 Hello, welcome to the British Library. Today we're delighted to bring to you an event under the theme future thinking. It forms part of a small season of a spring event so we're hosting at the British Library under the title of the natural word. Please do look at the British Library website for more details. But tonight we think about the future with three eminent thinkers, Roman Koznaric, Kim Stanley Robinson and Gaya Vince, our chair. Gaya is an award-winning science journalist and a fellow of UCL's Anthropocene Institute in the geography department. Her books, Adventures in the Anthropocene, A Journey to the Heart of the Planet, we made one of the 2015 Royal Society, Winston Prize for Science books. And her most recent book is Transcendence, How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty and Time. There's a tab at the top of your page where you can find links to firebooks by all tonight's speakers. When I first joined the British Library a few years ago, one of the things I learned about it was that the building has been designed to last 400 years. And walking around the building, you look at the quality of the stone, the metal, the finishes and the solidity of the place. And sometimes you think, yeah, this could last 400 years easily. But then what does 400 years forward look like? What's it gonna be like? What sort of world is that robust British Library going to be existing in? Perhaps we're not that good about thinking about it. And tonight's event is designed to understand what goes on in our minds when we do think about the future and how we might start to make it a little bit better for those who are going to follow us and inherit what we have left in. Please enjoy the events and don't forget to ask your questions in the tab below the screen. Thank you. Hello, hello. Well, we are living in strange elastic time at the moment. It feels as though this pandemic has been going on forever. I mean, I can scarcely remember normal times before it. And yet at the same time, most of us are doing so little of note that all our days seem to merge into one. But while most of us are concentrating on planning the now and our immediate future, we mustn't neglect our future selves and the future people who will live on long after we've gone with the consequences of the lives that we live today. Well, today I am thrilled to be joining two exciting authors who have both written in very different ways about how we might look at the future that we face and we're going to explore some of those ideas, those ways of thinking about our future and why it matters. We may even attempt to peer into that crystal ball itself and make some predictions. And while we're talking, do send over any questions you have and there'll be time for those at the end. So I am so delighted now to introduce two very, very special authors and their books are really incredible who have been exploring different ways of thinking about the future. So you're in for a real treat. So first of all, Roman Chris Narick is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. He's the author of several books, including Empathy and he founded the world's first empathy museum. I'm holding up his book. So he's also a founding member of the School of Life and his latest book is The Good Ancestor, How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Term World. Now our other author is Kim Stanley Robinson, who's an American science fiction writer. He's a multi-award winning author of more than 20 books, including The Mars Trilogy and Aurora. And in 2008, he was named a time magazine Hero of the Environment. His latest book is The Ministry for the Future and do buy these books because they really are worth reading. So this is extremely exciting to first of all to probe our future and to talk to both of you. And I want to start, I think, with Stan and in your book, which I hugely enjoyed, there is, as the title suggests, an actual ministry for the future with global powers. And that seems really quite ambitious, doesn't it? Because if we look at the United Nations bodies, if we look at the WHO, they haven't exactly covered themselves in glory in terms of sorting out some of the really messy problems that we face as a global society. But your ministry for the future is a little bit more successful. And I wonder if you could briefly describe how it was set up and its role and why you chose this centralized body, please. Sure. And thanks for this to everybody. The Paris Agreement strikes me as a major event in world history because it's set up under the UN and all the nations on Earth agreed to try to deal with climate change by cutting down on the amount of carbon we burn into the atmosphere. And so in the Paris Agreement itself, which is a very interesting 16-page document, they give themselves the right to organize some standing committees to work on the problem. And what in my novel, I cover, say that the next 20 or 30 years with that as the organizing principle, a standing committee of the Paris Agreement. And really, as you pointed out in your question, they're overburdened. There is no one institution or organization that can solve this problem. So it's kind of like a holding tank for all of the possible solutions to be discussed and passed around as ideas. And we certainly have a lot of those already, but with the Paris Agreement as something that every nation has signed, I don't know how else we're going to organize coping with a global problem in a nation-state system that isn't really, we don't have good global governance. So it's gonna have to be a coordinated kind of a task force. So it gave me my organizing principle for this novel. In which I wanted to portray about maybe three decades in what you might call best case scenario mode where things were going as well as you could still believe in. So this is, I mean, the bar is kind of low in our minds now. And I keep thinking myself, if we dodge a mass extinction event in the next 30 years that that will be a real success. So this was the project of my novel. Thank you. And to Roman, your book is a polemic for long-term thinking in an age where much of the political and economic decision-making favors the short term. And you give examples of long-term planning in the past such as cathedrals that were commissioned with centuries-long build times and way beyond the lifetimes of their initiators. And you also give examples of people and institutions in our own time who are trying to think for the generations. And these are sort of variations on an attempt at various ministries for the future in a way. And could you talk about some of these and which ones do you think give us some sort of idea of where we might take this? Yeah, so my book's really driven by a question that was first asked by the great immunologist Jonas Sulk who developed the first polio vaccine in the 50s. But in the 70s, he asked this question, are we being good ancestors? And when I saw that question, the sort of scales for my eyes, I really started being able to almost picture all those future generations to come, the billions upon billions of people who will inhabit the future. And I think maybe for some people like Stan, they can see those people, they can hear their voices. But I think a lot of us find it really very difficult. But I've been incredibly inspired by what I call time rebels, people who are dedicated to long-term thinking and intergenerational justice. So, I mean, I think there's some that we naturally come to mind, like, you know, the Fridays for Future Movement, for example, or Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movements, those kinds of things. But there's also long-term thinking going on in other