Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Ministry for the Future' has lessons for the present
Release Date: 06/03/2025
Rewilding the world, one acre at a time
Mongabay Newscast
Rewilding advocate, financier and host of the popular podcast , Ben Goldsmith, joins Mongabay’s podcast to discuss nature restoration in his home country of England, where a significant cultural change is taking hold toward reviving biodiversity, such as . Once seen as a nuisance there, many farmers and planners now embrace the rebound of the huge rodent, thanks to its impressive ability to mitigate flooding events that the island nation now experiences with regularity, due to climate change. “If you stop a random person on the street now, in the city or in the countryside, they know that...
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Alan Weisman’s ‘Hope Dies Last’ weaves stories of environmental hope
Mongabay Newscast
On this week’s episode of Mongabay’s podcast, best-selling author Alan Weisman details the people and places he visited in reporting his new book, , a chronicle of miraculous accomplishments and resilience of the book’s protagonists, many of whom are working to solve humanity’s most intractable ecological problems. The book’s impetus was an accumulation of despair at the state of the world and how humanity treats it. “I started this book because I was really, really, really depressed about how I saw systems breaking down,” Weisman says. But as he uncovered each story, Weisman’s...
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How empathy and spiritual ecology can heal humanity’s rift with nature
Mongabay Newscast
is a new podcast series from the nonprofit nature and culture magazine that speaks with prominent figures in conservation and culture about how humans relate to the natural world, and how they might heal and strengthen that relationship. On this episode of Mongabay’s podcast, its host and Atmos editor-in-chief Willow Defebaugh details the series’ resulting revelations and why her publication covers the environment through the lens of community, identity, arts and culture. “From the beginning, we knew that we wanted to invite creative storytellers and artists into this conversation...
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How Singapore leads the way in urban-wildlife coexistence
Mongabay Newscast
Singapore has come a long way since the 1880s, when only roughly 7% of its native forests remained. Since the 1960s, when the city-state gained independence, it has implemented a number of urban regreening initiatives, and today, nearly 47% of the city is considered green space, providing numerous benefits to human residents and wildlife, like heat mitigation, freshwater conservation and cleanliness, carbon sequestration, coastal climate adaptation, biodiversity protection, and public enjoyment. To discuss his city’s regreening efforts — from the philosophical to the practical applications...
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To change the world, change the narrative
Mongabay Newscast
Narratives help shape our society, culture and environment, entrenching beliefs that can help — or harm — our planet and human rights. , story manager at , joins Mongabay's podcast to explain how dominant narratives — stories shaped by existing power structures and institutions — often undergird destructive industries and favor the powerful and the wealthy, and to discuss what people can do to counter such narratives. In this interview, she expands upon thoughts shared in the essay “How to Reject Dominant Narratives,” from the new book , published by . "A dominant narrative in...
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Cash for community conservation is tight, but this nonprofit unlocks it
Mongabay Newscast
says organizations know best how to tackle the complex conservation challenges unique to their ecosystems. However, they’re also among the most underserved in terms of funding of all stripes. On this week's episode of Mongabay's podcast, Collomb explains how his nonprofit, (WCN), is working to change that. When it comes to funding conservation," it's really difficult to know who to give your money to besides a handful of organizations that a lot of people are familiar with," Collomb says. WCN facilitates partnerships between community-based conservation groups, primarily in Global South...
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Are Rivers Alive? Author Robert Macfarlane argues they are.
Mongabay Newscast
This week on Mongabay's podcast, celebrated author and repeat Nobel Prize in Literature candidate Robert Macfarlane discusses his fascinating new book, , which both asks and provides answers to this compelling question, in his signature flowing prose. Its absorbing narrative takes the reader to the frontlines of some of Earth's most embattled waterways, from northern Ecuador to southern India and northeastern Quebec, where he explores what makes a river more than just a body of water, but rather a living organism upon which many humans and myriad species are irrevocably dependent — a fact...
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Coffee drives tropical deforestation, but it doesn’t have to
Mongabay Newscast
Roughly a billion people enjoy coffee daily, and more than 100 million people rely on it for income. However, the coffee industry is the sixth-largest driver of deforestation and is also rife with human rights , including the labor of enslaved persons and children. But it doesn't have to be this way, says this guest on the Mongabay Newscast. is the founder of the NGO , having formerly served as a senior adviser at the U.S. National Wildlife Federation. The main commodity on her radar now is coffee. On this podcast episode, she explains how the industry can — and should — reform its...
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Lessons from 30 years of successfully fending off mines in an Ecuadorian cloud forest
Mongabay Newscast
Carlos Zorrilla has been living in an Ecuadorian cloud forest since the 1970s, and his last 30 years there have been spent mining companies seeking to extract its large copper deposits. He and his community have successfully fought such proposals by multiple firms in one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, but sometimes at great personal risk, he tells Mongabay's podcast. While his organization, Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag (), and allies in the local community notched a against mining there in a 2023 court case, he explains they're still not out of the proverbial...
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Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Ministry for the Future' has lessons for the present
Mongabay Newscast
Five years since groundbreaking climate fiction novel, , hit The New York Times bestseller list, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer shares reflections on themes explored in the book and how they apply directly to the world today. The utopian novel set in a not-so-distant future depicts how humans address and the , toppling oligarchic control of governments and addressing chronic inequality. Robinson explains how the novel works as ”a kind of cognitive map of the way the world is going now, the way things work and the way things might be bettered. And also a sort of...
info_outlineFive years since Kim Stanley Robinson's groundbreaking climate fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future, hit The New York Times bestseller list, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer shares reflections on themes explored in the book and how they apply directly to the world today.
The utopian novel set in a not-so-distant future depicts how humans address climate change and the biodiversity crisis, toppling oligarchic control of governments and addressing chronic inequality. Robinson explains how the novel works as ”a kind of cognitive map of the way the world is going now, the way things work and the way things might be bettered. And also a sort of sense of hope or resiliency in the face of the reversals that will inevitably come along the way.“
In this conversation, he also explains how storytelling can help humans fight a “war of ideas” and speaks about challenging economic inequities with what he calls “postcapitalism.”
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Image Credit: Screenshot of the book cover for ‘The Ministry for the Future’ by Kim Stanley Robinson, published by Orbit. Cover art by Trevillion Images. Cover design by Lauren Panepinto.
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Timecodes
(00:00) What Stan would change about the book today
(07:56) We’re all ‘in a sci-fi novel we’re co-authoring together’
(13:37) Challenging capitalism with ‘post-capitalism’
(19:43) Is ‘Degrowth’ part of the Ministry for the Future?
(23:45) About Frank
(27:24) The inspiration for Mary Murphy
(30:34) The threat of ‘wet bulb’ 35C temps
(36:37) How to fight a ‘war of ideas’
(42:21) You cannot kill the future
(46:26) Before you read the book…
(49:27) Looking to Antarctica