Soul of the Future: The Last Utopia

 “What is history?  An echo of the past in the future, a shadow of the future on the past.”

Victor Hugo: The Man Who Laughs (1869) 

Regarding the future, we come to the ultimate question of our time: Is there going to be one? If the soul of the future is in the stories we tell, what do those stories say about that?

 Before there could be stories about the future, there had to be a sense that there was something that would be different called the future.  The industrial revolution gave western civilization a consciousness of change, both extensive and rapid.  If the present is different from the past, the future is likely to be different from the present.  The question then was: What will that future be?

 H.G. Wells applied Darwin’s logic of evolution to define our sense of the future as change governed by discernible forces, by processes.  So there was a way to imagine a future, and tell stories about what the future might be (or could be, or should be), and that way was rooted in what leads to that future.  If you remember the future, you’d best anticipate the past. 

But then came the question that exploded in 1945, and shrouded the 1950s and beyond: will there even be a future?  The fact of nuclear weapons powerful enough to destroy civilization led to both attempts to predict outcomes of nuclear war (those Herman Kahn megadeath scenarios), and stories about how war could happen and what the consequences would look like in various futures.

 Now those questions confront us again, regarding the slow motion nuclear war we blithely call climate change or global warming, the climate crisis or increasingly now, the climate emergency.  And so we are telling stories about that.

 Some previous posts in this series were devoted to describing a kind of progression of atomic apocalypse stories.  At first—even before the first atomic bomb exploded-- there were first a variety of print stories, mostly in science fiction magazines, for a self-selected but limited readership.  A few post-apocalyptic tales briefly became best-sellers in the early 1950s. 

Then in the mid-1950s there were the atomic monster movies like Gojira/Godzilla and Them!  The earliest and best of them released suppressed fears in somewhat symbolic, mythical form. Then there were metaphoric variations: the invasion from space substituting for a nuclear attack, the subversion or monster from within expressing a range of related fears.  Political satire entered with Doctor Strangelove, and other stories highlighting the absurdities required to start nuclear war, such as the 1983 WarGames with Mathew Broderick and Ally Sheedy.  

 Then there were straightforward confrontations with the reality of nuclear war itself: quietly at first, with On the Beach (1959) and Fail Safe (1964), and finally with specific horror in Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1966), Testament (1983), Threads (1984), and the television movie that reached a huge U.S. audience, The Day After (1983).

 The Day After Tomorrow

 On the subject of the slow nuclear war of the climate crisis and climate calamity, there is perhaps more of a jumble, but a similar pattern. A variety of climate fiction print stories substantial enough to earn the genre name of “cli-fi” reach a self-selected by so far limited readership (though Richard Power's Pulitzer winner, The Overstory, is sometimes classified among them.) 

 Movies and television stories mostly have used climate and environment generally as a remote cause for apocalypse or dystopia, substituting it for nuclear Armageddon, though some popular stories (for instance, The Road) at best only imply a cause.  

There’s a symbolic dimension in substituting climate change for the usual nuclear explosion that revives monsters, as in the 2021 streaming series The Tomorrow War, or swapping humanity’s threat to the natural world as the chief indictment made by powerful aliens, as in the 2008 remake of the previously nuclear war-themed The Day The Earth Stood Still, or a couple of Marvel’s Avengers movies.  The animated Wall-E may function as the satirical Dr. Strangelove environmental equivalent, though deceptively gentler.  

Instead of environmental causes, some dystopias (notably The Hunger Games) tend to concentrate on the same social divisions that inspired the future of the Eloi and the Morlock in Wells’ The Time Machine future: the powerful and rich few and the many oppressed and poor.  Occasionally the connection is made that these riches are usually accumulated by destructively exploiting the planet.  

 This division is also inherent in the genre that is perhaps closest to the 1950s atomic monster movies in their pop symbolism: the vampire and zombie stories. Vampires are the upper class exploiters (he was Count Dracula, after all), sucking the blood of the faceless masses as well as the natural world.  The zombies are the embodiment of the faceless and mindless masses, maddened into swarming and destroying.  Though zombies may also symbolize the breakdown of civilization that could result from pandemics and environmental catastrophes, vampires more cynically exploit the veneer of civilization to mask their savagery.  As such, these stories can be seen as critiques and satires of this exploiting civilization, as can such stories as The Hunger Games. 

In the atomic movie age, symbolism and satire were followed by more realistic stories. As of this moment, the one hit movie with some claim to a realistic approach to the climate crisis was Roland Emmerich’s 2004 The Day After Tomorrow.  Though it sacrificed scientific credibility to enhance its dramatic story, it at least mentioned causes for a climate shift, and depicted some predicted effects, particularly in early scenes before the main action. The ice sheet breaking, the hail storm, the tornadoes caused in part by climate changes are among the effects that have since happened in the actual world.

 So we do not yet have the climate equivalent of The Day After or Testament—not even an On The Beach.  We don’t yet have a cause-and-effect apocalyptic story about climate.  But oddly, what we do have are climate crisis utopian stories told in realistic terms, set in the near future.

 After The Warming

 Despite the scornful cliches, utopian stories never pretended to depict a perfect society—just a better one. But in other ways, utopia as a story form has changed over time. In the early 20^th century, H.G. Wells introduced three variations: the “kinetic” utopia, or the utopian community built to keep on changing and getting better, the utopia that was spread over an entire planet instead of only a single isolated place, and the utopia set in the future.

 In his keynote address at the “Utopian Dreaming Conference” in 2015 at the University of California Santa Cruz, author Kim Stanley Robinson added another key ingredient.  It was no longer enough to describe a utopian society—this was just an exercise in modeling (he included his Mars trilogy of novels in this type of utopian story.)  A utopian story for our age has to describe the ways and means to get to that utopia, from this moment forward.

 Using these criteria, it turns out there have been several such utopian stories focused on addressing the climate crisis.  In the midst of some very hot summers, especially in the eastern US, Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature and several other books of warning more or less inaugurated the era of climate crisis concern in 1989.  A climate crisis utopian story emerged that same year, in an unusual form: a two hour television program by James Burke called After the Warming.

 Beginning in the 1970s, Burke wrote and hosted many imaginative hours of television on science and technology in their historical and social contexts, such as The Day The Universe Changed and the various Connections series.  The premise of After the Warming was a look back at global response to the climate crisis from the future of the year 2050.

 The first hour catalogued the decisive changes in the history of life on Earth, including the development of the human species and human civilization, largely caused by major changes in climate.  It’s difficult not to notice that the relatively benign and stable climate that supported the last thousand years of western civilization had completely blinded our leaders, historians and other explainers to climate’s role. But this hour is perhaps the most literal enactment of: To remember the future, anticipate the past.

 The second hour was a “retrospective” account of how human civilization felt the effects of what was then called the greenhouse effect, and how it then addressed the long-term crisis resulting from global heating.  

Wearing a simplified 2050 futuristic suit (which got the fashion right so far—no tie), Burke spoke of carbon trading as a means of limiting and then ending industrial processes that added greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.  There would be a United Nations authority in charge of managing these efforts, as well as responses to the ongoing effects of those greenhouse gases emitted in the past, called the Planetary Management Authority.  As climate effects become more pronounced (droughts, food shortages, sea level rise, huge refugee movement, border wars), the PMA even has a military component.  

