Science Friday - SciFri Book Club: ‘The Fifth Season.’ Feb 15, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: February 15, 2019

In this final installment of the winter Book Club, we wrap up a winter of exploring The Stillness, learning how volcanologists research lava flows and crater tremors, and even diving into the center of the earth. Ira joins Science Friday SciArts producer Christie Taylor, Caltech seismologist Lucy Jones, and University of Colorado disaster sociologist Lori Peek to talk about the power of earthquakes, volcanoes, and other hazards that shape societies. We also talk about how a natural hazard becomes a human-scale disaster—and who suffers most when a community is insufficiently prepared. Plus, a roundup of the week's biggest science news, and a story from Arizona about dealing with drought.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. I was there yesterday, and I was there with the team as these commands went out into the deep sky, and I learned this morning that we had not heard back, and our beloved opportunity remained silent. It is therefore that I'm standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and attitude that I declare the opportunity mission as complete, and with it, the Mars Exploration Rover mission as complete. That was Thomas Zerbukin, Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, officially declaring opportunities remarkable 15-year-long mission to be over.

The Mars rover had gone silent since getting caught in a dust storm last summer. On Tuesday night, the Space Agency made one. One last attempt to contact the rover, sending it Billy Holiday's rendition of I'll be seeing you, but opportunity did not answer. Maggie Gerth Baker, senior science reporter with 538 is here to talk about sort of a sad occasion. Hi, Maggie. Hi, that almost made me cry a little bit in the studio. I got a little misty myself. It was almost like a death in the family, was it not?

Yeah, I mean, these rovers are so personable. I mean, they kind of feel like they have faces a little bit, that people get attached to them. You know, they have Twitter presidences. Everybody really loves these things. And this one was scrappy and tough. It was only supposed to last for 90 days when it landed in 2004. And instead it ran for 5,352 days. And it took a planet-wide dust storm to take it down. So that's what happened. It could not recover from the dust storm. Yeah, it had gotten stuck in a previous dust storm a few years ago that it did recover from. But this one went on a lot longer, and the rover was powered by solar power. So its solar panels got covered up with dust. And after a certain point, it didn't have enough energy to kind of keep itself alive long enough for the dust to clear. Because they had sent it, what, more than 800 commands?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, over like the course of the past few months, and it just didn't ever contact us back. Let's talk about some of the highlights of Opportunities Time on Mars. We checked in with Opportunity-Marves Rover Deputy Project scientist Abigail Frayman this week and asked her to share her favorite memory of the mission. It's really hard for me to pick a favorite memory from this mission because I have so many over the past 15 years. One of them that really sticks out in my mind, though, was in 2010 when we first pulled up to the rim of Endeavor Crater.

Endeavor Crater is this big 22-kilometer diameter impact crater, and we'd been seeing it in the distance for months before we got there. Pulling up to this crater was basically the start of a new mission. In the rim of the crater, we encountered new kinds of rocks, much older rocks than we'd seen before. and it was so cool to think that after so many years, the exploration was just as fresh and exciting as it was the day we landed. Maggie, do you have some of your favorite highlights? I think one thing that I thought was really exciting to me was the fact that this rover actually held the record

for longest distance driven by a wheeled vehicle off of planet Earth. It went 28 miles in its time on Mars, which doesn't really seem like a lot, But when you think about everything that sort of had to happen for this little guy to be there and to have the power to drive those miles, like that's a lot of effort and a lot of work. And it's 28 miles that is very important to our understanding of Martian history and also of what the water systems on Mars had once been a long time ago. You know, this rover picked up a lot of evidence for ancient water on Mars. It found signs of hematite, which is a mineral that forms in water. At that endeavor crater that was mentioned, it was finding like these white veins of gypsum

that suggests that water was kind of coming up to the ground through tiny fractures at one point. And it found clay minerals that would have been formed in a kind of water that had like a neutral pH. So that's kind of talking about something not too acidic, not too bad. basic water that's akin to what you'd find in a drinkable lake here on Earth. You know, this was a really important little rover, and it found us a lot of interesting information about what Mars used to be like. It's stretched out its three-month tour to 5,000 days. Yeah.

