There’s a visceral connection between our bodies and the nature that surrounds us. Almost as if the elements that compose our flesh are called by the same elements that form life on this planet: water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium and magnesium. There’s poetry in knowing where we come from and where we’re going. Our bodies are made by eternal building blocks. Forming and unforming, giving shape to innumerable living beings. The same water that flows through us was in the dinosaurs 200 million years ago; was in the glaciers, the clouds, the rain that patters on the walnut leaves outside my window.

You were once the rain. A wave in the ocean. A chip of blue ice. The soil beneath your feet. A tree. A flower. A bird in the sky.

Our modern society has severed our mental ties to nature. In our heads, we’re not part of this planet. Instead, we live in an imaginary world where we outgrew our lowly animal beginnings. We’re not rooted into the forests, the meadows and rivers. We don’t breathe the same air as our little brothers and sisters roaming this earth as whales, bears, elephants, tigers, foxes, rabbits, beavers, pelicans and bees. We don’t drink the same water. Our food no longer comes from the soil. Nor from the flesh of other beings. Our supermarkets are filled up every day by the horn of abundance gifted to us by the gods. Our clothing is spun from heavenly threads. Our palaces are built by genies summoned from magic lamps. And we travel on flying carpets. It’s a beautiful dream.

But human civilization as we practice it today is not magic. Every human action drains the planet of a little more life blood. We’re losing our natural world at an alarming rate and there’s a high chance we won’t wake up from our beautiful dream until it’s too late. Even as we try to make things better, we’re destroying the last protected lands to mine for lithium and rendering them uninhabitable for the indigenous populations that cared for them for millennia. We’re cutting the few remaining forests to install large-scale renewable energy projects. Is this the right way to green our energy? What will be left by the time we’re done fixing this planet for humans? Electric vehicles won’t save us. Solar panels won’t save us. A better economy won’t save us. Technological progress won’t save us. The only thing that will save us is reconnecting with the natural world.

Our ecosystems are dying by a thousand cuts every single day. Every object we hold—every meal we eat, every glass of water we drink, every city we build, every car we make, basically every breath we take and every move we make on this planet as human beings in the 21st century—leaves a dent into our world. And when you multiply that dent by billions of us, it becomes clear we are a huge insatiable mouth that never stops chipping away at the planet. How must we seem to other living beings on this planet? Like the No-Face character from Spirited Away, a Faceless species gobbling away the world, desperately trying to fill ourselves with meaning.

I listen to the soothing sound of rain pattering on the rooftop.

25 bathtubs of water to grow the cotton for one t-shirt. 7,500 liters of water to make a single pair of jeans.

It’s been raining for the past three days.

140 liters of water to produce one cup of coffee—enough to fill a bathtub. 15,000 liters of water to produce 1kg of beef—enough to fill a swimming pool.

But it’s not enough. Since 1900, Austria's temperature has risen by around 3.1°C. Last winter was one of the driest on record, with precipitation levels approximately 70% below average.

12,000 liters of water to make a smartphone. 8 kg of lithium on average to make a battery for an electric vehicle—the Tesla Model S contains around 62.6 kg of lithium. 1,9 million liters of water to mine one ton of lithium.

Our ancestors had a deep respect for water. Entire civilizations were built around water management. Even today, 3000 year old water systems save lives in times of drought. Learning to once again respect nature and be accountable for the resources we take from our ecosystems can go a long way in healing the planet. Our lives are intertwined with the land that feeds us, the water that quenches our thirst, the air that fills our lungs; with the forests and the meadows and the oceans; and with all other living beings.

What a beautiful gift this Earth is.
Let us not waste it.

🜁

In my climate fiction mosaic novel, There Is Hope, Central Europe has turned into a Dust Bowl by the year 2550. Here’s an encounter with the scavengers living in the abandoned European cities.

The ghost city spreads in front of them, caked in dust and ravaged by the passage of time, a heavy mastodon staring at them through the empty sockets of its windows, hollow and grim like its past that had unleashed the wrath of heat on Earth. Sanse crosses his fingers to avert the evil eye of these worthless ancestors.

‘Why did we come here?’ His father eyes him in silence. He casually searches through his pockets, takes out a package of seaweed crackers and offers it to him. Sanse takes it, chews and waits. At a distance, Shia is dragging her feet over cracked soil.

‘We’re leaving a tip for the Dust Pirates,’ his father says.

‘The Dust Pirates live here?’ Sanse gawks at the ugly ruins.

‘Do you think the Dust Pirates live here?’ His father searches again through his pockets and lights up a pipe.

‘No idea.’ Sanse shrugs and licks his fingers.

The koi fish sun, now lower on the horizon, paints the ocean sky orange. The evening wraps them in its stillness, a hot and suffocating embrace. Sanse’s thoughts are melting away like cheap plastic, and, for a moment, he believes he is hallucinating when something looking like a tall zombie emerges from the gray ruins. It’s a bone-skinny human being pulling a cart of what looks like scavenged goods. Sanse stares at the emaciated figure with a mix of horror and fascination.

‘We’re not here to buy today, but I’ll have some lithium batteries. Do you have any?’ his father says taking out a jug of water. The tall zombie man searches through the scraps in his cart, hands two batteries to his father and takes the water.

‘Thanks,’ his father says, placing the batteries in his cart. ‘We have a delivery for the Dust Pirates.’

‘Unfortunately, you’re a bit late.’ The tall zombie man looks his father in the eyes and nods thoughtfully.

‘What do you mean?’ his father says.

Shia stops next to Sanse, breathing heavily.

‘Are these the Dust Pirates?’ Shia searches through her backpack and takes out a water bottle. She’s about to drink again when a strange song fills the air.

‘Blue ice melting
melting into the sea
our drinking water
flowing into the ocean
the salty ocean
we’re melting in the heat
dreaming of cool
blue ice melting.’

Several zombie children leak through the hollow doors and windows of the ruined buildings and surround Sanse and Shia.

‘Water?’ a zombie child says, tugging at Sanse’s sleeve. Sanse looks into the cavernous voids of the child’s thirsty and hungry eyes.

‘You poor little thing. Here,’ Shia says, offering her water bottle to the zombie child. The child snaps the bottle and runs away.

‘What are you doing?’ Sanse stares at Shia, who is busy digging through pockets and bags and handing all her food and water to the greedy little hands.

‘At this rate, you won’t survive on the Dust Road long enough to meet the pirates!’ his father says, extracting Shia from the insatiable hands of the little rascals and shooing the children away.

🜁

Your curator,
Claudia—Builder of myths. Architect of deep futures.

🜁

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Subjecting all living beings on Earth to human laws and ideology is not the answer to our modern conundrum: that nature’s supply chain is struggling to meet the ever-growing demands of a single species—our own.

At a theoretical and ethical level, why do the needs of our species supersede the needs of every other form of life on this planet?

The climate crisis is nature’s response to our fight for supremacy. And ultimately, nature holds the upper hand. This climate crisis is nature’s French Revolution, an uprising against its greedy, self-appointed human emperors.

It is a reminder that life on Earth is not about the survival of the fittest, but about coexistence. That Earth’s ecosystem is a superior planetary operating system, with data centers, information networks, ecological algorithms and power supplies that no human technology can replace or replicate.

We pride ourselves on being the most intelligent beings on this planet. But nature is more intelligent than us. It is also longer lived. Our finite lives don’t allow us to grasp the scale at which nature operates. Cause and effect extend far beyond even our existence as a species.

Human life is part of this natural ecosystem and not the other way around. Therefore nature doesn’t need rights dictated by our laws. Quite the contrary: human laws must adapt to ensure our survival within nature’s laws.

Perhaps it’s time we reckon with the fact that our attempts to dominate this planet are not to our advantage. Instead of conquering nature, maybe we should allow it to once again enter our lives. Where a human steps, a tree should grow—not be cut. We should use our creative powers to help life flourish on this planet, not to take it away.

There was a time when humans were co-creators with nature. After the last Ice Age, our ancestors helped re-green the planet. Over millennia, they bred a wealth of seeds and plant species in collaboration with nature. These people left us a planet covered in ancient forests and still put food on our tables today. What will we leave behind for future generations? A spaceship to escape a planet we rendered uninhabitable for humans?

Rethinking our place and role as a species on Earth—and in the universe—is not the answer to everything. But it’s a start. A change of perspective can help us break out of this mental bubble in which we try to pass a camel through the eye of a needle. We cannot fit nature, the planet and the universe within our human capitalist system. We cannot even fit humans within our capitalist system. If we give up our notion that the highest ideal of human existence is to accumulate as much wealth as possible in this life, a whole new range of possible futures opens before our eyes.

Think of the implications of taking consumption out of the equation and replacing it with nurturing the natural world. What ripple effects would that have on our planet, our society, our future? How would this influence the way we build our technology, educate our children or treat other living beings on this planet?

The world as we know it is a reflection of the mental bubbles in which we live. The fastest and only way in which we can change is by changing our mindset. For the past 300 years we’ve been operating on a mental model that doesn’t serve us. We’re so obsessed with our own survival that we ended up destroying everything in our path. Our pathological need for hoarding resources is the animal instinct of survival brought to the extreme by an intelligent species. In our quest to secure our future, we’re annihilating it. This is existential angst brought to paroxysm. A form of collective madness.

But hoarding won’t save us when the ecosystems that sustain us collapse. We’ve become lonely islands dreaming of transforming into superheroes that will save the world. We are so wrapped up in our individual existences, so cut away from each other that we feel helpless in the face of collapse. Plugged into our glowing screens, we’re more blind than ever.

Meanwhile, indigenous women in rural India—some of the poorest and most marginalized people on Earth—are creating dream maps to reimagine their landscapes in the face of climate change. These women are connected to their ecosystems. They can clearly see the issues and what needs to be done. And they’re taking action: they submitted their dream maps to government officials and requested financial and legal support to restore the forests and rivers that ensure their livelihood.

Nature doesn’t need rights. Humans need a change of heart.

How much suffering will it take?

🜃

I explore this question further in my mosaic novel There Is Hope, set in the year 2550—long after the Earth has reached +5°C of warming and a 400-year war over the last resources. Told through a collection of human memories in a Museum of Life, it follows the last humans walking the Dust Road, searching not just for survival—but for hope.

There Is Hope is an ode to what we stand to lose and a meditation on what it might take to live again in harmony with the Earth.

Subscribe to read the serialized novel.

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Your curator,
Claudia—Builder of myths. Architect of deep futures.

Of all the visions I read about the future, none struck me as more cynical—or more eye-opening—than the idea of building an economy around collapse. Yet this is exactly the world depicted in Naomi Alderman’s climate fiction novel The Future.

Set in a not-so-distant future, the book imagines a society where looming collapse due to climate change is not just background noise—it’s content. Social media is flooded with influencers sharing tech survivalism hacks. Streaming platforms feature doomsday courses. Brands sell tactical gear and survival product lines by placing ads in articles about wildfires and hurricanes. The ultra-rich? They’re busy building secret bunkers, waiting for the algorithms to tell them when it’s finally time to retreat.

There’s something grotesque about a society that capitalizes on its own collapse—apocalypse biz. And yet, Alderman’s book asks a simple, sobering question:

Are we ready for the end of the world as we know it?

I know I’m not.

I will not die. It’s the world that will end.

<>

When I was five, the Chernobyl disaster happened. I remember that day vividly. My mother came home early from work, carrying a green gas mask. It stayed on our balcony for years. We never had to use it, we were at a safe distance from the nuclear site. But I always wondered what we would’ve done with one mask when there were four of us.

Since then, I’ve never faced another crisis requiring emergency supplies. Today, I write climate fiction and work in the energy industry, yet I don’t even have a blackout kit. But Alderman’s book brought to mind an old truth: It’s better to be safe than sorry. So how do we prepare for systemic collapse, when change is gradual, not sudden? When each crisis is regional, not global?

When complex planetary systems are at play over long periods of time, where will the next disaster come from? Will it be a flood, a wildfire, extreme heat, a hurricane, a tsunami, a drought or just a blackout?

<>

In the novel, one of the protagonists—a tech survivalist who monetizes a large following through survival courses and product reviews such as camping gear and clothing—prepared the following survival bag for herself:

• 16 packets of ramen

• A large bag of trail mix

• Bamba snacks

• 8 SurvivalGel pouches

• 12 sticks of beef jerky

• 6 packets of protein powder

• 28 squeeze packs of peanut and almond butter

• 90 multivitamin tablets

• One apple

• An anthology of English literature

• A language guide with the 1,000 most common words and basic grammar in 20 languages

• A book of crosswords

• A windup radio

• 8 pencils, 5 ballpoint pens, a children’s exercise book

There’s something tragic about this list. It’s detailed, carefully curated and completely inadequate. It begs the question: Why isn’t anyone in the book trying to fix the root problem instead? And then you read that those who caused the crisis and have the means to solve it, simply don’t care. The ultra-rich want to get rid of us all:

They think they can survive a global environmental breakdown. They think they’ll inherit the Earth after it’s done. They don’t want to do the things it’ll take to fix this. They don’t want us to think about it. And they can direct our attention where they want it to go.

