So many of us get lost in terror about humanity's future. But how often do we ask what's our best possible future? Best-selling author and climate activist Kim Stanley Robinson joined me on Earth Day this year for an urgent and hopeful conversation at UC Berkeley's School of Journalism. This is the third time I've been fortunate enough to have Stan on the podcast, and this time we traced a through line across humanity's past, present, and future through three of my favorite books of his The Ministry for the Future, High Sierra a Love Story, and Shaman. Where do we find hope in the face of the climate crisis? How can we reconnect with the extraordinary nature that for many of us is right outside our door? And what can our ancestors from 30,000 years ago teach us about living in balance with the planet and one another today? I'm Scott Snibby, and this is How to Train a Happy Mind. It's a huge pleasure speaking to you today on Earth Day. So thanks for joining me here at UC Berkeley's School of Journalism, where they now have this dedicated climate journalism program led by Jason Spin Garnkoff, who helped arrange this event. So thanks to both of you.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you. It's good to see you again, Scott. And um I'm happy to be always happy to be doing stuff with UC Berkeley.
SPEAKER_00So I want to connect three of your books today, three of your dozens and dozens of books. Hi Sierra, a love story, Shaman, and the Ministry for the Future, that, if I'm not mistaken, they chart a through line through humanity's past, present, and future. And uh in fact, I've almost finished a second reading of High Sierra. I'll pull out my battered copy here. Um my daughter and I, wonderfully, my daughter fell in love with this book too when we started uh listening to it on our way back from Desolation Wilderness last year. And every night we read a little bit of it aloud. It's taking a year to get through it again. So um thanks for that.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Thank you for reading it. Um it's a book very close to my heart.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I highly recommend it, it's an extraordinary book. So I want to start our conversation talking about nature itself, which strangely sometimes goes unmentioned in conversations about the climate crisis. That book, the book I just mentioned, High Sierra Love Story, it instantly became one of the essential books about this extraordinary place. And for those who might not know it, I wonder if you could just say a little bit about what the Sierra is and why you spent about a month there out of every one of the last 50 or so years.
SPEAKER_01Sure. Um you can think of it as the spine of California. It runs from just north of LA to just well, all the way up to Mount Lassen in the north, which is maybe the southernmost of the Cascades. So it's a it's a typical tectonic mountain range uh subduction, the a Pacific plate shoved under the North American plate about 20 million years ago, and created a the incredible trench of California's Central Valley, which is filled uh now with uh dirt and sediments that ran off of the older mountain ranges. But the mountain range is still there, being hard granite with some older metamorphic rocks still on top of that granite that never wore away. And it was a barrier for white uh settler colonials coming to California uh in the days of covered wagons, and even for trains, it was a hard uh crossing, which was completed in the middle of the Civil War. But it it sort of made California a place apart. Um the specialness of California comes from several different um components, uh a sort of a uh a resource curse or a blessing, its incredible beauty, its Mediterranean climate, then the Gold Rush, Hollywood, and now Silicon Valley. Um, California is a special place on earth, and the Sierra is is, as I say, the backbone or the the spine of it, the place to get away. And it was early recognized by people uh living in San Francisco and all up and down California that the range could be ruined by logging and by sheep herding, such that the the natural landscape would um be torn up and then melt in the rains and snow and be devastated. So it was protected extremely early on for compared to it was early in the conservation movement. And this was partly because of John Muir, but John Muir was used as a figurehead by a much larger actor network of people in uh San Francisco and in Fresno, and uh, and then as I say, all up and down the the California. So it's protected land, federal state. There's um a stretch of it that has no roads from Tioga Pass all the way down to I think Lake Isabella or Tahby Pass. This is a distance longer than the width of Switzerland that has no roads crossing the range, and it's a pretty broad band as well as a long band of land that we've left alone. And there I know that wilderness is now a somewhat of an academic controversy, its history, its practices. Um, but I I think that on balance it's uh extremely valuable to leave some of the surface of the earth alone to the wild animals. They do better and therefore we do better. So this year is uh is an early and a spectacular example of that, especially being in a in a patch of land that has 35 million people living on it. The that that land stays empty and is only visited by people who then go away is a remarkable human accomplishment as well as a stupendous mountain range. Very benign, very interesting, very beautiful.
SPEAKER_00It is a place you're really in love with, right? Like why why do you love it?
