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So many of us get lost in terror about humanity’s future, but how often do we ask, “What’s our best possible future?” Bestselling author and climate activist Kim Stanley Robinson joined me on Earth Day this year for an urgent and hopeful conversation at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism.

This is the third time I’ve been fortunate enough to have Stan on the podcast, and this time we traced a through line across humanity’s past, present, and future through three of my favorite books of his: The Ministry for the Future, High Sierra: A Love Story, and Shaman.

Where do we find hope in the face of the climate crisis? How can we reconnect with the extraordinary nature that, for many of us, is right outside our door? And what can our ancestors from 30,000 years ago teach us about living in balance with the planet and one another today?

Scott Snibbe: It’s a huge pleasure speaking to you today on Earth Day. Thanks for joining me here at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism, where they now have this dedicated climate journalism program led by Jason Spingarn-Koff, who helped arrange this event. So thanks to both of you.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, thank you. It’s good to see you again, Scott, and I’m happy to be here. I’m always happy to be doing stuff with UC Berkeley.

Scott Snibbe: I want to connect three of your books today—three of your dozens and dozens of books—High Sierra: A Love Story, Shaman, and The Ministry for the Future. If I’m not mistaken, they chart a through line through humanity’s past, present, and future. In fact, I’ve almost finished a second reading of High Sierra. I’ll pull out my battered copy here.

My daughter and I, wonderfully, my daughter fell in love with this book too when we started listening to it on our way back from Desolation Wilderness last year. Every night, we read a little bit of it aloud. It’s taken a year to get through it again. So thanks for that.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Thank you. Thank you for reading it. It’s a book very close to my heart.

The High Sierra

Scott Snibbe: Yeah, I highly recommend it. It’s an extraordinary book. I want to start our conversation talking about nature itself, which strangely sometimes goes unmentioned in conversations about the climate crisis. The book I just mentioned, High Sierra: A Love Story, instantly became one of the essential books about this extraordinary place. For those who might not know it, I wonder if you could say a little bit about what the Sierra is and why you’ve spent about a month there out of every one of the last 50 or so years.

Kim Stanley Robinson: You can think of it as the spine of California. It runs from just north of L.A. all the way up to Mount Lassen in the north, which is maybe the southernmost of the Cascades. It’s a typical tectonic mountain range formed by subduction. The Pacific Plate shoved under the North American Plate about 20 million years ago and created the incredible trench of California’s Central Valley, which is filled now with dirt and sediments that ran off the older mountain ranges. But the mountain range is still there, made of hard granite, with some older metamorphic rock still on top of that granite that never wore away.

It was a barrier for white settler-colonials coming to California in the days of covered wagons, and even for trains, it was a difficult crossing, which was completed in the middle of the Civil War. It also made California a place apart. The specialness of California comes from several different components. It’s either a resource curse or a blessing: its incredible beauty, its Mediterranean climate, the Gold Rush, Hollywood, and now Silicon Valley. California is a special place on Earth, and the Sierra is, as I say, the backbone or spine of it—the place to get away.

It was recognized early by people living in San Francisco and throughout California that the range could be ruined by logging and sheep herding, to the point where the natural landscape would be torn up and then devastated by rain and snowmelt. So it was protected extremely early on compared to many other places. It was an early victory in the conservation movement. This was partly because of John Muir, but John Muir was used as a figurehead by a much larger network of people in San Francisco, Fresno, and throughout California.

So it’s protected land—federal and state. There’s a stretch of it with no roads from Tioga Pass all the way down to, I think, Lake Isabella or Tehachapi Pass. This is a distance longer than the width of Switzerland, with no roads crossing the range. It’s a broad band as well as a long band of land that we’ve left alone. I know that wilderness is now somewhat of an academic controversy—its history, its practices—but I think, on balance, it’s extremely valuable to leave some of the surface of the Earth to wild animals. They do better, and therefore we do better.

The Sierra is an early and spectacular example of that. Especially in a region with 35 million people living in it, the fact that this land remains empty and is only visited by people who then leave is a remarkable human accomplishment, as well as a stupendous mountain range. It’s very benign, very interesting, and very beautiful.

Scott Snibbe: It’s a place you’re really in love with, right? Why do you love it?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I wrote the book to try to explain, and I don’t think one can explain it. It’s a feeling, right? Can we ever explain love? It generates a lot of literature, but explanations are lacking. I went up there when I was young. I was an undergraduate in college. I was a beach kid. I didn’t give a damn about mountains because I grew up in the chaparral mountains of Southern California. They’re scrubby and deserty and unattractive to me. Some people like them. But when I went to the Sierra, I had an epiphany. It was a peak experience in the most literal sense.

When I went to the Sierra, I had an epiphany. It was a peak experience in the most literal sense.

So I kept going back, and it kept happening. For me, it’s a refuge, a place to calm down, regain sanity and perspective, and have a good time like a five-year-old on a jungle gym. There’s some scrambling to be done up there. It’s very up-and-downy. There’s not much flatness in the Sierra Nevada. You have to hike up, then you have to hike down. It goes on and on like that. You have to like walking, that’s for sure. But I do.

For me, it’s a refuge, a place to calm down, regain sanity and perspective, and have a good time like a five-year-old on a jungle gym.

What have we lost in our modern society?

