#40 Nathaniel Rich | Construire un monde habitable où trouver notre juste place

Thomas Gauthier

Hi Nathaniel

Nathaniel Rich

Hi, how are you ? Thanks for having me on !

Thomas Gauthier

You’re welcome, this is a pleasure; so here you are, you are looking at the Oracle and to the questions you asked her about the future, she will answer right every time. Can you please tell us what is the very first question that you would like to ask her?

Nathaniel Rich

Well, I’m going to distinguish between highly personal questions and public concerning questions, and I’ll stick to the latter given the context of this conversation. I won’t ask about the lives of family members and so on that are important to me.

But I think in discussing the fate of civilization more broadly, my first question would be, has there been a nuclear war? There’s a kind of naive understanding of climate change.

It is that it’s dangerous because the world is getting warmer. And of course, we tend to talk about climate change in terms of degrees Celsius of warming.

And then the various ramifications of one and a half versus two versus 2.5 or 2.6 degrees Celsius warming. But what I think is often lost in these conversations, at least in sort of the general public, is that the real… great civilization level dangers of climate change, ultimately sort of, once you follow them past a certain point, they converge with a lot of our other great existential problems.

And they converge typically in the point of a nuclear missile. You know, when there are great disruptions because of climate change in The kinds of things that we expect to see increasing, you know, of course, we’re already seeing this now, but enormous tensions between foreign states, particularly in parts of the world that are most endangered by sea level rise, places where the effects of sea level rise and natural disasters supercharged by climate change will lead to massive migrations of people. you know in the US that might mean ever-increasing migrations of people from South America to North America.

And typically it’s from the global south to the global north, right? And you see this in Europe, you see it in Asia.

And besides all of the many humanitarian problems that that causes, it puts enormous stress on borders and on relationships between states that may not have equilibrium even now. And ultimately, I think the great concern is that… long before warming will even get to a kind of catastrophic level, should we not arrest the warming that’s ongoing, what we’ll see first is breakout of hostilities between major states.

And the ultimate determinants of that, of course, is a nuclear exchange. And so I think with that one question, that would be my best effort to kind of reduce all of climate change, sort of the outcome. of where things are headed to one question, and that is, has there been a nuclear exchange?

Because it seems that… that would tell us essentially how well we’ve managed the problem or not.

Thomas Gauthier

So with this first question, I hear you make a connection between climate change that is often considered to be, at least by the general public, a threat in itself and possibly disconnected from other societal threats. In your question, I see you, I hear you connect climate change with civilization.

Would you mind clarifying for me and for the listeners how you would define civilization and where are the contact points that you see between climate change and civilization? I mean, this association, I’ve heard it just a handful of times.

I’m interested in your own appreciation of what is a civilization in the context of climate change and how it… threatens our ways of collectively organizing ourselves. Any words from you on where to go with civilization?

Nathaniel Rich

Yeah, I think you have to go back into the history of climate change, which I’ve written about in Losing Earth and elsewhere. But the basic understanding, you know, our concerns around climate change on a sort of societal level, we only started becoming worried about climate change, let’s put it that way, on a public level, heads of state. state-affiliated scientists and the rest.

Once it became clear, and this is probably in the late 1950s, that climate change didn’t only represent warming, which of course that mechanism was understood, you know, going back to the 19th century, that the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet will get. And that as we burn fossil fuels, we will increase carbon dioxide and with it warming in the atmosphere.

That had been well understood for many decades. And if anything, it was… seen by an earlier generation of scientists, people like Svante Arrhenius in the late 19th century, a Swedish chemist who would win the Nobel Prize, and then later Guy Scott Callender, a British steam engineer who continued to work on this question in the 1930s.

Those scientists understood warming. They understood that burning coal, especially, would lead to warming, but they didn’t think this was a problem, because they mainly because they lived in cold. you know northern european cities and they thought well if it’s a little bit warmer in in some you know 50 years time say great hopefully we’ll have milder winters uh it really wasn’t until the late 1950s that you have roger revell a major figure within the scientific and political firmament in the united states an advisor to presidents a close advisor to presidents um beginning, I believe, with Lyndon Johnson and through the Kennedy administration and Nixon, that he understood that the warming itself wasn’t exactly the problem for human beings.

It was the fact that our entire society, and by which I mean, this gets to your question of civilization, our agricultural systems, our national borders, the location of our cities, our trade patterns, essentially our economies, were all… founded on the shared assumption that the basic climate as we had known it was stable. You know, that the location of the ports would not change, that the land on which we built railroads and roads would stay the way they are, the way we grew food and shipped it around the world. were not themselves in jeopardy.

And once you have, and he understood that once you start changing the basic features of the climate, shifting those basic guidelines for the behavior of weather and ocean circulation and all the rest, that destabilizes every kind of infrastructure and system on which modern society rests. Whether it was warming or cooling or, you know, ultimately… was less important than the shifting of these fundamental features of the planet.

And it was with that insight that he started to warn about climate change. Climate change began to be understood as a problem.

And it’s with that that he helped to found the Mauna Loa Observatory, which has been continuously tracking the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ever since 1958. And it was with that insight that he began to warn presidents, beginning under Lyndon Johnson. that this could be a problem.