realms. So for instance, in the arts, there's the great Scottish artist Katie Patterson who's created a future library, a 100-year project where every year for 100 years, a famous writer is donating a book which will remain completely unread until the year 2114, at which point the 100 books will be printed on paper made from a thousand trees, which are being planted in a forest outside Oslo. Maybe Stan will donate a book one day and never see it published in his lifetime. It's about leaving gifts to the future. Well, think of the, you know, all my cameras are slightly gone, sorry. And just think, for example, of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is collecting millions of seeds in an indestructible rock bunker in the Arctic Circle that's designed to last a thousand years. Or the legal movements, young people in the US, for example, in the Organization Our Children's Trust, campaigning for the legal right to a safe climate and healthy atmosphere for both current and future generations. And some of those legal struggles, you know, come up in Stan's book, in the Ministry for the Future, National Level Struggles, International Struggles. So there's this whole, I think, quite exciting movement really going on that's seeing beyond the here and now, you know. Stan talks in his book about the tragedy of the time horizon. And I think I very much grasp onto that idea, too, we're inhabited by the tyranny of the now. You know, we need to think beyond the long-term escape from the present tense. Yeah, I mean, it's difficult. It's difficult to escape from the present tense, given that that's the time we actually live in. It is a challenge. What was so seductive about your book, Stan, is that it's also plausible. And it speaks to us very directly. And partly that's because it is set in the very near future, a time that's not that disconnected to our own. You know, I know you've written books sent even millennia in the future, but you chose to do this book set really in almost in our time, but just over the horizon of our time. And I'm wondering, why did you make that decision? What was the thinking behind it? Well, I've been a utopian science fiction writer for about 30 years, where most of my novels have tried to portray positive futures. And they've ranged out to the year 2312 because maybe as far as I've gone, but there's a famous problem with utopias that the name comes from Sir Thomas Moore, the Great Trench, so that utopia in Thomas Moore's novel was a peninsula where they cut a trench across the peninsula so that they became an island. And what the Great Trench represents in utopian studies is the gap between the world we live in now and the better social order that the utopia describes. And most utopias give themselves the free pass of a fresh start. In The Dispossessed by Le Guin, they're kicked off to the moon of their planet. In Island by Huxley, they're off on an island on their own. In most of the Great Utopias, the Great Trench is there and somehow they've gotten a fresh start and can design from scratch, and it comes out better. Or in some cases it doesn't. But what I got interested in was you can, in fact, in many, it's not that hard to imagine the world being run better than we run it now. That isn't really the problem. The problem is, how would we get there from where we are now? Given the massive infrastructure and the massive social system that we live in, the network of laws, international and national, and the economic system of neoliberal capitalism, it all looks and wants to look like the only alternative. It wants to look like it's permanent and unchangeable. So having worked on it for 30 years, I thought, well, let's bring it on home. And that has been a repeated effort of mine in the last couple of novels, New York 2140. Well, that's naturally, that's cast out far enough that its connection to now is somewhat metaphorical. In my trilogy about Washington, D.C., Green Earth, well, that's set far enough out that the climate catastrophes have already hit. And so I just needed to bring it back home. Let's start now and describe a plausible bridge across the Great Trench that you could believe in. And so that meant it had to be messy, chaotic, filled with violence and pain and stupidity, but still a best case ending. So, I mean, I would regard it as a somewhat crazy project, but it's so much, you know, when is it never, it's always been crazy, so why not give it a try? And so it, and it also brought to bear everything that I've been working on for the previous couple of decades. I could throw it all in and the kitchen sink as well. So it's a long, messy novel, but it was time for that one. Yeah, and it works really well. I mean, it is, you know, it is actually really believable and we do care because this is a world we're very familiar with. And is that not a real challenge, Roman, in long-term thinking that it's actually hard to imagine, let alone care about people several generations ahead of us. And also that the pace of change right now is so great compared to what it was a few centuries ago, that it's really difficult to predict. It's a predict the future and predict what will happen then. So how do we care and why should we care? Yeah, but two really interesting and difficult dilemmas. I mean, you know, because the book I've written really isn't about trying to predict any kind of future. It is primarily about how we should care and why we should care. I mean, Groucho Marx famously said, why should I care about future generations? What have they done for me? Yet anybody, oh sorry, there's something going wrong with my camera. Can you hear me still? We can still hear you. So it's really interesting. So do talk through it and hopefully the camera will catch up. It is clicking back on. So I think anybody who with young people in their life is able to, with a bit of effort, make an imaginative leap at least a century into the future. I mean, I've got my daughter, for example, is 12 years old. I can close my eyes and imagine her in the year 2100. I just went off again then, you know, when she's like 92 years old. You know, Guy, you recently, you know, did something on the radio where I heard you imagining your own kids when they're in their 80s, a letter to your own children. And we can do that. I can close my eyes and imagine that world that my daughter's facing or my twin brother are facing. And, you know, that's just one step away from my own life. And then if I think of her grandchildren, my daughter's grandchildren, they'll be alive mid 22nd century perhaps. So that's an intimate relationship. And so I can imagine that. The second question you raise. Well, look, what about the uncertainty of the world? I sometimes think that this idea of the world so uncertain is a kind of ideology and excuse for doing nothing. You know, this idea that we don't know what world's going to come. So let's just wait till the future hits us and then respond then. But actually, we know a hell of a lot about the future. On the one hand, no, I don't know if the 2049 is going to be like Blade Runner 2049 and the machines have taken over. No, I don't know that. But we know a lot about the ecological future. We know that basically as a business as usual in 2100, we're going to be at three to four degrees of heating and one to do degree meters of sea level rises. We don't know exactly how much it's going to be. But I know that my daughter when 2100 is going to need air to breathe in the water to drink. So there is something that unites us all, you know, across class and other barriers. And of course, that just made me think actually of a great UN report, thinking of international institutions by Phil Alston, who was the former UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. And he talked about the idea of climate apartheid that's coming. He talked about how Hurricane Sandy, you know, when it hit New York in 21, not 2112 and 2012, you know, the Goldman Sachs had 10,000 sandbags around it and they had their own generators and they were fine behind their walls. About half a million other New York as many of them, mostly people of color had no access to healthcare and education. And there are these differentiated future effects. So I'm not saying that any of this is easy to deal with. And we need to think about these different ways that the future has been colonized as I put it in my book, that we treat it like a dumping ground for ecological degradation and technological risk. And there are differentiated effects. The Global South gets hit more than, you know, the Global North, which is exactly how Stan's book, you know, starts with a mass tragic event, you know, in the Global South while in India with millions of people dying. And that's really wrenching, but a kind of crisis that the kind of thing that might kick start us into action. Yeah, that's a very powerful thing actually. Both of you write in your books about the power of crisis, of a huge crisis to trigger these big moments, these big movements for long-term planning and social change. Yeah, so in, yeah, Stambings begins his book with a huge heatwave, which is really, it's a really powerful beginning to a book actually. At first I picked up the book and I was like, God, nearly 600 pages, are you joking? And then before I knew it, I was bang in there. So that worked. But that was a very powerful heatwave. And right now, obviously we are still very much in this global pandemic with just emerged from a year of fire, presumably going into another year of fire. I mean, is this our crisis? I don't know who wants to answer this, but is this the crisis that's going to trigger this? I'd love to hear from both of you. I think it is. But I think it's a, the pandemic itself was a slap to the face where everybody on earth had to admit that they were part of a global civilization and that stuff happening on the other side of the world could completely disrupt your home life at home. And that this was news and felt news, not something that you just read, but something you had to live. And then it went on and on and you had to contemplate it. So the pandemic was a slap to the face. And we saw some countries and some cultures dealing with it well and others poorly. We saw the scientific community respond really quickly and cooperatively and well. We saw the political communities be slow and disorganized and sometimes completely stupid. And then in all of that, the constant drum breed of climate disasters that people had to deal with smoke that there has been also floods that the glaciers are melting. And that's the water supply for a billion or two people on earth. The whole thing, there's no such thing as climate denialism anymore. That's just a residual pose. But by and large, the functioning world is now completely aware that we can't cook the planet as we were cooking it. So the, what was somewhat theoretical and hypothetical this 1.5 C rise, the two C rise, beyond that, higher than that, and you get to wet bulb temperatures where people simply die as in the opening season, seen in my novel, but also lots of other subsidiary bad things begin to happen. The release of methane from its frozen state offshore. And then, what about the tipping points? Well, there's a new kind of tipping point. I think that you might call a social in civilization itself. We've gotten over a tipping point into. Becoming determined to act as a civilization. I'm seeing it in the plans for the recovery from the pandemic. In the talk of keeping 30% of the land surface free for wild animals. And then, we'll talk amongst the central banks of paying for climate reduction work through carbon quantitative easing means. These, these are adding up to a kind of social tipping point into real action. And what I think the pandemic might have done is it completely deranged the timeline of my novel, which is irrelevant. But see, I had strong things being done in the 2030s. And we basically saved a decade of dithering. By the slapping in the face of the pandemic and that it's in the 2020s where we're going to, which is good, because this is when it needs to happen. It's in the 2020s when we'll begin to actually deal in a systemic way, which is to say an economic way, as well as the kind of. What Roman's talking about, I would call a structure of feeling that in society, there's a structure of feeling that our common basic human animal emotions are organized by linguistics and by culture into a structure of feeling. It's Raymond Williams, the British philosopher, and that the structure of feeling is now shifting quickly to a different structure of feeling that takes into account the future generations more properly than had been true before under neoliberal capitalism. So it's a jumble, but at least it's a jumble that's begun now rather than after a decade of dithering and wasted time. Well, I think it helps that you got rid of Trump. Thank God. Otherwise, I think we would be in a very different place right now in what we're talking about. I will just raise the fact that when we're one of the central problems when we're thinking about the future in any kind of grand scale is this question of whose future because we live in a very unequal global society, unequal in terms of poverty and opportunities, and also in terms of the impacts that we each feel and we each contribute towards. And, you know, so have this shared vision, this idea. I think you resolved it quite well Stan in this idea that there were basically climate terrorists who helped drive change. I thought that was a really clever idea actually from the poor world. So they got agency in that way. In the world that we're in now, I don't know, would you like to see climate terrorists or is there another way of resolving this in the nonfiction world that we all live in? Well, I would hope that it doesn't happen. I think that it never helps to have violence. My book maybe doesn't make a good enough distinction between violence against property and violence against people. Sabotage, noncompliance, general strikes, getting in the way of business as usual and the extractive industries by breaking stuff. I think we'll see more on that. And then if there isn't climate equity, then in other words, if the Paris Agreement calls for shared but differentiated responsibilities, which is to say the rich nations pay more. Having over the last couple of centuries sucked value out of the developing world by way of colonialism. And so between carbon burn and imperialist history, the developed nations simply owe the world more. And if that happens, which it can, it will be an investment in a peaceful, safe future. If it doesn't happen, there are going to be people angry enough to take action. And I think that it's going to be as targeted and effective as the action described in my book, which is a kind of a mission, impossible fantasy of violence being directed intelligently. Usually it's spasmodic and destructive to the people who are doing it as well as the people that they're angry at. It would be better. And my book is trying to make the point that we can do this by changing laws. We can do it legally now, but we can do it violently later. So it's a, it's an argument made that, you know, I wrote this book in 2019. I wrote it before the pandemic with the idea that we were not coping, that the apperance agreement was maybe going to turn out to be like the League of Nations, a great