Since I trained under former vice president Al Gore to serve in his Climate Reality Leadership Corps just over a year ago—a period in which no fewer than eighty-five federal environmental regulations have been rolled back, greenhouse-gas emissions have spiked (after leveling off in years prior), polar-ice melt is outpacing predictive modeling, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has strenuously warned us we have a mere decade to halve our current rate of carbon-burning if we hope to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change—there is one distinct emotional state that has been entirely absent from my life.
Despair.
I might, in fact, be happier and more optimistic than at any other point in my adult life.
Activism, I’ve discovered, is the antidote to despair, to doomism. Over the past year, I’ve given public presentations on the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, a bipartisan bill in Congress that would charge fossil-fuel extractors for the privilege of pollution—of treating the public commons of our atmosphere like an open sewer—they’ve thus far enjoyed free of charge.
This past March, my Climate Reality chapter was proud to enlist Los Angeles into the County Climate Coalition, an alliance of jurisdictions across the United States, formed by Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese, that have formally pledged to uphold the standards of the Paris Accord. Less than six months later, we were in attendance as the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to adopt the OurCounty sustainability plan, one of the most ambitious green initiatives in the United States.
And just last month, I joined 300,000 activists in Lower Manhattan for the Global Climate Strike as we swarmed the streets of City Hall, marched down Broadway, and rallied at Battery Park—where no less than Greta Thunberg addressed the crowd. None of that, as it happens, has left much time to actually worry about the climate breakdown.
But that level of activism, I acknowledge, isn’t something to which everyone can readily commit. So, if you want to share my profound hopefulness about the solutions to the climate crisis—if you want to appreciate the world-changing opportunity humanity has been handed by history—do yourself a favor and read a book that might admittedly be outside your comfort zone: Naomi Klein’s On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal.
I promise: You won’t be inundated with scientific facts and figures; if you want to understand the basic science of global warming, Mr. Gore’s documentaries An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2017) are both excellent primers. Naomi Klein’s On Fire is a recently published collection of her essays and lectures from the past decade, bookended by all-new opening and closing statements on why a Global Green New Deal is the blueprint for an ecologically sustainable and socially equitable twenty-first century:
The idea is a simple one: in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts. Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s quality of life in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to the breakdown of any semblance of social cohesion. Challenging these underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once. . . .
. . . In scale if not specifics, the Green New Deal proposal takes its inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal, which responded to the misery and breakdown of the Great Depression with a flurry of policies and public investments, from introducing Social Security and minimum wage laws, to breaking up the banks, to electrifying rural America and building a wave of low-cost housing in cities, to planting more than two billion trees and launching soil protection programs in regions ravaged by the Dust Bowl.
Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), 26
Klein goes on to make the case, building on themes explored in some of her previous books (No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate), that our rapacious economic model, capitalism, would need to be entirely reprogrammed if not altogether replaced by a kind of “democratic eco-socialism” if we are to begin to heal what ails our biosphere:
We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period that we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe, and that would benefit the vast majority, are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.
ibid., 249
Coming to terms with climate change requires that each of us, even self-identified liberals (like yours truly), fully recognize just how deeply inculcated we are to the ideologies and practices of late capitalism, which “teaches us to create ourselves through our consumer choices: shopping is how we form our identities, find community, and express ourselves. . . . This is likely why, of environmentalism’s original ‘three Rs’ (reduce, reuse, recycle), only the third has ever gotten any traction, since it allows us to keep on shopping as long as we put the refuse in the right box” (ibid., 122). Because make no mistake: Liberals are climate deniers, too. Oh, sure—we don’t argue with the science… we just don’t really believe climate change will ever directly impact our children.
Conservatives, on the other hand, far more quickly and thoroughly grasped the scope of transformative changes required to our current extractivist, consumerist, winner-take-all way of life, because “climate disruption demands a reckoning on the terrain most repellent to conservative minds: wealth redistribution, resource sharing, and reparations. And a growing number of people on the hard right realize this all too well, which is why they are developing various twisted rationales for why none of this can take place” (ibid., 46).
