In this episode we connect with Martin Puchner, author of the book Literature for a Changing Planet. We discuss his philosophical journey to the intersection of literature, history and ecology in his book. We explore how ancient texts have given clues to how humans have engaged with our planet, abused resources, protected resources, and understood the relationship we had with Earth. We look at one of the oldest works of written literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, to find clues of how humans viewed city living compared to agrarian lifestyle, and how we saw the Earth as designed to support us as we take whatever we need. We examine the similarities of the story of the Great Flood in The Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Great Flood stories of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and the Quran. These stories are the first examples in literature of ecological disaster caused by the moral behavior, or the over abundance of humans.
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Guest
Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he also serves as the founding director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research. Puchner completed his BA at the Universität Konstanz; MA at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at UC Irvine; and PhD at Harvard University.
A recent fellow of both the Guggenheim Foundation and Cullman Center, he has published over a dozen books and anthologies, including Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, 2006), which won the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Award; The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy (Oxford, 2010), awarded the Joe A. Callaway Prize and the Walter Channing Cabot Prize; The Written World: How Literature Shaped Civilization (Random House, 2017); Literature for a Changing Planet (Princeton, 2022); and Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop (Norton, 2023). Puchner is the co-editor of Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage (Palgrave, 2006) and The Norton Anthology of Drama (2009), and the general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature.
"And I think that is a story that worked for a while. It was a kind of scare tactic. It galvanized groups of people, activists, but it also, I think, alienated a lot of people. Alienated and it made it seem a little implausible. It was an exaggeration. And because it came with these extreme moral overtones of sin and punishment."
Credits
Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on the Environment and Building Resilient Futures is a series that explores how natural, social, and political climates both shape and are changed by institutions and social structures. We engage with artists, educators, activists and authors to examine where we live and how we live in our surrounding environment and what it takes to build a resilient future.
Guest: Martin Puchner
Host: Jon-Barrett Ingels
Produced by Past Forward in partnership with Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University.
Date recorded: November 26, 2025
Past Forward is providing this podcast as a public service. The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Please read our Program and Product Disclaimer for more information.
Transcription
[00:00:02] Martin Puchner: It's like a meme. It's like a package. It's a story that moves into these different texts and because then both the Hebrew Bible and the Quran and then the Christian Old and New Testament become these world texts, this particular story of the flood really moves around the world and becomes one of the lenses through which we now look at climate catastrophes.
[00:00:31] Host: Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Past Forward present Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on the Environment and Building Resilient Futures. In this series, we explore how natural, social, and political climates shape and are changed by institutions and social structures. We engage with artists, educators, activists, and authors to examine where we live and how we live in our surrounding environment and what it takes to build a resilient future.
In this episode, we connect with Martin Puchner, author of the book Literature for a Changing Planet, exploring how the history of the written story tracks humanity's history and our connection with the planet. Here is Martin Puchner.
So, Martin, let's start with the inspiration and the journey of writing literature for a changing planet. I want to know how did ecology find its way into the path of a philosopher and literary critic?
[00:01:34] Puchner: First, Jon-Barrett, thanks so much for having me on your show. And it's a good question because it's not obvious. You know, my background is, as you say, in philosophy, but more recently in world literature and I've been doing these large sort of world history projects, often connecting different topics of culture with technology. So why would someone like that think about climate change? One answer is because, you know, everyone should think about climate change. I certainly have for a long time, though I didn't really connect it to my work. And then at some point, I realized that I was doing a lot of sort of collecting of stories from around the world, including in this large anthology I edit with a bunch of colleagues called the Norton Anthology of World Literature that's used in lots of colleges and, you know, some high school classrooms. And I suddenly, I think because I became increasingly preoccupied with climate change, I started without really planning to do so, to read different works of world literature, everything that we were collecting from the very beginning of literature to the present through that lens. And I think I suddenly realized, wait a minute, there is this long history of humans thinking about the environment, about resources, about climate way before climate science 40, 50 years ago started to realize human-made climate change. And so I thought, OK, here is maybe something, a kind of cultural perspective that lets us understand a little bit how humans for the last 5,000 years or 4,000 years have thought about the nature, the environment, resources, and maybe there are some lessons that we can draw from that.
[00:03:41] Host: Yeah, I guess it would, in understanding how in your history of literature, we're looking at how literature tracks the formation of the modern world, it would make sense that it would track the decline as well.
[00:03:57] Puchner: Or the problems, exactly. Sure. Or the mindset. And not just the modern world, but even starting in the ancient world, this is what's so interesting about written literature, because that's really what we're dealing with since oral literature kind of disappears. But written literature writing emerges really with the earliest cities and the emergence of city living in Mesopotamia several thousand years ago. So in some sense, you could say that in that sense, written literature, and by literature here, I don't just mean novels, but religious texts, any form of important, culturally important writing really, really grows up with the world we inhabit today, namely a sedentary world where people live in one place rather than roaming around, mostly fed by agriculture rather than hunting and gathering, living increasingly in cities. Of course, it starts with a few cities only. And then, you know, now, a majority of the world's population is living in cities, and so on and so forth. So yeah, so you have this, it really tracks the modern world or the world we live in, as you say. Yeah, I think that's right.
"This is sort of a definition of world literature, it's literature that manages to speak to readers beyond its immediate context, either through translation in other countries and societies or through time by, you know, by surviving in time."
[00:05:15] Host: Now, I'm going to kind of veer just a little bit to a philosophical hypothetical question. If all that was left of humanity was literature, and we're looking more at stories of fiction, poems, you know, not necessarily historical nonfiction accounts, do you think there would be a clear understanding of human nature and our relationship to our planet?
[00:05:46] Puchner: Yeah, I, you know, because when I started to work on this anthology, I thought this is a kind of the one text I'm going to take to a desert island, which is a similar idea. And I love these kinds of speculations. My last book called Culture, the Story of Us, ends with time capsules, especially sort of mid-century when humans started to shoot time capsules out into space and packed a bunch of texts and other artifacts into them. I find that fascinating.
[00:05:59] Host: The Voyager.
[00:06:02] Puchner: The Voyager, Apollo 11, they left something behind Voyager. But also during the World Fair in Queens, they, you know, they sunk a time capsule into the ground. Yeah, there are a bunch of them. So I love that. And I think it really focuses the mind on what culture is, that it is sort of something that we pass on to the next generation. So I love that. To answer your question, I think we would learn a lot from it. Now, you know, literature is not a bird's eye view, objective, scientific, historical account of how humans live. It's a more, you know, from the ground. But I think there is something, especially about the literature that survives, that makes it resonate with all kinds of different readers. This is sort of a definition of world literature, it's literature that manages to speak to readers beyond its immediate context, either through translation in other countries and societies or through time by, you know, by surviving in time. So I think you would learn a lot because literature always is sort of grounded in the lived experience of writers, whether they live in cities or not.
So I would think that you would actually get a kind of fascinating record, not just of the, you know, circumstances in which different societies lived, the technologies available, the political systems, but also how it subjectively felt to be alive at these times. However, I think with literature, this is true of all artifacts that survive and that everyone who stumbles upon a time capsule knows is that you have to sort of learn how to interpret it. These things don't speak for themselves. So you have to sort of pay attention to them. And I think that's maybe a segue to the question of climate change, because I started to pay attention to nature, representation of nature and climate change, even though, of course, our modern understanding of climate change didn't exist back then. But I brought it to those texts. And suddenly they started to speak to that. So I think you can do that with any interest. If you're interested in how, you know, cities worked, you can look at different texts, you know, that are set in that world, commerce, politics, hunting, you know, how did people hunt? And you always have to sort of correct for these might be idealizing situations. All authors and societies have a certain interest and sort of maybe conception about what a representation of a hunt should be like. So these are not all taken at face value, but they are nevertheless, if you know how to interpret it, incredibly information rich.
"...I think a lot about all the things that had to happen for certain texts to survive hundreds or even thousands of years, especially since before our recent world of electronic storage, where the cost of storage suddenly goes to almost zero. For most of human history, storing, transmitting text was very costly."
[00:09:25] Host: Now, there's a lot that has been lost in our history. Contexts and historical accounts lost in fires, books with limited printings that maybe are just, you know, in some library stuffed away, or you mentioned in your book, limited translations of literature from other countries and cultures. So there are gaps in the literary tracking of our history.
