Clive Hamilton, in a recent oped in The Conversation in Australia, noted that geophysicist Brad Werner in 2012 argued the case that we are in this Approaching Climapocalypse (A.C.) mess not because the market system is not working well enough but because it is working too well. Werner’s startling presentation to the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union that year was titled ‘Is the Earth Fucked?’ and he posed in public the question climate scientists and others who follow their work had been asking in private. His answer was bleak, or just possibly inspirational, according to Hamilton, one of Australia's most brilliant climate change observers. (I've spoken to him on the phone about this, too.)
Werner’s conclusion is that the Earth is indeed fucked, unless somehow the market system can be prevented from working so well. So Hamilton is arguing that what we urgently need is friction; sand must be thrown into the machine to slow it down. Only resistance to the dominant culture will give some hope of avoiding collapse with the next 30 generations of man.
''Only activism that disrupts the dominant culture — including ‘protests, blockades and sabotage’ — provides an avenue for a negative answer to his rude question," Hamilton said. "It is a kind of geophysical model of Naomi Klein’s recent call to arms.
This brings me to an important new book, co-written by a friend of mine in Australia named Christopher Wright, who I have known for a while via our cli-fi Twitter exchanges and links. The book is title ''Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations,'' and Wright wrote it with Daniel Nyberg, both academics with the University of Sydney. The duo gives readers a detailed and fascinating analysis of what global corporations do to keep the wheels of the system spinning; a phenomenon they term ‘creative self-destruction’.
''When Bill McKibben calculated that limiting global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels requires that 80 per cent of proven reserves of coal, oil and natural gas be left in the ground untouched, but that doing so would destroy the balance sheets of several of the world’s largest and most powerful corporations, he showed us in the starkest possible way the fundamental incompatibility of the current structure of economic power and the survival of the world as we know it," Hamilton underlined in his essay, which has been well-received Down Under and in North American and European capitals, too.
Hamilton says it with tough love here:
"The hard truth is that these corporations would sooner see the world destroyed than relinquish their power. As Wright and Nyberg show in fascinating detail, it is not that the executives who run them are evil; they simply function the way the system dictates and the system, as we find over and over, is structured to keep the global capitalist system growing."
''In other words: The executives have no choice: if they cannot stomach it then they must leave and be replaced by people with fewer scruples or an enhanced ability to deceive themselves, to believe the stories their own PR people make up.''
[It is astonishing how gullible we all can be. In the history of greenwash rarely has there been a more cynical corporation that the oil company BP, which in July 2000 rebranded itself ‘Beyond Petroleum’, announcing it would over time transition out of fossil fuels and into renewable energy.]
Today it has sold out of its small investments in wind power and solar energy and is investing heavily in the development of shale gas, oil sands in Alberta (the worst kind of fossil energy), and, we must not forget, new oil fields under the melting Arctic, Hamilton warns.Read ''Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations'' as an important wake up call and a very welcome corrective to the beguiling world of mistaken ideas we carry around, ideas that have us sleepwalking into disaster as the Climapocalypse approaches in the next 500 to 1000 years (some 30 to 50 generations of man).
Because of the economic system that we humans have created and live under, many of us an unthinking slaves of fashion, pop music, pop culture, cartoons, Hollywood gossip and hundreds of other parts of modern life that are a total waste of time and in fact bringing us closer and close to the End Times 30 generations from now, that is why I say "we are doomed, doomed."
That is why I am writing ''THE LAST GENERATION OF MAN'' as a cli-fi novel. I am writing as fast as I can. The shit won't hit the fan for a long long time, so those of you reading this essay today do not have to worry. And our childrend and grandchildren will be fine. Life in the luxurious fast lane of modern life will go as crazily as ever, distracted as we are as ever, and nothing will change, not even with the Bill McKibbens and Naomi Kleins and Andy Revkins and Clive Hamiltons and Margaret Atwoods among us. We are doomed, doomed.
