Stewart Brand's Blog, page 5

How to Raise Kids for the Long Run

When my kids play in the mud at our family's farm in California's Central Valley, they're frolicking in the soil their ancestors have farmed for over 175 years. Their slingshots are fashioned from branches of olive trees planted by their great-great-great-grandparents. They're tied to the land, like I am, through their blood. Someday, God willing, they'll own a piece of it. We are extraordinarily lucky to have a successful family business that has passed through seven generations and survived, even thrived. We've also worked for it.

Farmers, at least good ones, think in broad terms about time. They see the land and its past, present, and future from 10,000 feet, honoring and learning from experience while planning for succession and future generations of abundance. Good farmers temper ambition with conscientious stewardship of the Earth and its resources. Farms that last are no accident — they're built that way, managed, and engineered for the long haul. Patience and foresight are necessary. Intention is king. There is no room for greed, dishonesty, or small-mindedness. Like most things, good fortune and capital can't hurt. While you can't anticipate everything, you can have a set of principles by which you operate and, with any luck, core values you pass from one generation to the next. As my kids laugh and splatter the rich soil gifted by their forefathers, it occurs to me that perpetuating a happy family could be guided by some of the same principles that make for sustaining great farms.

The author's farm in California's Central Valley. Photograph courtesy of the author.

When we think of how to raise our children, we usually consider time on a woefully myopic scale. We worry about what we do that day, week, or month. Sometimes, particularly during a tantrum, we count the minutes. Occasionally, parents will stretch their minds to think of how they're preparing their child for that season or the school year. Rarely do parents endeavor to consider how they raise their children on a macroscopic scale, not just in years but in decades, lifetimes, and generations.

Scientists know that more than your DNA is inherited. Your children, little sponges that they are, soak up every choice you make in terms of behaviors and lessons, both implicit and explicit. Scientists estimate that personalities are somewhere between 30% and 60% heritable. Each generation learns from the last, modeling what they see and modulating what they inherit biologically, culturally, and socially. Epigenetics tells us that which of the inherited genes expressed depends largely on behaviors and the environment. There is no more nature vs. nurture debate — it's both in a delicate feedback loop scientists are just now starting to untangle. Our nature is largely fixed, locked into the 23 pairs of spiraling chromosomes that comprise our genetic material. Nurture is far more malleable. How, then, might we prepare young people to be both good global citizens and admirable stewards of our lineage? How will our choices today affect our descendants in 10, 100, 1,000, or even 10,000 years?

One of the best things you can do is teach a child to cultivate grit, which encourages a growth mindset. Grit is like emotional stamina, passion, and perseverance for long-term goals in the future, despite any adversity. Grit has five primary characteristics: courage, conscientiousness, perseverance, resilience, and passion. Each of these features is noble individually but combined, they can confer success in life. Angela Duckworth, largely considered the world expert on grit, believes it separates the winners and the losers, literally. Grit encourages kids to see they can do difficult things if they persist. These successes, in turn, promote confidence and autonomy while demonstrating the value of hard work. Just as farmers weather bad seasons and failed crops, the focus on the horizon and unwavering persistence are essential. My great-great-great grandfather was the posterboy for grit. He left Germany at 16 with nothing and worked carrying lamb carcasses on his shoulders across town in San Francisco until he saved enough to open his own butcher shop. From there, he bought a few cattle and some land. When he died, he was the largest private land owner in the US. He knew both profound poverty and extreme abundance in his life. In between those polarizing experiences he suffered unfathomable loss and adversity that would have broken most men. It didn’t break Henry Miller.

The author's great-great-great grandfather, Henry Miller.

Research suggests creativity is another essential ingredient for success. Creativity sparks innovation, accelerates and deepens learning and adds meaning and satisfaction to life. It optimally challenges us to explore our imaginations through expression. Additionally, creativity can be immensely joyful and bring people together. Acting creatively encourages open-mindedness, empathy, risk-taking, and critical thinking. It can help manage stress and even aid in treating some forms of mental illness. Good farming requires nimble thinking and unusual solutions to unique problems. This type of divergent thinking, generating new and original solutions to problems, is one of the core components of creativity. Recent research suggests it may not only be good for business but also for your brain. For many reasons, not the least of which is the sheer joy of it, promote creativity at every opportunity.

Cultivate gratitude by acknowledging the goodness around you. Levels of gratitude are consistently strongly correlated with happiness. Gratitude can increase positive emotions, help to relish good experiences, improve health, counter adversity, and build strong relationships. The benefits of gratitude may seem evident to us, but it's important to spell them out explicitly for children, encouraging acts like thank you notes and gratitude lists. Bolster appreciation with other core characteristics like kindness, tolerance, and empathy. Gratitude is closely tied to optimism, an essential trait for any farmer. In agriculture, particularly over the span of 175 years, there are inevitably thick years and there are thin ones. My ancestors that were worth anything were the ones who didn’t let the wins or the losses go to their heads. They kept their eyes on the horizon and realized that that variability is an inherent part of agriculture and of life. They neither lamented their misfortunes on bad years nor squandered their windfalls on good ones. A healthy dose of gratitude and unwavering optimism were essential.

Kindness permeates every aspect of a family. In fact, researchers found that it was the single most important predictor of satisfaction and stability in a marriage. Kindness is not all about doing for others, it is immensely rewarding for the individual as well. Research shows that acts of kindness can boost confidence, happiness, and sense of control of the world around us. It affects levels of empathy, self-esteem, compassion and improves mood. Being kind can even offer neuroprotective factors through reduction of stress hormones like cortisol and boosts of serotonin and dopamine. Every descendant has heard the stories of how Henry Miller was an honest, brilliant and kind man. He took excellent care of his workers, something we are proud to still do today. He gave to the poor, establishing what was known as the “dirty plate route” which meant any hungry person who showed up on Miller’s land was given a free meal, provided the vaqueros had eaten first (hence the ‘dirty plate.’) In his will, Miller left substantial amounts to loyal workers and their families. This kind of kindness and generosity trickles down and has been incorporated both into the ethos of our farm business, and the heart of our family.

Educate your kids to the best of your ability, particularly on how to honor the Earth and oneself. Being well educated doesn't necessarily mean knowing calculus and literature; it can be anything from social-emotional intelligence to how to properly rotate crops or maintain soil composition over time. Learning about what goes on inside us and around us makes for interesting, inquisitive people. Teach teenagers to change a tire, cook a meal, and comfort a friend. Teach them to honor their feelings, the boundaries of others and the environment. Teach them how to apologize and how to forgive. Above all, follow their curiosities and embrace them. Transmission of knowledge through generations is ancient and powerful; many of the lessons you teach your children will be introduced to theirs.

Raising kids for the long run is about more than just promoting good behavior and encouraging character traits. It is also about escaping or minimizing things that threaten your lineage's health and longevity. Like a parasite that infects a crop, dysfunction can carve its way through a family, leaving destruction in its wake. Emotionally toxic things like abuse or disease are apparent in how they affect future patterns. Less obvious, but perhaps just as potent, is how trauma is inherited.

Mass cultural and historical traumas are carried both in the survivors' genes and their behavior. Personal traumas also leave their mark. Famed researcher Bessel Van der Kolk says, "the body keeps score" of traumatic stress; it is literally "encoded in the viscera." In that way, trauma can be inherited, just like eye color, money, or anything else your parents give you. Like a weed, it can take root and must be eradicated. It's easy to say, "avoid trauma," but much harder to enact it reasonably. Instead, experts suggest a healthy processing of sometimes inevitable trauma in a safe environment to take some of the power out of the experience. Therapies like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) for example, are excellent at helping people to reprocess their pain and eschew some generational transmission of their suffering. A recent study suggests that psychoanalysis can also help to diminish the corrosive effects of intergenerational trauma.

Finally, model good behavior. There are many influences in your child's life that are out of your control, how you behave is not one of them. All the lessons in the world are worthless if you're not walking the walk. Behave in a manner you would like to see reflected in your child. Be someone they look up to. Our family looks back fondly on those who have behaved with integrity as inspiration. We practically idolize Henry Miller. We also remember those who squandered what they inherited as cautionary tales to be avoided at all costs. Be honest, loving, and warm. Laugh a lot. Form close, authentic bonds that help children feel safe and promptly admit when you are wrong or behave in a way you wish you hadn't. Kids are taking notes in their brains and in their bodies and mimic what surrounds them. With any luck, these good habits weave their way through the family tree.

The author's farm in California's Central Valley. Photograph courtesy of the author.

