by Lynn Keller
Historians are wary of thinking in the monolithic terms of species, and Chakrabarty raises the question of whether such generalizing talk simply obscures “the reality of capitalist production and the logic of imperial . . . domination that it fosters.” He acknowledges that much responsibility for the current crisis lies with the rich nations and rich classes rather than all of humankind. (Chakrabarty is pointing to a common critique of the Anthropocene concept—to be explored in chapter 6—that, in framing humans as a species, it elides issues of environmental justice.) He nonetheless argues that the history of capital alone is insufficient to explain climate change. He proposes that the combined resources of geology, archeology, and history are needed to explain the current catastrophe—that is, the combined resources of disciplines that work in divergent time scales. We are called upon “to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history.”6 Precisely because he believes an (otherwise unlikely) awareness of pan-human collectivity arises from the shared sense of catastrophe prompted by climate change, Chakrabarty does not dismiss this as impossible, though it requires working at the limits of historical understanding. In a more recent essay, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” he has elaborated on three of the “rifts” that he sees us necessarily straddling as we think or speak about climate change. These inject, he acknowledges, “a certain degree of contradictoriness in our thinking, for we are being asked to think about different scales simultaneously,”7 but he embraces those tensions as sites of productive possibility.8 The essay explains why it’s necessary to bring together different scales—for instance, why economists, politicians, and others thinking in terms of risk management need to understand scientists’ uncertainties about exact climatic tipping points and “safe” levels of greenhouse gases.
In Chakrabarty’s view, the climate crisis requires us to meet the challenge of “mov[ing] back and forth between thinking on these different scales all at once,” bringing human-centered thinking into play with a planetary perspective.9 Given that paleoclimatologists, evolutionary biologists, and other natural historians think in terms of far larger time scales than historians, Chakrabarty positions himself as championing a kind of thinking that is unfamiliar to historians and humanists, but by no means ungraspable. He concludes another essay on essentially the same issues by advocating “multiple-track narratives so that the story of the ontologically-endowed, justice-driven human can be told alongside the other agency that we also are—a species that has now acquired the potency of a geophysical force, and thus is blind, at this level, to its own perennial concerns with justice that otherwise forms the staple of humanist narratives.”10
If Chakrabarty articulates an aspirational approach to the problem of scale in the Anthropocene, Derek Woods’s critique of Chakrabarty represents the second, skeptical position on this issue. Woods does not believe that we can in fact “scale up our imagination of the human,” as Chakrabarty proposes, because of what are called scale variants, which create scale effects. As Woods explains in “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene,” “at its most general, scale variance means that the observation and the operation of systems are subject to different constraints at different scales due to real discontinuities.” For example, while insects can walk on the ceiling and fall from it without damage, because surface forces have more impact on them than the force of gravity, insect bodies could not be dramatically scaled up and have that remain true. Insects “inhabit a different regime of scale constraint from that of larger vertebrates.”11 Global climate change, he asserts, does not operate like the familiar cartographic scale where one can smoothly zoom in and out (think Google Maps). Non-cartographic concepts of scale introduce discontinuities, and scaling up or down may introduce contradictions or failures.
In relation to current global climate change, nature’s response to multiple anthropogenic changes of the Anthropocene, this has powerful implications for human agency and responsibility. Timothy Clark, on whose work Woods draws, points out that “with climate change . . . we have a map, its scale includes the whole earth but when it comes to relating the threat to daily questions of politics, ethics or specific interpretations of history, culture, etc., the map is often almost mockingly useless.” Clark explains:
Scale effects in relation to climate change are confusing because they take the easy, daily equations of moral and political accounting and drop into them both a zero and an infinity: the greater the number of people engaged in modern forms of consumption then the less the relative influence or responsibility of each but the worse the cumulative impact of their insignificance. As a result of scale effects what is self-evident or rational at one scale may well be destructive or unjust at another. Hence, progressive social and economic policies designed to disseminate Western levels of prosperity may even resemble, on another scale, an insane plan to destroy the biosphere. Yet, for any individual household, motorist, etc., a scale effect in their actions is invisible. It is not present in any phenomenon in itself (no eidetic reduction will flush it out); but only in the contingency of how many other such phenomena there are, have been and will be, at even vast distances in space or time. Human agency becomes, as it were, displaced from within by its own act, a kind of demonic iterability.12
