Here's Bruce Sterling, Cyberpunk pioneer and former Pope/Emperor of the Viridian Greens, talking about the Anthropocene, the new geological age we are living in, the age of human impact at the Art and Environment Conference in Reno, NV in October 2011:
(28 minutes)
From the transcript:
Nature's over. We're in next nature and there's no way back.
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The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century's frontier.....
Your real problem is like what happens when stuff reverts to next nature. Not reverts to nature but reverts to next nature, the sort of
unnatural, anthropocenic, abandoned area. That's really the 21st century's big organizational problem.
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And then a lot of the problems that sort of bother us most will be redefined as "their" problems by the coming generation. The sort of idignados, the sort of young crowd who have been written out of capitalism and are out in the streets all over the place, inventing their own lives and careers and finding no jobs and sort of
creating a post-political-Baby Boomer paradigm. These people are being alienated even as we speak and they're going to be the ones who bury us so they're going to be the ones who sort of redefine, they are going to find their own way of approaching this and it's going to be very much anti-Baby Boomer because they don't really have much reason for gratitude there.
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Before we were literate we started transforming the planet.
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And we're still not nearly literate in transforming the planet now that we know that we do.
More from the transcript:
I will pass the rest of my lifetime under the shadow of climate change. It's not about warning people in 2011 or trying to avert or diffuse some misfortune. The wolf is beyond the door. The wolf is in the living room. This is the anthropocenic condition. This is how we live. This is the force majeure. It's here. It's obvious.
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The Texas of my grandfathers is visibly going. I was driving across the state for a month during our record setting drought and you could see the dead trees, some of them decades old, waiting to be consumed by fire. They're brown. They're leafless. They're flammable. They're not coming back. Even though the city of Austin is full of sympathetic greens like myself and is the only fully green powered city council in the USA. They're flammable.
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There are no national forests. You cannot protect a forest with a nation. There are forests that protect nations.
There aren't nations that have forests. The global climate crisis is a climate crisis and it's global because the globe is an externality.
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The nation-state is not sustainable... They're not part of the natural landscape.
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Young people growing up today will not know what lost is. They all have satellite locators in their purses and pockets.
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It never occurred to anybody to just sort of like actually watch the bison like on Facebook and real time. If you have them tracked, you can let them into the cities. You can have urban farming but there's no reason you can't have urban wilderness animals. You don't have to shoot them, you don't have to fence them. They're going to walk in on videocams and walk out. LIke any other kind of tourist.
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Bruce Sterling on media in the next 25 years
(less than 6 minutes)
Bruce Sterling does an annual State of the World at the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), one of the original online communities. The 2011 edition is up at http://www.well.com/...
It's always a lively and thought-provoking discussion.
Some of the themes of the next nature:
http://www.nextnature.net/...