ANY HUMAN POWER by Manda Scott (AUTHOR INTERVIEW)
Manda Scott Author pic by Alexandra Preston
Novelist, podcaster, renegade economist and regenerative smallholder, Manda Scott’s novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and the Saltire Award, nominated for an Edgar, won the McIlvannery Prize and dived into the endless iterations of TV adaptations.
She’s co-creator of the Thrutopia Masterclass aimed at helping a whole generation of writers to craft plausible, generative, thriving, near-term futures we’d be proud to leave to our children – and map the routes to get there.
Her latest novel, Any Human Power is a seismic thriller, wielding the power of intergenerational connection to combat the sting of death and the iniquities of a dying establishment to open the doors to a new way of being.
TOM: Manda, thank you so much for joining us at the Hive to talk about your latest novel. It is a book very much after my own heart and head. It addresses so many issues that arose in the course of my recent PhD research and books I have reviewed for the Hive as the Unseen Academic over the last three years. Which is all by way of saying, please forgive me if this interview gets a bit fan-boyish.
MS: You’re more than welcome – fans are always good for a writer’s ego, however much we pretend we don’t care.
I would also very much like to read your PhD thesis – if you have a pdf, please do send it…
TOM: Thank you so much, a pdf of the thesis is winging its way to you even now! Any Human Power is your 16th novel but represents something of a departure from your previous work with crime thrillers like the Kellen Stewart series, or historical fiction like the Boudica and the Rome Series. You’ve described Any Human Power as genre bending, but what was the elevator pitch for this remarkable story?
MS: To an extent, this depends on who’s sharing the elevator, but the broad/blunt one says that Any Human Power is a political thriller aimed at mapping a route through from the present mess of late stage predatory capitalism towards a future we’d all be proud to leave behind. Clearly this misses out on all the mythic/visionary/dreaming threads, but if we assume the elevator’s not got too many floors to go, then we focus on of the plot revolves around a family that finds itself thrust to the leading edge of a global movement for change; the rage-moving-into-action of a whole betrayed generation — and that they have the help of the older generations to rise to the challenge. For one shining moment of time, the world is with them. Then – as it does – the establishment fights back, and it fights dirty. So how do we establish the values of a new paradigm while using all the tools of the old system to dismantle it? How do we, in fact, use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house – because that’s pretty much the only way to do it peacefully. It’s just that we use them in different ways, with a different heart-mind behind all we’re doing.
How do we, in fact, use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house – because that’s pretty much the only way to do it peacefully.
TOM: Some might think it a bold decision to have the protagonist die in the book’s first chapter (and that’s not really a spoiler). Why did you decide that and what opportunities did that open up for the novel?
MS: This is hard. The absolutely honest answer lies in the mythical/visionary concepts we carefully stepped around earlier. The highly edited-for-content answer is that my spiritual path is shamanic and I was teaching a course in the summer of 2021, during which I had a set of plain-text instructions of the kind it’s seriously unwise to ignore. They led me to sit on the hill above our house for an hour at dusk every night until further notice. In fact, it only took a week for the heart of Any Human Power to arise –that concept a dying grandmother makes a promise to her grandson that if he needs her and he calls, she’ll do her best to answer…and then she has to honour this promise. The only other thing that came in that first sit was the concept of Lan (the grandmother) being shown how to split the timelines of all possible futures – except the ones in which she has agency (because: free will, even if you’re dead) and then she has to work out how to have some agency when she’s dead and the dead have very limited capacity to act in the lands of life. What happens if she sees the futures of all humanity and her capacity is even less than when she was newly dead? That was the core question of at least her arc through this first book in the series.
TOM: There is a large and diverse cast of characters who all have their part to play. While Lan’s grandson Finn and granddaughter Kaitlyn are central to the narrative many others play important roles in how the story develops. I particularly enjoyed the enigmatic Connor. Which character (apart from Lan) did you most enjoy writing and why?
