 Hello, everybody, and welcome. It's wonderful to be able to spend some time with you all today and to talk about our climate futures and how we can unlock more positive visions for the world we actually want to live in. My name is Ed Finn. I'm the director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. I'm also the academic director of Future Tense and really excited about this program we have for you today. I want to start by talking a little bit about how this really amazing group of people came together and the project that we are leading to address the issues that we're going to be talking about today, the Climate Imagination Fellowship. So this started for us as a conversation about our growing unhappiness with this collective challenge we face. How do we catalyze affirmative climate action in the present? I'm sure that you all are aware of the traumatic climate events happening every week. It seems like there's another hurricane or forest fire or superstorm or drought. And many of these challenges don't really go away. They just leave the headlines and they persist as ongoing challenges. And it's clear that these challenges are only going to get worse. And perhaps naturally, people all over the world often feel powerless in the face of these changes. We have a sense of fear and anxiety about climate stress and these growing futures, the sort of looming dystopian future that seems to be ahead of us. But as one of our panelists reminded me in our conversation right before this, Amitav Ghosh and many others have argued that what we are dealing with here is a failure of imagination. That we can only seem to see the problems ahead of us. And we're not even really grappling with the problems. We're just talking about them and that what we need to motivate systemic change, transformative change is more positive futures about where we want to go instead of just what we're worried about where we don't want to go. So our Climate Imagination Fellowship takes this challenge on to ask how we can redefine human and interest species, narratives, stories, visions of the future that are built on more sustainable foundations. How are we not just going to survive but thrive in the coming century? So what we're trying to do is create visions of positive climate futures that model cooperation and coordinated action that are rooted in local complexities that are based in reality. They're not all sunshine and unicorns. They effectively model and maintain fidelity to all of the challenges inherent in the human condition and all of the problems, the real problems that we have. But there are still stories that are optimistic and they're grounded in real science. So they're extrapolations from where we are and asking ourselves, where could we get to? So important to us is not just that we come up with a few stories that and say, well, this is it. This is the set of answers we've solved this problem because that's not really going to happen. But what we are going to do is model how you do this kind of storytelling. So our ultimate goal is not just to come up with these visions of the future but to inspire communities and individuals, young people around the world to start imagining their own positive climate futures. What does a climate future look like for you in your community? And I think to do that, we have to begin with this attitude of possibility, this attitude of change and recognize that the most important tool we have to do this is storytelling. That stories are a way that we can inspire different pathways. We can inspire different causal relationships. And it's one of the few tools we have as humans to grapple with the complexity of climate change. We're pretty bad at math and statistics and risk assessment as humans, but we're pretty good at storytelling and we use stories to balance foreground and background ambiguity and complexity. And so for all these reasons, we're really excited to have this group of climate imagination fellows and we'll be meeting three of them today. So the structure of this project is that we have four fellows from all over the world. They are creating novel length climate futures narratives as well as flash fiction stories and they're incorporating input from researchers, from policymakers, community members, leaders across a whole variety of different fields. And we're doing a series of events. This is one of them leading up to TED's project countdown and COP26, the next major meeting of the Congress of parties for the international climate accords. And all of this will culminate in a project of publication next year. We're calling the Climate Action Almanac that will collect all of these different materials, fiction, nonfiction interviews, do it yourself activities and more. And we're doing all of this in collaboration with an amazing group of partners including the UN high level climate champions team, TED countdown, Climate Works Foundation, the Climate Works Foundation is supporting this work and most importantly of all are four fellows, Olivia Brenda, Hano O Nogue, Bandana Singh and Ja Ja, and our advisor and in many ways the sort of spiritual inspiration for this project, Kim Stanley Robinson, who's new novel ministry for the future has really fired this conversation for many others as well. And as an extended experiment and exactly what I'm talking about, how do you imagine a positive climate future that is grounded in the world as it is today and projects forward to hopefully inspire us towards real change. So without further ado, I'm gonna introduce the participants in our first panel, Kim Stanley Robinson is a novelist and winner of the Hugo Nebula and Locust Awards. He has written more than 20 books including the Mars trilogy, Green Earth and Aurora is the latest novel the ministry for the future imagines a new transnational agency that advocates for the rights of future generations amidst escalating climate chaos. Beena Venkataraman is an American journalist, author and science policy expert. She is currently the editorial page editor at the Boston Globe. She also teaches in the program on science, technology and society at MIT. She is the author of the Optimist Telescope thinking ahead in a reckless age, which is a book near and dear to my heart. She served as senior advisor for climate change innovation in the Obama White House. And finally in our first panel, Nigel Topping is the UN high level champion for climate action for the United