This stayed with me because we are so distractible. And collapse is so slow, so abstract, until it’s not.

<>

After finishing the book, I started researching what collapse really looks like today and found mainly courses on how to survive in the wild. There’s 8 billion of us and there’s been a staggering 73% drop in wildlife populations since 1970 due to habitat loss and degradation. How exactly are we going to survive in the wild?

Then I looked up windup radios, all purpose knives and wear-and-tear resistant pants before I gave up.

As Alderman writes in her novel, ultimately survival in a collapsing world is not about having the right gear or skills. It’s about having the right mindset, working together and helping each other. Here’s what another protagonist from the book—a woman who grew up in a doomsday fundamentalist religion—writes in a forum:

Genesis, in particular, is a record of what it was like to survive the last ice age and to move from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Genesis is the last book we have of stories passed down by people who survived our most recent extinction events. It’ll tell you shit about canning and rifle maintenance. It’ll tell you what kind of society and what sort of values we’re gonna need to survive.

So it’s all about strangers, caring for the members of society who have nothing. Not thinking just about your own needs.

In other words, we don’t have many chances of survival if we don’t look out for each other. But do we still know how to do that? Like in the novel, today’s ultra-rich are busy building survival bunkers, gated utopias and defense technology. A painful reminder that the future depicted in the book is nearer than we might think.

<>

And yet, not all futures are dystopian. While some are building bunkers, others are building solutions. Last week I started researching the European Union market for carbon payments for a work-related project. It was a deep dive into carbon allowances and how the EU is regulating carbon emissions with the goal to become climate neutral by 2050. Thanks to the RepowerEU Plan, the EU reduced their dependency on Russian gas from 45% to 19% from 2022 to 2025 and plans to stop all imports by 2027. Meanwhile, in 2024 almost half of all electricity in the EU came from green sources.

Perhaps we won’t do apocalypse biz after all.

We are always in the process of catching up to the future. Only when we get there, it’s never what we imagined. Sometimes, just once in a while, it’s better.

Perhaps, like in The Future, we’re going somewhere with a million beautiful things.

How about you?

• Do you ever think of collapse?

• Do you have an emergency kit?

• Do you know how to survive in the wild?

• What would you pack in your emergency bag?

• What would you miss the most?

I don’t think I’d be able to live without books and without journaling.

📣 New There Is Hope season announcement

The fifth and last season of our climate fiction series There Is Hope will start dropping on May 25. Five new episodes will be released weekly.

Join me one last time on the Dust Road.

‘There Is Hope’ is a climate fiction mosaic novel about life on a planet devastated by climate change and the things that give people hope.

🌱 If this story resonated with you…

The full novel There Is Hope is being serialized now and the final season drops in May. After June, it will go behind the paywall and will be available only to paid subscribers.

If you want to support independent climate fiction and help me build this world, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Your support makes all of this possible and means the world to me. All funds are used to cover the costs of the upcoming book, including a beautiful cover illustration. Thank you for being part of this journey!

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One summer day after my fourth birthday, I woke up to the deafening noise of a chainsaw. By the end of the morning, the two giants growing in front of my bedroom window were lying on the ground, defeated. I cried the whole day and remember waking up the next morning and looking out the window. Where my beloved linden trees once stood, there was a gap, like a child’s missing front teeth. Except no new trees would be growing on the freshly asphalted street.

Sometimes, I wonder about the little girl’s kinship with those trees. Is this connection spontaneous for humans? Is it ingrained in our psyche? Our DNA? Many years have passed since that summer morning, and soon, I’ll turn 44. But this story stayed with me all these years, and last year, it inspired a short story titled The Cooperatives.

Today, I want to write about tree huggers and digital minds, the leitmotivs of my short story.

The last forest

When I read The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, I was fascinated to learn that climate change might transform Siberia into a future-day California. Research suggests there’s an optimal temperature for human productivity—19°C. Silicon Valley is perfectly placed within that range, but as the planet warms, such zones will shift. Siberia will become the goldilocks zone for human productivity and this is where I placed the richest and most important European colony around the year 2550ÆV1. However, the Siberia of the future will not draw its wealth from manufacturing silicon chips but from something far more valuable.

As the planet gets hotter, the tree line will begin to migrate north in search of cooler climates. But natural succession—the process by which forest ecosystems adapt following disturbances such as climate change—happens far too slowly. Most forests won’t survive. The boreal forest is an exception, and will be the last standing forest. I learned about the last forest in Ben Rawlence’s book ‘The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth’ and was captivated by the Siberian indigenous people and their connection with the cold and the land.

There’s a scene in my story where a character enjoys a bountiful meal—‘a plate with long icy strips of fish—kyspyt, the local delicacy—and small bowls of mustard, salt and chilly powder’—that was directly inspired by the book. Having access to nature and food will be a privilege few people will enjoy in a world transformed by the abrupt, catastrophic consequences of climate change.

‘The larger public still thinks that climate change will be gradual. They are not alive to the fact that it will be abrupt and what that means in terms of climate disasters and the suffering of their children.’—Ko van Huissteden

A defrosted Siberia will bring both peril and opportunity. It will disrupt our fragile climate and ecological systems, and it will shift power to a new dominant region, benefiting from favorable climate conditions, access to a resilient forest, and fresh land as the treeline and the people migrate northwards.

‘There is twice as much greenhouse gas—carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous gas—stored in the permafrost as currently is in the atmosphere, enough to accelerate global warming exponentially and effectively end life on earth as we know if it were all released at once. Yet most climate models discount permafrost because of the lack of data even though 40 percent of permafrost is projected to be gone by the end of the century.’—Ben Rawlence

Tree-huggers in popular culture

Writing ‘The Cooperatives’ was challenging because protecting trees as a story trope has often been ridiculed in popular culture. I’m sure you’ve seen at least one rainbow-beanie-wearing, hippie-dippie tree hugger on screen. No matter how noble these characters are, tree huggers are often portrayed as losers. This perception traces back to the first historical tree huggers.

In 1730, a woman named Amrita Devi stood against the Maharaja of Jodphur who sent his army to cut Khejri trees—the sacred trees of her Bishnoi faith—for the construction of his new palace. Amrita Devi hugged a tree to prevent it from being cut and was decapitated for her defiance. The incident sparked the Khejarly Massacre, in which 363 Bishnois were killed during a peaceful protest to protect their sacred tree grove. Two and half centuries later, their sacrifice inspired the Chipko Movement in 1970—all over the country, Indian people started to hug trees to protest against indiscriminate deforestation by the government.

As a four-year-old girl, I felt the same compassion for the two linden trees. I burst out of our apartment crying, wanting to protect them with my little body. There’s a symbiosis between humans and trees. Humans reforested the planet after the last ice age, and trees have been our companions over millennia, offering us food and shelter.

‘Trees are sanctuaries. When we have learned to listen to trees… that is home. That is happiness.’—Hermann Hesse

Today, tree-hugging is starting to lose its stigma thanks to practices such as Japanese forest bathing or shinrin-yoku that promotes wellness through forest walks and global reforestation efforts to fight against climate change. Yet, I am still waiting for a positive portrayal of a tree hugger in popular culture.

You know what? I think I might’ve written that character myself!

Digital minds

When I think about the future, I see two main forces that will change life as we knew it ever since Homo sapiens set foot on this planet. Climate change will transform our habitats, ecosystems, and weather conditions, pushing us to find new ways of surviving and cohabitating on this planet. Technology will transform humans beyond recognition. I am surprised we talk so little about transhumanism—‘the use of technology to modify and enhance human cognition and bodily function, expanding abilities and capacities beyond current biological constraints’ (P.D. Hopkins).

The Ghost—the main character of ‘The Cooperatives’—is an artificial intelligence inspired by recent advances in AI technology, human-computer interfaces and the long-term aspiration of digitizing human minds. A couple of years ago, I read the Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it by Martin Ford and learned a lot about the future of AI. During my screenwriting studies, I developed two projects exploring different aspects of AI and its impact on the future of humanity. I’m especially interested in human enhancement with AI and plan to dive into this more in future works.

When writing The Ghost, I had several AI characters from popular science fiction in mind. Data from ‘Star Trek’ is one of my favorites, and HAL from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is the most fascinating. I also enjoy Star War’s droids R2-D2 and the humanoid robot C-3PO who is a translator—a profession I studied myself. Another memorable AI character is Gigolo Joe from ‘A.I. Artificial Intelligence’. Among them, Gigolo Joe feels closest to ChatGPT with his verbosity and slightly insincere personality. There’s a human quality about him that’s rare among fictional AIs.

Recent AI developments have stripped away some of its magic, making the technology more prosaic than we might have imagined. For me, AI has lost its veneer of perfection. It’s imprecise, biased and verbose, like Gigolo Joe. We now understand that AI is governed by algorithms created by humans, powered by a corpus of human knowledge—much of it unfiltered internet content. Left unchecked, AI becomes a grotesque mirror of humanity, a mirror in which we’d rather not contemplate ourselves.

This realization has shaped the Ghost as a character in my novel. Unlike Data—an impartial, objective intelligence driven by noble intentions and with a childlike curiosity about humanity—the Ghost is deeply human, judgemental, with veiled intentions and uncertain loyalties. In the short story Wildfire, I reveal The Ghost’s human origins and connection with the last forest.

As I continue to research and learn more about transhumanism, my exploration of digital minds will deepen in future fiction works. I hope you’ll allow me to share this journey of discovery with you.

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Did you get a chance to read The Cooperatives?

A group of wonderful people read the mini-series over the holiday season.

This is what they had to say:

• The world needs more stories like this.—

• This is haunting! Really great dialogue especially.—

• A powerful ending! The depth of human emotions that the Ghost experiences on this part of the journey is captivating.—

• This was a bang-up ending to this series. What’s left of the world is alerted to a final bit of ecocide. Will the people rise up?—

• My new favorite character on Substack: The Ghost!—

Thank you so much for your support! 💚

If you haven’t had a chance yet, the story is still FREE to read until March!

Read The Cooperatives now

P.S. The fifth and final story in my mosaic novel, There Is Hope, will be published as a mini-series in March.

As a writer, my goal is to inspire action through fiction. I write cli-fi and speculative stories on climate change, transhumanism, and our evolving relationship with nature and technology. Subscribe to get my stories directly in your inbox!

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It was a sunny summer morning, and I was sitting at our tiny kitchen table—covered with the ubiquitous PVC oilcloth— dangling my feet and watching my mother cook. She wore her familiar blue house dress, her waist-long black hair tight in a bun at the base of her neck. The clerestory window of our little communist kitchen, facing the alley, was open. We lived on the ground floor, and the high-placed window kept prying eyes at bay but not prying ears. I’m not sure what went through my five-year-old head when I suddenly asked, ‘Mommy, who is this Ceausescu man you’re always talking about?’

It was an innocent question. I had no idea that the man with the neatly cropped salt-and-pepper wavy hair, buttoned-up shirt, and jacket, who struggled with rhotacism and was always on TV, was our dictator. My question hit my mother in all the wrong places. She dropped whatever she was doing at the kitchen sink, closed the kitchen window, and, before I could blink, she was staring into my eyes her face so close to mine they were almost touching: ‘Don’t ever ask this question again. Do you understand me? You could put us in jail!’

Like in any authoritarian regime, one of the most important currencies in communist Romania was information. Eavesdropping was a key tool for suppressing dissent and controlling the population. The Securitate, the communist secret police, employed regular citizens as informants. Anyone could be an informant: your spouse, child, or friendly neighbor walking by your kitchen window. The communist regime in 1980s Romania understood one simple truth: to have power over the masses, you must have access to the individual.

Beyond the attention economy: The rise of digital power

Just as authoritarian regimes use surveillance to maintain control, today’s digital platforms leverage access to individuals for economic gains, creating a new form of power: the attention economy. In capitalism, you must have access to the individual to dominate the market. Thanks to the technology we carry in our pockets, an industry of macro and micro influencers has sprouted, redefining advertising, reshaping cultural narratives, endowing ordinary individuals with extraordinary influence. But the attention economy goes two ways:

1. Users are engaged through content and algorithms, and their attention is farmed to generate income for digital platform owners and, hopefully, result in sales for advertisers.