SPEAKER_01Well, I I wrote the book to try to explain, and I don't think one can explain it. It's a feeling, right? Um can we ever explain love? Uh it it uh generates a lot of literature, but explanations are uh lacking. I went up there when I was young. I was uh I was an undergraduate in college, I was a beach kid. I didn't give a damn about mountains because I grew up in the chaparral mountains of Southern California. They're scrubby and deserty and and unattractive to me. Some people liked him. But I when I went to the Sierra, I had an epiphany, I had a Satori, and I never really um uh recovered, or I never came back from that. It was uh a peak experience in the most literal sense. And so I kept going back and it kept happening. I for me, it's a refuge, a place to uh calm down, regain sanity and perspective, and have a good time like a five-year-old on a jungle gym. There's some uh scrambling to be done up there, it's very up and down y. There's not much flatness in the Sierra Nevada. So you have to hike up, then you have to hike down, it goes on and on like that. You have to like walking, that's for sure. But I do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I love it. One of the reasons you I love the Sierras, although I I I don't want to um put it against your fanaticism. Uh uh, but I do love it. I do love it. And one of the reasons I fell in love with it is the feeling I had on my first trip that I'd stepped into the way humans lived tens of thousands of years ago. And until I read High Sierra, I hadn't, I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't realized people actually had been going up there for thousands of years. You know, you have a great story about coming across obsidian shards up there in the book that could could only have been brought by humans because the they come from hundreds of miles away. Yes. Um I wonder if you can just talk about this deep. I mean, that had a very, very profound feeling for me when I when I read that. And then when I went to Shaman after you know you mentioned it in your book, and I realized I'd missed only with Kim Stanley Robinson can you miss you know, a thousand-page novel that that came out and I wasn't paying attention. So I went back and read Shaman, and in that you deeply imagine this relationship we had to the planet like 10, 20, 30,000 years ago. Um, can you just talk a little bit about like what we've lost as we moved into modern life? Like you you imagine that time so beautifully.
SPEAKER_01Sure. And thank you for that. I've thought about it a lot on the trail. I I reckon in the series and off trail, walking with a pack on your back, sometimes with a little child on your back. It feels so good. It feels right, and there's a reason for that. We evolved to do it. And I want to add parenthetically that also we evolved it into bipeds relatively recently. We were quadrupeds before. And so when you hike with walking poles, that part of your brain that is a quadruped still is extremely pleased. So I recommend hiking with walking poles to get back into your quadruped mind. And then even as a biped, we co-evolved with walking across landscapes that we didn't know, see what's over the next ridge, and see what you can find there to um make a living, to eat, to take shelter, and perhaps stay there or perhaps move on. And I'm very impressed that people left Africa to a uh a world that had other humanoid uh species like the Neandertals and the Denosovians, but by and large, the Homo sapiens came out of Africa about 100,000 years ago, got to Australia 60,000 years ago, had covered everywhere, but were not in the Americas until the the date keeps getting shoved back, but one can say not older, we think, than 30,000 years ago. And then they filled the Americas, sometimes in kayaks down the west coast, and sometimes just by walking over the next ridge, uh, within a few thousand years. So it's in us, it and our brains evolved doing these activities. So when you do them now, you get a rush, you get a feeling that it's right, that you know how to do it, even when you have never done it before. The first time you do it, you feel like, oh yes, I this is instinctual. I know how to do this. And then when you do it, there's a pleasure, parts of your brain that are not activated when you're sitting on your butt being a writer at a desk like I've been, uh, but many of us spend a lot of time inside rooms, like more waking time inside rooms than is really good for us, and a lot of time, especially for desk workers like myself, just uh looking at things and and uh tapping at a keyboard. Well, we didn't evolve to do that, and uh there was a lot of hanging out, sitting around the fire, sitting around, um preparing food, talking, doing all the things that we still do. But the walking is crucial, and when it comes back, it makes you uh feel better and is probably really good for you. I feel that in my in my bones, in my in my body, that we're primates and that were made to walk. So that's one part of it. And for sure, when I wrote Shaman, that was about the Chauvet Cave, which was painted about 32,000 years ago. So this is in central France and in southern France. And um, it means that 30,000 years ago we were very much like we are now, same DNA, same kinds of uh feelings towards the world, as far as we can deduce from looking at their artwork. And that's an interesting take on it. We see a little bit of their tools, a little bit of their calculations, because they they marked uh bones with lines, and so they were early, they were just like us. They certainly counted and calculated and knew the seasons. It's we don't know how much they knew because it's so prehistoric, but I bet they knew a lot. They certainly knew how to make snowshoes and fur clothing and stuff that uh doesn't last, but we can see this by the bones and by the stones, um, the kind of culture that they had, and then these incredible works of art on the cave walls. And one has to assume that cliffs everywhere, a breeze and and um good clean stone cliffs were probably painted all over the world, and the rain has washed them off. But in the caves, that didn't happen. So we've got nothing but the remnants of prehistoric art which probably covered every surface they could get to. You see that in the Owens Valley with petroglyphs, but there were also paintings, I think, on every surface they could get to. So I wanted to write about that because I'd had the experience of walking in the Sierra that at that point was probably 40 years. I think I wrote Shaman about uh 10 years ago. So 40 years of walking, and I finally thought, what was it like for them? And I knew it was kind of impossible, um, but it was worth trying because as a science fiction writer, I'm always making things up in the future. And to tell you the truth, making things up in the past and using the science of archaeology and anthropology to base it on, and then to think, um, well, they were just like us, and so what would it have been like? Um, I knew something like it had to have happened because those paintings are there. So people did them, they were like us, but not like us, and then I had my adventure of trying to imagine it.
SPEAKER_00There's a few things about how you I just love that book so much. Um, but part of what I love is the reverence for the earth that that you describe and all the activities of you know the shamanic culture of like giving back to the earth, no matter how hungry you are, giving back to the earth the first parts of the harvest, thanking animals for giving them your lives so you can eat. You know, as Tibetan Buddhists, we I was learned that was when I learned to do that as a Tibetan Buddhist, that if you eat a fish or something, you thank you. Oh, thank you for giving me your life, and then you then you eat it. Um, are there ways that we can reclaim that that kind of reverence that you write about?
