Welcome back to the cultures of energy podcast. Thank you very much. Taped live here in the basement of Rice University's Fondren Library and the Digital Media Commons. And in glorious past, but very, very quiet, quiet, quiet as a mouse. Sponsored by the Center for Energy and Environmental Research and the Human Sciences at Rice University, sense. And I'm Dominic Boyer and this is my co-host. Same anyhow. And here we are back for Episode 3, which is going to be a really good one and features an interview with Roy Scranton, which we'll talk about in a second. But first of all, since the last time we spoke with you to you, we had a close encounter with the Anthropocene. Yes, we did. It was a climatological moment that we had in the great city of New York during a blizzard called Jonah. Jonas. Jonas was Jonah. I keep wanting to call it Jonah because it reminds me of that character on VIP. Yes. Just because it was that it was actually had that much stature as 27 inches and he's like 27 feet tall. It was 26.8 inches. And the funny thing is by the time you, which was that which missed the highest snowfall in New York history by 0.1 inches, at which point you're sort of going, come on, right? Let us, let us at least tie for the glory. Think that I think we still get to be heroic actually are heroine if you would rather put it that way for having survived it. And not only that, I had to counseled flights, not one but two. Originally, we had taped the intro to this episode at LaGuardia Airport, which actually would have been pretty sick now that I think of it because here we are complaining about how we can't get in our jet fuel a plane yes, to fly home at our convenience. As we're doing a podcast on the Anthropocene, on climate change, on thinking about these really dramatic environmental chefs. And here we are whining at the airport about this now and the climatological disasters we're facing. And yet here we go boarding up the plane again. I don't think the irony is going to be lost on our audience. And I think one of the themes here, and it's sort of evolved in the podcast is just our entanglement, despite our better judgment and better intentioned in the fossil fuel world that we live in. And so here we are exactly. But it was sort of fun to see Amsterdam Avenue turned into basically a skate park, people skiing down Amsterdam Avenue. And it was super cool to see people skiing up to the subway and chances and kids on sleds and people are snowboards. Not that there's a whole lot of elevation in New York City, but they were trying their hardest and it was very pretty. It was like a letter revelry. It was, it was a moment of communitas and a lot of ways except then the day after when you're trying to get out to the airport, which was his agro is I think I've ever seen I've ever encountered in the history of going to New York was like trying to get into the airport. So he's absolutely anyhow that happened. Well, you know what makes Roy Scranton an interesting person in a sense. And thinking about all these entanglements is that he was actually a soldier who was deployed and the Iraq war, or just afterwards, or just on Iraq and Iran. And so he was part of the military industrial complex in some different ways. And of course, there has been a long, a cry that, that war, among others was based on the desire to get hold of more fossil fuels. And yet he emerged out of that going into a program in, in English, a doctoral program. And then that's fantastic and widely circulated op-ed piece in The New York Times called, called Learning to die and the Anthropocene, right? Yeah, exactly. And it's such a moving piece, such a beautiful piece that I, you know, I actually really did bring me to tears the first time I read it and having suggested, circulated it to a lot of friends and acquaintances and relatives and so forth. Subsequently, I think people are generally very moved by this piece. And, you know, as, as Roy himself speaks and the interview him and he's got a certain authority as a former soldier, you know, that He's sort of trying to bring to bear in addressing the Anthropocene and drawing people's attention to the kind of civilizational shift that awaits us, which I think is a great project. And he's also here as a post-doctoral fellow now at sense for the semester. And it's great that we're going to have a chance to talk with a more interact in a number of contexts. And one thing that you don't know about relay, I don't think that I found out during a seminar where we are reading a chapter in progress of mine, which is called trucks. Trucks. He wrote a lot of great commentary and offered lots of great feedback on that chapter. And then afterwards told me. The teams to drive a truck is a truck driver. Wow. Wow. Wow. So there you go. Well, there we go. Okay. That seems like a good place to transition to stop, shall we? Yeah. And we'll go right now to the interview with Roy. We're still working out the kinks and the pops, remember? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that'll pop, you know, making a, making a podcast dear listeners is actually less obvious a process than you would think. There's a lot of moving pieces and we're working really hard to sort of improve, especially the technical side of things I think we're going to, we're improving. Each episode is getting a little better as we learn more features in the software and as we learn or re-learn those of us who used to be on radio, like what it is to speak in front of a mike. I think we're getting there. But anyway, yeah, there are a couple of hops on this which I apologize for an advance, but otherwise I think it's pretty solid. So without further ado, restaurant. Okay, We're live Royce Scranton. Welcome to cultures of Energy. Welcome to rice. It's so great to have you here. Thanks for having Dominic. It's great to be here and it's great that we're going to have a chance to have ROI with us for months, not just a couple of days. So we're going to break this conversation up into a few parts. And but really I wanted to start with just Praise basically. And thanks to you for writing first of all, that incredible New York Times op-ed piece, learning to die in the Anthropocene. And then of course, the book that just came out from city lights last year. Because when those pieces came out, especially when the New York Times article came out, I feel like that was a moment when this sort of, there wasn't really a concept of like energy humanities, but it was sort of the best proof of concept one could ask for, for that, right? It's this incredibly moving, engaging story that is also incredibly philosophically deep and complex and substantive. So it could appeal to like scholars and philosophers on the one side. But I think everybody I've shown that piece too has been moved by it in some way or another. So again, I'm very aware that you've been on tour probably answering the same suite of questions again and again and again. But if you would indulge us, Maybe you could just one more time, tell us the story about what motivated you to do this project in the first place. Happily. And i'm, I'm glad that you've found that the piece in the book so so affecting, It's nice to hear. So the whole thing started when I was working on my dissertation at Princeton and got the chance to go to a school for criticism and theory at Cornell and attend a seminar on postcolonial thought in the Anthropocene had nothing to