Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson

Photo by Charles N. Brown
After devouring his latest trilogy which highlighted Permaculture for millions of readers (Thank you very much, Stan!) I contacted the acclaimed science fiction author, Kim Stanley Robinson, and he consented to the following interview. If you haven't read his work, I recommend it VERY highly. See the links at the bottom of this interview for other mentions of his work on this blog.

I am very grateful to Mr. Robinson for taking the time to engage my questions and curiosity. I hope you enjoy it. Keith
KEITH: Permaculturists are trained to recognize 'leaks' in, or 'damage to, the landscape (or a continent) so that appropriate strategies can be applied to restore and enhance life support for all organisms that could be sustained in that environment...in essence a kind of localized 'terraforming' using simple earthworks to manage water and other flows. How do you imagine that we can accelerate the adoption of these terraforming practices and what might they look like in the places most people now live: cities?

Kim Stanley Robinson: It would be really good if ecological and permaculture principles were taught in schools as a basic part of the science curriculum and one's general education. I think to an extent this is happening, it's getting more common to learn ecology and earth sciences by studying where your food and water come from, and the energy and carbon and water cycles, and so on. These educational basics are needed to make sense of the oncoming problems of this century. It would help also if this education led to a more realistic economics, in which there wasn't so much false pricing based on theft from the future generations. This would take legislation and run into opposition from "free enterprise" (read free to steal from the future).

Making things cost what they really cost; this would be part of any real solution.
I think the "terraforming" of cities will involve a melange of approaches that will run the gamut from ancient "low tech" technologies to still emerging "high tech" technologies. To generalize, I think the best way forward would be to use all "appropriate technologies" in the sense Victor Papanek used the term. I'd also like to point out that the appropriate technologies for bridging from the current unsustainable population and technology set to true sustainability might not be the same technologies as those that will be appropriate once we have bridged to true sustainability.

I would hate to see permaculture used as a term only to describe a hypothetical sustainable population much smaller than what we really have. It needs to describe also the way forward from this actual moment in history.

Cities: maybe there will be streetgrasses and cities become kind of prairies, and maybe the streetgrasses would be a GMO. Then also intensive gardening where we don't usually think of it, as on rooftops, interior floors, balconies, streets [vertical surfaces - Keith]. Also a lot of tearing down and rebuilding to better design and materials, a centuries-long project for sure, but cities are always doing this anyway.

In compact cities, walking, bikes and trolleys could all happen on street prairies. In extensive autopias like southern California, freeways could be converted so that the fast lane was railed for light rail, the middle lane for golf cart type cars, and the slow lane for bikes. White bicycles everywhere (the Amsterdam model) using also big group bikes or bike-trolleys, could make transport a really low-carbon and fun activity. In general I've been trying to make the point that decarbonization will raise our quality of life rather than lower it.

At sea, big sailing ships should come back, they could be made much safer than a hundred years ago when the last generation of really big ones all disappeared, presumably sunk in storms from problems of scale engineers weren't seeing. Now they could do better and it would be a much cleaner tech than what we use now. Of course it would help too to bioregionalize things so that there is less pointless global transport.

In the air, blimps and zeppelins. All these transformations would require an adjustment in our sense of the need for speed. There is no human need for the speed of transport we have. If there is a system of continuous supply in which a unit is appearing every week, then it doesn't matter how many weeks at sea or in air any unit took to make its trip. So there are adjustments that could be made. They would often require more human labor, which while only a "cost" in current economics might really be a benefit in human terms. Ships' crews as parties, colleges, prison sentences, simple cruises, or other.

Maybe this train of thought (that slow isn't necessarily bad) should cause us reconsider even the idea that we need to "accelerate" these better technologies and practices. Granted we appear to be facing a crisis moment, but maybe that will force the action in a natural way, so that we don't have to always feel that we are failing because of the slow pace of change relative to our perception, the discrepancy between biological time and historical time. If it's slow relative to our need, that's indeed bad, and that may be happening.

Maybe the real acceleration needed now is in everyone's sense of how badly capitalism is failing us, tearing the human and natural world apart. So many of these issues raised by the concept permaculture are more economic, political and social than specifically technological; I know it's all bundled together but given the immense power in many possible technologies, it's the political/economic/cultural element that is the crucial point of decision.
Keith: Another interviewer said, "It seems so easy [to terraform] on Mars, and looks so hard on earth, which is kind of ironic," to which you replied, "It's infinitely more difficult when there's already an established ecology. There's no room for error. And also, alas, there are some mistakes that we simply don't have the power to correct"...such as "ocean acidity." Do you think that huge engineering projects will be necessary or could many small human-scale solutions (where, for example, bulldozers and other heavy equipment are used to shape earth for ponds and in-ground water storage with contour infiltration channels) produce similar results?
KSR: This is a tough question because I'm not sure which problems will really eventuate. I don't think we can do anything to alter the acidity of the oceans by any engineering project large or small; and I wonder if we go to more than 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, if we could do anything to stop the resulting major climate change. I doubt it.

Once we push over relatively delicate tipping points the climactic momentum is massive, beyond the forces we can marshal with any kind of engineering. If big environmental changes start to occur that have positive feedbacks and are far beyond our powers to reverse, maybe society will then try the various space projects now being proposed, launching clouds of solar deflectors or particulates or whatnot, in the desperate hope of trying to reverse things by initiating what would really be the start of a kind of artificial ice age. But what a scary thought.