And it was that insight has basically powered our political response to this problem ever since. And so it’s the great destabilization of just about every structure that we use to govern life on the planet that is the fundamental issue more than the warming itself.

And that is a, you know, although it’s a kind of fundamental insight that informs the politics and to a large degree, the science around climate change. It still hasn’t that that idea hasn’t really sunk in to the general public who tends to think of it.

I mean, largely, I think because of the terminology we use, you know, warming change that hasn’t sunk in that it’s what we’re talking about is a major threat to our economies, to trade, to food production, to water, you know, scarcity, to the situation of where we you know, where we live. and the way we communicate with one another. And so, you know, of course, that’s not the whole picture.

There’s a lot more to it than that. But it’s, you know, ultimately, when we’re talking about the threat of climate change, we’re talking about the destabilization of all of these systems that we use to govern life on planet.

And once you start pulling the rug out from under those systems, you get chaos. And we’re starting to see it already, of course.

And the way… we will continue to see it in the future, is not just forest fires and hurricanes, it’s migration patterns, it’s economic trade, it’s food and water scarcity, and then all of the follow-on effects that those problems have as they move through the political sphere.

Thomas Gauthier

And listening to your developing your line of thinking, what comes to mind is that, well, just focusing on science, for instance, It makes progress, it develops new knowledge by incremental step forward, by most of the time staying within established paradigms where there are some puzzling situations that scientists are working at to find some answers, develop new hypotheses, and they incrementally help the general collection of knowledge to increase in size and in depth and in relevance. However, what I hear you say is that in this context where civilizations are shaking, the very process, just focusing on them, the very processes of acquiring knowledge may not be any more fit for purpose.

I’m wondering, and this is connecting your line of thinking with your work also as a fiction writer, what role do you see for fiction to help us? possibly move into a new paradigm to see ourselves in a world with a worldview, if you will, that would be appropriate given the amplitude and given the depth of changes and given the multiplicity of moving pieces that are now not still anymore. It’s like some of our most fundamental hypotheses, like climate is stable.

They have to be, let’s say, put aside. And I personally don’t see the traditional ways of generating new knowledge to be able to race to the levels of changes and levels of reconfiguration that you’re discussing.

Where can fiction fit in this picture of us in a way understanding, appreciating and living this civilization or reconfiguration?

Nathaniel Rich

I think fiction is hugely needed now. I always want to be careful in this, you know, when asked about this question, I don’t think it’s needed to communicate the problem to people, to convince people to act.

I mean, I’ve often been in rooms or lectures or symposia with people in the sciences or, you know, political sciences who say, you know, oh, great, we have a novelist here. We’re so glad because, you know, we are struggling to get the word out about how. dangerous this problem is, typically climate change.

We need more novels to be written to tell the story about what’s happening and to make people understand in plain language what we’re up against. And I’m always in this sort of uncomfortable position of having to say, well, if you’re hoping that novels are going to communicate these ideas to the public, you’ve lost the game.

It’s not, you can count on one hand sort of the number of of novels that have really caused major political change, major public wellspring of change, and I think when those novels have been published. You know, I think of something like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, maybe, or, you know, you see it sometimes more in nonfiction.

Rachel Carson, you had mentioned in an earlier conversation. But there’s not a lot in fiction.

And the reason, you know, and when those novels have been published, it tends, you know, typically is in a time when, first of all, many more people read novels and got their news of the world through novels than today. but second of all the form of the novel is just at odds with that kind of writing, which is essentially propaganda. It’s essentially writing designed to motivate people to act in a certain way.

And there’s bad propaganda and there’s good propaganda. Climate change probably needs a lot more good propaganda, but I don’t feel that it’s the job of novelists to supply it because the aims of propaganda are also at direct odds with the aims of fiction, which is to say that fiction is not about simplifying. complex issues to a single dictum or advice or prescription.

It’s the opposite. It’s about trying to understand and explore tensions in which there may not be clear answers, in which, you know, a novel of ideas, we would call it, are novels in which both sides of an argument are allowed to be the strongest possible force.

And the novel, the tension of the novel comes out of the conflict. between two ideas that are typically not compatible. And there’s a great tradition of that kind of fiction in Europe as well as the US.

But all of this to say is we still need fiction for a different thing, even more important thing, frankly, which is to say we are at this moment of enormous transition, as you said, and we’re entering and really have entered this new phase in which our… relationship with the natural world has been completely destabilized and will only increasingly be so. And we will be forced to make some very difficult decisions about how we want to intervene in the natural world, how we want to shape the world as we move into this weird future.

And what fiction can do is to help us understand the ways in which these vast public crises and challenges and transformations touch our personal lives, you know, our individual, intimate inner lives. And that’s something that fiction can do very well is to mediate between these vast public concerns and the private thoughts and imaginations of an individual.

And the way fiction does that basically is through, you know, immersive narrative and through empathy. Fiction is a kind of empathy machine where the reader enters the world of the central character and sees the world through their eyes and through that process asks oneself the same deeper questions about that the character is asking him or herself.

And it’s a way of thinking more deeply and more personally about these great public crises and the way they touch our daily lives and our intimate lives. And I think that’s been missing.