And we currently have other explorers still there, right? Right, right. We have curiosity is up there. A little bit more jerry-rigged and aging than she used to be, but she's there. there's a non-mobile lander also, and there are two new rovers that are set to be launched in 2020, and both of those have been designed using knowledge and skills that we've sort of picked up from building these rovers like Opportunity and Curiosity and Spirit that have lasted far longer than they were expected to, so probably these new 2020 rovers will as well.

Let's move on to some other interesting, the week is so filled with interesting news. There's some good news and some bad news out of Greenland, right? What's the bad news first? Well, I mean, the bad news is that Greenland is melting a lot. There's been several studies over the past year that kind of came out showing big amounts of melt in that ice sheet. I think there was one from December that was showing, you know, melting five times faster over the last 20 years that it had been in pre-industrial times. You know, they were using ice course to kind of look all the way back 350 years ago. But one of the things that was coming out this week is the Greenland government sort of starting to talk about how to make the most of a bad situation.

So as these glaciers, as this ice sheet is starting to melt, what's coming out of it is sand and gravel and it's kind of flowing down towards the sea. And one of the things that they're starting to realize is that those are things that they can collect and that they can sell. and ironically what they would be selling it for is so that other places with rising sea levels from glacier melt can build up the land. It's a very, very fun little shell game that we have going on here. Just move the sand from one place to another. Right, because of climate change in both cases.

And maybe you could get your own bottle of glacier sand. Yes. So all these entrepreneurial opportunities. Thank you, Maggie. Yeah. Maggie Kurt Baker, senior science writer with a 538. Now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News.

Iowa Public Radio News. Stories of national significance right in your neighborhood. Out west, water, as you know, is a big issue and will become a bigger issue with drought and climate change. The seven states that depend on the Colorado, River for water are drawing up their own plans to prevent future shortages. Two states, California and Arizona, failed to meet a federal deadline last month, so the government has given them another month to hammer out a final agreement. We're going to focus in on Arizona.

My next guest is here to take us through the details of that state's proposal. Brett Jasper is a reporter for KJZZZ in Phoenix. Welcome. Hi, thanks for having me. Arizona is allocated a specific amount of water from the Colorado and has to figure out how to distribute this throughout the state, right? How much does Arizona have to work with? That's right. So Arizona is entitled to 2.8 million acre feet. That doesn't mean that they don't get a little bit more sometimes, but that's what is going to, part of that is going to be cut back with this, what they call the drought contingency plan, about 500,000 acre feet.

And so figuring out where those cuts go and how they're going to. distributed legally is what the bulk of their negotiations have been over the last year or so. And every state has their own way of tackling how to budget its water. How does this work in Arizona? Well, in Arizona, the portfolio for the whole state, and it's different for each user within the state, but the sources are the Colorado River, in state rivers, groundwater, and reclaimed water. And there's legal claims on all of those different sources from various users. So when Colorado river water gets cut back, that will affect only certain users within Arizona. And so the state as a whole does get 40 percent of its water from the Colorado,

but the particular users that are being affected with this drought contingency plan are people who are in the center of the state who are getting Colorado River water through a canal system that we have. So the state must have a way of prioritizing who gets the water, right? That's right. And it's all kind of been laid out legally for generations. And so there are certain Native American tribes in certain cities and irrigation districts which serve farmers and other users that have what they're entitled to purchase each year kind of laid out in a priority system. And that's been a big sticking point for some users that they want to really maintain that priority priority system, even as we scale back.

and have to maybe help users that will be most cut because they're at the back, they're at the end of the line and will be hurt economically. When you say help them, does that mean you'll give them funds instead of water? Well, if I can take just one particular group, there's a group of central Arizona farmers that are at the back of the line, and they're in the back of the line because of past agreements where they've gotten money in exchange for their position in line to get Colorado River water. But because we're scaling back now, because of drought,

and climate change, they will suffer economically. So what they're going to get under Arizona's design plan is some water that's been stored in the Lake Mead, which is the main reservoir for the state of the Colorado River system, they're going to get some of that stored water, and then, for example, an Indian tribe on the western part of the state is going to fallow some land so that they can then, in exchange, save water in Lake Mead to make sure that the lake doesn't suffer. And it's a weight of, it's kind of an accounting deal that they've made with the drought contingency plan is how do we, you know, keep water in the lake and yet send some water to people that are going to not get what they expected to get. Water, it's the next big thing, right? Southwest.

