Chance encounter on an airplane at 32,000 feet in 2017 lands Margaret Atwood in a Dartmouth College lecture hall in 2019

Margaret Atwood and Sonu Bedi on stage at Dartmouth College in April 2019.

(Photo by Herb Swanson; Courtesy of Dartmouth News)


by Dan Bloom with agencies


Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, who just might win the Nobel Prize for Literature this fall, keeps busy -- in addition her popular literary and TV work -- flying around the world on an almost monthly basis to give lectures at universities and book festivals in over a dozen countries.

 

Look up in the sky at any moment, and you might catch a glimpse of Dr Atwood sitting in a 747 headed to France or Britain or Australia or Mexico or in smaller jets flying to Texas, Boston, Seattle or Indiana.

 

To book the literary rockstar for a lecture takes ingenuity, PR savvy and patience, as Atwood's schedule is almost always full and making contact with her or her office assistant in Toronto is not a simple matter.

 

But dozens of speaking dates materialize month after month, and persistence by college English professors and lecture hall bookers almost always pays off.

 

Still, what happened at Dartmouth College this month makes for a great one-of-a-kind Atwood story, and I'll let the professor who told the story on stage during her recent lecture tell it again here. It's one for the books.

 

You see, when the Toronto novelist visited Dartmouth College across the border in New Hampshire in mid-April to meet with seniors in a ''cli-fi'' seminar taught by English professor Alysia Garrison, little did the delighted Ivy League students know that they owed Atwood's campus visit to a chance encounter on a Chicago-to-Indianapolis airplane two years ago that put a Dartmouth professor  named Sonu Bedi in a seat next to her [BY COMPLETE RANDOM CHANCE IN THIS BLACK HOLE OF A UNIVERSE]

 

According to a delightful news article by Charlotte Albright, Professor Bedi explained in his introduction to the SRO lecture that Atwood’s visit to Dartmouth was ''a stroke of luck.''

 

"Two years ago, he was seated next to her on a plane [from Chicago] to Indiana, where they were both scheduled to give lectures," Albright wrote, adding: "Bedi thought the person sitting next to him was the famous writer. But he wasn’t certain."

 

Then he told the lecture hall, with Atwood sitting next to him on the Dartmouth College stage: “She graciously asked me what my talk was about -- and you know, you ask an academic what they are going to talk about and they will answer -- so I did.”

 

Then he said he asked his seatmate, “What is your talk about?”

 

“She said, ‘I am going to talk about a book I’ve written called 'The Handmaid’s Tale,'” Bedi said.

“That’s how we came to have Margaret Atwood here today.”

 

Bedi, a professor in Law and Political Science at Dartmouth, later arranged Atwood's 2019 visit and appeared on stage with her during her talk.

 

Her lecture was part of the Ethics Institute's Dorsett Fellowship Lecture Series in the Spaulding Auditorium at Dartmouth College on April. The 900-seat auditorium was packed, according to Albright.

 

After I read online the other day about the Atwood-Bedi airplane encounter at 32,000 feet, I told the professor I planned to blog about his anecdote and asked him by email: "Was the plane leaving from Boston with both of you on it by chance? What was your lecture titled and where did you give it?"

 

Professor Bedi was kind enough to answer in internet time, from his university office in New Hampshire to my kitchen table ''office" in Taiwan.

 

"Thanks for the email," he wrote. "I’m glad you enjoyed [the write up about Atwood's Dartmouth lecture. In 2017, I was on my way from Chicago to Indiana to give] a talk on race and the reproductive market at the Political Theory Colloquium at  the University of Notre Dame. She was on her way to give a speech at Notre Dame, too. Thanks for your kind email. It was my pleasure to bring her to campus [in 2019.] I was pleased that so many enjoyed her lecture."

 

So there you have it: a chance encounter of a literary kind due to the cosmic convergence of a random seating arrangement on a jet airplane. One thing led to another.

 

Moral of the story: Always keep your eyes open and be open whatever happens next.

 

Final words: Professor Bedi's second email, after I asked him what he thought about the possibility of Atwood receiving the Nobel nod this October:

"It will be grand if she wins!"

DARTMOUTH LINK
https://news.dartmouth.edu/news/2019/04/writer-margaret-atwood-offers-amid-warnings-rays-hope

When Cory Doctorow goes ''cli-fi'' along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the whole world listens

The Cli-Fi Maven Cory Doctorow

on:

[Slightly edited for clarification and amplification]

"A Message From the Future": short 7-minute cli-fi video about the "Green New Deal Decade," narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, drawn by Molly Crabapple, presented by Naomi Klein and seconded by Bill McKibben's tweet and over 30,000 other tweets worldwide!

The Intercept has just released "A Message From the Future," a short 7-minute cli-fi video narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and drawn by Molly Crabapple, describing the coming "Green New Deal Decade," when Americans will pull together and find prosperity, stability, solidarity and full employment through a massive, nationwide effort to refit the country to be resilient to climate shocks and stem the tide of global climate change.

It's an astonishingly moving and beautiful piece, and deploys a tactic that has been surprisingly effective at mobilizing large groups of people: creating a retrospective describing the successful project to inspire people to make it a success.

Famously, this is the tactic that Jeff Bezos insists on at Amazon for the launch of new internal projects: ambitious internal entrepreneurs must submit a memo describing the project as a fait accompli, and if the description is compelling and exciting enough, they get the resources to make it happen.

