Preamble: --I am buried in nonfiction which would take many lifetimes to get through, so forgive me for deprioritizing fictionSci-Fi as a ray of hope?
Preamble: --I am buried in nonfiction which would take many lifetimes to get through, so forgive me for deprioritizing fiction. …When I do dabble, I’ve been trying to deprioritize dystopia fiction. If I want critical substance, I go to critical nonfiction; the rest of the doom-and-gloom is mostly esthetics. And that goes for nonfiction as well (ex. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?). --Now, the struggle beyond survival to actually addressing social needs and unleashing creative potentials, this should not be simply portrayed in an escapist, utopic manner either. There’s pain, a sign of life. There’s also wonderment, recognizing the huge range of potentials/contradictory mess in each of us, and there’s purpose, to untangle this and bring out the better in each of us. …This is what I expect from solarpunk, to paint canvases in the context of near-future ecologies where we can imagine and play with this real-world process.
Highlights:
1) “Foreword: On the Origins of Solarpunk”: --Fiction readers will facepalm, but my main highlight in this fiction collection is the nonfiction forward summarizing “science fiction” (we should note how Anglo-centric this concept is) in several paragraphs: i) Early modern Europe: Thomas More’s Utopia, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein. ii) Late-19th century: Jules Verne, H.G. Wells iii) 1930’s popular magazines Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, etc. iv) 1950’s-early 60’s “golden age” of “hard science fiction”: the focus here is on “possibilities of the future” esp. the sciences/technologies: Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, etc. v) 1960’s-70’s: “new wave” of “soft science fiction”: more focus on the human condition rather than the sciences/technologies: Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick (ex. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Harlan Ellison, James Tiptree, Jr., Joanna Russ, etc. vi) Ecological shift: within (iv) and (v), we see some works focusing more on future ecologies, like Frank Herbert’s 1965 Dune (I’ll be reviewing this soon from an anthropology perspective). …and of course there is new wave Ursula K. Le Guin. The foreword cites her essay “Vaster than Empires and More Slow”, but we can add: -The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia -The Left Hand of Darkness -The Word for World Is Forest -The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas vii) Solarpunk: emerging from the ecological shift, a “more optimistic future in a more just world”; while the foreword classifies Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012) as pre-dating solarpunk, it is used as a model. We can add KSR’s more recent works: -2017: New York 2140 -2020: The Ministry for the Future
2) “Solar Child”: --This short story stood out the most; it’s about genetically-modified “photosapiens”, so it’s a condensed tangle of contradictions:
“The human race does not need revolution. We have tried that so many times, and here we are. No, what we need is a new way of living with ourselves. A way to adapt to the world we have created. We need to evolve. And evolution takes love.” She and her fellow researchers knew that Dr. Laird meant that to dedicate one’s life to this project would take more than an ideal, it would take passion for the project and love for its subjects.
Preamble: --In perhaps my best reading year, it’s quite something for this book to challenge for the top A Guide to 21st Century Survival and Beyond…
Preamble: --In perhaps my best reading year, it’s quite something for this book to challenge for the top spot: i) #1 topic that haunts me. ii) Broad synthesis (bite-sized essays introducing each topic, 100 in total), balancing accessibility with nuance. iii) Featuring some of my favourite authors.
--While reading this book, I made the startling connection (it’s so clear now, how did I miss it?) that my most-memorable childhood lesson and my adult political slogan are actually identical: i) Whenever I procrastinated as a child and paid for it, my dad would say: “plan for the worst, hope for the best”. ii) As an adult, I draw inspiration from the political slogan popularized by Antonio Gramsci (imprisoned by Mussolini): “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”.
--Meanwhile, capitalism’s logic is “profit now, worry later”. --Here’s the kicker: this is not a momentary lapse of “reason” that can be remedied with “enlightenment”; this is actually capitalism’s inherent logic. If a capitalist cannot profit, why bother? There’s no other reason for capitalists to exploit their workers (who keep the machines running) and the earth; it’s not a charity! --An example to visualize this logic’s absurdity is the infamous passages from The Grapes of Wrath on global capitalism’s endless Great Depression. Watered-down socialist policies were not enough to hold things together this time; it took the greatest war in human history, i.e. WWII ("creative destruction" of stagnant capital; military-industrial complexes of Fascism, US, etc.) to temporarily “resolve” this crisis, only to unleash the Great Acceleration of climate/ecological crises (Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System) [emphases added]:
This vineyard will belong to the bank [Finance capitalism]. Only the great owners can survive […]
Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten [profit vs. social needs]. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price [profit or why bother?], and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. […] A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. [Such waste is still rampant in global capitalism; “efficiency” is for making profits.]
