The Uninhabitable Earth

III. The Climate Kaleidoscope

Storytelling

On-screen, climate devastation: One good academic survey of this phenomenon is E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

“Dying Earth”: The genre really picks up steam with H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, eventually finding a natural home in postapocalyptic cinema, e.g., The World, the Flesh, and the Devil and The Day After.

“climate existentialism”: “Nihilism and defeatism in response to the climate crisis isn’t either brave or insightful and it’s deeply weird to see it treated as some beautiful, poetic intervention,” Kate Aronoff has written, on Twitter, referring probably to the writing of Roy Scranton. “Climate change is many things. One thing it’s not is a vehicle for literary men to opine on their existential dread and then dress it up as science.” See https://twitter.com/KateAronoff/status/1035022145565470725.

literary theorists call metanarrative: See, especially, Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

as surely as screwball comedies: A great account of this is Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

The Great Derangement: Ghosh’s book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) was published with the vivid subtitle Climate Change and the Unthinkable.

“cli-fi”: The term has gained currency only over the last decade or so, but examples of the genre—typically speculative fiction driven by climate conditions—date back at least as far as J. G. Ballard (The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World) and possibly to H. G. Wells (The Time Machine) and Jules Verne (The Purchase of the North Pole). In other words, it’s more or less as old as the science fiction genre, from which it draws its name. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (which also includes The Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake) surely qualifies, as does even Ian McEwan’s Solar. All of these test Ghosh’s thesis, since they are climate-powered novels with the narrative architecture of the classic bourgeois novel, more or less. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a bit of a different beast—a climate epic. But those who these days talk up cli-fi as a genre seem to mean something more…well, genre—for instance, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy and, later, New York 2140. Going back further, J. G. Ballard’s Drowned World trilogy is an exquisite example.

especially in conventional novels: Ghosh is dealing here with a very narrow definition of the archetypal novel, emphasizing stories of protagonist journeys through emerging bourgeois systems. And while he raises the Cold War and 9/11 as examples of real-world stories that have inspired novels in that tradition, it’s not really the case that the best novels, and films, about the end of the Cold War are the ones that place their characters very precisely on a map of the 1989 world, like butterflies pinned to a screen. And the ones that have approached 9/11 have been mostly duds, as well, though an entire generation, especially the male half, sometimes seemed to feel called to literary action by it. “If September 11 had to happen,” Martin Amis wrote in The Second Plane, his meditation on the fate of the imagination in the age of terror, “then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime.” Global warming has not made Martin Amis feel like George Orwell, as far as I know, though it has spawned a whole small genre of mourning essay: the fatalistic, quasi-poetic, first-person ecological lamentation—exemplified by Roy Scranton, with his Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and We’re Doomed. Now What?—which may be the closest that climate change stories can get to the self-mythologizing moral clarity of Orwell.

“man against nature”: This is one of the archetypal “conflict narratives.” Other examples range from Robinson Crusoe to Life of Pi.

the richest 10 percent: Oxfam, “Extreme Carbon Inequality,” December 2015, www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf.

many on the Left: The argument is a pervasive one, in part because it is so persuasive, but has been made with special flair by Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything and The Battle for Paradise; Jedediah Purdy in After Nature but perhaps more strikingly in his essays and exchanges published in Dissent; and of course Andreas Malm in Fossil Capital.

the socialist countries: History is not a much better guide, with Left industrialization during Stalin’s Five Year Plan or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, or even Venezuela under Hugo Chávez not offering a more responsible approach than anything that was happening in the West.

The natural villains: Accounts of the bad behavior of oil companies abound, too, but two good places to start are Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010) and Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles, The Madhouse Effect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

a recent survey of movies: Peter Kareiva and Valerie Carranza, “Existential Risk Due to Ecosystem Collapse: Nature Strikes Back,” Futures, September 2018.

less than 40 percent: According to the IPCC, the figure is 35 percent: see IPCC, Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Geneva, 2014).

world’s ten biggest oil companies: Claire Poole, “The World’s Largest Oil and Gas Companies 2018: Royal Dutch Shell Surpasses Exxon as Top Dog,” Forbes, June 6, 2018.

15 percent of the world’s emissions: According to the World Resources Institute, the figure was 14.36 percent in 2017: Johannes Friedrich, Mengpin Ge, and Andrew Pickens, “This Interactive Chart Explains World’s Top Ten Emitters, and How They’ve Changed,” World Resources Institute, April 11, 2017, www.wri.org/blog/2017/04/interactive-chart-explains-worlds-top-10-emitters-and-how-theyve-changed.

the story of nature and our relationship to it: In 1980, the art critic John Berger called modern zoos “an epitaph to a relationship that is as old as man”: “the zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters.”