Kingdom. He works to mobilize climate action by connecting the work of governments with voluntary and collaborative actions taken by cities, regions, businesses, investors and local communities. Previously he was the CEO of We Mean Business where he drove collaboration for climate action among NGOs working with world's most influential businesses. He's a commissioner on the energy transitions commission, a global coalition working toward net zero emissions. We're really delighted that Nigel can join us here today as well. So let me dive in here. So in August, we saw the most dire report yet from the IPCC, innumerable scientists, experts and activists have been sounding this alarm for decades now. The ravages of the climate crisis are unfolding before our eyes. What is the role of positive climate futures in this effort to reduce global emissions, to transform our economies? Where do stories of hope, imagination and inspiration come in? Stan, do you want to kick us off? Sure. And thank you, Ed, for gathering us. We, all humans have a sense of their future. They're all, we are always planning. It's one of the things that distinguishes us as a species is that we can imagine futures. So given the situation that we're in now, there is a best case scenario going forward or a range of scenarios and some of them are better and some of them are worse. If the cultural imaginary doesn't express the best case scenarios, then the assumption of all of us in general is that there isn't such a thing, that essentially we are already doomed to a terrible fate. But it isn't true. I want to truncate this by saying that the media, imagine history as a kind of a tide, an estuary, a river running into the sea, some nautical or riverine metaphor like that. There's a lot of chop on the surface because of social media and the world today. And a lot of that is foam. And then what is interesting to contemplate is the underlying tide of history which would include science and diplomacy, people working hard to make it go in a certain direction, a good direction. So maybe it's important to ignore the froth and the surface chop and focus on the underlying tide where enormous advances are being made and the potential, the potential is there to get to a best case scenario even given the dire straits that we're in right now. We have to tell that story too. We have to get below the surface to the deeper movement of history and hope that it'll take us in the right direction. You know, maybe we turn to you because you have thought about some of these larger, the large scale question of optimism in your work. How do you see that playing out in climate? Yeah, so I mean, I really came at this when I was researching the Optimist Telescope from the perspective of what inspires human beings to act on problems or opportunities of the future. What actually allows us to make that leap from merely planning or plotting for the future as Dan was saying, to actually taking the future far more seriously which I think is something we really need to do when it comes to climate change. And as Stan was saying, we have this unique superpower as a species to contemplate the future but our imagination is constrained by sort of the evolutionary purpose for one of conjuring the future. It's largely based on our episodic memory. So episodes in our past, we are constrained to Kim's point about the sort of surface noise which I'm very much a participant in doing as a journalist today and activating our concern about the immediate that reinforces for us the sense that what is happening right now is what is possible in the future. And really what we need to be able to do is expand our view of the future in order to be what I think of as pragmatic or practical Optimists who are working towards a better future, we need to be able to expand that notion of what's possible in the future. And there are a few things, I guess really three things that I would point to as sort of components of imagining the future that are really important. The first is that imagining the future is not just about predicting the future. So we give people information about climate change all the time and we expect that to somehow galvanize them into action telling people that the sea level is going to rise two to five feet within a certain number of decades, telling people that the temperature is gonna rise by an average number of degrees. And what's been often missing from that conversation which has driven both the scientific and the policy and political conversation about climate change is to me, I think of it as imaginative empathy has been missing from that conversation. So one of the things I write about in the Optimist Telescope is the Munich Olympics and the sort of scenario planning that was done for that in 1972 was really elaborate scenario planning because I think often we're using scenario planning when we talk about climate futures. And there were all of these reasons why even though a perfectly construed scenario of what actually happened there, which was a terrorist attack, you can look it up if you want more of the details were ignored and it goes to this point of if you have information about a future scenario but you're unable to really contemplate and empathize with yourself having to face that scenario or with other human beings, future generations having to face that scenario, it's going to be very difficult for you to cross into the realm of acting and caring about that more than that immediate surface rippling, more than that immediate urgent demand that's in front of you today, whether it's putting food on your table or something in the realm of your professional life, that's your piles of emails. So we have to really think about bringing in empathy and I think that is where storytelling like stands work, like the work of so many Clifai authors today is really populating a space where we can be more empathetic. There are other tools than storytelling like writing a letter to your future self or future child, even virtual reality that can help, I think bridge that imaginative gap in terms of really empathizing with the future in a way that we don't when we merely look at climate scenarios. The other aspect which I think, Ed, you mentioned in your introductory remarks is about you said powerlessness and I almost think of sort of the opposite of that is feeling a sense of agency to affect the future. So we know from looking at the behavioral