That’s why climate change is denied on both the right—who insist it isn’t happening, or it’s all part of a “natural cycle”—as well as the left—who assume their heirs will be the anointed beneficiaries of First World insulation from it. “This is a crucial point to understand: it is not opposition to the scientific facts of climate change that drives denialists, but rather, opposition to the real-world implications of those facts” (ibid., 92).
Because while it is true that climate change is a crisis produced by an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is also, in a more profound sense, a crisis produced by an extractive mind-set, by a way of viewing both the natural world and the majority of its inhabitants as resources to use up and then discard. I call it the “gig and dig” economy and firmly believe that we will not emerge from this crisis without a shift in worldview at every level, a transformation to an ethos of care and repair. Repairing the land. Repairing our stuff. Fearlessly repairing our relationships within our countries and between them.
ibid., 270
Still with me so far? Good—because here’s how all this is relevant to storytellers.
Part if the reason I’ve spilled so much ink on this blog complaining about how Hollywood has become a 1980s nostalgia factory isn’t because I hate Star Wars and superheroes (though I do) or that I think the industry is creatively bankrupt (it is). It’s because when we do nothing but retell ourselves the reassuring bedtime stories of a previous century, we osmotically assimilate the outmoded values embedded in those antiquated narratives, a practice that consigns us not only to a bygone era, but, in many instances, its uncontested set of mores—i.e., the gig-and-dig worldview Klein identifies.
That’s the danger of habitual backward-gazing. It’s why I’ve implored writers to consider the messages they’re (often unconsciously) reinforcing through their fictions, and why I’ve begged Gen X to put its toys away for good. Because when we don’t, we wind up celebrating (and financially rewarding) movies like Avengers: Infinity War, in which the antagonist is a deranged environmentalist who can only be stopped by—oh, dear—a pantheon of demigods. (So much for the fallacy of “liberal Hollywood.”) Are those really the kinds of stories we should be telling ourselves—and our children—at this pivotal historical juncture?
Interrogating the stories we have long taken for granted is healthy, especially the comforting ones. When the narratives and mythologies still feel helpful and true, resolving to do more to live up to them is also healthy. But when they no longer serve us, when they stand in the way of where we need to go, then we need to be willing to let them rest and tell some different stories.
ibid., 173–74
And that’s where storytellers—you and me—can play a direct part in helping bring about the world of collective purpose and empathetic coexistence the Green New Deal envisions. “If these kinds of deeper connections between fractured people and a fast-warming planet seem far beyond the scope of policymakers, it’s worth thinking back to the absolutely central role of artists during the New Deal era. Playwrights, photographers, muralists, and novelists were all part of telling the story of what was possible. For the Green New Deal to succeed, we, too, will need the skills and expertise of many different kinds of storytellers: artists, psychologists, faith leaders, historians, and more” (ibid., 271).
Indeed, Klein devotes the penultimate chapter of On Fire, “The Art of the Green New Deal,” to demonstrating the indispensable role Works Progress Administration–funded creativity (the Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, Federal Theatre Project, Federal Writers Project) played in lighting a path out of the Great Depression:
Much of the art produced by New Deal programs was simply about bringing joy and beauty to Depression-ravaged people—while challenging the prevalent idea that art belonged exclusively to the wealthy. . . .
Some New Deal art set out to mirror a shattered country back to itself and, in the process, make an unassailable case for why New Deal relief programs were so desperately needed. . . .
Other artists produced more optimistic, even utopian creations, using graphic art, short films, and vast murals to document the transformation under way under New Deal programs—the strong bodies building new infrastructure, planting trees, and otherwise picking up the pieces of their nation.
ibid., 276–77
Now, if you’ve been cool enough to stick with me through the end of this overview, no one would blame you for assuming you’ve got the gist of On Fire and not bothering to actually read the book itself. I get it: No one wants to spend their scintilla of leisure time on a 300-page political-science treatise about a subject as depressing as climate change—certainly not when there are all-new seasons of Watchmen and Castle Rock and Jack Ryan and AHS available to binge.
But consider this: Hollywood now systematically exploits our anxieties with ever-more-convincing visions of catastrophic societal collapse (Mad Max: Fury Road, 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Walking Dead, Terminator: Dark Fate), then conveniently sells us the nostalgic antidote (The Lion King, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, BH90210, Star Trek: Picard). Back and forth that noxious pendulum swings—alarm and allay, alarm and allay—until our entire whiplashed sense of reality is one of a dystopic future down the road (the inevitable) and the euphoric good old days in the rearview (the irretrievable). All of which distracts us from the present—and the looming existential challenge history has selected us to confront.
