by Roy Scranton
According to Jim Blackburn, “Even a locally funded project would probably be three years in the permitting and another six to eight years in construction.” Most local politicians, however, seemed to prefer the Ike Dike, necessarily a Federal project. “I have heard more than one person say our plan is to wait until the next hurricane comes,” Blackburn said, “and then depend on guilt money from Washington to fix the problem.”
Bill Merrell told me much the same thing: “We see local politicians in general content with doing nothing. The do-nothing option is pretty gruesome. It gets you a storm, sooner or later, that’s going to kill thousands of people and cause at least $100 billion in damage. The cost of doing nothing is horrendous. But trying to get politicians from doing nothing to doing something is really hard. I think I’ve started to appreciate that more. I didn’t realize it would be as hard as it was.”
Two weeks after the JICCBS meeting, Houston was inundated with more than a foot of rain in less than twenty-four hours, almost two feet in some neighborhoods. Flooding damaged more than 200 homes and killed eight people. By the end of the month, it was the wettest April the city had ever recorded. More rain and more floods hit Texas in May and June, then a week of precipitation in August dumped more than seven trillion gallons of water on Louisiana, with some areas accumulating more than twenty inches of rain. Flooding killed thirteen people and damaged 146,000 homes.
Imagine Earth. Imagine “Pretty Hurts.” Imagine Lakewood Church, wind-lashed magnolias, a bottle of Topo Chico, the Astrodome. Imagine surface and depth, weather drones, the Geto Boys, thermodynamic disequilibrium, a body in a hole. Imagine the economy slowing, snowy egrets nesting in a live oak, becoming one with the Ocean of Soul, a Colt Expanse carbine. Imagine purple drank and a bowl of queso. Imagine Terms of Endearment. Imagine stocks and flows, a pearl, a rhizome. Imagine the end of the world as we know it.
The Sam Houston’s ninety-minute tour of the Houston Ship Channel only goes a few miles out before turning around at the LyondellBasel refinery, one of the largest heavy-sulfur-crude refineries in the United States, processing around 268,000 barrels a day. The loudspeaker voice offered us complimentary soft drinks. I asked Tim Morton whether dark ecology had a politics.
“Obviously,” he said, “it’s not just that unequal distribution is connected to ecological stuff. It is ecological. It’s not like we need to condescend to include fighting racism and these other issues under the banner of ecological thinking. It’s the other way around. These problems were already ecological because the class system is a Mesopotamian construct and we’re basically living in Mesopotamia 9.0. We’re looking at these oil refineries and it’s basically an upgrade of an upgrade of an upgrade of an agricultural logistics that began around 10,000 BC and is directly responsible, right now, for a huge amount of carbon emissions but also absolutely necessitated industry and therefore global warming and mass extinction.”
We passed the CEMEX Houston Cement Company East Plant, the Gulf Coast Waste Disposal Authority’s Washburn Tunnel Wastewater Treatment Facility, the Kinder Morgan Terminal, and Calpine’s Channel Energy Center, a natural gas steam plant.
“This is where I have to say something English, which is ‘Give us a chance, mate.’ Because we can’t do everything all at once, and we come to the conversation with the limitations and the skill sets that we have, and we’re getting round to stuff. But maybe the first thing to do is to notice: We. Are. In. A. Shit. Situation. Maybe the first thing to do is go, okay, we’re causing a mass extinction the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the end-Permian extinction that wiped out 95 percent of life on Earth. Dark ecology has a politics, but it’s a very different kind of politics because it means that the idea that humans get to decide what reality is needs to be dismantled. It’s an ontological war.”
Off our starboard, Public Grain Elevator #2 poured wheat into the hold of a Chinese freighter, a hundred yards from a giant mound of yellow Mexican gypsum. The Valero refinery rose again to port, flare stacks burning against the sky, just beyond where Sims Bayou broke off from the channel and meandered in toward South Park and Sunnyside, poverty-stricken African American neighborhoods largely abandoned by Houston’s government. One area of Sunnyside was recently rated the second most dangerous neighborhood in America. Seventy-six percent of the children there live in poverty. Residents have a 1 in 11 chance of becoming a victim of violent crime.