SPEAKER_01Well, for sure. Just to pay attention. Um, and and imagine that everything alive is part of your body, that that we are connected with each other uh very intimately. Uh the that the the biosphere of Earth is a single uh supra organism. So we are like bees in a hive, very accomplished, like bees are individually, but uh we are crucially dependent on the hive, which is to say, in our case, and and in all living creatures' cases, is the is the biosphere of the earth itself. You can call it Gaya, you can call it Mother Earth, um, and and go for maternal imagery. Why not? It's uh it's a feeling that I think is not that far under the surface of our modern minds. You only have to pay attention, which of course is a Buddhist practice, right? Pay attention. And also breathing in Buddhism is very important. I myself go into when I teach in schools or make a visit to schools, I should say, especially with um younger kids, but right up to anybody, I'll say, okay, you know, we're like jellyfish in the sea. Um, we the the whole world is our extended body. And I get looks of skepticism, and then I say, okay, we're going to do an exercise, we're going to hold our breath for five minutes. And then everybody, you know, rolls their eyes. We and I say, No, let's try it. We hold our breath. Usually there's a clock on the wall if you're in an elementary school. Hold your breath, and about after a minute, it's time to breathe. And then the lesson is there. We depend on the world with every breath. Not to mention, of course, um, water and food. And then the health of all those is impacts our own health. So it it's a it can be um a scientific finding or it can be a religious feeling, but they both uh tell the same story.
SPEAKER_00It's quite striking because one way of describing shaman is that it's about the origins of art and science, you know, in the in in humanity. So so after reading it, you know, I went on a journey. I'm always on a journey with your books. So I went on to read The Mind in the Cave, which you must have read in preparing for that book. Yeah. Yes. And which explores early cave paintings, and you have this vivid scenes of creating those incredible paintings in the cave. It's so bold of you to try to imagine that, right? Kudos to you. The ones we see in Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, right? Is it exactly yes?
SPEAKER_01A very fine movie. Um Herzog is, of course, a famous and great filmmaker, but he's also erratic as hell and a little crazy. But in the hit in that movie, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, he trusted the cave. He said, This isn't about me, this is about the cave. And he just panned across those paintings, sometimes for five minutes at a time. I mean I have watched that movie on my TV um frame by frame, but also just played it five or six times while I was writing that book. And I also um the French have a good website about the Chauvet Cave where they actually showed the sequence of the painting, the the panels they can tell which horse was first and which second, and they they give you a kind of a time-lapse photograph of the painting itself. I stuck with all of that when I wrote the book to um try to be accurate to how it might have felt.
SPEAKER_00It's beautiful. There's this idea that the images weren't just representational or aesthetic. You know, that's been this recent realization, but that they connect us to altered states of consciousness. And that and I'm wondering if there's anything about that the very first art that you write about in the book that can inform today's art. You know, the people, some of the people listening here at the School of Journalism, they're trying to make art through journalism documentaries that somehow will benefit humanity. Is there anything we can learn from that very first art to inform the art we're making today?
SPEAKER_01I wonder. I it seems likely. Um there's a couple uh parts to your to what you're talking about here. One of them is this theory that the shamanistic cultures seem to uh often have found the psychedelics, the mind-altering drugs that were in their landscapes, and then use them in rituals to um the and uh and sometimes it was the shaman himself or herself, they were it's gender um neutral, really, and then sometimes the celebrants as well, to enter the spirit world by eating or drinking some something with psychoactive properties. And sometimes this gets called entheogens. Um, the god uh goes into you. Uh, and so entheogenic is uh uh they might be trying to rehabilitate the the hippie craziness of the idea of psychedelics, but it certainly seems to be a much longer tradition. Now we can't prove what people were doing 30,000 years ago, and so these anthropologists argue about this and the archaeologists all the time. But the mind in the cave, the book you reference, says that the first hallucinations that one has coming onto many of these drugs are abstract patterns, dots, crisscrosses, weavings, um, swirls, and on the cave walls, there are all of these features. So they were painting what they were seeing, maybe. Um, it's a theory, it can't be proved. But when you go to the first peoples that still have their cultures together, which are fewer and fewer, but maybe some still exist now. But um, mostly they've been contacted and are in contact, but try to keep the old ways. And in the 19th century and the early 20th century, there were more of these cultures visited. I'm currently I'm amused, and in a good way, I think it's great uh that that that the the hippie interest in getting high in psychedelics is somewhat being rehabilitated as something that has therapeutic and even religious uh values if if um considered in the right way while you experience them. Um I myself in the in the 1970s was enthusiastically in exploring these things, but I think this is sort of a for me, it was a young person's thing to do. And I also got to that moment where I thought, I've learned what I need to learn out of this. And I experienced a kind of revulsion at the way that it can make your body feel sick, and I quit. But I like seeing the people who are now interested in it talk about it in such enthusiastic terms. Yeah, it doesn't take away the stupidity of what we did when we were young, since we didn't actually know what we were taking. And it was sort of a wild exploration of ignorant young people, but whatever. Uh, it looks like our instincts were right that this was an interesting thing to do. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And altered states of consciousness, too, it they can come about through sitting in the dark in a cave or going on a long walk.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I love the walking meditation for sure. Yeah, this is uh and and running. Um these altered states you can you can uh inspire them by all kinds of things. But for sure, the eating of certain substances looks to be very ancient. It makes sense. You see birds do it, you see the other primates do it.
