by Roy Scranton
Later that morning, after most of us had already done our sightseeing and returned to the ship, a polar bear ambled up out of the water onto the beach. It was the fourth bear we’d seen. Those of us who’d already returned massed on the sundecks at the rear of the Endeavour, snapping photos, while Zodiacs swiftly ferried back everyone still on the island. Meanwhile, the Latitude’s runabout broke away and motored in toward shore, coming to rest about a hundred yards from the bear. The bear watched the runabout closely. We watched the bear. Then, after several minutes, the bear suddenly looked up, startled, and fled. Photographs and video showed a drone flying from the runabout and buzzing the bear. Assistant expedition leader Chris Dolder vowed to report the incident to Canadian authorities.
That night, compounding the excitement about Beechey, the bear, Leo, and the drone, we were led in a rousing rendition of Stan Rogers’s Canadian anthem “Northwest Passage,” treated to a special Franklin Expedition–themed dinner, and invited to dress up in costume for an explorer-themed dance party. The mood was high, charged with a peculiar mix of compulsory fun, emotional release, and cultural pride.
In the late 1840s, after the Franklin Expedition failed to return to England, the Royal Navy and Lady Jane Franklin funded numerous search-and-rescue attempts. The rescue expedition led by Dr. John Rae was the most successful in terms of actual information but was also the most controversial: Rae brought back reports from Inuit that the Franklin Expedition had degenerated into cannibalism. The news was a scandal, and Rae was attacked in the press by Charles Dickens. The controversy ended Rae’s career.
One of my fellow passengers, a retired microbiologist from Los Angeles, was dismissive of Franklin’s allure. “What’s the big deal?” she asked. “He fucked up and he died. End of story.”
“Maybe it was the sense of mystery,” I offered. “The fact that they never found his ships.”1
She was skeptical. And as I looked around the dance party at all the pale, pink-cheeked Canadians dressed like Vikings and British explorers, it occurred to me that she was right. It wasn’t mystery. It wasn’t even Sapere aude. What the Franklin Expedition glorified was the war of Man—white men—against Nature. Franklin was indeed a tragic figure, and the tragic flaw he embodied was a will to power that knew no bounds. He was doomed because “nature” proved, finally, unconquerable, but in honoring his memory, we were celebrating and carrying on the war he’d waged.
As the MS Ocean Endeavour burned another fifteen tons of carbon, sailing blithely through placid, warming seas, Franklin’s war against Nature was being replayed by retirees dancing to Abba in Viking helmets, confirming Marx’s well-known observation that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Ian Tamblyn: “We live in different times at different times. The arguments that Tagak and Bernadette are making are in a different time frame than the time frame we live in. What they’re arguing is really good, but there’s another wheel that’s turning. The effect of European trampling is not over.”
Heather McGregor, postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Ottawa, author of Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic: “If climate change demands of every human on this earth that we put aside some of our national affiliations and look at this as something that we need to tackle transnationally, beyond the borders that have made sense to us up until now, I’m still not sure that we can do that without recognizing the history of relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous people. If there’s going to be climate-change cooperation, it needs to be done within the context of the call for decolonization.”
Stefan Kindberg, expedition leader, Adventure Canada: “It’s all over the Arctic. It’s not only this part. It’s the Russian Arctic, it’s the Scandinavian Arctic. It’s the Arctic everywhere.”
The “Idea of the North” has long been a whirl around a void, a dreamland, a question to be answered. As Margaret Atwood writes, “Popular lore . . . established early that the North was uncanny, awe-inspiring in an almost religious way, hostile to white men, but alluring; that it would lead you on and do you in; that it would drive you crazy, and, finally, would claim you for its own.” This conception of the Arctic brings with it a sexual politics, a racial politics, and a geopolitics, all of them calling for assertions of white male mastery—from the search for the Northwest Passage to claims for Canadian sovereignty to the idiotic death chant “Drill, baby, drill!”