The sunset bursts cotton candy pink over the statue of my great-great-great-grandfather in the heart of central California's farmland. A small fountain surrounds the bronze statue of the slender, bearded German man on horseback in the red brick plaza square. My kids leap over the waters from rock to rock. They pepper me with questions about our family's history. My tales of their ancestor sometimes seem to go in one ear and out the other, but today they’re listening intently. Perhaps someday they’ll tell these stories to their kids. We've just finished Thanksgiving and come to give thanks at the memorial of our immigrant ancestor, Henry Miller. His vision and entrepreneurship changed the history of the state and the trajectory of our family. The city of Los Baños still celebrates the "Cattle King," who founded it in 01889, and I'm teaching my kids to do so as well. Henry Miller knew a thing or two about farming. As it turns out, he knew a bit about families, too.

Announcing the Pantone Color of the Year 02123

In a cultural milieu suffused with technological progress and biological optimism, Pantone’s color of the year for 02123, Cochineal Red, speaks to the exuberance of the moment. PANTONE 19-1780 Cochineal Red, a resplendent shade of ruby, pays tribute to its namesake, the cochineal beetle in an equally bold display — by distancing itself from it.

While humanity has been using cochineal beetles for millennia to produce vivid red dyes in textiles, clothing, cosmetics, paint, and food products, the pigments used to create Cochineal Red© are derived from lycopene biosynthesis in yeast, a process that effectively supercharges an antioxidant and red-colored pigment already present in red carrots, papaya, and tomato. The resulting colorant is scalable, cost-effective, and fully vegan. It is, in essence, the union between bioengineered microorganisms and liberated ones.

In the 123 years that Pantone has been selecting an annual color, reds (as well as closely related pinks and purples) have made appearances 68 times. And for every one of those years, a bloodbath worthy of their sanguine shades ensues. Trillions upon trillions of these cochineal beetles, which are not really beetles at all but a species of Hemiptera known as scale insects, are farmed and pulverized for their carminic acid, or carmine, a substance that makes up around 20 percent of the dry weight of their bodies and one which produces the world’s most arresting reds.

“We chose this color because we think it is time to address the carnage of previous industry paradigms,” Darius Keller, executive director of the Pantone Institute, tells me. “While the 02115 injunction on insect farming for livestock feed and aquaculture may be old news, last year’s moratorium on all arthropod-derived bi-products in human food additives is groundbreaking. We wanted a color that acknowledges the brutality of previous centuries, but also one that expresses animation and alertness. The latter is especially important because we are trying to allude to some property present in conscious states, the same property that the architects of these protective laws appeal to when they increase the scope of animals whose welfare it’s our moral obligation to concern ourselves with.”

Though the evidentiary picture of invertebrate sentience may still be painted in the most ambiguous of grays, the precautionary principle is clear: we should give any living animal the benefit of the doubt. By this logic, although it is unclear that cochineal beetles and other scale insects experience any conscious states, “unclear” is enough to afford them some degree of legal protection. As it stands, there is an average of 110K insects killed per kilogram of cochineal in a practice that dates back to antiquity, ultimately amounting to trillions upon trillions sacrificed for the hue. In an era where mounting data sketches a portrait of sentience amongst other more sophisticated insects, the paucity of research on cochineal beetles is insufficient to suggest that they suffer while at the same time to convince us that they do not.

Whether life as a largely immobile sap-sucking parasite is pleasant, or valenced at all, remains to be seen, but the ways that cochineal beetles are harvested and processed are dubious for an animal that may or may not have conscious experiences. The simplest, and possibly the oldest, method to process cochineals was to spread the insects on mats placed in the sun, desiccating them. It was recorded that this method produced some of the best cochineals, which is just as well because alternative methods of killing and harvesting the insects involved submerging them in buckets of boiling water or steam or suffocating them with sulfur.

Some might bracket criticism of these practices by stating that these were different times. Science as we know it was in its infancy. Even some of the greatest minds of antiquity, such as Pliny the Elder, described scale insects as berries that turned into worms — undoubtedly a striking feat for any berry, but one which removes much of the onus of “slaughter,” while their turning into worms evokes a “natural” process of riot and decay, one which boiling or drying is only hastening. For generations people operated under a monotheistic worldview, which saw mankind’s dominance over the earth as preordained. As such, the red-hued slaughter of scale insects would just take its place beside the kosher or halal throat-slitting of blood-bearing beasts. However, these harvesting practices persisted well after people had the resources and instruments to know better about the constraints of speciesism or the underestimation of animal cognition.

As 02123 ushers in yet more victories against obsolete and immoral industries, we must remain chastened by the centuries of crunching cochineal carapaces. Uncertainty abounds in many human enterprises, and we do well to hold the precautionary principle close. Fortunately, there is great polysemy in red. There is caution as well as courage, passion as well as purpose. Perhaps it is unsurprising that it is here in red’s longest wavelength, where we chase the arc of the moral universe.

Ryan North

Consequences of Perspective

As part of the larger strategy to keep our decaying nuclear waste undisturbed in long-term storage facilities, linguists, artists, and scientists alike have proposed building monuments over and around the areas where the waste is concealed to discourage future generations from entering these toxic sites for at least 10,000 years. Linguists speculate that the English language will decay by 89 percent over the next ten millennia.

Only 11 percent of our warnings will reach them.

The following is an erasure of a paper published inThe Medical Implications of Nuclear War. The text was sourced from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine website.

Only 11 percent of the original document remains.

The purpose of this systematic war:

                          offer care

                          complications progressed

It became all

            impact has been , and continues to be

Subject of

                                       consequences.

                                                                                        uncovered to be confined entirely

The application of our knowledge has been done on subjects

Response to warning:

            Administer economy without nations.

There is, shortage of change,

We

            Pretend, We do not question, speculate, entertain possibilities.

Mutually assured

                                                              vulnerability

                                                                                         Casualties thought to be effective

under conditions for civil system.

            Blast-resistant citizens of an impending time.

This so-called crisis of realism a product of orchestrated flight targeted escalation

            We citizens under catastrophe have to be appropriate, even without safe

Persons responsible evacuate.

            The completeness devastation brings,

Suffering the subject of studies. We begin with a scenario then Megatons

            (detonation would be skeletal, contents blown into streets)

Leave no signs.

                                      This is the circuitry of the classified.

blacked out economy interruption to the data

  In the event of sabotage, fail. The nature of a glitch is to predict total collapse.

                                                                                          How long can a body carry on?

Maintenance of

                         the absence

                         the presence

                         of insect of radiation described by complications

                                                                                                   of time disruptions of static

  The consumer nature of commodities is a pattern of victims assessing material

                                      well-being from productivity.

A collapse of behavior, efficient, but impersonal An individual creates

            an image which masks the whole.

                                                                                         intimate in industrialized

                                                                                         objectification essential to nation

                                                                                                                             of emergency

Human: a disaster-induced suspension of highly-concentrated time

                 and again biologicals deteriorate to the raw units. Deplete the embodied.

                       Form the machines.

                       Forecast estimates

                                                                       medium of exchange rendered useless

Metallurgical growth

                       from

                                                                                   the totality within reasonable speed.

Peering Into The Invisible Present

Every two weeks from March to November, Chris Halsch walks a ten-mile loop near the Donner Pass, high up in California’s Sierra Nevada, for the sole purpose of counting butterflies.

It is one of five sites at various altitudes that Halsch, a PhD candidate at the University of Nevada, Reno, has been visiting with metronomic regularity for the past five years. At each one he retraces his steps, pausing every so often to jot down species and numbers in a notebook.

Along the way, he sometimes meets recreational birders or hikers who take photographs and use nature apps to identify species for fun. But unlike those random snapshots, Halsch’s notes are a coveted resource for scientists. Once he types them into a spreadsheet, each of his data points adds a new segment to a chain of observations that has been growing without interruption for half a century, in one the world’s longest-lived efforts to monitor butterfly populations. Like a relay runner, Halsch is extending a marathon of sustained attention that began 20 years before he was born.

Multi-decadal time-series of field observations are among the rarest and most valuable artifacts in ecosystem science because they help to overcome a peculiar weakness in our ability to perceive and interpret the natural world. Humans have developed powerful methods for reconstructing events in the distant past, from the birth of a galaxy to mass extinctions in the Devonian. We have built instruments that can parse the present down to the zeptosecond. But when it comes to the modest timescale of our own lifespans, we are like near-sighted moles.

Weren’t there more birds in this meadow when we were kids?

Doesn’t it seem like spring is a lot rainier than it used to be?

Are you sure it’s safe to eat fish from this river?

