Rather to my surprise, my little TED performance piece from the TED Countdown conference on climate change last year (October 2021 in Edinburgh), which was released in June 2022, has over 1.4 million views. Of course, the lack of a Comment feature means that I don’t know whether the point I am making with this story-fragment is at all clear. But I am hoping that the long story I’ve written for the Climate Imagination Project at ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination (of which story the TED piece is a fragment) will help put it in context.
I haven’t had time to write about my attending the TED conference last year. It was a revelatory experience to see how elites in the West construe the problem according to their (mostly unconscious) guiding metaphors. My sense was that there was (among many) genuine sincerity and concern, but widespread paradigm blindness, a term that I am finding more and more useful in both fiction and my academic work. There were some really good talks, but most of the talks did not challenge the deeply problematic dominant paradigm. The surreal experience of a conference during the pandemic (before vaccines, and conducted with great competence in terms of logistics) in a city that was one of the centers of the Industrial revolution, related to my own history through colonialism – continues to reverberate. It made me interested in how people of privilege construct their realities, and informed the long story I wrote for the Climate Imagination project. The story, along with those of my wonderful fellow fellows from around the world, will be out later this year.
In other updates: I’m working on an academic book (on climate, what else), designing a couple of new courses that will hopefully run, and am about to submit two pieces of short fiction. In the summer of 2022 I had a mini-Cambrian-Explosion of creativity and wrote drafts of six short stories, published one (see “Left to Die” in Clarkesworld) and hope that the remaining will see the light of day this year. I also worked on two academic pieces that will be out this year as well.
On to 2023!
Note: Above Picture credit: Ryan Lash, TED
Antariksh Yatra 
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