The future, as they say, is unwritten. But that didn’t stop authors Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros from speculating, in their acclaimed book The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis. We spoke with Christina about some of the 20 locations covered, combining artistry with science, and seaweed. Can our cultures and economies leap forward in acts of transilience?
Christina's website: www.christinaconklin.com
What's Next For Earth art project: www.whatsnextforearth.com
The future, as they say, is unwritten. But that didn’t stop authors Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros from speculating, in their acclaimed book The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis. We spoke with Christina about some of the 20 locations covered, combining artistry with science, and seaweed. Can our cultures and economies leap forward in acts of transilience?
Christina's website: www.christinaconklin.com
What's Next For Earth art project: www.whatsnextforearth.com
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Pat Choate:From the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, this is The Steady Stater, a podcast dedicated to discussing limits to growth and the steady state economy.
Brian Czech:Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Brian Czech, and our guest today is artist, activist, and author Christina Conklin, based in Half Moon Bay, California. Christina gets creative in a variety of media at the nexus of nature and culture. Her award-winning work has been exhibited in the USA, Japan, and Hong Kong. She's also worked in the publishing and non-profit sectors, and she's a co-author of the recent book, The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis. Believe it or not, her co-authors name is Marina; that's Marina Psaros, a climate and sustainability activist. The Atlas comprises 20 stories of global heating impacts around the world, from Hawaii to Hamburg, San Juan to Shanghai. These contemporary narratives are woven together with speculative "future histories" envisioned for 2050. This creative book, with stunning and colorful maps and graphs, is a one of a kind mix of fact finding, coffee table, storytelling, and cli-fi genres. Christina Conklin, welcome to The Steady Stater.
Christina Conklin:Thank you so much for having me.
Brian Czech:Thanks for being on the show. Christina, your love of the oceans comes through loud and clear in your work. What's the love story there, if you will? How did you get so close to the oceans?
Christina Conklin:Well, I grew up going to the Oregon coast a lot as a child. And I think, you know, we just each have an inherent love of a certain kind of a place, whether it's the mountains, or the desert, or the city. And for me, the ocean is my place. And I ended up doing a lot of work on the ocean, in my graduate work, my fine art degree, looking at long-term cycles and geologic time, and how the ocean is both a metaphor for that, but also a specific site, where you can do a lot of work that has to do with ecology, and you know, the state of the planet and the peril that we're in at the moment.
Brian Czech:Okay, in The Atlas of Disappearing Places -- I'll just call it The Atlas -- you focused on four global heating impacts in our oceans and along our coastlines: changing chemistry, warming waters, strengthening storms, and rising seas. You've tied these four themes to a metaphor of the human body, too. Can you elaborate a bit on the metaphor you constructed?
Christina Conklin:Yes, of course. I developed an ocean-as-body metaphor throughout the book, because I felt like if we could identify-- we understand our own bodies fairly well -- if we could identify with the living world as an organism as well, then we might be able to come back into stronger relationship with it, rather than seeing the Earth as a resource and an ocean as a garbage dump. Let's think of it as a body, and all of the systems and how they connect, and how they are healthy, and how they get sick. And so within our own bodies, you know, if we have -- we change our chemistry if we overuse a particular substance, "substance abuse," and so the metaphor is that -- in the book -- is that we are overusing fossil fuels right now. And that is the abuse that's happening on the planetary scale. And in the warming water section of the book, you know, the Earth has caught a fever. And when we catch a fever, there are impacts throughout our body, beyond just the local site of the infection or the, you know, the particular virus, and fevers can be deadly, right? And so we are at a moment of runaway fever in the ocean. It's only just begun, but it's already impacting ecosystems on a global scale. And we need to be paying attention to the ocean's systems and the Earth's systems. In the same way we would take care of ourselves if we were ill.
Brian Czech:Yeah, it's kind of a coastal COVID scenario.
Christina Conklin:Right.
Brian Czech:Well, Christina, it's my privilege to quote one of our favorite CASSE signatories, Vandana Shiva. She said, "The Atlas of Disappearing Places is a story told through art and science that takes us on a journey across the planet, through the throwaway culture of plastic waste and the toxic culture of fertilizers and pesticides and dead zones. It's not just a story of climate change. It is also a story of extinction. A must-read for anyone who cares about the future of the planet and people." You had some other great blurbs, Christina, but that one does a nice job of introducing the book, and sounds to me like you made quite an impression on Vandana Shiva!
