Kim Stanley Robinson on Technology, Climate and Capitalism
Kim Stanley Robinson, renowned science fiction author, is our guest on this episode of MCJ. He is the author of the Ministry for the Future, a novel which outlines humanity's attempts to navigate climate change in the coming decades.
Former President Barack Obama named the Ministry for the Future as one of his favorite books of 2020. The work has been cited by numerous entrepreneurs and builders in the MCJ member community as having had a significant impact on their interest in working on climate and decarbonization solutions. The subject of climate change shows up in many of Kim Stanley Robinson's works from his Mars trilogy, written in the 1990s about humans terraforming Mars, to his science in the capital Series from the mid 2000s, to his 2017 novel, New York 2140, which is set in a Lower Manhattan that is submerged due to sea level rise.
And it shows up in many of his other works as well. Stan, as he goes by, has won numerous awards including the Hugo Award for best novel for both Green Mars and Blue Mars, and the Nebula Award for best novel for Red Mars and his book 2312. The Atlantic has called his work the gold standard of realistic and highly literary science fiction writing. And according to an article in the New Yorker, he is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science fiction writers. Stan and Cody have a wide-ranging conversation about his relationship with nature, his views on capitalism, society, government and technology, and of course his writings and his views on climate change and the path ahead for us all.
Episode recorded on Feb 7, 2024 (Published on Mar 11, 2024)
In this episode, we cover:
[03:04]: Stan's early life, finding solace in nature on the California coast
[06:40]: Writing "The High Sierra: A Love Story" during the pandemic
[08:57]: Noticing climate change impacts in the Sierra Nevada
[12:08]: Climate change awareness sparked by a 1995 trip to Antarctica
[14:13]: Mixing dread and hope in climate change discussions
[17:36]: Viewing technology as both hardware and software
[21:19]: Critiquing capitalism's role in power dynamics
[26:58]: Majority's desire for a sustainable world despite hurdles
[28:00]: Individual actions within broader societal efforts
[30:14]: Civil disobedience as a response to failed representation
[34:18]: The UN and other international governance's role in global challenges
[39:18]: The potential of international treaties in climate action
[42:11]: The concept of sudden societal change in climate action
[48:06]: Ministry for the Future and "following the money" in climate change narratives
[55:59]: Overview of Stan's works and current projects on Antarctica
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Cody Simms (00:00:00):
Today on My Climate Journey, our guest is the renowned science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. He is the author of the Ministry for the Future, a novel which outlines humanity's attempts to navigate climate change in the coming decades.
(00:00:15):
Former President Barack Obama named the Ministry for the Future as one of his favorite books of 2020. The work has been cited by numerous entrepreneurs and builders in the MCJ member community as having had a significant impact on their interest in working on climate and decarbonization solutions. The subject of climate change shows up in many of Kim Stanley Robinson's works from his Mars trilogy, written in the 1990s about humans terraforming Mars, to his science in the capital Series from the mid 2000s, to his 2017 novel, New York 2140, which is set in a Lower Manhattan that is submerged due to sea level rise.
(00:00:56):
And it shows up in many of his other works as well. Stan, as he goes by, has won numerous awards including the Hugo Award for best novel for both Green Mars and Blue Mars, and the Nebula Award for best novel for Red Mars and his book 2312. The Atlantic has called his work the gold standard of realistic and highly literary science fiction writing. And according to an article in the New Yorker, he is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science fiction writers. Stan and I have a wide-ranging conversation about his relationship with nature, his views on capitalism, society, government and technology, and of course his writings and his views on climate change and the path ahead for us all. But before we start... I'm Cody Simms.
Yin Lu (00:01:50):
I'm Yin Lu.
Cody Simms (00:01:51):
And I'm
Jason Jacobs (00:01:52):
Jason Jacobs. And welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu (00:01:58):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (00:02:03):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help.
(00:02:16):
Kim Stan, welcome to the show.
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:02:18):
Thanks, Cody. It's good to be with you.
Cody Simms (00:02:20):
Well, I am so excited to have this conversation and learn from you. I can't tell you how many people I know that were incredibly inspired by your works, are incredibly inspired by your works, and of course, most recently, obviously, Ministry for the Future, an incredibly influential book for a lot of people trying to pursue solutions to climate change because you actually try to tackle some potential solutions in there. And we're going to get to all of that, but where I thought we would start is actually in a bit of a different place. I'm interested to understand more about your personal relationship with nature. As I understand it, you're a big hiker. You're a big mountaineer. Tell us more.
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:03:04):
Thanks for that. It's important to me. And I guess there's three big parts to talk about to split it down. I grew up in Orange County, California in a booming suburbia. It was being built at the time. And really my refuge and my sanity was down at the beach in the ocean as a body surfer. So a childhood and youth spent on the waves. What I realized then very strongly was that the blandness and the stupidity of suburbia could be immediately erased by just swimming 50 yards offshore back in Mother Nature, quite dangerous, a force way bigger than me, and you had to pay attention. And I could look back at them at the ticky tack plywood homes fringing Newport Beach, plywood Mediterranean view, and that was civilization. And then there I was being careful to not drown and that was a possibility.
(00:04:03):
So it was what gave my childhood and youth a certain sanity and groundedness, even though I was floating. I loved it. And I thought I would always love it and would always live near a beach. That didn't happen. But I did go to San Diego when I was a kid for college. I spent about 10 years in the San Diego area, mostly North County, always in the water, always going to UC, San Diego. And during that time, a friend of mine took me up to the Sierras and we began backpacking in the Sierra Nevada of California. Then that was somehow even better. I felt it more strongly getting away for a week or 10 days and being up there where you didn't see any civilization and you weren't really struggling for your life or making sure you didn't drown. I've stayed as a backpacker, mostly walker, a scrambler. I never liked the idea or the actuality of climbing. My brother was a climber and taught me how to climb, but I didn't like it. I wanted to walk and see as much of the Sierra as possible. And that became a lifelong thing.
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And then the third thing I want to add is that I've ended up still just a small town guy, a suburban house husband. My time in the Sierra, as precious as it's been, it might exaggerate a little, but let's say about a month per year, spread out through different trips. Well, that's not that much. And in the rest of life, here I am in Davis, California. But here again, I have my refuge and my sanity in a vegetable garden and then the birds. And the big valley, its industrial ag, once could have been called the Serengeti of North America has been completely wiped out and turned into industrial ag with very little wildlife. But wildlife does matter to me, the remnants who are still skulking around and the birds. And my garden, just weeding, planting growing crops, watching things grow and tending the soil, that's been really important too.