Our answers to these types of questions are notoriously unreliable. Think of the tendency to describe a single weather event as evidence for (or against) climate change, or the panic caused by invasive zebra mussels that, 20 years later, turns out to have been misplaced. Perceptions are distorted by selective memories, cognitive biases, political agendas and shifting baseline syndrome—the propensity of each generation to gradually forget past environmental conditions and accept present ones as normal. In an essay published in 01990, the zoologist John J. Magnuson wrote that this temporal myopia can trap us in the “invisible present,” a space where we fail to see slow changes and are unable to interpret effects that lag years behind their causes. “In the absence of the temporal context provided by long-term research, serious misjudgments can occur not only in our attempts to understand and predict change in the world around us, but also in our attempts to manage our environment,” he warned.

Magnuson was echoing a group of mid-century scientists who believed that some of the biggest questions in ecology could only be answered with field observations that were carefully structured and repeated at the same sites for at least two decades. The longer the time-series, the greater likelihood that the invisible present will “melt away,” exposing the complex and often unexpected dynamics of ecosystem change.

They had compelling examples to point to. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (01962) used a 20-year time-series of migrating raptor observations made by volunteers at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania to illustrate the devastating impact of DDT and other pesticides on bird populations. In 01972, precipitation samples analyzed by scientists at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, a 7,800-acre living laboratory in New Hampshire that has been continuously studied since 01955, became the first irrefutable documentation of acid rain in North America, and led to landmark amendments to the Clean Air Act.

And yet, with the exception of weather records that have been widely maintained since the late 19th century, long time-series remained extremely hard to come by. The effort required to visit outdoor locations and keep meticulous records, year after year, discouraged most scientists. Three-year grant cycles—still the standard in academia—made it nearly impossible to finance long-term experiments. The result was thousands of “snapshot” studies that look, say, at the impact of a single hurricane on the health of a mangrove forest in Key West, but almost none that describe the deeper cycles of damage and recovery following multiple hurricanes spread over 30 years.

Now, thanks to several converging developments, that short-term bias is giving way to an era in which long time-series could become a ubiquitous tool for understanding the Anthropocene.

In 01980, at the urging of leading ecologists who were frustrated by the lack of funding, the National Science Foundation launched the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program with the goal of financing multi-decade observations at a network of field stations throughout the United States. The network has since grown to 28 sites where some 2000 scientists—plus many more students and volunteers—gather data on a vast spectrum of ecosystem indicators. These observations have been quietly accumulating for four decades, providing the evidence for thousands of scientific papers, theses and books. But the raw data collected in the field—first in notebooks, later in spreadsheets and databases—were often saved in fragmented and incompatible formats that essentially hid them from all but the most dogged researchers. To ensure that more people would be able to harvest this data, in 02016 the NSF financed the creation of the Environmental Data Initiative, an open access data repository that has systematized terabytes of data from LTER sites and other sources.

Scientists quickly took note. In 02017, after a study in Germany based on a 27-year time-series showed a precipitous decline in flying insects, alarm over an “ecological armageddon” flared up around the world. At Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, biology professor Matthew Moran wondered if similar declines had been documented in the United States. He found some studies tracking individual species, but nothing that offered an aggregate picture of multiple species in ecosystems including deserts, mountains, prairies and forests. When Moran and his colleagues examined the LTER repository, they were amazed by the richness of the data—and the fact that no one had used it to look at the big picture. “We were the first ones to put it all together,” he recalls. Moran, who has since retired, assembled a 12-person team that ultimately reviewed more than 5000 insect time-series in the LTER repository. The resulting paper, published in 02020, revealed a much more varied picture than the authors anticipated. While some species have declined, others are increasing, and overall, there was no evidence of an insect apocalypse across these sites.

In the years since the founding of the LTER program, concern about climate change has also fueled a revolution in the study of climates from before the era of direct measurements. Even as scientists were tracking the rise in atmospheric CO2 (most notably at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, now in its 64th year of observations), new technologies were enabling the creation of proxy time-series by examining tree-rings, ice cores, lake and ocean sediment samples, pollen grains and other physical evidence, some going back two million years. Other researchers began to mine archives for human observations that were not intended for scientific purposes but can yield serendipitous climate data. Magnuson and several colleagues scoured archives for references to the freeze and thaw dates of lakes and waterways, including a river in Finland where locals have been keeping such records for 325 years. Yasuyuki Aono, a professor of environmental science at Japan’s Osaka Prefectural University, has pinpointed the spring flowering date of cherry trees for numerous years over the past 12 centuries by reading diaries and chronicles written by monks, aristocrats and public officials in Kyoto starting in 0812 AD.

These studies are exposing a vast reservoir of temporal evidence that has been hidden in pre-digital documents as varied as harvest reports, livestock records and ship passengers’ memoirs—but also in scientific papers whose titles don’t openly advertise that they include time-series data. Eliza Grames, a postdoctoral researcher at UNR’s Biology Department, spends several hours each week reading the freshly scanned pages of yellowed journals and unpublished dissertations related to moths. If she finds any time-series information, she uses data-capture tools to convert analog graphs into digital formats that will be accessible to researchers. “Sometimes the graphs are literally drawn by hand,” she says. No time frame is too short. “One multi-decadal time series is great, but if you find a thousand two-year studies and they are all showing the same trend, that’s also valuable,” she says.

Grames is co-coordinator of EntoGEM, a community of scientists that is compiling all available evidence about global insect population and biodiversity status and trends. She and her colleagues are sifting through more than 60,000 journal articles to both assess the current state of published evidence and surface data sources that have been overlooked, such as the research of Norman Criddle (01875-01933), a Canadian entomologist who devoted his career to combatting the grasshoppers that would periodically devour local crops. In the process, he left behind 30 years of observations on the relative abundance of several species. “We don’t have a lot of grasshopper population data from before 01920,” Grames says. “These records aren’t perfect, but they can complement other sources and help us better understand an issue.”

EntoGEM is one of several initiatives that aim to synthesize temporal evidence by conducting better meta-analyses of disparate data sources. BioTIME, a consortium based at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, is curating a collection of time-series that track the assemblages of species that live in particular ecological communities. So far it has gathered records on more than 600,000 distinct geographic locations, some going back 130 years. More broadly, large international repositories such as DataONE and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) are facilitating access to time-series as part of the movement toward open science and FAIR data.

Collectively, these efforts are widening the aperture of our ecological attention, enabling scientists to find and stitch together scattered fragments of temporal data into panoramas that tell a more illuminating story about the interactions that drive change. Unfortunately, the emerging picture is still largely focused on wealthy countries—particularly ones with long histories of field-based science. A map of the International LTER network, an association of 750 field stations that, like their U.S. counterparts, are making long-term observations, shows that more than two thirds are concentrated in Western Europe. Numerous countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America have no stations at all. Moreover, even as scientists like Moran and Grames are exploiting the new wealth of temporal evidence, it is not clear how this research will influence the wider culture, where the blinkered perceptions of the “invisible present” are still pervasive.

The trend that may ultimately overcome both of these limitations is driven, paradoxically, by smartphones. Non-scientists have long been a critical source of field labor for long time-series, most famously for the Audubon Society’s 122-year-old Christmas Bird Count, but also in hundreds of smaller projects that monitor other kinds of flora and fauna.  Now, smartphones with powerful cameras and apps such as eBird, iNaturalist, Seek and Picture Insect have enabled millions of casual observers to supplement this pool of dedicated volunteers. Despite the lively debate on whether smartphone usage in the outdoors enhances or interferes with people’s appreciation of nature, one fact is clear: because nature apps automatically time-stamp, geo-reference and store each observation in a robust database, they are generating potential time-series at an unprecedented scale.

In the 20 years since the Cornell Lab of Ornithology launched eBird, the app has amassed more than one billion observations by 700,000 birders from every country in the world. Carrie Seltzer, who heads stakeholder engagement at iNaturalist, says that more than 2.4 million people have made observations on the app, at a rate that has grown between 50 percent and 100 percent per year since 02012. “By October of 02022, iNaturalist had accumulated nearly 120 million observations, more than half of which have been classified as ‘research grade’ because the species has been verified by more than one user,” she says. Although observations in industrialized countries still predominate, iNaturalist users in the global South are rapidly catching up. In virtually every country on the planet, users have created dozens of self-administered “projects” that gather observations around specific themes. A group of spider enthusiasts in the Southern Cone of South America, for example, has so far uploaded 87,000 observations of 853 species.

Reivindicando a las Arañas, a group of more than 10,000 South American users on community science site iNaturalist, have logged more than 87.000 observations of spiders found in the continent's Southern Cone. Screenshot courtesy of iNaturalist.

This torrent of raw field data vastly exceeds what even well-funded researchers could ever dream of gathering with traditional methods. Not surprisingly, scientists have already published more than 2,800 studies citing iNaturalist data. One of them is Michael Moore, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver. In 02019, he was pondering the potential impacts of rising temperatures on the evolution of wing coloration in dragonflies when his partner introduced him to iNaturalist. “I logged on and saw that at that time, there were around 14,000 observations of just one of the species of dragonfly that I wanted to study. I realized very quickly that I could essentially answer this question using the data that was already there.”