Christina Conklin:Well, that's a, it was a great honor, of course, to get that kind of endorsement from her. She's amazing. I think what we tried to do was tied together, you know, often climate change gets talked about in isolation, as an issue of, you know, greenhouse gas emissions, but it's so much more interconnected than that. And what Dr. Shiva was pointing out was that plastics is, we think of as just like a pollution problem, but it's actually a climate change problem, because it is the fossil fuels we extract from the Earth to create the plastic that then becomes the garbage that chokes the turtles. So we really have to take things back to their sources. And the source, as you all well know, is an extractive economy that is bent on growth above all else, and that is just using the Earth as-- this is ridiculous to say -- but a resource rather than the source itself of all that we, all we have and all that we are.
Brian Czech:Mmhmm, yes. You know, you featured the plight of our oceans. But of course, a lot of the human suffering is meted out along those coastlines. And I hope this isn't too personal of a question, but what keeps you up at night? Is it our violation of Mother Nature or the vulnerability of the Rohingya refugees stranded out on those Bangladeshi chars?
Christina Conklin:Yeah, well, I think this is a very personal-- I mean, it has to be personal, we all have to take this personally. I think that's been what we-- so many people haven't been willing to do yet. And it's hard, because it can bring up feelings of like hopelessness and despair, and like feeling too small to be able to create an impact. And so the, you know, these are difficult emotions, there's grief associated with what is happening in the world right now. And I would say that the important thing is to acknowledge those things, and then to come together with other people, and discuss those things so that you're not, you know, we're not alone. And that, in itself, is an act of, I would say, a revolutionary political act, to talk about these things together. So yeah, I am kept up at night by basically what the world's gonna be like for my children and grandchildren, of course. And it is, it's a very, it's a painful position we're in. I was able, I think, to abstract it enough in the process of writing the book to get the book written. But this is I think, the next cultural challenge for all of us is to have difficult conversations together in a, you know, compassionate and forward-looking way that doesn't fall -- I think despair is a cop out at this point. We really need to actually be doing all we can to build the new systems we need within the old broken systems, so that they are ready, they are ready when the old systems, you know, stop working even more fully than they have already.
Brian Czech:Well, along those lines, some of the disappearing places you wrote about are a lot further into the disappearing act than others. Those chars in Bangladesh are pretty high on the list. And what other places would you say would round out the top five in terms of catastrophic imminence?
Christina Conklin:Well, where things are happening now, I would say the Arctic is in the greatest danger in the world right now. They've seen rising temperatures and environmental changes at a scale that the rest of us really can't even imagine. There aren't that many people in the Arctic witnessing this, but there are indigenous Inuit in northern Canada and peoples along the Asian continent, as well. And there's a lot we can learn from indigenous folks around the world wherever they are, because they have long cultural memories, and we have comparatively very short cultural memories. So how you live in times of change, and how you adapt, and how you listen to nature, and have a relationship with it, and correspond with it is something we should really be focusing on. And fortunately, there is a big movement in the indigenous community to share their knowledge and to become more powerful and vocal. And so I would actually say that's a very hopeful sign. I would say the other main place I think about is urban cities. Just because we have culturally invested so much of our money and investment in urban cities around the world, and they're almost always on a coastline. So we have the challenges of industrial toxins, and we have the challenges of, you know, in-- people have filled in land in cities and still are, all that land is going to drown. And you know, so the the challenges of reconfiguring how we design and live in cities is I would say the other main thing that is -- feels a little far away now, but it's actually a critical issue to address now, because of course, as we build things they last a century. And we are heading on the wrong path in that regard.
Brian Czech:Yeah, you wrote about New York City -- the"Capital of Capital," you called it -- some of the policy choices made in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. And you made the ironic point that making an area more resilient, such as with sea walls, can then just encourage further development and growth in the now supposedly safe flood plain. Do you have any artwork in mind to illustrate the folly of such a response?
Christina Conklin:Well, there has been an interesting artwork, actually, in New York City, it's maybe even 10 years old now. But it was called High Water Line. And it was an artist who walked around New York with a baseball field chalking machine to show people where the tide line would be in the future. And of course, you're walking through the middle of people's neighborhoods, and, you know, around office buildings. And it's something, I think there are a number of artists who are trying to help visualize for people what it could be. There was another project in San Francisco where the artist sort of put barnacles halfway up the telephone poles. Just to say,"hello!" And so I've led some participatory walks, called Tideline as Timeline walks. And they really talk about, you know, where is this tideline going to be? And how do we relate to that future that we can't quite imagine. I mean, as you will probably know that, you know, we've been in this kind of geologic pause for the past 5000 years when sea levels have been very stable. And that is going to change. And it's going to change very, very quickly, starting, you know, soon in the next couple of decades. So these are conversations we need to have.
