads Northwest Giants still grow in pockets of old-growth scattered from Northern California up to Washington she wants to see what uncut forest looks like while there's some left the Western Cascades in a damp September nothing prepares her from mid distance without any scale the trees seem no larger than the biggest tulip poplars back east but up close she's lost in measurements opposite all she can do is laugh and look some more hemlock grand fir Douglas fir buttressed monster Connor conifers disappear above her with pearls as big as minivans even the runts would dominate in Eastern forests down in the understory Patricia's own body seems freakishly small like one of those acorn people she made in childhood clicks and chatter disturbed the hush the air is so Twilight green she might be under water it rains particles spore clouds broken webs and mammal dander skeletonized mites bits of insect frass and bird feather if she holds still fines will overrun her she walks deeper in crunching 10,000 invertebrates with every step watching for tracks in a place where the indigenous language uses the same word for footprint and understanding the temperature plummets as she passes through a thermal curtain she swings her singing stick before her the canopy is a colander stippling the beetle swarm surfaces sword fern liverworts lichen things with leaves as small as sand grains stain every inch of the dank logs the mosses are thumbnail forests all their own more bushwhacking reveals the prodigious rot creature riddle Boles crumbling for centuries snags gothic and twisted silver as inverted icicles she presses on a fissure of bark in her fingers sink in second putrefaction fills her lungs the sheer mass of ever dying life packed into each cubic foot woven together by fungal filaments and do betrayed spiderweb leaves her woozy mushrooms ladder up the sides of trunks soaked by fog all winter long spongy green baize she can't name coats every wooden pillar to a height well above her head the forest pulls her along past the trunk of an immense western redcedar her hand Pat's the fibrous strips of a trunk whose fluted girth rivals the height of an Eastern dogwood it reeks of incense the top has sheared off replaced by a candelabra of boughs promoted to stand in trunks a grotto opens at ground level in the rotted heartwood large enough to house whole families of mammals she addresses the cedar in the phrases of this forests first humans long life maker I'm here down here she feels foolish but each word is a little easier than the next thank you for the baskets in the boxes thank you for the capes and hats and skirts thank you for the cradles the beds the diapers canoes paddles harpoons and nets poles logs posts the rock proof shakes and shingles the kindling that will always light finding no good reason to quit now she lets the goods spill out thank you for the tools the chests the decking the doors and floors the beams and paneling I forget thank you she says following the ancient formula for all these gifts that you have given and still not knowing how to stop she adds we're sorry we didn't know how long it takes for you to grow back [Applause] I like to make one acknowledgement there a lot of that passage was inspired by the remarkable Robin wall camera and Terry and I had the pleasure of being on stage with her in Harvard she's yeah people who haven't read her work yeah she's grating sweetgrass but a couple of things I mean one the the the direct sense of the the need the the need for reciprocity the need for gratitude the need the realization that this is not a right it's a gift whatever we get from the nonhuman and also very specific things like the this the throwaway line the the the the mosses are a thumbnail forest all their own you know when you read Robin you know she she she opened my eyes she says something says the the scale of size difference in in nonvascular plants from the from the smallest mosses to the tallest is greater than that between a blueberry bush and a redwood so you know once you tire of this forest there's a fourth in fact the forest down there for you but I also want to mention this this direct address to trees I mean it's it's that point where the pragmatist and the economical minded would most ridicule the tree hugger you know do you expect them to answer you do you think that you know and of course yes hi yeah well you know David Abram the the natural right philosopher the spell of the sensuous one of the greatest books ever written among other things about the rise of what happened when the Hebrew alphabet yeah took its current form yeah and and he he said to me the the reason I like that he says I also talk to trees no I do not expect an answer but when I talked to a tree that tree moves from being an object to being a subject he me I changed myself I make myself capable of giving it the sanctity that we ordinarily only give ourselves I find trees quite ready to talk back regularly and often more eloquently than the people you encounter and I mean it's not like Twitter or you know but yes hi there's a but for that we also have to stop talking yes right exactly all right it does take some time to sink in the I mean the question of them in just when you get to those huge trees and this is very powerful in the book the question of scale after just being and it makes me I mean I mean did you did you go back and read Moby Dick at any point when you were working on any of this because there's another that's the sort of scale and it and it feels the you know then I I have been so under that the spell of that book my whole life that I think I was challenging that his channeling his insistence on confronting