Chapter 34. Is It Too Late?

[Ted]

For chapter 34 comments

[Ted]

Kim Stanley Robinson, California-based science-fiction writer and author of the Mars trilogy, 2312, and other novels..

(view spoiler)[I would guess this is the first time a science fiction writer has contributed a chapter to a State of the World edition. (hide spoiler)]

This chapter is presented as one single section, no heading, quite like a short story. And Robinson, master story teller that he is, has an interesting twist that I’ve never considered, which he keeps in his pocket for quite a while. It’s not a long chapter, but the argument is not easy to summarize. Hence I will need to use many quotes in the following to present a reasonably fair reconstruction of Robinson’s narrative. I sense that this needs to be done, because not only does he end the book on a guardedly positive note, but the story he tells is surprisingly similar to what I have come to conclude myself over the months of reading the book; so I want to be sure to tell it in his own words.

Robinson begins by talking about the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote, forever running off a cliff and continuing to spin his wheels in mid-air – until he looks down. Then it’s all over.

He then asks, “are we already in the air? … (is it) a foregone conclusion that we’re in for a fall?”

His answer is “no”, it’s still possible, if we did everything right, starting now and continuing for several decades, to keep the global temperature rise to around 2 degrees C, and to wind up with a sustainable future with the humans living well, and other species mostly still here.

But is it likely that will be the outcome? Again, his answer is “no”.

We just aren’t that good, either as a species or as a civilization – it’s hard to tell which … But either way, oh dear – at least one foot is off the cliff. Could be quite a fall. Must turn quickly in a new direction.

The question could be changed to How much damage will we let happen?, then flipped to How much will we save?, then (to get to the real question), How much of the biosphere will we save?

He reminds us that life is robust, so that anything short of extinctions can be brought back, repaired; but that’s no reason for complacency:

In the damage that will come first, the poor will suffer much more than the rich, both because the rich will be better able to afford adaptations to the degrading environment and because many of the poor live in the parts of the world that will be most hammered by climate change. This human suffering is both a moral and a practical issue for the richer part of the population … morally, no one is free in an unjust system, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out; practically, there is no firewall that will protect even the rich from the kind of damage we are creating, which ranges from endocrine disruptors to food crashes to infectious diseases to political violence, meaning terrorism and war. Nor is it difficult to imagine more than one of these impacts combining.

To change fossil-fuel infrastructure (energy, transportation, food as just the most obvious) “takes immense social effort”. (376)

What if some of the most powerful elements in our decisionmaking process decide to do everything in their power to ignore new information and stick to the very infrastructure that is wrecking the biosphere? This is, of course, not a hypothetical question. (376)

Robinson is convinced of the ultimate importance of science. This is where he introduces his twist to the narrative - that the two power centers of science and capitalism are “vaguely understood to be at cross-purposes,” and that “modern history could be understood as a struggle between these conjoined twins for primary control of humanity’s affairs.”

One view of their fight could portray capitalism as attempting to buy science’s efforts and direct them to reinforce capitalist ownership, while science could be seen as attempting to reduce human suffering, repair damage, and dismantle injustice, all by its particular method of discovering and manipulating the world. In Raymond Williams’ terminology of the residual and the emergent, which says that any given historical moment consists of residual elements and emergent elements engaged in a collaboration and a struggle, we could say that capitalism is the residual of the feudal system while science is what we named the emergent next system long before we recognized it as the post-capitalism it has been from its very beginning.

(view spoiler)[My, this is an entrancing and hopeful story – is it fiction or non-fiction? For the residual/emergent paradigm, Robinson references Williams’ book Marxism and Literature, pp. 121-27. (hide spoiler)] (all 377)

This line of argument is pushed along by contrasting the good that science can do through its ever increasing understanding of ecology and the biosphere, versus the blindness of the older system (capitalism) “to the realities of our biosphere as our ultimate life support.” (378)

This changing away from a fossil-fuel infrastructure is a major investment, and “our current economic system is telling us that it is unaffordably expensive compared with using the dirty old infrastructure; changing out would not be profitable.” (my emphasis) And although economics can change, “as currently constituted it (capitalist economics) supports the present distribution of power.” (378)

“Here is a case where science needs to emerge more fully as a form of political action, for the good of all.” We now do science better than we have ever done it, and its growing versatility and power “is why many intellectual fields have, to one degree or another, been scientized, to their own good; philosophy is now infused by brain science, sociology and anthropology and psychology are all collecting and analyzing data like never before.”

Economics should be given a similar infusion of the scientific method, which would start to turn it into a wing of ecology and of science generally, as it will include behavioral economics, biophysical economics, and so on. At that point we could formulate our economic plans within the paradigm of ecological thinking, with the biosphere regarded as the bio-infrastructure, with its estimated $33 trillion a year of unpaid services, all finally accounted for in a way that properly values and preserves it. (378-9)

“Economics as a field, is still so protected by power that it can ignore critiques from the other social sciences and humanities, and it does. But in the face of evidence of the damage being done by capitalist economics, pressure is rising for change … If scientizing economics allowed us to analyze and subsequently direct our activities in ways that helped us live more sustainably in the only biosphere we have, then all civilization would become in effect a project composed of a collection of experiments in improved relations with the planet.” (379)

Taking a long view, there is a possible future where “we will be providing ourselves with energy, food, water, transport and infrastructure using an extremely clean and renewable suite of technologies. Our population will have stabilized as a result of the full extension of justice to women and to everyone alive. We will be restoring landscapes and wildlife populations while still feeding ourselves … All these accomplishments are possible … Having seen the possibility, humanity can make this permaculture its project.” (379-80)

There are many things being proposed or tried today “to make the first little bends in the system that will curve it in that good direction.

We would surely learn more about
Mondragon,
Kerala,
Ecuador,
Cuba, and
Bhutan.

We would also find out more about ideas like
predistributed value,
microtaxing financial transactions,
treating necessities as public utilities,
full employment,
permaculture,
environmental repair,
gross national happiness,
the 2000 Watt Society,
carbon taxes as truing the cost,
intrinsic shareholders,
land tithing,
living wages,
steady state economics,
degrowth economics,
moral hazard,
systemic predatory dumping,
deponzification,
Leyden contentment indexes,
rewilding,
assisted migration,
mongrel ecologies,
cooperatives,
open source,
earth work,
earth credits,
the land ethic …

… We can see our present danger, and we can also see our future potential: a stable human population … living cleanly and well on a healthy biosphere, sharing Earth with the rest of the creatures who rely on it. This is not just a dream but a responsibility, a project. And things we can do now to start on this project are all around us, waiting to be taken up and lived.

[Mary Ann]

Thanks, Ted. I did not know of this book and will seek it out. Also, Robinson's contribution is congruent with my take on things, as well.