by Lynn Keller
Those pleasures are connected to a shared awareness of embodied embeddedness in threatened ecosystems. In Graham’s poetry, such embeddedness puts into sharp relief the aesthetic pleasures of the pastoral, which has long provided a literary foil to apocalyptic destruction. In Reilly’s apocalyptic writing, embeddedness is registered most through human connections to nonhuman animal species and their destinies, while paying attention to oncoming disaster in the context of ongoing crisis requires most especially the pleasures of humor—even if, as in the blues, laughter may be mixed with pain. As in Graham’s work, the double burden of ongoing crisis and looming catastrophe encourages renewed appreciation of presently available sensory delight, suggested by her title’s reference to a spirited music developed in resistance to oppression, calypso. The poets’ inclusion of compensatory pleasure focused in the physical world does not make apocalypse welcome as the promise of the New Jerusalem’s earthly paradise does in the Christian narrative. It does, however, make anticipation of catastrophe momentarily more bearable, while it may support a reinvestment in environmental well-being. Although neither artist’s poetry says so explicitly, this approach to apocalyptic discourse that includes reminders of worldly pleasures may renew—and may well be intended to renew—readers’ personal commitments to do what they can to mitigate and minimize ongoing environmental damage and reduce the threat of utter devastation.
ENVIRONMENTAL APOCALYPTICISM AND DWELLING IN CRISIS
The previous chapter’s discussion of poetry concerned with the toxicity of plastics was framed partly through risk theory as formulated by Ulrich Beck. Beck examines relatively new types of ecological and high-tech risks that have a “new quality”: “In the afflictions they produce they are no longer tied to their place of origin. . . . By their nature they endanger all forms of life on this planet.” Consequently, “in the risk society the unknown and unintended consequences come to be a dominant force in history and society.”3 If all forms of life on this planet are now inadvertently threatened because of multiple types of industrial or military production and energy generation, it is not surprising that current awareness of risk is often linked to the anticipation of catastrophe. It’s equally unsurprising that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which Lawrence Buell identifies as the “effective beginning” for contemporary environmentalism’s toxic discourse, is also considered, due especially to the prefatory fable, its inaugural example of apocalyptic discourse.4 Carson, in Buell’s words, “invented doomsday by environmental genocide.”5 The shift from the last chapter’s exploration of ecopoetic engagement with one contemporary form of toxicity—one set of the “toxic things” that “will far outlast current social and biological forms” dubbed “hyperobjects” by Timothy Morton6—to this chapter’s concern with poetry that envisions environmental apocalypse and engages apocalyptic discourse seems almost inevitable.
Ursula Heise has even suggested that the “vision of a terminally polluted planet” typical of toxic discourse is a “subgenre of apocalyptic narrative.”7 Heise’s views are worth elaborating because, although characteristically insightful, they seem to me not entirely accurate in relation to twenty-first-century ecopoetics. In addition to subsuming toxic discourse within apocalyptic discourse, Heise claims that the secular version of apocalypticism found in environmental writing of the 1960s and 1970s “can appropriately be understood as a form of risk perception.” But she goes on, “Yet to the extent that such narrative, even in its secular version, articulates quite clear-cut distinctions between good and evil, desirable and undesirable futures, it indeed relies on a different mode of projecting the future than theories of risk, which tend to emphasize persistent uncertainties, unintended consequences, and necessary trade-offs.”8 In Frederick Buell’s diagnosis of “the demise of environmental apocalypticism,” which I will soon examine more extensively, Heise finds valuable the suggestion “that apocalyptic scenarios differ from risk scenarios in the way they construe the relation between present, future, and crisis. In the apocalyptic perspective, utter destruction lies ahead but can be averted and replaced by an alternative future society; in the risk perspective, crises are already underway all around, and while their consequences can be mitigated, a future without their impact has become impossible to envision.” She goes on to state that this is not a dichotomy, but nonetheless maintains that the important difference between the two “lies in the way that many (though not all) environmental apocalypses continue to hold up, implicitly or explicitly, ideals of naturally self-regenerating ecosystems and holistic communities in harmony with their surroundings as a counter model to the visions of exploitation and devastation they describe, while perspectives grounded in risk analysis tend to outline more or less desirable consequences and futures of certain courses of action, but by definition none that are completely exempt from risk.”9 Although we will see ways in which Graham does hold up a countermodel to devastation, it is a profoundly damaged or doomed rather than a self-regenerating ecosystem. Reilly’s and Graham’s approaches to apocalyptic rhetoric—approaches that combine what Frederick Buell calls “dwelling in crisis” with visions of planetary catastrophe—render the distinction between apocalyptic rhetoric and the language of risk less clear than Heise’s argument suggests, even given how she qualifies her claims. Similarly, their work, as we will see, challenges Frederick Buell’s presentation of apocalyptic vision as an alternative to the acknowledgment of living in crisis. Both visions coexist, however uneasily, for these twenty-first-century poets.
