Episode 68: Transcript
Episode: 68: Everything Is Literally on Fire
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, science and pretty much anything we want. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:11] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer who thinks fairly constantly about science.
Annalee: [00:00:16] Today, we're going to talk about a question that's on a lot of our minds as the western United States burns to the ground, the southern United States is flooding, and people elsewhere are dealing with a pandemic, on top of all that other stuff.
[00:00:31] The question is, can we survive climate change and other environmental disturbances? And are we going to adapt? Are we not going to adapt? How are we going to use science? And also how do we use storytelling to help us get out of these situations that seem almost impossible to conceive of?
[00:00:51] We are super lucky to have a terrific guest with us here today. Maddie Stone, who worked with Charlie Jane and I, when we were back at Gizmodo, and io9. She's a fantastic science journalist. She worked for many years as an environmental science researcher, she founded the blog Earther, which is still going and is really awesome. And now you can find her work about environment and science at Grist, National Geographic, Vice, Washington Post, and pretty much anywhere else on the internet where people are saying smart things about the environment.
[00:01:21] All right, let's get started with the show.
[00:01:23] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:01:49] All right, welcome to the show, Maddie. We're gonna start by playing you a clip.
Waterworld Clip: [00:01:57] The future. The polar ice caps have melted, covering the earth with water. Those who survived have adapted to a new world. [Drums start]
Annalee: [00:02:11] So that was from the opening of Waterworld, the documentary about our future. And I wanted to play that just because it sounds so campy, and yet, it's just a kind of exact description of what's going on right now and what we're really likely to be facing. Other than the whole bit with Dennis Hopper and the spam. I don't know if that's gonna happen for those of you who watched Waterworld.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:38] That's totally going to happen. We're gonna drink our own pee.
Annalee: [00:02:42] Well, that obviously, that's like, that's actually a staple of—
Maddie: [00:02:45] That can happen in space.
Annalee: [00:02:48] That's already happening.
[00:02:49] So Maddie, I wanted to start out by having a discussion with you about the science of climate change and all of the knock on effects. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how some of the problems we're facing right now, including the pandemic and the wildfires can really be traced back to environmental issues.
Maddie: [00:03:09] Yeah. Such a great and topical subject. In thinking about climate issues and environmental issues, this is really something that is not abstract anymore. I mean, for those of us living anywhere in the United States, I think, have dealt with some pretty severe environmental issues on top of the pandemic this year. I mean, right now, out west, basically, the entire West Coast is burning or covered in smoke at the moment. I've heard that the sky in San Francisco is a lovely shade of orange today.
Annalee: [00:03:42] It's terrifying.
Maddie: [00:03:44] Yeah, I mean, it's just bonkers. But this sort of extreme fire weather seems to be becoming the new normal. And that's just one of many signs of a changing climate that have hit this year, that have been hitting more regularly and with more intensity in recent years, and that scientists say are really going to be a permanent fixture of our future unless we rapidly reduce emissions and reverse course.
[00:04:15] One of the things that has made this year especially interesting and concerning is of course, you don't just have these climate-related and extreme weather disasters, you have the impacts of climate change playing out on top of a pandemic. And so, you know, the pandemic itself wasn't caused by climate change. It's not like malaria or mosquito borne disease that's showing up further north and in new places due to a warming climate. So that is absolutely a thing that is happening for some diseases. Not the case for COVID-19. But COVID-19 is absolutely tied to our abuse of the natural world. This is a virus that likely entered human populations through wild animals, something wildlife biologists have been warning for years will become more of a threat as we continue to destroy and degrade native habitats.
[00:05:04] And so there's that aspect of COVID-19 as sort of something that has come out of our out of balance relationship with nature. And then as we've seen this summer, when you mix a pandemic with climate change, that's really a recipe for all sorts of disasters. And the two really kind of intersect and create some really difficult, complicated things for society to respond to. So this is really the first time in modern history, we're being forced to grapple with pandemic and extreme climate change amplified weather at the same time.
[00:05:40] And these two things, the way we respond to them are often quite at odds with each other. You know, if you have to evacuate your home during a wildfire or hurricane, you might be forced to go stay in a shelter. But from a public health perspective, during a highly contagious pandemic, being crammed in a shelter with a bunch of strangers is exactly the opposite of what you want to be doing. And if that shelter is trying to be compliant with public health guidance, they may want to keep windows open to promote airflow. But if the air outside is unbreathably smoky, that might not be an option.
