Having twice read Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, I still don’t even know where to begin.

Despite its incendiary title, the book is not a “how to” so much as a “why not?” Given the increasingly dire signals from Earth, Malm asks: “When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands?” Third Act, founded on nonviolent principles, would say never. More on that later.

Malm’s short book combines history, philosophy and organizing experience to call for more drastic action on climate. For starters, he says, many movements lauded for their nonviolent tactics were not always peaceful. After decades of peaceful pressure, the British suffragists resorted to property destruction: breaking windows at the prime minister’s residence and shops and torching mailboxes. “To be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation,” suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst said. A violent uprising in Haiti brought emancipation there, and the US fought a Civil War to end slavery here. In South Africa in 1960, after years of boycotts, strikes, pass-burnings and other civil disobedience, Nelson Mandela called for acts of sabotage and, if that didn’t work, “guerrilla warfare and terrorism.” Some activists have targeted pipelines, including those in the Niger Delta fighting predatory and polluting oil companies. Malm argues that the nonviolent U.S. civil rights movement was successful in part because a violent “radical flank” also posed a threat.

Malm asks: “Is the root system of fossil fuels within the prevailing order so shallow that they can be extracted with smaller effort than any of those other ills?”

In July 2007, in a wealthy Stockholm neighborhood, Malm was among climate activists who “disarmed” 60 SUVs. They left a note on each windshield: “We have deflated one or more of the [tires] on your SUV. Don’t take it personally. It’s your SUV we dislike. You are certainly aware of how much gas it guzzles, so we don’t need to enlighten you about it. But what you seem to not know, or not care about, is that all the gasoline you burn to drive your SUV on the city’s streets has devastating consequences for others.” The notes explained the climate crisis and encouraged the owners to use readily available public transit. They announced the sabotage efforts in a blog post. Copycat actions persisted through the summer, only to be called off as winter approached so as not to endanger any lives on slippery roads because some people tried to drive their SUVs anyway.

One of the criticisms of the SUV action was that it targeted private consumption instead of fossil-fuel production. Malm counters that consumption, particularly by the super-rich, is a big part of the problem. Take so-called superyachts, he says. One study showed that, in one year, the global fleet of just 300 of these yachts “generates as much CO2 as the 10 million inhabitants of Burundi.” Other studies differentiate between “subsistence emissions” – from rice paddies or cattle in developing nations – and “luxury emissions” that are entirely optional.

“The rich could claim ignorance in 1913,” Malm writes. “Not so now. A group of American and British criminologists have consequently argued that conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels ought to be classified as a crime.” Luxury emissions, he says, need to go first: “If we cannot even get rid of the most preposterously unnecessary emissions, how are we going to begin moving towards zero.”

In a 2016 action, Malm participated with Ende Gelande in civil disobedience, breaking through fencing, storming into a coal plant and shutting off power for a limited time. The plant’s CEO called it “massive criminal violence,” irony not lost on Malm: “the breaking of fences could be officially framed as … devastation, unimaginable damage, whereas the perpetual cloud of CO2 from [the coal plant] was the mark of a peaceful normality.”

Malm discusses Bill McKibben’s commitment to nonviolence, a core principle for Third Act. In part, McKibben finds a “spiritual insight” in nonviolence, involving the idea of “turning the other cheek, of taking on unearned suffering.” Malm has little patience for that approach: “Isn’t suffering unearned by the victims precisely what is so morally repugnant about the unfolding crisis?” McKibben has landed on nonviolence as the better strategy, the “tactically sound choice” and the “greatest ‘innovation’ of the twentieth century.” McKibben also maintains that our strength lies in numbers, not violent acts. The state will always have the advantage in a fight of arms, to which Malm counters that the “enemy has overwhelmingly superior capabilities in virtually all fields, including media, propaganda, institutional coordination, logistical resources, political legitimacy and, above all, money.” Of course, the Trump regime now poses added risks, as it silences dissent – from law firms, universities, students and more – and decrees that “climate change” are forbidden words.

