In April 02023, The White House proposed major regulatory changes with huge implications for how the federal government considers the environmental impacts of new projects. The news barely made a blip in headlines.

The proposed changes concern two arcane documents called “Circular A-4” and “Circular A-94” that set recommendations for how federal agencies conduct cost-benefit analyses for social projects. Specifically, the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed lowering the discount rate from between 3% and 7% to 1.7%.

If you’re still there, let me explain.

Unless you’re a policy wonk or a certain kind of federal contractor, you can be forgiven for not knowing what the discount rate is. The discount rate or the “social discount rate” is a modeling rate for discounting the cost of future impacts in terms of present value, and it’s often used in the cost-benefit analysis of social projects that will have a delayed effect. Not to be confused with the discount rate set by the US Federal Reserve, which sets the interest rate charged to banks by the Fed, the social discount rate is mostly used by various government agencies in project planning.

The higher the discount rate, the less we value future impacts in the present. By contrast, a lower discount rate means we place a higher value on future impacts. This often gets applied to financial figures, but it can also be applied to benefits like lives saved.

The social cost of carbon is a good example. This metric seeks to quantify the harm caused by carbon emissions in terms of dollars. In 02021, the federal government used a 3% discount rate to arrive at a cost of $51 dollars per metric ton of CO2, in 02020 dollars. That cost rises every five years, so at a 3% discount rate, the cost in 02020 dollars would go up to $56 in 02025, $62 in 02030, and so on.

Critics of a low-cost calculation of carbon praised the proposed decrease to a 1.7% discount rate — a sharp departure from the 7% discount rate employed by the Trump administration. This set the social cost of carbon as low as $1 — something made possible by ignoring climate impacts on other countries — and made it much easier for fossil fuel projects to get approval. But in the proposed changes published earlier this year, the Biden administration recommends lowering the discount rate even further for projects with more long-term effects.

If all of this still sounds obscure and confusing, it might help to consider an example from the 02020 science fiction novel The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

As far as sci-fi writers go, Kim Stanley Robinson stands out for a few reasons: he’s widely regarded as one of the best science fiction authors alive today, he writes extensively about the climate and ecological crisis, and he likes to do so through the language of political economy, throwing around terms like “carbon quantitative easing” amid the standard science fiction themes of his work. If ever there were a sci-fi writer who had his characters talk about the discount rate, it would be him.

The book follows Mary Murphy, an Irish woman who becomes the leader of a fictional Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) office called the Ministry for the Future in the year 02025. The Ministry for the Future is tasked with advocating for the rights of future people who will suffer from the climate change previous generations caused. In Chapter 32, Mary asks Dick, a minor character, what his team is doing to improve economics for future people. Dick tells Mary they’re studying some changes India has made to its discount rate, saying:

[India’s] idea is to shape the discount rate like a bell curve, with the present always at the top of the bell. So from that position, the discount rate is nearly nothing for the next seven generations, then it shifts higher at a steepening rate. Although they’re also modeling the reverse of that, in which you have a high discount rate, but only for a few generations, after which it goes to zero.

That proposal is, of course, fictional. Yet it raises important questions about our own world — and our own economy. Why do we discount the future so heavily? What does that mean for climate change? What are some different ways we might imagine the discount rate to help fight climate change?

…

Picture this: a ship sails in one direction on an endless ocean. When it stops at various ports along the way, different groups of passengers board and disembark, but the passengers have limited control over where the ship goes next, and therefore, who comes aboard. Like all ships, this one requires regular maintenance and repairs to stay seaworthy, but each group of passengers has finite time and resources it can devote to repairs before passing them off to the next group. How should current passengers spend their time and resources on repairs to be the most fair to future passengers?

This analogy from philosopher Nicholas Vrousalis provides an introduction to the subject of intergenerational equity, or intergenerational justice. Intergenerational justice has ancient roots, with one example being the Seventh Generation Principle found in the Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Haudenosaunee Native American cultures.

In the Western tradition, the political philosopher John Rawls provides much of the foundation for today’s discussions. Rawls’ idea of a “just savings principle” suggests people alive today should “save” enough to leave future people just institutions and the ability to enjoy the same benefits previous generations left those of us alive today. It’s sort of like political philosophy’s equivalent to the Golden Rule: live for future people the way you wish people in the past would have lived for you.

Intergenerational justice concerns itself with determining the responsibility current generations have to other generations. These could be people who haven’t been born yet, but it also includes seniors and children. The social discount rate plays an important part in such discussions, and opinions differ on what that role should look like. One of the strongest arguments comes from economist Tyler Cowen and the late moral philosopher Derek Parfit.

In their influential paper “Against the Social Discount Rate,” Parfit and Cowen make the case for setting the social discount rate at 0%, effectively getting rid of it. The basic reasoning goes like this: the problems of future people will be just as real as ours are today when they arrive. How can we morally make an argument for valuing them less just because they don’t exist yet?

Parfit and Cowen’s paper considers a number of arguments against a 0% discount rate, one of the most common of which says we should discount effects on future generations because they’ll be better off than us. Sure, Parfit and Cowen say, some future people will probably be better off than us, but some future people will also be worse off than us. That alone is a good enough reason to ditch the social discount rate.

But The Ministry for the Future takes up another argument against a 0% discount rate, which I will call “The Argument from Infinity.” In Chapter 32, Dick tells Mary:

See, if you rate all future humans as having equal value to us alive now, they become a kind of infinity, whereas we’re a finite. If we don’t go extinct, there will eventually have been quite a lot of humans — I’ve read eight hundred billion, or even several quadrillion — it depends on how long you think we’ll go on before going extinct or evolving into something else…If we were working for [future generations] as well as ourselves, then really we should be doing everything for them. Every good project we can think of would be rated as infinitely good, thus equal to all the other good projects.

Paradoxically, by valuing future people less, we can perhaps be better ancestors and set them up to better cope with their problems. But in an interview, Cowen told me that he doesn’t find the Argument from Infinity convincing.

“The world’s going to end,” Cowen said. “And I don’t mean in a billion years, you know. How long do species last? You could look up the number, but it’s just not that long.”

But what about the remaining issue Robinson brings up about all good projects being infinitely good? Wouldn’t this demand that we sacrifice everything for the sake of future generations?

Parfit and Cowen again reject this in their paper, not because we should be able to demand that the current generation sacrifice everything but because a social discount rate doesn’t actually address this issue. It could lead us to, for instance, forgo preventing a major catastrophe in the future even if it would cost the same as preventing a minor catastrophe tomorrow.

Cowen expanded on this in our interview. “If you just think, ‘What can we actually do for the distant future?’ there’s very little we can do to help those people. The main thing we can do…is to leave them good institutions — a good constitution, good social norms, whatever you might put under that rubric. And that we should be very careful to make sure we do.”

Cowen’s argument for a 0% discount rate, then, doesn’t obligate us to take on every moonshot that could save lives in 03400 or 10320. Instead, by leaving a solid foundation of options for future generations, we can grant them the same wealth of choices prior generations granted us.

…

There’s one last argument in favor of non-zero discount rates worth considering here: The Argument from Special Relations. According to this argument, we all naturally use a kind of discount rate when we prioritize people who are related to us over others. For instance, most people will make sacrifices for their children before they will for strangers. Parfit and Cowen acknowledge this, saying, “Such claims might support a new kind of discount rate. We would be discounting here not for time itself, but for degrees of kinship.”

Earlier, I mentioned the Seventh Generation Principle from various Native American cultures as an example of an intergenerational equity concept. Though this idea is far from new itself, it can help us piece together the “new kind of discount rate” Parfit and Cowen began to sketch out in their work. By listening to indigenous community leaders putting the Seventh Generation Principle into action today, it’s possible to build a roadmap for our societies as we race to reorient our ways of living to be more harmonious within planetary boundaries.

Journalist, professor, author, and Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe citizen Patty Loew writes about this philosophy in her book Seventh Generation Earth Ethics: Native Voices of Wisconsin. In an interview, Loew explained the Seventh Generation Principle.

“Seventh Generation, I think, is a broad notion of stewardship,” she said. “Seventh Generation thinking obligates us in this generation to make decisions that we think are in the best interests of generations seven into the future…And when you think about the really wicked problems that human beings face…I think those kinds of problems really require us to think with more vision.”

Loew said this philosophy is interpreted differently across Native communities, and even within communities. Some communities, she said, interpret Seventh Generation to include three generations forward and three generations back in addition to the present generation.

“The other thing that’s kind of interesting about Seventh Generation thinking is that it also means you look back with gratitude,” Loew said. “So the decisions that my great-great-great grandfather made when he signed two of the three Ojibwe session treaties, he was thinking about my generation and understanding that the land that he was being coerced into giving up — the reservation — was not going to be large enough to sustain the generations that came after. So we were one of the few tribes that insisted on the right to hunt, fish, and gather on the land that we were giving up.”

Of course, the Seventh Generation Principle is part of a larger worldview that stands in stark contrast to modern ways of thinking in terms of commodities. Loew cited examples of Seventh Generation thinking during our interview, especially the sustainable logging and forestry management practices of the Menominee Tribe in Wisconsin. Over the past 160 years, Menominee Tribal Enterprises has been sustainably logging the Menominee forest, resulting in more trees in the forest than it had before their logging operations began. Loew attributed this to a different way of thinking about the forest: instead of viewing it as a commodity, the Menominee see it as a relative.

“Right now, we have more volume of wood in our forests than we did 100 years ago…even though we’ve cut the forest, the volume, over four times since then,” Jonathan Wilber, president of Menominee Tribal Enterprises, said in an interview with Insight on Business. “We do not just manage our forest for the trees. We manage the forest for the animals, the streams, the species of plants that are out there. This forest has to be managed for the long haul.”

In The Ministry for the Future, there’s a part of the exchange between Mary and Dick where Mary asks how the discount rate is calculated. Dick’s clever reply: “Out of a hat.” This is one major critique of the social discount rate: no matter who ends up determining it, it’s somewhat arbitrary. Some might say the same when considering ways to incorporate Seventh Generation thinking into our economic systems. After all, isn’t seven also an arbitrary number?

But fixating on the exact number misses the point. As Cowen noted in our interview, we don’t know what people living 300 years from now will need. Instead, we should focus on leaving them good institutions, which, I would argue, should include a healthy environment. Thinking in terms of special relations — both in terms of relationships across generations and of other beings as relatives — can help us sort out the details of that broader goal. When we are bound in a system of reciprocity, not return on investment, we will be closer to being the kind of ancestors future people need.

The post In “The Ministry for the Future,” New Ideas From Ancient Wisdom appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Hope. It’s in short supply these days, particularly among those of us who are climate-aware.

Earlier this month, the IPCC released a new report warning it’s “now or never” to act on climate change if we’re to limit global warming to 2.7ºF (1.5ºC). President Biden recently announced plans to increase exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to make Europe less dependent on Russian fuel in addition to resuming the selling of oil and gas drilling leases on public land—two major mistakes that spell bad news for the climate and therefore all life on Earth. There’s more, of course, but you don’t need me to tell you.

And yet, some people have the audacity to talk about hope. Who are these people? Two voices I’ve been paying attention to lately are Dr. Jane Goodall and Dr. Viktor Frankl. In her latest book, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, Dr. Goodall says, “Hope…is what enables us to keep going in the face of adversity. It is what we desire to happen, but we must be prepared to work hard to make it so.”

Dr. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor who wrote in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Dr. Frankl was also fond of quoting Nietzsche, who said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

I struggle with hope. I guess all thoughtful people tuned in to what’s going on in the world do. Sometimes I try not to think about hope, preferring to keep my head down doing what work I can to help. Other times I do genuinely feel hopeful, like when I read about the growth of green jobs, Germany shortening its timeline to 100% renewable energy by 15 years, and the exciting vote to unionize at the Amazon facility on Staten Island.

News in the real world isn’t a reliable source of the warm-and-fuzzies, but it has its moments. And then there’s fiction.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing author G.G. Kellner about her debut novel, Hope, A History of the Future. With this, Kellner has done the difficult work of imaging a hopeful future. It’s not a sunshine-and-rainbows kind of future—some very bad things still happen—but it is decidedly hopeful.

Living in the world we live in, I think just writing this book in the first place was an act of radical hope. We hear a lot about how screwed we are, but it’s rare to be offered a vision of what a better world might look like. This book is inspiring, and it’s a call to action to bring forth this better world. I would love to see more artists channeling their imaginations in this direction, so I’m thrilled to share my and Kellner’s conversation about her novel.

At the risk of sounding preachy—don’t give up hope. Find your “why,” and let the hard work of building a better world give you purpose. There is still so much good in the world worth fighting for.

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1. “Hope, A History of the Future” by G.G. Kellner
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“Hope, A History of the Future” by G.G. Kellner

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About the creator

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G.G. Kellner is a writer, an artist, a poet, and an educator. Her major focus over the last few years is the completion of her book Hope, A History of the Future in which she envisions a world seven generations into the future in which we have solved the some of the major social, political and environmental crisis of our time.

Her essays, letters, and poems have appeared in Utne Magazine, Orion Magazine, The Loop, The Beachcomber, and The Nature of an Island. Her most recent publications include the poem “Instructions: On Getting Ready to Die.” It can be seen on line at everywritersresource.com and her essay How to be Mistaken As an Islander was recently published in the collection, “The Heart of Vashon.”

G.G. Kellner is currently a regular guest and occasional host on the community radio program The Brown Briefly VOV 101.9 FM. Her paintings and sculptures have been shown at Lopez Library, the Blue Heron Center for the Arts, and the Barnworks. Her work in stone has been shown at the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington Kentucky. She recently facilitated a community art project as part of a local movement to move to a fossil free future. She is currently designing block prints to be incorporated into the interior design of Hope: A History of the Future.