[…] There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot [millions die under global capitalism each year due to preventable hunger/thirst/diseases, the other side of all the waste].
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
--So much work is needed for humans and ecosystems to survive (let alone thrive) in the 21st century, yet global capitalist profit-seeking refuses to reward such radical/progressive/enlightened/indigenous/spiritual/holy/conservationist ...(whichever-framing-inspires-you) work to save and reconnect with our shared home. …Instead, capitalist work reproduces our daily hamster wheel, which in reality is our downward spiral destroying our shared home: i) Rewards short-term gambling (financial speculation) and violence (military industrial complex) at the top. Parasites and merchants of death; we should note the other great existential threat: nuclear war: -The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner -Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe ii) White-collar jobs include keeping us all addicted to short-term dopamine spikes with the colossal advertising/media/public relations/lobbying complex. More parasitic and bullshit jobs. iii) Blue-collar extractive jobs: the initial extraction then flows through production/distribution/consumption/waste in a linear manner, with minimal circular restoration (let alone time/space for nature's restoration). iv) Security/surveillance jobs (responding to increased inequality), from private security to police to soldiers. v) Precarious jobs and no jobs (Global South’s mega slums, Global North’s structural unemployment Rust Belts/opioid crises “deaths of despair”). vi) The jobs (social services) and non-jobs (care work) not mentioned are more clearly following a different logic (social needs), which profit-seeking suffocates (just look at the US’s healthcare/education/welfare/public infrastructure etc., despite all its wealth). …How do we escape with our lives and repair our communities and our planet?
Highlights --Of the 100 essays, 18 are by Greta Thunberg (as introductions). I’m just going to follow the collection’s useful structure and provide my highlights:
2) “How Our Planet is Changing”: --Each topic (essay) here is fascinating, but my top priority is to first get a sense of the big picture. It’s a curious paradox: a) “Everything is connected” (synthesis), but how do we prevent this from becoming a tautology? b) Break things down and prioritize; this is still a useful lens to start with, as long as we remember to follow up by shuffling things around with different lenses. …Useful technical tools to start with: i) Measurements and scale: the huge (global) numbers for emissions, energy units, etc. are simply not intuitive, especially when each essay uses them from their own specific contexts. We need to first take a step back and appreciate the overall picture. While I have many social disagreements with Bill Gates and his favourite author Vaclav Smil, Smil at least provides this: How the World Really Works: A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future. ii) Critical statistics: given the unintuitive numbers, we need to be exceedingly careful in how we communicate with statistics; how can we compare the stats between the essays when the methodologies behind them may be inconsistent? -Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks -I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That -How to Lie with Statistics iii) Systems science: Thinking in Systems: A Primer; we can see the applications for this in the previously-recommended Earth System Science: A Very Short Introduction. --So, how do we start with a big picture synthesis (i.e. scale, priorities) of all the essay topics covered here? Once again, “everything is connected”, but it is daunting keeping track of all these moving parts in your mind simultaneously; we need to start with some foundation. Since we do not dive into the social aspects here (ex. how does “agriculture” actually play out in the social world, i.e. global division of labour, colonization/cash crop exports/food sovereignty, etc.), I’ll revisit this later. --Topics: heat, methane, air pollution, clouds, arctic warming/jet stream, dangerous weather, droughts/floods (water cycle), ice, oceans, acidification, microplastics, fresh water (curious to read more about centralized infrastructures like dams vs. smaller-scale distributed systems)… …wildfires, Amazon rainforest (tipping point into degraded savannah?), boreal/temperate forests (since 2002, our “British Columbian” [what a colonial name] forests have shifted from carbon sinks to carbon sources due to wildfires; “sustainable forestry” focuses on wood as commodities, thus harvest young trees lacking biodiversity), biodiversity, insects (3/4 crops pollinated; inspired by Silent Spring), nature’s calendar (phenology), soil, permafrost (I was impressed by the impact of soil in carbon storage and how much is made up by permafrost), what happens at 1.5/2/4 degrees C of warming… --Curious to read more about “attribution science” (extreme event attribution, measuring how climate change directly affects extreme weather events), esp. for wildfires (very local here in the Pacific Northwest)/droughts/floods. --Of course, many people are experienced with certain topics, so the other important task here is to raise everyone’s general awareness in order to facilitate communication/cooperation.
…See the comments below for the rest of the review: 3) “How It Affects Us” 4) “What We’ve Done About It” 5) “What We Must Do Now”...more
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