SPEAKER_00You talked about actor networks, and this is one of the things from High Sierra that also um I found very inspiring is these stories of quite small groups of people that came together to preserve these vast landscapes. Um that seemed like a very successful movement. Is there any Anything we can learn from that time, that hugely successful movement to conserve such vast tracts of um our country that can help us address the climate crisis today.
SPEAKER_01I think so. This is a Margaret Mead thing. I never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. That's the only way the world ever gets changed. There's more to it than that, but it's important to remember that because your actor network is never going to be very huge compared to the 8 billion people that exist now. And yet you can feel that you're in solidarity with all 8 billion people and in a shared project to come a good life here together and to pass it on to the generations that come. So then the small groups, you have one project, or or maybe it's more than one, but it's you it's often targeted. We're going to try to do this, and then you need general popular support for it, for it to last. And I think that's what the Sierra Nevada Actor Network managed. Everybody who goes there is struck by its beauty and and the benign quality of it, the way it's um not just beautiful, but like there are many mountain wrenches that are beautiful that will kill you in an hour. But the Sierra is more kindly. And so they come back and then they're willing to support a group of people who are actively saying, let's do this, let's do that. And when you get down to it, creating legislation and believing in the rule of law and saying that some land is sacred, not just in our hearts, but in our laws. And I think that having seen that that did succeed, first it has to continue to be defended. It can be that can be overturned, being a law. And then, second, it's suggestive of things we might uh extend outward. Like therefore, if we really care about these things, we have to protect the atmosphere. Uh, we breathe it. It's a if the globe, if the world, if the earth, and this is great after Artemis too, if it was the size of a basketball, the atmosphere would be much thinner than cellophane surrounding it, wrapping it. And so we have the power and we have indeed changed the atmosphere. And so it's a it's an obvious need to uh fix that, to clean it up. So it's like uh putting in a sewage system, and it's it's it's more complicated because we have to put the sewage system in and draw the sewage back out of our bodies while it's already distributed out there, or after it's been distributed out there, is what I should have said. Well, that's harder, but it's not impossible. So these projects exist as things to do.
SPEAKER_00When I talked to you last year, um, about 18 months ago, I was a little disheartened that your functional optimism might have taken a hit. And um you've gone back this year, right? You attended the 30th UN climate change conference. What's our best possible future looking like today with respect to climate change and how optimistic are you still?
SPEAKER_01Well, it's a it's a delicate um balance to talk about this properly. We are in extraordinary danger. Um, but we have not yet crossed fundamental physical tipping points that would cast us back into hot house earth like about three million years ago. Um so given the danger, we are it's very incumbent on us to act on that really fast. There's only, and it's not a matter of it will all be over, it's a matter of better or worse. But the worse it gets, the harder it's going to be for to come back from it, very hard. And at a certain point, then if we um start a runaway greenhouse effect, not towards something like greenness, something more like Earth in the Pliocene, if we start that, then after that, it becomes so difficult that it's possible that all the human efforts we could possibly apply would not be enough. That's the danger. Uh that we are very close to sliding down a slippery slope into um permanent climate change to hot house earth, which is a stable state, but a state where you know sea level is is many meters higher and the tropical regions are often too hot for humans to survive, it could direct civilization. So that's the danger. But the um the good side of it, and I saw this at uh in Belém, Brazil, last November, is that this is widely known. They're the the supposed climate denialists, they know it too. And they have other programs, other projects that they they don't care, they're in a Gurj Damarang state of mind, they're thinking if I have to die, then I want to kill the whole world too. There's a psychopathology in climate denialism that makes it very close to a death cult. But most people are not interested in being in a death cult. So dealing with climate change is on the it's it's not as important as making sure you have food on your table that night for many people, but it is on the minds of everybody who thinks about the larger situation of humans on the planet, everyone. And because we all have phones, I mean, even in the developing world, there's no part of the world where people are ignorant of the reality. Because of our interconnectedness, you have to think of it this way: everybody knows everything. And there isn't really ignorance, there's perversity, uh, but not ignorance. And so it is a wicked political battle. But what I saw in Brazil is this 65,000 people, average age, uh and an average or a mean of about 40, 45, more women than men, maybe 55 to 60 percent women, and they're all there from every country on earth, speaking every language on earth, but using English as the lingua franca, which is very convenient for us. And they are all dedicated to this work, and they go back home, and they are part of a network in their home countries that are also doing this work. So there are some serious problems with the fossil fuel industry and its representatives, the human beings that have somehow managed to talk themselves into the project of saving the fossil fuel industry, have not yet got it and are going down fighting and are actually trying to keep that stuff going, even though it's poisoning us, and they know it's poisoning us. Well, that's their problem. For the rest of us, the problem is gathering the political, working political majorities all across the board, whatever that means, from the from the town council all the way up to international treaties, working political majorities to get the work done that we need to do. And then, like you talked about the best possible future, I can end with this. Clean energy is now cheaper to install than fossil fuel energy. And this is revolutionary and new, and it's simply technological advancement, pressed by social forces and paid for by money, invested in a thing that looked new and marginal, and now is rolling up the world. It's led industrially by China, but everywhere in the world, people want solar and wind and have battery power, and there are other methods, but those are the big three for getting off fossil fuels really fast and still having electricity available to all and brought to the people that never had it yet, which is important and has to be done, but it can be done now without um without burning much more fossil fuels. So, in in if when you describe the total situation, you have both extreme danger and incredible opportunity. And this is why the present feels so weird. Uh, both are true at once. And if you if you're true to both at once, then you can't really do good clickbait. You know, the social media, the way that we now curate and get our own news is somebody's gonna say something extreme uh about one side or the other of this extremely complex problem that we're facing. And it's never quite true because in radically different things are occurring at the same time.