[00:09:51] Puchner: Absolutely. And that's something that I think a lot about all the things that had to happen for certain texts to survive hundreds or even thousands of years, especially since before our recent world of electronic storage, where the cost of storage suddenly goes to almost zero. For most of human history, storing, transmitting text was very costly. If you have to copy a text by hand, you really have, you have a very hard choice. You only copy texts that still feels important to you. And if, you know, if you skip one generation, maybe that's okay. But after a couple of generations, you have to preserve them in libraries. And so yes, it's this Darwinian struggle always about survival of these texts. And you know, you can think about what is it about certain texts that makes them survive and have some thoughts about it. And I already mentioned that they have to somehow have to speak to people across time and space. But it's also often accidents. It's, as you say, libraries that burn down and texts survive by accident on the flip side of a different text or, you know, in during up to the Middle Ages, writing on parchment, people would scratch away a text because the material was expensive and then write across it. And then you can still sometimes see the text underneath it, Palimpsest is the name for that. So there are various accidents or stumbling upon some kind of time capsule.
"It was because of the volcano that buries this provincial Roman town under a heap of ash and kills everyone. It's terrible. It's a terrible destructive force, but it also preserves. And it's only thanks to that destructive moment that we have this incredible time capsule of the Roman Empire."
Again, this is something I thought a lot about in this book culture. And so I talked, for example, about Pompeii, where this is something about these time capsules that has fascinated me, that, you know, sometimes they're created deliberately as the ones we mentioned a moment ago, but often they're actually a product of sort of destruction and Pompeii is the best thing. It was because of the volcano that buries this provincial Roman town under a heap of ash and kills everyone. It's terrible. It's a terrible destructive force, but it also preserves. And it's only thanks to that destructive moment that we have this incredible time capsule of the Roman Empire. And this is why we historians actually speak of the Pompeii distortion or Pompeii effect, because we know so much more about Pompeii in the Roman Empire than any other place. That probably weirdly skews our conception or our knowledge of it. We're constantly extrapolating from that one random time capsule.
[00:12:36] Host: That connects perfectly to where we're going to go in your book. You're talking about these accidents that happened that preserve text. One of the things I love about your book is that you track the history of humanity's relationship with the planet through literature, but you parallel it with the history of literature itself and the ecological impact of the written word, the printed page, the digital file. And you start with the oldest piece of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was preserved because of a fire. If that fire hadn't have happened, we may not have this story.
[00:13:16] Puchner: Absolutely. So, yeah, so the Epic of Gilgamesh is so fascinating. It's one of the first, it's really the first oldest longer surviving text in the world written on clay tablets. This is in the first full written form of full writing in the cuneiform writing, Mesopotamian cuneiform writing. It started sort of as small hymns and then became a more elaborate text. And then it was, you know, survived, started to become very culturally important. As mentioned before, we see the rise of cities, and that means city-states, and then some of these city-states become territorial empires. And this clearly happened with these Mesopotamian cities because little fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh were found all over the Near East. So you know that this was sort of the soft power, you know, of the Mesopotamians. And so it expanded and was very culturally significant, but then it kind of disappeared because it was never transliterated into more modern forms of writing. So it remained tied to cuneiform, and so it sort of was forgotten.
No one even knew that it existed for almost 2,000 years until in the 19th century, a British sort of amateur, sort of a hobby explorer started digging near Nineveh, because it's mentioned in the Bible, and discovered the library of a Neo-Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, and then figured the story you're alluding to is that Ashurbanipal had this library where he collected these clay tablets, and that this library at some point burned down. But because the cuneiform writing was making little incisions onto moist clay, that these clay tablets weren't destroyed in the fire, but rather were hardened, it was like a kiln, you know, they were burnt hard in that way, and because of the dry desert kind of climate in Nineveh, today's Mosul, they survived. And then, though, no one knew how to read this script because it had been disused for so long. And then there's a second story, took several decades in the British library about how to decipher it. It's a fascinating story and an unlikely story of complete disappearance and then chance discovery.
"...from a kind of environmental perspective, it's interesting how much the epic thinks about the distinction between the wilderness, where you hunt animals to live off, where wildlings live, and the city, which is protected by the city wall, and where people don't drink water, but processed drink, in this case, barley-based beer, where they eat bread, another product of this agricultural revolution that's made city living possible."
