Beyond Dread: Rebooting Utopia

A left-handed approach to climate breakdown

IMAGE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang#/media/File:Yin_and_Yang_symbol.svg

I never wanted to have to write this blog. I never wanted to write an account of how consumer-industrial societies on Earth in the 2020s opted to tank their own civilisation. I never wanted to have to track the ongoing, mounting ecological and climate-related disasters occurring non-stop across the surface of the Earth.

No. I wanted to write about how industrial-consumer societies, despite difficulties, were beginning to solve their ‘wicked problems’ and grow up. I wanted to write in a time when the future looked likely to be better than the present. A time that was more benign, more exciting, replete with adventure and excitement. I wanted to write in and about a place that from our perspective looks like utopia.

But perhaps our perspective has become too limited.

Rishi Sunak goes for broke

A recent sequence of events in the UK:

• Civil Service World announces the first overhaul of the UK’s risk register since 2020. Climate change is to be dropped from the register.

• On Monday 31st July, the Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vows to “max out” fossil fuel reserves. On a visit to Scotland, he promised to offer over 100 new licenses to fossil fuel companies for the North Sea.

• On 3rd August, five Greenpeace protestors were arrested after a rooftop protest on Sunak’s North Yorkshire mansion. They had draped the manor with an oil-black fabric.

• On the 4th August, the UK Department of forestry and agriculture is ordered to cut ties with Greenpeace.

• On 10th August, Greenpeace published an open letter to Rishi Sunak, accusing his government of adopting a “bunker mentality.”

• At the Green Gathering, the Mayor of Glastonbury revealed how right-wing think-tanks have been able to turn veteran environmentalists — in her words, “vulnerable people” —into conspiracy-advocating reactionaries and climate skeptics.

At the same time:

• On the 14th August, the BBC reported that the death-toll of the Hawaiian fires had risen to 93 in the state’s deadliest natural disaster.

• Heatwaves ‘surged’ causing deaths in Phoenix as the state governor declared a ‘heat emergency.’

• ‘Huge’ coral bleaching was reported in the Great Barrier Reef and in America, due to overheating oceans.

• Extreme events continued to unfold in the Antarctic, as the summer ice minimum record was once again broken.

• There was a mid-winter heatwave in South America. Chile experienced historical highs, towards 40 degrees celsius.

• Orange Juice prices were set to surge as US crops were ‘ravaged’ by climate and disease.

• A UN expert warned that global heating would likely hit food supplies before we hit 1.5 degrees celsius of warming.

It’s hard not to feel sucker-punched after reading these reports. The bad news seems relentless, and getting worse. The toboggan-ride to hell continues. But like Bill McKibben, I find the reaction to it far worse. This goes beyond right-wing politicians: yesterday, in the gym, I heard two people discuss the Just Stop Oil protestors in less than flattering terms. Such sentiments are not uncommon in my neck of the woods. (And, I suspect, are mostly tabloid-inspired). For me this is as bizarre as a Londoner in 1940 complaining about noisy air-raid sirens just prior to the massed arrival of the Luftwaffe.

And it’s taken its toll. I’ve felt like a dead man walking in the last few weeks. I’ve had a dawning awareness that I can’t continue in such a zombified state. That I need to do something to go beyond this terrible, nightmarish helplessness. Psychologically, such ‘learned helplessness’ is not good. Learned helplessness is what happens when you get exposed to repeated painful stimuli beyond your control. Essentially, you end up curled in a whimpering ball.

There have recently been debates in environmental circles about whether or not you need ‘hope’ to face climate breakdown. Some people claim you need hope to take action, others claim that “stubborn optimism” is part of the problem and may worsen the disaster. Both sides of this debate make important points, but it seems likely that some people will need ‘hope’ and others won’t. Realism is one alternative, although this doesn’t strike me as sufficient. Something more is needed.

I trust that everyone who’s reading Cataclysmic knows that the human species is in very serious trouble. I trust that they know that humanity’s overall response (or non-response) is making things worse. Culturally speaking, we seem trapped in a cul-de-sac. I think that this has a lot to do with the aggressive pushing of the idea that There Is No Alternative to the way we’re currently living. This idea of course benefits the fossil-fuel companies, because we’re living in a fossil-fuel powered civilisation. But I’d suggest that it goes deeper. I think that we’ve got to the point where many people cannot imagine how life might be different. And this failure of imagination, at this current historical moment, is what’s damning us.