MS: Good question! Also hard. This evolved in the writing. As you recognised, I loved writing Connor and Hail (and anyone who’s read the Boudica series will recognise Hail from Dreaming the Eagle). But I came to enjoy writing Niall far more than I’d imagined. When he turned up early on, he was the balance of a sentence: I barely noticed he was there. But then he grew in colour and depth and I became intrigued by his journey. Similarly Leah was someone who chaired a debate, until she was more than this. And I loved writing the Salmon. So… it would be hard to pin down, but for sure Connor is looming large as I plan the sequel. I just haven’t quite nailed down what happens.
TOM: You have talked online about lucid dreaming as Lan does, and you live on a small holding with your wife as Lan does. Lan also engages in massive online role-playing gaming (I may have dabbled a bit in WOW myself) and, even in the afterlife s still subject to fear and doubt – as one early epigram puts it “Just because you die, doesn’t mean you get to be wise.” How much of Lan is you, and which bits aren’t?
MS: Lan is more of me than any character I’ve ever written with the obvious difference that she’s dead and I’m not (yet). Some of her early shamanic training is different to mine, but not in ways that really matter. The big disparity is that she and Kate have a daughter together which is not a path I’ve gone down. So a lot of her deep connection to family is imagined, as is the connection to land and a village that goes back generations. But yes, I was playing WoW quite solidly as I was writing it dropping into a battleground for twenty minutes is a really good mind-break that brings me back refreshed. Or so I keep telling myself. I’ve given up just now, but this is the fifth time I’ve ‘given up’ in the past 20 years, so I have no doubt it’s temporary.
I was playing WoW quite solidly as I was writing it … I’ve given up just now, but this is the fifth time I’ve ‘given up’ in the past 20 years, so I have no doubt it’s temporary.
TOM: As I read Any Human Power and how the media machine swings into reactionary reaction against Kaitlyn’s tweet, it made me think of the orchestrated vilification of Greta Thunberg. However, in the author’s note you mention having a specific inspiration of a 2021 tweet by a twelve year old girl whose family did not respond as supportively as Katelyn’s. I’d not heard that story, can you perhaps tell us a bit about it?
MS: There’s a limit to what I can say, partly because it’s not my job to out the young woman who posted the tweet – and then took it down within the hour (Or it was taken down by people who swiftly took control of her account). It was clear who she was – and whose daughter she was – but this was 3 years ago and I have no doubt she’s moved on. That said, I happened to see the tweet in its brief moment of being as I was writing the first stages of the book and I was appalled both by the content and by the fact that it was removed so fast… that the adults around this young woman cared more for the reactions of their peers than for the obvious truth she was speaking. They could have supported her and it could have triggered a real, open and honest discussion about the nature of what she was revealing (essentially the ready access of violent pornography for teenagers, almost to the exclusion of everything else) – and instead it was all covered up. Heads did explode for a bit, but only in a limited way: as with anything in the whole limbic-hijack of social media, the span of outrage barely lasts one refresh of the screen. I was pretty pissed off, though, and the fact that you’re asking leaves me much happier.
TOM: The promotional material identifies Any Human Power as a visionary new fantasy thriller for the cli-fi generation. However, it avoids specifically identifying the work as an example of climate fiction. Personally, I try to reject labels that confine cli-fi to the category of sub-genre or even genre – Climate change (like, class, gender and inequality) is a theme that can be manifested in many different genres of fiction (eg Bildungsroman in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012) or Thriller in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015)). However, are there any works of climate change fiction that were particular inspirations or favourites for you as you set out to write Any Human Power?
MS: I am totally with you on the fact that the climate emergency spans genres. But then so does much else. I was one of the co-founders of the Historical Writers’ Association and I still remember an author rejecting an invitation to come and speak at the Historical Writing Festival in Harrogate because their early 20th century novel was ‘literary, not historical’. So I’d say genre is very often in the eye of the beholder.