Naomi Klein’s On Fire, by contrast, neither pretends the past was exclusively halcyon nor insists the future is inexorably apocalyptic. Instead, it envisages a new kind of narrative for a correspondingly new century, the outline of which is the Green New Deal—the keyword being new. This is what the first chapter of that story would look like:
The emergence of the Green New Deal means there is now not only a political framework for meeting the IPCC targets in the United States but also a clear (if long-shot) path to turning that framework into law. The plan is pretty straightforward: elect a strong supporter of the Green New Deal in the Democratic primaries; take the White House, the House, and the Senate in 2020; and start rolling it out on day one of the new administration (the way FDR did with the original New Deal in the famous “first 100 days,” when the newly elected president pushed fifteen major bills through Congress).
ibid., 31
And, hey—if that’s a quixotic fantasy, at least it’s sufficiently fresher than anything Hollywood is hawking. Read Naomi Klein’s On Fire and be inspired by the creative possibilities of a Global Green New Deal: a fairer, cleaner, healthier, more cooperative, more humane world.
How much fairer, cleaner, healthier, more cooperative and humane is limited only by our collective imagination. Call me foolishly optimistic, but I’m betting we’ll surprise ourselves.
I like the tone of this piece and the hope it embodies. I fear it may not be possible. I will, however, get my thinking cap on and start work on a fiction that attempts to spread the message. In fact, my present, stalled, WIP could well be it. Than ks for the inspiration.
Did you see my earlier comment about “Hopepunk”?
https://www.seanpcarlin.com/writing-horror-and-fighting-climate-change/
>Are you familiar w/ “hopepunk”?
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2019/09/prelude-to-commonwealth-iii-hopepunk-dreams/
https://festive.ninja/one-atom-of-justice-one-molecule-of-mercy-and-the-empire-of-unsheathed-knives-alexandra-rowland/
This might help inspire you
Good luck
Thank you, Dell — those are all worthwhile links! I encourage everyone to peruse those articles.
And it’s worth pointing out that any genre or narrative can carry a prosocial and/or humanistic agenda — it needn’t only be “hopepunk” or “cli-fi.” I think there’s a lot of truly terrible TV right now — whether it’s the dubious messaging of shows like The X-Files and The Walking Dead, or, alternatively, the dearth of meaning in “mega-franchises” that are less concerned with saying something profound about the human condition than they are with challenging the viewer to catch all their internal cross-references — but there are little diamonds in the rough out there that haven’t given in to dystopia (The Orville) or cynicism (The Good Place). Those shows don’t play to our anxiety but rather appeal to our probity; they’re aspirational rather than exploitive. And we need a lot more of that kind of prescriptive fiction right now…
Yes, the Orville is more optimistic about the future than much that’s out there… But it’s also problematical, particularly in its treatment of women
Really? How so?
And I am by no means arguing with you by asking that, Dave — I’m genuinely curious to get your observations and insights on the matter. I’ve been so taken with what Seth MacFarlane has done with The Orville — backdooring into Star Trek so cleverly, and telling stories so old-fashioned (closed-ended and prescriptive) that the series can rightfully be considered an act of creative subversion! — that perhaps I’ve been insensitive to problematic aspects of its gender politics…?
For me, The Orville is beyond merely optimistic — it’s anti-dystopian. Not to diminish what Gene Roddenberry did when he created TOS — and even TNG two decades later (from which MacFarlane draws his inspiration) — but optimism was easier to invoke in a pre–Road Warrior cultural canon. Nowadays, though, to buck the dystopian worldview — to refuse to validate the inevitability of holocaust (as Moore had hoped to do in Twilight of the Superheroes) — takes a degree of creative vision and commercial courage all too uncommon. Perhaps The Orville is imperfect — and I’m willing to debate that — but, Jesus, if we don’t need more of that kind of fiction right now…
On that note: I only somewhat recently read the first compendium of the Walking Dead comic. I watched the show till the Negan plotline wore me out, but I’d never read the comic, so I thought — after quitting the TV show — I’d go back and see what the source material was like.