“Today those words could be applied to much of middle-class mass culture,” the legal scholar and environmentalist Jedediah Purdy wrote in “Thinking Like a Mountain” (n+1 29, Fall 2017), an essay on new forms of nature writing in the age of the Anthropocene. “It has become a kind of memorial to the nonhuman world, revived in a thousand representations even as it disappears all at once.” What he means is that we built a zoo out of nature, yes; but we live still inside those cages. “Alongside global domestication, an opposite and terrifying potential broods,” Purdy writes. “Every new superstorm, contagion, or annual heat record is pregnant with doom, most acutely for the world’s poor, but finally for nearly everyone. For all our deep and accelerating inequalities, life is less dangerous, and the natural world a more stable and fungible backdrop for human activity, than ever before. Yet the whole world also seems poised to come for us like a phalanx of piqued gods who have just switched sides.”

half of them extinct: E. O. Wilson made this prediction in a New York Times op-ed, “The Eight Million Species We Don’t Know,” published on March 3, 2018—and it echoes, conceptually, his 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). According to the 2018 Living Planet report, prepared by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, world wildlife has already declined that much—in fact, by 60 percent, all since 1970.

Another such parable is bee death: I wrote a long magazine story about the phenomenon called “The Anxiety of Bees” (New York, June 17, 2015).

Flying insects might be disappearing: The 2017 study was published in PLOS One under the unwieldy title “More than 75 Percent Decline over 27 Years in Total Flying Insect Biomass in Protected Areas.” In 2018, a survey of insect populations in the rain forests of Puerto Rico was even more alarming—in fact, another researcher called their findings “hyperalarming.” Insects there have declined sixtyfold. (Bradford Lister and Andres Garcia, “Climate-Driven Declines in Arthropod Abundance Restructure a Rainforest Food Web,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 30, 2018.)

devoting whole feature articles: Jamie Lowe’s “The Super Bowl of Beekeeping” (The New York Times Magazine, August 15, 2018) is perhaps the most recent example. The original “fable of the bees” had a very different meaning: Bernard Mandeville’s 1705 poem of that name was an extended argument that public displays of virtue were invariably hypocritical and that the world was made a better place, in fact, the more ruthlessly individuals pursued their own “vices.” That the poem eventually became a touchstone of free-market thinking, and a major influence on Adam Smith, is all the more remarkable given that it first gained popularity in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble.

“designer climates”: “If geoengineering worked, whose hand would be on the thermostat?” asked Alan Robock in Science, in 2008. “How could the world agree on an optimal climate?” Ten years later, his student Ben Kravitz wrote, on the Harvard geoengineering program’s blog—yes, Harvard has a geoengineering program, and yes, they have a blog—“it may be possible to meet multiple, simultaneous objectives in the climate system.”

Twenty-two percent: Jakub Nowosad et al., “Global Assessment and Mapping of Changes in Mesoscale Landscapes: 1992–2015,” International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation (October 2018).

Ninety-six percent: Yinon M. Bar-On et al., “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (June 2018).

the age of loneliness: Brooke Jarvis, “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” The New York Times Magazine, November 27, 2018.

“scientific reticence”: J. E. Hansen, “Scientific Reticence and Sea Level Rise,” Environmental Research Letters 2 (May 2007).

a 2017 Nature paper: Daniel A. Chapman et al., “Reassessing Emotion in Climate Change Communication,” Nature Climate Change (November 2017): pp. 850–52.

IPCC released a dramatic, alarmist report: IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty (Incheon, Korea, 2018), www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15.

Crisis Capitalism

The scroll of cognitive biases: The single best primer on what behavioral economics has to teach us about these biases is by the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013).

the scope of the climate threat: This is why the theorist Timothy Morton refers to climate change as a “hyperobject.” But while the term is useful in suggesting just how large climate change is, and just how poorly we’ve been able to perceive that scale to date, the deeper you get into Morton’s analysis, the less illuminating it becomes. In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), he names five characteristics: hyperobjects are 1) viscous, by which he means that they stick to any object or idea they come into contact with, like oil; 2) molten, by which he means so big, they seem to defy our sense of space-time; 3) nonlocal, by which he means distributed in ways that frustrate any attempt to perceive them entirely from a single perspective; 4) phased, by which he means that they have dimensional qualities we cannot understand, as we wouldn’t understand a five-dimensional object passing through our three-dimensional space; and 5) interobjective, by which he means that they connect divergent items and systems. Viscous, nonlocal, and interobjective—okay. But these do not make global warming a different kind of phenomenon than we have seen before, or than those—like capitalism, say—that we actually understand quite well. As for the other qualities…If climate change defies our sense of space-time, it is only because we have an impoverished, narrow idea of space-time, since in fact warming is taking place very much within our planet’s atmosphere, not inexplicably but in ways scientists have predicted quite precisely over decades. That we have failed to deal with it, over those same decades, does not mean it is literally beyond our comprehension. Saying so sounds almost like a cop-out, in fact.

“It is easier to imagine”: Jameson wrote this in “Future City,” published in New Left Review in May–June 2003.

pet theory of the socialist Left: Degrees of emphasis vary, of course, but you can find forms of the “fossil capitalism” argument in Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization, along with Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital and Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life.

Can capitalism survive climate change?: Moore raises this question in Capitalism in the Web of Life, and it is discussed at some length in Benjamin Kunkel, “The Capitalocene,” London Review of Books, March 2, 2017.

Klein memorably sketched out: Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).

the island of Puerto Rico: Naomi Klein, The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018).