do with my dissertation. But my interest was in comparing sort of my topic of research, which was primarily World War Two in American literature. As a global event, a global catastrophe with a kind of homologous global catastrophe, which is climate change. And so I wanted to think about how we're sort of inhabiting and thinking about climate change now. And compare that to that as a way of sort of getting into the thoughts space of the forties. And what happened was, I mean, that, that happened but, but also there was this whole other sort of explosion of intellectual. I don't know, all these lights going off for, for a bunch of reasons. One, because it was introduced to this idea of the Anthropocene, which seems remarkably just incredibly productive and a new and exciting in terms of thinking about humans and human civilization. But also the, the urgency and like intensity of climate change, which I hadn't really thought about. I hadn't really realized. They'd been in the back of my mind. I had never seen, I had never seen the Al Gore film. I knew things are bad, but I didn't realize how bad. And in studying up for that seminar, I I learned I read the IPCC reports. I read that the World Bank reports, books by David Archer and others and just got caught up on the current moment for us, climate change and a lot of the research and realize that we're, we're screwed were just as you've heard in your book, where it was kinda early on in the book, you were sort of saying as a, as a, you know. I mean, that's a really interesting moment and maybe that's something we want to talk about a bit later too, is just what you're meaning without provocation, we're ******. Because in a way, I mean, by the end of the book, you feel like it's more of a message where there is, there's kind of some hope titrated in there as well. But at the beginning you sort of are really sort of confronting people with I think, something that a lot of us for a long time and I would include myself in that category. Just weren't really paying attention to. We were sort of vary, if you will. Kind of anthro centered in our sort of thinking about the problems of the day, which are many poetics and capitalism and race and whatever else as is, seems to be weighing us down in our aspirations to improve humanity and improve society. And yet there's something like looming in the background or just like right in our peripheral vision that is really unsettling. But what does it take to get people to confront that, right? Well, and I think so part of the response to the, to the New York Times pieces that developed out of that and part of their response to the way I I couched the the problem was I think a results or it came from I think a wider concern with I don't know what it is. This sort of vaguer sense that that were in trouble or like things aren't working. Or a sense of sort of unease and anxiety connected to the global war on terror and connected to the recession, and connected to real changes in formerly reliable weather patterns that, that we're feeling and our and our daily monthly, yearly lives. This last the last couple of months have been a great example of that. Yeah. And I think there's there's this I think for a lot of people there, there's, there was more a sense of unease than there was an awareness of the sort of the scientific data for why we should be more than uneasy. In fact. Yeah, and so that's where sort of the, that we're screwed came from was, was looking at, looking at the research that suggests that we're actually not, we're not well-placed globally to, to address global warming, climate change, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, to address it in any substantive way before it causes catastrophic problems. And so here's like another thing that I think is kind of, you know, if, if you were to write an energy Humanities 101 course, you'd make some of these points and in your book so nicely. And one of them is where you sort of go through all these sort of magical salvation. Old technologies like that are supposed to possibly fix from geo-engineering to carbon capture and storage. And you sort of say very clearly like the sort of the magic techno fix isn't going to work like that's one of the things we have to accept and come to terms with. If we're going to find any kind of life in the Anthropocene for ourselves is that the technology is not adequate to, to save us from a massive transformation. And that's something that's hard for people because I think to my mind, that's where people tend to go for a sense of security if they're not just a kind of living this all out as nightmare fantasies. They want to live it out in a sense of, okay, well, at least so lots of really smart people working on this problem by our engineers can do amazing things. They'll figure out a way to deal with this too. And in some ways that's a perfectly rational response because we've lived through an era of unimaginable technological change. I mean, that's, that's in fact been the promise of carbon culture, right? For the last 200 years, is that, is that we have this amazingly cheap, ever-present source of energy. And if we just find the right machine, we can turn it into whatever we want. It's kind of, it's like magic. We can make railroads, we can make airplanes, we can make nitrogen fixed fertilizer and have a green revolution and grow away more plants and feed everybody, just whatever it is. Somehow sort of oil and coal had been able to make it happen, filtered through various technologies that have been powered by that. And that's, I mean, that's where we, that's, that's the mindset, that's the culture we live in. That there's technologies is, has shown this amazing ability for innovation and it's totally transformed our world. So why shouldn't, right doing except, and here's the wrinkle that you, that you highlight so nicely in the book is that the wrinkle is that all those technologies are powered by the massive energy magnitudes of fossil fuels. That's right, and that's, that's where the hitch as well. How are we going to use that to turn it back on itself? And that's why I think carbon capture and storage is this kind of beautiful idea. It, so perverse, you're pumping, pumping, pumping the carbon back into the earth to drive out more through an enhanced oil recovery, drove home yet more oil. And so it's like a perfect idea, but yeah, we're just going to be muscular. Pump it right back down on the Earth. And I guess I shouldn't laugh because who knows? They may be the ones laughing. Somebody actually figure out how to get this stuff to work. I would be really pleased if they, if somebody figured out how to do carbon capture and storage on a global scale in the next five years. Because that would mean that we'd be able to mitigate the worst effects of global warming and not have a runaway. One runaway hot, hot house effect and turn that into something like Venus. So that'd be great. Yeah. So do you think it's the case that the Anthropocene makes all of us and to philosophers, is it, is it something about this moment that encourages a scholar of English or an anthropologist of something or else to sort of want to sort of be doing that philosophical work. Is it, is it, is it sort of necessary where we are? I, I think it should make those of us who have the leisure and, and privilege to think about the world, I think it should compel us to think about how it's changing and how