Dodging a Mass Extinction Event: Climate Change & Necessity 2021

14th Annual Wheelwright Lecture - Kim Stanley Robinson

The 2020s will be a pivotal decade in history, as human civilization faces the necessity of getting into a more balanced relationship with the biosphere that is our one and only home. The transformations required will be social, technological, and economic. Some discussion of how these might come about will be sketched out in various science fictional scenarios, including a best-case result you can still believe in.

The Speaker

The public intellectual Kim Stanley Robinson is an acclaimed award-winning radical science fiction author of more than 20 books, and many essays and short stories. His works, through the lens of an inherently political genre, present the possibility of an alternate future to the ecological devastation created by capitalism.

A speaker at the UN's COP-26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (2021), his works include this essay recently published in The Financial Times A climate plan for a world in flames, his book The Ministry for the Future and an insightful talk Rethinking our Relationship with the Biosphere.

Hosted by the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, together with the Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE) and the Political Economy Student Society (ECOPSoc).

To register for this online event, click here

Previous Wheelwright speakers have included: Susan Ferguson, Jayati Ghosh and Adam Tooze (2020), Susanne Soederberg (2019), Alfredo Saad-Filho (2018), Katherine Gibson (2017), David Ruccio (2016), Erik Olin Wright (2015), Leo Panitch (2014), Susan George (2013), Diane Elson (2012), Sheila Dow (2011), Fred Block (2010), Jim Stanford (2009), and Walden Bello (2008).