Yet for thousands of years before Franklin tried to pierce the Northwest Passage in 1845, humans eking out a tenuous existence there knew very well what the North was made of. It was giant bones and qalupalik, angakkuit who could turn from animals to men and back again, anirniit that were sometimes wind and sometimes women, sometimes waves and sometimes seals. Their world was neither Edenic nor sublime but fraught with constant danger from bone-cracking ice, ravenous bears, and innumerable unseen spirits.
“The greatest peril in life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls,” an Inuk named Ivaluardjuk told Danish anthropologist Knud Rasmussen a century ago. “All the creatures that we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, like we have, souls that do not perish with the body, and which must therefore be propitiated lest they should revenge themselves on us.”
Those nomadic Arctic hunting cultures have been destroyed by colonialism, by modernity, by industrialization, as completely as were those of the great Iroquois nations and the Nambikwara of Brazil. We no longer live in the world of Ivaluardjuk, in which humans must battle and propitiate invisible spirits. But we no longer live in the world of Franklin, either, in which the white man is locked in an unending war with Nature. The Enlightenment hero’s “Idea of the North,” that conception of the Arctic as a sublime encounter with pristine wilderness, was being destroyed by the very ship I sailed on and the very passengers I traveled with.
We live today in a world in which humanity has been struck low, perhaps lower than ever before. Unwitting agents of our own demise, unable to control the immense technologies we so arrogantly believed were ours, incapable of exerting the rational collective will necessary to save our civilization from destruction, we find ourselves reduced to something less than human, lacking even the dumb instinct for survival we see in plants.
Geologists, scientists, and other thinkers have advanced the idea that the Earth has entered a new epoch, one characterized by the advent of the human species as a geological force. They’re calling this epoch the Anthropocene. Some thinkers suppose this idea implies that we have advanced beyond nature, that the world is now completely human, but while they grasp the truth that we’ve left the Enlightenment’s division between “Man” and “Nature” behind, they’ve grasped that truth by the wrong end. The Anthropocene implies not the supersession of nature by human civilization, but the opposite: the reduction of human civilization to the status of a fossil. On a geological time scale, we’re just another rock.
As the Endeavour sailed south from Beechey Island, I sat with Ian Tamblyn over a glass of chardonnay, watching the sun drop into a black and iceless sea. “When Students on Ice started, their motto was ‘Save the Pole, Save the Planet,’” he recollected. “In recent years, that logo’s disappeared, in part because of the reality of the situation. It’s heartbreaking for me, because these kids really want to save the planet. They’re totally dedicated to it. But a few years ago, one of [Prime Minister Stephen] Harper’s ministers came on the trip, and he told the students that global warming should be seen as an economic opportunity. I don’t understand why they did that, but at the same time, that’s a reality. It’s a reality that our prime minister sees, and a reality that others see as well. What do we do? Do we try to save a planet that can’t be saved, or do we adapt? I’ve got a generation of kids who are still living in a paradigm of saving the planet. Others see that we’re beyond that and that it cannot be saved. An
d so a Machiavellian politician will say, ‘Let’s look for opportunity where we can. Let’s look for the rare metals under the glaciers. Let’s open the Northwest Passage.’ Again, going back to my lifetime, I’ve seen that transition—of going from a pre-climate-change world, to a climate-change world, to a post-climate-change world. We’re acting it out. But I’ve never actually been allowed to say these things. It’s not part of the party line.”
Ree Brennin Houston: “I do hear people say, ‘Well, what’s the point?’ What’s the point!? It’ll make the Earth completely uninhabitable for life as we know it. Bacteria and whatever will survive, but I care about life as we know it. We need to be fighting all we can to decrease greenhouse gases.”
James Halfpenny: “To be honest, the North is doomed. The Inuit way of life is gone. They can’t go out on the ice to hunt, it won’t be long before it’s only annual ice, and I suspect there may be a time when there’s no ice. There just ain’t a rosy picture there.”
Tagak Curley: “Maybe it’s like the elders say: ‘Ajurtnarmat.’ Nothing to be done.”
The first cruise ship to transit the Northwest Passage, the MS Lindblad Explorer, did so in 1984. In 2015, six other cruise ships made the passage with the Ocean Endeavour, plus at least seven private yachts, two cargo ships, and a tanker. A similar total in 2016 included the MS Crystal Serenity, an 820-foot-long luxury liner that carried more than a thousand passengers on a thirty-two-day cruise from Seward, Alaska, to New York City.