Maria could cut Puerto Rican incomes: This comes from Hsiang and Houser’s “Don’t Let Puerto Rico Fall into an Economic Abyss,” The New York Times, September 29, 2017.

carbon emissions have exploded: According to the International Energy Agency, total global emissions were 32.5 gigatons in 2017, up from 22.4 in 1990. Of course, it is worth remembering that the world’s socialist nations, and even its left-of-center ones, do not have a notably better record when it comes to emissions than its excessively capitalistic ones. This suggests that it may be a bit misleading to describe emissions as having been driven by capitalism per se, or even interests made especially prominent and powerful within capitalistic systems. Instead, it may reflect the universal power of material comforts, benefits that we tend to assess using only a very short-term calculus.

“Neoliberalism: Oversold?”: This paper, by Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri, was published in June 2016.

something like a fantasy field: Romer published “The Trouble with Macroeconomics” on his own website on September 14, 2016.

Nordhaus favors a carbon tax: The Nobel laureate has published widely on the subject of the carbon tax, and he gives the most plainspoken account of the tax level he considers optimal in “Integrated Assessment Models of Climate Change,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017, https://www.nber.org/reporter/2017number3/nordhaus.html.

$306 billion: Adam B. Smith, “2017 U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: A Historic Year in Context,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, January 8, 2018.

$551 trillion in damages: “Risks Associated with Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees Celsius or 2 Degrees Celsius,” Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, May 2018.

23 percent of potential global income: Marshall Burke et al., “Global Non-Linear Effect of Temperature on Economic Production,” Nature 527 (October 2015): pp. 235–39, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15725.

Of 400 IPCC emissions models: “Negative Emissions Technologies: What Role in Meeting Paris Agreement Targets?” European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, February 2018.

a third of the world’s farmable land: Jason Hickel, “The Paris Agreement Is Deeply Flawed—It’s Time for a New Deal,” Al Jazeera, March 16, 2018.

a paper by David Keith: David Keith et al., “A Process for Capturing CO₂ from the Atmosphere,” Joule, August 15, 2018.

total global fossil fuel subsidies: David Coady et al., “How Large Are Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies?” World Development 91 (March 2017): pp. 11–27.

$2.3 trillion tax cut: David Rogers, “At $2.3 Trillion Cost, Trump Tax Cuts Leave Big Gap,” Politico, February 28, 2018. Other estimates run higher.

The Church of Technology

outlined by Eric Schmidt: He laid out this perspective most clearly at a conference in New York in January 2016.

“Consider: Who pursues”: Ted Chiang, “Silicon Valley Is Turning into Its Own Worst Fear,” BuzzFeed, December 18, 2017.

an influential 2002 paper: Nick Bostrom, “Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 9 (March 2002).

close to universal: In “Survival of the Richest” (Medium, July 5, 2018), the futurist Douglas Rushkoff described his experience as a keynote speaker at a private conference attended by the superrich—these patrons not themselves technologists but hedge-funders he came to feel were taking all of their cues from them. Quickly, he writes, the conversation attained a clear focus:

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

“The event.” In Rushkoff’s telling, this is a kind of catchall phrase for anything that might threaten their status or security as the world’s most privileged—“their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

“This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour,” Rushkoff continues.

They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

In To Be a Machine, Mark O’Connell traced the same impulse through Silicon Valley’s whole Brahman caste. The book opens with an epigraph from Don DeLillo: “This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other.” The quote comes from White Noise, in particular from its narrator’s colleague and sidekick Murray Jay Siskind, who is both the novel’s comic foil and its “explainer.” It was never clear to me just how seriously we are meant to take Murray’s pronouncements, but this one does quite sharply describe the contemporary tech two-step: freaking out about “existential risks” while simultaneously cultivating private exits from mortality.

For Rushkoff, these are all facets of the same impulse, broadly shared by the class of visionaries and power brokers and venture capitalists whose dreams for the future are received as blueprints, especially by the armies of engineers they command like impetuous fiefdoms—investing in new forms of space travel, life extension, and technology-aided life after death. “They were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion,” he writes. “For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.”

“An Account of My Hut”: Christina Nichol, “An Account of My Hut,” n+1, Spring 2018. Nichol explains the title this way:

I once read a story called “An Account of My Hut,” by Kamo no Chōmei, a 12th-century Japanese hermit. Chōmei describes how after witnessing a fire, an earthquake, and a typhoon in Kyoto, he leaves society and goes to live in a hut.

Seven hundred years later, Basil Bunting, the Northumberland poet, wrote his own rendition of Chōmei’s story:

Oh! There’s nothing to complain about.

Buddha says: “None of the world is good.”

I am fond of my hut…

But even if I wanted to renounce the world, I wouldn’t be able to afford a hut in California.

as old as John Maynard Keynes: Keynes extended the prediction—much, much talked about ever since—in an essay notably published in 1930, just after the stock market crash of 1929: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Nation and Athenaeum, October 11 and 18, 1930.

