CZM Book Club: Cool Zone 2055: The Peace Department
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So check out Lenovo.com slash Legion. Empowering creators everywhere. Cool Zone Media. Dino Wars. Dino Wars. Dino Wars. Hello. Welcome to Cool Zone Media Book Club. The only book club about Dino Wars. Probably. Unless you started your own book club to study Cool Zone Media Book Club's Dino Wars. But you could.

Except if you had a book club about it, you'd probably find a lot of inconsistencies. But anyway, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. And in case you hadn't figured it out, this is a Dino Wars episode of Cool Zone Media Book Club, which means this is an episode from 30 years in the future. That's right. We got exclusive access to podcasts from 30 years in the future, including the one that we're about to run. So here it is.

Hello, and welcome to Cool Zone 2055, How to Survive the Dino Wars, the show where we cover all things World War 3.5, all things Dino Wars. We've got news from the front and we've got news from the back. We've got everything you need to know about triceratopses, except how you're supposed to pluralize that word because we don't know.

and everything you need to know about the Nazi zombies. We've got analysis. We've got how-tos. We've got our most generous sponsor. That's right, Dino Cadence, the world's premier chain of dinosaur-riding academies. Every single one of our locations has passed our extensive certification program. Not just once, not just once a year, but every season.

So you know that if it says dino cadence, the teachers are well trained and paid well. That the dinosaurs are well trained and well cared for. And the students, like you, receive a world-class education. So join the war for human and dino liberation. Join the war on climate change and fascism. Join the war against brutality. Join the worldwide revolution.

Tuition is free, but spots are limited. So apply to Dino Cadence today. Okay, so that's out of the way. There's a quote that is regularly misattributed to Lenin, who is a terrible man to whom so much is misattributed. People like to pretend that Lenin said, there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen. A man named Romero Arridias, the Mexican poet and environmentalist, did say something similar, though.

He said,

I struggle to understand what the night sky sounded like without the cries of giant reptiles setting down for bed. It is the terrible curse of human history that most new technologies are turned first to war, turned first to destruction, before they find their way to peacetime use. We unlocked the atom so that we could punish Imperial Japan and kill hundreds of thousands of its civilians in one of the greatest war crimes in human history.

our desire to kill our fellow humans has always brought out our ingenuity. Of course, ex vivo genesis and, you know, dinosaur de-extinction was developed during peacetime, but it was the dinos versus zombies arm race that really got de-extinction going at any kind of scale. And today, like I promised last week...

I'm at one of the world's oldest and largest creches, a simply massive compound somewhere in rural Finland where extinct species are resurrected. I can't say the name of the place on air, not during wartime, so I'm going to call it Tuoneilu, the ancient Finnish land of the dead. There are three different facilities here, each with their own staff, headquarters, and even social norms. There's the Center for the Eradication of the March of Time,

aka the research department, which de-extincts new animals. There's the Center for Application of Muscle and Bone for the Purpose of Liberating the Earth, aka the War Department. And then there's the Center for the Cohabitation of Flora and Fauna, aka the Peace Department. The War Department is far and away the largest of the three departments, receiving 60% of the grounds, 70% of the personnel, and 74% of the funding.

I understand why this is the case. I used to be an activist journalist. Well, I used to be just an activist back in my youth, a decade of work I've been milking for street cred ever since. But these days, I'm a war journalist. Most of us didn't set out to be war journalists, war bookkeepers, war chefs, war graphic designers, war crocheters, war animal trainers, war doctors, war pilots, or war anything. We simply set out to live our lives as free people.

And war came to us. So the War Department is the largest, and I understand why. And it still makes me sad. But this episode isn't about the War Department. Nor is it about the Research Department. Wartime secrecy prohibits me from reporting on those departments anyway. No, the reason I am in Finland was because of an invitation I got from an old friend who works in the Peace Department, Dr. Sjoerd Lampo, a Dutch Finn I met in the 2030s at a climate change conference in Dublin.

He was a zoologist then, studying how native species were migrating with the changing weather. He just walked out of a German prison after serving six years as part of the Bremen 12. Maybe you remember the Bremen 12? It was a big deal at the time, but there have been so many big deals in the intervening decades that it's hard to keep track of them all. The Bremen 12 were convicted of ecoterrorism. Do you remember when ecoterrorism was seen as a bad thing?

Each of the Bremen 12 were prominent scientists and environmental engineers. They released a paper in 2029 with their names attached in which they laid out why direct action, including destructive direct action and potentially violent direct action, was the only feasible method by which humanity could confront climate change.