yelling with unknowing that the world is alive and it has a will and we cannot read it and it's it's our duty to subordinate ourselves to take our place as a single species in this incredible community I'm reminded so much of the the first great piece of nature writing and the Western tradition the gods answer at the end of Jobe yeah yeah where where that seems to be sort of I mean God gives this incredibly great tour of the universe right but in a very sarcastic tone that indicates that we're too you know we're sort of getting above ourselves it's time for you to remember that you're a small part of a blooming buzzing cruel mysterious in complex' world so so bill and I have collaborated on something I was asked by some musicians if it might be possible to produce a piece of music that would be some kind of companion to the work that that I was doing in this novel and I went to four writer friends who are all known for their an environmental engagement and Bill was one Kim Stanley Robinson was another John Maloof whose marvelous books on trees were eyeopener's to me and I asked them all to contribute a favorite environmental text and that's the one you gave me where were you when I go to earth yes right and and bill called it the earliest invoked piece of environmental writing in some way still the best in the Western Canon oh yeah yeah that sense of the world saying to us not so fast and of course the the thing about our time on earth is we were I mean I mean God gives job this tour of the universe and then and and and very sarcastic where were you you know did you lay down the tell the crowd wave is where to break and I know further and job like all human beings up till a certain point has to say no that's your job at the end of this three chapters but this is sorry I asked and I sat down because people were always kind of small and come until we got big enough to take down everything around us which is why that passage becomes so crucially now it's a whole different yeah and now we able to answer God right back so so a word about this book as a religious book i i've characterised myself as the as the most religious atheist you'll ever mean but you know i'm i'm i'm deeply in sympathy with the etymological sense of that word right leo to tie back together that's the project no to tie back together there is no autonomous thing called man there's no aw tanto humans there's no autonomous thing called nature it's of a piece or it's it's not it's not you know we're not gonna we're not gonna be around a static piece great Northern Californian mr. Jeffers once said that not man apart yeah you know and that's a noir wilderness apart yeah right so you know so so that program the the the green religion it's very much it at the heart of the book and but I also want to say that the other thing that ties the two of us back together you noticed I've made several forays here unsuccessfully but you know to remove the entire spiritual question the entire question of this change in consciousness that we've been talking about and just address you know staying within that framework of you know operational ism what are trees to us well if you if you googled the word drawdown and go to the site which is this enormous consortium of very forward-thinking people who have said all right we're not doing so well on the reduction end of emissions what can we do on the sequestering end and you look at their eighty most potentially world-changing projects of sequestration a good thirty percent of forty percent have to do with trees well and we're finding out it's in fact I was thinking of you the other day because I was talking with the great tree scientist Bill Mumma Massachusetts who had a new you know people have proposed this project of planting a trillion trees around the world to soak up carbon and things and he was saying yeah I mean there's some problems with that because we don't really have the land to do it on and it's you know getting harder to get trees to grow in lots of parts of the world things but the biggest what he said was what we were discovering now actually is that probably mathematically you're better off your sequestering more carbon if you let old trees keep growing beyond a doubt degrees in their second quarter century we're taking up more carbon and in their first and in the third more than yes second after a protracted period of forestry that thought that's dead stuff you know that's that's decadent where I have to get those old ones out of it right it's going to waste this is the revolution in thinking of what's happening in forests that's just been unfolded in recent decades and and sadly what we're actually doing in your part of the world particularly is cutting down trees turning them into pellets shipping them off to Europe burning them to produce electricity and pretending that it's somehow carbon neutral yeah if you want a quick education on that the documentary burned is a very good place to stab salutely yeah absolutely including this gentleman it's saying as a talking head but but yeah what we need is you know as Thoreau says you know breathe the air drink the drink taste the fruits live in each season as it passes resign yourself to the influence of the earth we need as much study as possible as to what that influence is in order for us to resign ourselves to it rather than imposing willful fantasy on what's happening in in these ecosystems we need to look and listen to them amen to that yeah there's a dr we should we should let other people in on this conversation sounds good we've reached there we I think we have about 20 minutes to for a few people I think and I think also yes are there people with microphones