Woods and Clark emphasize the agency of the nonhuman, which, along with scale effects themselves, they see as insufficiently recognized. Woods argues that “the scale-critical subject of the Anthropocene is not ‘our species’ but the sum of terraforming assemblages composed of humans, non-human species, and technics. . . . ‘Anthropocene,’ ironically, names the disempowerment of human beings in relation to terraforming assemblages that draw much of their agency from nonhumans.”13 As the environmental crisis erodes boundaries between intellectual disciplines so that people attempt to “think ‘everything at once,’ ” Clark sees “an implosion of scales, implicating seemingly trivial or small actions with enormous stakes while intellectual boundaries and lines of demarcation fold in upon each other.”14
Rather than advocating, as Chakrabarty did, multitrack narratives that bring together in tension-filled amalgamation the different scale perspectives of different disciplines, Clark proposes a metacritical analysis that separates out different scales. He proposes examining assumptions about scale in different kinds of readings of literary texts—the personal scale, the scale of a national culture, the scale of the entire earth and its inhabitants over a time scale of (in his example) six hundred years—to clarify the inadequacy of familiar critical assumptions and highlight nonhuman agency. His approach, then, is also multitrack, but emphasizes disjunctive scale effects and does not aim for synthesis. Clark advocates a way of reading that would make clear the need for change in methods of thinking and analysis but is not itself a means to that change. Woods similarly announces, “the point is not to think human agency across scale domains, as Chakrabarty argues, but to recognize that (what earth-science calls) humanity as geophysical force is the emergent property of operations in discontinuous scale domains.”15
As I understand them, these two positions represent different assessments of human capability. Chakrabarty and his ilk believe that by pushing the limits of current forms of thinking, we may straddle scalar rifts sufficiently to use reason to address climate change, while Woods and company believe that the mind is itself like the nonscaling phenomena in nature that they call to our attention. The human mind cannot scale up and down without failure or error, and therefore it is best used now to recognize the disjunctions of scalar effects. The three poets to whose work I now turn demonstrate comparably differing emphases and different assessments of human perceptual and conceptual limits.
Juliana Spahr’s emphasis in “Unnamed Dragonfly Species” is on a psychological dimension of Anthropocene scalar challenges that I call “scalar dissonance”: the cognitive and affective dissonance between minute individual agency and enormous collective impact. As we collectively lurch toward one tipping point after another, each of w
hich has cascading consequences we can barely comprehend, the individual feels tiny and helpless.16 One’s conscientious choices—not to travel by airplane, say, to eat locally and organically grown produce, or to purchase clothes only for necessity rather than fashion—seem completely without impact. Yet on a collective scale, our unconscientious, wasteful behaviors cause significant environmental damage. Ruling political, corporate, and economic systems, which seem responsible for continuing and dangerous environmental degradation, are evidently beyond the individual’s control, even as the individual cannot avoid participating in them. The mental and emotional costs of maintaining an awareness of these scale variants as part of one’s moral and political consciousness—the awareness Clark and Woods want to cultivate—can be high. Spahr’s poem illuminates what it feels like to try to live one’s daily life with the sense of imploding scales that Clark identifies. Her work exposes the disjunction of scalar effects as she struggles with the agonizing impossibility of bringing divergent scales into alignment. I will also suggest, however—here’s the dance—that Spahr’s poem points indirectly to other possible avenues through which individuals in the self-conscious Anthropocene might legitimately feel less disempowered.
In the poems I’ll examine by Forrest Gander and Ed Roberson—both of whom have had substantial training in natural sciences—psychological struggles are not a focal interest; instead, like Chakrabarty, these two take interest in what their writing implies are attainable ways of stretching our thinking to meet the scalar challenges of the Anthropocene. That does not mean they suggest that we will manage to apply that thinking pervasively and promptly enough to avert disaster. Even so, we might see them as attempting to participate in Worster’s revolution of the mind—what Evelyn Reilly talks about as a paradigm shift—in order to respond to current environmental crises. They model fresh ways of deploying traditional resources of the literary imagination, such as storytelling, lyricism, and metaphor, along with the human gifts of attention and sensory perception, to foster thinking that might straddle divergent Anthropocene scales.
SCALAR DISSONANCE AND JULIANA SPAHR’S “UNNAMED DRAGONFLY SPECIES”
Spahr’s “Unnamed Dragonfly Species,” from her 2011 collection Well Then There Now, explores how daunted people feel when they try to grasp the suprahuman scale of the human-generated transformations taking place in the Anthropocene. It effectively exposes scalar dissonance and its accompanying aggregate of emotions and intellectual responses, drawing the reader into that experience through its rhetoric and construction. “Unnamed Dragon fly Species” presents information about two huge and complex environmental issues, global warming and species extinction, but its focus is less on the data than on the difficulties nonscientists from the U.S. experience trying to process the reality of global warming and respond meaningfully to it.
