Speaker 1: Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshatrati. This week dystopia, utopia, and optopia.
Speaker 1: There's a quote I really like from the documentarian Werner Herzog.
Speaker 1: It goes an I quote, facts never illuminate you. The
Speaker 1: phone directory of Manhattan doesn't illuminate you. But these rare
Speaker 1: moments of illumination that you can find. When you read
Speaker 1: a great poem, you instantly know, you instantly feel the
Speaker 1: spark of illumination. That's also the power of a good story.
Speaker 1: It takes something and makes it clear. You suddenly get it.
Speaker 1: The world makes a little more sense. And when it
Speaker 1: comes to working out how we are going to tackle
Speaker 1: climate change, I think we need good stories and we
Speaker 1: need good storytellers. Over the next few episodes of Zero,
Speaker 1: that's what we are focusing on. We'll hear from Dorothy Fortonberry,
Speaker 1: one of the creators of the Apple TV show Extrapolations,
Speaker 1: and Amy Westervelt, an investigative journalist behind the true crime
Speaker 1: podcast Drilled. But we start with my guest today, one
Speaker 1: of the best known writers of climate fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson,
Speaker 1: who goes by stan.
Speaker 2: We're in an emergency. It doesn't do any good to
Speaker 2: just sit down on the ground and say, oh my god,
Speaker 2: we're in an emergency. It's a race against disasters, so
Speaker 2: you have to run like hell. And that's what I'm
Speaker 2: seeing happening more and more in ways that I like.
Speaker 1: Stan is the author of more than twenty novels, including
Speaker 1: Ministry for the Future, which was published in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: It opens in India in the year twenty twenty five
Speaker 1: with a heat wave that kills millions. It's a grim scene,
Speaker 1: and what follows is the story of humans striving to
Speaker 1: cope with an increasingly inhospitable planet. There's eco terrorism, high finance,
Speaker 1: wild chases over the SSS helps, and what emerges at
Speaker 1: the end of it is a kind of plan to
Speaker 1: deal with the climate crisis. For me, Ministry for the
Speaker 1: Future perfectly fits Herzog's description of illumination. It's not a
Speaker 1: dystopian novel where civilization has already been destroyed. It's a
Speaker 1: story of how the world gets to grips with the crisis.
Speaker 1: It's a long road, but it allowed me to imagine
Speaker 1: how the solutions can work despite the planetary scale messiness
Speaker 1: that comes within advanced civilization, and that ability to tell
Speaker 1: a story of solutions, even though it's fictional, is a
Speaker 1: powerful thing. So in this first episode talking with climate storytellers,
Speaker 1: I wanted to hear from Stan about how he crafts
Speaker 1: a good story out of a desperate situation, what he
Speaker 1: thinks the limits of climate storytelling are, and how his
Speaker 1: thinking has changed since publishing Ministry for the Future. Stan,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Well, it's good to be here. It's been a long
Speaker 2: time since we crosspaths.
Speaker 1: Yes, and you're speaking to us from beautiful main I
Speaker 1: hope you're having a beautiful day there. Now. Climate touches everything.
Speaker 1: We feel it directly through the weather, through the season's wind, rain, snow, sun,
Speaker 1: but its impacts run much deeper. Climate effects, food production,
Speaker 1: population movements, the presence of plants and animals. It's a huge, complex,
Speaker 1: vast thing. There are a million threads to pick ut
Speaker 1: if you are a fiction writer, where do you begin.
Speaker 2: It's a problem. So I write novels, and therefore I
Speaker 2: think you have to begin with characters and a plot. Characters.
Speaker 2: We understand you need a protagonist, but here you already
Speaker 2: have a problem, especially talking about climate change. It's a
Speaker 2: global problem. It affects eight billion people, so any characters
Speaker 2: you KOs are going to be seen as representative types.
Speaker 2: The novel is kind of designed to show the relationship
Speaker 2: between the individual and then their family, their context, their
Speaker 2: maybe their society, their social setting, and maybe history at large.
Speaker 2: Only when you get to science fiction do you have
Speaker 2: a relationship between the individual and the planet. So science
Speaker 2: fiction is the good genre for talking about climate but
Speaker 2: still you have to have characters and a plot I've
Speaker 2: decided is really the story of something going wrong. We
Speaker 2: have two joys in reading fiction. One of them is
Speaker 2: sort of like anthropology. You get to go to other
Speaker 2: times and places and you get to be inside other
Speaker 2: people's heads. So in science fictional terms, you could call
Speaker 2: this time travel and telepathy, and fiction gives us both
Speaker 2: those things. And here's where it gets kind of fun.