that's affecting everything from how neighborhoods get built to how the world works, everything from our ideas of race and culture to what, what kinds of, I don't know, what kinds of books will have. Just it it's going to affect everything. And yeah, No, I think I think it should. Of course not everybody has that has that opportunity and not everybody is going to be able to sit down and think about what it means when there's rising water because they're dealing with what it means in their in their neighborhood, in their ward in there? Yeah. In their home. So how much do you think? I mean, because again, you know something else here. You know, your own background is not one of generations and generations of privilege that brought you to Princeton and so forth. But, but rather actually, as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, you know, going to the army in order to be able to go to college, right? That's part of what you did your military service in the first place. So that is increasingly an experience that is just not the experience of any segment of the 1%, including the radical nationalists given right in Washington. So to what extent is, I mean, in your mind that this issue of Anthropocene also sort of fundamentally a class issue, is that something that concerns you? It means it's not as it doesn't come out of strength the medically in the book. But I can imagine this is something that we've thought quite a lot about, right? Because what happens with the Anthropocene and a catastrophic climate change is that differential. I mean there's differential impacts, but more important than that, there's differential abilities to deal with the impacts. And so having more resources means that you can move for one if there's a, if there's a flood, if there's a storm coming and so on and so on. And it also helps protect people and, and allow the rich will be able to rebuild much more easily than the poor well. So no tears remind me. Reach no. Well, yeah, not for the not for the big towers. Know. There's poor people in Miami to and, and they're not gonna they're not going to get the kinds of bailouts and the kinds of help that they, idiots who keep building giant hotels are going to, right? So the thing, the thing that this does is that it, is that it brings out these other issues about income inequality, about class, about how we, how we put society together and distribute resources, right? In a, in a sort of existential and much more urgent way. I mean, it's it's pretty urgent for somebody who can't you can afford to close their kids or, you know, but have a house for their kids. But it's urgent for all of us. Really as, as a social justice issue in the way that it poses the question of how we, how we are accountable to each other, and how we want to, want to think of ourselves as humans together on this world. Moving through this, this event That's, that's going to affect all of us. Absolutely. And I think that, you know, striking in this sort of philosophical part of this, of this project. Three things, when I was rereading, it even came across even more vividly to me. So on the one hand, there's acceptance. On the other one. Something that I, enlightenment also still a sort of belief and enlightenment maybe as being, maybe not the kind of enlightenment that brought us, you know, our belief in techno fixes, but still some kind of enlightenment is important. And then of course, this idea of death or perhaps rebirth, the acceptance of death. But also I think it seems to me this sense of a potentiality that maybe we could become human a different way. I think that's right. One of that. I sometimes hear from people that, you know, why, why, why are you saying the humanities? Why are you saying that the humanities are even? If not an answer like even, even something to look too, isn't it the humanities that caused this, caused this problem. And it's similarly with the law, isn't it the enlightenment that caused this problem? And I, I think that's a misapprehension. And I think part of that results from not wanting to think about not wanting to differentiate aspects of enlightenment culture and aspects, historical aspects of the humanities, from structures of power and structures of technology and energy and how, and not really account for how energy changes in energy changed culture, right? The sort of Carbon Democracy idea that the effect that, that coal and oil had on, had on civilization and hat on structures of power. So that, the thing is that the only reason we know that climate change is happening is because of the sort of old enlightenment science, right? And I think the only way that the only way we're able to ask questions about what it means is through old, the human, humanism, right? Right, Yeah, and the old sort of ideas of the humanities. The thing that, the thing that the humanities, the thing that the idea of the enlightenment offers. And this is similarly with the, you know, the scientific tradition and the scientific method. What they offer is not just self-correction and, and advancing through, through finding out, figuring out what doesn't work and doing something else. But they also offer the potential for self revision, sulfur vision based on self-reflection. And so what the humanities offer, I think, or this idea of the enlightenment. And there's even, there's more to be said there on the connection between the idea of enlightenment and confronting one's own mortality, both human and to offer is, is a mode of, or is a way of thinking about what we, how we put our lives together, right? The Renaissance, humanity's is one thing that's a particular cultural Technology right, of, of living in a certain way. Then and similarly with you, no. I don't know Aboriginal Australians or Inuit or you know, that the just any, any of the myriad, of, any use of any of the myriad cultures of the Earth. There's so many that my brain freeze it because it's too much, too much to think about as an anthropologist. I get that. Yeah, you get that. And so, so there's all these just countless different ways that humans can figure, have figured out how to live in the world. And that's like, that's culture. And what we face now is a transition out of carbon-based, carbon fuelled capitalist culture, right? That's the culture we live in now we face a transition out of that into something that we can't determine in advance. We can't know what, what it will be, what we will need to live with, what we will need in order to live together on this planet that's warmer and weirder and falling apart and whatever. And so what we need to be able to have the most, have the best chance, I think, to put together something humane there is to bring forward all the sort of cultural technology through this, this idea of the humanities thorough, through this idea that, you know, we look at these old artifact and these old cultures and we gotta, I gotta, I gotta, I flagged section. I'm gonna embarrass you by reading something you wrote, isn't it? Okay. This is this is, I think in Chapter 5 of your book and I thought it was, it was so great as just, just what you're saying, a way of thinking about why humanities matters at this particular moment. So this is Roy Scranton. We must practice suspending stress, semantic change of social excitation through critical thought, contemplation, philosophical debate and posing and pertinent questions. We must suspend our attachment to