SPEAKER_00Is there anything you think climate activists are missing in their approach today?
SPEAKER_01Well, I wouldn't want to. There are so many of them and they're all taking different angles. Let me I would have to ponder that for a while. I definitely don't I mean, I was a teacher for 10 years, but I don't like telling people what to do. I'm a novelist, and so I write my novels as a kind of a testament to oh listen to this story. Or if you if you live in this novel for a month or so, you'll come out of it a little bit different, but I don't know how. It depends on you. So um, I am uh um a climate activist. I what you would want is to have a stories that you could tell to people who are um prominently against you that might make them feel uneasy, and to people who are confused, who are looking for clarity, these might not be the same stories. So I would say read books of rhetoric, ancient Greek rhetoric, every every kind of argument and persuasion uh method that got analyzed and made into a taxonomy by the ancient Greeks, I don't believe that we're very good at that anymore. And yet it's a super useful tool for persuasion.
SPEAKER_00A lot of what we talk about when we talk about the climate is kind of bemoaning what humanity has done to the planet. But you are a science fiction writer. And then saying that you do have some great, you know, glee looking into the future. Like um, what what is there to look forward to? What is there to enjoy right now about how humanity has changed and transformed a planet, our society, and what do we have to look forward to, you know, uh outside of this great challenge, or perhaps through it?
SPEAKER_01Well, um uh there's a wonderful there's a great substack about climate called the climate brink. Um Andrew Dressler and Zeke Housefather, they share the site. And uh Dressler is writing a really good introduction to energy and climate. And he made the point that with electricity, we have the work, uh physical work of about 100 human beings uh backing us for everything we do as modern people who are not immiserated or are not lacking electricity. If you got electricity, you've got the equivalent of 100 people working for you and doing physical work. And that is food, uh, shelter, clothing, and all the things that if you had to do by yourself, it would be much more um undeveloped, let's say. So there's electricity, which means there's travel also. You can see places on this planet. Um, of course, there's a carbon burn involved, but that doesn't always have to be true. It depends on how you travel. And as the Dalai Lama said to me at uh McLeod Gange at his place there, um the Buddha was a green, and you have to you're going to burn some carbon as a living being, so you have to burn carbon mindfully, the way he used to talk about consume mindfully, and pay attention and be um modest in your uh desires and realize that enough is as good as a feast, and you can be happy with a rather uh small amount of physical things because that's experiences that you want. And then you could also talk about lifetime extension. In, and I don't mean by hundreds of years, it seems like it's really hard, that it's um asymptotic, and the more progress we make, the harder it gets to make more progress. But there might be some breakthrough breakthroughs in medical research coming, so that young people, when you look at the historical um successes of increasing average lifetimes, that young people today could justifiably think that they might be pretty, if they're lucky, uh healthy and hearty into their 90s, into their early hundreds. Um, as I say, uh because in my Mars trilogy I had a single trick, uh, do cell repair, and suddenly um uh everybody was living to like 250. That sounds good. I would I would love to have that fix um made uh pretty soon. But it might not be that easy. And but we are already lifetime extended. You understand that that uh in America and in the developed world, an average lifetime of, well, let's say 80 is a a massive upgrade from where we were even 100 years ago, much less uh 200 years ago. And that might continue at a rate that you do not want to cut research, uh medical research. You don't want to cut funding for medical research. And that's another reason why I call the current administration a death cult, because attacking medical research is attacking life and diminishing life, and you don't want to do that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You've touched on this a little bit already, but um and you know, you talk you talk a lot in your in your work about the financial changes, the political changes, the technical changes we need to make it through the crisis. But um, you've hinted a lot at the spiritual changes we need to do today. Um I don't know if you want to articulate those anymore about what we need to do as a society to feel connected to nature again, to see harm against the planet as harm against us. Like how do we do that? Your novels obviously have some impact there, but how can we do this?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, again, I don't want to everybody will have their own way, but I have a simple suggestion. Spend more time outdoors. That it will hit you. Well, when you're outdoors, it's when that's when those feelings of of reverence and awe and also connectedness to the biosphere of the planet as a whole. When you're in rooms, and everybody listening to this has got to admit it, your waking and sleeping hours are spent. Name a percentage to yourself, how much time you spend it indoors. And some people will be working in the trades and their work will be outdoors, uh, or they'll be uh working in agriculture or working in forestry. And these are happier people, and they know it that whatever else may be in terms of status in modern society, they have happier lives because they spend a lot of it outdoors. You can also sleep outdoors, so spend more time outdoors. Go at it consciously, like the way that Dalai Lama would suggest. Uh, living consciously, making choices. And um, in most of the climates that people live in, being outdoors is either a thrill because it's so cold, or it's um a trial because it's so hot, or it's quite nice and you are uh uh feeling it. So just going outdoors and then you know, being mindful and thinking about why do I feel this way when I'm outdoors as opposed to when I'm in a box. Imagine that we spend most of our lives in a box looking at other boxes. Wow. How did smart primates figure that out or get themselves in that box? It seems a little um crazy.
