Why Is Hollywood So Scared of Climate Change?

 

Why Is Hollywood So Scared of Climate Change?

 

 

 

According to New York Times culture reporter Cara Buckley, Hollywood is hopping on the cli-fi bandwagon and as evidence she cites the latest Avengers and Godzilla movies  as well as “Aquaman,” “Snowpiercer,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “Interstellar” and “Mad Max: Fury Road” — as having invoked the climate crisis.

 

Her article was headlined ''Why Is Hollywood So Scared of Climate Change?''

 

Her answer was that actually Hollywood is not so scared of climate-themed movies nowadays and more are on the way, thanks to audience demand and a good flow of money by activist investors.

 

As the 2020s approach, we can expect more and more Hollywood studios to greenlight hot topic cli-fi movies with A-list actors and top producers and directors, among them activist producers such as Marshall Herskovitz, Sonny Fox and Norman Lear, the Times believes.

 

One of the producers in Hollywood that Buckley interviewed (and typical of the lazy reporting by Times climate reporters, she didn't bother to contact The Cli-Fi Report for a quote or two) told me after the article appeared in print: "I mentioned the cli-fi term to Cara several times during our discussions and I was surprised by how much of our conversation made it into the piece, although my main point got a little muddied by the way she framed it."

 

Buckley put things this way: In “Avengers: Infinity War,” the archnemesis, Thanos, opts to head off environmental collapse by reducing humanity — along with all living beings — by half. In “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” eco-terrorists unleash predatory beasts to forestall mass extinction and keep the human population in check.

 

In “Aquaman,” King Orm, the leader of an undersea kingdom, concludes that the only way to prevent earthly destruction is to wage war on humans.

David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, one of the writers of “Aquaman,” said using pollution as a motivator made Orm more relatable and less “mustache-twirly,” and added, “It gave him some nuance.”

 

More sober takes on the subject, at least on the silver screen, Buckley wrote, have largely been confined to documentaries, such as the 2006 Al Gore hit, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

 

One big studio feature that tackled climate change, “The Day After Tomorrow,” in which subzero superstorms envelop half the globe, was released 15 years ago and while it got the science complertely wrong -- global cooling, a new Ice Age? -- that movie prooved to be a global hit and woke up audiences worldwide to the theme of climate change. In that sense, the movie was a real step forward.

 

The actor and director Fisher Stevens, who has made several documentaries about environmental issues, including two with Leonardo DiCaprio, said he found it deeply frustrating that Hollywood had not taken Big Oil to task onscreen in a significant way.

 

“We need a pop culture ‘Forrest Gump’ movie like the one Hollywood legend and Tufts alum Steve Tisch produced to wake people up,” Stevens told the Times, “because the fossil fuel industry is doing everything to stop us in America from believing that fossil fuels are causing climate change.”

 

While several un-named movie directors told the Times it is hard to find financing for cli-fi movies that challenge audiences to change their ways, things are changing now in Hollywood.

 

Roland Emmerich, the writer and director of “The Day After Tomorrow,” said that while it is still not so easy to find a story that franchise-addicted film studios will release, there's an enromou sea change in Los Angeles now.

 

Adam McKay, whose film “Vice” about former Vice President Dick Cheney included references to the Republican Party’s minimization of climate change, said that he was working on a new cli-fi movie addressing the issue, and that his production company was developing a scripted series looking at the effect of radial warming on human civilization.

 

So yes, cli-fi is in the air in Hollywood and the 2020s and 2030s will be pivotal, according to the Times.

 

“Is any of this enough? No way,” McKay wrote to the Times in an email. “It seems like there’s no such things as ‘enough’ with global warming.”

 

In addition, TV dominates the culture at large now and plays a vital role when portraying our warming planet, according to the Times.

This is the entertainment era of cli-fi and sci-fi where the climate crisis takes a central role.

Item: A June 2019 episode of ''Big Little Lies'' dove into the subject in an unexpected way when the young daughter of the main character has an anxiety attack about the future of the planet. The storyline constituted just a single subplot, but it spawned a minor eruption of hot takes, analysis pieces and recaps.

Grist magazine discussed the question of how to talk to children about climate change. 

Esquire magazine deemed the second grader's panic-stricken retreat into a closet as a metaphor for living in 2019.

The Vulture website called up a child psychologist to get her point of view.

Climate-change anxiety is now a part of growing up, opined  the Washington Post.

Pop culture has caught on to the cli-fi predicament we are in now.

The 2020s will be an important decade in the entertainment industry, as producers and directors get the Greta Thunberg message.

Item: When an editor and writer with set out to find major cli-fi TV shows addressing the damage that humans are inflicting on our atmosphere he said he found three good ones:  ''Game of Thrones,'' a National Geographic docu-series called  ''Life Below Zero'' and the Norwegian cli-fi thriller  ''Occupied."

More are on the way, according to industry sources. Hollywood is waking up.

The climate crisis that's reshaping every aspect of human experience is being mirrored now on TV and in Hollywood.

Advocates think that this shows the chances for real, aggressive action on climate. A writer and producer for a climate-themed web series  told a reporter earlier this summer that if we want to change the politics in this country, we have to change the stories that are being told around [climate change] issues. We need something [like cli-fi] that can contain the whole range of people's lived and real experiences.

The deep level of emotional engagement that comes from a dramatic storyline can influence people's real-world behavior, according to an American literary journalist who has been studying the issue for years and founded The Cli-Fi Report online.

Hollywood gatekeepers are no longer standing in the way of great climate television shows. Science Fictional and cli-fi shows and series are beginning now to agressively tackle climate change. The jig is up.

Although ecological catastrophe is often seen as supremely difficult to dramatize, more screenwriters, producers and directors are beginning to say "Lights! Camera! Action!''

Disasters linked to climate change are now more in the headlines than ever before and people are feeling the consequences much more acutely. The science has also become more terrifying.

An American blogger says we have 30 more generations, 500 years, to create novels, movies and TV shows about global warming and try to stop it before it becomes ''unstoppable.'

While telling a direct story about climate change is hard because there aren't instantly identifiable heroes and villains, according to industry sources, help -- and hope -- is on the way.

Hollywood will never be the same and neither will social media conversations after major new cli-fi TV series and movies reach the masses worldwide.