the continual press of the president by keeping alive the past, cultivating the info garden of the archive, reading, interpreting, sorting, nurturing, most important reworking our stock of remember it's, we must keep renovating and innovating perceptual, effective and conceptual fields through recombination, remixing, translation, transformation, and play, we must inculcate ruminative frequencies in the human animal by teaching slowness, attention to detail, argumentative rigor, careful reading, and meditative reflection. We must keep up our communion with the dead for they are us as we are the dead, a future generations. I mean, come on, That's great, great, great moment. But I mean, you know, I, I, just building a poet you were saying. And also not wanting to lose sight of play. To which for me is so important that, that if we, if we can't laugh and the Anthropocene, if we can't find a way to live with some joy. And of course, humility, as you're saying in the Anthropocene, then it's not going to be a life worth living at some level. And it's also going to be harder to enroll people in the project of getting towards something different. If they think it's going to, it's going to conform to these nightmare, apocalyptic fantasies that Hollywood gives us about what the future could be, right? Or, you know, some, some kind of somewhat inane but still somehow timely TV show about all the electricity stops tomorrow and like what's life going to be we're going to refer to, right? We're going to revert to a kind of tribal savagery essentially. Anyway. But you know, I think that it's really great this idea that with a sense of rigor and humility. But, you know, serious attention. We have to sort of look back through, as you put these sort of store of cultural technologies through time to look for all this sort of an chosen paths that were not taken as we went headlong into fossil fuel modernity. Because there may be prototypes there for, for different better ways of living that are already available. It's not like we have to invent things like out of nowhere, right? Right. That's absolutely right. And even if we do if we knew, even if we do need to wind up inventing things, then it would be far better for us to have different things to put together, to remakes to you now, to build hybrid, new, new things. Rather than just try to create something out of whole cloth or just try to do more, try to do more of the kinds of techno fixes that we were talking about earlier, right? So this is not, to my mind, this is not a complete project, right? This is sort of just the, the, the opening chapter in a way of something that is still sort of something to calm, right? You know, because you're sort of, you've given us in a sense a certain kind of a guidebook towards something and a set of ideas. But it feels to me as though this is in so many ways like a call to engagement as much as anything to say, it's a call to reflect, a call to sort of turn on maybe a philosophical attentiveness or kind of investment that we sort of allowed to sort of fall dormant because we sort of felt like we had everything figured out until suddenly, you know, the world is not behaving in the way modern science and rationality taught us it was supposed to it, which is as, as our *******. Rather I can just do what we want where suddenly the world is back hand, even at the time that so many species are disappearing, it's never been a feeling of greater vulnerability for **** sapiens either. Yeah. Now it's definitely, I mean, writing that book is Marx, Marx a shift for me because at the same time, while I still, I still intend to keep doing some of the other kinds of things I was doing. And still in terms of scholarship and, and, and even in terms of writing, there's, there's a way in which those things now for me have to be justified in terms of what they can contribute to or what, how they can connect to the reality that we live in. And so, and so it's the end that question sort of, you know, how, how can, you know what I've got to offer? How can I connect that to the very real, very real problems that will face in the world from climate change. But then also, how can I connect that to this bigger issue of sort of conceptual and cultural change? That's a driving question for me now. How do I do that for myself in my own work and my own writing. And then also maybe connect that to institutions and, and sort of builds or some institutional structures to help do some of that work and help change the conversation and bigger ways. And that's what we're all about here at Rice right now, at least our little corner of rise. So before we get onto the next projects, I would like sort of what you've been doing most recently and what you might be doing here while you're arise. I'm really curious as I am about the book and hearing you talk about it. I'm almost as curious, if not more curious about how other people have reacted to this. Because you've just been on a tour through many, many cities as far as I can tell you, probably done a lot of readings. You probably feel that a lot of questions. Maybe they were appreciative, maybe they were critical. What did you feel like was overall the response you had and then are there any sort of particular exchanges that sick in your head as being sort of like, wow, that was a moment that I'm not going to forget. There were, there were a lot of great responses from readers. A lot of people very positive about the book or felt it that articulated something that they felt hadn't met or take hadn't been articulated? Yeah, I know there was a very strong response. Generally where I did get There were a couple of things that sort of that came up again and again. Particularly from more, more activist oriented people on the left. Because it would change. What would come up would change depending on the audience. Sort of academics would ask different questions and activists. And it depended on who was there and, and what the bookstore was and so on. But but two things that came up repeatedly. And I and I and I did my best to address them. One was perhaps what you would expect. And this often came from older, older and activists who had sort of cut their teeth in the sixties that right, and when, and who saw my book or saw my message as a call to give up her whom and who are like, you know, you're just saying that that we're we're done and we should give up and you're wrong. And we need to fight, we need to fight, fight, fight. And sometimes I, I was able to convince them or to to show them that that's not actually what I'm saying because I don't think that's what I'm saying. And then other times it was more difficult because there is a certain way in which if you are, if you are locked into a zero-sum conflict model of, of how we're going to, how culture happens, I guess, and how we distribute resources. There's a point at which we need to realize that, that the, the rich and powerful aren't going to just give there their stuff away. They're not going to give up their resources. There's a point at which, you know, fighting for justice becomes fighting in the streets. And i'm I'm not at that point yet. I don't I don't I don't know if I ever will be because of my own my own experience, what I've seen with violence in Iraq as a soldier, I have a really hard time believing that violence. I have a hard time believing that we can control violence. Like I'm not going to say that violence