[00:15:56] Host: Let's talk about the story itself, and give us just a little understanding of this relationship between King Gilgamesh and his counterpart Enkidu.
[00:16:07] Puchner: Yeah, so it's a story of a king, the king of a city, a state of Uruk, where, according to tradition, writing was invented. So it's a city-state, and, you know, the first longer piece of literature, very much closely tied with the city. It describes the epic, starts with a description of the city, and a very proud, look at these amazing temples, and the wall, the city wall, and all these features. It's very kind of an excited text, and it ends with the same description. So the epic is sort of framed. Wow, this is such a cool new thing we have going here. We've got a city, you have never seen anything like that. And Gilgamesh is sort of the product or the preserver of the city, is described as the one who's rebuilt the city wall, who's taking care of the city, very much identified with the city. But there's a problem with the king, too, because he's a terrible king. So the gods, observing this, say to themselves, we need to reign in this king, and the plan they devise is to give him a kind of sidekick, or like, first, he's an adversary. So this is someone who, you know, the gods create this being, Enkidu, and plop him down in the wilderness. And that's where, initially, this being lives with the animals, drinks with the animals, lives as an animal. But then it starts to help the other animals escape traps from the city. And so you see immediately here, the city is living off the hinterlands, they're going into the hinterland to hunt and trap animals and hunt animals, and this new being here is interfering with that. So the city sort of figures out, there is this weird wildling, you know, living there, we need to do something about him.
So what they do is they sent a woman to literally seduce him. And that happens. And after that, he's rejected by the other animals, and in some sense, doesn't have another choice but move into the city. And then Enkidu becomes a civilized first, Gilgamesh wants to battle him, because this is what he does with anyone, he wants to do battle and maybe kill him, this is part of why he's a terrible king. So they battle, but then somehow they're equally matched. And then they suddenly become friends. And then, you know, then it becomes sort of a, for a while, the epic becomes a buddy movie, and they go off on adventures together. But it becomes a very close, intimate, you know, intense friendship. So from a kind of environmental perspective, it's interesting how much the epic thinks about the distinction between the wilderness, where you hunt animals to live off, where wildlings live, and the city, which is protected by the city wall, and where people don't drink water, but processed drink, in this case, barley-based beer, where they eat bread, another product of this agricultural revolution that's made city living possible. And so, all of this is described. So now Enkidu, drinks beer, eats bread, becomes– So those are the technological advancements of the time.
[00:19:46] Host: Like, the pleasures of technology, Enkidu is slowly becoming a part of it.
[00:19:52] Puchner: And becomes a complete convert to, yeah.
[00:19:56] Host: As the story progresses, they go into the woods and have to kill this forest spirit. Humbaba, yeah. Humbaba. And they start cutting down trees. And Enkidu, like, becomes this, like you mentioned, a full convert, where the world is for him to take, as opposed to he is a part of the world, and he is one with the world and the animals in the forest.
[00:20:28] Puchner: Yeah, exactly. I think you described it very nicely. When he and King Gilgamesh go out to kill the forest monster, the guardian of the forest, Gilgamesh has these dreams. And they're kind of ominous dreams because it takes them several days. They have to go very far because, in fact, it registers the fact that because of urban buildup, there's been widespread deforestation. So that's one of the ways in which the epic registers sort of environmental change here, in this case, deforestation because of city building. So they have to go pretty far. And so they spend various nights. Gilgamesh has these three ominous dreams that seems, oh, no, something terrible is going to happen. Maybe we should turn around. And then he tells—that's how close this friendship is—he tells his dreams to Enkidu. But Enkidu comes up with these incredibly far-fetched interpretations. No, no, no, what seems to you like a terribly ominous dream just means something completely different. Everything is fine. Let's go on and kill the forest monster. And so, yeah, that's sort of where I feel like he is a kind of convert and egging on Gilgamesh and really making him kill that forest monster so that they can bring back timber to further expand the city.
[00:21:53] Host: Is there an element of this being a cautionary tale against the basically reaping of the land for your benefit? Or is the story more a celebration of that urban living?