Seeking inspiration: two left-handed utopians

Two people that I regularly turn to for inspiration in hard times are the science fiction writers Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson. I like each for different reasons…. Actually, that’s an understatement. Both Le Guin and Robinson have been massively influential on my life and thought. For me, they’ve offered crucial, if somewhat contrasting, frameworks for imagining the present and future of the world.

Ursula Le Guin (1929—2018) was one of the most significant science fiction writers of the ‘New Wave’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Her key works include The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Earthsea series and Always Coming Home. The Left Hand is about a world where people most of the time have no gender. For short periods called kemmer they spontaneously become either male or female. The Dispossessed depicts two very different societies, one on the planet Urras and the other on its moon, Anarres. Urras is capitalist and patriarchal, but Anarres is anarchist. The Earthsea series concerns a boy who goes to wizard school (sound familiar? The first book was written in the sixties….) And Always Coming Home is a lengthy account of the Kesh people, who live in far future, post-collapse California.

Le Guin opened up possibilities for me. I first read her in the 1990s, when I was also dabbling with anarchism. I’d read Peter Marshall’s voluminous history of anarchist thought Demanding the Impossible, but it took The Dispossessed to bring some of the rather dry political ideas to life. What I liked about The Dispossessed was that Le Guin confronted the weaknesses of an anarchist regime. The story concerns Shevek, a brilliant physicist from Annares who must move to Urras because an anarchist society can’t easily accommodate exceptional intelligence. But Shevek also finds Urras a hard place to live. He has a disastrous sexual encounter, and realises that his work will be used to develop weapons.

So The Dispossessed does not shrink from depicting the strengths and weaknesses of both regimes. In fact, in some senses the two societies compliment each other. This reflects the yin-yang principle of taoism; the Tao Te Ching being a crucial influence for Le Guin’s thought.

Le Guin was very, very wise. One essay I often return to is “A Left Handed Commencement Address” (In Dancing at the Edge of the World, Gollancz, 1989). In this, Le Guin explicitly rejects ‘success.’

“Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it.”

Instead, Le Guin talks about failure. About how to live in the ‘dark places’ of ‘exile’ that “our rationalising culture of success denies.” This is, she says, a country inhabited by women and by men who don’t play the macho-power games of mainstream culture.

“And when you fail, are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that the darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is.”

I first read this essay in Brighton, in 2003, during a time when my life was falling apart. I was falling into severe depression, I was heavily in debt and I was on the point of being made homeless. I’d lost my job and I felt like my life was an utter failure. This essay was a lifeline. It helped me to understand that I’d unconsciously absorbed the rotten values of a “rationalising culture of success” and that I was already in a ‘country’ that was potentially far more habitable. This is a lesson that I suspect many of us are going to have to learn, and re-learn, as things get tougher in the coming months and years.

More recently, in 2014, Le Guin made a speech that ‘went viral’ after receiving the lifetime achievement award at the 2014 National Book Awards. Her words have since proven to be highly prophetic:

“I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. ”

One of the greatest honours of my life was to be asked to speak on the Ursula Le Guin commemorative panel at the Eastercon Science Fiction Convention at Harrogate in 2018. Here’s an except from my blog diary:

I headed back to the Le Guin panel. Edward James, who was chairing the panel, had asked us to pick four ‘favorites’ and I’d made notes abecause I didn’t want to make an idiot on myself on a panel with Nnedi Okorafor! (Nnedi is a very famous contemporary writer of SF and Fantasy).

Other panellists were Ruth Booth and my friend Kari Sperring, a committee member who’d stepped in a little late to replace another panellist. Kari said on the panel that she was a little tired, which was understandable because she’d been working really hard all weekend, running hither and yon like a fast moving thing.

The panel went well and I think people enjoyed it, although I was glad to have taken notes. Le Guin’s essay titles aren’t always very rememberable, as in ‘A non-Euclidean view of California as a cold place to be.’

We’d been asked to name favourites, Kari naming ‘The Tombs of Atuan,’ one of the Earthsea books, Ruth ‘The Word for World is Forest’ and Nnedi the short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’ I was really glad I’d asked them about favourites before the panel, as the last two works were on my list! I ended up talking about ‘Always Coming Home,’ which I read over about six weeks earlier this year.

Ministering to the Future: Kim Stanley Robinson

Another guest at that convention was Kim Stanley Robinson (Stan). Ursula Le Guin and Stan are in fact linked. Kim Stanley Robinson was actually taught creative writing by Le Guin for a few months in 1977. He reports that they even saw Star Wars together, and laughed all the way through. They were both also on the political left — although Le Guin was more on the anarchist side, and Stan on more the statist, Keynesian, socialist side of things.