Malm finished the book just before the pandemic, when Greta Thunberg and climate strikes were in the news and huge actions in the works. The pandemic shut all that down. It also temporarily slowed emissions as much of commerce came to halt. Whatever one thinks of the merits of sabotage vs. peaceful protest and nonviolent civil disobedience, the pandemic raised a key question for Malm: “If a pandemic can induce governments to take emergency actions, why can’t a climate breakdown that threatens to kill off the very life-support systems of the planet do the same? After this, there can be no more excuses for passivity.”

It’s not an overstatement to say that music is fundamental to the human experience. Music provides emotional expression, social connection, and cultural identity. It even has therapeutic and healing powers. As such, it’s unsurprising that music has bound people together in common cause throughout the protest movements in our country’s history since the Revolution. Examples include “Yankee Doodle,” which was co-opted from the British troops as a symbol of defiance, and “We Shall Overcome,” which had its roots at the turn of the 20th century but was popularized by Pete Seeger in the 1960’s for the Civil Rights Movement. A lesser known but suitable anthem for our current times is “All You Fascists Bound To Lose” by the Resistance Revival Chorus. (This is a favorite of one of our Third Act PA Comms Team members). For a very recent and widely heard example, consider Kendrick Lamar’s Superbowl halftime show, which hit on themes including the fading American dream and broken promises to formerly enslaved Black people. (For an excellent breakdown of the show, see this essay in the New York Times.)

Looking for a playlist of popular protest songs? Here’s my completely biased top 10 list, sorted by date, with links to some great live performances.

“Blowin’ in the Wind,” Bob Dylan, 1963. Ranked number 14 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest hits of all time, this classic poses questions about war, peace, and freedom. These questions are rhetorical, but the answers, found in the refrain “blowin’ in the wind,” can be interpreted as either obvious or fleeting.

“The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Bob Dylan, 1964. A call to action for societal change, this song was released during the war in Vietnam and became an anthem for the anti-war and civil rights movements.

“All Along the Watchtower,” Bob Dylan, 1964, and also recorded by Jimi Hendrix, 1968. With abstract lyrics about confusion and chaos, it’s not strictly a protest song, but for Hendrix it was about the Vietnam War.

“Respect,” Aretha Franklin, 1967. Be sure to check out the linked version of this song from the Blues Brothers 2000 movie, which hearkens back to the much better The Blues Brothers movie from 1980 where she performed “Think.” “Respect,” a feminist anthem, earned Franklin two Grammy Awards.

“Fortunate Son,” Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1969. This song provides a critique of class inequalities in the Vietnam War, which allowed people of higher privilege to avoid military service.

“War,” Edwin Starr, 1970. “War” was originally sung by The Temptations, but Starr’s version made it a hit. A powerful anti-Vietnam War song, it continues to resonate.

“Imagine,” John Lennon, 1971. This song challenges us to envision a world free of conflict, where we are not separated by religion or class. It seems particularly timely in our current political state.

“Sunday Bloody Sunday,” U2, 1983. This song wrestles with the violence in Northern Ireland, focusing on the shooting of unarmed civil rights protesters in 1972.

“Born in the U.S.A.,” Bruce Springsteen, 1984. Springsteen’s song is a critique of the Vietnam War and the treatment of veterans returning from it. It’s often misinterpreted as a patriotic song. During last year’s presidential campaign, The Boss was not shy in his condemnation of its use in Trump rallies.

“We Are the World,” Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, 1985. Although not strictly a protest song, its call for humanitarian relief of Africa seems relevant today given Elon Musk’s attack on USAID.

“[T]he despair was something else again. Sometime before the election was over, I vowed to keep away from what I thought of as ‘the Conversation,’ the tailspin of mutual wailing about how bad everything was, a recitation of the evidence against us … that just buried any hope and imagination down into a dank little foxhole of curled-up despair.”

Sound familiar? Match the mood today? Well, that’s Rebecca Solnit writing about the despair we felt – in November 2004, when a majority of our compatriots re-elected George W. Bush. Heck, I remember the “Sorry Everybody” website where we could post images of our notes of abject apology – for re-electing W and in advance for all the terrible things he was sure to do. Despite worldwide protests, Bush had already launched the war on Iraq based on the lie of “weapons of mass destruction.”