 The utopian aspect of this future is that human civilization addresses each element of the ongoing effects while confronting the causes with a wide range of measures, from green energy to some ingenuous inventions and a return to old ways of cooling homes without high-powered air conditioning.  There are more challenges ahead in this 2050, but the far future of runaway climate collapse and the resulting end of human civilization are avoided.

 Now that we are more than 30 years into this future envisioned in 1989, we can see that the dimensions of the effects it predicts did not happen as early as it stipulates, and neither has the size of the response.  Burke tried to inject some political realism by projecting that the world wouldn’t take concerted action through the UN until the year 2000—a delay of more than a decade, which may have seemed so long a lapse as to qualify as cynical.  But then, the realities of the climate crisis were not immediately accepted in 1989, not even by all scientists in the relevant fields (as Burke himself found in post-program discussions aired on PBS.)

 Burke’s breezy, colloquial style at times oversimplifies both problems and solutions, but this 1989 program correctly assumes particular characteristics of the climate crisis that are different from other crises that modern societies have faced.  Some of these characteristics would not be more generally understood for years, even by those who advocated action. 

 First, there are profound time lags between causes and effects, between the greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere, and the effects on weather and longterm climate, including melting ice and sea level rise, higher temperatures, droughts, fires, flooding, storms and heat waves of greater proportion, and secondary effects like famine, water shortages, and more disease spread by insects who live through warmer winters. 

 One ramification was immediately understood: if serious effects were to be avoided, action had to be taken to reduce greenhouse gases even before these effects were evident.  That was to a great extent something new.

 Another ramification took longer to understand and accept: time lag meant that even if action in the present effectively reduces greenhouse gases, the near future will still suffer effects of past emissions. 

 A second characteristic is related but not quite the same: the importance of what became known as tipping points.  A rise in global temperature past a certain point could tip the climate into another state, that would likely last for a very long time—potentially thousands of years. 

 Later science suggested a series of such tipping points: polar ice cap melting that once past a certain point, won’t stop until completed, with devastating consequences to the world’s coastlines. And probably the most fateful tipping point of all: the point at which the oceans can no longer sustain life.

 Part of the rationale for tipping points involve a third characteristic: feedback effects.  For example, melting ice and snow means there is less white surface to reflect solar radiation, which leads to even faster melting of the ice and snow that’s left. 

 Because of these characteristics as well as just because of the nature of the natural world, scientists and policymakers had to face the sheer complexity of the interactions that make climate. Everything from deforestation and key species extinctions to the interactions of barely understood phenomena like clouds and wind were involved.

 But the “greenhouse summers” of the late 1980s came and went, and throughout the 1990s, “global warming” was studied and discussed but—despite several flurries of interest, including Al Gore’s book and film, An Inconvenient Truth—the climate crisis seldom made it to the top of the news and never high on the national or international agenda. 

 Then between 2004 and 2007, Kim Stanley Robinson published a trilogy of novels that constituted another climate utopia.  Known collectively as the “Science in the Capitol” trilogy, their author later condensed them into one volume as a single novel titled Green Earth, published in 2015.

 Green Earth

 This story is set in contemporary or perhaps an unspecified near future Washington, with some differences in the public figures. It is narrated chiefly by three characters: Anna Quibler, a scientist at the National Science Foundation, and her husband Charlie, an environmental policy advisor to California Senator Phil Chase, currently working on a climate bill from home while taking care of their toddler son. Frank Vanderwal is a West Coast scientist with an active interest in sociobiology and primatology (Robinson named him after famed primatologist Frans de Waal) who is working for a year at the NSF with Anna.

 Anna gets interested in the monks opening an embassy in the same building as NSF representing the (fictional) island nation of Tibetan Buddhist exiles called Khembalung, which is threatened by rising sea levels.  Frank is upset that the Foundation isn’t doing enough to confront the climate crisis, and writes an angry letter to its director, Diana Chang.  These actions begin the chain of events and relationships that carry through this richly textured novel. 

The climate itself becomes a character in probably the book’s most fabled sequence, when a superstorm crashes up the East Coast, seriously flooding subways and streets in Washington.  Robinson named it Tropical Storm Sandy.  Eight years later in the real world of 2012, another perfect storm, formed in a similar way, became Tropical Storm Sandy, and then Hurricane or Superstorm Sandy that did extensive damage in 24 U.S. states and several Caribbean islands, notably in substantially flooding subways and streets in New York City.  

 At about the same time as the fictional Sandy hits the East Coast, an enormous storm attacks the West Coast of a type that has also since become a reality (a result of the “atmospheric river,” a phenomenon that didn’t even have a name when this part of the novel was first published.)  All of this is closely associated with climate distortion, and adds impetus and urgency to concern and even action in this fictional Washington.

 Also a major climate element in the plot is the same phenomenon fictionalized in the movie The Day After Tomorrow: the slowing of the North Atlantic conveyor that results in periods of very cold weather in Washington, among other places.  One of the first actions initiated by scientists is a massive effort to add salt in key areas of the ocean to try to reverse the slowing.  

KSR

Though the climate plotline is not the only one in this capacious story of more than 1000 pages, it is central.  Eventually Senator Phil Chase is elected President and begins both governmental change and persuasive focus on the climate crisis, especially in a series of blog posts and conversations.

  Though climate tragedies continue to happen—including the complete inundation of Khembalung—the idea of science guiding policy leads to a hopeful conclusion.  In fact, the novel winds up being a comedy in the classic Shakespearian sense, because it ends like a climate As You Like It: good people restoring the state, gathered in nature for marriages (including one that is more than symbolically a marriage of science and power)—blessed by none other than the Dalai Lama. 

 No sooner had the final volume of this utopian climate story been published however, than real world prospects suddenly began to look so alarming that attitudes among those thinking and writing about the climate crisis shifted.  The possibility of even this utopia was slipping away.

 A World of Falling Skies   

From around 2005, scientists—especially in Europe-- were seeing the prospect of climate disruption coming much sooner than generally predicted: not necessarily the abrupt climate shift that fascinated storytellers but a worsening series of already known effects (floods, fires, ice melts, heat waves, droughts, etc.) and possibly some unknown ones, that were going to continue no matter what the world did to limit greenhouse gases.

 At first there were debates about whether sounding the alarm on coming effects would distract from addressing the causes of greater catastrophe in the farther future.  There was worry about “alarmism” either damaging the credibility of climate scientists and climate action advocates, or driving people into the numbed inaction of despair.

 But despite these fears, the writing about the climate crisis began to darken a few years later, in 2009 or so, as scientific observations—particularly of polar melting—were showing consequences not predicted to happen for decades even in worst case scenarios.  The rhetoric of “solving” the climate crisis (in Al Gore’s words) quietly slipped away.  Instead, various writers attempted to constructively confront the prospect of a darker future, hoping to prevent an even worse one, at least in the farther future.

 A particularly eloquent example was environmentalist David Orr’s Down to the Wire (2009.) The evidence that global heating was causing grave consequences, and due to time lag effects, would continue to do so for the near future, became his guardedly accepted premise. “The news about climate, oceans, species, and all of the collateral human consequences will get a great deal worse for a long time before it gets betters,” he wrote. “The reasons for authentic hope are on a farther horizon, centuries ahead...The change in our perspective from the nearer to the longer term is, I think, the most difficult challenge we will face.”

   The early and persistent voice on climate belonged to writer and activist Bill McKibben, and his 2010 book Eaarth acknowledged the new prospects.  His title was meant to symbolize that the planet had already changed from the Earth we knew, and won’t change back.  The best we can do for the near future is “manage our descent.”