“You can see the computer age”: This line first appeared in Robert M. Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” review of Manufacturing Matters by Stephen S. Cohen and John Zysman, The New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987.

a million transatlantic flights: Alex Hern, “Bitcoin’s Energy Usage Is Huge—We Can’t Afford to Ignore It,” The Guardian, January 17, 2018.

“If we don’t act quickly”: Bill McKibben, “Winning Is the Same as Losing,” Rolling Stone, December 1, 2017. “Another way of saying this: By 2075, the world will be powered by solar panels and windmills—free energy is a hard business proposition to beat,” McKibben wrote. “But on current trajectories, they’ll light up a busted planet. The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter; indeed, the decisions we make in 2025 will matter much less than the ones we make in the next few years. The leverage is now.”

“The future is already here”: The quip first appeared in The Economist in 2003.

less than 10 percent of the world: IDC, “Smartphone OS Market Share,” www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os.

somewhere between a quarter and a third: David Murphy, “2.4BN Smartphone Users in 2017, Says eMarketer,” Mobile Marketing, April 28, 2017, https://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/24bn-smartphone-users-in-2017-says-emarketer.

global decarbonization in 2000: These figures come from Robbie Andrew, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research, and his presentation “Global Collective Effort,” which he published on his website in May 2018 (http://folk.uio.no/roberan/t/2C.shtml). He was drawing on figures put forward by Michael R. Raupach et al. in “Sharing a Quota on Cumulative Carbon Emissions,” Nature Climate Change (September 2014).

only one year: “UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Calls for Climate Leadership, Outlines Expectations for Next Three Years,” UN Climate Change News, September 10, 2018: “If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us.”

poured more concrete in three years: Jocelyn Timperley, “Q&A: Why Cement Emissions Matter for Climate Change,” Carbon Brief, September 13, 2018, www.carbonbrief.org/qa-why-cement-emissions-matter-for-climate-change.

the world would need to add: Ken Caldeira, “Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty and the Need for Energy Without CO₂ Emission,” Science 299 (March 2003): pp. 2052–54.

in four hundred years: James Temple, “At This Rate, It’s Going to Take Nearly 400 Years to Transform the Energy System,” MIT Technology Review, March 14, 2018, www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-going-to-take-nearly-400-years-to-transform-the-energy-system.

official death count is 47: U.N. Information Service, “New Report on Health Effects Due to Radiation from the Chernobyl Accident,” February 28, 2011, www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2011/unisinf398.html.

as high as 4,000: World Health Organization, “Chernobyl: The True Scale of the Accident,” September 5, 2005, www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38.

“no discernible increased incidence”: United Nations, “Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation” (May 2013): p. 11, www.unscear.org/docs/GAreports/A-68-46_e_V1385727.pdf.

an additional 1,400 Americans: Lisa Friedman, “Cost of New E.P.A. Coal Rules: Up to 1,400 More Deaths a Year,” The New York Times, August 21, 2018.

nine million each year: Pamela Das and Richard Horton, “Pollution, Health, and the Planet: Time for Decisive Action,” The Lancet 391, no. 10119 (October 2017): pp. 407–8, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32588-6.

growing its carbon emissions: James Conca, “Why Aren’t Renewables Decreasing Germany’s Carbon Emissions?” Forbes, October 10, 2017.

“How many will play augmented reality games”: Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2018).

The poet and musician Kate Tempest: These are lyrics to her song “Tunnel Vision.”

Politics of Consumption

a note, handwritten: Annie Correal, “What Drove a Man to Set Himself on Fire in Brooklyn?” The New York Times, May 28, 2018.

a longer letter, typed: For an in-depth account of this letter, see Theodore Parisienne et al., “Famed Gay Rights Lawyer Sets Himself on Fire at Prospect Park in Protest Suicide Against Fossil Fuels,” New York Daily News, April 14, 2018.

moral arms race: Citizens who now clean their consciences with philanthropic donations directed toward medical research, college scholarships, or museums and literary magazines may begin increasingly to do so by buying carbon offsets or investing in carbon-capture funds (indeed, some progressive nations may invest the proceeds of carbon taxes directly into CCS and BECCS). Progressive scientists will apply gene therapy to climate change, as they have already begun to do with the woolly mammoth—which they hope, once brought back to life, might restore the grasslands of the Eurasian steppe and prevent methane release from permafrost—and will probably do soon with the mosquito, hoping to eradicate mosquito-borne disease. Perhaps a rogue billionaire will try to single-handedly cool the earth with geoengineering, flying a few private planes around the equator to disperse sulfur and citing the model of Bill Gates and his mosquito nets.

“apparatus of justification”: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

SoulCycle, Goop, Moon Juice: The founder of hipster foodie magazine Modern Farmer is, in 2018, rumored to be launching a “Goop for climate change.”

the pesticide Roundup: Alexis Temkin, “Breakfast with a Dose of Roundup?” Environmental Working Group Children’s Health Initiative, August 15, 2018, www.ewg.org/childrenshealth/glyphosateincereal.

elaborate guidance: “During a wildfire, dust masks aren’t enough!” the National Weather Service warned on Facebook. “They won’t protect you from the fine particles in wildfire smoke. It is best to stay indoors, keeping windows and doors closed. If you’re running an air conditioner, keep the fresh-air intake closed and the filter clean to prevent outdoor smoke from getting inside.”