The invention of “cli-fi” as a narrative category can be credited to Dan Bloom

Irish Journalist Stephen Phelan on "The Rise of Cli-Fi in a Global Context"

(c) COPYRIGHT 2019 / Stephen Phelan
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More than a decade ago, in the year of Hurricane Katrina, climate change had not yet flooded into fiction. Scientists were wondering if and when the worlds of art and literature would ever collide with the overheating planet that they saw in their projections. “Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” asked the leading US environmentalist Bill McKibben in an article of 2005. His theory was: we still weren’t quite scared enough.

The problem was too big, too diffuse, too complex to provoke a visceral response. “It hasn’t registered in our gut,” he wrote. “It isn’t part of our culture.” In the years since, the weather has worsened and the culture has shifted. The US alone has seen its eastern seaboard half-submerged by Hurricane Sandy and half-buried under arctic snowstorms, while the west coast suffers chronic drought and near-constant bushfires.

As this article is being written, the monsoons are again inundating the streets and buildings of Mumbai, and the heat index in Marshahr just popped the top off the thermometer at a fantastical 165 degrees F.

 

Rising temperatures, sea levels and rain gauges seem to have finally released what McKibben calls “a torrent of art” around global warming.

Poems like Ruth Padel’s Slices of Toast. Plays like Richard Bean’s The Heretic. Movies like Snowpiercer and Interstellar. This past May, we even got the climate change opera that McKibben called for, when CO₂ – directed by Giorgio Battistelli and inspired by Al Gore’s landmark eco-documentary, An Inconvenient Truth – made its debut at La Scala in Milan.

We have also seen the flourishing of literature on the subject. Relatively recent non-fiction titles like Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything and Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From A Catastrophe draw on McKibben’s own work by way of precedent. His pioneering 1989 treatise The End Of Nature is now read as something of a classic, having raised the alarm with an early, mournful note of eulogy. “I love winter best now,” he wrote way back then, “but I try not to love it too much, for fear of the January perhaps not so distant when the snow will fall as warm rain.”

McKibben says he’s too busy organising to get much writing done. He’s an instrumental figure in the 350.org campaign, which takes its name from the maximum number in parts per million CO₂ at which the Earth’s atmosphere can sustain our current civilisation. Artists are a vital part of the project, he says, “the antibodies of the cultural bloodstream”. He cites the time-lapse photography of James Balog, which shows city-sized regions of ice collapsing into the ocean, and the aerial tableaux of John Quigley, who arranges crowds into formation against dramatic natural backdrops to militate for urgent action. But writers make images in their own way.

“They help people picture meaning in their minds,” says McKibben. “Nuclear explosions were relatively easy to imagine, because we always had the mushroom cloud. But here we have the explosions of a billion pistons in a billion cylinders every second.” He doesn’t think another treatise from himself or some like-minded polemicist would “move the needle all that much”. “That said, a really good metaphor is probably as useful in the fight as a new kind of car engine.”

And this is where the novelists come in. When Cormac McCarthy published ''The Road'' in 2007, a  lyrical parable of human endurance set in a near-future of dead trees and starving survivors, the activist George Monbiot called it “the most important environmental book ever written”. Marcel Theroux’s ''Far North,'' which traced the grim adventures of US refugees across post-eco-apocalyptic Siberia, was heralded two years later by the Washington Post as “the first great cautionary fable of climate change”. Other acclaimed authors like Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, and Barbara Kingsolver have conducted their own extensive research on glacier retreat, fresh water depletion, and species extinction to produce novels as diverse as Solar, The Year Of The Flood, and Flight Behavior, all best-sellers that were peer-reviewed by scientists as well as the usual literary critics. In terms of style, tone, or approach, these books have almost nothing in common.

Though heavily based on his disheartening artist’s expedition to Arctic Norway with the Cape Farewell project, McEwan’s Solar, for example, took the form of absurd and bitter comedy. But if visions of a weather-beaten future have been the stuff of pulp and science fiction for at least a century, we have lately reached the point where they are taken much more seriously. And there is now enough climate change fiction on the shelves for “cli-fi” to become a growing genre unto itself.

The invention of “cli-fi” as a narrative category should be credited to Dan Bloom, an American freelance journalist based in Taiwan, circa 2008. Today he says he came up with it “on the spur of the moment”, while trying to sell a script he’d written for a movie titled Polar City Red, to be set in a dystopian Alaska. His pitch was inspired, in a roundabout way, by renowned environmentalist James Lovelock, who has long since decided that it’s too late to prevent the worst effects of climate change, and that we are effectively “doomed doomed doomed”, as Bloom puts it. Lovelock is his hero, but he doesn’t share that view.

“I’m an optimist,” says Bloom. “I’m not coming from a dark place, I’m working from a reservoir of compassion for the next 30 generations.” He was also thinking of Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On The Beach, a work of popular fiction that probably awakened more people to the threat of nuclear war and the horror that would follow than any contemporary scientist or campaigner had managed. It was later made into a hit movie with Gregory Peck that buried even deeper into the public consciousness. Bloom’s own film has not been produced as yet, but he has parlayed his coinage of that resounding new term into an ongoing project called The Cli-Fi Report, a web-based archive and research tool.

He keeps particular track of the literature now making its way into school curricula and college reading lists – “cli-fi” is being rapidly adopted as a subject of academic study, giving rise to new university courses in Cambridge, Norway, India. More important, says Bloom, is the way that subject seems to be engaging and inspiring young readers.

“My hope is that one of those readers might become the next Nevil Shute and write the On The Beach of climate novels. Personally, I’m not so worried about the next 10 or 20 years. No apocalypse will come that soon. But we need to start preparing now, mentally, emotionally, and I think art can help. Visionary storytelling that sounds the alarm.”

As Bloom well knows though, no true storyteller wants to be a preacher, and no serious artist would consent to serve as a mouthpiece for scientists and policymakers. The politics of climate change put art at risk of being read as propaganda, and the whole concept of “fiction” becomes pretty slippery when both sides of the debate use that word to dismiss each other’s “facts”. To sceptics, man-made global warming is a myth. To those convinced of its reality, denial is a kind of counter-myth.