(00:06:05):
So when we talk about nature, one tends to think of essentially the charismatic mega font would be backpacking trips in the Sierra and getting away and having my mind boggled and everything reset. But for daily life, an hour in the garden has been really important.
Cody Simms (00:06:21):
I love hearing that. And I've been fortunate enough to have planted a bunch. I live in southern California myself, and I've been fortunate enough to plant a bunch of fruit trees in my backyard and I love it. It's what I love to do on the weekends, is go back there and take care of them. I think most recent book is The High Sierra: A Love Story. Tell us about that.
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:06:40):
Even I tend to think of my most recent book as the Ministry for the Future because it's eaten up my life and been a hit. But it's true that when the pandemic struck in 2020, I had more time than usual. I was sequestered in place. I had for a long time, and I mean maybe decades, wanted to write something about this year in Nevada and I couldn't figure out how to tell that story. I'm not a nonfiction writer. I had some constraints that went away, perhaps unfortunately. My main backpacking partner died, my parents had died. I could begin to write about parts of my life that I would've felt constrained to talk about before, and there was the pandemic. And so I said, "Well, let's just do it." I was out of contract and I do actually was... The Ministry for the Future was almost a swan song, but also the end of a contract and the end of a phase. I had done six books in a row for my wonderful editor at Orbit Books and I needed to rethink what to do as a fiction writer and as a novelist.
(00:07:45):
So everything fell together and I started typing about the Sierra and said, "Don't organize it. Let's write down what comes to you as it comes to you, and then we can organize it later." And the same format for Ministry for the Future began to emerge, which is a grab bag, a bricollage, a collage, a mosaic of parts. So I could talk about the past of the Sierra, the wildlife, the geology, my own personal reminiscences, which was actually quite challenging and interesting to try to write your own life, it reveals you to be a real fiction writer. And then just throw them into the order later. And my gosh, it poured out of me. The first draft probably only took a couple of months and it was probably half again as long as I had to edit down to the pretty thick book that you see there because there were a lot of stories to tell and it was a lot of fun.
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So that's the story of that book. It's done quite well as nonfiction books about mountains go, but that's not really the important thing. I can tell that there's a Sierra community that really appreciates it, and that's been fun.
Cody Simms (00:08:51):
How much do you think about climate change when you are in nature?
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:08:57):
It's been growing in these last few years how much I think about climate change. From about 2015 on, we see dramatic changes in the summer weather in the High Sierra. So we go up there, we're in nature, fine. The monsoon hits. Well, it didn't used to hit that far north and that hard. And so there was a myth about the Sierra Nevada. You didn't even need to bring a tent. It doesn't rain there during the summer. That was never true, but it was kind of true compared to now where you can get into a summer monsoon where it rains a lot through July.
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And then, well, more rain in the Sierra is a good thing because drought has struck it bad. We've seen the effects of drought. We've hiked up there where streams that would be difficult to cross, you'd need a raft, would be utterly dry. You could climb down into their channel and climb up the other side and they were black trenches in the ground. So that's shocking and I think profoundly shocking.
(00:09:58):
And then lastly, the little glaciers in the Sierra Nevada are doomed, are going away. And I wrote about this in my High Sierra book. We went up there in, I guess it was September of '20 or '21, I think '21, and we went up to the top of Dead Man Canyon where the map will show you. There were seven little glaciers tucked up into the head wall because it's a north facing head wall and they're in the shade. These seven glaciers were reduced to one half of one, and the other six were gone, gone, gone, because you could see rock. You could walk right on the bed of an ex glacier, which I did. And that just is proof of concept.
(00:10:34):
The arguments about climate change are much changed now where everybody has to admit it's happening. But whilst there were still doubters, glaciers are like a thermostat. They sit there. If it's cold, they'll stay in place. If it warms up, they'll melt. It's just as simple as a thermostat or a thermometer on your wall.
(00:10:52):
The Sierra Nevada glaciers were remnants. Even the biggest one was I think less than a mile long, the Palisades Glacier. And it's lost 50% of its mass since 1935. But the thing is the speed of loss is massively accelerated and even the Palisades Glacier will be gone pretty soon. And when I say that, I'm saying for sure, and I'm saying for the Palisades Glacier, 10 years and it'll be gone too. And there'll be no glaciers whatsoever in the High Sierra. When I was young, there were, I think they called it a hundred glaciers and 500 glacierets, which are ice that don't actually slide downhill because they're just small patches. They'll all be gone. And that is a haunting and disturbing, painful realization that I make with my own eyes.
(00:11:40):
So when we hike up there now, when we see things wet, when we get stormed on, we're going, "Oh, good. Precipitation. We need it." And snow or rain, it'll help. When we go up there and we see drought, then it can be devastating.
Cody Simms (00:11:56):
When did you first start thinking about climate change compared to when it became more mainstream in culture to talk about it or in the scientific community even to talk about it?
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:12:08):
Well, I can put a pretty good date on it, which was my trip to Antarctica in 1995. The National Science Foundation sends artisan writers down to Antarctica, maybe five to a dozen per year depending on requests and budgets, et cetera. A beautiful program. I'm very proud to be an alumnus of it. And in '95, I was excited as could be. The only thing that makes me put in a little qualification here is that when all the scientists down there were talking to me about climate change in 1995, it was not surprising to me. So there had to have been some precursor readings through the early '90s so that I was actually prepped for this information. It was not startling, but it was pervasive. And these scientists were intense to tell me that this was a real problem.
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And so I came back from Antarctica, had it be something that was research and something that would happen a hundred years from now. It was germane to me writing my Mars trilogy because I was transforming Mars in ways that I called it terraforming, but it was really geoengineering. And it was climate change, for you provide the climate, changes it.
(00:13:17):
And so I was prepped, but it was '95 where I remember I was in the drive alley and I'm a scientist who has since passed away, Bob Wharton, wonderful guy, said, "If all the ice on earth were to melt, sea level would be about 270-ft higher than it is now. He had me do the talking. He was too nervous and unsure of himself. I was talking to a 6th grade class by satellite phone as somewhere near San Francisco. So he had me convey that information. The teacher in the class was going, "Kids, that means we'd be underwater right now by some a 100-ft or whatever." We all were taken aback by this. So I can date it pretty well. When I came back from Antarctica, I was interested to write about climate change.
Cody Simms (00:14:05):
So that was almost now 30 years ago. How do you feel about our ability to navigate the problem?