Thermostatting Earth's average temperature; I don't think we'll be very good at that as a species. Certainly it would be better to engineer it by way of a great number of small early human-scale solutions, as you suggest in your question. Treat each watershed as a water and carbon repository of a certain capacity, and coordinate action over all the world; it comes down to a matter of continuous landscape restoration and biome management. But starting this in the next ten or twenty years may be the crucial factor.
There's a philosophical impact to this realization that humans have to take on responsibility for stewardship of the biosphere, as a highly conscious Gaia sort of action. It's scary and it seems presumptuous and really beyond our knowledge, power, and wisdom. And yet since we clearly have the power to wreck the whole thing and create a mass extinction event, the burden of responsibility for avoiding that falls on us more or less inevitably, and permanently from now on. It's as if permaculture is now required, both morally and in sheer survival terms.

Keith: How are you applying permaculture principles in your own life and landscape? Has the example of Village Homes and its extensive food forest / edible landscape / swale infiltration system been inspirational to you?
KSR: Oh yes, most definitely. Village Homes has changed my life. My wife and I fell into Village Homes by accident; we did not seek it out, and if we had not fallen into it, we would have lived a much more ignorant and conventional life. So we were very lucky.

Also, I should say that VH is not that extraordinary a place, but merely a kind of tweaked suburbia, in which some of the ordinary bad design of suburbia has been mitigated by the application of some fairly simple tweaks, which nevertheless violate some of most American cities' zoning and building codes, so that it was a political hassle to get the approvals and do it. Some of the tweaks just come out of condominium complexes, others from East Coast earlier practices, some from British garden cities of the 19th century, others from 1960s ideals, which themselves usually had older roots. So, it's only 80 acres and about 220 units in west Davis, and the housing density is not great. But the swales and ponding of rainwater, the common ownership of all the land not occupied by houses, the communal buildings for daycare and offices and restaurant and meetings, the bike paths and de-emphasis of streets, the edible landscaping, the many garden spaces, the orchards and vineyards, the open space for gatherings and sports—all these are really great ideas, and they combine to make something wonderful.

If every suburb built since WWII in America had been built to the Village Homes plan, we would have a much saner society, and be burning much less carbon (energy use in VH is about half the normal American rate.) Without claiming too much for it—it is not an intensive effort nor rigorously applied—it has still been a profoundly calming and educational place for me and my family to live, and I would imagine about two-thirds of the neighbors feel the same (the rest don't seem to notice it is any different, and often move away).

Living here had a huge impact on my Mars novels and really all my books since 1991, and when I look at my utopian novel Pacific Edge from 1987, written before I knew about VH, I am surprised to see that I was longing for something like this place, thinking about alterations in the suburbia I came out of in southern California. Living here the last 17 years I've learned gardening, and grow about five percent of my family's food, variable by season of course; I've experienced village life, both the social life and sense of community, and the nano-politics of managing a commons together; I've brought up two boys who don't know how good they've had it; and I've greatly enjoyed my place. All this feels rare and lucky in the postmodern American context. There is room for further progress and improvement, of course, but it shows what can be done and how much urban/suburban design matters.

Keith: Water is a major theme in your Mars trilogy and also your Science in the Capital series. In the former humans had to deal with too little of it (extreme aridity and the necessity of importing it via comets) and in the latter too much (storm surge, flooding, rising sea levels, lots of snow). Currently our planet has an abundance of H2O but very little fresh water. 97% of Earth's water is saline. Of the remaining 3% which is fresh water, 75% is stored in ice and glaciers (this figure is subject to rapid change), 13.5% is in aquifers 2500+ ft deep, 11% is in shallower aquifers less than 2500 ft, .3% is in lakes and ponds, .06% is in soils near the surface, .035% is in the atmosphere, and .03% is in rivers.

Humans are using the available fresh water faster than its replacement rate such that we are reaching what Richard Heinberg and others call "Peak Water". Currently 31 countries are dealing with severe shortages and lack of access to clean water. What do think it will take for humans to become adept at managing water resources half as well as beavers did for this continent before they were decimated?

KSR: "Peak Water"—that's a powerful concept! Again, education about this matter of fossil water and our unsustainable mining of it is an important part of the story. The standard economic answer to this would be price, I guess. Do we pay less for water than it really costs? Is this yet another case of "predatory dumping" therefore, with the ones predated on being the future generations? Theft from our grandchildren, again? It would be good to be always asking these questions and "costing out" answers. But it's also dangerous to play these economic games, as that seems to concede that economics really is what it says it is, which is a rational system of evaluating our ecologies and their healthy actions. It isn't really so, as permaculture theory tries to show, as I understand it. But it may be a powerful rhetorical or persuasive strategy, to be able to use economic theory to show that even in standard economic terms, the system is not sustainable. Talking about spending capital as if it were disposable income, etc. Always reminding people that many real costs have been externalized, and that standard economics is often a big lie about reality, trying to justify the privileges of the powerful few. Comparing it to the use of astrology in the middle ages, calling it just another pseudo-science justifying power. But also trying to reform it to make it a truly useful tool of evaluation of practices.

If economics were real, it it was based in ecology and admitted to having values embedded in it, and explicitly tried to include positive human values like the simplest ones of justice and sustainability, it would become a very important tool, a human science. It is not that now, but it could and should be. So many of these problematic issues, like water and food, will come to the forefront of the attention of our society either by war, economic depression, natural catastrophe, or ongoing successful education. Looking at that list, it becomes clear that education is very important.