doesn't solve anything because it does. But I have a really hard time believing that we can control it. And I think that's, I think that's hubris. I don't I don't think that just because we're on we're on the right side or we think we're just, or we think we, we have the right moral values that we will then be able to limit the violence that would occur from some sort of like, you know, class revolution or whatever. Yeah. And so, you know, there was one particular conversation in Philadelphia with a really I pulled school sort of adamant activist. And eventually we had to have that discussion about, well, what does it mean to fight? Like? What does what does that mean? And and where, where I'm able to go and how that hot and flex the message I'm trying to put out. Because if, if, if I was okay with violence, I would just say world revolution right now. I would just say, you know, blow up the pipelines, blow up the refiner, eat the rich. Yeah. Like because it's really, it's, it's life or death for us, for the planet, for for everything. But I'm not I'm not okay with that. And I also don't know I don't know that I believe that that would solve things. And it would also I'm just I'm not there. I mean, that is fascinating. And I was going to at some point ask you about this too. It's a slightly different group of activists. But one of the reasons why I think your book and sort of your way of thinking is so helpful is, I don't see it as being, you know, anti-gay activists, but I see it as something that would have to happen in parallel to any successful project of activism for real change to be made. And this is sort of, I'm speaking now, maybe not to the people who are who we're going to chain themselves to. Shells like Explorer unit that's going up to the Arctic, not that type of direct action, but more to the folks like, let's say to Naomi Klein, who I think the world of and I'm glad she's in the world and glad she's doing the work she's doing, she's making a better place. But sometimes we should see hero. Definitely. I just want to say that flat and Bill McKibben and everyone else who's doing that work. Absolutely heroes of mine. But you do feel sometimes as though they have a little bit too much faith. The capacity of liberal democracy to regenerate itself, right? That if we can sort of get the corporations out, if we can get the information to the people, there'll be a natural process of coming to awareness about this. That again, it's like it's sort of a non-violent message yet through like struggle and through sort of getting MPIs faces, right? But, but often doesn't. It doesn't necessarily involve the type of stock taking an ethical, you know, remaking that you're proposing. It stops a little shorter. That is though, we're just, it's just the corrupt corporations and politicians that are keeping us from getting where we need to go. It's not as though all of us really love this incredibly energy-intensive modern life, which we do like we're so wrapped up in its pleasures and luxuries. Even I would say, the poor of the world in the right parts of the world also who can benefit from some of those things like driving cars. And you know, that that is part of what I think what I hear you saying, this is what we have to accept the death of, right? It's not just, you know, a certain line, the corporate capitalists up against the wall or give up. But in fact, we all sort of need to take stock of ourselves as the type of modern life we live, the type of modern life we love, relationship to the Earth and to each other. That's something that has to transform philosophically if we're actually going to be able to get. So I think it's a kind of a radical call to my mine which I, which I really like, which not to critique and say their activism isn't, isn't a good thing. But I do, I do worry a little bit. Is it that to some extent they're not having to look deeply enough at their own entanglement in it. And that's a hard thing to do. An entanglement in this sort of the fossil fuel universe. The kinda again, and this is something that the critics on the, the pro carbon people will say, Oh, look at all these activists flying around the world burner and have a point there, right? And, and I think more to the point there's the issue of this sort of, again, to go back to the idea that, that we live in a carbon culture. We live in a culture constructed around the materiality of cheap oil and coal, right? And one of, and again, this idea that comes out of these, this amazing magical energy source that we can just fix everything. That humanity is something you can fix. The world is something you can fix. That whatever these problems, whatever problems we have, we're just going to keep fixing more and more problems until we finally live in some kind of utopia, right? And this idea, this progress for progressivist teleology, I think, is what's, you know, what's a lot of it. It's the sort of frame of thinking that I think people like Naomi and Bill McKibben and others are, remain sort of trapped in. And you're right, You're exactly right without without recognizing the conditions for the possibility of that thought at all. What I have to say, I think is more, is on the one hand, a more tragic conception of human life. But I also think it's more, I think, more hopeful and, and I actually think more. What's the word? More, more human, more open to the world? Because the fact of the matter is, and this is something that, that this ideology as continued to resist and displace. The fact of the matter is, we're limited, like we're finite. We're only here for a little while, right? And then we die. Every, every human being dies, every single one of us, David Bowie, even God. Yeah. And you know, because, because we're mortal beings, we live, we live within biological systems. We live on a planet that gets so much energy from the sun. And there's these, all these complex ways that you know, that we are beholden to our material reality. And we can't escape that. We're not gonna, we're not ever going to escape that. We're not ever going to get to that utopia where we can just rub our white wave, our hands in the air and we have coffee and live forever and so on and so on. However much technology has seem like it's going to be able to provide that. It's not, it's, it, it, it T2 runs on, runs on Earth. It runs on things dug out of the earth and burned. So that's, and that's part of my, part of the thrust of the book. And I think you are right, that there's a, there's a bigger idea there that we just fix, fix capitalism or that we fix the, fix Wall Street or we fix, you know, even how we do. Cole, right? We we need to we need to come to terms with the fact that not everything can be fixed, right? Which I think is also a nicely feminist intervention if I'm us, might say as well because I think a lot of it is this kind of carbon culture idea, but it's something we've talked a lot here. And I think also increasingly we'll be talking about on the podcast 2 is just that there's a kind of a masculinist dimension to this, to this sort of technology boys in their toys and their technology. I wanted to fix everything. And I think that's when I sit in rooms here with the other folks on campus who do work on energy issues. You know, you're always in a group of all white men of a certain age and it's not surprising that they all have the same thing sometimes, you know. And again, without I think it's