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:14:13):
Like anyone else, I'm feeling many things at once. There's a combination of dread and hope that I think is a signature feeling for our time. Each generation has its own newly named feelings. And so for us, climate dread is a real thing and is one of the main affect states of our civilization now, a feeling that we are in terrible trouble, that we're about to start a mass extinction event where many of our fellow species will go extinct and be gone forever. And also it has momentum. It's a slippery slope. Not all human beings are on board with feeling this. There's denial. There's repression. The facts are so obvious that you have to work hard to repress it and that makes you angry. There are people very angry at climate change and at people who want to talk about climate change. They'd like to deny it or blame you for bringing it up, et cetera. So it's complicated.
(00:15:13):
When I wrote Ministry for the Future, it was 2019, so it's more or less the beginning times for your group. I was much angrier then. And it seemed to me that the denial of climate change and the lack of coming to terms with it and dealing with it and putting it off onto the next generations was really wide-ranging. Trump was still president, looked like he might get reelected in 2020, and I wrote Ministry in a state of high anger and dread. And I think the book shows that. It's a pretty... I don't want to characterize it, but I myself was angrier at the time and less hopeful. Everything that has happened since then has actually been, I've found many reasons to be encouraged. And I put it down to the pandemic. I think the pandemic was a gigantic slap in the face. And for one thing, one person out of every thousand persons on earth died in that pandemic, which people don't actually calculate properly. Somebody told you I had a one in thousand chance of dying, but those are not good odds. You don't like that.
Cody Simms (00:16:14):
I lost three people close to me. It was very real.
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:16:17):
Very real. I know what you're saying. And so after that, the notion and my Ministry for the Future came out in the midst of it early on. And people had time to read. People had time to think. Yeah, the biosphere can't reach up and swat you down and even shut down civilization on a dime. What I think I'm seeing, and of course everybody here is interpreting a massive inflow of information and then sorting it out by way of their own belief systems, but what I think I'm seeing is a world that is trying to cope with climate change like never before and trying to use the instruments that are at hand now, which are not hugely appropriate instruments. In other words, I mean the nation state system, I mean the capitalist economic system. Neither of these are especially free market capitalist system. These are not well-suited tools to the problem, but they're what we have. So I'm seeing many people making extreme efforts to tweak both systems to put them to use.
Cody Simms (00:17:19):
Let's dig into a few of these systems. I don't know if I would consider this a system in terms of my first question, but what is your relationship with technology? You write about it a lot. Do you consider yourself a techno optimist? Does technology ultimately make our lives better?
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:17:36):
I can say appropriate technology makes our lives better. A techno optimist, if you take that as a political position or a term that people understand, I would want to push it around to make it more useful term. We are a technological species. This is the point I'd like to make. It was before humanity that our precursor species, the various homo habilis, et cetera, they started using technology, which is to say fire and stone tools and language. And this is one thing I want to do, is extend our vision of what technology is from hardware to software. Since we're a computer society, you get what I'm saying. The hardware is just a hunk of metal and plastic. The software makes it run. Okay, we got these little hominids and they're running around the world using stone, using fire, using their smarts to one funny little technological innovation, which is to say needles, bone needles, and suddenly humans are 20 latitude lines further north because they're wearing the furs of their fellow creatures and they've sewn them into clothes. This is clear in the archeological record.
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So I want to assert that we are a technological species and we co-evolved with our technologies and that's what's made us so powerful in the world. Many technologies reduce human suffering, which is inevitable no matter what tech you've got, but it reduces it or mitigates it. And then some increases our power to make ourselves more secure and comfortable in the world. You could say Homo Faber, the humans, the makers, we're a technological species. But there's good tech and bad tech. There's stuff that isn't worth doing in terms of some large cost benefit analysis. And ultimately, you've got to extend the vision of technologies to language and then to law to justice. Social systems are technologies and we're living in a rather incredible technology of 8 billion people coexisting on one planet, feeding ourselves for the most part, not killing each other for the most part. It's a technological achievement.
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But then people say techno optimist to say, "Oh my gosh, climate change. We'll just invent a better carbon grabber and all will be well." No, we need a better political economy and all will be well. And this is the crux when you're trying to speak to people as an American leftist, as a science fiction writer, as someone who's saying our political economy is stupid. It creates inequality that's so bad that it's unsupportable and it wrecks the planet for the future generations. It extracts more than it gives back. Our political economy is a clunky stupid technology that needs an upgrade.
Cody Simms (00:20:39):
So a lot of your works, not just Ministry, touch on capitalism, touch on the powers that be or the forces that be that individuals are reconciling their own place in the world around. In particular in Ministry, you envision a world of significant change in a short amount of time to our central bank system, our finance system, really our capitalist way of existing. Tell me more about your view on capitalism and your view on the way our world economy is structured today.
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:21:19):
I'll try to summarize and be succinct in ways that I think will help me as well as our audience. I regard capitalism as the name for our power relations amongst people. So the few people have power over the many by a combination of law, guns and money that mean that the richest 1% of people on the planet own more property and power than the 50% of the poorest people on the planet. So inequality is not an accident or a crime, but is a natural byproduct of the capitalist system. So it's a power relation.
(00:22:02):
Now, capital is good. Capital is sometimes called the useful residue of human labor, infrastructure systems. Capital per se, if you think, well, you can't live without capital. Like the local hydroelectric jam or the computer that you're hearing this talk through, et cetera, that is not just technology but it's capital. Yes, we need capital. It's the useful residue of human labors. It's what creates our civilization. The control of it, the benefits from it, they don't have to be confined to the 1%. And that's the system that is named when people talk about capitalism.
(00:22:41):
The way it functions in this world is this is a very rough cut in government and business as conjoined twins that together run the world. The government keeps things regulated, passes the laws, runs the police and prints the money and backs the money. And then business takes that capital, invests it, makes more, makes profit, shareholder value and its owners of that stuff prosper. The rest of the world works for those people and often has nothing to sell but their own labor hours. Well, all this is kind of classic and it's a given.
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Now in the neoliberal period from 1980 till 2020, it was said that, "The government just gets in the way. Government's the problem, not the solution. Just let the free market do it and the best decisions will be made by all of us making consumer choices," et cetera. And that turns out not to be true. There were too many negative externalities that aren't taken into account like the health of the planet and like massive injustice amongst humans. So the neoliberal years showed the weakness of the capitalist system at large because it isn't as if free market capitalism is an exaggeration of already existing capitalism. Before that, there was Keynesianism where government told businesses what to invest in and how much return they could get and distributed a fair bit of it to the people who were doing the work so that you had at least social security and a wage that would keep you alive when you were just selling your labor alone and had no capital. So that was the Keynesian moment and it was in response to the depression and World War II, et cetera. There's history to all this.