“Take hyperobjects,” Tim said, staring fixedly at the Valero refinery. “Hyperobjects are things that are so huge and so long-lasting that you can’t point to them directly, you can only point to symptoms or parts of them. You can only point to little slivers of how they appear in your world. Imagine all the oil on Earth, forever, and the consequences of extracting and burning it for the next 100,000 years. That would be a hyperobject. We’re going through this ship channel and these huge gigantic entities are all symptoms of this even larger, much more disturbing thing that we can’t point to directly. You’re in it and you are it, and you can’t say where it starts and where it stops. Nevertheless, it’s this thing here, it’s on Earth, we know where it is.”
We passed Brady’s Landing and Derichebourg Recycling and Brays Bayou. The boat motored back much faster than it had gone out, and I had to strain to catch Tim’s voice against the noise of the wind and water.
“My whole body’s full of oil products,” he said. “I’m wearing them and I’m driving them and I’m talking about them and I’m ignoring them and I’m pouring them into my gas tank, all these things I’m doing with them, precisely that is why I can’t grasp them. It’s not an abstraction. It’s actually so real that I can’t point to it. The human species is like that: instead of being this thing underneath appearance that you can point to, it’s this incredibly distributed thing that you can’t point to. The one thing that we need to be thinking right now, which is that as a human being I’m responsible for global warming, is actually quite tricky to fully conceptualize.”
The Sam Houston throttled down and bumped against the wharf, the crew laid out the gangplank, and we disembarked. Tim and I got back in his white Mazda and he punched the destination into his phone.
“Make a U-turn,” the fembot voice commanded. We drove out past the guard shack and over some railroad tracks, then out onto the highway.
“Anybody who’s got any intelligence or sensitivity working with this stuff very quickly gets into dilemma space,” Tim said, changing lanes. “I think it’s a matter of nuance, how you work with that. I admire any mode of thought that goes as quickly as possible to this dilemma space, but we’ve only just begun to notice the ‘we’ doing these horrible things, and it’s okay to be completely confused and upset. We’re in shock, and that’s on a good day. Most days it’s just grief work because we’re in a state of total denial. I am too. I can only allow myself to feel really upset about what’s going on for maybe one second a day, otherwise I’d be in a heap on the floor all the time crying.”
We took Alt-90 to I-10, passing a Chevron and a Shell and a Subway and Tires R Us and Mucho Mexico, then rose into the flow of traffic cruising the interstate west.
“We’re constantly trying to get on top of whatever we’re worrying about, but if you look at it from an Earth magnitude, that’s magical thinking. We’ve given ourselves an impossible-to-solve problem. The way in which we think about the problem, the way in which we give it to ourselves, is part of the problem. How do you talk to people in a deep state of grief when you’re also in that deep state of grief?”
The lanes split and we wove from I-10 to 59 and then, just past Fiesta Mart’s enormous neon parrot, slid down the ramp to Fannin Street.
“I think there’s an exit route, actually,” Tim said, “but it’s paradoxical. It involves going down underneath: it’s not about transcending in any sense, it’s about what I call subscending. There’s always so much more about weather than just being a symptom of global warming. It is a sympt
om of global warming, but it’s also a bath, these little birds over here, it’s this wonderful wetness on the back of my neck, it’s this irritating thing that’s clogging up my drain.”
We passed Fannin Flowers and then turned onto Bissonnet Street, rolling by the Museum of Fine Arts, with its special exhibit on Art Deco cars, and the Contemporary Art Museum, which was featuring an exhibition about the colonization of Mars. We turned in past Mel Chin’s Manilla Palm, a giant fiberglass and burlap tree erupting out of a broken steel pyramid, then turned again, tracking back toward my apartment, past expensive new condos and down the dead end where I lived. Bamboo rose against the fence at the end of the road. Tim parked by the curb and shut off the Mazda.