“philanthrocapitalism”: Perhaps the most piercing account of this phenomenon is Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (New York: Knopf, 2018).

“moral economy”: This story is recounted in Tim Rogan, The Moral Economists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); see also Tehila Sasson’s review, published in Dissent under the headline “The Gospel of Wealth,” August 22, 2018.

asked to be entrepreneurs: Stephen Metcalf, among many others, has written memorably about this phenomenon, in his brief history of neoliberalism, “Neoliberalism: The Idea That Swallowed the World,” The Guardian, August 18, 2017.

Climate Leviathan: Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (London: Verso, 2018).

In 2018, an illuminating study: Katharine Ricke et al., “Country-Level Social Cost of Carbon,” Nature Climate Change 8 (September 2018): pp. 895–900.

Belt and Road Initiative: Perhaps the best account of this initiative is Bruno Maçães’s Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order (London: Hurst, 2018). The initiative “may also promote permanent environmental degradation,” a group of researchers argued recently. (Fernando Ascensão et al., “Environmental Challenges for the Belt and Road Initiative,” Nature Sustainability, May 2018).

the possibility of disequilibrium: Harald Welzer, Climate Wars: What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

pulls criminals out of pop concerts: According to The Washington Post’s Hamza Shaban, this happened three times in just two months in the spring of 2018: “Facial Recognition Cameras in China Snag Man Who Allegedly Stole $17,000 Worth of Potatoes,” May 22, 2018.

domestic-spy drones: Stephen Chen, “China Takes Surveillance to New Heights with Flock of Robotic Doves, but Do They Come in Peace?” South China Morning Post, June 24, 2018.

History After Progress

most unshakable creeds: It wasn’t just the promise of growth that was invented in the industrial era, but the idea of history, which promises that the past tells a story of human progress—and suggests, therefore, that the future will, too.

This progressive faith has a demotic basis, which is that daily life changed so quickly in the Victorian era that no one with eyes open could have missed it. It also has an intellectual one, which is that philosophers from Hegel to Comte proposed, at various points in the nineteenth century, that history had a shape—that it evolved, in one form or another, toward the light, of one kind or another. The idea would not have confused readers of their contemporaries Darwin and Spencer. Nor, for that matter, visitors to Queen Victoria’s Crystal Palace exhibition, the first World’s Fair, which organized national showcases into an implicit competition of relative development and more or less promised that technology would bring about a better future for all. By the time Jacob Burckhardt was writing his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which furnished the now-proverbial three-act structure of Western history—antiquity followed by the Dark Ages followed by modernity—he could imagine himself as an opponent of both Hegel and Comte and yet nevertheless produce a work that explicitly periodized the past into a single unfolding drama. That is how thoroughly the idea of progressive history had taken hold in a time of rapid social, economic, and cultural change: even critics of reflexive Western triumphalism tended to see history as marching forward. Marx is the clearest example: squint at his reimagined Hegelianism, and its shape looks a lot like the enduring wall-chart of history first published by Sebastian Adams—motivated by Christian evangelism, amazingly—in 1871. In 1920, H. G. Wells published his influential version, The Outline of History; in it, he declared that “the history of mankind,” which he traced through forty chapters from “The Earth in Space and Time” to “The Next Stage of History,” “is a history of more or less blind endeavours to conceive a common purpose in relation to which all men may live happily.” It sold millions of copies and was translated into dozens of languages, and it casts a shadow over nearly every project of popular, long-view history undertaken since, from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Sapiens: That this kind of total skepticism won Harari such an admiring audience among so many leading avatars of technocratic progress is one of the curiosities of the TED Talk age. But the skepticism also flatters, especially those inclined by their own sense of accomplishment to contemplate the longest sweeps of history. Inviting you to contemplate that history, Harari also seems to pull you beyond or outside it. In this way, he shares strains of lecturesome DNA not just with Diamond but with Joseph Campbell and even Jordan Peterson. In his subsequent book, Homo Deus, Harari endorses a new contemporary myth, though he doesn’t quite recognize it as such—making his own case for the near-term arrival of a superpowerful artificial intelligence that will render everything we know as “humanity” close to obsolete.

Against the Grain: The human remains excavated from this time tell a clear story of human strife: the people were shorter, sicker, and died younger than their predecessors. The average height fell from 5′10″ for men and 5′6″ for women to 5′5″ and 5′1″, respectively; settled communities were more vulnerable to infectious disease, but obesity and heart disease also spiked. This is why it’s so that the case against civilization, as the critic John Lanchester has called it, can be made simply as a case against farming.

“the worst mistake”: Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover, May 1987.

“we might call the Liberal Story”: Yuval Noah Harari, “Does Trump’s Rise Mean Liberalism’s End?” The New Yorker, October 7, 2016.

ekpyrosis: This was the belief that, periodically, the cosmos would be entirely destroyed in what was called a “Great Year,” then be re-created and the process would begin again. Plato preferred the term “perfect year,” in which the stars would be returned to their original positions.

