The knowledge that one is to be hanged in a fortnight concentrates the mind wonderfully. – Dr. Johnson
I have been reading Roy Scranton’s latest book, We’re Doomed. Now What? As far as I can tell, his answer is: Keep doing the same things you’ve been doing – eating meat with every meal, going on cruises to the Arctic, flying around the world on book tours. At least that’s what he says he’s doing. And why not? If the horse has left the barn and the genie’s out of the bottle, who are we to try to get them back in? If you’ve already destroyed the earth, why try to save it? Or as William T. Vollman puts it, in Carbon Ideologies (vol. 1), “Nothing can be done, so nothing need be done.” On one hand, this is entirely logical. If no sacrifice, no effort, no change to your pattern of life will “make a difference,” then why bother? Resistance is futile. So rev up the ol’ SUV! Crank up the thermostat. On the other hand, this attitude strikes me as profoundly amoral, even pathological – like the serial killer who isn’t satisfied with slaughtering his victims, but has to eat them, too. Or: first you kill your mother, then you piss on her body. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is an ahistorical view of the world. “[T]he biggest problem[s] the Anthropocene poses,” Scranton writes, in his 2013 essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene, “are precisely those that have always been at the root of humanistic and philosophical questioning . . . .” However, he goes on to say that, in “the epoch of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality . . . is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination.” So, universal human nature you have always with you, but the current historical circumstances have changed the nature of human nature. This kind of contradiction brings out my inner Marxist. As the Old Man said (maugre the Young Hegelians), the fishness of a fish is different in a polluted river than in a pristine mountain stream. And water is different, viewed as a commodity vs. as Zen monks treat it, in a quasi-sacramental manner. Likewise, the thinking person who sees the coming end of all civilization on earth as being fundamentally different than, say, the fall of the Western Roman Empire is going to see being human in a radically different way than they did before. But I don’t get that from Scranton. The other issue, I think, is that, no matter how horrible the projected effects of climate change appear, they don’t appear to be real until they affect us – by which I mean us in the global north. We’re so used to seeing droughts in east Africa, tsunamis in east Asia, flooding in Bangladesh, that it always already happens “over there.” So, when it is Houston that is hit by a deadly hurricane or the Sierra foothills that are ablaze, it still doesn’t seem quite real, if we aren’t in one of those places. Thus Scranton can “look into our future” and “see water rising to wash out lower Manhattan. I see food riots, hurricanes, and climate refugees. I see 82nd Airborne soldiers shooting looters. I see grid failure, wrecked harbors, Fukushima waste, and plagues. I see Baghdad. I see the Rockaways. I see a strange, precarious world.” But what Scranton doesn’t seem to see – at least not vividly – is himself, in that world. Now, intellectually, he knows very well it will affect him, his partner, his child, his friends, his publisher. But he visualizes it as a seer envisions the future – like the Dream of Scipio meets the prophet Jeremiah. What will he do – be willing to do – to protect and care for his family, when life starts looking more and more like a zero-sum game? Scranton is 43 as of this writing. I’m 57. When the S starts hitting the F, I’ll be pretty old, without children. He’ll be my age or a little older, with a young adult daughter and possibly other, younger kids. What do you tell yourself, in that position? “They’ll be able to look after themselves”? “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”? “I just gave them life, they’ll have to figure out how to live it”? “Go engage in humanistic and philosophical questioning”? After such knowledge, what forgiveness? People continue to ignore climate change because they (we) don’t know how to deal with these eventualities, and they know those eventualities will arise and will demand a response. Based on previous history, it would be reasonable to expect some kind of world-wide barbarism. In that event, what do I do as an individual?
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |