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
Preamble: --Goodreads reviews are overwhelmingly for escapist fiction... …As a child, “reading” was indeed my eClimate Fiction, to Re-imagine Reality…
Preamble: --Goodreads reviews are overwhelmingly for escapist fiction... …As a child, “reading” was indeed my escape. With busy first-generation immigrant parents and constant moving severing friendships, my vivid memories include sneaking my cassette player underneath the bedsheets to listen to far-off adventures; these were my bed-time stories... “books on (cassette) tape” did more than just help me learn English. …One childhood book did plant a seed to reality (although seeds were already planted being a first-generation immigrant who didn’t completely grow up in the Western bubble); this was Nowhere to Call Home, a fiction about a middle-class girl who became a hobo during the Great Depression. …However, it took much more than fiction to crack my lifetime of status quo conditioning (i.e. assimilate into the colonizer’s world where hard work pays off). The fiction taught at Western schools could not bring the contradictions to a crisis; indeed, they could be rendered conformist in their own peculiar ways (i.e. George Orwell). --It took exploring critical nonfiction in my own time, when I realized my overwhelming ignorance of how the world worked, to finally turn my world upside-down (or rather, flip it back to reality), starting with my first Chomsky book (Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance). I mark that as the end of my childhood, a period of lost ignorance for which I have little nostalgia for. …So, with this context, how do I engage with fiction nowadays?
Highlights:
1) Climate Fiction 101: --If you are like me, you’ll want to read this book's “Afterword” first. It provides a foundational discussion, distinguishing: a) “speculative fiction”: focus on speculating possible societies, rather than focus on characters. b) “science fiction”: speculative fiction where science/technology is a driving force for possible societies (note: Atwood distinguishes “speculative” as possible vs. “sci-fi” as unlikely). c) “climate fiction”: speculative fiction where climate is a driving force in possible societies. d) “fantasy fiction”: fantastic often by “magic”, including in the past. --Amitav Ghosh, in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, considers why fiction seems so inadequate in imagining the climate crisis and potential alternatives, i.e. fiction has been predominantly used as a magnifying glass (focus on characters) whereas the climate requires a telescope (well, satellites) and big-picture abstract thinking (Thinking in Systems: A Primer). ...So, the author (Hudson, a sustainability researcher) takes up Ghosh’s challenge to fiction by providing structural innovations to “climate fiction”, in contrast to authors starting from the character-driven fiction side (ex. Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior). --Besides from the climate modeling “scenario thinking” (detailed in next section), Hudson’s structural foundations also feature the distinction in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: a) “Normal science”: “mostly values-free context of relatively low stakes and relatively clear facts”; Hudson adds that most fiction writers operate here. b) “Post-normal science”: “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent” (citing Jerome R. Ravetz); Hudson contends this framing is crucial to meeting Ghosh’s challenge.
2) Climate Modeling “Scenario thinking”: --Hudson’s key innovation is writing the same story setting/characters under 5 different climate scenarios (scenarios, rather than prediction, given post-normal science’s uncertainties), eliminating certain variables that can distract from direct comparisons. --These scenarios are inspired by IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report’s (2021-2023) “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways”(SSPs). I must confess I still haven’t gotten around to unpacking one of these assessment reports, respecting the physical science parts will be outside my specialty (I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That). …However, my critical social sciences warns me that the further the report moves into social sciences (esp. “economics”), the more we consider political power, where “expert” analysis is conservative (conserving status quo) thus downplaying risks (esp. towards the public masses). Even if we exclude power/inequality/social history, “mainstream economics” (i.e. Neoclassical school) is utopian, externalizing energy/environment/crises: The New Economics: A Manifesto. --While structurally innovative, my main critique stems from the book’s target audience. With how the stories in each scenario play out, I do not see the target audience being radical global activists (unlike the fantastic Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072; note: the fictional oral history format ), but (Western) liberal/“progressive” technocrats: “Fictional illustrations could further develop the SSPs as communication tools to help individuals, institutions, and policymakers see how their choices and investments push us toward different possible futures.” …This results in 4 dreadful scenarios (somehow without the hope of revolutionary upsurge) and 1 enlightened-liberal scenario. This fails both my critical social science analysis and inspiration. In addition to scenarios, writing fictional characters means the author can have contradictory thoughts debate each other; Varoufakis made better use of this in Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present. --Note: the 5 scenarios are not numerically-chronological in the book; the order instead provides a better overall story arc. I’ll consider the sociopolitical insights in each scenario below. In brief, 5 stars for the plan, 2 stars for the execution. I'll settle on 4 stars (with an added star as encouragement for more fiction writers to boldly take on this challenge).
…see the comments below for the rest of the review (breaking down the 5 scenarios)…...more
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