It might be worth noting that certain core arguments about the power of humanity over nature, and vice versa, can be traced back to one of the oldest stories in existence. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written some time around 2100 BCE, begins with the destruction of forests to make way for mighty cities, and builds toward an account of a deluge that drowns the world. That ancient Sumerian poem survives at least in part as the original flood myth, and we tend to resurrect such myths when circumstance demands – witness last year’s odd but timely Hollywood blockbuster Noah, which cast Russell Crowe as the eponymous ark-builder, and recast a biblical apocalypse in a ecological light.

British nature writer Robert Macfarlane has noted that the Norse legends of Ragnarok and Balder became popular again in Victorian England, when eminent scientists like Lord Kelvin were predicting a new age of global cooling, as a prelude to the so-called “heat death” of the universe. The Earth would turn too cold to live, the sun would freeze into a ball of black ice and fall out of the sky, just as the Vikings had foretold. Except, of course, it didn’t happen.

Which is to say that we’ve been burned before. If we need a fitting flood myth for the Anthropocene epoch – what some environmentalists are calling our current geological period of prevailing human impact and influence – then we also need it to ring absolutely true. To be most useful to us, Macfarlane has suggested, the ideal literary response to climate change “would need to be measured and prudent, and would need to find ways of imagining which remained honest to the scientific evidence”. And to that end, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow might be the very model of a cli-fi novel: the story of a New York risk analyst who is fully exposed to one of his own worst-case scenarios when a superstorm devastates Manhattan.

Drawing on the author’s years of research and reporting on the subject, it was written just before Hurricane Sandy hit the city in 2011, and released only after the offices of his publishing house had been cleared of broken glass and floodwater. Sandy created “complications”, as Rich puts it today. He had set his novel in the near-future, then the present came crashing in. For the sake of maximum veracity, he made a few last-minute adjustments to the manuscript, adding in little details to reflect what had actually happened. His fictional Hurricane Tammy was still a worse event by one or two orders of magnitude, but beyond that, he says, “all the scientific facts are accurate”. “It’s scarier that way, and more honest too.”

Rich did not intend Odds Against Tomorrow to be read as prophesy, or prescription. He wasn’t trying to convince climate change sceptics or play to the worst fears of those already persuaded. “I had no axe to grind,” he says. His protagonist, Mitchell Zukor, obsesses over imminent disaster, while other characters face it down or look away, adopting attitudes that range from nihilism to pragmatism to panic. Rich says he doesn’t feel that any one of these positions is more valid than another, but he does think they raise questions “that all of us must resolve for ourselves”.

“When it comes to environmental issues, should we all quit our jobs and become activists? Or recycle and turn the lights off at night and feel bad all the time? Or should we just do whatever it takes to support our families?” The overriding question is an existential one, and Rich believes that novelists are no less qualified to ask it than scientists or politicians – how are we to live like this? “It’s not just the fear of environmental collapse, but pandemics, terrorism, financial ruin, natural disaster, you name it. What’s it doing to us, this constant sense of threat, the inundation of bad news? And what are we supposed to do about it?” Writing cli-fi might be one answer, and reading it might be one way to prepare.

“Imagination can ready the mind for eventualities that might once have seemed far-fetched,” says Rich. “It can also be a form of inoculation. I don’t think anyone who watches Independence Day is necessarily going to be more afraid of an alien invasion. They’re more likely to be less afraid.”

By 2030, he reckons, every university in the world will be teaching courses in environmental fiction. “But younger novelists will be producing the work. We’re the ones with most at stake. We’re the ones who have to live through this mess.”

Cli-Fi genre filmmaking can tackle serious issues in unexpected ways. Here are some feature films --- outside of documentaries -- that explore climate change. LISTEN TO RADIO PODCAST HERE:

 

Cli-Fi genre filmmaking can tackle serious issues in unexpected ways. Here are some feature films --- outside of documentaries -- that explore climate change. LISTEN TO PODCAST HERE:

Photo credit: Universal

Bruce Dern starred as an astronaut in charge of preserving Earth's last forests on a spaceship in "Silent Running"

 

2 San Diego Film Critics Pick 6 of Their Favorite Cli-Fi Feature Movies

That's right: Cli-fi movies are in the game now too, and it’s not just documentaries that tackle issues of climate change

 

Webposted on Wednesday, July 3, 2019

 

Climate change movies

Beth Accomando's top picks
"Silent Running" (1972)
"Beasts of the Southern Wild" (2012)
"Snowpiercer" (2013)

Yazdi Pithavala's top picks
"Melancholia" (2011)
"Take Shelter" (2011)
"Mad Max: Fury Road" (2015)

Genre filmmaking can tackle serious issues in unexpected ways. Here are some cli-fi feature films -- outside of documentaries -- that explore climate change issues with storytelling

There are plenty of documentaries about climate change — "An Inconvenient Truth," "Before the Flood," "11th Hour," "Chasing Ice" — and all these try to build a case to convince people that climate change is real and requires attention. But documentaries often are seen as having distinct points of view that can limit their audience and end up just preaching to the converted.

That's where genre cli-fi films may have an advantage in reaching a larger audience with a message. A film like "The Day After Tomorrow" may just be a ridiculous disaster film without much science to it yet the impressive images of a new ice age can stir the imaginations of people to contemplate what if. It's that power of a narrative film with its engaging characters and cinematic magic that can pull an audience in and sometimes get them to think about serious ideas while they are being entertained.

Moviewallas' film critic Yazdi Pithalvala joined KPBS radio arts and culture report Beth  Accomando to talk about climate change movies.

TRANSCRIPT:



Speaker 2: 00:32 Well, best start off. What do you think a cli-fi genre films and narrative films can do differently from documentaries and tackling these issues?

Well, I think when people go to documentary, sometimes if the documentaries have a point of view, people put up their guard a little bit and they tend to preach to the converted more. But with a narrative film you're using usually personal stories and something that really engages the audience, I think it really hooks them and brings them into a story so that they're more open to ideas. Right.

And Yaz do talk about that engagement a little bit. I mean, people may not really realizing they're getting a climate change message when they're watching a feature film.