In 02021, Moore and his colleagues published a paper showing that over just 17 years, males of several species of dragonflies have evolved less breeding coloration on their wings in regions with hotter climates—a change that affects their breeding success and internal temperature regulation. The principal evidence was citizen science observations from GBIF and iNaturalist. “Thanks to this data, we’re able to literally watch evolution take place at a grand scale,” says Moore, who last year gave a keynote presentation entitled “How citizen science is super-charging the study of evolutionary adaptation” at the American Philosophical Society.

Moore acknowledges that citizen science data presents numerous statistical challenges. Sudden growth in users and observations can create the illusion of population growth in a species that simply was not being observed in the past. Observations are concentrated in accessible spots near cities and roadways, and they almost never occur at regular intervals over multiple years in the manner of Chris Halsch’s biweekly butterfly surveys. But Moore shares the optimism of many other researchers who believe that the sheer volume of these observations, combined with advances in data science and artificial intelligence, are enabling researchers to correct for these factors and extract powerful insights from citizen science. He also believes that by getting millions of people to discover the joy of habitual observation, these apps will ultimately deepen public understanding of incremental ecosystem change—and support for conservation.

Halsch, who has walked several thousand miles while gathering butterfly data for his PhD, straddles the age of laboriously hand-crafted time-series and the future envisioned by Moore. Although the fieldwork can be monotonous at times, Halsch says on most days he relishes the prospect of being outside with his notebook, his mind temporarily free of all other responsibilities. He has also come to love the analytical side of the research much more than he expected. “There’s a real sense of importance of the work, and the tremendous power of a long time-series,” he says. “There are things we can do because of the length of these data that no one else can do. It’s a quantitative gold mine.”

Matt Forister, a biology professor at UNR who is Halsch’s dissertation advisor, worries that some young scientists are not achieving this balance between observation and analysis. “There’s so much veneration of large data sets these days, and of the computational challenges of interpreting them, that I feel like too many students are just training to wrestle with big data,” he says. “They feel like all the data is already out there—we don’t need to go collect it.” Forister believes that paying close and repeated attention to “the chaos” of natural systems in the field is essential to sparking our awareness of anomalies and generating new questions. Although he is a tenured professor with his own lab and he could easily delegate, Forister chooses to spend hundreds of hours doing field work each year.

It is a mindset he picked up two decades ago from his own thesis advisor, Art Shapiro, a professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis. Shapiro began monitoring butterflies at 10 sites in a transect across central California in 01972. He single-handedly conducted observations at all the sites for more than four decades, amassing data that has become indispensable to understanding the decline of butterflies in the state, among other issues.

Chris Halsch standing at the top of Castle Peak, in the Sierra Nevada. The specks visible in the foreground and sky are California tortoiseshell butterflies. Courtesy of Matt Forister.

Around five years ago, when knee pain was making it harder for Shapiro to maintain his grueling fieldwork schedule, Forister offered to personally take over monitoring five of the sites. He subsequently recruited Halsch, with whom he tag-teams to ensure that no site ever misses its scheduled survey. Shapiro, at age 76, is still visiting five of the lower-elevation sites every two weeks. Forister, 48, intends to keep doing so “for at least another 20 years,” and he is confident that younger scientists will be happy to take the baton and maintain the time-series “in perpetuity.”

Halsch, 29, expects to help train a successor. “I often think about the fact that ideally, no one will see this to completion,” he says. “I’m going to do this for as long as I’m here, and then someone else will continue it.”

Rick Prelinger

Join us in-person at the Herbst Theater for a special one night showing of a new LOST LANDSCAPES film by Rick Prelinger! Long Now Members and supporters of the Prelinger Library will get early access to tickets, which will be released the second week of November.

Prelinger Library Patron Tickets include reserve seating in the front rows of the theater. 100% of the funds raised via Patron Tickets goes directly to support the Prelinger Library, San Francisco's famed experimental research library that supports artists, historians, community members, and researchers of all kinds.

This year's LOST LANDSCAPES pictures the infrastructures, peoples and landscapes of California, centering on San Francisco’s everyday past and the futures we have tried to build. Casting an archival gaze on San Francisco and cities, towns and places throughout California where nature and culture meet, the film recalls moments in the history of our state's resources, the scars of settlement and its backbones: transportation, extraction, communication, travel and labor — all intersecting in a panoramic city/state symphony documenting the past and suggesting possible futures in an age of systemic uncertainty.

As always, this year's film (the 17th!) combines home movies, government-produced and industrial films, feature-film outtakes and many other surprises (including many newly discovered San Francisco historical images). As with all LOST LANDSCAPES events, the audience makes the soundtrack, and you are cordially invited to identify people, places and events, pose questions to one another and to the host, and engage in spirited conversation as the film plays.

We will also do a public livestream of LOST LANDSCAPES 02022 on a later date in December. Rick will be joining us live on chat to engage in spirited real-time repartee with you and fellow viewers! More information coming soon.

News from Now-here

It’s a curious quirk of utopian fiction that it consistently fails to imagine how utopias come to be. Characters fall asleep for hundreds of years; figures communicate telepathically from the future; travelers voyage to far-flung secluded lands, are shipwrecked upon mysterious islands or stumble into mythical spaces while lost at sea; a young woman is kidnapped and made Empress of another world that can be reached via the North Pole; humanity is instantaneously “exalted” when a green comet strikes the earth. In almost every fictional description of utopia, we arrive in the midst of things, in medias res, into a fully-formed perfect place – an “epoch of rest,” as William Morris put it in News from Nowhere (01890).

Many revolutionaries, on both the left and right of the political spectrum, see history as the inevitable unfolding of an ordained process – a sort of secular second coming of Christian millenarianism that presumes a future salvation so certain it radiates backward through time, generating its own insurgent precursors. But in today’s context of ecological collapse, we can take nothing for granted about the future. We’re inundated by speculative visions of a future planet under climate emergency. We don’t lack images for what is going to happen. So what explains the gulf between what we know about these potential terrors and what we are (not) doing to avert them? Climate change is really a lesson in limits: the limits of the atmosphere’s ability to absorb our waste, the limited ability of our economic and political models to deal with what’s coming, the limits of our control over nature and ourselves – and the limits of our ability to imagine alternatives to the way we live now. We are failing to act on climate not because we don’t know enough about it, or because we don’t know how to prevent it, but because it remains far from clear how to galvanize our enlarged concept of the future into action in the here and now.

The urgent task confronting us would seem to be a reworking of the revolutionary imperative to account for protracted, uneven and irreversible collapse. How do we plan for the future or act in the present knowing what we know? Without doubt, our planning horizons have shrunk as politics, driven by electoral cycles, focuses on the urgent and immediate. But might other ways of thinking through the short-term forge new connections between present and future? Can we imagine transformative change that is not linear or teleological but processual and that actively generates the future society we want?

In 02011, two months after the start of Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber identified “prefigurative politics” as one of the movement’s four characteristic principles (the other three were direct action, illegalism and the rejection of hierarchy). Graeber linked “prefigurative politics” to the creation of “democratic General Assemblies,” consensus decision-making and a range of mutual aid, self-help initiatives – including kitchens, libraries, clinics – all of which made Occupy a genuine attempt “to create the institutions of the new society in the shell of the old.” For Graeber, the spontaneous emergence of these practices attested to the immediate practicality of radical aspirations. In terms reminiscent of Gandhi’s precept to be the change you wish to see, Occupy was a kind of present-tense experimentation, developing and establishing political forms that “prefigure” the egalitarian society it sought to create.

“Prefigurative politics” has since become a core concept in contemporary anarchist thinking. The phrase was first used in the 01970s to capture a type of politics orientated around an ethically consistent relationship between means and ends, but it has a long history. Emma Goldman – the “high priestess of anarchy” who supposedly inspired the assassination of US President William McKinley, though she was not directly involved – made the landmark claim in her memoir, My Disillusionment in Russia (01923), that “No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the means used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the purposes to be achieved.”

All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical. To-day is the parent of to-morrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future… Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society. The means used to prepare the future become its cornerstone… the ethical values which the revolution is to establish in the new society must be initiated with the revolutionary activities of the so-called transitional period. Revolution is the mirror of the coming day; it is the child that is to be the Man of To-morrow.