I first encountered Kim Stanley Robinson in the early 1990s, when I was nineteen, with the publication of Red Mars. Red Mars was the first in a trilogy of books detailing the centuries-long settlement of the Red Planet. I asked for a copy of the British first edition for Christmas, because I’d seen it discussed in Interzone magazine and had the instinct that it was a key work. So it proved to be; the Mars trilogy joined the pantheon of Mars literature, which is, believe it or not, fairly extensive.

Mars had been an obsession of mine for quite some time: as a kid, I’d lapped up Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars. Both are wonderful books! The problem was that both of those were quite dated depictions of Mars, written decades before the Mariner and Viking probes had revealed the real face of the Red Planet. Bradbury’s work in particular was basically fantasy. Robinson’s Mars trilogy helped me to appreciate Mars for how it really is.

By the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Robinson began to focus more on the ecological problems on Earth. I was fortunate to meet him in Birmingham in 1997, at the now-defunct Andromeda bookshop where he was signing his book, Antarctica. After this, he wrote what has become known as the “science in the capital” trilogy (republished and updated as a single volume, Green Earth, in 2015). In this trilogy, the National Science Foundation and a truly progressive president spearhead drastic action on climate breakdown. I remember feeling both inspired and a little depressed when I read this trilogy in the 2000s. Inspired because Robinson showed how we could begin to solve problems like claims breakdown if we really wanted; depressed because the book contrasted so much with the lived reality, where President George W. Bush was doubling down on fossil fuel extraction.

In 2018, Stan had just published a book entitled New York 2140, about life in a permanently flooded, post climate breakdown New York. I was fortunate to get Stan to sign this book at Eastercon. I also had the opportunity to talk to him, properly, on several occasions (some friends of mine were ex-students of his). I found this simultaneously inspiring and a little intimidating. Meeting a literary hero is often tricky — you don’t know whether they’ll live up to your expectations. In addition, I was very conscious of not making an idiot of myself (See my above comments re. Nnedi Okorafor). Fortunately, it seemed to work out okay.

In 2020, when Trump was still in the White House, and the UK had just Brexited, Stan published The Ministry of the Future. This book begins about a decade on from 2020, with a wet-bulb heatwave in India where many people die. The world is finally forced to take action on Climate Breakdown. The Zurich-based “Ministry of the Future” becomes instrumental in the birth of a new future where the Sixth Extinction is averted. The book is difficult in places — reflecting the times in which it was written — but is ultimately inspiring.

Since 2020, on the back of Ministry, Stan has given many lectures and podcast interviews that further explore the implications of the book. I’d recommend them if you’re ever feeling down about the current situation. One recent example is a talk that he gave at bioneers. Another is an online talk and dialogue at Hertford College, Oxford. In this talk, Stan highlights the current widely-prevailing mood of dread. That there’s the sense that we’re on a trajectory towards a crash. Stan suggests that this might in part be the result of what’s been termed “capitalist realism;” that there’s no alternative to our current actions and that there’s nothing that can be done about it. But on the contrary, there’s plenty that can be done, and needs to be done. Stan concludes that giving up is not an appropriate response to the current moment.

Return to Utopia

Both Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson taught me to be an unapologetic Utopian. For a long time, I’ve thought that human beings, with less difficulty than you might think, could drastically improve their lot on this good Earth. In 2020, I wrote:

“From this moment in history, many worlds are possible. Individuals and societies are more than the passive victims of circumstance. Individuals can make daily decisions that help remake the world. The conditions that create a seemingly solid and unsolvable problem today will have changed by tomorrow. Every person can help push that change in a positive direction. That’s what utopian thinking is all about.”

What’s desperately needed at this moment is an opening up of possibility. In 2022, Stan recorded a message from a utopian 2071, where we’d solved climate breakdown and averted the sixth extinction. The steps humanity took from now onwards meant that, after much difficulty and struggle, climate breakdown was finally consigned to history. This still remains a possibility for humanity and the Earth. It may eventually even be possible to reverse climate breakdown. And for those who doubt that the entrenched power of capitalism is unassailable, I’ll leave you with another quote from Le Guin’s 2014 speech:

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

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Finally, a request: I’d love to hear from some of my readers! I’d be especially interested to know what you like about Cataclysmic, and what you’d like to see more of. At some point, I’m planning to make this more interactive, and start a podcast.