But it's not just Amazon: as anthropologist Gabriella Coleman describes in Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, her seminal 2014 study of Anonymous, this is how Anon ops get started: an individual Anon makes a video announcing victory in some op that hasn't taken place yet, and if enough other anons are inspired by it to make it happen, then it happens.

[And this is how the rising new genre of cli-fi was born. An individual created a new coinage, blogged it, put in YouTube with the assistance of Margaret Atwood in 2011 and slowly, as more and more websites picked up the coinage, other bloggers and reporters were inspired to make cli-fi happen in the pages of the New York Times and UK Guardian, and it happened! Cli-fi is now all over: www.cli-fi.net ]

In her article accompanying the video, Naomi Klein describes the audacity of other projects on this scale, like FDR's New Deal, and how much skepticism they were met with at their outset -- and how, as the vision caught on, it spread like wildfire through the population, so that something that was once impossible became inevitable.

''One reason that elite attacks never succeeded in turning the public against the New Deal had to do with the incalculable power of art, which was embedded in virtually every aspect of the era’s transformations. The New Dealers saw artists as workers like any other: people who, in the depths of the Depression, deserved direct government assistance to practice their trade. As Works Progress Administration administrator Harry Hopkins famously put it, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.”
Through programs including the Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, Federal Theater Project, and Federal Writers Project (all part of the WPA), as well as the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture and several others, tens of thousands of painters, musicians, photographers, playwrights, filmmakers, actors, authors, and a huge array of craftspeople found meaningful work, with unprecedented support going to African-American and Indigenous artists.
The result was a renaissance of creativity and a staggering body of work that transformed the visual landscape of the country. The Federal Art Project alone produced nearly 475,000 works of art, including over 2,000 posters, 2,500 murals, and 100,000 canvasses for public spaces. Its stable of artists included Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Authors who participated in the Federal Writers Program included Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and John Steinbeck.''

A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [Naomi Klein/The Intercept]

==============

ADDED BONUS NOTES:

Published on April 17, 2019

What if we actually pulled off a Green New Deal? What would the future look like? The Intercept presents a cli-fi film narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and illustrated by Molly Crabapple.

Set a couple of decades from now, the film is a flat-out rejection of the idea that a sci-fi dystopian future is a forgone conclusion. Instead, it offers a cli-fi thought experiment: What if we decided not to drive off the climate cliff? What if we chose to radically change course and save both our habitat and ourselves?

We realized that the biggest obstacle to the kind of transformative change the Green New Deal envisions is overcoming the skepticism that humanity could ever pull off something at this scale and speed. That’s the message we’ve been hearing from the “serious” center for four months straight: that it’s too big, too ambitious, that our Twitter-addled brains are incapable of it, and that we are destined to just watch walruses fall to their deaths on Netflix until it’s too late.

This cli-fi film flips the script. It’s about how, in the nick of time, a critical mass of humanity in the largest economy on Earth came to believe that we were actually worth saving. Because, as Ocasio-Cortez says in the film, our future has not been written yet and “we can be whatever we have the courage to see.”

Subscribe to our channel: https://interc.pt/subscribe
Read the article from Naomi Klein: https://interc.pt/2UktTeE 

LitHub poked some ''cli-fi'' novelists and Cli-Fi short story anthology editors for some quotes on the role of ''cli-fi'' in this age of runaway global warming

Literary Hub website poked ''cli-fi'' novelists and Cli-Fi short story anthology editors

for some quotes on the role of ''cli-fi'' in this age

of runaway [AGW] [TheAnthrocene].

Excerpts: Here's what some of them said:

“Climate change is a social and spiritual emergency as well as a political, scientific one. Clearly all the arts need to address themselves to it, and never fear, soon enough they’ll have to. All too fast that confrontation will be unavoidable. The fact that we can’t put out the fires and lower the seas with words or pictures or music doesn’t mean we’re off the hook for trying.”

–Lydia Millet, author of Fight No More

 

 

“Roger Ebert called the movies ‘a machine that generates empathy.’ The same is true of climate-change fiction. Climate change is both monolithic and multifarious. Its effects show up differently in different places, but it’s also one big thing that we have to live through together. Stories give us the power to see climate chaos anew, through the eyes of people whose lives and experiences are utterly unfamiliar to us. They’re indispensable for building the shared global consciousness that we’ll need to respond collectively, and in time to preserve as much as we can.”

–Joey Eschrich, editor of ASU cli-fi short story anthologies 1 and 2

“Humans are no good at the large-scale or the future tense. We tend to recoil from enormity in awe and stupefaction—a reaction that is terribly dangerous now, in the Anthropocene, when it is not nature but humanity that is the uncontrollable danger, the ungraspable vastness. Fiction is uniquely equipped to counter that paralysis by bringing readers a direct and human-sized experience of climate change: one family’s battle against rising water, one man’s flight from a forest fire. I have to believe that if we learn to see, up close, what we have done, we might begin to change.”

–C. Morgan Babst, author of The Floating World

“Our deepening climate crisis is going to require much more creativity and willpower from all of us, and we’re not going to get through this without the power of imagination. Which means that fiction and creative writing have a unique and super vital role to play in helping us to visualize what’s coming and how we’re going to cope with it. Seldom have fiction writers had such a rich opportunity.”