2. Platforms must know users to engage them effectively. Automated tools collect and analyze user data, monitoring preferences, fears and behaviors. While my mother’s fear was rooted in an authoritarian regime, today, the surveillance economy holds similar power through access to individuals, whether for control, influence or change. Social media platforms have become the gateways to you and me.

The owners of social media platforms discovered the power of access to individuals almost two decades ago. While many have predicted the fall of social media and the age of the influencer for years, the ad-driven business model is booming. Millions have built lucrative careers through these platforms, but the power of social media goes far beyond the market.

The 2016 US presidential elections and the Cambridge Analytica scandal marked a turning point, showing how social media could be weaponized for political influence—50 million user profiles were harvested from Facebook in early 2014 and used ‘to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalized political advertisements’. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these platforms became arenas of misinformation, fear-mongering, and public division. This trend continued after the pandemic, with public fights between ideological and political factions echoed by the public like an Ancient Greek chorus. Elon Musk recognized the trend and, in 2022, acquired Twitter—a platform that shapes political discourse. TikTok has emerged as a global powerhouse in recent years, becoming one of the top five most popular platforms worldwide after Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp. Yet its Chinese ownership has raised concerns about national security, culminating in a temporary US ban on January 19, 2025.

The TikTok ban highlights two realities:

1. Due to its global reach and massive user data, the Chinese-owned TikTok is regarded as a national security threat, as it allows a political and economic rival to gather intelligence about US citizens. In 2020, India banned TikTok, citing similar national security concerns, while the European Union’s GDPR laws set strict limits on user data collection and processing. In the 2024 Romanian presidential elections, an unknown far-right candidate gained popularity with the electorate in a matter of weeks via his TikTok channel leading to the annulment of the election results.

2. TikTok’s immense power makes it a valuable asset, akin to Twitter. Musk has proved that ownership of such a platform offers influence that transcends financial metrics.

Digital platforms tend to evolve into monopolies. Users gravitate toward large networks that provide global connectivity, investing significant time and effort into creating their digital presence. As such, platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok dominate their space with little competition. When challengers arise, dominant platforms often consolidate their power through traditional monopolistic practices. Instagram’s acquisition by Facebook in 2012 exemplifies this trend. TikTok, however, has defied conventional Western monopolistic practices, offering users unprecedented creative freedom with better discoverability, wider reach, and more permissive algorithms.

Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and X (formerly Twitter) provide freedom of speech, access to information and global communication on an unprecedented scale. Their informal digital networks sprout new ideas daily and distribute them via their synapses—communities wired by algorithms—while collecting and storing vast amounts of information about every individual. The communication ebbs and flows, dictated by macro and micro influencers and their objectives, as well as the algorithms serving the commercial interests of the platform owners. This resulted in a decentralized network of informal digital structures that are abstract in nature but have real-world impact—from consumption of natural resources in the form of infrastructure and energy to dictating market trends, cultural and political narratives, spreading mis/information, and granting immense power to those who own them.

An individual like Elon Musk can influence entire governments with a single tweet, as evidenced by the UK’s decision to monitor his posts; or influence presidential elections with his platform’s reach. Whoever grabs TikTok will hold even greater power. Beyond commerce and politics, these platforms’ data collection capabilities rival the intelligence networks of the past, mapping our entire existence.

In 2024, the case of Luigi Mangione—the 26-year-old suffering from debilitating back pain that raked him a mountain of healthcare debt—allegedly killed the CEO of the largest US health insurance company in downtown New York in broad daylight, shocking traditional media and the upper classes. In a remarkable moment in the history of digital platforms, the public response to the murder expressed in real-time across social media, revealed the beating heart of a whole nation fatally wounded by the inequalities of the US healthcare system. Many were shocked and disgusted at the grassroots support for an alleged killer, but the reaction revealed a deeper issue: the dehumanizing effects of profit-driven healthcare. The online conversation exposed the systemic mistreatment of those without means, leaving many elites unnerved by the digital pulse of a nation.

The case raised serious questions about the role of social media in radicalizing public opinion. Could our social media presence have legal consequences in the future?

The future of digital power

The race to control social media platforms begins a new era. Digital ownership now rivals traditional governance in influence. As invasive technologies become more sophisticated, society faces critical choices:

• Will we allow these platforms to deepen inequalities and facilitate control?

• Or can we harness their potential for collective good?

The tools that grant unprecedented access to individuals could liberate or oppress us.

In the book ‘1984’, surveillance invades every aspect of life. In ‘Minority Report’, predictive technology arrests people before crimes occur. Today’s algorithms may not be far behind with new technologies such as AI and Neuralink, which will further enhancing their reach and power. As Australia’s 2024 initiative to raise the age limit for social media users shows, governments are beginning to grapple with these challenges. But how else can we shape the future of these platforms?

Three years after I scared my mother in the kitchen, the communist regime fell. Unfortunately, my mother never got to enjoy her newly gained freedom because she got sick and died within one year. My mother’s fear was a response to a regime that sought control through surveillance. Today, as we confront the digital age, her story is a cautionary tale, reminding us that the power to access and influence individuals must be wielded with care. Giving others access to us comes with great rewards but also immense dangers. Social media platforms have the power to connect us and transform our world, but they could also recreate the oppressive mechanisms of past regimes in new, digital forms. What we choose now will determine whether these platforms lead us to a dystopia or a more equitable world. I, for one, would never want to live in a world where a five-year-old girl could put her parents in jail by asking the wrong questions.

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P.S.: I don’t specialize in journalistic social media coverage. This article stemmed from my own reflections and concerns after reading the news and observing how social media platforms are used to leverage economic, political and personal power, as well as to disseminate ideas, control discourse and—starting with the Luigi Mangione case—potentially control and surveil individuals based on their social media usage.

After I wrote this post, I found a great article from who is in a much better position to comment on the landscape of social media. This is an article about a group of people who want to free social media from the shackles of billionaire ownership.

Today, a group of former Twitter users who are fed up by the platform’s decline under billionaire control, are launching a new campaign to transform social media into a public good, free from profit-driven incentives, venture capital pressure, and politically-motivated censorship.—Taylor Lorenz

Here’s the link to the article, I think it will be a great follow-up read. I absolutely agree with the idea that social media should be a public good and I’ve been talking about this with friends and family for some time now.

P.P.S.: And because going down rabbit holes is almost second nature to me, here’s a second article that will give you an insight on how another influential culture uses social media: Japan is not ready for the culture wars by .

As someone who studied transcultural communication, now I’m fascinated by how local cultures influence the use of social media—a story for another time.

P.P.P.S.: If you’re wondering whether there will be social media in the future—it’s something I didn’t encounter in sci-fi novels yet—here’s a piece I wrote last year where social media is used by poor children to make a living in the year ∼2532 CE.

As a writer, my goal is to inspire action through fiction. I write cli-fi and speculative stories on climate change, transhumanism, and our evolving relationship with nature and technology. Subscribe to get my stories directly in your inbox!

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Initiation: Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4

In 2012, I jumped on a bus in the city of Guilin, China, excited to visit the famous Longji Rice Terraces. It was a foggy, two-day journey up steep, hand-carved mountains. As I climbed, trying to keep up with a nimble, middle-aged Yao woman carrying my luggage in a hand-woven basket on her back, a milky mist enveloped us. Although I couldn’t see much of the landscape during my stay in the Yao village, I had time to observe its people. A handful of cedar-wood houses dotted the mountain paths, and Yao women were everywhere—guiding tourists, making and selling crafts, hosting shows, and managing their homestay businesses.

From time to time, I noticed men swiping dust, washing laundry by hand in a cauldron, or working at construction sites, occasionally making brief eye contact and then smiling shyly. I found this odd at first, and then intriguing. My host’s husband would shyly withdraw to shadowy corners every time I passed, children clinging to his pants. Why did men in this village behave like shy teenage girls? It turns out that the Yao minority is matriarchal.

This experience stayed with me. Every time I share this story with men, they laugh and cringe, slightly shrinking into themselves. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by the ways society shapes women’s roles—a theme I set out to explore in Initiation.

The power of storytelling

Stories help us make sense of the world, and this is as true for authors as it is for readers. When I write, I’m often telling myself a story to understand or reframe an aspect of reality. With unique perspectives on life, existence, and the future, storytelling allows us to shape, question, and explore our visions of the world.

To craft captivating stories, I need to start with an essential ingredient: fascination. Whether it’s an idea, a concept, a theme, or a vision of the future, fascination lies at the intersection of observing nature, technology, science, society, history, and the universe, and using imagination to weave them into new realities through fiction.

To write fascinating stories, we first must be fascinated ourselves.

Initiation is part of a larger worldbuilding project I’ve been developing for nearly a decade with each story adding to this intricate secondary world. Below, I’ll share some of the inspiration and thought processes that shaped this story.

Themes and inspiration

Societies have continuously reshaped women’s roles, from matriarchal and shamanic leadership to those of constraints and subordination. Throughout history, practices like purdah, the Victorian cult of womanhood or China’s infamous footbinding served as tools to control women’s visibility and mobility. Historically, footbinding was viewed as an aesthetic practice, but recent studies suggest a strong economic component: young girls with bound feet became skilled thread spinners and cloth weavers, often serving as the main breadwinners of their families, despite being labeled as burdens. Footbinding became economically obsolete once the textile industry penetrated rural China, replacing handmade textiles, and this is when the thousand-year-old practice was finally abolished.

Today’s landscape contains equally complex forces shaping women’s roles. We face economic instability, climate crises, lingering pandemic impacts, and a resurgence in traditional gender roles, often driven by perceived demographic and economic pressures. This has revived practices like restricting reproductive rights or promoting traditional family roles, that echo the past. This context led me to the core question behind Initiation.

What new forms of control might societies impose on women in the future?

Transhumanism and mindbinding

Another theme driving Initiation is transhumanism, which I believe will one day rival artificial intelligence in shaping our world. We already see glimpses of human-tech integration in sci-fi, from Dune to The Broken Earth trilogy, but it’s often overlooked in public discourse. I foresee a future where human minds, especially those more emotionally attuned, become integral to running powerful AI systems. Thus, the concept of mindbinding emerged—a vision where human minds act as living interfaces for complex tech systems, blending human intuition with machine efficiency. In Initiation, this future form of control becomes both a survival tool and a powerful mechanism of societal control, with a strong economic component. The virtual habitats created by the Vesper women are the main income source of the powerful Vesper family.

Building the world of Initiation

I explored many of Initiation’s themes during my screenwriting studies, where I had the chance to develop stories around sensory enhancement through technology. One early story involved a character that could communicate with animals, inspired by the real-world cyborg dancer attuned to earthquakes. Researching ancient hunter-gatherers, I was fascinated by their profound knowledge of ecosystems—something modern society has sadly lost. I wondered if technology might one day help restore our environmental awareness.

In Initiation, explore this idea with the influential Vesper women, who communicate with the whales guarding their domain. Amiie, the story’s protagonist, has a strong bond with her sister whale, Alva, which serves both as a rite of passage and a survival tool, reflecting a rekindled connection with the natural world in this future society. The virtual whale environment that Amiie creates after she’s initiated in the practice of mindbinding serves as a form of protection for the natural world which is as integral to her society as technology. I find the idea that empathy and intuition could one day become powerful technological tools profoundly compelling.

Looking ahead

Initiation is just one facet of a larger secondary world I’m excited to explore, one story at a time, through this newsletter. This narrative world will continue to unfold, eventually culminating in a novel. Initiation is also connected to my cli-fi series There Is Hope, with hints of this larger world appearing in its fifth story.

Thank you for joining me on this deep dive into Initiation. Let me know if you enjoyed this exploration.

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Initiation: Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4

A humpback mother whale with her baby-calf

While writing Initiation I listened to a lot of humpback whale singing. This video featuring a humpback whale singing with her baby-calf is my favorite and it inspired the last scene in the story.

Further reflections on my research for this story can be found in these notes.

Further reading

Textiles inspired by nature

• Textile materials inspired by structural colour in nature

• Structural colour and iridescence in plants: the poorly studied relations of pigment colour

• Buckling as an origin of ordered cuticular patterns in flower petals

• Cuticle chemistry drives the development of diffraction gratings on the surface of Hibiscus trionum petals

• Plants employ chemical engineering to manufacture bee-luring optical devices

Whales

• The evolution of whales from land to sea

• Whale song mystery solved by scientists

• Post-whaling shift in mating tactics in male humpback whales

• The life cycle of the humpback whale

Footbinding

• Lotus feet and light labour: Stories of footbinding in China

• Uncovering the economics of foot-binding

• Why footbinding persisted in China for a millennium

• The neglected consequences of foot-binding

Brain-machine interfaces

• Four ethical priorities for neurotechnologies and AI

• Can machines control our brains?

