 So truly, what a pleasure it is to be welcoming Delia Hannah, Bandana Singh, and Gil and Darcy Wood here to Columbia for this conversation on climate and the imagination. And their presentations here today are really going to revolve around work for a book that we're going to be publishing on our imprint Columbia books on architecture and the city in this coming February titled A Year Without a Winter. And the book has really been schemed up and edited by Delia, so I won't say too much about it, except to say that I couldn't be happier that we as a press are getting to engage with this kind of work. Delia is a gatherer of great collaborators, and I feel privileged to have been looped into her orbit somewhat. I'd really like it if we could sort of imagine today as a kind of a public workshop of the sorts in which you, the audience, will sort of help us think through some of the ideas that we'll be addressing. So climate and the imagination, there is, of course, nothing imaginary about climate change. It is real, and its effects are already all too real. And yet climate is also a figure of thought, cultures produce, and are produced by climatic imaginaries. And I think much has been made of the sort of sociotechnical apparatuses through which we know the climate. But I think there remains an incredible amount of work to be done on what exactly climate means to us and how we sort of know it as individuals, and especially as collectives. And so I think in that regard, climate has figured fairly prominently in the history of literature, as I think we'll discuss today, and offers one real avenue for future work and in sort of creating new reckonings with our environment. And I think as the discipline that is maybe sort of most prominently complicit in the expenditure of energy, either through the buildings or the sort of way of life that our settlement patterns produce, I think this is something for architects to be thinking about very actively. So we're super excited to have these folks here. First up to explain the Earth Outta Winner Project will be Delia Hanna. Delia is a philosopher and curator, that very familiar combination of the philosopher, curator, based in Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in philosophy from Columbia, so welcome back. And she is currently the research curator for the Center for Environmental Humanities. At Arhus University in Denmark, the Earth Outta Winner Project was really started by Delia. She was at Arizona State University. And I would say she is an instigator and a expeditioner with recent travels to Tambora and to Antarctica, which we'll perhaps hear about shortly. Then we'll hear from Gil and Darcy Wood, who is the Langan Professorial Scholar of Environmental Humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he directs the program in environmental writing, which is a program that I would love to have discovered as a younger person. I might have sidestepped architecture all together. His research takes the form of revisionist environmental histories of the global 19th century with a special focus on climate change. And he's the author of Tambora, The Eruption that Changed the World, which we'll figure in the conversations today. While his new book in progress, Antarctica Through the Looking Glass, the Victorian Discovery Voyages, 1838 to 42, reconstructs the vital role of the first South Polar expeditions in the origins of modern climate science. And then finally, we'll hear from Vandana Singh. Vandana is an Indian science fiction writer and a professor of physics at Framingham State University in Massachusetts. Again, a familiar combination of physics and speculative fiction. I love that everybody here is sort of wearing multiple hats. She's invested in a more transdisciplinary scholarship of climate change and recently traveled to the Alaskan Arctic to create a case study of climate change at the intersection of science, culture, and economics. So the polls, I think, will figure heavily in the conversation here. She has a collection of short stories titled Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories coming out in February and contributed the really beautiful and, I think, deeply humane story that I'm to a year without a winter. And then we'll sort of prepare to the conversation pits to engage you in conversation. Please join me in welcoming our panelists and especially up first, Delia Hanna. So thank you so much, James, for the warm introduction and to all of you at GSAP for supporting this project. It's allowed the project to expand into a kind of Frankenstein monster that I wouldn't say I never dreamed of it. And in fact, I did dream of it, but I didn't know that it would find such a hospitable habitat in which to roam. And so a big thanks to GSAP and to Columbia. It's great to be back. Also, I just had to give a shout out to the philosophy department, to my PhD supervisors, Lydia Gerr and Philip Kitcher, who originally let me go a bit rogue in that discipline by bringing together philosophy of science and aesthetics. Something, a tradition that has just continued over the last few years as I have tried to turn my attention more and more to putting philosophy into practice in order to think about climate change. Just a few thank yous I have to put out here at the beginning. I'm sure there will be others I'll have to add at the end. But the second really goes to my colleagues at Arizona State University in the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering and the School for the Future of Innovation and Society, where Shashin Wei, Cynthia Selene, and all of my colleagues in the department really encouraged me to develop and really collaborated with me in the development of this project. In particular, Cynthia Selene, a future scholar who first took this project on in collaboration as a kind of imaginary scenario, which I haven't told you where it comes from yet, but an invitation to think, what if at some point in the present or the future there were to be a year without a winter? So as I mentioned this though, I thought, I have this wonderful idea, a phrase. It really just began as a phrase. And I thought, what should we do with this idea, with this scenario? And of course, the obvious thing would be to have an art exhibition in which you could collect a bunch of ideas and speculations and images. But as I started discussing it with people, this was the immediate reference. Not bad, actually. But when I was thinking about a year without a winter, I was sort of thinking, OK, this is a sort of horrific scenario of climate change. Because a year without a winter would be a bad thing. But it also, of course, has the connotations of the endless summer and this possibility of kind of endless recreation and vacation. And so the immediate impulse of this project was to sort of push past our reliance on the stability of natural variation and to start to think about what would happen and what is really happening as we confront a world in which seasonal patterns are increasingly irregular, unstable winter, summer, all of the seasons are not what they used to be and not what they may be in the immediate future. But where does this story come from? Well, it comes from a story you may or may not know, now that we're in the 200th anniversary period of this historical moment. It's the story of how Frankenstein came to be written. So it was the summer of 1816. Mary Shelley was 18 years old. In fact, she was Mary Godwin at the time, not yet. Married to Percy Shelley. And she set off on a summer holiday, on the grand tour, where she was with her lover, Percy, and they planned to join Lord Byron, his doctor, John Poladori, and his already pregnant lover, Claire Claremont, at this villa on the banks of Lake Geneva. But as they moved southward, they encountered a kind of catastrophic weather, sort of inundated by torrential rains, washed out roads, cold, and a kind of dawning sense of horror, which Dylan Darcy Wood has described so evocatively in his book, Tambora, the Eruption Dutch of the World. But at the time, there was no reason to think that this was anything more than a wet, undenial summer, as Mary would later say. So they proceeded on and did their best to enjoy their holiday. And she writes in the introduction to Frankenstein that was published in 1831 at the request of her publisher, who said, how could an 18-year-old girl have come to entertain such horrific visions of a monster, which is a good question to ask ourselves in university when we might feel the pressure to follow in her footsteps. And she wrote, in the summer of 1816, we visited Switzerland and became the neighbors of Lord Byron. At first, we spent our pleasant hours on the lake, but it proved a wet, undenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. And of course, they read them with the light, while also consuming alcohol, laudanum, dallying with the entertainments that they had available at hand. And this gave rise at a certain point after two days cooped up inside the house to a proposal. We'll each write a ghost story, said Lord Byron, and his proposition was acceded to. And after this, Mary goes on to describe the waking dream that she has. She has a sort of hallucination or a vision of a monster staring into her window, and this becomes the kernel of the story of Frankenstein. In fact, my interest was less in the story itself at the time than it was in this story, this historical account, of how it is that we come to have this incredibly influential novel of modernity's encounter with science, technology, engineering, and this kind of figure of a modern Prometheus, a cautionary tale about what can happen when scientists harness powers of nature and use them to affect experiments, explorations, or radical changes in the world. And it was fitting somehow that I should have come across the story in the context of an article on stratospheric injection, which is a technology that's being considered as a means of mitigating climate change. So I happen to come across this story, which I've just recounted of the beginnings of Frankenstein, in an article by Jack Stilgo and Company on the ethics of mimicking the effects of volcanic eruptions in order to induce climate cooling. So little did Mary Shelley and her companions know at the time, but 1816, which was remembered in the British literary imagination as the year without a summer, was actually the beginning of a three-year climate crisis would last until approximately 1818 that was caused by a massive volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, the eruption of Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sambawa. And the authors of this article, geoengineering made this observation, such climatic disruption has inspired scientific as well as literary insight. It's a wonderfully understated comment and it's wonderfully apt that Frankenstein should then give us precisely the kind