“dynastic cycle”: Although some accounts of the cycle offered a dozen or more phases, according to the Chinese philosopher Mencius the cycle had only three (essentially rise, peak, and decline).

“eternal recurrence”: Nietzsche first proposes this idea, that everything is bound to repeat itself eternally, as a sort of thought experiment in The Gay Science (1882). But he would return to it again and again, often describing it as something more like a law of the universe—which is similar to how it was treated by the ancient Egyptians, Indians, and Greek Stoics.

“public purpose” and “private interest”: Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Cycles of American History (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986).

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: In his 1987 book, Kennedy offers a relatively simple model of great-power history: growth fueled by natural resources followed by decline precipitated by military overreach.

The Progress of This Storm: The main thrust of this book, Malm’s follow-up to Fossil Capital, is that while we may believe that “nature,” as something distinct from “society,” has disappeared, in fact global warming has brought it back with a punitive vengeance.

Ethics at the End of the World

podcast “S-Town”: McLemore, whose panic may have been caused in part by mercury poisoning, was most concerned about Arctic ice melt, drought, and the slowdown of the thermohaline convector.

“I sometimes call it toxic knowledge”: Richard Heinberg, “Surviving S-Town,” Post Carbon Institute, April 7, 2017.

“nature is thriving”: Thomas’s book is Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction (New York: Public Affairs, 2017), and while it offers not so much a full-throated celebration of what he calls an “age of extinction” but a more modest proposal that we view the positive, generative effects of climate change alongside its crueler impacts. This is a note of contrarian optimism echoing Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, in their Break Through: Why We Can’t Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists and Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene; and the Canadian, Swedish, and South African academics behind the research collaboration “Bright Spots,” who, despite considerably more concern about the effects of global warming, nevertheless keep a running list of positive environmental developments they believe makes the case for what they call a “good Anthropocene.”

“The Second Coming”: Among other things, Yeats gave Joan Didion the lines she built into her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

“immanent anti-humanism”: The program is also neatly contained in Jeffers’s most famous poem, “Carmel Point”:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

a time of approaching ecological collapse: Indeed, the manifesto continues, “human civilization is an intensely fragile construction,” and yet, they write, we are forever in denial about that fragility—our very day-to-day lives depend on that denial of fragility, perhaps as much as they depend on the denial of our own mortality. This is what the philosopher Samuel Scheffler means when he suggests that, in an agnostic world, the role once played by an afterlife in inspiring and organizing and policing moral and ethical behavior has been taken up, in part, by the conviction that the world will continue on after us when we die. In other words, the idea that life is not just worth living but worth living well, he suggests, “would be more threatened by the prospect of humanity’s disappearance than by the prospect of our own deaths.” As Charles Mann summarizes Scheffler, considering the ethical paradox of human action on climate change, “The belief that human life will continue, even if we ourselves die, is one of the underpinnings of society.”

“Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilization may become unstoppable,” Kingsnorth and Hine wrote in their manifesto. “That civilizations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.”

“We believe that the roots”: “We do not believe that everything will be fine,” Kingsnorth and Hine write. “We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be.”

In the manifesto, Dark Mountain outlined what they called “the eight principles of uncivilization,” a sort of mission statement for their movement that moves from general principle and perceptions to a more focused statement of intent. “We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our time can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions,’ ” the list begins, and though they foreswear these kinds of solutions, they don’t entirely give up on response. But Dark Mountain is ultimately a literary collective—organizing festivals, workshops, and meditation retreats—and the most concrete, practical response they call for in their manifesto is in art. “We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves,” namely “the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature.’ ” These, they add, “are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.” In response, they promise, “we will assert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment” and “will write with dirt under our fingernails.” The goal: through storytelling, to find a new vantage from which the end of civilization would not seem so bad. In a certain way, they suggest, they themselves have already achieved this state of enlightenment. “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop,” they write. “Together we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.”

Kingsnorth published a new manifesto: Paul Kingsnorth, “Dark Ecology,” Orion, November–December 2012. This manifesto includes this passage:

What does the near future look like? I’d put my bets on a strange and unworldly combination of ongoing collapse, which will continue to fragment both nature and culture, and a new wave of techno-green “solutions” being unveiled in a doomed attempt to prevent it. I don’t believe now that anything can break this cycle, barring some kind of reset: the kind that we have seen many times before in human history. Some kind of fall back down to a lower level of civilizational complexity. Something like the storm that is now visibly brewing all around us.