[00:06:16] So we're seeing COVID-19 complicate the response to extreme weather. We've seen that with the wildfires out west this summer, we've seen that in the south with the hurricanes, and we're seeing extreme weather complicate the response to COVID. And it just goes to illustrate, I think, how the systems we built to cope with the disasters of the 20th century are really inadequate in light of the worse and compounding disasters of the 21st century.
Annalee: [00:06:46] That's really true, what you were saying about how we have this kind of infrastructure in place based on a really different model of what might go wrong. And I think one of the things that really fascinates me about the coronavirus pandemic is something that you touched on, which is that it's what's called a zoonotic disease, meaning that it jumped from wild animals into domestic animals, aka people. We are a great domestic animal. And this is because humans are moving more and more into habitats that have belonged to other animals for a very long time. And so diseases that circulate in those ecosystems, either relatively harmlessly or affecting only a small population of non-human animals are now getting to have fertile ground in a brand new environment of people in cities and towns.
[00:07:45] And it's funny, because I think when people imagined climate change, back in like the ‘60s and ‘70s, when it really first became something that the general public was aware of, it was always this idea that the planet would be iced over or the planet would become super hot, or it would become Waterworld. We don't think about those knock on effects of, you know, we aren’t unnecessarily polluting, we're just moving into habitats that aren't human habitats. And how that can actually come back to literally bite us in the ass, in some cases. Or, I guess viruses can't really bite you in the ass, but they can do bad things to your ass.
[00:08:25] And I think that these knock on effects are something that really, really fascinate me. And I wonder, do you see the wildfires as being a kind of knock on effect as well?
Maddie: [00:08:39] Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the wildfires are the result of a number of compounding factors and knock on effects that all kind of trace back to our relationship with nature and the ways in which we use and abuse nature. We need to alter those relationships in so many ways. To kind of lay it out for you, the fire situation out west right now is tied to the warming climate. So the climate is getting hotter and drier. Both conditions make it easier for fire to spread, leading to bigger, more dangerous fires that are exhibiting all kinds of unprecedented behavior.
[00:09:18] So the fires are getting worse due to a warming climate, which is tied back to our rampant consumption of fossil fuels. So there's that. And then you have more humans moving into the so-called wildland urban interface, meaning there are simply more potential fire starters, people in places where fires can explode in size very quickly.
[00:09:40] And there's more of our infrastructure moving out there. So there's more of those PG&E power lines being laid across landscapes that are drier than they used to be, that are more prone to catching fire, you know, if a transformer falls down and starts to spark, for example.
[00:09:58] So you have more people at this wildland urban interface where fires are more likely to start, you have climate conditions that are making it easier for fires to start, easier for fires to get bigger and more dangerous. And then many places out west, just to add another compounding factor, are also dealing with the legacy of poor wildland management decisions in the past. So that includes, for example, early 20th century fire suppression policies that actually prevented naturally occurring and ecologically good fires from clearing out brush and weeds. So the Forest Service for a long time had a policy of stamp out fires, stamp out fires, and do this everywhere. Fire was just bad, it did not have a role in a Forest Service managed ecosystem. That, of course, is not the way these systems work for many thousands of years before that.
[00:10:53] And as a result of those fire suppression policies, we have a lot of landscapes with more vegetative fuel than they should have, which are getting warmer, getting drier, ready to burn when someone provides the spark. And so I really think this is what an environmental disaster looks like in 2020. It's inadequate infrastructure and planning and a legacy of poor management decisions kind of all rolled up against this backdrop of an increasingly hostile climate.
Annalee: [00:11:25] So you were saying that there used to be a strategy of stamping out fires and you make that sound like a bad thing. Like why would we want to have fires burning?
Maddie: [00:11:37] So a lot of landscapes out west, desert landscapes, chaparral landscapes actually have fire occurring as a regular part of the ecosystem. So the vegetation is adapted to fires that burn on a relatively frequent recurrence interval. So fire is a part of the natural ecology. And it helps the ecosystem regenerate and restore itself. It also helps keep fuel loads on the landscape low.
