Episode 380 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to the episode in its entirety on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your shows.
Also, here’s the full show in video format above.
If you want to hear the episode with Charles C. Mann, it is below.
If you’d like to hear the episode with Paul Kingsnorth, it is right below this text.
The perennial fight returns... In one corner, there are the wizards: optimists who are betting that technology and economic growth can solve our problems faster than it can create them? In the other corner, prophets: who believe we have deeply lost in our way in ignoring limits and that we need to get ourselves back to the garden.
How much wizard and how much prophet do you have contained in your own heart?
Today's monologue episode has host Ross Kenyon exploring two recent books: Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson's Abundance, and Paul Kingsnorth's Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, regarding how they continue the oldest and deepest fight in environmentalism.
This episode's sponsors
Absolute Climate: the only standard that’s developed independent of registries
Philip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliers
Listen to the RCC episode with Peter Minor from Absolute Climate
Listen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP
Resources
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth
Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
"S2E53: Paul Kingsnorth on the shared roots of climate crisis, transhumanism, & immortality"
"S2E15: Are you a wizard or a prophet?—w/ Charles C. Mann"
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C. Mann
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
Joseph Schumpeter & creative destruction
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond (do note the disputing of a claim I echoed from the book, that violence can be endemic in hunter-gatherer societies; take my words with a grain of salt here)
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)
"Anyway, Here's Wonderwall" meme
The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society
What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares
A brief interpretation of some of Peter Thiel's Greta Thunberg antichrist comments
"The mountains are calling and I must go."
- John Muir
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
- Albert Einstein (attributed)
"The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house."
- Audre Lorde
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still goofing around.
The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.
🎧 Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube
Paid subscribers get this episode ad-free. The ads in the free feed are inserted by Spotify when you press play. They are not in the file I make.