If you don’t like any of this, but you know you can’t stop it, where does it leave you? The answer is that it leaves you with an obligation to be honest about where you are in history’s great cycle, and what you have the power to do and what you don’t. If you think you can magic us out of the progress trap with new ideas or new technologies, you are wasting your time. If you think that the usual “campaigning” behavior is going to work today where it didn’t work yesterday, you will be wasting your time. If you think the machine can be reformed, tamed, or defanged, you will be wasting your time. If you draw up a great big plan for a better world based on science and rational argument, you will be wasting your time. If you try to live in the past, you will be wasting your time. If you romanticize hunting and gathering or send bombs to computer store owners, you will be wasting your time.

tending toward more engagement: You can see this in how quite radical thinkers about the environment and our obligations to it, from Jedediah Purdy to Naomi Klein, focus so intently on the problems of political action. In Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2015), he builds an entire practical politics out of the intuition, inarguably true, that the final and total conquest of the planet by people is marked simultaneously by its degradation; and argues that the end of that long era of natural abundance demands a more democratic approach to environmental politics, policy, and law—even when, or perhaps especially because, any alteration from the present course seems almost infrastructurally impossible. In a 2017 exchange with Katrina Forrester, later published in Dissent, he elaborated:

Here is our paradox: The world can’t go on this way; and it can’t do otherwise. It was the collective power of some—not all—human beings that got us into this: power over resources, power over the seasons, power over one another. That power has created a global humanity, entangled in a Frankenstein ecology. But it does not yet include the power of accountability or restraint, the power we need. To face the Anthropocene, humans would need a way of facing one another. We would need, first, to be a we.

From a certain vantage, this may just look like conventional politics, of the kind that Kingsnorth derides as impossibly naive. They are also my politics, for what it’s worth—I nod my head in recognition when I read Kate Marvel calling for courage rather than hope, and when I read Naomi Klein rhapsodizing about a community of political resistance growing out of the local sites of protests she calls “Blockadia.” I believe, as Purdy does, that the degradation of the planet and the end of natural abundance demand a new progressivism animated by a renewed egalitarian energy; and I believe, as Al Gore does, that we should push technology to chase every last glimmer of hope for averting disastrous climate change—including unleashing, or indulging, market forces to help do so when we can. I believe, as Klein does, that some particular market forces have almost conquered our politics, but not entirely, leaving a bright shining sliver of opportunity; and I also believe, as Bill McKibben does, that meaningful and even dramatic change can be achieved through the familiar paths: voting and organizing and political activity deployed at every level. In other words, I believe in engagement above all, engagement wherever it may help. In fact, I find any other response to the climate crisis morally incomprehensible.

global mobilization: That this is a familiar analogy is unfortunate, because it blunts the intended impression: the Allies’ mobilization was unprecedented in human history and has never been matched since. We did not defeat the Nazis with a change to the marginal tax rate, as much as proponents of a climate tax want to see it as a single-step cure-all. In World War II, there was also a draft, a nationalization of industry, and widespread rationing. If you can imagine a tax rate on carbon that would produce that kind of action in just three decades, you have a better imagination than I do.

“eco-nihilism”: Wendy Lynne Lee, Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017).

“climate nihilism”: Parker used the term in explaining his decision to quit Canada’s New Democratic Party after its premier endorsed subsidizing natural gas.

“climatic regime”: In an essay titled “Love Your Monsters,” Latour elaborated a jeremiad of environmental responsibility from Mary Shelley’s parable, one that begins with a perhaps romantic plea for a clear-eyed recognition of just what we have wrought—writing that, “just as we have forgotten that Frankenstein was the man, not the monster, we have also forgotten Frankenstein’s real sin.”

Dr. Frankenstein’s crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that he abandoned the creature to itself. When Dr. Frankenstein meets his creation on a glacier in the Alps, the monster claims that it was not born a monster, but that it became a criminal only after being left alone by his horrified creator, who fled the laboratory once the horrible thing twitched to life.

A similar case for responsibility comes from Donna Haraway, the theorist behind the pioneering feminist Cyborg Manifesto (1985), in her more recent Staying with the Trouble, subtitled Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016)—after Chthulu, H. P. Lovecraft’s many-faced monster of cosmic malevolence.

“human futilitarianism”: Sam Kriss and Ellie Mae O’Hagan, “Tropical Depressions,” The Baffler 36 (September 2017). “Climate change means, quite plausibly, the end of everything we now understand to constitute our humanity,” Kriss and O’Hagan write. “Something about the magnitude of all this is shattering: most people try not to think about it too much because it’s unthinkable, in the same way that death is always unthinkable for the living. For the people who have to think about it—climate scientists, activists, and advocates—that looming catastrophe evokes a similar horror: the potential extinction of humanity in the future puts humanity into question now.”

“species loneliness”: “If the most common causes of individual suicide are depression and psychic isolation, the cause of our accelerating and collectively willed suicide may be despair over the failed system of capitalism and commodity-driven meaning, as well as the crippling condition that psychologists call ‘species loneliness,’ ” Powers told Everett Hamner of The Los Angeles Review of Books (April 7, 2018), in an interview published under the headline “Here’s to Unsuicide.” “We will always be parasites on plants. But that parasitism can be turned into something better—a mutualism. One of my radicalized activists makes this proposal: We should cut trees like they are a gift, not like they are something we a priori deserve. Such a shift in consciousness might have the effect of slowing down deforestation, since we tend to care for gifts better than we do for freebies. But it would also go a long way toward treating the suicidal impulse in people caused by species loneliness. Many indigenous people knew this for millennia: thanking a living thing and asking for its pardon before using it goes a long way toward exonerating the guilt that leads to violence against the self and others.”

