Tim Weed, a 1994 GPS graduate, has used his degree to combine his passions for writing, teaching and exploring the world
Many people turn to novels to escape the stress and uncertainty of real life, even if only for a few moments. However, Tim Weed, a 1994 graduate of UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS), takes a different tack in his writing: he aims to use the narrative power of fiction to warn people about the pressing issue of climate change in a way that numbers and graphs on the news often can’t convey.
Weed’s forthcoming book, “The Afterlife Project,” a finalist for the 2023 Prism Prize for Climate Literature, follows a team of scientists using technology originally designed for interstellar travel to send a test subject ten millennia into Earth’s future. Marooned in an uninhabited wilderness, a microbiologist searches in vain for remnants of the human race, while back in the year 2068, a small crew of survivors undertakes a sailing voyage to a small volcanic island north of Sicily on a quest for a second test subject.
While it may seem fanciful, Weed said that the time traveling aspect in “The Afterlife Project” has its roots in real science.
While serving as a featured expert on a National Geographic expedition at Tierra del Fuego, the archipelago at the very southern tip of South America, he struck up a conversation with an astrophysicist and a paleoclimatologist.
As he was talking with them, Weed said he began to wonder what it would be like to use a scientific lens to explore what the world might be like in the future with the impacts of climate change.
“I asked the astrophysicist if it seemed theoretically possible to travel into the future using the technology for interstellar travel,” Weed recalled. “He did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and said that yeah, theoretically at least, it was possible.”
A career story, starting at GPS
Just as “The Afterlife Project” has different, complementary plot threads, the story of Weed’s career has gone in several different directions at once, but they all inform each other.
In addition to his work as a fiction writer, he directs and leads travel programs, in which he guides writers, artists, families and other small groups on visits to Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries; his conversation with the two scientists was on one such voyage.
His travels have allowed him to see the wonders of the natural world and the people who live in it, and what’s at stake if governments don’t take action to mitigate climate change.
“We have the climate crisis, but there’s also a major biodiversity crisis,” he said. “It’s a crisis not just because we love wildlife and we love wild places — which we do and should — but also because our survival depends on these networks of life that support us.”
Weed explained that getting his master’s degree from GPS — when he was the managing editor of the Journal of Environment & Development, a policy review which was then associated with the school — was a catalyst for his multi-pronged career. For one thing, it qualified him for one of his first jobs in the world of international education. Eventually, the analytical skills that form the backbone of the GPS curriculum allowed him to start and manage his own educational travel business.
“At GPS, I learned how to be disciplined with research and how to look at issues rigorously,” Weed said. “Because of that, my book is really grounded in science, even though it’s fiction.”
Weed is the first one to admit that his path from GPS seems unconventional. But his work still embodies the message at the heart of the GPS curriculum: using data to address some of the world’s most intractable problems, and then balancing the perspective by examining how the numbers affect people out in the world.
So he advises all GPS students, as well as those deciding whether GPS is the right place for them to pursue a degree, to do what he did and make sure that whatever the next step is, it brings personal fulfillment.
“I’d encourage people early in their careers to look at the road before them with their intuition — which may feel a little bit strange to a lot of GPS graduates, because we’re used to looking at things empirically,” Weed said. “Try to figure out what it is that really drives you as a human being, what gives you joy.”
“The Afterlife Project” will be published on June 3, 2025. You can preorder the book through Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon or at an independent bookstore.
