The Uninhabitable Earth

by David Wallace-Wells;

  On-screen, climate devastation is everywhere you look, and yet nowhere in focus, as though we are displacing our anxieties about global warming by restaging them in theaters of our own design and control—perhaps out of hope that the end of days remains “fantasy.” Game of Thrones opens with an unmistakable climate prophecy, but warns “winter is coming”; the premise of Interstellar is an environmental scourge, but the scourge is a crop blight. Children of Men depicts civilization in semi-collapse, but collapsed by a fertility menace. Mad Max: Fury Road unfurls like a global-warming panorama, a scrolling saga of a world made desert, but its political crisis comes, in fact, from an oil shortage. The protagonist of The Last Man on Earth is made that way by a sweeping virus, the family of A Quiet Place is hushed by giant insect predators lurking in the wilderness, and the central cataclysm of the “Apocalypse” season of American Horror Story is a throwback—a nuclear winter. In the many zombie apocalypses of this era of ecological anxiety, the zombies are invariably rendered as an alien force, not an endemic one. That is, not as us.

  What does it mean to be entertained by a fictional apocalypse as we stare down the possibility of a real one? One job of pop culture is always to serve stories that distract even as they appear to engage—to deliver sublimation and diversion. In a time of cascading climate change, Hollywood is also trying to make sense of our changing relationship to nature, which we have long regarded from at least an arm’s length—but which, amid this change, has returned as a chaotic force we nevertheless understand, on some level, as our fault. The adjudication of that guilt is another thing entertainment can do, when law and public policy fail, though our culture, like our politics, specializes in assigning the blame to others—in projecting rather than accepting guilt. A form of emotional prophylaxis is also at work: in fictional stories of climate catastrophe we may also be looking for catharsis, and collectively trying to persuade ourselves we might survive it.

  Already, with the world just one degree warmer, wildfires and heat waves and hurricanes have inundated the news, and promise to cascade shortly through our stories and inner lives, making what may seem today a culture suffused with intuitions of doom look like a comparatively naive season. End-of-the-world nightmares will blossom, including in children’s bedrooms, where siblings once whispered worries over the fact of death or the meaning of godlessness or the possibility of protracted nuclear war; among their parents, climate trauma will take its place in the pop-psychological vernacular, if often as a scapegoat for more personal frustrations and anxieties. What will happen at two degrees, or three? Presumably, as climate change colonizes and darkens our lives and our world, it will do the same for our nonfiction, so much so that climate change may come to be regarded, at least by some, as the only truly serious subject.

  In fictional narratives, in pop entertainments, and in what was once praised as “high” culture, a different, weirder course suggests itself. At first, perhaps a revival of the antiquated genre known as “Dying Earth”—initiated in English by Lord Byron with his poem “Darkness,” written after a volcano eruption in the East Indies gave the Northern Hemisphere “The Year Without a Summer.” That environmental alarm was echoed in similar fiction of the Victorian era, including H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which depicted a distant future in which most humans were enslaved troglodytes, laboring underground for the benefit of a pampered and very small aboveground elite; in an even further future, almost all life on Earth had died. Our new version might include epic lamentations, a flourishing of what’s been called already “climate existentialism.” One scientist recently described to me the book she was working on as “Between the World and Me meets The Road.”

  But the scope of the world’s transformation may just as quickly eliminate the genre—indeed eliminate any effort to narrativize warming, which could grow too large and too obvious even for Hollywood. You can tell stories “about” climate change while it still seems a marginal feature of human life, or an overwhelming feature of lives marginal to your own. But at three degrees of warming, or four, hardly anyone will be able to feel insulated from its impacts—or want to watch it on-screen as they watch it out their windows. And so as climate change expands across the horizon—as it begins to seem inescapable, total—it may cease to be a story and become, instead, an all-encompassing setting. No longer a narrative, it would recede into what literary theorists call metanarrative, succeeding those—like religious truth or faith in progress—that have governed the culture of earlier eras. This would be a world in which there isn’t much appetite anymore for epic dramas about oil and greed, but where even romantic comedies would be staged under the sign of warming, as surely as screwball comedies were extruded by the anxieties of the Great Depression. Science fiction would be seen as even more prophetic, but the books that most eerily predicted the crisis will go unread, much like The Jungle or even Sister Carrie today: Why read about the world you can see plainly out your own window? At the moment, stories illustrating global warming can still offer an escapist pleasure, even if that pleasure often comes in the form of horror. But when we can no longer pretend that climate suffering is distant—in time or in place—we will stop pretending about it and start pretending within it.

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  In his book-length essay The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global warming and natural disaster haven’t yet become preoccupations of contemporary fiction, why we don’t seem able to adequately imagine real-world climate catastrophe, why fiction hasn’t yet made the dangers of warming sufficiently “real” to us, and why we haven’t had a spate of novels in the genre he basically imagines into half existence and names “the environmental uncanny.”

