Extrapolations, unextrapolated

"Extrapolations is life on gluten. It’s just all the bad stuff."

Might plays by Aristophanes or Shakespeare be played out against a backdrop of climate change a half-century from now? That was my take on the Apple+ series Extrapolations.

RogerEbert.com show-runs it this way:

Each of “Extrapolations”’s eight episodes introduces a new conflict set in a slightly different time in the future. New and returning characters are placed in various dilemmas and are intrinsically connected by subtle details. One of the biggest selling points of “Extrapolations” is its star-studded cast: Meryl Streep, Diane Lane, Edward Norton, Forest Whitaker, Marion Cotillard, Sienna Miller, and Kit Harington, among many others.

Science-wise, it’s a mixed bag, with as much wrong as right. In 2037, Algeria is in extreme drought while California is being devastated by wildfire. Nothing new there, it could as well be 2027, or 2020. In the plot, Algeria is being deprived of lifesaving technology. It would like to make water but an evil and ubiquitous Alpha Corp (run by a Bezos- or Musk-like Kit Harington) has a lock on the patent.

Okay, first, we already know how to make water from sewer water, the air, or the ocean, but it is impractical because of biophysical economics — it takes a huge amount of energy. Controlling patents while the planet burns is both incredibly anti-survival and to be expected — point taken. That is kind of the series’ running theme, not so much anticapitalism but that as a species, Homo TikTok, we’re too stupid to avoid extinction. Just don’t look up.

Extrapolations recalled for me an obscure Seth Rogan film, This is the End. Rogan’s character tells his friend he won’t eat junk food because he is on a cleanse.

“Whenever you feel shitty, that’s ’cause of gluten.”

“That’s not true. Who the f*** told you not to eat gluten?”

“It’s just true.”

“You don’t even know what gluten is.”

“I know what f***in gluten is.”

“No, you have no idea what gluten is.”

“I do know what gluten is. Gluten is a vague term. It is used to categorize things that are bad. You know? Calories, that’s a gluten. Fat, that’s a gluten.”

“Somebody just told you you probably shouldn’t eat gluten [and] you’re like, ‘Oh guess I shouldn’t eat gluten.”

“Gluten is bad shit, man, and I’m not eating it.”

 

Extrapolations is life on gluten. It’s just all the bad stuff anyone ever told you about the future — nanobots in your nose, rationing, extreme wealth inequality, Texas leaving the US, Florida sinking.

This we know. Drawing humanity’s attention to the climate crisis — and none have succeeded in that yet — must strike the difficult balance between frightening people out of complacency and offering hope. If you give too much hope people assume it is under control and just go back to consuming and polluting — and making more people — like before. If you give too much scare, people clam up, turn away, figure they have no agency anyway, so why bother? They go back to consuming and polluting, making more people, or the next best thing — adopting dogs and cats.

In the late sixties, it was possible to succeed as an environmentalist on the strength (and flash) of one’s pessimism alone.

— Stephanie Mills

Margaret Mead said a small number of people are the only ones who ever changed the world, but that’s not always a good thing, is it? In one of the middle Extrapolations, a rogue scientist launches a geoengineering test that backfires and ruptures the ozone layer. That may explain why so many of the chapters that follow are set in a dusty world where the air is unbreathable and no one can venture out in daylight. Climate change alone would not explain that and neither does the show.

In Episode 3, set in 2047, Miami’s streets are flooding but land speculators keep building. Are you sure that is not 2023? Seeing people in the temple praying in rubber boots as the water sloshes through the aisles is entirely plausible, and we don’t have to wait 24 more years. The next full moon might do. Or visit Fort Lauderdale.

One piece they got right is that most coastal change happens during storms, suddenly, not by gradual erosion and flooding. Any direct hit by a Category Four hurricane is a city killer. Miami Beach is as doomed as New Orleans. In the series, the government offers free relocation to the Midwest or Canada but most just try to live their lives as if nothing were happening.

How could it be that as late as 2047 Miami would still be a thing, or that authorities would still be taking bandaid approaches like re-zoning? How anyone gets to 2047 without a better grasp of climate science than these Miamians beggars belief.

In one scene the Miami rabbi is seen tinkering with a Roomba-like shop vac that is supposed to vacuum up the water in the Synagogue but has gotten clogged. This is well past the point where Artificial General Intelligence is assumed to have arrived, and the show reminds us that although humans may have landed on Mars and ended cancer, appliances still break down and will require a screwdriver.

Anyone who cares to get some more realistic science on what we know and don’t know about the near future climate could start by reading Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If all 2030 nationally determined contributions are fully implemented, warming of 2.4 °C (1.9 °C to 3.0 °C) is expected by 2100. Meeting all long-term pledges and targets could reduce this to 2.1 °C (1.7 °C to 2.6 °C). Even these optimistic assumptions lead to dangerous Earth system trajectories. Temperatures of more than 2 °C above preindustrial values have not been sustained on Earth’s surface since before the Pleistocene Epoch (or more than 2.6 million years ago).