• Commonality of neural representations of sentences across languages

Initiation: Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4

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While fairytales were a childhood favorite, it was the communist children’s books that left a lasting impact. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu adored children, and those born within the party were considered the future. The books I grew up with depicted children as little geniuses who contributed to society’s betterment—for example, by making major scientific breakthroughs at nine. Ultimately, science [fiction] couldn’t solve the systemic issues of a totalitarian government, and in 1989, communism fell, and the dictator and his wife were shot by the same children whom they claimed to love.

Recently, I’ve noticed a new crop of climate fiction literature focused on saving the planet within the next 200 years. With the help of writing prompts, climate fiction writers are encouraged to imagine how they personally helped save the world by a specific date through their actions. The resulting stories remind me of the communist children’s books I read at the end of the 1980s. While I appreciate the hope they inspire, I can’t help but notice a massive disconnect between our aspirations and the practical challenges we face.

Take the European Union’s push for carbon neutrality by 2050, for example. While commendable, it’s undermined by slow progress in digitalizing grids necessary for renewable energy integration. Estonia is the only EU country that used blockchain technology to succesfully digitalize its grid. Meanwhile, in an effort to transition away from fossil fuels, the UK plans to obtain renewable energy from Africa via underwater cables along the Atlantic Ocean coast.

As someone who has worked in the energy industry for the past two years and has a background in project and product management, I understand the enormity of the task at hand: switching from fossil fuels, the main culprit for global warming, to renewable energy in a world increasingly hungry for energy. It didn’t take me long to understand that despite our best efforts and intentions, we're not making any progress.

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The CO2 emissions aren’t declining

In the battle against global warming, one primary culprit is burning fossil fuels and one key measure of success is reducing CO₂ emissions.

Here’s a chart from Statista showing the average global CO₂ levels in the atmosphere worldwide from 1990 to 2024. It doesn’t take a genius, communist child or otherwise, to see that they're not declining.

Meanwhile, countries worldwide have taken serious action against climate change for the past two decades, and the CO₂ balance is moving in the right direction on paper. However, while the carbon certificates economy is thriving, the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere is booming.

According to the European Environment Agency, there was a 31% reduction in CO2 emissions in 2022 in Europe compared with 1990s values. The EU accounts for 6% of global emissions as the fourth largest emitter. But according to this article, the CO₂ emissions from energy, the biggest source of emissions by far, increased by 1% globally in 2022.

On the other hand, according to NRCD, China, India and the United States, the top three largest emitters of CO₂ worldwide, ‘are coordinating and cooperating at levels never seen before in order to tackle the most pressing issue of our time’. Are they making any difference? Not according to this and this statistic. Let’s check the numbers.

These are the CO₂ emissions of the top four polluters worldwide in 1990 in billion metric tones:

• United States → 5.12

• EU-27 → 5

• China → 2.5

• India → 0.6

These are the CO₂ emissions of the top four polluters worldwide in 2022 in billion metric tones:

• China → 15.7

• United States → 6

• India → 3.9

• EU-27 → 3.6

Here’s the only top 10 chart in the world on which nobody wants to be listed.

Here are the cumulative CO₂ emissions of the top 5 most polluting countries in the world from 1750 to 2022 in billion metric tones:

1. United States → 426.9

2. China → 260.6

3. Russia → 119.3

4. Germany → 94

5. United Kingdom → 78.8

For a one-ppm increase in CO₂ atmospheric concentration, a total of 7.8 billion metric tons of CO₂ need to be emitted. The United States alone contributed with an increase of 54 ppm from 1750 to 2022. To give you a simple overview, in 1750 there was a CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere of approximately 277 ppm. In 2020 we had 417 ppm on average, in February 2023 a concentration of 420.3 ppm, and in February 2024 of 424.55 ppm.

Fortunately, a partnership managed to effectively 'coordinate and cooperate' in the fight against climate change: the oceans, the soil, and the atmosphere of the planet, which we're so bent on setting up in flames. But, as I wrote in my article Climate change started thousands of years ago, their capacity to process and store CO₂ is reaching a saturation point.

Once that point is reached, the current CO₂ emissions levels will lead to faster global warming. Once we pass the 2°C threshold of global warming, scientists can no longer model and predict how our planetary systems will react. We are in unknown territory, and the consequences of climate change’s will be much harder to control.

Our global energy needs are the main driver behind the surge in CO₂ emissions in the past 60 years and why we’ve been unsuccessful in our fight against climate change. We can clearly see a sharp dip in emissions in 2020, the year human activity around the globe came to a halt due to the pandemic. In 2023, fossil fuels covered over 80% of our global energy needs. Cities account for over 70% of global CO2 emissions.

When it comes to energy, electricity is the sector in which we’ve seen the highest surge in renewable energy production in the past years. But even so, over 60% of our global electricity production in 2023 was generated by fossil fuels.

‘Total energy-related CO₂ emissions increased by 1.1% in 2023’ based on the annual CO₂ emissions report of IEA, the International Energy Agency.

Far from falling rapidly - as is required to meet the global climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement - CO₂ emissions reached a new record high of 37.4 Gt in 2023.—IEA

Our thirst for energy has yet to show signs of being stilled anytime soon. According to Jeff Bezos, we should actually increase our energy consumption.

The most fundamental measure is energy usage per capita. You do want to continue to use more and more energy, it is going to make your life better in so many ways, but that's not compatible, ultimately, with living on a finite planet, and so we have to go out in the solar system.—Jeff Bezos

Meanwhile, Amazon drastically undercounts its CO₂ footprint on this finite planet and pledges to run a net zero e-commerce empire by 2040 while increasing its CO₂ emissions year after year. With such a mentality we won’t save the planet in the next 200 years.

Is there hope?

In my childhood books, under communism, there was great hope that today’s children would become tomorrow’s scientists, leading the world to a brighter future. Progress was seen through the lens of scientific advancement, and questioning the party’s ideology or worldview was forbidden. Similarly, the discourse about combating climate change focuses primarily on technological advancement, infrastructure, and inventions that sustain our current way of life. While dissenting opinions may not land us in jail, challenging our existing worldview, notions of progress, and materialistic perspectives is met with overwhelming resistance. There’s an illogical hope that we can solve our problems with the same mindset that created them in the first place.

However, this moment invites us to reconsider our values and life aspirations. Is consuming more energy truly a worthy life goal? Are material possessions the ultimate measure of success? Must progress be defined solely by consumerism? Ultimately, it won’t be technology alone that saves our species from disaster, but a shift in mindset. The form this shift takes remains uncertain, but one thing is clear: the future of our planet will bear little resemblance to our current existence.

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Story Voyager is where we explore climate change through the lens of climate fiction or cli-fi. Under the motto ‘travel your imagination’, we embark on a journey of reading, researching, writing, and exchanging ideas with like-minded people. Let’s change the narrative about the future of humankind together. If you’d like to support this space even more, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your financial support will go toward commissioning illustrations for my first cli-fi series, There Is Hope.

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Further reading

• Emissions grew in 2023, but clean energy is limiting the growth

• CO₂ emissions may be starting to plateau, says global energy watchdog

• Analysis: Growth of Chinese fossil CO2 emissions drives new global record in 2023

• CO₂ emissions

• Climate change mitigation: reducing emissions

• What Are the Solutions to Climate Change?

A well-coordinated slaughter

The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward. —Winston Churchill

The blazing fire sparkled in the eyes of the hunters gathered on the limestone escarpment, peaking down at the frenzied herds of migrating horses. Maddening terror ignited by the sky-high flames rushed through their bodies like wildfire, driving the horses toward the narrow path along the ridge as they screamed and squealed, eager to escape, only to be corralled into an even deadlier trap. A well-coordinated slaughter begins when the humans descend upon the terrified horses with their Swiss-army-knife-like hunting tools skilfully embellished with detachable and interchangeable microliths, spearheads, harpoons, needles and projectile points.

While a product of the imagination, this could well be a scene from the seasonal horse hunts that took place at Roche de Solutré, France, where researchers estimate that ancient hunters slaughtered some 30,000 to 100,000 horses over 20,000 years during the Upper Paleolithic (40,000 to 10,000 years ago). For thousands of years, our ancestors hunted deer and horses, mammoths, hyenas, wolves, hares and foxes seasonally. The meat was then dried and preserved for the summer and winter months, which is how they survived the last Ice Age.

When wildlife biologists look at those paintings of reindeer and bison, they can tell you what time of year it was painted just from the appearance of the animals' hides and skins. The way these people knew their environment was absolutely incredible by our standards. —Brian Fagan

Their tools, survival skills and intimate knowledge of the environment were passed down from generation to generation via fluent speech and storytelling, drawing, song and dance, thus ensuring our survival through a 40,000-year-long glacial period.

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Surviving an Ice Age

The clear blue sky met the vast mammoth tundra at the horizon. A gust of wind twirls dust in the air, enveloping the group of humans and dogs walking over the roiling grassland carrying packs of food, tools, clothing and fur tents waiting to be unpacked at the next seasonal settlement. Further away, herds of migratory mammoths, reindeer and wild horses spread across the grassy landscape, all in a perpetuum mobile steadily followed by the humans. As the wind eases off and the dust settles on the tundra, the humans uncover their faces and breathe in the dry, cool air. Summer is coming.

The mammoth or steppe-tundra was Earth’s most extensive biome during the last Ice Age, and it stretched east to west from the Iberian Peninsula to North America and north to south from the Arctic to China. At the height of the last Ice Age, the steppe tundra extended over the Bering land bridge, a 1,000 km wide area situated between the Lena River in Russia and the Mckenzie River in Canada that was uncovered by the low sea levels and connected Europe with today’s Alaska and Canada. The tundra ecosystem dominated Earth for 100,000 years, or the length of an Ice Age cycle. It started to diminish about 12,000 years ago at the beginning of the current interglacial era, the Holocene.

Homo sapiens have been around for 300,000 years, and they survived two Ice Ages. The last Ice Age started 30,000 years ago, and 27,000 years ago, it reached the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), which lasted until 19,000 years ago. The vast ice sheet covered North America and Northern Eurasia during this time. This caused glaciation in mountain ranges in North America, Europe, Africa, South America, the Tibetan Plateau, Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, lowered the sea level by approximately 130 meters and reduced the air surface temperature by 8–15°C below present-day values.

About 36% of Europe's continent remained suitable for human survival. At the beginning of the last glacial period, there were about 500,000 inhabitants in Europe, but by the peak of the last Ice Age, around 23,000 years ago, only about 200,000 inhabitants were left. Europeans lived isolated from each other by ice sheets and roamed in bands of fewer than 30 people, well below the stable size of healthy reproduction of 500 people. During the last ice age, there was a population density of 4.3 to 8.0 people per 100 km2. Today, Europe’s population is 742,073,577, with a density of 3,400 people per 100 km2.

From hunters to farmers

The delicate flames of the oil lamps sprinkled around the heavy fur tent raised on mammoth bone pilar tremble in the dark. The inhabitants of the little village are gathered around the heart where a bright fire is burning. The children are warming themselves up watching the adults sewing boots and clothing from the fur of young foxes, flintknapping daggers and arrowheads, repairing their portable hunting tools, making necklaces from bones, teeth, shells and tusks, or carving voluptuous statues of the goddess of fertility that would fit in the palm of the hand and protect them from famine during the long and harsh winters.

The Ice Age people lived between 37,000 and 14,000 years ago. They descended from a single founder population and contributed to the gene pool of present-day Europeans. During this time, they developed the Gravettian cultural complex that spread around Europe mainly due to their high mobility. To survive, bands of hunter-gatherers needed to have deep knowledge of the flora and fauna of an area as large as 250,000 square kilometers. Food was scarce due to the cold, and the Ice Age people invented modular portable tools for hunting, a prehistoric Swiss army knife. To protect themselves from the cold, they initially draped themselves in hides that doubled as sleeping bags and made baby carriers and protection gloves for chiseling stones. Then, about 30,000 years ago, they made one of the most significant inventions in humanity: the needle.

If you saw a needle from 20,000 or 30,000 years ago, you'd know what it was in an instant, a very fine-pointed tool with a hole in one end to put thread through. —Brian Fagan

The invention of the needle helped them make tailored clothing to protect themselves from sub-freezing temperatures. Like contemporary mountaineering clothing, their dress was made from carefully selected animal skins and was sewn and worn in layers ‘from moisture-wicking underwear to waterproof pants and parkas’. The thread was made from vegetable fiber and died in turquoise and pink. During the ice age, people lived in natural rock shelters, which they weatherproofed by draping large hides and building internal tents with a fire heart. During the summer months, they migrated outdoors in search of food. During the cold summer nights, they slept in tents covered in animal hides and topped with sod which served as permanent shelters for several months.