G.G. Kellner lives on an island in the Salish Sea in a home that has been in her family for five generations. She spends most of her time writing, reading, working on artistic interests in painting and sculpture and walking the beaches and forests of her island home with her dog. She is allergic to cats.

Source: Author’s website

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Recommended reading

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• Interview: Alison Stine, Author of “Trashlands”
• Interview: Julie Carrick Dalton, Author of “Waiting for the Night Song”
• “New York 2140” by Kim Stanley Robinson: Summary & Analysis

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The post Interview: G.G. Kellner, Author of “Hope, A History of the Future” appeared first on Stories for Earth.

If you’re a longtime listener of the show, you might remember meeting author Joel Burcat last year when I talked to him about his novel Amid Rage. Always the prolific writer, Joel is back to talk about his new book that was published on February 2nd: Strange Fire.

Set in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, Strange Fire follows Mike Jacobs—the same lawyer from Joel’s previous two books—as he fights off a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). While Joel’s last book, Amid Rage, took a closer look at the coal industry in Pennsylvania, Strange Fire shifts the focus to fracking for natural gas. If you’re a fan of environmental legal thrillers, this one’s for you!

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“Strange Fire” by Joel Burcat

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Joel Burcat is an author and environmental lawyer. He has written three award-winning environmental legal thrillers: Drink to Every Beast (2019), about illegal dumping of toxic waste; Amid Rage (2021) about coal strip mining; and Strange Fire (2022) about fracking for natural gas. All have been published by Headline Books. He has won awards from Next Gen Indie Book Awards (finalist, thriller category), PennWriters and others. He has written dozens of short stories (from the best beer he ever had, to horror, to murder for hire) and nine have been published. His short stories have also won awards.

Burcat lives in Harrisburg, PA with his wife, Gail. They have two grown daughters, a son-in-law and two grandchildren.

Source: Goodreads

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Recommended reading

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• “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Hurricane Katrina, and Climate Change
• Interview: Nina Munteanu, Author of “A Diary in the Age of Water”
• “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler: Summary & Analysis

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Widely regarded as a masterpiece of climate fiction and solarpunk, New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson is a sprawling novel about how New York City has adapted to climate chaos in the 22nd century. In this special two-part episode, I’ll first offer a plot summary and list of characters, followed by analysis of major themes. This is a long book with a lot to teach us about what a better world could look like and how we might get there, so I’m excited to finally discuss it on the podcast!

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1. About Kim Stanley Robinson
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   1. Introduction to “New York 2140”
   2. Summary of “New York 2140”
      1. Setting
      2. Character list
      3. Plot summary
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3. Recommendations

About the creator

Kim Stanley Robinson is a literary science fiction writer from Davis, California. Born in Waukegan, Illinois in 1952, Robinson moved to Southern California as a child but has also lived in Washington, D.C. and Switzerland. His books frequently incorporate themes of climate change, sustainability, nature, environmental justice, and critiques of capitalism. The author of over 19 books and numerous short stories, Robinson has been awarded the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards for his literary contributions to science fiction. He holds a BA in literature from UC San Diego, an MA in English from Boston University, and a PhD in English from UC San Diego, and he has taught at UC Davis and the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. His latest novel, The Ministry for the Future, was published in fall 2020.

Official website: https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/

Transcript

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I’m Forrest Brown, and you’re listening to Stories for Earth.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

You’re listening to Stories for Earth, a podcast about everything climate change in pop culture.

Today, we’re talking about Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel New York 2140. It’s a long one, so we’re covering it in two parts. You’re listening to part one, where we’ll provide a plot summary of the book. Part two will cover a discussion of major themes and will be available a few weeks after the release of part one.

If you’d like to support further production of the show, consider becoming a member on Patreon for as little as $1 per month. We’re on Twitter and Instagram, and our website is storiesforearth.com.

And now, here’s part one of our discussion of New York 2140. I hope you enjoy.

Introduction to “New York 2140”

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“The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority.” -Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

“Ecology without class struggle is gardening.” -Chico Mendes, Brazilian trade union leader and environmentalist

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world’s 2,365 billionaires became $4 trillion—or 54 percent—richer, according to a March 2021 analysis from the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). While the pandemic has killed millions of people around the world and doubled the global poverty rate, it’s been kind to the world’s richest people, further widening the already gaping wealth disparity between the haves and the have-nots.

This should come as no surprise if you’re familiar with Naomi Klein’s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The Shock Doctrine examines how capitalism has taken advantage of and benefitted from moments of crisis, subverting the popular narrative of free market capitalism’s peaceful triumph over the 20th century. From the collapse of the Soviet Union to the rise of the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Klein demonstrates how capitalism pounces on moments of social upheaval and extreme violence to create economic opportunity.

Also read: “Pacific Edge” by Kim Stanley Robinson: A Future Mythology

We’re seeing the Shock Doctrine at play in real time with the COVID-19 pandemic, and many people, myself included, believe we’ll see it again and again as extreme weather events made worse by climate change become more frequent. Given shifting messaging from capitalists and neoliberal politicians, you might say it’s already happening.

Take, for example, recent remarks made by venture capitalist John Doerr, in which he called climate change the “…largest economic opportunity of the 21st Century,” according to MarketWatch. You can also see this in the way shipping companies are gushing about melting Arctic ice opening up new shipping lanes for trade. Or for a more lengthy analysis, consider the 2014 book Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming by Mckenzie Funk.

Summary of “New York 2140”

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But it’s not just captains of industry and heads of state who hear cha-ching when they think of climate change. Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has seen the writing on the wall for the next big money making crisis, writing his 2017 novel New York 2140 about this very phenomenon and exploring a possible solution for escaping it.

Setting

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Set over a century in the future, New York 2140 takes place after some of the most cataclysmic effects of climate change have been felt. Based on the extremely high sea level rise seen in the novel, it’s safe to assume the world has blown past the Paris Agreement target to limit global warming to 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial average. Much of Lower Manhattan is now partially submerged, with neighboring boroughs like Brooklyn almost totally drowned. The ultra-wealthy live Uptown in superscrapers—dizzyingly tall skyscrapers—and Wall Street is fleeing for higher ground in Denver, Colorado.

Lower Manhattan is now known as “the intertidal,” where flooded roads have transformed into canals and skyscrapers have been converted into partially self-sustaining housing co-ops for the dwindling middle class. Those not fortunate enough to make it into one of these vertical villages survive by squatting in the crumbling ruins of shorter buildings, which now serve as poker chips for investors in a kind of climate-induced housing bubble.

Being a New York novel, finance plays a big role in this story, and it can be easy to feel lost at times if you don’t have a basic understanding of finance or economics. But more than anything, New York 2140 is a massive exercise in worldbuilding, where Kim Stanley Robinson has seemingly imagined every conceivable aspect of a future New York and chosen to follow the lives of ten main characters over the course of about three years. While most of the characters are neighbors living quite different lives as residents of the Met Life Tower, four of them are lumped into pairs and another one represents the city itself as a character.

Character list

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To briefly summarize, the characters are as follows:

• Mutt and Jeff—two unemployed financial analysts living in a hotello (a sort of pop-up tent) in the vertical farm of the Met Life Tower
• Inspector Gen—an NYPD investigator who works on cracking a series of mysterious and seemingly unrelated cases throughout the novel
• Franklin Garr—a cocky young hedge fund trader who becomes the mastermind behind the largest debt strike in history
• Vlade—a middle-aged Ukrainian immigrant who works as the superintendent of the Met Life Tower
• The Citizen—a somewhat Shakespearean character who embodies the voice of New York City, often providing helpful historical context and snarky comedic relief in what I can only hear as a classic Manhattan accent
• Amelia Black—a futuristic streamer of sorts who hosts an internet show where she rescues endangered species and moves them to more hospitable environments as the climate continues to make ecosystems shapeshift
• Charlotte Armstrong—the chairperson of the Met Life Tower housing cooperative who works for the Householders’ Union, an NGO working to help those in need secure housing
• Stefan and Roberto—two “water rat” young boys orphaned in the intertidal who have had to learn to fend for themselves and are obsessed with hunting for buried treasure

Plot summary

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New York 2140 is a sweeping novel that contains many subplots, but the overarching plot has to do with changing the global financial system for the good and transitioning to a post-capitalist economic system. Simple topics, I know. Stay with me.

The book starts with a sort of socialist realist version of a Statler and Waldorf skit from The Muppet Show. Jeff is lecturing Mutt on the problems with capitalism and how he has a plan to make tiny tweaks to what he has identified as the 16 financial laws that govern the global financial system. Thanks to computer access granted by a recent freelance project for Jeff’s cousin who works in finance, Jeff can actually deploy the code he’s written to change these laws and hopefully save the world from greed and exploitation in the process.

Except, right after Jeff pushes the code revisions, the two realize they’ve been caught and have to make a run for it. The men go missing, and Charlotte Armstrong—chairperson of the Met Life tower housing co-op—files a police report. While Inspector Gen gets started on the case, a peppy and opportunistic Franklin Garr boats to work at WaterPrice, a hedge fund firm that manages investments in sea level and housing securities.

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Franklin is somewhat of a wunderkind at WaterPrice thanks to his invention of something called the Intertidal Property Pricing Index, or the IPPI. This is where the book starts to lose some people since it can get a little technical with finance-talk, so I’ll do my best to explain it here.

In 2140, sea level rise is tracked religiously, thanks to the traumas of the past one-hundred-plus years when sea levels rose dramatically and rapidly, mostly in two events called the First and Second Pulse. These were episodes of massive sea level rise in a very short amount of time due to major collapses in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Both Pulses caused incalculable amounts of destruction to coastal communities around the world, and everyone is paranoid about the prospect of a Third Pulse happening.

True to form, Wall Street and other financial hubs found a way to make betting on sea level rise a lucrative business. Now, sea level has its own index on the stock market, just like the top 500 publicly traded companies have the S&P 500 today. Housing has its own index as well. So, to put it simply, this index that Franklin Garr has created—the Intertidal Property Pricing Index—functions to produce an accurate, real-time price estimate of coastal property based on the global rise and fall of sea level.

Also read: “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn, Climate Change, and Moving Beyond a Vision of Doom

This helps to explain why buildings in the intertidal zone of New York City are so valuable now. Even though the East Coast is largely drowned, people haven’t totally abandoned their homes, stubbornly sticking around through some drastic adaptation measures. The submerged ground floors of buildings are totally sealed off to prevent flooding, and buildings have been reinforced with graphene to keep them from tumbling into the polluted water.

However, this interest in betting on housing prices has led to a fiercely competitive housing market, which is causing some stress for Charlotte Armstrong. The Met Life tower housing co-op has recently learned of a bid from an unknown party to buy the building, and the size of the bid smells like an attempt at a hostile takeover. Forced to put the bid to a vote among the tower’s residents, the co-op narrowly avoids getting bought out, but Charlotte is rattled by this and determined to find out who’s behind the bid.

To complicate things, it seems someone is trying to sabotage the Met Life tower. Vlade, the building’s superintendent, gets an alert early one morning of a leak in the building’s basement. Upon inspection, it appears someone has intentionally drilled through one of the walls facing the outside canal. Vlade manages to contain and patch the leak, but the event is still unsettling. Charlotte suspects whoever tried to buy the Met Life tower might be behind it.

Meanwhile, we’re introduced to Amelia Black, a “cloud” star who hosts a popular show called Assisted Migration, named after the giant airship she flies of the same name. Amelia is on a mission to relocate some starving polar bears to Antarctica, where conditions are still similar enough to their ideal environment to give them a chance at survival. Stefan and Roberto—two orphaned young boys who live in the canals—make an appearance after Franklin Garr saves them from drowning. Vlade takes them under his wing, and they eventually spill the beans about their plans to salvage the wreckage of an old British ship they’ve found and hopefully recover some sunken treasure.

Vlade goes on a couple of other treasure hunts with the boys, eventually employing the help of his ex-wife Idelba and her boat to recover the gold from the wreckage of the HMS Hussar. It’s on one of these expeditions that Vlade accidentally finds Mutt and Jeff, who have been held prisoner in a kind of underwater facility on the bottom of the bay. This gives Inspector Gen some new leads, who eventually narrows the list of suspects down to Jeff’s cousin, a hedge fund manager named Henry Vinson.

Seemingly unbeknownst to him, Vinson’s hedge fund, Albany Albany, hired a private security firm to kidnap Mutt and Jeff, though we later find out it was Charlotte’s ex-husband and chair of the Federal Reserve who ordered the kidnapping under the guise of placing them in witness protection. Mutt and Jeff’s rescue also provides some evidence that Vinson’s hedge fund was going through Morningside Realty in the attempted buy-out of the Met Life tower.

These discoveries are soon overshadowed by news that a massive hurricane is heading for New York City, and the residents of the Met Life tower scramble to prepare for what is likely to be a nasty storm. Amelia Black is forced to delay her return home, flying north to ride out the storm, and Stefan and Roberto go missing after they’re caught in the storm while trying to find the grave of Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick.

The other main characters hunker down in the Met Life tower, which emerges relatively unscathed compared to some of the other nearby buildings. However, the intertidal zone where the poor live as squatters in crumbling buildings, is completely annihilated, and Vlade and his ex-wife Idelba venture out in her tugboat to save as many people as possible from the lethal storm surge.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, hundreds of people have perished, and thousands more are effectively climate refugees—now homeless and living in a massive open-air refugee camp in the wreckage of Central Park. Charlotte is overwhelmed with requests to the Householder’s Union, and she makes an unsuccessful attempt to convince the mayor to seize all the unused housing uptown that has been bought up by rich investors. A riot ensues after the refugees are essentially abandoned by the city, and the NYPD gets locked into a tense standoff with the same private security company who kidnapped Mutt and Jeff.

