I highly recommend this interview with Kim Stanley Robinson about his most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, which charts an imaginary path through our realistically projected future of ecocatastrophe. It's simultaneously brutal and optimistic. The interview delves into some of the book's main themes.
On May 29, 2020, in the wake of the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstration marched about a half-mile from Oakland’s Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building. Around ten o’clock at night outside the federal building, as the protest continued close by, bullets spewed from a moving vehicle striking security personnel and killing one.
Oil companies knew 50 years ago the huge damage they were doing. Their motive to ignore it is the same now as it was then
Capitalism is on a collision course with human life and the future of our planet. Each year, air pollution takes more lives than smoking: the last estimate suggests 8.8m deaths across the world, compared with 7m from cigarettes.
A lengthy read, indeed, but we need big-picture summaries like this to appreciate the scope of what lies before us. This is not to say that I take everything in this essay as gospel. But U.S. imperialism is definitely a thick strand in the weave of difficult problems we're going to have to overcome (or in this case, overthrow).