[00:12:05] These early 20th century fire suppression policies really came from a place of wanting to keep communities out of harm's way and keep communities safe from fire. But the result of these policies with these naturally occurring wildlands fires that would have cleared out so much fuel on these landscapes all by themselves, were not allowed to occur for many decades, until the Forest Service started to reverse those policies a couple decades ago. And as a result, there's millions of acres of landscape out west that have more fuel on them than they should and that really need fires to come through and sort of restore things.
[00:12:47] Unfortunately, we're now in a situation where we have even more people living out west in these wildland urban interfaces, and we have a different climate than we used to have. And so when so called natural fires do burn, they're amplified by climate change. They're bigger, they're worse, they're more dangerous. And so we're living with this legacy of management decisions that have compounded the extreme fire situation we see today.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:15] And it feels like, in general, maybe there's a pattern of humans thinking that we can control things, including fire, but also other aspects of the climate, that we actually cannot control. And I'm sort of… the quote that comes to mind, weirdly, is when in the original Star Wars, when Princess Leia says to Darth Vader, “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”
[00:13:36] And it feels like that's kind of what we've been doing with the climate is we've been tightening our control, or attempting to tighten our control. And the more we try to control it, the more it gets out of control, kind of. Do you think that's accurate?
Maddie: [00:13:47] Oh, totally, yeah. I think we often, in thinking about environmental adaptation and climate adaptation, we take a very kind of brute force approach. We’re going to stamp out fires or we're going to build a giant sea wall. We're not going to work with nature, or try to live within the boundaries that nature has laid out for us, we're going to dominate it, or we're gonna put up a wall and not have to deal with it anymore. And I think we do see that playing out more and more as the consequences of climate change become ever more apparent.
[00:14:26] You know, New York City has a draft of a plan to build a multi-billion dollar sea wall to keep back the rising seas. It's this huge potential infrastructure project that the city could embark on. But there's real questions as to whether that will be effective, and how long will that be effective for and how long is a wall going to keep out the rising seas if we're on track to melt the entire Greenland and half of the Antarctic ice sheet? And so I think we really need to start thinking more holistically about how we can live with nature and work with nature and not just how we can dominate nature and keep nature out.
Annalee: [00:15:06] What would be a good example of some of the things that we might do that would be adapting to climate change with nature as opposed to building a wall, for example.
Maddie: [00:15:18] One thing that comes to mind is that one of the biggest human health risks from climate change is extreme heat. So heat waves are becoming more frequent, they're becoming hotter, and heat stress is one of the number one public health hazards facing many communities around the world. In terms of adaptation, there's a few different ways in which we can deal with it. There's technological solutions, the most obvious one being more air conditioning, so we can keep our indoor spaces cool. But that air conditioning also has a climate cost because it runs on electricity, it runs on a lot of electricity. And that electricity today mostly comes from the burning of fossil fuels, so contributing to the climate crisis.
[00:16:06] Another option entirely, that would benefit the hundreds of millions of people who live in cities around the world that lack air conditioning today, would be starting to redesign our cities in ways that keep them more naturally cool. So introducing more green space and more trees into city centers, and designing our buildings in such a way that they reflect rather than absorb sunlight.
[00:16:34] So there's all these ways that we can sort of work with nature and dial down the ambient temperature so that when those climate amplified heat waves strike, they're not leading to a situation where we all just need to get inside and close our windows and crank up our electricity full tilt, and burn more fossil fuels in order to cope.
[00:17:00] So I think things that can be done to reduce the, what's called the urban heat island effect, which is the phenomenon where cities are are simply several degrees warmer, often many degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside, and taking advantage of natural solutions to do that, is a way we can cope with a climate change amplified extreme weather event like a heat wave.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:24] So will geoengineering save us from all this? Like I was reading a New Scientist the other day about an initiative funded by a mysterious Silicon Valley billionaire, who aims to like de-acidify the oceans by grinding up rocks or something. And it was very kind of shrouded in mystery. And there's a million ideas like that. Like, building a giant mirror or something. Can we just geoengineer our way out of this?
Maddie: [00:17:49] Yes, such a great question and such a fraught question. I mean, on so many levels, it's so, I think, appealing, in some sense. The idea that there's just some whiz bang tech solution that we're just going to deploy, whether that's space mirrors, or scattering sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight, and it's going to cost maybe a couple billion dollars, as opposed to the 10s of trillions of dollars is going to cost to overhaul our whole energy system. And then we've solved climate change. And we don't need to worry about any of this anymore. And…
Annalee: [00:18:26] Yay.