Inspector Gen manages to de-escalate the situation, but not without getting some important information on who the security company works for—Henry Vinson. By this point, Vinson’s name has been found to be connected to a number of mysteries throughout the novel, from the hostile buyout of the Met Life tower to Mutt and Jeff’s kidnapping to a private security firm threatening to shoot rioters attempting to breach a pretty much vacant building.

This eventually gets back to the hedge fund trader, Franklin Garr. Remembering a conversation he’d previously had with Charlotte Armstrong about how a debt strike could bring the global financial system to its knees to better serve everyday people, Franklin springs into action. He calls up Charlotte, and the two hatch a plan to make the debt strike a reality. Amelia Black also gets in on the action, using her enormous platform as a cloud star to send the rallying cry.

What is this debt strike? It’s basically an intentional recreation of the 2008 financial crisis. If you recall, the 2008 financial crisis happened because a housing bubble collapsed in the United States. This caused a domino effect of economic consequences that resulted in the global Great Recession.

In very simple terms, banks approved a lot of predatory mortgages to people who most likely could not afford them. And by that I mean they started issuing mortgages like what they called “No Income, No Assets” or Ninja loans. When these people inevitably couldn’t make payments on their mortgages anymore, thousands of houses went into foreclosure, and behemoth investment banks like Bear Stearns went bankrupt. If you want a really entertaining and accessible explanation of what happened, I highly recommend the movie The Big Short.

This is essentially the kind of financial crisis Franklin, Charlotte, and Amelia helped orchestrate. Except this time, mortgage payments stopped because hundreds of thousands of people made a choice to stop paying them all at the same time rather than being forced to stop making payments out of financial necessity. Just as they hoped, this caused a domino effect that brought the global financial system down. The banks asked for a government bailout, but this time was different from the series of stimulus packages Congress passed in 2009.

Governments around the world still bailed out financial institutions but in exchange for nationalization. In other words, governments gave them the cash they needed to survive on the condition that the money go towards buying shares. This effectively made governments around the world majority shareholders in the various failing financial institutions, thereby netting them a lot of revenue for their national budgets.

What happens next is a bit of a blur. With bolstered confidence from the successful nationalization of Wall Street, Congress passed a flurry of legislation straight from a progressive Democrat’s wildest dreams: universal healthcare, free college tuition, full employment, programs, aggressive environmental protections, a corporate tax rate of 90 percent, laws preventing capital flight to tax havens, et cetera.

Thus ends New York 2140. It’s a long and wild ride with lots to say about the fundamental brokenness of our current neoliberal era marked by extreme wealth inequality, climate breakdown, fascism, and disaster capitalism. And yet, despite a tendency to pontificate and perhaps lean too heavily on historical events from the early 21st century, it’s a pleasant and engaging read that has a lot to teach us about human resiliency and the power of collective action.

Outro

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I’m doing this episode a bit differently from past ones, so be on the lookout for part two of our episode on New York 2140, where we’ll move beyond a plot summary to analyze some of the major themes in the novel.

In the meantime, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram, and check out our website at storiesforearth.com. If you’d like to support further production of the show, consider becoming a member on Patreon for as little as $1 per month.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Recommendations

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Book: Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson

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Book: Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland

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The post “New York 2140” by Kim Stanley Robinson: Summary & Analysis appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Despite recently being thrust into the limelight thanks to a certain senator from West Virginia, Appalachia often gets overlooked in climate discussions. A beautiful, mountainous region in the eastern US that played a big role in my life growing up, Appalachia might be one of the most misunderstood and maligned parts of the country, thanks in no small part to damaging depictions found in books like Hillbilly Elegy and in films like Deliverance. So you can imagine my excitement when I heard about a new novel that seems to actually understand this place: Trashlands by Alison Stine.

Set in a near-distant future Appalachia, Trashlands is a brilliant and inventive story that sees the region transformed into a giant junkyard where plastic waste is currency. The book focuses on a young woman named Coral, an aspiring artist and “plucker”—someone who cleans up plastic litter. In this interview, Alison and I talk all about Trashlands, the role of art in facing the climate emergency, and about some of the issues raised in the book that we can see in real life today.

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1. “Trashlands” by Alison Stine
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“Trashlands” by Alison Stine

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• Find at your local library
• Buy on Better World Books from $23.51
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Alison Stine is a poet, freelance journalist, and award-winning novelist from rural Ohio. In addition to writing three poetry collections and a novella, Alison has also written and published two novels: the Philip K. Dick Award winning Road Out of Winter and her latest, Trashlands. Alison lives in Colorado with her family where she contributes to the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, 100 Days in Appalachia, and more. Visit her website at alisonstine.com to learn more.

Transcript

*Coming soon*

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In the summer of 2019, Mary Annaïse Heglar, one of my favorite climate writers, published an essay on Medium that caught me off guard. Titled, “But the Greatest of These is Love,” a reference to a quote from Jesus, the essay argues that love is one of the most powerful feelings we have to maintain the fight for climate action. I confess—at first I was skeptical. But then Mary floored me with this quote:

“This love is not a noun, she is an action verb. She can shoot stars into the sky. She can spark a movement. She can sustain a revolution.”

I’ve thought about this essay a lot since it was published over two years ago, and I think Mary is right: love is the solution to the climate crisis. It’s the only force powerful enough to sustain the kind of revolution we need to build a sustainable, equitable, and just world. So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my recent conversation with Cheryl Grey Bostrom saw us talking about the importance of love in this context.

Cheryl is an author and photographer from Washington State who recently published her debut novel, Sugar Birds. Set in the Pacific Northwest, Sugar Birds tells the story of young Aggie, a girl on the run from her troubles after starting a devastating fire at her family home. I had the pleasure of talking with Cheryl about her first novel, and now I’m happy to share our conversation here. I hope you enjoy.

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1. “Sugar Birds” by Cheryl Grey Bostrom
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“Sugar Birds” by Cheryl Grey Bostrom

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About the creator

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Cheryl Grey Bostrom is a naturalist, photographer, poet, and author from rural Washington State. The author of two works of nonfiction, Cheryl made her fiction debut with the publication of Sugar Birds in August 2021. Since its publication, Sugar Birds has won at least three awards, including the 2021 American Fiction Awards in Literary Fiction, General Fiction, and Cross-Genre Fiction. You can learn more about Cheryl and her writing at her official website: cherylbostrom.com.

Transcript

*Coming soon*

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The post Interview: Cheryl Grey Bostrom, Author of “Sugar Birds” appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Seeing The Day After Tomorrow as a youth was probably the first time I was exposed to the idea of climate change. And 17 years later, this film remains one of the only major Hollywood productions to explicitly engage with the topic. For this special episode of Stories for Earth, I chatted with Dr. Yanas Kisten, a scientist and host of the podcast Geekoscopy, about one of our favorite disaster flicks: The Day After Tomorrow, directed by Roland Emmerich.

• Buy or rent on YouTube: https://youtu.be/K_xwj9bHZm4

Special guest: Dr. Yanas Kisten, host of the Geekoscopy podcast

For this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Yanas Kisten, a South African scientist and host of the Geekoscopy podcast, which explores “…the intersection between science, story, and play.” Yanas is a postdoctoral researcher at Nelson Mandela University in Eastern Cape, South Africa and is interested in science communication. He examines the many different ways that geek culture can help science reach a broader audience through his podcast.

• Website: https://www.geekoscopy.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/geekoscopy
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/geekoscopy/

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1. About Roland Emmerich
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

Roland Emmerich is a German film director and producer known for movies like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Independence Day (1996), and The Patriot (2000). Educated at the Munich Film and Television School, Emmerich’s career began with his student film, The Noah’s Ark Principle (1984), opening the 1984 Berlin Film Festival. The film was a success, paving the way for him to make his Hollywood directorial debut with Universal Soldier in 1992. Roland Emmerich lives in Los Angeles where he runs the film and television production company Centropolis Entertainment.

Official website: http://www.centropolis.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rolandemmerich

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*Coming soon*

Recommendations

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Article: “The lingering influence of ‘Day After Tomorrow’” by Michael Svoboda in Yale Climate Connections

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Video: Everything Wrong With The Day After Tomorrow from CinemaSins

Podcast: “Gun Island” and “The Great Derangement” by Amitav Ghosh: Summary & Analysis from Stories for Earth

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The post A Discussion of “The Day After Tomorrow” with Dr. Yanas Kisten appeared first on Stories for Earth.

As human society has become more advanced and industrialized, so has the way we keep time. Most of us no longer tell the time by looking at a sundial or a mechanical clock, but by referencing our smartphones, which are synced over the internet.

In doing so, we keep time more accurately, giving us the ability to plan for the future and coordinate with others. Digital clocks afford us many benefits, but there’s an argument to be made that this method of reckoning time contributes to an illusory idea that we humans are somehow separate from nature.

A new conceptual art project called the Atlanta River Time Project aims to challenge this fantasy by offering an alternative method of timekeeping: the meander and flow of a river. Created by experimental philosopher and artist Jonathon Keats, the Atlanta River Time Project keeps time by comparing the current rate of flow of the Chattahoochee River against its historical average. I had the chance to speak with Jonathon about his new project earlier this summer, and now I’m happy to share our conversation with you.

Jonathon and I talk about everything from the intersection of art and philosophy to the industrialization of time and why Jonathon believes this was—and continues to be—a driving force behind the climate emergency. Learn more about the Atlanta River Time Project and Jonathon at the links below.

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1. The Atlanta River Time Project by Jonathon Keats
2. About the creator
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The Atlanta River Time Project by Jonathon Keats

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• Learn more about the Atlanta River Time Project

About the creator

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Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, conceptual artist, and the author of six books, the most recent of which is titled You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future. Jonathon has been an artist-in-residence at multiple colleges and universities around the country, currently at the SETI Institute and UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. He lives in San Francisco.

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(00:00:04) – Forrest

Thank you for coming on the podcast. First of all, I was just hoping you’d tell me a little bit about yourself and how you became an artist.

(00:00:12) – Jonathon

My name is Jonathon Keats, and I am an experimental philosopher and an artist, although only really accidentally. I studied philosophy in school and fled as soon as I possibly could because I recognized that what I thought I would be doing, which basically was being Socrates, is not, in fact, what you do in an academic setting when you’re studying philosophy and where you have a very particular tradition that you’re working in and methodology and a language that you’re using that doesn’t really allow for much conversation outside of academia and also doesn’t really allow for a very varied or very relevant, I think, in certain respects, a very relevant discourse about the issues that we’re contending with today.

And I think the  need to involve these conversations that is need to involve everybody, and they need to involve everybody in ways that are accessible and our open in terms of what meaning might be made. They really need to be a conversation. And so the accidental part was that I needed to figure out where to go with these big ideas or these notions that I had. And since clearly, academia was not the space in which to be able to do philosophy as I thought philosophy needed to be done, I simply found the ultimate no man’s land. And I think that that’s probably the best description that I can give for the art world, because ever since, well, iconically, ever since Marcel Duchamp brought a urinal into the context of an art exhibition, it really has been a state in which anything goes. And that has probably been one of the greatest act, and therefore one of the most significant enlargements of what art can be and what it can do. But it also has led to a lot of confusion. And as a result, it means that you can do more than simply bring more urinals into more exhibitions, which, unfortunately, has been largely the response to the Duchampian turn. It seems like there’s been a lot squandered on the open invitation to do more with art than to make paintings of pretty landscapes. And I have nothing against a painting or a pretty landscape, for that matter. We don’t have enough pretty landscapes left. And painting is still as interesting as it ever was. It’s continually renewed. But also, the art world is a space where you can do a lot of other things. And so I found that I could take from philosophy some of the ideas that I was interested in, and I could also smuggle out some of the methods. And to give an example of this, probably the most important of these was the thought experiment. And this is how I’ve call myself an experimental philosopher, which, by the way, is a job title that conveniently doesn’t exist out in the world, and therefore I can just make of it whatever I want. There actually was—once upon a time—there were natural philosophers—this was the word for scientists before they were scientists, and “experimental philosopher” was occasionally used as an alternative to that, but it’s relatively unoccupied territory and therefore optimal for self-definition. So, the thought experiment is basically a a counterfactual that you posit in order to make an argument, essentially by bamboozling your opponent into agreeing with what you set out to prove in the first place. It’s a rhetorical turn, but I think, has a lot more potential than that, because it’s basically—in terms of starting with a counterfactual, and then in the classic way that a thought experiment is used, showing that that position is untenable, that it’s absurd, therefore, that the position that the philosopher had up his or her sleeve was actually the position that was meant to be accepted by all from the very outset, that everybody has to go along with it, because anything else would be absurd. Instead of going through that, which would require, first of all, that I actually knew something, which I don’t claim to, and in fact, I’m much more interested in the questions than in the answers. And the answers are interesting to me, mostly for the fact that they generate newer and better and bigger questions. But the thought experiment could be used quite literally as an experiment for a possible world that could be inhabited by people, and that we could inhabit that together and have a conversation within it, or interact within it in ways that would reveal the workings of the world that we know today and might potentially reveal both oversights or blind spots, and also could potentially, in terms of that alternative world, could reveal that there are attributes of that alternative reality that are desirable or that are the opposite, that are to be avoided, and therefore could be a means by which to think about the future in relation to the familiar and do so in a way that anybody could interact. So in a sense, it’s like sci-fi, only without any real narrative, that in the case of a sci-fi film or novel, you’re being sent through a story. And yes, there’s choose your own adventure, which somewhat upsets that. But still, there are basic ways in which you are being transported. And the idea that I had all along was that the thought experiment could be genuinely experimental, and that that would be, that would have a certain kinship to science fiction, which is to say really, to all fiction and really going all the way back to the fable to folklore, but that it could do something different, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since, and I’ve been using—or abusing, perhaps—the art world for purposes of doing this sort of work, if you can call it work. And I think that it’s play really more than it is work, but I’ve been doing so also outside of the art world. And so at the same time that I accept the title of artist, and I deeply respect people who are artists, I don’t know that I am one. I don’t know if I really want to be one, because to me, there are great advantages out of the completely confused state of the art world that allow for me to do a lot of things that there’s just no other place in the world for them. But on the other hand, the art world sets certain expectations. And it also has a certain threshold that it places in terms of…there are a lot of people who just don’t think that they can understand art. There are a lot of people who just won’t walk into a museum or won’t, accept art as something that is relevant to their lives, either that is frivolous, that it is entertainment, in other words, or, on the contrary, that it’s too serious and too stultifying. And I don’t really want either of those qualities to adhere to what I do. The art world gives a certain sort of space in which to explore an experiment and gives a certain sort of leverage. But it also I think ultimately, like Wittgenstein’s famous ladder, needs to be kept away ultimately. And of course, that means that I ended up stumbling and falling flat on my face.