Scott Snibbe: Yeah, I love it. One of the reasons I love the Sierras—although I don’t want to put it against your fanaticism—but I do love it. And one of the reasons I fell in love with it is the feeling I had on my first trip that I’d stepped into the way humans lived tens of thousands of years ago.

Until I read High Sierra, I hadn’t, I’m embarrassed to say, realized people had actually been going up there for thousands of years. You have a great story about coming across obsidian shards up there in the book that could only have been brought by humans because they come from hundreds of miles away. I wonder if you can talk about this deep—I mean, that had a very profound feeling for me when I read that.

And then when I went to Shaman after—you mention it in your book, and I realized I’d missed it. Only with Kim Stanley Robinson can you miss a thousand-page novel that came out, and I wasn’t paying attention. So I went back and read Shaman, and in that, you deeply imagine this relationship we had to the planet 10,000 years ago.

Can you talk a little bit about what we’ve lost as we’ve moved into modern life? You imagine that time so beautifully.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Sure, and thank you for that. I’ve thought about it a lot on the trail. I reckon that in the Sierras, and off-trail, walking with a pack on your back—sometimes with a little child on your back—it feels so good. It feels right, and there’s a reason for that. We evolved to do it. And I want to add parenthetically that we also evolved into bipeds relatively recently. We were quadrupeds before. So when you hike with walking poles, that part of your brain that is still a quadruped is extremely pleased. I recommend hiking with walking poles to get back into your quadruped mind.

I recommend hiking with walking poles to get back into your quadruped mind.

And then, even as a biped, we co-evolved with walking across landscapes that we didn’t know—seeing what’s over the next ridge and seeing what you can find there to make a living, to eat, to take shelter, and perhaps stay there or perhaps move on. I’m very impressed that people left Africa to enter a world that had other humanoid species, like the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. But by and large, Homo sapiens came out of Africa about 100,000 years ago, got to Australia 60,000 years ago, and had spread almost everywhere. We weren’t in the Americas until later—the date keeps getting pushed back—but one can say, we think, not older than about 30,000 years ago.

Then they filled the Americas, sometimes in kayaks down the West Coast and sometimes just by walking over the next ridge, all within a few thousand years. So it’s in us. Our brains evolved doing these activities. When you do them now, you get a rush. You get a feeling that it’s right, that you know how to do it, even when you’ve never done it before. The first time you do it, you feel, “Ah, yes, this is instinctual. I know how to do this.”

And then there’s a pleasure in it. Parts of your brain that aren’t activated when you’re sitting on your butt being a writer at a desk, like I’ve been. Many of us spend a lot of time inside rooms—more waking time inside rooms than is really good for us. And a lot of time, especially for desk workers like myself, just looking at things and tapping at a keyboard. Well, we didn’t evolve to do that.

There was also a lot of hanging out—sitting around the fire, preparing food, talking, doing all the things that we still do. But the walking is crucial. When it comes back, it makes you feel better and is probably really good for you. I feel that in my bones, in my body, that we’re primates, that we’re made to walk. So that’s one part of it.

And when I wrote Shaman, that was about the Chauvet Cave, which was painted about 32,000 years ago. This is in southern France. It means that 30,000 years ago, we were very much like we are now. The same DNA, the same kinds of feelings toward the world, as far as we can deduce from looking at their artwork. That’s an interesting perspective. We see a little bit of their tools and a little bit of their calculations because they marked bones with lines. They were just like us. They certainly counted, calculated, and knew the seasons.

We don’t know how much they knew because it’s so prehistoric, but I bet they knew a lot. They certainly knew how to make snowshoes and fur clothing and other things that don’t last, but we can infer this from the bones and stones that remain. We can glimpse the kind of culture they had, and then there are these incredible works of art on the cave walls. One has to assume that cliffs everywhere—any good, clean stone surface—were probably painted all over the world, and the rain has washed them away. But in the caves, that didn’t happen.

So we’ve got only the remnants of prehistoric art, which probably covered every surface they could get to. You see that in the Owens Valley with petroglyphs, but there were probably paintings on every surface they could reach as well. I wanted to write about that because I’d had the experience of walking in the Sierra for what was probably 40 years. I think I wrote Shaman about 10 years ago, so it was after 40 years of walking that I finally thought: What was it like for them?

I knew it was kind of impossible, but it was worth trying. As a science fiction writer, I’m always making things up about the future. And, to tell you the truth, making things up about the past—using the science of archaeology and anthropology as a foundation—and then thinking, well, they were just like us, so what would it have been like? I knew something like it had to have happened because those paintings are there. People made them.

They were like us, but not like us. And then I had my adventure of trying to imagine it.

Reclaiming our reverence for the Earth

Scott Snibbe: There’s a few things about how you—I just love that book so much—but one of the things I love is the reverence for the Earth that you describe and all the activities of the shamanic culture: giving back to the Earth no matter how hungry you are, offering back the first parts of the harvest, thanking animals for giving their lives so you can eat. As a Tibetan Buddhist, that was when I learned to do that. If you eat a fish or something, you say, “Thank you for giving me your life,” and then you eat it.