perhaps Huson and is there someone who can turn down the light just enough that we can see the rest of the world here okay so start up here on your left hey how are you guys I was intrigued just as you were saying Bill sort of transitioning from literature more to activism and in a way your book being really focused on activism in a weird way I work as an ecologist a very practical scientific realm but I also see science fiction having more of an impact than my science does and so I was just curious and both of you're sort of wrangling with both of those topics of sort of literature and the persuasion of people through media arts versus the persuasion of people through activism and well I mean they're not I don't think they're very different human UNT's understand the world through stories so the best activism is I kind of puts stories into practice I mean so you mean for instance one of the I mean some years ago I helped start the campaign picked up sort of nationalized the campaign around the Keystone pipeline and the story we were able to tell was Jim Hansen the great NASA scientist said dig up the tar sands of Canada and it's game over for the climate and that story became that you know so then this pipeline became the 1500 mile long fuse to the bomb that that and that animated 1,500 people to go to jail in 2011 which launched this sort of thing that not only took down the for the moment so far the Keystone pipeline but persuaded people that it was possible to fight every frack well and every coal mine and every you know whatever in the that story got loose we're planning I mean the next round of this work I think is drawing from work that people have started a lot of them here in San Francisco and indigenous organizers around the financial institutions that support the fossil fuel industry I think we're gonna be calling on you before the next six months are out to be at you know to take the chase card out of your pocket and cut it with a pair of scissors because Chase Bank gave one hundred and ninety six billion dollars into the fossil fuel industry in the last three years but that's a story okay the story is that money is the oxygen on which the fires of global warming burn that's how activism works it tells stories that allow people to situate themselves in action and those stories go deeply into the tropes that exist in our imagination and the kind that that over stories so beautifully deploys I mean the great story the great trope that activists are usually working with is the Battle of the small and the many against the mighty and the few you know the Israelites and Pharaoh and the engravers story David and Goliath you know the Rebel Alliance and the Death Star which is precisely where we are I see where you got this now so I'm an absolute agreement that that it is a false dichotomy I I do believe that there's a refrain and overstory all all the facts in the world can't force a person to change their minds the only thing that can do that is a good story and I do believe that the the pathway is usually change of heart produces change of mind for a change of heart we need the the power of empathy and identification and kinship to be enhanced and it's tough to do that with argument in fact sometimes you know George Bernard Shaw said something like the true measure of a civilized person is the ability to be moved by statistics deeply moved by statistics it's it's a kind of a high bar I mean I don't think there are a lot of people in fact I do so I run something called 350.org yes I know what can I say but you certainly you you must find that there there are that this is a psychological problem how to move a person from their baseline and oftentimes arguments through statistic gets people's backs on them or it'll demoralize them and it'll say well we can't get to that number so you know what why go on we were talking before about the story that's at loose in the world now this last year the story that Greta Thornburg yeah started to tell and many others with her but just her enunciation of the idea that if this if government's couldn't be bothered to prepare the planet so that she had some future it was a much to ask her to go sit in school every day preparing herself for a future that didn't exist that story that story and then the kind of quite magical ways novelistic ways that she figured out to tell it coming to America in a sail Harbor neutral you know you know is it was a remarkable pitman that's just storytelling that way that is that's yeah and it has it has viscerally changed people's ability to empathize and identify with that passion they they have been Americans have been galvanized by that in a way that they haven't been by all and one of the wonderful things is that it turns out there were thousands of Greta's out there the minute that sort of people begin it then there were all kinds of kids who were and that's right that said I mean and there was wonderful to watch and help with these climate strikes with millions of kids out in the streets and things that said there is something mildly undignified about taking the biggest problem in the world and assigning it to junior high school students their job so we're gonna have to up our game considerably in the time ahead before we scoot you you also felt the seduction of writing fiction and in in a in a delightful and playful but also deadly earnest novel tried to move people in a different way than you have done through your discursive variety I'm I you're much too kind I did write a novel sort of the publisher decided to refer to it as a fable which I believe yes may have been their commentary on for me it was mostly I mean it was it was a great pleasure