[00:22:09] Puchner: I mean, in some sense, I think you articulate that question or those two options so well. And in some sense, at first blush, it's clearly the former. It's a celebration. Oh, the great King Gilgamesh is gonna build the city. And everyone, every reader knows we all depend on timber. We all live in the city. So this is what a king is supposed to do. But here is the thing, and that's where I think great literature isn't just a simple propaganda piece for timber exploitation, but is a much more nuanced sort of three-dimensional complex work, because you don't have to even read the text against the grain to kind of see how much Enkidu is egging on Gilgamesh, to see that they are killing this forest monster that has done nothing to them. And then also to see that maybe this is still part of this Gilgamesh arrogance. Remember, this is a story about a king who is out of control, because when they come home, Gilgamesh is even more full of himself. And a city goddess, in fact, offers herself as a companion to Gilgamesh, but he rejects her. And so he even, in some sense, is arrogant in that way. And that's when the gods start to think about, okay, this is getting too much. We have to punish this guy. Even though we created this companion for him, that still is not working. And so then I suppose because they feel like they can't kill Gilgamesh himself, they decide to punish him by killing his companion, Enkidu. And in fact, Gilgamesh becomes so grief-stricken, he literally goes out of his mind. He doesn't believe for the longest time that his friend is really dead. So that whole sequence is a story of hubris, of arrogance, of out-of-control violence. So yeah, it— .
[00:24:30] Host: And consumption, too. Taking in, consumption.
[00:24:31] Puchner: And taking in, consumption. And so you don't have to do very much to say, well, maybe this is a cautionary tale here.
"...maybe for a lot of readers, they will still read it as a celebration of the city. And maybe there's something bad that Gilgamesh did, but now a chastened Gilgamesh probably still needs to go out on logging expeditions. But what's fascinating is that before the time of our modern form of climate change, there is something about deforestation, and logging, and bringing this back, and city building, and arrogance, and wilderness, and the city. And these elements are kind of arranged in a fascinating, kind of complex way."
[00:24:42] Host: And he ends his life. Well, the last part is him kind of returning to the forest himself and becoming that wild man.
[00:24:52] Puchner: In some sense, yes. He starts to roam, because he's sort of out of his mind, he starts to roam the world from one end to the other. He's looking for eternal life. He is also coming to terms—I mean, that's another reason why this epic became so rightly famous, because it's grappling with mortality in that way. And so he's looking for eternal life, doesn't find it, and at some point at the end sort of returns, chastens to the city. But then the epic does end on this proud note, this is our great city of Uruk. So it's really sort of balanced on a knife's edge, or you could say maybe for a lot of readers, they will still read it as a celebration of the city. And maybe there's something bad that Gilgamesh did, but now a chastened Gilgamesh probably still needs to go out on logging expeditions. But what's fascinating is that before the time of our modern form of climate change, there is something about deforestation, and logging, and bringing this back, and city building, and arrogance, and wilderness, and the city. And these elements are kind of arranged in a fascinating, kind of complex way.
"...there's one anthropologist who hypothesizes that these famous city walls that Gilgamesh built weren't only to keep the wildlings and wild animals out of the city. It was also to sort of keep people from leaving the city, sort of to trap your labor force, even though they might feel that they ate better and were much freer in the countryside."
[00:26:16] Host: But there's also parallels that are fairly clear to colonization. The way how colonization treated native populations who were more connected to the Earth, more symbiotic, like Enkidu was before he was brought in. And those native populations were either killed or reformed, like Enkidu.
[00:26:42] Puchner: Yeah, I think you could say that, yeah. So that, you know, it's true. It's sort of an expanding empire, a Mesopotamian empire, and it imposes a sedentary, urban, agriculture-based form of living. And it's sort of the beginning of that. But then you're absolutely right. You could say from then on, there is, and there is in Mesopotamia, this back and forth between more nomadic, pastoralists people, and then these few city dwellers. And there's been fascinating research in the last couple of decades about actually, while there were lots of conveniences, there were actually also really significant drawbacks, especially in the beginning, when agriculture wasn't fully developed, so to speak. The diets became much worse. They're much more—
[00:27:28] Host: Monoculture.
