Interview: Kim Stanley Robinson - Farsight

Some of the questions on the agenda for the participants to explore include "What is extinction and what are we losing? How do we understand loss and endings? How can an individual understand themselves in relation to a collective responsibility? What is the artist’s role in responding to mass extinction? What happens after the end has come an

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“Moving away from an Anthropocene into a Symbiocene requires a biological, psychological, and sacred perspective in our foresight & futures thinking work.

Why? When we leave out the interconnected, vibrant, and emergent qualities of life in favor of only serving dominant systems of productivity, efficiency, and hyper-monetization, we fail to re

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Faced with climate change and other interconnected existential crises in the twenty-first century, it is quickly becoming a cliché to say that there is a strong need to “imagine better futures.” But such a statement hides many questions and challenges. Who gets to imagine these futures? Who feels safe and supported enough, economically, politically... See more

We still need to live in some sort of recognition that humans can't hive themselves off into cities and pretend that nature happens outside the city, and inside the city is some fantastically controlled biome over which humans have dominion. That's not the way that the planet or ecology works.

A technologically advanced culture cannot flourish without getting better at anticipating the future. That’s why science fiction matters. That’s why scenario planning matters. That’s why complex software simulations that enable us to forecast things like climate change on the scale of decades matter.

And here I want to bring us back to another idea... See more

“Our individual psychological doom manifests collectively as a universal ecological calamity. Both are interwoven with one another. Both are symptoms of a fundamental misunderstanding of ourselves and of reality. In a world of ruined aliveness, it is impossible to be alive oneself. Both inner aliveness and the aliveness of the natural world are fac... See more

We are entering an age of increasingly unpredictable climatological change. We are entering an age when we must remember that the most important ideas may not belong to human beings, but to bacteria and insects and entire geographies.