  Others call it “cli-fi”: genre fiction sounding environmental alarm, didactic adventure stories, often preachy in their politics. Ghosh has something else in mind: the great climate novel. “Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, ‘Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?’ or ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ ” he writes. “Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at 400 ppm?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’ ”

  His answer: Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in conventional novels, which tend to end with uplift and hope and to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the miasma of social fate. This is a narrow definition of the novel, but almost everything about our broader narrative culture suggests that climate change is a major mismatch of a subject for all the tools we have at hand. Ghosh’s question applies even to comic-book movies that might theoretically illustrate global warming: Who would the heroes be? And what would they be doing? The puzzle probably helps explain why so many pop entertainments that do try to tackle climate change, from The Day After Tomorrow on, are so corny and pedantic: collective action is, dramatically, a snore.

  The problem is even more acute in gaming, which is poised to join or even supplant novels and movies and television, and which is built, as a narrative genre, even more obsessively around the imperatives of the protagonist—i.e., you. It also promises at least a simulation of agency. That could grow more comforting in the coming years, assuming we continue to proceed, zombie-like ourselves, down a path to ruin. Already, the world’s most popular game, Fortnite, invites players into a competition for scarce resources during an extreme weather event—as though you yourself might conquer and totally resolve the issue.

  There is also, beyond the hero problem, a villain problem. Literary fiction may not accommodate epic stories of the kind for which climate change fashions a natural setting, but, in the genre fiction and blockbuster movie space at least, we have a number of models at hand, from superhero sagas to alien-invasion narratives. Stories don’t get more elemental and familiar than those that used to be describ
ed as “man against nature.” But in Moby-Dick or The Old Man and the Sea or many lesser examples, nature was typically a metaphor, encasing a theological or metaphysical force. That was because nature remained mysterious, inexplicable. Climate change has changed that, too. We know the meaning of extreme weather and natural disaster, now, though they still arrive with a kind of prophetic majesty: the meaning is that there is more to come, and that it is our doing. You wouldn’t have to do much in rewrites to Independence Day to reboot it as cli-fi. But, in the place of aliens, who would its heroes be fighting against? Ourselves?

  Villainy was easier to grasp in stories depicting the prospect of nuclear Armageddon, the intuitive analogy to climate change, which ruled American culture for a generation. That was the whole cartoon of Dr. Strangelove—that the fate of the world sat in the hands of a few insane people; if it all blew up, we’d know exactly who to blame. That moral clarity was not Stanley Kubrick’s, or a projection of his nihilism, but something like the opposite: conventional wisdom about geopolitics in the then-adolescent nuclear age. The same logic of responsibility appeared in Thirteen Days, Robert Kennedy’s memoir of the Cuban missile crisis, which endured in part because it comported so neatly with the lived experience of its average reader through those weeks in 1962: watching the prospect of global annihilation wax and wane in a protracted game of telephone being played by two men and their relatively small staffs.

  The moral responsibility of climate change is much murkier. Global warming isn’t something that might happen, should several people make some profoundly shortsighted calculations; it is something that is already happening, everywhere, and without anything like direct supervisors. Nuclear Armageddon, in theory, has a few dozen authors; climate catastrophe has billions of them, with responsibility distended over time and extended across much of the planet. This is not to say it is distributed evenly: though climate change will be given its ultimate dimensions by the course of industrialization in the developing world, at present the world’s wealthy possess the lion’s share of guilt—the richest 10 percent producing half of all emissions. This distribution tracks closely with global income inequality, which is one reason that many on the Left point to the all-encompassing system, saying that industrial capitalism is to blame. It is. But saying so does not name an antagonist; it names a toxic investment vehicle with most of the world as stakeholders, many of whom eagerly bought in. And who in fact quite enjoy their present way of life. That includes, almost certainly, you and me and everyone else buying escapism with our Netflix subscription. Meanwhile, it simply isn’t the case that the socialist countries of the world are behaving more responsibly, with carbon, nor that they have in the past.

  Complicity does not make for good drama. Modern morality plays need antagonists, and the desire gets stronger when apportioning blame becomes a political necessity, which it surely will. This is a problem for stories both fictional and non-, each kind drawing logic and energy from the other. The natural villains are the oil companies—and in fact a recent survey of movies depicting climate apocalypse found the plurality were actually about corporate greed. But the impulse to assign them full responsibility is complicated by the fact that transportation and industry make up less than 40 percent of global emissions. The companies’ disinformation-and-denial campaigns are probably a stronger case for villainy—a more grotesque performance of corporate evilness is hardly imaginable, and, a generation from now, oil-backed denial will likely be seen as among the most heinous conspiracies against human health and well-being as have been perpetrated in the modern world. But evilness is not the same as responsibility, and climate denialism has captured just one political party in one country in the world—a country with only two of the world’s ten biggest oil companies. American inaction surely slowed global progress on climate in a time when the world had only one superpower. But there is simply nothing like climate denialism beyond the U.S. border, which encloses the production of only 15 percent of the world’s emissions. To believe the fault for global warming lies exclusively with the Republican Party or its fossil fuel backers is a form of American narcissism.