Maddie: [00:18:27] Yay. And and yeah, so I mean, I think there is a place for these discussions. And I think the fact that these discussions are becoming more mainstream amongst scientists in the scientific literature is, on the one hand an indictment of the fact that we've so miserably failed to act on climate change to the point to this point that we're considering things like dimming the sun in order to prevent a couple degrees of temperature rise this century. But also speaks to the reality that we might really need some of those solutions as part of a larger toolkit of solutions to combat climate change.
[00:19:11] So, no, I don't think geoengineering is a panacea. And I also think that some of the ideas that have been put out there by these shadowy, billionaire-backed Silicon Valley tech startups are pretty concerning. But I do think there is a space for thoughtful research on geoengineering and also on geoengineering governance, and how we could implement geoengineering as part of a broader, more holistic global response to climate change, in a way that is just and equitable, in a way that compensates countries or parts of the world that are negatively impacted by geoengineering. Because really what this would be if we did it is a grand experiment with our shared global atmosphere.
[00:20:05] And as we've learned from studying the climate over the last 50 years, the atmosphere is really complicated and behaves in a lot of kind of unexpected and unpredictable and nonlinear ways when we perturb it. And so we can run all the supercomputer models we want to try to game out what geoengineering is going to do. But ultimately, we don't really know how the climate system is going to respond until we implement it. And implementing a geoengineering solution by its very nature means implementing it globally.
[00:20:40] It raises a lot of questions about governance, and who should be responsible, and how those decisions should be made. And I think we need to start exploring those questions sooner rather than later before we get to the point where climate change is so advanced, and having such dramatic impacts that some Rogue Nation or actor just sort of unilaterally decides that they're going to do this.
Annalee: [00:21:08] Yeah, it's really interesting that you bring up the idea of governance, because I think one of the things that people in Silicon Valley and these kind of pie in the sky geoengineering projects, tend to forget is that this isn't just a scientific problem. That this is a… It seems like, of course, these are natural disasters, right? Like, it's a fire, that's not a political issue. A fire is a fire. But in order to deal with this stuff, and in fact, in order to cause a lot of these problems, we really had to have political systems that did it. And we had to have governments that stepped in to mitigate problems when they came up. And so I wonder if we can kind of wind down our discussion of science by talking a little bit about how climate change is impacting frontline communities, communities of color, people who are essential workers, is the is the new term that we're using. And how there's climate change, but then there's also climate change affecting different communities based on really political issues and governmental issues.
Maddie: [00:22:18] Yeah, such an important topic. And I think within the climate media sphere, one that does not get nearly as much attention as it should. And so this is, I mean, this is the real injustice of climate change is that it's not going to be an equal opportunity killer. It's going to hit poor and vulnerable communities the hardest. And I think, you know, not to keep harping back to the California weather, it's just been on my mind a lot recently, but—
Annalee: [00:22:46] I'm on our mind, too, so feel free.
Maddie: [00:22:50] I think the recent California weather this summer offers some really salient illustrations of that. So, for instance, in early August, which I guess was like three heat waves ago, the state was forced to institute these rolling blackouts to curb electricity use. Because statewide loads on the grid were so high because everyone was running their air conditioner because it was so hot. And it's pretty anecdotal at this point. But what I heard while reporting stories about this was that it was really these low income communities and communities of color, predominantly Black and brown communities that were most impacted by the blackouts.
[00:23:32] And that is not an isolated example. Communities that have been marginalized and under-invested in for years are frequently the first communities to lose power during a heatwave. And it's these same communities that are more vulnerable to heat stress, because their neighborhoods have less green space, their buildings are less well insulated. That's just one example.
[00:23:58] So this is something we see playing out over and over again when we look at all the ways that climate change impacts our communities and our lives. It’s the wealthy people who are going to be able to pick up and move to higher ground when parts of South Florida and the Gulf Coast start to go underwater. It's those poor, marginal communities, and often predominantly communities of color, that are going to bear the brunt of this environmental disaster that's been created largely by rich people and by a couple of very powerful and wealthy corporations.
