Dan Bloom is an American climate activist based in Taiwan. Mike Roddy is a screenwriter in California. This back and forth chat [audio link] took place online in the middle of September of the year 2011, for those readers looking back in time from the future of say the year 2099 or 3055 AD.
Dan Bloom: Human-made global warming
is at the top of our radar screens now, with James Lovelock and Mark
Lynas and George Monbiot and James
Hansen, not to mention, Al Gore, making sure we don't ignore the
issues. What is your take, Mike, on global warming
and what can we do now to try to stop it from causing devastating
climate chaos in some distant future, say 500 years from now?
Or do you think things will happen sooner than that, sooner than 30
generations from now?
Mike Roddy: The science has advanced in sync with disastrous weather events in the last two years. MIT came out with
predictions exceeding IPCC worst case by 2100, or in the 10 F range. That means catastrophe. Polar cities
will be under construction before the end of the 21st century.
Dan Bloom: For the past 5 years, I have been exploring the concept of
polar cities" as climate refuges for climate refugees in
some distant future, perhaps around the year 2500 AD. But for some
reason, I cannot get the mainstream media in the USA or the UK to report
on my admittedly eccentric and also admittedly "self-appointed visionary"
ideas on this. Why do you think the media is afraid to even
engage with me? Except for one small report in a blog on the New York
Times "Dot Earth" site a few years ago, which was mostly
presented in a humorous, "cute" way --which was fine with me -- not
one newspaper or magazine or website in North America
or Europe or Australia will talk with me. Nobody will interview me or
present my ideas for polar cities, pro or con? Why do you think this
is, this silence about "polar cities"? Of course, I am not famous, and
I have no PHD and am not connected with any university or group,
so I basically do not exist for the mainstream media's criteria since
I am not an "expert." I accept all that. But why can't even one
newspaper
or magazine or website engage with me about polar cities, as a mere
idea? What are they so afraid of?
Mike Roddy: The two words "afraid of" is the operative phrase. Media outlets are somewhat afraid of fanning
panic, but are far more afraid of losing advertisers, which include auto, fuel, and utility companies.
Media income is in decline, especially in print. TV doesn't lend itself to hard scientific analysis,
and events even a few decades away are too abstract for most of their audience.
Your polar cities idea absolutely deserves a wide audience, not only because it's a good predictor, but
due to its clarification of what life will actually be like. I did a little research here myself- buildings
can already be taken out by an infantryman, with hand held ordnance. Underground living, with either rock or
reinforced concrete for strength, will become common.
Dan Bloom: I envision polar cities serving as climate refuges for
climate refugess in the northern regions of the world around 500 years
from now.
James Lovelock is my teacher here, and I got the idea indirectly from
him, and he knows of my work on polar cities and has even seen my
illustrations and proposals by email. He wrote back to me by email two
years ago: "Thanks for sharing your polar cities ideas and images with
me. It may very well happen.... and soon!"
But I cannot get the mainstream media or any serious reporter anywhere
in the world to interview me on this topic. So I decided to ask a published author in Texas -- with ten sci fi novels already to his credit -- to write a
novel about
polar cities, a trilogy perhaps, but first just one novel, about 250 pages, with a working title now of "Polar
City Story: Arrival" -- to be maybe followed by ''Polar City Story 2: Awakening" and
finally "Polar City Story 3: Going Home." I am
working with a published novelist in Texas on the books, and we intend
the stories to be both entertainment and instruction. I want the books
to be first of all, a very good yarn,
wonderful storytelling and pure entertainment. My ghostwriter -- really the main writer, it is his book, his story, and only his name will appear on the cover -- is working on it now. The stories are set in
the near future, in 2080 AD, when the world population has been
reduced from 9 billion to just
200,000 men and women and children living desperate lives in a few
scattered "polar cities" in the north, from Alaska to Canada to
Russia. And in New Zealand and Tasmania, too.
But the story we want to tell will take place in North America. We don't
want to scare people. We want to first, entertain readers, and then
have the books also serve as an alarm bell,
a warning, about global warming, about how if we do not take action
now to stop climate change, then polar cities might become a reality.
I don't want polar cities to ever become
a reality. Do you think readers -- and reviewers -- will go for this
kind of storytelling, Mike?
Mike Roddy: Sure they will, and I like your idea of telling simple human stories in that environment.
Mammals don't evolve very fast, so we'll be telling the same jokes etc inside our shells, too. The timeframe
for polar cities looks to me to be about 100 years away, if not sooner.>>
Dan Bloom: Readers often respond to dystopian novels with the thought
of "Oh no, it can't happen here." For example, people
find it hard to believe that anyone could even imagine a novel where a
corporation send a virus through the world via sex pills. They
simply don't want to believe it. Do you think people could be drawn
into a well-told story about polar cities serving as lifeboats, as
saviors of humankind?