[00:27:30] Puchner: Monocultural. People, you know, when harvests failed, people had to sort of drift back into a nomadic lifestyle. There's even one, I think it's a little bit polemical, but there's one anthropologist who hypothesizes that these famous city walls that Gilgamesh built weren't only to keep the wildlings and wild animals out of the city. It was also to sort of keep people from leaving the city, sort of to trap your labor force, even though they might feel that they ate better and were much freer in the countryside. Now, one also has to kind of make sure that we are not romanticizing that life, but you're right that it's, you could say, and it's interesting if we take that to be a mode of colonialism, then, you know, because of modern colonial empire tend to think of colonialism as primarily a question of sort of race, that that's clearly not the case here. But it's more like the imposition of a certain mode of living, in this case, urban, agricultural, and so on and so forth onto a nomadic pastoralist lifestyle, yeah.
"If very few people can read, then, you know, reading and writing is a very specialized skill. It actually didn't start with literature. It started with more sort of like accounting, recording, economic transactions, bureaucratic, diplomatic letters between city states and so on and so forth. Many kings didn't know how to do it. They had their specialized scribes for that."
[00:29:08] Host: And we can also look at how we're all walled into our connection to our technologies at this point, that we can't live without them, that we are freer because of them. Yeah. There's another element, civilization, or this sedentary lifestyle, city building also plays a role or played a role in accessibility to literature, who is allowed to read, and who is allowed to write the story, which also kind of taints how our history has been written and received.
[00:29:47] Puchner: Absolutely. Who is allowed or who has access? I mean, these earliest scripts, the cuneiforms, are very complicated scripts, often using hundreds of signs. It's very hard to learn. There are very few people who bother to do it. At first, it even probably was a secret that was sort of passed down from within families. But it was also, it's a skill, very specialized skill that only had very limited demand. If very few people can read, then, you know, reading and writing is a very specialized skill. It actually didn't start with literature. It started with more sort of like accounting, recording, economic transactions, bureaucratic, diplomatic letters between city states and so on and so forth. Many kings didn't know how to do it. They had their specialized scribes for that. And so it's at first very confined to a small group of people, you know, professionals, and slowly expands and tied to the court. And then throughout a lot of the ancient world, they're sort of centers of writing, often the courts and temples. And, you know, sometimes they're the same, sometimes not, because soon religion sort of gets his hands on writing. And then we have all these sacred texts. And then we have a lot of writing in temples. So that happens in Mesopotamia. It happens in Egypt, you know, later in Greece and in China and in different places. So, yeah, for the longest time, very restrictive in terms of access. And over very long periods of time, hundreds of years, thousands of years, does it slowly sort of trickle down and you have wider readership.
It’s something that I describe and studied in a book called The Written World. And you have, as writing becomes a little bit more democratic, drawing larger populations into its orbit, you also have then different stories that get told for different audiences and by different writers. One example that I often think of is The Thousand and One Nights. You know, it's this collection of stories. And the stories themselves come from all over the place, from a far ways, India and Greece. So it's this sort of, it's this collection. And since I myself collect stories in the anthologies, I've always been sort of interested in these early story collections. But they're very different from like the Epic of Gilgamesh or early sacred writings. There are stories that are often set among merchants, a kind of merchant class in the Arabic world, in Baghdad. Baghdad is sort of the geographic center of this collection. They're often sort of fantastic tales. Some are more literary, some are more popular. So they're different styles.
"There are actually stories that it was during a war that the emerging Arab empire took Chinese prisoners of war and realized some of them possessed the secret of paper writing and paper making, and they somehow, probably not through very nice means, convinced them to give up that secret. There's no reason to believe that that story is true, but it registers that it was seen as an incredible technology that China didn't want to share with the rest of the world."
But suddenly, the kind of literature that hitherto had just been told orally now makes it into writing. And there are a couple of reasons for that. We now have alphabetic writing that's easier to read and write. We have also new writing materials, no longer these cuneiform tablets, but we have paper, which is a fascinating technology. Since you mentioned technology, I think an understudied technology that starts in China and then makes its way to the Arabic world. There are actually stories that it was during a war that the emerging Arab empire took Chinese prisoners of war and realized some of them possessed the secret of paper writing and paper making, and they somehow, probably not through very nice means, convinced them to give up that secret. There's no reason to believe that that story is true, but it registers that it was seen as an incredible technology that China didn't want to share with the rest of the world. But ultimately, you can't, as we know from our own world, you can keep technology secret for only so long. And so, Baghdad becomes a center of paper making. And so, in some sense, this new technology lowers the cost and is basically the technology behind what becomes the golden age of Arabic letters. The Thousand and One Nights is just one of many examples of that. Yeah.