 Also in 2010, Paul Gildings The Great Disruption was billed as an optimistic view because he believed that humanity will eventually rise to the occasion, though only after we “tragically lose a few billion people.”

 Journalist Mark Hertsgaard, who got onto the time lag consequences early, wrote about ongoing efforts to deal with the near and farther future of the climate crisis in Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (2011.)  (In a 2005 essay he called the two tracks “protection” and “prevention,” though in this book he reverts to the conventional and confusing nomenclature of “adaptation” and “mitgation.”  I prefer to simply call them causes and effects.)  Hertsgaard provides a practical mantra for planning along both tracks: “Avoid the unmanageable, manage the unavoidable.” 

In Apocalyptic Planet (2012), another important work of journalism and a book of deep eloquence, Craig Child visited places where climate distortion consequences were tangible, and to extreme places where one apocalypse or another already happened in the past.

 A major figure in Childs' long Greenland chapter is Koni Steffans, a European climate expert whose research camp Childs is visiting.  From time to time, government officials and others visit the camp for updates, Steffans said.  “What he tells people who visit,” Child writes,” is not that the sky is falling but that we live in a world of falling skies, and it is best not only to know your options but to make moves ensuring the worst does not happen.”

 The long-term worst is a severely hotter world that lasts for thousands of years, obliterating human civilization and most forms of life as we know them now.  But climate alone is not the only path to that profound end.  The Sixth Extinction (2014) by science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert details the increasing danger if not likelihood of the permanent death of most forms of life, all in one way or another caused by what humans are doing.  Climate distortion is a major but not sole cause of the extinction of half the species now existing on the planet, before this century is half over.  A more optimistic estimate is one-fourth. 

The element of extinctions emphasized another profound aspect of the dilemma.  Once it happens, extinction is permanent.  It is probably impossible to reverse it for any species, let alone a significant number of them.  Then changes begin in the ecosystem because of extinctions, and it is deformed in ways that humans can’t fix. 

 The same is true of other effects that are very likely at the end of the road we’re on. If the ocean dies—acidified and deprived of oxygen—people can’t bring it back.  If the North Atlantic/Gulf Stream currents stop, there’s no do-over, no reset button.  The only solution is to anticipate these effects and prevent them from happening.  This requires imagining a future before it arrives.

 Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about one climate crisis future or another several times after his Science in the Capital trilogy.  But when he returned to a near-future utopian tale centered on climate issues in 2020, he had a dramatically specific definition for what constitutes a utopia today: a future that manages to avoid a mass extinction event. 

 That’s it.  That’s all. But it looks so difficult to attain that it is utopian, in its several senses (including the pejorative.) Which in several ways may qualify his resulting novel, The Ministry for the Future, as the Last Utopia.

 The Ministry for the Future

 “I happen in the present but am told only in the future, and then they think they speak of the past, but really they are always speaking about the present.  I do not exist and yet I am everything.

 You know what I am.  I am History.  Now make me good.”

 KSR: The Ministry for the Future (2020) 

Published in 2020, The Ministry for the Future won widespread praise and interest, notably outside the science fiction community.  New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein extolled it and interviewed the author.  The book made several best or favorites of the year lists, including that of former President Barack Obama, who played a key role in creating the 2015 Paris Agreement, in which every nation on Earth acknowledged the deadly seriousness of the climate crisis and pledged to confront it.  In interviews publicizing the book, author Robinson suggested this was such an unexpected watershed achievement as to qualify as science fiction.

 By the summer of 2021, with its clusters of apocalyptic climate disasters and the UN climate scientists’ dire now-or-never report, Robinson’s very near future novel was already bumping up against reality.  The paperback edition scheduled for fall 2021 had a new cover, featuring the face of an old style pocket watch, but with no hands.  The future is now.

 In his keynote speech for the Utopia Dreaming conference in 2015, Kim Stanley Robinson provided the aforementioned criteria for a utopian story today: it has to be global, and it has to not only describe the utopian result, but how it was achieved.  He then described what a 2015 utopian tale might look like, with a lot of detail about world finance that seemed to stun his audience into silence.  But he centered his tale in the United States, because it was the indispensable nation, the obvious superpower.

 He had already set his Green Earth utopian novel in Washington, and largely in the United States.  But in striking contrast, his 2020 near future utopia seldom even visits the US and barely mentions its role, except as a reactionary government and a problem.  Confronting the climate crisis is left to the rest of the world.

The Ministry of the Future begins in India, with a climate catastrophe that is orders of magnitude greater and more horrific than the storms in Green Earth.  From at least the time of H.G. Wells (including his film script for Things To Come), utopian stories often begin with apocalypse.  Often these are the result of wars, lately nuclear wars.  This novel depicts their climate equivalent.

 Part of what made the imagery of nuclear war so powerful was the new element of radiation and its effects.  But many climate distortion effects are phenomena that might be awesome and terrifying but also familiar, though perhaps not on the same scale: floods and fires, storms and drought.  But what had not been much discussed prior to 2020 was the most obvious effect of global heating: heat itself.  

Summer heat waves are even more familiar.  Dangerous to some (the old, the unsheltered poor), getting through them was a kind of game to others.  Some reveled in them, as some people claim to love the hottest hot sauce they can find.  Illnesses and deaths from heat were hard to quantify, and the imagery of heat waves in the media was seldom scary: usually people dousing themselves with water to cool off.  At least before the summer of 2021, heat didn’t seem all that dangerous.  But global heating makes possible and even likely the combination of temperature and humidity that human beings simply can’t survive.

  In just its first twelve pages, this novel indelibly describes what an extreme killing heat event might be like.  In 2004, a superstorm flooding a northeastern US city was a stretch, if not much of one.  But this time, the event described here is more like the opening scenes of the 1936 Things To Come, in which a major city is shown bombed from the air a few years before such an attack actually happened for the first time: it’s an eerie look at an all but inevitable near future. 

 In this novel, such a heat wave covers a large area of India.  It is days and nights of the combination of heat and humidity that exceeds the human body’s ability to function.  Though there are more precise descriptions, basically people are cooked by the air.  In this event, the heat affects machinery as well as organisms, and very soon the power goes out, and with it the slim hope of air conditioning.  Old people, babies and young children begin to die.  In the one town described, people stand in a lake, but in the sun the water is close to the boiling point.  Everyone there dies, except one survivor.

 Across this region of India, perhaps twenty million people die from the heat. The government responds with anger and resolve.  It begins with the controversial geoengineering technique of scattering sulphur dioxide in the stratosphere to block solar radiation, to cause slightly lower global temperatures for a few years, much as the volcano Pinatubo did in 1991. 

former President of Ireland is model for Mary Murphy

The year before this heat wave, responding to a general lack of compliance to the agreed promises, a conference of the parties to the international Paris Agreements on climate sets up a new organization to “advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens” and to defend “all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves.”  This organization, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, is soon known as the Ministry for the Future.  It is headed by Mary Murphy of Ireland.

 Followers of fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson know of his predilection for naming one of his main characters Frank.  The author claims (perhaps with tongue in cheek) that he gives the name to characters who are not always truthful.  However, in his two climate-themed utopian novels discussed here, his Frank character notably gets action going precisely by being frank. 

 In Green Earth, scientist Frank Vanderwal writes a scathing letter to his boss at the National Science Foundation claiming the NSF isn’t doing enough to address climate change, which leads to action and a forward momentum for the rest of the story.  In The Ministry for the Future, the character Frank May does something similar, but the difference again reflects the new urgency.  This time, Frank briefly but forcibly kidnaps Mary Murphy to demand that the Ministry for the Future do more. 