of cautionary tale through which we tend to think about emerging technologies like mimicking the effects of volcanic eruptions. And so this constellation of the story itself, the content of the story itself and the historical account of how it came to be led me to the thought, well, if a year without a summer brought us Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and all of the after effects that that novel has had in shaping our kind of cultural encounters with science, what will happen if there's a year without a winter? Can we envision a novel, a story, an artwork that might last, that we might be reading 200 years later and that might shape our encounter with the contemporary crises of environment, technology, science, society, et cetera. And so this gave rise to the idea of using the framework of the crisis, the Tambora crisis which we later learned began in 1815 with the eruption of Mount Tambora on April 10th, 1815 and lasting until about 1818 as a framing device for rethinking our contemporary moment and the contemporary climate crisis that we face. So Tambora was the largest volcanic eruption on record in modern human history, at least about the last 10,000 years as we expect. And it was strong enough to inject superheated gases and enormous amounts of dust, a whole mountain as we'll see some pictures of later, up into the stratosphere, into the upper atmosphere where the gases and the dust could be circulated around the globe. And the effect, although it was very different in different geographical regions, it took about a year to register all around the world. So the northern hemisphere was plunged into cold and darkness in our local regions, there was vast destruction, there was a disruption of the monsoon in the southern hemisphere, but interestingly, there was also a warming of the poles, which I'll leave it to Gillan perhaps to touch upon and explain. But in any case, there was a kind of vast global environmental disturbance. And it was against this background and in the midst of this context and without any real awareness of the grand story of what was going on, there not being internet communications or even telecommunications to register what was going on, that Mary and many, many other authors and writers around the world composed artworks and works of literature that reflected a kind of nascent awareness of some sort of disturbance in the environment. And this registers at the introduction to Shelley's novel. And I love this quote. It's told, I wonder, just a quick question. How many people have read Frankenstein? No shame and not, yeah, okay, wonderful. I wonder, I'll just toss the question out there. How many people remember that the story of the creation of the monster is actually told aboard a ship bound for the North Pole? It's told to a captain who picks up Dr. Frankenstein who's chasing his monster across the ice. And he, Frankenstein promises to tell a story that's barely believable. And indeed, it is barely believable, although we continue to sort of hover at the edge of believing it. And that's really, you know, a powerful story. But before he agrees to tell the story, he says to Captain Moon, prepare to hear of occurrences that are usually deemed marvelous. Were we among the tamer scenes of nature? I might fear to encounter your unbelief, perhaps your ridicule. But many things will appear possible in these wild and mysterious regions, which would provoke the laughter of those unacquainted with the ever varied powers of nature. And I love this quote. And it's, I mean, it's very obviously a kind of reality of like deployment. You know, it's an inducement to believe. And one can imagine, in reading the book, a sort of conjuring of the scenes. What was it that Captain Walton and Frank Stein were seeing such that this ship captain might be induced to believe that this guy had created an actual living being? And of course, I was curious about these untamed scenes of nature, which we are increasingly invited to look at in portraits of glaciers and melting ice that we look on with a kind of wonder and horror and discussions of climate change today. But it also raised the question for me, where would we go today to encounter a kind of a version of nature or environment as we might encounter it in a possible future in that we might call a year without a winter. So a year without a winter is really not about one year. It's about the prospect of a future without a winter or a future without recognizable seasons. So a plan was hatched with my collaborators at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, who generously agreed to fund a reenactment of precisely this literary competition that Byron had proposed to Shelley, the dare, as they remembered it. And we were joined by Vandana Singh, along with three other science fiction authors Tobias Bacal, Nnedi Okorafor, and Nancy Kress. And we went for several days into the Arizona desert, which was our proxy for an extreme environment. I have to say, we did try to get our authors there in July, but we compromised October when it was warm, but it was maybe quite as extreme as you can encounter in the Arizona desert in the summer. So we brought them to the desert in order to try to restage and recapture something of this constellation of environmental exposure, sharing of literary, sharing stories, sharing kind of literary experiences, and discussion of the science of the day with a group of science fiction authors. So the event began at the university in the morning with lectures by scientists, including oceanographer Hilary Hartnett, who's gonna be, I'll maybe speak about later, she's contributing an essay to the book. My colleague, the futurist, Cynthia Selene, a number of other scientists and experts that tried to conjure for our authors a sense of what the world might look like during a year without a winter. And we then went to spend the evening, perhaps drink wine, tell stories, wander around this unusual environment, which I was later very excited to discuss with James, because it was in a way a happenstance occurrence that Arcosanti was available to the Arizona State University community as a place to retreat to. And we thought, you know, this place is really cool, it's really interesting, we know it's interesting for architects. But actually at the time, what we thought of it more was as a kind of imaginary city and an imaginary environment for science fiction writers. So the opportunity to unfold the implications of Arcosanti itself in the context of a book with an architecture press has come later, but it's something that we're really quite excited about. But I'll leave a bit of a discussion of the retreat for later to discuss with Vandana and James afterwards. But I'll just say that in reenacting the dare, we sought to share some of the experiences that our kind of carlaries 200 years ago did. But what this event also gave rise to was the question, well, if the novel is a sort of quintessential aesthetic form of the 19th century, is what was able to capture a sense of the global to sort of capture an emerging, environmental consciousness, what's to say that the same artistic or aesthetic form would be the salient one today? So we also entered into a conversation about what other aesthetic forms might participate in the dare. And from this point, we started to, what I have found with this project is that beginning at Arcosanti and beginning with this group of science fiction writers, I have been restaging the dare over and over and over again in the company of artists working in a wide variety of different mediums. So these have included fashion, which from the early 19th century until today is always a register of our environmental encounters. Perhaps a year without a winter would be a year in which people would be subject to endless rain as a speculation of a Dutch artist and Van Galen. Or would we be able to confront a year without a winter in the form of a sculpture? This was an iced overplant that I encountered at the Armory Show in New York last year. And I'm missing a slide, but I'll say another prospect was the possibility that it would be an artist performing scientific experiments or something that resembled scientific experiments. Artist Carolina Sobeca has been performing something that approximates stratospheric injection, geoengineering experiments, and actually enrolling geoengineers in thinking about the plausibility of her artistic practice and its ethics. But this particular object, this sculptural object, an iced overplant captured my imagination last March. And as I was wandering through the Armory Show, I was thinking, oh, it's so hard to see art in here and I just wanna see what's going on in the world and get out of here. And at that moment, I got a message from the curator of an exhibition that I had been long desperately hoping to get to be a part of, which was the Antarctic Biennale, a ship full of artists heading to Antarctica. And I got the message, if you can get a commission to write a review of the Biennale, I think we can find a place for you on the ship. So I thought, oh my God, of course, because in fact, my dream really would be, if I was to ask the question, what sort of artwork would emerge from a year without a winter? I couldn't think of anything more apt and exciting than the possibility that it might happen on a ship bound not from the North Pole as in 200 years ago during a year without a summer, but for the South Pole during a year without a winter. And like Captain Walton, writing to his sister with his various laments, I think I probably said to my mother, I try in Maine to be persuaded that the pole is a seat of frost and desolation. It ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. And this experience, oh, I think we have the old presentation, sorry, we're missing a few images. There were, in fact, many unbelievable scenes, scenes that would be one would have difficulty believing had happened, had one not been exposed to the wonders of the pole. I can say more about Andrei Kuskin's performance later if you're interested, but it's just to say a man can survive buried in the ice upside down for quite a long time, naked in Antarctica. But what this experience cemented for me was that the intersection of exposure to extreme unfamiliar or kind of approximately extreme environments and a creative response there too in any medium is the crucial force of what this project has turned up to be as important. That's one element and the other element, and I'm sorry, I'm missing a quote that maybe I can share with you in the discussion, is a final comment that's made in the introduction to Frankenstein in which this polar explorer is writing letters home to his sister and saying what he anticipates to find at the North Pole. And he says something to the effect of the one thing that's missing from my voyage is the company of a friend to share my reveries and temper my