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Now we have the climate crash, we have the inadequacy of free market capitalism. We need to respond really fast to the climate crisis and the polycrisis, pandemics, et cetera, new tech that is weird. All that needs to be responded to appropriately. That requires government coming back. And we are in a capitalist world. You can't just say immediately, "Oh my god, that system doesn't work. Let's invent a new one for the entire world right now tomorrow and institute it." You have to deal first with the tools you have at hand and the system that you're in.
(00:24:52):
So what do you do? Well, immediately you can look back to how Keynesianism worked and say, "Government should pass laws that push business around and tell them what to do for the sake of humanity and also reward them and print money in the first place that is dedicated to green projects." So this is what Ministry for the Future describes in some detail is a Keynesian stimulus, a quantitative easing that people call carbon quantitative easing or green quantitative easing so that when central banks make up money in the first place and inject it into the economy, which we saw in 2020, which we saw in 2008, that that new money injection, fiat money, government money, the stuff we all believe in and used to organize our lives, that should be spent on green projects first by government. And how will it be spent? For the most part it will be paid out to businesses.
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And here's where we see that we're in a mixed economy. It isn't like government takes over the entire economy and everybody's suddenly working for government and the various departments run everything. Never been true. What happens is that government money is paid out in contracts to businesses who agree to do this work and then you're back to the world of private businesses working to make profit and shareholder value. It might be measured with tighter measurement rubrics, which would be good, but it is the same system. And so, it isn't such a radical change. It's something that is legal and well understood. It could be legislated and the businesses are there ready to pick it up. And this I know people on your show and you all must be as aware of as anybody that as soon as the return on investment for green work is as high as the return on investment for destructive extractive work, the floodgates will open and we'll be in a rapid transition.
Cody Simms (00:26:49):
Nobody says I want the world to be more ravaged. Even the people who are doing it don't want that to be the case in almost every case I can think of.
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:26:58):
I think that's right. You have to postulate snidely whiplashes or some kind of a sociopathic villainous. We've got a person like that running for president with great success. So it isn't as if those kind of people don't exist or it isn't as if it isn't an impulse in people. If I have to change or admit I was wrong, I'd rather destroy the world. So there is that natural psychological impulse in some people, but you're right, most people, looking at their kids, looking at the world going, "Geez, if my work was helping to restore the health of the world and I was making a living, what could be better?"
Cody Simms (00:27:35):
Let's talk about the individual in that case. A lot of your work pushes on the tension between individual motivations and reconciling their place in that of greater society in lots of different directions. And I'm curious to hear from you how you see that tension, how you see other humans navigating that tension?
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:28:00):
I want to first say I'm a novelist, I'm an observer. My own work has been weirdly solitary and not antisocial but asocial. And so I watch and try to understand. And so given all that, what I see is people like working with other people and they like the idea that their work will be of some good to others. This seems to me evident. You see it a lot. And then we got climate change. The news is out there, it's undeniable. As I said, climate dread. Inadvertently and then through criminal negligence and even cussidness, the [inaudible 00:28:43], "I want to wreck things," we find that humans are wrecking the biosphere that supports us. There's a feeling of hopelessness that can come in when you realize that no matter what you're doing as an individual is not going to be enough. You can't save the world by yourself.
(00:28:59):
So what I think needs to happen, and is happening more, your podcast, spreading the news. You're not alone, that it's a team effort. If you think of it like you're a brick and a wall, but the wall exists. You don't have to be the whole wall. You just have to provide your brick and stick yourself in place in the larger process. When you get that feeling, then your own efforts are less futile. They might be a piece of a puzzle. They might only be 1/8 billionth of the piece of the puzzle. It's a big puzzle. But to know that you're part of a worldwide effort to get humanity in balance with its one and only home, well that's encouraging. That gives you a little pep in your step and a realization that, "I'm not just struggling to stave off starvation here, I'm actually rebuilding civilization." It's that story that needs to spread.
Cody Simms (00:29:53):
Now some people, and I see this also represented in your work, take their way of trying to contribute to that and turn it toward civil disobedience or revolution even. How do you view that playing into the changes that need to occur in our world around us?
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:30:14):
That's a big question for all of us. One thing I could say there is if government of the people, by the people, and for the people has been bought by people with way more money than ordinary persons and our representatives are voting for the vested interests that have bought their campaigns rather than for the people who elected them. At that point, the people are going to have to set a marker that, "That isn't okay. Democracy has been bought. It isn't working. My political representation is not really representing me. I protest." So at that point, civil disobedience, really the more massive it is, saying to our political representatives, you represent us. You do not represent the special interests who have funded your campaign. Tough one for politicians. They all have to make a choice and you get to choose who you vote for. Some of them will support the people who voted them more than others.
(00:31:17):
Civil disobedience I think is a tool. It's not a tool of last resort, but it is actually a sign that things are going wrong in ordinary democratic processes. And then beyond that, I mean I think it's important to make a distinction between sabotage and murder, a moral distinction and also a political strategic distinction. The two aren't that different. It's never okay to hurt other people. It might be okay in some circumstances to break a thing that was wrecking your home. So we will indeed stop a forest fire. Would we then also stop the flooding of the world by carbon dioxide? This is the analogy that you might want to make there. And could resistance go to physical breaking of things? We call that sabotage. Don't even call it violence. It's just breaking things. Violence is a word, should be reserved for hurting other people. And then maybe you should say never use violence, never. It never worked. It doesn't get you your political objective. And it also is wrong to hurt other people for what is, in some ways, it's life or death, in other ways it's just political preferences.
Yin Lu (00:32:32):
Hey everyone, I'm Yin, a partner at MCJ Collective here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast.
(00:32:44):
We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. Each week, we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established, and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly women climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more. Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (00:33:34):
Okay, let's go from the individual back all the way up to big governance. You cover a lot on the United Nations throughout a lot of your books. You clearly have an interest in international governance and international, I guess cooperation might be the phrase for it. How does that fit into what you talked about around neoliberalism over the last 30 years, Keynesianism before then, and yet we still have these institutions that were put in place 75 years ago that are trying to help us move forward. I would put COP maybe in that bucket, which I think you attended and spoke at. Maybe share a little bit more about your thought on how nation states themselves try to cooperate and whether it's effective.