less to do with like individual fault of any one person then sort of a certain subject position in the world and a certain idea that the world has kinda been made and our interests than its work that way for us for a really long time and that's really convenient. But now we need to, when I say we, I mean, humanity really needs to begin exploring the empowerment of some of these other subject positions that again, I think belong to the two, you know, on sort of possible alternative futures that weren't followed because of a certain way the society took shape over, especially over the past couple of centuries, right? So anyway, just back to the, back to the sort of, the sort of question of the, of the audience for the war he was engaged. I mean, that's really interesting and sort of a follow up. Again, because you're somebody who has maybe a potential given your own background to speak to folks who are, you know, other than the sort of maybe typical activists profile or the typical environmental his profile or the typical sort of energy humanists profile, let's say, did you feel that you were having luck? Also reaching people who sort of weren't, didn't maybe know what the word Anthropocene met, right? That wasn't already part of the vocabulary. Because I'm really curious about the potential of book like this, which I do think it's, it's, it's challenging in some ways, but it's also lyrical. It reads well, it flows well and you can speak to, I think to a nonce and intelligent, even not so educated on specialist audience, like to think that you have potential there, that you were able to see, that you're able to sort of reach some other folks. The book has, has some, not nearly as much as the, the article for the times that book developed out of that article was widely disseminate and got a lot of traction. I think definitely people who didn't know what the Anthropocene meant. The book, because of the way books are marketed. And they're sort of that kind of the way they're disseminated. Also, it's a whole book. It's a small, It's a small bug. It's a short book. It's not a very long book, but it's not something you can just read in 15 minutes on your computer. It hasn't reached nearly as wide an audience anywhere near what the what the Times article did. Yeah. And I sometimes I wonder, you know, sometimes I wonder if there was maybe a different way to title it or pitch it, but i'm I'm actually very happy with with the title and the way that it's gone out. The book is just it's going to come out on Audible.com now. So I'm very excited about it at that just asking about luck. That's it. Yeah. So that will reach more people there? Definitely will. So have you had a chance to sort of assuming you're staying in touch with sort of your, your, your, your former colleagues, veterans of the army. If you're a chance to talk to any of them about, especially about that analogy between sort of your experience in Iraq and your experience with the Anthropocene, does that work for them to some some vats I've talked to. Get it. They, they they already have to buy into climate change. Right? And that's been, it's, it's been weird. Either It's been weird talking to I guess most of the veterans I talk to you now are sort of in the writing community somehow. And they seem not much exercised by the idea of, of climate change or that it's, that it's, that it's something to pay much attention to. And so then they, they don't see, they don't see that connection, right? As, as making a lot of sense. Which is interesting to me. I'm like, I don't yeah. Well, this is because I feel like we end up talking to a lot of folks about this. And I'd love to hear your perspective on it because I'm sure it's a unique one. You know, just that question of why, why aren't more people started paying attention to this? Why aren't more people moved by it? Obviously, the number of people who are moved by, it seems to be growing. You had sort of the size of climate marches and what happened to COP 21. And they're definitely more and more people. And plenty of artists and scholars and writers to be sure in that, in that group as well as all sorts of other folks. But it still seems like by far fewer than should be, right? So there's that question about where the points of resistance that are the ideological or they behavioral, or they just just, you know, run-of-the-mill like I can't deal with this, It's to stressing. And so when we think about sort of where something, you know, the work of something like energy humanities could make a difference. You sort of want to also have a, have a sense of what we're, are the obstacles to this awareness. And let me also just say the flip side of this two, and this is where I think I'd like to train my own sort of critical reflection back on myself is that every one of us who's had this experience of like, oh my god, climate change, the Anthropocene, right? It's like it fits really nicely into this religious kind of epifaunal idiom, which I'm also very suspicious of. You begin to feel like, Oh am I one of those people who's got this complex that wants to save the world and you know, okay, now that's maybe not, that says always work so well for humanity in the past. Like I kind of heroic jumping into like a heroic position, right? Wanting to. So I don't know. It's for me, it's very complex emotionally and intellectually. But on the other hand, as much as I do think there's a certain and nothing against religion, because religion is a real structure of feeling and it's something that connects people to the world into each other. But you also don't want to sort of have the depth of this be a kind of sort of an unthinking mission to accomplish X, Y, or Z. Because that's kinda running against what you were just talking about, which need to be reflective and thoughtful and have to have a kind of philosophical depth of your engagement is sort of front-and-center. And what we need to get back to the Holocene or get onto something after the Anthropocene? Yeah, more of the latter I think, but I had to do at some point in writing the book, I had to do a gut check for myself. And really ask myself, is this just, you know, APOC, year? Is this just knee jerk apocalypses? Like it's so exciting, the end of the world, it that's all going to burn it down. And you told them first, yeah, isn't that great? And we're going to die. So it's totally cool with the rest of the world does too because ran, so, you know, yeah. And then that might be there might be some of that there, but actually, to be clear, I'm not accusing you of that. I just I'm trying to sort of work through. Yes. I have my own comments. No, no, no. But I think you see where I'm coming. I think I mean, in terms of this, in terms of the idea of self-reflection, like especially, you know, thinking about like, exactly like you said, like religious ideas of epiphany and sort of structures of knowledge and who knows and who gets to know and where's your authority based? And I've asked a lot of these questions about about revelation and about authority in terms of the veteran experience where my scholarly work comes out of. And so and that connects to the sort of authority I felt foisted on me as a veteran coming back from, from Iraq. And so these are questions that are very close to me and that I've thought a lot about. And I think and I've certainly and I even in a certain sense take advantage of my authority as a veteran, right? To