Not only in the sort of understanding of climate change writ large that we read in the newspapers or, you know, see on television, but in the arts. I think the arts are only starting to come around and grapple with these questions more intimately and to not be so general.

You know, for instance, I’ll give you some examples. You know, when I’ve gone around the country speaking about climate change in the U.S. and about losing Earth and Second Nature, the newest book about it. these things.

The question that I tend to get asked basically at every event is a person comes up and the question answer and says, you know, knowing what we know about climate change, is it ethical to have children? For instance, the person who usually poses that question is a young person, you know, 20s or 30s.

Sometimes it’s someone who would be a grandparent and they’re posing the question about they’re adult children. They’re saying, my adult children don’t want to have my grandchildren because they’re worried about the world that they’ll inherit.

And that to me is kind of the first, our first real understanding of the ways in which this vast public crisis is starting to enter our personal lives, you know, shaping the way we think about having children. And then you see it shaping the way we think about the work we do, about how to structure our lives, about what car to buy, where to live, you know, what kind of charities to commit ourselves to, all of those things.

You know, what is a meaningful, fulfilling livelihood? I think all of these questions are now ones that we have to re-ask ourselves and reframe, given what we know about what’s coming down the line.

And I think that it’s through fiction. Fiction is one of the best ways we have individually to ask ourselves those questions on a deeper level than we might be able to simply by just reading a newspaper or a magazine article about these themes or even conversations with friends through the act of reading and thinking deeply in a sustained way. through an immersive narrative.

It’s really through this form that I believe that we get to know ourselves better. And so I think that the art has to respond to this need, and it has begun to do so, and I try to do so in my work, to ask some of these questions.

But I’m very careful, as I do so as a writer, to ask questions that are open-ended, because these are questions ultimately that are subjective. And it’s for each reader to come to his or her own conclusions about them.

And that’s what makes them interesting questions. There’s not how to live in the world doesn’t have one answer.

That’s the kind of answer that everyone has to arrive at individually. And I think fiction is a tool that we can use to help us through that process.

Thomas Gauthier

And without trying to summarize too quickly what you said, it sounds to me like fiction is a great device for… reframing the way that we see the world and re-perceiving the various ways in which we individually might intervene in the world without, to your point, suggesting any pre-established most favorable attitude. It’s a reframing and re-perceiving device that anyone can grab and draw some very personal conclusions from.

Nathaniel Rich

Yeah, I think that’s accurate. I would only add that it’s also it It’s a path to deeper thinking and to deeper reflection and to original thought.

And I think we need, you know, the more opportunities for that kind of thinking, as many as we can get.

Thomas Gauthier

Well, then to echo one last time on what you said regarding deeper thinking, it then sounds to me like fictional narratives are devices that can help also ourselves with the help of. you know the artists make connections and embrace some kind of a systemic thinking where perhaps in the past through science development and other human progress we’ve very much favored the analytical way of thinking so narratives help clarify also our appreciation of ongoing dynamics that may not be understandable if we look at them through the single lens of a discipline or another discipline. They help us engage with complexity rather than let the complexity be on the side and draw some easy conclusions from what we observe.

Nathaniel Rich

Yes, I think that’s accurate. I mean, I think climate change must be understood as a human problem.

You know, the Earth has been warmer in the past. It’s been colder in the past.

The Earth will be fine. right? The climate will be fine.

It’s the people who are in danger. And we’re at this moment of enormous, not only vulnerability, but enormous opportunity in that we have a great amount of control over our destiny.

We’ve lost some control of some outcomes, you know, had we acted decades earlier on these issues politically. And I’ve written about that in Losing Earth.

But nevertheless, there’s a wide range of outcomes available to us. And We have these incredible technologies to help us through.

And so the question becomes one of priority. What do we want to fight for?

And as we think through that, I think we have to understand, you know, what are the virtues and what are our positive associations with the past that we want to continue through? You know, in a world in which the natural landscape, and I sort of always cringe when I use the word natural, even though it’s in the… title of my last book because there’s nothing natural really about the about the planet anymore every every square centimeter of of land of soil and and the atmosphere has been altered by human activity our imprint has been can be found um every every square centimeter of of the planet and yet as we move forward and we have these these enormous powers to reshape the world as we know it the question is What principles, what virtues, what values do we want to commit ourselves to?

And let those questions, the answers to those questions inform the political processes. And sometimes the answers might be sort of strange.

I mean, I’m particularly, or unexpected, I mean, I’m particularly drawn to… this recent efforts to try to restore some restore environments restore to restore parts of the natural world that have been missing or imperiled things like trying to bring back species that are endangered or have even gotten extinct using genetic methods or bringing back for instance close close to home where i live in in new orleans and southern louisiana trying to restore the swamps, you know, thousands of miles of swamps south of New Orleans that have vanished because of human activity, mainly oil and gas, but a few other causes as well. So in efforts to kind of bring back what we’ve lost and recreate what we’ve lost.

And of course, in the recreation, we’re building something new, but it resembles what we’ve lost. And that itself creates a lot of strange possibilities.

You see it especially in… these ideas of bringing back extinct species through genetic engineering methods. It’s sort of one of the great examples of this.