All that said, in terms of looking for favourites, I would dearly like there to have been more. In recent weeks, long after the final draft, I have read Claire North’s ‘Notes from the Burning Age’ and ‘Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker’ and enjoyed both enormously, though I wouldn’t describe either of them as Thrutopian (which is how I’m describing Any Human Power). And for sure when I started writing, I looked around for anything at all that attempted to map a route through from the here and now to somewhere we’d actually all want to get to – a future we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry for the Future’ is probably the closest I could find, and for sure it paints a powerful picture of where we’re heading if we do nothing, and some of the tweaks to the system that would at least slow the acceleration of the bus towards the edge of the biophysical cliff, but I think we need total systemic change – much more radical action than was proposed there. There are, of course, books that either critique where we are or propose alternative systems, but the key is that we need to see how to get there – utopias are no more useful than dystopias if we can’t all see the actual steps to getting from where we are to a plausible, grounded, accessible future we’d all actually enjoy.
TOM: You’ve quoted Ursula le Guin’s inspiring 2014 speech in the book’s front matter “Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words” (2014). You’ve also mentioned Amitav Ghosh’s work The Great Derangement(2016) in which he wrote about fiction having a duty to address the issue of climate change and future historians “may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable – for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats” (2016, p. 135). Barbara Kingsolver, in interview about ecocritical inspiration behind her cli-fi work Flight Behaviour echoed Le Guin in saying “What can I do but write a novel” (2012)
However, some would say that fiction needs to be careful – for example, Ian McEwan, author of Solar (2010) has said that “Fiction hates preachiness…nor does it much like facts and figures…nor do readers like to be hectored.” (Tomkin, 2007). While George Marshall predicted in a New York Times feature that “climate fiction will reinforce views rather than shift them…The unconvinced will see these stories as proof that this issue is fiction, exaggerated for dramatic effect” (2014).
How have you balanced that potential conflict between ‘saying something important’ in your writing, while also entertaining?
MS: Well, that was the plan. I suspect I’m the least able to say whether I succeeded or not. And while I admire both McEwan and Marshall for their different work, I disagree fundamentally with both. Of course, we need not to preach – nobody likes a polemic, but there are factoids in a lot of books that brighten up the narrative – McEwan stitches them all through his historical works without hectoring and while Marshall does some astonishing work, he’s assuming that ‘climate fiction’ is, by its nature all dystopian and that the broad swathes of humanity are incapable of stitching ideas together, which is plainly not the case. Nobody watches ‘Oppenheimer’ and decides nuclear war is fictional and they can stop worrying about it, and I’m pretty sure the people who read ‘Ministry for the Future’ know a lot more about wet bulb crises than they did before (where humidity is so high that we can’t sweat and the ambient temperature is above our safe homeostatic levels: at which point, we basically cook in our own skins). Obama said it was one of the most important books of this decade, and I don’t think he was deciding it was fiction.
It seems to me both these comments come from a mindset locked in the old paradigm, which is sad, not to say frightening, given that both McEwan and Mitchell are supernovas in our writing/communicating firmament. When I was at Schumacher ‘old paradigm thinking’ was the worst thing anyone said of an idea. (Schumacher puts a lot of effort into helping the students find emotional literacy and in doing so, treat each other with respect). So we need to stop with the old paradigm thinking and writing. If we don’t imagine a way different forward, we won’t get there and I’m with Ghosh on this, it’s the job of fiction writers to imagine different ways of being. It’s not the job of politicians and bureaucrats to break out of the box – they wouldn’t have their current jobs if they showed any sign of doing so. The system is designed to perpetuate the system and the kleptomaniac psychopaths who currently hold the reins of power have been allowed to do so because they are not going to change anything useful in a time frame that will make any difference. They don’t have the bandwidth, the understanding, the emotional intelligence, or the incentive to gain any of these.
So it’s up to those of us who can create fictional realities to create those which could potentially open the imaginal doors to other ways of being. We are a storied species – every change we make in our world whether it’s moving house or partner or job, whether it’s buying yet more stuff to fill the void inside or deciding not to and doing the inner work that might heal the impact of a trauma culture…every single thing we do arises out of the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other.