–Charlie Jane Anders, author of The City in the Middle of the Night

“As climate change impacts become more widespread, our world grows less legible. I believe this transition, which is already upon us, will create a hunger for literature that helps make sense of it. And if fiction is, at its core, an exercise in empathy—the act standing in the shoes of another and inhabiting her life for a few hundred pages—then literature that documents life in this changing world might help un-impacted individuals understand what’s at stake. In a world in which climate change impacts will not be equitable, I see this as a crucial step toward collective action.”

–Ashley Shelby, author of South Pole Station

 

“Great fiction allows us to see ourselves more clearly—to understand how the most urgent crises of our time touch our inner lives. ‘The private life,’ as James Baldwin wrote, ‘is the writer’s subject.’ I don’t think a novel can cause the United States and China to agree on stricter emissions limits or make West Virginians hate coal. But fiction can help us to understand how our climate crisis is changing us.”

–Nathaniel Rich, author of Odds Against Tomorrow and the forthcoming Losing Earth

“For a long time, much of literary fiction has been committed to the idea that meaning is primarily subjective and synthetic, mediated by commodity and defined by the morally ambiguous private self.  Until our stories return to the stance that meaning is out there, that it resides in the enormously difficult task of reconciling human society to the influences and affordances of the planet, we will fail at the task of living here, inside the cycles that the living world requires.  Climate change is one symptom of that failure.  The challenge lies not so much in taking climate change as our subject; it lies in taking the Earth as our object and our setting and our enduring source of meaning.”

–Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize winning cli-fi author of The Overstory

 

 

Hopefully next year's 2020 Lit Hub list of climate-theme writers will grow to include more women and men and people of colour and non-English speaking people and such climate gurus as  David Wallace Wells and James Bradley and Roy Scranton and Paolo Bacigalupi and Annaleen Newitz and Megan Hunter. And many many more, film directors like Paul Schrader and Marshall Herskovitz, too. The next 80 years are going to see a massive increase in the number of writers jumping into the cli-fi literary arena. -- Dan Bloom, editor, The Cli-Fi Report

“Fiddling while Rome burns, whistling from the coal mine, serenading the doomed while the ship sinks—I’d like to think that storytellers and poets have a more urgent role right now than this. As many other writers and critics have said, if you’re writing realistic fiction that’s set in the modern world right now, you’re already writing about climate change in some way. There’s nothing the least bit speculative about cli-fi anymore. We already know, because we can see it happening today. The economic and practical effects of climate change will be felt first and worst by the very populations that are the most at-risk and vulnerable. We have to tell those stories. Not just because it’s a moral imperative but because pretty soon, those stories are going to be representative of more of the audience for fiction. Writing fiction and poetry in the era of climate change is an opportunity and a privilege. The purpose of art is to generate radical empathy, to enlarge our understanding of ourselves and our world, through people and stories that dramatize what a climate report or news story can’t. And our world has never needed that generative power more than now. Who if not us?”

–Siobhan Adcock, author of The Completionist

“...With climate change in particular, Paolo Bacigalupi has been modeling what the world looks like after the fact; anyone who thinks climate change is not a big deal should be assigned his novels.”

-- John Scalzi

 

 

[Hopefully next year's 2020 Lit Hub list of climate-theme writers will grow to include more women and men and people of colour and non-English speaking people and such climate gurus as  David Wallace Wells and James Bradley and Roy Scranton and Paolo Bacigalupi and Annaleen Newitz and Megan Hunter. And many many more, film directors like Paul Schrader and Marshall Herskovitz, too. The next 80 years are going to see a massive increase in the number of writers jumping into the cli-fi literary arena. -- Dan Bloom, editor, The Cli-Fi Report ]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greta’s 10-minute speech

Greta’s 10-minute speech at the EU: is she feeling the stress too much now. Will somebody take care of her, like her dad maybe or mom?

 

During the speech, around 1-minute into this video here, ss the 16 climate protester spoke of a “sixth mass extinction”, her weak voice faltered and she began to cry, unable to hold back.... “The extinction rate is up to six times faster than what is considered normal, with up to 200 species becoming extinct every single day,” she said in tears. “Erosion of fertile topsoil, deforestation of the rainforest, toxic air pollution, loss of insects and wildlife, acidification of our oceans – these are all disastrous trends.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/16/greta-thunberg-urges-eu-leaders-wake-up-climate-change-school-strike-movement

The Segmented Earth: The end (or transformation) of Capitalism and the Decline of the Anthropocene

The Segmented Earth: The end (or transformation) of
Capitalism and the Decline of the Anthropocene

by Fernando Gularte in Uruguay,

a friend of this blog

TRANSLATION BY GOOGLE MACHINE

SPANISH LANGUAGE LINK ORIGINAL:

http://www.comerciazo.com.uy/pdf/Ensayo_Clifi.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2hpVQhEJqunbs92n20rAOTkliBHSNvj_Ii9l_sWeOmHMYGoM5nWOALYNs

In this paper I will try to relate central concepts that are part of
the life of Man This, with the intention of provoking some instances of
reflection that allows us to discuss some possible answers to issues that
they will emerge in the development of the following lines.

Nature and Man

We know that long before the appearance of Man on the face of the Earth, and
there was life. We are, at least to this day, the final product of a
succession of species on an evolutionary scale.
Up to a certain moment in our History; together with different species of
animals, we were biological agents that interacted with Nature,
located at the top of a pyramid formed by these species, due to the
high degree of development of our brain.
We create civilizations in Mesopotamia, in China, in Greece, in Egypt, in
Rome. We create culture and knowledge. In this evolution, we achieved stadiums
of development and intelligence increasingly higher. So we went away
more and more of other species, in addition to our hominid ancestors.

