coe092_scranton2.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Oh, welcome back, everyone, to our second episode this week of the Cultures of Energy podcast, we are just rolling, so

Speaker2: [00:00:30] It's a bonus pod. Today it

Speaker1: [00:00:32] Is

Speaker2: [00:00:33] Part of Bonus A.

Speaker1: [00:00:34] So you deserve it because you had a hard week and what do you want to listen to on the weekend more than our chatting about the Anthropocene?

Speaker2: [00:00:42] Exactly. It'll it'll bring light and cheer into your world and some other heavy-duty stuff as well. But we have a fabulous conversation with the ever brilliant Roy Scranton, who is somewhere on the road in the Midwest when he pulls over and we hear an encounter with a train and some bats. And where's he's near?

Speaker1: [00:01:02] Grinnell, Iowa, Cornell, Iowa.

Speaker2: [00:01:04] Yeah, and he verifies that there is, in fact, corn in Iowa, just as the stereotypes would have it. That's right. It's true. You guys, it's all true.

Speaker1: [00:01:12] Yeah, it's a very moving conversation. This is part of our we were talking a bit about wanting to do a few follow ups, not letting the storm season go as the news cycle has moved on, obviously, but to try to reflect a bit more on the significance of this very stormy storm season. Yeah. And so we talk a bit about, you know, it's a bit more of our thinking are are kind of half-baked philosophy of the Anthropocene here.

Speaker2: [00:01:34] Yeah, OK, that sounds good. Half baked.

Speaker1: [00:01:36] Yeah, it's not authoritative, but I think the reflection is a good action, quite moving. This is one of the more emotionally moving conversations I think we have ever had because we get into issues like children and the future and how to parent in the shadow of the Anthropocene. And anyway, all good stuff.

Speaker2: [00:01:51] It's all good stuff. You're giving away all the good stuff.

Speaker1: [00:01:54] No, it's it'll it'll still surprise them by the time it comes on the people listening. This podcast have about a 10 minute memory span.

Speaker2: [00:02:00] I think they have that, that goldfish condition. Well, it only lasts. They can only hold the attention for about 60 seconds.

Speaker1: [00:02:06] Mostly it's people who are sunsetting at this point.

Speaker2: [00:02:09] Oh boy. Right. Well, you're listening to it at this hour. You probably are. Well, yeah, now very moving indeed. So I found something actually very moving today that I wanted to recommend that people go check out. I found it rather melancholy. I almost got a little sniffle, sniffle in my nose and a tear in my eye, and I'm not quite sure why, but sometimes things have that that impact upon us. So this is an article in The New Yorker that came out yesterday, I guess, and it's called Why the Last Snow on Earth may be read.

Speaker1: [00:02:42] Hmm. Okay. So, yeah, I'm intrigued. I want to know more.

Speaker2: [00:02:45] It's provocative. And so then they have these pictures of these microorganisms. They're like, kind of like, they're like a kelp. They're a little green, single celled green algae. They're kind of like seaweed. But instead of living in the ocean, they live in snow and they they spend their winter in the snow pack. And then in the spring, they kind of wake up and swim through the melt. So you see this right, the melt. So they swim up and then they they divide in photosynthesize. And then when they get to the very top, they turn red. And so they called this they call it pink snow or watermelon snow. And it eventually becomes this kind of almost like a blood red. So it does sort of look like blood on ice. If you look at the pictures

Speaker1: [00:03:30] Kind of looks like the snow we saw in the glacier in Iceland. I wonder if it's the same thing or if that was just the dirt, probably.

Speaker2: [00:03:36] Except this is really it's pretty red and it's red, pink, red anyway. So these people have been studying it. And of course, the problem with its thriving right because as the melt is happening, it's thriving and and reconditioning itself. But it's also causing further melting because the darkness. Well, first of all, they thrive in this melting space, but as they're subdividing, they're also creating heat and so they create more melt around their little bodies. The irony and they're also drawing on. They're also drawing in more heat because they're red instead of white, right? And so the snow that has these little creatures on it is not reflecting. It doesn't have as much a blade effect. It's not reflecting as much because it's not as white. So it's this it's again, it's this feedback loop. But these these creatures are really thriving in these conditions, so it's kind of heartening to hear about them. And there's lots of different species. And then I learned about in the same article, you learn about these things called ice worms, which are completely cool. Ok, listen to this. These are this is just so brilliant. This is like one of those things where you're like fucking evolution, mother nature. You know, the great, great tricks. Whoever did it like. This is just amazing shit. Ok? Ice worms don't migrate horizontally, so they don't cross over from one glacier to another.

Speaker2: [00:05:01] So every glacier is an island, and every population on every glacier is a distinct genetic pool. Because they don't, they don't go horizontal. So they live on these ice islands. And so they have this kind of, I guess, a genetic inbreeding of the ice worms. But listen to this to capture food the animals can anchor the. Themselves in the ice and dangle their mouths into streams of snow melt, they eat pollen, the spores of ferns and snow algae. Cool, but they also die at at temperatures like much below 15 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer than 50 degrees. Hmm. Anyway, it's just it was kind of fascinating. I won't give it all away, but it's a it's a short piece. It's in. The New Yorker came out yesterday, but it's a it's just great about these kinds of the life on ice. I mean, this is, you know, speaking of melt life on ice and the kinds of adaptations that these amazing creatures have done and they're going to thrive. And you know what else is going to thrive? Does little water bears? Yeah. The little water bears, I guess, are even more hardy than the average cockroach. So scientists have speculated that those little water bears remember we saw them through the microscope and in Iceland.

Speaker1: [00:06:21] Oh yes, yes, I.