In those despairing times, Solnit wrote a short book called Hope In The Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. I returned to it to rediscover her guidance, history lessons, and that elusive hope.

Solnit’s hope is not a passive, feel-good, everything-is-fine stance. It’s intricately tied up with activism. Hope, she writes, “is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky, … hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.” To hope, she says, “is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable. Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it. … The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.”

Our actions, even if unsuccessful in the moment, can change the future. “It’s always too soon to go home,” she writes, noting the long campaigns for women’s suffrage and gay rights or against slavery and apartheid. The Berlin Wall had seemed permanent, until it wasn’t. “What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes past, it seems inevitable,” she writes. In one example, she spoke to an activist with Women Strike for Peace, an anti-nuclear weapons group whose work contributed to the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty that ended above-ground testing. The activist said she often felt defeated and disillusioned. The small group’s protests in front of the White House seemed futile. But, years later, she heard that Dr. Benjamin Spock had seen them at the White House. Their efforts had been a turning point for him to become active in the antiwar and anti-nuclear weapons efforts.

“Hope,” Solnit writes, “is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.”

Her book is a call to press on, to realize that change treads a convoluted path. “The sleeping giant is one name for the public; when it wakes up, when we wake up, we are no longer only the public; we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies. We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, and of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remains asleep.”

Working together, we are very powerful, she writes, “and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that yes, we can change the world because we have, many times before.”

Much as we might like to be in a coma or whatever for the next four years, that’s the one way to ensure defeat. We will need to grab that ax and break down some doors. This is most definitely an emergency.

In last month’s Third Act PA newsletter, we gained an appreciation of our place in Earth’s geological history with a review of Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Save the World. Continuing this theme, we consider climate scientist Michael Mann’s book Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis.  Mann is one of the creators of the famous hockey stick chart. This graph, depicting global temperatures over the last 2,000 years, is an icon in the fight against climate change. The chart, appearing in United Nations climate assessments, shows that the global warming we’ve experienced in the last 50 years is a sharp break from the stable temperatures over the last 2,000 years. However, in Our Fragile Moment, Mann traces Earth’s changing climate over its entire history and goes beyond the chart to reveal that the current warming exceeds anything experienced in the last hundred millennia. As Mann says, “Let that sink in.”

Mann traces Earth’s climate from when it formed 4.55 billion years ago up to the present era. In this timeline, it’s humbling to conceive that modern humans emerged only 200,000 years ago, and human civilization has existed for just 6,000 years. During this “fragile moment,” prior to the hockey stick’s upward spiking blade in the 1970’s, the climate has been remarkably stable and has provided conditions for humans to thrive. This stability has been maintained by self-reinforcing mechanisms that resist changes to the climate. However, Mann warns that pushing the climate system too much through the burning of fossil fuels will disrupt these mechanisms and trigger new ones that will destabilize our climate.

Mann’s book describes Earth’s climate resilience, detailing one example 4 billion years ago when high levels of greenhouse gases provided temperatures warm enough for life despite the Sun being 30% dimmer than it is today—the Faint Young Sun paradox. He also delves into destabilizing mechanisms, like a “Snowball-Earth” episode 2 billion years ago in which photosynthesis caused a rapid increase in oxygen that cannibalized atmospheric methane, resulting in an ice-covered Earth. These examples inform us about the climate-disrupting tipping points seen today, such as the slowdown — and resulting impacts — of the ocean conveyor belt (AMOC), a future including worst-case rising sea levels of 6.5 feet by the end of the century, and the US East Coast suffering a Superstorm Sandy event every few years. With business-as-usual climate policies, Mann warns of warming as much as 5.4ºF, resulting in “…a lot of suffering, species extinction, loss of life, destabilization of societal infrastructure, chaos, and conflict. An end, perhaps, to our fragile moment.”