Goldman, in calling for immediate social reorganization, was thinking about the long-term effects of present actions and structures, and the choices that become locked-in once a certain path is taken. The road one travels determines the destination one reaches. “Means and ends aren’t the same,” activist Cindy Milstein explains, “but anarchists utilize means that point in the direction of their ends. They choose action or projects based on how these fit into longer-terms aims. Anarchists participate in the present in the ways that they would like to participate, much more fully and with much more self-determination, in the future – and encourage others to do so as well. Prefigurative politics thus aligns one’s values to one’s practices and practices the new society before it is fully in place.” The concept’s recent popularity among organizers and activists reflects renewed attention to the radical end of the alter-globalization protests of the early 02000s. Unlike the trade unions, NGOs and political parties who also participated in these protests, radical groups rejected top-down organization, lobbying and programs aimed at the seizure of state power. Instead, they promoted anti-hierarchical and anti-capitalist practices: decentralized organization in affinity groups and networks; decision-making by consensus; voluntary and non-profit undertakings; lower consumption; direct action, such as land and factory occupations, urban squatting and digital piracy; and an effort to identify and counteract regimes of domination and discrimination such as patriarchy, racism and homophobia in organisers’ own lives and interactions.

Prefigurative politics also invokes a peculiar way of imagining time. In contrast to the orthodox socialist telos that sees revolution as a future event, prefigurative politics seeks to transform social relations now, in the present moment. The spectacular moment of revolution is replaced with the ongoing process of actually creating alternatives in the here and now, rather than waiting for a singular proletarian identity to congeal and the entire structure to be torn down and resurrected with new leaders. As the geographer Simon Springer puts it, “the politics of waiting — for the revolution, for the withering away of the state, for the stages of history to pass — are all rejected in favor of the realism that comes with acknowledging that the everyday is the only moment and space in which we have any tangible control over our lives.” Rejecting the assured blueprints of utopian socialists and Soviet planners alike, anarchists privilege repeated, concrete experiences of social struggle which give rise to unexpected forms of collective power and solidarity. Prefigurative politics is a continuous exercise of testing imaginary landscapes against the necessities and flows of daily life.

But if non-hierarchical social relations are to be enacted without the assurances of historical momentum, what remains of radical imaginations of the future?

One response – “perhaps nothing” – marks a recent strand in activist expression that attempts to absorb revolutionary accomplishment entirely into current ethical practices, dissociating it from the future altogether. This turn to the present has often raised controversy, described as a symptom of organizing networks becoming mere cultural scenes, abandoning revolutionary politics for self-seeking pursuits or so-called “identity politics.” But prefigurative politics does suggest a number of distinct tactical uses for utopian thinking in our current political moment.

The temporality of social change implied in prefiguration does not allow for easy declarations of success or failure. The question of when such an assessment can be made therefore becomes a central concern with powerful consequences. It also stands as a challenge and refutation to questions of political strategy. If social change is something that is not achieved but practiced in the present, it is less amenable to tactical deferrals of action or conversation as the supposedly most expedient way of achieving future goals. End-state politics is common in single-issue campaigning for policy change; lobbying, litigation and other instrumental strategies can be effective for groups seeking philanthropic funding, a political party trying to win an election, a radical revolutionary group attempting to overthrow a government, and so on. But much, of course, is sacrificed in privileging a single future goal; conceiving of and locking in a future has the potential to push out other, currently unknowable, claims for justice.

Our imagination of the future is no longer structured by traditional revolutionary expectations. A century or more ago, anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin who had experienced the revolutions of 01848 and 01871 could still expect that “when the hour of the People’s Revolution strikes again” it would raise the “simultaneous revolutionary alliance and action of all the people of the civilized world.” But any generative temporal framing towards the future must now account for tremendous growth in both state and commercial military and surveillance powers, the understanding that there is no keystone center of power open to definitive attack, and industrial civilization’s transgression of multiple planetary tipping points, as global resource-use continues to grow unabated. Any expectations for social change must be projected into a future shaped by an awareness of converging planetary crises: runaway climate change, energy depletion, ecosystem collapse, inequality, deprivation and conflict. Such an unstable, open-ended political environment makes it hard to sustain any fixed notion of future accomplishment.

If the affective space attached to disposition towards the future, long vacated by reassurance or expectant optimism, is now filled with anxiety, frustration and guilt, then prefigurative politics can sidestep this crisis – by avoiding an explicit disposition towards the future while at the same time seeking to shape an as-yet-unknown future out of the present. Prefigurative politics goes hand in hand with the desire for long-term, broad-horizon imagination. For meaningful change to take place, practices and relationships must prioritize equitable outcomes in the present. But there remains an investment in the future, for at the same time prefigurative politics is characterized by a notion of enacting hoped-for futures in the present. This is not a paradox to be resolved, as such, but rather a productive tension, a way to engage the concept of the future in order to explore what it means for us to act now. Practices and relationships are guided by an envisioned future and an awareness of the closure and exclusion that can come from fixing the future. Our actions today generate a future which is seen as the unknown product of the affordances and contingencies that will have preceded it; in which the pursuit of utopian goals is recursively built into the daily operation and organizational style of everyday politics.

To foreground the temporal paradox of prefiguration is to create a particular disposition to politics that is always unsettled and restless. In the orthodox Marxist revolutionary program the temporal framing is clearly forward-looking, with a present figure looking towards its future fulfillment. The role of the vanguard in the present is thus worked out backwards from the endgame in which it seizes state power. Only the grand narrative grounding this program, with its specific account of class and party, can offer a clear enough image of the future (a workers’ state) to form a model for present-day activism. Only a revolutionary scenario can make such symbolic projection from the future intelligible. This is not to endorse ambitious claims about a messianic streak at the heart of Marxism; the point is that in this scheme, the one possible – if not guaranteed – path towards revolution is already decided. In other words, whereas a revolutionary imperative is a means to an end, prefigurative politics is a means without end.

What becomes of this principle, if it is to address the inevitable consequences of industrial and neoliberal over-reach? One response may be found in the idea of “anxious” hope, elaborated by Bürge Abiral in her work with practical sustainability activists in Turkey. Unsurprisingly, activists promoting community sustainability, bioremediation, energy transition and permaculture system design are among the most attuned to prognoses of collapse. Abiral thus associates the idea of “anxious hope” with the grain of anxiety always attending the “belief that small actions matter… that it is not too late to act”:

Instead of being an opposite of hope, anxiety is a companion to it. This hope rests on thin ice. The desired results attached to hope, and the effects that are hoped for may never materialize, and the permaculturists are well aware of it… Instead of driving permaculturists to despair, the anxiety that they feel about the future accompanies their hopeful condition and all the more pushes them to act in the present.

Embracing the here and now of the everyday offers a deeper appreciation for space–time as a constantly folding, unfolding, and refolding story, where direct action allows us to instantaneously reconfigure the parameters of possibility. Utopia is not held up as “the end,” but can be invoked in order to assert the possibility of different alternatives and the revolutionary openings these may involve, the advent of a radical alterity here and now. As John Holloway, the Irish social scientist teaching in Mexico, argues in Crack Capitalism, “the revolutionary replacement of one system by another is both impossible and undesirable,” and the only possible way of conceiving revolution is as an interstitial process that involves the creation, expansion and multiplication of cracks – such as the Argentinian workers’ takeover of bankrupt factories abandoned by their owners, or the self-governed communities in the Mexican state of Chiapas led by Marcos and the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation). These movements, “cracks” in capitalist space-time, remind us that politics is derived from politeia, an ancient Greek term marking the singularly human practice of constituting a particular mode of collective life through the generation of multiple associations, institutions, boundaries, mores, habits and laws. Institutions may ossify, mores become oppressive and so on, but politics holds out the irreducible possibility that we might always constitute our world anew.

We need an anticipatory consciousness where the future is thought of as a collective autonomous pursuit of what the early twentieth-century philosopher Ernst Bloch called the “not yet”; in the interplay between the “now” and the “not yet,” the future exists not as a fixed destination but instead performs a challenge and disruption to the present. Activists today are not working towards a post-revolutionary resting point. Instead, we need to create the conditions for a kind of ongoing restlessness, or restiveness.

A typo in the first edition of News from Nowhere saw it accidentally subtitled “an epoch of unrest.” Maybe Morris did get that right first time after all.

Alicia Eggert's This Present Moment

The Long Now Foundation is presenting interdisciplinary artist Alicia Eggert’s This Present Moment, with an opening party on Friday November 4, 02022 for the sign's exhibition in partnership with Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. Centered around Eggert's neon sculpture This Present Moment, the exhibition provides a space where the passage of time is brought to the foreground, illuminated brilliantly through the words of Stewart Brand.

Alicia Eggert's work gives material form to language and time, powerful but invisible forces that shape our perception of reality. Her creative practice is motivated by an existential pursuit to understand the linear and finite nature of human life within a seemingly infinite universe. Her inspiration is drawn from physics and philosophy, and her sculptures often co-opt the styles and structures of commercial signage to communicate messages that inspire reflection and wonder. Long Now's Ahmed Kabil writes that Eggert's work makes contemplating empathy on grand temporal scales "feel as intuitive as looking at a clock to check the time."