that I needed and it was in the first year of the the Trump dispensation when the idea that one would write you know a book that added to the psychic burden that we all were suddenly staggering under just seemed too much so to get to entertain you I mean it's a funny book not it is you know but it's also a serious yes it has its moments yeah I mean the story is really fun I mean debt the musty so activism to me is a lot like writing in that you're trying to figure out what the thing is that will what what the thing is that will allow people to see me when you're when you're right at least we're writing nonfiction the the my goal is always like what question is now arising in a reader's mind and can I answer it right now right at the moment that it arises in their mind when something is successful I think so that you never so that the reader doesn't stop you know it so that it just is an experience trying to figure out sort of what it is that might allow people to I mean to do difficult thing mean it's uh it's hard to try and it's hard to to try and figure out what story might be told that would cause someone to say okay I need to go to jail now I need to know whatever it is those are trying to figure those out are hard but fascinating and it's sort of the same craft I mean story teller stories really are how people understand the world yeah you need all the statistics and whatever but environmentalist did a very good job for a very long time of appealing to whichever hemisphere it is of your brain that likes bar graphs you know and not such a good job of appealing but back in our history they did I mean when I you know one of the things that I kept flashing on when I was reading over story was you know old John Muir they're up in the top of the Douglas fir swaying and the wind back and forth you know an image that I mean let me travel the universe together trees and then he he he managed to give us an entire new kind of grammar of the wildness and new old grammar of all races and things that just yeah that that you know ended up allowing us to have Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and a lot of other things so good because he did not keep himself out that's right yeah ok next question on your left hi both books sound fantastic and I will read those as soon as I get home I have a question for mr. McKibben I was working with 350 South Florida for a couple years I loved it really thank you so much thank you and I just have a question because we you know how there's different groups all over and splinters and we had a one person in our group that was pushing nuclear hmm and I was thinking is that Mister McKibben's does he advocate nuclear power because even in my heart of hearts I did you tell me right now I don't think I would still support nuclear but I couldn't find out I was right he knows I was emailing you guys national to find out cuz this guy in our group kept pushing this over in our events and I'm so stop so truthfully it's a subject I've spent almost no time on and the reason is I just don't think it's gonna be that that is that crucial question the priming look everybody knows what the you know all the various dangers are of a nuclear power plant compared to I mean you know something has to go wrong for a nuclear power plant to do big damage you operate a natural gas-fired power plant according to spec and it destroys the earth okay so that's worth remembering but the the the cost of a solar panel or a wind turbine in the last decade has gone like this and the cost of a nuclear power plant just keeps going up up up up up like this so my guess is that it's not gonna play a huge role in I mean we've got a very short period of time if we're gonna if we're going to transform our energy system the IPCC told us last October that we really had to do much of the job by 2030 if that's the case I wouldn't I you know I think we're probably a lot better off grabbing at things that are cheap and that you can do fast and and since mr. musk at all have now gotten pretty good at building the battery that allow you to store the power when the Sun Goes Down we're in a better shape than we were even a few years ago in this regard that's just my guess you know people I like and trust like Jim Hanson think that there's a new generation of advanced nuclear reactors coming at some point down the line that will eat nuclear waste and be small and cheap and flexible and things and if it happens then the world may be different but for now we've been given an unbelievable gift by the engineers in the plummeting price of Sun and wind and we should take I mean job one in the whole world is taking advantage of that gift and doing it fast you you you clothes falter with two good stories and Solar is one and and I mean I've said in faulter that there are two great inventions of the 20th century the solar panel and the nonviolent social movement and and together I think they provide some possibility of not of stopping global warming obviously at this point much too late for that but perhaps of stopping it short at the point where it cuts civilization off at the knees even that at this point a a by no means a sure thing even if we do everything right I mean we're on a world where there's half as much sea ice in the Arctic as there was thirty years ago that's bad sign I mean look I was saying to someone today I you know I wrote the end of nature came out thirty years ago when I was a young man and I'm an old man now that's okay people are supposed to age over the course of 30 years planets are not supposed to age dramatically over the course of 30 years and worse we're in tough place we're gonna take two more questions the next ones