CZM Book Club: Cool Zone 2055: The Peace Department

Margaret from the future reports on the dinosaur creche in Finland.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media Dinah Wars, Dinah Wors, Dinah Wars. Hello,
Welcome to cool Zoned Media book Club, the only book
club about Dinah Wars, probably unless you started German book
Club to study cools owned media book clubs Dinah Wars,

(00:23):
which you could, except if you had a book club
about it, you probably find all the lot inconsistencies. But anyway,
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. And in case you hadn't
figured it out, this is a Dinah Wars episode of
Cool Zone Media book Club, which means this is an
episode from thirty years in the future. That's right. We

(00:43):
got exclusive access to podcasts from thirty years in the future,
including the one that we're about to run. So here
it is, Hello and welcome to cool Zone twenty fifty
five to Survive the Dino Wars, the show where we
cover all things World War three point five, all things

(01:06):
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 triceratops's 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 to's, we've got our most generous sponsor. That's right,

(01:28):
Dino Cadence, the world's premiere chain of dinosaur riding academies.
Every single one of our locations has passed our extensive
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(01:50):
that the dinosaurs are well trained and well cared for,
and the students like you receive a world class education.
Joined the war for human and dino liberation, Join the
war on climate change in fascism, Join the war against brutality,
Join the worldwide revolution. Tuition is free, but spots are limited.

(02:15):
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 Himero Aridius, the Mexican

(02:40):
poet and environmentalist, did say something similar, though he said,
there are centuries in which nothing happens, in years in
which centuries pass. It is very hard to believe that
we've only had six years with dinosaurs. World War IIE
feels like a lifetime ago, and the pre war years

(03:00):
before that unimaginably distant. We have always lived with dinosaurs.
It feels like when I access my old memories, which
forgive me I'm in my early seventies. I do so
more and more often. I struggle to understand what the
night sky sounded like without the cries of giant reptiles

(03:21):
setting down for bed. It is the terrible curse of
human history that most new technologies are turned first to war,
turn 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.

(03:44):
Our desire to kill our fellow humans has always brought
out our ingenuity. Of course, X vivogenesis and dinosaur de
extinction was developed during peacetime, but it was the dinos
Versus Zombies's armory that really got de extinction going at
any kind of scale, and today, like I promised last week,

(04:06):
I'm at one of the world's oldest and largest crushes,
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 Punelu, the ancient Finnish Land of the Dead.
There are three different facilities here, each with their own staff, headquarters,

(04:30):
and even social norms. There's the Center for the Eradication
of the March of Time aka the Research Department, which
d 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

(04:51):
the Cohabitation of Flora and Fauna aka the Peace Department.
The War Department is far and away the largest of
the three departments, receiving sixty percent of the grounds, seventy
percent of the personnel, and seventy four percent of the funding.
I understand why this is the case. I used to
be an activist journalist. Well, I used to be just

(05:14):
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 crocheers, war animal trainers, war doctors, war pilots,

(05:34):
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,

(05:59):
the reason as I am in Finland was because of
an invitation I got from an old friend who works
in the Peace Department. Doctor Schuart Lumpo, a Dutch Finn
I met in the twenty thirties 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

(06:21):
as part of the Bremen twelve. Maybe you remember the
Bremen twelve. 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 twelve were convicted of eco terrorism. Do you
remember when eco terrorism was seen as a bad thing.

(06:41):
Each of the Bremen twelve were prominent scientists and environmental engineers.
They released a paper in twenty twenty nine 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 con front
climate change. The paper came out the same day that

(07:03):
they bombed a Tesla factory under construction and 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 doctor Lampo, But do you know what else?
I was excited about the opportunity to spend my entire

(07:24):
life interweaving anti capitalist podcast content with advertising from whoever
pays us enough money. This podcast is brought to you
by the Council for calling your friends when you're feeling sad,
instead of assuming they don't want to hear from you.
The Council for calling your friends when you're feeling sad.
Instead of assuming that they don't want to hear from you,

(07:44):
would like to remind you that it's actually rude of
you to not call your friends when you're feeling sad,
because it's rude to assume what people want, and rude
of you to cut yourself off from the people who
care about you. So put down your doom scrolling phone
and pick up your hauling phone and call your friends today.