impulses and kind of reflect back to me what it is that I think I'm experiencing on this search, this quest, to achieve colonial domination and plant my flag at the pole. Because the other aspect of this project that has become the most forceful for me is precisely that it's this enrollment of a broad group of people in what I like to think of as a collective thought experiment, a kind of living out a reenactment of a story that allows this hypothetical scenario to have actually a life of its own and to take me into places and into encounters with people and with environments that I might never have had, but if I had had them, and this is the crucial part, I wouldn't have had a way of narrating and organizing and kind of comprehending. Had I not been living my way deeply into this story. So with this in mind, it felt apt that given an opportunity that arose quite by surprise this summer when I was also doing my best to have a summer holiday, but I don't seem to be very good at taking a holiday. I'm based in Denmark and I was going to Thailand to go to the beach and relax, endless summer, maybe some surfing, but then it arose that this was not far from the source of my whole project, Tambora, which is on an island in Indonesia. And at the same time, the artist who had, I discovered, had actually made that frozen plant who I met in Antarctica, got a commission to do a piece about a glacier that had created a huge flood in Switzerland in 1818 during precisely the same climate crisis. So with Julien Charier, who I'm very pleased is gonna be doing the cover for our book, we made a final visit just this August through Tambora, and I'll refrain from showing you pictures of this lovely volcano because what actually stayed with me as the most powerful image was the fog that we hiked through for many hours in order to reach the summit. And as with the retreat and a little bit also with the retreat that we staged, it was a period where we actually experienced some profound self-doubt. Really, what are we doing here? Are we even gonna be able to see it when we get to the top? Why? Okay, this volcano is at the center of my story, but what will it mean actually to go there to experience it, to see it? And I think this is a question that we have to continuously ask ourselves in thinking about climate change because climate change demands that we try to think the global, which is both imperative and impossible. And the effects of our activities on one side of the world can be dramatic in a place that we'll never see. And likewise, we can experience things that are going on very distant. And I think this is something, this is one of the things that Vandana's fiction captures. And it's one of the things that strikes me is it must be one of the aesthetic impulses that will emerge as a powerful response to this challenge to think what will we create during a year without a winter? So I'll stop there. I think I'm out of time and leave us wandering in a fog. And I think Dylan will tell us a bit more about Tambora and the meaning of this term. Well, thanks, Delia. And it's terrific to be back here at Columbia. I was a graduate student here in the pre-Jurassic era in the 1990s. So volcano's glaciers, climate change is a neo-romantic age. And characteristic of romanticism is to imagine oneself to be alone, but also to be relieved that you're not. And it's that with that sense of relief that I met Delia who we've been following each other like Frankenstein and his monster on parallel tracks through to Tambora and also to Antarctica. And I'm so glad that our paths converged and that I'm able to be involved in this terrific project the year without a winter. Now, Delia being the kind of impresario that she is, she gives great permission and latitude for what one wants to do, which is a little unusual in the academic profession. And so what I've done today is, and the way that you framed the entire enterprise as a dare, I realized that with all Delia's effusive and welcoming energy, there was also an implicit dare to me to produce something for her. And when I heard about the constellation of contributors and the creative aspect of the volume, I suppose I went in a direction that I don't normally go and took some risks that I don't normally take. And I'm grateful for that. What I want to do is talk about my trip to Tambora, reflect upon it and draw from a journal that I kept. The spirit of Walton's letters to his sisters from excerpts from a journal that I kept on my journey to Tambora. And the other novel of 1816, not Frankenstein, but Jane Austen's final novel, Persuasion. Those two stories. This is called Notes from Tambora. In May of 2011, I traveled to the Indonesian island of Sambawa to climb Tambora. Or what was left of it? It's eruption in 1815 blew the mountaintop into the sky. A volcanic haze drained the world of heat and color, three years of wild weather and biblical suffering. I brought one book with me to Tambora, Jane Austen's Persuasion, written in the colorless summer of 1816. And I brought a journal. I wondered what insights of volcanic pilgrimage half a world from Hampshire would bring to Austen's deathbed novel from the year without a summer. On the bone-jarring road out of Bhima, I first see Tambora as a long gray giant under a blanket of cloud, one pothole too many and an SUV burst attire. I stroll across the pasture by the road in the view of the sea. This is Tambora's new coast, Tambora's lava landfill. I try to imagine an orange plume 40 kilometers in the air, trees like burning javelins into the sea, but I fail at that. It's too peaceful to conjure up apocalypse. Distant cowbells drift across the pasture like a faint gamelan orchestra. 72 hours ago, I was shoveling snow in a driveway in Illinois. The teleconnections of modern travel are like the teleconnections of climate. Fist-sized rocks, black and granular, are strewn about me, volcanic debris. This is not a recognized tourist site. Souvenirs of a forgotten disaster are worthless. So it's the easiest thing in the world for me to reach down and pick up a rock. As if it had just fallen there yesterday, the hellish night of April 10th, 1815, when thousands perished in a fiery hour. I put the rock in my pocket. In the summer of 1816, Jane Austen battled to finish her last novel while her body rebelled. She suffered constant fevers and broke out in spots. Her head, her jaw, throbbed. She carried a small cushion to press on her cheek ineffectually against the pain. There's no record of her treatment with leeches. She couldn't walk or barely hold her pen. Austen's heroine of 1816, Anne Elliot, is an avatar of the author's fatal wintry illness. 27 years old when persuasion commences, Anne has lost her bloom early. According to the norms of the marriage plot novel, she's effectively dead. Persuasion, like the other great Tambora novel, Frankenstein, centres on the elaborate reanimation of corpse. Anne's second chance at love with Captain Wentworth is Austen's fantasy of the second spring she herself will be denied. The summer after the year without a summer, Jane Austen is dead. The name Tambora means to appear and disappear, there and not there. A volcanic name uncannily tied to our perception. The earth we inhabit that is both here and not here at our convenience. A volcanic eruption that is both a magnitudinous event and a giant hole, an author who is full of words, but empty of person. We know so little about Austen and her last illness. A hollow woman. Her sister Cassandra made a small inferno of Austen's letters. The first committed to the flames were those that described too graphically the full symptoms of her 1816 illness. Austen's bodily fluids were not for posterity. If tuberculous, then gobs of phlegm. If cancerous, then bouts of vomiting. As Austen wrote to her brother in July of 1816, it is really too bad and has been too bad for a long time, much worse than anybody can bear. This is Austen's body talking through the medium of weather. Oh, it rains again, it beats against the window. The pain, for Cassandra it was vital to preserve the image of a cheerful resilient sister who died uncomplainingly after a short illness. But Jane out pointed her loving sensor by figuring her distempered body through the storm skies of 1816. I begin to think it will never be fine again. And sure enough, she never was. The climb is kind at first among the coffee plantations built by the Dutch in the days of the spice trade. Slaves laboured here for 200 years under their Chinese overseers. My guide, Macho, carries a machete and stops every few yards to thrash at ferns and nettles and pick leeches off his skin. Macho has climbers legs with muscles like sailor's knots. Next to him, mine look like greasy chicken thighs on a lunch tray. How many Indonesians does it take to transport an American academic up a volcano? I can report the answer is five, conservatively. While I reapply insect repellent and take a puff of albuterol, my companions look at me pittingly, a helpless westerner in the jungle, clutching his little medicine bag. I sip morosely on cups of very sweet tea. Persuasion in 1816. Summer denied was like love denied. Frankenstein's monster enacts the stormy destruction of 1816 while Anne Elliot is the storm's victim. A hollow woman, a stuffed woman, headpiece filled with straws of regret. Anne almost never talks. Her listless body, like her creators, is empty of hope. The pale vessel for a season that never was. The summer of 1816 never did happen except calendrically. A summer in deep winter masquerade. No sun, no warmth, no color, like the end of days. Those who lived those weeks of rain underwent a peculiar unraveling. The mind insisted on summer like a wish list, a mental catalogue of pleasurable expectations, but the body only suffered in nutritional vacuum. In July, Austin commiserates with a hamshire fire that it's bad weather for the hay. He comforts her with the reflection that it's much worse for the wheat. How much hunger subsists in that passing exchange. Empty bellies across Europe and Asia. In 1816, the starving peasantry ate cattle feed. Hollow men, hollow women, stuffed with straw. Macho takes conversation with clients seriously as a professional service. He practices sustainability management, though he enjoys no official title. In his village on the nearby island of Lombok, he advises his neighbors on the disposal of their ever rising tide of plastic waste, bottles, bags, tubs, wrapping. At Macho's urging, his village no longer burns its trash and piles by the road. Instead, they've dug pits at a distance behind the store where they put all their empty plastic. When the hole is full to the brim, they set fire to it. Then they dig another hole, another hollow in the ground for more hollow stuff. In the bitter chill of the year without a summer, Austin rewrote her ending to persuasion as if alert to the historical lie of happiness. Austin