Absolutely. Appropriating water and how to use it. Thank you, Brett. Brett Jasper is a reporter for KJZZ in Phoenix, Arizona. We're going to take a break and get out your reading glasses because the sci-fry. Book Club returns to tackle all kinds of stuff. We have geoscience, disasters, and society with NK. Jameson's book, The Fifth Season.

We hope you've been reading it. It's a long book, but really interesting stuff in there. We'll talk about how it might pertain to real life. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. Our number 844-8255 for the book club. I'll be right back. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. If you're home or destroyed tomorrow, Would you be ready to get out and start all over again? Would you be prepared? That's a question the people of NK. Jemison's the fifth season grapple with daily, as they live on a planet racked constantly by volcanic winter, devastating earthquakes,

acid rain, and even shifting magnetic poles. And while some of those people called OroGenes have superpowers, they can control the energy of earthquakes and volcanoes. Everyone is reeling from what, what may be the actual end of the world. That's where we kicked off a month ago with our SciFRI Book Club reading, the fifth season. And today we reconvened to talk about it.

And here to steer the ship, Cy Arts producer Christy Taylor, chief bookworm and wrangler of this book club. And if you want to get in and talk about the club, please. We're inviting you. 844-724-825-8-8-4-4-Sy-Talk or you can tweet us at SciFri. Hey, Christy, take it away.

Well, thank you so much. I want to say welcome back. By the way, it's good to have you back behind the host microphone. Did you finish your reading? Actually, I did. All that time away allowed me to read the book. It's a long book, but I got through it. Great.

Well, while you were gone, we learned a lot about geosciences to sort of celebrate or acknowledge the geoscience disasters of this book. So we learned about volcanoes. We learned about researchers who make lava in their labs. We learned about scientists who record teeny tiny vibrations that. you can't even hear in craters to figure out what the magma or the lava lake under the volcano is doing. We talked about the Earth's core and what that has to do with our very important magnetic field. We learned a lot. So it's a coin upon you really dug deeply. Thanks, Ira. I really

appreciate that. Yeah. And so when we're talking about this book, one of the big terms I think we need to get to first is what is a fifth season. You know, this book is called the fifth season. What is a fifth season? Yeah, because that's the first thing I wanted to know. When you assign the club, we know four seasons, right is the fifth season. Right. Well, in Wisconsin, Warren, probably you also only have two seasons, which is winter and road construction season. But, yeah, in this book, the fifth season is usually volcanic winter. So you have this idea that volcanoes spew ash into the air.

They cloud the sun. It distorts sort of like what agriculture can do. You have famine, et cetera. So that is a season. We have changed to the climate of the earth. And so in this book, you can have a fifth season from volcanic winter or any other sort. of major disaster that disrupts the way the world works for a period of time. And then, of course, we have these people, the origins who can control earthquakes,

help them stop, help them further. And we have one person in particular who has kicked off what may be a completely world-ending fifth season where we may see ash in the air for hundreds of years, and how is humanity going to survive that. So what's on the docket for today? How do we get started? We're going to talk about some of those geophysical disasters, for starters, so earthquakes, volcanoes, and how they've affected, how they do affect societies. And surprise, surprise.

We're also going to talk about how people prepare for and respond to disaster. Who suffers the most? How societies and individuals are affected, prepare, respond. And we've got two guests to help us talk about that. So first of all, we've got Lucy Jones, a seismologist at Caltech, an author of The Big Ones. And she's the director of the Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society. She joins us from Pasadena. Hey, Lucy. Hey, good to be here.