At the moment, the entirety of our media ecosystem from newspapers to social media to film and TV to books is all predicated on business as usual – that the value system that says the markets rule and profit is the only viable motive has hegemony and that people who strive to extract/consume/discard are the only ones who count. We valorise people who in other cultures would be shunned as being insane. And every single book/screenplay/song/poem/TikTok video that perpetuates this is another grain on the side of the balance that makes it less likely we’ll get through. Suggesting fiction is not propaganda is inane. It’s how we choose to use the power that fiction gives us that matters.
If we don’t imagine a way different forward, we won’t get there and I’m with Ghosh on this, it’s the job of fiction writers to imagine different ways of being.
TOM: Adeline Johns-Putra noted that “overwhelmingly climate change appears in novels as part of a futuristic dystopian and/or apocalyptic” (2016, p. 269). Matthew Schneider-Mayerson echoes Johns-Putra and others in saying “The vast majority of explicit climate fiction employs the disaster frame” and accordingly “helplessness grows and the fear message backfires” (2018, p. 490). Kim Stanley-Robinson, labelling himself as a utopian author, went so far as to describe dystopias as “a kind of pornography of despair” (Robinson, 2017). The climate scientist, Michael Mann has spoken eloquently about how “doomism” is as much an obstacle to effective action as denialism (Watts, 2021).
You have described Any Human Power as neither Utopia, or Dystopia, but instead Thrutopia. What does that mean and how does a Thrutopia address the concerns of cli-fi critics and climate activists alike?
MS: Thank you. Such good questions. ‘Thrutopia’ is a term coined by Prof Rupert Read (co-founder of the Climate Majority Project’ in a 2017 paper in the Huffington Post. When we set up what became called the ‘Thrutopia Masterclass’ in 2022, I asked Rupert to speak (he’d been on the podcast a couple of times by then), and described what I wanted to do – which was to give established writers the tools to imagine how the world might look if we abandoned business as usual and started behaving as if the meta-crisis was real. He sent me the paper, and we named the class on the spot.
My working definition has evolved slightly and I would now say that any work of Thrutopian creativity is designed to ‘map a route through from exactly where we are to a future we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.’ Because as you’ve pointed out, doomerism is not only not-useful, it’s actively hampering change. In energetic terms, we get to where we imagine we’re going. We throw ghost-trails out across the landscapes of tomorrow and if enough people follow them, they become much-trodden paths and we can build on their foundation. Dystopian writing is, frankly, trivially easy – all we have to do is imagine the worst of human behaviour welded to the best of emerging technologies and we’re looking forward to a hell-scape nobody would wish on their children.
any work of Thrutopian creativity is designed to ‘map a route through from exactly where we are to a future we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.’
The excuse peddled by those who keep churning this stuff out is that if people see how bad things are going to be, they’ll change. This is manifestly untrue: it’s always been untrue only now we have basic neurophysiology to explain that we are hard-wired only to appreciate danger in short time frames and if we’re not given templates of alternative action, then we are far more likely to freeze in place than to do anything to change the nature of the threat. Denialism is a form of this freezing in place: if all that I know is that things are getting seriously bad and I have no sense of agency, no way I can turn to make anything better, than I’m far more likely to look out of the window, see things much as they were yesterday and decide not to do anything at all. Weld this to the fact that the whole predatory death cult is a dis-imagination machine – that it’s really hard, if not impossible, to be creative when your sympathetic nervous system is firing overtime — and we have a recipe for denial, deflection and despair. And we don’t have time to wallow in this anymore. So… for me, writing dystopias is lazy at best and actively harmful at worst. Utopias are not useful because they don’t show us how the ‘better world our hearts know is possible’ arises. We need maps. We need narratives that inspire us, that motivate us to action, that give us a sense of what we can do and that show the beginnings of the likely outcome. They don’t have to promise unicorns draped in rainbows tiptoeing daintily through the bluebells; people aren’t stupid and they’re not afraid to work really hard at something worthwhile: the entire history of human endeavour shows this. So our maps and visions can show that it’s going to be hard, hard work and it’ll take time and we have a lot of repairing to do. But working in a team mending the holes in the roof is not always un-fun. In fact it can be really rewarding. We just have to all agree that the holes exist and we’d like the house to be warm and dry. This particular metaphor doesn’t stretch very well… but every single thing I suggest in the book (with the exception of Raye’s hi-tech catamaran, but I see no reason this couldn’t happen) has been done somewhere in the world. All I did was to bring them together in one coherent narrative. It’s not impossible. But it does take people to stop with the doom-writing and doom-scrolling.