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:34:18):
Good questions. And I have some thoughts about it because it's been pressing on me. It's the thing that I've been educated about the most since Ministry came out. Well, one of many things, but it's been prominent in my mind. Say the nation state system is a zero-sum game. Every nation state, very jealous of its sovereignty. Within the national borders, that nation's government gets to say what goes on there. Nobody gets to mess with them. So that's not a good system for a global systemic problem because it's always you win, I lose. It's a zero-sum game. And if you happen to win, then I have lost and the nation states fight each other right down into mutual doom.
(00:35:00):
Well, there's a realization of that amongst the diplomats and the political leaders and even more generally of people. "Oh gosh, our little country can't do anything. Let's throw a big wall around the whole country and stick our head in the sand and hope the problem goes away." Or you can say, "We're all in this together, all around the world. We therefore need to cooperate." And then you begin to look at international organizations. Quite weak, quite messed up. The UN is sort of the main one, the biggest, and it was formed at the end of World War II by the victorious powers of World War II, who wanted to create an order that people would abide by and also be in control of that order, the winning powers, the thumbs on the scale at the UN for the US and the countries on the security council that can vito all the other countries on earth if they want to on certain most important issues.
(00:35:51):
So the UN is both an international organization where everybody gets together and decides what they should do together and also an instrument of power for the strong nations after World War II over everybody else. It's both at once. And as the decades have passed, its weaknesses have been shown. Its strengths are a little less obvious, but it's done an awful lot of good in the world for human welfare. And it's a place to talk on the multilateral level. And then what you have is the nation state system with facing climate change and environmental degradation and the possible wrecking of civilization by an accidental poisoning of the atmosphere by CO2. What do we do? Well, we can't get along as nation states. We can't seem to agree what everybody is going to pitch in equitably. We need these international organizations to tell us what to do, a space to debate and then make a decision that everybody signs off on.
(00:36:50):
Well immediately, people back home begin to cheat on these things. These are promises only. There is no sheriff. But the promises are nevertheless important because they sort of set up where everybody can see it, the things that everybody has to do. So COP is important. But also what I've been seeing, organizations that aren't necessarily related to the UN but are like them in some ways. The World Trade Organization, the International Marine Organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD. The list of organizations can go on and some of them have signed treaties like the one signed in Montreal two years ago. 30% of the land surface of the earth should be left to the wild animals as a matter of our own human health.
(00:37:36):
Then the International Marine Organization, 30% of the ocean shall not be fished so that the ocean stay healthy for us. These were huge, these were international, these were promises only. The enacting of them has to happen. Same with the Paris Agreement. These agreements at COP, "We will reduce and now we're going to transition away from fossil fuels." These promises are set out there by the international treaty organizations. And so even though they're weak and toothless, they might be better than nothing as a way to try to organize the nation states in their efforts.
(00:38:10):
And so I'll end by this. Nation states have to really believe that they're also member states. So here the European Union gets super interesting. I mean recently the European Union said, "Look, we need to help Ukraine. This criminal Russian attack is a threat on all of us. The tanks can roll to Paris and so we need to help." And then Hungary says, "No, you don't get to help. But we don't want it." And they're part of the EU and they're working in this case on a consensus model. Everybody has to agree so one nation can screw it all up. That's true with COP also and with many organizations.
(00:38:45):
The EU put the screws on Hungary and said, "Look, you cannot mess this up. This is too important. If you insist on this, we're kicking you out of the EU entirely and all the benefits of it will go away for you." And the Hungary said, "All right. Okay, I guess we'll be good guys for once. Just this once." Well, this is what member states have to understand about themselves. They really are member states. They're not a completely sovereign nation state anymore. We're going to be seeing more and more of that on the climate stage and on every other stage.
Cody Simms (00:39:18):
So I'm hearing a bit obvious of a recognition that these are not legislative bodies. They're not creating the laws that everyone has to follow, but they are creating the momentum, they're creating alignment. They're giving everyone a common seat at the table and they're setting an expectation for society to some extent that hopefully also mirrors what society's hoping from, but are helping us all have something to point to. And if you don't want to participate, you can be uninvited from the ability to be part of that common ground setting.
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:39:53):
This is how gnarly the problem is. The COP agreements are a consensus model of 100% have to agree to the statement that comes out at the end of every COP. That makes those statements extremely conservative and weak because any one member state can say, "No, I won't sign that" and they need to go back and figure it out.
(00:40:14):
Alliances, cooperation, these are all foregrounded in these kind of efforts. And the big countries, let's just say immediately United States and China, can say, "Well, these poor organizations can say whatever they want, but we're the big dogs here and we're the one funding them. We're the ones that can do what we want and have Army so big we don't have to pay attention if we don't want to." So as member states, they're a little bit bashing around. The smaller states with less power have to band together, have to remind the big states that they too have signed these treaties and try to make sure that even the biggest states act like good members of the larger society. Sometimes you see that, sometimes you don't.
(00:40:59):
And you're right, all the national legislatures have to agree and vote for the things that their diplomats have agreed to on the other side of the world that they may or may not agree with. It's all rickety as hell. I'm not claiming this is a good system, I'm claiming it since it's the only system we have. Right now, we have to try to improve it and make it work.
Cody Simms (00:41:22):
And so if these bodies are to some extent trying to reflect what the global populace is hoping to see, and to some extent taking their sweet time to try to get alignment, which is naturally a consensus model is just going to take a long time to get there as you said, it strikes me that we should expect a continuation of what seems to be the case in society in general, which is this notion of everything feels slow, slow, slow, and then boom. Slow, slow, slow, and then bang. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on, I guess exponentialism and the pace of change in general with climate change, but broadly across these big problems that you're outlining.
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:42:11):
Parts of it seem right to me. What can change with the boom, what can change fast is the structure of feelings. The human sense of what's normal and what's desirable, they can experience really rapid change. Infrastructure, having path dependency, having been built to last for 40 years and already in place and making a certain profit, if you suddenly have to change, swap out the infrastructure of the whole world's energy system, the boom might be that moment where everybody realizes, "Hey, this can work and I can still make a living." Capital trembling on the brink.
(00:42:50):
There's so much private capital ready to be invested. It wants to be invested at the highest rate of return. This is a truism or a guiding light for behavior when we're thinking about investment capital. Say the stock market returns 7% on average. And then if you go with hedge funds that do risky things, they can return 10%, they call that differential the alpha, as you probably all know. And then if you do something that is a virtuously environmental and helps the world out by saving some natural spot or improving some technology from carbon intensive to light carbon and you get a 3.5% return, well you are letting down your investors by investing in the right thing for the planet. This is a bad situation for encouraging investment.