Keith: The aim of permaculture is to liberate people everywhere to provide for their own and their communities' needs for food, energy, shelter, and a decent life without exploitation or pollution and from the smallest practical area of land. Cuba had to adapt in three years to the sudden unavailability of fuel but they were successful even though most adult Cubans lost 20 - 30 lbs. How do you think Americans will adapt to energy decline, especially since we are not blessed with Cuba's climate? [See The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil]

KSR: But soon we may have Cuba's climate, right? And a lot of us want to lose ten or fifteen pounds, right?

Anyway, jokes aside, whatever climate we have in the USA is adequate for the needs you list in your question, and there is no requirement that we do not engage in some trade to get some things distributed around from watershed to watershed. That would be part of any solution and would be okay. Purity is not really an idea I like in any realm. Food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, education, and a decent life: these have been my definition of utopia for a long time.

I think you are right to include energy, which at a certain quantity forms the basis for many of the other things; though we don't need as much as we use in the USA today. So, it's a good list to focus on.
I don't know how Americans will do. Right now we are caught up in a culture of capitalist hyper-consumption, also ideological fantasies about any number of things; what constitutes a good life, what America has been about historically, where we stand in the world community, what would make us happy. In many cases, for many of these questions, we are completely deceived and living as rats on a wheel in a cage, even though the cage has an open door and a better life lies just outside it waiting to be constructed. So it's a desperately deceived culture, neurotic, ill-educated, over-worked. And yet we are social creatures, and we tend to do what everyone else does, what our culture suggests is normal to do. We strive to be normal.

So... I try to imagine cultural revolution, which is to say changing the idea of what is normal. Big cultural revolutions have happened before from time to time. But analogies to past situations seldom work, they were all so different from now. Now there is a level of faux affluence created by stealing from the future, a sense that there is just enough stuff and just enough leisure time and just enough conformist triumphalist American theory, to keep people grinding on in lives that only intermittently reveal their Thoreauvian "quiet desperation," mostly at moments of bad health or unemployment, which we try to imagine will never happen to us. Risk is being privatized, and Americans are nervous and unhappy and resentful about it, but until the crisis hits, not miserable, and often distracted along the way by various future-stealing techno-euphorias that substitute for or mask what would constitute a truly good or decent life. So it will be a strange and potentially awful century.

But cultural changes sometimes happen very rapidly, even explosively. So maybe the task now is to try to set the ground for change and work on various starts. Just keep talking and even proselytizing for a different normal, for permaculture as a goal norm. I've started giving copies of Walden to every teenager I know. You can buy copies for a dollar, every used bookstore (including amazon.com) has tons of them, and even new they're usually only five dollars. Maybe only one kid in ten reads it, maybe one in ten of those is impressed by it. But it's like a kind of sign or symbol. And symbolic actions are also real actions. I mention this as just one example, because I am so impressed by Thoreau as a thinker and writer, scientist and artist. The case could be made that he is the greatest American writer ever, Walden the greatest American book; people often do this; and so this points to a strong strand of permaculture in the middle of American thinking, going back to the transcendentalists, the Quakers, the Shakers, many of the early utopian movements. And also Thoreau was a small town guy, living a pretty ordinary small town or suburban life, impure and compromised; you don't have to leave society for some heroic wilderness action like Muir's to follow Thoreau's example of daily permaculture practice in the American context of waste. So it's one way in, and has a historical, literary, and spiritual component that I like.
Keith: Confined Animal Feed Operations (CAFOs), dependent upon hormones, antibiotics (without which most of the animals would die before going to market) and GMO feedstocks, are the norm for American's meat supply. What do think about these practices in regard to a sustainable future food supply especially as famine looks more and more a real likelihood for many people?

KSR: Meat might be the crucial word here. Americans eat 800 kg of grain a year while south Asian poor people eat 200 kg of grain per year, and Italians 400 kg of grain a year, probably the healthiest, and most of the differences here are because of the pyramids involved with feeding grain to cows for beef. It would be better for the earth and for our bodies to eat a lot less meat. Eating healthier is better for the planet, and more and more this is common knowledge.

I would separate out GMOs from this problem for a separate consideration. To me the problem there is not so much the actual genetic engineering, which in many ways is only a heightened or more knowledgable form of the selective breeding that we have been practicing for thousands of years, but rather the corporate ownership of the results, and the stealing of the commons involved. As so often, the problem here is not intrinsic to science and technology, but to capitalism and its hierarchy of power and ownership. It's really important always to separate these two out and support the one (a utopian drive by way of science to a clean tech and to justice) and attack the other (the urge to power of the few over the many, and the destruction that results). In today's world this often is a delicate matter of surgically separating conjoined twins, but it's important to do it on a consistent basis, or else our way off the rickety tower of prostheses will not be clear to us.

Science is a utopian process, permaculture is a kind of science, science itself is full of half-hidden good values. I could go into this at much great length and often do, but will desist here, except to repeat I have no automatic objection to the concept of genetic engineering.
Keith: You said in another interview, "It's likely that we'll cause a small mass extinction, but I believe that ultimately reason will prevail. If the amount of money going into the war economy were invested in landscape restoration, we would be in a far more positive position. It may get a little dire before we pull together, but I think when the prosperous nations, and in particular the US, realise they're wrecking their own kids' lives, there will be a mass change in value. It will be a difficult century, and ugly, but I don't think that in the end people are so stupid as to kill themselves off." This same "hopefulness"(?) permeates your novels. What degree of "small mass extinction" are you imagining and how "dire"? (BTW, the universal permaculture answer to questions of this, or any other, kind is, "It all depends...," followed by a list of limiting factors.)

