Huffington Post - Casey Williams
We're obsessed with grim environmental tales, but most of them miss the point.
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If you live somewhere other than under a large rock, the premise of
The Tangled Lands will
sound familiar: A declining empire owes its former splendor to a
miraculous energy source. Now, emissions from that source threaten to
destroy the empire. Everyone’s freaking out.
The story is (maybe too) obviously an
allegory of climate change. Instead of hydrocarbons, the fictional
world Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell create in their recently
released novel draws power from magic, which also fertilizes the
voracious, writhing, poisonous weeds now bearing down on one of the last
great cities. Migrants pour in from the bramble-choked periphery. The
rich and powerful seek to turn the crisis to their advantage while
ordinary citizens resist. Al Gore is … not there, but you get the point.
Novels like
The Tangled Lands are
seismographic readings from a trembling society. They register a
profound anxiety that the world we know is collapsing under our feet. Literary
critics interested in climate change are currently debating whether
these works can also give readers tools for addressing the ecological
crisis. Perhaps fiction, the thinking goes, makes it easier to wrap our
heads around complex environmental changes and dream up useful ways of
dealing with them.
The stakes are high. “If there is any one thing global warming has made perfectly clear,” wrote novelist Amitav Ghosh in
The Great Derangement, “it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a form of collective suicide.”
Fiction that wrestles with the
changing world takes a number of forms. Some aspire to a kind of gritty
realism (David Simon’s television series “
Treme,”
for example). Other works pine for better days or “trade in the
nostalgic dreams of empire’s many lost wonders,” as a character in
The Tangled Lands puts
it. In general, science fiction and fantasy are the preferred genres
for staging the sometimes slow, sometimes
holy-shit-I-should-write-a-will-fast transformation of the world.
While some of these works avoid apocalyptic themes, such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s
New York: 2140, much eco-fiction plunges readers into near- or post-apocalyptic futures. Think movies like “
The Day After Tomorrow” and “
Snowpiercer” or novels like Claire Vaye Watkins’
Gold Fame Citrus and Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake. Even “Game of Thrones” is a story about cataclysmic changes in the weather.
These stories can be powerful aids for thought. Novels like
The Tangled Lands let us sample catastrophe from a safe distance. Films like “
Beasts of the Southern Wild,”
which tracks a bayou community through a violent storm, make familiar
dangers strange so that we might escape ourselves and reflect on a
bizarre, broken world.
The best of these works, like Octavia Butler’s
Parable of the Sower (published
in 1993, well before the current craze), highlight the uneven violence
of large-scale environmental change. Butler’s novel follows Lauren, a
black teenager, as she travels from Los Angeles, bone-dry and full of
bandits, to the relative security of Northern California. Lauren’s
journey through the wilds beyond walled middle-class enclaves reminds us
that ecological pressures lay some lower than others, while inviting us
to imagine more egalitarian ways of organizing future worlds.
Such speculations aren’t confined to fiction, of course. Journalist David Wallace-Wells’ 2017 article “
The Uninhabitable Earth” fuses literary conventions with hard reporting to conjure apocalyptic visions of a warming world. Even Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring, remembered as the nonfiction book that sparked the environmental movement back in the 1960s, begins with a “fable.”
“There once was a town at the heart
of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its
surroundings,” Carson wrote. We know how the story ends: Humans lugged
in their cars and pesticides, and broke the balance.
Nonfiction does as much aesthetic
work as any novel. Indeed, if people relate to the world through culture
― through images, tropes and social scripts that give meaning to the
raw data of the universe ― then every book, movie and cereal box reveals
something about how someone somewhere is puzzling through life on a
changing planet. So too does every scientific report, news briefing and
presidential address. There is something profoundly cinematic about
footage of oil gushing from Deepwater Horizon’s blown wellhead (
watch it again and try to look away). And there’s something deeply haunting about the “
hockey stick” graph that has come to symbolize the planetary warming trend.
Fictional or factual, these stories
matter because they frame people’s moral and political responses to
ecological change. Activists who
shut down
several major oil pipelines in 2016 risked lengthy prison sentences
because their culture (white liberal American) tells itself stories
about personal moral heroism and understands the theatrics of righteous
lawbreaking. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Seattle valve turner Michael Foster
is a lover of
Henry David Thoreau. “I’m just more afraid of climate change than I am of prison,” he
told The New York Times as he stared down the possibility of decades behind bars.
There are plenty of reasons to be afraid. Global average temperatures
creep higher
each year; superstorms ravage coastlines; droughts and floods wipe out
homes and farms and city blocks. As usual, those denied wealth and power
suffer most from the intensifying disaster.
Over 100,000 Puerto Ricans remain
without electricity seven
months after Hurricane Maria tore through the island. “No electricity,
no water, no food, no fuel, no hospitals and no means of communication,”
Puerto Rican journalist Omaya Sosa Pascual
wrote of her post-storm home. “It seemed unreal that this could happen in the 21st century.”
It’s tempting to read worsening
disasters as portents of the apocalypse to come, a preface to some final
lethal bang. But this isn’t usually how environmental change, and
especially not climate change, works. Climate change doesn’t describe a
single future catastrophe, but a slow and uneven unraveling, a drawn-out
apocalypse that began long ago and that will stretch to an end that
probably won’t feel like much of an ending at all.
For most people, climate change is
ordinary danger amplified, enduring injustice heightened. For those few
who have enough wealth or power to recuse themselves from the
vicissitudes of planetary change, global warming will probably feel like
banal anxiety: a vague worry here, a twinge of guilt there. Anyone
waiting for the apocalypse is likely to be disappointed, over and over
again.
Journalist Kathryn Schultz summed up
the problem nicely. “We excel at imagining future scenarios, including
awful ones,” she wrote in a
New Yorker article
about a mega-earthquake threatening the Pacific Northwest. “But such
apocalyptic visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and
still less a plan of action.”
Some recent environmental literature is resisting the easy spectacle of apocalypse. Take Ben Lerner’s novel
10:04. The
novel’s action is bookended by fictionalized versions of two actual
superstorms ― Hurricanes Irene and Sandy ― that fail to live up to the
apocalyptic hype that precedes them. When Irene hits, the narrator
expects catastrophe, but none arrives. “I went into the kitchen and
drank a glass of water and glanced at the instant coffee on the counter
and it was no longer an emissary from a world to come,” he says. “There
was disappointment in my relief at the failure of the storm.”
The narrator’s disappointment
contains a lesson: Reckoning with the complexity of climate change means
acknowledging one’s desire to turn it into a spectacle, an art object, a
moment of personal transformation, a dramatic tale to which one can
append existential anxieties like so many railcars on a train barreling
over the edge. Lerner asks readers to confront an unsettling
possibility: For the wealthy and well-connected, climate change will not
feel catastrophic most of the time.
For Lerner, as for Butler and
Bacigalupi and Buckell, confronting climate change isn’t about staving
off some future disaster, but dealing with the everyday injustices that
make the present unbearable for so many.
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