(00:43:45):
If the rules were tweaked of how you measure profit, if there were guardrails, incentives, penalties arranged and imposed by governments, by and large saying, "This is the law "such that investing in good green projects got you a 7% return just like the stock market historically, then talk about boom, the Chinese central bank has $5 trillion in assets. That's the biggest one. Mark Carney at COP26, he gathered promises from investment firms that were $130 trillion in their assets. This is what private capital is in this world we're in right now, is an enormous amount of potential human work. And then the return can be there just like any other capitalist investment.
(00:44:33):
So there's a requirement that governments do their part and set the guardrails such that private investment capital can flow into good green work and expect the same return as any ordinary investment. And that would be the boom where it's slow, slow, slow, tangled, everybody's fighting. We're never going to get anywhere, a feeling that we're doomed, the dreadful feeling. And then by enough political work successfully applied, you could get to a situation where suddenly what humanity does is repair the planet and make sure that every human has an adequate, decent existence and makes a living and is living in health.
(00:45:12):
So you need justice, you need a sustainability. These are our two main goals right now, but what I like in the years since my book came out, these last three years, is a rapid acceleration and people aware of it and beginning to work on it. By no means are we there yet. I mean, it's really in a dangerous situation still. There's resistance. There's that slow, slow, slow you're talking about. But I get the feeling that there's a momentum building that when the boom moment comes, there's going to be a feeling that, "Hey, we're on a roll here and we might survive this century."
Cody Simms (00:45:50):
We haven't talked a ton about a number of your works yet. And I'm struck by... Gosh, I'm going to spoiler alert this. So if you don't want to hear this, fast-forward 30 seconds or whatever, but the end of Red Mars, it feels like that the whole book feels like a tension building up, building up and then bang at the end. And that's a technology bang to a large extent. But if that is representative of just being a good device for hooking a reader and a good fictional device, or if you see those types of changes happening in our world.
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:46:21):
We have indeed have moments that have been explosively transformational. But I would hope that we are not facing one of those now. I'm thinking the French Revolution, the Chinese revolution, the gigantic wars that is stimulated technology so much in the 20th century, World War II in particular. We have had revolutionary moments and moments of extremely rapid transformation of civilization, but mostly accompanied by stupendous suffering and catastrophe, war in effect. And we don't want that now. The stakes are too high and the damage would be too great and we wouldn't get the positives out of it. The positives would be overwhelmed by the negatives.
(00:47:06):
So what I've been trying to discuss here is precisely not revolution, but extremely rapid reform or the use of the present system. The IWW used to have this great slogan, "Creating the new society within the shell of the old." And that rapid transformation I hope can happen. We're already seeing the edges fraying. There are active wars around the planet. And not just Ukraine and Gaza, but elsewhere on the planet. There's some pretty brutal counterinsurgency wars going on everywhere. So the sense of tension is really high. But what I hope for and what I'm trying to describe, and this is why people have become so fond of Ministry for the Future, is can you describe the next 30 years in ways that is a best case scenario where we get to a good result without a great plan, with a lot of conflict, but without massive suffering also? Well, you can try to tell that story.
Cody Simms (00:48:06):
Let's actually turn our attention to that. We haven't dug into some of your specific works. And let's start with Ministry. It's the most recent book you wrote on this topic. It strikes me that in Ministry, as I think about my orientation around how we solve climate change, Ministry actually doesn't think a lot about technology innovation, solving our way out where prices get better, products get better in terms of green product, and the world just starts to adopt those things, whether it's EVs, whether it's renewable power. Ministry seems to really hinge on what you're talking about, which is changing the way money works and frankly a significant amount of investment in adaptation technologies, just helping the world deal with the change that's already happening to it. I'm interested how you approach that and if that was a conscious choice or if I'm misreading that in the book.
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:49:06):
As far as I can remember, I did want to make the book a encyclopedia or blueprint, a kitchen sink. Everything but the kitchen sink gets thrown into it. And I wanted to create a sense of chaos and a lack of a plan and also a lack of simplicity. So novels have to simplify in order to get any story told, but I wanted to suggest that it was going to be chaotic and unplanned and there were going to be defeats along the way, and that was not going to mean the end of the story. So even the best case scenario, given where we are now, is going to be filled with dangers and problems and reversals.
(00:49:46):
So the story was constructed along those lines, but I wanted to suggest that it's going to take all kinds of solutions. So there is in the book a regenerative agriculture and a stopping of slave fisheries and illegal fishing. There's people drilling through the Antarctic ice cap in order to slow down the ices slide into the ocean. And then what I began to realize is that all this depends on what we pay ourselves to do. This is not a charity project. This is not a saintly volunteer project where we're all being asked to put on hair shirts and suffer. It's a way of make a living, greening the world, that getting ourselves in a good sustainable technological balance with the planet and then getting us to a better equality with each other is a political problem and an economic problem.
(00:50:34):
The political economy is the name for the dual system of economics and politics put together. It's a good name because the two are two parts of the same process. Political economy mattered, therefore money mattered. It felt a little ridiculous and instrumental and accounting-like or whatever. It seemed a little wonky. And yet, if money from its very source was being spent on good work, then we could squeak through. So the carbon coin, so the central banks.
(00:51:05):
Now a plot element of a science fiction thriller, a cli-fi that focuses in on the central bank, that's another reason why people are intrigued by Ministry for the Future. It's that weird. But it also goes to what everybody understands instinctively as the heart of the matter. "But what do we pay ourselves to do? What is a profit?" Et cetera.
Cody Simms (00:51:28):
I guess follow the money would be a very classic device.
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:51:31):
Follow the money. Who benefits in this situation? Cui bono? Yes. That became my guiding principle. And that's why I had to have a Mary Murphy character, someone wandering the world, doing her best from her limited position to pull on the leverage that she has because leverage is powerful. It's not just a financial term, it's a physical term. Anybody who's ever used a crowbar to move a thousand pound rock with their own puny powers just because they've got the lever in the right spot. Leverage is powerful. She does what she can. And the novel follows, to a certain extent, the money.
Cody Simms (00:52:13):
For those who haven't read it, I'll say one comment without hopefully spoiling anything for people, which is, the book starts out with the most gut-wrenching, devastating, fictional portrayal of a climate impact that I think I've ever read and honestly ends on somewhat of an optimistic note. And watching that change happen over the course of 25, 30 year period that the book covers maybe does cover just a myriad of different solutions and attempts and things that humanity is both dealing with and trying to solve. And I'm curious, did you set out knowing you were going to end in a relatively optimistic place?