Speaker2: [00:06:23] I've got their scientific name here, but I'm not going to look it up, but they're like, they're going to survive new tardigrades. Tardigrades. Yeah, they they're going to. They're going to survive the nuclear Holocaust if it ever comes or when it comes, not just not just climate change, but.

Speaker1: [00:06:43] So you went from red to black there? What do you mean from dark to darker still?

Speaker2: [00:06:47] Oh, well, no. I'm just saying they. I'm just saying

Speaker1: [00:06:51] A melancholy Friday

Speaker2: [00:06:52] Afternoon. No, not well, no. I mean, not for them. It's good for them. It's not dark. They're going to be fine.

Speaker1: [00:06:59] I think it sounds like it sounds like a nice story. And I like it as an antidote to most of what you hear about life in melting glaciers, which is, oh, all of these ancient forms of life that are going to come back and it's going to be like John Carpenter's The Thing, but maybe at a microbial level or something like that, or the cholera and the influenza melting out of the permafrost and getting out again. And I think that that is all against the backdrop of the idea somehow that these escapes are, you know, barren and don't have any biotic, you know, activity. But this article sometimes because it embraces, yes, there is, you know, a whole habitat, there's a whole ecology to glaciers, right, that you know, it's going to evolve. And who knows? I suppose what the future of it is. But that's exactly the kind of life in the Anthropocene question that we're talking to Roy about to. So it's one of those things.

Speaker2: [00:07:52] Right?

Speaker1: [00:07:53] Yeah. You know, as he says, you know, we got to live in this world, right? I live in this world, got to find some joy here, too. Can't all be depressed. In fact, I would say it was for Roy Scranton, a downright uplifting conversation. I think, you know, he's got he's a dad now. I think he's I think he's coming over to the optimist side a little by little.

Speaker2: [00:08:13] Yeah, I don't think he's all the way. I don't know. I don't know that he was ever not there, but

Speaker1: [00:08:19] Well, he wrote a book called Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene. So like, some people, take him to be somebody that people

Speaker2: [00:08:24] Take, but at least he wasn't like, you know, how to just like, ignorantly perish in the Anthropocene. At least he was trying to learn how to die. Yeah, no. I give him credit for that.

Speaker1: [00:08:33] No, no, no. It's it's it's it's a great it's a great augmentation to that conversation, too. And it's, you know, as you know us, dear listeners, we're learning how to party in the Anthropocene one day at a time. So you don't have to worry about us. We'll be fine. Yes. All right. Anything else?

Speaker2: [00:08:50] No, that's alright. Ok, what's your name, Roy?

Speaker1: [00:08:53] Keep it short. Enjoy your weekends, everyone. And hey, just heard that Obamacare lives another day. John McCain is voting no on this latest proposal. I know that has nothing to do with the environment, but I just thought it's a little piece of good news.

Speaker2: [00:09:05] Good. Thank you. All right. Go Roy. Go Roy. Hello, Roy Scranton in the beautiful Grinnell, Iowa. How is it there in Grinnell?

Speaker1: [00:09:32] Hello in the beautiful Grinnell?

Speaker2: [00:09:35] I'm sorry.

Speaker3: [00:09:36] It's actually gorgeous. There's a very nice sunset. It's probably some kind of agricultural waste or something that's that's creating these beautiful colors in the sky. But it looks nice. So it's very flat here, very flat.

Speaker2: [00:09:50] Sometimes we have to embrace our waste so we can do that visually too. Oh, lots of corn. So that's not just phasing

Speaker1: [00:09:58] Out Midwestern boy language

Speaker2: [00:09:59] Corn. I thought that was I thought that that was fake news, too. They really do have corn in Iowa, huh?

Speaker3: [00:10:05] They have a ton of corn.

Speaker1: [00:10:09] Thanks for that. That update and report from the Roy Roy, you are. You are literally making history tonight on the Cultures of Energy podcast. You are the first person to have been on this podcast three times, and I know, I know that probably you're probably going to rush and put that on your CV, you know, probably immediately after this. But seriously, it's great to have you back, and it's been a long time. And you know what? Congratulations, man, you're a dad. Just wanted to congratulate you and Sarah on that amazing family event. In the meantime, that plus Trump being elected, those are the two things that have happened right since the last time we talk. So.

Speaker2: [00:10:45] Oh, don't, don't, don't, don't even put those on the I don't put

Speaker1: [00:10:49] Those in the same sentence, but I'm thinking about his story of historic events

Speaker3: [00:10:52] For both both of

Speaker2: [00:10:53] Those. It sounded like that. You have to watch him. It sounded like

Speaker1: [00:10:57] That. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was kind of like running you down. But no, man, that's great. So congratulations. How is it? How's that big year? Yeah, exactly.

Speaker2: [00:11:05] And I will say that I've actually created a new instrument that I'm calling the cocktail maraca. Can you hear that?

Speaker1: [00:11:12] That's that's what passes for sound effects on the cultures of energy podcasts. It's like, Oh, don't get

Speaker3: [00:11:17] Over the computer. I do.

Speaker2: [00:11:19] That's nice. That's like just a little bit of ice and a little bit of something else.

Speaker1: [00:11:23] We're going to raise a disability spirit in spirit, right? Thank you. So.

Speaker2: [00:11:28] So one of one of the great pieces that you've written, Roy, which came out, I don't remember how long ago now, maybe a year or so, but it came out in the New York Times

Speaker3: [00:11:37] About a year.

Speaker2: [00:11:37] Yeah, yeah. And it it was very prolific in its way because it suggested a series of potential what ifs and consequences were a massive storm to hit the ship channel here in Houston. And as we know, from talking to a bunch of experts and everything we've heard on the news and the fake news that in fact the scenario that unfolded with Harvey was not as bad as it could have been. And so, you know, in your piece, you really detail some of the horrors, and I remember just being truly aghast when I read the piece. And so I'm wondering if you can tell us for the readers, I mean, the listeners who haven't read it, tell us some of the story about the ship channel and the future storms come in that we can anticipate in this almighty Anthropocene.