Brian Czech:Yeah, you can see it in places already, where, you know, down on the Gulf of Mexico, and Chesapeake Bay, and places where we've already lost-- half of some of the National Wildlife Refuges in those areas, for example. Your chapter on Vietnam is titled Doing More With Less. So we like the sound of that -- sounds very steady state-ish. And the chapter focuses on rice production, which often has a large methane footprint. These rice farmers face growing challenges as the climate changes, hence, the less part of the chapter title doing more with less. So what's happening to farming in places like Vietnam? And where are they going to get their food?
Christina Conklin:Well, I -- not being an agronomist, I don't have an easy answer for you. I mean, I know that there are, of course, projects that are developing heat-tolerant grains, and things like that. I don't know if they will keep pace with the rate of change that will be coming in a few decades. It is, you know, it's a major challenge feeding the world, and especially when -- in especially like the rice growing countries, those are really, I mean, not even high, I think high risk makes it sound as if something might not happen, but sea level will rise a meter in the coming decades, and 40% of the Mekong Delta rice growing area will be underwater. So you know, these are facts. Again, it behooves us to think of them as such not as risks or probabilities, but as facts.
Brian Czech:Exactly.
Christina Conklin:Yeah, I'm hopeful for science and coming up with ways to keep the people fed. But of course, population growth is one of the real risks of our culture right now. We have outlived, we've outstripped our planet in terms of human population.
Brian Czech:Moving over to a different part of the world. In your chapter on San Juan, Puerto Rico, you go back to the 2017 disaster of Hurricane Maria, where the death toll estimates went as high as 4000. Based on your account of the problem, it wasn't just bad geographical luck, but the bureaucratic and legal confusion caused by Puerto Rico status as an unincorporated territory of the USA. How tragically frustrating that must have been for Puerto Ricans. You think we should expect a geopolitical future of more independence and secession movements?
Christina Conklin:Well, it is interesting. I actually am hopeful that that will happen. And the chapter I wrote about the Cook Islands in the South Pacific also points at this idea of greater autonomy for colonial and formerly colonial nations. You know, how do we, how do people have more say about their their own communities, lives, and futures? And so it's -- I was actually surprised to learn that there's actually a UN department whose whole mission is to move some of these small island territories and far flung places, you know, into -- out of-- into a post colonial era, into an autonomous status. I think there will be more moves for that, I think there is energy moving in this direction, both because as I mentioned, of the sort of indigenous claims, and rights, and the rights of nature is another interesting area of law that is developing, that I think will move things toward, more toward locality, and more away from globalization, I guess is the simple word for it.
Brian Czech:Well, Christina, we've got a few more questions for you, including about the futures you envision for the disappearing places. But first, we need to take a short non-commercial break with James Lamont. Take it away, James!
James Lamont:Hello, listeners. We hope you're enjoying the show. If this episode has inspired you, and you're considering any creative methods to advance the steady state economy in 2022, there are lots of ways that you can communicate those ideas with us. Our podcast page at our website steadystate.org is open to public comments. And you can also find email addresses for all of our staff. On social media, we're active on Twitter and Facebook. Just search either site for CASSE. And if you need another way to get in touch with us, we're sure that you'll find a creative solution. And now, back to the show.
Brian Czech:Welcome back. We're talking with Christina Conklin, co-author of The Atlas of Disappearing Places. Before we get to the future, as I alluded to in part one, let's talk for a bit about the artistic methods you used, Christina, in The Atlas. You rendered the maps in your book using an ink-on-dried-seaweed process. It makes for a pretty unique presentation, kind of reminiscent of the maps of yore. Tell us about so-called"sea-lettuce" as a medium, and why you chose to work with it on this project.
Christina Conklin:Yes, well, I spend a lot of time at the ocean, as I said, lucky enough to live near it. And I began collecting all of this abundant seaweed that was washing up on our shores, and playing with it, really, this is what artists do, luckily. And I found that when these sort of the big sheets of, they call it sea-lettuce. They wash up, and when it dries, it shrinks a bit, it turns into something like a kind of a parchment paper that does look like the old fashioned maps, it has sort of a veiny living quality, which I really liked. And then it bleaches out over time the chlorophyll dissipates, and it becomes again, like this kind of creamy color. And so I just started playing with that a lot. And then transposing the actual published scientific maps that climate scientists are developing in these many, many research studies to show the shrinking of the Arctic ice sheets, the sea level rise as it will be in coming decades and centuries. And so that kind of light painting on the seaweed and then layering that onto a Google Earth map to give some geographical reference points, does kind of marry this kind of new data with old timey look. But also using the product of the sea to illustrate the issues in the sea, which to me was a good reason to go with this material.
