The Uninhabitable Earth

by David Wallace-Wells;

  James Scott comes to this subject as a radical anti-statist, toward the end of a long career producing genuinely scintillating works of academic dissidence with titles like The Art of Not Being Governed, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, and Two Cheers for Anarchism. Harari’s is a stranger approach, but also more telling—a from-the-roots reconsideration of our collective faith in human progress, put forward and gobbled up in the midst of an ecological crisis of our own making. Harari has spoken movingly of the way his own coming out, as a gay man, has shaped his skepticism about human metanarratives as pervasive as heterosexuality and progress; and, though trained as a military historian, he has arrived in the spotlight of popular acclaim, praised by Bill Gates and Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, as a sort of expositor of myth. The central exposition is this: society is and always has been bound together by collective fictions, no less now than in earlier eras, with values like progress and rationality taking the place once held by religion and superstition. Harari is a historian, but his worldview grafts the pretense of science onto the philosophical skepticism familiar from contrarians as diverse as David Hume and John Gray. You could also name the whole line of French theorists, from Lyotard to Foucault and beyond.

  “The story that has ruled our world in the past few decades is what we might call the Liberal Story,” Harari wrote in 2016, a month before the election of Donald Trump, in an essay that both basically predicted Trump’s election and outlined what it would mean to the world’s collective faith in the establishment. “It was a simple and attractive tale, but it is now collapsing, and so far no new story has emerged to fill the vacuum.”

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  If you strip out the perception of progress from history, what is left?

  From here, it is hard, if not impossible, to see clearly what will emerge from the clouds of uncertainty around global warming—what forms we allow climate change to take, let alone what those forms will do to us. But it will not take a worst-case warming to deliver ravages dramatic enough to shake the casual sense that as time marches forward, life improves ineluctably. Those ravages are likely to begin arriving quickly: new coastlines retreated from drowned cities; destabilized societies disgorging millions of refugees into neighboring ones already feeling the pinch of resource depletion; the last several hundred years, which many in the West saw as a simple line of progress and growing prosperity, rendered instead as a prelude to mass climate suffering. Exactly how we regard the shape of history in a time of climate change will be shaped by how much we do to avert that change and how much we let it remodel everything about our lives. In the meantime, possibilities fan out as extravagantly as the paint chips on a color wheel.

  We still don’t know all that much about how humans before the arrival of agriculture, statehood, and “civilization” regarded the course of history—though it was a favorite pastime of early modern philosophers to imagine the inner lives of precivilized people, from “nasty, brutish, and short” to idyllic, carefree, unencumbered.

  Another perspective, which offers another model of history, is the cyclical one: familiar from the harvest calendar, the Stoic Greek theory of ekpyrosis and the Chinese “dynastic cycle,” and appropriated for the modern era by thinkers as seemingly teleological as Friedrich Nietzsche, who made the cycles of time a moral parable with his “eternal recurrence”; Albert Einstein, who considered the possibility of a “cyclic” model of the universe; Arthur Schlesinger, who saw American history as alternating periods of “public purpose” and “private interest”; and Paul Michael Kennedy, in his circumspect history lesson for the end of the Cold War, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Perhaps Americans today see history as progressive only because we were raised in the time of its empire, having more or less borrowed the British perspective from the time of theirs.

  But climate change isn’t likely to deliver a neat or complete return to a cyclical view of history, at least in the premodern sense—in part because there will be nothing neat, at all, about the era ushered in by warming. The likelier outcome is a much messier perspective, with teleology demoted from its position as an organizing, unifying theory, and, in its place, contradictory narratives running uncorralled, like animals unleashed from a cage and moving in all directions at once. But if the planet reaches three or four or five degrees of warming, the world will be convulsed with human suffering at such a scale—so many million refugees, half again as many wars, droughts and famines, and economic growth made impossible on so much of the planet—that its citizens will have difficulty regarding the recent past as a course of progress or even a phase in a cycle, or in fact anything but a true and substantial reversal.

  The possibility that our grandchildren could be living forever among the ruins of a much wealthier and more peaceful world seems almost inconceivable from the vantage of the present day, so much do we still live within the propaganda of human progress and generational improvement. But of course it was a relatively common feature of human history before the advent of industrialization. It was the experience of the Egyptians after the invasion of the Sea Peoples and the Incas after Pizarro, the Mesopotamians after the Akkadian Empire, and the Chinese after the Tang Dynasty. It was—so famously that it grew into caricature, which then spawned decades of rhetorical critique—the experience of Europeans after the fall of Rome. But in this case, the dark ages would arrive within one generation of the light—close enough to touch, and share stories, and blame.