Speaker3: [00:12:26] Certainly. Well, you know that that piece, I have to say, first of all, that, you know, I sort of I actually owe it to to you all because it was when you had me down to talk to to participate in the annual Sense Cultures of Energy symposium that actually first got to see the Houston ship channel. And it was it was Dominic and some of the other people connected with Sense who first pointed out to me how much of a catastrophe it was just waiting to happen there. And all I did was do some of the of the legwork and some of the research, and I was actually able to. There was a great ProPublica article that came out also last year that took a lot of the research that was coming out of rice out of the Bede Center, the storm surge protection. I don't remember what exactly it stands for, but don't worry. Yeah, but research really important research coming out of Rice University arguing that that the ship channel is incredibly vulnerable because it's such an intense energy infrastructure center, it's incredibly vulnerable to the next. The next hurricane. It just something has to hit it just right or even close to just right. And you know, as we've seen with Harvey, all these toxic toxic waste sites flood these incredibly important petroleum production facilities and refineries flood. And there's there's actually a lot of potential that it seems didn't happen with Harvey. But, you know, will next time for storage tanks to to come up to come loose, basically, as happened in Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and then spill oil everywhere and the the chemical, the explosions that happen at the chemical plant outside of Houston is just a tiny taste of.

Speaker3: [00:14:26] Actually, what what could happen and what will happen at some point unless serious work is done to protect the ship channel and Houston from a storm, but you know, here's the the big picture issue, which I I get to in that piece from the times, which there's a longer version of it that I can talk about. In a minute that was published in a Finnish art magazine called Muster Into the bigger picture issue is that there's actually sort of in the world of the Anthropocene in a world of increasingly intense storms and rising seas. There's there's actually only so much you can do to protect these places, you know, such as Houston or New Orleans, or as we're going to likely see with Miami because the world's changing and the seas are rising and the water is going to get in and get in. And so, you know, that piece for the times, it was about a year ago it was talking about, you know, warning against sort of exactly some of the things that happened with Harvey and much worse case scenarios. And the sad fact is, is that it's it's likely it's only a matter of time before we see these things play out and probably play out again and again and again.

Speaker2: [00:15:45] Yeah, I mean, I think this is imaginary and that preparing for the worst case scenarios of the future is precisely the way we need to be thinking. That's the direction we need to be thinking in. And I think you raise a really important important point here, too, which is, yes, there's only so much we can do in terms of infrastructure and abatement of these harms that are going to occur in coastal cities. There's only so many seawalls and pumps and dikes that can be put into place to quote unquote protect these areas. But then, you know, beyond that kind of engineering or infrastructural question is the question of what are we protecting here? I mean, you know, in the case of Houston, I mean, I don't mean to sound cruel, but it's like, we're like, we're protecting these petrochemical industries. We're protecting the petroleum refineries for good reason to prevent them from detoxifying the entire region and particularly communities, the fenceline, communities who who live nearby. But I think the bigger question that you're getting at here, too, is that as as we try and protect the status quo, which in the case of Houston, is this massive petrochemical infrastructure and the ship channel, or maybe in Miami, is the massive hotel luxury accommodation industry and tourism. You know, take your pick. But what is it that we're trying to preserve as we're trying to protect these spaces and places from inundation that's becoming more and more inevitable, it seems.

Speaker3: [00:17:22] That's right. There's a there's a particularly striking irony when it comes to Houston, because it's what what we're talking about protecting and what we're talking about. Saving from rising waters and and increased storms is is the very the heart of the very industry that is helping create the situation right by being, you know, being a part of this, this carbon economy in which we basically rely on burning, burning up dinosaurs and and then we just pump that carbon into the atmosphere and it's heating the planet. And so and that that situation is just I mean, that problem is it seems and has seemed for a couple of years to me that it's just out of control and that we actually need to come to terms with the fact that that we sort of we've gone we've gone past the tipping point and that there's not going to be even before Trump's election and before, you know, he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. Even even before that, the Paris climate agreement itself is relatively toothless, and there was little chance, it seemed to me that we were going to, as a global community, write quote unquote fix the problem of global warming. And so what you know, how do we how do we deal with this? How do we make sense of this? And I don't, you know, the my book Learning Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene suggests that I argue that we we need to accept that this whole way of our whole way of life, a modern global carbon fueled capitalism is not just no longer sustainable, but it's it's dead. It's sort of it's in this sort of suicide spiral. And we the first thing we need to do is is accept that and and then that might open the space for another step or some other direction to deal with the changes. That have been irrevocably put into into motion by this long term sort of poisoning of the planet.

Speaker2: [00:19:34] So Roy, do you think is there a reincarnation after the agony of dying and the Anthropocene?

Speaker3: [00:19:40] Human beings are incredibly virulent species. Yeah, we're we're very, you know, we're we're we're very robust and adaptable. And I I suspect that there will be human beings as long as there's there's some ecosystems where we we can carve out a niche. But I mean what that means in a human timescale, what that means for us, what that means in terms of massive, unimaginable global suffering is is another question.

Speaker1: [00:20:16] Yeah, no, absolutely. And and I think that your piece when I first read it, of course it was it was because I know the science that's behind it and I know something about the risks and the probabilities. And I know that it's more plausible than many people think that it was quite scary to to to see it realized in the vivid way you did in the piece. And when we offered it to the Group of University of Houston students who are working with John Gardner on writing a TV series about or at least a pilot episode for a TV series based on the idea of a Category six hurricane striking the city. They too were, you know, rather it was a kind of come to Jesus moment. I think for them, were they like, OK, yeah, I didn't know about these petrochemical tanks and that lack of understanding of of what the spine of Houston is is is pretty widespread in Houston itself. I found among people, even people in the industry who don't often think about the vulnerability of those infrastructures to the type of storm strike that you know, as you as you offer that portrait or, you know, are not unfeasible.