“It boils down to knowing that global warming is a catastrophe rather than a disaster. Disasters are things that you rubberneck as they’re happening to other people because you’re reading about it in the Book of Revelation. It isn’t now. A catastrophe, on the other hand, is something that you’re inside of and it’s got this weird, loopy, twisty structure to it. Disaster’s like: everything’s being destroyed and I can see perfectly how everything’s being destroyed. Catastrophe’s more like: OMG, I am the destruction. I’m part of it and I’m in it and I’m on it. It’s an aesthetic experience, I’m inside it, I’m involved, I’m implicated.”
A cardinal flew across the street, a streak of red against the green.
“I think that’s how we get to smile, eventually, by fully inhabiting catastrophe space, in the same way that eventually a nightmare can become so horrible that you start laughing. That’s how you find the exit route. I feel like maybe part of my job is giving people that.”
Imagine black. Imagine black, black, black, blue-black, red-black, purple-black, gray-black, black on black. Imagine methane. Imagine education. Imagine wetlands. Imagine a brown-skinned woman in white circling the Rothko Chapel chanting “Zong. Zong. Zong.” Imagine a regional, comprehensive approach to storm-surge risk management, lemonade, the Slab Parade, increased capacity, complexity, attribution studies, progress, a wine-and-cheese reception, TACC’s Stampede Supercomputer, an integrative place-based research program, Venice’s Piazza San Marco, sea-level rise, Destiny’s Child. Imagine a red line. Imagine two degrees. Imagine flare stacks. Imagine death.
Maybe it was the eleventh straight month of record-breaking warming. Maybe it was when the Earth’s temperature hit 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. Maybe it was new reports that Antarctica and the Arctic were melting faster than anyone expected. Maybe it was when Greenland started melting two months early, and then so quickly that scientists didn’t believe their data. Maybe it was watching our world start to come apart, and knowing that nothing would be done until it was too late.
We’ve known that climate change was a threat since at least 1988, and the United States has done almost nothing to stop it. Today it might be too late. The feedback mechanisms that scientists have warned us about are happening. Our world is changing.
Imagine we’ve got twenty or thirty years before things really get bad. Imagine how that happens. Imagine soldiers putting you on a bus, imagine nine months in a FEMA trailer, imagine nine years in a temporary camp. Imagine watching the rich on the other side of the fence, the ones who can afford beef and gasoline, the ones who can afford clean water. Imagine your child growing up never knowing satiety, never knowing comfort, never knowing snow. Imagine politics in a world on fire.
Climate change is hard to think about not only because it’s complex and politically contentious, not only because it’s cognitively almost impossible to keep in mind the intricate relationships that tie together an oil well in Venezuela, Siberian permafrost, Saudi F-15s bombing a Yemeni wedding, subsidence along the Jersey Shore, albedo effect near Kangerlussuaq, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the polar vortex, shampoo, California cattle, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, leukemia, plastic, paper, the Sixth Extinction, Zika, and the basic decisions we make every day, are forced to make every day, in a world we didn’t choose but were thrown into. No, it’s not just because it’s mind-bendingly difficult to connect the dots. Climate change is hard to think about because it’s depressing and scary.
Thinking seriously about climate change forces us to face the fact that nobody’s driving the car, nobody’s in charge, nobody knows how to “fix it.” And even if we had a driver, there’s a bigger problem: no car. There’s no mechanism for uniting the entire human species to move together in one direction. There are more than seven billion of us, and we divide into almost two hundred nations, thousands of smaller subnational states, territories, counties, and municipalities, and an unimaginable multitude of corporations, community organizations, neighborhoods, religious sects, ethnic identities, clans, tribes, gangs, clubs, and families, each of which faces its own internal conflicts, disunion, and strife, all the way down to the individual human soul in conflict with itself, torn between fear and desire, hard sacrifice and easy cruelty, all of us improvising day by day, moment by moment, making decisions based on best guesses, gut hunches, comforting illusions, and too little data.