up on your right yes hi this is just a comment for the overstory it's a small offshoot I take kids out into parks the regional parks is part of an eco education thing 3rd through 5th grade left kids in from mostly underserved schools and when we get to a Grove of redwoods it's easy to talk about the family of the trees because of the way they are and then at one point I have the kids hold their hand on their chest and feel their breath and then I have them all put their hand on the tree and if they're very quiet and very still they could hear that they could feel the tree breathe so just as I thank you it just as a way to that I was able to sort of add on a little bit to the story certainly as an important link is kids they are the next generation they're going to be the custodians of the world so thank you thank you I that's so beautiful I don't want to add anything to it but all Marit slightly just by expanding it and say yes it is in childhood when we're all animists mm-hmm that that cut the consciousness that were after is already there how we should be educating them to stay there and to grow that out not to change and become this other thing and we we know now that all kinds of psychic problems resulting from the knowledge of what we've done to the living world are real and that you know people are inventing new words for describing what's been lost and and the effect that it's having on us but so many people in the in the in the year and a half since this book has come out and I've been out and in in in the world talking to humans say I I miss my home you know I plants that I knew in my childhood right the smell of them the sound of them the look of them and you you are you are giving them their local home and the job of continuing to live on this earth is going to be the job of rehabilitating where we are becoming indigenous to our place again and it has to it has to start in childhood and and be nurtured as long as possible and and I would just add because people always ask me oh how do I talk to young children about global warming and things and I always say up to a certain age please do not the job of all of us as parents and grandparents and teachers and things is to help people fall in love with the natural world first and foremost yeah and nobody falls in love with the terminally ill you're you know it's just scary you know and and it's just too much pain yeah so so if I have no doubt that that if anybody who falls in love with the natural world will end up defending it when the appropriate time be home you know and that's exactly why the last question is here in the middle Oh hold it okay I have a question for mr. powers it's something that came up tonight for me that came up when I was reading your book too and talking about trees you use the word intelligence and communication but then you go it seems to me a step further and talk about volition and agency those words seem to me to imply sentience is that what you're suggesting you know a lot a lot of our estrangement starts in language and it's a it's a it's a continuous process to look at our words and find sexism I and and and find other forms of exclusionary prejudice right ageism you know cultural bias when I was a young man in college my psychology professor said you know you think that your dog loves you right and you think the animals to have emotions but they don't have emotions they're just machines you know they're they're they're automatons and and you know this was the consensual position of that time and several brave souls decided to say well let's go look you know let's let's make the measurements and and and pay attention and stand in front of creatures and and say not what we think is there but what is there what you know in the absence of my words and my desires let's just look and that started a cascade and the field of animal intelligence is a burgeoning place now and we look back and we say how could we ever have thought that they weren't it's ridiculous so that word sentience has traveled so far in such a short period of time what would be lost if we said yes but no further and what would be gained if we said well what do you want to call it if it's flexible complicated social project you know anticipatory and remembering in plans and this goes back to the beginning of our conversation because this is a question that the oldest wisdom traditions on this planet have taken up from the star and boy one of the things we're finding in the in the world the moment in which we live is that the oldest wisdom traditions on the planet were pretty wise about a lot of things you know the view from the sweat lodge and the view from the satellite are now meshing pretty well across a wide variety of phenomenon and what they're telling us is that the view held by the rest of us about the conventional wisdom is essentially wrong and it wouldn't yeah it wouldn't be a great shock to find that the apprehensions about the plant world that that humans held for many thousands of years were were based on on close observation deep love and and a good deal of sense it seems to me you know the the crucial takeaway I think is the distance between us and the rest of the living world is smaller than we think and let's use the words that we love to explain ourselves with to deepen our sense of just how much is going on out there in a planet that's alive and has to be taken seriously as well as as having those problematic words that we ordinarily just apply to ourselves and then let's try to keep it alive long enough that we find out more that's sounds like thank you brother you you

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Published: Thu Oct 24 2019