Speaker1: [00:21:22] In fact, it could really be just a matter of time. And so I began to think and this was only accelerated after Harvey, you know, is this city habitable anymore? We've been talking about it. Is this city, you know, is there a is there a Houston after that infrastructure? Or in fact, is the whole kind of raison to altra of a place like this really based so much on petroleum that as as that system collapses, which it probably will, these things don't tend to go gently, they tend to kind of erupt and dissolve in ruins. If it if that happens, you know what, if anything, will be left of a place like Houston besides the swamp from which it emerged in the first place, it was kind of a sobering thought, but maybe to put that as a question. Roy, do you want to tell us a little bit about what you put into the more extended version of the article, which we'll also put a link up to? So what did you put in the muster in the piece that you couldn't get into the New York Times piece?

Speaker3: [00:22:14] Well, my original conception for the article was to talk about to overlay a couple different, I guess, lenses, if you will. And one was to look specifically at infrastructure in terms of dealing with climate change. So with Houston specifically, storm surge suppression was what I was looking at. There's a lot of other things that one can talk about with Houston. You know, again, with Harvey, the problem wasn't storm surge. It wasn't surging waves. It was flooding from from from rain. And so there's there's all these other questions about drainage and and the bayous and all these other different approaches. But I was looking at storm surge depression and I wanted to overlay that and what people were actually doing and thinking about with a look at the Houston ship channel and an interview, a long interview with Timothy Morton, your colleague, friend of the pod. And yeah, and and we actually did the interview. Most of it, as we were writing on the on that tour of the Houston ship channel. And what I was, you know what I wanted him to talk about was object oriented ontology and his perspective and his his this sort of mode of thought mode of thinking he's developing and he's part of developing, which is trying to sort of rethink our ontological relation to the world, right? Trying to think about human relations in a in a in a in different ways that don't necessarily privilege human perspective and that are able to think about agency and and what an object is in in new ways and at the and as well.

Speaker3: [00:24:04] So while I'm doing those two actually related if you think about it, but but very different, but from very different perspectives, things I was also I also included these sort of lyrical sections that were me trying to think of Houston as a as a hyper object. And that's. That's one of Tim's terms, and I I'm not going to be able to explain it with the justice that that he would or I'm sure many others would be able to. But basically the idea of a hyper object for your listeners is, I'm sure they know, but you know, it's an object that is sort of that exceeds right. It's almost sublime in a kind of way. It exceeds our comprehension as an object. And yet it's something to which we relate and with which we exist in in countless ways. And so I was just trying to, you know, I got to spend a few months in Houston thanks to sex, and the city made a really, really deep impression on me. It's it's an incredible, beautiful, interesting, complicated, paradoxical place and these sorts of their almost lyrical kind of meditations, what they what they're doing is they're pulling together objects, a vastly different scales and just arranging them, putting them together sort of in a pair tactic kind of way.

Speaker3: [00:25:36] Just doing my own sort of homage or thinking through what what Houston looks like from that kind of kaleidoscopic or multi multi lens lens view of of object oriented ontology. And so. And then as well, of course, which the part that did make it in the to the New York Times piece was was trying sort of the opener trying to imagine, right, what the next storm looks like. Worst case scenario when it hits as a way of dramatizing the stakes of this whole gamut, right? Dramatizing the stakes of this. What I what I kind of actually see is a disconnect, in fact, between our ways of being in the world as they're embodied in and infrastructures and institutions, and then our ways of thinking that being which, you know, aren't aren't ever quite adequate, right? The the the reality of things always escapes us. And and I mean, that's one of the interesting and provocative things that Kim's idea of the hyper object can help us conceptualize is the way that we can know and and be a part of and be related to something that we can't think all at once. And of course, the preeminent hyper object in, you know, in the background of of all this discussion is climate change.

Speaker1: [00:27:11] Right? Yeah. And it's really challenging, and I'm sure you struggle with this too. You know, as a writer, as a as a, as a philosopher that, you know, when we're thinking about what will it take to really get people to change their thinking? And, you know, you keep hoping that the one silver lining to an event like Harvey is that it might prompt some more concerted accelerated action and awareness about what's happening that would actually cause people to begin to think and act in the time scale that we would need to. And maybe, maybe it's too late. And maybe whatever we do now might only help us two hundred years from now. But in some ways, you know, this idea that people would get serious and focus about it now is something that we do hope after these events. But then, you know, we're also aware, or at least, you know, a great many philosophical traditions that are dear to us like phenomenology psychoanalysis. I mean, they all make the point that so much of our behavior depends on memory. And memory, of course, is can only be a reservoir of past activities and experiences. The future has no content. So in other words, you know, the future is always going to lose out to the past somehow in determining behavior.

Speaker1: [00:28:20] That would be it sounds fatalist, but you know, there's some probably some truth to it too, right? So that you know what we remember are, you know, the kind of the better days and the happy things that go along with, you know, carbon modernity and fossil fuels and all the fun we have with that energy. What we can't imagine is how big the storms are coming, and that's one of the frightening things is after Harvey, you could even look at the article you wrote for the New York Times and say, Well, it could probably even get worse than that. And because in part, the one thing you weren't really talking about there was the floods, and there have been three of these five quote unquote five hundred year floods in three years in Houston now. And it's beginning to think like that is the normal. Some of the homes of people that we helped clean out last week were people who had flooded like three years in a row. So you're beginning to say, Well, you know, you shouldn't have a home here, right?