Brian Czech:Yeah, well, it was quite an effect. I'm glad you did that. Early in The Atlas you wrote about ecological thresholds or tipping points, and you displayed this fairly well-known graphic by now on planetary boundaries from the Stockholm Resilience Center. Kate Raeworth helped to popularize that image in doughnut economics. And then of course, we took the donut and rolled it out into a steady-state diagram. A"breadstick" we called it, with GDP on the Y axis. I guess I don't need to tell you this, Christina, you as an artist, but the old adage that a picture speaks a thousand words was a real winner, wasn't it?
Christina Conklin:Absolutely. And to that end, I would love to let people know that there are art projects going on now, as we mentioned earlier to help visualize this change, not just climate change, but all of the interwoven economic and social crises that are rolling up together at this point. And I'm part of a project called"whatsnextforearth.com." That is artists responding to the video course put out by Richard Heinberg, and the Post Carbon Institute. It's called "Think Resilience." And it lays out, you know, the interconnection between where we get our energy and how we create our economies, and what assumptions we make around those things and how those have created the problem that we're in, and how we can write new stories to write a different future. So anyway, there are artists who are responding with visual artworks to these challenges of resource depletion, and population growth, and such. And I would encourage people to look it up-- whatsnextforearth.com -- as a way to, again, just take the artistic impulse and try to move beyond words in conveying some of these powerful ideas.
Brian Czech:Well, I guess proportionately how many artists out there, do you think, know about the need for a steady state economy now? Do artists tend to be more or less aware than the average citizen about limits to growth?
Christina Conklin:You know, unfortunately, I'm going to say, it's not very well-known. And there are some of us, you know, working hard to spread the word. I first learned about it as a possibility -- I had never even really heard of it until about 2015 -- when I went to a big conference on process philosophy down in Pomona College. That was-- it was looking at where we are in the world from lots of different perspectives. So I just think it's an idea that hasn't, doesn't really get enough airplay. And, you know, we're working on it, as are you. But I think artists like so many people are really in the culture that, you know, we're the fish in the water, right? It's hard to see the water when you're in it. And artists have been -- typically have kind of gone to a more of a like a Marxist model or, like they understand the system is broken, don't have a full understanding of why, and how, and what to do about it. So there are those of us who are working to to educate artists so that artists can then educate others.
Brian Czech:Well, we noticed that in one of the sidebars of your book, you did bring out the concept of the steady state economy, which of course we really appreciated. And then, in fact, you introduced a number of terms in the book. And one of them, it seemed that you really took too is the term"transilience," which you wrote about in your concluding chapter. Now, you know, E. O. Wilson just left us a few weeks ago. In fact, we eulogized him on our last episode. And Ed was a big proponent of consilience.
Christina Conklin:Yeah.
Brian Czech:So what, yeah, what's the difference between consilience and transilience?
Christina Conklin:Yes, well, I read Consilience, his book on that topic, and came away with a feeling that he really just wanted everybody to agree with him. And that would be called consilient thinking.
Brian Czech:Don't we all?
Christina Conklin:That does sound nice, right? So I think it had -- so my academic background is actually in religious studies, and I have tremendous admiration for and respect for the need and drive among humans to understand our place in the world. And that's, that has existed in every culture through time and looks like, you know, different religious traditions and philosophical traditions. So, to me, Consilience didn't really incorporate that element of human culture in a way that speaks to me. Transilience, you know, these are all just words. But the idea, "silience" is the idea of jumping, right? You can either be "resilient," which is to jump back, to bounce back, to have the skills and strategies to become whole again. Transilience is the idea of jumping forward, a transformative change. And the idea that you can make creative leaps rather than incremental change. And so I like the word to posit it, as as an idea to say, can we jump? Can we leap? Do we have to do small, small, incremental changes to economies, and cultures, and climate policies, etc? Or can we just make the leap? And my hope is that we can, and that I think, and I think it's been shown, you know that this is nonlinear change. And that implies, and actually assures that, yes, we can make leaps.