SPEAKER_00Yes. So I wanted to there so so many people submitted questions, and I'm going to now ask you a few of them. So there are many great questions um from you know students and other people listening. Um I cherry-picked my favorites too. Uh here's the first one. If you're writing the Ministry for the Future today, what would you change?
SPEAKER_01I would take out the word blockchain because it's not that good of a cryptography, and it's been corrupted by its association with um Bitcoin. So I would have said encryption or digital instead of blockchain. That was a mistake. I also might have given more room for um the idea of small nuclear reactors being used to bridge as a technology to bridge us through the getting off of fossil fuels century. Uh, I've been convinced, although there are obvious downsides in terms of long-term waste, but I think that it's important enough to decarbonize our technology really fast that I might have added a chapter of, oh, we put in like a U.S. naval submarine nuclear reactor, which you can live net right next to for five years and you won't have accidents because safety comes first rather than profit. And, you know, I could imagine a chapter 107 um talking about small nuclear just to throw it out there for people to discuss. Because we are trying to talk about you know the best possible future, and we are in a very dangerous moment. I guess you could call this the overshoot century where we have overshot and put too much CO2 in the atmosphere, and everything else is therefore endangered. And that's not the only bad practice, but that one, you know, and inequality are together really bad. So I don't know. I would just proceed on that basis that we understand the situation and there are things we have to do.
SPEAKER_00That leads to another one of the audience questions, which I have heard you talk a little bit about recently. Solar geoengineering feels like my only hope for climate stabilization. Why isn't research into it a top priority?
SPEAKER_01Well, it's becoming so. Um, and this is the idea of casting sulfur dioxide or some other um aerosol into the high stratosphere where it would reflect some sunlight away, you know, one or two or three percent of the sunlight would be bounced off before it hit us and it would cool the planet. This is based on Pinatubo. Maybe everybody listening already knows about what it is, and I'll dispense with a further explanation. And it it's scary, and it also makes some people feel like it's an excuse that that will allow the fossil fuel industry to somehow get away with it. But I'm thinking we're all stuck in the same boat when it comes to the emergency, and we have overshot. We're at 425 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. We need to get down to 400 or maybe back to 350. That will take decades. In that time, the the place could get so hot that um civilization will be scrambled and fall into wars and lose its ability to cope with the climate problem. So cooling things down, it's like um the analogy that I think is quite good. Someone's really sick, but and part of it is if they've got a fever, you cool them down like throw them in a cold bath, and then the underlying disease has to be dealt with, but they don't die of the fever. Well, it's not a bad analogy, although all analogies are inaccurate. So this is being more and more discussed, uh, and it's partly because of the first chapter of Ministry for the Future and how the Indian nation responds to that catastrophe, and it's partly because it's been discussed now for 20 years, maybe 30 years, and its time seems to have come. Let's talk about how we would govern it, because how to do it is relatively straightforward. How would we govern it? How would we decide who would decide? This is something that I think needs to be on the table at the COP meetings in the UN. That that the UNFCCC being the UN body charged with dealing with climate change, ought to be looking into it. And the IPCC, which is another UN body uh in the end, uh uh describing our climate situation, they've already called for carbon drawdown. We need to draw down billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as part of the plan. That too is geoengineering. And I'll end by this they're all band-aids on a very sick person unless we stop burning fossil fuels. None of these other things do anything but bias time. And it's important to remember that this is not a cure. This is just buying some time so we can affect the cure, which is decarbonization.
SPEAKER_00Okay, another person asks, what single change to our daily lives would have the greatest positive impact if widely adopted? I don't know if that's going outdoors or something else.
SPEAKER_01Well, that that's just good for anybody and would reduce your carbon burn, uh, presumably. And these are just cliches, but I mean they're true, but everybody knows them. If you were to stop eating beef, if you were to stop eating meat entirely, these these would change land use by way of demand, and we could turn over some land that's being used now to grow cows to uh growing forests. And this, but these are personal choices that once you get into them, you begin to uh say, you begin to imply, oh, well, it's all your fault from the way that you live. And that's both true and wrong. It's it's it's all of our fault for the way that we have decided to reward certain industries and practices. But back to individuals. You could also try to minimize your car mileage and get an electric car and then try to electrify it by clean energy rather than natural gas. So I feel like everybody already knows all this, and and there's nothing brand new. Maybe. To join a small local group doing something that you think is important? Because that uh has indirect effects that are uh quite huge.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a good one. Rob Hopkins has a transition network that's been really effective with that. Um here's a good question that just came in. In order to solve the climate crisis, is it necessary to have a political system beyond capitalist liberal democracy? You've certainly been a proponent of that for a while.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's a damn good question. Yeah. Because the problem itself is a matter of capitalism in its pure form, of uh nothing matters. The iron law is the highest rate of return. And if you were to uh take care of a forest and make a uh 10% per year from taking care of it well and and harvesting it in a sustainable manner, and if you were to make 13% by clear-cutting it and turning it into toilet paper, capitalism says take the 13%. And a lot of people are trained in business schools and then have a fiduciary responsibility.