(00:09:14) – Forrest

Great introduction. Awesome. And I think, too, philosophy is like that for a lot of people as well, which I think probably gets a little bit at what you were saying at the beginning of why you ran from philosophy, if I’m correct in that assumption.

(00:09:29) – Jonathon

Yeah. I think that philosophy and art have a lot in common and a lot to answer for, as far as the fact that both of them seem to me to have come out of fundamentally popular activities. That is to say that they became rarified through a sort of self-reinforcing mechanism that, in the case of art, basically, if you look at art up through the 19th century and you’re really fast and loose with the facts, but nevertheless, the trends are I think that they map on pretty well. And I spent a lot of time in the art world. Another part of what I do is that I am an art critic. So I’m constantly thinking and writing about art. And as I said earlier, I’m really deeply respectful of and interested in art. But basically, what happened was that up through the 19th century, you had a sort of reinforcement of certain genres and techniques, basically the effect of what guilds have done or what guilds did in the crafts. For the most part, the arts were craft in terms of their basis. So it became something that was very specialized in terms of who could do it. But still, it remained for a long span of that time, fundamentally in the service, for instance, of the Church, where you couldn’t be too obscure or I don’t know, you get excommunicated for it. But you certainly would not be doing much good in terms of the propagandistic qualities and, well, the propagandistic qualities are really problematic. I think that, first of all, a lot of artists subverted them, even in the course of seemingly adhering to them. But also there was a way in which this was accessible. You have the Bible in Latin. I don’t want to end up in some territory of religious discourse here, but very briefly—you have, you have the Paupers’ Bible that is as a tradition and the stained glass window, as well as a tradition, both co-existent with a Bible that is inscrutable to most people. So I think that with art, then you end up with this turn toward an insecurity that comes from the de-skilling that is the Duchampian turn I referred to earlier.

(00:12:18) – Forrest

Right.

(00:12:19) – Jonathon

That results in the need for self-justification, and that leads to an academic not academic in the sense that art was academic in previous centuries, but a different sort of academic approach where it basically is a barricade. And I think that philosophy also has had that sort of insecurity in terms of the fact that anybody can talk about ideas. So what happens when you think about the history and when you think about the present case of the Academy, when you think about the University. How does the University differentiate itself? How do philosophers in the University differentiate themselves? So part of this is, I think, equivalent to in the sciences, where you have a genuine need for methodology, become more and more complex in order to operate in terms of what has come before and also the body of knowledge becomes increasingly rich and increasingly voluminous. These also are limiting factors in terms of the fact that then it becomes specialized, both out of intentional—a sort of intentionality on the part of a self-protective maneuver, but also in terms of the sheer weight, the sheer scale of this body of knowledge, and it ends up ossifying. So I guess this is all a very long-winded way of saying that what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to figure out how to avoid all of that while sort of helping myself to as much of it as possible. How do I take those legacies, how do I take all the thought that has come before me, and play fast and loose with it? How do I do that in an art world that is, on the one hand, it’s not well funded at all. So I’m not going to say that. There’s the auction market, which I’ll never have any success in whatsoever, but the art world that has some resources and has some capacity to be able to put something in front of a public. How do I do that without ending up stuck in a whole bunch of assumptions that don’t interest me and a whole bunch of limitations that are constraining?

(00:14:55) – Forrest

Yeah. I feel like your work does a pretty good job with that for anyone who is familiar with your work. One thing that does seem like a common thread through what I’ve seen of your work, or your play, as you called it, is that a lot of it seems to kind of question or challenge the common perceptions of time. Is that something you’re really interested in? Why do you think that is?

(00:15:18) – Jonathon

I think everybody is. I mean we’re all running late all the time. And I think that when I consider all of the different ways in which we’ve gotten to where we are, that is to say, in an industrialized society that has appropriately been referred to as the Anthropocene whether that’s an epoch or not remains to be seen based on our actions, and I very much hope that it is just a geological episode, that we are in a…an untenable and clearly unsustainable situation. And I don’t need to tell you that, but I can maybe say something about how I think we got there and what I think we might be able to do in terms of a cognitive shift that might help us to move beyond it because we can’t give into this. I think that the ecological grief that is really present in our society right now? Absolutely understandable and justified, but it is not an excuse for inaction, nor do I think that we should be encouraging that mindset, if we can possibly provide some sort of alternative mindset that might get us past the cause of that grief.

(00:16:57) – Forrest

Yeah, totally.

(00:16:58) – Jonathon

So basically, from my perspective, which is really quite untutored, and I would say that you’d be highly irresponsible if you believe me on any of this, but I’ve given it a lot of thought and I’ll share with you what I thought.

(00:17:14) – Forrest

Okay.

(00:17:16) – Jonathon

I think that time is largely responsible for this turn, and that seems strange to say. I mean, you would think it’s a steam engine, you would think that it is the railroad, and it is all of those. But all of those are very much contingent on the industrialization of time, time becoming technical. Basically, when we get the ability to measure time and to coordinate action in the world on the basis of some sort of calibration that is abstract and that is accessible to all without any sort of reference to the planet. It means you can first of all, you can make the railroads run on time, perhaps, but you can make them run in the first place because you have the ability then to coordinate action at a distance. But you also ultimately end up with the possibility of controlling labor, and you have the possibility through transportation, of creating global industry and multinational corporations. So it is a gross oversimplification, but I think it’s a useful oversimplification, to say that time is what is driving us forward toward oblivion. And so what might we do in terms of how we think about time as a way in which to think differently without turning into an Apple billboard: “Let’s think different.” So I guess that I am not quite going to be accused of trademark infringement there, but, “Think differently.” And I think that this is really about recognizing that time is all around us reckoned by every living being and also by all living systems, ranging from the small to the planetary, and that we need to tap into these alternative ways of reckoning time and the alternative time that is reckoned, or, in other words, as an extension of the idea of biodiversity, we need to think about chronodiversity. And that chronodiversity manifests when we start to, for instance, look at the time that is lived by a Bristlecone pine tree that lives for 5,000 years, or alternatively, by a mayfly, which doesn’t live for 5,000 years. So I think that it isn’t just a matter of lifespan, but it’s also a matter of how these, how each and every organism and also a living system, and a river is a living system, and river also, there’s a way in which time is measured by the river, for instance, by watching its meander and watching how it’s meander changes as a way in which to understand time through that particular perspective. So what I’m saying is so blatantly obvious as to be almost criminal. And also, what I’m saying is something that was present in all preindustrial societies and is present in Indigenous societies, and that needs to be recognized and acknowledged for the fact that this has been around for a long time and remains actively present. For instance, I’ve spent some time in Alaska and in Inuit communities and had some exposure to Inuit ways of thinking about time through some conversations that I’ve had. And this is just one example of many. But really, what I’m trying to figure out are ways in which we can recalibrate modern society using the apparatus that we’re familiar with in a way that we are brought back into sync with nature. And we are not apart from nature we’re mainly a part of nature and we need to recognize that as much as we have done all that we can to ignore it. So partly I think that is really, through time, we can reconfigure our society and come to the recognition of how we really are—have always been and remain—a part of nature. But it also becomes many other things. So what I’m looking at, for instance, is in Alaska, I took rivers as a basis for reckoning time, and so I took a cliché. And time flows and rivers…rivers flow as well. So what would happen if we were to calibrate our clocks and calendars based on the flow of our rivers and to localize. So, the local river, as it flows more quickly in one season, more slowly in another, that that actually changes the rate at which time is passing according to the municipal clock. So you can imagine a water wheel that you place in the river. The water wheel is scaled to spend at one RPM given the current average annual flow. Well it’s going to flow more quickly in some seasons, more slowly in others. It also, in the case of Alaska, for instance, we’re talking about glacially dead rivers, it’s going to change over time. There’s a phenomenon in glaciology, which is peak flow, where basically there’s going to be an acceleration in terms of flow and then there’s gonna be a deceleration. And ultimately there may be nothing. Therefore, if you take the water wheel—literally not a good idea in Alaska, so we’re working with the US Geological Survey and using their metering. You do the equivalent, and you then calibrate a clock based on that flow, and then you make that manifest in a way that people in the city are seeing time in that way. It leads to a certain, at least two different ways in which to think in terms of time and to think through time in terms of our actions in the world. One of these is contingent. And that is to say that the seasonal flow, it fluctuates, but it also fluctuates between day and night, and it also has a certain stochastic quality. It is, there is a randomness in the system. Therefore, you never know quite when 2:30 tomorrow will be, and you need to be constantly aware of your surroundings and that situates you in the world, in the environment, with an attentiveness that we have largely lost. At the same time, we need to be thinking in the long term, in terms of the consequences of our actions and to be calibrating what we’re doing today in ways that will allow for a world in the future to be a world that is desirable, or at least that we do as little harm as possible. So in order to do that, I think that being able to see the impact of human activity in a vernacular that we all know, the vernacular of time, and being able to calibrate our actions, which clocks do, based on the speed at which this clock is running, it leads to where the clock can be thought of sort of an environmental observatory. It leads to a way to which to observe these changes and to react, to respond. So responsibility comes out of responsiveness, and that responsiveness is only possible through an attentiveness that needs to have the combination of foresight and humility. The foresight comes through an understanding of how actions are impacting change in aggregate. Humility comes from the not knowing and the awareness of not knowing and the contingency in the moment. And so, while they seem to be contradictory, they both can be built into this sort of clock. So what I’m really trying to do is try to figure out: how do we access in ways that that fit into our world today, what we have always known and what we still know and what is more essential to us now than it has ever been, because our actions today can have such extraordinarily profound impact on the environment at any moment.

(00:27:32) – Forrest

Yeah. Now, I really love this concept of using rivers as a timekeeping device, because that is such a huge problem. Like you were saying, the industrialization of time or maybe like, the commodification of time is that we today, especially when I feel like we are guilty of such short-term thinking. We really have lost a lot of our ability to think in long term. But, I mean, I was reading this book last year, The Overstory by Richard Powers, which I’m not sure if you’ve read or not. He talks, like the whole point of that book is just the need for humans to think in long term and think at the speed of trees, I think, is the way that he put it, which is something that I’ve kind of been wrestling with since I read that. Like, how do you, you know, get people to shift their thinking in that way without really being able to see it? And I think something like your River Time Project can help with that, because it is giving people more of a visual, I guess. It’s giving them something a little bit more tangible.

(00:28:54) – Jonathon

And I think that it can operate in all sorts of ways. So just to bring up trees for a moment, I’ve been working for a while now with the Long Now Foundation and the Nevada Museum of Art on Bristlecone pine trees, where what the idea there is is to start with a calendar as the concept. So as we all know, a tree grows a ring every year. What’s most interesting about that is that the thickness varies based on environmental conditions.

(00:29:32) – Forrest

Right.

(00:29:33) – Jonathon

So you have a whole field of research, dendrochronology, that is dedicated to understanding that, and archaeology actually uses it in order to be able to date an old house, for instance. So the proposition that I’ve been working with is that we can look to a Bristlecone pine tree, a tree that will live potentially for 5,000 years, maybe even longer, as a very long term calendar that can, again, as with the Rivers, can calibrate us in terms of our actions. So the basic idea is: imagine a sapling and take the average annual growth for Bristlecone pine trees right now, it’s about 1 millimeter per year, and extrapolate out 5,000 years. Place stone markers, for instance, in the landscape in a spiral around the tree. For each marker, engrave precisely a date where you are calculating using the Gregorian calendar standard dates. You’re going forward 5,000 years, and you have them regularly spaced based on that 1 millimeter per year rule. That is, in fact, not a rule, because it will vary. And so, envisioning that we continue to put more carbon into the atmosphere, the result is an acceleration in growth for the trees. So in other words, based on an estimation we could maybe make at this stage in history, the tree is going to end up well ahead of the Gregorian calendar and something that is, of course, inaccessible to most because Bristlecone pine trees grow in places that are highly inaccessible. So what we’re working on right now is on Mount Washington in Eastern Nevada, where the Long Now Foundation has a property with Bristlecone pine trees. So we’re looking to do this there to build these calendars around some trees there. But the idea is equally to make this something that is present in the city. So that has been my work with the Nevada Museum of Art, where, for instance, one way in which to approach this would be to take the measure of the tree using a dendrometer, which is a device that you can wrap around a tree, and it will tell you in microns what the tree is doing, how quickly the tree is growing. So you might imagine that that is used as a basis for a new time protocol in the same way that I was doing with rivers, to have a protocol that is calibrated by the tree where the tree has authority. So basically, in the case of the spiral of stones, the tree might end up well ahead. But what I’m challenging people to do is to say that this tree has authority in this place. And in fact, this is the year right here, right now. And we need to accept that that chronodiversity, which also manifests in terms of place and diversity of different times in different places. So a sort of spatiotemporal diversity that manifests from it, but also to transport that into people’s lives by, for instance, I’m working with Earth Law Center on legislation that would mandate as a legal time standard the time that is kept by the trees. Or in the case of Atlanta, where I’ve been working most recently on the River Time Initiative for the Chattahoochee River, where the Chattahoochee would provide an alternative time standard for Atlanta. But then it also is a matter of how you make this accessible in people’s lives. And I think that part of this is a matter of building a clock, municipal clock. And so in the case of Alaska, we did this as a projection on the museum, the Anchorage Museum, which was a museum that sponsored the project. In the case of Atlanta, we’re looking actually to build, in downtown Atlanta, a physical clock that would be calibrated by the Chattahoochee. But then you can also bring it into people’s lives in other ways. You can do so through, for instance, a smart watch app, or scheduling software. So you can also have experiential means. For instance, in Alaska, we set a metronome that was operating at the rate of—and in the case of Alaska, we have five different rivers, and each one, there’s an Alaska mean river time, and each one of these rivers kept time on its own. So what we did was we had a a string quartet, a chamber orchestra.

