“Sure, but everyone expects that one to be big. That’s different. And they didn’t have to announce it tonight.”
I thread a long silver earring through the second hole in my ear, and press back my gray hair. “Christa, you told me it’s all about locking away carbon. Free your ego!”
She’s still quiet.
“You know it in your heart, size doesn’t matter. Just think about your father. You think I would have hooked up with him if size mattered?”
“Ew. Just—no. I’m sorry I called you. I’ll see you tonight.” She ends the call. Another failed conversation. But she should be on top of the world. It’s opening night.
I wrap myself in a cashmere cape, pull on my black boots, and wait by the open window. There’s a slight breeze coming off the ocean. Over the past four years, I’ve been watching the mountain rise from this window. It came up over the rooftops, and then it greened up, slowly. Tonight, it’s lit up for the opening, twinkling with fairy lights against the cobalt sky. It’s a bit silly not to hold the opening during the day. But it is, as Christa insists, an artwork. Which connotes an evening opening. I guess.
My own mother was against the mountain. Ironically, it was the opposition of people like her to building higher that even got the mountain ballot measure passed. The city had failed to create enough housing, trying to preserve its “character,” which was ironic given that the character had pretty much eroded to dust by then. Thousands of people were literally living on the streets. Housing was the compromise for Christa’s art project: the mountain would have to have one stable face. Apartments on the city-facing slope would increase the city’s housing stock by 23 percent, avoiding razing more old neighborhoods for high-rises. Christa offered to arrange for me to have one of the mountain flats, but I said no. I’d rather keep my tiny old studio than live on her very nice mountain.
The car glides up to the curb. I climb in and nod to the other passengers. A spiderweb of light traces the route: seventeen minutes.
“Where are you off to, all dressed up?” the woman beside me asks.
“I’m going to the mountain.”
“Oh, that’s right. The unveiling is tonight, isn’t it.” She laughs. “Not any real way to veil it, though.”
“What do you think about the mountain?” I ask her.
“I voted for it. Better than just dumping all those rocks into the ocean. If the carbon fund pays for it, why not? I’m going to take my grandkids to the park next week to have a look. Maybe climb all the way to the top.”
The glowing tent is set in a garden. Slate stone, jasmine air. I head immediately for the bar. The Chardonnay is a preview of the variety they’re planning to grow on the mountain, the server tells me. Biodynamically, in the mist. The soil of this mountain will produce a most unique flavor, he explains. I nod, taking a step back. I notice the music start to creep in, upbeat. The lighting is warm. People are buzzing all around: big names in the carbontech / land art scene, I guess.
A man comes over: a journalist, wanting to interview me. I sigh. “How do you like the mountain?” he asks.
“Haven’t been yet.” Christa invited me to come during the creation, when it was just a dusty construction site, but I told her I’d wait.
“Did you always know your daughter was going to do something big?”
I have been asked this question before. What I am I supposed to say—she was always into blocks? She built fabulous sandcastles? She drew great pictures of mountains? “I knew she was a visionary. And that she was persistent enough to stick to a vision, and that she could collaborate with others, and charm them into her vision. But no, I didn’t know she was going to generate a mountain.” I can tell he likes this quote. I excuse myself to go look at the exhibition. There are full-color photos from the mountain’s construction, as well as an interactive display about the coral reef and aquarium beneath its slopes. I skip past the materials science part; I already know all about the underpinning structure and the technical feats of building the skeleton and casing—how only the parts that are designed to weather will crumble into the sea lapping at its edges. More interesting to me are the native gardens on the ocean-facing side, and the way they taper off into a blank space, where it remains to be seen what will take hold in the gray-green sand. This was the most audacious part of the design, and the part that Christa had to fight for the hardest. She wanted a whole face of the mountain to “design itself,” as she put it. I want the viewer to experience and aid in the weathering, to contemplate geologic time. For their feet to send off mineral grains into the sea.