Yeah, thanks for coming. And then we also have Lori Peek, a professor of sociology, director of the Natural Hazard Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. She's the author of a couple books to The Children of Katrina and Behind the Backlash, Muslim Americans after 9-11. Hey, Lori. Hi, Christy and hi, hi, Ira. Hi there. And let me just remind our listeners, the number is 844-8255. You can join our conversation, and you can also tweet us at Cyfry. So to kick off the conversation, this is a book club, we're going to talk about the book.

What did you like or maybe not like? Ira, I'm going to start with you because I think you had some quibbles. The book was very interesting. I had never read a book where the heroes, supposedly the heroes of the book. I mean, the origins who can basically move heaven and earth are the bad guys, right? I mean, they're the things that are the people that most people fear instead of being the superheroes that we all want to help us out. I was surprised by that. Yeah, and we're going to dig into that a little bit more later.

Lucy, what were your thoughts? I shared some of virus things. This is sort of weird to make them feared, but maybe that does connect with how people are so afraid of disasters and the suddenness of it, so it makes us not very rational in how we think about it. I had to get over a little bit of geologic realism. I had to just suspend it and accept it.

And that part was a little hard. I really liked the delving into the idea of what would a much higher level of disaster due to society and social norms. And because I spent a lot of time thinking about how people react to the disasters. Sure. And Lori, I know you do that quite a lot as well. What were your thoughts on this book? Just sort of big picture.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. I was really interested in this question of what happens to the social order. when people are born into a world in a perpetual state of disaster. I also love that she invites every reader to think about equity and social justice and what happens to people when those key elements are missing during times of great catastrophe. You're talking so much about catastrophe in this book. I thought of it as a dystopian book. I wanted to know if you all thought that this is also,

an apocalyptic dystopia. Well, I mean, I think, like, one thing is, like, also is this fantasy or science fiction. So we have, like, it seems very fantastical that people can control earthquakes. But then you also have all these references to, like, a past, higher-tech civilization. So maybe this could be, like, a future of a high-tech world. But, yeah, I really liked, I guess it digs into this question of do we want to save the world, right? It's at the very end, spoiler alert, by the way, for anyone who hasn't finished it. one of the main characters says,

help me finish destroying the world. And I really like being asked that question of, is it worth it? Lucy Lorry? I also saw it as dystopian. There's something odd of this turning on the people who could be making a difference and not embracing that. But it's also,

it wasn't to me so much, is destroying the world as revenge. And which, I mean, the dystopian aspect of the social corruption in a turning on a group of people and letting that go to the end. I mean, that's actually part of what human beings do face with disasters. We need to find somebody to blame. And so it's like they're being blamed for causing the disasters, even though, in fact, they don't. I have a calling.

8447248255 if you want to participate. A call from Amy, who says, Hey, come on. Well, let her say it. Amy, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, how are you? Fine, go ahead. I am relatively new to the genre of science fiction,

so I'm not quite sure I'm quite getting all of the book. I've enjoyed it immensely. I really like the story. I thought it was very interesting. My thing, the thing that kept hitting me over and over was the walls. They kept, you know, walls were supposed to keep cities safe. And oh, look, they didn't. And toward the end, and I hope this isn't a spoiler,

but when the wall is raised up out of the water, didn't keep them safe. And so that struck me as being quite prescient. Also, I just, I like the character development. thought it was very interesting. And also the whole thing with the societal equity, how these people who had such power at one time had been kind of in charge of things, but then, you know, were shunted to the side and were made to be evil. I actually have a quick question for you, Lucy, sort of on the back of that when we talk about real world earthquakes and volcanoes and and disasters out of shape societies.

This book is talking about these fifth seasons. A lot of the time that's volcanic winter, ash clogging the sky, blocking sunlight, killing crops. How often and how badly does this actually happen in real life? It's more common than people think. That seems world ending. In fact, you get around it. So the eruption of Krakatao in 1883 caused a year with, you know,

a cold year around the world. There was another one in the early 19th century. They had the year without a summer. And 1783, the Lockhe eruption in Iceland, is attributed. Millions of deaths are attributed to it because of famines around the world. Cooling of the earth disrupts the monsoons,

which then led to drought in India and Egypt. And I actually, to speak of dystopia, I find that an important lesson to give people that what seems like a small change in, say, the global average temperature can lead to these major famines and disruption of systems