So what's my purpose in writing THE LAST GENERATION OF MAN and keeping these blog posts online? I am trying to send a message to the future generations in 2121 and 2222 and 2323 and 2424 ane 2525 to help them help their descendants to prepare to die with grace and dignity as the END comes after the Climapopaclypse impact events turn the human species into a thing a thing of the past. The Earth will go on, without us, thank you.
Is tehre a God? If you think so, pray. If you know there is no such thing, prepare, prepare, prepare and stop feeing yourself like a glutton at the fountain of distraction and time-wasting entertainment shit on TV and from Hollywood. The human species is at risk. And all you want to do is play video games and see the next anime from Japan?
Peace on Earth. We don't have much time. Five hundred years will come and go ... in a cosmic second!
Where did you get the idea of a best friend turning into a bully in Cat’s Eye? Is it something from real life?
'I was just ignorant when I started out. I didn't see why I couldn't publish my writing … if I'd known the odds I might have been discouraged'
How did you find the confidence to believe in your writing and submit it to be professionally published, or was it something you always had?
What was your reasoning and inspiration behind the meta-lecture at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale? What do you feel it adds to the story? (And did Offred get away and survive?)
Do you think the story you wrote for Future Library (not to be read by anyone for 100 years) will date?
I am a huge fan of your work and I have read almost all your short stories. However, in recent years I’ve been noticing a decline in short story publications – which saddens me, as they are my favourite form of literature. What do you think about this decline, and how do you feel about the form itself? What purpose does it serve you? Do you think the growth of online writing platforms have something to do with this decline? And do you have any recommendations of any short stories that are personal favourites?
I grew up on anthologies of stories. Mansfield, Hemingway, Porter, Checkhov, Gogol, Poe... many many more
Please tell us about the rumour of a new (and anticipated) novel based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest?
I’m a molecular biologist, and I loved Oryx and Crake – a fantastic novel. With the current revolution in genome editing, how do you feel the dystopia portrayed in the novel looks now in the light of the new technology? Must things necessarily turn out so wrong, or is there a more positive side to genetic engineering?
'Should my having a readership disqualify me from writing about matters of public interest? … The press is called The Fifth Estate for a reason'
When do you plan to quit lecturing Canadians about how our values are all wrong if we don’t agree with your personal viewpoints about politics? I mean, you are entitled to your views on anything, but you also need to remember that only you have a bully pulpit!
In a liberal democracy, people should indeed feel they can say what they like. But a lot of people are constrained from doing that, partly because they fear for their jobs.
I'm currently writing a piece called "Cheated of Our Public Science." Our public scientists aren't allowed to speak to the public about their findings, even though the work for the public, in the public interest, and are paid by the public. They can't write such a piece themselves.Do you think it's only my personal political view that this is wrong? Do you think there should not be any public science, and that data should be generated (and lied about) by the likes of Volkswagen? Do you think I ought not to publish the piece?
The press is called The Fifth Estate for a reason. It is a key component in a liberal democracy. The fact that it exists has allowed you yourself to make this comment.
'I based the regime in The Handmaid's Tale on history – nothing we haven't done, some time, some place'
I recently read The Handmaid’s Tale, and more than the Christian right in America it seemed to very accurately predict the likes of how ISIS and the Taliban treat women. Is that something that has occurred to you in more recent years?
In your recent essay in the Guardian, dated 19 September, you are talking about us “surrendering our hard-won freedoms too easily …” and that “digital technology has made it easier than ever to treat people like domesticated animals farmed for profit.” Because we leave a digital footprint wherever we go – a footprint we cannot escape because we have a social security card, a health card, a bank card and so on – shouldn’t we look to ourselves for the answers? We are making it easier for them by streaming all that information online – and the amount of information we reveal about ourselves voluntarily is stupefying. We reveal our phone numbers, birthdays, addresses, where we are, what we are doing, whom we are with, what we buy, what we eat, how much we spend and where we spend it. How and when did we become so gullible?
