After World
Why is witnessing critical?
Maybe you can talk about witnessing a little bit, because I feel like, in a way, you in this novel are witnessing something for the rest of us.
Witnessing in the novel is a job that Sen Anon has. So there’s witnesses all over the world, and their job is to pay attention to what’s happening. This Great Transition, going from a human-centered world to a world where humans are extinct. And the witness’ job, they might not even have readers. They probably won’t have readers, but it’s really just to pay attention to what’s happening in front of them. They’re supposed to write down their observations. Writing is a way to make sure that they’re paying attention. Yeah, that’s cool to think of my role in writing this as witnessing…
Are we running out of time?
So the Great Transition is the period of time from when humans are aware that they’re going to go extinct to the point of time when the world is okay. The world’s been rewild. Humans are gone. It’s healing. There’s an equilibrium again. There’s going to be a certain messiness in the Great Transition, I think, whoever and/or whatever is organizing the Great Transition is trying to prepare people. It’s going to be uncomfortable, messy, essentially everyone dies, but it should be worth it. It will be worth it because the earth is going to be okay and, in fact, thriving afterwards. I think that’s what the big picture is, that humanity, in the perspective of the AIs of the book, is just this little part of the entire world. And so losing humanity, losing the physical bodies of humanity should not be that big of a deal if we take in the size of the world, the amount of species there are-
Preserve humanity or the planet?
The big picture. What is the goal of fixing climate change, to preserve the planet and its diversity of species, or to preserve humanity and its way of life?
Yeah, that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book. And that second question, I’ll separate out even preserving humanity and preserving humanity’s way of life because I wish those two things were more separate too. I started thinking about After World, the novel, when I was reading about species extinction. I was reading The Six Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, and it’s a devastating book. It really gets me emotionally, even on this reread. It starts off with talking about the golden tree frog, yellow tree frogs, and how, in the span of decades, these scientists went from forests being covered in these frogs to hardly being able to find them. Maybe finding one or two.
And at present, they could really only exist in the small terrarium in a sterile environment. So something about that just breaks my heart that we’re losing so much, and I would love to see us try and preserve everything. Preserve all species, preserve the planet, preserve humanity, and preserve humanity’s way of life. But I think we just have to… We’re forced to make decisions about what we prioritize. And yeah, I wish other species and the planet played into it more.
You talk about this human-centered versus earth-centered. And I wanted to tell you that was one of my questions in my 15 questions in the future 2043. I asked people to indicate, did they think 20 years from now people would be living in harmony with other species, or would humans be living as a separate species? 20% think that we’ll be living in harmony. 55% think we’ll be living, in our minds, a very separate division between us and the other species on earth. That one is sad, but it didn’t surprise me. Does that surprise you?
Sure. Yes, it makes me sad. But there’s this idea that we’re going to need to preserve these little pockets of wilderness or even endangered animals are just going to be living in zoos or even there’s the idea of frozen zoos. So I guess I could see that where we’re really going to have to protect the remaining biodiversity by keeping them away from us.
Rebootable future life
Talk about a second chance. It’s a version of ourselves that is being given a second chance. And if that chance doesn’t work out, we’ll be given a third chance and a fourth if necessary and so on. So I feel like we’re in a situation that’s sort of… I wouldn’t say cyclic because I think it’s more like a spiral going somewhere, I don’t know where, where things are rebootable. And you talk about the fact that we’ll have a better version of ourselves.
Yeah, I feel like maybe that’s how we are treating the current world, this hope that we’ll be able to just start over when climate change gets too bad, but that’s not the case. So yeah. So I imagined if some entity was going to create a new place for us, we probably will need multiple chances to get things right. Literally, that probably will get rebooted. But I don’t think humans are going to be perfect even in this new form, so that we will need a lot of chances to figure stuff out.
Is saving the world a choice or an obligation?
Should saving the world be a choice? Or is it okay to force people to save the world?
It seems like that might be the only way to make it happen. And it’s not only individuals, but also corporations and also countries. So there has to be some kind of über something forcing everything to prioritize the climate. That would require giving up a lot of individual freedom and choice. Yeah, it’s a tough call. I guess it counts on what we find most important. Is it individual freedom, or is it preserving the planet?
Why priority to the young?
One thing you say is, “The priority of purpose has been granted to younger generations who lost the longest futures.”
Yeah, that’s the tragedy of climate change. And in the book too, I was trying to acknowledge how Sen and her generation got the short end of the stick where their lives end at 25 or 20. So I think there’s so much more self-awareness now, or just awareness, in general, with the younger generation about climate change where, just looking at my own kids, they’re teenagers, and they’ve seen in recent memory in the past five or six years, winters change here in Syracuse, New York. We don’t get much snow anymore. Snow days are a lot less. It’s so much warmer here year round. So the fact that this new generation is aware of what’s happening and it has really seeing the devastation that climate change is causing. I am really hopeful that those are the people who are going to be in power and running governments and corporations.
So how could they not make decisions that take that into account, right? There’s that idea with climate change. I think it might be a Buddhist idea where you do what you think is necessary and what you think is right, and you let go of where it’s taking you. Especially with climate change, it could feel so hopeless and helpless. It’s very easy to think, “I can’t do anything. I give up.” But if you focus on just what you think needs to be done and keep that being the goal, we’ll still be taking action even if the end might not be what we want or can’t be what we want.
Why write After World?
I did start writing the book because of species extinction and what I was reading about it and how upsetting that was to me, and just the grief that I felt when we’ve seen the past couple of years species go extinct, multiple species every year. And it’s not just the charismatic ones that I care about, but it’s like the plants or species we haven’t even identified that are going extinct. And that’s just feels like such a… I mean, I could feel it in my chest. It’s such a loss. So I want After World to succeed as a novel and to have people enjoy the experience of reading it. But I’d love for just our minds to nudge a little bit in the direction of acknowledging the importance of non-human species, and if we can make room for not just us at the center of the world, that’d be pretty awesome.
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