science that when people think that they have no ability to affect the trajectory of the future, it's very disempowering. And you can feel like, well, why not just party like there's no tomorrow if I can't affect this future anyway. And so when thinking about how we paint the future and create ideas of the future, it's important to be able to show how individual people and how people particularly in community can change the direction in the course of history which remains true as dire as the climate predictions are today. And lastly, what I think this conversation is about is being able to imagine not just climate futures that are doomsday, but climate futures that actually make society better than it is today and better than we've known it in the past. So being able to imagine where we go as a society, does our society become more cohesive? Do neighborhoods become cleaner and safer? Can we show people a world in which taking better care of the oceans and the resources in the oceans also makes life more rich and exciting? Can we show people the wonder and awe of living on a planet that is thriving? I think that's a really wonderful perspective. And I think we have to want these things. We have to want this future. We have to be excited about it and believe in it. And I really love that both of you mentioned people, the individual people, whether they're the people who are working really hard to try and swing the arc of history in the right direction or this idea of imaginative empathy, which I am a really strong believer in as well. So Nigel, you have this unique perspective because you have really been working with people in the trenches as it were and trying to think about some of these changes and enact them. So how do you see the role of storytelling in your work from your perspective? Well, I really want to pick up on being as reflectance on agency because to me, this is at the heart of it. I think that I'm really compelled by George Soros' description of what he goes, reflects his futures like. The future that we see affects our choices today. So there's a relationship between our expectations of the future and our actions today. And what I think often happens is we fall between two standard stories, which aren't really stories actually. It's your point being of their more sort of dry descriptions of the future, which leave us with no agency. The one's what I call gloom porn, which is just like, have you heard how screwed we are? It's just like going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. And it basically gets to the point where there's nothing we can do. So this is the kind of party like there's no tomorrow or just prepare for survivalism. So there's no agency about changing the future. It's just accepting a terrible future and dealing with it. I mean, that's for me, that's an incredibly dangerous and I think people who promulgate that scenario are evil because they're actually saying to people, give up hope, don't do anything, allow billions to die. I've just been visiting some small island communities. They're not giving up and if we have any human empathy, then we shouldn't be giving up, absolutely. Nevertheless, a little bit of that, I mean, and Stan starts his book, Commodities for the Future, with quite a dose of gloom. So I think it's not like, so you don't wanna be the other extreme, which is what I'd say, it's sort of tech utopia, which is like, hey, don't worry about it. We've solved every problem in the past, just leave it to Silicon Valley and the tech with us. That equally, there's no agency there. It's like, oh, I'd have to do anything because the tech guys will fix it, right? So I think between gloom, porn and tech utopia, there's these more sort of pragmatic, messy descriptions of the future and positive. And I think one of the things that gives real, I mean, the key to agency is choice, right? So I think the successful literature or stories of the future that we're talking about are ones which make us think and say, oh, I never thought about that. Maybe we can organize business differently or maybe there's different types of money or maybe, you know, just all maybe, dot, dot, dot. Then we're starting to open up the agency of choosing to believe in a different possibility and therefore acting in a different direction. So I think that, I think it's really, it's about opening up agency so that we can choose different futures and just not accept what someone else tells us is inevitable. Yeah, and so by the way, I wanna just let everybody in the audience know that we do have a little bit of time for Q&A. So if you have a question for this first panel, we'll do a couple of minutes of Q&A immediately right after this in a few more minutes. So feel free to drop a question into the Q&A box on your screen. So I think that with agency also comes this notion of responsibility, right? That they have to work together and that choices have consequences and not making a choice is also a kind of choice. And I wanna ask you about the sort of pragmatic role of storytelling, how, you know, let's say we've passed this first gate of motivating people to say, look, we need to work towards a better future. How do we actually get to positive climate futures? You know, the socials and collective transformations involved in actually trying to navigate all of these challenges, there are gonna be hardships, there will be inconveniences, there will be shifting industries, there will be, you know, new jobs and jobs disappearing. The physical world will clearly have to change. The human world, the world that we have constructed will need to change. So can narratives help us explore and design pathways from where we are to where we need to get to? What role does stories play in this more pragmatic mapping out of change? Stan, why don't we go back to you? Sure, it occurred to me a decade or so ago that a plot for a narrative is simply something going wrong. So when we read fiction, which is what I do, you read for two things. It's a kind of anthropology. What is it like to be in a different time and place? And in my case, often a future time and place, so it's imagined, but if you were doing the past, it would be the same or somewhere else on the earth. So anthropology, but combined with the puzzle of say a detective story, something's gone wrong. How can we set it right? So climate narratives are weirdly well mapped by the structure of detective stories in particular, but