However, 14,000 years ago, the climate changed abruptly, becoming warmer, leading to icebergs melting, more precipitation, and a change in the landscape. The tundra was flooded together with the food sources of animals, such as mammoths, on which humans had subsisted during the Ice Age, who couldn’t adapt fast enough and got extinguished. With the climate change at the end of the Ice Age and the arrival of ancient farmers from the Near East around 8,000 years ago, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that helped humans weather an entire Ice Age would end forever. A new agricultural lifestyle begins that will profoundly and unexpectedly influence Earth’s climate.

Winter isn’t coming

The ice sheet cracks and lifts from its grounding seafloor and starts marching backward toward the land, bobbing up and down on the tide of an ever-growing ocean. Calling ice shelves flood the tundra landscape, melting glaciers send rivers crashing down from the mountain tops, and storms beat against the shores, eroding the land as the frozen arid world of the last Ice Age melts into water.

At the end of an Ice Age cycle, a sudden climate change leads to a new interglacial period. The surge in atmospheric temperatures is so sudden and drastic that the ice sheet covering Eurasia melted away at a speed of 600 meters per day for several months in the area of today’s Norways about 15,000 years ago. The temperatures continued to rise and peaked at the beginning of the interglacial era, about 10,500 years. At the peak of natural warming in our interglacial, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere didn’t exceed 268 ppm or parts per million. Afterward, it started to drop, reaching 261 ppm around 8,000 years ago, and it would have continued to drop to about 240 ppm by the end of the pre-industrial era. Except it didn’t. In 1860, we had 284 ppm. Today, we are at 422 ppm. The last time global dioxide levels were 400 ppm was around four million years ago. We must turn our sights toward the sky to understand what happened next.

While the Earth rotates around the sun on an orbit that changes its shape every 100,000 years, tilts its axis toward and away from the sun in 41,000 years cycles, and wobbles its axis in circles that bring each hemisphere closer or farther from the sun in 23,000 years cycles, Ice Ages come and go in a climatic dance that shaped the blue planet for the past 2.4 million years. Three orbital movements are responsible for Earth’s pacing of the glacial-interglacial or Ice Age cycles, also known as the Milankovitch orbital cycles: eccentricity, obliquity and precession. And they have a story to tell.

Eccentricity or running in circles (or ellipses)

Eccentricity refers to the shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun. The more elliptical, the higher the variability in insolation or the amount of solar radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface on a specified area over a set period. Insolation increases the differences in air surface temperature between the seasons. The more concentric Earth’s orbit around the sun is, the lower the variability in insolation is. Eccentricity has a periodicity of 100,000 years, meaning that it changes shape every 100,000 years, determining the start and end of a new Ice Ace and the length of an interglacial.

To calculate how long the Holocene or MIS 1—Marine Isotope Stage 1—our current interglacial period should last, scientists had to find the previous isotope stage with a similar eccentricity to ours. Today, Earth’s orbit around the sun is almost a circle—the eccentricity is anomalously small—and we have low variability in insolation. With the help of the Milankovitch cycle, scientists could calculate that MIS 19, an interglacial period that started around 790,000 years ago, had a similar eccentricity to ours. MIS 19 lasted about 12,500. The Holocene began 12,500 years ago. By analogy, it should end by now.

Obliquity or the roly-poly planet (in slow motion)

Obliquity is Earth’s axis tilt relative to its orbital plane and has a periodicity of 41,000 years. As the Earth rotates around the sun, its axis is not parallel to its orbit but tilted towards it. In the last one million years, Earth’s axis tilt has varied between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees relative to Earth’s orbital plane. At maximum tilt or 24.5 degrees, we have more extreme weather differences between the seasons, as each hemisphere receives more insolation or solar radiation during summer because the Earth is at a lower angle toward the sun, thus getting solar radiation on a larger surface area. As the Earth tilts more toward its orbital plane, summers are getting cooler and at minimum tilt, or 22.1 degrees, a new period of glaciation starts. Glaciation periods usually last around 40,000 years and coincide with Earth’s obliquity cycles.

Currently, Earth’s tilt stands at 23.5 degrees relative to its orbit around the sun. The Earth was at maximum tilt—24.5 degrees—about 10,000 years; this is when we reached peak natural temperature in our current interglacial era, and it will reach minimum tilt—22.1 degrees—in about 10,000 years when, theoretically, the next glaciation should start. The current summer solar radiation or best summer half-year insolation—the amount of solar radiation Earth receives during the summer months—is characteristic of a late interglacial period. A similar summer half-year insolation was registered at the end of MIS 9 or the Holstein Interglacial period from about 300,000 years ago. This is the second clue that the Holocene should end by now.

Precession or how to get an even tan (even in winter)

While obliquity determines glaciation periods, precession determines interglacial periods. Precessions have a periodicity of 23,000 years, and they determine in which season Earth is closest to the sun. When Earth is closest to the sun during the summer solstice—perihelion—we have precession minima. When Earth is closest to the sun during the winter solstice—aphelion—we have precession maxima. During precession minima, summers are hotter while winters are cooler, and during precession maxima, summers are cooler, and winters are hotter. Interglacial periods always start around orbital precession minima.

The last precession minima occurred about 11,000 to 10,500 years ago, causing the midsummer insolation that led to warming, ice melting, monsoon flooding in tropical and subtropical areas and the maximum increase in methane emissions, about 700 ppb or parts per billion, at the beginning of the Holocene. This phenomenon of fast global warming occurs at the beginning of every interglacial period. The temperatures then naturally decrease over several thousands of years until the glacial inception that marks the end of the interglacial period. We are now in a period of precession maxima, and in 2023, Earth was closest to the sun on January 4th, meaning that in July, we had aphelion. Once again, the orbital mechanics indicate that we should witness glacial inception. It’s worth noting that after the natural peak methane emissions that occurred 10,500 years ago, the CH4 levels went on a downward trend, and they were expected to reach 450 ppb at the end of the preindustrial era. However, in 1860, the CH4 level was 704 ppb.

Winter isn’t coming. Why?

Breaking the Ice Age cycle

Had it not been for early agriculture, Earth’s climate would be significantly cooler today. —Stephen Vavrus

After reaching peak at the beginning of an interglacial era, the CO2 and CH4 levels start lowering naturally until a new glacial inception that marks the end of the interglacial and the beginning of a new Ice Age. The same downward trend could be observed in our interglacial, with the CO2 and CH4 levels on a downward trend until 8,000 years ago when the trend started to go in the opposite direction. 10,000 years since the onset of the current interglacial era, we reached 284 ppm and 704 ppb. However, during stages 5, 7, and 9, at the time of the closest modern analog or timescale, the CO2 values were around 250 ppm, and the CH4 values were around 450 ppb. In the Holocene, there was an anomaly of about 30 to 34 ppm and 230 ppb. This shows that very little is needed to bring Earth’s climate out of balance. It is a scary but informative notion.

So what happened?

The Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis (EAH) published in 2003 proposed that the CO2 and CH4 levels in the Holocene climate would have naturally cooled substantially during recent millennia. However, the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions reduced the cooling. Greenhouse gas emissions from early farming are why the Holocene climate remained relatively stable, and new ice sheets failed to appear. It is well-known that post-industrial emissions are generally attributed to human activity in the post-industrial era. However, a theory that traces global warming back to ancient farming? That is a controversial idea!

In a study from 2007 called The early anthropogenic hypothesis: Challenges and responses, William F. Ruddiman takes an in-depth look at the science behind his own hypothesis and comes to a surprising conclusion.

We live in a world in which peak interglacial warmth has persisted only because of the inadvertent impact of early farming.

Now, let us have a look at the science that proves this.

Insane in the methane (or the CH4 anomaly)

About 5,000 years ago, there was an abrupt reversal of the natural downward trend of the CH4 levels in the atmosphere. By 1500, an atmospheric methane anomaly of 230 ppb temporarily lowered during the Little Ice Age, only to increase back to 230 ppb for a total of 704 ppb by 1860. From its onset 12,500 years ago, the Holocene, our current interglacial era, looked identical to previously studied interglacial periods. Until 8,000 years when something unexpected happened: Homo sapiens started farming.

Also, 5,000 years ago, China started to use irrigation to grow wet-adapted strains of rice in Southeast Asia. By 3000 years ago, irrigated rice was cultivated from China to the Ganges River in India. Rice was initially grown in valleys next to rivers because it was easier to bring water to irrigate them, but it also meant that weeds were very prominent in the rice fields. Early rice farmers used disproportionately large areas to grow rice, meaning their CH4 emissions were also disproportionately large. As much as 25% to 40% of the CH4 anomaly in the preindustrial era is attributed to rice irrigation. The remaining 60% to 75% of contributors are livestock and human waste emissions, biomass burning, irrigation and climate system feedback. By 1500 AD, an anthropogenic warming of 0.5 degrees increased the methane emissions from natural feedback by 9%.

Research shows that the optimal CH4 levels for the onset of glacial inception are around 450 ppb. In July 2023, the atmospheric methane concentration was 1904 ppb. It’s safe to say that we won’t reach the methane levels necessary to end the Holocene and start the transition to the next Ice Age any time soon.

Burning down the house (or the CO2 anomaly)

What’s in a footprint? A footprint is…

• …an impression of the foot on a surface.

• …the area on a surface covered by something.

• …a measure of a defined population's total CO2 and CH4 emissions.

• …a measure of how fast we consume resources and generate waste compared to how fast nature can absorb our waste and grow new resources.

• …a measure of the area of deforestation necessary to grow food for a person. Or a forest footprint.

Did you know that today, the forest or agricultural deforestation footprint is 0.2-0.3 ha per person? We are 8.1 billion people. I won’t do the math.

Instead, let’s look at the forest footprint of humans through history and what it means for climate change.

Agricultural deforestation

Here’s some historical data on the deforestation areas needed to feed humans at different stages since the agricultural era started 8,000 years ago.

• 6000 years ago, the forest footprint of a Central European in the late Neolithic was 3 ha.

• By the Roman Empire, 27 BD - 330 AD, up to 90% of the agricultural land in Greece, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula had been deforested.

• In 1086 England, the forest footprint per capita was 9 ha. A similar footprint was registered in the rest of Europe.

• By 1500 AD, the indigenous people in the Americas had repeatedly burned vegetation to maintain grassland, attract game, and promote the growth of berries and other foods to supplement their nutritional needs.

• By 1700 AD, much of China had already been deforested. Most of the deforestation occurred by 1200 AD when the population of China reached ∼115 million, almost as large as the 130 million in 1700 AD.

Resource deforestation

Besides agricultural deforestation, there was a second type called resource deforestation, where wood was cut mainly for building homes and ships, cooking and heating, and charcoal production for smelting. By 1300, access to commoners in the remaining forests was forbidden in England, and other kingdoms followed.

Forest footprint and climate change

As we’ve already seen, our interglacial reached a natural peak CO2 levels of 268 ppm 10,500 years ago, which naturally decreased until 8,000 years ago when the trend reversed. By 1860, we should have had a natural CO2 level of around 240 ppm, facilitating the onset of the glacial inception and the end of the interglacial era. Instead, we were up at 284 ppm. But we actually reached this peak preindustrial levels by 1200 AD. The CO2 levels fell by 7 to 8 ppm in the next 500 years due to the Little Ice Age.

This means that, by 1860 AD, we had an anomaly of 34 to 40 ppm.

Scientists calculated that a 40-ppm preindustrial CO2 anomaly would require at least ∼550 Gt C of anthropogenic emissions during the last 8,000 years. But was this really the case? We have an anomaly of about 35 ppm. Let’s do some math.

• Pervasive early deforestation of southern and western Europe and more limited deforestation of northeastern Europe could have released ∼33 Gt of carbon by 1500.

• Total carbon emissions from China by 1700 AD amounted to ∼33 Gt C.

• In the Americas, total deforestation by 1500 would have produced ∼14 Gt C.

• By the Sung dynasty in the 1200s, China had become the world’s first partly “industrialized” country, with greater iron production than would later occur in Europe, even during the early stages of the industrial era. The early burning of coal in China and the deep erosion of soils in degraded regions of Eurasia could have contributed to more than 14 Gt C of additional preindustrial emissions.

• Total preindustrial carbon emissions: 120–137 Gt C, amounting to a 9 ppm increase.

So, where did the rest come from?

Feedback (not by Kanye West)

The short answer is feedback enhancement.

In previous interglaciations, natural CO2 decreases of 35 to 55 ppm occurred soon after peak interglacial warmth. As we’ve seen, after the peak warmth in the Holocene, the CO2 decreased by 7 ppm over 1,500 years and would have continued to get naturally cooler. Instead, the CO2 trend in the Holocene is anomalous by ∼35 ppm.

