Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  The second assumption is equally problematic. According to Weisman’s thought experiment, the elimination of humans from the picture can’t help but lead to a situation in which nature rapidly recovers from the impacts of human activity; even a million years is insignificant in geological time, and Weisman discovers that much of the recovery would take place in only a few hundred. The ability of nature to recover in the absence of humanity leads to two additional and equally problematic conclusions. First, the fact that nature can recover—and indeed, do so relatively quickly—undermines ecological narratives about the threat of human activity to the environment’s health and sustainability. And even if we were to concede that humans have made a significant impact on the planet, Weisman’s thought experiment suggests that nothing can be done. If the only way by which the environment can be ameliorated is by bringing about the end of humanity (or, at a minimum, producing a massive, unprecedented reduction of humans’ environmental footprint) then there is nothing that can be done by humanity, much less for humanity. It is perhaps because he recognizes these limits to the narrative form he employs that Weisman repeatedly invokes the need to “dream of a way for nature to prosper that doesn’t depend on our demise”16—a dream that SF might be able to outline for us through its rich allegories of the future consequences of present contradictions, but which science faction, in its reconfiguration of SF’s cognitive estrangement function, cannot.

  Commenting on the fiction of E. L. Doctorow, Fredric Jameson writes: “If there is any realism left here, it is a ‘realism’ that is … of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.”17 Science faction exceeds the limits of this kind of realism, if falsely, by using the crutch of its scientific explanation as something like an extra-historical justification for the present as what is—a present that “doesn’t need any explanation,” historical or otherwise, because of the simple fact of its existence. To put this somewhat differently: the fact of science factions means that these texts cannot engage in an analysis of what is, after all, the most significant factor in thinking about the ecological future: politics—the messy reality of human social configurations and their deleterious impact on the environment that is at the heart of the problems that necessitate the production of science factions in the first place.

  ECOLOGICAL THINKING IN THE INTERREGNUM

  What can be done to push and prod us into addressing the ecological crisis that we have generated for ourselves—into, that is, taking up the political challenges that necessitate the narrative appeals of Hansen, Suzuki, Weisman, and other environmentalists? The capacity (or rather, incapacity) of collective social amelioration lies at the heart of the endeavor called critical theory, which has since its inauguration in the work of the Frankfurt School been nothing if not an elaboration of the characteristics of late modernity that have blocked or impeded political possibility. One of the founding limits of narratives like Weisman’s—above and beyond those already listed above—is that while they attend to consequences of the dark side of the Enlightenment, they remain enraptured by the capacities of reason and fact to generate collective action; they see environmental destruction as a misstep in a story of progress rather than as a necessary outcome of that self-same science that is so apt at diagnosing the problem if not generating any solution (other than the elimination of humanity tout court).

  Lauren Berlant’s analysis of the affective dynamics of “cruel optimism” generates an explanation for the above impasse. The very way in which contemporary life is lived out points to the affective limits of science faction and, indeed, of other dominant modes of environmental narrative, in generating the change they so desire. For Berlant, contemporary narratives of future change open up the optimistic “possibility that the habits of a history might not be reproduced.”18 They do so, however, in a way that, instead of pushing toward a historical break, generates a desire for a “reanchoring in the symptom’s predictability.”19 Despite the fact that ordinary life constitutes a slow wearing out of the subject, the tendency is for contemporary subjects to “choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to,” instead of leaping into a new social mode that might well no longer wear them out, but whose precise form and nature is necessarily uncertain and unknown.20

  Berlant intends “cruel optimism” to describe the form of contemporary politics in general. The suspension of politics and the reaffirmation of the inevitability of the present even in critiques of it are, however, especially powerful in narratives of environmental futures. Though there might initially seem to be little that is optimistic about tales of future environmental destruction premised on humanity continuing in its ways, the generation of the possibility of a new historical trajectory is optimistic in precisely the sense Berlant identifies. Even at the risk of collective destruction, in the case of such narratives the cruel “retreat to the ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity” is understandable: the trauma of ecological crisis never arrives as a determinate event but remains a relatively abstract component of a quotidian reality in which (for example) even the most extreme meteorological events are read simply as evidence of the usual vagaries of weather in any given year.21 The optimism of science faction is of a different and even less effective sort. If the cruel optimism of typical environmental narratives generates a potential political opening that is then shoved aside because of the demands of our exuberant attachments to the mechanics of daily life, the optimism of Weisman’s science faction merely affirms the already given: The World Without Us suggests that, in the end, our impact will have been seen to be inconsequential and easily remedied, and that since the planet can recover in our absence, then our presence can’t have been as bad as we may have feared.