The room is getting quiet. Heads turn. Christa and her entourage are electric, beaming. Someone hands her a microphone.
“I’m so grateful you all could be here tonight,” she begins. She talks about all the teams—the engineers, the hydrologists, the landscape ecologists and wildlife biologists, the housing architects, the museum designers, the policy and regulation team. My attention has wandered by the time she gets to thanking the lawyers; I need another glass of wine. “And I’d like to thank my mother. Mom, where are you?” I straighten up, smile. “Throughout all of this, I knew my mother had my back. I’m so excited to finally share this mountain with her today. Mom, you always believed in me, and I couldn’t have done this without you.” An involuntary lump swells in my throat. Everyone around me is clapping. She gestures me forward. I wave, no thank you, but she insists; I make my way through the fancy dresses and bright lights, and give her a hug. She’s got dark circles under her eyes, but they’re sparkling like they did when she was a child.
“Let’s see this mountain,” I tell her.
Part III: The After-Zero Society
6
Working
What would it be like to live in a society that’s brought greenhouse gas emissions not just down to zero, but into negative territory? Who works there? How did they learn the skills they need to know? And what are their rituals, their aesthetics, their emotional lives like? Do they pride themselves for having come down a curve of carbon dioxide emissions and temperatures? Does success in achieving the feat of climate restoration define aspects of their culture? Or is that curve long forgotten?
Exploring an after-zero society means playing with utopian possibilities. These may seem like flights of fancy in today’s world, where men of industry are making presentations about “carbon negative” oil for “negative emissions,” preparing to capture the concept of carbon removal to prolong the life of fossil fuels. Even so, it’s worth taking a moment for utopian exploration. The casual dismissal of utopian thought is linked to an oppressive politics. Marxist feminist scholar Kathi Weeks observes that “political realism tends to be associated with a mode of hard-nosed, hard-ball politics,” while “utopianism can be understood—building on this traditional gender logic—as both softhearted and softheaded, or, more precisely, softheaded because softhearted.”1 Social relations are stabilized by claims about their natural basis—for example, claims about how women “naturally” are—and analyses that propose alternatives are often dismissed as unrealistic, Weeks writes. It was for this reason that the eighteenth-century feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft was forced to say that even her moderate visions of gender equality could “be termed Utopian dreams.”
When you dig deep into the discourse of what’s possible with regard to climate change, you find similar claims about the “natural” state of things—that it’s human nature to degrade our environment, for example, or that humans will always place their own and their group’s self-interest first. That humans won’t choose to do things unless they garner economic incentives. And to suggest otherwise will inevitably garner labels of utopianism.
As science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson writes, it may be easy to imagine a radically different society, “in that one merely expresses wishes and defines some version of justice, equality, peace. That’s all easy. What’s hard is imagining any plausible way of getting from here to there.”2 Robinson writes that perhaps
when Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson talks about the future as being “unimaginable,” he doesn’t mean that the future is an unimaginable destination; what’s unimaginable is “a history to a good future place.” Trying to imagine it anyway, though, is valuable, Robinson says: doing so points to the problem, and it generates new stories.
So, is this after-zero society techno-utopia? Or is it a small-is- beautiful utopia? Perhaps it can be both. I’m interested in a synthesis between these industrial technologies and something that appears to be on the other side of a binary from them: degrowth.
