I'm doing a talk in a few weeks. The kind I haven't done for ages. In front of people. And it requires some ideas. New ideas. Ideas that aren't about how to divide your presentation into three.
As per usual I have a title, a vague idea of territory and a bunch of notes and links. But no idea how they all go together. If, indeed, they do.
So I thought I'd start by sticking them no here, see if that helps. It often does.
There are these bits from Cory Doctorow's interview with Kim Stanley Robinson in Fatherly magazine:
Cory Doctorow: Both The High Sierra and The Ministry for the Future are about the climate emergency and nature. What would you say to kids about nature and the emergency?
Kim Stanley Robinson: You can tell kids, “50% of the DNA inside your body is not human DNA.” You yourself are a forest. You are an amazing collaboration between literally millions of individuals and thousands of species. That’s so strange that it might take some getting used to, but it's good to know the truth, and it is true.
If you can understand all that, you might think, “Well, that’s that swamp, that there aren’t very many swamps left. That hill that is wild at the edge of town, that’s part of my body. If we tear it apart, we're tearing apart, like my foot, and then I’m harmed.”
The sense of connection between our bodies and our world needs to be enhanced — especially for modern kids who are very often Internet-ed, looking at their screens. Screens are all very well, that urge to communicate. But the planet around you, the landscape, is part of your body that needs to stay healthy. I would start with that and go on from there.
CD: I’m thinking of my own kid. She’s 14 now. She's been locked indoors because of the pandemic, and it’s become a habit. She wants to be on screens with her friends in her bedroom with the door closed. The great outdoors are a little scary and uncomfortable for her. How can a parent approach the High Sierras or other wild places?
KSR: Scale the trip to the strength of the person you’re taking so that they don’t experience it as suffering and renunciation — allow them to be comfortable. At that age, they’ll actually be quite strong. Even if they sit all day, every day, they will have native strengths that will come into play.
I started taking my kids up into the Sierra when they were 2 and carried them a lot of the way. If you have kids that young, carry them and let them trip around the campsites but not have to get into a mode of suffering, because then they won’t like it the rest of their lives.
CD: The High Sierra is a book about how the Sierras changed your life, how you went up and never came down. How did it change your life?
KSR: It’s not straightforward. I keep a garden. I grow vegetables and, therefore, I live in fear because I know that we’re not even in control of our food supplies.
I began working outdoors. I put up a tarp, so I had shade on my laptop. The first time it rained, the tarp kept the rain off. All of my novels in the last 16 years have been written 100% outside.
The heat is hard, but the cold is not, and you can work in the rain too, and it’s quite glorious. For three or four novels in a row, my last day of work coincided with bizarre storms, and I was thinking that it was nature’s way of going out with a flourish.
I came home and I realized that it’s best to spend more time outdoors than we do. There’s a lot of people who know it’s fun to be outdoors because they’re carpenters and they’re outdoors all the time, and they like it. Farmers too. But writers, not so much. So a garden, working outdoors and then being an activist for environmentalist causes, greening everything in my life and my political aspirations of looking for what would be best for the biosphere.
Aldo Leopold said, “What's good is what’s good for the land.” It’s a deep moral orientation — like a compass north — but the land, the biosphere, goes from the bottom of the ocean as high in the air as living things. Think about the land not as just dead mineral sand but as soil. It’s alive. So “what's good is what’s good for the land” becomes a rubric you can follow all over the place.