"...as it's told in the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible, and partly as it's told in the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's a story of sin and punishment. And the climate discourse, of course, very much is a very moralizing discourse. And, you know, we've brought it upon ourselves, we have sinned, we now need to change our ways."
[00:34:13] Host: So, we're going to look at, there's another element of the Epic of Gilgamesh. There's the story of the Great Flood that, you know, for most people who have heard of the Epic of Gilgamesh, that's going to be something that kind of pops into their mind. And this Great Flood also appears in the Bible, as a lot of us know, but it also appears in the Mayan epic Popol Vuh, which I think is fascinating that these three stories have an element of warning, of tragedy that awaits if we anger the gods, or God, or if we don't live up to the potential of what we are supposed to be as humanity. And you could kind of draw connections to dystopian stories of the climate-led extinction that we have in our current day.
[00:35:08] Puchner: It's certainly clear in the story of the, you know, the biblical story of the Flood. That was one of the wow effects when, in the late 19th century, people suddenly, finally deciphered the Epic of Gilgamesh, and they realized, wow, there's the biblical story of the Flood in this text that's much older. So, then it became clear, and this was a time when more and more people were finally studying the Bible as a historical artifact, meaning that it was written and assembled from different sources over the period of many hundreds of years. Part of it was written in Babylonian exile, some of it was written later, elements of it earlier. But this was sort of, for the, you know, scholars knew this by the late 19th century, but sort of the general public, some knew it and some didn't, but suddenly there's the biblical story, and it's basically an identical story is from this older text.
So, it's clear that, yeah, the story of the Flood, this particular story of the Flood circulated around the Near East and therefore found its way into the Hebrew Bible that then became the Old Testament. And because it's in that text, a lot of later texts drawing in part on the Hebrew Bible, including the Quran, also have the story of the Flood. Now, there are different Flood and catastrophic stories in many other traditions, you can find this in China and so on and so forth, in the Popul Vuh, but this is, but what's cool about the story of the Flood is that it's like a meme, it's like a package, it's a story that moves into these different texts. And because then both the Hebrew Bible and the Quran, and then the Christian Old and New Testament become these world texts, this particular story of the Flood really moves around the world and becomes one of the lenses through which we now look at climate catastrophes. And it's particularly tempting to do so because it's, as it's told in the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible, and partly as it's told in the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's a story of sin and punishment. And the climate discourse, of course, very much is a very moralizing discourse. And, you know, we've brought it upon ourselves, we have sinned, we now need to change our ways. And so there is this very–
[00:38:23] Host: Because of the greed and the arrogance that we are led to this place.
[00:38:30] Puchner: Exactly, exactly. Now, you know, it's good to remember that in the Hebrew Bible and in the Old Testament, it's mostly because people no longer worship their one God, which is a little different. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's a little different still, because there, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's sort of an interpolated tale. It's something that King Gilgamesh hears during the period when he's looking for eternal life. So it's sort of the story within the story. It's sort of a story of sin and punishment in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but not as extreme, not as stark as in the Old Testament, because in the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's more like the humans have become too noisy and too numerous. And the gods, some of the gods get annoyed. And so they decide, you know, we need to population control these humans, and so we'll send the flood. And then there are some descendant and some help the Noah character survive. So various forms of annoyance created by humans. But I like the Epic of Gilgamesh just because it's not that full-blown, you have sinned. Yeah. And it's maybe more appropriate if we want to apply it to our own situation, because it's not so much that we've sinned against God, but we have become very numerous and very noisy and a general nuisance. And I think that's easier to translate into a kind of climate change discourse, perhaps.
[00:39:33] Host: You are not a big fan of apocalyptic climate stories. Is that correct?