 Frank Vanderwal became a somewhat damaged character in Green Earth, but Frank May, an American who wanted to do good by running a medical clinic where it was most needed, is deeply and permanently damaged in the novel’s first pages—for he is the single survivor of the heat wave in that town in India.  He remains a character for most of the book, but mostly as a quietly courageous friend to Mary, who is never quite sure why she needs him. 

Zurich

The novel covers some 25 years, ending about where After the Warming ends: around mid 21^st century.  The efforts to address climate and extinction advocated and orchestrated by the Ministry are various--technological (including the novel idea of sucking out the water underneath polar glaciers to slow their sliding into the sea), economic and financial, and a number of other ways that might be grouped as political.  Unlike Burke’s Planetary Management Authority, the Ministry for the Future has no power to compel nations or even individuals to do or not do anything—which is certainly more realistic for today’s world.  How it is effective, in partnership with highly placed government officials (notably in India and China) and—of all people—major bankers, is this book’s utopian substance.

 But there is also a darker side—groups like the Children of Kali, who use targeted assassinations and other acts of violence, some of it in cyberspace.  Even the Ministry has a “black wing.”  Both the ethics and effectiveness of such acts are debated, but remain as measures of the desperate moment.  That moment—this moment—is neither exaggerated nor minimized, which is sobering in itself.

 Through the “trembling twenties” and even after the Great Turn in the 2030s there are more catastrophes along the way, including a flood that destroys Los Angeles, and a couple of serious economic depressions.  But the world starts to look better, with more animals (including the Ghost Dance dream of the buffalo’s return) and fewer people.  The ruinous control of most of the world’s wealth by a few is largely over: there is more equality and broader sufficiency.  Airships (high tech dirigibles) replace jet planes, and on the oceans fossil fuel driven vessels are replaced by the kind of high tech sailing ships that brings this utopia more towards the one in KSR’s first utopian novel, Pacific Edge (1990), which he wrote while living for a year or so in Zurich. 

He uses a few narrative forms in short chapters (first person accounts by unnamed characters never mentioned again, “Who I am?” riddles like those presented in old school texts and children's magazines, and meeting notes and transcripts) in addition to the main narrative that mostly follows Mary Murphy.  Some of these interpolations are real highlights.  A chapter that is nothing but the names of a number of grassroots permaculture organizations introducing themselves, while functioning as an economical way of suggesting the hundreds of activities that contribute to making this better future, turns out to also be powerfully moving.

 In figuring out ways that an extinction event could be stopped and the future saved from the broadly fatal climate cataclysm, Robinson ends up with a classic utopia: a greatly changed but better world, that nevertheless saves the best of what’s still around. But it is neither perfect nor permanent, especially as climate distortion effects continue, and some of the environmental consequences (such as ocean acidification) are in a practical sense permanent.  But it is a kinetic utopia—built to continue to respond and change. 

 The novel ends with Mary Murphy, newly retired from the Ministry for the Future, and living in the kind of housing co-op that Robinson made up in Pacific Edge and now actually lives in. She is in the company of a new flame, the less than dashing pilot of one of those new airships, attending an event with centuries of history and continuity: the Fasnact, Zurich’s version of Mardi Gras. 

 Elsewhere in this novel Robinson mentions the statue in Zurich of 20^th century writer of mythic fiction, James Joyce.  In the original preface to his first collection of stories, The Planet On The Table, he conducts a dialogue with it, and the Joyce statue talks back.  Robinson concludes this novel with a circular Joycean flourish, in which the end is also a beginning, in Mary’s testament of stubborn faith in the future:

 “We will keep going, she said to him in her head—to everyone she knew or had ever known, all those people so tangled inside her, living or dead, we will keep going, she reassured them all, but mostly herself, if she could; we will keep going, we will keep going, because there is no such thing as fate.  Because we never really come to the end.” 

  Next post in this series: “Soul of the Future Concluded: The Culture of Hope.”

Awareness

Awareness

 Of a summer day, of what moves

 in the trees.

 Of your own departing. Of that branch

 no one else notices.

 Of time, what it carries, the sideways

 drift of it. 

 Of hiding important things because

 they don’t belong in the world.

 Of now. Of maybe. Of something

 different being true. 

 --Willam Stafford

Addendum: Native Paradigm in Flight

While broad concepts of Indigenous knowledge or the Native Paradigm translate into languages spoken in contemporary civilizations, a lot of detail, resonance and meaning is lost from the original language and culture.  Unfortunately, many Indigenous languages are themselves extinct, and many others are on the brink. 

 So we can generalize and say that Indigenous peoples live in deep relationship to the rest of nature, but what does that mean in detail, in specifics?

 One of the best examples I’ve run across recently is in an article on the BBC Future site by the aptly named Jim Robbins, author of The Wonder of Birds, about the various functions of local legends and stories about birds in local languages in Papua New Guinea. 

 Birds are a major element of the ecology, and Steven Feld, an anthropologist who had studied the Bosavi peoples for more than a quarter century, suggests what “deep relationship” to nature means in their lives:

" And while we may enjoy the trill of bird song, the Bosavi hear in the songs of 125 species near their village, a richly detailed ecological portrait. "They instantly know the time of day, the season of the year, what layer of the forest canopy the bird is in, what fruits are in season, soil acidity changes, the knowledge of the migratory situation, who's nesting where.

"Listening becomes a science journal, a system for sensing on an everyday basis and putting into memory all of the diagnostics we would be writing down or using equipment to measure," says Feld. "It's a deep science."

It can be so deep that it goes beyond our typical means of knowing:

" Felice Wyndham, an ethnoornithologist and ethnobotanist who works on the EWA project, says peoples she has worked with have the ability to move their consciousness out of their body and intimately sense the world, which she called a "heightened form of mindfulness".

"It's quite common, you see it in most hunter-gatherer groups," she says. "If you are in a highly diverse and sensuous natural environment, you are also going to be doing that with all of the organisms, the plants, the water and the birds – especially the birds – because they fly and it gives you a completely different perspective."   

Intimate knowledge preserved in local languages has practical application beyond the locality.  “A recent study found, for instance, that most of the Indigenous knowledge about medicinal plants in North America, northwest Amazonia, and New Guinea are to be found in one language in each of the regions."

 When ornithologists studying tribes  “realised that these cultures related to birds in vastly different ways than our own and in studying biology they were getting only a small, distorted picture of a rich, ancient and holistic relationship that had evolved over thousands of years,” the discipline of ethnoornithology was born.  Now there is an ongoing, online Ethnoornithology World Atlas, to which Indigenous peoples contribute. 

  That languages and the species those languages speak about are both going extinct together is not just coincidence.  Without the value placed in these species by those languages, humans aren’t motivated to save either the birds or the bird stories.

 Andrew Gosler, the research director of the Ethnoornithology World Atlas, teaches at the University of Oxford. "Half of our first-year students in biology can't name five British birds and 20% can't name one," says Gosler. "That's a common story across the world."

Yet, he says, one 19th century study showed that there were 78 songbird species in England that once had 7,000 folk names. "When those names vanished common local knowledge about their biology and behaviour went with them.”

A Swiss linguist in his 90s has gathered more than 100,000 folk names in many languages for 600 species of birds throughout Europe. “Every valley once had its own name for the same birds. They say a huge amount about how people related to birds across Europe for thousands of years," says Gosler.    ' "As natural experiences dwindle an emotional investment in protecting nature goes with it – that may be part of why birds are in steep decline."

