Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
EPA plans to boost EV sales tenfold by 2032 (NYT)
Tesla cuts US prices for fifth time since January (RT)
San Francisco has a new official city bird (SFC)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
All-in-one investment platform Altruist raised a $112M Series D led by Insight Partners (VCN)
Lithium extraction startup EnergyX will raise a $50M Series B led by General Motors (RT)
Hometree, a nearly seven-year-old, London-based residential energy services company, has raised $46 million in Series B funding led by 2150 and Energy Impact Partners. (HT)
AMSilk, a 15-year-old German company that uses vegan silk proteins to create fully biodegradable and microplastic-free silk materials, raised a $27.3 million Series C extension round led by previous investor Anthos. (V)
EcoSoul Home, a two-year-old, Bellevue, Wa.-based maker of plant-based home essentials products (think plates, forks, cups trash bags), has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Accel, with participation from Singh Capital Partners. More here.
Sustainable materials science company Kintra Fibers raised an $8M Series A led by H&M Group (VCN)
GaeaStar, a 10-month-old San Francisco and Berlin-based technology company creating ultra-thin clay containers to break consumers' dependency on single-use plastic, says it has raised $6.5 million in seed funding. Its backer include Morningside Technology Ventures (TS)
Aqua Cultured Foods, a two-year-old Chicago startup that is creating whole-muscle cut seafood alternatives, including calamari, shrimp, scallops, and filets of tuna and whitefish, raised a $5.5 million seed round led by Stray Dog Capital (TC)
Carbonwave, a Puerto Rican startup that aims to transform sargassum seaweed into biomaterials that can replace petroleum products, raised a $5 million round led by Mirova (F)
Macro Oceans, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based biotech startup that says it's transforming seaweed into low-carbon chemicals, has raised $5 million in seed financing. The round was co-led by Refactor Capital, Lowercarbon Capital, and McKinley Capital. (MO)
Zero Cow Factory, a two-year-old Indian startup that is focused on producing animal-free dairy proteins, raised a $4 million seed round. Investors in the deal included Green Frontier Capital (GQ)
Alga Biosciences, a two-year-old San Francisco startup that is trying to reduce methane emissions from cattle burps, raised a $4 million round led by Collaborative Fund (TC)
Haven Energy, an 11-month-old two-sided home energy marketplace that was founded by the founders of the direct-to-consumer mattress company Casper, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding. Lerer Hippeau and Giant Ventures co-led the round (TC)
TablePointer, a 2.5-month-old, Singapore-based SaaS startup that's focused on helping small and medium-size commercial facilities to optimize their energy efficiency, has raised $3 million in seed funding co-led by Wavemaker Partners, AgFunder and Engie. AgFunder News has more here.
Green Theory
Speak Softly and Carry a Big Bag
Sticks, spears, and other such objects have been popular for millennia. Just ask US President Theodore Roosevelt, who mumbled, “Speak softly, and carry a big stick, and you will go far,” in 1901. Though used to describe foreign policy, this motto (and its enduring popularity) echoes a fixation with sticks, which could be blinding technologists, storytellers, and society at large, from a very different form of innovation, nevertheless integral to human technological evolution: the carrier bag.
In her 1986 essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, award-winning science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin extends Elizabeth Fisher’s 1975 Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution. Fisher posited that the first human tools were likely carrier bags and baskets, for gathering food, rather than hunting weapons. Le Guin explains how the power and prominence of stories about violence, weapons, and domination (stick/spear-focused narratives) bias our perception of what makes a good story, and thereby what it means to be human. By ignoring and downplaying the importance of technologies that help us slowly collect and share, rather than project and dare, the development of more weapons (and more stories about big sticks) continues. In order to instead expand the common concept of technology to include more carrier bags, we may need a broader concept of good storytelling, too.
How the spear sailed past the carrier bag
If the carrier bag were so important, why was the mammoth hunt painted on cave walls (and in these weird textbook drawings)? Le Guin illuminates: “It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats....” The oat gatherer’s tale isn’t typically one of high drama. Clearly, Ool & the gnat bites aren’t the writing that won Le Guin back-to-back Hugo Awards.
She continues, “No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood spouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.” The mammoth story certainly contains more conflict than the oat one—also a clear hero, with a swift, direct, violent action to win the day, and bring resolution.
Still, Le Guin thinks reducing stories down to conflict is a grave error. The essentiality of bags, baskets, and bottles is batted away by stories about rifles, rockets, and risk. Le Guin recognizes that “we've all heard all about all the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things,” but we have the chance to turn toward a “new story,” for “we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained…” We only have two hands, after all!