[00:24:40] And that's playing out in the United States. That's also playing out all over the world. I mean, the first countries to potentially go underwater are going to be low lying Pacific island nations that have contributed an absolutely miniscule fraction to the climate crisis. They're virtually negligible contributors. And yet, they are poised to potentially lose their homelands forever as a result of this. And so, I think as we think more and more about adapting to climate change, responding to climate change, these issues of climate justice are really starting to come to the forefront and become more and more essential issues for us to grapple with.
Annalee: [00:25:27] All right, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we will talk about what science fiction says about how we can deal with the climate crisis.
[00:25:36] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Annalee: [00:25:48] We're just gonna assume, for the sake of argument, that storytelling is one way that we communicate important issues to each other and to people in the future, say. I think there's been a ton of debate among scientists and among science communicators and journalists about how do you tell people that the world is on fire? How do you tell them, I mean, when it isn't literally on fire. But how do you how do you explain how tough it's going to be if we don't do anything about the ways that the environment is changing? And no one has a good answer. There's been a ton of scientific studies, actually, that came out within the last several months, showing that it's really hard to persuade people if you aren't telling them what they already want to hear.
[00:26:35] There’s no science to injecting awareness into someone's brain. But we can use stories to to gently awaken people to different possibilities of where the world might be in 50 years, or 1000 years, depending on the story.
[00:26:52] So I want us to talk a little bit about some of the themes that we see in science fiction that is about climate change. Obviously, we heard that clip at the beginning from Waterworld. And a lot of these stories take the form of just giving us a really dark dystopian future. And it's like The Road where everything is covered in smoke, but we don't even know why, because it’s just really bad.
[00:27:20] Or you get stuff like Paolo Bacigalupi, which is just his novels like Shipbreaker and a number of his other novels are just these really relentless, horrifying depictions of like extreme poverty and extreme deforestation and the earth is going to be terrible.
[00:27:37] And you have stuff like this:
Godzilla vs. Hedorah: [00:27:40] Out of the polluted waters, it came to become the most fearful menace that ever threatened mankind. [Monster growling] Feeding. Growing ever more deadly on smog. Only one force dares stand up towards overpowering evil.
Godzilla!
Godzilla versus the smog monster.
Will Godzilla, man’s friend, be vanquished?
More than 1600 dead have been reported, while other casualties are expected to exceed 30,000!
The main storage tank of the Japan oil—
Annalee: [00:28:33] So I'm going to stop talking now and toss this to you two. What do you think about the idea of a story that's giving us a warning about some terrible evil that's coming, whether it's the smog monster or some other terrible thing? Do you feel like that's an effective way to alert people to these dangers?
Charlie Jane: [00:28:55] So this is… I'm just gonna jump in. This is a topic I've thought about a lot, obviously. And I've written a couple of essays saying that science fiction authors really need to be writing about climate change and that if you're writing a near future depiction of the United States or of Earth, that you need to include climate change in your your near future world building.
[00:29:16] I feel like, though, the kind of go to place for a lot of people reading about climate change is either the disaster story, like the Roland Emmerich style, oh, everything’s on fire! Disaster! Buildings crumbling. Or there's a giant smog monster, or the kind of like post apocalyptic kind of story that you're talking about with The Road. And my personal preference, and the kinds of stories that I like to read, as well as the kind of stories that I like to write about this, are ones that are a little bit, maybe more just show it as a thing that… I think that the reality of climate change thus far, and it's obviously going to change, is that is the thing that we kind of are aware of, and it's happening and we get used to it and it gets worse and worse. And we just have to find ways to kind of deal with it. And we have to both adapt to it and we have to try to find ways to mitigate it. But it’s not necessarily like a Roland Emmerich kind of 2012 situation. It's more like a change. It's a change over time. It's a gradual thing that we have to adapt to.
[00:30:18] And I love novels like Want by Cindy Pon, or N.K Jemison's Broken Earth trilogy, or Kim Stanley Robinson does a lot of this kind of stuff, where it's just kind of like, try to deal with it in a more realistic way. I don't know, what do you think, Maddie?
Maddie: [00:30:34] I totally… I think that that is a really important point that we need to be thinking about how to sort of weave climate change into the fabric of our storytelling, rather than sort of hitting people over the head with, “Oh, look at this post apocalyptic world and how terrible everything is!” Or trying to personify it as some kind of Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster thing. No shade to Godzilla Vs. Smog Monster. I think that's awesome.