Speaker 3: 01:06 Yeah. I think it's like, you know, a good, a good dose of medicine when, when it's wrapped properly, when it's weakened enough that it goes down. You spoonful of sugar. Yeah. Spoonful of sugar goes down. Well and, and you know, not, not to make it sound terrible, but I think there's the history of science fiction has been the history of climate change in a way.

Speaker 2: 01:24 And uh, well let's get onto the role of science fiction. How has it played in the role of the world of real science, science fiction?

Speaker 3: 01:31 I mean, being a scientist myself, I mean I think I see a lot of parallels. A, I think certainly a lot of the early star Trek, you know, they've borrowed heavily from science, so I think they've kind of helped each other out.


Speaker 2: 01:41 And uh, Beth, how can pop culture work to influence public opinion or help focus attention on certain issues? Well, pop culture, like as you said, it goes down easy. So people go to get entertainment and a lot of times filmmakers will hide messages underneath or just make them a little more digestible. So I think people are more game to go to a film that looks appealing or that's an art house film and possibly get a message they weren't anticipating getting. But these climate fiction films, is the real purpose behind a lot of them climate change in this message or is that incidental? Well, I think a lot of films and a lot of filmmakers have something to say and they choose to say it in a particular manner because narrative fiction or science fiction appeals to them. Because you know, with science fiction there's so much about it that is engaging from a filmmaking point of view that a filmmaker is very attempted to work within that genre.


Speaker 3: 02:37 Josie, yeah, I mean it takes regular situations and makes them extreme. So I think from a, from a plot and script writing perspective, it's fabulous because you know, you can, you can put characters to very extreme situations and watch what happens.


Speaker 2: 02:51 All right, well let's get onto your top climate fiction film picks. And Beth, your top pick. It's being screened Monday at digital. Jim Cinema. Tell us about silent running white's your topic. Sure. This film was made in 1972 but it really feels like a holdover from the 1960s Joan Baez does a song at the end of the movie. Bruce dern plays kind of the environmental astronaut because this is set in a future where earth can no longer grow any plants. The plants are all on a spaceship that's floating around waiting to find out what the decision of the lawmakers are. So in this scene, Bruce dern tries to explain to the other astronauts why it's important to keep these forests alive


Speaker 4: 03:31 and that it calls back a time when there were flowers all over the earth and there were valleys and there were planes of tall green grass that you could lie down in that you could go to sleep in. And there were blue skies and that was fresh air. And there were things growing all over the place, not just in some domed and closures blasted some millions of miles out into space.

Speaker 3: 03:51 Your top pick Yazdi my topic is, uh, the Mad Max movies and they've all been set in a very dystopian future where all of arts resources of La have run out. But I think more so the very last one, uh, Mad Max fury road, uh, really brings to point, you know, this, this, this future world where the most precious commodity is water because there's so little of it now I've Seen Mad Max fury road didn't occur to me that was a climate change film. Can you kind of explain the context? So that's precisely the point of we were talking about earlier is that when it's packaged as entertainment, I still think mad max fury road is the epitome of action. And within the context of that action movie, this whole point about water being a very precious resource, resources being seemed in and you don't even realize that, you know, that's the message that we could very easily get to a point there. Uh, while you're having fun and watching things blow up.

Speaker 5: 04:46 [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] its absence

Speaker 2: 05:08 thirsty. Just listening to that though. You're number two pick. This is a beautiful film called beast of the southern wild and it's about a by you community called the bathtub where a storm is threatening to flooded out and completely destroy it. And it's very kind of sad and melancholy and in the sense that it's not just climate change, but it's the loss of a whole culture. And there's a little girl at the center of it and she talks a little bit about what they're expecting in the by you


Speaker 6: 05:38 one day till the storm the ground's gonna see and the water's gonna rise up so high ain't going to be no bathtub, just a whole bunch of water.

Speaker 3: 05:50 Al Gore couldn't have said it better himself and a Jasta, you're a number two pick. My number two pick is a movie called Melancholia came out in 2011 and it's about two sisters and they're frayed relationship, but it's set in the context of a looming disaster in that a, this, this, this giant planet is going to collide into planet earth. And it's about how do you live your life knowing that this is happening. And it's kind of curious because the main character played by Christian Dunn suffers from acute depression. And for her, the end of the world is a daily occurrence. So she's the only one who is well adjusted in a way.

Speaker 2: 06:26 All right. And quickly, I want to get to each of the films that came in last and your top three Beth. Sure. Snowpiercer reminds me a little bit of Mad Max in that it's set in a dystopian future. And the thing about both of those films is they show that if there's climate change and if something like water or something else becomes a valuable commodity than it shifts the whole power structure too. And that's one of the dangers. Alright, in a Jasta you're third

Speaker 3: 06:49 before I go to my third. I have extreme love for Snowpiercer as well. If you haven't seen it, you need to, my topic is take shelter and this is a movie about a man who has visions that something bad is going to happen and that a storm is going to come and it's going to engulf everyone. And in a way becomes an allegory about those people who believe in climate change versus those who are deniers. And where do you put your faith? Who Do you believe? And it's a, it's a pretty good film.

Speaker 7: 07:16 You gotta go crazy. Is that what he told her? Well listen up [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] you [inaudible]

Speaker 2: 07:37 and I remember when George h w Bush called the Al Gore ozone man. And that was kind of friend, son from that glip right there. Well A, it's, it sounds like a, a lot of thing to, to think about and plenty of things that you want for moviegoers, especially if they're passionate about climate change or what to do about it. And even if they're not.

Thanks very much Beth and Yazdi. Thank you very much. Thank you.

And they were speaking to KPBS's Mark Sauer

 For more coverage from the KPBS climate change desk: Go to kpbs.org/climate change

 

         

 

 

 

 

La Tierra Segmentada: El fin o la transformación del Capitalismo y el ocaso del Antropoceno

La Tierra Segmentada: El fin o la transformación del
Capitalismo y el ocaso del Antropoceno

by Fernando Gularte, a friend of this blog

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

En este trabajo trataré de relacionar conceptos centrales que forman parte de
la vida del Hombre. Esto, con la intención de provocar algunas instancias de
reflexión que permitan discutir algunas posibles respuestas a cuestiones que
irán surgiendo en el desarrollo de las siguientes líneas.

