New Waves: Science Fiction and Radical Climate Change

Starts: 3 July 2007

Time: Tuesdays, 7:30-9:30pm

Duration: 8-10 weeks

Location: 774 Richmond St. (SE of Trinity-Bellwoods Park)

Contact: christian@anarchistu.org

RSVP (Class size limited to 25; students welcome at any time during the course; check for space.)

by 2050 human influences on the climate will have surpassed all natural influences ... there will be no more climatic acts of God'

Tim Flannery The Weather Makers 2006

How can anything survive in a climate like this? A heat wave all year long! The greenhouse effect! Everything is burning up!

Charlton Heston Soylent Green 1973 based on Harry Harrison Make Room! Make Room! 1966

At a time when nuclear catastrophe is more imminently possible than at any other time in history since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the publics imagination has seized upon climate change as the more compelling end-times scenario. And suddenly overnight it seems we find ourselves in a very different new world.

But how new is climate change? Scientists have been aware that man-made carbon emissions have the potential to rapidly heat up the planet since Arvid Gustav Högbom's accurate speculations in 1867, and don't we remember within our lifetimes the previous media incarnations of the phenomenon? In the 90s it was the greenhouse effect, the 80s, the depleting ozone layer, and in the 60s and 70s it was a major theme in the burgeoning environmental movement. Each time it has resurfaced in the media the concept has evolved in the mass imagination to the point where it has become a strong lever of public will against the interests of their elites. It is in this climate--the media climate--that change has been the fastest and the most noticeable.

In this new environment of awareness, the mass media's paradoxical role of crystallizing public sentiment only to anaesthetize it in deference to elite interests is thrown into increasingly bold relief. Over the last century, a new globe-spanning consciousness has emerged of humanity's active role as a community of living organisms in an evermore tightly integrated global ecology. The owners of the means of communication have met this by putting a proportionally greater emphasis on our passivity in the face of the specialized expertise of scientists and economists from whom we patiently await studied assessments of the long term viability of the human species. This works to displace the responsibility for human environmental adaptation squarely into the hands of the very class whose power flows from the smoke stacks and exhaust pipes of the world.

It is for this reason that the most pressing and obvious questions will never be answered--or even asked--in the public sphere:

• What meaning does a debate between man-made and natural climate change have when in either case the dire and pressing need for a massive and effectual global emergency relief force strikes a tragic dissonance with our governments' growing preoccupation with war making?
• Why are the mandates and recommendations set by the Kyoto Agreement and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change portrayed as the extreme avant garde of environmental policy when it is widely held among scientists that even these fall far short of meeting minimal standards of efficacy?
• How can climate change be understood with any coherency when it is cordoned off as a phenomenon from other environmental crises such as the unprecedented mass extinction the world is concurrently suffering?

But as greenhouse gases are collecting in the troposphere, the thicker gauze of collective denial toward the true state of the Earth in our hands is dissipating at an even faster rate. Over the next few years, I believe that changes in climate will reawaken the organism's apprehension of its proximal environment and create crisis within the mind's mediated preoccupations. This threatens to be painful only so long as we continue to hold onto the unconscious Republican ideologies of economic and military Darwinism and Calvinist resignation to apocalyptic judgment that radiate down upon us from the teetering summits of international capital.

I'm offering this course because I want to present an alternative to the portents of inevitable doom that saturate public discourse about climate change and serve only to paralyze. This is a false choicelessness that obscures the widening opportunity for each of us to take a fuller responsibility for our existence and become active, creative outlets for the continuation of new forms of life. It's my belief that change and adaptation can only truly happen on the level that is most immediately at hand: the creative imagination. It's here that conscientious and intelligent use of speculative thinking can begin to create an expansive inner ecology that can complement and integrate with the radical changes we're facing in the outer one. I want to present this as a joyful and exciting expansion of the possible.

We're going to do this in part by examining the only precedent I can find for such an undertaking: the science fiction literature of the new wave, 1964-1977. In the brief flourishing of this literary movement several authors operating within a counter-cultural milieu struggled to wrest scientific speculation away from specialized elites and their necrotic fascination with exploding phalluses and restore it to the public sphere where a new popular scientific imagination could be cultivated to advance civilization. It was here that new progress in environmental science first reached a mass readership and serious work was done to open up new possibilities for long-term survival. This course is to be a continuation of that project.

CLASS FORMAT

This class is meant to be an experiment in pedagogy. Each week's two hour class will be evenly divided between lecture and discussion. Discussion will be free-form and will be periodically punctuated by short 10-20min presentations on specific topics of interest. Presentations will be geared over the weeks to conform to the general current of interest. Students are welcome and encouraged to research and prepare presentations of their own. I'll select at least two new wave SF books for the class to read over the course of the ten weeks and we'll integrate them into our discussions as students complete them. The overall purpose of the course is to foment new communities and encourage creative response of all kinds.

POSSIBLE PRESENTATION TOPICS

• Imagination is More Important than Knowledge: The Importance of Imaginative Speculation in Doing Good Science.
• Stability is the Exception: A Geological History of Climatic Catastrophe and its Role in Creating New Life.
• Living at the Bottom of a Deep Gravity Well: The Extreme Non-Normality of Being Alive.
• An Introduction to Astrobiology.
• Selecting Nature: Intelligently Designing Our Evolution.
• Energy, Energy Everywhere: Adapting to Abundance.

SOME SCIENCE FICTION BOOKS

• Brian Aldiss Hothouse: 1962 Tale of a far, far future Earth that has stopped rotating and is covered by a giant Tree.

• J.G. Ballard The Drowned World: 1962 Masterpiece of the survivors on a world covered by water.

• Harry Harrison Make Room! Make Room!: 1965 A crime story within a horrifying setting of a massively overpopulated New York.

• Frank Herbert Dune: 1965 A complexly built World, with a vastly interesting beat-all story of a Chosen One. An incredible book.

• Ursula Le Guin The Word for World is Forest: 1972 Post-Viet Nam account of de-forestation of a tree world by the Colonial Marines. Intricate ecological matrix is shared by dreaming, right-brained natives to whom the Marines teach the meaning of murder.