The Anthropic Principle

rudimentary understanding: Eunice Foote, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays,” The American Journal of Science and Arts 22, no. 46 (November 1856). This paper, in which Foote describes the effect of carbon dioxide on global temperature, was first presented at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856—where it was read by a male colleague, Joseph Henry. John Tyndall published his work several years later, in 1859.

“Where is everybody?”: In 1985, Los Alamos published a history of the conversation; see Eric M. Jones, “Where Is Everybody?: An Account of Fermi’s Question,” www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5746675.

For the entire historical window: Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this is the xkcd web comic “A Timeline of Earth’s Average Temperature,” September 12, 2016.

“the great filter”: Hanson first published his thinking on this subject in a 1998 paper, the ominous last line of which is “If we can’t find the Great Filter in our past, we’ll have to fear it in our future.” Robert Hanson, “The Great Filter—Are We Almost Past It?” September 15, 1998, http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html.

“Is it inhabited?”: This comes from Archibald MacLeish’s beautiful account, published on the front page of The New York Times, December 25, 1968—the day after Apollo 8 orbited the moon—under the headline “Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold.” The case MacLeish made was that seeing the planet from a distance could profoundly change how we saw our place in the universe: “Men’s conception of themselves and of each other has always depended on their notion of the earth,” he wrote.

Now, in the last few hours, the notion may have changed again. For the first time in all of time men have seen it not as continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or three, but seen it from the depth of space; seen it whole and round and beautiful and small as even Dante—that “first imagination of Christendom”—had never dreamed of seeing it; as the Twentieth Century philosophers of absurdity and despair were incapable of guessing that it might be seen. And seeing it so, one question came to the minds of those who looked at it. “Is it inhabited?” they said to each other and laughed—and then they did not laugh. What came to their minds a hundred thousand miles and more into space—“half way to the moon” they put it—what came to their minds was the life on that little, lonely, floating planet; that tiny raft in the enormous, empty night. “Is it inhabited?”

The medieval notion of the earth put man at the center of everything. The nuclear notion of the earth put him nowhere—beyond the range of reason even—lost in absurdity and war. This latest notion may have other consequences. Formed as it was in the minds of heroic voyagers who were also men, it may remake our image of mankind. No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality and blind with blood, man may at last become himself.

the Drake equation: Drake himself saw the equation as something very preliminary and tentative, a list of factors that would influence the likelihood of finding extraterrestrial intelligence, which he sketched out in advance of a small conference to discuss the issue in 1960. In 2003, Drake recounted the story in Astrobiology Magazine under the title “The Drake Equation Revisited” (September 29, 2003).

literally closed themselves off: Dyson first proposed this possibility in a 1960 paper, “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation” (Science 131, no. 3414 [June 1960], pp. 1667–68), though as a concept it appeared earlier in the 1937 sci-fi novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon.

“the astrobiology of the Anthropocene”: Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018). In this book, Frank writes, “Our technology and the vast energies it has unleashed give us enormous power over ourselves and the world around us. It’s like we’ve been given the keys to the planet. Now we’re ready to drive it off a cliff.”

“thinking like a planet”: The phrase also recalls Aldo Leopold’s “thinking like a mountain,” which first appeared in his Sand County Almanac of 1937, and which provided the title of an excellent meditative essay by Jedediah Purdy on nature writing and our changing relationship to the natural world, published in n+1 in 2017.

Personally the perspective strikes me as too Stoic—a mountain would not much care if humans, a single species, suffered tremendous setbacks, and the same is true for the planet as a whole. As those scientists kept reminding me, “The earth will survive; it’s the humans that might not.” And indeed, commentators have traced a prehistory of Leopold’s phrase through the ancient philosophy of Epicurus and Lucretius.

an unconventional recent paper: Gavin A. Schmidt, “The Silurian Hypothesis: Would It Be Possible to Detect an Industrial Civilization in the Geological Record?” International Journal of Astrobiology, April 16, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1473550418000095.

anyone trying to “solve” the Drake equation: One especially notable effort was Anders Sandberg’s et al., “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox,” Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University, June 6, 2018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf.

“Now I am become death”: An account of this—including the fact that Oppenheimer first quoted the line twenty years after the event—appears in Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage, 2006).

“It worked”: Frank Oppenheimer told this story in the 1981 documentary The Day After Trinity, directed by Jon H. Else.

forty-two scientists: Connor Nolan et al., “Past and Future Global Transformation of Terrestrial Ecosystems Under Climate Change,” Science 361, no. 6405 (August 2018): pp. 920–23.

James Lovelock: His “The Quest for Gaia” was first published in New Scientist in 1975, and over the years Lovelock became less and less sanguine. In 2005, he published Gaia: Medicine for an Ailing Planet, in 2006 The Revenge of Gaia, and in 2009 The Vanishing Face of Gaia. He has also advocated geoengineering as a last-ditch effort to stop climate change.

“spaceship earth”: Buckminster Fuller popularized the term, but it appeared originally almost a century before him, in Henry George’s 1879 work Progress and Poverty—in a passage later summarized by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier:

The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.

In 1965, Adlai Stevenson managed to give a more poetic treatment, in an address before the United Nations Social and Economic Council in Geneva:

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.