Speaker2: [00:29:07] You know, basically this habitable.

Speaker1: [00:29:09] But you know, to say that sounds, yeah, cruel and dismissive, and we don't care about your experience. But in fact, you know, I think it's part of what you're talking about. It's kind of coming to terms with the situation that that is a kind of a it's an extinction not necessarily of. Visuals, but of a way of life, that's the most important thing. I don't know if that made sense.

Speaker3: [00:29:31] Well, no, it's it's it's a good point. And it's also it's also a limitation of of human thought and existence that are our thought is is embedded not just in memory and experience, but also in the people that we know and the places that we live. And you know, when we see these threatened bye bye bye change, it's our our typical human response isn't, oh well, what's best for the world? What you know? Oh, my family's threatened. My home is threatened. My city is threatened. What's best for the world? You know, the response to to a storm in Houston or Miami or what have you in New York, you know, isn't necessarily going to be, how do we how do we figure out how to fix climate change for the world so that not only does this not happen to us, but this doesn't happen in Mumbai or in South Asia, which have also had catastrophic floods recently killed many more people.

Speaker1: [00:30:43] And Nigeria, too, was even further out of the news.

Speaker3: [00:30:46] And Nigeria, which is even further than the news, the response is how do we protect ourselves? How do we protect our community? And you know, this sense of endangerment and this sense of threat unfortunately doesn't, you know, with all due respect to people such as Rebecca Solnit, who argue that, you know, disasters bring out the best in everybody. They as often or more often bring out a kind of retrenchment and a kind of, you know, circling the wagons, the kind of fear and aggression, right, that seeks that seeks, then a target seeks, then something that that you can blame for these problems. This is, you know, I mean, you're you both are anthropologists. You know how scapegoating works. You know how this how this functions. And and and I think, you know, and this is a a speculative claim, but I'm going to make it anyway. You know, the the election of Trump, right, isn't just a response to, you know, the economic precarity of the white working class in middle America or, you know, a resurgent racism. It is those things, but it's those things in connection to write a deep, abiding and not entirely conscious sense of threat. Yeah, from from a changing world, from a world that seems out of control. And so the question isn't just, you know, what can we intellectuals do to either on the one hand, formulate policy or formulate, know ontology or, you know, figure out a good story to motivate people.

Speaker3: [00:32:43] But also, what can we do as members of our communities, as people who are who live in places right to to tamp down and work against this precisely this kind of collective threat response and to work against fear and to work against the aggression that comes out of it. And I think and I make I make this argument in my book right. I think I think part of it's like it's much more I think it's absolutely necessary to confront the to come to terms with the severity of the danger and the reality of human limits and mortality and go from there, right? Rather than try to like, fix it or find a solution or like, you know, try to figure out the thing that can help us avoid it. First of all right. If we're if we just jump to the solution or to the avoidance without without coming to terms with the real, the real severity of the situation and and what it means for all of us, then we're then the answers were going to be providing aren't actually going to going to resonate with people.

Speaker2: [00:33:58] Yeah, I mean, it's you know, when when storm events like this happen, when these disasters happen. On the one hand, I think in a pragmatic way, they are events that motivate people to change their habits and change their ways and change their policies and change their politicians. And that it might actually create a sense of longer term planning and thinking because there has been this extreme. France of crisis, but also many top us, right, coming together and everyone's recovering after the storm and all that sort of generative good feeling and hope that occurs after these instances. But at the same time, when these events happened and as they're happening, multiply right. We're seeing it in Texas, where we saw it in Sandy or the wildfires in Los Angeles. Or what's happening with Irma now in the Caribbean and perhaps in Florida is that they've become so instantly iterative. We're I mean, we're seeing them coming so fast that it almost feels like people are just constantly in recovery mode. And so we can't sort of find the the dry ground to imagine ourselves into the longer term thinking that we need and longer term action that we need in order to make the really substantive changes that are going to make a difference. Because if we're constantly literally bailing water out of the boat, then how can we collectively come to some kind of adequate response that really is going to make a difference in the world or even in our local communities?

Speaker3: [00:35:29] Right? I don't know. I think that's a that's a really, you know, key question. And and the you know, the the fact we have to face is that this the speed the, you know, the periodicity of these events is only going to increase, right? It's only they're only going to come faster and they're going to bring with them, you know, more and more political repercussions. And we're going to be facing it's, you know, we live increasingly in a world of catastrophe and those catastrophes are, you know, in different places and affect different people in different ways and different people have different capacities to respond to them. But this is now this is the world we live in. There is no there's no there's no way out, right? There's there's no there's a bat, sorry and walking her out and there's a bat. I love that.

Speaker1: [00:36:33] It's great. We've had dogs on the podcast before, but never a bat. Yeah, that's nice. You can get the bat to drop a comment.

Speaker3: [00:36:39] It was really loud and there's no right that you can. People are building lifeboats, right? Very well. Wealthy people, many people are thinking in terms of of lifeboats or in terms of building walls or how we can like block off the problem. And those solutions are themselves, you know, at best, only temporary and relative. But more to the point, you know, thinking, thinking ethically, there's no right, there's no happy ending. We don't get a happy ending in the world that we live in now and. You know this this has implications for how we conduct ourselves in our communities with each other as thinkers and intellectuals. We're not, we're not separated and we're not. I'm sort of distracted by a train going by.

Speaker1: [00:37:36] And that was the back. I was like, That's

Speaker2: [00:37:38] I love the train sound.

Speaker3: [00:37:39] It's great bats and trains. Who knew Iowa was so lively?

Speaker2: [00:37:45] It's like, it's like on a Wednesday night. That's like metonymy for our entire conversation. So now.