SPEAKER_00I hate that word. That's the worst. Yeah, fiduciary responsibility. It's like a swear word.
SPEAKER_01Well, it and it means I will be a capitalist no matter if it turns into a death cult or not. So it's it is the problem, okay? Uh the way we value what we do and how we pay ourselves for what we do. Could we uh reform capitalism rapidly? I hope so, because I don't see any alternatives that are very plausible. And what do I mean by that? I mean Keynesianism, and I mean a Green New Deal. I mean government taking over the reins of the economy from private capital and from finance, and the government saying we need to pay people to do this, these kinds of things, industrial policy, whatever you want to call it, Keynesianism, that is not the same as neoliberal, where private has whipped on public and governments are enthralled to the businesses that own them, that buy their by their workers and by their policies, by the laws. So in this mighty struggle, it would be within capital, within world history as it is run in the last hundred and or 150 years, you could have a better form of capitalism that leads quickly to social democracy, as in Scandinavia. And then uh public policy, social policy, um better equality amongst people, which should never be forgotten as a goal. They all come together in a political system that would still have a market, but instead of the market ruling all, people would keep the market in a zone of commodities that are not crucial to life and that don't wreck the environment. So um, I'm describing what I've called a stepwise process that goes from anti-neoliberal austerity to Keynesianism to social democracy. If that then leads to democratic socialism or some other kind of post-capitalistic political economy, yay. That's been a lifelong notion of mine that we would be better off in a different political economy that is more just and more environmentally conscious than than capitalism. But how we get there is, of course, the crucial question. And I just don't feel that we can change every law immediately. It's just uh people won't agree to it, it's not practical, it's difficult logistically and bureaucratically. So one step at a time, and you take the stuff that has already proven to do its job, like like Keynesianism, like social democracy, and you turn to that as quickly as possible and and then call the post-capitalist world a kind of a X for uh a century or two from now, and hope that we get there.
SPEAKER_00This is one of the things I find really encouraging uh talking to you is how a socialist can say we can make capitalism work.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, um uh is uh socialism that different? I mean, socialism itself is a little lame on on um on the environment, at least historically, it's been just as industrial and productivist. It rates the economy in the same way that Caspelists did. It's kinds of a mirror image or um um, it's not the last. Um, it's I wouldn't even define myself as unless you want to call it eco-socialist, but what does that mean until you invent it? I would rather stay flexible and say, let's do things that increase equality, decrease inequality, let's do things that that take care of the earth, and that you can make a living taking care of the earth and not so much make a profit for a tiny percentage of humans, but make a living for everybody.
SPEAKER_00Um, here's another question. How how can we help young people stay connected to real nature in a digital world increasingly filled with artificial substitutes?
SPEAKER_01Well, I don't know. I find this very, very hard. And the people that I know, the people in my life, the young people, it's like saying, Well, how do you help an addict? Whoa, this is a whole social science, right? And a whole zone of compassion and interaction. Uh, I don't think there's any simple answers. Again, I would say um go outdoors with them. And um you can even do your screen work outdoors if you've got some shade. But it will be you'll begin to realize if you're outdoors that the stuff on the screen is not as interesting as the stuff off the screen. That um reality has a very um very many pixels. You know, reality is just extremely dense with reality, and reality is more interesting than our little sub-subworlds.
SPEAKER_00They have a camera obscura in San Francisco. I I don't know if you've seen it, you probably have seen it before, but I've sat which is just literal light coming into a room, right, where the where you see an image of the outside. But I've been there many times with people who said, Wow, look at the resolution of that.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Really good resolution. Well, it's it's speaking of resolution, these photos from our Artemis too of the moon, of the back of the backside of the moon, and of the earth. Um, I mean, these are just iPhone 17, some of those photos, but the real the the truth is that for those astronauts with their own eyeballs, looking from just a few like almost uh well, almost like airplane distance from the backside of the moon, the and seeing meteors hit and sparking on the backside of the surface with their own eyes. I mean, you can see why they cried out and why they wept. It's just amazing. But here's the thing: you can walk out your front door and walk down even a street, but it'd be better if there was some um a creek, a hill, something uh living that isn't us, but uh even a botanical garden or any place outdoors, including the urban landscape, and have your mind boggled in almost the same way.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Oh, someone asks, are there meaningful ways to reduce greenhouse gases without relying on political action? You talked a bit about that, yeah, already.