TOM: Jon Raymond in his novel Denial (2022) sets his story in 2052 looking back at an era where the world awoke to the climate crisis through a worldwide series of disturbances called the ‘upheavals’ and put those identified as climate criminals (like fossil fuel executives) on trial for ‘crimes against Life’ at the Toronto trials (explicitly modelled on Nuremberg). In Any Human Power there are certainly some very dark corporate forces at work. How far were you striving to explore issues of guilt, system reset and generation driven uprisings in Any Human Power?
MS: I think I’ve probably addressed this. We’re in a mess. The system is broken beyond all repair. We could argue about when it started – I’d say that in the islands of Britain, the Romans brought a value system that wrenched us out of balance with the web of life and we’ve been in collective trauma ever since – but I’d also say quite strongly that I’m not interested in guilt – it’s no more useful than regret. We haven’t got time to waste energy and bandwidth on things that don’t get us forward. If you can harness guilt as a way to move, then do so, but it doesn’t work for me. Yes, we made some terrible mistakes. Yes, we are continuing to collude in a system that is explicitly designed to grow regardless of its impact on people and planet. Yes, this needs to stop. Working out how to stop it seems to me a lot more useful than bemoaning the fact that we are where we are. For sure, we have to acknowledge it. But we need to work on ways forward, too.
TOM: Schneider-Mayerson has looked in detail at the impact and reach of climate change fiction and some of its unintended consequences where messages were not received quite as authors may have intended (2020). In particular, Schneider-Mayerson notes that “action is critical. We tend to fetishize awareness but it means nothing unless it leads to changes in attitude, behaviour and engagement” (2021). Ursula McTaggart examined the impact of Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) describing it as “an activist handbook, offering ideas for actions, debate about their ethics, and instructions for completing them” (2020, p. 319). Your own online promotion describes Any Human Power as MY NEW NOVEL: MAPPING THE WAYS TO A FUTURE WE’D BE PROUD TO LEAVE BEHIND.
To what extent could Any Human Power be viewed (or intended) as ‘an activist handbook’ that might ‘lead to changes in attitude, behaviour and engagement.’?
MS: Totally. This is why I was so, so keen that it come out before the next General Election in the UK. I was not a happy bunny when it looked as if Sunak might call an early election to get himself out of a hole. Much as we need a change of government, we need radical change, not the switch in the primary colours of the ties that is currently the only change on offer. I would be immensely happy if the route taken in the book were to be replicated in the outer world. I see no reason why it couldn’t be. This is the point.
Much as we need a change of government, we need radical change, not the switch in the primary colours of the ties that is currently the only change on offer.
TOM: Toby Litt, in How to Write a story to change the world, highlights the problem of narratives that rely on the “hero with a thousand faces” (2021). Nick Admussen suggested literature in the era of climate change needs to “retire the portrait of the single soul” and the preoccupation with “the individual moral journey” (2016), while Jo Walton and Ada Palmer also wrote about The Protagonist Problem as constraining stories to a reliance on the spark provided by an individual protagonist (Palmer & Walton, 2021). By contrast, Schneider-Mayerson, in critiquing the climate related episode of the show Ted Lasso, lauded its positive impact through portraying joyful, effective collective action to address the sponsor’s corporate exploitation in the star overseas player’s home country (2021).
How did you balance the reader’s natural desire for identified protagonists to empathise with, alongside that imperative to write a different kind of book for the climate age and portray the kind groundswell of collectivity that Litt would term A Thousand Faces Without a Hero?