"When you say to students 'Did you know that this species has declined 70% in the UK?' it means nothing to them," Gosler says. "They say 'Why should I care? I didn't know that bird existed until you told me.'"

But as they hear the bird folk knowledge of Britain or hold a bird with fluttering wings in their hand to band it, he says, "it is a life-changing experience for them. Then they care."  

A Face

A Face

 It’s just by chance, who you are,

 but given myself

 I take care of this being.

 Nobody else will remember

 its hunger, cold, loneliness: 

I will be reminded, and care. 

 This face, like an old watch,

 I carry wherever I go.

 Grandmothers, grandfathers, you pictures,

 you should forgive my regret:

 my wanting another. I carry it

 as you did. It belongs

 somewhere, and I am taking it there.

 On corners I let the wind

 have all the world, and I turn

 as a ship accepts the waves

 but is itself and has a voyage

 built into it, stubbornly. 

 The choice of being who you are

 is offered us, or being nothing.

 The mask of myself is an old gift

 nobody else took. So I brought it here. 

-- William Stafford

Illustration: Self-Portrait by Gino Severini

Soul of the Future: The Ghost Dance Future

a continuing series.  For previous posts, click on Soul of the Future label.

In the modern industrial and scientific society of England in the 1890s, H.G. Wells invented our notion of the future in his story about the year 802, 701, as experienced by his contemporary inventor of a technology to travel through time. 

 Meanwhile across the Atlantic in the 1890s, the United States was moving through the extraordinary moment of an ever-growing modern industrial society in roughly half the country, while in the other half the remnants of the indigenous cultures of the Americas were making what appeared to be their last stands.

 The cities and industries of the U.S. were in the Eastern half of the continent. There were three cities with over a million people: New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.  The largest city west of the Mississippi was San Francisco, with half the population of Boston.  The only other western city of any size was Denver, with some 100,000 people. 

New York City 1890s

 The country was still bedeviled by the racism that had literally torn it apart, Northeast to Southeast, and would continue to be. But this Eastern half was beginning to rival and even exceed the old European powers.  Immigrants from poorer parts of Europe were pouring into the ports of New York and Baltimore to mine coal and work in steel mills in Pennsylvania and the Midwest. Together with the raw materials from the Southeast, the eastern half of the U.S. already had the most productive economy in the world, with an industrial output twice that of the original power of industry, Great Britain.

 The established cities of Boston, Philadelphia and New York fostered art museums and concert halls to rival the European sources of their art.  This U.S. was becoming a leader in science and technology. Thomas Edison had his Menlo Park complex up and running in New Jersey, symbolizing the age of American mechanical invention. In 1890 American businessman and inventor Herman Hollerith patented a punch-card electric tabulating machine, a core beginning for what would become IBM.

 According to Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden, 18^th American proponents of industrial development had countered objections to massive industry’s destruction of the nation’s natural bounty by re-defining nature as itself a machine.  Man-made machines were “improvements” on nature.  

Carnegie

This mechanical metaphor became the dominant and guiding assumption in the 19^th century. The logic of industrialism and how it was accomplished was increasingly seen as the natural order. The same Darwinian principle of change by natural selection that formed the basis of Wells’ view of the future was twisted into the near-religious doctrine of the rich called Social Darwinism, and there were no more enthusiastic adherents that the American titans of the Gilded Age. "The growth of a large business is merely the survival of the fittest," said John D. Rockerfeller. “We accept and welcome, therefore, great inequality of environment, to which we must accommodate ourselves," said Andrew Carnegie.

 This America had developed rapidly and rapaciously. The forests that had escaped being cleared for farms, towns and cities had been cut and sold for profit.  Timber was still one of the major U.S. industries in the 1890s. The titanic white pine forests of Pennsylvania were gone forever. So was the once abundant passenger pigeon.  The relentless destruction of the natural environment would soon be met with some alarm in Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Era, which also addressed some of the human exploitation of corporate industry in The Gilded Age, with its immense gap between the richest and poorest, not to be matched again until the 21^st century.

  This rapacity was extended into the West, led by the railroads speeding mining interests and hungry settlers into lands considered empty. 

Meanwhile, the indigenous cultures that had flourished within the American natural environment for thousands of years had been almost entirely destroyed or removed from the East.  Some tribes moved West, or were driven there.  They were barriers to this inevitable progress. 

 The Ghost Dance

 For this clash was not only racial or national, it was profoundly cultural (which includes what we call religious.)  Native Americans lived in the world in entirely different ways. Some former Europeans found themselves attracted to these ways.  But most had such contrary beliefs and vested interests in maintaining their beliefs in the often vain hope they would enrich themselves, that Native peoples and cultures were demeaned, denied their humanity, overrun, exiled and all but obliterated.

heads of slaughtered bison

 It had taken more than a century to empty the East, but overrunning the West was much faster. It took little more than a decade after the mid-century Gold Rush for California Indians to be massacred, sequestered or enslaved.  In the early nineteenth century there were more Native people living in the Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the Missouri River than the populations of St. Louis or Washington, D.C.  But when Europeans and their descendants flooded west to the plains, they systematically wiped out the great buffalo herds that sustained Native cultures.

 Already reduced by disease and overwhelmed by numbers and mechanized warfare, only pockets and remnants of Native cultures were left as the 19^th century ended.  Cut off from their traditional sources of sustenance and meaning, they were forced into ever smaller and remote reservations and alien ways of life.  In the West the last free fragments of proud tribes were harried and harassed by the U.S. military. 

Arapaho ghost dance

It was then, in the last decades of the 19^th century, that a prophetic dance spread from tribe to tribe in the West.  The Ghost Dance, a solemn circle dance, was basically and originally a ritual to bring the dancers in contact with their ancestors and to foster the return of the world they knew, their land and its animals and plants, and their way of life embedded in that now scorched, invaded and vanishing America.

 Near the end of 1890, soldiers, apparently made nervous by the mysterious Ghost Dance, bungled an attempt to complete the peaceful and agreed upon disarming of men in a Lakota encampment near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Soldiers killed nearly 300 Lakota, mostly women and children. 

Frozen body of chief Big Foot at Wounded Knee

The Battle of Wounded Knee, as it was known to Easterners in the 1890s, especially when its officers received their Congressional Medals of Honor in Washington, has come down through history as the Wounded Knee Massacre.  It symbolizes the effective end of independent Indigenous cultures in America for most of a century.

 The 20^th century

 With Native peoples out of the way, the predominant European Americans were free to follow their culturally embedded instincts and philosophies.  To that time however, they had the rare opportunity to consult a different vision that had grown in the very soil of this continent for millennia.  But with Native cultures largely broken and Indigenous wisdom imprisoned and ignored, that opportunity was lost.

 America had been identified with the future itself since Shakespeare’s time, and now industrial America forged its future and the world’s throughout the 20^th century.  But for all its ideals and efficiencies, its heroic moments and titanic accomplishments, its astonishing technologies and abundance, there was something missing, an active flaw that threatened to be tragic.

It began with the heedless greed that felled the forests of the East, the tearing up of the Midwestern prairie, and the killing off of the buffalo in the West, an animal fitted to its environment, in favor of European cattle, never suited to survive on the plains (as no less an expert on the West than Larry McMurtry observed.)  Cattle grazing and attempts at European-style farming destroyed the prairie and the grasslands, leading to erosion, floods and the massive 1930s Dust Bowl.