Speaker 2: Climate change is something going wrong to the plan and
Speaker 2: the causal agent is human beings, And then you can
Speaker 2: pick your individuals to represent the types people who are
Speaker 2: trying to ignore it, people are trying to do something
Speaker 2: about it, and the plot is given to you on
Speaker 2: a platter. In this case, if you're doing climate fiction,
Speaker 2: the plot is can we deal with it somehow? And
Speaker 2: if we don't, what will happen then, because things can
Speaker 2: go spectacularly wrong when the weather gets crazy. So to
Speaker 2: track my trains of thought as I came through my
Speaker 2: career as a climate fiction writer, beginning well, really with Antarctica,
Speaker 2: but then also the Washington, DC trilogy that I now
Speaker 2: call Green Earth, and then New York twenty one to forty,
Speaker 2: and then Ministry for the Future more and more. If
Speaker 2: I put my science fiction in the near future, it's
Speaker 2: had to be climate fiction. So I keep coming back
Speaker 2: at it from different angles.
Speaker 1: And your books play with disaster, but they tend toward topia.
Speaker 1: Why do you choose that path? And do you think
Speaker 1: that writers should avoid telling disaster stories.
Speaker 2: It's interesting you asked that, because what it does is
Speaker 2: it puts me back before I was writing climate fiction.
Speaker 2: I was always a utopian science fiction writer, and this
Speaker 2: is sort of my political project. You might say, I
Speaker 2: feel like the disaster stories are too easy. Dystopia is
Speaker 2: too easy. It's even a kind of a comfort food
Speaker 2: where we imagine situations worse than ours and then rest
Speaker 2: comfortably that we're not that bad. And as part of
Speaker 2: being an American leftist, the idea of that would be
Speaker 2: we could make a better society, and we need to
Speaker 2: do that work as an obligation to the people who
Speaker 2: come after us. So this, I would say, in the
Speaker 2: broadest terms, is the leftist project that we could make
Speaker 2: a better government than the governments we have. And I've
Speaker 2: written that story many times. When you get to the
Speaker 2: climate crisis, the utopian urge is highly modified, to say
Speaker 2: the least. Essentially, the bar has been lowered. If we
Speaker 2: dodge a climate catastrophe and a mass extinction event in
Speaker 2: this century, that's a utopian story. And indeed, I've been
Speaker 2: using a word that I think Joannaares invented called the optopia.
Speaker 2: So it's not the utopia, the no place, the perfect place,
Speaker 2: it's the optopia. It's the optimum that we can do
Speaker 2: given the situation that we're handed. And that's what I
Speaker 2: think I was doing in Ministry for the Future. That too,
Speaker 2: is utopian novel, because at the end of it, we've
Speaker 2: decarbonized and moved on to all the other problems that
Speaker 2: still remain.
Speaker 1: Science fiction does so many things, but one thing that
Speaker 1: it does do, especially if you're thinking distant science fiction,
Speaker 1: is that it plants ideas in people's head that become reality.
Speaker 1: So what was the motivation in writing the Ministry for
Speaker 1: the future in such near term scenario.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, that's true, and it was a deliberate choice
Speaker 2: on my part. I had written utopian scenarios before, but
Speaker 2: they were always elsewhere and in the future, one way
Speaker 2: or another, either near or much further out, but always
Speaker 2: a break. And this is actually a famous aspect of utopia.
Speaker 2: It starts with Sir Thomas Moore's Utopia, where it's called
Speaker 2: the Great Trench. The utopian island was a peninsula, and
Speaker 2: they cut a big trench across that peninsula to make
Speaker 2: it into a canal and make it more defensible. And
Speaker 2: people have taken that as being a good image or
Speaker 2: symbol for how utopias are separate from history, and so
Speaker 2: they become less applicable because you can indeed theorize or
Speaker 2: imagine societies that work better than ours. That's not very hard.
Speaker 2: But we're stuck in our history, and so the utopia
Speaker 2: becomes like a thought experiment, it's not really a plan.
Speaker 2: So I had put my utopias on Mars. I had
Speaker 2: put them in Antarctica, an alternative history, in fact, where
Speaker 2: all the Europeans died in the Black Death. Always there
Speaker 2: was a great trench of one sort or another, and
Speaker 2: I began to think to myself, it's not that hard
Speaker 2: to imagine a social system working better than ours does,
Speaker 2: because ours is an improvisation and very poorly suited to
Speaker 2: the present emergency. I might add, but the problem is
Speaker 2: we are in our history and we can't just simply
Speaker 2: jump the tracks to something better just because it might
Speaker 2: be better. So I thought, let's continue to express the
Speaker 2: utopian imperative and put it started right now and make
Speaker 2: a bridge toward utopia. We're in trouble. The wet bulb
Speaker 2: heat problem is severe and it's coming on us fast.