rewrites the conclusion, but the heroine rewrites the novel itself. First kiss barely enjoyed and insists to her uncomprehending lover that she was right to refuse him eight years ago, that their death-like suffering had to happen. She insists on a deterministic world when we have fallen headlong in love as we must with her free will. Anne is the true heroine of 1816. The lesson of the year without a summer is not human self-determination, sweet reward of the liberal novel, but of people en masse as the collateral refuse of planetary persuasions. Anne's pale, wasting body, internal figure of her creator's decline stands in for the hollow of history. In Austin's Tambora novel, historical romance craters beneath our feet. On the jungle slopes of Tambora, it's been raining for five hours when two Swiss climbers appear at our sodden camp where monkeys are screaming in the trees. One of the Swiss men is compact and sinewy. The other bearded and bearish with a kerchief tied across his forehead, like a cartoon duo. Marchot is quietly appalled. The Swiss set out late with no tents or food for their porters. Now darkness is falling, it's pouring with rain and the village men face a wretched night sleeping with the leeches on wet grass in the rain. My heart is broken for them, says Marchot over and over. He invites the porters into his tent and feeds the Swiss who have not bothered to pack food even for themselves. It means less for everyone. They do not thank him. With uncanny Swiss precision, the two Europeans have managed to reenact the history of East Indies colonialism in a single afternoon. It's the old story of careless Europeans and their aerobic hubris treating the world as their playground and indigenous peoples like trash. They speak only to me. And how friendly and civilised they are and how slavishly grateful I am for their polite interest in my book. The shame will come later. But neither are the homeless porters grateful to Marchot. Instead, they talk and joke inside his tent all night, keeping him awake. And when at last they fall asleep, they snore up ruriously. Marchot does not reproach them, though he burns with resentment. Meanwhile, my whole body aches from the climb. The rain has soaked through every last piece of clothing I have and I spend the night killing leeches. From the magnetic chamber of Tambora, an island's worth of gas and molten rock vaulted into the sky leaving a hollow a kilometre deep, six kilometres wide, a hole you could fill with Tambora's dead. But the words for those dead are missing, like Austen's burnt letters. We build history from texts and tales, not from magma, sulfate aerosols and deadly microbes, the inhuman stuff of disaster. So the crater is left empty as if raw earth cannot be made story. Like Jane Austen coughing up phlegm or vomiting blood, certain stories resist writing because they are too much of the body. Tens of thousands dead of starvation, of fluorine poisoning, of typhus, millions from cholera. Think of Tambora as a continuum of gaseous fluids passing from magma to sulfur to rain to human flam shit and blood with only the thinnest membrane of separation. Think of Lear's bare-forked animal in the storm on the heath and then subtract the poetry. That was Tambora, that is climate change. If seasonal affect disorder were a novel, it is persuasion. Only in 1816 could bad weather be made into art, except perhaps in 2016 and beyond. In Austen's letters of 1816, she insists to family and friends that she's getting better even as she's dying, summer and winter in one. In persuasion, Austen's novel of dissimulation, we have two novels with two endings and two heroines. Austen's internal monologue insists on the hopeless status quo while her body registers historical change, her connection to the biophysical world. With the return of desire, her color returns. She grows pretty, not like her former self, but like a different person. Mr. Elliot lusts after her in a chance encounter as if she were not his plane, spinster Cousin. Her father asks her what facial cream she's using as if she were a bath socialite. She's an alternate heroine in an alternate summer. Tambora is not Marchot's volcano. His is Mount Rinjani across the bay on Lombok, which he climbs 30 or 40 times a year as a professional mountain guide. It was Rinjani that exploded in 1809, first cooling the globe and setting the stage for the climate chaos of Tambora. Near the summit of Tambora, Rinjani is visible across the sparkling blue sea. During its last eruption in 1994, when Marchot was a boy, he fled down from the mountains to the sea with the rest of his family, stupefied with fear. They lived on the beach for a week. Marchot is pleased for me that it has stopped raining and that I will see what I came inexplicably to see. But when the clouds lift and he glimpses the fearsome outline of Rinjani in the distance, he instantly forgets Tambora and lets out a whoop of joy. The rain beats on the window at Shorten as Austin fights the pain to eke out the last scenes of persuasion. How to reunite the lovers? Of course, it must be raining and the comedy must turn on an umbrella. At this point, at the lovers' maximum estrangement, Anne's repudiation of desire is a mind forged manacle, not easily loosened. In the shop, in Bath, Anne insists to herself that she will walk the few steps to the window to see if it rains. Not in hopes of seeing the captain. To reach the window against such crosswinds of cognition is an Olympian feat. She must traverse the shop floor while denying the floor. Her body to cross it with, that the window exists, the street, the rain, and even that the captain is physically in Bath for her to see him. Why, then, do we shake our heads at climate denial when Austin demonstrates a cognitive equipment so adapted to delusion? The lesson of 1816 is the rogue lesson of persuasion. Without some and desire, life withers. Climate is written on the body even as the mind rationalizes its freedom from earthly constraint. In the night, the earth reverberates a deep sound almost beyond hearing, like from the well of a dream. Two weeks later, they will evacuate the entire peninsula. We wake to a light, sulfurous mist and Macho says, I hope today isn't the day. Kept awake by his ungrateful, some barren tent mates, Macho has spent the night worrying how to tell me that I've come all this way for nothing, that it's too slippery and dangerous for us to climb the last mile to the crater in the rain. But now, the clouds have cleared and we make the climb into sunshine, careful to keep to the grassy side of the ridge and away from the loose rocks down the ravine. At last, at the rim itself, the gruelling, step-at-a-time torture of the ascent melts into make-believe. The caldera opens up like a great blue-green pearl from the mountain depths. Tambora is a mountain without a summit, a volcano with no cone, a giant cyclops nursing its gaping wound. At the crater's edge is loose black sand, it slopes invitingly into the abyss. The wind is blowing hard at our back toward the depths. It plucks at my jacket, nudging me forward. Macho draws a line in the dirt 10 feet from the edge as if Tambora needs baby-proofing. At Tambora's rim, all is exposed, all hollowed out. The aridity of a moon, that's the volcano experience. The earth has shed all vegetation, all pretensions of caring. It reveals its brutality and we are like shells washed up. In my hollowed out state on Tambora's brim, death seems like a lovely thing, but self-loathing is only self-love repackaged. That's the cancer of souvenir from within I carry down from the mountain top. My fleeting distress is the meagrest residue of the historical trauma of 1815-18, in which the family dead went unburied. Mary Shelley saw monsters and Jane Austen bore witness to her own dying through the pale gaze of Anne Elliot, her own creation like the creature haunting Frankenstein. On the journey back to Beemer, we stop at a tiny roadside station, crammed between the jungle and a swampy inlet. A bullock is stuck in the mud by the road. A girl serves us instant noodles in plastic tubs under the watchful eye of her father. She is clean and pristine while we are filthy travelers. Piles of plastic bottles and trash line the road. Some of the piles are burning, sending plumes of smoke into the skies of Sambawa. I know this obscenity of waste scandalizes Macho, who has dug holes in his village to put their fresh garbage, but he makes no comment to the girl. She, after all, must live in it. The next day, I leave Sambawa. The soaring cities of Asia and America pass by in a haze like debris plumes of the built world. On the way, I see enough plastic bottles to fill 10 tambourines. Thank you. Greetings, everybody. I'm so honored and excited to be here. Thank you, Delia and James, and everybody who made this event possible. Can everyone hear me all right? All right. I'm going to start with just a small extract from the story that I wrote for this volume. Winter is a memory he holds close. When he was young, winter in Delhi was a tender thing. A benign spirit wafted down from the snowbound Himalayas, bringing cold air and the mist of morning. Winter was shawls and coats, the aroma of charcoal braziers in the shanty town he passed on the way to work, his breath a white cloud. Later came the smog age, the inversion layers and the choking fog that crept into rooms and nostrils and lungs. Today, the poison has not left the air, but winter is gone. One might think the loss of winter in a place where winter has been so gentle is not something to be mourned, but the desert lies waiting, west of Delhi, waiting to embrace the city in languorous sandy arms. The sandstorms are only messengers, rith duthas, carrying love notes to the great city to say, I'm coming, I'm coming. The city will be engulfed according to climatologists' models between 2025 and 2040. Dinesh wants to be there to see the two great monsters dance the dance of consummation, city and desert, desert and city, but before that, there are other monsters to consider. Monsters, winter, climate change. I come here to you as a sort of hybrid, an alien from the third world, an accidental immigrant washed up on these shores over two decades ago. That can speak Bostonian occasionally. My coming to the US was brought to you courtesy of fossil fuels, literally and otherwise. The first time I saw our planet from an airplane was on that very first trip. It was my first airplane trip. I remember seeing Saudi Arabia lying below me like a shawl of gold and thinking that my geography teacher hadn't lied after all. But in a deep and complicated way, my being here is a symptom of the Anthropocene. I'm a particle physicist by training, but my work is now in the area of interdisciplinary climate science and pedagogy, and I'm also a science fiction writer. I believe that we are, or at least speaking for myself, I am a creature of place. For