idea that failed. And then we got World War II. And I take Roman's point that crises, you can have what Naomi Klein calls a shock doctrine, a crisis followed by neoliberal capitalism, a crisis at the neck even harder than before. That's one response. And it was the response in 2008. We've seen that. So a better response is actually requiring some political will on the part of what in America we call middle class citizens, but you can say the developed world has to act properly. Or else the situation is going to degrade in ways that nobody's going to like. And I, again, I think the pandemic was a slap in the face like, oh, how bad could it be? You know, I don't know what to say before. And then you can say, well, maybe it will be worse than 2020 when I was locked in my house for eight months. And people have a better lived idea of how ordinary civilization could be disrupted. And we, and we end up in a time of, of immiseration for everybody. So I think that there's a stimulus to act well now. And that it's easier to imagine it now than it was in 2019. Can I come in on that? Please do. Please do. Yeah, I'm glad you I'm glad we can see you again in full color and everything. I've changed my camera, but just to pick up on what Stan was saying there. I mean, and what, and that Naomi Klein shock doctrine thing is exactly what I was thinking of. And, and the way that, you know, for example, after the, well, actually if you go back after the depression, you know, and in response to Wall Street crash, you know, some countries, like in Scandinavia went towards social democracy. Others went towards fascism, you know, in different directions here. But I found really also fascinating in your book, Stan, the idea of the, the sort of the black wing of this, you know, this sort of green gorilla movement, which arises partly because historically we know that movements when they've got social movements, when they've become, when they've tried all the legal means and have been able to unable to get anywhere, often resort to violence. And as you say, violence against property is the one, you know, which needs to be differentiated. I mean, the suffragists, suffragists, perfect example, you know, they ended up blowing up letter boxes and smashing windows and doing things. And of course their ANC, you know, turned towards violence too. But one of the things I was thinking about reading your book, Stan, and it's, and something I've noticed actually as I've been doing events around the good ancestor, something I've noticed people keep asking me about saying, they say to me, look, I love all this long-term thinking stuff, but look at our swabbling democratic politicians, you know, why don't we just, why don't we just have benevolent dictators come and sort it out or for us? Just look at China and their massive investment in green technology. Look at Singapore with its long-term investment in health and education. And I, and so I hear that from different constituencies of people. I hear it from eminent people like the, you know, British astrophysicist and cosmologist, Martin Reese or James Lovelock saying, ah, we need to put democracy on hold for a while. I hear it from frustrated climate activists on the ground from the progressive left saying, ah, I'm just frustrated. We don't have time. We've got a short window. We need the benign dictator. And then I also hear it from the far right. You know, you've got Marine Le Pen saying that we need to, you know, block the borders. You know, and so that way we won't have to build houses because we won't have so many immigrants and we won't have to chop down the trees, you know, and it almost feels like this, this potential movement of wanting, not the green grillers, but the green dictators to come and sort it all out for us is our only hope. And I was wondering, Stan, what you, I would like to hear what you think, Roman. I mean, is the benign dictatorship the way forward? Would you say? No. Right. And why is that? Why do you think that? Well, actually it's, it's something, I used to be a political scientist back in the 1990s. And I got very into measuring democracy, you know, how democratic countries were. And that was my apparent field of expertise. In fact, now I look back, I was one of my huge blind spots. It never occurred to me that we disenfranchise future generations in the same way that slaves and women, for example, have been systematically disenfranchised, continue to be disenfranchised in many ways, you know, now. But what I did in my book is I looked at some, I got some data together actually, started getting into data rather than philosophy as my usual approach, going back to my political science days and actually looked at the evidence. Is it true that autocracies are better at long-term public policy than democracies? And I worked with something called the intergenerational solidarity index developed by a great statistician called Jamie McQuilkin. We worked together and we measured the long-term public policy performance of 122 countries on environmental factors, like, you know, renewable energy and economic things like wealth inequality and then social stuff like long-term investment in health care. And then we, we mapped that against how democratic countries were, that these sort of standard measures of this. And basically it turned out that of the 25 highest scoring countries on long-term public policy, 21 of them were democracies. And of the 25 lowest scoring countries, 21 of them are autocratic governments of various kinds, military dictatorships and, you know, monarchies and stuff like that. So the evidence actually isn't there that, you know, autocracies will sort it out all out for us, you know, Singapore and China are kind of outliners, outliers in a way like Stan. I'm actually much more enthused by the sort of the taking, you know, trying to reinvent democracy, restructure our economies, donor economics, circular economics, worker cooperatives, rights for future generations, rights for the living world. I think that's where the action is. Yeah, and these movements are definitely growing. I think it's really encouraging. I want to be slightly provocative here and say that we all agree that we have some sort of responsibility to the future generations to leave them a world that's habitable. But I wonder if we might with our long-term projects actually be intruding in the lives of those people in the future. For example, I mean, much as I enjoy visiting the odd cathedral, we have been left rather a lot of cathedrals and these huge fast buildings and a lot of statues, and we've all seen the issue with statues. And I wonder, do we have the right to impose our decisions on future generations? After all, what is important to me and my contemporaries are not necessarily what's important to them? I mean, a few centuries ago, the most revered value might have been like purity rather than now it might be freedom. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that. I think that this is a way of flipping the story around. The future is free to ignore us and will. We will just be the older generation that told themselves stories while they were doing things. And what I want to insist on is that what we need to do now is dodge the mass extinction event. Because no matter what else we do, whether it's cathedrals or plans, if the generation 100 years from now, 200 years from now has lost the thousands of species that are headed towards extinction now, you can't bring them back. There's no such thing as de-extinction. That's a name for a game that people are playing that is an interesting game because it tests out a genetic engineering and archaeology and the like. We could bring back elephants that have some mammoth characteristics. We could bring back some birds that are somewhat like panchish interpissions. I like the de-extinction project, but it is not a real thing for the thousands of species that are endangered are being lost, including most of our cousin mammals. The big mammals on the planet are the ones most endangered. And only 2% or 3% of the biomass alive on the earth today is wild animals and 97 or 8% is human beings and their food beasts. So that's a shocking number. After you realize that, you realize that our project, you can call it a long-term project, but it's actually smacking us in the face right now and has to be acted on now is to create a civilization that's in balance with the biosphere to the extent that we dodge the mass extinction event and bring these creatures back to their own health. And our health will be dependent on that and will benefit from that. And all of these projects are simultaneous. We need a just and sustainable society. Justice is really important. You can't have a dictatorship of the ecologically aware people. And the two are like oxymoron really as Roman pointed out and China itself is not a great example because in their rush to alleviate poverty that was somewhat created by colonial, their century of humiliation at the hands of Western Europe and America, but mostly Western Europe. Well, you've got a, they've created an ecological mess that they have to deal with immediately. So, we're in an emergency that is multi variant and there is no one solution. Political representation needs to exist and different people think political representation means different things to them and we have to allow that and not insist on democracy, but on good political representation and then taking care of the animals needs to be insisted on across the board, but only by way of international treaties because that's what we've got. So, the scale of the emergency as compared with the kind of clunky old fashioned and cobbled together post World War one nation state order that we live in. It's a real discrepancy and really the project of our time. I guess what I could say to reconcile what we're talking about today is the emergency that you're in right now is so pressing that it becomes the long-term project and the short-term project. The immediate project is a long-term project by definition because we're trying to keep from doing a one time only extinction event that can't be recovered from. So, Roman, I noticed that you're wearing, you've had a little costume change, it's quite interesting. Do tell me about that. But also, I'm interested in the limits to long-term. When do we stop caring about people? How many generations into the future do we decide to stop being interested in that? I mean, is it when they start evolving into a separate species? When do we stop caring? Do we still, do we care for them for the next century and then that's enough or what's your thoughts? Just to go back to why I'm wearing this, I put this Japanese like kimono on while I was listening to Stan talk because I was thinking while I absolutely agree that we must avoid the mass extinction event, I'm trying to think, okay, what are the barriers here? And one of the major barriers I see which I don't see talked about enough is the short-termism built into our political systems that we need to inject democracy itself with long-termism so that that political representation of future generations, those future generations can be brought into the room. And I'm wearing this because this is actually a robe which is part of a, it was given to me by the members of a movement in Japan called Future Design. And it's a local government decision-making process where they invite local people to discuss and draw up plans for the towns and cities where they live. So it's a form of citizens assembly. In fact, it's based on the Haduna Shonsei and Lakota idea of seventh generation decision-making found in many cultures, of course. But what they do is they invite local people to discuss and draw up plans for the towns and cities where they live. And they typically divide them into two groups. Half are told their residents from the present day and the other half are given these ceremonial robes to wear and told to imagine themselves as residents from the year 2060. And it turns out the residents in 2060 systematically advocate far more transformative plans for their towns and cities, whether it's long-term investment in healthcare or action on the ecological emergency. And so I think these are some of the kinds of mechanisms that we need to kind of reinvigorate democracy itself. Because you can have all the sustainable development goals in the world that you like, but if your politicians can't see beyond the next election or the latest tweet, you're not going to get very far. But then there's that second question that you raised there. Well, how far can we ourselves look forward? And something just popped into my mind is some research I came across really fascinating about the sort of psychology of sort of nudge psychology, behavioral psychology. So in the UK, for example, 6% of people will leave a charitable gift in their will as a charitable request to people or planet, as a charity or to friends of the earth or something. So 6% of people. But if you ask people, would you like to leave a charitable request in your will? Suddenly it goes from 6% up to 12%. And then if you ask them, if you say to them, a lot of people like leaving a charitable request in their wills, is there an issue that you really care about? Suddenly it jumps to 17%. So in other words, it's possible to switch on what I call my book, The Acorn Brain, which is our capacity to think beyond the here and now, to plant seeds for the future. And I think what this comes down to is that one of the great things about human beings is that we die, not to wish tragedy on anybody, but the fact that because of our mortality, when human beings reach middle age, they tend to start thinking about, how am I going to keep the fire of my own life still burning beyond death? There are different ways to do that. So in Russian oligarch might want a wing of football stadium named after them. That's how they preserve their legacy, but it doesn't have to be like that. We can change the structure of feeling. We can change the values so that when we are thinking about our legacies, when we're gone, we can think about not just keeping our own name in lights like Alexander the Great, but about the universal strangers of the future. If I care about my daughter when she's 90, I do care about not just her life, but all life because she's part of a web of human relationships and part of the web of the living world. So that mass extinction coming our way at speed is intimately related to my own life. I only need to think those few decades ahead. I don't need to think about the 25th century. I can think much closer than that. And that's, I think, what comes across in Stan's book very strongly that those three decades of landscape that we traverse are politically energizing, let's say. Yeah, I find in my own writing, certainly when I write about the future, I can explore all kinds of things, but as soon as I'm writing about anything personal, in my first book, I had an epilogue which was set in the year 2100 and when my son was 90 and concretely putting somebody I know and love into that scenario, it was very, very different from a purely imaginative. Even though it was, of course, imaginative, I have no idea, but it felt very different, that kind of long-term thinking. Now, remember people who are watching this, you can send in questions and we've had a few already. So I'm just going to