Speaker 2: And now I think that actually ministry is not the
Speaker 2: best case scenario. There are actually better cases than that
Speaker 2: that we can achieve. But I wrote the book in
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen and it was a darker time than now
Speaker 2: in many ways.
Speaker 1: How did you choose which climate scenario to pick when
Speaker 1: you wrote Ministry for the Future, Because you start with
Speaker 1: the Skiller heat wave in India, which you don't feel
Speaker 1: maybe a reality anymore.
Speaker 2: Well, I think, actually, unfortunately, the fatal mix of heat
Speaker 2: and humidity is all too possible. That has not gone away.
Speaker 2: It's not that the situation has become less dangerous. It's
Speaker 2: that humanity seems to me to have woken up. And
Speaker 2: I think it was the COVID pandemic did this to us.
Speaker 2: It was a slap in the face, showing us that
Speaker 2: the biosphere can kill you, It can wreck everything, it
Speaker 2: can cause panics and rec supply chains. It woke us up.
Speaker 2: And now when I look around, I mean shows like yours,
Speaker 2: Bloomberg Green is a persistent reck of people doing things.
Speaker 2: And in twenty nineteen, the reason I say it was
Speaker 2: a darker time then was not because of the actual
Speaker 2: climate situation, but because of the human situation. We hadn't
Speaker 2: yet fully grasped the emergency that we're in. And now
Speaker 2: I think many people the only way to explain the
Speaker 2: response that you see around the world now is that
Speaker 2: people have got it. They're scared. They're realizing this is
Speaker 2: serious for the future and even for us the rest
Speaker 2: of our lives, that this cannot be avoided. And that's new.
Speaker 2: And so that's where Ministry now exists, as a historical
Speaker 2: novel that comes from the pre pandemic times.
Speaker 1: Taking another book of yours, you traveled to Antarctica twice
Speaker 1: and after the first time you visited in nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: you wrote the book Antarctica. On your second visit in
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, you said a lot of people you met
Speaker 1: in Antarctica who are there because they had read your book.
Speaker 1: So you recognize your books have influence beyond the pages.
Speaker 1: In writing the fiction that you do, do you hope
Speaker 1: that someone is nudge to take action?
Speaker 2: Yes, I do. I understand that this is a peculiar
Speaker 2: stance from the world of literary fiction. There's an art
Speaker 2: for art's sake, vibe that comes out of ordinary fiction.
Speaker 2: For the novel to be shrunk to that only is
Speaker 2: a terrible diminution in what the novel can really do.
Speaker 2: And in the nineteenth century you see people using the
Speaker 2: novel fully like ballsoc like George Elliott, to show the
Speaker 2: relationship between the individual, their traumas, their family concerns, but
Speaker 2: then also their relationship to the politics of their time
Speaker 2: and to their history at large. That's what the novel
Speaker 2: can really do. And then science fiction brings in the
Speaker 2: planetary element, and there you have the total package of
Speaker 2: what the novel can do. So I write with a
Speaker 2: specific political impulse. You can't avoid it. You're always expressing
Speaker 2: a political opinion, even if you stick your head in
Speaker 2: the sand, and that too is a political stance. It's
Speaker 2: just kind of a chicken one.
Speaker 1: Well. One way to think about ministry for the future,
Speaker 1: given it's based in the near future, is that you
Speaker 1: end up in a world that is still run on capitalism.
Speaker 1: I was reading a book as I was writing my
Speaker 1: own nonfiction book, which is called climate capitalism. But it
Speaker 1: was the same impulse, which is that we have thirty
Speaker 1: years to try and get to net zero and a
Speaker 1: few decades to go beyond that to keep temperatures below
Speaker 1: one point five degree celsius. Is it a given that
Speaker 1: that's how we have to solve this?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 1: The dominant economic system is where we are, and we
Speaker 1: must nudget in the direction of it working the world
Speaker 1: rather than wrecking it.
Speaker 2: Well, I think so, and I say that with some
Speaker 2: reluctance and unhappiness. I am an anti capitalist. Capitalism is
Speaker 2: the name of a power relationship of the few over
Speaker 2: the many. It is a hierarchy. It is feudalism liquidified,
Speaker 2: where money has replaced land as the source of power.