also just fiction in general. We've got our plot. Something's gone wrong. It has to be solved. Therefore, you have agents. You have characters from the inspector trying to solve the problem or the high champion, or you have the ordinary person who's been caught up in it. Anybody caught up in this problem that actually they're besnagged in it and their lives are affected by it. And for sure the pandemic has taught us all that world events can snag your life and drag you in directions you didn't really want to go and you have to solve that problem. So since this is an underlying structure for so many narratives anyway, and we have this problem smacking us in the face that is as you pointed out in your introductory remarks is less and less possible to avoid mentally and physically. The automatic result is going to be climate fiction. There will be a proliferation of stories about the various aspects of this problem because it has local, regional, national, and then global effects all across the board. It's no coincidence that climate fiction has come about. It's the realism of our time to cope with a humanity that is at this point poorly adapted to the biosphere by our habits previous, but that can change. So the solutions are there. So really we're gonna see a lot more of this and hopefully it will be inspiring to people. I think climate fiction is sort of just what happens when we talk about the weather now. It's inescapable, it's just what we're living in. Bina or Nigel, do you wanna add briefly on to what Stan said and then I'll turn to questions from the audience. Well, this just got me thinking about what are the different narrative structures and tropes that really work from just a point of view of engaging people in fiction or engaging people in non-fiction for that matter, but also then how does that map onto realistic pathways for how we solve this? And I think part of it is, of course, there's this great, I don't know, the film noir detective discovering climate change makes a lot of sense to me from the point of view of uncovering the crime or the set of circumstances that no one else sees. And there's certainly a lot of that going on from whether it's what particular oil companies have done to cover this up or just understanding the nature of change. But I almost think it's like, this is not like the boy with the thumb and his dike or the film noir detective kind of solution that we're moving towards. I think it's like the Muppet saved the theater kind of pathway in terms of the narrative where the individual is going to maybe be able to solve one part of the climate crisis or do one thing for their community or maybe unravel one portion of the scientific mystery of climate change, but when it actually comes to how we're going to address this over time, it's going to be, it's gonna be with other people. And I think that there are narratives and narrative tropes out there that really kind of can be drawn upon to show that that's true. And I think that disempowering lack of agency we often feel, I think is because we look at ourselves in isolation relative to the scale and proportion and really scariness of this crisis and how it's gonna manifest in our communities. And we don't recognize that we are actually more than just isolated islands, even in a pandemic where we're all social distancing. We are right, we exist in community. We all affect multiple orders of people beyond us and that there's a sort of excitement and beauty to coming together with people to solve problems. And whether you go back and read about the US civil rights movement in the 60s and how people were working together and the joy that happened is a lot while they were resisting severe oppression or you look at fictional stories where groups of people come together and do things, I think that there's for me at least a lot of potential inspiration in offering pathways to getting to climate solutions that don't involve just being the lone Cassandra or the lone warrior. Because I often think that that's part of what exhaust those of us who are in this space working on climate change, just being feeling alone. Yeah, so I wanted to make sure we have a time for at least a couple of questions because I know we have some time constraints with some of our panelists. So maybe Nigel, you'd like to take a shot at this. How do you build compelling narratives and future scenarios around actions that are positive and a gentle, but they're not exciting? How do you, the things like reducing energy consumption or changing the way that we react with commodities? A lot of the things we need to do are gonna be kind of boring. So how do you motivate people around that? I don't know if that's something that's come up for you Nigel in the business world. Yeah, I mean, I was thinking a bit about what Stan started by saying in terms of discounting the froth and identifying the underlying. Of course, since that's the real trick, right? How do we in narratives point to underlying trends which are illustrated in a believable way, right? Because otherwise it just feels like fantasy and no one engages with it, it doesn't give us agency. I mean, I'm not a fiction writer, although I think I'm spending most of my time telling stories about the future. And I'm trying to do it in a really compelling way. I think of myself more as a systems entrepreneur and actually I've been thinking that often that's what entrepreneurs do, is like they're telling stories of the future to future customers or future regulators or investors. And whether or not people believe the stories depends on whether or not, and ultimately the story's gotta be backed up with reality, right? You can't keep saying I've invented such and such a gadget without actually producing it and having someone use it. So I think a lot of the key is how do you inject the little factoids which people can recognize as having truth in them? So I spend a lot of my time looking for evidence of an underlying trend that often is not being picked up by mainstream media or by the normal kind of Pareto mindset of managers who look for one of the three big things that are defining the future. And then I try and scare people by saying, dude, this is happening really fast and everything that's ever changed has gone exponential. And if you're not, I mean, except if I'm talking to business people or policy makers, I'm like, you're not gonna be elected or you're not gonna be competitive. So a lot of things about finding the credible early signs of change and then as Venus has stitched them into a pathway which takes us to a much more attractive future. That's not the same as making green hydrogen exciting for the average person on the street. I think that's maybe too much of a stretch but I think you can make exciting the idea that actually we know how to live in a world where we have plenty of energy without burning fossil fuels. And we've already figured out the pathways and you can say, look, and here's this new steel plant being built in Northern Sweden right now that's gonna make five million tons of green steel from hydrogen that's producing renewable energy. And you can point to the news story and they say, look, you start going exponential there and in 30 years, we're not burning any coal to make steel. So I think it's about finding credible facts and then stitching them into a story that takes us to a very different future. Now, I know somebody needs to disappear. Is that correct at the half hour or do you have time for one more question? Yes, okay. I'm gonna just throw this out for all of you. How can these salvageable future climate narratives be used to mobilize not only individuals but also sectors of society like foundations, higher education, government funding agencies. And I wanna shout out, Samuel Churchill asked the last question on Zoom and Laura Pedrick asks this one on Zoom. Well, I mean, I think Nigel in part just gave a great response to this question because I think there's this question of how do you go from the narrative to sort of motivating particular actions in particular sectors. And I wanna be a little bit careful here of putting too much pressure on and I think this goes beyond fiction writers. This is really artists, right? Like there are a lot of creative people who can help populate our imagination of different kinds of climate futures and different kinds of futures on the planet. And, but I also don't think we should necessarily lean on artists too heavily to then make that leap to translating it into action in part because I think when art gets too didactic or when art gets too belabored by trying to drive actual progress it loses some of what it actually has to offer us, right? Which is the sense of like really revealing to us and helping us explore what it is to be human and what it is to be alive on this planet. And so I would just hate for us to like layer that all on to every clarify writer out there who might be watching this or thinking about this. But at the same time, I do think, right? Like why aren't we bringing in more possibilities of how we imagine the future into these conversations that happen? You know, I've sat with business leaders and with government leaders from all over the world to talk about climate change. And mostly what we've focused on are those doomsday scenarios. What happens when you have a heat wave and the elderly in your city are really vulnerable? Where are you going to put your cooling centers? Where are you going to do this? And why not take some of the information about what we know about social resilience, for example and say, look at this community. For example, in the nineties we know there was a neighborhood in Chicago that did really well in a heat wave at preventing deaths of the elderly. And why was that? It was because people knew each other and understood each other and knew the older people and the vulnerable people in their neighborhoods. There were a lot of local, leowned businesses what Eric Klinenberg, the sociologist calls social infrastructure. How do we populate an image of a neighborhood that does really well in a heat wave? If someone has imagined that if there's a writer who's imagined that if there's an artist who's imagined that can we bring that into these kinds of conversations where we are trying to help city planners or industry leaders or even the cop, the countries coming together globally to make decisions about their climate change commitments so that we are bringing into the space not just what they're trying to avoid but actually what they're trying to do and in studying social movements and sort of how they achieve change I think part of what we learn is that people are motivated by having a dream knowing you can imagining black and white school children going to school together motivates you more than simply the act of resisting violence or oppression I think the same can apply with climate change where if people can get their heads around some of these climate futures in these fora it could do a lot to motivate people to make more substantial change. Really like that idea of thinking about this also as culture change, a kind of sea change and that it needs to happen at all of these different levels in order to really be successful and again stories are such an important part of that because we can all write ourselves into this story. Bina, Nigel, Stan, thank you so much for being part of this panel and I'm sorry we didn't have there are a lot of fantastic questions I'm sorry we couldn't have just attained you all day to ask them all but I want to transition to our climate fellows now so let me introduce them briefly and then we'll have a discussion with them. Libby of Brenda is a writer, editor and translator based in Mexico City she writes fiction as well as non-fiction and criticism about science fiction and fantastic literature she co-founded the Cumilude Tesla Collective a multidisciplinary working group that promotes dialogue between the arts and sciences and Mexicana imagination and future a series of conversations about the future in speculative literature she was the first Mexican woman to be nominated for a Hugo Award for the bilingual and bicultural anthology a larger reality or una realidad más amplia Hannah Onogue is a writer of fiction and non-fiction based in Yanagawa, Bayosa State and Southern Nigeria a region famous for its oil industry her short stories have been published in the anthologies Imagine Africa 500 and Strange Lands Short Stories her collection Cupid's Catapult was one of 10 manuscripts chosen to kick off the Nigerian writer series an imprint of the association of Nigerian authors she is the winner of the association of Nigerian authors poetry competition in 2016 and finally Bandana Singh is a speculative fiction author physicist at Framingham State University in Massachusetts and an interdisciplinary researcher on the