(00:34:40) – Forrest

I was actually going to ask about that, yeah.

(00:34:42) – Jonathon

They performed to the metronome for different rivers at at the time that they performed. And, of course, something like Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” which is very familiar and also appropriate, in a way, that was really interesting. But it also is interesting to think about, okay, so what what gets composed for this? And that really is, I think, where in the case of Georgia, one thing that we’re looking at is to work with composers. So basically what happens is that you, you bring this into people’s lives in a way that they can experience these alternatives. And this is where I think what I was talking about earlier with alternative realities and the thought experiment. In a sense, all of this is one way you can think about this is that I’m building observatories, and these are observatories that are public observatories that are open to anybody and everyone. And I’m trying to bring science back into natural philosophy, where natural philosophy was something that was for amateurs where anybody could do it. But I’m also, I’m thinking about in terms of experimental philosophy, thinking about in terms of bringing it into the realm of the thought experiment and saying, “What if we were to live on this local time kept by this river? It’s a river that runs through our town or our city?” I don’t know! There are a lot of reasons why that could be a really bad idea. And there are a lot of things that could fall apart as a result of it. There are a lot of lives that might be made more miserable. There’s a lot of suffering that could happen. So I’m not saying that we should do that, giving it absolute authority right here, right now. But I’m saying that we need to be thinking about alternative ways in which to time our lives in order to be able to figure out how to live our lives collectively toward a…an environmental justice that is in sync with social justice. All of this can work in tandem because you can’t have one without the other, you can’t have a world in which we’re—any of us are going to want to live, let alone all of the other species that are being killed off by the 6th Mass Extinction. We can’t have that unless we put it all together. So part of what I’m doing also is I’m saying that time is something that affects everyone and everything. And while it is only one part of the totality of our world, it is a connective part of our world, it is something that connects all parts of our world and connects all parts of our world to all other parts.

(00:37:24) – Forrest

I think that’s great. It makes me think of, I believe it’s in Times Square now, if I’m not mistaken, but I think that there’s, like, a carbon counter in Times Square. Are you familiar with this? Or the climate clock? Yeah. That’s what it is.

(00:37:39) – Jonathon

Okay. So I’m going to try to be…I would never really want to try to be nice, but I’m going to try to look at this in terms of what I think is beneficial about it, but I’m also not going to give it a free pass. What is beneficial about it is what was beneficial and remains beneficial about the Doomsday Clock that has been maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists since the 1940s. There is real value in some sort of a public measure of imminent existential risk. There’s real value in that being very direct and very easily understandable, the same way that the warming stripes that were featured on the cover of The Economist, this way in which to visualize warming trends, just as far as simplification goes, a climate scientist isn’t going to be able to do anything with it, but it can motivate the public. And that is really important. We’re in a state of triage right now, and we need to be thinking in terms of triage. But we also need to be thinking beyond triage because if we continue to think just in terms of triage, we’re never going to get past it. So where I object to the climate clock in terms of that being, all that there is for that being, what we’re really focusing on is that I think that it doesn’t, it doesn’t open conversation, but rather directs decision. We definitely need to be directed. Activism is really important right now, and it is a mechanism for activism. But as important as activism is thoughtfulness, is the ability to understand, and especially a capacity for what is sometimes referred to as intellectual humility. I think that we need equally to develop that capacity first, for a number of reasons. One reason is, I think that a mechanism such as the climate clock or the warming stripes, that these bring too great a sense of certainty, and in their oversimplification, they short circuit the uncertainties that we need to be aware of in order to really understand the complexity of the problem. But more important than that, it doesn’t work, ultimately, within the context of a democracy of collective self-determination. We need the capacity to think, and we need to be prompted in ways activated in ways to think collectively, to think in a way that only philosophy. And I’m not talking about Western philosophy or Eastern philosophy. I’m not talking about philosophy in academia versus outside of academia, but philosophy, just in terms of love of knowledge, that sort of that impulse. I think that that is where we need to be going and that can be present at the same time that we can have our climate clock and we can have our doomsday clock and we can have our warming stripes and all the rest.

(00:41:39) – Forrest

I see the value, like you’re saying in the climate clock, but it does seem to kind of be ignoring the underlying problem, which I feel like is what the River Time Project gets at, which, as we were saying earlier, again, like the commodification or the industrialization of time. So I mean, like we always think in terms of ticking clock, of running out of time, and like, especially in the United States, like we’re very driven by schedules and we like to be very punctual. But I feel like just putting, like, a concrete number on it, like that like we have exactly ten years to save the planet or whatever the messaging is. That is an oversimplification in many ways. And I think what the River Time Project does is that it gets people just to think differently about time. And part of that is being more in tune with the so-called natural world, even though we’re part of the natural world. But in a huge way, I think we’ve lost that sense, and that seems to kind of be emblematic in things like the climate clock. So it’s interesting.

(00:42:45) – Jonathon

Well, I think that it’s also very interesting. As I’m sure you’ve seen, there is just in the past few days a report that has come out from the United Nations that finally the people studying climate and the people studying biodiversity realize that oh, actually, we’re talking about the same problem! I think I was flabbergasted by that, even though I knew that that was the case, because conversations I’ve been hearing this and one of the conversations I’ve been having with Earth Law Center, where I’m really trying to develop a lot of these at a conceptual level, and also a lot of these ideas I’m trying to develop at the level of how we can bring about real, real world action in terms of rethinking jurisprudence, rethinking ecosystems and legislation. But one of the conversations that we’ve been having has been around funding. Inevitably, that’s what happens when you’re an NGO and trying to figure out how do you get—in their case, their focus comes from rights of nature, but is more broadly Earth Law—which is to say that it is very much about living systems. And there’s a lot of funding for climate change, a lot of funding for climate change, as far as funding to try to change the climate, which is funding going to Chevron, but maybe not Exxon so much anymore, we’ll see about that. But there’s also the, there’s a way in which climate change seems to have captured the public imagination and in particular been relatively, I don’t know whether’s been safe territory, but for some reason, it seems like a lot of the philanthropy has been going to addressing climate change, but in a way that has been ignoring all of the inter connectivity.

(00:45:14) – Forrest

Like geoengineering.

(00:45:17) – Jonathon

Yeah. Well, like geo engineering, like just saying that we are, we’re trying to address the environment and environmental problems with alternative energy. I’m happy to get into the question of geoengineering with you, but I think we can be even much more banal here and say, “Okay, the the Biden administration is generally well-meaning in terms of recognizing there’s environmental devastation and something we’ve done about it.” But for the most part, the response is, “Let’s make more wind farms!” And that is not going to do it. That is going to help to some extent with also some hindrance. And I think that one of the great things about this UN report is that at least it starts a conversation in a very public way that has been happening in back rooms for a long time to do with “What are the relative gains and losses when you start to look at loss to biodiversity in an effort to, for instance, make more pellets for pellet stoves?” And all of these really complex trade offs, we need to be talking about those. But I think that just the fact that for the most part, when you look at a relatively well meaning US government, or at least saintly by comparison to the one that came previously, you’re still talking about something that is really short-sighted, I think, and really narrow-minded.

(00:47:08) – Forrest

Yeah. I mean, it kind of just is getting at the whole problem of the system is broken, not the way that we run the system is broken, necessarily. I will have people like my mom, for instance, ask me, “So what do we need to do? Should more people drive electric cars?” And I’m like “More people should just not have cars.” That’s really more of the problem are things like that. It’s not—building more wind farms is not going to save the world. Doing one thing, period, can’t save the world, so to speak, which is kind of a weird expression in itself. But I think it’s just—like looking at all these things really just lays bare kind of how entirely unsustainable modern life is.

(00:47:58) – Jonathon

So a lot of the work I’m doing with Earth Law Center really is about how do we go past climate change? And if we are able to address that, then all problems are solved. We go past rights of nature and past the implicit appeal to biodiversity that you find within a rights of nature philosophy to the implications. And those implications are, like everything, systemic. So right now I’m starting to work on a project with a number of partners, but in particular, right now, working with the University of Southern California on a first stage of this, where the proposition is that we need to enfranchise other species in democratic decision making.

(00:49:11) – Forrest

Yeah, totally.

(00:49:12) – Jonathon

Because all life ultimately is implicated in the decisions that get made, and also because other life has access to other stimuli or, in other words, the perceptual range, when we start to look at all life on Earth, as well as the—I’ll use the word cognitive as shorthand here, or the word intelligence as shorthand, but—the ability to process what is knowable through different modes of perception, the perception itself, and the processing of what is perceived. This is really essential in terms of how we can solve or address, even, the biggest problems of our time, which are these incredibly complex, systemic question. So basically, enfranchising other species is right as a matter of recognizing that we’re not special, that we’re not separate from nature, and not only is it right, but it just also happens to be what we need in order to be able to make decisions that are good decisions for us. And so in order to enfranchise other species, well, it isn’t easy, and it isn’t obvious how to do that. In the United States, we have this Constitution that is a couple hundred years old, and there are certain aspects that really would make that difficult, though there are other places, and we’re already starting a conversation, for instance, in Chile, which is they’re re-writing their Constitution. So there’s a lot of opportunity there. But there are ways in which, in the shorter term, to take these ideas and bring about real world action. So in the longer term, the basic idea that I’ve been working with is that we can understand what we’re doing when we go to the polls in a way that wouldn’t require that we anthropomorphize other species and say that, you could take your cat to the polls. Wouldn’t that be adorable? But we can actually have something meaningful happen. So one really—again, an oversimplification as a starting point. But this oversimplication that I have been working with as a starting point is that basically what we are doing is, we are responding to conditions, to the environment, in a way that we can change that environment through the policy that gets made through this mechanism that is our government, and that we are changing the state of the government from stasis toward change, or vice versa, in terms of the very general activity of the government and of governance, and that that could be potentially a matter of whether our stress level is increasing or decreasing as a result of the policy as it currently stands. So, in other words, basically, democracy approximated evolution in certain ways even before Evolutionary Theory had been articulated. And we can actually, then, back into that again by seeing democracy as evolutionary, where we can use stress measurement as a way in which to be able not only for humans but for any other species, also to enfranchise other species in that process of democratic decision making. So starting with—since we’re less than one percent—starting with the majority. In terms of biomass, that would be plants, more than 80 percent by some measures, starting with plants, how would you do this? Well, plants have hormones, stress hormones, that they emit in response to environmental conditions.

(00:53:36) – Forrest

Okay, I see what you’re saying.

(00:53:39) – Jonathon

So, for instance, when attacked by aphids, they’ll result in a plant making toxins that are expensive to make in the sense that that requires resources. So the plant does not want to be making those toxins all the time.

(00:53:59) – Forrest

Right.

(00:54:00) – Jonathon

So in reaction, and in order to be able to do so elsewhere within the plant, because a plant not have a centralized nervous system, it seems that the most efficient way in which to do so is where the plant is being attacked by the aphids. There is a reaction, the production of these toxins that happens in tandem with the production of ethylene, a gas that operates hormonally for the plant where that is detectable by the plant. So the plant is basically talking to itself in some way, and in so doing, is able to coordinate a defense. This gets into a whole area biology that I think we should probably avoid for the sake of this conversation, but as shorthand that there is the possibility of, “Okay, what if we start to look at, at scale a measurement of phytohormones?” And so I’ve been starting to develop with scientists, to just a very first approximation, how that might work as a matter of measurement of volatiles, for instance in a forest canopy. But in tandem with that, to say, “Okay, what can we do right now?” Well, and this is the work that I’ve been starting to develop with USC, what we can do right now, because we can’t change the Constitution, just you and me, as nice as that might be. We can, however, start our own Gallup, our own polling service, and it can be a polling service where we are polling the political position of other species.

(00:55:46) – Forrest

Okay, cool.