introduce the question of climate change, right? That's, I make that move. If not explicitly, very directly at the beginning of the book in The Times article by, by introducing the whole issue as through driving into, driving into Baghdad. Seeing that moment as, you know, at like driving into the into the future. You know, but, but the fact of the matter is, I don't want the world to fall apart. I'm actually very I've worked very hard to get through grad school, to get to grad school. I was I enlisted in the military for college money in part for lots of other reasons too. But and I mean, it's not just, it's not just the, the sort of bigger social tragedies that are happening and that will continue to happen. But on a, on a personal, selfish, my own life level, you know, I, I don't want this world to change that radically. I'd really be happy for it to kind of keep going. I mean, I'm a I'm a white guy. Like that would be great if things just kept going. Like we, we get all the stuff like that's fine. That's the very flippant. But, you know, and but also I've worked hard to get out of those sort of working class, poor working class milieu is born into. And to sort of climb the social ladder. And to be able to read and write and think about poetry and whatnot. And the fact, you know what, my guess, what it, what the science suggests will be happening over the next 25 to 50 years, as I get older and older and less and less able to adapt. Is that that's when we're going to be seeing some of the biggest changes. So I don't, I don't fancy the idea of trying to, of of living in Cormac McCarthy's road or something as a as a 70-year-old. That's not how I want to spend my retirement. I want to spend it reading Virginia Woolf, right? I don't want to spend it figuring out how to put my house back together. But that's what we're going to be living with, is this, is this continual degradation of infrastructure, resources, continuing inequality, just all that, like, you know, and then, then you'll get a big storm and then you'll get an, another big disaster. Then you'll get another thing. It's going to be all we live in that world right now. It's this, this world we live in is a climate post climate change world. But all the ****** things about it are just going to keep getting worse. And so I don't want to into the gut check. I'm like, No, I don't want that. I hope that I hope somebody figures out carbon capture and sequestration in the next five years. I hope they figure out solar energy and that we're able to completely transform the global energy economy in the next five to ten years. I hope that stuff happens, that I'm really, That would be wonderful. I'm just very pessimistic about about that fact. And so, you know, the ad, so I'm doing what I can, you know, given where I'm at to try to to try to make to try to help make that shift, the shift that we're living through to a different kind of world to make that shift better and more humane, little easier. Right? And I think that what you're saying about self-interest, I mean, I didn't take it as flip it at all because I think part of it is like, yes, the Anthropocene is also the Anthropocene. It's also like what I call the luca see, the white, the capitalist see, you know, people can have all sorts of scenes and, and they're all capture certain dimensions of what has made, sort of distinguish this era culturally and socially, politically in terms of its hierarchies and who this sort of winners and losers are and who the dispossessed and the alienated, the marginalized. But I think, you know, I do think though that when, when you're talking about the desire to maintain a world, that, that's a point at which a lot of other people would jump on board and say, you know, even people with very different positions would say, I don't want to live in McCarthy's the road either. Like that's a world in which no one wins, right? It's the world and devastation. But, you know, and this is something where I think I do very much do side with people like Naomi Klein is. Again, this is also an opportunity to remake a better, more just world of the Anthropocene as crisis, as a catastrophe. You know, the only sort of silver lining in this is that it shows the bankruptcy of a certain course and thus sort of sooner or later will force us, hopefully sooner to, to try to think of a new relationship to the Earth and a new relationship to each other. And a new scale of our occupation of the planet and new intensity of our footprint and everything else. That is something that can be sustained unless, you know, unless we go That kind of like let's just get everyone on the spaceship and send them off to like some star because it's all rect here. I mean, that kind of space movie I'll February fascinating, ran. But anyhow, so I mean, I think what you're saying, what you're saying really resonates with me. I think it's honest and I think it's got, you know, it's, it's fine to say, you know, it's my self-interest also, not to, not to want this to happen because I don't think anybody's self-interest it, the thing that's hard to get your head around is why more people can understand how much of their self-interest and their future is wrapped up in trying to address these issues now, instead of right, when the storms get real big, right. And when, you know, Miami goes underwater or whatever it is, that sort of finally, the tenth Hurricane, Sandy or whatever it takes where people actually, you know, we maybe should do something about this now, right? Right. Right, but where it's. It's hard to see. It's hard to see how I think one of the issues that were you were talking about earlier like why, why, what are the what are the obstacles to people coming to terms with this? What are the obstacles people making sense of it? What are the obstacles to people engaging with it? I think one of, one of the obstacles is that it's hard to see how, how the precarity of the Anthropocene is that much different from the precarity, the capitalist precarity we live in now. And why? Some form of collective action is better there. When it doesn't, when it's not, it's not. So when it's so rarely a go-to option now, right? I think we should have collective action to deal with capitalist precarity, whatever, yeah, go unions. But that's not, it's, it's an option that is so often train out of us, you know, at all the levels of, of American capitalism, capitalist society. That I think one of the obstacles to thinking, Well, this is that, that climate change is a problem we all need to face. Is that it's just like all those other social problems that are problems we all need to face, but don't wind up impacting if they're not impacting us directly in a way that we feel right now in our neighborhood, then it's not a real problem because we have both both in entity logical way and also just a sort of day-to-day reality way like you have other things to worry about right now. And I think that's a really good point, especially when you're thinking about your sort of Barbara Ehrenreich, nickel and dimed world, right? Of the people living in these really precarious circumstances, they are already ****** by that, right? And you add another level of goodness on to that. It doesn't seem okay. Yeah, it's just another thing, but it doesn't it doesn't make in terms of the day-to-day struggle that much of reference and I think that's certainly, that's certainly going to be part of