Sterling stirs it up (again): grim and scary outlook
Check out one of my scifi heroes, Bruce Sterling, waxing green-ish on the Well (via beyond the beyond).
On the challenge of global warming, Sterling says “It’s gonna take a tremendous amount of money to fix a soiled planetary atmosphere. There’s never been a state-sponsored project that size. Not even close. It makes the Hoover Dam look like a cork.”
The bottom line for Sterling seems to be this: “We’re past the point where reduction helps much; we will have to invent and deploy active means of remediation of the damage.”
Sterling continues:
“I’d agree that there is a frenzy of creative green thinking this year. I’ve never seen the like. Unfortunately, green doing, as opposed to thinking, is about forty years overdue. Even though there’s quite a lot of green doing, too, it’s starting mighty small.”
On ecological footprints, Sterling says:
“We’re not footprint-generating organisms whose presence on the planet is inherently toxic and hurtful. We need better handprints, not lighter footprints. We need better stuff, not less stuff. We need to think it through and take effective action, not curl up in a corner stricken with guilt and breathe shallowly.”
You may have read his “Tomorrow Now” from a few years ago. Here’s Sterling’s sense of our future:
“In the real world, technology ducks, dodges, and limps its way forward. But steady, reliable technocratic societies, if they approach the future with flexibility and patience, should be able to weather even the most radical technological and cultural changes.”
While you’re at it, stop by Sterling’s interview from last May on his own journey as an activist seeking to address the challenge of climate change. He discusses the role the internet plays in supporting activism globally and describes his own web-based initiatives.
Oh, and who is Sterling reading these days? Would you believe 160 other sterling thinkers on edge.
“Speaking of pundits shooting the breeze, you might want to mull over the statements of the 160 scientists, science journalists and science fiction writers who have gathered on edge-org looking for something to be optimistic about. There is some remarkably grim and scary material in this purported burst of affirmative jollity, but all in all, it does give one a certain brisk, bracing, get out of bed, shake off your hangover and confront the new year kind of feeling.”
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