(00:55:48) – Jonathon

We can do so with sophisticated equipment. Measuring ethylene is non-trivial. I’ve been working on that with a number of people trying to figure out a way in which to make it trivial, one of the more outlandish ideas being that ethylene also is involved in the ripening of fruit, probably for reasons to do with how stress and ripening are related processes. But what if we were to take bananas and use bananas as cheap ethylene sensors? Basically, is a banana ripening more rapidly now in proximity to that plant than it was a couple of months ago? Well, if it’s ripening more rapidly now, then the ethylene being produced by the plant is increasing, therefore, there’s clearly a vote for change. So, up with bananas, Dole is really happy, probably some environmental devastation that goes into all of that, but really where our thinking right now is, what I’ve been developing with USC and where I’m starting to now—so I’m a research associate at the University of Arizona at the desert laboratory, and they are particularly strong in terms of phenology, in terms of studying phenology, plant phenology. So I’ve been looking at plant phonology as a way in which to address this. So, for instance, when a plant flowers earlier in the season versus later, that is a proxy measure, at least, for increase in stress. Plants, whether it’s causal or not, and the nature of causality is a separate conversation, but you can, as a correlation, you can say that there’s a correlation between increase in stress and earlier blooming. Well, having that sort of observation at scale becomes quite feasible. And it becomes really interesting when you start to think about people as citizen pollsters. What happens when you have a Gallup for plants is, first of all, you can suddenly start to publicize that, and plants can, for instance, issue political endorsements. But in order to really compound the effect, what I think is required is not only for the sort of visualizations, a sort of presence of the state of the stress level of plants in our lives, and the interpretation of that, mapping that on to policy and policy changes in ways that can inform what policies we support, that also, we need to, to reinforce this sense of awareness of the environment. And the citizen pollster can do this, meaning making everybody a citizen pollster, making it easy, making it interesting for people. We have this phenomenon that’s referred to as plant blindness. How do we overcome plant blindness? That seems like it goes a long way toward starting to bring about something that’s equivalent in some ways to what I’m trying to achieve through time. How do we build awareness of the environment through a vernacular that we all are familiar with? Time—how can that tell us we are aware of the changing flow of a river and therefore, peak flow as a phenomenon for glaciers, for instance. Likewise, how can we bring about a general awareness of the stress state and therefore effectively, how do we create an intercom system for Gaia? How do we get past—because hormonal levels are really largely responsible for our own internal state as individual humans, how do we, how do we extend that out into the environment? And how do we make that manifest in a way that people are affected by it? There’s a phenomenon known as xenohormesis that’s really interesting, which is, when some species are able to detect changes in stress hormones of others and are able to respond on that basis. How do we, as humans, discover or maybe rediscover our capacity for xenohormesis? How do we build a system—ultimately, rebuild the whole thing? But as a starting point for what we can do right now, how do we build the awareness that leads to policy that actually is enlisting the full intelligence of the environment? And also, that is building the respect for other species and living systems that can lead to the political will to make those bigger commitments to change.

(01:00:44) – Forrest

Yeah. All very important things to think about. And it makes me think of the US Poet Laureate, actually, Joy Harjo. She’s got—I think her latest poetry collection is An American Sunrise. But there’s a poem that I really like called “Tobacco Origin Story,” and she talks a lot in it about how we’ve forgotten how to hear the songs of plants. And that’s like a really common refrain in that poem. And it sounds a lot like what you’re talking about with learning how to, I guess, kind of measure stress hormones in plants. It’s almost like how to talk to plants or how to listen to plants. And you said, how do we learn or perhaps relearn how to do that? I feel like, especially among, like, what I’ve read about a lot of Indigenous cultures, it seems like a lot of Indigenous cultures do kind of have a sense for that to some degree, in some way, maybe not in, like, as exact of scientific terms, as what we’re talking about here, but there does seem to be a lot more intuition there.

(01:01:48) – Jonathon

I would say that it actually is, in terms of if we’re going to talk about science in terms of a method that goes back to Roger Bacon, and we can find differences. But if we’re going to talk about science in terms of predictive capacity in terms of what science does, it is really remarkable. And so you have right now, for instance, the Karuk tribe here in Northern California, has been doing extraordinary work on what is deep knowledge within the tribe, putting it down on paper as a way in which to be able to—certainly fire management is one of the more obvious ways in which this is happening—but in all ways that you can imagine. And so this idea that ecology has an indicator species is something that the Karuk have as a matter of practice, going back unbroken over millennia. And so there’s now a really interesting collaboration taking place, for instance, where they are working within and with universities to try to expand this and also to make it more accessible to more people. But I think that what Joy Harjo is doing—and her poetry is truly extraordinary—it’s equally important what she is doing, because she is doing this work in a way that is making it intuitive. So within ecology you have, for instance, the principle of kincentric ecology, which comes from Indigenous systems and has gained some traction, though not nearly enough, very little within mainstream ecology. In other words, within the University system. But basically, it’s a lot of what you at least hear echoes of in Joy Harjo’s poetry is a sense of, these other beings are our kin, and we are in a familial relationship, which has to do with how you tend the land, but also has a lot to do with how you understand the landscape and how you understand yourself within it. And I don’t want to try to talk over her because her poetry does this far better than I’m able to do in terms of my attempt at putting together a bunch of different thoughts in rather extemporaneous and a somewhat sloppy way. But I do think that reading the report that has recently been issued by the Karuk, reading Joy Harjo’s poetry—these are ways into a lot of the sort of thinking. And Enrique Salmon is the name of the author of the first academic paper that I’m aware of to extensively and comprehensively address kincentric ecology. And he is an Indigenous scholar who has really—this was maybe about 20 years ago—but he really did some important work in terms of making that knowledge and that worldview accessible to a scientific mindset. I think that that conversation is a conversation that really needs to be taking place.

(01:06:11) – Forrest

Yeah, I agree. I’m reading another book right now, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and that’s a lot of what the book is, I think. She is a scientist. I don’t know the technical term for it, but she studies moss, essentially. But a lot of the book is just about Indigenous wisdom, Indigenous ways of doing things, and the ways that science kind of weave into that, or I guess Western science is what I’m talking about. But, yeah, it’s funny how you said, like, maybe there’s, like, two different ways of thinking about science in terms of, like, if we’re going back to a strict textbook definition, perhaps, or maybe if we’re thinking about science as a capacity for being able to predict things. There was—one of the chapters I just read is all about a study that one of her students did studying different ways of harvesting sweetgrass. And when she presented this to the thesis committee, they kind of scoffed. And they were like, “Well, of course, like, harvesting any kind of plant matter from nature is going to harm an ecosystem. This seems like a stupid study to do.” Basically, like, this isn’t really going to contribute anything to the body of scientific knowledge. But what she found after she did the study, after she convinced them to give her permission, is that actually harvesting the sweetgrass in the ways that these Indigenous communities in upstate New York were doing actually contributes to the ecosystems’ flourishing. And when you don’t harvest it, it actually withers and it goes away.

(01:07:53) – Jonathon

I just can’t understand how this is difficult for people to understand.

(01:08:00) – Forrest

I know.

(01:08:01) – Jonathon

And the reason is, going right back to where we were earlier in the conversation. The reason most fundamental reason—well, okay. So we can talk about colonialism, we can talk about politically speaking, and the de-legitimizing of other ways of knowing, tradition as a product of knowledge, all of that. Okay. So that’s definitely one conversation that’s important to have. But also it is this idea of humans being separate from nature. So if you understand that the sweetgrass didn’t evolve on its own, separate of the humans who had been in a symbiotic relationship with it over that long span of time.

(01:08:58) – Forrest

Like thousands of years.

(01:08:59) – Jonathon

Rather that it was a co-evolutionary process, then it becomes absolutely obvious that there needs to be a—that that connection needs to be sustained.

(01:09:13) – Forrest

Right. And that was a big point of what she was trying to get at is that, she was just saying, it was so telling, like, seeing the committee’s reaction to her proposal for the study. Because they said, “Of course, if you harvest it, it’s going to harm it.” She was like, it’s just such a prime example of humans thinking that we’re somehow separate from nature or above it in some way, when really, like—we talk about things like, like environmental restoration, people will talk about, like buffalo, for instance, out on the plains, and how actually reintroducing buffalo and restoring that population actually is good for the grasslands, and it actually contributes to a thriving ecosystem. She’s like, but we don’t ever think of that with humans. Like a lot of people, especially, simply speaking, like a Western, industrialized kind of society, we can only imagine us having a destructive relationship with nature. And the study that the student did kind of turns that all on its head, which I thought was just so interesting.

(01:10:21) – Jonathon

And we weren’t thinking about that with buffalo long ago, either. I mean, that’s a relatively new way of, again, a very old way of thinking.

(01:10:35) – Forrest

Right.

(01:10:36) – Jonathon

This process of resurfacing, or really just of listening. It’s kind of, science vaunts observation. And yet the kinds of observation that are methodologically, habitual, or even permissible, within the sciences often leave out a lot of what might be observed and who might be observed and whose observations count in terms of what makes knowledge. And I’ve been particularly interested recently in how we can expand ecology to include other species. I think that there is a tendency for us to think that we are studying the environment, that we’re studying these other species, and that’s what ecologists do. But I think that it is absolutely valid and actually really important to recognize that these other species also are ecologists and that they are studying the environment in which they live as well, and that their ability to do so, and to do so well, is actually, has been essential to their survival. And that their way of, their ways of sensing and their ways of processing what they sent. And this is at a sort of micro scale, perhaps what I’m getting at when I talk about democracy involving all species. I think that level of doing science, that thinking about the plant that you would typically say, “I’m studying that plant.” Well, no, that plant is actually, should be a co-PI, a co-investigator. And we should think about how we can, in terms of our publication, co-publish with other species and with living systems. And that also then means, how do we—how do we create an open system in terms of our publication? There’s been some begrudging movement on the part of the scientific journals toward opening publication such that you don’t have to spend $10,000 in order to have the privilege to read the paper that was published based on funds that came, I hate to say it, from taxpayer dollars. But it did! But how do we, how do we think about opening up the process such that other species also can access the results of the research that they participated in? In other words, what sorts of language actually would not preclude, and what sorts of manifestation of these results from research would not preclude other species from benefiting from them? Because if you think about it, we’re benefiting greatly from what that plant is sensing. Taking, for instance, as a really easy example here, an indicator species. So an ecologist studies an indicator species that is indicative in terms of what you can observe about it, indicative of larger changes in the environment. But in fact, that plant, that indicator species, is not just observed—it also is an observer. And it is an observer in the sense that it is also a scientist. It is also an ecologist. And therefore is contributing intellectually to the research as well. So if we recognize that, then, first of all, it’s the beginning of getting away from our hubris and the beginning of getting out of this sort of us-versus-them way of thinking of the world. But also that indicator species would perhaps benefit from the knowledge that, that it is helping to generate in a way that is in relation to what we’re doing as scientists. So if we’re co-investigators, we should be sharing our results. And this results, potentially, in a new way of doing science that actually turns into a new level of symbiosis. And that new level of symbiosis can potentially be symbiosis at a rate that can accommodate climate change in a changing environment. Because the thing is that evolutionary processes, if you’re a bacterium, you’re in relatively good shape. The horizontal gene transfer, which is, I think, actually a really good model for writing a property law. But that’s another matter. I think that when we’re looking at most species, their rate of evolution is far slower than the rate of change in the world right now and in times because industrialization occupies such a short span of time relative to the time that their evolutionary processes in their own right, that those processes evolve. So we therefore need to think about what are some of the other ways in which adaptation takes place? And one of those is you go to Monsanto. Another one is that you think about symbiosis. Symbiosis, in fact, kind of a rapid prototyping in nature, of adaptation. So therefore, if we start thinking about symbiosis with humans in the symbiotic equation, and if we think about one of the symbiotic activities being the activity of symbiotic science—science as a form of symbiosis—that can be potentially profound.

(01:17:12) – Forrest

Yeah. That would be huge, I think, if we were able to do that

(01:17:16) – Jonathon

Well I don’t think it’s that hard! So I’m working right now with Antenna with a journal that is a, an art and ecology journal, starting to prototype, what would a scientific journal look like that was a journal that was accessible to other life forms and other living systems? And so I think that one way to think about that is in terms of how life and living systems are already not only doing science in terms of the observational aspect, but also doing science in terms of the publication. And here, if you look at the way in which, for instance, a river inscribes its history in the land, in terms of meander, it is in effect, is a sort of publication, and the publication is, in effect, a way in which the river is able to learn from its own path. So what if we start to think about publication in the land instead of on paper? What if we have a scientific journal where we have an atlas, and the atlas has the abstracts for bringing you out to these landscapes where, in fact, the science is taking place, and where the science is being published, co-published, by us with other species. So this is a new way in which to think about scientific publication that can be a leading into a new way of doing science that can then get us past certain…so, the human mind obviously evolved in very specific conditions, and there are heuristics that were very good for those conditions that don’t necessarily work in conditions where we currently live, and certainly in the conditions that we have created. So essentially, only if we have this sort of broadening of epistemology,, or a sort of epistemic diversity that goes along with biodiversity, only then do we have any chance of being able to get past these sort of evolved blind spots and to be able to generate knowledge at the rate of, because of the symbiosis, but also at the intelligence of the environment itself, the whole ecosystem can evolve in ways that is generating its own knowledge, and that is acting on it in which we are fully integrated into it. And that gets us into a rather different system than we’re living in today.

(01:20:08) – Forrest

Yeah. Do you think that going back to the River Time Project a little bit, do you see that, I guess, creating a clock based on the flow and meander of a river, is that a form of publication, you would say? It seems like kind of a form of communicating back and forth.

(01:20:24) – Jonathon

Absolutely. By all means, the river is engaged in some sort of publication. However, that publication is a publication or broadcast, perhaps, that for which we are the recipients.

(01:20:46) – Forrest

Right.

(01:20:46) – Jonathon

Clearly, it needs to go beyond that. Clearly, there needs to be cross-communication and there needs to be a genuine sharing, and that sharing potentially becomes between rivers and trees. They already are doing so within a small radius, because a riparian system, basically, is doing something along those lines. However, we’re looking at, through globalization, we’re looking at an environment where a decision made here has an effect on another continent. So how does publication, where every species is constantly publishing within an ecosystem, where the ecosystem is at a scale of change that these species evolved in, how do we, then, go from that to this expanded ecosystem that humans have created that all other species are ultimately implicated in?

