IDEAS MATTER lectures: Who Owns the Sky? ~ The Tragedy or Triumph of the Commons
Thursday, February 21, 2008 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
"The concept of the commons/enclosure can very usefully be applied to the coming crisis of global warming and potential environmental collapse. Already some climate scientists are suggesting that
carbon, or the burning of carbon, be considered a commonly-owned resource of humankind. How far can that perspective be extended? How much besides land is being enclosed? Speaking as a science
fiction writer, Robinson will sketch various scenarios of the next century or two, exploring a range of possibilities, from hyper-consumption to permaculture, utopia to mass extinction event."
Award-winning novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (the Mars trilogy, Antarctica, The Years of Rice and Salt) is one of America's greatest living utopian thinkers and novelists. Robinson’s latest work, set
in Washington DC, is the Science in the Capital trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting, about global climate change and ecological disasters.