me, words beget words, beget worlds, although words are not all there is. As I journey in space and time, I'm always seeking home as an immigrant, an accidental immigrant. I'm always seeking home, a quest that is doomed from the start. Not only does our globalized era sever us from home, but it also guarantees that when we go home, again, it isn't what it was when we left it behind. For one thing, there's way more plastic than there ever used to be. Perhaps home survives only in the imagination. So here are some worlds that have intersected with me. That is me on top of the NOAA meteorological observatory in Barrow, Alaska, 71.3 degrees north, well within the Arctic Circle. The NOAA observatory was the first place that recorded carbon dioxide levels above 400 parts per million in 2013. The other picture is another world that intersected with mine, the world of the high plateau of Arizona. At the occasion of the reenactment of the dare back in 2016, where you can see me with some of my fellow authors, editors, and if I have time, I'll go back to that. So space and time, place, journey, story, worlds and worlds that intersect and how they beget other worlds and how they beget story. This is a little picture of me as a wide-eyed college student in the physics lab, obviously, and the other is a picture, a much more recent one of my mother's courtyard, my mother's garden, where my family now lives just outside Delhi. Delhi was where I grew up. And how all those worlds intersect and how that intersects with what I've, I'm here to tell you, which is less about myself than how I'm entangled with the world and climate change and how perhaps we are all entangled is really summarized in this diagram where we are all living on a damaged planet. We live here in the Anthropocene and one of the things I realized much later, thinking back to that very first plane trip from Delhi to America was when I saw the Earth for the first time in its fullness and its roundness that I was an Earthling and that I had multiple identities, Indian woman, professor, bad cook, all of those things, but one of them was Earthling. And the other thing that I do now, apart from trying to figure out what it means to live on this planet as an Earthling, is to come up with or try to come up with transdisciplinary pedagogies for teaching climate physics. And all of that feeds into writing science fiction, imagining other world makings through science fiction and being part of, being part of more than myself. I am, for instance, at this very moment indebted to phytoplankton in distant oceans for more than 50% of the oxygen that I breathe. I'm indebted to the Amazon rainforest and all of these systems and creatures and beings that I don't even know about. So I'm a node in a wide nexus that goes beyond the human. And it's that beyond human aspect that I'm very interested in exploring, whether it's in the classroom or through writing. So being a storyteller, I'm particularly sensitive to story. And in fact, it's that storytelling ear that I've developed since childhood that led me into physics, that led me into trying to hear what protons are telling us, for instance. And realizing that nonhumans have stories to tell that are perhaps just as interesting and sometimes perhaps often more interesting than the stories that humans tell about humans. And the question that's before us is what is the earth telling us? And we all know what it's telling us now that the earth is warming, that climate change is real, that it's happening because of human activity, specifically the burning of fossil fuels. And I don't know how many people have read Naomi Klein's book, This Changes Everything. Margaret Atwood's famous statement that it's not just climate change, it's everything change. So looking at everything change, looking at everything, how can we, who are so local, so localized, so encouraged into this kind of solipsistic individualism, how can we possibly have the guts to imagine everything and imagine changing everything? So I'm going to ask that question in a different way that relates to my field and also to my searches and wanderings and eclectic readings and researches into a new kind of pedagogy. So to ask ourselves the question, how did we get here? How did we get to this point in space and time where we're actually seriously talking about the end of the world? How did we get here? And so when I started exploring and I looked back into my own field and I discovered something, I discovered that there's, that what we had caught in is a framework for looking at the world. And so I'm going to use the term Newtonian paradigm as a oversimplification that covers a lot of ground, but nevertheless describes what I'm trying to say. A paradigm is a philosophical and theoretical framework as we know that gives us a way of making sense of the world. And the way I think of it is a superstructure of sense-making concepts arising out of our intraaction to use philosopher Karen Barad's term with a particular way of choosing what to look at the world which is what the word cut here means. And that includes our unexamined assumptions and it's about time we examined those. But what is the Newtonian paradigm? Like I said, it's an oversimplification. It includes pre-Newtonian ideas, but essentially it's based on atomic materialism, the mechanistic view of the universe of living beings, and some of my favorite scientists and physicists. I love Galileo, I love Newton, I love the laws that Newton came up with, but some of them collectively and unintentionally are responsible for what I'm calling the Newtonian, the paradigm, the mechanistic paradigm, the clockwork universe, and it's characterized by reductionism, determinism, atomism, separateness, linearity. So here is a conception of the clockwork universe. As you know, William Blake, as perhaps many people know, William Blake, was a passionate objector to Newtonian ideas. And I have a more recent statement from Rilke's sonnets to Orpheus, a quote that I love, about the machine. And I think here he's talking about a Newtonian machine. So we ask the question that if indeed, if it's true that we have to understand where we've come from in order to understand where we are, and if that means taking our unexamined assumptions and examining them, making the invisible visible, then what we have to do is to go backward a little bit and understand why we are here and whether climate change can explain what we are, the current moment. So I'm going to go forward a little bit. These slides are merely signposts to make a few points. I'm not gonna, I'm gonna try my very best not to exceed my time. But one of the things about global climate is that it is what we call a complex system, a complex system being one of multiple interacting parts, which if you want to be technical is basically our strongly coupled nonlinear interactions, but essentially the interactions are such that they're just as important as the parts. So if you take an analog clock and take it apart and understand all the gears and springs, you have understood the clock. A clock is a Newtonian machine, but a climate and other systems, like for instance our body's endocrine system, our complex systems, understanding the parts only takes you some of the way towards understanding the whole. And as Aristotle said, passionately arguing against democratic's atomic materialism, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So I acknowledge Aristotle's ghost in the room at this moment because we cannot describe the system, a complex system on the basis of its parts alone. So some of the things that we do know about complex systems are that they have feedback loops, which I'm gonna explore a little bit further. Feedback loops are, can often be destabilizing if they are for example, like the most famous feedback loop in the climate system the ice albedo feedback, where, well, let me have a character from my story talk a little bit about that. So here is this piece. So my story has different characters and different parts of the world because I'm trying to engage with this question that how can we as locals, as individualists, how can we dare to imagine something that's global and something that's connected? And so that's why my story has multiple characters and multiple places. And it's what I hope is a valiant failure and an attempt to go towards the kind of literature that actually speaks to our time. So here in the story at this moment, the character Dinesh, whose thoughts you were witness to in the early extract that I read is reading an old letter from a lover of his who is now on the moon for a mining expedition and who has stopped sending him messages. He has no idea. So Dinesh on earth in Delhi has no idea what's happened to his lover Manu. So here is Manu's letter, one of his last letters. Long ago when I was a child, my mother would show me the round face of the moon before bed. I would look for the man in the moon and having found him would go to bed without a fuss. Now I'm here on this empty arid world and I am the man on the moon looking back at my world. Behind me the bots have fanned out over the mare sounding, digging, scraping. Instead of building large as we can do on earth, the mission has focused on building small, fast, numerous little intelligent machines roving over the surface looking for minerals. I volunteered for this mission because I thought that pillaging the moon was better than pillaging the earth. But for some time I have not been entirely certain of this. I'm changing here slowly in some way that I can't understand. Perhaps it's the cold. Imagine being 200 degrees below zero. That's how cold it can get here. Winter has permanent residence on the moon. Even inside my suit or in my little hab, I am cold. I shouldn't be. What I miss is sunlight falling on snow in the Himalayas. There is no snow here. This is a dry world. The snow queen wouldn't be happy here even though it's always winter. The snows are vanishing on earth too. When I left the international orbiter on my way here, I sent back a few high-res images of the Arctic. Have you seen them? The North Pole, free of summer ice. It's astonishing how quickly the sea ice vanished. It's the power of the accelerating feedback loop, the vicious cycle, heat the air and water, melt snow, warm the air and water even further, which melts more snow until all the snow is gone. Dinesh sees his life too as an endless accelerating loop. Nothing seems to move in his life except in circles, like his desire for a cigarette, then the self-disgust and avoidance, then sweet desire rising in him again. So feedback loops. The physician Robert Lustig blew the whistle recently on the health hazards of sugar, likening it to a poison because of the way it stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain. It's essentially an addiction. The more you have, the more you want. Lustig goes as far as to say that