Are there ways that we can reclaim that kind of reverence that you write about?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, for sure. Just to pay attention and imagine that everything alive is part of your body—that we are connected with each other very intimately, that the biosphere of Earth is a single supra-organism. We are like bees in a hive, very accomplished individually, as bees are, but crucially dependent on the hive, which in our case—and in the case of all living creatures—is the biosphere of the Earth itself.

We are like bees in a hive, very accomplished individually, as bees are, but crucially dependent on the hive, which in our case—and in the case of all living creatures—is the biosphere of the Earth itself.

You can call it Gaia. You can call it Mother Earth and use maternal imagery. Why not? It’s a feeling that I think is not that far beneath the surface of our modern minds. You only have to pay attention, which of course is a Buddhist practice, right? Pay attention. And also, breathing in Buddhism is very important. When I visit schools, especially with younger kids but really with anyone, I’ll say, “Okay, we’re like jellyfish in the sea. The whole world is our extended body.”

I get looks of skepticism. Then I say, “Okay, we’re going to do an exercise. We’re going to hold our breath for five minutes.” Everybody rolls their eyes, and I say, “No, let’s try it.” We hold our breath. Usually, there’s a clock on the wall if you’re in an elementary school. Hold your breath. After about a minute, it’s time to breathe. And then the lesson is there.

We depend on the world with every breath, not to mention water and food. And the health of all those things affects our own health. So it can be a scientific finding or it can be a religious feeling, but they both tell the same story.

Scott Snibbe: It’s quite striking because one way of describing Shaman is that it’s about the origins of art and science in humanity. After reading it, I went on a journey—I’m always on a journey with your books.

So I went on to read The Mind in the Cave, which you must have read in preparing for that book. And it explores early cave paintings, and you have these vivid scenes of creating those paintings. It’s incredible—the paintings in the cave. So bold of you to try to imagine that. Kudos to you. The ones we see in Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, right?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Exactly. Yes. A very fine movie. Herzog is, of course, a famous and great filmmaker, but he’s also erratic as hell and a little crazy. But in that movie, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, he trusted the cave. He said, “This isn’t about me. This is about the cave.” And he just panned across those paintings, sometimes for five minutes at a time. I watched that movie on my TV frame by frame, but I also played it five or six times while I was writing that book.

The French have done extraordinary work with Chauvet Cave, where they actually showed the sequence of the paintings. They can tell which layer was first and which came second, and they give you a kind of time-lapse view of the painting process itself. I stuck closely to all of that when I wrote the book, trying to be accurate to how it might have felt.

What we can learn from psychedelics

Scott Snibbe: It’s beautiful. There’s this idea that the images weren’t just representational or aesthetic—that’s been a recent realization—but that they connect us to altered states of consciousness. I’m wondering if there’s anything about that very first art, which you write about in the book, that can inform today’s art. Some of the people listening here at the School of Journalism are trying to make art through journalism and documentaries that somehow benefit humanity.

Is there anything we can learn from that very first art to inform the art we’re making today?

Kim Stanley Robinson: I wonder. It seems likely. There are a couple parts to what you’re talking about here. One of them is the theory that shamanistic cultures often found the psychedelics—the mind-altering drugs—in their landscapes and used them in rituals. Sometimes it was the shaman himself or herself—the role is really gender-neutral—and sometimes the participants as well, entering the spirit world by eating or drinking something with psychoactive properties.

Sometimes these substances are called entheogens—the idea being that the god goes into you. The term may be an attempt to rehabilitate the somewhat hippie-era connotations of psychedelics. But it certainly seems to be part of a much longer tradition. Now, we can’t prove what people were doing 30,000 years ago. Anthropologists and archaeologists argue about this all the time.

But The Mind in the Cave, the book you referenced, suggests that the first hallucinations people experience on many of these substances are abstract patterns—dots, crisscrosses, weavings, swirls. And on cave walls, we find all of these features. So perhaps they were painting what they were seeing. It’s a theory. It can’t be proved.

But when you look at Indigenous cultures that have managed to preserve some of their traditions—which are fewer and fewer now—you find related practices. Most cultures have been contacted and incorporated into the modern world, though some still try to maintain older ways. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were more opportunities to observe these traditions directly.

I’m amused—in a good way—that the hippie interest in psychedelics is being rehabilitated as something with therapeutic and even religious value when approached thoughtfully. I myself was enthusiastically exploring these things in the 1970s.

I’m amused—in a good way—that the hippie interest in psychedelics is being rehabilitated as something with therapeutic and even religious value when approached thoughtfully.

But for me, it was a young person’s thing to do. I eventually reached a point where I thought, I’ve learned what I need to learn from this. I also developed a revulsion toward the way it could make your body feel sick, so I stopped. Still, I enjoy seeing people talk about these experiences in such enthusiastic terms today. It doesn’t erase some of the stupidity of what we did when we were young, since we often didn’t actually know what we were taking. It was a wild exploration by ignorant young people. But whatever the case, it seems our instincts were right that this was an interesting thing to investigate.

Scott Snibbe: And altered states of consciousness can come about through sitting in the dark in a cave or going on a long walk.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I love walking meditation. Running, too. These altered states—you can inspire them through all kinds of things. But the use of certain substances certainly looks to be very ancient. It makes sense. You see birds do it. You see other primates do it.

Small groups can actually make a difference

Scott Snibbe: You talked about actor networks, and this is one of the things from High Sierra that I also found very inspiring: these stories of quite small groups of people who came together to preserve these vast landscapes. That seemed like a very successful movement.