La Naturaleza y el Hombre

Sabemos que mucho antes de la aparición del Hombre en la faz de la Tierra, ya
existía la vida. Somos, al menos hasta el día de hoy, el producto final de una
sucesión de especies en una escala evolutiva.
Hasta cierto momento de nuestra Historia; junto a distintas especies de
animales, fuimos agentes biológicos que interactuaban con la Naturaleza,
situados en la cúspide de una pirámide formada por estas especies, debido al
alto grado de desarrollo de nuestro cerebro.
Creamos civilizaciones en la Mesopotamia, en China, en Grecia, en Egipto, en
Roma. Creamos cultura y conocimiento. En esta evolución, logramos estadios
de desarrollo e inteligencia cada vez más elevados. Así nos fuimos apartando
cada vez más de otras especies, además de nuestros antepasados homínidos.
Mientras tanto, transcurría la época del Holoceno.
2
Podríamos pensar, en resumen, que fuimos de alguna forma creados por
interacciones naturales determinadas, como lo fueron las demás especies, y
que por tanto, como agentes biológicos, estaríamos sujetos o condicionados
por la Naturaleza y sus códigos evolutivos.
Los Siglos XIX, XX y XXI: La aparición y dominio del
Capitalismo
En nuestro afán por superarnos a nosotros mismos cada día, lograr mejores
niveles de confort, mayor poder y dominio, fuimos tomando un control mayor
sobre el mundo natural, sobre sus recursos, sus fuentes de energía. Logramos
dominar, cielo, mar y tierra, mediante nuestras creaciones materiales. Surgió el
papel moneda a modo de intercambio entre distintos bienes y servicios, junto a
distintos grados de importancia y valor que eran definidos por lo que
conoceríamos después como Mercado. Con este último concepto, la mayoría
de las veces poco visible, de cierta naturaleza abstracta, nació el mundo del
Capital.
Quizás el Capital sea visto por ciertos sectores de nuestra sociedad como un
arma moderna, un instrumento de poder, que permite refugiarnos en pequeños
clanes ( élites ) y defendernos de los otros ( grandes masas humanas,
animales, naturaleza ), como lo hacían nuestros antepasados cuando
descubrieron que con un garrote o el fémur de un gran animal, podían matar a
otros animales para alimentarse, o incluso defenderse de intrusos ajenos a sus
comunidades que buscasen apropiarse de sus alimentos, mujeres o cuevas.
3
En este caso:
¿No sería el Capital acaso; más allá de ser una creación intelectual, un
elemento natural más, dispuesto al servicio del Hombre?
El cerebro humano fue evolucionando a lo largo de miles de años; el ADN, las
células y por tanto las neuronas del Homo Sapiens, seguramente poseen una
naturaleza distinta a la que poseía el Hombre de Neardental.
¿Porqué hubo un momento en la Historia en que el Hombre logró utilizar un
garrote a su beneficio, y antes no? Esta misma pregunta nos la podríamos
hacer, con el fuego; hubo un antes y un después.
Lo que trato de fundamentar, es que el Capitalismo puede verse como un
elemento inherente a la naturaleza humana, a su Biología, un elemento más de
supervivencia, y también de lucha contra el miedo.
Capitalismo y Antropoceno
Es difícil pensar en la aparición del Antropoceno, sin pensar en el Capitalismo.
¿Sería posible la existencia del primero sin el segundo? Es decir, ¿La
desaparición del Capitalismo implicaría la extinción del Antropoceno?
Si el Capitalismo es un factor inherente al Hombre, ¿Sería ahora imposible la
existencia del Hombre sin el Antropoceno, como lo era en sus primeras
etapas?
El punto de quiebre o quizás los puntos de quiebre, en los cuales el Hombre
fue abandonando su estado de agente biológico para convertirse en agente
4
geológico y por tanto creador de la época del Antropoceno, ocurrió en plena
expansión del Capitalismo, y de aquí las interrogantes anteriores.
Podríamos pensar en la existencia de “ciclos de refinamiento naturales del
Capitalismo” en el futuro, y que en algún momento dado, podamos abandonar
naturalmente ese ciclo, y continuar en las siguientes eras evolutivas sin
desaparecer como especie. Este punto, lo desarrollaré más adelante, con un
poco más de detalle.
Antropoceno y la posibilidad de un desastre nuclear
No es descabellado pensar que como especie podríamos desaparecer, al
pensar en una catástrofe nuclear de gran magnitud. Creo que entre todas las
amenazas existentes, la relacionada con la tecnología nuclear, si acaso no es
la más importante, estaría entre las primeras, entre las más probables.
Pensemos y analicemos el maquiavélico y letal cóctel al que estamos
expuestos.
Disponemos de centrales nucleares distribuidas por distintos países en todo el
planeta, que generan toneladas de residuos radiactivos que son enviados en su
mayoría a países pobres. Diseminamos así, cantidades potencialmente letales
de veneno, que harían desaparecer comunidades enteras, sin dejar ningún
rastro de vida.
No solo la basura generada es preocupante, sino también el hecho de que
estas centrales están a cargo de un grupo reducido de personas, que pueden
cometer errores, sumiendo a grandes áreas pobladas en catástrofes, como la
5
sucedida en Chernobyl, en 1986. Hasta el día de hoy, y por muchísimo tiempo
más, ciudades como Pripyat, permanecerán completamente deshabitadas.
Ciudades fantasmas por al menos cientos de años debido a la alta radiactivad
existente.
Si a esto, unimos casos como lo sucedido en las inmediaciones de Fukushima,
en el año 2011, en donde, fenómenos naturales como sismos y tsunamis se
unieron, desafiando las probabilidades y provocando la destrucción de una
gran central nuclear, a escasos 200 km de uno de los centros económicos más
importantes del mundo, liberando altas cantidades de radionucleidos a la
atmósfera y al océano; el futuro no resulta muy alentador.
Sin olvidar, la amenaza de conflictos bélicos nucleares, o simplemente
conflictos bélicos que pondrían en riesgo la futura existencia de las centrales
nucleares energéticas que menciono más arriba, el panorama resulta aún más
aterrador. Las pruebas nucleares que aún realizan países como Corea del
Norte, creando nuevas regiones estériles, ennegrecen aún más la situación.
El cambio climático, las catástrofes naturales, la tecnología nuclear existente,
junto a la negligencia y ambición de poder humanos, son factores que aunque
no queramos reconocerlo, se encuentran interrelacionados y nos ponen con un