In conjunction with the exhibition, Alicia Eggert will be giving a Long Now Talk at The Interval on Thursday November 3, 02022 at 7:00pm which will be livestreamed on our YouTube channel. There will be a limited number of in-person tickets for sale.

The opening party for the exhibition on November 4, 02022 will start with a Long Now Member preview at 5pm (Members RSVP here) and will feature remarks from the artist and a reception. The public is invited to join the opening from 7pm on.

Alicia Eggert and assistant Jess Green working on This Present Moment at Long Now's property at Mount Washington, Nevada. Photograph by Danielle Engelman

Following the opening party, the sign will be on public exhibit in Building B at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco from November 02022 through February 02023. The exhibition will feature large lenticular prints of Eggert’s work, a behind the scenes video of the sign's journey up to the bristlecones on Long Now’s property in Nevada, and the sign itself, sculpted steel and neon illuminating a quote from Stewart Brand’s book The Clock of the Long Now:

THIS PRESENT

MOMENT

USED TO BE

THE UNIMAGINABLE

FUTURE

Eggert’s work uses neon, steel, and time to expand the scope and possibilities of the carefully chosen quotes she uses in her work. In This Present Moment, Brand’s quote moves from its original form to Eggert’s subtly edited version:

THIS

MOMENT

USED TO BE

THE

FUTURE

And then blinks into nothingness before returning once more to the start of the cycle, bringing a deeper awareness of time and place to the viewer through the simple flickering of the neon sign.

Placed briefly amongst ancient bristlecone pines in the mountains of eastern Nevada, this image of the sign serves as a provocation towards long-term thinking. In the words of Long Now Research Fellow Jonathon Keats, the juxtaposition of ancient landscape and neon sign "establishes a literal relationship between the present moment and the long term, and physically models the essential simultaneity of multiple time scales."

This Present Moment has previously been exhibited in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, where it lends its title (and Stewart’s words) to This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World, an exhibition running from May 13, 02022 to April 2, 02023.

[image error]Stewart Brand with This Present Moment at Fort Mason Center. GIF by Justin Oliphant

Eggert's artworks have been installed on building rooftops in Russia, on bridges in Amsterdam, and on uninhabited islands in Maine, beckoning us to ponder our place in the world and the role we play in it. Eggert is an Associate Professor of Studio Art and the Sculpture Program Coordinator at the University of North Texas.

Long Now’s exhibition of This Present Moment will run through February 02023. We hope that you can visit Fort Mason Center and contemplate the Big Here and the Long Now through Alicia Eggert’s work.

Envisioning Our Shared Storm with Andrew Dana Hudson

The future is inherently a space of imagination. To think responsibly and comprehensively about what it may hold, any good forecaster needs to think beyond precise extrapolations and wander responsibly into the world of speculation.

Futurist, science fiction author, and Long Now member Andrew Dana Hudson’s work helps guide us into that world of speculation. Hudson’s work spans both fiction and nonfiction. As a fiction writer, he’s been published in Slate Future Tense, Lightspeed Magazine, Vice Terraform, MIT Technology Review, Grist, and Long Now Ideas. As a nonfiction writer, he’s been published in Jacobin, Slate, and Solarpunk Magazine. In this interview, Andrew discusses his new book, Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, as well as his approach to thinking about the long-term future, the solarpunk movement, and the notion of “Climate Repair.”

Courtesy of Andrew Dana Hudson

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You've got experience in writing about the future from a few different angles. You write various sorts of speculative fiction, but you also write a lot of non-fiction, as a cultural critic and researcher into similar topics. How do you see these different paths working together? What different insights do you get from these different angles?

In some ways I don't think of myself as a non-fiction writer, but there's a lot of non-fiction pieces on my website that I've written over the years. In many ways, the nonfiction pieces are more fleeting. You sort of write them for a moment and put your argument into the discourse and then things move on. With stories, I return to them more frequently for some aesthetic element or idea.

Non-fiction is where I make arguments, but I pretty much know what I want to say. Fiction is where I try to articulate something that isn't yet an argument, to unveil something so that it's there and then you can make an argument about it. It’s saying “imagine this other situation” and then figuring out what the conflict or the debate that world is having. Hopefully, engaging with that tells you something about our present situation.

Some of your nonfiction writing, in your newsletter and elsewhere, is nonfiction about fiction. For example, you recently wrote a piece about the different aesthetic ideas that people often associate with the future in science fiction – the common use of pods and wrist computers, say.

There are very few fiction writers who are just writing from pure instinct, right? Almost everyone is in this sort of big cocktail conversation and people are making different points. With speculative fiction, there are all these ways people have imagined the future; so many different ways that anytime you write, you’re speaking to this past stack of possibilities. It’s like a big Jenga tower and you’re plucking something out and saying, “Oh, maybe it doesn't go this way. Maybe it goes like this,” and you put it back on top of the stack.

So it's a conversation that we're all in. I hope that pods piece did not come off subtweeting specific people, even though it was inspired by specific stories that I had read and thought, “Oh, I hate it when people do this.” Don't tell him I said this, but the guy who I think gets me most annoyed about wrist computers is Kim Stanley Robinson, because he insists on including them even in his most realistic pieces. They're just phones. They can hold them in their hands!

On the topic of the Jenga tower of influence: Who do you feel you are in conversation with most?

I’m definitely building off of some of the cyber punks: William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson. Increasingly, my work is responding to other people in the solarpunk space. Becky Chambers’ solarpunk novellas have really seeped in my thinking. Malka Older is someone whose work I really appreciate. Obviously, Kim Stanley Robinson is someone who's engaged with a lot of ideas that I found really interesting. We both had climate bureaucrat books come out within a year or two of each other. There's a lot of people in this space trying to ask interesting questions about climate.

[Ursula K.] Le Guin is another author [that I’m influenced by.] I mean she's the G.O.A.T — the greatest of all time. Anything one writes about social change and how our social arrangements are constructed — anything utopian — probably nods to Le Guin.

Andrew Dana Hudson's "The Mammoth Steps" explores de-extinction science and interspecies communication. Illustration by Casey Cripe.

In that discussion you mentioned solarpunk. You wrote an insightful essay about solarpunk and its political dimensions in 02015, almost a decade ago. How do you see solarpunk as having changed in the years since you wrote that? How do you think it's had an impact more broadly on politics and political imagination?

It’s been a wild ride being in that space and having written this essay that people still come to and read and email me about on a regular basis. The main sort of takeaway is that there was a time where there was basically a small town's worth of people engaging with this. It's so much bigger right now. Now, one can no longer keep track of all the solarpunk projects out there, and definitely not all the social media pages, websites, and story collections coming out.

So many people have been inspired and that's great — that's the point. You want to be successful enough that the movement has its own momentum. But that momentum means that people run with it in directions you don't always anticipate, directions we were not talking about five years ago. For example, solarpunk has become a sort of guiding principle in parts of the Crypto/Web3 world.

I do take a little issue with the crypto use of the term. One thing that I feel passionately about with solarpunk is that one of the ways that's different from cyberpunk is that cyberpunk was about these technologies of abstraction. It’s about taking human life and bringing them into these abstract worlds of cyberspace and greater levels of abstraction. Solarpunk is at its best when it is talking about technologies that are not about abstraction — tech that in fact, de-abstracts and gives us more capacity to interact with material reality. Tech that affects food and water, healthcare, climate, and the land. With crypto, there's a hope that these are tools that could later have an effect on material reality, but right now it feels like it’s further abstracting things.

But then again, this is an open source movement. No one owns this idea and that's just the breaks. I don't always agree, but these are really petty fights to have. What's good is that you have so many people who see solarpunk and there's this magic click that happens in people’s heads and they have revealed some possibility space to themselves. I was ignited like that when I read Adam Flynn's “Solarpunk: Notes towards a manifesto.”

Over a sort of similar time arc the term climate fiction has also gone from a niche subgenre to a much broader idea, including in spaces beyond speculative fiction — in literary fiction spaces. How do you feel about your work in the context of climate fiction?

I mean, my book is called Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures. It is definitely climate fiction. I have an afterword in which I go into some academic detail about how the genre works and is formulated. There's been a lot of literary people who have taken up the clarion call that Amitav Ghosh put out with The Great Derangement, which is a useful book for anyone thinking about climate change. But it was a very annoying book for some science fiction writers who felt they had been writing about climate change for decades when this guy comes in and says, “No one is writing about climate change!”