ask you one of the questions, which is how do we ensure that governments act for the benefit of future generations without sacrificing the democratic principle that no government binds its successor? So we've been talking about making these long-term plans, but of course the difference between autocracy and democracy is that you can't make sure that everything you put in place will definitely be adhered to by your successor. Who would like to take on that? Well, do you want to go for it? Yeah, it will always be a work in progress, but there are strange... I'm thinking of the American Constitution, which has a mechanism for amendments that would change it, that were set too high, the bars set too high, and in the rest of my lifetime, I doubt we'll see any more amendments to the Constitution. So law is the imposition of the present on the future, unless the laws are changed, they hold. But I think the questioner is right. A ministry for the future is an imposition of all the other arms of government in an uncomfortable way that is hard to accommodate. In America, there should be, for instance, in the cabinet a secretary for science, but the problem is that everything in life depends on science, such that the secretary for science would be able to preempt or overrule secretary of labor, secretary of transportation, secretary of education. These are all scientifically based. So what does the secretary for science do? Well, it gets shoved up to an advisory position that doesn't have the same kind of departmental responsibilities. Wales, I did an event with Jane Davidson. Her book Future Gen is very good. She helped for the government of Wales to establish a ministry for the future. So indeed, I did an event with the minister for the future. It was quite beautiful and a lot of fun. And she says that actually now they're working on that at the UK level. But what it does is it puts a mandate across all aspects of government to look towards the generations to come and take that into account like the citizens that Roman are talking about that would represent in, and so this is partly children, but then the generations passed children as well. It's also the natural community like Ecuador has legal rights for their forest and scribed into the constitution as a, as a legal citizen, the forest. So these things are indeed outstanding problems in political science and how we govern ourselves. And I guess that the way I would want to generalize from this is it's been a kind of a aspect of our political thought that we think that it needs to be top down, that effectively the leadership, the avant garde, the Vanguard party establishes what we're trying for. And then individual people work out that the inaction of that. So that in other words, the leadership does strategy, the citizens do tactics. I want to suggest that it's backwards that that's backwards. What happens is the multitudes, the masses, the citizenry of the world, they establish what they want through a structure of feeling. They establish strategy. The leadership figures out the tactics. How do we get it done? And that will change from administration to administration from generation to generation. But the, what's important I think is to focus on strategy. What do we want? Do we want a decent world for the people for generations from now? Well, yes, we do because we have descendants. They're essentially ours. They're extensions of ourselves. So then with that strategy in mind, you have to figure out the tactics moment by moment in a, in a nasty, sometimes vicious political debate. Well, I was actually going to say pretty much the same thing about the, the way that law, civil services and so on. So, you know, government isn't just a parliament. Of course, Britain has this history of the parliament doesn't buy in the next parliament, but you know, universal declaration of human rights. Do we want to not have things which try to transcend the moment? Of course we need things to transcend the moment, but of course they need to be amendable and shift with the times like a constitution. And I guess, you know, we, the, as Stan was talking there, I sort of just thinking about, you know, how do we want to be universal in a way? And I guess it's going to sound a little bit tangential, but I was thinking about this amazing biomimicry thinker called Janine Begnez, who, you know, I'm sure, you know, you both know, you know, she talks about drawing on nature's 3.8 billion years of R&D. And in her view, you know, the way to think long-term is to learn from the living world. How do bears, beavers and bats take, you know, take care of the world 10,000 generations from now? Well, they, you know, they take care of the place that will take care of their offspring, you know? Life has created conditions conducive to life, as she said. You know, you don't foul the nest, which is what humans have been doing at an ever increasing pace and scale with a great acceleration in the last century or half century. So there's a kind of a load star, right? Which is, and this is what I really learned from actually reading Stan's book Aurora while I was writing my book, which is about creating an economy that lives stays within the limits of the biosphere. You know, you don't chop down more trees than naturally can grow back and you don't create more waste that can be naturally absorbed. You know, that's the fundamentals of ecological economics. And if you're in a starship going for two centuries, you can't keep growing and growing and growing your economy. You know, you have to live with the phosphorus you've got and preserve it and so on. So then coming back to the question in a way is we've got this load star, which is to not foul the nest, live within the planetary boundaries. And so our laws, our governance has to be aligned to that. And in different countries in different places, you might get there in slightly different ways, depending on your culture, whether you're a culture that's got seventh generation thinking built into it or not. In another culture, you might need to massively change the way the finance department does its discounting of the future, for example. But if you've got the load star, that is what we need. Can I add to that, what Roman brought up, the discounting of the future is very important, because we run by measuring and by economics, we're in a political economy. And setting a discount rate, if you set a high discount rate, 10%, then you're devaluing future generations. If you set a low discount rate or a zero discount rate, then you're rating the future generations as highly as yourself. When you make these calculations for cost benefit analysis, or is it worthwhile to spend $10 billion now, when if you put a discount rate of 10% on it in 100 years, it's only worth $100 million, so it's not worth doing, et cetera. That discount rate is a ethical statement. It has no scientific basis whatsoever. It's a statement of regard. There's a guy who won the pseudo Nobel Prize in economics for suggesting we should always have a 4% discount rate, which is actually way too high. So this seeming technique of just setting a percentage, a discount rate on how we value the future, the great English economist, mathematician Ramsey Clark, he said it should always be zero. Any discount rate at all is just a failure of the imagination and an ethical flaw of rapaciousness against the future. As Roman puts it, a colonizing the future, using them as a disposal site and also as a kind of a, an imaginary force of slaves that will recover the situation when it won't be recoverable, not by the expenditure of money. And so it's a great entry point for discussing this issue of how do we rate the future, because