climate crisis her short story collection Ambiguity Machines was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award for work on a justice-centered transdisciplinary approach to the climate crisis as part of a forthcoming UNESCO volume charting an SDG 4.7 roadmap for radical transformative change in the midst of climate breakdown so welcome all of you it's nice to see everybody as I said before you know this so much of our work is virtual now so it's nice to have these gatherings and convenings so for this project you're all engaged in creating these new positively inflected stories about climate futures we've tasked you with all everything we've just been talking about we've asked you to take on as a writing prompt how do you integrate climate science emerging technologies into your stories as well as information about local communities and cultures, physical geographies, everything else what knowledge and information goes into making a good story about the climate crisis and our responses to it Bandana would you like to start? You're muted, there you are. Sure, thank you and I just want to reiterate what a pleasure it is to be among you all and yeah, so this big question well, first I want to nudge at this term positive and to reiterate in fact Nigel said something similar that what I construed as positive is a kind of positivity that does not deny the reality of climate change and the unfolding apocalypse that marginalized people in particular have been going through for a long time but one that actually engages with the experiences of people in those communities and then tries to figure out, okay how do we get creative? How do we find ways out of there? So what I'm going to try to describe is my perspective which is positive in this sense and also part of it has to do with listening closely to real world stories and particularly with real world stories of marginalized people in locations that are climate vulnerable and to me it's like the climate science part of it of course which is something that I consider myself a climate translator as a physicist who teaches climate change in my classes and so the question of what is essential for everyone to know about climate change is really interesting and to me those essential points have to do with imbalance in the carbon cycle the fact that climate change is not our only problem but is intimately entwined with inequality with biodiversity loss with the imbalance and the nitrogen cycle all of those are the factors so I see climate change as an accelerant on a house that's already on fire so we have to pay immediate attention to it but we cannot ignore the fire that's been burning for the longer time so the way I see it and I'll end with this is that often people simply default to the techno fits as the way that you look at kind of solving the climate problem but we cannot simply we often don't look at the context of technology who is benefiting, where is it coming from what are its impacts both on society and on the environment so for example we know that electric vehicles we need to switch to electric vehicles there's no doubt about that but can we simply replace fossil fuel vehicles with electric vehicles without changing the socioeconomic structure I mean if we do that we're talking about mining the ocean we're talking about increasing perhaps fourfold the amount of mining we do for the materials for the EV batteries so what I really want to do is to take the power of fiction which I see in two ways to kind of like firstly ask those what if questions like what if technology arose from the needs of people instead of being imposed on us stop down by systems of power what if we had you know and so I look a lot at the low tech that already exists in cultures which we don't think of as technologies and finally the power of fiction is not really and this echoes what Veena just said that it's not so much to come up with blueprints for the future although I do think that it can give us ideas and ways of thinking the power of fiction, speculative fiction in particular for me is to put us in a different headspace to immerse us in an alternate reality where we suddenly see the world in a completely different way so Hanna, what about you? How do you think about this question of storytelling when we're also trying to draw in all of these different ideas, different fields of knowledge or even you might think of them as practices and methods and as Vandana was saying also knowledge that might not be the top down sort of Western scientific industrial complex but other kinds of knowledge Well, yeah, thank you once again for having me of having us For me, from my perspective on this side of the world first of all, we look at what are people willing to do for instance, when we talk about climate action I want to use the pandemic as an example you had the lockdown over here and then people said why are we, what's happening? How am I going to earn my daily bread? They're not able to envision thinking about my health they're like, I'm going to die anyway if I stay home, my kids are looking at me they're expecting food, they're expecting something and then you start to stay home it's like, you weigh the two and one weighs heavier so you think of the climate thing and it's like that's so far off so you have to get people to look beyond that survival mode of now and look in a place like Nigeria where you have governments and leadership which is faulty and failing you think, first let us try and solve our problems before we start thinking you think those are developed country problems we have to start where we are we haven't gotten there they're like, oh we have to solve our we have this poverty issue you have power issues so it's trying to translate that thing from where you are to where you can be like we have oil spills like in my story we talk about all these things those things are still there and they're like, okay so why don't they come and do it why don't they come and solve the problem what are we going to do we've been crying out for years we've been talking about this and we've been complaining and nothing seems to be happening so why do you think anything we do now is going to make any difference so it's having to think beyond like when I was talking about let us to future children thinking about, okay I have children who are going to have children and what are they going to inherit I think that will help to kind of spark some kind of