Meanwhile, the Holocene era passed.
two

We could think, in summary, that we were somehow created by
determined natural interactions, as were the other species, and
that therefore, as biological agents, we would be subject or conditioned
by Nature and its evolutionary codes.

The XIX, XX and XXI Centuries: The emergence and dominance of
Capitalism

In our eagerness to improve ourselves every day, achieve better
levels of comfort, greater power and mastery, we were taking more control
about the natural world, about its resources, its sources of energy. We achieve
dominate, sky, sea and earth, through our material creations. The
paper currency as an exchange between different goods and services, together with
different degrees of importance and value that were defined by what
we would know later as Mercado. With this last concept, most
of the sometimes little visible, of a certain abstract nature, the world of
Capital.

Maybe Capital is seen by certain sectors of our society as a
modern weapon, an instrument of power, that allows us to take refuge in small
clans (elites) and defend ourselves from others (large human masses,
animals, nature), as our ancestors did when
they discovered that with a club or the thighbone of a large animal, they could kill
other animals to feed themselves, or even defend themselves from intruders alien to their
communities that seek to appropriate their food, women or caves.

In this case:
Would not it be the Capital? beyond being an intellectual creation, a
more natural element, willing to serve Man?

The human brain evolved over thousands of years; the DNA, the
cells and therefore the neurons of Homo Sapiens, surely have a
different from the one that the Neardental Man possessed.
Why was there a moment in history when Man was able to use a
stick to your benefit, and not before? We could ask this same question
do, with fire; There was a before and an after.
What I try to support, is that Capitalism can be seen as a
element inherent to human nature, to its Biology, one more element of
survival, and also fighting against fear.

Capitalism and Anthropocene

It is difficult to think of the appearance of the Anthropocene, without thinking of Capitalism.
Would the existence of the former be possible without the latter? That is, the
disappearance of Capitalism would imply the extinction of the Anthropocene?
If Capitalism is an inherent factor of Man, would it now be impossible to
existence of Man without the Anthropocene, as it was in his first
stages?

The breaking point or perhaps the breaking points, in which the Man
he was abandoning his biological agent status to become an agent
geological and therefore the creator of the Anthropocene era, occurred in full
expansion of Capitalism, and hence the previous questions.

We could think of the existence of "natural refinement cycles of the
Capitalism "in the future, and that at some given moment, we can abandon
naturally that cycle, and continue in the following evolutionary ages without
disappear as a species. This point, I will develop later, with a
little more detail.

Anthropocene and the possibility of a nuclear disaster

It is not unreasonable to think that as a species we could disappear,
Think of a nuclear catastrophe of great magnitude. I think that among all the
existing threats, the one related to nuclear technology, if it is not
the most important, would be among the first, among the most likely.

Let's think and analyze

É possível escrever literatura sobre o aquecimento global? - TRADUÇÃO DE ROBERTO MUNIZ

É possível escrever literatura sobre o aquecimento global?

 

Can the cli-fi novel handle a subject as cataclysmic as climate change?

Writers are coming to appreciate the theme’s urgency—and its narrative possibilities

Aliás Estadão (Blog)- BRAZIL
TRADUÇÃO DE ROBERTO MUNIZ

 

O romance tem um problema de escala. Há séculos ele se concentra principalmente em temas do dia a dia. Não costuma se preocupar com ...

 

https://alias.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,e-possivel-escrever-literatura-sobre-o-aquecimento-global,70002788156

 

Escritores começam a avaliar a urgência do tema e suas possibilidades narrativas

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Redação, The Economist TRANSLATED INTO PORTUGUESE in BRAZIL

13 de abril de 2019 |

O romance tem um problema de escala. Há séculos ele se concentra principalmente em temas do dia a dia. Não costuma se preocupar com cataclismas ou erupções tetônicas. Compare a Odisseia, de Homero, com o Ulisses, de James Joyce. Enquanto o épico fala de deuses, massacres e destino de nações, o romance celebra o íntimo e o cotidiano.  

Viggo Mortensen e Kodi Smit-McPhee protagonizam 'The Road', baseado no romance pós-apocalíptico de Cormac McCarthy Foto: Dimension Filmes

O romance tem um problema com o tempo. Romances são uma das formas pelas quais uma cultura pensa os desafios que encara, mas frequentemente o formato, mais do que olhar para o futuro, vale-se do passado para iluminar o presente. É verdade que o romance vitoriano analisou a rapidez da industrialização da economia e as mudanças nas estruturas de classe da época. Ainda assim, muitos dos grandes livros do período, de Middlemarch a Um Conto de Duas Cidades, usaram contextos históricos. Hoje os romancistas buscam com frequência temas nas duas Guerras Mundiais, ou mesmo em eras mais remotas.