Environmental scientist Giorgios Kallis defines sustainable degrowth as “an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions.”3 The organizing principles are simplicity, conviviality, and sharing. Note that these are organizing principles, not values (though they are probably that, too). In a degrowth mindset, innovation is “directed towards new social and technical arrangements that will enable a convivial and frugal living.” Yet the view of many degrowth advocates is that technologically complex systems beget technocratic elites: fossil fuels and nuclear power are dangerous because sophisticated technological systems managed by bureaucrats will gradually become less democratic and egalitarian.4 Large-scale technological systems, the argument goes, result in a society divided into experts and users. This limits the engagement of degrowth thinking with many forms of carbon removal, which is unfortunate. Many tenets of degrowth encompass what I think a best-case scenario of carbon removal would look like: directing innovation toward conviviality, frugality, and also justice. As Kallis sees it, “sustainable degrowth denotes an intentional process of a smooth and ‘prosperous way down,’ through a range of social, environmental, and economic policies and institutions, orchestrated to guarantee that while production and consumption decline, human welfare improves and is more equally distributed.”5 The “way down” dovetails with the narrative of removing emissions. Some of the proposals Kallis sets out in his book In Defense of Degrowth include basic and maximum income, green tax reform, cessation of subsidies for pollution and reallocation of these funds toward clean production, support for a solidarity society, optimization of the use of buildings, and abolition of the use of GDP as an indicator of economic progress. Many of these would enable carbon removal at scale.
Whatever its particular form, what’s clear is that we need a social imagination to match our technological imagination. And these perspectives of degrowth and ecomodernism do not comprise two ends of a continuum. For we will need more of certain kinds of industries, and less of others, and we can use a lot of the same tools that degrowth advocates are calling for toward many of the ends degrowth theorists favor. Reiterating a tired binary between ecomodernism and withdrawal makes it impossible to see what we need to do. Critical thinkers have been so focused on documenting the unfolding crisis that we don’t focus on the ways in which industrialization could advance. But there may, in fact, be a hybrid position, a third, distinct frame. What about a democratically controlled industrial technology that doesn’t exist to “conquer” nature?
There’s clearly no single answer to what an after-zero society looks and feels like, who lives there, and what they will value and do—but there are manifest interesting possibilities. This terrain is made more complex by the variety of technological and non-technological trends we might anticipate over the next century. Some of them we can reasonably foresee: demographic shifts to a population of 9 or 10 billion, advances in machine learning and synthetic biology, transformations in the nature of work and education, and climate change itself. Other trends will be surprises. However, I’m looking at this terrain with an eye to how a culture committed to carbon removal would interact with these trends, and backcasting from there.
Work in the twenty-first century is complicated. The shifting backdrop includes stagnation of wages and rising inequality. There’s automation and machine learning, and the jobless class they portend. There’s the cult of the entrepreneur, posited as a savior from these trends. Trade wars are started over the ideal of domestic manufacturing jobs; people are trying to figure out what “dematerialization” means and if it even exists. Conversations are spinning in public spaces about race, gender, and employment. Academic venues are abuzz with discussions of how nature gets enrolled to do work for us. And there are billions of people subsisting on a few dollars a day, many of whom are forecast to move from rural regions to cities in search of work, where they may find only informal employment. Meanwhile, people in industrialized countries are working out what kinds of livelihoods will be had in emptying rural villages and towns.
That’s a lot going on. Suppose, emerging from all of this preexisting context, that there is also a massive effort to remove carbon from the atmosphere over the course of this century. Who does the work of carbon removal? What sort of work will it be? Will these be “good green jobs,” creative jobs, hard labor? Who will the employers be: the state, startups, reimagined large firms, tech companies, cooperatives, local organizations? Will the burden of jobs fall disproportionately upon one segment of society—or will they be exclusively granted to one privileged group?
I’d like to begin this inquiry with a (true) story about what was reported in the press as a geoengineering event—one of the only “geoengineering” events ever to happen. It took place in 2012, a few hundred kilometers offshore from Haida Gwaii, which is a remote archipelago near northern British Columbia. A chartered fishing vessel had poured iron into the ocean in order to generate a plankton bloom. The branding of “rogue geoengineering” crystallized quickly around the endeavor; a staff writer in the New Yorker called it an act by “the world’s first geo-vigilante.”6 From another point of view, though, some narrators saw the story in terms of beginning the work of climate and ecosystem repair when no one else was stepping up to the job.