Speaker3: [00:37:52] That's right. All right. So, you know, this has this has ethical implications because it means that we can't we can't put off. Right. The problem of of our relations with each other. It's not like, OK, well, I'm I'm OK now. I'm wealthy. I'm a professor, whatever. And like the people in this other ward or this other side of the street, they're they're poor and they're they're at risk and they're vulnerable. You know, but I'm just going to do my little part in society, and maybe it's going to work out eventually someday. It's not. It's never going to work out, right? If we if we want to think about our social relations ethically, they need to happen right now in real time and and our commitments to to justice and our commitments to compassion and our commitments to democracy and all these issues. They they need to be commitments that we that we think about and and act on every day because that's when it matters is right now, if this is it, this is all there is.

Speaker2: [00:39:05] Yeah, it's you know, I think this is this really points to something that I've been wanting to ask you actually ever since you became a new dad. And that is that we, you know, and all the discourse and discussion around climate change, we often talk like just in this common rhetoric, right? It's like, Oh, our children, our children's children, it's all this kind of future theology about how we need to make changes in the now in order to prevent further catastrophe in the future. So as someone who's very tuned in to the catastrophe of the now and the future and who has a brand new beautiful baby who could very well live to the year, twenty one, seventeen or maybe even longer? And you know, maybe we have a picture of what that world looks like for him. How do you prepare your your baby? How do you prepare your kid for this increasing world of catastrophic events and weather conditions and political unease that I think we all see coming faster than we maybe thought was possible?

Speaker3: [00:40:15] I don't know. I mean, you know, the first thing I said to my daughter after after she was born, after saying hello was to apologize to her for, oh really? Well, bringing her into into this world. There's it's a complicated it's a complicated question that I haven't I haven't fully, you know, reflected on. I'll I'll ask, I'll ask my daughter to to give me more time to think about it. But she's been, you know, she's brand new. And so there's a lot going on there. But it's uh,

Speaker2: [00:40:58] Yeah, she's like, she's like, I'm busy pooping, dad, give me a break,

Speaker3: [00:41:01] Right? All right.

Speaker1: [00:41:02] First things first

Speaker2: [00:41:03] Things first, we can talk about those other evacuations later.

Speaker3: [00:41:09] Yeah. On the one hand, you know, there's no it's like the the worst thing you can do for the planet is to have a child, right? This is this is there was this piece that this piece talking about a study that came out, I believe, from a from an environmentalist organization, although may have been from climate scientists. I don't recall exactly, but it was in the Guardian and it showed, you know, the climate impact of of different things you could do. And in order of of, you know, to with the idea of, you know, these are the things that you shouldn't do right or like things you can not do to help make the planet a better place. And like you know, the items on this list, like, you know, we shouldn't eat meat, right, eating meat as it increases your carbon footprint tremendously flying all these different things. But the the biggest carbon impact it listed was having a child, and they understand that, and I see the logic of that. But it's also I also reject reject it for a couple of reasons. One. One is that, you know, the problem isn't that we're not recycling. The problem isn't that I'm flying or you're driving your car, right? The problem is that we're all enmeshed in this petroleum fueled economy. And, you know, any one of us or any 10 of us or any ten thousand of us or any billion of us could opt out of the economy.

Speaker3: [00:42:45] And it's not going to change the fundamental calculus. And so and that's a position in which I'm basically rejecting the efficacy of individual action to solve climate change. And I'll stand by that. But the other thing we can talk about that if you want, but the other reason I reject it is because. Um. Because we're all going to die anyway. We were all going to die anyway before we knew climate change was happening. That's just, you know, that's a feature of being human. It's not a bug, it's a feature like, we're born and then we die. And while accepting that and understanding it, I think is key to, you know, having to growing, growing and wisdom and like developing, developing thoughtful ethical relations in the world. It's also not the end, right? We have to we still have to keep living until we die, right? And we want to live ethically and we want to live thoughtfully and we want to live in relations where we're we're not preying on each other and, you know, taking from each other and trying to ameliorate our ecological impact and have have more thoughtful, connected ecological relations and so on. But we're also just here. We're here and we have desires and we have we have to keep living right.

Speaker3: [00:44:24] We have to keep living until the end. And so, you know, I I can't apologize, right? And I can't feel bad on a certain level for I can't feel bad for for having a child, for having, you know, for for continuing the human species as awful as a species, as we are, right, because this is just part of what it means to be human is to live. And I can't deny that and I can't turn away from it. And in fact, it's that's that's the joy of it, right? Is that we live and we live together and we we make families and we make communities and we connect with one another. And so I'm filled with sadness. I'm filled with sadness when I think about the future and when I think about my daughter's future and when I think about the risks and precarity and danger and suffering in the world and in, you know, her life and all our lives together, I'm filled with sadness. Mm. And that's that's just part of it. That's just part of the part of the mix. I can't just live in that sadness, though, right? We have to have it be in us and accept it. And then also and then also get up in the morning and also do something and also keep having children and also keep living, you know?

Speaker2: [00:45:56] And I think that honestly, like, you know, you're spending time with this, these little tiny humans, these brand new humans is actually a way to see the good side of this really, really virulent species that humans are. Right? That's probably the place that's where where we see hope, but also the kind of tenderness and the possibility that human beings have always also exhibited in order in in addition to their rapacious tendencies, right? The really? Oh yes.