it. So let's let's, you know, maybe final, final thing. Shift gears a little bit. I want to hear more about your boat tour. Right? So it's a little bit about that experience. Yeah. I took a cruise ship through the Northwest Passage in August with an a, with a Canadian tour line, adventure Canada. And I wrote about it for The Nation magazine. And it was in October, October, November, November 9th, I think issue of the nation, something like that. And I wanted to do it just to see the Arctic before it all melted. But also because I heard there were these cruise ships giving you could take a cruise ship, you could take a cruise ship through the Northwest Passage. That idea itself just blew my mind. And they got great dream of centuries and centuries. Grade brought to you by Carnival Cruise Lines? Yeah. Yeah. This year they're supposed to there's there's a cruise ship planned that something like a 1000 passenger cruise ship. And then it's going to go all the way from like Alaska to New York. I mean, because right now it's just small, small cruise ships. They're all ice strengthened. The ship I was on had actually been built as in, I think Lithuania. Poland has a Baltic as a ferry for the Baltic Sea. So it's ice strengthen its not that big. And that's the kind of ship that doesn't now. And it's very expensive. But they let me on for free because they were going to get the publicity and the magazine article. But I just wanted to I wanted to go and see what it was like and I wanted to talk to people who live there and who knew the region. And I lucked out with adventure Canada because they have, they have a great sort of resource staff that goes along every cruise and gives lectures to the, the passengers. And you people who lived in the Arctic for years and years. And there was, there is also a marine biologist, couple marine biologist, some board. There was one guy doing active bird research on the ship. There is a guy who it's been studying ice and bears all his life. So anyway, just a lot of really smart people who knew a lot about the Arctic. And the thing I heard over and over again was that it was that it's done like the Arctic. The Arctic as we know, it is done. We will see an ice-free North Pole in the summertime within probably 15 to 15 to 40 years. So as early as 2030 that could happen. There's already been dramatic changes all across the hall, across the Canadian Arctic and all over the world. It's the Arctic that's, that's having the highest temperature increases and feeling the, the change them the most. And I heard it from people who witness to happen in their lifetime and saw some of it firsthand. The most remarkable thing to me was that for our entire crews had beautiful sunny weather. It seemed it wasn't like it wasn't warm like 70 or 80 degrees, but it was it was warmish and almost no sea ice. I saw the entire time. There was one basically one day when we were between Greenland and Baffin Island, about 78 degrees north, that was the farthest we went, where there was some sea ice between Greenland and, and Baffin Island. But then for the rest of the cruise we saw none. Basically, there was some further West which is which affected our route. But blue, blue, blue skies, blue C's clear, clear sees all the way. And it was, it was a fascinating experience for a lot of reasons. To see that happening. To see the icebergs calving at a Lewis at, to see the Greenland ice sheet melting. To know it's losing something like 300 billion tons of ice a year. To feel the glacier melting under my hand was incredible. But the other thing that really struck me was seeing the native cultures, the Inuit cultures of Greenland and Canada because I brought perfect get a chance to talk to anyone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, We stopped. So we stopped in a lot of villages in Greenland, towns in Greenland and then to two or three villages and three in Canada, including Greece fjord, Canada's northernmost community. About a 150 Inuit who were resettled there as part of this Canadian resettlement scheme in the fifties to protect their national sovereignty. But perversely, I'd brought Claude Levi-Strauss is Teresa truck with me. Because what else would you take to the Arctic, right? Right. That's good. And it was, it was incredible to read that book, which as you know, you're an anthropologist and I'll just write it like a 1000 times 1001 is about, is about how the end of the world has already happened. And it happened in the New World and happen to the people who live there. So to read that book and read Levi Strauss is meditations and the number Quora and, and what, you know, what being human means and all these, all these difficult, weird, interesting questions. Alongside seeing these Inuit communities that had within, probably three, that had within a 100 years gone from pre-contact a contact. So they're often later contact, right? Because they're so far north, I guess. Anyway. But had within generations been sort of settled and say, urbanized, if you can call it a city. And made forced to become literate. Just this tremendous cultural transformation, right? From which they, they're still recovering. If they're recovering. And now the, their climate is changing so dramatically that they're not even able to like it's not even the same, whether it's not even the entire, their entire way of life was built to, to make sense in this very specific niche, in a very hostile environment, right? Ice cold, arctic. And, and a supremely adapted and not only has their culture been devastated by, by the West and by technology and by rifles. But now it's being devastated again by all the ice melting. In a way that's almost invisible to folks at sort of closer to the equator like we are because we're not experiencing the intensity of the climate effects. I mean, he's being experience like what, ten times more intensely at the poles and the equator. So, so you're getting these massive effects. But again, so much already like on the sort of fringes of no Euro American sort of imagination that people don't even really pay a lot of attention to it other than, well, guess who? People are interested in mining things, drilling things. They know what's going on. And they're very interested in those new resources that are, I mean, Greenland is all set for this huge resource and mining boom around what I've heard two, so again, as you say, like tragedy and Treasury. Okay, I've got a, I've got a I've got an article pitch for you than Rio Grande meeting, tryst, trope, peak and the Arctic? Yeah. I'd have you already written that article? Well, I mean, that was the article I wrote for The Nation. Oh, no, no, no. Now, you mean somebody saying I was just I just have the title. Yeah. So in the rest. Yeah. Now, that would be I want to think more about, I mean, that was the most incredible book I've read this year. And it's especially thinking about it in, in what it has to say about or what it can teach us about climate change and cultural transition, right? Well, we appreciate the shout-out. So Russia, we put a pin in it for now show because we're going to have some more conversations, but this is fascinating and so much looking forward to engaging with you over the next several months into sort of working you into our little, little band of energy humanness here at Rice. I'm really excited to be here and yeah, thanks. Okay, great. Well, we'll pick it up later on then. Take care.