[Pil-pc-oceania] Comparative Planetology

[Robyn Williamson]

BLDGBLOG has published a really interesting interview with science  
fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson including some great photos of  
the surfaces of mars, earth and the moon.  Here is a rather long  
excerpt, stay with it for at least 3 paragraphs:

Kim Stanley Robinson:  One thing about Mars is that it’s a radically  
impoverished landscape. You start with nothing – the bare rock, the  
volatile chemicals that are needed for life, some water, and an empty  
landscape. That makes it a kind of gigantic metaphor, or modeling  
exercise, and it gives you a way to imagine the fundamentals of what  
we’re doing here on Earth. I find it is a very good thing to begin  
thinking that we are terraforming Earth – because we are, and we’ve  
been doing it for quite some time. We’ve been doing it by accident,  
and mostly by damaging things. In some ways, there have been  
improvements, in terms of human support systems, but there’s still so  
much damage, damage that’s gone unacknowledged or ignored, even when  
all along we knew it was happening. People kind of shrug and think:  
a) there’s nothing we can do about it, or b) maybe the next  
generation will be clever enough to figure it out. So on we go.

Mars is an interesting platform where we can model these things. But  
I don’t know that we’ll get there for another fifty years or so – and  
once we do get there, I think that for many, many years, maybe many  
decades, it will function like Antarctica does now: it will be an  
interesting scientific base that teaches us things and is beautiful  
and charismatic, but not important in the larger scheme of human  
history on Earth. It’s just an interesting place to study, that we  
can learn things from. Actually, for many years, Mars will be even  
less important to us than Antarctica, because the Antarctic is at  
least part of our ecosphere.

But if you think of yourself as terraforming Earth, and if you think  
about sustainability, then you can start thinking about permaculture  
and what permaculture really means. It’s not just sustainable  
agriculture, but a name for a certain type of history. Because the  
word sustainability is now code for: let’s make capitalism work over  
the long haul, without ever getting rid of the hierarchy between rich  
and poor and without establishing social justice.

Sustainable development, as well: that’s a term that’s been  
contaminated. It doesn’t even mean sustainable anymore. It means: let  
us continue to do what we’re doing, but somehow get away with it. By  
some magic waving of the hands, or some techno silver bullet,  
suddenly we can make it all right to continue in all our current  
habits. And yet it’s not just that our habits are destructive,  
they’re not even satisfying to the people who get to play in them. So  
there’s a stupidity involved, at the cultural level.

BLDGBLOG: In other words, your lifestyle may now be carbon neutral –  
but was it really any good in the first place?

Robinson: Right. Especially if it’s been encoding, or essentially  
legitimizing, a grotesque hierarchy of social injustice of the most  
damaging kind. And the tendency for capitalism to want to overlook  
that – to wave its hands and say: well, it’s a system in which  
eventually everyone gets to prosper, you know, the rising tide floats  
all boats, blah blah – well, this is just not true.

We should take the political and aesthetic baggage out of the term  
utopia. I’ve been working all my career to try to redefine utopia in  
more positive terms – in more dynamic terms. People tend to think of  
utopia as a perfect end-stage, which is, by definition, impossible  
and maybe even bad for us. And so maybe it’s better to use a word  
like permaculture, which not only includes permanent but also  
permutation. Permaculture suggests a certain kind of obvious human  
goal, which is that future generations will have at least as good a  
place to live as what we have now.

It’s almost as if a science fiction writer’s job is to represent the  
unborn humanity that will inherit this place – you’re speaking from  
the future and for the future. And you try to speak for them by  
envisioning scenarios that show them either doing things better or  
doing things worse – but you’re also alerting the generations alive  
right now that these people have a voice in history.

The future needs to be taken into account by the current system,  
which regularly steals from it in order to pad our ridiculous current  
lifestyle.

BLDGBLOG: When it actually comes to designing the future, what will  
permaculture look like? Where will its structures and ideas come from?

Robinson: Well, at the end of the 1960s and through the 70s, what we  
thought – and this is particularly true in architecture and design  
terms – was: OK, given these new possibilities for new and different  
ways of being, how do we design it? What happens in architecture?  
What happens in urban design?

As a result of these questions there came into being a big body of  
utopian design literature that’s now mostly obsolete and out of  
print ......."

Read the whole interview here, it's quite long but well worth a read  
and the photos are just stunning:

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/comparative-planetology- 
interview-with.html


CONTACT DETAILS:

Robyn Williamson
APC9 Secretariat
info at apc9.org.au
Ph/Fx:  (02) 9629 3560
Mobile:  0409 151 435
http://apc9.org.au