(01:21:48) – Forrest

Yeah. That’s another huge thing. I read somewhere recently that, this was talking about plastic, but the author said that every day people make thousand-year decisions. We don’t even really think about it that much. But, I mean, if you go to Starbucks, for instance, and you get, like, your iced coffee or whatever, it comes in a plastic cup and, you know, since 90 percent plastic is never recycled, and on top of that, like, what good does recycling plastic really do anyway? I mean, that’s not really going to decompose for thousands of years, if it ever does, since plastic tends to just break down into smaller particles. But that’s just such a huge disconnect that we have—and a huge part of that is just that we have these systems in place that don’t give us a lot of choices and what we can do with that. But that’s a massive issue is that we have such huge impacts on the environment through seemingly harmless actions. And thinking, too, there is—I saw, I think, on Instagram of all places, actually—there’s this organization in Nashville—I used to live in Nashville, Tennessee—called Tennessee River Keeper. And they shared a visualization, it was, I guess, a website you could go to where you could see how long it takes water from Tennessee, what impact that has on the I guess, overall watershed. If you put pollutants into a river in Tennessee, where does that end up in a couple of weeks or whatever? And it was showing how dumping huge amounts of fertilizer into, like, water systems, which we’re doing at an alarming rate, is creating this huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Which, I think, is another kind of thing that might be up your alley in terms of what you’re doing with the River Time Project. But, yeah, I don’t know, just made me think of that.

(01:23:48) – Jonathon

Yeah. I think that it’s really important to recognize the implications of our actions that may be beyond our evolved capacity to understand in our own heads. However, I would say that when we start to think about extended cognition, that is to say when we think about cognition as being something that is not only in our heads but also is out in the world, and that it also is distributed, and it also involves others, that we can start to really enact that as a basis for being able to understand what we’re doing. And that requires a very different sort of, a different set of hierarchical foundations, I guess, in terms of the hierarchy of our head and what happens inside our head and ultimately what happens literally and figuratively downriver. How do we start to think about what’s happening downriver as being part of our distributed cognition? And how do we think about the collective cognition that is manifested, for instance, in schools of fish, in terms of their behavior, how do we enter into it? How do we, how do we create a trans-species collective cognition that is intentional and that is constantly manifested in terms of the decisions that we make? I think that when we take this idea of embodied cognition, we take this extended cognition, we take this global view of it, and we start to then feed it back into our decision making, that we might be able to make decisions at the scale of the consequences of our actions.

(01:25:59) – Forrest

Yeah, that makes me curious. I feel like we’ve been talking about how we can learn from the publication, so to speak, of nature. That kind of makes me wonder how we might, then, I guess, enter into communication with nature, as it were, in response to that. Do you get what I’m asking?

(01:26:26) – Jonathon

We certainly are already. I think we are sending a lot of, we’re sending a lot of signals inadvertently, unintentionally that natural systems are very attentive to. Often the signal is sufficient to kill them, which is a problem. But also, I think that there’s a lot that we may not think that we’re disclosing that we are, but there is, I think, more generally, if you start to understand or start to think about cognition in this distributed way, then the cognitive system of planet Earth itself involves all of those pathways and all of the transportation of different chemicals and the effects that has and the effects of those effects. And to be able to, in any way grapple with that, of course, within one’s own head, is difficult, to say the least, and quite possibly impossible. And the impossibility of it leads us back, I think, to intellectual humility as being really an essential attribute that we need to cultivate. But we can certainly also just take any given instance of it. Recognizing that we’re being reductionist. I think that there is great value in, I think there’s great value in committing various sins of the sort that reductionism is, as long as we’re doing so intentionally, in the same way that apophenia, for instance, the recognition of a pattern of a signal in noise or the mistaken detection of a signal in noise. So astrology is a classic example of this, where you’re taking what you’re seeing in the stars and you are extrapolating from that some sort of predictive value. And it is possible, and I am agnostic on all things, including astrology. It is possible that this is valid and this is valid for reasons to do with one or more gods that are somehow involved in it. I don’t know. I have no way of knowing. But apophenia is rightly denigrated for the fact that it can lead to some very poor decisions and it can lead to some certainties that are unwarranted. But applied apophenia actually can be very valuable. That is to say that when we recognize that that’s what we’re doing, we do it intentionally, when we do it in order to be able to open up the possibility space, and here I’m getting back to experimental philosophy as a practice, I’m getting back to how do we generate hypotheses that we then can experiment on? Generating hypotheses is, it isn’t easy to think of counterfactuals that are really deep counterfactuals. And one way in which to do so is serendipitously, or to do so through a detection. Well, it’s, we’re seeing it in the stars, we’re seeing it in the tea leaves. The randomness can actually lead to a false recognition that can be used as a basis, then, for a real experiment.

(01:30:01) – Forrest

Sure.

(01:30:02) – Jonathon

I’m advocating also reductionism in an equivalent way that it can be helpful to us as long as we recognize that we’re being reductionist. But to bring this back around to time. I’m particularly interested in a lot of these questions to do with fertilizers, which is where you came from as far as this was concerned, because of the fact that there is a way, once again, to think about that in terms of time, and again, to be reductionist intentionally, and to acknowledge that reductionism here, but to say then, okay, “So what’s going on?” Amongst other things, one that I think is really pertinent is that fertilizer is partly comprehensible in terms of time, effectively a fertile… artificial fertilizers are accelerating certain processes, growth processes in plants. They’re in various ways accelerating aspects of ecosystem, and often accelerating them to the point that they exhaust themselves, because that is something that is not really involved in a way that can sustain itself. I think that we, therefore, need to look at that problem in terms of time itself. In terms of how we understand time in relation to natural systems and the abuse of various other life forms and living systems that happens through various materials, various activities. But they can be construed through time, and that thinking about, in terms of rights of nature, putting that framework on it. What would it mean to say that there’s a right of nature to live at its own pace? That life has a right to live at its own pace.

(01:32:32) – Forrest

Right.

(01:32:33) – Jonathon

And to to enshrine that in law? Well, it’s just folksy enough that I could picture, I can almost hear Joe Biden saying it. Because it’s an important thing that I think people can get behind, but that has really big implications, because it then reaches into all these territories, literally and figuratively, because suddenly when you start thinking about chronodiversity as being essential to biodiversity and vice versa, and having real value in terms of the sustainability of an ecosystem and also just in terms of its own legitimacy, its own rights. And then you start to build on that, that those rights need to be recognized, then that has these policy implications that lead to a change that is potentially systemic when it is applied globally. And is applied with the rigor that I’m calling for, that suddenly there are a lot of downriver again, to use an appropriate metaphor here, perhaps, downriver effects. And those are effects that don’t necessarily seem present when you start with the proposition that I have. For me, coming all the way back around, trying to bring you to a natural ending here. For me, one of the ways in which the projects in relation to time have been so interesting. Yeah, they are thought experiments, but they’re thought experiments that also, in addition to the specific conditions that I am experimenting with, that at that broader level, lead to other thought experiments that are well outside of what you think about when you think about clocks and time and that ultimately activate thought-experimentation as a mode of being in the world that perhaps has the potential, the capacity, to bring us to a systemic change that is at the scale that you’ve been alluding to earlier. It goes well beyond simply deciding whether to have an iced coffee or not, or whether to vote for the Republicans or the Democrats this cycle. So, I think that we need to, we need that to bring about that sort of thought experimentation, we all need to become experimental philosophers. And where we end up, as a result of making that move is in no way something that I think we can predict or even imagine right now. Because when I started working with time, it was with the Redwood trees and it was an invitation to go and to give a talk at the College of the Redwoods, in thinking about Redwood trees and their growth and thinking about what if we put a spiral of stones around it? It was just a really simple gesture. And here we are. And this was 15 years ago or so. And here I am still trying to bring this about in the world. But here we are having a conversation about chronodiversity and all these ideas that came about just as a result of following these conversations in new directions. So that maybe is where I’ll leave it, is to say that we should all become experimental philosophers and we should all have a reunion here on your podcast in order to be able to discuss our findings.

(01:36:09) – Forrest

Yeah, let’s do it whenever that happens.

(01:36:11) – Jonathon

And other species.

(01:36:13) – Forrest

Yeah, we’ll invite the cats and some of the trees too. Yeah. Alright. Cool. Well, really quick, before we end, I was going to ask, for anyone listening who wants to keep up with your work, where might be a good place for them to do that?

(01:36:27) – Jonathon

Well, that’s always challenging. Google. It is perhaps the best.

(01:36:33) – Forrest

Just Google you?

(01:36:34) – Jonathon

The Atlanta River Time Project is being run through Flux Projects, so that would be a good way to keep up with that. Other projects are happening through other venues all around the world.

(01:36:48) – Forrest

Okay, just Google “Jonathon Keats.”

(01:36:53) – Jonathon

And you tell me what I’m doing because I never know where I’ll be tomorrow, let alone next week.

(01:36:58) – Forrest

Okay, cool. Got it. Well, we’ll leave it there. Jonathon, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really, really enjoyed getting to talk to you. This was great.

(01:37:07) – Jonathon

Thank you. Really enjoyed it as well.

Recommended reading

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• “How Beautiful We Were” by Imbolo Mbue: Summary & Analysis
• Interview: Costa Boutsikaris, Co-Director of “Inhabitants”
• “The Overstory” by Richard Powers with Lovis Geier: Summary & Analysis

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The post Interview: Jonathon Keats on His Atlanta River Time Project appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue is the story of a decades-long fight for environmental justice. The novel centers around the Nangi family, telling their story from multiple different perspectives over the course of the book. And though How Beautiful We Were takes place in a fictional African country, it bears a close resemblance to some important modern-day climate themes.

In our first episode of season three, we’ll take a look at a plot summary of this novel, exploring the characters, providing an in-depth analysis, and looking at current events in Ecuador as a possible real-life parallel. Listen wherever you get podcasts below, and consider buying your own copy using our affiliate link below. We appreciate the support!

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Jump to

1. About Imbolo Mbue
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

Originally from Limbe, Cameroon, Imbolo Mbue is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Behold the Dreamers and How Beautiful We Were. Her first novel, Behold the Dreamers won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was selected for Oprah’s Book Club. After working on it for years, Mbue’s second novel, How Beautiful We Were, was published in March 2021. Imbolo Mbue lives in New York.

Official website: https://www.imbolombue.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imbolombue/

Transcript

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I’m Forrest Brown, and you’re listening to Stories for Earth.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

Welcome to Stories for Earth, a podcast about everything climate change in pop culture. I’m excited to finally share the first episode of season 3. It’s crazy to think how fast time has gone. We just recently had our two year anniversary as a podcast, and I’m looking forward to sharing many more interviews and discussions of important stories.

Our first discussion of season 3 is about the novel How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue, and I am sure that I am probably not pronouncing her name correctly. If you want to support further production of the show, consider becoming a member on Patreon for early access to new episodes. You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter to keep up with the latest news about the show.
Let’s cut to the chase. Here’s our discussion of How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue. I hope you enjoy.

The literary value of tragedies

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Some stories don’t have happy endings. And I think it’s worth telling you right off the bat that the story I want to talk about today is one of them. This doesn’t make it any less of a good story, a great story, even. We tend to steer clear of stories without happy endings. We’ll listen to a sad story, sure, as long as it ends on a positive note, but something in us makes us hesitant to commit to stories with unhappy endings. I understand this impulse, but at the same time, I think there’s something sad about that, too.

Some of the best stories ever told have unhappy endings. The Ancient Greeks called these tragedies. And just like their opposite, comedies, tragedies offer valuable insights and observations about life and the human condition.

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Consider one of the older tragedies you might be familiar with: Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Hamlet wrestles with some pretty tough questions—if you haven’t read it before, you’ll know the famous line: “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” This quote has been trivialized to some extent, but it’s actually asking something pretty heavy: is life, for all of its pain and sorrows, actually worth living?

One of my favorite books is also a tragedy. I first read A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway when I was in high school, and even though it was probably one of the saddest books I’d read at that point, I loved it. It’s even sadder when you learn that many parts of it are based on the author’s real life experiences. I was not the same person after reading that novel.

So all that is to say, How Beautiful We Were is a sad book, but just like some of the best tragedies, it’s not sad for the sake of being sad. It is a brilliant novel, and I think it has a lot to teach us about facing the climate crisis.

“How Beautiful We Were” plot summary

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Set in the fictional village of Kosawa in a fictional African country, How Beautiful We Were is the decades-long story of Kosawa’s fight with the American oil company Pexton. The story begins with news that something in the water is making the village children sick and killing them. We hear heartbreaking accounts of parents burying their sons and daughters with no one left to carry on the family name, and when the villagers seek help from the government, they’re met with gaslighting and denial of any wrongdoing.

Finally, some of the villagers have enough of their children dying, and after kidnapping some of Pexton’s men, things start to escalate. The battle between Pexton and Kosawa rages on for 40 years before reaching any semblance of a resolution, spanning continents and seeing Kosawa fighting in the courts, in the press, in civil demonstrations, and in violent sabotage campaigns to protect their homelands.

Also read: “Weather” by Jenny Offill

Rather than focusing on one main character, the story takes a collectivist approach, unraveling from the perspective of six members of the Nangi family and from a first person collective perspective of an unknown number of people simply called “The Children.” Each character has a different approach of dealing—or not dealing—with the environmental disaster Pexton caused.

The father, Malabo, ventures to the capital city of Bezam to plead with the government, and his younger brother, Bongo, goes after him. Young Thula studies abroad in the US on a scholarship and returns as a tireless activist. Her mother, Sahel, does her best to raise Thula and her brother while mourning the loss of her husband.