The usefulness of apocalyptic rhetoric for advancing environmentalist awareness and reining in environmentally destructive behaviors is contested, both in popular journalism and in ecocriticism. There’s a widespread sense that too much doom talk tends to produce a kind of deafness in those addressed. The telling phrase “apocalypse fatigue” appeared in the headline of a November 2009 article in the Guardian by environmental strategists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, where they assert that apocalyptic rhetoric has only polarized the politics surrounding climate change and undermined public faith in climate science. Yet in May of 2013 the Guardian ran a monitory article headlined “Apocalypse? No. But Unless We Change Tack, the Planet Is Running Out of Time.” Similarly, in May of 2012 Scientific American ran an article focusing on the forecasts of the MIT computer model World 3, titled “Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed the Environmental Point of No Return?” Also playing on the 1979 Vietnam War movie title Apocalypse Now, in August of 2015 Rolling Stone ran “Apocalypse Soon: 9 Terrifying Signs of Environmental Doom.” In 2011 the Wall Street Journal even published a Guide to Investing in the Apocalypse.10 Such journalistic venues seem to believe that talk of apocalypse at least attracts rather than deters readers, and perhaps they hope it will produce environmentally beneficial social or political changes in the process.
Lawrence Buell has argued that “apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.” He continues, “Of no other dimension of contemporary environmentalism, furthermore, can it be so unequivocally said that the role of the imagination is central to the project; for the rhetoric of apocalypticism implies that the fate of the world hinges on the arousal of the imagination to a sense of crisis. It presupposes that ‘the most dangerous threat to our global environment may not be the strategic threats themselves but rather our perception of them, for most people do not yet accept the fact that this crisis is extremely grave.’ ”11 As Buell sees it, such writing, in which “the imagination is being used to anticipate and, if possible, forestall actual apocalypse,” may be justified by the hope of practical efficacy: “Even the slimmest of possibilities is enough to justify the nightmare.” Robin Globus Veldman has drawn on sociological studies to argue for an association between environmental apocalyptic thinking and environmental activism. Some, such as Lisa Garforth, have made a case for apocalyptic scenarios claiming they can, by prompting recognition of the need for radical action
, “effect, metaphorically, a fresh start in terms of the imagination of future social possibilities.”12
Yet the potential pitfalls are many. The most often cited risk is of seeming to cry wolf; the public learns to dismiss claims of impending catastrophe as earlier dire predictions fail to prove true—even when the predicted scenarios may not have come true because people recognized and averted the danger. After all, as James Berger among others has emphasized, despite the long history of apocalyptic writing, the end of the world has not come about; the paradox of apocalyptic texts is that “the end is never the end” (and according to Berger, what remains after the end is the true object of the apocalyptic writer’s concern). Other acknowledged problems with apocalyptic environmental literature include its extreme moral dualism and, as Heise notes, the genre’s implicit or explicit “rel[iance] on pastoral as the template for alternative scenarios.” At its most culpable, Lawrence Buell observes, the turn to the pastoral enacts a “willful retreat from social and political responsibility” (though he cautions that this gesture may be strategic and that “the job of setting a pastoral moment in an appropriate ideological frame is trickier than it might seem”). When explaining “The Trouble with Apocalypse,” Greg Garrard notes that the rhetoric of catastrophe tends to produce the crisis it purportedly describes, that it generates polarized responses, and that it tends to simplify scientific findings and compromise scientific caution because of millennial panic.13
