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Exploring Our Planetary Future
Christopher Cokinos is a literary nonfiction writer who spends a lot of time thinking about our planetary future. This fall, he spent a week at UCLA on a journalism and media fellowship from the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He interviewed faculty—and visited the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant up the coast—for a new book project tentatively titled Re-Civilization: Six Heresies to Keep a Planet Running. Cokinos is the author of three books of literary nonfiction: Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, and Bodies, of the Holocene. His prose and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Scholar, Salon, Orion, High Country News, Science, Poetry, and Sky & Telescope. Cokinos is an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona, where is also affiliated with the Institute of the Environment. His current research has been supported by a Udall Center environmental policy fellowship and a crew journalist position at the Mars Desert Research Station.
IoES journalist-in-residence Jon Christensen caught up with Cokinos for a chat by email after his fast-paced stay at UCLA. For more information about IoES journalism and media fellowships, contact Jon Christensen.
Christensen: How did you get from Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, a rather elegiac book about extinction, to thinking about possible futures for the planet in this new book you’re working on?
Cokinos: After I finished Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, grieving the deaths of the passenger pigeon and other birds, as well as living through some personal grief with a divorce and the death of my mother, I was ready for something else. I started writing about astronomy—a long-time passion—and ended up with a book about meteorites and meteorite hunters—a group of folks, by the way, who are more obsessive than birders. I was wrong to think The Fallen Sky would get me away from thinking about extinction and the fate of things, though. I mean—duh, right?—big meteorites have hit the planet before and will again. But they also deliver organic compounds and water. I keep coming back to these themes of life and death on a planetary scale. As a reader of science fiction, I find myself attracted to writers tackling them too. After The Fallen Sky, I became interested in geoengineering, and those possible approaches to curbing climate change really opened up my interest in other technologies, such as nuclear power.
Christensen: You write that you’re interested in “the promise and peril of technologies that are being advocated by ecological modernists.” What are ecological modernists?
Cokinos: They are in some ways among the most audacious environmental thinkers around today. While many environmentalists believe technology, capitalism, growth, and consumption are big parts of our problems today, ecological modernists say the modernization that got us to this state is one of the things that will get us out of it. This rubs some environmentalists—who believe we need to slow down modernization—the wrong way. Still, their advocacy for finding new approaches—a third way, as it were—is an important contribution to thinking about our failure so far to do anything meaningful at a planetary scale to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As I was first thinking about what I call “re-civilization,” I found myself somewhat in their territory: questioning some fundamental assumptions about environmentalism, wanting to see how technologies—with socially just governance, I hasten to add—can make an immediate difference. GMOs come to mind. But we’ve seen how that has gone down in the court of public opinion.
Christensen: It doesn’t sound like you’re completely buying these versions of the future. Why are you skeptical?
Cokinos: I’m a writer and scholar. I have to be skeptical. Each of the areas I’m writing about—geoengineering; nuclear power; GMOs and synthetic biology; human engineering; de-extinction; and terraforming—are fraught with difficult questions. They have the potential to save species, including our own. They also have the potential to fail miserably. I’m interested in what we might call this poetic texture of policy complications. The ecological modernists have a lineage that goes back to at least the 19th century and its faith in technological progress and embrace of utopian thinking. So that history informs what I’m up to as well. I am increasingly convinced that nuclear power, for instance, under the right circumstances, is among the best essentially carbon-free power sources we need to have in the near-term. But it’s highly controversial. So we have to look at its technological potential and the social reality of resistance to nuclear power. Those are two different things. The same goes for geoengineering. It’s hard for me to see how we stave off the worst climate change effects—which are getting underway now—without some version of managing solar radiation, by putting particles in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, for example. Technologically possible. But socially? Who decides? The questions are pretty complex. So I guess I’m dwelling—this book project is dwelling—in both that uncertainty and that possibility. It’s certainly more interesting than despair.
Christensen: But I take it you believe we need new thinking, right? So do you think we will end up with some combination of these technologies?
Cokinos: We absolutely do need new thinking but we also need to be mindful of tone. So I appreciate the ecological modernists for widening and reframing the debates. And, yes, I think we’ll have some of these technologies in the near-term. The last three—re-engineering human beings; bringing species back from extinction; and terraforming other planets—are far more speculative, though. But even these very speculative proposals work well as lenses through which to consider the present.
And I am frustrated with mainstream environmental rhetoric, which has masked the systemic failures of international climate change negotiations to grapple with the real challenges, so far. It’s abundantly clear that electricity lifts people out of poverty, and, yet, how we generate electricity is the problem, right? So the kind of high-handed moralism that might have led to relatively simple results—good things, you know, such as The Wilderness Act in this country a few decades ago—that kind of approach is dead on arrival when it comes to climate. We have to lift the bottom three billion as well as redesign consumption by the top billion. And it looks like we are stuck with capitalism for awhile, so how can we steer that ship, ecologically speaking?
Christensen: What did the IoES journalism and media fellowship enable you to do?
Cokinos: It gave me a chance to take a week away from being very busy as director of creative writing at the University of Arizona and really immerse myself in these kinds of conversations and connect with people who are doing world-class work. Peter Kareiva, Allison Carruth, Alex Hall, Troy Carter, and others all spent good time with me. It was a chance not only to interview them but also to hear more about everything that they are doing. I hadn’t planned on spending too much time on the promise of fusion energy, for example, but Troy Carter’s perspective was fascinating. And he literally walked me through the UCLA tokamak, where fusion has actually occurred. It’s now a different kind of instrument, but still that kind of physicality, tying the future to walking in the present, well, I love that. It’s vivid, and I hope to convey that to my readers.
Christensen: And as you’ve been talking with researchers and scholars here at UCLA and elsewhere, what have you learned about how to balance thinking about the promises as well as the perils of these technologies?
Cokinos: Coming to UCLA this fall was part of my ongoing education in thinking about not only specific technologies, but the larger state of climate issues and how various stakeholders are engaging with different aspects of policy and practice. I spent a heady week on campus talking with lots of people. Ted Parson and I had an expansive conversation about climate engineering and other speculative technologies, which, it happens, he’ll be exploring in a class he’s teaching using science fiction. I wish I could take it. Albert Carnesale gave me a sober look at the problems facing the nuclear industry. I’m writing about that right now, so it was timely to be thinking about the very real questions of nuclear’s cost-efficiency, and how to overcome, if we can, public misunderstanding of radiation and misunderstanding of the industry’s safety record. All that is also leading me to examine how we determine the so-called social cost of carbon—the total cost to people and the planet of burning fossil fuels.
Christensen: When can we read the book? Will there be anything in the meantime?
Cokinos: I’m asking myself those questions too. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers took me 10 years to write. The Fallen Sky took eight. I’m a book-writer, first, more than an article-writer, but I’ll also be writing articles and sharing ideas and stories while the book is percolating. Stay tuned.
Christensen: We will, and hope to get a first look soon.