An existential crisis bigger than any election.
 | By Heba Elorbany Producer, Opinion Audio |
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Since the launch of Times Opinion’s podcast, “Sway,” hosted by Kara Swisher, we’ve produced interviews with power players in every sphere — from politicians to tech titans to pharmaceutical executives. So last week, amid a historic election, our guest choice was obviously … the author of “Annihilation,” Jeff VanderMeer. |
Jeff is not the kind of sci-fi writer who seeks to escape reality. He soaks in it, lets it inspire him. And that means confronting climate change, an existential crisis bigger than any one presidential race. |
It’s the issue that overwhelmingly permeates his books — and his life. (Among his political acts is the rewilding of his yard in Florida to welcome native species.) While many of us remain consumed by the pandemic and the continuing fallout from a day-long-turned-week-long election, Jeff’s conversation with Kara is a much-needed reminder to keep our eyes on what is arguably the most urgent issue to have fallen off the news cycle. |
The truth is, “some version of the apocalypse is inevitable,” Jeff told Kara. “The question is whether we can mitigate it to the point where it’s livable.” |
Read some highlights from their conversation below and listen to the full episode here. |
Kara: The story of a lot of these things is “oh, oops. Oh, we shouldn’t have done that.” Such as Covid, for example, right now. Here we have this idea that these diseases leap from animals to humans, sort of nature getting back at us in some ways some people see it as. Do you think we’ll come out of it with a different relationship to nature, or is it the same? |
Jeff: We have to understand that this is — it’s almost like the election. It’s like, yes, we are pushing to this goal, but there is so much that has to be done after the goal, and the same thing with the coronavirus in the sense that it is part and parcel of the climate crisis. It is not divorced from it. It is linked to things like habitat loss and habitat degradation and the fact that we have to not just have green tech. We have to have biodiversity on our planet in order to survive. And so it’s almost weirdly this invisible thing has made visible the cracks in our systems and the faults in our systems that we need to desperately fix in order to deal with the next thing and to deal with the climate crisis in general. |
Kara: You write this for your fiction, and you sort of draw out all these odd and unusual ways [the apocalypse is] going to happen. But give me the realistic version of it. |
Jeff: The realistic version of it is we go through a really bad patch that includes a lot of civil unrest. The stuff with regard to Trump doesn’t go away because he’s stoked up this thing. We have to manage and deal with that and hope that at least some aspect of it dies down because we have a restoration of somebody who believes in science and doesn’t stoke this kind of stuff. So I really think we’re going to go through a rough patch. We still have time to mitigate these issues, but we have to fight really hard for it. |
Kara: Where do you see hope? Because you’re actually a very hopeful person, and your writing is a form of activism, or maybe I’m misreading. |
Jeff: No, it is a form of activism. I wouldn’t write at all If I didn’t have hope. I just — |
Jeff: I don’t know. I probably would just be hanging out in the ravine with the raccoons until the end times. I think really what it boils down to is not having a false sense of hope. What gives me hope is having the actual information. My daughter works for a sustainability company in Amsterdam that’s really, really good, and she has all the data. She gives us the data. She’s the one who convinced me that we still have time to change things. |
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