The questions are, what do we want to bring back? How do we want to bring it back?

And when we bring it back, what is a way to do it that preserves the thing that we’re missing? And can we preserve what we’re missing, whether it’s a kind of buffer against hurricanes and protection from hurricanes and sea level rise in the case of New Orleans and the swamp or bring back some sense of wonder. that is gone because of loss of biodiversity.

Make sure that, you know, can we bring back what we’ve lost in some other form? You know, is it possible to preserve that wonder or the defense of the coast or the sort of infrastructure or beauty that we miss and, you know, focus on, well, can we bring that back?

And if so, are there ways to do it, even if we can’t replace and go back to the past that we had? Can we create a new version? that will still honor the best qualities that we hope to bring back.

That line of questioning, I think, goes down some very odd and challenging paths. But that’s a place where fiction can help as well as narrative nonfiction to help us puzzle through these dilemmas, because these are the kinds of dilemmas that we will increasingly face in the years ahead, where because of climate change, there’s no outcome, there’s no path available to us that doesn’t have some pitfalls.

There’s always, we’re now at a place in the history where we will always be making compromises. And so I think it’s very, it’s crucial to be clear up front about what values will govern our decision making going forward.

And I think the arts and fiction more specifically has a really valuable role to play in these considerations.

Thomas Gauthier

Let’s meet the Oracle again and ask her a second question. What would that be?

Nathaniel Rich

A second very practical question would be just simply the level of carbon CO2 emissions. Of course, all this depends on what year we’re asking the oracle.

You know, I guess you might say, well, I could predict it. I mean, I could ask for a certain year.

I mean, I would want to know CO2 emissions in, you know, 2050, say, to see where. And that would also tell us with some mathematical certainty the kind of world that we will be inheriting.

Thomas Gauthier

Well, speaking about CO2… levels. To me, this is one feature out of many features of what I would refer to as the biophysical reality that we’re in.

I’ve been wondering for a while now if it would ever be possible for humanity to have a more precise appreciation and ability to, let’s say, track in real time whether we are still staying within, you know, some kind of a safe operating space below planetary boundaries, which include probably the amount of CO2 emissions that the atmosphere can take. Do you have any peculiar thoughts on how there could be ways for us as humanity to, let’s say, be a bit more clear on whether we are… we are staying within this conceptual safe operating space.

This is a bit of a puzzling question for me. Can we achieve enough precision in a way in our ability to sense the biophysical reality so that we could also inform going forward some choices?

You used the word priorities or compromise. Any thought on whether eventually we might have this clearer picture of where we’re at in terms of staying or not staying within a somewhat safe operating space.

Nathaniel Rich

Yeah, I think actually I would go in the opposite direction. I would think, you know, the math of climate change is ultimately fairly simple.

I mean, you get, of course, it’s not just carbon dioxide, it’s greenhouse gas emissions. It’s more than just CO2.

But I think a problem is actually in the opposite direction that we tend to talk in a lot about our success with various, you know, in the US, we have this major climate bill that was passed by Biden. And that’s… been a huge is a huge success in terms of its uh you know it’s by far the most ambitious piece of legislation on climate change that’s been passed in history here but it’s also far short of you know where we need to be of course and you know so we talk about political successes or failures we talk about excitement about electric vehicles for instance the market share effort growing renewables and you know so we see a lot of numbers and statistics about things that are happening in the energy economy.

We hear a lot about politics, but frankly, one sort of odd thing about this is it’s unlike a lot of other major social crises, it really comes down to a math problem. You know, it comes down to, and with a very small number of variables ultimately, and that’s, you know, greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

And we can predict based on how much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere there is, how much warming there will be. And so, you know, we use CO2 as a shorthand because it… it gives us the best sense it’s not the entire picture but it but it correlates pretty closely but i i think actually like if you want a better sense of where we we’re at i would propose more quantification you know to not get distracted by the fact that you know like we see this past year all these good things have happened you know that that climate activists might be able to boast about and yet you know you ultimately look to the scoreboard of uh of co2 in the atmosphere and that will tell you where we’re at.

And so the solution would be to go in the other direction and give more constant reading, you know, kind of Keeling curve reading the way we have at Mauna Loa now where we can see it. You can go onto a website and see how much CO2 is in the atmosphere every day.

You can see the curve increasing over time. I think if we had a version of that, that you could score not only put globally, but go country by country or state by state or town by town. and have it be a continuous reading.

I think that that kind of statistical clarity would be helpful, and it would kind of cut through a lot of the nonsense and say, well, yes, we’ve made great strides, but look, we’re still emitting, you know, X amount of megatons of CO2 a day. And so until those raw numbers come down, we’ll know that the progress we’ve made is not nearly consequential enough.

So we possibly would need some kind of a live… globally accessible dashboard, like you mentioned, the Mauna Loa Observatory. But perhaps for now, this data, which is updated on a daily basis, is being checked by a number of specialists, but it hasn’t yet connected with, let’s say, the more bread and butter activities and decision-making processes that are taking place at various scales.

I think I get the point of yeah it should be like the weather report. Every day you should be able to look and say, oh, it’s 57 degrees today and our carbon emissions are X.