 Green land turned to asphalt, coast to coast.  Throughout the century, poisoning of waters, soil and air by industrial waste and products became increasingly deadly and obvious.  Spurts of concern reversed some destruction—often temporarily—until attention moved elsewhere.  But the sense was growing that this oblivious destruction of the natural underpinnings of life could topple the future.

 The threats and perils of pollution and other environmental destruction were embedded in science fiction stories since the 1930s.  But ecology—the relationships within the environment as a whole—became a focus of both apocalyptic and utopian stories in the century’s seventh decade.

 Back to the 70s

 So from the 1890s, when our idea of the future began, we return again to the 1970s, when “the future” was emerging as a concern in itself, as a set of studies and a centering of political, economic, ecological and moral ideas.

 At the “Utopian Dreaming Conference” at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2015, author and keynote speaker Kim Stanley Robinson described the 1970s as a very different time, pervaded by “the feeling that anything could happen.”  The 1960s had opened the door to new ideas and possibilities that entered the mainstream academic and popular consciousness.

 Robinson cited some of the books that were widely read and discussed in the 1970s, many in paperback editions and some on Best Seller lists.  Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) led the parade of studies of the future mentioned here in a previous post.  But there were many others, also integrative, but with a different focus. 

 
Robinson listed The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, a 1975 best seller by physicist Fritjof Capra, and the pioneering work on cybernetics and systems thinking by Gregory Bateson, such as his Steps To An Ecology of Mind (1972).

  Be Here Now (1971) by Ram Dass was only one of many popular books on spiritual attitudes. Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973) by economist E. F. Schumacher was a popular and influential book throughout the 70s.

Robinson also mentioned Charles Reich’s very popular 1970 book The Greening of America, Theodore Roszak’s Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society (1979), as well as the work of John C. Lilly (best known for his work with dolphins and communication), Paolo Soleri (architect and designer of a model “arcology” as a self-contained human environment), economist Hazel Henderson, early clean energy advocate Amory Lovins, and Stewart Brand’s popular and influential Whole Earth Catalog. 

He might also have cited the persistent influence in the 1970s of Buckminster Fuller, the ramifications of second wave feminism and liberation movements, the ferment in education and the flood of other books following Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Postman and Weingartner, 1969), and the continuing deepening of work on ecology reflected in such books as Gary Snyder’s Earth House Hold (1969), Turtle Island (1974) and The Old Ways (1977), and the two anthologies Paul Shepard edited (The Subversive Science in 1969, Environ/Mental: Essays on the Planet as Home in 1971) as well as his own strikingly original and seminal books, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (1973) and Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence (1978.)

The 1970s were also the years that the first environmental legislation passed, and regulations and cleanups began.  The federal government established the Environmental Protection Agency, followed by similar state-level agencies. These became increasingly bureaucratic, spawning equally bureaucratic advocates, consultants and vendors.  Still, many cleanups proceeded, lands were saved, and ecological ideas continued to expand.

 Ecotopia

Kim Stanley Robinson experienced the 1970s as a young man in California, an active center of new lifestyles, and characterized this period as partly a consequence of the 1960s counterculture growing up and starting families, looking for the constituents and models of a future that follows from their ideals.  And it was from California that the most influential utopian novel of the 1970s emerged.

This swirl of ideas represented by these books and public figures became incorporated in several notable utopian novels all published within a few years of each other in the 1970s—something that probably hadn’t happened before in the 20^th century, and hasn’t happened since.

In order of their appearance they included: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974), Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach (1975), The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975), Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) by Samuel R. Delany  and Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (1976).  (To these might be added a utopian society of women only: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; though published in an obscure periodical in 1916, it did not appear in book form until 1979.)

 Piercy was a young but well-regarded literary novelist.  Le Guin, Delany and Russ were considered science fiction writers, and their books were well received within the science fiction community.  Le Guin in particular, with much of her best-known work published in the 1970s (including several other fictions with utopian elements) was preeminent: Science Fiction Studies devoted a 1975 issue to her work.  Delany later said that he wrote his book partly in response to Le Guin’s.

But these four books did not find a large audience immediately, though they all are now considered important and perceptive works, perhaps classics (especially in the case of The Disposessed).  It was Callenbach’s Ecotopia, however, that became the best-selling utopia of the 1970s.  Callenbach’s novel and his subsequent Ecotopia Emerging were the focus of the 2015 Utopia Dreaming conference.

Not only was Ernest Callenbach living in the midst of all this 1970s ferment in its capital of California, he was a book editor for the University of California Press, and regularly saw manuscripts about innovations and speculations in the sciences, engineering, education and societal ideas.  He decided to combine versions of the best ideas he read about and knew from experience in California, and integrate them into a practical new society, within a fictional framework.   The result was Ecotopia.  

The story, as Kim Stanley Robinson noted, follows the traditional Utopian form of a stranger to the utopian community being shown around.  Initially skeptical, he becomes a convert by the end. 

The story’s premise is that in 1980, northern California had joined with Oregon and Washington in seceding from the United States, creating the nation of Ecotopia.  In 1999, New York writer William Weston is the first journalist from the U.S. permitted to visit. The novel consists of his reports plus his diary entries as well as other first person narration.

Callenbach’s Ecotopia is a recognizably post-1960s California vision, but it turns out to have anticipated many changes that have since occurred, from C-Span and on-demand printing, urban pedestrian malls and mixed use complexes, to holistic health, recycling and various uses of green energy and organic materials (including to make moldable plastic for housing.)  In fact, readers may wonder what is so radical about a lot of it, but as late as the real 1990s, editorial writers were still scoffing at the idea that Americans would ever routinely recycle waste. 

Though some other aspects of Ecotopia appear in communities here and there (and its assumed attitudes on gender and race are questionable), its larger institutional, economic and ethical underpinnings remain visionary. Callenbach’s visitor tries to describe the basic Ecotopian vision: “...mankind, the Ecotopians assumed, were not meant for production, as the 19^th and early 20^th centuries had believed.  Instead, humans were meant to take their modest place in a seamless, stable-state web of living organisms, disturbing that web as little as possible.  This would mean sacrifice of present consumption, but it would ensure future survival...People were to be happy not to the extent they dominated their fellow creatures on the earth, but to the extent they lived in balance with them.”  

It did not escape notice that this core idea was also central to the ancient Indigenous cultures of the world that still existed, including American Indians.

The Native Paradigm

There was a great deal more evidence developed in the decades after the 1970s that supported this vision (despite the continuing counter-revolution becoming powerful in the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s), much of it the work of scientists. 

One result of these findings was a new understanding of evolution, and the crumbling of old assumptions that supposedly supported the Social Darwinism still implicit in global capitalism.  So even while scientists fought a rear guard action against fundamentalist attacks on the basic functional concepts of evolution, they were expanding and fundamentally changing their understanding of how evolution operates.

Lynn Margulis

New insights came from all over. Darwin derived his theory from careful study of plants and animals. But microbiologists like Lynn Margulis used 20^th century technologies to study organisms too small for Darwin’s microscopes.  She found new instances of symbiosis and other behavior that challenged the orthodoxy of the selfish gene.Organisms can self-organize and respond to environmental conditions by switching genes on or off, thus guiding their own evolution. Acquired information--knowledge and behavior--can be inherited.  Evolution is often co-evolution: creatures and their environment changing each other.