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:52:57):
Yes, that's an easy one to answer. I have regarded myself as a utopian science fiction writer. I've written three or four or five books that can be called in the roughest largest sense a utopian future. Well, that's an odd project. And with Ministry, I decided, "Let's put all my cards on the table. Let's admit all of the dangers and difficulties in this process and write utopia as best case scenario given where we are now so that the bar gets lowered hugely." If we survive the 21st century without a mass extinction event and horrendous wars, then that's utopia given where we start.
(00:53:36):
Sometimes I hear futurologists and futurists call this back casting, that you postulate where you want to get and then you look backwards to what it would take to get there. It's not a bad term, even though I think of futurism and futurology are not good forms of human thought. And nevertheless, there's some good in any attempt to try to think about the future and plan because we all do that for our personal lives. So backcasting, I said let's try to portray a best case scenario that the reader can still believe in while they're reading it and when they're done and with some skepticism, with some second thoughts. You finish the book and going, "Oh, but wait, what about this? What about the resistance of the fossil fuel industry and of the people who hate the idea of change? You've low balled that." Et cetera, et cetera. What I wanted to do was make it as realistic as possible as a thought experiment.
(00:54:29):
And I notice now, only after the fact, that for every good thing that happens in Ministry, a bad thing immediately follows. And there's a lot of death in the book. And I don't just mean generalized, but death of characters. And I noticed there's murder, there's accident, and there is disease. In each one of those kinds of deaths, all three are represented in characters that you are at least mildly acquainted with. And I did not do any of this on purpose, but looking back on it, I think unconscious systemization of this novel where I was trying to cover all the bases and trying also to cover my ass, that there's not an easy attack on the book, although I see them made, but they're generally vague like, "Oh, this is so unrealistic," or whatever people will say. When people get to specifics, it gets more interesting. And there I did my best to make the book a bombproof.
Cody Simms (00:55:24):
For those who aren't familiar with your full catalog, obviously not everything you write is climate change related, but you do have a few books in your back catalog, your full catalog I should say, that touch on the topic from New York 2140, to the other book 2312, to Your Science and the Capital trilogy. And then I would even argue that your Mars trilogy is a climate change story. Maybe I'm leaving something out, but maybe loosely describe each of these books for folks who might want to go jump in and familiarize themselves with some of your other writing.
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:55:59):
Well, in the Mars trilogy, which is still well, except for Ministry, my most famous work, they transform Mars from a place that is poisonous and dead to a living second earth, terraforming it's called. That's definitely climate change because they create and change the climate continuously. The physical elements of climate change need to be discussed as they are in that book. It's a work of the early '90s that shows, but I like it as a novel because of its characters and it's epic.
(00:56:29):
Then, I mean, I decided to say if climate change were to hit the world really quickly and what they call abrupt climate change, the stalling of the Gulf Stream, the freezing out of Europe, that happened once 8,000 years ago. We see it in the historical record. What if it happened now? How would we cope? That was my science in the Capital trilogy of the early 2000s. Well, that one's a mess. And I shortened it in ways that made it better in a one volume compression called Green Earth. I'm happier with it as a novel, but it was a gnarly topic. DC bureaucracy. It's a swamp in multiple ways, including trying to tell its story. It's a swampy story to tell. I did that.
(00:57:10):
2312 is a story of what happens if we become, 300 years from now, incredibly powerful and kind of spread through the solar system in these tiny settlements everywhere else. What happens to earth then if we don't pay attention to it?
(00:57:23):
And then Aurora, I wrote a novel about what I think is a fact, we are not going to the stars. This is our one and only home, this solar system, but really this earth, and Aurora is about that.
(00:57:37):
Shaman is about what were we like at the end of the ice age when we were a technological species running around in bands of 20 people and the technologies were fire and stone and fur and language. That was about the painted caves of the Chauvet caves discovered in the early '90s, are 32,000 years old. And the artwork is just like ours, if not better.
(00:57:59):
And then New York 2140. Yes, that one is a comedy of coping. If sea level rise happens fast and big, the world is wrecked. But does that mean that capitalism comes to an end? Does that mean that young people don't still try to find love and have some fun? New York 2140 is about New York, our mental New York and our physical New York, as a permanent site of ambition and accomplishment and joy. There's many ways in which I'm fond of New York 2140.
Cody Simms (00:58:31):
And that contemplates sea level rise, I think specifically?
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:58:35):
Yeah, of 50-ft. So Lower Manhattan, it becomes super Venice. It's underwater all the time. The streets are canals. There's a playfulness to New York 2140 that absolutely does not exist in Ministry for the Future, for instance. I don't know what to think of it, but people do enjoy that one especially if they like New York.
(00:58:53):
And I will add this. Galileo's Dream is about how did science begin as a human enterprise, what was the first scientist like, and what was his relationship to power. So if you think of science as being born with a gun to its head and immediately being subverted into the defense industry, then you'd have to think again about what science is and how it operates in this world. So I had a great time writing about Galileo, who's just a marvelous character, a gift to a novelist.
Cody Simms (00:59:23):
What's next for you?
Kim Stanley Robinson (00:59:24):
Well, right now I'm writing nonfiction about Antarctica. So indeed I wrote a novel called Antarctica, another climate change novel. But since it's so icy down there, it isn't obvious. This novel is about Antarctica as it exists right now. I'm writing nonfiction about what it could become if we try to slow those glaciers down and then rehearsing some of the great stories from the past of Antarctica, the Scott Expedition, the Shackleton Expedition. My own visit travels down there. This is a book like my High Sierra book. And in terms of fiction, I don't know. I'm still staggering around in the blast zone that has accompanied Ministry for the Future. Eventually I'll figure it out, but I'm not actually in that much of a hurry, particularly since I have this sweet Antarctic project.
Cody Simms (01:00:06):
Lastly, what do you think the next 50 years is actually going to look like?
Kim Stanley Robinson (01:00:14):
But this is impossible. So everybody hearing that question can contemplate it themselves and try to answer it themselves because everybody is equally good/bad at thinking about the future. It's inherent to all of us to think about the future. We're all science fiction writers of our own lives, and everybody speculates about society.
(01:00:37):
So the spread is this. It could be a general catastrophe where there's food shortages, food panics, supply chain panics for food, and a significant portion of the 8 billion people on the planet die of starvation. And then there'll be social disruption in wars and a complete collapse of civilization to some kind of miserable, dark ages that doesn't represent extinction for humanity. That's a false problem. That won't happen. But if civilization crashes, in some ways, it's even worse. So that's the bad possibility that we are trembling on the brink of. It should never be slighted or underestimated how dangerous the situation is now.