Thula’s little brother Juba, comes back from the dead as a boy and spends the rest of his life struggling with the sensation of being half-dead, half-alive. And Yaya, Juba and Thula’s grandmother, reflects on centuries of destruction and exploitation from foreigners—first through the trans-Atlantic slave trade to rubber plantations to oil fields—and laments what appears to be the end of her home. Finally, The Children grow up in desperation, eventually looking to Thula, their peer, as a leader.

Similarities between Kosawa and Cameroon

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How Beautiful We Were paints a rich story and explores a number of themes, including imperialism, political corruption, environmental destruction, nonviolent versus violent direct action, and courage in the face of certain defeat. And while we never learn the name of the country where the story takes place, it bears many similarities to Imbolo Mbue’s home country of Cameroon, a relatively small West-Central African country that borders Nigeria to the north and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of Congo to the south.

Some people refer to Cameroon as “Little Africa” because it encapsulates so many facets of this vast continent. And just like Cameroon, the story of Kosawa is a familiar one in Africa. Africa is an enormous continent, but many of its people have been the victims of violent Western European and American colonizers. The people of Kosawa, too, were often victimized by Western colonizers, such as slave traders, plantation owners, and oil company executives.

Returning again to Cameroon, this land was historically inhabited by the Adamawa Emirate in the north and by various chiefdoms and fondoms in the south. That is, until the German Empire imposed brutal colonial rule in the late 1800s. The Germans controlled the colony they called Kamerun—after the Portuguese word for shrimp—until the end of World War I in 1916.

After the war, Cameroon was split in half between the English and the French. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Cameroon gained independence from England and France and reunified as one country. In the many years since, one political party has primarily controlled the country and has focused heavily on oil production to grow its economy. Meanwhile, the country has faced many problems, from political corruption to civil unrest to terrorism. In other words, many of the same problems facing the fictional country from How Beautiful We Were.

Parallels between Kosawa and Ecuador

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But in terms of the plot of this novel, I’m reminded of another country, albeit in the Western Hemisphere. Ecuador is a small South American country on the Pacific coast, sharing a border with Peru to the south and Colombia to the north. The Amazon rainforest extends partially into Ecuador, and in the 1960s, the American oil company Texaco, since acquired by Chevron in 2001, started drilling for oil in the Ecuadorian rainforest in what is known as the Lago Agrio oil field. Literally translated: the sour lake oil field.

You probably don’t need me to tell you the effects were disastrous. Texaco didn’t properly dispose of toxic waste from drilling operations—meaning they dumped toxic wastewater into a river that provided drinking water to many indigenous people. Just like the residents of Kosawa in How Beautiful We Were, indigenous people in Ecuador started getting sick and dying. And just like the fictional American oil company Pexton from the novel, the very real oil company called Texaco—now a brand of California-based Chevron—denied any wrongdoing at first, blaming the sickness and death among the indigenous people on poor sanitation. Which was, of course, a racist lie.

Like the people of Kosawa, Ecuadorians finally had enough of this, and in 1993 some local villagers filed a massive class action lawsuit against Texaco. Seemingly against all odds, the plaintiffs won the class action suit, and in 2011, the Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay $9.5 billion in damages. And sadly, much like the story of How Beautiful We Were, this story is still developing today. Even though Ecuador found Chevron responsible for oil drilling contamination in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Chevron has fought back against the ruling with everything it has.

In 2018, Chevron won a very important appeals case with The Hague in which an international tribunal ruled that the 2011 ruling by Ecuador “…was procured through fraud, bribery and corruption and was based on claims that had been already settled and released by the Republic of Ecuador years earlier.” This effectively rendered the 2011 ruling unenforceable, meaning that in the 25 years that passed since the first class action lawsuit was filed, the indigenous people from the region surrounding Lago Agrio still had not received reparations.

In fact, three years after the 2018 tribunal ruling, the original plaintiffs still haven’t received reparations. Chevron has spent a lot of money on PR campaigns to push its side of the lawsuit and discredit a key environmental attorney, going so far as to create a publication called The Amazon Post, a website that is “…maintained by Chevron to express the company’s views and opinions on a fraudulent lawsuit against the company in Ecuador,” according to the site’s About page. At first glance, The Amazon Post appears to be a legitimate news outlet rather than an aggressive PR initiative from one of the world’s largest oil companies.

And finally, reminiscent of the fates that met Austin, the young journalist from Bézam, and Thula, the quiet-village-girl-turned-fierce-activist, the American lawyer who represented the Ecuadorian villagers in the first class action lawsuit in 1993 has found himself in Chevron’s crosshairs. In August 2020, attorney Steven Donziger was placed under house arrest. His bank accounts have been frozen, he has been disbarred from practicing law, he’s forbidden from earning money, and he faces exorbitant fines, in addition to other hardships.

I’ll be honest: things don’t look good for Steven Donziger. I hate to use this word after hearing it overused to the point of becoming meaningless since the start of the pandemic, but in many ways, Chevron’s legal campaign against him is unprecedented. According to The Intercept, Chevron has flat-out said its strategy in overturning the Ecuador court ruling is to demonize Steven Donziger.

Also read: Joy Harjo: “Crazy Brave,” “An American Sunrise,” And The Land

As you can tell, this is an extremely complicated legal case that will likely be studied by law students for years to come. If you’re interested in learning more about the latest developments regarding Chevron, Ecuador, and Steven Donziger, I recommend listening to season five of the excellent podcast Drilled from journalist Amy Westervelt. I’ll include a link in the show notes.

So what’s the takeaway from all of this? Well, Kosawa might be a fictional African village suffering the consequences of a corrupt government that opened its doors wide to an irresponsible oil company, but it sadly bears a strong resemblance to countries like Ecuador who are now dealing with some very similar problems in real life.

And just like the battles against the fictional company Pexton from How Beautiful We Were, the court cases involving Chevron and Ecuador just go to show how far the fossil fuel industry will go to protect its interests.

As the latest IPCC report makes abundantly clear, there is no scenario in which the fossil fuel industry continues to exist if we’re to have a livable planet. But how we take down the fossil fuel industry is the biggest question that remains unanswered.

Violent versus nonviolent direct action

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As How Beautiful We Were starts to pick up steam, a clear dichotomy begins to emerge in how different villagers of Kosawa fight back against Pexton. We see this first when Malabo and his friends kidnap the men from Pexton, but this theme becomes more fleshed out after Thula leaves the village to attend university in the United States.

After arriving in New York City, Thula reconnects with Austin, the journalist from Bezam who originally broke the story about Pexton’s misdeeds. Austin starts taking Thula to meetings with activists who work on various human rights issues, and it doesn’t take long before Thula becomes a fierce activist herself. But unlike some of the other villagers taking a stand against Pexton, Thula is staunchly committed to non-violent direct action.

The first-person collective narrator known simply as The Children has a different approach, though. These people are Thula’s peers, and they exchange letters back and forth with her about what should be done to stop Pexton. Thula forbids them from using violence, threatening to withhold funding for their cause if they violate their agreement to remain peaceful. But after a certain point, The Children use funds from Thula to buy guns from a corrupt soldier anyway, using them to murder a number of different Pexton employees.

The Children also carry out sabotage campaigns, setting fire to Pexton facilities in the hopes that they will finally leave after seeing how unwelcome they are. Meanwhile, Thula eventually returns to Africa, becoming a school teacher and organizing massive nationwide protests against the corrupt government that lets Pexton destroy the environment and make the people sick. Thula works her entire adult life trying to enact change through peaceful protest, but in the end, she’s largely unsuccessful.

Also read: “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn, Climate Change, and Moving Beyond a Vision of Doom

In fact, the character who seems to be the most well-off by the end is Juba, Thula’s younger brother who came back from the dead as a child after getting very sick from Pexton’s poison. As an adult, Juba can’t shake the feeling that he never fully returned to the realm of the living, constantly feeling as though he’s half-dead, half-alive.

I read this as a metaphor for how Juba chooses to engage with the war between Kosawa and Pexton. Juba isn’t violent, but he also doesn’t have the same activist’s passion that we see in his sister. Instead, Juba goes to the best schools in the country and gets a government job doing the bidding of corrupt officials and politicians. He marries a woman named Nubia, named after one of the earliest civilizations in ancient Africa, who has somewhat of a scammer’s philosophy. She hates the corrupt government as much as anyone else, but instead of fighting it at great personal cost, she prefers to take advantage of the crooked system to benefit herself as much as possible.

Near the end of the book, we see Juba and Nubia living a life of luxury while Thula lives a modest lifestyle as an activist school teacher. Speaking about Thula on page 343, The Children say, “One angry woman did everything, and she failed.” The book ends with a judge forcing the residents of Kosawa to relocate. The judge doesn’t deny the damage Pexton has caused, but he also doesn’t think the law can hold them accountable. Given the extent of the damage, it’s best for the villagers to just find a new home.

The best way forward?

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After reading How Beautiful We Were and reflecting on the world we currently live in, one that is honestly so much more bleak and dystopian than the one in this novel, I’m not sure of how we should proceed.

High profile climate organizations like Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement are committed to peaceful direct action, but how long can this continue to be a viable strategy? At what point do some people renege on this principle and resort to violence? Many important movements throughout history have been fought with violence. Is that what the environmental movement will one day be forced to do?

But honestly, out of the three responses I see in How Beautiful We Were, I think Juba’s response might be the most relatable to many people. Heartbroken and half-dead, many of us walk through life like zombies, complying with our evil capitalist overlords while we scheme to exploit the broken system to our advantage. Jia Tolentino makes many excellent observations about this phenomenon in her essay “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams” from her essay collection Trick Mirror. Many of us know the system is fucked, but what can we do about it? At a time when one percent of the world’s population owns the vast majority of the world’s wealth, playing the system to our advantage is what’s expected of us. It’s a vicious cycle until some external force breaks that cycle, or the house of cards comes crashing down under its own weight.

I’m sure we’ll see a combination of all three responses, as the environmental movement progresses and our insane society continues to flirt even more with the threat of apocalypse. I strongly believe there is no one right way to tackle this enormous problem. Perhaps a hybrid approach will be the path we take. As for me, I don’t want to see violence and bloodshed erupt as we struggle to save our planet. But I have to wonder: are there limits to peaceful protest, and what will happen if we cross that threshold?

Outro

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Stories for Earth is created by me, Forrest Brown. The music you heard in this episode is also by me. If you want to support further production of the show, consider becoming a member on Patreon. For just a couple bucks a month, you’ll get early access to each new episode, and you’ll help me keep making Stories for Earth.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you’ll join us for season 3, episode 2 for our discussion on the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow.

Recommendations

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Book: Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $15.64 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Book: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $20.24 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Article: “How The Environmental Lawyer Who Won A Massive Judgment Against Chevron Lost Everything” by Sharon Lerner in The Intercept

→ Read the article

Documentary: Crude: The Real Price of Oil from Joe Berlinger

→ Watch on YouTube
→ Watch on Prime Video

Like what you see? Become a Patreon member today for as little as $1 a month.

The post “How Beautiful We Were” by Imbolo Mbue: Summary & Analysis appeared first on Stories for Earth.

This is a podcast about the greatest story ever told. It’s actually a story that’s being told because we are all living through it right now, and we will be for the rest of our lives. I’m talking, of course, about the climate emergency.

But the tricky thing about stories unfolding in real time is that we can’t see the whole picture yet. Remember, we’re all characters in this story, and none of us have a narrator’s God’s-eye-view of what this all means or what happens next. So what do we do? We tell stories ourselves to make sense of this muddled reality. We write novels. We program video games. We direct films. We sing songs.

We have so many ways of telling stories, and I believe that paying attention to some of the best ones can help us as we try to navigate the bigger story, the climate story, in our own lives. We’ve already talked about some incredible stories on the show. Last season, we started out by talking about one of the greatest video games ever made, Final Fantasy VII, a tale of an ecoterrorist organization that must persevere against all odds in the fight to save the planet.

The current US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo spoke to us through poetry about what it was like when her people could hear the songs of plants, and why it’s imperative that all of us learn how to hear them now. A farm girl from South Korea showed just how far people will go to save the ones they love and how creating the world we want might just start with how we engage with capitalism.

In her novel Weather, Jenny Offill taught us how a New York City librarian narrowly avoided becoming a doomer by learning to always look for the obligatory note of hope. A heavy metal band from Australia painted a vivid and terrifying audio picture of what kind of future we might expect if we don’t drastically change course immediately.

My friend from across the Atlantic and I had a makeshift therapy session with each other to process the eon-level view of life on this planet from The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Amitav Ghosh, one of the most eminent writers on literature and the climate crisis, took us on a journey through the history of world literature to show us how modern literature is failing to address climate change and what must be done to change that.

This August, we’ll embark on another journey through stories in all forms to discover what they can teach us about living in an age verging on climate chaos. We’ll see how those least responsible for climate change suffer the worst consequences through heartbreaking novels like How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue.

We’ll consider the story of a lone robot left to clean up the mess humans left on Earth while they rocket through space in search of a new planet to inhabit. We’ll find inspiration from a brave young princess in an imaginary world as she struggles to simultaneously prevent a war and save the planet. And we might just revisit one of the first major Hollywood films ever made about climate change.

It’s going to be a powerful exploration into the different stories that can help us better understand the real-life story of climate change, and I hope you’ll tag along. Our first stop is coming up shortly through a discussion on How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue. Thank you for listening, and I look forward to seeing you then for the first episode of Stories for Earth Season 3.

The post Coming Soon: Stories for Earth Season 3 appeared first on Stories for Earth.