  The limited operations of science faction within our protracted political interregnum are also highlighted in Slavoj Žižek’s attempts to unsettle the shape and character of dominant forms of ecological analysis. In The World Without Us, nature is the “good other” of humanity; in the wake of the latter’s disappearance, nature would gradually and smoothly reclaim cities and sites of human development with little impact or consequence. Žižek counters how science faction imagines the changing face of the planet, understanding humanity’s relation to ecological balance in a precisely opposite way: “The lesson to be fully endorsed is that of an environmental scientist who concluded that while we cannot be sure what the ultimate result of humanity’s interventions into the geosphere will be, one thing is sure: if humanity were to abruptly cease its immense industrial activity and let nature on Earth take its balanced course, the result would be a total breakdown, an imaginable catastrophe.”22 For Weisman, the catastrophe is only speculative—either humanity avoids such a catastrophe via action, or the environment (and as a result humanity) suffers a fatal downfall (though neither scenario is spelled out or described in the book). Žižek’s assertion that the cessation of human activity would necessarily produce a catastrophe illustrates the inadequacy of any narrative that would separate humans from nature and write them out of the future. If it is our future inactivity (just as much as our current activity) that spells catastrophic doom, how can we argue that we are somehow separate from nature, that our lives are somehow not complexly knotted and entwined with the fate of the planet?23 For Žižek, the configurations of “nature” with which science faction and other environmental narratives operate have to be seen as an ideological crutch that manages a problem rather than resolves it. He writes: “With the latest developments, the discontent shifts from culture to nature itself: nature is no longer ‘natural,’ the reliable ‘dense’ background of our lives; it now appears as a fragile mechanism which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic direction.”24

  Žižek characterizes this moment’s version of ecology as an ecology of fear—as a “fear of a catastrophe (human-made or n
atural) that may deeply perturb or even destroy human civilization; fear that pushes us to plan measures that would protect our safety.”25 Science faction is an example par excellence of such fear, generating a mode of pessimism about the present that has to be read as suspect about its true inclinations and desires. Citing Hans-Georg Gadamer, Žižek reads such forms of ecological pessimism as simulated: “‘The pessimist is disingenuous because he is trying to trick himself with his own grumbling. Precisely while acting the pessimist, he secretly hopes that everything will not turn out as bad as he fears.’ Doesn’t the same tension between the enunciated and the position of enunciation characterize today’s ecological pessimism: the more those who predict a catastrophe insist on it, the more they secretly hope the catastrophe will not occur.”26 In the secret heart of the pessimist, then, is an optimistic core, a small piece of hope that grows in intensity with the insistence on the inevitability of imminent destruction. This optimism is not that described by Berlant but, once again, a less political form of hope for the future, which projects, extrapolates, and predicts the dangers of ecological change, in order to affirm the desirability of keeping everything else—liberal, democratic capitalism—the same as ever.

  One of the implicit political claims of those who would imagine a world without people is that there is no necessity of addressing the fourth antagonism of contemporary capitalism that Žižek describes: the population explosion of global slum dwellers.27 Žižek observes that today “the needy people in society are no longer the workers.”28 Science faction depicts the discontented negatively, representing the absence of the worker in the world as a perverse solution to global slums and the ever-increasing surplus armies of the global South, armies that are blamed (by developed countries) for many of the environmental problems detailed by Weisman. Ironically, science faction’s dream of a world without people, a perfect nature able to move unhindered by a human presence on Earth, is only fully realized through the fictional genocide of indigent and slum populations: they are truly the only humans wiped from the face of the earth, while the so-called “symbolic class” is retained to describe the events of the supposedly peopleless world. The problem of (the lack of) narrator and audience that we described earlier reappears here in another guise, in the contrast between the presence of the talking heads and interviewees and the perverse absence of global slums and the unemployed—a problematic intimately related to the very ecological questions Weisman and others had set out to address. Once again, here, we detect through the absence of one of the major contradictions of global capitalism—massive, epidemic unemployment and underemployment—a lack of any consideration of the political in the unfolding of the future narratives of science faction. Indeed, one has to conclude that this absence of the political, which emerges in the celebration of the cleanliness of expertise in contradistinction to the filth, problems, and drama of human social life, is necessarily constitutive of the genre as a whole: the latter is wiped away so that the former can do its work.29