Scientists noticed that the natural CO2 decrease in an interglaciation doesn’t happen only in the atmosphere but also in the ocean because tropical monsoons are decreasing, and the tundra and forests are gradually replaced by ice sheets. The displaced CO2 most probably ends up in the deep ocean, the only remaining carbon reservoir. In the Holocene, the oceans should have absorbed about 85% of the 120–137 Gt C from preindustrial anthropogenic emissions. But this was not the case. While the surface temperature of the Southern Ocean cooled off toward glacial maximum values early in the previous interglacial stages 5 and 7, in the past 5,000 years of the Holocene, it remained ∼3°C warmer.

CO2 solubility decreases with increasing water temperatures. A warmer surface and deep ocean resulted in an atmospheric CO2 increase of 20 to 24 ppm as a feedback of the climate system. Thus, ancient farming warmed the atmosphere by 9 ppm, thus maintaining the ocean surface temperature at 3°C warmer, which led to more climate warming. Isn’t it alarming how little it takes to ruin the climate balance of a whole planet?

Baby, it’s not cold outside

By running simulations and studying previous interglaciations, scientists confirmed that the overdue glaciation hypothesis, which claims that a new glaciation is overdue because of greenhouse gas emissions by early farmers during the last few thousand years, is probably true. In interglacial stages 5, 7, and 9, substantial volumes of new ice accumulated by the times most analogous to today. This means that a glaciation of some extent would have begun by now if greenhouse gas levels were now at the reduced levels specified in the hypothesis. Instead, our planet is getting warmer and warmer. Humans have adverted a new Ice Age for the foreseeable future.

There is pretty good agreement in the community of climate scientists that we have stopped the next glaciation for the long, foreseeable future, because even if we stopped putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, what we have now would linger. The phenomenal fact is, we have maybe stopped the major cycle of Earth’s climate and we are stuck in a warmer and warmer and warmer interglacial. —William F. Ruddiman

Drop it like it’s hot (or cold)

In the first episode of this documentary on the history of climate change in the Holocene, we looked at the Ice Age and the role humans played in climate change during this time. Indeed, research on well-dated ice from Dronning Maud Land and the South Pole site has confirmed a CO2 drop of ∼7 ppm from 1100 to 1700 AD, breaking the upward trend that had started 8,000 years ago. Solar forcing due to volcanic activity is unlikely to have caused such a significant decrease. Instead, scientists looked at other sources for climate change: pandemics and social unrest.

Three major pandemics occurred in preindustrial times.

1. Between 200 and 600 AD, the Roman Empire lost 40% of its population in southern and western Europe, 10 million people, due to a pandemic over several centuries. As a result, broad farmlands reverted to waste until the population recovered to pre-pandemic levels by 1000 AD. Research indicates that the atmosphere registered a CO2 decrease of ∼1 ppm CO2 decrease during the interval 600–650 interval because of reforestation.

2. During the Black Death pandemic of 1347–1353 in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, bubonic plague killed 25–33 million people (one-third of the population), and abandonment of farmland was common in north-central Europe. Between 1400 and 1450, there was an abrupt CO2 decrease of ∼2 ppm in response to reforestation during the Black Death pandemic. Populations recovered to pre-plague levels by 1500 AD.

3. The arrival of the Europeans in the Americas in 1492 introduced a host of diseases from which the indigenous people had no immunity. Between 1500 and 1750 AD, 80– 90% of the pre-Columbian population or 50 to 60 million people, died. This caused a drop of almost 2 ppm CO2 between 1600 and 1700.

China experienced massive mortality (an estimated 40 million deaths) between 1250 and 1400 because of civil strife and the near collapse of the economic order. Because many people in northern China at this time burned coal instead of wood, these deaths would have reduced releases of carbon to the atmosphere, a net reduction of atmospheric CO2 to just over 4 ppm by 1600–1700.

The combined anthropogenic factors can account for about 4 ppm of the 7-ppm CO2 decrease observed between ∼1200 and 1750. This estimate matches the amount that was not explained by the natural cooling.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, CO2 emissions fell by 5.4% in 2020, but the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere grew as in previous years. As NASA reported, this is because of natural feedback enhancement and the fact that our warm oceans cannot absorb as much CO2 from the atmosphere. At this stage of our climate change journey, we are deep in unknown waters, and it is increasingly difficult to predict what will happen next. Our survival and advancement as a species have been tied to our ability to predict and anticipate our planet's climate.

Conclusion

Do you associate Stone Age people with Ice Age people? The ability of our ancestors to survive such adverse climate conditions, their skills, technology, environmental knowledge, fashion acumen and complex cultural system cast in a new light a very misunderstood period in human history. The vast landscapes that our hunter-gatherer ancestors roamed for survival leave us in awe, as does their lifestyle and deep connection with nature, raising questions about their capabilities. Could these resilient hunter-gatherers have, in their own way, laid the foundations for a civilization akin to ours during the interglacial? What would their world look like today?

Conversely, one must marvel at the profound impact human action has had on our planet since the advent of the agricultural lifestyle 8,000 years ago. Ancient farmers could break the Ice Age cycles that dominated Earth’s climate for over 2 million years. What else can we achieve as a species if we collectively redirect our lifestyle and relationship with the natural world? Is it time again for a radical shift, a new chapter that offers hope for our shared future?

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Did you enjoy this episode?

This is the second episode in a four-part documentary on the history of climate change in the Holocene and research for my cli-fi mosaic novel There Is Hope.

In the third episode, we will explore the impact of climate change on historical societies and how climate has shaped human progress in the past 8,000 years.

As I navigate the intricate terrain of climate change, I am not a scientist but a curious learner, much like you. Your insights and perspectives are invaluable in this shared exploration. Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

1. What resonated with you?

2. Do you see connections between ancient farming practices and our present climate challenges?

Your engagement fuels the ongoing exploration here at Story Voyager, turning this journey into a collective adventure. Let us unravel the threads of our past together, weaving a better understanding of our collective future.

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Story Voyager is where we explore climate change through the lens of climate fiction or cli-fi. Under the motto ‘travel your imagination’, we embark on a journey of reading, researching, writing, and exchanging ideas with like-minded people. Let’s change the narrative about the future of humankind together. If you’d like to support this space even more, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your financial support will go toward commissioning illustrations for my first cli-fi series, There Is Hope.

Resources

• The early anthropogenic hypothesis: Challenges and responses by William F. Ruddiman

• Human population dynamics in Europe over the Last Glacial Maximum by Miikka Tallavaara, etc.

• Ice-age Europeans roamed in small bands of fewer than 30, on brink of extinction by Francesca Jenner

• How early humans survived the ice age by Dave Roos

• Slaughtering Site by Musée Départemental de Préhistoire de Solutré

• Glacial Inception in Marine Isotope Stage 19: An Orbital Analog for a Natural Holocene Climate by

• Integrated summer insolation forcing and 40,000-year glacial cycles: The perspective from an ice-sheet/energy-balance model by Peter Huybers, Eli Tziperman

• Evidence of Fur and Leather Clothing, Among World’s Oldest, Found in Moroccan Cave by Brian Handwerk

• The Impact of Upper Pleistocene Climatic and Environmental Change on Hominin Occupations and Landscape Use by Andreas Taller, Nicholas J. Conrad

• ‘Scary’ new data on the last ice age raises concerns about future sea levels by Kasha Patel, Chris Mooney

• Climate explained: what the world was like the last time carbon dioxide levels were at 400ppm by James Shulmeister

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Winter was coming

In the winter of 1608-09, Henry IV, the king of France, awoke one morning to find his handsome beard—a henriquatre—iced over. This was the beginning of one of the most brutal winters in recorded history, and it turned Europe into a frosted world. In his book Nature’s Mutiny, Philipp Blom writes that the Thames was frozen so solid that a Frost Fair was erected on it, wine froze solid in its barrels, and deep snow-covered parts of Spain.

A century later, Louis XIV, the grandson of Henry IV, also woke up one morning to a frozen continent. Fortunately, le Roi Soleil sported only a thin mustache when the Great Frost or Le Grand Hiver happened overnight. The winter of 1709 is recorded as the coldest winter in the past 500 years, with temperatures ranging from −12°C in London to -16°C in Paris and -25°C in Beauce, France. The temperature dropped to -18°C in the Bordeaux region for 2 months. It was so cold that ice birds fell from the sky, fish froze in lakes and livestock in the stables, tree trunks shattered, church bells fractured when rung, and water, food and wine froze solid in the pantries. Le Grand Hiver brought food shortages and claimed the lives of 630,000 people only in France, the largest European country at that time.

The Little Ice Age

These extreme weather events were part of the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling that started in the Northern Hemisphere around 1250 and ended around 1860. The Little Ice Age mainly affected Europe and was likely the coldest period of the last 8,000 years. Global temperatures dropped significantly by -1°C from around 1400 and by -2°C from 1560 onwards in Eurasia, particularly the Atlantic region, bringing brutal winters and cold summers with hailstone or snow. This era was marked by severe storms, weeks of rain, unrelenting frost and years of summer drought, such as the heatwaves from 1473 and 1540.

The Little Ice Age led to famine, disease, and social unrest. Interestingly, the decline in wine production contributed to the disease outbreaks. Before they learned that boiling water kills germs, Europeans were used to drinking watered-down wine to keep diseases at bay. For example, the biggest wine producer in Vienna was a hospital, the Bürgerspital, and Viennese people had a yearly wine consumption of 150 liters per capita, including children.

Initially, Europeans thought that the catastrophic weather was brought by witches. But the ruina mundi—the world's destruction—continued despite the witch trials. The search for food and resources pushed the Europeans to form trading routes and go on religious Crusades, which, in turn, introduced them to ancient science, setting the basis for a new worldview.

Carolus Clusius (1525-1609) helped establish modern botany, and his work changed the landscapes and even the nutrition of an entire continent. He introduced the tulip from Constantinople to the Netherlands and the potato from the New World, contributed widely to the botanical Renaissance of the old continent and is considered the father of all beautiful European gardens.

Ambitious merchants like the Dutchman Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587-1629) established trading empires by exploiting faraway lands. He made the Dutch East India Company a success story by employing questionable means, such as burning the city of Jakarta to the ground, publicly executing competitors who sold nutmeg without his permission, hunting people until they starved and selling the survivors into slavery. The slave trade flourished because the cost of purchasing and feeding a slave was minimal compared with their profitability over a working lifespan of five to ten years, their average period of survival.

The influx of wealth led to the establishment of universities that turned traditional social systems upside down, giving opportunities to ‘dirty people of no name’ from farmer or merchant families to voice their views of the world. Rene Descartes, the son of a middle-class lawyer, studied science in France, applied his mathematical knowledge in a military career and later furthered his incursions into science in aristocratic salons and in the budding Dutch universities that encouraged free thinking. Rene Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, set the basis for the modern scientific view of the world where ‘reason, empirical knowledge, and logic alone can get to the heart of things’.

A new worldview was taking shape, giving birth to the Enlightenment with philosophers such as Voltaire (1694-1778), who believed that ‘individual greed could serve the common good’ and that merchants, not aristocrats, were society’s true heroes.

But could the European world expansion prompted by the Little Ice Age help, in return, worsen the extreme climate conditions?

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A climate mystery

The term Little Ice Age was coined in 1939 by François E. Matthes, a geologist and climate change expert. Initially, it referred to the resurgence of the Sierra Nevada glaciers in California during the cooling that followed the Holocene Thermal Maximum, a warm period during 9000 - 5000 BC. The Little Ice Age (LIA) was preceded by the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) or Medieval Warm Period (MWP), and the transition from MCA to LIA took place gradually between 1200 and 1400 AD.

Several factors are considered for what caused the Little Ice Age. Each of these factors is influential at different timescales, from millennia to centuries to decades, and they represent phenomena that are not easily correlated.

1. Orbital forcing: During the Little Ice Age, Earth’s orbital variations, more precisely precession and obliquity, caused a decrease in summer insolation or the amount of solar radiation energy received by our planet during summer and a slight increase in winter insolation. According to scientists, this is the backdrop of the Little Ice Age. However, the transition from the Medieval Climate Anomaly to the Little Ice Age is more complex, and more factors must be considered.

2. Volcanic activity: The volcanic events around 1200 and 1260 AD, including the eruption of Samalas in Indonesia around 1257 AD, the largest volcanic event of the last 1,000 years, caused several years without a summer and contributed significantly to the glacial advance around 1380 AD.