Speaker 2: But there's still the powerful, and there's still the weak,
Speaker 2: and there's still incredible inequality in the world system. If
Speaker 2: you set aside the abstractions, then we have a world system.
Speaker 2: It's a laws, treaties, it's in place. We can't change
Speaker 2: it fast enough to deal with the climate crisis. So
Speaker 2: looking at the system that we have, how can it
Speaker 2: be nudged? I think of keynesianism. I think governments sees
Speaker 2: the direction of the economy as they did in the
Speaker 2: depression and in World War Two, and in this case
Speaker 2: we have an emergency that is as existential as those were.
Speaker 2: So it's appropriate for the governments of the world to
Speaker 2: say we are going to spend money on these projects.
Speaker 2: They're so important they can't be left to the private market.
Speaker 2: I'm very, very unimpressed by neoliberal capitalism. The idea that
Speaker 2: the market solves all problems, to me is obviously wrong,
Speaker 2: and it's been proved wrong over the last forty years.
Speaker 2: The market is a kind of a foolish algorithm. We
Speaker 2: need government direction. So capitalism, yes, But Keynesian capitalism for me,
Speaker 2: would just be the first step, and the next step
Speaker 2: might be what we now call social democracy out of Scandinavia,
Speaker 2: That too, is a capitalist system, but it's ameliorated by
Speaker 2: social overwriting concerns that the market is just a tool,
Speaker 2: not a master.
Speaker 1: You have said that you wish you had read more
Speaker 1: of Thomas Picketty before you had written The Ministry for
Speaker 1: the Future. Now, the central thesis of that book that
Speaker 1: Picketty wrote, Capital in the twenty first Century is that
Speaker 1: inequality is not an accident, but rather a feature of
Speaker 1: capitalism and can only be reversed through state interventionism. The book,
Speaker 1: this argue is that unless capitalism is reformed, democratic order
Speaker 1: will be threatened.
Speaker 2: Yes, if we do.
Speaker 1: Believe that's right, why is it that the capitalistic system
Speaker 1: as a solution to the climate crisis is okay?
Speaker 2: It's not okay, it's just what we have. And to
Speaker 2: make it work as a climate crisis solution, we would
Speaker 2: have to reform capitalism until it was some kind of
Speaker 2: post capitalism. And Picketty is very useful in pointing out
Speaker 2: the nature of the beast, but also the solution, which
Speaker 2: is state intervention. And he points quickly to tax and
Speaker 2: Picketee is pointing at laws that would create more equality,
Speaker 2: just progressive taxation like existed in the United States around
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty three under Republican Congress. Progressive taxation could flatten
Speaker 2: the inequality. You could make sure that there was social
Speaker 2: security so that the one of the minimum salary for
Speaker 2: any citizen in the world was an adequacy. And then
Speaker 2: by way of taxation itself, you could make sure that
Speaker 2: the richest person on the planet had ten times adequacy,
Speaker 2: which when you think about that it carefully, you realize
Speaker 2: that's already incredible luxury. You don't need the current American
Speaker 2: ratio of six hundred and seventy to one between the
Speaker 2: executive compensation and the worker compensation. We're in a ridiculous
Speaker 2: gilded age situation. And as Picket points out, it's the
Speaker 2: natural course of the accumulation of capital to accumulate more.
Speaker 2: And then, as he points out, there's enough that you
Speaker 2: can buy the state, you can essentially buy off the
Speaker 2: people running the state apparatus, and then you control the
Speaker 2: government too, and you again reward capitals so that you
Speaker 2: become into a cancerous growth in the capitalist system. That's
Speaker 2: what we're in now.
Speaker 1: And what do you mean by adequacy?
Speaker 2: Good question, food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, electricity, and
Speaker 2: a sense that that will endure through the course of
Speaker 2: your life, in your children's lives. So I guess you
Speaker 2: could call that security. If you had all of those
Speaker 2: needs fulfilled, then you get to this kind of Abraham
Speaker 2: Maslow pyramid of needs to wants. If you have your
Speaker 2: needs fulfilled, then you can begin to think about your wants.
Speaker 2: If you don't have your needs fulfilled, your life as
Speaker 2: a human being is crimped. Your life is an animal
Speaker 2: gets crimped and made miserable when it doesn't have to be.