Is there anything we can learn from that hugely successful effort to conserve such vast tracts of our country that can help us address the climate crisis today?

Kim Stanley Robinson: I think so. This is a Margaret Mead thing: never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. That’s the only way the world ever gets changed. There’s more to it than that, but it’s important to remember because your actor network is never going to be very large compared to the eight billion people who exist now. And yet you can feel that you’re in solidarity with all eight billion people, engaged in a shared project to live a good life together and pass it on to the generations that follow.

The small groups usually have a specific project. Maybe more than one, but often it’s targeted: we’re going to try to do this. Then you need broad popular support for it to last. I think that’s what the Sierra Nevada actor network managed to achieve. Everybody who goes there is struck by its beauty and its benign quality—the way it’s not just beautiful, but gentle. There are many mountain ranges that are beautiful and will kill you in an hour, but the Sierra is kinder.

There are many mountain ranges that are beautiful and will kill you in an hour, but the Sierra is kinder.

People come back, and they’re willing to support a group of people who are actively saying, “Let’s do this. Let’s do that.” When you get down to it, it means creating legislation, believing in the rule of law, and declaring that some land is sacred—not just in our hearts, but in our laws. Having seen that succeed, first, we recognize that it still has to be defended. Laws can be overturned.

And second, it suggests things we might extend outward. If we really care about these things, we also have to protect the atmosphere. We breathe it. After Artemis II, it’s especially striking to think about this: if the Earth were the size of a basketball, the atmosphere would be much thinner than a layer of cellophane wrapped around it. We have the power to change the atmosphere, and we have changed it. So it’s obvious that we need to fix it and clean it up.

It’s a little like putting in a sewage system, except it’s more complicated. We have to put the sewage system in and also draw the sewage back out after it’s already been distributed. That’s harder, but it’s not impossible. These projects exist as things to do.

Are you optimistic about the future?

Scott Snibbe: When I talked to you last year, about 18 months ago, I was a little disheartened that your functional optimism might have taken a hit. But you’ve gone back this year, right? You attended the 30th UN Climate Change Conference.

What’s our best possible future looking like today with respect to climate change, and how optimistic are you still?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, it’s a delicate balance to talk about this properly. We are in extraordinary danger, but we have not yet crossed fundamental physical tipping points that would cast us back into a hothouse Earth like the planet was about three million years ago. Given that danger, it’s incumbent on us to act very quickly. It’s not a matter of “it will all be over.” It’s a matter of better or worse. But the worse it gets, the harder it will be to come back from it.

We are in extraordinary danger, but we have not yet crossed fundamental physical tipping points that would cast us back into a hothouse Earth like the planet was about three million years ago.

At a certain point, if we start a runaway greenhouse effect—not toward something like Venus, but toward a Pliocene-like Earth—then it becomes so difficult that it’s possible all the human effort we could apply would not be enough. That’s the danger: that we’re very close to sliding down a slippery slope into permanent climate change, into a hothouse Earth, which is a stable state, but one where sea levels are many meters higher and tropical regions are often too hot for humans to survive. It could wreck civilization. So that’s the danger.

We’re very close to sliding down a slippery slope into permanent climate change, into a hothouse Earth, which is a stable state, but one where sea levels are many meters higher and tropical regions are often too hot for humans to survive. It could wreck civilization.

But the positive side—and I saw this in Belém, Brazil, last November—is that this is widely understood. The supposed climate denialists know it too. They simply have other projects and priorities. Some seem to be operating from a kind of Götterdämmerung state of mind: “If I have to go down, I want to take the whole world with me.” There’s a psychopathology in climate denialism that makes it resemble a death cult. But most people are not interested in being part of a death cult.

There’s a psychopathology in climate denialism that makes it resemble a death cult.

For many people, climate change is not as immediate as putting food on the table that night. But it is on the minds of everyone who thinks about the larger human situation on this planet. And because we all have phones—even in the developing world—there’s really no part of the world where people are ignorant of the reality. Because of our interconnectedness, you have to think of it this way: everybody knows everything. There isn’t really ignorance. There’s perversity, but not ignorance.

For many people, climate change is not as immediate as putting food on the table that night. But it is on the minds of everyone who thinks about the larger human situation on this planet.

So it is a difficult political battle.

What I saw in Brazil was 65,000 people, with an average age of around 40 to 45. There were more women than men, perhaps 55 to 60 percent women. They came from every country on Earth, speaking every language, though using English as the lingua franca, which is convenient for us. They were all dedicated to this work. And then they go back home, where they are part of networks in their own countries doing the same work.

There are serious problems. The fossil fuel industry and its representatives—the people who have somehow convinced themselves that saving the fossil fuel industry is a worthy project—still haven’t grasped the situation. They’re going down fighting and are trying to keep these industries alive even though they’re poisoning us, and they know it. That’s our challenge. For the rest of us, the task is to build working political majorities at every level—from town councils all the way up to international treaties—to get the work done that needs to be done.

And since you asked about the best possible future, I’ll end with this: Clean energy is now cheaper to install than fossil fuel energy. That’s revolutionary. It’s new. It’s the result of technological advancement, pushed by social forces and financed by investment in something that once looked marginal and experimental but is now transforming the world.