Carbon emissions in your state, in your town, in your city, your country, your continent, and so on. Your industry, that should be just like checking the stock market or the weather report or the box scores in the sports section.

Thomas Gauthier

Let’s have a final round with the Oracle. You have one third and last chance, at least for today, to ask the Oracle a question regarding the future.

How would you like to end your conversation with the Oracle?

Nathaniel Rich

I think my last question would be to ask the location of the city of New Orleans, where I live now. You know, most experts here believe that…

Even in the best case scenario, even if this coastal master plan that’s now underway in southern Louisiana, which I should say most people even in the state don’t realize is the most ambitious climate infrastructure plan in the world. Now it’s a 50-year plan that renews every five years to rebuild the swamp, rebuild the marshland south of the city, and reverse 100 years of land loss. by using the diversions of the Mississippi River, opening cuts into the banks of the Mississippi River to flood the marsh with sediment-rich water that will rebuild the land over time, in imitation of the natural process of a river before it was imprisoned between levees.

So even in the best-case scenario, this 50-year plan, it will buy us some time here but but ultimately the city if it’s to exist you know in somewhere between 50 and 100 years it will most likely be as an island off of the gulf coast uh which will have then drifted up to probably around baton rouge um about an hour hour and a half uh northwest of here and so the the question of where is the city of new orleans is really a kind of litmus test for how do the world’s most advanced societies, the wealthiest nations, how will we handle the disruption of climate change? Will we just abandon in a chaotic way coastal areas, for instance, or will there be enough forethought and care applied that we’ll be able to either resettle in a kind of orderly way as much as possible.

Of course, orderliness might be a total fantasy, but with as little suffering as possible, will we try to… One version is New Orleans moves to Baton Rouge.

Now, of course, you abandon, essentially, the lived city and relocate it somewhere else. Another version is it’s just completely abandoned to the sea.

And the third version is you create a kind of fortification around it, and it becomes an island city, basically. So I think to see how the U.S. manages this problem, which, of course, is not just about the city of New Orleans, but about this major economic center of economic life in this country, you know, the mouth of the Mississippi River, a major percentage of the oil and gas and energy infrastructure in the country is down here.

How that problem is managed, I think, will be a kind of canary in the coal mine for how. nations, and especially in the developed world, handle similar questions. What happens to New York?

What happens to London? What happens to Boston?

You name it, the Bay Area. And more broadly, how are we managing this transition and how chaotic will it be versus how organized and carefully thought out?

And so that would be my sort of silver bullet question to try to find the answer to those questions is what happens to New Orleans? Where does it go?

Thomas Gauthier

Well, and I think that we’re going to leave the listeners thinking about how this question might be answered. I’m going to be sharing with them links and additional information on the plans that are being laid out by the state of Louisiana, as you said.

And this is a topic that I had researched in anticipation of our discussion. And we’re talking here about one of the most massive plans ever to… find ways in a way to limit the consequences of climate change.

And you said also that New Orleans could serve as a canary among others to inform us on how we as humanity are doing in terms of limiting and adapting to climate change. And I think that there could be examples in other parts of the world that could essentially build up a network of you know more fragile areas that could inform policy making and that could also help in almost real time change or enrich our policy making processes that could find themselves not at the level of the challenges that they are trying to limit.

I don’t think that we can anticipate whether ongoing policy making processes and decisions are at the level where they shall be to restore areas and allow life to continue in some parts of the world, essentially. We don’t know.

It’s like a live experiment that we are all a part of.

Nathaniel Rich

Yeah, absolutely. And what I’ve been writing about, I mean, and I write about this at length in Second Nature, is the kinds of problems that, you know, even the best, most prudent solutions like the master plan, you know, that when you talk about, you know, really intervening in a dramatic way in natural processes. even if you’re trying to restore a natural process that has been eliminated by human activity, when you’re trying to bring things back to the way they were, and even if you’re doing it in the most responsible way possible, you still create some very difficult choices or states for individuals.

In the case of the Mississippi River, in order to save the lower river and the towns and communities, Peace. that live alongside it, including New Orleans, you know, you have to sacrifice others, essentially. You have to retrain the flow of the Mississippi, and by doing so, it’s enormously disruptive.

You essentially create new rivers. The diversions of the Mississippi River that are now being planned and have just been authorized to go ahead in the next couple of years will create essentially new rivers that will be in the top five or so largest rivers in the U.S.

The Mississippi is the number one most powerful, but even these tributaries off of it will be, you know, four or five in the country. And so you’re introducing these really powerful new rivers into the coastal areas.

And that… will be deeply inconvenient for a lot of people who live near those diversions. And so many of them are not in favor of this, even though failure to act will doom the land they live on anyway, because of sea level rise.

That to me is an example, a sort of quintessential example of the kinds of trade-offs and moral challenges that we face going forward as we try to correct some of these horrible injustices that we’ve… created through our carelessness, even the best solutions will create new problems. And I’ve tried to write about stories in which people are trying to navigate through those difficulties and where there are impossible trade-offs.