  That narcissism, I suspect, will be broken by climate change. In the rest of the world, where action on carbon is just as slow and resistance to real policy changes just as strong, denial is simply not a problem. The corporate influence of fossil fuel is present, of course, but so are inertia and the allure of near-term gains and the preferences of the world’s workers and consumers, who fall somewhere on a long spectrum of culpability stretching from knowing selfishness through true ignorance and reflexive, if naive, complacency. How do you narrativize that?

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  Beyond the matter of villainy is the story of nature and our relationship to it. That story seemed for a very long time to be contained within the simple logic of parables and allegories. Climate change promises to transform everything we thought we knew about nature, including the moral infrastructure of those tales. We still tell them at nearly every age, from the animated movies toddlers watch before they learn the alphabet, to fairy tales lifted from earlier eras, to disaster movies and magazine features about the fate of endangered species, and segments on the nightly news about extreme weather, which rarely mention warming.

  Parables are a teaching tool and work like glass dioramas in natural history museums: you pass by, you look, you believe that what is contained in the taxidermy scene has something to teach you—but only by the logic of metaphor, because you are not a stuffed animal and do not live in the scene but beyond it, outside it, observing rather than participating. The logic is twisted by global warming, because it collapses the perceived distance between humans and nature—between you and the diorama. One message of climate change is: you do not live outside the scene but within it, subject to all the same horrors you can see afflicting the lives of animals. In fact, warming is already hitting humans so hard that we shouldn’t need to look elsewhere, to endangered species and imperiled ecosystems, in order to trace the progress of climate’s horrible offensive. But we do, saddened by stranded polar bears and stories of struggling coral reefs. When it comes to climate parables, we tend to like best the ones starring animals, who are mute when we do not project our voices onto them, and who are dying, at our own hands—half of them extinct, E. O. Wilson estimates, by 2100. Even as we face crippling impacts from climate on human life, we still look to those animals, in part because what John Ruskin memorably called the “pathetic fallacy” still holds: it can be curiously easier to empathize with them, perhaps because we would rather not reckon with our own responsibility, but instead simply feel their pain, at least briefly. In the face of a storm kicked up by humans, and which we continue to kick up each day, we seem most comfortable adopting a learned posture of powerlessness.

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  Plastic panic is another exemplary climate parable, in that it is also a climate red herring. The panic arises from the admirable desire to leave a smaller imprint on the planet, and a natural horror that the environment is so polluted by detritus passing through our air, our food, our flesh—in this way, it draws on a very modern obsession with hygiene and lightness as a form of consumer grace (an obsession familiar from recycling). But while plastics have a carbon footprint, plastic pollution is simply not a global warming problem—and yet it has slid into the center of our vision, at least briefly, the ban on plastic straws occluding, if only for a moment, the much bigger and much broader climate threat.

  Another such parable is bee death. Beginning in 2006, curious readers were introduced to a new environmental fable, as American honeybee colonies began to suffer an almost annual mass die-off: 36 percent dead one year; 29 the next; 46 the next; 34 the next. As anyone with a calculator might have figured, the numbers didn’t add up: if that many bee colonies collapsed each year, the total number would be very rapidly approaching zero, not steadily increasing, which it was. This was because beekeepers,
who were mostly not adorable amateurs but industrial-scale livestock managers trucking their bees across the country in an endless loop of pollination for hire, were simply rebreeding their bees each year, offsetting the die-offs with new hives that were more than paid for by the industrial-scale profits they were pulling in.

  It’s natural, so to speak, to anthropomorphize animals—our whole animation industry is built on it, for starters. But there is something strange, even fatalistic, about such vain beings as ourselves identifying this strongly with creatures who operate so entirely without free will and individual autonomy that many experts in the field aren’t sure whether we should think of the bee or the colony as the organism. In my own reporting about colony collapse, bee lovers kept telling me it was an appreciation for the great spectacle of bee civilization that was behind this outpouring of concern for their well-being. But I couldn’t help wondering if it wasn’t almost the opposite quality that gave colony collapse the force of fable: the complete powerlessness of individuals facing down inevitable, civilization-scale suicide. It’s not just bee rapture, after all: we see visions of our own world being wiped out in the mysterious deaths brought about by Ebola, bird flu, and other pandemics; in anxiety about a robot apocalypse; in ISIS, China, and the Jade Helm exercise in Texas; in runaway inflation that never actually happened in the wake of quantitative easing, or the gold rush such fears spawned, which did. One does not open the Wikipedia page for “Honeybee” expecting an encounter with millenarianism. But the more you read about colony collapse, the more you are filled with a kind of awe for just how much the internet is a divining rod by which we choose to intuit an end of days.