because of the complexity of atmospheric circulation. Our number 8447248255, you can phone us in 844 SciTalk or a tweet at Cy Frye. And I actually wanted to also move on to Lori. When we're talking about disasters, there are more than just geophysical disasters. Hurricane Katrina jumps to mind

as one of those big questions of equity and social disaster sort of compounding natural hazard. Are there other instances like that that you can think of or that you've worked closely with? Yeah, absolutely. And this was something that I loved

about the book is that she really centered these social questions, and I think that is one of the fundamental insights of decades of social science disaster research is that these events are not equal opportunity events. Instead, disasters tend to reflect our pre-existing social order, and so when societies are highly unequal, when there are many vulnerable people, we tend to see bigger, more destructive disasters. And I think that is one of the big lessons and insights of this book. I want to get a tweet in here. It says, Caleb Musman says,

it's always a good sign of good writing when an antagonist, an antagonist can be drawn entirely in shades of gray. What do you think about that? I mean, because the book, I mean, when I think about the book now, you're right. thinking a very little color in this book. You know, maybe because of the ocean a little bit, but I'm thinking so much of it is about rocks and volcanoes and drawing the powers to use those forces that I'm really thinking in shades of gray here besides a personality of a shade

of gray. I guess I really saw a lot of red to like any time you had lava being talked about, but it did feel like there was a lot of lava and not necessarily, I don't know, Lucy, like there were a lot of volcanoes and earthquakes sort of in the same spot. And I don't know if that felt like, felt realistic necessarily. But, I mean, it felt dramatic. That's for sure. Okay.

Yeah. So the idea that they come in the same place, that's actually quite real. And she brings in a subduction zone. And that's a place where because of repeated earthquakes, you're actually melting rocks and creating the volcanoes. So that aspect was good. This was sort of like a world. with where the tautonics had gone into overdrive right you take what we have as a natural process and try to move it up by a couple of order of magnet orders of magnitude and and in that sense it was realistic

there were some parts of it that she she didn't really get which she kept on talking about shakers causing creating land for instance and and that's not true um the earthquakes move one piece of land past another and volcanoes when they create the new land don't have a huge there aren't a lot of earthquakes associated with it so there was part of it where the science wasn't quite right but why am I trying to make science of a place where people have magic powers to control the earthquakes speaking of magic powers this is science Friday from WNYC studios talking about the fifth season that's our book choice this week and we're talking about it with our guest. Christy? Go ahead. Yeah, well, and this is a question for Lori.

You work primarily on natural hazards and disasters, which are not the same thing, but when you look at this society in the fifth season, they always seem ready for disaster, they have supplies packed, they build with earthquakes in mind. Are you looking at this and thinking, good job? Are you saying this is like the way we should be ready here for earthquakes or floods? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think something that's really interesting about the book is at the beginning she opens and she says that the people of the stillness live in a perpetual state of disaster preparedness. And I was thinking that's quite different than how we're living right now. Studies show that about two-thirds of Americans do not have disaster plans and don't have the recommended preparedness supplies and so forth. And so we're not living in the same world right now, but she, again, invites us to think about what kind of a world would we be living in where people would be forced to live in this perpetual state of disaster preparedness.

And what would it take? What kind of resources? What kind of attention and focus would it take to move people into that state? Yeah. And going also into recovery, one of our listeners, Marty, had some speculation about how. she envisioned the technology or even like living quarters of a population that's constantly rebuilding, namely it might actually be pretty low or low tech. I would imagine in this era when earthquakes and devastation are common that people's dwellings are very simple.

There's not a lot of technology available. They don't have a lot of infrastructure. that affects the way people think and plan and create. I guess I don't see it that way, in that essentially all damage could be prevented if we choose to do so. And what you see is that societies build for the common disaster. sociologists like Lori will tell you about the normalization bias, that we think that what we've experienced is what we have to deal with. And so we don't build for the thousand-year tsunami. We build for the 50-year tsunami. And you see that Japan, with essentially the same technological knowledge as us, chooses to build buildings that are a lot more resistant,

and they had a magnitude 9 that killed 150 people because they've chosen to make those stronger buildings. So I think that with this level of disaster, you would end up building better buildings. You would reach to the technology. And they sort of have that in their main central city. They also use the origins to keep the shaking from happening there. So they sort of have that out that we don't. But I actually think that we would build more. And then they still have their fifth season.

