Show Notes
In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see the ocean not as an ‘absence’ but an intricate series of operations that makes life as we know it possible.
In this episode, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith reflect on the ways Czerski’s book has altered their thinking about the ocean, and whether new perspectives can ever be enough to change public policy.
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More from the LRB:
Richard Hamblyn on deep-sea exploration:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n21/richard-hamblyn/hurrah-for-the-dredge
Katherine Rundell on the greenland shark:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/katherine-rundell/consider-the-greenland-shark
Liam Shaw on coral:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n22/liam-shaw/in-the-photic-zone
Amia Srinivasan reviews Peter’s book on octopus minds:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-sucker-the-sucker
Film: Forecasting D-Day
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/videos/lrb-films-interviews/forecasting-d-day
Next episode: ‘The Burning Earth’ by Sunil Amrith
More from Nature in Crisis
Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of the transition away from fossil fuels. But lithium, like the copper, cobalt and rare earths that renewable technologies also require, has to be mined. ‘Everywhere that mines are dug up to provide raw materials for the energy transition,’ Thea Riofrancos writes in Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, ‘global climate action comes into conflict with local environmental protection.’ Or as Meehan puts it at the start of the episode, there’s a fundamental contradiction between two desirable things.
‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series, even as their focus has shifted from biology to society. Its authors, Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, are both anti-fascist researchers writing explicitly from the activist left. Unlike commentators such as Mark Lilla, who worry about ‘vilification inflation’, Moore and Roberts make the case for the continuing salience of the word fascism.
Over the past twelve years, the walls and shop shutters of Upper Manhattan have been gradually filled by giant paintings of climate-threatened birds, inspired by the species depicted by the artist John James Audubon, who lived in the area. Emily Raboteau’s ‘Lessons for Survival’ (2024) takes these murals, along with Raboteau’s own photographs of local birds, as a way into exploring the challenges faced by a mother of two Black sons in New York City living through Hurricane Sandy, the first Trump presidency, Covid and mounting climate breakdown.
At Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert lie the ruins of a once vibrant and extensive Ancestral Puebloan civilisation. Sometime in the 12th century the society fell into decline, as a fifty-year drought may have helped to push the settlement to collapse. ‘How is it that a complex society like Chaco could survive one drought but not another?’ Roy Scranton asks near the start of ‘Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress’ (2025).
Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 'Braiding Sweetgrass' argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical science, to support ‘mutual flourishing’ between humans and the environment. 'Braiding Sweetgrass' was an enormous success for a small press publication, becoming a bestseller and a touchstone for readers searching for alternatives to extractivist realpolitik.