KSR: Yes, you have to say "it all depends." It could be conceptualized as an array of possible futures that extend out from the present moment and its realities, possibilities that range from very good to very bad, and bulking in some middle, as in any probabilities chart or weather forecast. Science fiction is the detailed description of this array of possibilities; but it's not like weather in that it depends on the choices we make now, and in every moment to come.

From this present moment, it's hard to see any possible future that doesn't include some damage to the environment in the coming half century, just from a matter of historical and technological inertia, path dependency, and selfish and destructively applied political power. But the response in each year creates a new set of possible futures arrayed before it. Right now it would be really counter-productive, even irresponsible, to be pessimistic. "We don't have the luxury of pessimism any more," and besides it would be factually wrong, because it is undoubtedly physically possible to proceed from this moment in a way that would save many many species and biomes.

We have the theory, we have the technologies. What we lack is the political power, the will, the cultural support, the supportive economics. So to say at this point that it's impossible to avoid a crash is factually wrong, and it really only is saying that we are whipped politically and can never win, or that people are too stupid and selfish, greedy or fearful, ever to do things right. That's a view that feeds into the power of the few over the many, that obstructs progress, that also, given the various hard-won successes of past history and politics, is factually wrong and cheaply cynical. Too easy, even cowardly. Well, I don't need to be saying this to a permaculture audience. The optimism I advocate as policy (and temperament if you're lucky!) is inherent in the philosophy and practice of permaculture.

All that said, six to nine (though my guess is it will never surpass about 7 or 8) billion people on Earth, using the current technology set, is a dangerous thing; and worse yet is capitalism's extractive strip-mining of everything. And capitalism does LOOK massively entrenched, and has tried to buy all the governments, armies, laws, and the future itself, in the form of debts, mortgages, contracts and laws. It is one dangerous awful system, appealing to the worst in us, and also trying its best to create and expand the worst in us (fear and greed, but all the deadly sins really) to increase power of the few, over the many and over the world at large. So in that context I think it is right to call the coming situation "dire," even though the biosphere is robust, and hard to damage in any permanent way.

Keith: You said in 2005, "The current guy is worthless, probably the worst president in American history. There's a sort of stupid, small-minded meanness - a pathological assholery - to him. I think he likes doing bad things." No doubt your opinion is only further confirmed since then. What can we hope for in terms of a realistic governmental-corporate response to our escalating crises? Any hopeful candidates in the current lineup?

KSR: Yes, I like a lot of the candidates in various partial ways, always keeping in mind that they are mainstream capitalist politicians, but I'm talking about what is available in the current election. This has indeed been the worst administration in American history by a long shot. Its impact could be either good or bad, in a range like everything else. It's been so bad it may have shaken people, and so prove useful in the long run. On the other hand it may have just lowered the bar and helped destroy the very idea of good government, which was part of their project, and must be resisted. It's important to work to create politics of a more democratic, progressive and future-oriented sort. That would be one way to resist the Bush jihad against government, to say "we were better than that, those were dismal years." That particular nightmare will soon be over, but repairing the damage will be a long project.

You are right to point out the corporate nature of the problem, but I tend to think of government as the commons, as "we the people," a commons under assault by a process of enclosure that never ended ("privatization"). We should never fall for the Reagan-Thatcherite assault on the idea of government, their assertion that government itself a bad thing. We are the government, and government is the vestige of the commons and the collective, with huge potential to do good in the name of all. But it needs to resist being bought; we need to make the demands and collect the votes, and try to free up government from being bought by private interests to become in effect their private Blackwater against us. Partly that depends on us conceptualizing government as a good force.

Therefore you shouldn't, to my way of thinking, speak of "government-corporate" as if this were one entity. Capitalist power tries to buy governments because they are immensely dangerous to it. In theory a democratic government could be elected that would rewrite the laws in a month and nationalize all kinds of things (public utilities!), tax corporate "profits" so intensively that surplus value is returned to those who created it, redefine property and ownership, reconfigure work and health care—and all of that be just as legal as can be, because of it being enacted by the legal government, and enforced by the police, courts, and military.

The New Deal is only a (very encouraging) partial indication of what could happen; it could go further. So democratic government is immensely dangerous to corporate-feudal hierarchy, and thus the capitalist response is to buy government to the extent possible (which is big right now), and to confuse the issue as much as possible with talk of "freedom," "government is bad," etc. etc. Keep your mind clear on that, and keep the faith that democratic government can change the laws and make things better, as a collective exercise. Losing that faith is a victory for feudalism.

The following interview with KSR is from http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/

The following interview with KSR is from http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/

Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson

[Image: The face of Nicholson Crater, Mars, courtesy of the ESA].

According to The New York Times Book Review, the novels of Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson "constitute one of the most impressive bodies of work in modern science fiction." I might argue, however, that Robinson is fundamentally a landscape writer.
That is, Robinson's books are not only filled with descriptions of landscapes – whole planets, in fact, noted, sensed, and textured down to the chemistry of their soils and the currents in their seas – but they are often about nothing other than vast landscape processes, in the midst of which a few humans stumble along. "Politics," in these novels, is as much a question of social justice as it is shorthand for learning to live in specific environments.