(08:06):
This podcast is brought to you by the only domesticated
Animals should be kept as pets Society, who 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 a struggle against global fascism, they
are not suited for living inside with us. Just because

(08:29):
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 up Bronto doesn't mean you should forget about horses

(09:00):
were back. It's strange to think back to the twenty
thirties and the early days of direct action against climate change,
so many movements rose and fell. If you look back
in the Cool Zone archives, you'll see the week of
coverage we gave to Besteele Day two. This time it's personal.

(09:23):
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 in their campaign for Irish unification and ecosocialism.
Those early days, those opening salvos, were full of some

(09:45):
of the bravest people to ever walk and defend the earth.
In the twenty forties, 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

(10:09):
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 doctor 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

(10:29):
been on this show before. In one episode from twenty
forty six, 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.

(10:51):
And now he works in the peace department in a
nameless research facility in cresh in an undisclosed location in Finland,
even though like me, he is years past retirement age.
When he heard I was in Finland for Dino Khan,
he reached out and here I am a lifetime ago, literally,

(11:12):
not even in this century. I went to Finland for
the first time. I was a teenager in the US,
and by strange circumstance, I was dating a Finnish girl.
I had fallen atop her while crowdsurfing to Blondie at
a festival in DC, 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

(11:34):
she signed her name with the a's and 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 sixteen 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

(11:55):
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

(12:17):
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 twenties. A festival
and conference invited me there because of my work writing
about anarchism and fiction. If I remember correctly, and my

(12:38):
ability to remember things correctly has become less and less
certain as time marches onward musta pispola. It was called,
I remember the mural they'd thrown up for a Finnish
anarchist wh'd been killed by the Israeli army in Palestine.
Back then, I stayed in a village somewhere outside of Thampiay,
with a house of green anarchists, and I spent some
time on one of the thousands of lakes that dotted

(12:59):
the country side. Some folks had built a sailboat entirely
from trash, the hall from old barrels, The deck was
woven from discarded fire hose. It was near midsummer and
the sun refused to set, and 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.

(13:22):
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,

(13:43):
even the I wonder if I can get away with
rambling about Finland and the nineties and oughts. 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 Finish winter that wasn't half so
cold as it would have been in my youth. I'm
not allowed to describe the unnamed facility in any detail,

(14:05):
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 sigh
up and I'm actually in the indigenous controlled regions of Siberia.

(14:27):
Who knows. So there was a sleigh, and 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,

(14:50):
occasionally throwing up a half hearted complaint that I could
walk just fine, which is half true. Doctor Schuward Lampo
met me hell 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 in that strange twenty
thirty style. He's got crow's feet for days. As as

(15:13):
long as I've known him, I gave him a hug
and he took me on a tour. But do you
know what else? I gave him? First pick at these
sweet sweet deals. This podcast is brought to you by
Simpy Steve's Soft Serve, the only ice cream brand that
sounds euphemistic but isn't. Simpy Steve's Soft Serve is collectively

(15:34):
owned by six people named Steve, only four of whom
had to change their names to Steve in order to
join the collective. They make the finest soft serve ice
cream on the planet, with all those viral flavors that
you love, like dust and rust, Nazi tears, and vanilla.
Simpy Steve's is entirely plant based except for the flavor

(15:56):
a lot of your enemies, so you can rest assured
that animal agriculture had nothing to do with your favorite
ice cream. Warning, consumption of blood of your enemy's ice
cream is considered cannibalism by at least six territories worldwide,
and the Council for the Investigation of War Crimes is
currently working on a report on that particular flicker. This
podcast is brought to you by the Read Octavia Butler Council.