As the Ocean Endeavour sailed west through Coronation Gulf toward our final destination, Kugluktuk, I was overtaken by the realization that what I’d come to see was already gone. The Arctic was changing in response to global warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, and by the time I’d gotten there, it had already been through the hottest years and the most precipitous declines in sea ice ever recorded. The five record lows for sea-ice extent had all occurred in the past eight years. The lowest recorded seasonal maximum occurred in February 2015, and the same year ranked fourth-lowest in summer sea-ice extent, bottoming out at 1.7 million square miles on September 11, but that year’s record low for sea-ice maximum was shattered again in 2016, as the planet warmed beyond anything human civilization had ever seen.
If it is true, as the Buddhists teach, that nothing is ever what it is for very long, then it is also true that nothing is ever wholly lost. Things morph from one form to another, as energy and matter coalesce and transition back and forth from waves to beings. Any truly empirical view of life must admit that the universe is flux, time change, and death nothing more than a shift between states. As the Earth’s gyres and floes wheel and pass, diminish and crescendo, there is no final end, no doom, no death spiral, for as each wheel turns another and turns into another, every end is a new beginning.
Passengers board and disembark. Ships sail east and west. Planes fly in and out of Iqaluit, Sydney, Beijing, NYC. Traffic thickens and thins along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the lights along Manhattan turn off, turn on, as the coal-fired grid ebbs and surges. The stock market rises and falls, days turn into weeks, weeks turn into years, money changes hands, and carbon flows from under the earth into the sky. Ice melts into the sea, drop by drop. Another UN convention meets. Another election cycle begins. Another hottest summer ever passes.
As we stood in our life jackets below decks the last day, waiting to Zodiac ashore for our flight to Edmonton, we were met by passengers coming aboard for the next cruise: “Out of the Northwest Passage 2015.” Another crowd of silver-haired adventurers, our group’s uncanny twins, smiling in confusion as we cheered them on. [2015/2017]
Anthropocene City
Imagine an oyster. Imagine waves of rain lashing concrete, a crawdad boil, a fallen highway, and a muddy bay. Imagine a complex system of gates and levees, the Johnson Space Center, a broken record spinning on a broken player. Imagine the baroque intricacy of the Valero Houston oil refinery, the Petrobras Pasadena oil refinery, the LyondellBasell oil refinery, the Shell Deer Park oil refinery, the ExxonMobil Baytown oil refinery, a bottle of Ravishing Red nail polish, a glacier falling into the sea. Imagine gray-black clouds piling over the horizon, a chaos spiral hundreds of miles wide. Imagine a hurricane.
Isaiah whirls through the sky, gathering strength from the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters. City, state, and federal officials do the sensible thing, evacuating beach towns and warning citizens and companies in Texas’s petro-industrial enclaves from Bayou Vista to Morgan’s Point to prepare for the worst.
The massive cyclone slows and intensifies as it nears the barrier islands off the coast, with wind speeds reaching over 150 mph. By sunset, several hours before landfall, the storm’s counterclockwise arm is pushing water over the Galveston Seawall; by the time the eye finally crosses the beaches east of San Luis Pass, the historic city of Galveston has been flattened by twenty-foot waves.
As Isaiah crosses into Galveston Bay, it only grows in strength, adding water to water, and when it hits the ExxonMobil Baytown refinery, some fifty miles inland, the storm surge is over twenty-five feet high. It crashes through refineries, chemical storage facilities, wharves, and production plants all along the Houston Ship Channel, cleaving pipelines from their moorings, lifting and breaking storage tanks, and strewing toxic waste throughout east Houston.
The iridescent, gray-brown flood rises, carrying jet fuel, sour crude, and natural gas liquids into strip malls, schools, and offices. By the time Isaiah passes inland, leaving the ruined coast behind, more than two hundred petrochemical storage tanks have been wrecked, more than a hundred million gallons of gas, oil, and other chemicals have been spilled, total economic damages for the region are estimated at over a hundred billion dollars, and three thousand six hundred eighty-two people have been killed. By most measures, it is one of the worst disasters in US history: worse than the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, worse than Hurricane Katrina, worse than the terrorist attacks of September 11.