you can actually do it with a number, with a percentage. And of course that's a crazy. It takes it from a level of morality and religion to a level of accounting and economics, but the problem is that economics is already an expression of morality and religion. So it needs to, and it runs the world, given that we have 8 billion people that have to coordinate their efforts. So it's good to discuss it on all these levels at once and try to coordinate them as being translations of the same sets of values to different kinds of conversations and lawmaking. Yeah, I mean, we have undergone such a huge transformation just in the last, in the last century or so, because obviously these weren't such huge issues for the centuries past. It was just, we weren't, the population was increasing, but really not that much. And most of the things that we made were biodegradable. There was this surplus of resources, a nice climate that was pretty stable, not that many people. We really are moving into a very different time now where we do have to think about these things into the Anthropocene, where that has changed. So I'm going to ask you another question, which is, well, it's addressed to Stan, but I think it's one, addressed to Stan, but it's one you can both answer, which is apparently you told Stan a group of techno optimists that justice is a technology. And the question is, do you think the convergence of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movements have finally brought the vocabularies of social justice and technical science, technology and science into one conversation? So are they aligned now, or are they at least in the same conversation? Perhaps we should hear from Roman on this first because we haven't heard for a bit. Okay, let me think about that for a moment. I tell you what comes to mind actually, a moment last summer when I was at a Black Lives Matter protest in the city where I live, Oxford, and we were occupying the street, trying to pull down a statue basically of Cecil Rhodes, one of the architects of apartheid. And I mean, for me personally, this was an incredible kind of moment because on the one hand, on the left-hand side as I was sitting on the street was Oriole College, Oxford, where I'd had tutorials and learnt very bad economics 30 years beforehand. On the right-hand side was the Library of All Soul College, Codrington Library built from slave money. I was in this sort of white privilege pincer movement and it was a really good moment. And it'd partly come out of the pandemic of course and George Floyd and all of that. And I think that there has been a kind of a confluence of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter producing something. But for me, I think what I've noticed most or what I've focused on most is, sometimes people say, look, isn't thinking about the long-term being a good ancestor something for white privilege? This is a middle class for people with security in life who aren't just trying to put food on the table, dealing with their kids being beaten up by the police. And actually just reflecting on that, what's really interesting is that so many people in Black Lives Matter movement talk about intergenerational justice as well as racial justice. In other words, racial injustice is something that gets passed down from generation to generation embedded in criminal justice systems, judicial systems, culture, our economies and so on. And Leila F. Saad's written a very wonderful book called Me and White Supremacy, where she talks on page one about being a good ancestor. And then I was also thinking about my dad who was a refugee from Poland to Australia after the Second World War. And on one level, he was just trying to live in the moment, make ends meet, not think long-term. But if you think of migrants crossing the refugees, crossing the Mediterranean with a child in their arms, they are dealing with something in the moment. Maybe they're fleeing a war, but they're also thinking, I want a better life for my child. They're thinking decades in the future. And so there's something, I think, deeply connected between Black Lives Matter and long-term thinking, but I haven't really brought in the pandemic aspect and the techno thinking, and that's what Stan's about to do. Go, Stan. This is it. All right. The floor is yours, Stan. Yeah, thank you. And I think I can follow up on that in that, especially being in California, and we have such a bizarre history here and we're currently dominated by Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is famous and I think rightly so for the idea of the techno fix, that capitalism could go on and continue to do what it's been doing all along. And there's some kind of silver bullet solution that was made of technology, as in machines, as in that would that would solve all our problems and we could go on as before the silver bullet techno fix well it was probably at a conference like that because i go to silicon valley a lot where i said this is a very limited way of thinking about it and i use because it is silicon valley a computer place computer thinking your computer is a mass of articulated metal and plastic and other materials it's completely inert as one notices when it breaks without software the software has to be working the electricity has to be there but in particular crucially is software so with that added to the mix you can simply blow up the definition of technology to include language justice human rights these are all technologies these are software technologies for running society eight billion people on this planet are not automatically going to be getting along and providing all of the parts of the division of labor so that we all have what we need to survive through the cooperative work of the entire civilization that cooperation is a technological achievement of software so once you bring that in you can begin to broaden the horizons of those who are thinking that there will be a technological fix to this solution and then to finish what uh roman began the um we have a bad history we have a racist imperialist history where um white privilege is a real thing as a result of it um you you can learn from it and you can only work in the present you can't change the past given what we've been given what do we do now and at this point I would say that justice is part of our survival technology unless everybody on the planet is living at adequacy and in balance with their biosphere and with each other nobody on the planet is safe so this is a high bar unless everybody is at adequacy and I don't want to talk about happiness because we're always unhappy or happy in weird relationships to our real conditions of existence but if everybody's at adequacy then we have a chance for safety for all if if we continue in a imperialist and uh in uh inequitable world where there are um a few who are doing well and many who are suffering the thing will come crashing down on our heads and then very rich people on their fortress mansions will begin to notice that in fact they don't have um electrical supplies or food or servants or uh sperm counts there are things that the fortress mansions can't protect you against and then you two die so survivalism is a bad science fiction story a kind of fantasy of escape we're in a very peculiar kind of all or nothing situation but on the other hand that kind of spur in our butts might inspire action that we wouldn't otherwise take because now's the time yeah I mean I agree I think the um this is a great human project that we're all a part of is one of collaboration of collaboration with the people that came before us and collaboration with the people around today and um uh it's a collaboration