Annalee: [00:31:02] I think Godzilla could defeat climate change, like if you gave them a chance.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:05] Oh my God? I wish. I feel like we need Godzilla right now.
Maddie: [00:31:09] I'm actually really fascinated with the question of like, can you personify climate change as a monster? And how realistic is that? What aspects of climate change can you sort of depict through a monster narrative? But I think you're absolutely right, Charlie Jane, that perhaps the most, not only realistic, but interesting way of bringing climate change into storytelling is to sort of make it more of the backdrop or allow it to give the story a sense of uncanniness, which is really how climate change manifests in our lives, right?
[00:31:49] It's not like, we are going to wake up one morning, and all of a sudden, you're going to look at the sky and be like, oh, well, climate change is happening today. I mean, maybe that's happening to you if you live in San Francisco right now. But for the most part, it's going to be sort of this gradual weirding of the world. And so I'm really interested in seeing more science fiction, both books and literature and movies, try to tackle it in that way. As, it’s this kind of creeping presence, this thing that appears on the horizon and changes our lives gradually and slowly that we're going to have to adapt to.
[00:32:27] I will also add that I think Jeff VanderMeer, his Southern Reach Trilogy. I don't know that everyone sees it as an allegory for climate change. But I feel like those books and the movie adaptation, the Alex Garland film Annihilation, do a really nice job, kind of presenting climate change in this way. You have this mysterious landscape, it's called the Shimmer in the film, Area X in the book, that sort of appears to be overtaken by some sort of alien invader, and everything is just a little bit uncanny and unnatural. And it's a story that shows that you can present climate change in that way, and still have a really exciting and engaging story based on it.
Annalee: [00:33:11] Yeah, Jeff VanderMeer has said that he's fascinated by transitional ecosystems. And that's something that he sees a lot where he lives in the south. And also he wanted to kind of evoke that in in those books and also his novel Borne, which I highly recommend, which is also kind of post climate change island world and has lots of like, weird biotech and like a giant bear. Which, it's kind of hard not to like a book that has a giant bear. I think it sort of fits with our our giant monster theme, like how do you embody climate change? Often, a giant monster really helps with that for some reason? It's just like, where our imaginations go.
[00:33:48] One of the other fantasies that we see a lot in science fiction around climate change is kind of the opposite of what we've been talking about. This is more like how do you fix climate change by completely taking control of the climate using some kind of futuristic technology, and I just want to play a clip from a scene from the David Lynch Dune movie where our hero is talking about the planet.
Dune Clip: [00:34:16] Arrakis. Dune. Desert planet.
Your time has come. A storm is coming. Our storm. And when it arrives, it will shake the universe. Emperor! We come for you. We come for you!
Annalee: [00:35:04] So what's interesting here is that.. So, Arrakis, the desert planet known as Dune, as he says portentiously, it's a desert now, or it's a desert in the present of the books, but we find out that there's this deep history of the planet where it used to be more earth like and have water and green plants on the surface.
[00:35:24] And so the entire story cycle of Dune ends up being about how Paul Atreides and his offspring kind of re-green the planet. It's a fantasy about taking control of the carbon cycle on that planet, and you know, reigniting a so-called natural ecosystem. But the way they do it is through war. You know, they do it through this political uprising that he's talking about at the end, where he's like, “Emperor, we are coming for you.” And I just, I think it's so interesting to sort of frame it this way, to say like, alright, well, we're having these fantasies about basically fascism in relation to the environment.
[00:36:08] Where else do we see that in science fiction?
Maddie: [00:36:11] There are a couple of examples of sort of this more apocalyptic, ecofascism strain of environmentalism making its way into science fiction recently.
[00:36:22] So one of my favorites is Thanos from Avengers. So he's this giant purple bad guy on a quest to collect all six of these Infinity Stones, which are going to allow him to rule the entire universe. And the whole reason Thanos is seeking this omnipotence is that he has convinced himself, in some twisted logic that if he can kill half of all life forms, or I guess, half of all intelligent beings in the universe, he will eliminate suffering overnight, which he attributes to overpopulation and not enough resources to go around.
[00:37:00] And so this is sort of this very old idea in the environmental movement, the idea that overpopulation will be our ruin and we're going to run out of resources. And basically we need top down autocratic control or we're just going to breed ourselves into oblivion.