The paper came out the same day that they bombed a Tesla factory under construction in what had been considered a critical forest for the remaining biodiversity of mainland Europe. They all went to prison. Naturally, I was excited to meet Dr. Lampo. But do you know what else I was excited about? The opportunity to spend my entire life interweaving anti-capitalist podcast content with advertising from whoever pays us enough money.

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This podcast is brought to you by the only domesticated animal should be kept as pet society. We would like to remind you that no de-extincted animals have been truly domesticated. While dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers can bond with humans and even be trained and may serve as comrades in arms in the struggle against global fascism, they are not suited for living inside with us.

Just because there's dinos, don't forget dogs. Just because there are giant cats, don't forget the regular ones. And just because you can ride a Bronto doesn't mean you should forget about horses.

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You'll see our interviews with Goblin and Orc, the non-binary couple who lived and eventually died, like the Bonnie and Clyde of industrial sabotage. And who can forget the double green IRA and their campaign for Irish unification and eco-socialism? Those early days, those opening salvos, were full of some of the bravest people to ever walk and defend the earth. In the 2040s, though, it got easier.

The Vishnu shield is more or less the greatest weapon in the war against the misuse of technology that has ever been developed. A single person with a single briefcase-sized device can shut down five city blocks of technology. Of course, that's been used to evil effect too. But frankly, I think the human portable tactical EMP is the best thing that's ever happened to environmental activism. All of that is besides the point.

After my friend Dr. Lumpo got out of prison and I met him at the conference in Dublin, we stayed in touch off and on. And he's even been on this show before, in one episode from 2046, talking about the migration of native species and how it impacts both home gardening and also commercial food production. He'd retired from a life of crime. But even as he talks about the horrors of his time in a German private prison, he never spoke of a single regret.

And now, he works in the peace department, in a nameless research facility in Kres, in an undisclosed location in Finland. Even though, like me, he is years past retirement age. When he heard I was in Finland for DinoCon, he reached out, and here I am. A lifetime ago, literally not even in this century, I went to Finland for the first time.

I was a teenager in the U.S., and by strange circumstance, I was dating a Finnish girl. I'd fallen atop her while crowd surfing to Blondie at a festival in D.C., and we had fallen in love. She pierced my ear with a safety pin and shoplifted me an earring. It was all terribly punk rock, and she signed her name with the A's in it circled. Her father had been in the Finnish embassy, and when he was promoted back to Finland, her and I stayed together. So I was only 16 when I flew alone to Helsinki.

We didn't last past high school, her and I. Somewhere in some old notebook of teenage poetry, I scrawled the phrase, "Finland is a fever dream." Fifty-five years later, it still is. Finland had half expected to fall to Putin's Russia. Russia has always liked invading Finland whenever it's feeling bored. And since then, Finland has become, alongside Lagos, the center of internationalist resistance. Lagos is the political, in some ways cultural, hub of the revolution.

Finland is the technological center, simply because it's where dinosaurs come from. The first time I spent much time in rural Finland, I was a traveling anarchist activist in my 20s. A festival and conference invited me there because of my work writing about anarchism in fiction, if I remember correctly. And my ability to remember things correctly has become less and less certain as time marches onward. Mustapispala, it was called. I remember the mural they'd thrown up for a Finnish anarchist who'd been killed by the Israeli army in Palestine.

Back then I stayed in a village somewhere outside of Tampere with a house of green anarchists, and I spent some time on one of the thousands of lakes that dot the countryside. Some folks had built a sailboat entirely from trash. The hull from old barrels, the deck was woven from discarded fire hose. It was near midsummer and the sun refused to set. We hung out on the lake for endless hours. If I ever retire, maybe I'll retire to a cabin on a lake in Finland.

More likely, I won't retire until it's to assisted care or a hospital somewhere. As long as I can write, I'll write. And yes, as long as I'm an old woman with a platform, I'll do stereotypical old woman shit like get lost thinking about the old days despite the fantastic, terrifying world I live in today. But all of that, even the I wonder if I can get away with rambling about Finland in the 90s and aughts part of it,

ran through my head while a young friend led me through the Vishnu shield on a horse-drawn sleigh, bundled up against the Finnish winter that wasn't half so cold as it would have been in my youth. I am not allowed to describe the unnamed facility in any detail, not physically. While satellite imagery has been greatly disrupted through the proliferation of AI hacking tools and the occasional Vishnu satellite, it's still reasonable to presume the fascists occasionally get eyes on the countryside of Finland.