Holy sh!t was I unprepared for how terrible it is! This piece of sh!t won the Eisner?! You can read my full review here, but one of the big, big problems with it — something I’d never heard mentioned in any review or discussion — is how appallingly regressive Kirkman’s sexual politics are. His women have no agency whatsoever. They’re there to be saved and to service the men sexually. That’s it. Shane saves Lori; she sleeps with him. (“Oh, Shane. I can’t thank you enough for coming with us. Carl and I never would have made it down here on our own. I’ll never be able to repay you.”) Meanwhile, Dale and Andrea, unlike their father-daughter dynamic on the show, have an ongoing tryst. (Gross.) Maggie offers to f**k Glenn out of nowhere. Carol’s sleeping with Tyreese, until Michonne gives him an unsolicited b***job, prompting Carol to slit her wrists in despair! The badass, self-reliant, emotionally complicated versions of Michonne and Carol from the TV series are nowhere to be found in the comic.
Furthermore, the female characters are routinely scolded by the men for being hysterical (which, incidentally, is their only mode of behavior). At one point at the prison, Rick, Dale, Hershel, and Tyreese form a governing committee, and even Rick is taken aback by the lack of women in a leadership role. Dale’s response? “Lori, Carol, Andrea, Maggie — they all said they wanted us in charge. They figure the four of us have pretty much been making the decisions anyway.” Yikes…
I mean, seriously: How has no one taken The Walking Dead to task for this…?
You might want to read this post:
Are You Afraid of the Darkness?: A Hopepunk Explainer – A brief guide to the hopepunk movement—its origins, and its possibilities.
https://www.denofgeek.com/culture/are-you-afraid-of-the-darkness-a-hopepunk-explainer/
– “We can retreat into paralysis, and pretend that’s somehow pragmatic or realistic,” says (Annalee) Newitz. “Or we can say, fine, this is a horrible problem, let’s get together with other people and try to solve any small part of it that we can…”
At the end of the post are several links to interviews w/ authors on the same topic, including an interview w/ one of my favorite authors
A Hopepunk Guide: Interview with Ferrett Steinmetz
https://www.denofgeek.com/culture/a-hopepunk-guide-interview-with-ferrett-steinmetz/
Thanks for this, Dell. It was you who introduced me to the subgenre classification of hopepunk, and articles like the two you’ve linked to above continue to broaden my understanding of and appreciation for it; thank you, as always, for bringing these to the blog’s attention. Certainly framing hopepunk as a sort of antithetical aesthetic to grimdark is a helpful conceptual précis. Much like the Green New Deal resolution itself, the subgenre isn’t intended to be a dogmatic directive so much as a flexible concord — less a way of doing something than a way of thinking about it.
To my view, the trouble with so much Digital Age grimdark fiction is that it doesn’t merely depict nihilism, but openly revels in it. The reasons for such can be attributed to a dearth of moral imagination. Shows like The Walking Dead and its ilk are reflective of a fundamental inability to envision precisely what Klein calls for in On Fire: “a shift in worldview at every level, a transformation to an ethos of care and repair.” To their credit, these series rightly recognize that our old narratives are irreparably broken, but they lack the moral imagination to envision new narratives that dramatize a successful transformation of society — merely a back-to-basics breakdown of it. It’s an admission of defeat, in a way — an acknowledgment that building a better world is going to be way more work, and way less fun, than letting everything go to hell.
And cynicism begets cynicism. Gen X is no stranger to retelling old stories — we’ve remained happily mired in the comforting fantasies of the 1980s, biding our time in the comic-book multiverse until civilization collapses and we never have to reply to another fucking text message — but that has meant putting a grimdark spin on a lot of stories that we were never meant to carry with us into adulthood, like superheroes. Dystopian fiction and retroactively grimdarkened fantasies are absolutely indicative of an intellectual and moral paralysis that we use to justify our cynicism, our apathy, our lack of moral imagination, and certainly our lack of interest in the real world — because the real world is an inhospitable place that’s fucked anyway, unlike our sprawling fictional “universes,” the tangled affairs of which are easily remedied with a periodic continuity reset.