[00:37:21] And so, while this idea kind of died down in the ‘80s and ‘90s after predictions of a population bomb didn't exactly come true. It has started to see this very disturbing resurgence in recent years. And I think this resurgence is very much tied to fears about climate change. So there's this emerging dogma of ecofascism, mainly embraced by elements of the far right, which sort of posits that the climate apocalypse can only be stopped with dramatic population reduction. And that, of course, is tied to xenophobia and racism and white supremacy and all these other terrible things. So Thanos kind of embodies all of that. He's literally the universe's ultimate ecofascist. And so that's an area where I feel like, we definitely see that theme play out.
Annalee: [00:38:11] What about you, Charlie Jane?
Charlie Jane: [00:38:12] Yeah, I mean, it's funny, I was literally just in a Reddit conversation the other day where Peter Watts, who's the author of a trilogy called Rifters, was talking about how he feels like ecototalitarianism is going to become a bigger theme, both in storytelling and in real life. And that we, we may need ecototalitarianism to get us out of the mess that we're in right now. Which is a terrifying thought.
[00:38:35] I think that there is… In 20th century science fiction, there's like a strand, always, of kind of fascist scientists who want to rule over the rest of us, because we've made such a mess of the planet. And there's always like a scene in a lot of 20th century and early 21st century scifi where scientists kind of, or some bad guy of some sort points to a variety of terrible problems, many of which are climate related. And they say, look, look what a mess people have made of this with free will. And like, we need to just take away people's freedom to choose because this is the only way to stop this.
[00:39:12] And I feel like there is that strand in the environmentalist movement of feeling as though democracy is not going to be able to solve this. Democracy is all about instant gratification. It's all about people just getting whatever they want, whenever they want it. And that that philosophy is incompatible. And I think that the the response to that in politics, and I think, also in science fiction is that it's really, as Maddie said earlier, it's about a handful of rich people and a handful of wealthy corporations.
[00:39:40] And that the rest of us have been kind of hoodwinked a little bit. And that if we just could get… like, that's what's so great about the Green New Deal, I guess, as a political concept, is that if we could just have something that was more egalitarian and more eco-friendly, we could solve both problems, kind of.
Annalee: [00:39:57] So I'm glad you brought up the Green New Deal, Charlie Jane. Because I wanted to finish up by talking about science fiction and real life science policy, that's actually more utopian. So kind of the other side of ecofascism. And I have this, maybe not very hot take, which is that the Green New Deal is a kind of work of science fiction. Just the way a lot of future looking policies are. They’re about planning a future and imagining how we could manage resources in that future. And it is the opposite of an ecofascist vision. It's a vision where we bring together these issues that we've been talking about today about governance and politics, with the scientific issues around how do you clean up our mess? And how do you try to mitigate extreme heat and fire and all that kind of stuff?
[00:40:55] So I wonder, what do you guys think about that? I mean, how does where does the Green New Deal sit in the context of science fiction? Is it kind of a Star Trek-y or Expanse-y kind of document?
Charlie Jane: [00:41:09] I mean, I think that it's important to bring up the concept of solarpunk here, which is a thing that's kind of become a meme in the past, like 5-10 years. There's been a solar punk movement, which we can discuss the overuse of the -punk suffix some other time. But, solarpunk is this idea that we're going to tell stories specifically about more sustainable systems and building better green energy and better communities that are able to live in a way that doesn't screw up our planet so much. And I think the precursor to this is the novel Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach, which is a very intentionally utopian vision of future where we are actually living in harmony with our natural environment. But I feel like—
Annalee: [00:41:56] Though it is also about a civil war where California and most of the West Coast secede from the United States. So it's a little dark in some ways.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:09] Yeah. Which I think is actually a thing. I think that it's hard to imagine a more sustainable future without imagining some kind of struggle to get there, or some kind of fight, or some kind of political war.
[00:42:22] In addition to trying to warn about climate change through a ton of books, and there are some great lists online, which we can link to in the show notes of recent science fiction about climate change. There is also this new movement of trying to kind of imagine ways that we can do better. And I think that we're just in the early stages of doing more of that.
Maddie: [00:42:43] I really like the idea of the Green New Deal as science fiction, Annalee. I had not thought of it in that way, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Both in the sense that the Green New Deal, as it has so far been articulated in policy documents, is very much a set of guiding principles. It's an idea document that articulates what we want our future society to look like and the principles behind this energy transition. Principles of justice and equity and ideas about governance and so it's sort of this idea about how we're going to build the clean energy future of tomorrow that leaves a lot up to the imagination for now as to the nuts and bolts of how we're actually going to get there.