Speaker 2: So that's what I mean by adequacy, and it's a
Speaker 2: big ask, but I think adequacy for all eight billion
Speaker 2: humans and all the rest of the living creatures on
Speaker 2: the planet is actually achievable. And so the raining in
Speaker 2: of the capitalism that we existed in in the last
Speaker 2: forty years and the last two hundred years, and the
Speaker 2: shifting of it to some kind of more just and
Speaker 2: effective system in the world, in the accommodation with the
Speaker 2: biosphere and spreading of goodness around, that's all possible. But
Speaker 2: it's a project that's in progress.
Speaker 1: With a work of fiction, you can let your imagination
Speaker 1: run wild, create the world you want, organize it, engineer it.
Speaker 1: Do you think that when we're trying to solve the
Speaker 1: climate crisis, we're not letting our imagination run wild and
Speaker 1: thinking of the kind of transformation we really can make happen.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think there's a bit of a gap there.
Speaker 2: Because it is fiction. You can set the endgame. You
Speaker 2: can say, I want a best case scenario here, Let's
Speaker 2: tell the story of things going right within the constraints
Speaker 2: of the reality effect. So, especially when I was writing Ministry,
Speaker 2: for instance, I wanted there to be no point at
Speaker 2: which the reader said that couldn't happen, or that doesn't happen,
Speaker 2: or people are not like that. I wanted people to
Speaker 2: read it with the in literary terms called the reality effect.
Speaker 2: It seems real. So there's a whole lot of countervailing
Speaker 2: pressures in writing fiction of this sort, and I've done
Speaker 2: my best to try to assure my readership this is
Speaker 2: still going to be fun. And so I am now
Speaker 2: a kind of a walking cliche or a brand. I mean,
Speaker 2: chat GPT three or four can write a Kim Stanley
Speaker 2: Robinson's story and it's quite bad, but it's it's apt.
Speaker 2: It's clearly playing off something that people recognize in my work,
Speaker 2: not just the brand, but a cliche. But I think
Speaker 2: one part of it, of my brand is that it's
Speaker 2: still going to be fun, it's going to be entertaining,
Speaker 2: it's going to include all the human emotions, it's going
Speaker 2: to include characters you care about. The ordinary novelistic virtues
Speaker 2: will still be there. So, yeah, it's a problem.
Speaker 1: So I'm a journalist. I deal with facts, and facts
Speaker 1: are all I think about. My imagination does not run wild,
Speaker 1: and so it's very hard for me to put myself
Speaker 1: in your world and to think about how to think
Speaker 1: about fiction. And so with that in mind, what do
Speaker 1: you think are the limits of fiction for climate solutions?
Speaker 1: And what are things that only fiction do well?
Speaker 2: I'll start at the back. What fiction can do is
Speaker 2: put you in the experience a novel. Especially, You're going
Speaker 2: to take twenty hours of your life. You're going to
Speaker 2: take a couple of weeks and give it your creative time.
Speaker 2: Because reading fiction is a very creative activity. You have
Speaker 2: to bring it alive in your head by an act
Speaker 2: of the imagination. These words on the page suddenly they
Speaker 2: are feelings in your mind. There are people that you know,
Speaker 2: that's your achievement, not just the lines on the page.
Speaker 2: So that's what fiction can do, is put you through
Speaker 2: the experience of a heat wave in India, or twenty
Speaker 2: years of a person's life where they have continued to
Speaker 2: struggle year after year to get something done. And while
Speaker 2: you're reading it, you believe it. You're even kind of
Speaker 2: living it like you would live a hallucination or a dream,
Speaker 2: a vision. This is the power of fiction to my mind.
Speaker 2: But where I would say when you talked about your
Speaker 2: focus on facts, the reality effect is there too, but
Speaker 2: also which facts, And this is where I would say
Speaker 2: the creative aspect of journalism comes in. And the work
Speaker 2: that you are doing is you're sorting. You're a sorting
Speaker 2: mechanism yourself. You're making judgments at all points which facts
Speaker 2: are actually important enough to pursue and tell the stories
Speaker 2: of and to make into a narrative form. And indeed,
Speaker 2: I want to ask you a question. You've been talking
Speaker 2: to people all over the world since we met at
Speaker 2: COP twenty six. You have never ceased to talk to
Speaker 2: people as your job as a journalist, and there must
Speaker 2: be making in your mind a cognitive map, a sense
Speaker 2: of where we're going, So not just a sense of
Speaker 2: where we are, but a sense of where we're going.
Speaker 2: All this work for Bloomberg, Green and Bloomberg Green itself
Speaker 2: seems to suggest that we're Can I say this that
Speaker 2: we're going in a good direction? Is that true? Do
Speaker 2: you have that impression?