Brian Czech:Well, you know, we've been contemplating here at CASSE, the value of stories, storytelling, and narratives quite a bit lately. Now you've declared that [quote]"imagination is needed to tell a new story, one that refuses heroes and villains but rather finds the threads that bind all to all, such stories are best told quietly, like fables, because the world is scary enough, without all the screaming." Can you elaborate on that for us?
Christina Conklin:It's interesting that you chose that quote, it's one of those that I believe in my very bones. But of course, it's hard to maybe elaborate on too much. It's just I, you know, have faith in humanity that we can find a way forward that we are meant to be in relationship with each other and with nature, and that all of the fear, and panic, and denial, and rage right now is, you know, I suppose psychologically understandable, but not really what we are called to be as people. And so I just -- I have a tremendous amount of hope in people finding each other and creating small, functional ecological civilizations. Sure, you're, you know, well familiar with that term, that, you know, that we can have communities that function well. And it's not easy. I mean, none of this is easy. I don't want to pretend that it is. But I just, I think it would be too easy to give up and to say, we're doomed. But I refuse to do that. I'm a defiant optimist.
Brian Czech:Oh, sure. Yeah, I mean, we like to use the metaphor of the runaway train. And even if we are on one, it's a matter of how bad the crash is at the end of the proverbial day y'know, we can slow it down and make things a lot less bad than they would have been. But that brings us to the speculative future histories, portions of the book, these are all set in the year 2050. So how did you and Marina Psaros go about deciding what to write in terms of optimism versus pessimism? So in Chapter Two, for example, you speculated that Pakistan is in a world of pain by 2050, whereas neighboring India not so much. Are you extrapolating some geopolitical trends? Or is it more about raw ecology or what?
Christina Conklin:Well, I would actually say this is where the artistry came in, you know. Fiction is necessarily wrong. It's not meant to be predictive, we really just used these sections of each chapter as a way to draw forth perils and possibilities, I guess, you know. To point out in the chapter that involves India and Pakistan, for instance, what it looks like to in India, where they have green tribunals, currently, and if they make them effective environmental mechanisms to transition their culture and economy away from the most damaging impacts that are currently there, you know, that's actually -- could be this tremendously hopeful next -- transilient next step. Whereas if Pakistan, you know, follows old habits that have gotten, you know, have led to lots of political corruption and other things that also exist in India now -- it was really just a fictional exercise in compare and contrast, right? So each of these fictional narratives about the future is really purely speculative, but hopefully is pointing to better and worse ways to make decisions, what we might want to do and what we might not.
Brian Czech:Okay, and then in your chapter on the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, you imagine a future where the government authorizes mining of the sea floor for minerals. Vaguely reminded me of the plotline in that new flick Don't Look Up, where they're trying to figure out how to mine that comet. You know, your book is full of dramatic stories, the true ones unfolding as we speak, plus the potential ones you've envisioned. Which one would you most like to see up on Netflix?
Christina Conklin:Well, I actually -- that Cook Islands chapter is interesting, I suppose because it actually came true sooner than I predicted in the 2050 chapter. I imagined that they would start sea mining in 2022. But they did it in 2021. And they used COVID as an excuse, that the drop off of tourist dollars meant that they really needed to quote-unquote"diversify their economy" and create this kind of dependence on deep seabed mining, which is a new and unstudied technique of raking the sea floor of minerals. And so that's already happening. And that actually would be a fabulous movie because there are ecological heroes who have been fighting this, there is political intrigue and infighting, and self-serving businessmen and mega corporations. And the whole thing is right there actually. It would be a great miniseries. But sadly not with the end that we would hope at least not yet. You know, again, I always have hope that justice will prevail.
Brian Czech:In the name of GDP is sounds like could be a title for that. Well, Christina, thanks so much for being on the show today. You're an extremely creative thinker and producer of different types of products that are going to help for a long, long time in helping to raise awareness about limits to growth and the need for degrowth toward a steady state economy. Hope you come back again in a few months.
Christina Conklin:Yeah, well, thank you so much. I've enjoyed the conversation.
Brian Czech:Well, folks, that about wraps her up. We've been talking with Christina Conklin, artist, activist, and co-author of The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis. The Atlas gives a deep dive, so to speak, into the oceans. Now I don't want to misportray this truly unique book. It's not so much a deep data dive, but somehow a deep thinking, deep reflection dive that must be seen to be appreciated. And just because it's not an atlas of the International Cartographic Association, let's not shrug it off either. It's a far better roadmap than Atlas Shrugged. I'm Brian Czech and you've been listening to The Steady Stater podcast. See you next time!