Mann emphasizes that uncertainties in climate models, often cited by climate-change deniers, are reasons for more action, not less. At this stage of the climate debate, he says, the larger issue isn’t climate denialism but doomism—the idea that it’s too late to ameliorate the worst effects of climate change. On the contrary, his analysis concludes that limiting these impacts is still entirely within our power both physically and technologically. The problem is politics.

For a fascinating glimpse of how Earth’s climate history informs us of the possibilities of our future climate, I highly recommend this book’s rigorous yet readable treatment of this topic.

Tom: This has been one of my favorite books the last few years. I learned about it when I heard Bjornerud speaking about it on a Long Now podcast. She does a fantastic job of outlining the history of our planet. I’m in awe of all the incredibly unlikely things that happened in its 4.5 billion years of history that led to…me. It truly is a wonder we are here at all. The flip side is that it is all so fragile––it could all go away. We are not guaranteed the conditions we enjoy now. It makes me really sad to see the damage we’ve done in my lifetime alone. For example, the planet has its own way of regulating CO2 in the atmosphere with weathering of rocks and locking that CO2 away as calcite. The system has worked over thousands of years, but it can’t keep up with all the fossil fuels we are burning. The excess just ends up in our atmosphere, as shown by the Keeling curve with its steady upward slope. Climate change is the result. Some cultures, unlike our American culture, have recognized that we are so out of balance. Bjornerud’s description of the native American practice of survivance and their fights to save our environment––despite centuries of mistreatment by the American government––is a tragic irony.  Jo––those were some of my initial big takeaways. What were your thoughts?

Jo: Tom, what struck you about the book is such an important point: humanity’s unlikely development over earth’s 4.5 billion years—and the damage we’ve done to our planet despite the miniscule amount of time we’ve spent on it. This past summer I had the pleasure of hearing Marcia Bjornerud in conversation with Maikin Scott (WHYY) at the Academy of Natural Sciences here in Philly. When I saw the announcement, I must admit that I hadn’t heard of Bjorenrud, but the title of the presentation—“Reading the Rocks: How Geology Tells the Earth’s Story”—immediately caught my attention. I found myself scrawling down significant phrases on the Q&A notecard I’d been given: for example, “Rocks are not nouns but verbs”; they are “time travelers” and “story-tellers.” I was so inspired by the talk that I picked up Timefulness. Once again, her title caught my attention (she seems to be good at that), and as I read what she meant by the term, I began to understand the meaning of her subtitle, How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. Timefulness, according to Bjornerud, constitutes “a clear-eyed view of our view of our place in Time, both the past that came long before us and the future that will elapse without us” (17). As humanity continues to pursue present-day gain and convenience at the expense of our future, the idea of embracing timefulness particularly resonates with me.

Tom: Oh, I am so jealous. I would love to see her in person––she’s a real rock star (sorry–– couldn’t resist). One of the other parts of her book that I really loved was her takedown of the Elon Musks of the world. They are so entitled and brimming with hubris that they think they can recreate a living planet out of Mars. Bjornerud correctly points out that they have absolutely no understanding of the 4.5 billion year process it took to get here. We can’t take care of the one planet in the Universe we know harbors life. Why would we think we could make another one? It is shocking that Trump has taken Elon in his confidence for the moment, so we will be stuck with his kind of arrogance for at least the next few years––or until Musk falls out of favor. Because of my organizing background, I immediately jump to, “Well, so now that we know this information about Earth, what are we gonna DO about it?” Unfortunately, I doubt we can give a copy of the book to everyone in the country, LOL. We can however work to build Third Act into a large organization that has some clout. I was struck, given the weird weather we are having, that climate was so rarely mentioned during the presidential campaign. As environmentalists, we have to accept responsibility for that deafening silence. It indicates the lack of power of the environmental movement. This is one thing that draws me to Third Act. With so many folks of our age and hair color, we should be able to build the power to get climate back to the table.

