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Iconography of Optimism

(Picture: nyt.com)

(Picture: Lukasz Kobus)

(Picture: International Rice Research Institute)

(12.10.2023) It would be interesting to conduct an interview with Bill Gates, and on the subject of optimism. This would include a section on the iconography of optimism, and perhaps he would say that, yes, that he would know that people would see him as the smiley kind of optimist. And I would ask him about the precise kind of optimism that he did display in his book on the subject of how to avoid climate disaster. And so on. But this is not an interview; this is only about a couple of observations as to the iconography of optimism, in the framework of my iconography of sustainability series, respectively my Art History of Sustainability.

1) What Kind of Optimism?

At one point in his book (which had mixed reviews in Germany) Bill Gates says that what he had just said was not »pie-in-the-sky optimism« (p. 20). Which is an interesting metaphor in itself, as it is an indication that Bill Gates is aware of people seeing him as an optimist (and perhaps as an all-too naive one). As an optimist that, apparently, he also wants to be, but to be fair, as someone who has faith in technical solutions, knowing that technology is not the answer to everything (see the chapter on politics). This kind of optimism does perhaps, but this is not what I am going to discuss here, underestimate the optimism of other people, people having an interest of not to decarbonize the economy. Since it does generally seem to me that in ›Saving-the-Planet-literature‹ it does generally get underestimated that there are organized interests of not changing the way of the economy and society, since these interests would simply loose in the short term (and might not to be willing to accept that they, or future generations would also benefit from changing the way of the economy and society).

But now I have put Bill Gates into a genre of literature, and what is this, ›Saving-the-Planet-literature‹?

2) ›Saving-the-Planet-Literature‹

Our public library, from time to time, is selling books cheaply, books that probably only few people had wanted to borrow, or books that seem already outdated and so on. Recently there was seemingly a whole bookshelf of literature for sale, literature which I have labelled as ›Saving-the-Planet-literature‹ (it included literature on how to live according to the principle of sustainability, books on how to save the planet and so on) and of course, to further study the iconography of sustainability, I have bought them all.

On this basis – and the stack of books included the book by Bill Gates – I have informed myself on how various authors deal with the subject of ›saving the planet‹. There are those authors, as Bill Gates, who seem to have faith in technical solutions, in the inventiveness of people; other authors have faith in enlisting hundreds or thousands of tips of how to live sustainably; and again other authors borrow from authorities (as for exampple Laozi) to recommend, or to convince people to follow a certain path (change yourself, then your house, then your neighborhood, your city, your country and finally the whole world). A path, as I already have said, which is perhaps underestimating the path of people not wanting to change the way of things (for example because it would mean to have less and less sophisticated technology, and because it would mean to eat less chocolate).

In contrast to these diverse optimists I find other authors who prefer to scare people. For example with attributing future deaths due to the consequences of climate change to the now living generations, and so on. I am not discussing these strategies here. It is only about having a very general and broad overview on these various positions.

3) Technological Solutions of Nature

And what I am doing here is in fact focussing on the imagery of ›Saving-the-planet-literature‹ (I might say also, and for once, that I seem to be the only one to do that, but I am showing here also why what I am doing and have been doing might be important). Optimists might tend to avoid rather the imagery of catastrophe, of disaster and of apocalypse (those who want to scare do use it). And if we look closely at how Bill Gates is using images in his book we find a couple of very interesting things:

– For example I find it very interesting to observe how someone who is probably an embodiment of having faith in technology shows himself to be fascinated by the ways nature does solve problems, by the ways humans can learn from how nature solves problems, and probably also by the ways nature can be helped by humans to help solve problems that have been caused by humans.

– My two examples, or better: the two examples that are to be found in Bill Gates’ book, are on the one hand the so-called «Scuba rice« (also called Deepwater rice), and mangroves, on the other hand (since mangroves do help to milden the consequences of floods).

– Showing oneself to be fascinated by »Scuba rice«, a rice that has the capacity to survive longer inundations, does also mean that Bill Gates is indeed not the ›pie-in-the-sky optimist‹ that many people might think him to be, since thinking of future floods does mean to see that more inundations might be to come, and thus the imagery of disaster comes in here, indirectly, also in the iconography of optimism (which is also the reason that I have chosen to show a picture above, of a farmer working with inundated rice, and standing in water).

– A literature aiming to scare, on the other hand, would be working with the imagery of flood, and less with images showing what there might be to do to – at least – adapt to climate change, respectively its consequences.