But still, it's good that you have literary people taking this on. The shift that I noticed, totally anecdotally, is literary writers are starting to write more dystopian climate futures and science fiction writers are starting to write about climate solutions. Those are both valid expressions of the form, but it's just interesting to see sci-fi writers, the ones who come up with all these dystopias, sort of moving on from dystopia.

The way I tend to think of climate fiction as a genre is that all speculative fiction has an implicit theory of social change. Science fiction is all about the scientific method and technological development as a driver of social change. We invent something new or we discover some new principle and then science fiction shows us the ramifications as that invention or discovery plays out on the rest of society.

Climate fiction’s theory is instead that the key driver of social change for the next century is climate change. Climate change and how we react to it are going to be the biggest determiners of movements of people and changes in lifestyles and politics, much more than new gadgets. In reality, it’s probably a mix of the two. Right now, we need fiction that is interested in climate, regardless of which social theory it uses. It's good that there is so much of it, but climate fiction is necessary, but not sufficient. It is very possible for us to write a lot of great compelling climate fiction stories and still fail to mobilize the world to address climate change. There are still power structures and material complications that do not care what kind of future you write about.

There's an annoying number of articles out there that ask, “Can books save the world?” No, but we still need them. Climate fiction needs to be one piece of a huge tidal wave of culture-making that's a part of an even bigger tidal wave of general societal mobilization.

In some ways it's similar to the case of science fiction where Le Guin or Asimov are not the ones actually causing technological and social change to happen, but they're certainly inspiring people over the course of the decades after to start thinking about things in different ways.

I was listening to an interview with Eliot Peper the other day, and he quoted someone who said “if you talk to paleontologist about Jurassic Park, they say it's terrible, that it gets so much wrong about dinosaurs. But on the other hand, every single one of their grad students are there because of Jurassic Park.” Even if the stories don't contain the solutions, the compelling, striking ones can inspire people to work on these problems.

Let's talk a little bit more about the new book, Our Shared Storm. In the book, it's not just one future scenario explored but five interlocking ones with a shared setting but a different context and situation. What inspired you to kind of embark on that five-part division?

Andrew Dana Hudson's novel Our Shared Storm explores five different possible climate futures.

The stories are based on a set of scenarios that the IPCC uses called the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. They’re the core scenarios in the AR6, the latest assessment report. They're an influential set of narratives of how we deal with climate change, of the challenges we might have or the approach we might take. You read them and you think, “These are kind of climate fiction stories.”

I encountered the scenarios while studying sustainability at ASU as a graduate student, and I realized I could use stories to illustrate them. I came to this idea of wanting to try to eliminate variables. I would go and tell a story that’s set in each scenario but convey that these are different options. The difference between these stories are the results of actions taken in the now. It's a sort of experiment. Each story shares the same place, the same time, the same inciting events. I have the same characters show up in every story — they've changed depending on the state of the world, but the same at their cores. I ended up deciding to set it at the COP conference, the UN climate negotiations.  I went to COP24 in Poland and did an informal ethnography of the conference. A lot of that then went into the stories and trying to figure out where that institution is going to go.

The result is that it does something that a lot of climate fiction stories don't do, which is to show this as a live set of possibilities. In my book, there are several flavors of dystopian futures, a very utopian possibility, and one that's sort of muddling through. That's very useful in this set of issues. If you just write climate horror, it can be demoralizing. If you do something that's all utopian, like most modern solarpunk, it gets people excited to build it, but there is also a moral obligation to talk about how dangerous the situation is. So a book that is both utopian and dystopian at the same time, that shows us failing as much as it shows us succeeding is, I hope, useful to people.

I did an interview with Solarpunk magazine about the book and I said that it's not really a solarpunk book. It's not about the counterculture, which solarpunk tends to focus on. It's about the bureaucrats, the technocrats, and the people who are inside the halls of power. I hope that on a close read you can see that there are punks in most of these scenarios. Somewhere in the background, there is a counterculture that has some of these sensibilities.

Even as you are right in the halls of power, there's clearly a world beyond these halls. The story doesn't feel completely bottled in.

That took some doing, because at the COP you feel really bottled in. You have to go through these security checkpoints and it's all very climate controlled — literally. But it was important to sort of capture that feeling but also show the world beyond.

You've recently written a good amount, both in Our Shared Storm and also in non-fiction about the idea of climate repair. What does that term mean to you? How do we kind of get there both in terms of our political imagination and our political reality?

I use the term Climate Repair to talk about what happens after decarbonization: trying to draw down, remove, and dispose of the carbon waste that we've dumped into the atmosphere and caused this hotter planet. Decarbonization is about trying to stop the runaway train we’re on that’s headed off the cliff. That's a huge and vital project and more parts of society and political power structures are getting on board with that.

Even if we stopped emitting all carbon today, we would still be getting the types of horrific climate impacts that we have been seeing these past few years. A third of Pakistan was underwater. It is beyond words what is happening there. All the rivers of Europe are down to their hunger stones. This does not feel like a habitable world to me. It's going to be an order of magnitude worse by the time we fully decarbonize and stop global warming. We’ll hold the world to 1.5 or 2 degrees warming, but we're already at 1.1 and it sucks. We have to start thinking about the project that lies beyond getting to net zero emissions.

That project is going negative. It’s rolling back the damage we've done in dumping 500 gigatons worth of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We need to draw that back down. Maybe we don't go all the way back to the 270 parts per million of atmospheric carbon that we had before, but we don't want to stick around at the 400 and some ppm that we're likely to be at when we fully decarbonize.

[To deal with this,] people are figuring out all these different ways to do direct air capture, accelerated weathering, and soil carbon storage. To decarbonize, you have to find [carbon] sinks. You have to find reservoirs where you can put CO2 back into the ground as a fluid or gas, or grow a bunch of trees and you preserve them in some way that keeps them from decomposing and releasing CO2 back to the air.

Fossil fuel companies want to do carbon capture instead of cutting emissions, but really, you have to end emissions and then keep going with this. Otherwise, it’s this moral hazard that some people fear implementing.

There's a real danger that in 02050, we'll have achieved our emissions reductions pledges and people will say, “Okay, climate emergency over. Good job.” We'll be having climate disasters all the time, but that’ll just be the world now. And we've had an additional generation unfold. In 02050, people in their thirties may have never known a world before widespread climate disasters. They’ll not know the difference, and people will say, “I don't want to fund a million DAC machines, I want a tax cut.”

We have to be prepared for that, so we have to start baking repair into our climate ambition. Otherwise, it could peter out and it’ll be similar to what happened with COVID. We got people vaccinated, but doing anything more is hard and a pain and people are tired of it. So we're just going to live with lots of people getting sick and dying and becoming disabled because of COVID. So we just added something the equivalent of diabetes to the menagerie of human suffering.

To end on a more hopeful note: What work out there, or what people working out there in the world today make you hopeful for the future? What do you want to see more of in the world of the future and the world of building the future?

There's so much. People are really reimagining human life in incredible ways and figuring out how to redefine prosperity, what a good life is in thoughtful ways. There’s so much incredible work happening and renewable energy.

There are pieces of the problem that are constantly being unlocked. We keep plotting into the adjacent possible. That's really cool to see, especially with people who are really committed to justice and equity and various pro-social approaches. There are plenty of people out there to make a buck, but broadly there's a sense that we can and should learn from the foibles of the previous technological upheavals, where we advanced technologically but we did it in unjust ways. We had political structures that didn't view marginalized communities as fully human. We're trying to be better. We're entangled with lots of different kinds of people and lots of different beings and systems. That requires a thoughtful, humble approach.

Keeping one's eye on the ball of these ideas around climate repair: A lot of those ideas require a kind of long-term thinking. We must be prepared for what the debate is going to be in 50 years. I think that’s very Long Now. So I appreciate Long Now for helping instill that in me as one player in my intellectual journey.

Andrew Dana Hudson's work can be found at his website, https://andrewdanahudson.com/. Our Shared Storm is out now from Fordham University Press.

What If The Best Times Are Still To Come?

The first time I saw speculative futures used to shape cities, I was standing on the work. It was an April evening years ago, and I was headed to a client meeting. I hustled from my car toward the building in question, my arms full of rolled paper, when I noticed a series of questions chalked in block letters on the sidewalk below my feet.

I wish this was _________ the words called out. A statement followed by an empty line, stretching out like an invitation.

The sidewalk fronted an empty lot, surrounded by a chain link fence. Save for a few clumps of grass and plastic bags, the lot was empty. The sidewalk in front of it, however, was full. Chalked statements spread across the cracked pavement, each starting with the same phrase: I wish this was _________. Pieces of chalk lay scattered along the sidewalk’s edge, which previous passersby had used to fill in the blanks. I wish this was A PARK. I wish this was A GARDEN. I wish this was A GLOW IN THE DARK DANCE FLOOR.