MS: This is one of the questions we wrestled with in the Masterclass and that I considered while writing the book. Let’s go to basics. We are a storied species. And we in the trauma-cultures of the west (I’m using Frances Weller’s framing here, putting us in distinction to the Initiation Cultures of current and ancient indigenous peoples) have been socialised in the individual-as-hero for so long that most of us believe most of the time that we’re the hero in our own story. I spoke recently to Josiah Meldrum of Hodmedod’s who works with indigenous peoples from the Amazon and says they make amazing videographers, that their films of the jungle are astonishing and beautiful – but nobody in our culture fully understands them because their framing, particularly of time, is so radically different from ours.
So I am aware that we could create other narratives, but the people we need to reach are the people in our culture. The forager hunters in the Amazon are not the culture that is perpetuating the giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity (aka the death cult of predatory capitalism). At the same time, we need to draw our maps forward in ways that make it clear that collaboration, connection and community are what will get us through: the myth of individuation is, and always has been, an effort to increase our dependency on markets and our concomitant consumption of stuff we don’t need to heal the wounds inflicted by our culture’s incapacity to build relationships with ourselves, each other and the web of life.
In all of this, therefore, we need to find a balance between creating a relatable narrative and shifting that narrative towards a new paradigm: a new set of values and new ways of being in community. It has to be done at a rate that works. Change moves at the rate of trust and if we’re going to change, we have to trust the process above all else. There are things I was able to do at the end of the book that I couldn’t have done at the start because I needed to build the reader’s trust in the power of collective action. Starting a sequel where we need to assume some people won’t have read the first one, is proving…interesting.
Change moves at the rate of trust and if we’re going to change, we have to trust the process above all else.
TOM: G.R.R.Martin’s admonition that “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, a non-reader lives but one” alludes to the power of empathy in literature’s impact. Various studies have shown empathy is increased through reading fiction, for example Mar’s study (Mar, Oatley, & Peterson, 2009) which found that “fiction exposure predicted performance on an empathy task.” But Empathy is only one emotion in a broad palette, McTaggart argues that other emotions – eg anger and hope – might be even more effective at stimulating action. noting that “participants (in a study) enforced economically fair behaviour more strenuously, even at a cost to themselves, when they were angry at others for behaving unfairly” (2020, p. 315).
There were parts of the book where I got quite emotional. What emotions would you like your readers to feel as they read Any Human Power? What emotions did you experience as you wrote it?
MS: Heck….I felt everything from profound grief, to rage, to despair, to delight, to the adrenaline-rush of a really good climb, to gut-wrenching terror, to the sparkling crisp-edged sensation of real hope. The thing about writing is that what I write and what you read are never quite the same. So I’m hoping that at least a few of those come across. And I would say that above all the emotions cited, real agency is promoted when we have a sense of real agency. What can we do that will be most effective? Asking and answering this is what will move us forward.
TOM: George Marshall in Don’t Even Think About it: Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change (2014), contrasts the dour complex impenetrable worthiness of climate science with the joyful ‘simplicity’ of Christian evangelism and notes that this difference in messaging may account for evangelism having a reach and impact in sectors that climate activism could only dream of reaching. Any Human Power has strong spiritual strands running through the narrative alongside the politics and the science.
Can you tell us about the role of spirituality both in the narrative, your own writing and the extended reach one might hope this gives the book?
MS: As we’ve said, my spiritual path is shamanic. Like the Boudica: Dreaming series, this book arose out of and was written from, my own practice – I blogged about the process here, So the sense that consensus reality is a tiny fraction of all possible realities and that, with appropriate training, it’s possible to cross between the worlds to ask for help — and that help is available…this is the heart of how I live and is the heart of this book. Spirituality is a completely experiential thing, though. The Boudica books have been out for 2 decades and I still get emails weekly from people whose lives they have changed, partly because they opened doors to possibility – but more because they verified something they already half-knew but for which they didn’t have words or a structure, or any idea that there were others who lived in the same way. Finding that you’re not alone is a really powerful affirmation.