Jo: Tom, I agree that’s frustrating that catastrophic climate change wasn’t addressed during the campaign, particularly as I think it would have struck a note with young voters, such as the two who spoke at our Silver Wave event in Philly. The current political landscape makes me more and more aware of the importance of the geological thinking that Bjornerud recommends: “Recognizing that our personal and cultural stories have always been embedded in larger, longer—and still elapsing—Earth stories might save us from environmental hubris” (178). Bjornerud tells a story of her own hubris when, trying to dislodge a delicate, “watermelon-colored” tourmaline crystal from an abandoned mine, she accidentally smashed it “with one errant blow” and realized “that in one avaricious second I had carelessly destroyed an exquisite thing that had witnessed a third of Earth’s history” (128). I can’t help but think that this story serves as a microcosm of the macrocosmic planetary destruction in which humanity is currently engaged because our greed trumps (pun intended) our care for our planet. I wish that I could give a copy of the book to every climate denialist—but they probably wouldn’t break away from their misinformation platforms to read it.

Tom and Jo: We highly recommend this book to our Third Act members. If you don’t have an independent local bookshop in your area, we recommend that you shop through bookshop.org, which supports such bookshops.

Fire Weather, by John Vaillant, was  among the New York Times 10 Best Books for 2023 and was a National Book Award finalist. While not an easy read, it is a gripping page-turner and its accolades well-deserved. Fire Weather examines the utter devastation wrought by a massive climate-fueled wildfire that in 2016 destroyed most of the city of Fort McMurray in the province of Alberta, Canada.

Vaillant takes the reader through the history of colonization of Western Canada, from pelt trade to the development of the oil industry. Fort McMurray arose solely around the extraction and refinement of bitumen found within the oil sands. Bitumen forms the basis for a number of petroleum products, a sizable amount of which are imported to the United States. He provides a richly detailed deep dive into the role fire has played in human civilization. He also looks at fire behavior as though it were a living, breathing being–particularly as it pertains to wildfires, which are not uncommon in the boreal forest. Generally speaking, they go unnoticed. That is until they aren’t.

In the spring of 2016, conditions were exceptionally favorable for significant wildfire activity: well above-average temperatures combined with extremely dry vegetation, high winds and low humidity. A small fire not far from the city limits quickly grew into a raging inferno that would soon flank and overtake the city, rendering neighborhood after neighborhood unrecognizable. The fire was so intense that it created its own weather, generating a massive pyrocumulonimbus cloud and a rare fire tornado. It’s as if Vaillant were describing the horrid scenario of a low-yield nuclear blast. In some sense, it is an easy comparison, given the immense power of this force not of nature, but of man. This is a catastrophe born of the explosive growth of the fossil fuel industry with all its deleterious effects. Despite their valiant efforts to contain the massive blaze, firefighters became overwhelmed, and the focus shifted to saving the lives of some 88,000 desperate souls who were forced to flee in a matter of hours. Through the tireless efforts of first responders, and some luck, there was no loss of (human) life. The fire was not fully extinguished until August  2017.

Vaillant poignantly makes the case for how the fossil fuel industry is complicit in the ever-increasing threats from the climate crisis, boldly demonstrated in one of the continent’s worst wildfires. (Underscoring his point are the many record-setting costly and deadly wildfires in North America and beyond in recent years). He goes on to articulate all manner of efforts to change the dynamic as we face an ever-warming world. Powerful and timely, this is investigative literature at its finest.

Dear Friends,

I spent a Saturday knocking on doors in East Norriton for the Montgomery County Democrats. The experience wasn’t at all what I expected!

To my surprise,  folks were there from pretty much all over the Eastern Seaboard: Connecticut, DC, Vermont, Massachusetts. These folks drove in for the weekend, or the month. One fellow has committed to work the next 100 days in Montgomery County. These folks know that Montgomery is one of those purple counties that may very well decide PA and the outcome of the entire election.

We received detailed training from a fellow with a lot of experience doing this work. I downloaded an app to my phone that details the voting status of almost everyone in a particular neighborhood laid out on a map. And then we set out in pairs to knock on doors.

We visited only homes with a record of a registered Democrat. Some were married to Republicans or Independents.

I thought we were there to register folks to vote. During the day, the team must have knocked on close to 200 doors. There were only a small handful of new registrations. A larger number of people completed an application for mail-in ballots. Initially, I felt disappointed.