In its current state, it takes neither courage nor imagination to write grimdark literature, but hopepunk takes both. This is not to suggest noble intentions inevitably produce good work — and often ignoble intentions result in a lot of supremely entertaining stories, like the lion’s share of our cop movies — but hopepunk, as Rowland and Steinmetz (and others) provisionally define it, can provides a philosophical model for the kind of ethical and aspirational (and nuanced) storytelling our world needs at this moment. Just like the Hamilton lyric “Dying is easy, young man/Living is harder,” cynicism is easy — optimism is harder: “It’s believing that humanity may not be inherently good, but we’re not inherently bad either, and that giving people the chance to prove themselves compassionate is a worthwhile choice.”
Amen.
Frank, as a Climate Reality Leader, I work every week with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people across the socioeconomic and -political spectrums who’ve committed their time, energy, and passion to solving the climate crisis — from soft-spoken college students in my Citizens’ Climate Lobby chapter to the Chief Sustainability Officer of Los Angeles County (the biggest district, population-wise, in the nation) to no less than former VP Al Gore himself (who trained me) — and I can promise you this: The folks most engaged in this movement are also the most optimistic that we’ll implement the solutions.
People bury their head in the sand about this subject — Christ knows I understand why! — but the more you learn, the more you see that there is a path out of this crisis… and the more you want to be a part of those solutions! (Environmental activists are also the most realistic about the tough fight ahead, but that only makes us more motivated and prepared to fight it! See: Thunberg, Greta.)
Read On Fire… then lend your copy to a neighbor. If enough of us across the globe — myself in the United States, you in the UK, mydangblog in Canada — get galvanized about a Global Green New Deal, I absolutely believe it could be a reality within the next few years. As we like to say in Citizens’ Climate Lobby, politicians don’t create political will — they respond to it.
Thanks for reading and commenting, Frank. You are always welcome to keep us informed of your work on this forum any time!
SPC
>we just don’t really believe climate change will ever directly impact our children.
Dude, as you know, CLIMATE CHANGE IS ALREADY DIRECTLY IMPACTING US!
A friend of mine just got back from a tour of Alaska (a red state. Sarah Palin was the Governor for a while). She said they kept talking about how the glaciers were melting under the current climate
We have our heads in the sand, hiding from the future. And we’re trying to ignore the present coming right up our butts!
Denial is the easiest way to handle this. Despair is the second easiest
>..(A) world which, having lived through the terrors of the Fifties through the early Nineties with overhanging terror of a nuclear Armageddon that seemed inevitable at the time, has found itself faced with the equally inconceivable and terrifying notion that there might not be an apocalypse. That mankind might actually have a future, and might thus be faced with the terrifying prospect of having to deal with it
rather than allowing himself the indulgence of getting rid of that responsibility with a convenient mushroom cloud or nine hundred.
Alan Moore – Twilight of the Superheroes (unpublished)
Well said, Dell. The lion’s share of my work as a Climate Reality Leader is trying to make people unambiguously aware of the urgency of the climate crisis without inadvertently provoking them to retreat into denialism, on one end of the spectrum, or despair, on the other. Here’s the good news: More and more of us are waking up to the exigency of this global emergency every week, and demanding our governments respond to it with the speed and scale it demands.
And as you always do, my friend, you have chosen an absolutely wonderful and relevant quotation from one of our era’s great philosopher-artists: Alan Moore. I wish I’d included that quote in my essay, so thank you for that. It so perfectly presages — by three decades! — the same points Klein makes: It encourages us to imagine a new, decentralized twenty-first century by banishing the old narratives that no longer serve that vision. For that reason, it’s worth giving the paragraph you cited from Moore’s 1987 Twilight of the Superheroes comic-book prospectus fuller context here:
Your insightful contributions are always most welcome here, sir. Many thanks again.
And now that we have a pandemic, many “preppers” are PISSED that instead of riding around on armed dune buggies Mad-Max-style we have to wear masks and practice social distancing to protect EACH OTHER from disease
An optimist would point out how many people ARE taking care of themselves and others, how many of us ARE helping each other through this, how we have adapted
And what many “survivalists” fail to grasp is that long term survival is not about guns and gas-masks. It’s about doing whatever it takes to survive. Even if that means caring about other people and the world as a whole
I mean, look: That those imbeciles can unironically invoke “My body, my choice” as a rationale for why they shouldn’t be subjected to the Big Government tyranny of mandatory facial coverings (to say nothing of carrying signs that read SOCIAL DISTANCING IS SOCIALISM) should tell you all you need to know about the caliber of stupid we’re up against in this pandemic (to say nothing of the forthcoming election season).