But that’s the human way: reactive, ad hoc, improvised. Our ability to reconfigure our collective existence in response to changing environmental conditions has been our greatest adaptive trait. Unfortunately for us, we’re still not very good at controlling the future. What we’re good at is telling ourselves the stories we want to hear, the stories that help us cope with existence in a wild, unpredictable world.
Imagine life. Imagine a hurricane. Imagine a brown-skinned woman in white circling the Rothko Chapel chanting “Zong.” Imagine grief. Imagine the Greenland ice sheet collapsing and black-crowned night herons nesting in the live oaks. Imagine Cy Twombly’s “Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor,” amnesia, a broken record on a broken player, a tar-stained bird, the baroque complexity of a flooded oil refinery, glaciers sliding into the sea. Imagine an oyster. Imagine gray-black clouds piling over the horizon, a sublime spiral hundreds of miles wide. Imagine climate change. Imagine a happy ending. [2017]
Rock Scissors Paper
1. Rock
In the beginning was rock and out of rock came rock, the beginning was rock slow light, light sinking into rock, heat, and the beginning was rock and out of rock came rock, a rock slowly spinning in space, heat, where you burn a rock makes life, hydrogen to helium to carbon and back again, from hydrogen to oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, sodium, potassium, rocks accumulating cool molecules, slow light, burning across long eons. In the beginning there was rock and rock was rock and out of rock came rock, the beginning was rock in the beginning weeping water, rock and water fusing sky out of space, rock bleeding fire, rock forging chains, molecule to molecule, and God was rock in the beginning and rock is rock and rock is dead and space is dead and light is dead and life is dead, life rock and water and God, dead, dead light, dead heat, dead rock, dead space, dead rock, dead God, and God was dead in the beginning: rock, light, space.
The motivating enigma of the Anthropocene is the human as echinoderm, mortal flesh as immortal rock. Over eons, starfish and sea urchin skeletons recompose into limestone, just as stegosaurus recomposes into Brent crude, becoming Earth: we have not only joined the ranks of such geoforms, but surpassed them. When the human species was just a crafty primate and there were perhaps fifteen million of us roaming the planet, before the invention of agriculture, we were no more geological than the spiny anteater or hedgehog. Today the human is more than rock, more than oil: the human is a geological agent, a forcing, a carbon monster, a breaker of ice ages, mother of plastic and methane and macadam, a species transforming how rocks come into being.
A great power, Tyrant Primate, or at least this is how we might like to think of it. The truth is more troubling, since what the Anthropocene means is that we act at strata beyond those at which we can conceptualize conscious or rational agency. We act beyond individual beings, beyond collectives, be
yond species and spaces: we act as planetary function. The forms of life understood in the Western tradition, the Greek bios, physical life, psyche, the life of the soul, and zoe, spiritual life, are insufficient to comprehend our existence as geos.
The idea of the Anthropocene, as more and more people understand the word today, poses the possibility that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch, one characterized by the advent of the human species as a geological force. In the middle of the twentieth century, Homo sapiens sapiens began to shape the geological processes of the Earth so profoundly that it inadvertently transformed the global cycles of warming and heating caused by the planet’s orbit around the sun, and will continue to do so for a hundred thousand years or more, in ways that will be readable in the geological record millions of years in the future. No one intended this, and we seem to be incapable of preventing it. This is the deep meaning of the Anthropocene, the meaning we can usually only look at in flashes, peeking between primate fingers.
2. Scissors
The Anthropocene is a synonym for climate change, but with a difference: it transforms the idea of climate change from an event, a confluence approaching from the future that we might be able to innovate our way out of, to a time period, a geological epoch in which we find ourselves already adrift. The Anthropocene is a post-climate-change time zone, the “when” we live in today. There is no escaping it.