Essas tendências são uma desvantagem para o escritor na era da mudança climática - uma crise que é tanto atual como futura. O romancista indiano Amitav Ghosh reconheceu esse obstáculo em The Great Derangement, uma coletânea de ensaios publicada em 2016. Num dos ensaios, que aborda ostensivamente a catástrofe ambiental, Ghosh avalia o papel cultural do romance. A mudança climática, argumenta ele,  parece um tema por demais amplo, incerto e abstrato para ser trabalhado em um formato que teme o desconhecido e o provisório – isto é, o futuro. Então, se o romance não se presta a confrontar os maiores perigos que a humanidade enfrenta, conseguirá ele manter sua relevância?     
Tempo é um fator que se apresenta em mais de uma forma. Particularmente desde o Modernismo, que viu Joyce e Virginia Woolf dissecarem as minúcias da vida, o tempo literário está circunscrito. Seja no dia de Mrs Dolaway, ou no longo arco do Bildungsroman, geralmente existe um limite nos horizontes temporais dos romances: a duração da vida de um personagem. O tempo do romance é rigidamente restrito, como se estivesse preso ao passado. Já o salto à frente necessário para se divisar a trajetória climática requer parâmetros mais elásticos. 
Nem toda ficção está sujeita a esses limites. Romances de ficção especulativa e des ficção científica - que Ghosh chama com esnobismo de “puxadinhos genéricos” – vêm tentando abordar abertamente a mudança climática. Os limites desses gêneros são difusos e contestados. O romance de J.G. Ballard The Drowned World (1962), um dos primeiros de ficção científica a falar do medo relacionado ao clima, foi reavaliado e reclassificado à medida que a reputação do autor evoluía. Mas o romance literário há muito se definiu como oposição a outros gêneros, e o futuro e seus riscos são abordados apenas por associação. Ou pelo menos tem sido assim até recentemente.       
À medida que a divisão entre ficção literária e outros tipos de ficção tem se tornando cada vez mais porosa, o establishment literário começou a reconhecer as possibilidades imaginativas da mudança climática. A Estrada, de Cormac McCarthy (2006), romance no qual pai e filho vagam por um mundo cinzento após um apocalipse não designado, foi um ponto inicial de mudança. O livro é uma espécie de ponte entre os medos de uma geração, que envolviam cogumelos nucleares e certeza de destruição mútua, e os da geração seguinte, como derretimento das calotas polares e incêndios devastadores.    
McCarthy escreveu A Estrada após se tornar pai depois dos 50 anos. Contemplando com o filho uma paisagem texana, ele visualizou colinas calcinadas e negras – espetáculo que ele não veria, mas o filho sim. A história pode ser interpretada como uma mensagem de McCarthy para o filho; como uma metáfora da agonia universal de deixar descendentes entregues à própria sorte; ou, ainda, como uma dramatização do horror de uma Terra despojada de tudo pela ação do homem. O livro chama a atenção para o fato de que, em certo sentido, romances são sempre sobre o futuro, que é quando serão lidos. É também uma plataforma para escritores dispostos a se engajar em clima – romancistas como Ian McEwan e Margaret Atwood.

Agora, o gênero que McCarthy ajudou a galvanizar, também conhecido como “cli-fi”,  está ganhando força. O impulso de contar histórias para gerações futuras é visto em dois exemplos recentes.

Em The End We Start From, Megan Hunter fala em “uma inundação sem precedentes. Londres inabitável”. A narradora anônima vaga com sua filha bebê, Z, por essa Grã-Bretanha inundada em busca do pai da menina e de segurança. A narrativa se entrelaça com passagens mitológicas, fechando o círculo entre inundações destrutivas de um futuro “cli-fi” e as origens aquáticas de muitas religiões. 
De modo semelhante, Future Home of the Living God, de Louise Erdrich, é supostamente escrito por uma mulher para seu filho por nascer, preparando-o para o mundo que vai habitar. O termômetro avança como uma bomba programada. O romance termina com uma passagem lírica na qual o narrador relembra as neves de sua juventude. “No inverno seguinte choveu. O frio foi substituído por uma temperatura amena e refrescante, mas apenas choveu. Aquele foi o ano em que perdemos o inverno.”
 Algumas distopias combinam o espectro da devastação climática com outros medos. The Wall, de John Lancaster, imagina um futuro no qual a costa britânica foi ocupada pelo muro (wall) do título, levantado tanto para conter marés destruidoras quanto “os Outros” – hordas de migrantes que chegam de barco em busca de refúgio. A crise da migração e o Brexit contribuem para uma sombria visão da insularidade paranoica. Em American War, Omar El Accad prevê que no fim do século 21 vastas porções dos Estados Unidos estarão cobertas de água. A Flórida desaparece. Uma segunda Guerra Civil estoura na disputa por combustíveis fósseis.   
Romancistas literários começaram a compreender que  mudança climática não é só um assunto urgente, mas uma fonte de dramas e enredos. Muito em breve o tema pode sair do território da ficção científica para o domínio do velho realismo. / TRADUÇÃO DE ROBERTO MUNIZ

Notícias relacionadas

• O aquecimento global já é realidade. E agora?
• O aquecimento global está ganhando
• Aquecimento global e desinformação

Mais conteúdo sobre:

aquecimento globalliteratura

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When Sir David Attenborough Speaks, the World Listens

Rachel Riederer at the New York magazine says she talked with David Attenborough over the phone and, just for a moment, the sound of his voice turned her into a 

April 13, 2019

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[In the controversial and much-criticized for its take walrus suicide segments filmed in 2017 on two separate beaches, Netflix series “Our Planet,” Attenborough’s voice-over places global climate catastrophe front and center, delivering not just reverent narration but policy recommendations.]

Photograph by Ben Macdonald / Silverback / Netflix

Earlier this month, Netflix released “Our Planet,” an eight-part series that follows in the footsteps of “Planet Earth” (2006), a standard-bearer of prestige nature documentaries. The series’s presenter is the naturalist Sir David Attenborough —he was knighted, in 1985—and has written and narrated so many wilderness programs, starting in the nineteen-seventies, that he has become synonymous with the genre.