That said, there are plenty of people who read the Boudica books as historical thrillers and saw nothing else in it. I suspect there will be plenty who read Any Human Power as a political thriller and the rest doesn’t touch them – which is fine. For those for whom it opens doors, the Accidental Gods programme and the Dreaming Awake training are available to help support the process.
All of which is to say, I absolutely believe that our birthright as human beings is fully connected to the web of life and whatever happened to break that connection, we’re born expecting it to be there and it’s entirely repairable. Following on from this, if (when) we —the whole of humanity — gain the capacity to connect to the web as integral parts of an overall complex consciousness, such that we can ask ‘What do you want of me?’ hear the answers in ways that feel authentic and respond in real time… then we’ll be on the way to creating a future that works for people and planet. An actual flourishing future where our grandchildren’s grandchildren wake up in the morning with confidence that they’re the right people in the right place at the right time to do whatever is needed and they’ll be supported in this by the human and more than human communities around them; that they will feel pride in their being and will be both respected by and offer respect to, those around them.
All of which is to say, I absolutely believe that our birthright as human beings is fully connected to the web of life and whatever happened to break that connection, we’re born expecting it to be there and it’s entirely repairable.
This is worth working towards, I think. And one of the great assets is that it takes our Head Minds (in some systems, Left Brains) and removes from them the sense of responsibility to ‘fix everything’. Which they can never do. Head Mind/Left brain thinking is linear cause-effect and we live in a hypercomplex system in which every cause has multiple knock-on effects which ripple on in endless feedback loops. There is no possible way we can get our heads round this. It’s why geo-engineering is absolutely guaranteed to trigger the Law of Unintended Consequences and trying it is just a way to pretend we’re doing something when what we actually need urgently to do is change the system.
TOM: There were so many yee-hah moments for me in the book, and I’ve quoted just a couple of them below.
“Few things are more toxic than the pride of old white men deprived of power to which they believe themselves entitled.”
“Triggered people are easy to control.”
I may have come at this with my cl-fi hat on, but from my own perspective the climate crisis is not separate from but embedded within the world’s need for systemic change. The real crisis is not so much of science or politics but of communication. The combination of (a) toxic inequality, (b) corporate driven misinformation and (c) human susceptibility to emotive (mis)-messaging make for a heady challenge to any call to action.
In Any Human Power you address the issues of communication and particularly the need to manage social media trends and fight off bots and trolls in order to get a message through. As we gear up for a UK election a year later than hypothesised in your book, what hopeful signs do you see that the social media battleground and the information war could both be won?
MS: Well… you’re asking really intelligent questions and you’ve clearly understood what the book’s about… this (and the others similar these past few months) are about as hopeful as it gets. But beyond this, there is so, so much happening under the radar of our blinkered legacy media system. Daily, I get notice of things like the work of the Dark Matter Labs, or Co-operation Hull, which is based on the work of Co-operation Jackson in the US, or YouthxYouth creating education for young people by young people, or r3-0.org who are working to transform business, or organisations like the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission which is bringing together people in a national conversation to mend our broken food systems, or the firms like Riversimple, which I mention in the book, which has its Guardian Governance Model that could genuinely change the world if we were to take it up.
It’s all out there and the more people who are engaged in things on the ground, the more the disparity between the media’s narrative of what’s happening and our understanding of how the world is will become clear.
So I have endless optimism – there’s no point in having anything else. We’re in the midst of the 6th mass extinction, the meta-crisis is unfolding all around us. We do everything we possibly can to shift the trajectory and if we fail, we gave it everything. But I don’t think we’ll fail.
So I have endless optimism – there’s no point in having anything else.
TOM: And finally Is there any question you wanted me to ask but I didn’t? and, if so, how would you have answered it?
MS: I think we’ve covered everything. If I think of anything else in the next day or two, I’ll send it.
Thank you for this, it’s been really inspiring, thought-provoking and heartening.
TOM: Well thank you so much for joining us today Manda.
The book Any Human Power is out now and you can read my review of it here.
I’m excited to learn that is part of a planned series and will be fascinated to see how Lan and her family and friends’ paths develop.
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