(01:01:20):
And this is again the way the pandemic helped us. Remember when suddenly everybody was hoarding toilet paper? This was stupid, but it showed the way lemming-like quality of panics and hoarding. "Oh, if I only hoard, then I'll be safer." And then suddenly everything is made less safe by that impulse, that panic. If that panic had to do with food, we are screwed. I'm frightened of that just as I'm frightened of wet bulb 35 temperatures like in the beginning of Ministry. That's all too possible that certain areas of the world get cooked such that if there's an electrical failure, everybody dies. If there's a food panic, many people die. It's just we're trembling on the brink. So that's one feature.
(01:02:04):
The other one is we get a grip. We make these shaky alliances with each other. We trust the people on the other side of the world enough to go ahead and work with them as Gaia, a feeling that we're on one planet together, we're one species on one planet, we got to make it work, we all pitch in. And the potential upside of that, the prosperity that could follow, and I'll describe it, every person on the planet living their full potential and becoming the version of themselves they want the most. Then all the wild animals living in health side by side with this and the biosphere beginning to heal itself while we still busily mine stuff that we need out of the surface of the earth, but then restore those scarred areas later on. And it's a process.
(01:02:54):
And then equality amongst humans. Let me put it flatly and again numerically that everybody is at adequacy, we'll call that one, and that the richest person on the planet is only allowed to be 10 times one. We're not that good at exponentials, but 1 to 10, so that everybody on the planet has one for sure, guaranteed. And then once you hit 10 times that, which is think about 10 times adequacy for a while and get over the notion that billionaires are a sane thing to have. Because 10 to 1, if 1 is adequacy, then 10 adequacies is luxury. And beyond that, it's stupid.
(01:03:33):
So justice amongst humans, equality, a sense we're all in it together, shared prosperity, the biosphere at health, all the wild animals doing really well, that's quite possible. We can do that as a species and as a civilization. It's not off the table. We aren't like Wile E. Coyote spinning in air and not noticing that we're out in the air and we're going to fall them. We are still in a process where it could go right. So if you have this spread, maybe it's 180 degrees between a truly terrifying and awful catastrophe that along with all the badness and the suffering would also be, let's just say this for people like us, prosperous westerners, it would be intensely boring. Not only would life be tedious and horrifying and tragic, it would also be boring compared to what we have now.
(01:04:23):
And then you've got the other vision, the utopian vision of we solve our problems, we get a grip. We'll still be working on certain issues, but we have prosperity and general health. Well, that's 180 degree spread. Both are possible in the next 50 years. So the main thing to be is confused and filled with dread. And realize that this spread is so vast that you can't think it properly. You have to pick a course, you have to do some back casting. You pick a relatively good result and you do what you can to push in that direction.
Cody Simms (01:04:56):
The very last question I have for you, I know I said that was my last, but the very last I have for you is in reading your works, I know I have synapses connected in my brain that don't connect when I'm reading nonfiction articles about what's happening around us or technology or finance or business. And even in Ministry, some of your chapters basically are nonfiction essays, but they're positioned into a narrative. And it strikes me that the role of art and the role of creativity, inspiring humans to think differently and to think outside of themselves is being under leveraged in this moment.
Kim Stanley Robinson (01:05:43):
Maybe. And I think it's necessary. And art, the imagining of the good, is also a religious position. There should be a faith community or a spirituality, a sense of the sacred and miraculous Gaia religion that you can say, "Oh, you can't just drum up a religion from scratch," but actually many a religion has been drummed up from scratch and Gaia religion would help.
(01:06:06):
But back to art. And for me, my art is the novel. What I've been realizing in this last three years is people still are affected by novels in powerful ways in their feelings. And this I think is because they have to give so much to that art form. You do the work, the reader has to co-create it. It's a string of sentences on the page, black marks on a page, and suddenly you're having experiences in your head. But they are active experiences that you have to put a mental effort into, an imaginative effort into and an emotional effort into.
(01:06:41):
So characters in a plot, you're thinking, "Oh my gosh, finance. I've been talking a lot about green quantitative." But Mary Murphy, she's got a problem. She's got a past, she's got to cope. She's got this young man who kidnapped her one night and scared the shit out of her. And then she wants to continue to observe him in his life as if she's an elder sister to a younger brother who is a constant screw up. It's interesting on the human level. And the reader, if you get caught up in it, which is an act of immense generosity on the reader's part, when you're done with it, you've kind of lived it. And that's the art. That's what you said about how you can read the financial reports, but you haven't lived them. Whereas if you read a novel, you've put so much effort into it that it's a fictional experience, but it's a real experience at the same time. And this is the power of it.
(01:07:34):
I'm old-fashioned, which is a funny thing to say because Ministry is quite an experimental novel in some ways. In formal terms, it's sophisticated, et cetera, but I'm old-fashioned in this sense. The novel is about characters you care about in a plot that's interesting, where their stakes are high and people have to behave in certain ways and you follow it like a soap opera. It is a soap opera in a certain extent, and we love those. We live those. So this is what I would say is that the last three years have taught me the novel still works, and I'm pleased for myself. It's actually been kind of a mess. But as a novelist, I'm pleased at this evidence that the novel still works.
Cody Simms (01:08:16):
Well, Stan, I'm grateful that you have contributed this to all of us. As I led with at the start of our conversation, this work is cited by so many people I know who are working to change the world, working to create new clean technologies, working to change the way money works. Whatever way people are deciding to leap in, your work has been very influential to them. And I appreciate you for taking the time out of your day to come in here and share a little bit more about it with all of us.
Kim Stanley Robinson (01:08:51):
Well, thank you, Cody. I very much appreciate it. It's been fun. I'm off to the garden now. I'll stick my hands in the dirt and try to get reconnected. But I just want to say it's been an astonishing education and kind of a privilege to see this. The UN will have a summit of the future. Oxford is planning a Ministry for the Future. I've heard from many people, like you mentioned, people who've read the book and have been inspired. And so having seen it the way I have to have seen, it's inspirational to me too. I don't know exactly know what to do with it, but I just want to say thanks to everybody and to you too.
Cody Simms (01:09:28):
Thanks so much.
Jason Jacobs (01:09:30):
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey Podcast.
Cody Simms (01:09:34):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs (01:09:43):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at mcjcollective.com. And if you have a guest suggestion, let us know that via Twitter @mcjpod.
Yin Lu (01:09:56):
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Cody Simms (01:10:06):
Thanks, and see you next episode.