pie en el precipicio. Todas consecuencias de un Capitalismo salvaje,
posiblemente creador único del Antropoceno.
¿Con qué herramientas contamos aquellos ciudadanos que deseamos revertir
este camino de autodestrucción? ¿Cómo minimizar estos aspectos del
Antropoceno?
6
En cierto modo, mucho daño ya se ha hecho. Es improbable que se desarrollen
en el mediano plazo, tecnologías tendientes a reducir los niveles de basura
radiactiva que sigue aumentando año tras año. Quizás es uno de los desafíos
más grandes del quehacer científico de las próximas décadas
Chernobyl y Fukushima: Paraísos Radiactivos
Pero aún en uno de los peores escenarios, el desarrollo de la vida es posible.
Una muestra es lo que ha sucedido en las inmediaciones de Chernobyl en
Ucrania, y más recientemente en Fukushima, Japón.
En los bosques cercanos a la extinta central nuclear de Chernobyl, la vida ha
florecido. Distintas especies de animales y vegetales se han desarrollado
desde la catástrofe en 1986. Lobos, osos, ciervos , insectos y plantas han
poblado estos lugares, formando verdaderos paraísos radiactivos. Y en parte,
ha sido posible debido a la ausencia del hombre. Los niveles de radiación son
muy altos, y más a nivel del suelo. Los animales consumen alimentos con altas
concentraciones radiactivas y también diseminan de alguna forma esa
contaminación, ya que es posible que se desplacen a zonas de radiactividad
menor.
También está el caso más reciente de Fukushima, con sus jabalíes radiactivos.
No solamente estas especies han sobrevivido, sino que además coexisten en
gran número. Lo que se ha investigado también es que ha disminuido la
diversidad y que algunas de las especies que existían desde antes del
accidente, han sufrido mutaciones.
7
Tal vez aquí la Naturaleza también nos esté mostrando algo: La vida es
posible, en otro ambiente, con una menor diversidad ( ya que algunas especies
más sensibles han desaparecido por no poder adaptarse al nuevo medio ).
Este ambiente podría pensarse como artificial, consecuencia de errores
humanos. Pero también, podríamos pensarlo como una forma de selección
natural, en donde sobreviven los más aptos. Las acciones del Hombre,
pensado como ente biológico, también podrían entrar dentro de un marco
natural, al formar éste parte de la Naturaleza.
La Tierra en la era postnuclear como Espacio Segmentado
Los dos ejemplos anteriores nos pueden llevar a pensar en un futuro
postnuclear: La Tierra como un espacio dividido en zonas. Podríamos pensar
en tres básicamente:
Zonas convertidas en paraísos radiactivos sin presencia humana.
Zonas sin radiactividad habitadas por el hombre. Islas.
Zonas híbridas, con radiactividad y presencia humana
Podría ocurrir que luego de una o varias catástrofes, que si bien aquí
pensamos en la nuclear, como eje central de nuestro análisis, podrían ser de
otra índole, aquellas personas que logren sobrevivir ya sea en “ Islas no
contaminadas “, o en zonas híbridas, quizás hayan “aprendido la lección”
acerca de las peligrosas consecuencias que puede traer una sociedad
capitalista desmedida en la cual se concentren ciertos tipos de poderes.
Podríamos pensar en nuevas sociedades que si bien tengan ciertos tintes
8
capitalistas, estos sean limitados o controlados. Lo podríamos ver como un
“refinamiento capitalista”, por parte de una sociedad que de alguna manera, ha
dado un paso siguiente en la evolución. Quizás lo podríamos ver como un
pequeño eslabón en la cadena, con posibles cambios biológicos.
¿Por qué si ciertas especies animales, han mutado y sobrevivido en
condiciones letales y lograron reproducirse y aumentar su población, no lo
podrían hacer los humanos?
¿Sería una segunda oportunidad para el Hombre de convertirse nuevamente
en un agente meramente biológico dejando atrás el antiguo Antropoceno?
¿Se aprovecharía esta oportunidad, o se crearía un nuevo Antropoceno, con un
nuevo capitalismo, generando así un nuevo ciclo de autodestrucción?
Ciclos de Refinamiento naturales del Capitalismo
Sospecho, que si bien como humanos, podemos cometer los mismos errores,
los haríamos de forma distinta, de algún modo nos podríamos volver a
equivocar pero de un modo “más inteligente”. Es decir podríamos repetir el
ciclo :
Hombre como agente biológico -- Capitalismo -- Antropoceno --
Catástrofe Nuclear -- Zonas Segmentadas ---> Nuevo agente biológico
, pero de forma distinta, quizás produciendo efectos sobre nuestro planeta cada
vez menos devastadores. A estos ciclos, los podríamos llamar “ Ciclos de
Refinamiento Capitalistas”, y los podríamos ver como ciclos de selección
9
natural. Tal vez, tengamos como misión, interrumpir incluso el primer ciclo, que
ya puede estar próximo a cerrarse, y que creo que aún estamos a tiempo de
evitarlo, o aprender del primero, para no volver a repetirlo y entrar en un
segundo ciclo. O en el peor de los casos, repetir tantos ciclos sucesivos como
sea necesario, hasta superar el Capitalismo y evolucionar hacia estadios
mayores de inteligencia. Siempre teniendo en cuenta el hecho de que algunos
de nosotros podamos sobrevivir a estos ciclos y perpetuar nuestra especie, y
teniendo en cuenta las posibles diferencias en el formato biológico.
Definiendo un Futuro distinto
Aún como meras creaciones naturales, podemos diseñar desde el Hoy, un
futuro distinto. Escapar a esos ciclos que se cerrarían de manera muy dolorosa,
más aún si imaginamos un mundo el cual hemos abandonado sin mejorarlo en
ningún aspecto, sino por el contrario.
Nuestras sociedades tienen la capacidad organizativa y ciertas herramientas
como la democracia, la educación, la ciencia, la tecnología, el arte y la ética,
entre tantas otras, que puestas a su servicio, podrían evitar catástrofes como
las desarrolladas más arriba.
Pero también existe un factor que no depende de nosotros como humanos y
que escapa a nuestra razón, y es el hecho de venir codificados “de fábrica”, y
que en última instancia no seremos nosotros quienes crearemos o
diseñaremos un futuro distinto para nosotros mismos, o para las especies que
nos sucederán. ¿0 si?
10
Del polvo venimos y al polvo volveremos, y la Tierra seguramente continuará
en su evolución, con o sin nosotros, porque como especie humana somos
ínfimos, ante la Naturaleza, y más aún ante el Universo.