responsibility or some agency of, okay if I do this in my little way then maybe it will make a difference Thank you, yeah I think that question of the fundamental needs that any human has we have to think about how we address those as well as asking people to think towards the future and it's very difficult to think towards the future when you're uncertain deeply uncertain about what might happen tomorrow or even what might happen today so I think some really great points Libya I'd love to hear you talk about this as well because you have created a kind of collaborative structure or part of a collaborative structure that I think seems really interesting and engages with some of these questions of how you move between art and science storytelling and other kinds of discourse so how do you think about your work in this relationship? Thank you Ed and hello everybody Well, first of all I think how Bina was pointing out earlier sometimes we deal with very heavy concepts and sometimes we feel like a burden you know what can you as a writer do to change the world and it's like, oh my God, I just can't read a story I just can't write stories also about earlier you were talking about lack of imagination and I think that is a key word in this context imagination is necessary to the science imagination is necessary to write stories imagination is necessary to live actually as human beings we need imagination even to start thinking what am I going to eat at my lunch hour, I need to imagine at first and sometimes we kind of step up like, so slayamos I don't know how to translate that word in English we made aside the idea of imagination as just something escapist for instance and I think imagination is a very, very, very powerful tool and I was thinking hearing Vandana and Hannah how in Mexico for instance we have to deal with a lot of issues that are not only international and huge but also we are the product of colonization we are now living in this weird place between the late capitalism and our own and environmental issues so in that context what can we do it's probably very little but it's okay but it's little because we are only humans we are, I am just one person and I can only do so much and I can only reach so much but language is a very powerful tool also and it's a very, I don't like to make like metaphors as oh this is a tool or this is a word but English is my second language so bear with me please anyway about what you were asking specifically I work with a collective of people scientists and artists and writers from some years now and it's the best thing it can happen to me in my life because I like to say I have a lot of imagination I can imagine a lot of things in my head but I am just one person so I am finite I have limits but if I connect with other people suddenly I became infinite because I create this net of ideas, of souls, of conversations so to work with the Cumulo de Tesla and Mexicona these wonderful people here from Mexico that are interested also in science fiction and in art and in sciences my horizons expand so we are creating this sort of short fictions about what if as a result of the changes and the climate crisis, et cetera what if one of our volcanoes exploded the I see what, which is near to Popocatepi that Popo it's more famous probably, worldly and the idea is that probably many people get isolated and many people had to looking for their own resources to survive and it kind of reflects what is happening in the world that is not in Zoom that is not posting in Twitter on the internet daily lives that are affected by real problems that seem small but at the same time reflects what is happening in the whole world right now we live in a moment in history that we feel the necessity slash obligation probably to be connected with all the world and we feel that when we speak even if I just tweet that I make cookies I have the illusion that I am speaking to a very large audience 100 years ago everybody knew that their voices were limited that their voices were just like you can hear me and probably if I write something someone can read it but now we have this idea of the global communication so I think we can learn from just listen to little voices and observing what is around us and trying to be conscious about where and how we are living right now in this point in history and just to finish I was thinking right now that listen to everybody I was remembering Gabriela Damiami but Miraveta another Mexican writer which is part of this collective group she was talking lately a lot about superstition which is this kind of concept in which you can it's a sort of very reductive reductively it's sort of a prophecy that you write in order to became through so if we are imagining the future of the people that is going to read us from the I don't know 20 years from now what we are reflecting if we as science fiction speculative writers are reflecting our world what we are building, what we are imagining and that I think it's a very interesting question so the local resources are way more important than the global resources the local communities and the way of doing things I think it's more important to see for instance, I don't know in Mexico how people have been cultivating the earth from centuries before colonialism maybe there is some answers there it's not going to be the answer that solves anything everything, I'm sorry but I think there is something very rich in there that we are able to now comprehend it another way I don't know if I think that's a really great point and there's so much we can learn from one another that we are not sharing right now so much of our communication and knowledge structure are very top down or very one way and local knowledge and indigenous knowledge and different practices are sometimes those ideas, those life ways have already been forgotten or they're just sort of tenuously hanging on and I think it's really important to find ways to empower communities to have those voices as well I wanted to make sure we left a little more time for questions for you all as well from our audience and if you haven't please feel free to put some questions into the Q&A again but I wanted to ask one from Autumn Po which is any advice for graduating students wanting to get involved in the climate change conversation? I don't know Vandana if you have any thoughts about that Yeah, definitely but I'll try to be brief I think that like Libya has also