And so I think a lot of the work that we’ll be doing as a society, as a civilization, as a species going forward in the next, you know, decades will be, how do we make those decisions? How, you know, and as we make those decisions, what values will guide us and how do we choose who to sacrifice? you know, how do we make it right?

And if we can’t make it right, what are other ways we can think about how to move forward? And there’s some really dramatic stories that come out of that.

And that’s, I’ve found, especially my nonfiction, those are the kinds of stories that I’ve been drawn to writing about and some of the questions I’ve been wanting to ask.

Thomas Gauthier

So we’re finding ourselves in this turbulence. I’d like for the second part of our discussion, if you will, Nathanael, that…

I ask that you please bring back from history, perhaps three historical events or processes that you think can help us orient ourselves in this time of turbulence and possibly help us also prepare for unexpected futures or even try and still shape parts of the future. What can history help us make sense of now?

Nathaniel Rich

Well, I think, I mean, certainly in… in light of this conversation over the over the the mississippi i mean one example that comes to mind is the original control of the mississippi river um which is dates back about a hundred years and although efforts began earlier than that but the the u.s government taking control of the path of the mississippi river and by entrapping it between two levies and making sure that it couldn’t flood you know historically The river would change path every year. It would diverge.

It would, you know, you can think of it as a kind of hose, like a garden hose flipping around. And that’s how the entire, you know, south, essentially, southern third of the continent was built.

The flooding of the river, spraying sediment-rich water in different places ultimately created land. You know, originally the Gulf of Mexico was all the way up in, the coast was up in Missouri. and it was over thousands of years that the land south of missouri down to louisiana was created and so after the devastating floods of 1927 of the mississippi there was this this great effort to control the river finally and make sure that it couldn’t flood again and there’s a fascinating book about this by the historian john john barry called rising tide is sort of the classic account of how this happened, how it happened to us politically, socially. scientifically.

And I think that story is a very, very clear analog for the kinds of interventions that we will be forced to make one way or the other in the years ahead. And to understand, you know, what’s especially valuable is to understand the way biases, political interests, sort of old-fashioned questions of power guided the way that decisions were made that would influence the, you know, the future of… the continent and certainly of the the nation in all kinds of different ways and so i think that that kind of story of massive intervention and certainly extremely imperfect um and flawed intervention you know i feel like we’re at another great period of where those kinds of efforts uh national even global efforts to change the way we operate you know the way we’ve structured our relationship with the natural world you know we’ve entered another age of that And so that story, I feel like it’s an instructive one as we move forward.

Thomas Gauthier

Yes. And to your point, this first story, this first landmark connects very well with the challenge that you brought up in the… latest question to the Oracle regarding where is Eurelians going to be in the future.

One question that comes to mind is, so we’ve built over the years these memories of historical landmarks that can be of great help to orient ourselves in the present and perhaps support our decision-making processes. Some would say that sometimes memories of the past can also, in a way, be a trap for us because they lock us into some kinds of thinking that were applied in the past and proved themselves to be successful.

A question that comes to mind and that connects again, perhaps with fiction and other ways of, let’s say, generating knowledge is, are there ways to also acquire memories of the futures? I mean, can we find ways as human beings, as communities, to share memories of the futures, to be both informed in our decision-making processes and collective behaviors by the past, as you are just bringing it back for us, but also informed by alternative futures, like the three scenarios that you brought up for the future of New Orleans.

How could we see these futures informing us in a somewhat similar way as memories of the past can inform us.

Nathaniel Rich

Yeah, I think there’s certainly a role there for fiction, for the arts more broadly. You know, one basic version of that, of course, is a kind of science fiction, you know, futuristic concept.

And there’s, you know, we’ve seen a lot of that, especially in recent years with the kind of climate or ecological tinge. I mean, I think of the work of novelist Jeff Vandermeer as one example. you know typically what you see in stories about the future, I guess I should say, and I wrote one, Odds Against Tomorrows, is set in the near future after a catastrophic storm hits New York City.

But, you know, those kinds of narratives tend to tell us more about where we are in the current moment. You know, of course, it reflects the author or our culture in the moment thinks about what’s possible or extrapolates typically from the present.

So I think that’s a useful exercise. It also has value in sort of focusing our understanding of the present.

I think that’s probably the greatest value to those kinds of exercises. I mean, I knew when I was writing Nods Against Tomorrow, I wasn’t trying to predict anything, you know, that would happen necessarily.

I don’t think prediction, you know, I don’t think novelists are especially good at prediction. And those who end up predicting things accurately, I think it’s more from by chance and it’s not necessarily related to literary merit of the work.

And yet… I think if it’s done well, it can help us explore our understanding of where things are in the moment.

And it can bring clarity to the way we see the world and to the way we think things are headed. And I think that’s enormously valuable in and of itself.

Thomas Gauthier

So can you now please bring perhaps a second historical process or landmark that you would like to bring into focus for us?

Nathaniel Rich

Yeah, I think another important, especially when it comes to climate change. Crucial analog is the tobacco industry’s fight over smoking and the safety of smoking, which was fought over many decades.