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“Our Planet” contains many of the classic elements of his earlier programs. The dappled hot-pink petals of an orchid open with a loud, crisp pop. A parade of fluffy gray flamingo chicks, gathered on a salty mud flat, gallop to music so jaunty they seem about to break into a kick line. A pod of orcas slices menacingly through Antarctic waves like so many silent assassins. But the segment with scenes of hundreds of walruses apparently committing suicide by jumping off a cliff due to climate change has been debunked now as faked footage and commentary. However, I didn't ask The Voice about this; it would not be polite, would it now?

But in important ways “Our Planet” is a departure from Attenborough’s previous documentaries. It places global climate catastrophe front and center, and treats the problems of climate change and habitat loss with a new urgency. “The longer we leave it, the more difficult it will be to solve the problem,” Attenborough, who is almost 100, said over the phone. “Eventually, of course, you can’t solve the problems, and the result is chaos.”

The changes in the series seem to reflect a kind of political evolution in Attenborough. His voice, for anyone who has watched nature programs during the past couple of decades, is The Voice. You are looking at a flat glare of desert sand under a hot, still sky when, all at once, fat gray clouds roll in at hyperlapse speed and, when they burst generously open, it seems to be because of Attenborough’s whispered incantation: “Rain.”

In this series, the same voice delivers not just reverent narration but policy recommendations—some quite radical, like the proposal to protect a third of the Earth’s coastal waters as marine reserves.

He has been presenting in this vein since the 1979 series “Life on Earth.” In an especially famous moment during an episode filmed in the Rwandan rain forest where Dian Fossey was studying mountain gorillas, he came face to face with a family of gorillas including an adult alpha male, a silverback, and abandoned his scripted speech about opposable thumbs to whisper, ad lib, about how unfair it was that humans had used gorillas as symbols of violence and aggression—“when that is the one thing that the gorilla is not—and that we are.”

In his decades of travelling to the world’s wildest places, he has seen firsthand the evidence of human influence on climate. He talked about about travelling up and down the rivers of Borneo; as recently as twenty years ago, those forested river banks were “rich with birds and all sorts of wonderful creatures.” No longer. “You go down now and the trees are still there, but there aren’t the monkeys that there were, there aren’t the birds that there were. And you wonder why, until you go up in the helicopter and you see that the band of forest along the riverbanks only extends inland by a mile. Beyond, there is nothing but oil palm.”

For decades, most nature programs have spent a lot of time appreciating the majesty of the ecosystem or animal at hand, tacking on a quick warning at the end about the danger of poaching or pollution. In “Our Planet,” warnings and appreciation are woven together throughout. “Fifty years ago, we didn’t even realize what the problem was. Maybe thirty years ago we did recognize what the problem was but didn’t know much about it, thinking, That’s way in the future. Now we know that it’s right here ahead of us,” Attenborough said.

Compared to its predecessors, the series also frames the value of nature in a new way. Usually Attenborough’s programs establish a place or a species as a thing of remarkable beauty—this soulful orangutan, that industrious bird of paradise—before warning that it is somehow imperilled. The value of the creature is its existence. We may never see a polar bear, but we take pleasure from knowing that they’re out there.

In “Our Planet,” the value of nature is presented as something much closer to home, and more practical. Attenborough reminds viewers again and again of the connections that link these far-flung ecosystems to our own species’s survival. Protect the sea otter because it’s lovely, if you like, but also because it keeps in check the sea urchins that otherwise mow down kelp forests, which act as crucial carbon sinks. “We are part of nature. We aren’t separate from nature,” Attenborough said.
Attenborough said that these documentaries have always had a role to play in teaching people about how Earth’s systems work, so that this understanding and valuing of nature can filter up to the elected officials they choose; they are more important than ever now that half of the world’s population is urbanized, he told me, and therefore perhaps more disconnected from the natural world.

Later in the day, in his speech to the I.M.F., Attenborough critiqued our dependence on fossil fuels and government subsidies of them, drew a connection between global migration and climate change, and called for nations to uphold their commitments to the Paris climate accord. Over the phone, he spoke like someone with financial systems on his mind. “The principles by which you deal with the natural world are very like the way you deal with finance,” he said. “If you have a system that is producing you an income, you are very foolish if you take so much of the profits that you start eroding your capital—you’re heading for a disaster.”

The "30 Generations" quiz as "The Time" approaches: Take It in 2019

Did you ever wonder what the next 30 generations of humankind will be like as climate change impact events make themselves felt on future generations of man, of women, of children?

Some people are predicting things will be all over, game over, in 12 years, which is silly.

No way, we have much more time. Other are saying we have one more decade, two at the most, before things get real bad. Again, no way.

We have plenty of time for what is coming down the road, but later later. In my own vision of things, we have 30 generations more and we can use this time, these next 29 generations, to start planning ways to prepare for what's coming, and in the end, to prepare future generations for what they might very well be facing, in 500 to 1000 years. Not now. We have time.

Let's use it wisely and not panic.


My vision is that we can help future generations of humanity learn to to face what's coming.

 So for now, in 2019, let's explore what these future generations will look like.

NOTE: this is not a prediction sheet.

This is  thought experiment to prod you out of your comfort zone re climate change impact events in the future.