In his most recent trilogy – Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting – we see the earth becoming radically unlike itself through climate change. Floods drown the U.S. capital; fierce winter ice storms leave suburban families powerless, in every sense of the word; and the glaciers of concrete and glass that we have mistaken for civilization begin to reveal their inner weaknesses.
The stand-alone novel Antarctica documents the cuts, bruises, and theoretical breakthroughs of environmental researchers as they hike, snowshoe, sledge, belay, and fly via helicopter over the fractured canyons and crevasses of the southern continent. They wander across "shear zones" and find rooms buried in the ice, natural caves linked together like a "shattered cathedral, made of titanic columns of driftglass."
Meanwhile, in Robinson's legendary Mars Trilogy – Red Mars, Blue Mars, and Green Mars – the bulk of the narrative is, again, complete planetary transformation, this time on Mars. The Red Planet, colonized by scientists, is deliberately remade – or terraformed – to be climatically, hydrologically, and agriculturally suited for human life. Yet this is a different kind of human life – it, too, has been transformed: politically and psychologically.
In his recent book Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Fredric Jameson devotes an entire chapter to Robinson's Mars Trilogy. Jameson writes that "utopia as a form is not the representation of radical alternatives; it is rather simply the imperative to imagine them."
Across all his books, Robinson is never afraid to imagine these radical alternatives. Indeed, in the interview posted below he explains that "I’ve been working all my career to try to redefine utopia in more positive terms – in more dynamic terms."

In the following interview, then, Kim Stanley Robinson talks to BLDGBLOG about climate change, from Hurricane Katrina to J.G. Ballard; about the influence of Greek island villages on his descriptions of Martian base camps; about life as a 21st century primate in the 24/7 "techno-surround"; how we must rethink utopia as we approach an age without oil; whether "sustainability" is really the proper thing to be striving for; and what a future archaeology of the space age might find.
This interview also includes previously unpublished photos by Robinson himself, taken in Greece and Antarctica.
• • •
BLDGBLOG: I’m interested in the possibility that literary genres might have to be redefined in light of climate change. In other words, a novel where two feet of snow falls on Los Angeles, or sand dunes creep through the suburbs of Rome, would be considered a work of science fiction, even surrealism, today; but that same book, in fifty years’ time, could very well be a work of climate realism, so to speak. So if climate change is making the world surreal, then what it means to write a “realistic” novel will have to change. As a science fiction novelist, does that affect how you approach your work?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I’ve been saying this for a number of years: that now we’re all living in a science fiction novel together, a book that we co-write. A lot of what we’re experiencing now is unsurprising because we’ve been prepped for it by science fiction. But I don’t think surrealism is the right way to put it. Surrealism is so often a matter of dreamscapes, of things becoming more than real – and, as a result, more sublime. You think, maybe, of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and the way that he sees these giant catastrophes as a release from our current social set-up: catastrophe and disaster are aestheticized and looked at as a miraculous salvation from our present reality. But it wouldn’t really be like that.

I started writing about Earth’s climate change in the Mars books. I needed something to happen on Earth that was shocking enough to allow a kind of historical gap in which my Martians could realistically establish independence. I had already been working with Antarctic scientists who were talking about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and how unstable it might be – so I used that, and in Blue Mars I showed a flooded London. But after you get past the initial dislocations and disasters, what you’ve got is another landscape to be inhabited – another situation that would have its own architecture, its own problems, and its own solutions.

To a certain extent, later, in my climate change books, I was following in that mold with the flood of Washington DC. I wrote that scene before Katrina. After Katrina hit, my flood didn’t look the same. I think it has to be acknowledged that the use of catastrophe as a literary device is not actually adequate to talk about something which, in the real world, is often so much worse – and which comes down to a great deal of human suffering.

So there may have been surreal images coming out of the New Orleans flood, but that’s not really what we take away from it.

[Image: Refugees gather outside the Superdome, New Orleans, post-Katrina].

BLDGBLOG: Aestheticizing these sorts of disasters can also have the effect of making climate change sound like an adventure. In Fifty Degrees Below, for instance, you wrote: “People are already fond of the flood… It was an adventure. It got people out of their ruts.” The implication is that people might actually be excited about climate change. Is there a risk that all these reports about flooded cities and lost archipelagoes and new coastlines might actually make climate change sound like some sort of survivalist adventure?

Robinson: It’s a failure of imagination to think that climate change is going to be an escape from jail – and it’s a failure in a couple of ways.

For one thing, modern civilization, with six billion people on the planet, lives on the tip of a gigantic complex of prosthetic devices – and all those devices have to work. The crash scenario that people think of, in this case, as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed; your ability to feel confident about your own – and your family’s and your children’s – safety would be gone. People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario.

It’s easy to imagine people who are bored in the modern techno-surround, as I call it, and they’re bored because they have not fully comprehended that they’re still primates, that their brains grew over a million-year period doing a certain suite of activities, and those activities are still available. Anyone can do them; they’re simple. They have to do with basic life support and basic social activities unboosted by technological means.

And there’s an addictive side to this. People try to do stupid technological replacements for natural primate actions, but it doesn’t quite give them the buzz that they hoped it would. Even though it looks quite magical, the sense of accomplishment is not there. So they do it again, hoping that the activity, like a drug, will somehow satisfy the urge that it’s supposedly meant to satisfy. But it doesn’t. So they do it more and more – and they fall down a rabbit hole, pursuing a destructive and high carbon-burn activity, when they could just go out for a walk, or plant a garden, or sit down at a table with a friend and drink some coffee and talk for an hour. All of these unboosted, straight-forward primate activities are actually intensely satisfying to the totality of the mind-body that we are.