The old assumptions of how competition in nature really operates began to change, as well as the perceived role of cooperation.  Frans de Waal and other primatologists observed natural conflict resolution as well as altruism and empathetic behavior among primates.  Why hadn’t this been seen before?  Perhaps because scientists weren’t looking for it, and couldn’t see past their assumptions about aggression and dominance.

De Waal

Scientists were finding behavior in insects, birds and other animals that challenged old assumptions of what constitutes intelligence and consciousness, theorizing that both were much more widespread than previously acknowledged.  The borders defining sentience and life itself began to seem uncertain and permeable.

 They found that trees in a forest communicate, warn each other of danger and even help heal and cure each other, through their root systems and other chemical means. 

 The idea of what constitutes an independent, individual organism began to loosen. Even human beings were shown to be a complex of essential, interacting lifeforms, as dependent on the bacteria they carry as on the society and the natural world that nurtures them.  

The new physics inspired daring speculations on the nature and extent of consciousness in the universe. Despite a fundamentalist resurgence, even science and spirituality moved towards reconciliation and expanded understanding, partly through the Mind and Life series of conferences with notable scientists and Buddhist practitioners, with the participation of the Dalai Lama. These revealed analogous ideas and led to combined research projects.

Writers like William Irwin Thompson and Fritjof Capra in the 1990s began to synthesize and explain some of the ramifications of these systems of interdependence, complexity and connection.  Capra’s 1996 book, The Web of Life, opened with an influential chapter titled: “Deep Ecology: A New Paradigm.”  Christopher Peters, head of the Native organization Seventh Generation Fund, heard a Native speaker at a 1990s conference remark that maybe it ought to be called the Native Paradigm. 

For the new science was rediscovering by different means what Indigenous peoples had learned through close observation and interaction with their natural environs for many generations, and passed down through practice, tradition and story.  The anthropological record as well as the words of contemporary Indigenous leaders confirm this.

In the Native Paradigm, interdependence was both practical and sacred. Humans had responsibilities to the natural world that gave them the means of life. In the Native Paradigm, there is no contradiction between science and spirituality. 

"The basic principle of Delaware religion was that spirit was the prime reality," Paul A. W. Wallace writes in Indians in Pennsylvania. "All things had souls: not only man, but also animals, the air, water, trees, even rocks and stones." Another scholar observed that the Delaware "trod lightly through his natural environment, merging himself sympathetically into the world of living and non-living things." 

“Indians not only lived in nature but saw themselves as an integral part of it,” wrote Robert F. Heizer and Albert B. Elsasser in The Natural World of the California Indians.  “In Native belief, animals had an intelligence equal to man’s...The animals were often seen as providers...Among the Pomo and many other California tribes, all plants, animals, and natural features (stones, springs) were believed to have thought and feeling. A Nomlaki Indian told one ethnographer, “Everything in the world talks, just as we are talking now—the trees, the rocks, everything.  But we cannot understand them, just as white people do not understand Indians.”

 This understanding of the world was perhaps the underlying despair and the underlying dream of the Ghost Dance.

Almanac of the Dead

Leslie Marmon Silko

The 1960s also saw a new Native American political activism, and the beginnings of widespread cultural revival.  This spirit, plus the Native writer N. Scott Momaday winning the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, propelled a new generation of Native writers. As 1992 approached-- the 500^th anniversary of Columbus discovering a beach in the Bahamas—this generation was claiming a higher profile and new readership.  It included novelists Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch and Gerald Vizenor.  Several published new books around 1992 (with Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit one of three finalists for the 1991 Pulitzer), helping to co-opt the anniversary and focus it on the cultural survival of Native America.

Prominent among these novels was Leslie Marmon Silko’s epic and apocalyptic Almanac of the Dead, published in 1991.  It begins in the contemporary American Southwest—principally southern Arizona and Mexico—ending with the near-future prospect of an apocalyptic war.  Exposing the generally unnoticed but ongoing and violent war between the largely nonwhite underclass and the police as agents of the rich, this novel also deals with rebellion and survival in the long context of Native peoples, their history and tradition. 

Towards the end of this novel of more than 750 pages, a Native leader talks to a mixed audience about the Ghost Dance, which he claims has never ended (which is factually true: among tribes here and there, it continued to be danced) and which did not fail in its goals.

“Have the spirits let us down?  Listen to the prophecies!  Next to thirty thousand years, five hundred years looks like nothing.  The buffalo are returning.  They roam off federal land in Montana and Wyoming.  Fences can’t hold them.  Irrigation water for the Great Plains is disappearing, and so are the farmers, and their plows.  Farmers’ children retreat to the cities.  Year by year the range of the buffalo grows a mile or two larger.”

This, too, is factual, and the trend has continued into the 21^st century.  Human settlement in America is contracting into sprawling cities, leaving vast lands across the West where animals are returning.  Spaces elsewhere on the continent abandoned by the heavy footprints of humans and their machines are being reclaimed by woodlands and other life.  The movement for habitat corridors in a number of states is made easier by the retrenchment of European American civilization from the land. 

Deb Haaland sworn in as Sec of Interior

Meanwhile many Native American tribes, more powerful and self-sustaining thanks partly to casino cash, are showing the way with ecologically sustainable development.  In a year that the Poet Laureate of the US is Native writer Joy Harjo, the US Secretary of Interior is Deb Haaland, enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo, the same tribal affiliation as Leslie Marmon Silko.  One of her first initiatives was to join 50 other countries in pledging to preserve 30% of the world’s lands and waters in their natural state by 2030.

Applying the Native Paradigm in partnership with western and eastern civilization’s best insights and practices is becoming more crucial as it becomes clearer that the human future is facing its ultimate challenge.

For the same interdependence that was being found on smaller scales, has been shown to operate on the Earth itself.  The Gaia Hypothesis, suggesting that the delicate self-regulating interactions of life with is planetary environment is behavior of a single organism, was first proposed in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. 

Both controversial and inspirational, it set the context for examining the ways that the industrial age and heedless human impacts can threaten the balance that nurtures the current life of the planet.  By the 21^st century, these impacts were seen as so profound that scientists designated this geological epoch as the Anthropocene, in which humans are the dominant determining factor.

Lovelock’s research involved chemistry and physics, and Margulis focused on biology. Findings from all those fields and more for decades have proven that the interactions of the industrial age with Earth’s atmosphere have caused and continued to cause a huge shift in the planet’s climate, ultimately placing planetary life as we know it in peril, in the greatest challenge to the future humankind has yet faced.

The glib labels of the Greenhouse Effect, of global warming, climate change and even the Climate Crisis, are not equal to the dimensions of what humanity and all life on Earth are beginning to experience.  The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of the world’s climate scientists, has issued a series of accelerating warnings since the early 1990s.  Summarizing a draft of a 2021 report, the Agence France-Press (quoted by Rebecca Solnit in a Guardian article in July 2021) concludes:

 “Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions...Species extinction, more widespread disease, unlivable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas” are among the dire phenomena that will become “painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.”

If those emissions cannot be stopped or rendered harmless in time, human civilization and nearly all life as we know it, will disappear in a future that may not even be measured in centuries.

Eventually the human species could dwindle drastically in number for a much longer time, perhaps spiraling down into an unrecognizable and very long Dark Age.  Within some meaning of the words, human civilization may reform in that forever changed world, perhaps after thousands of years.  That possibility leads us to two more utopian stories, both by Ursula K. Le Guin, including one based on the Native Paradigm.