A thought exercise to get you to think and visualize about the future. Your future. Our future.

Is this the future?

Nobody knows.

There's still time to talk about all this over the next 10 to 20 to 30 generations.

We have 500 years, 1000 years. Not 12 years, not 20 years, not 30 years, not 80 years. Where will your
descendants be in the future. LOOK AT THESE DATES BELOW and try to place where you think your grandchildren and great grandchildren and great great grandchildren and great X 10 grandchildren and great X 20 grandchildren will be and where and under what conditions?






1990-2020 (the present)
2020-2050 (the coming 3 decades)
2050-2080  (where will you be living then?)
2080-2110
2110-2140
2140-2170 (what will your descendants be doing then?

2170-2200
Do you see yourself here or where?
2200-2230
2230-2250
2250-2280 (where will most humans be living then?)


2280-2310
2310-2340
2340-2370
2370-2400
2400-2430
2430-2360
2360-2390
2390-2420
Can you see yourself or any of your descendants in any of these distant generations? Which one? What's it like at that time in that generation?
2420 - 2450
2450 - 2470
2470 - 2500
2500-2530
2530-2560
2560-2590
2590-2620
2620-2650

2650-2670
2670-2690
2690-2710
2710-2730
2730-2760
2760-2780
2780-2800
.... to the year 2980-3010
and 3010 - 3040.

FIND YOUR KIN. Leave a comment here, pro or con. Or leave a prayer or a vision. THE TIME is still far away, we have plenty of time to get our affairs in order, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically. Are you with me on this quiz? Are you following? Agree or disagree.

Let's discuss in the comments here below or on the TWITTER thread on Twitter.

How the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship regime in Beijing will collapse one day without a shot due to people's revolution of fed-up Chinese citizens "living within the truth"

by staff writers with agencies


BEIJING -- When a friend of mine in Boston was 21, long ago, the year was 1989, the month was November, and he was a senior at college, and he remembers very well that one day in his dorm’s dining hall -- ''I’ll never forget this," he told me recently -- a classmate stood on a chair and announced excitedly to the room that the Berlin Wall between West Germany and East Germany was coming down.
  
And it was, and it did, and the students watched it on American TV. The ''Eastern Bloc'' disintegrated before their eyes, miraculously, and more or less without a shot.

“A political earthquake was shattering the frozen topography of post–World War II Europe,” Tony Judt later wrote of those events. “What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air.” In a mere two years’ time, the USSR itself ceased to exist, and the Cold War nightmare, the only global political reality Americans and Europeans had  ever known, was over.

In a famous essay titled "The Power of the Powerless" (in 1978), the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel -- among the leaders of Prague’s Velvet Revolution November and December of 1978 and the first president of the newly democratic Czechoslovakia -- argued that the most potent form of resistance to a “post-totalitarian” system -- including today's Communist PRC China dicatatorship in 2019 -- built on pervasive falsehoods is what Havel called “living within the truth.”

He wrote: “Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future.… It pretends to respect human rights.… It pretends to pretend nothing.” In order for the system to function and to maintain its control of society, Havel went on, “Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie.”

To illustrate his point, Havel set up a hypothetical grocer who decides he can no longer live under a totatlitarian dictatorship like PRC China. One day, Havel wrote, “something in our grocer snaps.… He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support.” In taking this step, the grocer “rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game.… His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.”

For Havel, the effect of such simple acts is radically revelatory: “He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power.” This is “extremely dangerous,” Havel notes, not just for the grocer (as Havel, who went to prison in 1979, well knew) but for the regime, the system itself. In that essay Havel went on, prophetically, to describe the “singular, explosive, incalculable political power of living within the truth.”

"As a 21-year-old," my Boston friend recalled, " I had yet to read any Vaclav Havel (though his plays and essays were available in English), but it didn’t matter -- it was clear enough what was happening. History had been jolted back to life by the explosive, incalculable power of those hundreds of thousands filling the streets and city squares in Germany. My fellow students and I were witnesses to the kind of fundamental, world-changing political action that Hannah Arendt (who was so inspired by the 1956 Hungarian uprising) called 'the one miracle-working faculty of man.' My fellow students at college that day literally came of age as witnesses to revolution. ''

 

As riveting as those scenes were, the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the unimaginable collapse of the Soviet Union were not the only world-altering processes unfolding on planet Earth as my Boston's friend's generational cohort came of age. They also came of age with the increasing awareness of the ruthlessness and brutality of the long dicatorship of the Chinese Communist Party centered in Beijing and began hoping for an end someday to that ugly, brainwashed, mindcontrolled regime.

 

Fast forward to 2019, to 2029, to 2039 at the latest: the people of China are beginning to revolt, quietly at first, then more visibly and noisily.

 

A young American friend in Boston, just 21, and a senior in college, he remembers very well that one day in his dorm’s dining hall -- ''I’ll never forget this," he will say -- a classmate stood on a chair and announced excitedly to the room that Chinese Communist party regime in Beijing had collapsed completely and freedom had finally come to the 1.6 billionChinese people there.

  

The American students watched it on American TV. The Chinese Communist Party regime disintegrated before their eyes on CNN TV, miraculously, and more or less without a shot.

“A political earthquake  shattered the frozen topography of communist China,” a future reporter will write  later wrote of those events. “What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable has taken on a more transient air.” In a few year's time, the PRC itself ceased to exist, and the Chinese Communist Party nightmare, the ugly geopolitical reality Americans and Europeans knew well, was over.