So a little bit of analysis of what we are as primates – how we got here evolutionarily, and what can satisfy us in this world – would help us to imagine activities that are much lower impact on the planet and much more satisfying to the individual at the same time. In general, I’ve been thinking: let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.

Because a lot of these supposed pleasures are really expensive. You pay with your life. You pay with your health. And they don’t satisfy you anyway! You end up taking various kinds of prescription or non-prescription drugs to compensate for your unhappiness and your unhealthiness – and the whole thing comes out of a kind of spiral: if only you could consume more, you’d be happier. But it isn’t true.

I’m advocating a kind of alteration of our imagined relationship to the planet. I think it’d be more fun – and also more sustainable. We’re always thinking that we’re much more powerful than we are, because we’re boosted by technological powers that exert a really, really high cost on the environment – a cost that isn’t calculated and that isn’t put into the price of things. It’s exteriorized from our fake economy. And it’s very profitable for certain elements in our society for us to continue to wander around in this dream-state and be upset about everything.

The hope that, “Oh, if only civilization were to collapse, then I could be happy” – it’s ridiculous. You can simply walk out your front door and get what you want out of that particular fantasy.

[Image: New Orleans under water, post-Katrina; photographer unknown].

BLDGBLOG: Mars has a long history as a kind of utopian destination – and, in that, your Mars trilogy is no exception. What is it about Mars that brings out this particular kind of speculation?

Robinson: Well, it brings up an unusual modern event that can happen in our mental landscapes, which is comparative planetology. That wasn’t really available to us before the modern era – really, until Viking.

One thing about Mars is that it’s a radically impoverished landscape. You start with nothing – the bare rock, the volatile chemicals that are needed for life, some water, and an empty landscape. That makes it a kind of gigantic metaphor, or modeling exercise, and it gives you a way to imagine the fundamentals of what we’re doing here on Earth. I find it is a very good thing to begin thinking that we are terraforming Earth – because we are, and we’ve been doing it for quite some time. We’ve been doing it by accident, and mostly by damaging things. In some ways, there have been improvements, in terms of human support systems, but there’s still so much damage, damage that’s gone unacknowledged or ignored, even when all along we knew it was happening. People kind of shrug and think: a) there’s nothing we can do about it, or b) maybe the next generation will be clever enough to figure it out. So on we go.

[Images: Mars, courtesy of NASA].

Mars is an interesting platform where we can model these things. But I don’t know that we’ll get there for another fifty years or so – and once we do get there, I think that for many, many years, maybe many decades, it will function like Antarctica does now: it will be an interesting scientific base that teaches us things and is beautiful and charismatic, but not important in the larger scheme of human history on Earth. It’s just an interesting place to study, that we can learn things from. Actually, for many years, Mars will be even less important to us than Antarctica, because the Antarctic is at least part of our ecosphere.

But if you think of yourself as terraforming Earth, and if you think about sustainability, then you can start thinking about permaculture and what permaculture really means. It’s not just sustainable agriculture, but a name for a certain type of history. Because the word sustainability is now code for: let’s make capitalism work over the long haul, without ever getting rid of the hierarchy between rich and poor and without establishing social justice.

Sustainable development, as well: that’s a term that’s been contaminated. It doesn’t even mean sustainable anymore. It means: let us continue to do what we’re doing, but somehow get away with it. By some magic waving of the hands, or some techno silver bullet, suddenly we can make it all right to continue in all our current habits. And yet it’s not just that our habits are destructive, they’re not even satisfying to the people who get to play in them. So there’s a stupidity involved, at the cultural level.

BLDGBLOG: In other words, your lifestyle may now be carbon neutral – but was it really any good in the first place?

Robinson: Right. Especially if it’s been encoding, or essentially legitimizing, a grotesque hierarchy of social injustice of the most damaging kind. And the tendency for capitalism to want to overlook that – to wave its hands and say: well, it’s a system in which eventually everyone gets to prosper, you know, the rising tide floats all boats, blah blah – well, this is just not true.

We should take the political and aesthetic baggage out of the term utopia. I’ve been working all my career to try to redefine utopia in more positive terms – in more dynamic terms. People tend to think of utopia as a perfect end-stage, which is, by definition, impossible and maybe even bad for us. And so maybe it’s better to use a word like permaculture, which not only includes permanent but also permutation. Permaculture suggests a certain kind of obvious human goal, which is that future generations will have at least as good a place to live as what we have now.

It’s almost as if a science fiction writer’s job is to represent the unborn humanity that will inherit this place – you’re speaking from the future and for the future. And you try to speak for them by envisioning scenarios that show them either doing things better or doing things worse – but you’re also alerting the generations alive right now that these people have a voice in history.

The future needs to be taken into account by the current system, which regularly steals from it in order to pad our ridiculous current lifestyle.

[Images: (top) Michael Reynolds, architect. Turbine House, Taos, New Mexico. Photograph © Michael Reynolds, 2007. (bottom) Steve Baer, designer. House of Steve Baer, Corrales, New Mexico, 1971. Photography © Jon Naar, 1975/2007. Courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, from their excellent, and uncannily well-timed, exhibition 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas].

BLDGBLOG: When it actually comes to designing the future, what will permaculture look like? Where will its structures and ideas come from?

Robinson: Well, at the end of the 1960s and through the 70s, what we thought – and this is particularly true in architecture and design terms – was: OK, given these new possibilities for new and different ways of being, how do we design it? What happens in architecture? What happens in urban design?