(16:19):
Do you remember when in the year twenty sixteen, a
far right fake Christian ran for president under the slogan
make America a great Again? How about the Los Angeles
fires of twenty twenty five. Who could have predicted such
a thing? Well, the science fiction author Octavia Butler, That's who.
If you want to read the most eerily prescient science

(16:40):
fiction author of the twentieth century, then you want to
read Octavia Butler. Start with Parable of the Sewer and
then keep going until you spend half your time telling
everyone you know, God has change and we're back. Doctor

(17:12):
Lampo took me off to the far corner of the
large estate 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

(17:33):
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

(17:54):
Tyrannosaurus survive being shot with? But the War Department raises
dinosaurs from eggs 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

(18:17):
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 and 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

(18:41):
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

(19:03):
and clucking. The whole thing is heated to something like
eighty five degrees fahrenheit, I was told in Celsius. But
the older I get, the stranger of things. I picked
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

(19:23):
everything around me. What is it that you all do here,
I asked doctor Lampo. Every species in this pavilion, with
the exception of ourselves, as Homo sapiens, was considered extinct
by the year twenty forty five, he told me. I
looked around at the flowers and butterflies, and insects and birds.

(19:44):
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

(20:06):
of discussions in both academic and activist circles was around
the primissy 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

(20:29):
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 vuogenesis, we were working with a
dramatically shrinking pool of biodiversity. Our attempts to restore and

(20:51):
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

(21:13):
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.

(21:36):
Where did dinosaurs fit into this, I asked, Well, because
we want them to, Doctor Lompo 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

(21:57):
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

(22:21):
species breaks containment and becomes an invasive species elsewhere. That's
happened several times already, and it'll keep happening, doctor Lompo said,
with a cavalierness that shocked me. If we had discovered
this technology in the nineteen forties instead of the twenty forties,
I think it would be the foremost concern on any
of our minds. But it's simply not that way anymore.

(22:44):
The thing is, the world, without our help is dying. Rather,
it was killed. The Earth was killed fifty years ago,
and its death throes are long and arduous. We didn't
stop climate change. Left to its own devices, the Earth
will always find some sort of equilibrium. But it's quite

(23:07):
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

(23:27):
minor course correction. We are skating on the brink of
destruction even still, and it's only through Vishnu technology and
ex vivogenesis 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,

(23:48):
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

(24:09):
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 thoughts, and a global society that
combines the best parts of decentralization and federation is exactly

(24:30):
what we need to start to address climate change. Think
about this is a strange comparison, perhaps, but I grew
up in the nineteen nineties 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.

(24:50):
During the AIDS crisis, when gay men were essentially abandoned
to die by conservative society, no essentially killed on us
by medical neglect, some doctors and patients turned unorthodox means.
As new experimental drugs came online, people volunteered to test
them outside of accepted protocols. Because aides had more or

(25:12):
less one hundred percent 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

(25:36):
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.

(25:58):
You have to COMMITO agreed. We're trying things that would
have been unethical to try only fifty years ago, but
now it would be unethical to not try. The ecosystems
we are likely to be living in one hundred years
from now might look more like the ecosystems from sixty
five million years ago than they look like the ecosystem

(26:19):
of sixty five 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

(26:40):
to that position from a dinosaur skeptic who also works
at the Department of Peace. In the meantime, though, keep
fighting that mini boss bascism must be stopped, and we
will stop it together with or without the help of dinosaurs.
Margaret in twenty two, twenty five. Here, boy, what a

(27:02):
fun message from the future. It's really great to know
that I'm still around thirty years from now. Isn't that exciting?
I'm excited for it. But you know what else is
around soon or than thirty years from now, tomorrow If
you're listening to this today when it comes out, where
you're listening to it today in your own relative terms,

(27:22):
no matter what. But if you're listening to this on Sunday,
the day comes out March second, then tomorrow March third,
twenty twenty five, 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

(27:44):
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 Kine series, and even the first two books in
the Daniel Kaine series, because we're even going to offer

(28:05):
all three of the books as one of the rewards,
and there's gonna be audio books, and there's gonna be
tattoo flash maybe if we reach our stretch goals, and
you know, it's gonna be fun. It's really funny to
be like, it's gonna 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

(28:26):
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 grief 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.

(28:53):
You'll like it or you wonte Either way, I'll be
back next week. There're more book Club It Could Happen
Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more
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com or check us out on the Iheard Radio app,
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find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at

(29:14):
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.