Greenpunk.net

Archive for the ‘Editorial and Otherwise’ Category

As the GreenPunk Manifesto states, the genre “Envisions a world in which the detritus of consumer culture as propagated by the Elite is appropriated and repurposed by the masses toward the reconstruction of a devastated ecology and the address of social ill.”

I’ve been assuming that the devastation of the ecology and the social ills mentioned here would be outcomes deriving from the natural course of what’s going on in the real world now, such as the continuing, unchecked amassing of that “detritus of consumer culture,” the persistent failure of governments and individuals to take climate change seriously, the acceleration of overpopulation, and many other obvious problems and impending calamities. But what if all these crises, bad as they are, are made even worse by the attempts to fix them?

Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s new book, SuperFreakonomics, has attracted attention and controversy for its segment on climate change in which they dismiss the idea that carbon mitigation ought to be a big part of the near-term strategy for the moderating the planet’s temperature increase. Instead, they say that since the problem seems to be that the planet is getting warmer, then the solution is simply to make it cooler. They suggest undertaking a big geo-engineering project involving pumping massive quantities of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Like a gigantic volcanic eruption, this new layer of pollutant would screen the planet from some of the sun’s rays and cool us down.

Personally I think this idea sounds both preposterous and highly dangerous. I don’t have the scientific expertise to explain exactly why I think that, but Professor Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago does, and he does so with great panache in this open letter to Stephen Levitt.

While I doubt that it would be a good idea to do this kind of geo-engineering experiment in the real world, it occurred to me that something like the sulfur dioxide pump could be good fodder for a fictional world in the GreenPunk genre. Large-scale projects could lend themselves to epic stories. What other giant climate mitigation schemes are people thinking about?

This image, from Oregon State University, shows diatoms–single-celled marine lifeforms have been modified to create nanotech-backed solar cells. As explained in an article at greendiary.com, “Rigid shells of diatoms are attached to conductive glass creating a grid into which a soluble titanium dioxide is fed. Through dye-sensitized technology photons in the film bounce around striking dyes and producing electricity..” This is just one example of the spectacular new ideas that nanotechnologists are dreaming up to find ways of creating renewable energy that may one day be cheap and accessible to everyone. I am convinced that off-the-grid ways of getting electricity is going to be key to survival and success in a GreenPunk world.

I also recently heard of another experiment underway to create “organic solar cells” from a polymer which could be literally painted onto the roofs of buildings or transported like a roll of plastic wrap as a mobile power source. It’s going to be interesting to see how GreenPunk storytellers incorporate some of these wild news technologies into their fictional futures or dream up even weirder ones.

When GreenPunk becomes more fully developed, and when there eventually exists a large body of new fiction in the subgenre, I would imagine that it’s inevitable that certain tropes and character archetypes will come to be associated with it.  I do not mean that as a negative thing, just an interesting likelihood. For example, today I thought of a GreenPunk protagonist-type that I started to think of as the “Philosopher-Mechanic.”

I heard a re-broadcast of an installment of the Diane Rehm Show (on most NPR affiliates) in which she interviews Matthew Crawford about his book Shop Class as Soulcraft. Crawford is, in fact, a PhD-holding philosopher, but his main work in life is running a motorcycle repair shop. After trying employment in more academic and “officey” professions, he had the revelation that he wasn’t really suited for a desk job and that he got the greatest satisfaction out of fixing and making things. He makes the excellent point that a viable, sustainable economy needs to somewhere, somehow produce something and that there are all kinds of works opportunities that need to happen on site and can’t be sent offshore (like getting your motorcycle fixed). Also, he notes that in the same way that a lot of large manufacturing operations moved abroad for cheaper labor and laxer environmental laws, a lot of intellectual labor is doing the same thing. A doctor can look at an American patient’s MRI from India just fine, thanks to the internet. Where the real work is, says Crawford, and where the greatest pleasure can be found for a lot of people is in those things that can’t be done over a wire.

This all sounded a lot like a good attitude to have in a GreenPunk world. Repurposing the detritus of civilization, remediating ecological damage, breaking free of Big Energy constraints on human activity, adapting and innovating technology to new and better uses—all these things involve somehow doing stuff and making or repairing things. So this GreenPunk archetype that I am daydreaming about, the Philosopher-Mechanic, is probably a highly intelligent, highly inventive intellect who is also completely hands-on with his or her work and is making things happen in visible, tangible ways in his world. He or she understands that the line between intellectual work and hands-on work is bogus. It doesn’t exist. In a GreenPunk world, the winners and the heroes are probably not going to be the people seated behind desks all day. Maybe they’ll be people with dirty hands and a clean conscience.

