Interview: Kim Stanley Robinson - Farsight

People understand things through narratives, including the future. Everyone is the science fiction writer of their own life. When hoping for a good life, and thinking about what might bring that about, we are utopian writers; when fearful that bad things will happen, we are dystopian writers.

"The world is your body, you breathe it, drink it, eat it, it lives inside you, and you only live and think because this community is doing well. So: nature? You are nature, nature is you. Natural is what happens. The word is useless as a divide, there is no Human apart from Nature, you have no thoughts or feelings without your body, and the Earth ... See more

The longer view is coming into human consciousness in part because of the radical danger of the immediate moment – which is that humanity might create a mass extinction event and wreck Earth’s biosphere for all the generations of humans to come, plus of course the many species that would be driven to extinction. 

Nature and natural are words with particular weights that are perhaps not relevant now. We are part of a biosphere that sustains us. Half the DNA in your body is not human DNA, you are a biome like a swamp, with a particular balance or ecology that is hard to keep going – and indeed it will only go for a while after which it falls apart and you die... See more