Book review: Climate change has doomed us – now what on earth should we do about it?
We’re Doomed. Now What?
By Roy Scranton
Reviewed by Andy Martin
What seems to be at
fault in climate change denial is an overinflated concept of intentionality. As
if everything had to be intended, to have an author or Creator behind it. No one could ever
accuse Roy Scranton of denial: he is a climate change oracle. He is a crusading
unintentionalist. No one – apart possibly from Dr No and Blofeld – is
Machiavellian enough to think of blowing up the whole planet, and yet
apocalypse is now. As he writes in his
new collection of essays, We’re Doomed. Now What?, “The
Anthropocene is an apocalypse, but an apocalypse that has already been revealed
and is already happening, though not all at once and not all the same.”
Optimism and pessimism
don’t even come into it, we’re already in a “death spiral”. He anticipates the
imminent collapse of agriculture, the “extinction of the human species”, or at
least the end of fossil-fuelled civilisation as we know it. On the other hand,
he’s just had a daughter. So he hasn’t completely given up. And talking of
giving up, he acknowledges that logically we all ought to be vegans, but he
still likes bacon for breakfast. And he drives a car and flies a lot of air
miles too. He feels as guilty as anyone else. Or as innocent.
Scranton has an
unusual backstory. He started out as a hippy-anarchist-poet-weirdo dropout (I
am adopting his terms). Then he dropped into the US army in search of
adventure, authenticity and masculinity, and served in Iraq and other places
from 2002-2006. Then he went to college, wrote a novel, an essay, Learning
to Die in the Anthropocene, and now teaches English at the University
of Notre Dame. He looks more scholar
than veteran, with grey hair and John Lennon glasses, but he writes like a
warrior. Militant, forceful, unstoppable. But with a dash of battlefield poet.
He sees an inevitable fusion of climate change and war. He ought to know,
having been there, armed to the teeth with an M16 and a grenade launcher, driving
a Humvee around Baghdad. War, he argues, is normal.
“We have little reason
to hope that our long history of war and murder might someday come to an end.”
And beyond all the causes, what we are fighting over is the right to use up
what’s left of the planet. Whoever wins, everybody loses in the end. We’re Doomed. Now
What? reads like a
dark re-shoot of James Lovelock’s “Gaia” hypothesis. Lovelock was a
British scientist who ended up with his own laboratory in California, studying
the possibility of life on Mars. Conversely he finds himself wondering why
Earth was not already a dead planet. We’re breathing exhaust gases from other
beings, and they’re breathing ours.
Scranton would say,
yes, but we produce more exhaust – CO2 and methane – than any other creatures.
But Lovelock argued that the planet, understood as a “superorganism” – Gaia –
was a self-correcting society or “democracy”, in which all the constituent
members act together, collectively, in a kind of mass symbiosis, to achieve
homeostasis – even if that might involve the death of most of humanity (the
so-called “revenge of Gaia”). Recently Bruno Latour,
the French philosopher, has taken up Lovelock’s arguments in Facing
Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Latour sees Lovelock as
the Galileo of our day, overthrowing some of our simplistic ideas of the way
the world is stuck together, and showing how interwoven everything is.
Maybe the classic
retort of Galileo to the Pope, “And yet it moves” – referring to the Earth
going around the sun rather than the other way around – can provide a common
denominator here. Certain things move, or are moved, irrespective of human
wishes. We have a huge impact on the planet, whether we like it or not.
We anthropoi of the “anthropocene” now have a geological
force. Within our local biosphere, we are like a rock, or an asteroid hitting
it at immense speed. All of which suggests
we need a different way of thinking about ourselves and the everything that is
not ourselves. While also toning down the “selves” part of that last sentence
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