Or maybe I'm not in Finland at all. Maybe this whole thing is a psyop and I'm actually in the indigenous-controlled regions of Siberia. Who knows? So there was a slay. And I entered past a gate that probably had security of some kind. Being vague is my least favorite part of wartime journalism.

The grounds itself are not Vishnu-shielded, I'm glad to say, and I transferred from the sleigh to a glorified golf cart, occasionally throwing up a half-hearted complaint that I could walk just fine, which is half true. Dr. Sjoerd Lampo met me, hat held in his hand, goofy smile across his face. He's a trans man who has aged quite gracefully, with a full white beard without mustache and that strange 2030s style.

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And we're back. Dr. Lampo took me off to the far corner of the largest state, where the Peace Department does its studies. To be honest, I don't mind that I'm not allowed to cover the War Department or the Research Department. It has always been complicated for me, as a lifelong vegan and a longtime animal lover, to reconcile my politics with our use of animals in war.

It would be still more complicated for me to witness how the proverbial sausage is made. I'm sure the de-extincting process is not without suffering and experimentation. And I'm sure the study of dinosaurs in war is no nicer. To be clear, I don't believe the facility runs tests like, how many bullets can this Tyrannosaurus survive being shot with?

But the War Department raises dinosaurs from egg to warrior in the fastest possible ways, including a number of growth acceleration technologies that I am not privy to discuss the details of. And it's just, well, it's war. Younger scientists, and likely younger listeners, are more fatalistic about such things. If your brain wasn't fully formed before World War III, you will likely accept a lot more suffering and death than us old softies are likely to.

The age discrepancy between scientists in the Peace Department and the War Department is immediately apparent. It's white-haired over here in the Peace Department. It's also idyllic, an old science fiction dream of a happy Mars colony or something. We drove up to the entrance of a gigantic, clear plastic dome, and I dismounted and walked through the entrance into a peaceful garden of gazebos and flowers and butterflies.

Throughout it all, small and medium dinosaurs roamed freely, cooing and clucking. The whole thing is heated to something like 85 degrees Fahrenheit. I was told in Celsius, but the older I get, the stranger of things I pick to become stubborn about, like speaking in the human-centered Fahrenheit instead of the science-minded Celsius. We walked along a mulched path, and I marveled at the beauty of everything around me. What is it that you all do here? I asked Dr. Lampo.

Every species in this pavilion, with the exception of ourselves as Homo sapiens, was considered extinct by the year 2045, he told me. I looked around at the flowers and butterflies and insects and birds. Besides the dinosaurs, they all seemed like species that were quite normal to me, species I'd spent most of my life around. I even probably had. The rate of extinction in our lifetimes has been simply astounding.

The doctor continued, When I was coming up in the sciences, a lot of discussions in both academic and activist circles was around the primacy of native plants to habitat restoration, which makes sense. Invasive species tend to throw off well-established balances between species and destroy the equilibrium of a given ecosystem. But the thing is, and this is what you saw me present about the day we met,

A warming world shifts that balance. In the northern hemisphere, plants and animals creep their way north. In the southern hemisphere, they go south. Species also move further up into mountains, and the deserts expand everywhere. Before ex vivo genesis, we were working with a dramatically shrinking pool of biodiversity. Our attempts to restore and preserve habitats, even shifting to adjust for climate, were hampered by, well,

lack of remaining options. De-extinction, alongside the Vishnu Shield, are the two most powerful tools we've ever developed to help us mitigate the worst effects of climate change. All across the world, scientists are building these test gardens to see what sort of ecosystems we can build and what climates. We anchor everything with native species, although sometimes they are native species from slightly further south or north.

but supplement them with species, sometimes from all over the world, and now from all over the history of the world, to see how they relate and see what is compatible. Where do dinosaurs fit into this, I asked. Well, because we want them to, Dr. Lampo said. We've got other reasons besides that. Dinosaurs were adapted for a warmer world, so they can teach us about what life in a warm world can look like.

Dinosaurs are generally larger than the average animals today, and they can fit complex niches within an ecosystem. Those are the reasons I'm probably supposed to give you. But frankly, we do it because we want to. Dinosaurs are neat. God has changed and things are changing, and our general rule is the more biodiversity we can add to an area, the better, the more resilient it is.