Speaker 1: It's a very good question. I've been a climate journalist
Speaker 1: for seven years now, and the way my cognitive map
Speaker 1: has evolved in that pie is that every year has
Speaker 1: been a completely different year. And that's true. When you
Speaker 1: come to a new subject, you will learn and then
Speaker 1: you'll refine it, and so the first few years are
Speaker 1: very steep, and they'll usually be quite different. But I've
Speaker 1: been surprised and shocked that after the first three years
Speaker 1: they've continued to be that different. And that tells me
Speaker 1: two things. One is that either the subject is so
Speaker 1: vast that it does just take that much time. But
Speaker 1: that's definitely not the only thing, because the world in
Speaker 1: that period has done so much that we have gone
Speaker 1: from a world where temperatures of five to six degrees
Speaker 1: celsius work completely within the realm of possibility by the
Speaker 1: end of the century, and they are not anymore. Now.
Speaker 1: We're looking at three degrees celsius, which is a pretty
Speaker 1: bad scenario, but it's not the dystopia that could be
Speaker 1: five or six degrees celsius. So there's certainly more happening
Speaker 1: in the world which is keeping me on this treadmill.
Speaker 1: But you're right, it does feel like the direction is
Speaker 1: better than it was a few years ago. How much
Speaker 1: of a voice should be given to the rocks and
Speaker 1: the trees? And where does geoengineering fit into stands map
Speaker 1: of climate solutions? That's after the break you've spent You
Speaker 1: said something like two years of your life camping out
Speaker 1: in the high Sierra Mountains in California. Ministry for the
Speaker 1: Future is based on the establishment of a un body
Speaker 1: that is, in your words, charged with defending all living creatures,
Speaker 1: present and future who cannot speak for themselves. Was that
Speaker 1: way to give a voice to the natural places you love?
Speaker 2: Yes, it was, and I need to unpack that a little.
Speaker 2: The planet is rock and water, soil, and then the
Speaker 2: living creatures on it are all cousins of ours. All
Speaker 2: living things share something like nine hundred basic genes. All
Speaker 2: mammals share a mammalian set of two hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: genes that are identical, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2: They're all our cousins, so they're all citizens, but they
Speaker 2: are not able to speak in human courtrooms and in
Speaker 2: human governments. So they need human spokespeople to be advocates
Speaker 2: for them. They need representation, legal representation, and so the
Speaker 2: humans would speak for the rest of the creatures. And
Speaker 2: the health of the rest of the biosphere is our
Speaker 2: own health. We are absolutely interpenetrated with the biosphere. And
Speaker 2: when I'm talking to classes of young people, I say,
Speaker 2: let's all hold our breath now for three minutes, and
Speaker 2: of course nobody can do that, and then you realize
Speaker 2: better that we are interpenetrated with this biosphere breathing, drinking, eating,
Speaker 2: and every other interaction that we have in our lives.
Speaker 2: We're just creatures like the rest of the creatures, but
Speaker 2: we have enormous powers, and that's where we have to
Speaker 2: be careful and arrange our powers such that we aren't
Speaker 2: damaging our own body. It's like we're shooting off our
Speaker 2: feet in our enthusiasm to fly, but we need to
Speaker 2: be able to walk. So I'm interested in this matter
Speaker 2: of representation. And you see all around the world efforts
Speaker 2: to make legal status are standing, as they call it
Speaker 2: in the courts. Do trees have standing? Do rocks have standing?
Speaker 2: These are famous environmental ethics papers or books, Christopher Stone,
Speaker 2: Christopher McKay. They do have standing, or they should have standing,
Speaker 2: let's put it that way. So this is indeed a
Speaker 2: utopian story that I'm telling. We need to make sure
Speaker 2: that all the creatures are doing well so that we
Speaker 2: too are doing well. And you see that happening all
Speaker 2: around the world in various governmental efforts. In Ecuador, the
Speaker 2: Chilean constitution that failed, in New Zealand, in many countries,
Speaker 2: the land itself is beginning to accrue some legal rights,
Speaker 2: and then, of course humans have to speak those and
Speaker 2: act those. I added that to the Ministry for the Future,
Speaker 2: because the health of the bioseries is the health of
Speaker 2: civilization also, so I thought it was appropriate. And I
Speaker 2: noticed that the UN is convening a Summit of the
Speaker 2: Future next year, and so I think they too, think
Speaker 2: it's a good idea to have this kind of a
Speaker 2: convocation of interested parties, which means everybody.