Did the bag precede the spear?
Fisher’s theory reminds us that most human calories came from gathering, and that gathering sounds miserable if you don’t have a bag. Simply, Le Guin asks, “what's the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug ones you can't eat home in…” More poetically, she follows: “with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.” In fact, these tools are all around us, even if they don’t take up the flashiest place in public discourse.
Le Guin admits she felt left out of the human story, written almost entirely by men. Deemed “defective” in a culture that upholds violent heroes, discovery of the Carrier Bag Theory relocated Le Guin “personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before.” This shift posed a sharp contrast to the spear-obsessed picture of humanity she had been fed before, as Le Guin continues, “So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it.” Finally, she had found the hidden—or suppressed—side of technology that connects human stories to human flourishing.
Le Guin provides a little carrier bag paragraph of the humanity she found: “If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again--if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.” Le Guin’s version of humanity comes across as far more universal than spear-throwing.
Do stories about technology matter?
Undoubtedly there’s much more to humanity than technology. At the same time, technology holds tremendous power over our wellbeing, especially in the face of climate change. Cutting-edge, transformative technologies catch the world by surprise because they exist in the margins of imagination, where many think something impossible, but not all.
Sure, many discoveries are made by accident, but Le Guin’s field of science fiction holds an unusually large sway over where technology goes, due to its influence on the edges of imagination. Because of science fiction’s role in technology, and technology’s role in our lives, it becomes all the more critical to recognize and reward the carrier bags that go unheeded—but needed—every day.
In warning, Le Guin gives the hero/stick-focused world of technology a taste of its own, linear methods: “If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. ‘Technology,’ or ‘modern science’ (using the words as they are usually used, in an unexamined shorthand standing for the ‘hard’ sciences and high technology founded upon continuous economic growth), is a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy. The fiction embodying this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now).” As is evident across narratives, neglecting the end of the hero’s story inspires countless future heroes (and their own violent ends) that follow.
We’re gonna need a bigger bag
The focus and direction of our imaginations is malleable. The question facing humanity today, as Richard Powers said of one of his novels, is “whether the imagination is powerful enough to save ourselves from its power.” Framed in the stick & bag way of thinking, perhaps Le Guin would have dared us to ask whether our imaginations are big enough to save us from our imaginations’ power.
Le Guin’s brand of imagination and worldbuilding steps outside the sticks & stones paradigm of science fiction, and into a more dynamic truth. The upside, “If…one avoids the linear, progressive, Time's- (killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination,” Le Guin writes, “is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one.” On the way to more inclusive, thoughtful technologies, and bigger imaginations, Le Guin’s novels, and those of the authors she inspired, present readers perspective-expanding parallels to the stories of conquest and control that typify the male-dominated genre, not to mention tech itself.
In an increasingly distracted world, with plummeting attention spans, the desire for simplicity and brevity commands shortening of thoughts. The opportunity for expanding our imaginations is lost, if we lose our mental carrier bag for nuance. Perhaps looking down from the spears whizzing back and forth, and taking time to consider carrier bags we all carry, as well as the capacity for complexity and diversity in their shifting contents, we’ll move closer toward a more generative, generous, and greener technology future.
“Neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process”
Le Guin doesn’t reject conflict in storytelling or life, but requires an appreciation for its role in a larger, ongoing movement:
“Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.”
On the multi-pronged pathways we must pursue to reverse the climate crisis, it won’t all be simple right and wrongs, but a complex, often unharmonious bundle of difficult truths. This struggle reflects Le Guin’s vision of technology, of fiction, and of humanity at large. As she reminds us why her novels’ unusual realms remains relevant, in our bizarre modern world, even 37 years after the essay:
“It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality” –Ursula K. Le Guin.
Continuing process sounds a lot less satisfying than resolution. Even worse, however, is accepting a false resolution, when reality is stranger than we care to admit. To solve the climate crisis, and save us from our own power, we’re going to need to hurry up and slow down, to carefully pick through our carrier bags and imagine a little bigger.
The Closer
Pro tip
Tremendous theory section, as always. I've used bags way more times than I've used spears, and I've collected a lot more than I've hunted: "Le Guin’s version of humanity comes across as far more universal than spear-throwing."
The quality just keeps going up, excited for #100.
I find H&M a really interesting company: the original fast-fashion-behemoth and now the biggest investor in renewable textiles (citation needed) and probably the biggest consumer of renewable textiles (citation needed).