Margaret Atwood

speaker

143 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2025 last heard 9 Mar

Margaret Atwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism · 9 May 2025 podcast

You saved newspaper. You saved tinfoil. You saved all of those things up. And then they had war salvage drives, and you donated all of those things. You saved up your clothes. You donated them to Europe, to people that didn't have clothes. You never threw things out.

And then in came the consumer society, and that is pretty much driven, too, because everything is joined at the hip with the energy force driving that civilization. And if you want to read about that, you can get a book called Art and Energy by Barry Lord. So every energy source produces a culture which is connected to that energy source.

And what you saw between the 19th and the 20th centuries was the shift from coal a very worker-intensive form of energy, gave us labor unions, gave us Karl Marx, thanks a lot, gave us this emphasis on jobs. So controlling the means of production was supposed to solve everything. I can tell you that it does not.

When I was in Poland, before the Iron Curtain came down, they had a big pile of overshoes. Because the workers controlled the means of production and they were producing overshoes, but nobody wanted to buy them. Uh-oh. So yeah, just making things doesn't necessarily work in and of itself. So you had coal shipped over to oil. Oil is cheap. It's cheap to produce.

It doesn't take a lot of workers compared to coal. And suddenly you had all of this cheap energy. And not only that, there are all these other things you could make out of it. So middle of the 1950s, in came nylon, those horrible nylon shirts, never mind. We don't have them anymore, they really stank. But new stuff, hula hoops, plastic things, and they were really cheap.

So a metal pail, a plastic pail, which are you gonna have? How many metal pails have you got?

Yeah, and no metal pails, right? None. Plastic pails are cheap. So cheap stuff, and therefore you had to have, to keep all the wheels turning, you had to have people wanting to buy stuff. And you got the throwaway economy, and you got a lot of plastic, and that's the big problem that we're dealing with now, or one of the big problems. Where is it all going?

Well, it's going into your bloodstream ultimately. going into the ocean, it's going into the water, it's going into the food, a lot of microplastic.

Oh, yeah. I think so. This largesse, you know, just completely. Think of all the food that is thrown away every day on the North American continent. That would never, ever, ever have happened in times of scarcity. You would not do that.

Exactly. They are looking into happiness these days. They're looking into neurological happiness and they're looking into social happiness. One thing that they're thinking these days is that happiness and unhappiness are very tied to your perception of what other people have. And in a material world in which you're valued according to the stuff you've got, being poor isn't just being poor.

Being poor is being undervalued and treated as negligible. The more equal people are from the point of view of what they've got, the happier they are likely to be. So it's not a question of what you've got, it's a question of whether what you've got is considered negligible, or whether what you've got is considered exceptional.

Yeah, well, you can't do it every day, but you might take time off now and again. So back in the days when people did these things, everybody said grace before a meal. Grace is of different kinds, but basically it was an acknowledgement that you were lucky to be eating grace. There was an old Scottish grace that said, let me see, what is it?

Some have meat and cannot eat, some something and lack it, but we have meat and we can eat, and so the Lord be thanked. Like that. And then they got silly about it and said things like, good drink, good meat, good God, let's eat. So that was a normal thing that people did in their life at one time. It used to be a daily but often hypocritical thing that people did.

However, any form of social convention is going to be hypocritical at times. And just so we realize how lucky we are. Wouldn't it be awful if we always had to tell the truth on social occasions?

Oh, I'm so glad you're here having dinner with us. When are they leaving?

Things are going to get nastier. We can afford to be neighborly and tolerant when there's basically enough to go around. When that starts diminishing, then people get angry and defensive. So if you go to Ireland, there's a time when people start building defensive towers. And that can be keyed pretty closely to a climate change that took place then. Things got wetter.

And when things got wetter, you knew that the food supply was going to be diminishing and people were going to be becoming more territorial and trying to protect that which they had. That is one theory. So yeah, if you have enough for three squares a day, are you going to go out and steal food? yourself. I'm just asking you, Ezra.

No, probably not, because you don't need it. You don't need to take the risk for that. But when you're starving, it's a different story. So sure, as I said, one of the effects of the climate crisis is going to be diminishing harvests. And another effect is going to be the moving around of invasive species and destructive plant diseases.

Oh, boy.

I think there's no doubt about that. You know, when the French Revolution started, it was very hot.

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