3. The Medieval Climate Anomaly: The warm climate of the Medieval Climate Anomaly enhanced iceberg calving and weakened the North Atlantic circulation. Scientists argue that sea-ice and freshwater exports from the Arctic Ocean, which commenced abruptly around 300 AD and ended in the late 1300s, initiated the abrupt onset of LIA. Some researchers even think this alone was enough to start the Little Ice Age.

4. Land use changes: A team of scientists from Stanford University published a research paper in 2008 that found that land use changes in the Americas contributed to the cooling trend in the Little Ice Age.

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The Great Dying

When Christopher Columbus arrived at the shores of the Caribbean island that he baptized Hispaniola, he met a handsome people called the Arawak Indians who lived on a paradisiac island with beautiful sandy beaches, trees laden with fruits, beautiful harbors and lush vegetation. Christopher Columbus instantaneously became a huge fan of the Arawak Indians who shared their gold and food with him and whom he described as ‘the best people in the world’, and he found it impossible to believe ‘that anyone has seen people with such kind hearts’.

When Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492 at the shores of the Caribbean island Hispaniola with the royal mission ‘to discover and acquire certain islands and mainland sea’, there was a population of at least 100,000 Arawak Indians. By 1514, only about 32,000 were left and by 1542, only 200. At first, the Arawak Indians were asked to pay high gold and spun cotton tributes. When they failed to fill the quotas demanded by their new masters, the lands and their people were handed over to the Spanish, who enslaved, tortured and fed them to the dogs.

When Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492 at the shores of the New World, which he never learned that he discovered, there was a population of approximately 60.5 million indigenous people living in the South and North America. By 1600, about 90% of the population (about 55 million people) died. This period is known as the Great Dying.

Researchers have explored connections between the Great Dying and the Little Ice Age in Europe. It's suggested that the Little Ice Age might have been influenced by the extinction of native populations in the Americas. This was the ripple effect:

1. Virgin soil epidemics: The introduction of diseases unknown to the Americas, such as smallpox, measles, and the bubonic plague, caused up to 95% mortality, leading to societal breakdown and reduced agricultural activity. Typically, the mortality caused by virgin soil epidemics is 30%. Still, the indigenous population was hit by several epidemics over 100 years. Whoever survived the first epidemic was struck by the second, and so on.

2. Land use changes: Native populations practiced agriculture on a scale that significantly transformed their environment. Research shows that a pre-Columbian population of 60.5 million would have used 0.5 to 1.5 ha of land per capita. Thus, the death of 55 million people led to the abandonment of approximately 56 million ha of land, which underwent secondary succession, a type of ecological succession in which plants and animals recolonize a habitat after a significant disturbance such as human activity.

3. Carbon storage: New vegetation stores substantially more carbon over a short time. Research suggests that, in the 100 years after 1517, 7.4 Pg C (carbon) was removed from the atmosphere and stored on the land surface following the Great Dying, contributing to a decline in atmospheric CO2 corresponding to a drop of approximately 3.5 ppm. This is consistent with an abrupt 7 to 10 ppm decrease in atmospheric CO2 between 1500 and 1600. The research concludes that land use changes in the Americas contributed about 4.4 ppm in atmospheric CO2 reduction.

4. Cooling period: The Little Ice Age coincided with the population decline in the Americas. The period between 1577 and 1694 is the only significant global cooling in the past 2000 years and the only period when the Little Ice Age went global. The researchers conclude that ‘these changes show that human actions had global impacts on the Earth system in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution’.

Conclusion

In his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable Amitav Ghosh writes about the difficulties of addressing climate change in literary fiction. How do you include ‘forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space’ in narratives?

Understanding the Little Ice Age from a scientific and historical perspective is similar. Next to the astronomical and geological events that account for the onset of the Little Ice Age, human activity is a surprising factor when contemplating climate change in the pre-industrial era.

The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel thought that indigenous Americans could not build a culture because ‘cold and heat are too powerful to allow a mind to construct a world for itself’. Not only did the indigenous Americans have a rich culture, but they also did agriculture at a scale that, when interrupted, caused global climate change. Moreover, they were crafty enough to grow foods and plant varieties that could survive in extreme climate conditions, thus saving Europeans from starvation and helping them survive the partly self-induced climate change conditions.

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Did you enjoy this article?

The Little Ice Age was part of a series of cooling events in the past 5,000 years, and ancient farmers might have played a role in all of them. I’ll reveal more in the next article from my series on climate change in the Holocene.

In the meantime, I would like to hear from you!

1. Did you know about the Little Ice Age?

2. Were you surprised to learn about the human contribution to the onset of the Little Ice Age?

Join the discussion in the comments section.

Leave a comment

Bibliography

• Research team suggests European Little Ice Age came about due to reforestation in New World by Bob Yirka

• Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492

• The variable European Little Ice Age by Heinz Wanner, Christian Pfister, Raphael Neukom

• Winter Is Coming: Europe’s Deep Freeze of 1709 by Juan José Sánchez Arreseigor

• The deadly great frost of 1709 is still a mystery by DB Kelly

• Great Frost of 1709: The Coldest Winter in 500 Years Killed 600,000 by Hrothsige Frithowulf

• Columbus’ Confusion About the New World by Edmund S. Morgan

• Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present by Philipp Blom

• The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

Can you imagine the wealth? I need to see it in your eyes!

—Gurney Halleck, Dune

To get rich, you have to overreach

What do capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and Baron Vladimir Harkonnen have in common?

They overreach.

Empire, whether British, Viking, Roman or otherwise, is, by definition, overreach. And colonialism, capitalism and white supremacy share a common, perverse philosophy: limits on some humans’ freedom of action are seen as an affront to the principle of freedom itself.

—Ben Rawlence, The Treeline

What does it mean to overreach?

In his book The Treeline, Ben Rawlence defines overreach as the act of applying force to acquire resources elsewhere after exceeding the limits of what the own environment can sustain.

Rome was built on timber. After depleting the woodlands surrounding Rome and the Apennine Mountains, the Roman Empire reached as far as northern Britain in search of natural resources, principally timber. The Roman Empire was built on long-distance timber trading and the Romans used timber mainly for construction, shipbuilding and firewood. They were also the ones who separated the trees from the woods and brought trees into the courtyard of Roman houses as pets. Rome was built on plundering wildwood, and, as far as the British Islands are concerned, the Roman invasion was the beginning of the end for their Celtic forests. Those Roman baths needed their water hot.

The British Empire was built on fossil fuels. The unification with Scotland, coal and sea power allowed the UK to, at one point, rule a quarter of the world. The Brits cut down the rest of their forests to build their signature trading oak ships and mined all their coal to fuel their industrialized manufacturing empire. The coal was used at home and exported overseas with British manufactured goods suitable for industrialization, thus projecting their power elsewhere. By 1900, 85% of all internationally traded coal came from Britain. The industrial manufacturing business powered by fossil fuel pushed the British Empire to look overseas in search of natural resources. Perhaps one of the most infamous episodes in the empire’s overreach is the Anglo-Persian Oil Company established in 1909 that gave the Brits, as the main shareholders, exclusive rights to drill and sell the oil. Winston Churchill was very pleased:

Fortune brought us a prize from a fairyland beyond our wildest dreams.

—Winston Churchill, The Geography of Power

The book Dune by Frank Herbert is an allegory of the West’s exploitation of oil and people in the Middle East.

American capitalism was built on slavery. While the British Empire fought to keep manufacturing jobs at home—for example, by passing a law in 1815 that ‘placed tight restrictions on Indian ships and sailors,’ a law that was ‘more devastating to the economy of Indian shipping than all the competitive technological innovations of the last 300 years put together’ as writer Amitav Ghosh notes in his book The Great Derangement—America built their capitalist empire first on free and then on cheap labor. Next to raw materials and a large market, cheap labor is the backbone of capitalism. It is not enough to plunder Earth’s resources; you must do it at the lowest price possible to maximize profits. With slavery abolished, the next best thing is machines. AI anyone?

The Romans gave us the Roman baths, the Brits the steam engine, the USA Hollywood and the Marshall Plan. But the wealthy capitalists are going to save the world.

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Quote two

No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.

—Frank Herbert, Dune

Allow me to get rich, and I will save the world

A while ago, my husband worked for a young and ambitious start-up owner:

I’m planning my life 25 years ahead. I work hard now because, by my mid-40s, I want to stop working and become a full-time philanthropist.

—Young start-up owner, Real life

Today, the entire landmass of the Earth, excluding Antarctica, is divided among 193 sovereign states recognized by the United Nations, with democracy as the dominant form of government. However, the relative stability and personal freedom granted by democracy in a sovereign state don’t create a fertile ground for today’s economic engine: growth. Enter capitalism, an economic and political system in which private owners control a country’s trade and industry for profit.

Unlike the Roman Empire, the USA or China cannot march to the ‘Lithium Triangle’ of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, which hold about 60% of the world’s lithium reserves and start digging. But their companies can.

Thanks to capitalism and globalization, companies worldwide have seen enormous growth over the last decades and enjoy profits greater than the GDPs of whole countries. But for this, they need access to cheap resources.

The ‘Lithium Triangle’ is situated in the high Andean arid plateau, which contains wetland basins in its desert matrix. These wetlands are essential resources for human activity, and the astonishing biodiversity is ‘highly adapted to extreme temperatures, altitudes, and salinity gradients’ in one of the driest places on Earth. But in Chile, foreign mining companies use 65% of the local water in lithium extraction, pollute the local rivers and water beds, and leave the indigenous people’s farmlands covered in a blanket of salt. Around the world, the locals pay the price whenever poor communities from regions rich in natural resources come in contact with ‘foreign exploitation’.

But the rich and powerful don’t only exploit natural resources, use legislative loopholes to minimize taxation, move their production facilities overseas to benefit from a low-paid workforce, and lobby politicians to maintain monopoly. Lately, more and more of the world’s wealthiest have become philanthropists.

The modern-day hero, the philanthropist, is an archetype many young men and women aspire to. Like the heroes we encounter in Hollywood movies, the philanthropist’s ultimate goal is to save the world. And, like Neo from The Matrix needs to train in the Sparring Program to defeat Agent Smith, the philanthropist hero needs to accumulate wealth before they can give it away. The philanthropist is a modern-day Robin Hood: they take away from the rich and give to the poor without stealing a dime (in the eyes of the law).

Bill Gates, one of the most active philanthropists, is not only busy spending his Microsoft fortune on noble causes, but he also became America’s leading farmland owner because he wants to teach everyone sustainable farming while owning the food supply.

Elon Musk, an up-and-coming philanthropist, pledged to give away at least half of his wealth in his lifetime. In the meantime, he’s busy looking for lithium and other raw materials for Tesla’s batteries. Elon’s thirst for natural resources is so high that he wants to occupy Mars.

Younger entrepreneurs like Sam Bankman-Fried start their businesses with effective altruism in mind. I am sure that SBF, one of the wealthiest people in crypto by age 30, would have saved the world after buying the Bahamas had he not gone bankrupt.

Ultimately, the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is that we can’t be trusted to manage a common resource sensibly. So perhaps we do need these wealthy heroes to save us from ourselves. But will they?

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Quote three

Uncle, how did we let this happen? How can the Emperor take everything we’ve built and give it to that Duke?

—Beast Rabban Harkonnen, Dune

The Tragedy of the Commons, a modern myth

Remember the Romans getting rich by cutting timber in Britain? Back in the day, Britain was known as Caledonia or ‘wooded heights,’ a name the Romans gave to the lands covered shore to shore in pine forests. But the British landscape of wildwood didn’t come into being naturally.

Once every 100,000 years, our planet tilts a fraction away from the sun, and we have an ice age, a phenomenon known as the Milankovich cycle. Being so close to the North Pole, the lands known as Britain, Caledonia, Pretani or Albion as the Celts used to call them, are influenced by the ice age cycles. As the ice advances and retreats, the flora, fauna and people of these lands migrate south or north.

DNA analysis showed that the pines that survived the roman’s thirst for timber in the West of Scotland came from the Iberian peninsula, what is today Spain and Portugal, while the pines surviving in the East of Scotland came from a refugium, a place where species survived the last ice age, near Moscow around 9000-8000 BC. According to the scientists, both types of pine migrated to Scotland much faster than through natural succession, the ecological process by which the mix of species and habitat in an area changes over time.

So who planted the trees that the Romans cut in such haste? Ben Rawlence writes that ‘the most likely vehicle for such rapid migration was humans’, in this case the Celts who respected the woods through their traditional custom and practice.

Indigenous use of the forest is often the most reliable form of conservation. 

—Ben Rawlence, The Treeline

In today’s world, we feel a high sense of accomplishment at our technological prowess and a deep sense of shame at the mass destruction of our natural habitat. Some see humans as a plague on this Earth. It’s beautiful to learn that, once, humans were the stewards of the forests, re-greening the planet after an ice age. 