The piece is woven of two strands. One is a narrative concerning an unspecified but socially cohesive “they” who, in a year when hot temperatures came so early in April that their city’s daffodils all died almost as soon as they bloomed, became preoccupied with the melting of glaciers, which they learned about and observed on the Internet. Spahr’s pronoun, “they,” functions inclusively to embrace an unclosed group to which the reader might belong. Inserted between each of the sentences in that narrative about “they” is the bold-faced name of a plant or animal species. These names, which constitute the second strand, are alphabetically organized entries from a list of approximately 150 “endangered, threatened and special concern plant, fish, and wildlife species of New York State” found on a state government website.17
Spahr’s presentation of the experience of the people learning about glacial melting positions the reader not just as audience to their story but also as participant in the analogous experience provided not by the Internet but by the poem. While each of the work’s eleven sections begins with a sentence and ends with a species name, their content varies, so that some sections report the struggles “they” went through as they grew increasingly preoccupied with and informed about the geological evidence of rapid global warming, while others provide enough of the factual information “they” were trying to process that the reader has to struggle as “they” did to confront the mind-boggling scale of this global transformation. On the one hand, the reader is being invited to process information that is difficult to absorb; on the other, the reader is prompted to examine the conceptual and psychological drama this information produces both by reading about others who confronted this information and by examining his or her own responses to it.
Like all the poems in Well Then There Now, this one is preceded by a map showing its place of composition, for which the specific address (in Brooklyn) appears in the book’s “Acknowledgments and Other Information,” as well as by that location’s geographical coordinates. This emphasis on specific location suggests that Spahr values attention to local particularities within a consciously global context. Yet the place where “they” are experiencing the Anthropocene is most immediately the indeterminate space of the information-overloaded World Wide Web, an unfathomably vast realm of data that can be difficult to connect to one’s non-Internet reality in some specific locale. “On the internet they realized,” begins an early section, as one might say “on the boat to Dubrovnik they realized” or “on the plateau near Santa Fe,” but without any comparable sense of locatedness, orientation, or perspective. Spahr does not announce how difficult it is to grasp the actual scale, let alone the significance, of the facts about glacial melting that follow. She simply lists what “they” were learning, using “that” as an anaphoric base and saying nothing about how “they” reacted to this digitally obtained information: (For now I will attend only to the sentences that follow “they”’s experience, delaying attention to the text’s other strand.)
On the internet they realized that Iceland’s Vatnajokull glacier is melting by about three feet a year. Common Loon That the Bering Glacier in Alaska recently lost as much as seven and a half miles in a sixty day period. Common Nighthawk That the European Alps lost half their ice over the last century and that many of the rivers of Europe were likely to be gone in twenty to thirty years time. Common Sanddragon That the Columbia Glacier in Alaska will continue to recede, possibly at a rate of as much as ten miles in ten years. Common Tern That thirty-six cubic miles of ice had melted from glaciers in West Antarctica in the past decade and that alone had raised sea levels worldwide by about one-sixtieth of an inch. (WTTN 78)
Various units of measure for both space and time appear here—miles and cubic miles, feet, inches, a half century, thirty years, a decade, a year, sixty days—scalar options in familiar and readily imagined units, but applied to objects that were created and exist on scales far more difficult to apprehend. Did such accumulating knowledge bring home to “they” the scalar reality of this planetary transformation? Or did this wash of data prove too much to absorb? Similar uncertainties apply to the poem’s readers. Will Spahr awaken her readers with the startling facts and, with their multiplication, open dulled eyes to the severity of the situation? Or is she recreating the dulling mesmerization that “they” may have experienced? Might the repetitive anaphoric lists, as Judith Butler suggests is the case with the repetitions involved in performing gender identity, serve a normalizing function?18 By suspending the narrative of “they” while providing factual data, Spahr allows her readers to have, and reflect on, their independent experience of this information.
This section identifies 1988 as a turning point year in the history of global warming, and in the next section Spahr explores how oblivious the younger “they” had been to climate change at that time. Spahr’s narrative of an ordinary “they” helps readers acknowledge how little people generally think of anything outside their own immediate context and personal needs—unless, like that year’s explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, the event is particularly dramatic or spectacular. The scale of human attention tends to be small and self-cent
ered, and not attuned to what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence.”19 Even changes that geologists, oceanographers, or climatologists recognize as alarmingly rapid or dramatic can, because of their geographical distance and their suprahuman scale, remain abstracted from ordinary lives. Only when the daffodils in one’s own city suddenly die as early spring temperatures weirdly spike into the nineties does one take note: “This happened right where they were living” (WTTN 75). Readers may well recognize themselves in the younger “they” who spent their time thinking about finishing college and getting jobs or hitting baseballs or ridding themselves of drunk boyfriends rather than pondering locally imperceptible changes in global climate.