Clean energy is now cheaper to install than fossil fuel energy. That’s revolutionary.

China is leading industrially, but everywhere, people want solar power, wind power, and battery storage. There are other technologies too, but those are the big three for getting off fossil fuels quickly while still providing electricity to everyone—including the people who have never had reliable access to it before, which is important and necessary. And now it can be done without burning much more fossil fuel.

So when you describe the total situation, you have both extreme danger and incredible opportunity at the same time. That’s why the present feels so strange. Both are true at once. And if you’re honest about both realities simultaneously, it’s hard to make good clickbait. Social media rewards extreme claims on one side or the other of this enormously complex problem. But those claims are rarely quite true, because radically different things are happening at the same time.

Scott Snibbe: Is there anything you think climate activists are missing in their approach today?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I wouldn’t want to say. There are so many of them, and they’re all taking different approaches. I’d have to ponder that for a while. I definitely don’t like telling people what to do. I was a teacher for ten years, but I’m a novelist, and I write my novels as a kind of testament. I’ll say, “Listen to this story,” or, “If you live in this novel for a month or so, you’ll come out of it a little different.” But how you change depends on you.

I am a climate activist. What you would want are stories you could tell to people who are strongly against you that might make them feel uneasy, and stories for people who are confused and looking for clarity. These might not be the same stories.

So I would say: read books on rhetoric. Read ancient Greek rhetoric. Every kind of argument and persuasive method was analyzed and turned into a taxonomy by the ancient Greeks. I don’t believe we’re very good at that anymore, and yet it’s an extremely useful tool for persuasion.

What do we have to look forward to?

Scott Snibbe: A lot of what we talk about when we discuss climate is bemoaning what humanity has done to the planet. But you are a science fiction writer, and you take great delight in looking into the future.

What is there to look forward to? What is there to enjoy right now about how humanity has changed and transformed our planet and our society? And what do we have to look forward to outside of this great challenge?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, there’s a wonderful climate Substack called The Climate Brink. Andrew Dessler and Zeke Hausfather share the site, and Dessler wrote a really good introduction to energy and climate. He made the point that, through electricity, we effectively have the equivalent of about one hundred human beings doing physical work on our behalf. For modern people who are not lacking electricity, that energy supports food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that would be much harder to provide for ourselves individually.

There’s travel as well. You can see places on this planet. Of course, there’s a carbon burden involved, but that doesn’t always have to be true. It depends on how you travel. As the Dalai Lama once said to me in McLeod Ganj, “The Buddha was a green.” You’re going to burn some carbon simply by being alive. So you have to burn carbon mindfully, the way he used to talk about consuming mindfully. Pay attention. Be modest in your desires. Realize that enough is as good as a feast. You can be happy with a relatively small number of physical possessions because it’s experiences that you want.

As the Dalai Lama once said to me in McLeod Ganj, “The Buddha was a green.”

You could also talk about life extension. I don’t mean living hundreds of years. It seems that progress is asymptotic—the more progress we make, the harder it becomes to make further gains. But there may be breakthroughs in medical research. Young people today can justifiably think that, if they’re lucky, healthy, and hearty, they might remain vigorous into their nineties or even their early hundreds.

In my Mars Trilogy, I had a single trick: cell repair. Suddenly, everybody was living to around 250 years old. That sounds pretty good. I’d love to have that fix arrive soon. But it may not be that easy. Still, we are already living much longer lives. In America and across the developed world, an average lifespan of around eighty years is a massive improvement over where we were even a century ago, let alone two centuries ago. And that progress may continue.

You do not want to cut medical research. You do not want to cut funding for medical research. That’s another reason I describe the current administration as a death cult, because attacking medical research is attacking life itself. It’s diminishing life, and that’s something you don’t want to do.

You do not want to cut funding for medical research. That’s another reason I describe the current administration as a death cult, because attacking medical research is attacking life itself.

How can we connect to nature more?

Scott Snibbe: You’ve touched on this a little bit already. In your work, you talk a lot about the financial changes, political changes, and technical changes we need to make it through the climate crisis. But you’ve also hinted at the spiritual changes we need to make.

What do we need to do as a society to feel connected to nature again, to see harm against the planet as harm against ourselves? How do we do that? Your novels obviously have some impact there, but what else can we do?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Again, I don’t want to tell people what to do. Everybody will have their own way. But I do have a simple suggestion: spend more time outdoors. The feeling will hit you. When you’re outdoors, that’s when those feelings of reverence, awe, and connectedness to the biosphere arise. When you’re indoors—and everybody listening to this has to admit it—you spend most of your waking and sleeping hours inside.

Think about it for yourself: what percentage of your life do you spend indoors? Some people work outside. They work in the trades, in agriculture, or in forestry. And these are often happier people, and they know it. Whatever their status in modern society, they have happier lives because they spend so much of their time outdoors.

You can sleep outdoors, too. So spend more time outside, and do it consciously, in the way the Dalai Lama might suggest—living consciously, making deliberate choices. In most climates, being outdoors is either exhilarating because it’s cold, challenging because it’s hot, or simply pleasant because you’re immersed in it. Then pay attention to your experience. Ask yourself: Why do I feel this way when I’m outdoors as opposed to when I’m inside a box?