all of modern industrial civilization is built on the positive feedback loop of addiction in some form or the other. So here's another example of a feedback loop, one that involves the human element as well as natural elements. So as the optic melts, as the ice melts, the dangerous optic becomes more accessible to oil and gas drilling. So the fossil fuels that have, the fossil fuel industry that has caused in a large part the climate crisis is now ecstatic because of the melting of the optic because that means that more oil and fossil fuel reserves are accessible to them. So in fact, the little picture in the lower right is a picture of gas from the Russian drilling companies, RIG, which started drilling for oil in 2013. So what is it about what I call the Newtonian paradigm? What is it about it? That we can't see that we're working in feedback loops. And one of the challenges of climate change indeed is its transdisciplinarity because you saw in that one picture how the human element and the natural element are entangled together. And when I use the word entangled here, I mean it not in the sense of quantum entanglement but in the sense of complex entanglement. And in that sense, the lack of recognition that we work with a highly entangled complex system that we call the climate and that it's not independent of human systems has led us to such feats of which I say are delusionary, which others may not agree, but as geoengineering. So the issue of stratospheric control of the earth's climate, this little snarky picture is from another academic who was researching this idea of geoengineering. Geoengineering to me looks at the earth like a Newtonian machine that it does not recognize that it's a complex system. A complex system has surprises. It has feedback loops and tipping points. It has sudden accelerations. It has sudden changes. It has unintended consequences. The Newtonian machine is entirely predictable. It's entirely deterministic. It is a way for us to imagine control where there's not always control. And the irony in all this is that the Newtonian paradigm which has given us this world today and if you think about the impacts of the Newtonian vision, it's the industrial revolution and everything that follows from it. It's the way we live our lives. Consider for instance the nuclear family which has been an exception in human history, something that has been here on the mass scale only recently since the industrial revolution. Think of the impact of Newton's paradigm on our lives, on our economics, on the assumption of mainstream economics that for instance economics is led through or well-being of a society is led through individual humans acting in rational self-interest, social atomism, separateness, the Newtonian machine with us whether we recognize it or not. And the irony is here, the universe is not Newtonian. So going back to physics, my area, you can see the xy plot here is something that I've adapted, taken from a textbook that I use and what it shows you is where Newtonian physics fits in the grand scheme of things. So on the x axis we have size or distance and Newtonian physics occupies a range between 10 to the negative five and 10 to the 22 meters. And then on the y axis you have speed. The speed of light is a barrier beyond which there is nothing because it's forbidden to go above the speed of light by Einstein's relativity. Newtonian physics, the top bar on the box labeled Newtonian physics represents about 10% of the speed of light. But Newtonian physics is still more or less useful. The thing about Newtonian physics is that it's really, really powerful. It enables you to send human beings to the moon and back. It has, it is largely responsible for the technological comforts that we enjoy. And yet it's a small box in a big picture. It fails when your speeds are too high. It fails in the realm of the very small and also in the realm of the very large. So in my explorations in rethinking and philosophy and pedagogy and so on, I feel compelled to draw a z-axis in this picture where the z-axis towards the origin describes simple systems and further out describes systems of increasing complexity. And if I then extend out the Newtonian rectangle into a three dimensional box, then you see that that's the box in which we have learned to live and function and think. And where climate change is, is actually here outside the box. So another way of saying the same thing is to talk about the concept of modernity in the context of climate change. And if I, and I'm gonna take just a small piece of a very large and complicated concept and history, modernity, the notion that humans are separate from nature and able to have power over nature related to the idea of progress of continual evolution towards better and better. It drives our development paradigm, for instance. And the question is whether we can do this before that happens. And really, we all know the answer. We're trying to do this while this is already happening. My own intersections with these ideas actually have, start with when I was 17 years old, growing up just finished school, and actually went and studied with a bunch of other teenagers. One of the most famous movements, environmental movements in the world, that's also a social ecological movement, a movement for social justice and social change. And the way I understand environment is really inextricable from social justice. So that was an eye-opener for me. And then my Arctic trip that I described, that's me on the beach of the Arctic Ocean in Barrow. And more recently, the year without a winter project, which really helped me to blow open my mind and to kind of raise the lid of the bubble a bit and peer at what was beyond. So I started this by talking about home and the idea of home and what home means to an immigrant, which is a very hazy, foggy sort of concept. But when we think about our planet as a whole, we are also talking about home, what's happening to our home. And in fact, there were two kinds of stories that I heard when I was in the Arctic. One kind of story, I'll give you an example, a scientist told me this. He said, well, a bunch of us were camped out on the sea ice, and we just set up camp and we had a native elder, an Inupiak Eskimo, and the Eskimos have lived there for thousands of years. He was their guide. So he said, we had a native elder guide. We just set up camp on the ice, quite a distance from the shore. And then the guide said, all right, you got to pack up right now and leave. Get off the ice, go back towards the shore. The scientists looked around, the instruments weren't saying anything. The air was mild, the sky was blue, nothing on the weather stations, but they listened. They packed up, they left, as they went towards the shore, there was a resounding crack and the piece of ice that they were on broke away from the shore ice and floated off into the Arctic Ocean. So that's one kind of story I've heard about the fantastic attunement with their environment that native peoples, indigenous peoples have that we've lost, that sense of home where you have a constant interaction with your surroundings. We've lost that. The other kind of story I heard, however, was this, that the change in the Arctic is so weird, the weather that they're experiencing is so strange that there's nothing in ancestral memory of the Eskimo peoples that can speak to it. And so, and the ice has thinned out so much, the floating sea ice has thinned out so much that it's actually dangerous to make trails, to cut trails for the wailing season. But what's more, native elders are now saying that they cannot interpret the land as well anymore. It's as though the land that birthed them and raised them and fed them is starting to speak a different language. So even the people who haven't left home and don't want to leave home are seeing that home is becoming unrecognizable. So how do we engage with this? And I'm going to, I'm not going to take more than a couple more minutes because I'm mindful of the time. I'm going to race over this slide and not really say very much about my philosophical influences. What I really want to get to is this slide, where if we look at ourselves as part of a complex system and say, how can we engage with the climate crisis? How can we make a difference? Well, one of the things we know is that if you change your light bulbs and buy an electric car, it will make absolutely no difference, all right? This is very, very discouraging because we've been taught to think on an individualistic basis. However, if you think of yourself as a node in a network and one where you're pulling on the links, you're shaking the links up, you're being shaken as well because it's not as though you can step out of it. And then say, hey, this is a Newtonian machine. I'm going to try to fix this. You can't do that. You're caught in the middle. So the one thing we can do is to recognize that we are nodes in this network and then see what we can do to push or pull our connections to allow ourselves the humility that we can also be changed as we make change. And as we see that, I'm remembering Indra's Net, which is a concept from my own culture, which is basically the idea that the universe consists of a net of jewels. Jewels caught in a vast network where every jewel reflects the whole. And I'd like us to be able to think of us as being part of an Indra's Net, so to speak. And I believe that in thinking that way, we'll avoid the hubris of the technologists who are looking at climate as purely a technological problem. And if we think about it, we think about the Newtonian paradigm, the idea of thinking that the universe consists of parts, if you understand the parts, if you understand the whole and so on and so forth. The machine as a deterministic machine that you can control by adjusting a few parameters. Think about it as a child's terrified dream or desire for a home where everything is safe, everything is controllable. It comes from fear. And our entire modern industrial civilization, I believe, is driven by that fear, that child's conception of a home that can never be a home of absolute safety and control. And instead, I invite you to enjoy being part of this vast and utterly fascinating and incredibly rewarding network where to enjoy it fully, we also have to accept death and suffering. So ultimately, and this is my last slide, what I try to do in my work and my writing is to bring back place, to find a marriage of the local and the global through all of these different things. And I'm going to end with a line from Sahil Ludhianvi, who is a poet from India. And I'm going to quote it in Hindi first and then translate for you. He said this. He said, Aau ki koi kwaab bune kal ke vaste. And what that means is, come, let us weave dreams. For tomorrow's sake. Thank you. Thank you so much. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed being able to welcome words and stories into this room. I mean, I think architects are very much storytellers also, although usually through other means. And so I think we have a lot to learn from this kind of work. And I appreciate this invitation to join this sort of a web of dreams very much. I would actually like to turn it over to our audience pretty quickly, since y'all have gone on this journey with us. And since we don't have too much time, but I do want to start maybe with one question, which maybe I shouldn't ask, because it could be that a lot of folks in the room haven't read this book, but I would actually like to maybe bring up Amitav Gosh briefly and his text on The Great Derangement about why climate has generally been absent from fiction so far. And Vandana has written a really great review of this recently that I recommend looking at. But one of the comments that Gosh makes is that when we think about this era of the Anthropocene, which I think many have wanted to sort of revise to something like the capital scene and thinking about how capital has enacted these sort of transformations of the globe, he insists that the other term that we have to keep in play is empire. And that's the thread that I think I saw running through everybody's work is that reckoning, not only with capitalism, but with the sort of history of empire, both the asymmetries that sort of produced the condition that we're in, but also the kind of cynical desire to preserve those asymmetries. I mean, I think this is at the root of a lot of climate denialism. It's not that the science is actually up for debate, but rather that the outcomes that it leads to are the thing that are being in some way denied. And so I guess my question would be in the realm of the sort of fiction, the artistic, the literary, how could we sort of pick up on where Danana ended and to think about techniques, perhaps very activist techniques about helping us to think beyond the sort of individual space that I think as you so nicely put it, belongs to the sort of 19th century novel into a rethinking our collectives and contesting I think these sort of legacies of empire that result in the situation we find ourselves in. And perhaps even how might that implicate a sort of architectural imagination along with it if anyone wants to go there. And then audience questions. And it resists the urge to weigh in on this in order to hand it over and also leave some time because I'm curious of the audience. How they might respond to that and also other questions you might have in mind, but Danana or Dylan? Well, I appreciate your bringing up empire since I'm a product of colonialism, as you can tell from the language I'm speaking at the moment. And I think that it is ignored often in the discourse and Ghosh does a pretty good job in his book, The Great Derangement, which I recommend to everybody, to bringing out how empire intersects with capitalism to create. I don't think he says enough about capitalism because I think that does bear repeating. But and also science is also implicated in that. So for instance, much of botany for instance, comes from scientists accompanying colonialists into these new countries and cataloging the plants and animals and so on. So science is also a product of colonialism in that respect. And much as I love science, I have to paraphrase Robert Frost, a lover's quarrel with it for that reason. I think that, and I really appreciate, Dylan, you're bringing up the story, much of story because not everyone would have done that. Not everybody would have talked about the guides on the journey. And I think in recognizing, if you look at geoengineering, I'll just end with this comment and then hand this over. One of the issues with the stratospheric injection of aerosols is that the last time that something like that happened naturally, which was the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the 1990s, one of the things it did was to disrupt the monsoons. Now millions of people depend on the monsoons in South Asia. So geoengineering, tinkering large scale with the systems of the earth is also an ethical issue. So who's going to be on the wrong side of it? And if so, is that something that's going to be, you know, dismissed, saying, oh, well, you know, that's the price they have to pay. That's collateral damage. So it's an ethical issue as well, I think. Just a quick thought about the forces of globalization and perhaps the deepest fear in the West is that climate change, the paradigm of climate change will not precisely replicate the colonialist paradigm. I think that's what one of Ghosh's main disturbances in his lectures, that the outcome of climate change, and indeed, as he suggests, the origins lie in Asia and that the marginalization of the West in the 21st century story is perhaps the greatest fear to be realized. And the greatest confrontation. It's because it's the, I think Ghosh puts this a little more elegantly, but he says something like, we have in the West, we have no greater investment than in our own sovereignty and self-determination and in our own power. And that's precisely what is threatened by climate change. Thank you so much for the talks. And I wanted to ask whether it seems like the project is a really interesting attempt to produce a kind of interdisciplinary phenomenology of climate change in many, many different registered to tease out the complex dimension of it. And I wonder, to do so, you have to take climate change as a figure, as an aesthetic figure, not only as a technical problem, right? And I'm really on board with that. And I wonder if it's possible to do that in a way, so you've brought empire, we have capitalism. And I wonder if it's possible to do that without a figure and aesthetic phenomenology of socialism as well. Socialism as a kind of dialectical couple that is perhaps intrinsic to the birth of climate change in the terms you've put it. But also because it gives us perhaps a little bit more of a hopeful, even if it also has roots in a kind of Newtonian model, but understanding its connections to also anti-colonial practices, decolonial, anti-imperialist practices, and post-colonial practices, it also perhaps offers another lineage which is very political towards attempting what you're trying to do. Just briefly to say, in trying to both trace and articulate climate and climate change as a sort of aesthetic and phenomenological space, I'm following the artworks rather than sort of leading with theory. And that's sort of a methodological, principled decision, but absolutely, I think that it is a direction that I would very much quite curious to follow that direction. And in fact, there are some people here working in a museum of capitalism. I see them in the audience who I would be very curious, perhaps they would beat me in the direction of thinking about how a critique of capitalism and or socialist ideologies, examples, historical events might suggest a different relationship to climate. And of course, Marxism does not necessarily imply a better relationship to environment and use of natural resources, et cetera, but it's certainly an important part of that political aesthetic space. But I actually wanna put you on the spot, James, and ask if you might be able to speak to that question a little bit in terms of Arcosanti, because Solari is a good example of someone who has a kind of utopian socio-economic and environmental vision that would certainly be one example that we are trying to follow up in the book. Solari is dangerous territory in this room, but maybe the thing that, well, I would say two things. First of all, I think that's your characterization is I think exactly something I find super interesting about the project, which is in my mind, as we as a discipline struggle with the sort of managerialism that's latent within pretty much any way that we talk about climate and the way we try to design it into our projects. Even being critical of that managerialism tends to use the same language and kind of repeat the hegemony of the managerial. And so for that reason, I think the sort of phenomenological aspects of this project and the persuasion, which is a word that I think is great to bring in, is I think really urgent. For me, the Solari thing, which maybe doesn't totally connect in my reading of it, to the question is that I think if there's a fiction in Solari, the fiction isn't so much the fiction of the sort of socialist utopia that would take place in these archeologies, but rather that his fiction is actually the city. I think for me, it's Solari's sort of withdrawal from the city as a site of political action that is perhaps the most like fictive thing about it. And so I think the kind of fascinating disavowal of the urban is, which is part of the, I think the romance of Arco-Santi for sure, but is the thing that I find the most perhaps troubling in it also, which I look forward to digging into more since I am late with writing my essay for this. Particular book, but thank you for sparing the question. I just want to add a couple of comments. One is that I wish very much that art would walk outside on the streets more often because having it shut away doesn't reach as many people to engage with it. And I wish that we could also have more examples of architecture where you have trees growing out of walls and things like that. I grew up in Delhi where everyone keeps the windows open all the time. And so we had birds nesting inside the house sometimes. And it was just this inter-penetration of spaces that actually formed who I am. I mean, I was raised by non-humans as much as by humans. So I wanted to comment on that, that I think art needs to be out there. And, but the other thing I also want to say is that, is that I think that there's great potential in socialism, but I also think that, and one of the things I've been doing is looking at indigenous cultures, particularly because they are under threat from both the fossil fuel industry as well as climate change. And I think they have things to remind us of without, you know, falling into the noble savage, you know, trying not, I'm not trying to go there, but looking at a lot of indigenous cultures, including some in India that I've been, I've been following their struggles. I think they have something to give us of, where they don't have a conception, some of them, of nature or environment because those are separation words. Those presume a separation. So I think that where we are probably going is a place that's both very old and very new, taking elements from ancient, from old cultures, from political economies. Ideas like socialism, like certain kinds of anarchism as well. So it's a very exciting place to be in the sense that we're kind of reinventing our species. Thank you. I think this is really a wonderful presentation and the kind of interlinks between the three presentations that kind of implicit. I think we're really, really