When I was writing Losing Earth, I went back and read one of the great accounts of this fight called Ashes to Ashes by a writer named Richard Kluger, which the subtitle is America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War. First of all, there’s a direct connection here with climate change, which is that the same PR firms that were used by the tobacco industry to sow doubt on science, medical studies about the dangers of smoking, those same PR firms were employed by oil and gas companies in the late 80s when they started to professionalize their effort to sow doubt and confusion among the public about the dangers of smoking. climate change.

But I think there’s sort of a broader lessons to be learned from that history, which is essentially the, some of which are, you know, it’s not enough to simply to have the science, you know, to be able to understand what’s happening, to make a rational argument for why we should, you know, change our ways in some, you know, why we should move to renewable energy, for instance, why we should stop burning fossil fuels. It takes more than that to move politics.

It takes more than that even to move public opinion. And that was a lesson that has been learned.

It was learned very painfully by people who were against or trying to restrict cigarette smoking over the course of the 20th century. And it’s been relearned by climate activists and scientists over the last 40 years that it’s not enough simply to show people that climate change is here, that it’s real, that its effects will be dramatic and devastating.

You need more than that. And essentially what you need, a human story.

You have to put it into… human terms, individual terms. You have to explain the human dimension of it to people.

And that took a long time for the anti-tobacco lobby to figure that out and figure out ways to do it. Typically, they did it through public health, through stories of individuals suffering from emphysema and lung cancer and so on.

And with climate, it’s only been in the last three or four years, frankly. It was in 2018 that the messaging by activists and politicians has shifted to reflect a kind of centering of humanity, you know, that not simply saying, well, we know that climate is changing, that it’s bad, it’s going to cause all kinds of problems.

That’s what I think of as the appeal to reason, you know, like it would be stupid not to act. In other words, that’s kind of been the line of climate activists going back to the 1970s.

But the new generation goes beyond that. They say failure to act is not only stupid, it’s It’s a betrayal of the fundamental values that we claim as central to our democracies, to our civilization, that failure to act is a crime.

It’s harmful that it’s undermining our sense of equality, our hope for the future, that it’s threatening our lives in direct and indirect ways and the lives of our children. It’s a much more intimate claim.

It’s much more personal appeal. And I think, frankly, it’s more honest as well.

If you look back at the history, the tobacco history, I think we’re reliving another version of it now with climate change and climate action. And I think the lessons of that long fight still can teach us about how to move forward with this newer fight.

Thomas Gauthier

So in a way, going back to what you just said, there is much to be learned from, let’s say, the fights against tobacco. but at the same time in second nature you are developing the hypothesis according to which there is a set of old distinctions as you’re saying for instance between the natural and the artificial between dystopia and utopia between science fiction and science fact that have all blurred and so it almost as in second nature and other works that you’ve that you’ve done you’re trying to think also new categories that we could bring to bear to regain an appreciation of where we are and where we want to be.

Nathaniel Rich

Absolutely. Yeah, I think we’re at a moment of kind of major cultural bewilderment.

And, you know, I think that the science has outpaced, the technological advancement and the scientific understanding has outpaced the public understanding. And so things are happening in labs and even in sort of at the level of political action that most people are not only not aware of, but wouldn’t even believe it.

I mean, if they knew about it, I mean, some examples include creation of many miles of new land in Louisiana, but also the efforts to mass produce cultured meat, which I write about in Second Nature, essentially using cells from living animals and then culturing process in a lab. turning those living cells into hamburgers and pieces of chicken or bacon or you name it, in an effort to replace as much of the global agricultural meat industry as possible for environmental reasons, largely. I think a lot of people don’t know that that’s already been cleared in some parts of the world for public consumption, that you can buy self-cultured meat, hamburgers and things like that.

De-extinction is another example, efforts to bring back passenger pigeons and woolly mammoths. There’s a lot of things going on, especially genetic engineering, that most people encountered them would think there is some science fiction movie.

But these are things happening already in labs and in the real world at a fairly large scale. It’s important for writers to not only deliver the news.

I mean, I think that’s sort of a secondary mission, but I think more to… to help people grapple with the moral implications of these major transformations that are now underway.

Thomas Gauthier

Now, would you like to bring back a third and final historical process or event to, you know, keep helping us, let’s say, sense and make sense of the world we’re in today?

Nathaniel Rich

Yeah, I think my final one is the one that I ended Second Nature with, which is an art project, which is the creation of a rabbit that glows in the dark, glows fluorescent green by a Brazilian-American. artist named Eduardo Katz, who is sort of the original or certainly self-claimed original bio-artist. In other words, part of this new art form that uses biological techniques, typically genetic engineering primarily, to create artwork, conceptual art usually.

His most famous work is this work called the GFP Bunny, which he created in France, actually. in partnership with this French Agricultural Research Institute in a small town near Versailles that was testing on lab rabbits and in fact was genetically engineering these rabbits to have this gene that has been taken from a kind of Pacific Ocean jellyfish that is a bioluminescent gene that glows green in the dark and implant that gene into these rabbits. This artist, Eduardo Katz, took a rabbit out of this institute and presented it at an art show.

And as you might be able to imagine, it was a source of enormous controversy that he, you know, there’s this idea that he had done this inhumane thing of using genetic engineering to create this kind of monstrous rabbit that glowed in the dark, that it was this great perversity and scandal. And of course, his defense was simply that, first of all, He hadn’t created anything.