The effects ripple across the globe. The Gulf Coast is home to roughly 30 percent of the United States’ proven oil reserves; the Gulf Coast and Texas hold 35 percent of its natural gas reserves. The refineries and plants circling Galveston Bay are responsible for roughly 25 percent of the United States’ petroleum refining, more than 44 percent of its ethylene production, 40 percent of its specialty chemical feedstock, and more than half of its jet fuel. Houston is the second busiest port in the United States in terms of pure tonnage and is one of the most important storage and shipping points in the country for natural gas liquids. Isaiah shuts all that down. Within days of the hurricane’s landfall, the NYSE and NASDAQ plummet as the price of oil skyrockets. Fuel shortages ground flights throughout the country, airline ticket prices soar, the price of beef and pork shoots up, and gas prices at the pump leap to seven or eight dollars a gallon. The American economy slips into free fall.
Meanwhile, as the oil-poisoned water in east Houston flows back toward the sea, it leaves behind it the worst environmental catastrophe since the BP Deepwater Horizon spill. Rather than diffusing into open water, though, all the sludge is cradled within the protective arms of Galveston Bay.
The good news is that Isaiah hasn’t happened. It’s an imaginary calamity based on models and research. The bad news is that it’s only a matter of time before it does. Any fifty-mile stretch of the Texas coast can expect a hurricane once every six years on average, according to the National Weather Service. Only a few American cities are more vulnerable to hurricanes than Houston and Galveston, and not one of those is as crucial to the economy.
The worse news is that future hurricanes will actually be more severe than Isaiah. The models Isaiah is based on, developed by Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disaster (SSPEED) Center, don’t account for climate change. According to Jim Blackburn, Sspeed’s co-director, other models have shown much more alarming surges. “The City of Houston and FEMA did a climate change future,” he to
ld me, “and the surge in that scenario was 34 feet. Hurricanes are going to get bigger. No question. They are fueled by the heat of the ocean, and the ocean’s warming. Our models are nowhere close.”
Imagine Cobalt Yellow Lake. Imagine Cy Twombly’s “Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor.” Imagine colony collapse. Imagine refugees drowning off the shores of Asia Minor. Imagine causality, a bicycle tire, a million lost golf balls, a Styrofoam cooler, a bucket of crab claws, polyurethane, polypropylene, three copitas of mezcal, polyester, polyacrylic acid, polybutylene terephthalate, barbecue sauce, polycarbonate, polyether ether ketone, polyethylene, a Waffle House, polyoxymethylene, polyphenyl ether, polystyrene, the Wizard of Oz, polysulfone, polytetrafluoroethylene, polyvinyl chloride, a pair of pink Crocs.
I made a reservation aboard the MV Sam Houston to take a boat tour of the Houston Ship Channel, the fifty-mile artery connecting Houston to the Gulf of Mexico, and the densest energy infrastructure nexus in North America. It seemed the perfect place to ask Timothy Morton about hyperobjects, dark ecology, and strange loops—some of the concepts he’s been developing, as one of the leading thinkers of “speculative realism,” in the effort to make philosophical sense of climate change.
The thinkers behind speculative realism, including Morton, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, and Jane Bennett, share a predilection for weird writers, woolly European metaphysics, and big ideas like the Anthropocene, but they’d likely resist being lumped all together. Graham Harman’s “object-oriented ontology,” for instance, argues that objects are autonomous in a way that keeps them from ever really connecting, perpetually withdrawing from each other in spite of apparent relations, while Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter” tells us that everything is equally alive and equally interwoven, humming together in a humongous, homogeneous web in which a lost glove, an F-117 stealth bomber, and an Iraqi child are all basically the same kind of stuff. Morton, for his part, is more concerned with a critique of “Nature,” arguing that we need to get past our cherished “culture/nature” divide in order to see ourselves as always already bound up in a dark mesh of ontological feedback.