TC Boyle, The Author Who Predicted Earth’s Bleak Future Is Back, This Time With a Cli-Fi titled THE TERRANAUTS

The Author Who Predicted Earth’s Bleak Future Is Back With Another 'Cli-Fi' !

Written by

Jim Poyser for MOTHERBOARD

On October 26, 2016



http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-author-who-predicted-earths-bleak-future-is-back



EXCERPTS from Q and A

Jim: Here in Indiana, the land of climate denial where I live, when I talk about climate change, people mostly just want to talk about recycling.

Tom: As you well know we are doomed because we are caught in this capitalist wheel. All industrial society is built on producing product and buying the product. This is why I wrote Drop City (Viking; 2003): Could we go back to a simpler way of life?
Of course eventually we will, catastrophically, when the whole system collapses and the population is vastly reduced.
In my personal life and in talking with you and other people, I am a nice guy, and I’m joyful, I love to tell jokes and so on and I have a great sustaining group of close friends, and wonderful children, but in my heart I am more depressed than Samuel Beckett. Because I see the human condition and how preposterous it is, and how there are no answers to our existence, and science and religion are really equally voodoo, and we complicate this with rushing to the destruction of everything.

How do you deal with the reality of our potential demise?

I make art and try to explore it. In one sense I make light of it, in the other sense I’m trying to engage the reader to understand this and feel the way I do. It’s hard to walk out to the street and see life and embrace life when at the same time you know what the catastrophic problems are.
We all want. We have our wants. We all dominate. We all collect and aggregate that’s part of our DNA and hardwiring. When voters are polled in California, overwhelmingly they want to preserve green space and have nature. People give lip service to this. However if the price of gas goes up five cents, we will throw all environmental concerns out the window because we want to pay less for gas.
We are doomed. The only way out of it is to stop consuming and tear all this shit down. It’s not going to happen.
However, I will be optimistic. When I was a boy, there were no limits whatsoever. No one had any idea about packaging and recycling. Everything was into the trash and the landfill, including batteries and whatever poisonous materials. Now, at least, elementary school kids are learning about the earth and its ecosystems and recycling. If I have any optimism it is that there is greater awareness and our having this conversation demonstrates this to a degree. We are both influential; as teachers maybe we have an effect in the long run.
In the pessimistic view, though, there are way too many of us and we are already seeing climate dislocations; at least a third of the countries of the world are ruled by gangs whose only idea is to take your living and material possessions and destroy and annihilate everybody else; it is just going to get worse.
My plan, personally, is I’m going to die.

It’s easy to experience guilt about our own personal impact. Do you have any advice for us who are struggling with it?

My advice is the standard advice I’ve been giving for the last twenty years or more. If you are an environmentalist, go directly out into the yard, bury yourself in the compost pile, then shoot yourself in the head.
You and I feel this guilt. If I light a fire up in the mountain in the woodstove I’m destroying the earth. If I go to the supermarket—I very rarely eat any meat but my wife is a carnivore—and buy her meat, I feel guilty. And as Ty Tierwater says, just farting is contributing methane gas to climate change.
It becomes a kind of hatred of our own species and a kind of self-hatred if you take it too far.
I’m trying to find a balance in my own life between despair and ecstasy; between pessimism over what our species is heading toward and optimism about the beauty and creativity of our species.


Jim Poyser is a climate educator based in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he is executive director of Earth Charter Indiana. For more on Boyle, visit his website and follow him on Twitter.