Or is all that nonsense to people today?
Mike Roddy: You've got a great idea for a novel or movie. A screenwriter friend in Hollywood is
running with something similar. My own screenplay was a bit too political, but a better one would
be effective and important.
Dan Bloom: I have envisioned polar cities for use 500 years from now,
30 human generations from now, not now. But in our book now in progess, in the novel we are calling a "polar western" -- ''the world's first polar western'', as Scotland-based novelist Hamish MacDonald said to me the other day -- life will be desperate and dystopian. But of course, now life is wonderful. No
need to worry.
Yet, I worry about the distant future. I feel that a novel about polar
cities just might help the media to get used to the idea and maybe
start
broaching the subject with newspaper and magazine readers. Not science
fiction, but a kind of dytopia fiction, a bit of Mad Max mixed in with
Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." Do you think there are readers out there
who would go for such a book, even as mere entertainment and fiction?
Mike Roddy: Your ghostwriter's novel will find an audience if it's written well, no question. Let me know if I can help.
Dan Bloom: I sometimes call myself "James Lovelock's Accidental
Student." Because it was a remark he made in an interview in 2006 that
gave rise to
my thinking about polar cities. He said that in the future there might
be "breeding pairs in the Arctic" after global warming had caused
billions of people to die off
in unimagiable disasters caused by climate chaos. He said there might
be just 200,000 people left on Earth, mostly in the north, and they
would serve
as breeding pairs to keep the human species going in the far north. I
said to myself: so where will these breeding pairs live, in what kind
of homes or villages?
And the image of polar cities came into my mind, back in 2006, and I
began furiously blogging about them. But nobody has ever taken me
seriously. Only
Dr Lovelock has replied to me. Everyone else in the field of climate
research and climate studiea ignores me. They think I am nuts. Five
hundreds years from now?
They don't want to think that far ahead. What's holding people back,
do you think?
Most people only care about their present lives, theirMike Roddy: The timeline needs to be advanced, so your new decision to set the polar cities novel in 2080 or so is a good one. There are lots of scenarios where only a few
families and loved ones and friends now, and their children and
grandchildren of course. But
every few people, and especially politicians who set policy, care
about what happens beyond three generations from now -- or the next
election cycle. This is
what I am up against with my polar cities ideas. Very few people want
to go that far ahead, to my original polar city timeframe of around 2500 AD. Why do you think that is? What holds
people back?
hundred thousand up to maybe a few hundred million people are left in 2100, including melting permafrost, runaway fires, and ocean clathrate
releases. The tropics and most of the temperate latitudes will be uninhabitable. That leaves the poles.
Dan Bloom: Someone asked me once why I care so much about human lifeMike Roddy concludes the discussion this way: The media doesn't respond much to people who are
500 years from now. It was actually a newspaper reporter who was
interviewing
for me for a big story about polar cities three years ago -- until his
editor killed the piece before publication, without any explanation
other than that I was
a nobody and my ideas were pure nonsense -- and he asked me why I was
so concerned about life in the year 2500. I told him that I cared
because
I am worried that the great human experiment on Earth, our long story
on Earth, might face extinction 30 generatiosn from now if we don't
take action now
to stop global warming in its tracks. That means dialing back in a big
way on our current lifestyles and changing our
manufacture/consume/waste lifestyle
into something that's better for the planet as a whole. Yet, very few
people want to go down that road. I do. I already started walking on
it. I no longer fly
in airplanes, haven't flown since 1983, really. I haven't driven a car
for 20 years. I own a bicycle, that's all. And I care deeply about a
future that I am not going
to be here to see. I had a heart attack two years ago and my days are
numbered now. I could go anytime. Certainly before 2030. So my polar
cities ideas and books
are intended as a cri de couer. i think you understand what I am
saying here, but
why do you think it is so hard to get the mass media to pay attention to
future
scenarios that may not be rosy but are at the same time anchored in a
climate reality?
not well-known authors. They are insecure themselves, since so many reporters have been laid off in
the last decades. They reason that if they are going to lose their job, it will be to someone with a
sales track record. Breaking into writing is like becoming a movie actor- expect to be ignored, keep
working, and hope for luck or the right chain of events- which might be personal.
Humans might deserve to go extinct, but we'll take a lot of creatures down with us, making biological
regeneration tough for every species. Hansen believes that if we burn all of the coal and the tar sands
oil- a course we are already on- we will become Venus. That's much worse than Lovelock's prediction.
There is no return from Venus. Nothing will be absorbing carbon, and life will never happen here again.
In that scenario, polar cities are a transition period, on the way to something much worse.
LISTEN HERE:
http://podcasts.odiogo.com/northward-ho-polar-cities-will-serve-as-climate-re/podcasts-xml.php