Whatever its limitations, however, eco-apocalyptic writing seems unlikely to diminish in the near future, both because of the intensifying stream of environmental bad news and, importantly, because of the centrality of apocalypse to Christian thought and hence to Western cultures. Except when employed by evangelical Christians, eco-apocalyptic discourse generally differs from the pattern established in the Book of Revelation in envisioning a “blank apocalypse” without a welcome paradise, without the city of God here on earth to follow the destruction.14 The vast majority of environmentalists who foresee doom for current planetary life or for the human species find nothing redeeming about it and want desperately to avoid the catastrophe that looms. The framework of their eco-apocalyptic thinking is predominantly secular. Nonetheless, as will be evident in Graham’s and Reilly’s poetry, both the narrative structure and the imagistic particulars of the biblical story in Revelation and in the Old Testament books thought to anticipate its story, as well as the temporal complexity of apocalyptic prediction, provide compelling resources for environmentally concerned writers. In both poets’ work, an array of allusions to this tradition signals their apocalyptic perspective.
However deep its roots in an influential tradition, eco-apocalypticism in the twenty-first century is having to adapt to new pressures. Earlier consensus held that the function of apocalypticism—“a strategy of persuasion or coercion that interrupts routine and acquiescence with a call of alarm”—is to persuade the audience to change courses, to modify or abandon reigning ideologies.15 Environmental apocalyptic writings, as Jamie Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer noted in the mid-1990s, “are not to be taken literally. Their aim is not to predict the future but to change it.” Killingsworth and Palmer argue that “millennial ecology” is a radical attempt at social change, aiming to “replace the ideology of progress and to dislodge from power its primary perpetuators and beneficiaries.” Observing that apocalyptic narrative appears at moments when the environmental movement is seeking to appeal to new segments of the public, they assert that “the hyperbole with which the impending doom is presented—the image of total ruin and destruction—implies the need for an ideological shift. If the ‘predicted’ devastation is extreme in the apocalyptic narrative, then the change in consciousness or political agenda recommended by the narrator is correspondingly extreme or radical.” This is interesting rhetorical history, but what happens when the “predictions” of apocalyptic discourse can’t so easily be put within quotation marks and the doom depicted appears less evidently hyperbolic? A similar question emerges in relation to Lawrence Buell’s characterization of environmental apocalyptic literature, also from the mid-1990s, as embracing “the challenge of imagining the remote consequences of the transformation of environment that seem to follow from the unprecedented instability widely perceived to mark . . . the actual state of physical nature, as human power over it increases.” In the self-conscious Anthropocene the consequences of that instability may no longer seem “remote.” Observing that “technology is advancing at an ever more rapid pace even as our world appears to accelerate toward a plunge into chaos more profound than any pre-technological civilization would be able to take,” Benjamin Kunkel notes that this lends a “grim plausibility” to both dystopian and apocalyptic scenarios.16
One possible response is exemplified by Ed Roberson’s “To See the Earth Before the End of the World,” which figured in the first chapter’s discussion of dissonant scales. His apocalyptic poem locates contemporary humankind in the midst of the “world’s death”—the demise of the planet as humans have known it—with the current population witnessing the final, lethal stages of ongoing disasters, in particular the rapid acceleration of what the poem presents as anthropogenic global warming that will cause human extinction. The poem’s perspective is deterministic; the coming end is inevitable, human destruction having been assured ever since we first became hunters and assumed dominion over the natural world more than 2 million years ago. In stressing the inevitability of the end it foresees, “To See the Earth Before the End of the World” fits the “tragic” framework in the tragic/comic schema of apocalyptic writing that Garrard adopts for ecocriticism from rhetorician Stephen O’Leary.17 Roberson, however, does not present the radically dualistic battle of good vs. evil associated with tragic apocalypticism. Good and evil are also not the terms on which either Graham or Reilly structures apocalyptic writing. All three seem closer to the comic frame in that they depict “human agency [as] real but flawed,” so that fallibility rather than evil is at issue.18