But this was only a small part of the story! We TALKED to people. We asked them what they were thinking about the presidential contest. These were regular people. A lot of undecided people. Old and young. A Sunday school teacher and a millennial covered with tattoos. Latinos, black and white folks, too. These people are different from the folks I hang with. They have different backgrounds and perspectives. We asked them what they care about, and they were happy to talk about it, even to uninvited strangers! Many of them seemed to enjoy our visit. Many of them thanked us for our visit and the work we were doing. One woman, a registered Republican, stuffed a bag of home-baked cookies into our hands!

I was intrigued and astonished. There are a lot of good people out there who are still undecided about the issues. Some of them are not clear that their opinion matters. We asked questions and listened to their points of view. They felt seen and understood. And what I thought was impossible occurred: There was connection!

This work is not for everyone. You need to be genuinely curious about the views of others. You also need a sense of humor! It helps to not take yourself too seriously. And then what happens is really magical! Strangers open their doors, tell you their ideas about important issues, entrust you with private information like their date of birth, and how long they have lived at this address, and thank you for coming. They feel connected. I don’t know if we changed anybody’s mind, but the connections were made. I can’t help but feel that this meeting of minds makes a difference. This is democracy!

Canvassing is an opportunity to meet other voters, talk about the issues they are concerned about and make a connection that will touch you and those you meet. If this work interests you, please join me and other volunteers for canvassing in Montgomery County by clicking this link. Then put on your sneakers, bring a hat and a bottle of water and off we go!

As Kamala said, “When we fight, we WIN!”

For protectors of the environment, The Great Silence resonates deeply. In 2014, performance artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla proposed to writer Ted Chiang that he collaborate with them on the video installation. (Chiang, one of the finest speculative fiction writers of our time, may be best known for writing “Story of Your Life,” the basis for the film Arrival.) As Chiang explains, “Their plan was to juxtapose footage of the radio telescope in Arecibo with footage of the endangered Puerto Rican parrots that live in a nearby forest, and they asked if I would write subtitle text . . . , a fable told from the point of view of one of the parrots, ‘a form of interspecies translation.’” Although initially hesitant, Chiang complied, and the resulting collaboration provides a thought-provoking and ultimately touching examination of human aspiration and human heedlessness.

As the 16-minute film unfolds, shots of the mammoth Arecibo telescope arcing slowly in the sky alternate with shots of the highly endangered Puerto Rican parrots flitting through their jungle habitat, their calls providing a lush soundtrack. On the screen appear subtitles, supposed “translations” of the parrot narrator’s parrot language.  The parrot’s ability to communicate is integral to the argument of the film. The parrot notes that humans’ “desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe”—the ear being the Arecibo telescope. But, the parrot asks, why aren’t humans “interested in listening to our voices?” After all, “We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?”

The questions echo throughout the film as the parrot contrasts human’s desire to make contact with extraterrestrial species with human’s careless disregard of the other species that reside on this planet, a disregard that has led to numerous extinctions. “The Great Silence,” the parrot points out, is another term for “the Fermi Paradox” (This idea that may be familiar to viewers of the Chinese series Three Body or the American version 3-Body Problem, both based on Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem.) The parrot tells us that the Fermi Paradox posits that “[t]he universe ought to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it is disconcertingly quiet,” possibly because “intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space” or because “intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders,” The parrot regards this second possibility as “a wise strategy,” for its species “has been driven nearly to extinction by humans” and will likely “die before our time and join The Great Silence.” The poignancy of the species’ plight is heightened as the parrot refers to its “cousin,” the renowned gray parrot Alex, who understood not only words but also concepts such as shapes, colors, and numbers, regularly engaging in a sort of conversation with its human handler. The extinction of the Puerto Rican parrots, our parrot narrator tells us, “doesn’t just mean the loss of a group of birds. . . . It’s the silencing of our voice.” The Great Silence poignantly reminds us of the loss we would face if the parrots’ voices no longer sound through the Puerto Rican forest, and it encourages us in the work we do to ensure a livable planet for all species.