Speaker1: [00:46:35] This is the other side of being an anthropologist, as it gives you a real appreciation for how plastic our species are, you know? Yes, right? There is a kind of biotic hardware in there somewhere, but the software is very different depending on where you grow up and people can be raised to be injured and and anxious and to lash out and to hate others. And they can also be raised to be principled and confident and active and and forward thinking. And I think, you know, that's part of the challenge of parenting in the Anthropocene, which is probably the title of your next book. I hope learning how to parent the Anthropocene. Yeah, yeah. Right. But you know, I think that's there is a real challenge that we probably should talk more about as a parent in the Anthropocene, because a lot of people feel and I get emails from people sometimes like, What do I tell my daughter about this? And you know, well, you tell them the truth. But you also, you know, you say, we are entering into unknown territory in some ways with what we've done to the climate. But we also actually we know what to do to help. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe it'll take two or three hundred years to reverse this, but we actually know what we need to do to do it.

Speaker1: [00:47:41] That's that's the thing. It's not as though we are powerless here or unable to imagine alternatives. We have them, but we actually have to to turn to that aspect of our species that is also capable of collective good, which it is. And maybe it doesn't do it all the time, but there are, you know, kind of there are like instances in history where people have done a lot in a short period of time. And the most obvious analogy, of course, is the fight against fascism. But you know, there are other cases, too, where collective concerted action towards a goal has done amazing things. So, you know, we have to get there and we have to raise kids to think about that, too. And so I think it is a challenge and, you know, I do feel bad for it too. But you know, in some ways, our generation also was was left with a steaming bag of shit in our hands, too, because, you know, we really were the first generation to come of age and have to deal with this, you know, two or three generations ago, people were just enjoying, you know, burning coal and petroleum without even having a second thought, right? So yeah, fuck you, ancestors. Sorry. Right?

Speaker3: [00:48:50] Well, I don't know. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:48:52] But I do think learning how to parent in the Anthropocene, which which actually raises a question I did want to ask you, and maybe we can use this kind of as our outro talk, talk to us about what you're working on now because you said you wanted to keep your kind of your foot in the foot in the raise your hand in the game, your I don't know what the right metaphor is, but you wanted to keep working on sort of climate and Anthropocene issues, even as you pursued your day job. So what are you up to now?

Speaker3: [00:49:16] Right. Well, I actually haven't been been working on Anthropocene and climate related stuff recently. I'm trying to finish a book turning my dissertation into a book which is on World War Two in American literature. So it's I mean, it's funny to me because it's it was actually working on this project that I found my way into thinking about the Anthropocene because I wanted to find I was curious. But I also wanted to to think about a contemporary like giant event and think about and find out about the ways that people were thinking about it and dealing with it so that it could help me get my head into the the historical moment right in World War Two, in the way writers were responding to it and trying to respond to these issues of collective action and what that means and moral force and responsibility and the sense of doom and the sense of a struggle that is for for almost everyone involved sort of out of our hands and that has its own, its own kind of energy.

Speaker1: [00:50:31] So is your sense that we can learn. I mean, do you think we can learn from that era? I mean, my gut sense as we can, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts because you've looked in. Can we learn from the Second World War in terms of understanding the type of orientation we might need to deal with climate change?

Speaker3: [00:50:45] I do think we can learn things from it, but I don't think it's going to give us a roadmap. You know, a lot of people, Bill McKibben and others have pointed. To the collective, the total mobilization of the United States economy during World War Two, in the fight against Nazism and and the Japanese as a as a model for how we can all come together to fight climate change. And I don't think for many, many reasons that I don't know that I can totally go into here, I guess. I don't think it's an accurate model. I can I can gesture toward a couple. The most obvious one is the the way that, you know, World War Two, the World War Two mobilization involved enemies, right? Like an other human beings that we, that many people wanted to kill. And this fight was highly racialized, especially in the war in the Pacific, and it was a fight that put aside humanitarian concerns in, you know, the firebombing of cities and the targeting of civilians in Germany and Japan. And it was a fight that lots of people in the United States saw as an opportunity for profit in in both, you know, small and domestic ways. The other sort of Henry Kaiser and your your ship manufacturers and your war profiteers, but also in a larger global sense because, you know, World War Two was really the emergence of the United States as global hegemon taking over sort of the the that role from the British Empire.

Speaker3: [00:52:35] And these these sorts of things aren't they're not they're in the same way for climate change. There's not a there's not an enemy to target. The profit motive is is harder to connect. And and not only are some of these motivations not there, but but also I guess part of the point I'm making is that a lot of those motivations in World War Two weren't noble or humanitarian or positive, even though they were, of course, you know, Nazis are bad. I'm going to go on the record with that good and and we should fight them. And that was good. But you know, the war in the Pacific was much more complicated and it was a it was a contest for basically imperial control of of the Pacific. And yes, yes, the Japanese army committed horrible atrocities and the United States committed some pretty bad atrocities in that war as well. And you know, not least of which being, you know, the only time atomic weapons have been used on human beings and civilians nonetheless. So it's not as simple as just like, Oh yeah, we all came together, you know, because and then as well, right? You think about the Japanese internment camps in the Pacific coast in the U.S., and you think about pacifists put into labor camps.

Speaker3: [00:54:02] There's just a lot it's just much more complicated than it seems at first glance. And this is all even completely not talking about the the domestic politics of the issue in which Franklin Roosevelt, right, made serious compromises with the Jim Crow, with politicians from the Jim Crow South to sort of get his war, his war organization's war government together? Right? Ira Katz Nelson talks about this a lot in this great book. Fear, fear itself. Roosevelt Roosevelt did this for the new deal and he and he did it for World War Two, just basically turning a blind eye to the continued racial oppression in the South. And these these kinds of compromises there. I guess I'm sort of digressing quite a bit, but my point is is that it's is that it's not it's not an easy model. I don't think it maps on, but I do think we can learn from. And this is sort of the thrust of the book that I'm working on is that I think we can learn by going back to the people who are looking at the people who are living through that time right and looking at how they were trying to make sense of it and deal with it. Poets like Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore and and other writers, how they were trying to understand the demands of the wartime state on on poetry, on thought, on their on their daily existence and how they made their, you know, how they worked their way through through that.