As a result of these questions there came into being a big body of utopian design literature that’s now mostly obsolete and out of print, which had no notion that the Reagan-Thatcher counter-revolution was going to hit. Books like Progress As If Survival Mattered, Small Is Beautiful, Muddling Toward Frugality, The Integral Urban House, Design for the Real World, A Pattern Language, and so on. I had a whole shelf of those books. Their tech is now mostly obsolete, superceded by more sophisticated tech, but the ideas behind them, and the idea of appropriate technology and alternative design: that needs to come back big time. And I think it is.

[Image: American President Jimmy Carter dedicates the White House solar panels, 20 June 1979. Photograph © Jimmy Carter Library. Courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

This is one of the reasons I’ve been talking about climate change, and the possibility of abrupt climate change, as potentially a good thing – in that it forces us to confront problems that we were going to sweep under the carpet for hundreds of years. Now, suddenly, these problems are in our face and we have to deal. And part of dealing is going to be design.

I don’t think people fully comprehend what a gigantic difference their infrastructure makes, or what it feels like to live in a city with public transport, like Paris, compared to one of the big autopias like southern California. The feel of existence is completely different. And of course the carbon burn is also different – and the sense that everybody’s in the same boat together. This partly accounts for the difference between urban voters and rural voters: rural voters – or out-in-the-country voters – can imagine that they’re somehow independent, and that they don’t rely on other people. Meanwhile, their entire tech is built elsewhere. It’s a fantasy, and a bad one as it leads to a false assessment of the real situation.

The Mars books were where I focused on these design questions the most. I had to describe fifteen or twenty invented towns or social structures based around their architecture. Everything from little settlements to crater towns to gigantic cities, to all sorts of individual homes in the outback – how do you occupy the outback? how do you live? – and it was a great pleasure. I think, actually, that one of the main reasons people enjoyed those Mars books was in seeing these alternative design possibilities envisioned and being able to walk around in them, imaginatively.

BLDGBLOG: Were there specific architectural examples, or specific landscapes, that you based your descriptions on?

Robinson: Sure. They had to do with things that I’d seen or read about. And, you know, reading Science News week in and week out, I was always attentive to what the latest in building materials or house design was.

Also, I seized on anything that seemed human-scale and aesthetically pleasing and good for a community. I thought of Greek villages in Crete, and also the spectacular stuff on Santorini. One of the things I learned, wandering around Greek archaeological sites – I’m very interested in archaeology – is that they clearly chose some of their town sites not just for practical concerns but also for aesthetic pleasure. They would put their towns in places where it would look good to live – where you would get a permanent sense that the town was a work of art, as well as a practical solution to economic and geographical problems. That was something I wanted to do on Mars over and over again.

[Image: Photos of Greece, inspiration for life on Mars, taken by Kim Stanley Robinson].

Mondragon, Spain, was also a constant reference point, and Kerala, in southern India. I was looking at cooperative, or leftist, places. Bologna, Italy. The Italian city-states of the Renaissance, in a different kind of way. Also, cities where public transport on a human scale could be kept in mind. That’s mostly northern Europe.

So those were some of the reference points that I remember – but I was also trying to think about how humans might inhabit the unusual Martian features: the cliffsides, the hidden cities that I postulated might be necessary. I was attracted to anything that had to do with circularity, because of the stupendous number of craters on Mars. The Paul Sattelmeier indoor/outdoor house, which is round and easy to build, was something I noticed in Science News as a result of this fixation.

There was a real wide net I could cast there – and it was fun. If you give yourself a whole world to play with, you don’t have to choose just one solution – you can describe any number of solutions – and I think that was politically true as well as architecturally true with my Mars books. They weren’t proposing one master solution, as in the old utopias, but showing that there are a variety of possible solutions, with different advantages and disadvantages.

[Image: A photograph of Santorini taken by Kim Stanley Robinson].

BLDGBLOG: Speaking of archaeology, one of the most interesting things I’ve read recently was that some archaeologists are now speculating that sites like the Apollo moon landing, or the final resting spot of the Mars rovers, will someday be like Egypt’s Valley of the Kings: they’ll be excavated and studied and preserved and mapped.

Robinson: Yes, and places like Baikonur, in Kazakhstan, will be quite beautiful. They’ll work as great statuary – like megaliths. They’ll have that charismatic quality and, in their ruin, they should be quite beautiful. As you know, that was one great attraction of the Romantic era – to ruins, to the suggestion of age – and there will be something nicely contradictory about something as futuristic as space artifacts suggesting ruins and the ancient past. That’s sure to come.

The interesting problem on Mars, and Chris McKay has talked about this, is that if we conclude that there’s the possibility of bacterial life on Mars, then it becomes really, really important for us not to contaminate the planet with earthly bacteria. But it’s almost impossible to sterilize a spaceship completely. There were probably 100,000 bacteria even on the sterilized spacecraft that we sent to Mars, living on their inner surfaces. It isn’t even certain that a gigantic crash-landing and explosion would kill all that bacteria.

So Chris McKay has been suggesting that a site like the Beagle or polar lander crash site actually needs to be excavated and fully sterilized – the stuff may even have to be taken off-planet – if we really want to keep Mars uncontaminated. In other words, we’ve contaminated it already; if we find native, alien bacterial life on Mars, and we don’t want it mixed up with Terran life, then we might have to do something a lot more radical than an archaeological saving of the site. We might have to do something like a Superfund clean-up.