mentioned it's very hard to do things alone and modern industrial civilization the globalized culture that so many of us live in actually just encourages us to be isolated to be individualistic so I would say that yes first find a movement or a group of some kind maybe in your neighborhood maybe in your job or maybe in the area and there are also many groups working with this grassroots perspective nationally and internationally and work with them and see what you can do to give to those movements and groups but also be aware of the fact that power and power structures historically have generally stood in the way of positive change so we also need to pay attention to those and to basically at the highest levels when conversation takes place about climate change then we need to interrupt that narrative with reality checks so that's something that students can definitely do Thank you so there's another question here from Brian Alexander I'll leave this open to anybody what is the role of colleges and universities in helping the world foresee this crisis and our possible futures in it? Well I can talk about that but I don't want to hog the mic here so please Libya and Hannah if you have something to say on that please go ahead Not everybody has access to university first of all second of all as long as the knowledge is circulating I think it's more interesting to think what questions can you bring and what, yeah how can you also ask things from the universities or educational structures in order to help to move things because everything is so vertical right now like I have the knowledge I'm gonna shower over you and it's like we need to be more horizontal that will be I don't know if it makes any sense as I am saying it but we need to be more horizontal and that will be my response That's a great point as well so I want to ask well I guess Benana did you want to jump in as well or That's fine I think I'll just say this much that I think universities and colleges tend to reproduce the status quo but they need to become revolutionary forces for change and the only way to do that I think is to break the ivory towers as the bear was suggesting to grow more horizontal to engage with communities So again I think that's a really great point this next question I think maybe Hannah you can take on can poetry or literature be a great way of empowering and involving people in environment improvement Yes thank you Yes I think it can and talking about imagination and how it's so important to think to actually imagine a possible future So for me just to even harness what we've talked about for young people not everybody's in university but like what happened in Nigeria last year cut across whether you're in school or not I don't know if you heard about an End Stars protest that took place there were it had illiterate people in quotes it had students college age students it had some older secondary school students so it cuts across when you have that need of okay this is our issue how are we going to come together to solve it I think poetry a lot of people a lot of those people there on the internet they're in social media that is how they got word across that is how they communicated with each other that is also how they can inspire each other poetry and fiction can do that and it will cut across as long as you can hear a language and it doesn't have to be English we have even with the pandemic you're sending out messages in people's local languages so they can understand and grasp the seriousness of the situation so it's not always about education like you're saying we go to school and learn this you hear from your friend what is this about you explain it to them and it brings a better understanding you're kind of like that missionary who someone can relate to why are you doing this so and so this is for the environment and they can have a better understanding and if it's cloaked in big English and long words and things that generally might not it might take a while to break down so if you have if you come down to people's levels and communicate to them in a language they understand it might be poetry, it might be the local storytelling that it's not as it used to be with them the advent of TV and other media but you still have some oral tales that you tell you know people here in villages and all that such storytelling can connect with more people to give them more of an understanding of why they need to act and why it's important not just to think oh well we're doomed anyway so what is my little contribution going to do so I think yes it can go in a long way and help them with that Thank you Hannah that was beautifully said and that feels like a really good moment actually to bring this to a close so that we are on time I want to thank all of you for participating today and the tremendous work you're doing with this project and more generally around climate futures it's such a pleasure to get to work with all of you and I want to thank everybody for attending if you'd like to learn more about our project you can go to climateimagination.org you can also see some other upcoming events we have on September 7th we're going to be doing an event with the Journal of Science Policy and Governance around science policy in climate futures and on September 22nd we're going to be doing a conversation about climate futures with the British Library those are both going to be virtual events as well you can also check out Kim Stanley Robinson's TED Talk Remembering Climate Change a message from the year 2021 and I'm going to check in with all of our panelists but Stan at least has offered to respond to some of the other questions over a message that we can send out to everybody who RSVP later so if you didn't get your question answered in the panel maybe we'll be able to get an answer for you and we'll check in to see if anyone else can participate in that as well so I want to end here by just saying thanks again to everybody for participating and joining us all of the great questions all of the great thoughts from our panelists at Future Tense and the new America Tech team thank you to the UN Climate Champions team to the TED Countdown team to Climate Works there's such a tremendous coalition of people who are excited about this work and involved in it and it feels like this is the time this is the moment to be working on this and having these conversations so thank you all again and have a wonderful day