Vaclav Havel might just as well have been writing about a potent form of resistance to the Communist PRC China dicatatorship of the late 20th century and early 21st century that was built on pervasive falsehoods and finally challenged by what Havel might have called ''brave Chinese freedom fighters living within the truth.”

He might have written: “Because the communist China PRC regime was captive to its own lies, it had to falsify everything. It falsified the past. It falsified the present, and it falsified the future.… It pretended to respect human rights.… It pretended to pretend nothing.”

In order for the system to function and to maintain its control of China's 1.6 billion people, Havel might have written: “Individuals need not to have believed all those mystifications, but they had to behave as though they did, or they must have acted as though they tolerated them in silence, or got along well with those who worked with them. For this reason, however, they had to live within a lie.”


Havel would set up a hypothetical grocer in PRC China who decides he can no longer live under a totatlitarian dictatorship like PRC China. One day, Havel wrote, “something in our grocer snaps.… He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support.” In taking this step, the grocer “rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game.… His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.”

For Havel, the effect of such simple acts among Chinese citizens challenging the communist dictatorship would have been radically revelatory: “They will have broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power.” This is “extremely dangerous,” Havel will note, not just for the grocer but for the regime, the system itself.

Havel might go on, prophetically, to describe the “singular, explosive, incalculable political power of living within the truth.”

Could this happen one day inside communist China?

Yes! It will! Patience!

Catching up with the next generation of cli-fi writers

Catching up with the next generation of cli-fi writers

In a global community that attracts atheists, activists, anarchists, antipodian optimists, die-hard dystopians and heroes of hope, horror and hutzpah, one just might anticipate some lively lamentations and death-defying debates.

Welcome to the Anthrocene (three syllables, 10 letters, emphasis on the first syllable -- and much easier to pro-pro-pro-pronounce than its four-syllable cousin the An-throp-o-cene, emphasis on the second syllable)

by staff writer with agency

Here we go. Are you with us?

Ages 21 to 81

Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl
John Lanchester  THE WALL

Megan Hunter

Margaret Atwood

Jeff Vandermeer ANNIHILATION

Charlie Jane Anders 

Omar Elakkad AMERICAN WAR

Helen Phillips 

Bruno Arpaia 

Jean-Marc Ligny AQUA (TM)

Lorris Murail THE DOOMSDAY DAY CLOCK

Olga Ponjee

Jesper Weithz 

Bucket Unuzer 

Iljya Trojanow EISTAU

James Bradley CLAUDE

Alice Robinson ANCHOR POINT

Mireille Juchau 

N.K. Jemisin
N. H. Callister, ''Weird Weather''
Anneleen Newitz, AUTONOMOUS

MORE NAMES and TITLES to be added later as they come in from readers here:

 

Sam Bleicher 

Neal Shusterman,  DRY

Sarah Holding SEABEAN TRILOGY

Hamish MacDonald  FINITUDE

George Turner THE SEA AND SUMMER

Arthur Herzog HEAT

Peter Heller

JG Ballard

Jules Verne 

MORE NAMES to be added as they come in from readers here:

Segue now quietly to an excerpt from student oped at a Yale campus newspaper:

''I believe that the emerging literary genre of climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” may be the key to turning climate passivity into climate activity.''

 

''Dystopian literature has long been used to inform readers of impending threats. By drawing unnerving futuristic “what-if” scenarios, books such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984 frightened their readers about the possibility of a world gone awry. Decades later, their warnings still pervade popular consciousness. As artificial intelligence develops, we talk of technology backfiring just as Victor Frankenstein’s creature did. As Generation Z becomes increasingly taken by social media, we look back to Huxley’s commentary about constant distraction blunting the mind. And most topically, as politicians like President Trump forgo norms of truth in favor of “alternative facts,” we are reminded of Orwell’s Party slogans: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery.”

 

''If we cannot rely on the warnings of the scientific community to disrupt climate complacency, perhaps we must turn to tales of flooded cities, mass migrations, and barren lands. After all, what’s more viscerally terrifying: the figure “1.5°C,” or a story about millions of people being swallowed by a hurricane?

 

''Dystopian climate literature might scare people into action. But it could also prove to be counterproductive. When confronted with an existential threat so unfathomably grave as climate change, it is easy to become overwhelmed, cynical, pessimistic — the opposite of what needs to occur. There is a fine line between a doomsday scenario inspiring action, and a doomsday scenario prompting despondency. Besides, who in their right mind wants to spend their free time reading about climate catastrophes?

 

''If cli-fi is truly to provoke alarm, I believe that it won’t be through inspiring fear. Rather, it will be through inspiring empathy. The type of cli-fi I’m imagining does not feature sinking cities and crashing buildings; instead, it centers on the narratives of individuals.

 

''Through cli-fi, perhaps the readers who think of climate change as abstract and unfathomable would be pushed to rethink it as a threat on individual lives.

 

''The clock is ticking and we must convince seven billion people to care. For a minute, let us set aside phrases like “1.5°C,” “four foot sea level rise,” and “increasing number of extreme heat-days.”

 

''Instead, let us tell stories about a mother struggling to find food in a drought, a fisherman losing his

livelihood due to acid rain, or a child whose teddy bear gets swept up by a flood. Writers have always had the power to shape popular consciousness. Today, they face the most urgent of challenges. For the sake of our planet, authors must unleash their imaginations and do what they do best: write some good stories.''