wonderful, wonderful to hear. But I did want to sort of immediately ask the questions that are somewhat immediate at hand. And that has to do with the current politics and the kind of elephant in the room, but whether it's Trump and here or Modi in India, they are changing the kind of overall sort of sentiments and the kind of language we are all fascinated with including in the architecture school here and the kind of work we are doing is not something that's necessarily translatable to the kind of politicians. I mean, they're probably not even paying attention to that. So as we are thinking of these large feedback loop systems, even these little hopefully brief, but who knows, kind of trajectories do have a large impact, I believe. So I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts given your work and particularly the kind of imaginative language and transdisciplinary connections that you're all making, what effect if any do you think would have on the kind of immediate politics that I think is doing actually, we're already seeing big kind of damage and perhaps a regression of that, in some ways I feel like a lot of time, energy is being kind of wasted on the kind of regression that's happening with the immediate politics. So I would really love your thoughts on this. Okay, yeah, so I'm very sensitive to the idea that art not exists as a kind of palliative, have a palliative function and be a kind of replacement or some consulatory substitute for other forms of action. And Vandana's point about the problem of conservation as Dick Cheney once put it, conservation as a personal virtue and that the, to repeat the forms of atomism in our practicing climate solutions will be to fail and that the bottom line is we need a mass political movement for change. There's, as Vandana's talk clearly explained, this is a systemic issue, not one that can be acted upon really from within but in kind of total way by a mass, some sort of mass movement and that's the predicament we find ourselves in at this minute where that kind of political, in a way the question that I asked myself is the Trump moment accelerating forms of resistance that need to happen anyway is that the silver lining to the misery. And in part response to the earlier question is always go back to the idea that climate change is the single greatest failure of market capitalism but also that a social system that is not eco-cilable is yet to be invented. I just wanted to read something that a colleague or friend of mine sent me when I started having this conversation, actually it was after the, when Trump got elected, I was in Marrakesh for the COP 22 conference and I woke up that morning and looked, I had gone to bed the night before I think and I had said to friends, I'm not gonna stay up and celebrate because let's get on to the protesting Hillary because then that's where the real fight is gonna be. I woke up in the morning in horror and felt actually so ill that I didn't know whether I had actually gotten sick or it was the political news and it like as it did I think for many of us it just said about this new situation where all of our attention was consumed by just the horror of the situation. To the point that actually going to the COP 22 that day, it was almost like it was the second day of the conference and it was almost like it was over. There was no one could talk about anything else and I actually thought, well what am I doing? It's nice a book about art and science fiction and philosophy but really this is crazy that I'm doing this project and I went back to my childhood dreams of being a Greenpeace activist and a hero and chaining myself to a nuclear reactor was the only impulse I could think of and when I came back to New York for a visit the next time I spoke with a friend of mine who's a poet and his name is Enrique Enriquez and he reads tarot cards as poetry and I usually talk to him about the strangest things, the play of metaphors and images and but this time I wanted to talk about Trump obviously because I couldn't think about anything else especially since I'd seen someone in a make America greeting in hat at the first for the first time at customs and thought I would be ill and he warned me against the possibility of the possibility to pay attention to anything else being exhausted and he sent me this really short little poem of sorts who's learning Italian and he said he's an Italian the word for gazing is guardar and guardar is the Spanish word for keeping as if our gaze would prevent things from being lost and whatever that means I keep it very close to me because I have somehow in this project and I guess maybe in all of my research and curatorial practice had some sort of deep like faith or belief that paying attention and gazing is will be important even if we don't know when and how it will bear fruit I mean maybe this is a philosophical faith because we still read books that are thousands of years old or maybe no one has read for a few hundred years and absolutely there are huge political fights to be had and making art is not a substitute for that but I think the at least for some people to be very present and very reflective about the situations that are going on around us is important because somebody needs to notice and not all of us be so busy and so overwhelmed by this barrage of catastrophes that drain our capacity for attention and actually as clickbait kind of feed off of them I think it is a sort of rebellion in a way as well to turn off the phone, turn off the news feed, go somewhere whether it's very close or very far away and count bottles of plastic bottles or look into a volcano or see melting ice sheet and I guess I think some of that gazing and guarding needs to happen. Could we actually, we have to surrender the room but I was thinking it would be kind of fun to just gather all the questions that you wanted to ask real quick and we might not answer them. Anybody have any last, let's end with questions please. So thank you everyone, I'm really excited for the book. This is such a nice taste but my question was a little bit off of that one as well. Just if I really appreciated how you went back to really the beginnings of calling the characters and the people with whom climate change really began and even it began before then with Empire and calling all of those characters that it was already starting then into the dialogue and in that way seeing ourselves as being part of a much longer reach of time and also time into the future and that negotiation between the time of Empire and the current moment now with urgency and then seeing into the future for beyond our own capacity the reach of ourselves or lifetimes and wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that kind of paradigm shift of thinking also with the complex system that the complex system also involves that reach of time and how that attention between urgency and history that I think is so interesting to go back to those concrete moments and those characters has been for you in your kind of shifting thinking about how to act now upon these long and deep systems. Thanks. Any other questions to put on the table before we get a provisional answer? Well, let me comment on that and actually also on the previous question which is that I think we really have, we do have to look to the past to see for instance when young people, when 18-year-old undergraduates come to me and say, what can we do? That to understand how social change has happened in the past and it's a very interesting enterprise. I don't know if historians look at it from a complex system's perspective or not but if they could, I mean that I think we need to start talking to each other. If I were to, I mean there's no magic bullet but if there was one, it probably would have the words connect, connect, connect inscribed on it. I think we have to make meaningful connections across disciplines but also across people. I'm like a really shy person. My favorite place is under a rock but I'm here right now because even though I'm not very comfortable but because I think it's important and because I want to get over this and be able to reach people and connect with people and have them affect me and change me. So I think meaningful connection, whether it's in the context of immediate movements, for instance, if you hear something is happening and you have to be there and you get all your friends and family there and fight for political change or fight for policy change and so on and so forth but also at the same time, God what is precious, the fact that we have air to breathe and the fact that the world is still beautiful and that our bodies still need good nourishment looking after ourselves. This is not an argument for hedonism but it's also an act of rebellion to guard what is precious and important as well as to connect and as wide away as possible so that we actually connect in a way to put ourselves at risk, our sense of comfort, our sense of privacy, our sense of individuality to put all of that at risk because too much is at stake. And part of it is time and history and learning from what the past can tell us. That's a beautiful point and what I was trying to say in my story at the moment on the mountaintop was that self-flagellation and self-loathing is not a pathway and the future that you described or the kind of activation that you're describing is exactly makes that point that I think there's a lot of liberal political headbutting that goes on and self-tight casting as a kind of where we're simply trading in liberal guilt and shame and there needs to be a revolution in consciousness as well that enables us to see beyond that and imagine the new paradigms that will be forced upon us before long. So and this, the last point that I'll make is that there's one of the narcissistic bubbles that we can burst. It's precisely the one that you talk about which is the bubble of presentism which is also a bubble of exceptionalism that our moment is unique, that what is important is only the latest Twitter feed and the latest news cycle. We're in this kind of accelerated presence and this doom filled future. But in fact, our history is liberating, historical connections. And not, I mean, in my new work which is on Antarctica is actually beyond the historical record and into deep time. And I can only speak personally that I begin to reflect on deep time and geological processes and biological processes of deep time. And that is a lens which just really think the human has been, has produced the little kind of left fluorescence that I've needed personally, to artistically and intellectually to be able to keep going. We all need to find that way of means of self nurturing. Well, I think we should leave it there but thank you so much for our panels. Thank you to you for embarking on this collective journey with us. We look forward to continuing the conversations. So thanks.