Taking action
In Old Massett, the rain drives hard across vacant storefronts. A hand-painted plywood sign hangs off a shuttered building: True North Strong and Tanker Free. The cannery and docks are quiet; stacks of crab pots corrode. “Notice to clam diggers: The legal minimum size for razor clams is 4 inches.” Gravel lots host abandoned shipping containers, rust upon gray. Flocks of ravens swoop down to devour bright-red salmon scraps, scattered along the rocky shores. In the shelter of a café, a flier is pinned to a bulletin board: “British Columbia Reconciliation Week: Be Part of the National Journey for Healing and Reconciliation!” Bullet points include: “Statement Gathering,” “Traditional Ceremonies,” “Survivor Gatherings,” “Education Day,” “Witnessing Survivor Statements,” “Cultural Performances,” and “Films and more.”
Old Massett, to an outsider on a rainy day, feels desolate, a village of 600 souls that is quietly struggling to survive, to stay intact. Unemployment might reach 70 percent, though this is mitigated somewhat by people’s ability to fish and gather traditional foods. I talk to two guys on the wharf; they tell me the best field for wild strawberries is behind the school. The season for coho is ending in two weeks. “We’re natives, so we can catch our own fish,” they tell me—all they need is potatoes and rice. They freeze thimbleberries for smoothies. But the village is in a tough place. The most significant industries here are fishing and logging, and the fish catches vary, with licenses often granted to big companies from the mainland. If they manage to pick up enough shifts in the fish-freezing plant, they can get employment insurance assistance—$860 Canadian a month. But right now, the cannery is quiet.
There are about 2,500 indigenous Haida people in the Old Massett band, and another 2,500 in the band of Skidegate, about an hour and half’s drive south. Once, of course, there were many more Haida villages. After contact, the population decreased by between 90 and 97 percent. The Haida spent the following decades being forced into residential schools, their language banned and then endangered. Colonizers came to cut their forests and deplete their fisheries. But to write this is not to make Hai
da people out to be passive agents in the colonialization of their lands: their resistance to logging forced important changes in Canadian law. They have launched fishery and stream restoration projects. They are forward looking and creative.
The image of people resisting the imposition of someone else’s vision for their land and climate is familiar: we know the defiant faces at protests; the aerial photos of marchers, holding signs that say no to things. There is a certain comfort in these captioned photos: 1960s nostalgia, the idea that people are still out there resisting, that the resistance means some kind of democratic deliberation is happening. Resistance to environmental degradation is scripted, expected. Actively pursuing environmental interventions is less so.
The dependence of people on Haida Gwaii upon on the land makes it all the more important that they have access to local foods, like salmon, and to functioning ecosystems. In a place where the environment is cherished and relied upon, and where there’s also significant economic hardship, the idea of payment for ecosystem services takes on a different rationale than the get-rich-quick exuberance of financialized carbon. This context is important for understanding why leaders in the village of Old Massett decided to finance an intervention aimed at restoring salmon populations, and possibly sequestering carbon, in conjunction with an outside entrepreneur named Russ George.
The event happened as follows: In the summer of 2012, a small crew took a thirty-five-foot rented fishing vessel, the Ocean Pearl, out onto the blustery seas far beyond Haida Gwaii, in an area considered to be Haida territorial waters. The crew poured amounts of iron into the ocean over the course of a few weeks at sea, and they remotely monitored the resultant plankton bloom with two ocean gliders and twenty drifter robots. “We added approximately forty kilograms of iron-based material per square kilometer of ocean and thereby changed the background concentrations of iron in the top one hundred meters of ocean from approximately three parts per trillion to ten parts per trillion,” reported the former scientific director of the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation (HSRC), Jason McNamee, when I talked to him some years ago at their office, then in Vancouver (some time before it was investigated by the Canadian government). This event, however, was seen by many not as stewardship, but as a harmful intervention. “We never did and do not consider it geoengineering,” McNamee said.
After Geoengineering Page 17