In the post-fossil-fuels era, the ongoing need for energy will make people not just find ways to use less of it but also to use every possible new way of producing it in a sane manner. I could imagine an urban landscape in a GreenPunk world dotted with thousands of these little low-output wind turbines like the one pictured which sits on top of a building in Hong Kong, and perhaps thousands or millions of solar collectors. Why do things like streetlights need to pull power from a coal-fire-powered electrical grid? They don’t, and eventually they won’t.

Being “off the grid” is an idea that may still be associated fairly strongly with a paranoid survivalist mentality, but in the future it will be a matter of practicality and common sense for more people to be be able to get at least some of their energy on-site. It will make undeniable sense to democratize energy and break the backs of Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Everything Else. The very concept of the grid will need to change to accommodate more, yet smaller,  sources of power and smaller networks of people sharing energy. In a GreenPunk future, people will laugh at the notion of a giant utility company dictating what energy costs and where it comes from. They won’t even believe that we tolerated as long as we did. The relationship will be reversed, and people who want to be in the business of providing energy will need to offer what people will demand.

“Finding so much plastic there was shocking,” said Goldstein. “How could there be this much plastic floating in a random patch of ocean–a thousand miles from land?”

It’s big. Really big. Twice the size of Texas. Like a malevolent jellyfish, it drifts with the currents, plastic debris entrapping and strangling marine life, their carcasses adding to its mass. It’s slowly rotting. Some of it biodegrades in the sunlight, becoming small enough for animals to eat. It disrupts their hormones. They can’t reproduce. They become ill. They die.

We did this. What will we do now?

We could remove it. Recycle it. Make amends. Do better.

Will we?

Maybe they will. Maybe we can help them.

Apparently, I fear plastic bags more than murder itself.

Last night I dreamed that I, along with two other university buddies, committed a murder. The three of us were older now, no longer kids, each of us entering middle age with fully adult lives, each of us on our own forking paths of life. They resembled no one I know in real life, and even I did not really resemble myself. Crap, I might have even been straight in the dream, but I can’t recall very well. Yet somehow, a drunken evening and a foolish prank in a seedy corner of the city caused us to suffocate a transient stranger at a bar. It reeks of Hitchcock’s “Rope,” I know, but bear with me. It wasn’t quite like that.

You see, the details of the dream were all wrong. The swampy mansions of this place were more New Orleans and less Dickensian London. There’s no wide stretches of marshes cutting through the streets of London. I know that, and you know that. The Irish newsagent, wearing modern 21st century clothes at the corner belonged in present Dublin and not here. They sold butane lighters, as well as Snickers candy bars. The streets were filled with carriages drawn by horses, as well as the first few models of Ford motor cars. I might have even spotted a cell phone out of the corner of my eye. And yet, I knew we were in Dickens’ era, because the serial versions of his novels, like “Oliver Twist,”  were widely available in the street and in the newspapers. We were in the 19th century, yet there were objects, people, and language out of time, Haunting my college friends and their poor choices in the back of a urine-stained bar.

Objects out of time were haunting me.

After we committed the murder, my two college buddies and I escaped with the body into a rougher part of town, dodging curious glances, and we hid in buildings, sought shelter in gas-lit alleys. We eventually ducked into buildings that oddly resembled a Chicago Greystone (again, completely out of place in the world of Dickens). My two friends did not fare well. You see, at some point, the police caught up with them, and they were arrested.  I escaped with the body, which I stuffed into a black plastic bag. I knew that I had the upper hand, because a burlap or linen sack would smell, would stain, would lead the authorities to find me. But a plastic bag, well, we all know nothing quite escapes the man-made membrane of a plastic bag. I was the cleverest murderer.

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Climate Engineering is an emerging science that hasn’t generated as much personal excitement and optimism since I was a kid during NASA’s post-Apollo days. Imagine: technology that can not only mitigate but the reverse the effects of global warming. Long term? My naive but reasonable optimism is that climate engineering can lead us to eventually terraform other worlds, such as Mars. Sustainable life in an inhospitable environment — the ultimate green technology.

But it’s also a nascent science that, not unlike stem cell research, may fall prey to politics and ideology. “The Horrors of Climate Engineering,” an article in August 23, 2009 NY Times, portends what the technology may face.