Imagine that we spend most of our lives in boxes, looking at other boxes. It’s remarkable. How did smart primates end up organizing their lives this way? It seems a little crazy.

Imagine that we spend most of our lives in boxes, looking at other boxes. It’s remarkable.

If you were writing The Ministry for the Future today, what would you change?

Scott Snibbe: So many people submitted questions, and I’d like to ask you a few of them. There were great questions from students and others listening, and I cherry-picked some favorites.

Here’s the first one: If you were writing The Ministry for the Future today, what would you change?

Kim Stanley Robinson: I’d take out the word “blockchain.” It’s not that good a form of cryptography, and it’s been corrupted by its association with Bitcoin. I would have used a term like “encryption” or simply “digital” instead. That was a mistake.

I might also have given more attention to the idea of small nuclear reactors as a bridge technology for getting us through the century-long transition away from fossil fuels. I’ve become more convinced of their potential, despite the obvious downside of long-term radioactive waste.

The need to decarbonize our energy systems quickly is so important that I might have added a chapter exploring the idea. For example, we could imagine something like a U.S. Navy submarine reactor adapted for civilian use. People live next to those reactors for years, and they have remarkably strong safety records because safety comes before profit.

I could imagine writing a new chapter—call it Chapter 107—about small nuclear power, if only to put the idea on the table for discussion.

After all, we’re trying to think about the best possible future while living through a very dangerous moment. You could call this the overshoot century. We’ve put too much CO₂ into the atmosphere, and that has placed everything else at risk. It’s not our only bad practice, but along with growing inequality, it’s one of the most serious problems we face. So I suppose I would proceed from the assumption that we understand the situation and that there are specific things we need to do.

Why isn’t solar geoengineering a top priority?

Scott Snibbe: That leads to another audience question, which I’ve heard you talk about a little bit recently: solar geoengineering feels like my only hope for climate stabilization. Why isn’t research into it a top priority?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, it’s becoming one. This is the idea of casting sulfur dioxide or some other aerosol into the high stratosphere, where it would reflect some sunlight away. One, two, or three percent of the sunlight would be bounced off before it hit us, and that would cool the planet. This is based on Pinatubo. Maybe everybody listening already knows what it is, so I’ll dispense with a further explanation.

It’s scary. It also makes some people feel like it’s an excuse that will allow the fossil fuel industry to somehow get away with it. But I think we’re all stuck in the same boat when it comes to the emergency, and we have overshot. We’re at 425 parts per million of CO₂ in the atmosphere. We need to get down to 400, or maybe back to 350. That will take decades. And in that time, the planet could get so hot that civilization becomes scrambled, falls into wars, and loses its ability to cope with the climate problem.

So cooling things down is important. The analogy I think is quite good is that when someone is really sick and has a fever, you cool them down—throw them in a cold bath, say—and then the underlying disease still has to be dealt with. But they don’t die of the fever. It’s not a bad analogy, although all analogies are inaccurate.

This is being discussed more and more. It’s partly because of the first chapter of The Ministry for the Future and how the Indian nation responds to that catastrophe, and partly because it’s been discussed now for 20 or maybe 30 years. It’s time seems to have come.

Let’s talk about how we would govern it, because how to do it is relatively straightforward. But how would we govern it? How would we decide? Who would decide? This needs to be on the table at the COP meetings at the UN. The UNFCCC, the UN body charged with dealing with climate change, ought to be looking into it. The IPCC, another UN body that describes our climate situation, has already called for carbon drawdown. We need to draw down billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as part of the plan. That too is geoengineering.

And I’ll end with this: they’re all Band-Aids on a very sick person. Unless we stop burning fossil fuels, none of these other things will do anything except buy us time. It’s important to remember that this is not a cure. It just buys us time so we can enact the cure, which is decarbonization.

Unless we stop burning fossil fuels, none of these other things will do anything except buy us time.

What single change to our daily lives would create the biggest impact?

Scott Snibbe: Another person asks: What single change to our daily lives would have the greatest positive impact if widely adopted? I don’t know if that’s going outdoors or something else.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, spending more time outdoors is good for anyone, and it would presumably reduce your carbon footprint as well. Beyond that, the answers are somewhat clichéd, but they’re clichés because they’re true. If you stopped eating beef—or stopped eating meat entirely—that would change land use through demand. We could return some of the land currently devoted to raising cattle to forests and other ecosystems.

If you stopped eating beef—or stopped eating meat entirely—that would change land use through demand.

But these are personal choices, and once you start talking about them, it can begin to sound as if the entire problem is your fault because of how you live. That’s both true and untrue. It’s all of our fault in the sense that we’ve collectively rewarded certain industries and practices.

At the individual level, you can also try to minimize your car mileage, switch to an electric vehicle, and power it with clean energy rather than electricity generated from natural gas. I feel like everybody already knows these things. There’s nothing particularly new about them. What might be more important is joining a small local group that’s working on something you care about. The indirect effects of that can be quite large.

Do we need to go beyond capitalist liberal democracy?

Scott Snibbe: Yeah, that’s a good one. Rob Hopkins’s Transition Network has been really effective at that.