But how can poets who do not share, or at least resist, Roberson’s fatalistic view respond to current apparently dire circumstances? The eco-apocalyptic writing of both Graham and Reilly seems more fully aligned than Roberson’s with “comic” apocalypticism, in which, because “the End may or may not be nigh, believers must live in the light of its possibility whilst refraining from relinquishing their worldly duties.”19 This less deterministic frame lends itself to warnings designed to change behavior or keep people on the path of virtue—or, in this case, on the path of protection and care for the environment; it suits what Veldman calls “avertive” apocalypticism. Yet Garrard rightly cautions that a clear distinction between prophesy and exhortation cannot be sustained either by the history of apocalypticism or by rhetorical theory, and I regard the two modes as becoming only less extricable now, as the rhetoric of risk becomes entangled with that of apocalypse. Both Reilly and Graham seem to want to embrace hope that humans might have the will and the ability to change course with sufficient speed; Graham writes of the “obligatory / hope” that the artist must take up despite inner resistance in order to continue to create: “hope forced upon oneself by one’s self ” “before the next catastrophe.”20 Once assumed, however, that hopeful perspective proves difficult to maintain as the consequentiality of environmental changes humans have made or precipitated becomes ever more evident. What rhetoric will serve to acknowledge current environmental realities without relinquishing the hope of fostering a positive impact on the future?
And in this context of the self-conscious Anthropocene, how will readers respond to apocalyptic discourse? Beyond the emotional and cognitive exhaustion that Nordhaus and Shellenberger noted, the onslaught of dire news concerning an endless stream of sometimes irreversible anthropogenic environmental changes can produce an emotional and intellectual shutdown that discourages acts or activism that might help avert catastrophe. The predictions of doom can feel too convincing, while the awareness of environmental transfo
rmation on scales vast enough to warrant the epochal designation Anthropocene only reinforces feelings of hopeless disempowerment. Politically consequential, those emotions may weaken the will toward collective action. What I’m describing may be the inverse of Garrard’s assertion that “only if we imagine that the planet has a future, after all, are we likely to take responsibility for it.”21
Some of the ways in which eco-apocalyptic poets like Reilly and Graham are navigating this morass are usefully illuminated by the thinking of Frederick Buell (Lawrence’s brother) in his study From Apocalypse to Way of Life (2004). His central claim is that “environmental crisis seems increasingly a feature of present normality, not an imminent, radical rupture of it.”22 In response, he proposes that wise voices “will abandon apocalypse for a sadder realism that looks closely at social and environmental changes in process and recognizes crisis as a place where people dwell, both in their commonalities and in their differences from each other. Seen thus, problems will have both gone beyond and become too intimate to suggest authoritarian solutions or escape—for dwelling in crisis means facing the fact that one dwells in a body and in ecosystems, both of which are already subject to considerable degradation, modification, and pressure. No credible refuge from damage to these is at hand.” He advocates an initially individual act of “coming to one’s senses in a damaged world.” A “persistent awareness of ‘embodiment’ and ‘embeddedness’ in ecosystems,” he argues, can teach one to “[dwell] actively within rather than accommodating oneself to environmental crisis.” Such awareness “makes people experience in their senses the full impact of dwelling in environmental and ecosocial deterioration and rising risk,” which in turn, he optimistically claims, prompts more focus on ecological and social health and more caring behavior toward the environment.23 Happily for environmental poets with similar views, among poetry’s long-celebrated powers is its ability to help us come to our senses in literal as well as figurative ways. Moreover, although this is my emphasis not Buell’s, “coming to one’s senses” while embodied within ecosystems can bring joy as well as knowledge of damage or vulnerability; “sadder realism” therefore proves an inadequate term for the ecologically grounded vision of these poets.