The comedian’s name escapes me, but his droll quip could be summarized thusly: “There’s something bigger than my SUV out there responsible for global warming — it’s called the SUN.”

Guess you had to be there. But his snark sums up the conservative/libertarian view of climate change (née global warming) — anthropogenic (man-based) climate change is bullshit. GHG (greenhouse gas) contribution is bullshit. Global temperatures have been on the decline since 1998. Episodic climate change such as the Maunder Minimum are ‘inconvenient truths’ for anthropogenic global warming advocates. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt when Newsweek declared we had a global COOLING crisis back in the 1970s.

On the other side is a veritable avalanche of evidence that mankind is the progenitor of measurable, palpable and deadly climate change. The daily news is replete with corporate malfeasance in terms of environmental damage. And even if GHG impact on the climate is minimal, reducing dependence on oil makes sense on a domestic policy and national security level.

Climate engineering is agnostic. It’s not Democrat or Republican. It’s not red or blue. But it’s a science that could be derailed by ideology. Deniers would see no reason to fund a technology to remove C02 from the atmosphere; Believers would see it as a means for society to continue their C02 emitting binge, unimpeded.

The cause of global warming is debatable; the effects are not. Pushing climate engineering to the side for ideological reasons is misguided.

GlenH says:

“Given Paolo Bacigalupi’s views on the likelihood of a technological fix for future ills(see his blog and scroll down to find the link to an EcoGeek essay) and his pervasive pessimism I highly doubt that his forthcoming novel would fit into your GreenPunk movement.”

I’ve not identified it as such. A blogger did, right?

For the purposes of discussion, I believe that your definition of a “technological fix” and my definition of such may be different. Reclamation and re-purposing of existing technological detritus on a micro-scale (individual, homestead, village, city) rather than a macro-scale (nation, globe) is what I’m envisioning, whereas I think (and I may be putting words into your mouth) that what you’re imagining-and feeling rightly skeptical about-are things like alternative fuels and solar power that will allow us to continue what we currently conceive of as modern civilization. On this count, I believe that you and I are in agreement, because I don’t really think that this is ultimately going to happen. Life will continue, and it will be due to individual tinkerers and thinkers that some of us survive and discover a new way of life-Maybe even a better one. This is the optimism that I imagine.

Is Paolo Bacigalupi GreenPunk? I really don’t know. I’m not especially interested in labeling him. He’s a brilliant writer, for sure. People are more than encouraged to interpret and react to the GreenPunk concept in the way that makes sense to them: claim it, reject it, ignore it.  I encourage you, Paolo, and everyone else to do so. Consider GreenPunk a jumping-off point for both a dialogue about “movements” and also the environmental issues this one raises, rather than an end to itself.

Thanks for your comments.

GreenPunk has been the center of much conversation lately, much of it fiery, perplexed or amused. For this, we are grateful. We ask for anything but complacence or indifference. GreenPunk is about questions, and as long as people are talking –even angrily– we are pleased. happy. And they should be talking: about what they like and why, and how willing they are to go along with movements of one sort or another, even when one becomes painfully commoditized and reduced to a series of cynical cliches.

Here are some selected responses:

Steve Davidson asks why each new movement must trample upon another.

J.T. Glover encourages the reclamation of the notion of the apocalypse in light of the GreenPunk manifesto

IO9 mistakes GreenPunk for another visual arts movement, but we’re happy to have their thoughts. Be sure to read the comments for some very angry reactions, particularly from the Right.

CURRENT TV encourages writers to take up the call of GreenPunk

GreenPunk collaborator Paul Jessup offers a little more information about the movement

The Mad Hatter describes Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Wind-Up Girl” as GreenPunk

Fog in the trees by Jeremiah Tolbert

We are a collective of writers, artists, tinkerers and thinkers devoted to the exploration of an environmentally and socially conscious art movement that we have christened GreenPunk. You may read the original GreenPunk Manifesto here.

The purpose of this website is to: further define and delineate the boundaries of this emergent genre;  promote awareness and discussion of emergent environmental and social problems; and to create a centralized location for the dissemenation of education, art and fiction related to the same.

In accordance with our manifesto, we recognize GreenPunk as the following:

(A) A technophilic spec-fic movement centered on characters using and being affected by the use of DIY renewable resources, recycling and repurposing.

(B) Emphasizing the ability of the individual – and his or her responsibility – for positive ecological and social change.

(C) Envisions a world in which the detritus of consumer culture as propogated by the Elite is appropriated and repurposed by the masses toward the reconstruction of a devastated ecology and the address of social ills.

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