Here’s another good question that just came in: In order to solve the climate crisis, is it necessary to have a political system beyond capitalist liberal democracy? You’ve certainly been a proponent of that idea for a while.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, it’s a damn good question. Because the problem itself is rooted in capitalism in its pure form. Under a strict capitalist logic, nothing matters except achieving the highest rate of return. Suppose you could manage a forest sustainably and earn a ten percent annual return while preserving it. If clear-cutting that forest and turning it into toilet paper would earn thirteen percent, then capitalism says: take the thirteen percent.

Under a strict capitalist logic, nothing matters except achieving the highest rate of return.

Many people are trained in business schools and then operate under what they understand to be a fiduciary responsibility to maximize returns. That logic can push decision-making toward outcomes that are destructive even when everyone involved understands the long-term consequences.

Scott Snibbe: I hate that word. That’s the worst. “Fiduciary responsibility” is like a swear word.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, in its most extreme form, it can mean, “I will be a capitalist no matter what, even if it turns into a death cult.” So yes, it is part of the problem. The deeper issue is how we value what we do and how we compensate people for doing it.

Could we reform capitalism rapidly? I hope so, because I don’t see many alternatives that are politically plausible in the near term. What do I mean by reform? I mean Keynesianism. I mean a Green New Deal. I mean government taking a stronger role in directing the economy rather than leaving it entirely to private capital and finance. Government can say, “We need people doing these things, and we’re going to pay for them.”

Call it industrial policy, call it Keynesianism—whatever you want. The point is that it’s different from neoliberalism, where private interests dominate public institutions and governments become subordinate to the businesses that fund campaigns, influence policy, and effectively buy laws.

In this larger struggle, taking place within capitalism and within the world system that has evolved over the last century and a half, we could move toward a better form of capitalism—one that leads more quickly to something like the social democracies of Scandinavia. That would mean stronger public policy, stronger social programs, and greater equality among people, which should never be forgotten as a goal.

These goals all come together in a political system that still has markets. But instead of markets ruling everything, society would keep markets confined to areas where they work well: commodities that aren’t essential to life and don’t destroy the environment.

What I’m describing is a stepwise process. We move away from neoliberal austerity toward Keynesianism, then toward social democracy. If that eventually leads to democratic socialism or some other post-capitalist political economy, great. I’ve spent much of my life thinking we’d be better off with a system that is more just and more environmentally conscious than capitalism as we currently practice it.

But the real question is how we get there.

I don’t think we can rewrite every law overnight. People won’t agree to it, and the logistical and bureaucratic challenges would be immense. So we move one step at a time. We start with approaches that have already proven they can work—Keynesianism, social democracy—and we adopt them as quickly as possible. Then we can think of a post-capitalist society as a longer-term horizon, something a century or two from now, and hope we continue moving in that direction.

Scott Snibbe: This is one of the things I find really encouraging about talking with you: how a socialist can say we can make capitalism work.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, is socialism really that different? Historically, socialism hasn’t always been great on environmental questions either. In many cases, it’s been just as industrial and productivist. It often values economic output in much the same way, becoming a kind of mirror image of capitalism rather than a true alternative. So I don’t necessarily define myself as a socialist—unless you want to say “eco-socialist,” but even then, what does that mean until we’ve actually invented it?

I’d rather stay flexible and say: let’s do things that increase equality and decrease inequality. Let’s do things that take care of the Earth. Let’s create a society where people can make a living by caring for the Earth rather than generating profits for a tiny percentage of humanity. The goal shouldn’t be maximizing wealth for a few people; it should be creating a decent life for everyone.

Let’s create a society where people can make a living by caring for the Earth rather than generating profits for a tiny percentage of humanity. The goal shouldn’t be maximizing wealth for a few people; it should be creating a decent life for everyone.

How can young people stay connected to nature in a digital world?

Scott Snibbe: Here’s another question: How can we help young people stay connected to real nature in a digital world that’s increasingly filled with artificial substitutes?

Kim Stanley Robinson: I find that a very difficult question. Looking at the young people in my own life, it’s a bit like asking, “How do you help an addict?” That’s an entire field of social science, compassion, and human interaction. There aren’t any simple answers. Again, my instinct is to say: go outdoors with them.

You can even do screen work outdoors if you’ve got some shade. But once you’re outside, you begin to realize that what’s on the screen isn’t nearly as interesting as what’s off the screen. Reality has a very high resolution. Reality is incredibly dense with detail. It’s more interesting than any of the little worlds we’ve built for ourselves.

Scott Snibbe: They have a camera obscura in San Francisco. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I’ve sat there many times. It’s just light coming into a room, projecting an image of the outside world. And I’ve heard people say, “Wow, look at the resolution of that.”

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes—really good resolution. Speaking of resolution, think about the photographs from Artemis. The images of the Moon, the far side of the Moon, and the Earth. Some of those photos are essentially iPhone-quality images, but the reality is that the astronauts were looking at all of that with their own eyes. They were close enough to see meteors striking the far side of the Moon and flashing against the surface.

You can understand why they cried out and why some of them wept. It’s astonishing. But here’s the thing: you can walk out your own front door and have an experience that’s almost as mind-boggling.

Walk down a street—or better yet, find a creek, a hill, a patch of woods, or any place where there’s something alive that isn’t us. A botanical garden, a city park, an urban landscape with living things in it. If you really pay attention, your mind can be astonished in almost the same way. The world is already extraordinary. We just don’t always notice it.

The world is already extraordinary. We just don’t always notice it.