The “doomsday prepper” subculture has never been about responsible citizenry in mindful advance of potential societal collapse, but rather it is a pitiable coping mechanism — an escapist fantasy — for the “inconceivable and terrifying notion that there might not be an apocalypse. That mankind might actually have a future, and might thus be faced with the terrifying prospect of having to deal with it rather than allowing himself the indulgence of getting rid of that responsibility with a convenient mushroom cloud or nine hundred,” as you so aptly noted above, Dell.
And the inconvenience of the coronavirus crisis, of course, is that it’s shattering that cherished fantasy of apocalyptic reset, insisting instead on systemic reengineering — a page-one rewrite of the social contract — away from a model of extractive exploitation in favor of one of sympathetic coexistence… and the latter just don’t sound nearly as fun as holing up in our private doomsday bunkers.
Absolutely brilliant as always. You’ve read The Dome, so you know that I’m an optimist too–that no matter how bad things get, there are always people who will work to make positive changes, and that if we focus on renewable energy and infrastructure, and stop consuming everything we see, it just might happen. Unless of course, at the end of the election tomorrow in Canada, we have a corrupt Conservative government in place; they don’t give a shit about climate change. It takes a movement, and I’m glad you’re part of it. Hope we can be up here too.
Well, thank you, Suzanne, but any brilliance in this piece can only be attributed to Ms. Klein, since this particular post is comprised mostly of her words that I have simply cited and tried to shape into a call to action for those who read this blog for its views on the craft of storytelling!
As I said to Frank above, “ordinary” people all across the globe — be it Aboriginal Canadians, Extinction Rebellion in the UK, Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal here in the States — are challenging the fossilized establishment (pun intended) and demanding climate action. In my country alone, I’m deeply encouraged by the presidential campaigns of Sanders and Warren (among others) who have made climate change a central issue. We are so close to a political tipping point on this issue, so I implore everyone to not lose faith now — not when we’re about to bust this whole thing open!
And for those that may not know, Suzanne’s new novel The Dome is now available from Bookland Press. Having read it, I can attest that it is precisely the kind of socially conscious sci-fi — with an explicit environmental context, no less — that rebukes the every-man-for-himself ideology of dystopic fiction in favor of an ethos of empathetic coexistence. That’s a vision of the future worth imagining and aspiring to…
As for the Orville, https://mythcreants.com/blog/six-misogynist-messages-from-the-orville/ explains it better than I could
I should warn you: Oren Ashkenazi REALLY dislikes the show
I thought it was mostly all right, though the pairing of serious Star Trek drama and childish Family Guy humor did not work for me. I watched the first season, but quit the second, because the second season opener was all about one of the main characters urinating
But I do think it’s a better Star Trek show than Discovery
Well, I’ll give Oren this: He’s got strong opinions — and I love that — and he makes a lawyerly case for them. He’s given me a lot to think about, but I’d have to rewatch the first season with a critical eye toward some of the issues he raises before I weighed-in myself. I’ll at least put this out for consideration: My sister and my wife, both of whom are well-educated, enviably accomplished professionals in their respective fields (public health and advertising, the latter of which is replete with sexism) both count The Orville among their favorite shows; I’ve never heard either one of them issue so much as a word of criticism about its treatment of women. Quite the opposite.
To be clear: I am in no way suggesting Oren is wrong, or that his reaction is somehow less valid than theirs. As I said to Erik yesterday in a comment on my review of Rambo: Last Blood, we have a responsibility to question the values embedded in our popular stories, even and especially when we find them entertaining. That’s what this blog aspires to do, and it’s certainly one of the reasons I admire the scholarly analyses conducted at Mythcreants.