So the really bad ones are still ones that they can't cope with. We're going to take a break and come back and talk more about the fifth season. So with our guest, sci-fi producer, Christy Taylor, seismologist Lucy Jones, disaster sociologist, Lori Peek. And your phone calls, 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFri. We'll be right back after the break with the book club. So stay with us. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Plato. we're closing out the sci-fi book club for the winter, talking about NK Jamiesons the fifth season. What happens when people with superpowers, able to lift huge mountains with a single thought, are the bad guys? I'm talking with SciArts producer Christy Taylor, two experts in various kinds of disaster.

Caltech seismologist Lucy Jones, author of The Big Ones, and Disaster Sociologist Lori Peek, director of the University of Colorado's Natural Hazard Center in Boulder. Christy? So one of the things I want to get us to right now is we've been talking sort of on and off about the equity and justice issues in this book and also the ways in which the author even N. K. Jemison has said this book is about the marginalization of people of color in the United States to some degree as well. These origins who control earthquakes, their lives are controlled. They're often killed for no reason because people fear them. And we've had a lot of listener comments on that as well. So first we have John, who has a personal story to share. I grew up in a pretty oppressive Christian family and I went to conversion therapy and, you know, it's like you really tell the story of everyone who's oppressed, you know, anyone who's ever been in like a system that, you know, was built to destroy them or control them. And then another listener, Jamila, said she saw direct parallels in our criminal justice system and other structural inequalities.

The criminal justice and education systems have been used in a way similar to the folk forum to continue. continually keep social and psychological control over these misunderstood groups. As with the stillness in the fifth season, in our own society, these groups are often the most vulnerable of environmental injustices. And now I want to bring in one of our callers, Ashley in Portland, who has something similar that she wants to say. Ashley, go ahead. Are you there?

Oh, we lost her. Oh, no. Well, I think, I think Lori, Lucy, I think you got the point from those listener voicemails. What is your take on how people are blamed in this story and how that sort of comes out of the natural disasters in the world they live in? Okay, I can start with that. I think that this idea that we want, we face disasters by finding somebody to blame is one of the most constant features of the human reaction to it. and it does tap into our existing social problems. Lori's got more details on sort of like the bigger picture of it.

I think of anecdotes that you see in previous events that I wrote about of like the Japanese earthquake in 1923 where in the next four days, 6,000 Koreans were slaughtered by their neighbors or the, you know, our response to Katrina. In those first few days, all of the news stories were breakdown in social order. Look at how horrible it all is, which was a way of feeling superior to the people who were caught there and saying it was their fault. In fact, when you go back afterwards and try to understand what happened, the biggest breakdown in social order was actually quite vigilant. He's turning on their African-American neighbors. and actually just today there was one of the most egregious of them, what is it now, 14 years after the hurricane, and 10 years after he was first indicted, was finally convicted for having shot African Americans for just coming near his property.

And he told his neighbor, is anything darker than a brown paper bag coming up the street is getting shot? And it still took 14 years to convict him. Got a lot of listeners. Well, tweets are coming in faster than I can keep track of them, but I'll see if I can keep up because they're all very interesting. Let's see. This one is, Will says there's no such thing as a natural disaster. A tornado in an empty field isn't a disaster.