A final note: The parrot narrator speaks of Arecibo as a monument to humanity’s “immense” aspirations: “Any species who can build such a thing must have greatness within them.” In an unintentionally ironic twist, however, the Arecibo telescope spectacularly collapsed in December 2020. It can no longer “hear across the universe”—and soon we may no longer hear the parrots chattering in the nearby forest.

Sources:

The Great Silence premiered in 2014 at the Philadelphia’ Fabric Workshop and Museum. It can be viewed here.

In 2015, Chiang turned the text into a stand-alone short story, which can be found in the collection Exhalation: Stories, Knopf, pp. 231-36. Chiang’s description of the collaboration with Allora & Calzdilla can be found in “Story Notes,” also in Exhalation: Stories, pp. 347-348).

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals could take nearly a hundred years to build, and the early builders would never see the end results of their labors. This idea of cathedral-thinking—that is, thinking beyond one’s own lifetime to the generations that will come after––brings me to an important present-day initiative: Future Library. As its evocative website explains: “A forest in Norway is growing. In 100 years it will become an anthology of books. Every year a writer is contributing a text that will be held in trust, unpublished, until the year 2114. The texts will be printed on paper made from the trees, only to be read a century from now.” Since 2014, texts have been contributed by some of the world’s most renowned writers from across the globe—Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Sjón, Elif Shafak, Han Kang, Karl Ove Knausgard, and more.

Conceived by the gifted Scottish artist Katie Paterson, Future Library compels us to think beyond our own limited existences on Earth—to think in terms of a future we will not see but that we should want to be a livable future for those who follow us. Paterson explains her idea for the project thus: “Future Library is not a directly environmental statement, but involves ecology, the interconnectedness of things—those living now and those still to come. It questions the present tendency to think in short bursts of time, making decisions for those of us living now. It’s an artwork made not only for us living now, but for a future generation, in an unknown time and place” (Paul Harris, Katie Paterson, and David Mitchell, “Archivists of the Future,” in Time’s Urgency, The Study of Time 16, edited by Carlos Montemayor and Robert Daniel, Brill, 2019, pp. 38).

To think in regard to a future generation who will read the books written today is ultimately a hopeful enterprise. Addressing this idea, David Mitchell, who contributed the second manuscript to the project, notes, “I began to think about the beauty of launching a little bottle with my message in it onto the sea of time, knowing that people not yet born will receive it and read it, and think about the long-dead sender of the bottle. . . . It also feels like an affirmation that they, and books, and trees, and Norway, and civilization, will stand there in a hundred years. After the last couple of years, I need that affirmation. . . . In demonstrable everyday senses as well as some strands of Buddhist theology, the future is crafted by thought. The Future Library Project is a manifestation of this idea” (“Archivists,” 38).

We Third Actors will not live to read Mitchell’s novel, alas, but the Future Library initiative encourages us to think—and act––in terms of a future in which our descendants are thriving in a healing world, engaging in their own cathedral-building, and taking pleasure in reading David Mitchell’s From Me Flows What You Call Time.

By B. Wells

With his uncanny prescience, Neal Stephenson is the big ideas man of contemporary speculative fiction. In his breakout 1992 novel Snow Crash, he coined the term “metaverse” and described a type of virtual reality similar to what Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is developing today. Back in 1999, his novel Cryptonomicon gave readers glimpses of the basis of crypto currency. His many works since then have earned him fans including Barack Obama and Bill Gates.

In his 2021 novel Termination Shock, Stephenson takes on climate change. Set in the near future, the planet is fully beset with the  climate disasters we are already seeing.  Amidst this, a Texas billionaire named T. R. Schmidt takes matters into his own hands by seeding the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide, which reflects sunlight and thus has a cooling effect on the earth. For those not familiar with this climate mitigation strategy, I recommend this Open to Debate (formally Intelligence Squared) debate on solar geoengineering.  As argued in the debate, solar geoengineering only masks the causes of climate change. The novel’s title, Termination Shock, refers to the effects of sudden, rising temperatures should such a strategy be abruptly halted.