SPEAKER_01Well, okay. Is it the personal is political? This is an old phrase from the 60s. So, yes, you can. You can um by consuming mindfully, um some people are in areas where they can use bicycles or even e-bikes if necessary, um, to get where they need to go. Reducing car use, reducing the carbon burn. People who are uh well off enough can electrify their homes uh and and uh start cooking with electricity rather than gas. I mean, the the list is obvious and it's all over the place. So, yes, there's things you can do. And it and it's kind of interesting as a project. It feels more stylish, it feels less wasteful, and so it's not as if it's a burden. You don't have to put on a hair shirt, you have to just be stylish in a different way.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, we've done it with three houses, you know, as we've gone through our life where we totally electrified them, put solar, and it's an amazing feeling to say, okay, now for the rest of this lifetime, we're generating our own energy. Very satisfying. It is. Someone asked this is an interesting question. It's like what it's like to be you. You write about the profoundly disturbing consequences of our disconnect from nature while still keeping readers engaged. That feels like a real superpower. Where does that strength come from, Stan?
SPEAKER_01Well, uh it's a literary trick. Um, it's just sentence making. Um, I have a certain interests and I have certain experiences. And I want to say, I am just a suburban househusband uh and Mr. Mom. I don't have any superpowers. I mean, I garden, I run, I do the things that suburban men in California do. I have a sports life, I have even a Sierra life, which is a little unusual, but actually most of the Sierra people I know are suburban people. So uh I do I would claim no superpowers whatsoever, and uh and actually a pretty high uh carbon burn over my lifetime compared to many and many a person on this earth and through the course of history. So um it hasn't been it's it's been somewhat accidental and it hasn't been a matter of of um planning. But I even just following what you enjoy and living a relatively conventional modern American life, you can indeed stay healthier and happier by paying attention to these issues.
SPEAKER_00Well, you're quite an inspiration to us, and it's nice for you to say you're just ordinary because it makes us think that may each of us um can be like you two.
SPEAKER_01That's easy as can be. I really I I uh yeah, I'm I've convinced myself that um um this is my fate, but it's but you know, I grew up in suburbia and it's extremely boring and and um conventional and and unnatural, so I didn't have much nature except for God bless the ocean, living close to the ocean, going to the beach and jumping offshore into the ocean and suddenly being in a wild world that was obviously so much more vivid than my life in suburban California. I've never forgotten it, and anybody can learn these lessons. It really is just a matter of um going outdoors and paying attention.
SPEAKER_00You know, I thought we have a minute or two before I hand it back to Jason. I I wanted to try this exercise Rob Hopkins does, where you pretend like you're uh coming back from the future, you know, five, ten, fifteen years from now. If you do if you had to do that in just a minute or two, you know, Stan plus 10, plus 15 years from now in our best possible future, um, what would you tell us our future looks like?
SPEAKER_01In my case, I would still be alive. That's really quite positive because I'm old. But I can do it because I'm a science fiction writer and I'm seeing the signs of it. The rewilding of the earth, what I would have done in um in uh couldn't have done in earlier times, was go out into places where I'm in the same space as wild animals and they don't care about me, and I get to see them living their lives. This is happening intensely all over the world. In Europe, it's their leaders in it. Um, give back some space on the planet to the humans. And the 30 by 30 movement in California is also a worldwide goal of the biospheric COP. And if that happens, then the 10, 15, 30 years from now, the world will be more interesting, and we won't be in the middle of a mass extinction event, and you can witness that with your own eyes, and you can go out and see a herd of caribou, or you can see maybe I would like to see wolverines back in the Sierra Nevada, wolves all over the American West. And of course, you got to be careful. Some of these creatures will, in fact, eat you, but that means you'll be walking in a little group of humans, and no animals want to mess with a group of humans rather than a single one. So you might become more social, but you would see more of our wild cousins. And this, I feel, is um something that people are missing without knowing they're missing it. You accidentally see a coyote or or a bear rooting through the trash or or a raccoon down in the gutter, a possum, you know, impossibly uh survivalist, weirdo possums, and it's a thrill. Even denatured and and um cynical people still feel a little buzz, and that's ancient too. That's a part of the brain, a sense of recognition and of of uh love for your cousins. That could be we could I 15 years from now, that could be a widespread experience.
SPEAKER_00And that does sound like wrapping back around to our shamanic roots 30,000 years ago. So it's a good ending.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you. Many times good endings are accidental.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you, Stan. I I can't thank you enough for taking an hour out of Earth Day to speak with us and um keep up your great work, live long, prosper, and um help make the planet uh rewild.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Scott, and uh thank you, Jason, and everybody else. Um, it's been fun. And and uh I'll hopefully I'll run into you on a trail somewhere, but I think I'll see you also in Civilization because we travel in the same circles, which is a great thing.
SPEAKER_00See you soon, thanks for joining me for this conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson. You can find links to buy the books of his we talked about in this episode at how to train a happymind.org. You can also discover guided analytical meditations there, hundreds of past episodes of the podcast, and information about the Train a Happy Mind community that meets every Sunday morning to talk and meditate together. How to Train a Happy Mind is a nonprofit project of a skeptic's path to enlightenment. The podcast is offered freely and without ads, thanks to the support of listeners. Thanks to Isabella Assabal for marketing and production on this episode. We wish you a wonderful day.