that is unequally spread but we can't assume that we can uh well we cannot survive without each other and so unless unless this progress is um is inclusive and people feel people buy into it because they are a part of it they genuinely are a part of it it's not going to work it's going to break down um but we're coming to the end so I I would like to um ask you a question which I'm often asked actually when I um give talks um by young people particularly or parents of young people which is what hope is there for young people and I do think this is such um an important question uh to answer and it's and we owe it um to our audience and to the young people they know so I'd like to finish by putting this question um to both of you if I could um to answer this um shall I say something on that please go ahead I'm glad you mentioned the word hope actually rather than optimism because people often would ask me like are you optimistic about the future and I hate the word optimism drives me nuts because it's sort of a feels to me like a glass half full kind of way of looking at the world in spite of the evidence you you sort of you're happy about things go back to that that word which I also try and avoid which is happiness which I think Stan looks sounds like he has an antipathy towards as well but hope I like because hope in a way is a recognition of there's things that you care about the challenge might be difficult but you are committed to those values to those values of justice today and justice for tomorrow for example and so what hope is there for young people um you know I have dark days and lighter days when it comes to this um but I remember when I was doing research for the good ancestor I came across this one line and a wonderful book on economic history called energy in the English industrial revolution by Tony Wrigley an eminent demographer and he said that in the 18th century people like Adam Smith and later people like Ricardo didn't even know there was an industrial revolution going on when they were right in the middle of it or at least the early stage of it they couldn't see it right because it is very hard to see the moment of history that you're in and certainly research I've been doing around all these time rebels and long-term thinkers when I knit them all together I really see that there is a movement of kind um emerging and my hope comes from in a way trying to give people a language in which to talk about what they're doing being good ancestors being time rebels and you know there's amazing stuff happening everywhere we haven't really talked very much about about economics but I just wanted to bring up for example cities like Amsterdam you know in fact cities are one of the great technologies humans have invented as well and you know cities like Amsterdam have taken the covid moment to in effect launch a kind of green new deal post-covid recovery they have got pretty ambitious targets you know 50% circular by 2030 100% circular economy by 2050 10% of city procurement by 2022 circular in other words no waste that's quite radical no fossil fuel cars on the road after 2030 they've adopted the donor economy as their model so there's really exciting things happening and I guess ultimately you know where's the hope I think the hope is in peer-to-peer inspiration because once Amsterdam adopted these kinds of measures then Copenhagen did it now Costa Rica's doing it um there is this contagion effect a kind of a viral possibility when it comes to social learning in a way we you know in some sense of course the economic transit transformation we're looking for you know we've never been able to do this fast to transition from feudalism to industrialization to hundreds of years we need to do this so much faster now but good ideas have never been spreading so fast in history and I think that ultimately gives me hope thank you and um Stan yeah well we're in a desperate situation and I think that it's possible to survey the scene in a superficial way and throw up one's hands and say we're doomed and doomism is very comforting it's a kind of quietism it's a kind of defeat in advance not very many people will stay satisfied with it for long even if it's a common element of our internet lives it's a scary enough situation where you could indeed say well the sky is falling and some people can go in a mask of the red death and let's just party on while we've got the opportunity to party because there's not going to be a next generation other people will rebel against that thought and and um fight on what I guess I would say in terms of hope is that um we have the opportunity still to create a prosperous civilization that's in balance with the biosphere that's uh physically possible technically possible and I think also sociological possible so for young people today I talk to them a lot I think to myself my god they're a full half century younger than me this is um a two-generational shift what have they got to look forward to well they've got a project and a project is in existential terms is something by which you order orient your lives to make meaning out of existence and meaning out of existence isn't that easy to find but at this point in human history the next couple generations the next few decades are going to be critical to what happens after that absolutely critical so then a meaning comes into life in that you've got a project and it doesn't even matter what you do you can be in the arts the humanities the social sciences engineering medicine the hard sciences every single one of the fields of human endeavor are going to be entrained to this project of getting in balance with the biosphere in a just way in the next couple of decades so um on the one hand it's rather daunting on the other hand if you don't have to worry about life being meaningless because it's got a meaning it's shoved right in our face slapping us in the face it's a meaning can we dodge the mass extinction event can we make a decent civilization so uh project's not a bad thing to have and this is how i kind of end talks to young people on college campuses or in high schools or wherever i'm speaking to young people um it's a scary situation but you're going to have meaningful work and and that matters yeah well um certainly um whether or not they have hope the young people of today are giving me hope everyone from Greta Thunberg onwards they really are um i it's been such an enormous pleasure talking um kim stanley robinson um let me how do i do that there and romain chris uh you know it oh there we go and um i just want to leave you um with a few words with a few thoughts um which is that there was no inevitability to our existence and to the existence of this Anthropocene that we created even if when we look back it appears almost directed and yet we predict our future by examining the past and extrapolating forward so we don't know what the future holds societies change culture changes and this is an ongoing project but science does equip us with some certainties we know that the greenhouse gases we emit today have the power to change the atmosphere for centuries and what some of those effects could be we also know that if we eliminate a species from our planet it's gone forever it's it's evolutionary tree which which has the potential right now to go on for millions of years will stop stop there with its disappearance so in the precious few decades while the earth is ours while we enjoy the gardens planted by our ancestors we must not steal the shade from our descendants thank you so thank you so much for joining please do buy the books and um and think think ahead and try and make it a better world for our future thank you good night