[00:39:40] Puchner: That is correct. And I'm glad you're saying this, because yes, that is my other caveat about using the story of the Flood for climate change. And, you know, I'm not the only one who's been saying that. I think it's become clear in the last, I don't know, maybe two years or maybe a little longer, that climate, certain form of climate activism, I think in retrospect, put too much currency on apocalyptic stories. And I'm thinking of, you know, the last generation. This idea is if not now, if not this, that everything is going to go to hell. And I think that is a story that worked for a while. It was a kind of scare tactic. It galvanized groups of people, activists, but it also, I think, alienated a lot of people. Alienated and it made it seem a little implausible. It was an exaggeration. And because it came with these extreme moral overtones of sin and punishment. And so I think the climate movement there sort of overplayed his hand or put too much money on that one story type. And also because even within the climate, and I know some people in the climate movement, and I always have this kind of love-hate relationship to them, there were also negative effects of that story because they became just incredibly despondent. And there's so much depression among people in the climate movement. And this idea of helplessness and that it's too late and that nothing can be done, that this catastrophe is coming and that there will be nothing left. And so I would say both within the climate movement and without that kind of activist. I mean, the climate movement by now is a very broad umbrella, but a certain kind of hardcore activist climate movement. And without, I think, that apocalyptic story, that kind of flood story, if you will, I think is no longer the best story for constructive interventions, for having a, I think it's clear that it's happening. It's unclear what we should do about it.
There are many options, many trade-offs. And it's very important to have a very open conversation about these trade-offs. Last generation, the apocalyptic story is not about trade-offs. It's about sin and punishment and hands up. And so, yeah, and this is why I, since I study storytelling and think a lot about how to apply different stories to different situations. So how can you re-describe our situation from the perspective of different stories? I think it's very important to not be too stuck on that one story type and think of there are many other ways of describing our situation. And for organizing our thinking about this, engineers talk about wicked problems. I think it's a wicked problem where there isn't a simple solution, where you need many different disciplines to come together.
"...it can't be a matter of saying, okay, we'll give up on technology, we will become like Enkidu who lives with the animals. That's a back projection, that's the nostalgia, that's not the way. But we also see that there's a history here of technology having terrible byproducts or side effects of various kinds on the climate, but also on iPhones and depression and anxiety, especially among teenagers."
[00:42:52] Host: Yeah. We'll finish with this, kind of like looking at the cause and the solution in one kind of question. How do you think technology can play a role in telling stories of climate as it is the technological advancements that have impacted our climate? And we are all addicted and dependent on them. How can we find ways to use them to our advantage in preserving our world?
[00:43:25] Puchner: Yeah, I think that is exactly how I would phrase the task as well. And so, you know, it can't be a matter of saying, okay, we'll give up on technology, we will become like Enkidu who lives with the animals. That's a back projection, that's the nostalgia, that's not the way. But we also see that there's a history here of technology having terrible byproducts or side effects of various kinds on the climate, but also on iPhones and depression and anxiety, especially among teenagers. I mean, there are so many polarization algorithms. I mean, I think we can all think of many types of effects of technology.
Where I feel like this history of world literature sort of helps because you can look at earlier technologies, and you get a little bit taken out of your immediate context. Oh, should I, you know, should I go on a tech diet? Should I do one day without iPhones, but I can't really do it. And we get very quickly, very caught up in very particular kinds of choices that all seem sort of bad or hard to do, or we don't know how to do it. But if we try to look at our use of technology with a little bit of distance, and I think older texts can give us this distance, then we don't necessarily get solutions, but we get some historical distance, we get sort of taken out of our own context. And I feel like that's one of the things that literature can really do. It immerses you in a different time with different problems. But people also have problems with technology, whether it's forests, or clay tablets, or the wheel, or what have you. And that, in fact, in some sense, these 4,000 years of literature are sort of a record of humans grappling with this over and over again. So maybe we can learn something there. We can also, I think it is, it helps me certainly get out of the apocalyptic mindset, because the apocalyptic mindset says, this time it's different. This is really the big one. This is really the end. Now we are really going to hell. And you look at the history of literature, you can see people thinking that over and over again. So also from that, it gives you a little bit of an emotional distance, and in some sense, saves you from falling down that cliff.
[00:46:15] Host: We'd like to thank Martin Puchner. If you'd like to continue the conversation, visit chapman.edu/wilkinson to learn more. To access recommended books from our guests for further learning, and for more socially conscious content, visit us at pastforward.org, or follow us at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.