Particularly worrying, says this paper, is a “tipping cascade” in which multiple tipping elements interact in such a way that tipping one threshold increases the likelihood of tipping another. Thanks to Earth system dynamics, even if humans stopped all pollution today, rapid temperature rise and weather weirding will continue. But there are also tipping elements that can push us back in the right direction, and many of these are still within our control.

Most vulnerable nations index, National Academy of Sciences

In her collection of essays, Tough Little Beauties, Stephanie Mills writes:

I’m still more willing to talk about what’s wrong with the world and to daydream useful ideas for others to carry out than to change my own life accordingly. For years, I was daily entertained by the uncertainty and the gentle mocking irony of my lifestyle. Uncertain: I wondered time and again whether I should have a child someday, take a little chance on the future, and admit some of the life-enhancing (“growth-demanding,” one friend called it) chaos that babies bring. Ironic: I loved city life, being part of the imperium, reading in bed by electric light, and driving my car, all in the service of the ecological movement. Even now that I live in the woodburbs, I eschew the hands-on toil it takes to restore the Earth.

That makes me an ordinary human, and it is beginning to give me a little patience with the world’s slowness to reform.

Gandhis, Dorothy Days, and Martin Luther King, Jrs. only come along once in a generation or so. On close inspection, they aren’t perfect, either. But their conscience, their courage, and their adamant nonviolence are ideals that any of us can try to approximate, each in our ways.

Hope is the basic requirement for that kind of work. Folks don’t go to jail over A-bombs, civil rights, or the wrongness of war because they’re expecting to lose. They can’t lose any more than Mother Teresa can fail. They may not achieve a perfect good, but they will have labored in service of a higher purpose, and it isn’t over til it’s over.

Extrapolations is not a hopeful show. It does not show solutions. It beats us up for being dumb. Or blame the sinister billionaires. And yet, I went away with its images of the future seared into the mind’s eye. That is a good thing. It’s helpful to share a common stare toward what is coming. With hope, we’ll start sharing the work that needs doing if we are going to avoid the worst of it.

In her 1980 essay, Mills said, “I want to live in a society where people do make grave choices… Such mortal choices make us confront a reality which is forever more complex and less than ideal.” To start making right choices, we’ll need to learn better how to extrapolate. The hardest part is making difficult choices.

 

Meanwhile, let’s end this war. Towns, villages, and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. There are 70 sites in Ukraine and 500 around the region. As you read this, we are sheltering some 2,000 adults and 450 children. We call our project “The Green Road.” With public donations from people like yourself,

• 88 houses were restored
• 33 wells were restored
• 32 wood heating stoves in houses were restored
• water was supplied to 34 houses
• 5008 euros were spent on gardens, orchards, and animals
• 17,448 euros were spent on food
• 19,045.70 euros went to household and kitchen items
• 12,558.80 euros provided schoolbooks, musical instruments and hand tools.

The Green Road wishes to thank

• GEN Europe (@Riccardo Clemente Robert Hall).
• Landsforeningen for Økosamfund and CISU — Civilsamfund i Udvikling / Civil Society in Development (Denmark) Camilla Nielsen-Englyst
• German Ukrainian Co-operation in Organic Agriculture (Stefan Dreesmann)
• Visegrad and Beyond Permaculture Partnership
• Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology (Albert Bates)
• Gas Up Ukraine Canada (Vad Segal)
• The Mission Bambini Foundation (Mission Bambini )

For most of the children refugees, this will be their first experience in ecovillage living. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad or read this recent article in Mother Jones. Thank you for your help.

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The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed climate change, a juggernaut threat to all life, humans included. We had a trial run at emergency problem-solving on a global scale with COVID — and we failed. 6.87 million people, and counting, have died. We ignored well-laid plans to isolate and contact trace early cases; overloaded our ICUs; parked morgue trucks on the streets; incinerated bodies until the smoke obscured our cities as much as the raging wildfires. The modern world took a masterclass in how abysmally, unbelievably, shockingly bad we could fail, despite our amazing science, vast wealth, and singular talents as a species.

Having failed so dramatically, so convincingly, with such breathtaking ineptitude, do we imagine we will now do better with climate? Having demonstrated such extreme disorientation in the face of a few simple strands of RNA, do we imagine we can call upon some magic power that will change all that for planetary-ecosystem-destroying climate change?

As the world emerges into pandemic recovery (maybe), there is growing recognition that we must learn to do better. We must chart a pathway to a new carbon economy that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience. We must lead by good examples; carrots, not sticks; ecovillages, not carbon indulgences. We must attract a broad swath of people to this work by honoring it, rewarding it, and making it fun. That is our challenge now.

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