Speaker3: [00:55:39] I think part of what we can learn is that a lot of the sort of militarized thought that that we take for granted or that is just part of our landscape here in the United States, hadn't always been there, right? It was a product of a particular time. And. It really took over in World War Two and then just hung around. It didn't just hang around. It was actually, you know, promoted and cultured and fed and nurtured by a national security state for the next 60, 70 years. It's the world we still live in today where, you know, it looks like, you know, ISIS is mostly defeated in Iraq. And so now I guess the Russians are the enemies. Again, we just have to find, you know, it's like we're still in the same logic where, you know, we're a good country because we fight evil. Yeah. And and we have to find the evil and climate change is terrible, but it's not evil. And so it just it doesn't map into this moral logic that that still lives with us as a legacy of World War Two.

Speaker1: [00:56:48] It's like it's like a really bad relative who like, comes to your house and won't move out and is kind of critical of how you live and things like that. That's what climate change is. It's too familiar to me to be a faceless enemy, I think.

Speaker3: [00:57:00] Yeah. And you know, I think one of the things we can learn going back to these, you know, these people is is how to maybe think our way outside of that. Yes, that relation, that moral logic which demands, you know, the demands, an enemy that demands that the only way we can mobilize together collectively is to find is to define ourselves as good against evil. Yeah. And then maybe I don't know what figure something else out.

Speaker1: [00:57:29] Well, yeah, yeah. No, I like that. I think that was. No, that's right. No. I had somebody once asked me to write a little piece that they were asking if I, you know, if I agreed that we should treat response to climate change as a war, a war against climate change and whether that was the right metaphor. And I felt pretty uncomfortable about that, too, because all of that martial imagery in some ways, you know, seems to be leading again towards this idea. You have to have a basically another tribe or a group of people that you have to, you know, destroy in order to save yourselves. And I think that is not logic that's going to work when you're dealing with something that's going to require a lot of global cooperation. And it's not like you can just like shake your fists in the air and go like, fuck you carbon, like, you know, get out of my atmosphere, you know? And actually, you know, what would that would? That's where geoengineering comes from. That's where you have people like, let's attack the carbon in the atmosphere. Right?

Speaker3: [00:58:19] Yeah, right. And and the other, you know, many, many, many people know we all know William James is great essay on the moral equivalent for war and his his argument. You know that the United States this is back is sort of like, you know, pay onto to Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt now, manliness back in the early 20th century. But this argument that, you know, we need to like that organizing in a kind of martial way activates all this, you know, virtuosity and potency and and potential. And interesting thing about I mean, we we know what a war against climate change would look like because it would be just as William James argues in his essay, it would be a war against nature. It would be a war on nature because that's who's attacking us, and we know what a war on nature looks like. We know because that's that's how we've paved everything and and destroyed, you know, all these apex predator species. And that's, you know, that's how we've created the sixth extinction that's happening, right? It's through a war on nature. And so the last thing we need is another war on nature.

Speaker1: [00:59:40] So you're saying we don't need Teddy Roosevelt to come back and kill climate change like it was a lion or a tiger on one of his hunts?

Speaker2: [00:59:47] Right?

Speaker3: [00:59:48] I don't think that's going to work. I don't think it's argued that.

Speaker2: [00:59:51] I mean, I mean, the other and I know we're closing out now. But the other problem with that paradigm is that not only do we not have a faceless enemy and this ethnic other who are trying to kill and hunt down because they are the face of evil, evil, we don't have that in climate change and we also in some ways don't even necessarily have a war against nature. What we have is a war against ourselves because it's all about what we are doing right, especially in the industrialized North. So that's that's the other issue. It's very hard to find the enemy when the enemy is the person that you're sitting down to dinner with, right? The person who is pushing on the gas pedal, which is all of us. Well, at least in this, this corner of the world, right? So. But it's a really it's a it's a provocative question. Yeah.

Speaker3: [01:00:37] I mean, I guess you could, you know, take the richest 10 percent in the world and and wipe them all out. What does that 700 million people or something? Mm hmm. And that would take care of most of the consumption problems. But it would, you know, that seems. It's just the absurdity of that proposition and the cold bloodedness of it should be self-evident. That's just not realistic. Yeah, plus it's not something anyone can can I think ethically advocate?

Speaker2: [01:01:09] Yeah, no. Yeah, and they're never going to go for it, Roy. Well, we'll never get up to we'll never we'll never get them to sign on to that

Speaker1: [01:01:17] Plan, and we literally can't get them to buy hybrid cars. I mean, that's that's how that's how little leverage we have. I was just going to say it's been really great to to talk and really great to catch up. And we you do owe yourself a trip down to Houston to see what's left of us down here at some point.

Speaker3: [01:01:33] I can't wait till I can come down again. Yeah.

Speaker1: [01:01:36] And meanwhile, I know you probably are going to enjoy the flesh pots of Grinnell, meanwhile, but certainly. But yes, I will.

Speaker3: [01:01:48] If you let me. Yes, please. Maybe, I guess a little plug that please plug your stuff. The that the long version of the essay of the The Next Storm essay that was in most Orinda is actually going to be in a collection of work that will be coming out from Soho Press next summer. Oh, great. Called We're Doomed Now.

Speaker2: [01:02:08] What does a good title?

Speaker3: [01:02:11] And I, you know, if I don't get down to Houston before then, which I hope to, I will definitely come down, you know, for something book related. They're awesome, but I can't wait to come back because it's a beautiful city and fence has been has been a great place and it continues to be a great place for thinking about these issues together.

Speaker1: [01:02:31] Yes, absolutely. And consider that an open invitation. We'd love to have you back whenever you can find the time.

Speaker3: [01:02:36] Thank you.