Conversation with Steve Wheat

Steve Wheat is a teacher, renewable energy professional, and writer. He has created virtual power plants across the United States and taught English and writing around the world. His work is an attempt to blend the many ways we can respond to a world in climate flux, both the horror and the acceptance of what is lost, and the joy and fortitude of embracing what comes next. He has been published in various magazines, most recently On Spec, Halfway Down the Stairs, and Alternating Current Press.

Steve is the author of “10 Reasons Why the AI Predicted American Salvation” and “The Last Voyage: Island Relocation Program” from Radon Issue 8.

Q: What brought you from teaching English across the world to working your current day job?

Teaching English was a great way to see the world, to travel, to meet people, and experience some of Earth’s most beautiful places. Even in the early part of the 21st century some of these places I was experiencing for the first time were already changing or disappearing altogether.

When I’d had my fill of traveling, I wanted to devote myself to something that would help preserve what I’d experienced. Working with renewable energy and the climate crisis was a good fit.

Q: Which countries were the best and worst experiences for teaching?

For me, this is like asking which child a parent loves the most. Every country offered something unique and incredible, insight and growth that (I hope) stayed with me to this day. In Japan the school I worked for essentially rented me out, and I was able to teach everything from kindergarten, to the Japanese Air Force, and company executives in the same year.

In China I arrived in Shanghai with thirty other students in a master’s program and lived and worked side by side with our own little traveling circus. Oman and Saudi Arabia offered me a glimpse into worlds very few Americans get the privilege of experiencing, and finally offered me a second language with an alphabet which helped my proficiency. It also allowed me to travel throughout the rest of the Middle East for three years, and during the incredibly transformative era of the Arab Spring.

Q: For others looking to create/install renewable energy systems, what should they know?

I think many Radon readers can likely identify with many of the problems of late-stage capitalism and the enshittification of many of our institutions that were supposed to reign capitalism in to something that theoretically benefitted the many over the few. Any work directly with or parallel to the climate fight offers incredible benefits. No matter what the work is, how much is accomplished in a single day, or fiscal quarter, or year.

When working for a company that deploys renewables, you can go to sleep every night knowing that your day’s labor made the possibility of a better future the tiniest bit more likely. If even a single fossil fuel atom wasn’t burned or mined as a result, it’s an atom in the right direction. The work you can do in this space cuts across every possible type of work now, the industry is that large. Content creation is included here. There are billions and billions of dollars thrown into climate misinformation that can only really be fought by narrative generation that sticks in the mind for optimism that is more effective than propaganda.

Q: Do you take an optimistic or pessimistic mindset when thinking how long it will take for the world to become fully renewable for our energy needs?

I firmly believe that most pessimists are just optimists or realists that have fallen down and want to take a little more time to brush themselves off and get back up. The funny thing about the climate crisis when it comes to energy is that we have absolutely no need to wait for some magic bullet. There’s no invention waiting in the wings to come save us. No societal revolution and upheaval is necessary to reinvent humanity and avert the worst.

We have everything that we need, right now, today. Factories around the world are pumping out the solution to this crisis. What we lack is the collective will to wield our power to prioritize building what we need, along with retiring early and tearing down what we don’t. Relevant to this audience is that we have an information problem, a narrative problem, and a political problem. Organizing, informing, speaking out, and participating are the real tools that need to be brought to bear in order to solve it, and preserve as much as we can in the meantime.

Q: As someone who enjoys creating virtual power plants, do you find yourself also having fun with city management games such as Cities: Skylines?

Virtual Power Plants (where thousands of homes and businesses connect their energy devices to a single company that either reduces energy use or changes energy use on the grid) have a lot of administrative, legal, and technical challenges. A lot of the work comes down to collecting all of the participants. So, I guess it would be more analogous to a version of Pokemon Go, where instead of playing the game, you’re finding the people playing the game and collecting them. When I was younger I preferred playing real-time strategy games, but I’ve now aged into the world of turn-based RPGs, tower defense, and 4x games.

Q: How does your passion for renewable energy spark or shape your writing?

At first my work life and my writing life were distant from one another, but over time the desire to channel my fears, anxieties, and hopes of overcoming the climate crisis merged with what I wanted to accomplish in my writing. Right now, I’m focused on trying to find small pictures of a humanity adapted to climate outcomes as a way to make vivid and real the prognostications of climate scientists. I’m hoping to create a lived future experience that can resonate with people to go along with the desire to avoid these outcomes.

Q: How did you decide on the 10 specific reasons the AI uses to justify its predictions for America’s salvation?

There may be more tape left on the cutting room floor for this poem than any other single piece I’ve written. I think there are at least a few dozen more “reasons” left inside notes for this poem. Ultimately, there was probably a lot of subconscious and conscious work fighting over the final 10 chosen in the piece. I was hoping to have a spread of the content, a diversity of experiences or flashes of the human condition, and I also wanted to make sure there was a diversity of concepts that could be explained quickly vs. more drawn out.

The hope was to create some velocity and anticipation as the reader moved down the piece, and then hopefully have earned the reader’s patience for the final reason that explores the reaction of the AI itself.

Q: The AI seems to misunderstand or reframe human values throughout your poem. Do you think AI will ever fully understand human empathy, or is it destined to miss the mark?

I’m not technically skilled or proficient enough to fully understand the technical complexity and innovation happening in these increasingly expensive large language models. However, as an artist I think it is beyond the shadow of a doubt that the entirety of wealth or potential of wealth built with and from these models is entirely based on the largest theft of human creativity and art ever perpetrated.

My instincts tell me that no matter how much is stolen, the limits of AI are going to be that it will always be based on copying what has come before. No matter how advanced the prompting, true flashes of creativity may be beyond its reach.

Q: What lead you to constructing your unique page structure for “The Last Voyage: Island Relocation Program”?

It seems likely to me that there won’t be an inch of land on planet Earth that exists in the 21st century in the same state that it entered the century. I expect a generation has already been born or will be born soon who will become entirely enamored to how well they can adapt themselves and change things around them to come to terms with the warping of reality this will entail.

To some extent what I expect is a more extreme version of what has always been: older generations lamenting the changes to life around them while the younger generations charge forward, not fully understanding or internalizing what is being sacrificed to the churn.

I wanted to try and dig into this phenomenon, and it started with a list of things, how the two different groups might see the same event. That started to morph into this poem where I try to have these two different groups make sense of a managed retreat from an island simultaneously from the two perspectives. Merging the two streams at the end is less a notion of harmonizing these two inconsistent beliefs than it is coming to terms with a new reality at the same time. Whatever the replacement for the natural world is that we come up with will pale in comparison to what was there before.

Q: What poetic image from the above poem are you most proud of and why?

I think the second stanza of my “Last Voyage” poem, on both sides of the page, as it appears in the journal is probably the part of the poem that best captures the feelings I wanted to put on paper as mentioned above.

I think the piece hits its stride here. The stanzas can be read top to bottom or left to right without losing too much meaning, and highlights the alienation and foreignness of these two groups from each other.