Disasters are caused by human failures in community preparedness, adaptation, and recovery. Lori? Will, you're absolutely right. and in fact there is a book called There's no such thing as a natural disaster and I just want to echo what Lucy just shared and thank John and Jamila for those comments because I think they're really tapping into

what is at the heart of this book which are really the heart of the book really is related to questions of inequality and oppression and what happens when societies are so unequal. Is it even possible to affect? effectively prepare for, respond to, and recover from these events. And she writes in such a powerful way about these issues. And I think any reader is going to be able to draw these kinds of examples to both historical incidents, but also to contemporary moments of blame and great

inequality. So I really hope that people are going to read this book and talk about this book because it is so timely and so topical. Speaking of which, Ed tweets, remember that this series is written by a black woman. I don't think NK.C.'s the antagonist as, quote, a bad guy, but as a black woman's struggle in a world that is against her. So, oh, gone. I was going to say that's earlier when we were talking about the destruction of the world

and whether this is a dystopian novel, I sort of read it as a question. In order to have a more equal world and a world where everyone can truly be free, do we have to destroy the world? Do we have to destroy the structures and the institutions and totally recreate it? Is it possible to move forward

in a new and different way? And I think she's really, she is a brilliant author, and she's really raising these questions for the rest of, of us to grapple with. And speaking of making it pertinent to sort of our world now,

one of the things I also see in this book is a metaphor for climate change. We have this sort of fairy tale that's told in the middle of the book that Father Earth did not always hate humanity, but humanity poisoned the rivers, you know, destroyed all of the minerals and then stole his favorite child, which we don't necessarily

know what that means because this is the first book in a trilogy. But yeah, Ira, like I see this as planetary scale disaster. All of a sudden, everything's worse than it was and people are grappling with all of this way more often than they would. It seems like climate change. It does. And it does seem like a lesson of these people have been preparing for because they're prepared for these disasters. We're not prepared. We are unprepared for climate change. So maybe it is a, you know, some sort of warning to us.

Lucy, can climate change actually make earthquakes more common or do you think that's where the metaphor comes in? That's that you've got to go metaphor on that one. That's back to these. Climate change, apparently such a small change, you know, it's a couple degrees of change in the average global temperature. That has no impact at the depth at which geologic hazards are happening, but in the much more dynamic atmosphere is, you know, potentially shifting currents, changing wind patterns, you know, the polar vortex as a response to extra heating in the Arctic and then pushing the air, the cold air, air, down, the climate systems are incredibly complex and incredibly volatile compared to geologic systems. You know, I get to think about things that happen over 100 million years. Here's a tweet from Nana Kay says, I mean, I get the angle, but I think the approach does this book a disservice.

Firstly, it makes perfect sense that the origins could fix the world, became the bad guys, see X-Men and Heroes, to name obvious examples. I want to stay on that climate change angle for a second too. Lori, as someone who thinks about disasters and bracing for them all the time, are there any things that you see in the way, like this is a culture that is braced for disaster? They have like whole traditions of oral storytelling around how to build your house for earthquakes. And everyone has like a backpack full of supplies. Everyone does.

You know, you have a caste system so that everyone has a defined role. Community is stressed is really important. Are there tips in here for how a post-client, like a climate change world might be more resilient, or are there things in here that make you say neat? So maybe I'd love to answer that in two ways. So the first thing that comes to mind is really about risk communication and what we've learned over the years about how to communicate risk. And I think a big movement that has happened in this area is moving away. from you communicate about the threat, the volcano, the earthquake, the process. Instead, you communicate actionable information about what you're supposed to do in response to that threat.

And I think that's something that really is woven throughout the book. And then I think the second bigger question that ties back to your climate change question, Christy, is really about what do you do beyond the runny sack? So all the people in this world, they have these little runny sacks that have water and clothes and a sleeping bag and so forth in their runny sack. But then communities are also grappling with questions of displacement. And are we going to have to move our entire community in response to a volcanic threat or a tsunami?

And so I think that's where she really dances between the, this level of individual preparedness and then moving into questions of what do entire communities do when they're threatened by these kinds of potentially world-ending events. Let's go to Gabe in Minneapolis. Hi, Gabe. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey, it's good to be here. Go ahead. Oh, man, I absolutely love this book. It came out of nowhere for me, but I'm a massive sci-fi fantasy fan and just the world building. I think you guys have done a great job diving into the social critiques that this book brings up. I really loved for me, it didn't feel forced in.