He had simply taken a rabbit from this French lab, this institute called INRA, that was already being produced in this lab, that it was being used for medical experiments. And he was just showing it to the world and putting it in a different context.

In fact, his idea was to adopt the rabbit and bring it home to his house in Chicago and to live with his family as a pet and thus save its life. Because these lab animals, of course, after their… experimented upon are euthanized.

But in the firestorm of controversy that erupted, the Institute reclaimed the rabbit and denied their involvement, although it was undeniable on some level, of course, and probably ultimately killed the rabbit instead of saving his life. And so the work drew attention to many of these central ironies of this moment that we’re in, the idea of what we think of as natural. is, of course, a human conceit that, you know, in the case of this glow-in-the-dark rabbit, even the idea of a natural rabbit, a bunny rabbit, is an artifice.

These are, this is a species that has been created through human activity, through breeding, right, over generations. So we’re already talking about a man-made creature.

And Katz was simply saying, well, here’s a new, here are scientists using another tool to further refine this creature. And the uproar and outrage that came from it is deeply hypocritical because, of course, we’ve surrounded ourselves with man-made creatures, man-made environments.

And I think that kind of artwork like that that draws attention to the many sort of hypocrisies and ironies of our time is really sorely needed because we are a kind of amnesiac society who thinks that, well, things as they were 20 or 30 years ago were somehow in their natural state. And it’s hard to understand that actually everything that we think of as primeval nature or untouched nature or pure nature is itself a complete fiction that has been created by previous generations of humanity.

And I think we need a very strong understanding in that idea as we move forward to a time when we’re going to increasingly intervene in shaping the world around us. And so stories that draw Attention to those ironies, I think, are crucial, and crucial ways to determine how to move forward in this future.

Thomas Gauthier

The glowing rabbit is on the front cover of Second Nature. It’s also going to be on the front cover of Un Monde des Nature, which is the French translation that French readers are going to discover at the end of this month, on the 31st of March.

Can you please with me conclude this discussion with sharing? perhaps even more about the various ways in which you intervene in the world. We’ve heard you talk about the work on losing Earth, followed by the work on second nature.

You’ve had a chance to briefly speak to the fiction work that you’ve done also. You mentioned Odds Against Tomorrow.

Can you please help us just discover a bit more how you work as a writer, as a thinker and share some perhaps insights that… that could serve not as guidelines for others, but as additional examples of ways in which that we may all intervene in the world.

Nathaniel Rich

Yeah, I mean, I guess you wouldn’t know necessarily from just listening to the conversation, but for me, what’s the paramount thing that I do is narrative and write stories. And so whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, I’m always just trying to tell a good story and a story that asks questions, you know, and one that doesn’t. prescribe answers, but ask questions that are difficult.

And, you know, frankly, if the underlying questions are not difficult, and even if they’re resolvable, I don’t think the story is worth telling, you know, and it won’t be a very good story. I think I’m drawn to dramatic tension created by these sort of unresolved problems.

But the other thing that’s crucial to me is that any, you know, any kind of engagement with these ideas should be through the story, You know, that the story comes first. If the story doesn’t work, if it’s not exciting or funny or interesting or, you know, surprising, then the questions that it asks will be trivial or boring.

And so they go together, you know, that if the story is really working on the page, if it’s an exciting story, if it’s a fascinating story, a dramatic story, really, then the questions follow, you know, the sort of deeper, deeper pursuits follow. But if the story doesn’t work, then they don’t.

And so what that means is, you know, I write fiction and it also means that in the nonfiction that I write, I remove myself from it entirely. There’s no I person, you know, there’s no voice of the writer, there’s no voice of the journalist in the world.

Instead, what I try to do is, you know, immerse myself into the world that I’m writing about and try to And find characters, find people who then become the guides into those worlds and try to tell the story as faithfully as possible from the perspective of those people. Whether it’s, you know, a bio artist or it’s a fisherman in southern Louisiana or it’s a chef who decides to devote his life to creating artificial meat, you know, meat from a test tube.

You know, the stories only work if they’re told from deep within the world of… of the person I’m writing about. And I think that, you know, unless you have that kind of empathy, unless you’re able to create a kind of empathy with the character, then the stories don’t have value and they kind of crumble.

That’s always been my approach is to start with the people, start with stories, start with situations. And then the kind of, that takes me into some of these broader questions.

And it’s typically, I don’t know what those questions are. You know, it’s the characters that come first and then… they lead into these worlds.

And that kind of work is the most interesting to me because it’s a kind of active discovery that I find exciting. And it’s the opposite, I think, from sort of the world of, I don’t know, politics or even science, where you have a kind of hypothesis that you’re testing out, or you have a political point that you want to make, and then you find ways to support it.

For me, the excitement is the adventure and discovery. new worlds and new and new problems and so my hope as a writer is to try to bring readers into those Into the excitement of that process and so we need

Thomas Gauthier

Storytelling and story listening to create the world we want Thank you very much for the conversation Nathanael, and I hope that our path will cross again.

Nathaniel Rich

Thank you Thanks for having me on and for your thoughtfulness and good questions. I appreciate it.