Speaker 1: It's kind of animism, which is common in many non
Speaker 1: Christian religions Shintoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, but it's not so common
Speaker 1: in the So where did this sense of wanting to
Speaker 1: give a voice to the inanimate develop in your storytelling.
Speaker 2: I think it was in this era this year in Avadam, California.
Speaker 2: I walked up into it fifty years ago this year,
Speaker 2: and it changed me. I saw that the world was
Speaker 2: bigger than I was, that there was still wild places
Speaker 2: on this planet that humans had not altered much, and
Speaker 2: that this was a kind of baseline reality that we need.
Speaker 2: So ever since then, as you said, I've spent two
Speaker 2: years of my life wandering around the mountains. It's been
Speaker 2: among the most valuable of all the years of my life.
Speaker 2: These usually a week at a time, I have to say,
Speaker 2: but I've wandered a lot in the mountains of the world.
Speaker 2: And then I like all waste and solitary places, as
Speaker 2: the poet Shelley put it, Antarctica, the ocean. The planet
Speaker 2: is gorgious, and it's also part of our body, and
Speaker 2: so it's important to us.
Speaker 1: In December in Montreal, in Canada, delegates met from almost
Speaker 1: every country on the planet and they set a target
Speaker 1: to protect thirty percent of the planet by twenty thirty.
Speaker 1: Is this the kind of step towards utopia you see coming?
Speaker 2: Yes. I was astonished by that development, and I thought
Speaker 2: it should have been reported as one of the biggest
Speaker 2: events of this century. That is a positive action of
Speaker 2: enormous proportions. Thirty by thirty. This was a kind of
Speaker 2: an EO. Wilson, the biologist. He talked about half Earth.
Speaker 2: Thirty by thirty is like a step along that way,
Speaker 2: and it's the crucial step, the first step protecting thirty
Speaker 2: percent of the Earth's surface. And then of course that
Speaker 2: Ocean Treaty did the same thing just at the start
Speaker 2: of this year. So really the whole surface of the Earth.
Speaker 2: We promised to leave thirty percent of it as alone
Speaker 2: as we can in order for it to regain the
Speaker 2: health that the rest of the system will then benefit from.
Speaker 2: It will leak out into the rest of the system.
Speaker 2: That's the theory, and it probably will work. This is huge.
Speaker 2: It's one of the most positive things that has happened
Speaker 2: in this century. And I hope to do my part
Speaker 2: as a utopian science fiction writer and just say good
Speaker 2: things when they happen need to be reported as intensively
Speaker 2: and taken on board as successes. It's a civilizational success,
Speaker 2: even though it only exists at the level of a
Speaker 2: promise right now, but promises like that Montreal, the Ocean Treaty,
Speaker 2: the Paris Agreement itself. These are huge victories in the
Speaker 2: world system, the world human slash planet system, and it's
Speaker 2: the humans who are doing it. We're the ones with
Speaker 2: agency in this system, and so it's a really tremendous achievement.
Speaker 1: I think now, do you think weekends solve the climate
Speaker 1: problem without geoengineering? Because one of the plot lines in
Speaker 1: Ministry is that a team tries to pump water from
Speaker 1: beneath glaciers in Antarctica to slow down melting, and the
Speaker 1: Octic Ocean is dyed yellow to try and increase its reflectivity.
Speaker 1: Do you see geoengineering just as a useful plot device
Speaker 1: or that there is actually a genuine need at some
Speaker 1: point for using such a technology.
Speaker 2: Well, this is a word like growth or love or freedom,
Speaker 2: geoengineering it has a very specific meaning in certain minds,
Speaker 2: and what it means to a lot of people is
Speaker 2: the bad things that you do to the earth to
Speaker 2: try to get away with continuing to do the bad
Speaker 2: things you're doing to the earth. So once you use
Speaker 2: the word geoengineering, you're in very weird waters. And I
Speaker 2: think you have to if you want to have a
Speaker 2: useful discussion about it. You have to break it down.
Speaker 2: What are we really talking about. Usually when people say geoengineering,
Speaker 2: they mean solar radiation management, which is a euphemism to
Speaker 2: say throwing a sulfur dioxide or just simply dust up
Speaker 2: into the atmosphere to deflect some sunlight away before it
Speaker 2: hits us. Temperatures will cool for about five years, the
Speaker 2: dust or sulfur will fall to the ground, and then
Speaker 2: we'll see where we are. That's been proposed, and people
Speaker 2: talk about Pinatubo, the volcano and the Philippines that cooled
Speaker 2: the earth for about five years after it went off. Well,
Speaker 2: that is a weird idea, and I don't know that
Speaker 2: it will be necessary. It depends on how quickly we decarbonize.