[00:43:31] So if science fiction is all about big ideas, I mean, the Green New Deal is a big idea. And we need a lot of creative minds to come together and work out all the nitty gritty little pieces of it. So I really like it in that sense. And then also in the sense that the Green New Deal envisions a radically different future. This is not an idea that is just going to have us… If implemented, this is not about staying the course of 20th century capitalism. This is about how do we not only transition from coal and gas fired power plants to wind turbines and solar panels, but how do we reinvent our relationship with nature and each other in a way that produces a more just and equitable and sustainable world? I really like that idea.
Annalee: [00:44:21] It's basically world building. When people say, well, why do we need to care about science fiction in the context of climate change and environmental science? I feel like this is the answer. Is that, at their best, an early stage policy document, like the Green New Deal is going to have a little bit of a science fictional element to it. And by reading science fiction and familiarizing ourselves with the ways that science fiction talks about the future, we can actually create much better policy documents.
[00:44:51] And with the idea, as you said, that of course, at a certain point, you got to get your pie out of the sky and stick it in the oven and divid it up equally… I'm gonna just run this pie metaphor into the ground. But the point is that there's a point where the rubber meets the road and the science fiction has to be implemented. And of course you're always going to lose some of the idealism of that original world building but it can stand as a guide. It can be a map for us to follow to try to find a very different future. So I'm excited about the Green New Deal future and I hope we get something like it before California burns to the ground.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:33] I just want to say that now you're making me really crave pie a lot and then you said that there's rubber hitting the road so I was like somebody is driving over the pie! Don’t run over the pie!
Annalee: [00:45:42] I was just like, how can I pack as many clichés as possible—
Charlie Jane: [00:45:47] I’m like, now I really want pecan pie, now.
Annalee: [00:45:46] —into my final thought here?
Maddie: [00:45:50] Now I’m trying to imagine what the Green New Deal pie would look like. Like what is a—yeah. What is a climate-friendly pie?
Annalee: [00:45:57] It’s locally sourced.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:58] Very locally sourced.
Annalee: [00:45:58] It’s all locally sourced, it's seasonal fruits or vegetables only. Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:05] Mm, berries.
Annalee: [00:46:06] Ground… all the flour has been, you ground it yourself. Or your local flour grinder, baker? Wait what is it called if you’re—
Maddie: [00:46:16] Miller?
Annalee: [00:46:16] Maker… A miller, that's right, your local miller. We actually have those in San Francisco, so.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:23] Nice.
Annalee: [00:46:24] We have millers.
Maddie: [00:46:25] Amazing.
Annalee: [00:46:26] So yeah, no, I'm ready for the the Green New Deal pie with all those things.
[00:46:32] All right. Well, thank you so much for being here.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:34] Thank you so much for joining us.
Annalee: [00:46:37] Maddie, tell folks where they can find you online and find your work.
Maddie: [00:46:39] Yeah, probably the one stop shop for my work is on Twitter. I'm at @TheMadStone. I tend to share everything there. You can also go to my website, which is MaddieStoneWriting.com. Usually one to two months behind on updating my website, so Twitter is probably the place to go if you want to find what I have been writing about recently. And then you can check out Grist, Washington Post, Vice, Gizmodo occasionally still and other places all over the interwebs.
Annalee: [00:47:11] All good sources for solid scientific information. So thanks very much.
[00:47:15] And you have been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. We are a podcast that you can find in the places that podcasts are. We'd appreciate it if you would leave us a review on Apple Ppodcasts because that helps people find us. We are on Twitter at @OOACpod and we have a Patreon. If you support us with some money, we will give you neat extras. Audio extras, essays, excerpts from our upcoming work that no one else can see except for you if you pay us some money. And that helps us run the show and have great guests.
[00:47:53] And also thank you so much to our producer Veronica Simonetti at Women's Audio Mission who makes these podcasts sound a little bit less scatterbrained than they really are. And thank you to Chris Palmer for it the Music.
[00:48:07] Alright, see you in a couple weeks. Or hear you or make you hear us in a couple weeks. You know what I'm talking about. Bye.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:13] Bye!
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