"Jeopardy" TV quiz show goes cli-fi in episode 57 with host Alex Trebek on March 20, while Oprah Winfrey plugs the genre in ''O'' magazine

'Jeopardy' goes cli-fi on Alex Trebek show and Oprah Winfrey's branded magazine "O" lists seven important cli-fi novels to read in the magazine's ''EARTH DAY'' issue for April 2019

by staff writer with agencies

Hollywood is catching up with the ''cli-fi'' buzzword these days, if the popular TV show "Jeopardy" is any indication.
 

Let me explain: On my cable TV set in Taiwan, where I can watch over 100  channels from around the world in over a dozen languages, I cannot get "Jeopardy'' and to be honest I've never watched the program in my entire life. But I know what it is, of course, and how it is set up and who the host is: the one and only Alex Trebek, a Canadian native of Ukrainian heritage who now works in Hollywood and has been a naturalized American citizen since 1998.

So imagine my surprise last week when a friendly college English professor in New Jersey named Juda Bennett notified me by email that episode 57 on March 20 aired nationwide featuring a ''Jeopardy'' ''cli-fi" clue and its correct answer of ''climate fiction.'' Contestant Lindsey Shultz got it right and earned some money in the process.

All this was told to me by Juda in a brief email message that arrived out of the blue. Surprised and delighted, I Googled to a video and the transcript of the show.

Juda wrote: "Hi Dan, you contacted me about my "Walking in the Anthropocene" class a while back and so now I am contacting you to make sure you know that your term, cli-fi, was a 'Jeopardy' question yesterday.  Actually, they gave the question away when they asked what does cli-fi refer to, and I believe they referenced Kim Stanley Robinson's work."

Juda, an author, literary theorist and professor at The College of New Jersey, added: "Yes, it was the March 20 show where Jonathan Lindeen won.  I looked for the episode but I don't know when they post these things.  The clue -- if I remember correctly --- comes on the program about 3/4 of the way in."

My Google searches led to me to an online transcript of episode 57 with this initial clue: ''The planet's in trouble in the novel 'New York 2140' by Kim Stanley Robinson, part of the ''cli-fi'' subgenre, short for this.''

Lindsey clicked her stage buzzer before the other two contestants and got the answer right:  "climate fiction."

Here's a link to the transcript on the second page of the ''Jeopardy'' website:

http://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=6245

"Yes, they did give it away, but 'Jeopardy' increasingly gives away the answers," Professor Bennett told me. "It is difficult to assess because the rest of the world is just catching up to you (and the term you coined) my friend. There are even people who do not believe in anthropogenic climate change. This reminds me of a 1980s Jeopardy questions about AIDS, which was also a question that they gave away, but when I saw it during the early 1980s our American president at that time had still never said the AIDS word in public. Words are power.''

This month has been a busy month for the cli-fi genre in literary circles, and the "Jeopardy" mention was just icing on the global warming cake, so to speak.

On March 13, a journalist and book reviewer who has been writing a monthly ''cli-fi trends" column for the Chicago Review of Books for the past two years wrote an article for the Oprah Winfrey magazine "O" headlined "7 Books That Provocatively Tackle Climate Change: They Each Fit Into a New Genre: Cli-Fi."

https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/books/a26811549/climate-change-books/

Oprah! Who knew?

"O" introduced the book reviewer this way: ''Environmental identifies an intriguing epidemic: the proliferation of provocative novels in which the enemy is climate change.''

 "As news of the oceans warming and icebergs melting grows ever more urgent, the light drizzle of fiction about eco-disaster spawned by J.G. Ballard’s ahead-of-its-time sci-fi thriller 'The Drowned World' (1962) has gone full-on flood, with apocalyptic visions from a diverse array of authors hitting the mainstream," she told "O" readers online worldwide.

"In Barbara Kingsolver’s 'Flight Behavior,' pollution and other biospheric disruptions throw a colony of butterflies off their migration course to disastrous effect, while in Claire Vaye Watkins’s 'Gold Fame Citrus,' a California besieged by sandstorms illuminates social inequities and the excesses of Hollywood. So robust is the growing genre that it’s earned its own name: cli-fi (short for climate fiction)," she noted.

And then she introduced the following cli-fi novels: "Clade" by James Bradley; ''The Water Knife'' by Paolo Bacigalupi;  ''The Year of the Flood'' by Margaret Atwood; ''American War'' by Omar El Akkad; "Blackfish City" by Sam J. Miller; ''New York 2140'' by Kim Stanley Robinson; ''Salvage the Bones'' by Jesmyn Ward.

From ''Jeopardy'' to ''O,'' the PR doesn't get much better than this.

And there's more to come in the rest of 2019 and the 2020s.

SEE ALSO:
https://www.sdjewishworld.com/2019/10/18/remembering-his-hometown-from-across-the-world/

A new cli-fi short story by Boston writer Vandana Singh titled "Reunion"

Mr Shenoy notes:

"Capping the anthology is [a cli-fi tale,]  a climate fiction story about the language of Gaia herself – which in itself is worth the price of admission – by the author of Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, Vandana Singh, ''Reunion,'' which is at once a [cli-fi] meditation on where the future of cities and urban living lies in the context of a sustainable future and set in a climate-world world where Mumbai has become an archipelago.



What does ''kalpabigyan'' mean?