Of course, that’s all really hard to do without getting down there with yet more bacteria-infested things.

[Image: Two painted views of a human future on Mars, courtesy of NASA].

BLDGBLOG: That’s the same situation as with these lakes in Antarctica buried beneath the ice: to study them, we have to drill down into them, but by drilling down into them, we might immediately introduce microbes and bacteria and even chemicals into the water – which will mean that there’s not much left for us to study.

Robinson: They’re already having that problem with Lake Vostok. The Russians have got an ice drill that’s already maybe too close to the lake, and in the sphere of influence of the trapped bacteria. And now people are calculating that the water in Lake Vostok might be very heavily pressurized, and like seltzer water, so that breaking through might cause a gusher on the surface that could last six months. The water might just fly out onto the surface – where it would freeze and create a little mountain up there, of fresh water. Who knows? I mean, at that point, whatever was going on, in bacterial terms, with that lake in particular – that’s ruined. There are many other lakes beneath the Antarctic surface, so it isn’t as if we don’t have more places we could save or study, but that one is already a problem.

[Image: Architecture in Antarctica, photographed by Kim Stanley Robinson].

Also, I do like the archaeological sites in Antarctica from the classic era. Those are worth comparing to the space program. Going to Antarctica in 1900 was like us going into space today: as Oliver Morton has put it, it was the hardest thing that technology allowed humans to do at the time. So you could imagine those guys as being in space suits and doing space station-type stuff – but, of course, from our angle, it looks like Boy Scout equipment. It’s amazing that they got away with it at all. Those are the most beautiful spaces – the Shackleton/Scott sites – even the little cairns that Amundsen left behind, or the crashed airplanes from the 1920s: they all become vividly important reminders of our past and of our technological progress. They deserve to be protected fully and kind of revered, almost as religious sites, if you’re a humanist.

[Image: Shackleton's hut, Antarctica, photographed by Kim Stanley Robinson].

So archaeology in space? Who knows? It’s hard enough to think about what’s going to go on up there. But on earth it’s very neat to think of Cape Canaveral or Baikonur becoming like Shackleton’s hut.

Thinking along this line causes me to wonder about the Stalinist industrial cities in the Urals – you know, like Chelyabinsk-65. These horribly utilitarian extraction economy-type places, incredibly brutal and destructive – once they’re abandoned, and they begin to rust away, they take on a strange kind of aesthetic. As long as you wouldn’t get actively poisoned when you visit them –

BLDGBLOG: [laughs]

Robinson: – I would be really interested to see some of these places. Just don’t step in the sludge, or scratch your arm – the toxicity levels are supposed to be alarming. But, in archaeological terms, I bet they’d be beautiful.

BLDGBLOG owes a huge and genuine thanks to Kim Stanley Robinson, not only for his ongoing output as a writer but for his patience while this interview was edited and assembled. Thanks, as well, to William L. Fox for putting Robinson and I in touch in the first place.
Meanwhile, the recently published catalog for the exhibition 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas offers a great look at the "big body of utopian design literature that’s now mostly obsolete and out of print" that Robinson mentions in the above interview. If you see a copy, I'd definitely recommend settling in for a long read.

by Geoff Manaugh

Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson and Permaculture

Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy of climate change (Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007) is one of the more hopeful sets of books currently being read by (thankfully) millions of people. It is described as "Perhaps the most realistic portrayal ever created of the environmental changes that are already occurring on our planet."

The following text is drawn from the blog of fictional President (of the US) Phil Chase, near the end of the final book of the trilogy:

"...Capital is created by everyone and should be owned by everyone. People are owed the worth of what they do, and whatever they do adds to humanity somehow, and helps make our own lives possible, and it worth a living wage and more. And the Earth is owed our permanent care. And we have the capability to care for the Earth and create for every one of us a sufficiency of food, water, shelter, clothing, medical care, education, and human rights. To the extent our economic system withholds or flatly opposes these values and goals, it is diseased. It has to be changed so that we can do these things that are well within our technological capabilities. We have imagined them, and they are possible. We can make them real. Of course they can happen. You thought they couldn't happen, but why? Because we aren't good enough to do it? That was part of the delusion. Underneath the delusion, we were always doing it. That's what we're doing in history; call it the invention of permaculture. By permaculture I mean a culture that can be sustained permanently. Not unchanging, that's impossible, we have to stay dynamic, because conditions will change, and we will have to adapt to those new conditions, and continue to try to make things even better - so that I like to think the word permaculture implies also permutation. We will make adaptations, so change is inevitable. Eventually I think what will happen is that we will build a culture in which no one is without a job, or shelter, or health care, or education, or the rights to their own life. Taking care of the Earth and its miraculous biological splendor will then become the long-term work of our species. We'll share the world with all the other creatures. It will be an ongoing project that will never end. People worry about living life without purpose or meaning, and rightfully so, but really there is no need for concern: inventing a sustainable culture is the meaning, right there always before us. We haven't even come close to doing it yet, so it will take a long time, indeed it will never come to and end while people still exist. All this is inherent in what we have started...We have to become the stewards of the Earth. And we have to start doing this in ignorance of the details of how to do it. We have to learn how to do it in the attempt itself. It is something we are going to have to imagine. "This generation has a rendezvous with destiny." Our time has to be understood as a narrow gate, a widow of opportunity, a crux point in history. It's the moment when we took responsibility for life on Earth. That's what I say."