  There is a desperate need to produce a response to environmental change. The difficulties in doing so have little to do with our understanding of or our belief in human impacts on the environment and much more to do with the broader limits of political discourse at the present moment. Generating new forms of narrative that might unsettle or undo these limits is essential. Rather than opening possibilities, Mark Jendrysik has suggested that those texts we have described here as science factions are anti-utopian, since the consequence of texts such as Weisman’s is that they “reject the possibility of human action to perfect or save the ecosphere.”30 But perhaps even more problematic, however, is the manner in which these texts position themselves as utopian through their affirmation of the desirability and inevitability of a political present even as they draw attention to the problems of the environmental future—a utopia in the mode not of novel political possibilities but of Francis Fukuyama’s infamous end of history. The challenges posed to ecological writing by thinkers such as Berlant and Žižek demand a far more powerful narrative intervention than thinking of a life after people; they demand a negative, rather than an affirmative or positive, utopian impulse. Such an approach to the impasse would necessarily take more than the strictly ecological into its scope, accounting for the social relations of capital (labor, underemployment, and unemployment) as well as the petroculture that fuels such relations. Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently written of the inseparability of fossil fuels from the Enlightenment project as a whole, noting that, “the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive.”31 What remains certain is that ecological narratives that fail to make such direct connections between the dreams and nightmares of the Enlightenment do little more than comfort us with the belief that we can change everything without having to change anything. The World Without Us and texts like it provide good fodder for NPR interviews and dinner-table speculations about the future-to-come, but do nothing to solve the political problem of how to make this future different from the present.

  Notes

  1. James Hansen, “Game Over for the Climate,” New York Times, May 9, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-over-for-the-climate.html?src=me&ref=general.

  2. See J. Hansen, D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, and G. Russell, “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” Science 213 (1981): 957–66.

  3. David Suzuki in Guy Dixon, “The Bottom Line? He Has Some Regrets,” Globe and Mail, June 30, 2010, R2.

  4. One such image that begins chapter 2 is that of nature clearing houses “off the face of the Earth.” This wouldn’t seem noteworthy if it wasn’t oddly prescient of the housing crisis in the United States—an instance where we could see Weisman’s world without us in the cleared out, emptied homes of the racialized and gendered victims of housing foreclosures who bore the brunt of the financial recession. With this in mind, Weisman’s words take on a cruel irony: “If you’re a homeowner, you already knew it was only a matter of time for yours, but you’ve resisted admitting it, even as erosion callously attacked, starting with your savings. Back when they told you what your house would cost, nobody mentioned what you’d also be paying so that nature wouldn’t repossess it long before the bank.” Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (New York: Picador, 2007), 17.

  5. Ibid., 6.

  6. See Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu, “Ecology and Ideology: An Introduction,” Polygraph 22 (2010): 21. Canavan, Klarr, and Vu indicate that both aesthetic directions one could take in order to solve this puzzle—that of defaulting to a “higher omniscience” or to “project our consciousness into non-human entities”—are “equally implausible.” They are discussing the television documentary series Life after People, but the characterization of a “post-human non-perspective” applies here as well.

  7. Weisman, World Without Us, 119.

  8. Alan Weisman, “Interview: Alan Weisman,” Tricycle 17, no. 2, with Clark Strand (2007): 62.

  9. Ibid., 60, 67.

  10. Weisman, World Without Us, 21,

  11. Ibid., 196.

  12. See Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: Poetics of a Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).

  13. Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 16–17.

  14. Weisman, “Interview,” 61.

  15. Clark Stand responds, “True. The biologists and physicists and environmentalists and artists you interviewed are all right there on nearly every page of the book, speaking in their own voices about what would happen if we suddenly disappeared. In that respect, it’s a very densely populated book.” Weisman continues, “The whole book is really a way of getting people to imagine, first of all, how amazing the world would be without us, and second, how we might add ourselves back into this equation. We could still be a part of it. But then, there are a lot of things that we should do now in order
to make sure that happens.” Weisman, “Interview,” 63.

  16. Weisman, World Without Us, 6.

  17. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 24.

  18. Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17, no. 3 (2006): 31.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid., 23.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Slavoj Žižek, “Nature and Its Discontents,” SubStance 37, no. 3 (2008): 56.

  23. Ibid., 50.

  24. Ibid., 50.

  25. Ibid., 53.

  26. Ibid.

  27. “Although their population is composed of marginalized laborers, redundant civil servants and ex-peasants, they are not simply a redundant surplus: they are incorporated into the global economy in numerous ways, many of them working as informal wage workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, with no adequate health or social security coverage. (The main source of their rise is the inclusion of the Third World countries in the global economy, with cheap food imports from the First World countries ruining local agriculture.) They are the true ‘symptom’ of slogans like ‘Development,’ ‘Modernization,’ and ‘World Market’: not an unfortunate accident, but a necessary product of the innermost logic of global capitalism.” Ibid., 40.