Will's Thoughtstream

I've previously written about Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent science fiction novels that incorporate environmental themes. Well his latest novel, Sixty Days and Counting, is absolutely outstanding. In it, he continues the story started in Forty Days of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below about abrupt climate change. But in Sixty Days, we move beyond the abrupt climate change event itself and into the realm of political and cultural change, technical solutions and global environmental mitigation.

This is a book that is entirely about creating a positive future vision. It's about imaging what is possible if we were all working together really address the social and environmental crisis all around us. Having been interested in, and actively studying environmental issues for about ten years, and having studied sustainable business practices in the MBA program at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, I have a respect for the complexity of environmental and social issues: it's usually not as simple as banning this or that, or engaging in confrontations with big corporations. We can't, for example, look at logging as solely an environmental issue when it is also an issue of wasteful business practices, personal choice, and worker's jobs.

It feels as though Kim Stanley Robinson has been reading all the same books I have, been in the same book groups, taken the same sustainable business MBA classes, studied systems thinking extensively. Sixty Days and counting seems to tackle so much - so many issues, the political aspect, the business aspect, the cultural impacts, local impacts, global impacts. It's hard to imagine what someone would make of this book who didn't have the same background. It is even possible to grasp all the incredible concepts on this book? Reading the reviews on Amazon, people definitely do have strong opinions on the book.

Some of my favorite parts of the book are U.S. President Phil Chase's blog posts. Here's one long example, from page 361:

I think for a while we forgot what was possible. Our way of life damaged our ability to imagine anything different. Maybe we are rarely good at imaging that things could be different. Maybe that's what we mean when we talk about the Enlightenment. For a while there we understood that the ultimate source of power is the imagination.

"Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into the service of
economic royalists. It was natural and perhaps human that the priviledges princes of these new economic dynastics, thirsting for power, reached out for control of government itself. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happines. Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could only appeal to the organized power of the Government."

That was Franklin Roosevelt, talking as president to the nation 1936. In the same speech he said, "There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny."

But then we forgot again. We went back to imagining that things could only be as they were. We lived on in that strange new feudalism, in ways that were unjust and destructive and yet were presented as the only possible reality. We said "people are like that," or "human nature will never change" or "we are all guilty of original sin," or this is democracy, this is the free market, this is reality itself." And we went along with that analysis, and it became the law of the land. The entire world was legally bound to accept this feudal injustice as law. It was global and so it looked like it was universal. The future itself was bought, in the form of debts, mortgages, contracts - all spelled out by law and enforced by police and armies. Alternatives were unthinkable. Even to say that things could be otherwise would get you immediately branded as unrealistic, foolish, naive, insane, utopian.

But that was all delusion. Every few years things change completely, even though we can't quite remember how it happend or what it means. Change is real and unavoidable. And we can organization our affairs any way we please. There is no physical restraint on us. We are free to act. It's a fearsome thing, this freedom, so much so that people talk about a "flight from freedom" - that we fly into cages and hide because freedom is so profound it's a kind of abyss. To actually choose in each moment how to live is too scary to ensure.

So we lived like sleepwalkers. But the world is not asleep, and outside our dream, things continued to change. Trying to shape that change is not a bad thing. Some present that making a plan is instant communism and the devil's work, but it isn't so. We always have a plan. Free market economics is a plan-it plans to give over all decisions to the blind hand of the market. But the blind hand never picks up the check. And, you know-it's blind. To deal with the global environmental crisis now without making any more plan than to trust the market would be like saving, We have to solve this problem so first let's put out our eyes. Why? Why not use our eyes? Why not use our brain?

Because we're going to have to imagine our way out of this one.