Are there meaningful ways to reduce greenhouse gases without relying on political action?

Scott Snibbe: Someone asks: Are there meaningful ways to reduce greenhouse gases without relying on political action? You’ve touched on that already.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, the personal is political. That’s an old phrase from the 1960s, and I think it still applies. Yes, there are things you can do. By consuming mindfully, you can reduce your impact. Some people live in places where they can use bicycles—or e-bikes if necessary—to get where they need to go. Reducing car use means reducing carbon emissions. People who are financially able can electrify their homes and switch from gas to electric cooking.

The list is fairly obvious at this point, and it’s widely available. So yes, there are meaningful actions individuals can take. What’s interesting is that it can become an engaging project in itself. It often feels more elegant, more thoughtful, less wasteful. It’s not necessarily a burden. You don’t have to put on a hair shirt and live a life of deprivation. You just have to develop a different sense of style.

Scott Snibbe: We’ve done it with three houses over the course of our lives. We electrified them completely, installed solar panels, and it’s an amazing feeling to say, “For the rest of this house’s life, we’re generating our own energy.” It’s very satisfying.

Kim Stanley Robinson: It is.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s superpower

Scott Snibbe: Someone asked an interesting question—almost a question about what it’s like to be you. You write about the profoundly disturbing consequences of our disconnect from nature while still keeping readers engaged. That feels like a real superpower. Where does that strength come from, Stan?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, it’s a literary trick. It’s really just sentence-making. I have certain interests and certain experiences, and I write from those. But I should say that I’m really just a suburban househusband and a Mr. Mom. I don’t have any superpowers.

I garden. I run. I do the things that suburban men in California do. I have a sports life. I have a Sierra life, which is perhaps a little unusual, although most of the Sierra people I know are suburban people too.

So I would claim no superpowers whatsoever. In fact, over the course of my lifetime, I’ve probably had a relatively high carbon footprint compared with many people alive today and certainly compared with most people throughout history.

None of this has been part of some grand plan. It’s been somewhat accidental. But I do think that even while living a fairly conventional modern American life, simply paying attention to these issues can make you healthier and happier. You can follow what you enjoy, live an ordinary life, and still cultivate a deeper relationship with the world around you.

Scott Snibbe: Well, you’re quite an inspiration to us. And it’s nice to hear you say you’re ordinary because it makes us think that each of us can be like you too.

Kim Stanley Robinson: That’s as easy as can be. I’ve convinced myself that this is my fate, but I grew up in suburbia, and suburbia can be extremely boring, conventional, and unnatural. I didn’t have much contact with nature except, God bless the ocean, for living close to the beach.

I would go down to the shore and jump into the ocean, and suddenly I was in a wild world. It was obviously so much more vivid than my life in suburban California. I’ve never forgotten that feeling. Anybody can learn these lessons. It really is just a matter of going outdoors and paying attention.

Imagining the best possible future

Scott Snibbe: We have a minute or two before I hand it back to Jason, and I wanted to try an exercise that Rob Hopkins does. He asks people to imagine they’re coming back from the future—five, ten, or fifteen years from now. If you had to do that in just a minute or two, Stan—looking back from ten or fifteen years into our best possible future—what would you tell us that future looks like?

Kim Stanley Robinson: In my case, I would still be alive, which is already a positive outcome because I’m old. But I can imagine it because I’m a science fiction writer, and I think we’re already seeing signs of it. What excites me most is the rewilding of the Earth.

What I would be able to do then, more than I can now, is go into places where I’m sharing space with wild animals that don’t care about me and are simply living their own lives. This is already happening in many parts of the world. Europe is a leader in it, and movements like 30×30 in California are part of a broader global effort to restore the biosphere.

If those efforts succeed, then ten, fifteen, or thirty years from now, the world will be a more interesting place. We won’t be in the middle of a mass extinction event. You’ll be able to see the results with your own eyes. You might go out and see a herd of caribou. I’d like to see wolverines back in the Sierra Nevada. Wolves throughout the American West.

Of course, you have to be careful. Some of these creatures can eat you. But that’s one reason humans tend to travel together. No animal really wants to tangle with a group of humans. Maybe we’ll become a little more social as a result. But more importantly, we’ll be sharing the world again with our wild cousins. I think people are missing that without even realizing they’re missing it.

You accidentally see a coyote, a bear rooting through the trash, a raccoon in a gutter, or one of those impossibly resilient possums. Even people who are cynical or disconnected from nature feel a little jolt of excitement when they encounter them. That’s ancient. It’s a very old part of the brain—a feeling of recognition, a sense of kinship, even love for our cousins in the natural world.

Fifteen years from now, that could be an ordinary experience. And I think the world would be richer for it.

Scott Snibbe: And that sounds like we’re wrapping all the way back around to our shamanic roots from 30,000 years ago. So that’s a good ending.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Thank you. Many good endings are accidental.

Scott Snibbe: Well, thank you, Stan. I can’t thank you enough for taking an hour out of Earth Day to speak with us. Keep up your great work, live long and prosper, and help make the planet rewild.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Thank you, Scott. And thank you, Jason, and everyone else. It’s been fun. Hopefully, I’ll run into you on a trail somewhere. But I think I’ll see you in civilization as well, because we travel in the same circles, which is a great thing.

Credits