But forests aren’t our only natural wealth inherited from our ancestors.

In the mid-1990s, Frito Lay, a subsidiary of PepsiCo selling processed snack foods, sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to Native Seeds/SEARCH, ‘an organization which saves seeds native to the southwest’ warning them to stop using the trademarked wording ‘corn nuts’ when selling, well, corn nuts.

The corn kernels used by Native Seeds/SEARCH for the corn nuts come from Santa Ana Pueblo, home to a federally recognized Hopi tribe that, together with other indigenous American tribes, cultivated and preserved the genetic pool of the corn used for corn nuts for thousands of years. The genes of the corn used by Frito Lay for its trademarked ‘corn nuts’ come from these tribes.

In his book Seeds of Resistance, from which I took the above example, Mark Shapiro presents us with a fundamental question: ‘Who controls our seeds?’

American and European seed companies have been buccaneering their way through the world’s seeds, picking and choosing the ones to patent and out into mass production. This means they have retained exclusive rights to resources that have been in the public domain for millennia. 

—Mark Shapiro, Seeds of Resistance

When the Roman Empire introduced the idea of property rights over land, the Greeks and Celts resisted because they believed humans could not own nature, only use it. As Ben Rawlence writes, ‘forests ceased to be seen as sacred places of wonder, mystery and sustenance and instead became a standing crop with a value expressed in pounds, shillings and pence calculated by the acre and the ton.’

The commoners of the past left us a natural wealth generated by a social system that regarded Earth’s resources as a common good to use and protect. The rich of today give us philanthropism while plundering Earth’s natural resources for self-profit. I think it’s clear in which world we want to live.

Now who will tell the Harkonnens that we’re taking away their Dune?

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Corn

My husband is Mexican, and every time we speak about food, I learn that another vegetable or grain didn’t exist in Europe before the discovery of the Americas.

‘Did you know that peppers came from Mexico?’ he says.

‘How would you season your food without your paprika powder?’

‘Did you know that cacao beans come from Mexico? What would you do without your chocolate?’

‘Did you know that beans came from Mexico? Or corn? Tomatoes? Pumpkins? And the potatoes from Peru?’

Sometimes I wonder what people ate before they discovered the New World.

‘Meat and carrots’, he would say. ‘You do have an awful lot of carrots in Europe.’

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Growing up in Romania, I often spent summers in the countryside at my grandparents’ farm tucked on top of a hill. A single earthen road that got knee-deep muddy during rainy times led to the village on the hill. It was accessible only by foot, horse carriage, tractor, and the occasional car that would risk taking the bumpy ride. But, by the time they got up on the steep hill, it wasn't uncommon for those cars to break down.

My grandparents were farmers, and this was pure and unadulterated countryside with fields of corn, sunflowers, potatoes and gardens packed with tomatoes, pumpkins, eggplants and peppers. One summer, the village even had an attempt at growing tobacco leaves. My grandmother was quite skeptical about this new business trend.

As a child, I ran through the cornfields and munched on sunflower seeds all summer. I could not imagine the Romanian countryside without corn and sunflower fields.

I also could not imagine Romanian cuisine without potatoes—long before McDonald's came to Romania in 1995, we loved eating homemade fries. And without the signature eggplant bread spread that we made in summer. These were my favorite foods growing up!

But one of the Romanian countryside staple foods is polenta. There wasn’t a single meal preparation in my grandparents’ summer kitchen that didn't end with making a fresh polenta and tossing it over a wooden board in the middle of the table. My grandfather used a thread to cut it into slices before we dug in.

The polenta was yellow.

Corn was yellow. 🌽

Wasn’t it?

Many times, in our talks about tortillas—an important topic in our household—my husband would point out that European corn is yellow. And I would think, yeah, and the sky is blue. But even after traveling to Mexico several times and eating different types of corn, it still didn't click in my head that the yellow corn cultivated in Europe was probably not the norm when it came to corn. Sometimes I have a thick skull. 💀

And then, during my research on seeds for the short story ‘The Seed grower’ for my upcoming short stories collection ‘There Is Hope’, I started reading ‘Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save our Food Supply’ written by Mark Schapiro, and I learned that there are 22,000 types of corn.

And this brought me to the topic of seeds and their importance for the future of food. I also started to wonder about what people ate in science fiction stories.

What do people eat in science fiction stories?

When I shared some of the writing for my upcoming short story collection ‘There Is Hope’ with friends and family, there was one question that every single one of them asked: so what did they eat?

‘So what did they eat?’ they said.

I will be honest with you. My first reaction was: who cares what the people in the science fiction story ate?

‘They ate canned protein,’ I answered.

‘From what was the protein made?’ they said.

‘It's a synthetic protein,’ I said.

‘So how was it made?’ they said.

And so it went back and forth until my brother-in-law gave me an idea: they ate seaweed.

I jumped on the seaweed train, which was a brilliant idea because I used it to develop the background world for one of my short stories, ‘Human Island’. The story takes place in a colony of Japanese climate refugees who settled on the European Atlantic Coast and grew seaweed.

It was a win-win situation, and I was proud of myself for solving the pesky questions about what people ate in my fictional world. But when I started researching for my second short story, ‘The Seed Grower’, which I already wrote two years ago as a screenplay for my MA studies, I realized I was doing it all wrong.

Some years ago, I watched a movie with Jim Carrey called ‘I Love You Philip Morris’ about a con artist. In this film, Jim Carrey poses as a lawyer to get his boyfriend out of prison, becomes the CFO of a large medical management company without any education, and successfully fakes his death to escape prison.

To wrap it up, the plot of this movie was laid quite thick, even for a Jim Carrey comedy. And then I read it was based on a true story. Jaw drop.

Ever since I watched this movie, I have been convinced that what happens in the real world is far more extraordinary and mind-blowing than anything concocted by the imagination of a single human being. That's why I read about the real world every time I need to do research for a new story.

Reading about seeds and how we grow food in the modern world exceeded my expectations regarding material for worldbuilding.

I thought there could be more to the question about what people ate in my story world, and I started thinking about the food details in some of my favorite dystopian films.

When I was about 9 or 10 years old, I remember watching ‘Soylent Green’, and the most vivid memory of this film is that the food was made from dead human bodies. Food is a vital part of our lives, and it’s no wonder the food detail stuck with me for many years, even though I forgot most of the plot.

In ‘Interstellar’ people could only grow corn crops because all other plants had disappeared together with the bees and insects who helped pollinate them. And in ‘The Matrix’, the people who took the red pill ate some canned gelly protein.

I started looking beyond dystopian worlds.

In ‘The Expanse’ series, the crew of the Rocinante ate mostly a flavored food paste during interstellar missions. And the Star Trek series introduced the Replicator, a technology that could synthesize meals on demand, which is quite a clever way of ‘solving’ the food issue.

As I was reading about the situation of seeds in our modern world, I wondered why none of these series used food as a plot device. Instead, when we think about the future, we think about technology, space travel, and AI taking over the world. We imagine totalitarian governments cloning humans and creating a perfectly submissive workforce. But why not food?

Growing up in a communist regime, I know how food can be used to control people.

But this doesn’t happen only in totalitarian states.

It happens today under our eyes in the capitalist western world, and the real-world situation of how we deal with seeds puts any dystopian story to shame.

The future of food

Imagine a world where three giant chemical conglomerates control and engineer all the seeds used to grow our food. These companies use germplasm from unrelated organisms, such as salmon, to genetically modify the seeds and make them resistant to pesticides or enhance/remove certain plant traits. These crack-baby seeds cannot survive without the agrochemicals developed for them, and the seeds and chemicals needed to grow them must be bought in tandem by the farmers.

These seeds, together with the biochemical mechanism by which a plant takes on desired characteristics, like resistance to heat or frost, are patented by the chemical companies. The farmers are not allowed to reuse the seeds in the following season, as it would be a breach of contract with the seed company from which they purchased them. So instead, the farmer 'rents' the patented seeds against a price for a single season.

The farmers are also not allowed to use natural seeds that result from cross-pollination with the engineered seeds, as this would mean stealing the intellectual property of the chemical companies. In addition, the farmers are limited in their ability to naturally develop certain traits in seeds—such as heat resistance—by cross-pollinating different seed variations, as the chemical companies might already have a patent on these traits.

Imagine that these conglomerates bought and controlled all the independent seed banks and seed production companies, thus removing all competitors from the market. And the seeds that they produce and sell are perfect copies of each other, never allowed to cross-pollinate with other seeds variations and naturally evolve to changing climate conditions or develop resistance against pests.

The power these companies yield is so high that governments cannot control whether the engineered and genetically modified seeds are harmful to the health and well-being of humans, as this would breach the secrecy of the company’s intellectual property.

Even when it is proven that some of the substances injected in the seeds to make them resistant to pesticides are harmful to the health of humans, the three agrochemical companies can stop governments from passing laws that forbid the use of such substances in our food.

When concerned citizens try to stop these companies from destroying the environment by testing genetically engineered crops and new types of pesticides in precious natural habitats, such as Hawaii, the governments have no power to stop them.

Guess what? The world you imagined is already here.

‘The seed oligopoly1 we see today was built upon the conversion of freely grown and exchanged seeds into seeds as intellectual property.’

Mark Schapiro

Even though nature did 90% of the work of creating the seeds, indigenous farmers did 8% of the work in developing and diversifying the seeds over thousands of years, these companies can patent a whole plant by doing only 2% of the work.

That's why my grandparents cultivated a single type of corn, the yellow corn, which must've been an F1 hybrid. The ‘F1’ stands for ‘first filial’ or single-cross hybrid, indicating that the seed was produced by hybridizing two genetically distinct parent lines that are inbreds.

But like inbred humans, inbred plants grow genetically weaker and cannot adapt to changing growth conditions.

In 1970-1971, a corn blight in the USA—caused by a fungus discovered in the Philippines in 1961 that entered the Corn Belt2 in 1969—resulted in a 10-15% crop loss for farmers and 1 billion dollars in financial losses paid by the insurance with taxpayer money. The main issue was that 85% of the corn crops in the USA were cultivated with cms-T or cytoplasmic Texas male sterile, a line of corn seeds engineered to have only a male population to reduce work on the fields. The female corn requires manual detasseling to avoid unwanted pollination and maintain a pure hybrid seed.

It was the first time the world realized that engineered monocultures put our food production at risk.

But this didn’t stop the trend.

Today, three large corporates sell 60% of the world's seeds: DowDuPont, Bayer-Monsanto, and ChemChina-Syngenta. In the past three decades, these companies eliminated thousands of locally evolved seeds and favored the ones reliant on their chemicals.

So far, these three companies have relied on their financial power and public ignorance to sell us a story that the engineered seeds and the potent pesticides are needed to produce enough food for our growing world population.

Even though I’ve been mainly eating organically grown food for over a decade, I also bought this story.

But studies show that crops from seeds engineered to resist pests and weeds, with the help of agrochemicals, do not yield more production than ‘historical cultivars’—locally grown seeds—that are better equipped to resist familiar and unfamiliar threats than modern cultivars. So nature is much better at engineering seeds.

Seeds are the new currency and the world's most fundamental resource, and seed variety is a must with the changing climate conditions if we want to safeguard the future of food and humanity.

A glimpse into the topic of seeds gave me fantastic ideas for developing my world. But it also made me reflect on how callous corporate greed and government ignorance put life on this planet at risk.

What is the future of food if we continue down this road?

It's something I want to explore in my upcoming short story, ‘The Seed Grower’, which I will rewrite entirely in the upcoming months. In the meantime, I continue with my research and worldbuilding for this story.

In the next week’s newsletter, you can read what people eat in my fiction world.

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Resources

If you would like to read more about importance of seeds for the future of food I’ve added some resources.

• https://theconversation.com/amp/the-race-to-protect-the-food-of-the-future-why-seed-banks-alone-are-not-the-answer-173294

• ‘Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save our Food Supply’ by Mark Schapiro

• https://european-seed.com/2019/02/from-big-six-to-big-four-new-oecd-study-sheds-light-on-concentration-and-competition-in-seed-markets/

The setup

The short story ‘Human Island’ takes place in Southern Europe around 2550. Due to climate change and the increased occurrence of unpredictable heatwaves, most of Southern Europe lost its population as the locals found refuge north where the temperature was cooler, and there was the hope of finding jobs.

Climate change and temperature and sea lev…

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The creation

The mosaic novel “There Is Hope” is placed in a dystopian world ravaged by climate change and a data war fought by technology giants. Originally, it was a backstory for the utopian futuristic world in which ‘The Deep Dive’, my first science fiction story idea, takes place.

In the world of ‘The Deep Dive’, there is a new social order where pow…

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