Well, what happens if a de-extincted species breaks containment and becomes an invasive species elsewhere? That's happened several times already, and it'll keep happening, Dr. Lampo said, with a cavalierness that shocked me. If we had discovered this technology in the 1940s instead of the 2040s, I think it would be the foremost concern on any of our minds. But it's simply not that way anymore. The thing is, the world, without our help, is dying. Rather,

It was killed. The Earth was killed 50 years ago, and its death throes are long and arduous. We did not stop climate change. Left to its own devices, the Earth will always find some sort of equilibrium. But it's quite possible that the equilibrium it will find this time might be the destruction of multicellular life on Earth. That's an extreme scenario, but not an impossible one.

The mass extinction we've caused could very easily make the end of the dinosaurs, the original end of the dinosaurs, seem like a minor course correction. We are skating on the brink of destruction, even still. And it's only through Vishnu technology and ex vivo genesis that we've been able to course correct the tiniest bit. I know we're all caught up right now in the global war against fascism. And that's an essential fight.

But it is, and always has been, the less important fight. Fascism is the mini-boss. Climate change is the big boss. Fascism is a threat to all human life on Earth. Climate change is a threat to all life on Earth, period. It's a threat to the only life we know to exist anywhere in the universe. The stakes really are that high. And to be clear, the fight against fascism is not a distraction.

We need to destroy fascism in order to get to the big ones. And a global society that combines the best parts of decentralization and federation is exactly what we need to start to address climate change. Think about... This is a strange comparison, perhaps, but I grew up in the 1990s as a gay man. I wasn't around for the AIDS crisis, but it was this very, very present and recent and raw wound in my community.

During the AIDS crisis, when gay men were essentially abandoned to die by conservative society, no, essentially killed en masse by medical neglect, some doctors and patients turned to unorthodox means. As new experimental drugs came online, people volunteered to test them outside of accepted protocols because AIDS had more or less a 100% mortality rate at the time. So you might as well try to help everyone around you and, hey, what if it saves you?

That's the attitude that has spread across the environmental research community over the past few decades. The Earth is in trouble. Dire trouble. Existential trouble. Every native ecosystem is essentially doomed unless we course-correct, and fast, and hard. We should try to keep de-extincted species contained, for sure. We should try to experiment as safely as possible. But being too slow and too cautious will doom us.

It's like driving up a steep dirt road, I suggested. You have to commit. You have to commit, Dr. Lampo agreed. We're trying things that would have been unethical to try only 50 years ago. But now, it would be unethical to not try. The ecosystems we are likely to be living in 100 years from now might look more like the ecosystems from 65 million years ago than they look like the ecosystem of 65 years ago.

And we want those ecosystems to be full of life and diversity. We want them to be beautiful and fulfilling to live in. And yeah, it seems likely that they'll have dinosaurs in them. And that's where I'll leave it for this week. When we come back next week, we're going to hear a counterpoint to that position from a dinosaur skeptic who also works at the Department of Peace. In the meantime, though...

Keep fighting that mini-boss. Fascism must be stopped. And we will stop it together. With or without the help of dinosaurs. Margaret in 2025 here. Boy, what a fun message from the future. It's really great to know that I'm still around 30 years from now. Isn't that exciting? I'm excited for it. But!

You know what else is around sooner than 30 years from now? Tomorrow! If you're listening to this today, when it comes out, or you're listening to it today in your own relative terms, no matter what, but if you're listening to this on Sunday, the day it comes out, March 2nd, then tomorrow, March 3rd, 2025,

the Kickstarter launches for the immortal choir that holds every voice. And that means several things for you. One, it means there's only a couple more weeks where I keep telling you about this Kickstarter and you can be glad that I'll have something else to plug in the future instead of constantly plugging this one thing. But it also means that tomorrow you can go back that Kickstarter. You can get access to...

the third book in the Danielle Cain series and even the first two books in the Danielle Cain series because we're even going to offer all three of the books as one of the rewards for

And there's going to be audiobooks and there's going to be tattoo flash maybe if we reach our stretch goals. And, you know, it's going to be fun. It's really funny to be like, it's going to be fun to have a Kickstarter. I actually kind of do like Kickstarter campaigns. It's just very strange right now to be putting together books with the way the world is. But I think that you all might like this book. I think that this book, The Immortal Choir That Holds Every Voice, is some of my best reflections on...

and what it's like to hold on to loss. But it's also fun. There's trolls. There's evil fairies. There's, I don't know, love. It's great. You'll like it. Or you won't.

Either way, I'll be back next week with more Book Club. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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