I later learned that the effort was a replica of work by the artist Candy Chang. She had done a series of public installations in the mid-02000s, pasting stickers on vacant city buildings in New Orleans.1 Each was printed with the words I wish this was _________. Her stickers were a question and statement both, transforming boarded-up windows and weathered siding into spaces where people shared their dreams about what could be. It was a simple kind of speculative futures approach, an invitation to ask “what if?” and “why not?”

Vinyl stickers from Candy Chang's I Wish This Was project. Photo courtesy of Candy Chang.

Standing on the sidewalk that April evening, staring at the words chalked on the ground, I didn’t understand that bigger context. I didn’t know Chang existed. I didn’t know that “what if?” questions were fundamental to the speculative futures field. I didn’t know what speculative futures was. I just thought the phrases were a playful way to spark public conversation about the vacant lot’s future. People were voluntarily—happily, it seemed—brainstorming what the site could be.

I wanted to join, to skip the scheduled client meeting and add my ideas to the growing list. But since I also didn’t want to lose my job, I hurried toward the building.

Asking what people want vacant lots to become is one of many reasons to use speculative futures. Silicon Valley companies apply the tools to prototype new technologies. International governments harness them to shape long-term development strategies. Hollywood studios ensure the success of franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe by building on their principles.

The various approaches form an amorphous field, with little agreement on definitions or applications. To steal the words of researchers Shelley Streeby, Nalo Hopkinson, and Christopher Fan, I’ve come to understand speculative futures as “an umbrella … under which a wide range of strategies for world-making and imagining the future … are situated.”2 Although the tactics under the umbrella are distinct, they all use story-based speculation to explore alternative worlds. Peering into the future is what helps us reflect on current conditions and the long-term ramifications of choice.

It’s this gap between fantasy and reality that’s both where imagination lives and where real change can occur.3 Imagination massages the space between what could be and what is, transforming future uncertainties and hopes into present-day decisions. Speculative futures harnesses imagination to translate fantasy into reality.

For people involved in the work of building cities, that gap is familiar. Urban planning is a speculative storytelling exercise, one where alternative versions of city space are explored, evaluated, and enacted over time. Designers and architects envision new possibilities for districts, transit systems, and plazas, then work to build them in physical form.

Historically, the space between fantasy and reality has been key to promoting idealized visions of city life. Ebenezer Howard’s nineteenth-century plan of the “Garden City” was a speculative vision of what he saw as necessary change. This was 01898, at the tail end of the first wave of the Industrial Revolution, when urban centers were plagued by overcrowding, pollution, and disease. Howard proposed a radical alternative—move people out to the country and have them commute to work by railroad, trams, and (eventually) cars. His Garden City started off as an imaginary suburban ideal, but it was such a convincing solution that it dominated city making throughout the twentieth century.

Speculating about the future to predict and persuade is still a dominant part of how cities are made today. In 02020, the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels released a plan for the entire Earth. Titled Masterplanet, the project attempts to show that humanity can use already-existing technologies to have both a sustainable footprint on the planet and a high quality of life.4 While this kind of visionary thinking is inspiring, it promotes the belief that the right blend of technological tools, spatial strategies, and expertise inevitably leads to good solutions. A review of the project in Time magazine pointed out that “even in a world where the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed our understanding of what is possible in terms of collective responses to a global challenge, it’s all but impossible to imagine any single climate plan achieving meaningful uptake from industries, governments and communities around the world.”5 Like Howard over a century ago, Ingels focuses on the power of technological tactics and land-use strategies to predict a potential future and persuade others to agree.

Architects and developers have reason to present their ideas as predictions. Cultivating a compelling vision of what doesn’t exist requires more than imagination. It demands funding and support. An idea without the backing to bring it to life is just another idea. And backing is easiest to secure when the proposal at hand doesn’t offer a mere possibility of success, but a guarantee. Presenting a project as a certainty is a safer bet.

Yet certainty isn’t safe. Projects billed as solid regularly fall short of their original promises. Schemes that initially appear sure-fire can’t always adapt to climatic changes, demographic shifts, or funding gaps. Approaching city making as a process with guaranteed results perpetuates the idea that the future can be forecasted and controlled. That kind of thinking is dangerous. Summer temperatures will continue to spike higher than existing cooling systems have been designed to handle. Internet access and storage demands are already outpacing available tools. Even with the best research and foresight, urban life will continue to morph in ways beyond prediction. The past is not a sufficient template for what lies ahead.

Aiming for prediction also extends urban development’s long legacies of exclusion. For generations, the work of city making has limited public participation to minimize opposition and accelerate built work.6 Many communities have been dismissed, disenfranchised, and displaced as a result, setting the stage for many of the social and economic inequalities plaguing cities today. Prioritizing approval over collaboration reinforces those exclusive patterns, prolonging the narrative that cities are spaces for experts to shape. When imagination is a means for persuasion in development, the benefits of a particular design are rarely evenly distributed.7

Clinging to threads of certainty ultimately limits our imagination about what cities can become. Presenting futures as predictable requires grounding them in today’s logic. Yet the confines of conventional wisdom often turn envisioning alternative trajectories into impossible tasks. Because environmental degradation is progressing at increasingly rapid rates, it’s easy to assume total devastation is inevitable. Because exclusive planning is still the widespread norm, pushing for collaboration can feel impossible. Because privatization and deregulation have dominated Western societies for decades, many of us can’t picture a future without them. Placing boundaries around collective imagination makes long-standing issues appear increasingly intractable and dystopian futures more inevitable by the day.

By exploring what’s possible, speculative futures cultivates critical thinking about the present and imagination of what lies ahead. The field embraces the fact that what we call “the future” is a construct, an amalgamation of assumptions, interpretations, and inferences based on experience, research, and hope. Rather than presenting ideas of where the future can go as certainties, speculative futures works with those constructs, employing dynamic tools for prototyping, testing, and evaluating the ramifications of where our imaginations can lead.

Celebrating the space between fantasy and reality builds the resilience this century requires. Studies show that actively imagining the future cultivates psychological strength, helping individuals feel more prepared and resourceful during times of drastic change.8 Skill in envisioning potential futures increases our understanding that present-day choices affect how the future unfolds. Instead of craving extensions of the familiar, we can learn to find power in crafting proactive decisions. Doing so augments our personal agency, well-being, and resilience.

When practiced across communities, imaginatively working with the future builds what researchers call social resilience. Increasingly recognized as critical to navigating intense and unpredictable change, social resilience is a group’s ability to cope with adversity, adapt to challenges, and build shared prosperity over time.9 When imagining different futures becomes a collaborative process, the results augment our adaptive capacities.10 Developing shared visions requires and builds trust, cultivating the kinds of connections that help societies weather the unpredictable.11

Negotiating modern change demands the personal and social resilience imagination fosters. Technological, political, and climatic disruption will only accelerate in coming years. How these changes will play out over time defies prediction—there are too many inputs out of our control.

If we want to aim toward less-dystopian destinations, we have to get creative. Our survival on this planet depends on creating nimble responses to accelerating scales, scopes, and speeds of change. By creating containers for collective imagination of what the future can bring, speculative futures helps us create those responses together.

They do so in part by translating uncertainty into hope. As writer Helen Macdonald declared in the New York Times, “To keep hope for the future alive we have to consider it as still uncertain, have to believe that concerted, collective human action might yet avert disaster.”12 Speculative futures cultivates that hope by expanding how we articulate what the future can become.

Assuming that devastation is the entirety of what’s ahead is limited thinking. What if the best times are still to come? We owe it to ourselves to ask. Speculative futures are tools to help us in the asking and co-create the answers we find.

—

Adapted from Speculative Futures by Johanna Hoffman, published on October 4, 02022 by North Atlantic Books. Hoffman will be speaking at Long Now on October 12, 02022.

Notes

1. Chang’s work was a response in part to vacancies caused in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. A resident of the city, she wanted to start a community dialogue about what the many vacant buildings in her area could become. When she found local planning meetings to be overly prescriptive, slow, and low on imagination, she took matters into her own hands and printed the stickers (Chang 02020).

2. Streeby, Hopkinson, and Fan 02019.

3. Paul Dobraszczyk describes the dynamic in Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination, writing that “(t)he imagination is both an active agent—a way of constituting something—and also a transformative faculty.”

4. Block 02020.

5. Nugent 02020.

6. Smith 01973.

7. Yazar et al. 02020.

8. Sools and Mooren 02012.

9. Keck and Sakdapolrak 02013.

10. Fuchs and Thaler 02018.

11. Goldstein 02018; Adger 02006; Milman and Short 02008; Wamsler 02013.

12. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/magazine/dune-denis-villeneuve.html