The Dispossessed

Aspects of a utopian story inhabit several of Ursula K. Le Guin’s fictions, but her 1974 novel The Dispossessed claims the theme in its subtitle, “An Ambiguous Utopia.”  There are some resemblances to Ecotopia: each reports the impressions of a male protagonist who is the first visitor to a place separated from his homeland years before, because one society revolted against the other. The principal female character in each book resemble each other. But Le Guin’s book is much richer, more complex and profound.

In The Dispossessed, Shevek is the restless physicist from the nearly barren moon Anarres, settled some 200 years before by rebels from the larger and more Earth-like planet Urras.  Against violent opposition, he accepts an invitation to visit Urras.  Chapters narrating Shevek’s visit to Urras alternate with chapters providing a chronology of his life previously on Anarres. 

This utopia is ambiguous in several senses.  For one thing, which planet is the utopian one?  Urras is the obvious candidate: with gleaming cities and carefully tended natural surroundings, apparently prosperous and obviously beautiful.

But interest in this book has turned to the moon Anarres as a utopia of unique qualities in utopian literature.  It is technically an anarchy with no central government, dependent on self-organizing “syndicates” and other local democratic institutions. Nevertheless, there is only one society, resolving conflicts without violence.

Theoretically, everyone can choose any profession or any job anywhere that’s posted on the global network, or they can choose to do nothing at all.  The society holds together and works through individual commitment to social responsibility and affiliation, or brotherhood. 

But how this utopia works in practice is itself ambiguous.  Because it is a planet of scarcity, urgent demands claim individuals who might otherwise make different choices.  Despite the lack of government, bureaucracies have developed, and shared values have shaded into social pressures to conform.  And while there is technically no buying and selling, and people have few possessions, there are still ways to express and inflict greed, envy, dishonesty and betrayal. It is the pressure to be like everybody else that unsettles Shevek and sends him on his journey.

Ursula K. Le Guin in the 1970s

 Shevek also finds a dark side to the apparent utopia on the mother planet of Urras, but that is a subject for the next—and last—post in this series.  For now, the utopian system of Anarres, its attractions and its flaws, assume additional interest because of the natural environment of Anarres.  In particular, the chapters depicting a serious drought have new relevance as the climate crisis accelerates on our Earth.  And while Earth will likely never be as barren as this moon (which has no animals or insects, and few plant species), ongoing extinctions of Earth species could rival those of the distant past with catastrophic and permanent effects.

Though their philosophy of “the means are the ends” is as much Taoist as political, the Anarres example of nonviolent anarchism (or anarcho-syndicalism) is an unusual if not unique system in utopian literature, especially applied to an environment of scarcity that resembles the usual post-apocalyptic landscape. 

The Anarres chapters of The Dispossessed could therefore suggest elements of a positive if not classically utopian response to the reduced circumstances of a society coping with one set of effects of a deformed climate.  But if global heating continues past predicted tipping points, even these conditions may get worse in the farther future.

A decade or so after publishing this novel, Le Guin provided a different model of what might be viewed as a post-apocalyptic utopia, relevant to a longer view of a climate crisis future. 

Always Coming Home

Adobe, blue clay, serpentine, obsidian:
floors and walls
of the houses of the town of earth.
Cloud, rain, wind, air:
windows and roofs
of the houses of the town of earth.
Under floorboards, under cellars,
above roofs, above chimneys,
to the left of the right hand,
to the right of the left hand,
north of the future, south of the past,
outside the walls:
the limitless,
the wilderness,
the mountains and rivers of being,
the valley of possibility.

by Stone Telling

Always Coming Home was first published in 1985 (with a mass market paperback available in 1987), though Le Guin continued to add to it, up to the last week of her life in 2018 for the expanded Library of America edition.  Some critics called it her defining work, and there’s some evidence that Le Guin agreed.

This is not a conventionally structured narrative, but more akin to “a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us,” as Le Guin writes of the novel form in her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”

  The framework is a kind of anthropological or archaeological report by a character named Pandora, who in an unexplained paradox, is from the past—that is, roughly our present—who is unearthing a culture from the future.  This is a twist on what the author Le Guin is doing: imagining a future society in the present, but placing it firmly and deeply within the Earth.

But there is also a narrative voice from that future: Stone Telling, a woman of the Kesh people.  As in nearly all of Le Guin’s science fiction, there is a journey with dangers and adventures, and a return to home, though like Le Guin’s other protagonists, Stone Telling is changed by the journey. 

Much of the book however is comprised of songs, stories, poems and dramatic works by various individuals that together with Stone Telling’s descriptions, create a quiet, luminous and complex portrait of a place and a culture, with human depth and timelessness.

Though the culture of the Kesh clearly has resemblances to what is known about Native American cultures before European contact, the context is different.  Some technologies from pre-industrial and industrial times remain, though on a much smaller scale, and often in different ways. (There is a kind of railroad, but the tracks are wood.)  The Kesh have a strong oral tradition, but also read and write.

Le Guin displaying Always Coming Home

While Le Guin does not use specific stories or events from any Indigenous culture, the life of the Kesh is largely based on the values and relationship to the natural world that are integral to the Native Paradigm. And without belaboring the point, it’s clear they do so consciously, deliberately.

But the Kesh and other peoples of the region with similar cultures aren’t alone.  In one short, startling chapter, Le Guin reveals that on “eleven thousand sites all over the planet” there are “independent, self-contained, self-regulating communities of cybernetic devices or beings,” who also maintain outposts elsewhere in the solar system as well as probes into deep space.

They do not interfere with the human communities, or interact except to diffidently request information.  Their only apparent purpose is to gather and organize information from everywhere.  They provide computer terminals to communities that request them, with free access to all stored information.  But the Kesh rarely use them, except for weather and fire warnings and other practical information, and otherwise ignore them entirely.

The apocalypse that changed the planet occurred so far in the past that the Kesh aren’t sure what it was. But they know of the floods from sea level rise, and northern California has acquired an “inland sea.”  Some scientists and science fiction writers (notably Arthur C. Clarke) knew the causes and potential consequences of excessive CO2 emissions in the 1960s, and these would be more widely discussed in the last years of the 1980s, but pretty clearly this prospect was in Le Guin’s mind when she wrote this story. 

Could Always Coming Home be a story suggesting the actual post-Anthropocene human future?  Ursula Le Guin often warned against seeing such fictions as prophesy.  But if civilization does collapse due to the effects of a relentlessly deteriorating climate, something like this society of the Kesh after thousands of years might be the best possible utopia. 

It might not take place in northern California, however; at least not at first.  James Lovelock and others have speculated that intense global heating may force remnants of humanity to the polar regions, including the Arctic and Antarctic. 

Recently, scientists have begun taking more seriously the evidence that the Maori of New Zealand—descendants of the Polynesian seafarers who were also ancestors of Native Hawaiians—reached Antarctica a thousand years before European explorers.  There’s evidence as well that some Maori spent at least part of the year in the region, many generations before Europeans arrived.

Today, according to writer Sabrina Imbler, conservation biologists are looking to the Maori and other Indigenous peoples for guidance in managing Antarctica’s future, according to the Maori principle of kaitiakitanga, which environmentalists interpret as guardianship and stewardship.

There and elsewhere, this may be humanity’s main hope for a timeless future as well as a return, not to the medieval Dark Ages evil of many post-apocalyptic stories, but in a coming home to a version of the world envisioned in the Ghost Dance.

      BK photo: Wiyot Indian Island vigil 2014