It was very easy to understand the applicability to real stuff. But one of the things that really stuck with me was just how I loved the world building. I loved talking about the like capital city. they talk about like the emperor up in some like weird pyramid things. You get like one paragraph on that in the beginning of the book, and then that's it. You just get these great little drops that shows you how big this world is. I just, I loved that it was very easy to have great social commentary, great representation. I think there's really good breakdowns of emotions of being a mother and sexuality that come up in the

the later books as well. But the world building, and I think what I really enjoyed especially, was almost the brutality. Like, I loved reading this book. It's one of the first legitimate female authors I've read in sci-fi and fantasy, just because they're really underrepresented. And reading this book, you can stereotype it one way or another off an expectation. But I loved the depth of emotion, but then also the pure brutality. that you can get. That just, I'm sold on this author. I'm Ira Plato.

This is Science Friday from WN.N.Y.C. Studios. I'm glad that the listener brought up the idea of brutality in the book, because that was the one problem I had with one scene in the book, and that was the guardian breaking a little girl's hand, who was one of the origins. And it bothered me because this was, you know, inequality of somebody lording over a little girl, and he said it was good for her, you know. Well, it was so difficult to read that.

I mean, the whole book was so difficult to read, Lucy. That one struck me as that's what's necessary to convince those powerful people that they're not powerful. And I actually saw that as really, and it's sort of an insightful thing that as a white woman, I don't experience so much of what is it like to be told that you're, to have a whole society that convince you. you that you're powerless, which they would have to do to control these people. And I, you know, we are a little less intentional about it in our society, but it's clear that

we do this to a lot of people. I have a question about whether people are good for all of you. Just in terms of, we see these disasters hitting this society in this book. We have, you know, our own disasters to contend with on earth, hurricane. Harvey, Irma, and Maria, you know, recently did those wildfires in California. Are people good to each other after disasters? Like, does the book capture this accurately? Do we have the right perception of it in real life?

I think disasters obviously have the potential to bring out both the best in people as well as sometimes the worst. And we know that in the immediate time of disaster, that oftentimes, people are courageous and they are helpful and they are kind in these incredible sorts of ways. But then we also know that disasters can really deepen already existing inequalities. And so I think this question is a really important one. And Lucy, it sounds like you have something you want to say about that too. I completely agree with it, Lori.

But I think it's also human beings are human beings. We're both good and bad. And the thing about disasters is it brings out in higher relief where you are with that. And I found the book, I guess this is why I agreed with the dystopian statement, is it sort of emphasized the worst part. The idea that the communities would turn away the outsiders. They would only keep people that could help each other. It was a very sort of selfish view of how you would. respond to multiple disasters. And I can imagine, you know, why somebody, a black woman growing up

in America would have a more dystopian view of society in those realms. I, I, maybe it's I hope. The reality is that the good parts would be more predominant. And it probably really depends very much on the culture and where the norms are. And I think the, one of the problems with inequality is it creates the other. And so do we see the other, somebody else as part of our community that we're working together to help or do we see them as somebody who's a threat? You're going to have the last word on that because we've run out of time. You can see Lucy and Lurie's disaster prep suggestions on our website at science friday.com slash disaster. Thank you so much, Laurie Peck, Sociologist, Director of the Natural, Hazard Center, University of Colorado and Boulder,

Lucy Jones, a seismologist, and founder of the Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society, author of The Big Ones in Pasadena, California. Thank you, thank to you both for taking time to be with us today. Christy, is this the end of the book club? Definitely not. We are actually having an event here in New York City on Monday night with author N. N.K. Jemison herself, plus geology puns, tons of interactive activities, and some volcanologists will be joining us as well. You can find out about that on our

web page, ScienceFriday.com slash Volcano. Plus our Facebook group discussion is still going strong, and of course the book club will come back in the summer with a work of nonfiction. Stay tuned for that one. And thank you. Well, thank you very much, Christy for all of your work on the book club, sci-fri arts

producer, Christy Taylor. And that's about all the time we have today. Charles Berkowitz is our director, a senior producer, Christopher and Taliatta. Our producers, our Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, We have technical engineering help from Rich Kim's hair, Fisherman, and Kevin Wolfe. We're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media. And if you have a smart speaker, you want to hear us again.

You can ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want. So every day now is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato in New York.