Dr Arin Basu in New Zealand tells me:

[[ It's "Kalpabigyan" (Kalpa == "fantasy", "bigyan == "Science"), ........this means "science fiction", a term coined in Bengali by the author and sci-fi writer Adrish Bardhan. Kalpabiswa Kalpabigyan is @KalpabiswaWeb is the _only_ bengali language magazine devoted to sci-fi.]]



and

T Ravi Chandran a professor in India on Facebook tells me Dan Bloom ......''Kalpa refers to (in Hindu and Buddhist tradition) an immense period of time, reckoned as 4,320 million human years, and considered to be  the length of a single cycle of the cosmos (or ‘day of Brahma’) from creation to dissolution. The word implies something that is dystopian.the length of a single cycle of the cosmos (or ‘day of Brahma’) from creation to dissolution. The word implies something that is dystopian.

South Asian based writers and South Asian based writers living overseas in North America and Europe are a hotbed of brilliant cli-fi story writing, as well as writings in all the related genres and together, whether in Bombay or Boston, capture by the Bengali word "kalpabigyan (encompassing literature that is "science-dependent," "science-based," "science mystery" and "science"), and there have been many brilliant anthologies from writers in the region or born in the region and now naturalized citizens of other countries in other regions of the world; the latest entry to the field is Gollancz's new Book of South Asian Science Fiction, edited by Tarun Saint, the subject of a fascinating review by the blogger's friend Mr Gautham Shenoy in ''Factor Daily.''

Adrish Bardhanis credited with coining "kalpabigyan."  BUT... Mr Shenoy finds fault with one element: it only features writers from the "partitioned three" (Pakistan, India and Bangladesh), with no contributors from "Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives or the Tibetan Community in exile." Shenoy has called on Gollancz to revisit the book as a series with contributions from these other nations and literatures.  He writes" To paraphrase the title of my favourite Billy Paul song, “Am I South Asian enough for you?”  He adds: The answer would be ‘No’.  For one, the anthology features only writers from the ‘partitioned three’: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The editor, Tarun K. Saint, says in his introduction that they weren’t able to reach out to writers from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives or the Tibetan Community in exile. One hopes that The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction is not a one-and-done publication, but just the first volume of many.  So, subsequent anthologies could include stories from the aforementioned countries (and mayhap including even Afghanistan, each of which surely have a history of speculative literature of their own with many of them having a thriving contemporary SF scene, not least Sri Lanka) as also stories, not just from authors who write in English such as Samit Basu, Indrapramit Das, Sukanya Datta to name just a few, but also by writers such as Jayant Narlikar, Sujatha, Naiyer Masud and many others whose stories are written primarily in regional languages such as Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, Assamese, etc., so that The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction grows into something true to its name and becomes for speculative fiction from the subcontinent what Gollancz’s SF/F Masterworks is for the genre as a whole.

 

''Climate Change Is....Confusing.'' -- a list of 100 words project in progress, please join us

UPDATED NOW WITH MORE WORDS, and we are still hoping to gather more words
Uve Be Dolezal notes ''Love your project"

Wishing Well

 

WIKIPEDIA: "Cli-Fi" as a 21st C. literary genre‏ 
@do_you_cli_fi_


add your words to the coments section here
or email me
or tweet to me:          

 

 

"Climate change is...confusing".

And so on.

For a blog project and future podcast I'm looking for 100 single words like confusing, annoying, alarming, solvable, unfathomable, (either negative or positive words, up to you) to be sent me here. One entry or multiple entries, as you wish. RSVP . - Dan

THE LIST SO FAR: 19 words so far, we need to make it 100 words eventually, maybe 101 words,
maybe 99 words...
 

"Climate change is...(brief one second pause) natural.''
SPOKEN ON THE PODCAST BY A PROFESSIONAL VOICE-OVER ACTOR with  a slight one-second pause after ''is''....



HASHTAG FOR TWITTER suggested by Josh W. in Tweet to this blog.

#ClimateChangeIs
#climatechangeis

Climate change is...._______ [ADD A USEFUL ONE-WORD word TO THIS LIST]

Climate change is.... exisential [suggested by Christy George via FB]
Climate Change is....real
Climate change is.... painful
Climate change is.... inevitable
Climate change is.... happening
Climate change is.... cumulative
Climate change is.... incurable
  Climate change is...everywhere
  Climate change is...universal
  Climate change is...inescapable
  Climate change is.. global
  Climate change is...horrifying
  Climate change is...daunting
  Climate change is...terrifying
  Climate change is ..solastalgia [suggestedby ______via Tweet]
Climate change is ... annoying
Climate change is ...alarming
Climate change is ...solvable
Climate change is ...unfathomable

Climate Change is .....observable [suggestedby Susan Feathers via Facebook]
Climate Change is.....unfolding [suggestedby Susan Feathers via Facebook]

Uve Be Dolezal suggested
who notes "Use or replace any words BELOW that you like. Love your project"

RE ''Climate change is ....real''

AND....

2. Painful
3. Inevitable
4. Happening
5. Cumulative
6. Incurable
7. Everywhere
8. Universal
9. Inescapable
10. Global
11. Horrifying
12. Daunting
13. Terrifying
14. solastalgia"
15. annoying
16. alarming
17. solvable
18. Unfathomable

19. 20. [Susan Feathers] observable, unfolding

21. adjustable
22. circumstance
23. jobs
24. work
25. statistics
26. facts
27. math
28. data
29. science
30. ours
31. Responsibility
32. Ecological
33. environmental
34. debt
35.
36. awareness
37. felt
38. Revolutionary
39. passive
40. divided
41. voiceless / silent
42. dumb
43. industrial
44. human
45. pivotal
46. foreboding
47. demand
48. planetary
49. emissions
50. waste
51.
52. future
53. devastation
54. Survivable
55. ignorance
56. Suffering
57. death
58. species-ist / speciestalgia
59. alarming
60. unexpected
61. extreme
62. hell
63.
64.
65. war
66. conflict
67. refugees
68. turmoil
69. opportunistic
70. generated
71. caused
72. effectable
73. cataclysmic
74. catastrophic
75. studyable
76.
77. stimulated
78. advancing
79. measurable
80. destiny
81. duty
82. obligation
83.
84. movement
85.
86. unsustainable
87. preventable
88. unifying
89. undeniable
90. dividable
91. cyclical
92. empirical
93. experienceable
94. actual
95. inequitable
96. verified
97. undeniable
98. inherited
99. irrefutable
100. Climate change is .....change.