What so surprised me about The Orville when it premiered was that I tuned in thinking we were getting Galaxy Quest, and discovered it was instead a de facto Next Generation spin-off — but set on a ship where the characters experience all the awkward moments and (comically) uncomfortable conversations Picard never had to put up with in the dignified environs of the Enterprise! I got exactly what MacFarlane was going for — I in no way viewed it as a stylistic “mismatch,” though I certainly appreciate how it isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea — and was quite taken with the show’s ambitious pairing of potty humor with thematic depth.
More surprising still, subsequent seasons of the show — because Oren’s analysis only covers the first one — have actually moved away from an overt comedic agenda in favor of oftentimes now simply doing straight-up sci-fi! That’s what I meant when I said MacFarlane “backdoored” into Star Trek: He sold the project — and lured his fan base to it — as a Trek spoof, and then incrementally, nigh imperceptibly, developed it into the best Star Trek show since DS9.
Perhaps there are valid criticisms of The Orville (and I’m always happy to have those friendly debates), but at least MacFarlane is doing a TV series about something other than its own self-perpetuation — a damn rare thing these days. The Orville has a social conscience, and, better still, you can watch any episode, in any order, and get a complete story arc with a point. If Family Guy was MacFarlane’s commentary about how meaningless modern TV has become, The Orville is his earnest — if arguably imperfect — attempt to restore some meaning to it. And that’s okay by me.
Hey, Sean–this give me an opportunity (I hope) to discuss a YouTube video with someone who might view it with a critical yet discerning eye. It’s here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM. Be sure you make it all the way to the end, because at one point I was wondering if it was an elaborate rationale for climate change denial (it’s not).
I really like this guy’s work. But the problem is that it plays to my centrist mindset–I like to think that all points of view have something of value. I’d like to hear from someone who’s coming from the global warming perspective. If it’s too much to go into here, we can always email to discuss it (link is in the sidebar on my blog.)
Personally, I’ve focused my ecological efforts mostly on pollution. I can go and pick up trash and know that I at least accomplished something. I will add this, though: only humans would be stupid enough to bag their dog poop, and then leave the plastic bag on the forest path. Seriously?! Aargh…
Terrific presentation, Cathleen — thank you for bringing it to my attention! And really: You should know by now that no topic is ever “too much” to go into on this blog!
I agree all points of view have value, but all opinions are not necessarily equal. (One wouldn’t, after all, consult an accountant about hypertension.) For that reason, I very much appreciate the expertise Dr. Britt brings to the conversation through this lecture. I wouldn’t even classify his perspectives as centrist so much as apolitical, which only lends them more weight: He has no agenda other than conveying facts.
The factual essence of Dr. Britt’s argument is this: Increased atmospheric CO2 directly and demonstrably correlates with rising sea levels, and he makes the (unassailable) case that we — humankind — have exponentially escalated our emissions output since World War II, and even more so since the neoliberal free-market policies of the 1990s were implemented, so… sea-level rise is a-comin’. That outcome is quite literally written in stone.
Yes, I can certainly see how his fascinating demonstrations of orbital variations (the Milankovitch cycles) might be seized upon by deniers, but that would unambiguously be selective reasoning, because Dr. Britt clearly illustrates that human influence on atmospheric trends commenced under the Agricultural Revolution 8,000+ years ago. If anything, “Orbits and Ice Ages” shows that human activities have a profound effect on the environment, as the Earth should, by all geologic evidence, be in a period of encroaching glaciation at present!
Any attempt by deniers to cherry-pick this discourse to support the argument that — see?! — climate change is a “wholly natural phenomenon” goes directly to what Klein points out: that “climate disruption demands a reckoning on the terrain most repellent to [politically] conservative minds: wealth redistribution, resource sharing, and reparations. And a growing number of people on the hard right realize this all too well, which is why they are developing various twisted rationales for why none of this can take place” (emphasis mine).
Because while Dr. Britt goes out of his way to keep his lecture strictly within the realm of the scientific — for which I commend him — there’s an ethical component to the climate crisis that serves as the philosophical foundation of the Green New Deal (the mechanism by which we will address the problem). And because a person’s politics are a reflection of his morals, opposition to the systemic societal changes called for under a Green New Deal tell you a lot about the type of person expressing them:
For that reason, addressing climate change — the science of which is settled — is very much a matter of personal ethics. We’ve looked at core samples, and climate models, and glacial striations, and now the time has come to look within — to ask ourselves what we owe the planet, the generations to come, and our neighbors in the here and now. And facing some inconvenient truths about ourselves might even be harder — certainly scarier — than accepting the inconvenient truth of climate change.