The cat in your poem Blackie in Antarctica “leaps from roof to roof wearing a dolls bonnet and a pinafore”. Can I ask if you put them on Blackie – and had the same struggle as I had when I dressed our lecherous old tom, Tiddles?
Did you know – as I read in my vets book on cats – “that all vets know tom cats will put up with anything from little girls”. I didn’t know. No wonder they never scratched us.
I realise that, in some ways, there’s not a lot to recommend our planet’s future prospects under climate change. And in the past, you’ve said that it’s now become a race between our technological development and ecological management, and the decline of the Earth’s resources and our changing environment. Has there been any progress that makes you optimistic about our chances of survival? Something that impresses me tremendously about your books is that they make me imagine a future so precisely – and you so frequently draw upon fact and nature.
Atwood on MaddAddam: 'I'm a somewhat annoying optimist … You'll notice I didn't kill everyone off at the end.'
Thank you for the MaddAddam trilogy – I loved it! Do you present us with dystopia because you’er a pessimist, or because you are an optimist and hope that by being presented with dystopia we will fight more forcefully for an utopia?
Did you ever have a name in mind for Ofglen in The Handmaid’s Tale? In A-level English, we had discussed whether it could be June. There was a chapter that began with the handmaids sharing their names and we met all of those named characters, except for June. It’s something I’ve always wondered about! (I know the film version used Kate, which seemed wrong to me; as with so many adaptations, however, much of it did …)
How did you feel about your name being on the International Baccalureate’s Prescribed List of Authors and about having A Handmaid’s Tale read by so many students all over the world who are studying English literature? My students here in Armenia would love to read your answer. You have a truly global readership in our school, as our students represent scores of different countries.
It is of course very flattering that The Handmaid's Tale has been taught in so many schools, and also in the International Baccalaureate programme. I think that happens because the book generates a lot of discussion among students. The government in it is totalitarian, so I would hope some of that discussion would be about how to to avoid such governments. They tend to come in during periods of extreme social upheaval.
Will you ever construct a dark poem again – like the red-headed single woman of 1700s Salem, who’s accused of being a witch, is hung by the neck in her cherry orchard and defies all odds by living until morning – and therefore can no longer be accused of being a witch? She then collected black cats in earnest.
This beautifully twisted bit of work has changed my life forever. Whenever I am sad, I think of her, hanging all night in her orchard, quietly looking at the stars and thinking …
Will you please write more poetry?
You are such a creative genius.
The poem sequence called "Half-hanged Mary" was based on a real person, Mary Webster, who was indeed left hanging all night and was still alive in the morning. This was possible because the drop – which breaks your neck – had not yet been invented. So Mary Webster must have had a tough neck, or possibly she was very thin. My grandmother sometimes said she was an ancestor of ours. (Her family name was Webster.) Mary Webster is also one of the people to whom The Handmaid's Tale is dedicated. Will I write more poetry like this? I don't know.. but you might also like "Marrying the Hangman," also based on a real woman, this time in early Quebec.
Margaret Atwood is with us now
Post your questions for Margaret Atwood
She might equally be thought of as a science-fiction author, for her eerily possible fundamentalist dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale and her futuristic Oryx and Crake trilogy, set in a world where genetic engineering has created a new type of human. She has written historical fiction, like the Booker-winning The Blind Assassin; she is also a poet, essayist, children’s author, librettist and inventor.
New novel The Heart Goes Last is similarly resistant to category. “Jubilant comedy of errors, bizarre bedroom farce, SF prison-break thriller, psychedelic 60s crime caper: The Heart Goes Last scampers in and out of all of these genres,” wrote M John Harrison in the Guardian.
Atwood is joining us to answer questions about it and anything else in her career, in a live webchat from 1pm BST onwards on Monday 28 September. Post your questions in the comments below, and the ten that she deems the best will receive a signed ebook cover of the novel.