Speaker 2: It depends how many wet bulb thirty five events there
Speaker 2: are that kill thousands or even millions of people. But
Speaker 2: who would govern that, How would we decide? That's being
Speaker 2: discussed right now. The governance issues are more difficult than
Speaker 2: the technical issues. Now. To say that sucking water out
Speaker 2: from under glaciers is geo engine I don't know. This
Speaker 2: is where the word gets too strange. If we try
Speaker 2: to do something to reduce the bad effects of what
Speaker 2: we've done in the past to the Earth system. If
Speaker 2: it's localized enough, is that really geoengineering or is that
Speaker 2: just some kind of a mitigation attempt. And if you
Speaker 2: can't see any downsides to it, In other words, sucking
Speaker 2: water out from underneath the glaciers of Antarctica and letting
Speaker 2: it freeze on the surface, there isn't any obvious downside
Speaker 2: to that process, and it might slow the glaciers down
Speaker 2: to the point where we don't have immense sea level
Speaker 2: rise drowning all the beaches and wrecking all the seacoast cities.
Speaker 2: But to get back to the main thrust of your question,
Speaker 2: we are not decarbonizing as fast as we really should.
Speaker 2: There's going to be a discrepancy through the twenty twenties.
Speaker 2: I think between what we know we need to do
Speaker 2: to hold the global average rise to one point five
Speaker 2: or to two and what we're actually doing, which is
Speaker 2: going to overshoot that a carbon overshoot in the atmosphere,
Speaker 2: a CO two overshoot in the atmosphere. If we may
Speaker 2: need to suck some of that carbon down. Now, if
Speaker 2: you call that geoengineering, then I'm thinking it may come
Speaker 2: because there's many ways to suck CO two back out
Speaker 2: of the atmosphere into the Earth's system by way of
Speaker 2: reforestation or regenerative agriculture or celp beds. There are in
Speaker 2: other words, there are natural means scattering olivine on the beaches.
Speaker 2: I mean, the list of possible carbon drawdown possibilities extends
Speaker 2: way beyond building gigantic vacuum cleaners that suck CO two
Speaker 2: out of the air and would have to be a
Speaker 2: gigantic industrial process. But there are natural means as well.
Speaker 2: I have the feeling that may happen if we get
Speaker 2: too many parts per million of CO two in the atmosphere,
Speaker 2: the whole world will be better off if we suck
Speaker 2: some of that back down. Now, if you call that geoengineering,
Speaker 2: then I'm going to say it probably will come and
Speaker 2: will be a good thing for the biosphere of the Earth.
Speaker 1: Stan, thank you so much. That was a lot of fun,
Speaker 1: and I'm glad to be learning from a fiction writer
Speaker 1: to try and tell stories in a better way.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you Akshad for your work, and I'm keen
Speaker 2: on COP twenty nine. Let's meet at COP twenty nine
Speaker 2: wherever it is and see where we're at.
Speaker 1: The kind of climate fiction stand writes is just one
Speaker 1: way to tell climate stories. Join us next week to
Speaker 1: hear our interview with Amy Westerweld, the investigative journalist behind Drilled,
Speaker 1: a true crime podcast about climate change. Its latest season
Speaker 1: is about Egxon developing oil in Guyana.
Speaker 4: I got a press release about a lawsuit that had
Speaker 4: been launched in Guyana that was invoking the country's constitutional
Speaker 4: right to a healthy environment. The kind of format of
Speaker 4: this lawsuit was interesting to me, so that got me
Speaker 4: down on a whole rabbit hole.
Speaker 3: There was definitely some you know, intimidation, getting followed. My
Speaker 3: hotel room was broken into. I had some interesting surprise
Speaker 3: run ins with police.
Speaker 1: Listen to the full episode with Amy and how her
Speaker 1: team told this story next week. Thanks for listening to Zero.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you enjoyed this week's episode,
Speaker 1: please share it with a friend or someone who's run
Speaker 1: out of good books to read. If you've got a
Speaker 1: suggestion for a guest, or a topic or something you
Speaker 1: just want us to look into, get in touch at
Speaker 1: zero port at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Oscar
Speaker 1: Boyd and Senior producer is Christine Riskell. Our theme music
Speaker 1: is by wonderly special thanks this week to our intern
Speaker 1: ABRAA Ruffin as well as Todd Woody and Kira binram
Speaker 1: i'm Akshatrati back next week