Lastly: I agree that all activists need to find and focus on an aspect of environmentalism whereby they feel can be the most useful, do the most good, and sustain their efforts over the long haul. The burden to “solve” the climate crisis isn’t on any one of us — it can’t be and it shouldn’t be. Find your niche, bring passion to that particular commitment, and take heart in knowing you’ve played your part in the solution. Keep up the good work, Cathleen!
I”m glad you like the presentation, Sean–I thought a great deal of it, especially since Dr. Britt was personally involved in collecting the data. And this may be a little shallow, but honestly, one of my first thoughts was “Son of a gun. Cow farts really do matter.”
My centrist idea revolves around that if we hadn’t engaged in agriculture, animal husbandry, and the use of carbon fuels, we would currently be in an ice age. However, there’s definitely such a thing as too much, and that seems to be where we are now.
I would truly like to believe in his work. It would mean that we could cut down on carbon fuel usage and not have to eliminate it entirely. I see the first as something possible, but the second as simply not worth advocating. Our population is too fragile simply because it’s so large. Carbon fuels, and the resulting ready supply of electricity, are what have made the densely populated cities possible. If we tried to go “cold turkey” on carbon fuels, people would die. That’s not the sort of thing I feel comfortable promoting.
On a related note, the recent reaction to loss of power is kinda depressing. We have all these power outages in California, and everyone’s solution is to go out and buy a generator. And okay, we already have a small one because we have a construction company, but I’m certainly not going to go out and buy another bigger one so I can hook my whole house to it. I want solar. I’ve always wanted solar, ever since I was a teenager. It’s just now getting to the point that ordinary people can afford it.
I’m actually hugely depressed that the government rebates seem to be going away, and not just for personal reasons.
If you or anyone else is interested in solar, Will Prouse on YouTube has some really terrific stuff out about building your own system. I’ll be blogging about it when we reach that point in my “being prepared” series that I’m working on.
And in the meantime, I’ll still work on picking up trash and recycling. Thanks for doing your part. : )
Regarding cow farts: Yes, methane is a more potent source of GHGs than carbon! But I actually think — I’m sure I heard this somewhere — that cow belching is actually the true culprit, not, alas, flatulence. But “cow farting” as a concept is too much of a crowd-pleaser, I guess!
We don’t need to quit carbon cold turkey, only facilitate a rapid phaseout, which — to be sure — is already well underway. Read this. We can implement this transition both quickly and responsibly, and even the Trump administration can’t stop it, because the free-market — the GOP’s infallible all-purpose panacea — is now demanding it. And if we can get a GND-supportive president in the White House next year — or, hell, just one that doesn’t seek to roll back even the most modest environmental regulations — our societal transition to sustainable energy usage will be widespread and institutionalized overnight. This is going to happen in short order — shorter still if we elect the right leader next year.
As for California, as important as subsidizing and installing solar panels is (and I am all for it), what’s really required of us — and this is the same ethical plea Naomi Klein makes in On Fire — is a hard look in the mirror. A worldview reevaluation. An admission that we Californians love our culture just as it is: our cars, our sprawling suburbs, our out-of-sight “sacrifice zones.” We need to, as Klein suggests, challenge the “California narrative” we’re all so proud of and ask ourselves if it isn’t in need of a page-one rewrite? As self-described “California nationalist” Farhad Manjoo recently opined:
Until we are all willing to redefine what it means to be Californians, and make active and meaningful sacrifical change toward achieving that reformed ideal, solar paneling is a lot like recycling: It’s the kind of step intended to be as nondisruptive as possible to the consumerist lifestyle to which we’ve all become accustomed. And what the Green New Deal seeks to do is inspire us, as a society, to envision a new mode of existence. To that end, the California Dream has always been an ambitious one, from Sutter’s Mill to Silicon Valley, and I see no reason why we can’t apply it once again to lead the way into a bold new era of environmental sustainability, economic equality, and social justice — a Californian utopia! That is admittedly not the California Dream that brought me out here eighteen years ago… but it’s sure as hell the one that fuels my passion nowadays.