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  This is what is meant when climate change is described as a revenge of time. “Man-made weather is never made in the present,” Andreas Malm writes in The Progress of This Storm, his powerful sketch of a political theory for a time of climate change. “Global warming is a result of actions in the past.”

  It’s a tidy formulation, and one that vividly illustrates both the scale and the scope of the problem, which appears as the product of several long centuries of carbon-burning that also produced most of what we think of today as the comforting features of modern life. In that way, climate change does make us all prisoners of the Industrial Revolution, and suggests a carceral model of history—progress arrested by the consequences of past behavior. But while the climate crisis was engineered in the past, it was mostly in the recent past; and the degree to which it transforms the world of our grandchildren is being decided not in nineteenth-century Manchester but today and in the decades ahead.

  Disorientingly, climate change will also send us hurtling forward into an uncharted future—so long forward, if it proceeds unchecked, and into such a distant future, that we can hardly imagine the scale. This is not the “techno-shock” first experienced by Victorians encountering an accelerating pace of progress and feeling overwhelmed by just how much was changing within a single lifetime—though we are now acquainting ourselves with that kind of change, as well. It is more like the overwhelming awe felt by those naturalists contemplating the ancient-beyond-ancient historical grandeur of the earth, and calling it deep time.

  But climate change inverts the perspective—giving us not a deep time of permanence but a deep time of cascading, disorienting change, so deep that it mocks any pretense of permanence on the planet. Pleasure districts like Miami Beach, built just decades ago, will disappear, as will many of the military installations erected around the world since World War II to defend and secure the wealth that gave rise to them. Much older cities, like Amsterdam, are also under threat from flooding, with extraordinary infrastructure needed already today to keep them above water, infrastructure unavailable to defend the temples and villages of Bangladesh. Farmlands that had produced the same strains of grain or grapes for centuries or more will adapt, if they are lucky, to entirely new crops; in Sicily, the breadbasket of the ancient world, farmers are already turning to tropical fruits. Arctic ice that formed over millions of years will be unleashed as water, literally changing the face of the planet and remodeling shippi
ng routes responsible for the very idea of globalization. And mass migrations will sever communities numbering in the millions—even tens of millions—from their ancestral homelands, which will disappear forever.

  Just how long the ecosystems of Earth will be thrown into flux and disarray from anthropogenic climate change also depends on how much more of that change we choose to engineer—and perhaps how much we can manage to undo. But warming at the level necessary to fully melt ice sheets and glaciers and elevate sea level by several hundred feet promises to initiate rolling, radically transformative changes on a timescale measured not in decades or centuries or even millennia, but in the millions of years. Alongside that timeline, the entire lifespan of human civilization is rendered, effectively, an afterthought; and the much longer span of climate change becomes eternity.

  Ethics at the End of the World

  The twin towns of San Ignacio and Santa Elena, Belize, are fifty miles from the coast and 250 feet above sea level, but the alarmist climatologist Guy McPherson did not move there—to a farm in the jungle that surrounds the towns—in fear of water. Other things will get him first, he says; he’s given up hope of surviving climate change, and believes the rest of us should, too. Humans will be extinct within ten years, he tells me by Skype; when I ask his partner, Pauline, if she feels the same way, she laughs. “I’d say ten months.” This was two years ago.

  McPherson began his career as a conservation biologist at the University of Arizona, where, he mentions several times, he was tenured at twenty-nine; and where, he also says several times, he was surveilled by what he calls the “Deep State” beginning in 1996; and also where, in 2009, he was forced out of his department by a new chair. He had already been working on a homestead in New Mexico—a compromise location with his former wife—and moved in 2016 to the Central American jungle, to live with Pauline and practice polyamory on another homestead called Stardust Sanctuary Farm.

  Over the last decade, mostly via YouTube, McPherson has acquired what Bill McKibben calls, in his understated way, “a following.” These days, McPherson travels a bit, giving lectures on “near-term human extinction,” a term he is proud to have coined and which he abbreviates NTHE; but increasingly he has turned his attention to running workshops on what we should do with the knowledge that the world is ending. The workshops are called “Only Love Remains,” and offer what amounts to a kind of post-theological millenarianism, familiar hand-me-down lessons from the old New Age. The meta-lesson is that we should draw roughly the same meaning from an understanding of the imminent death of the species as the Dalai Lama believes we should draw from an understanding of our imminent personal death—namely, compassion, wonderment, and above all, love. You could do worse in choosing three values around which to build an ethical model, and when you squint you can almost see a civics erected out of them. But for those who see the planet as being on the precipice of crisis and biblical tribulation, they also excuse a retreat from politics—indeed from climate, as fully as that might conceivably be achieved—in the name of a slippery hedonistic quietism.

  In other words, down to the mustache, McPherson seems like a recognizable off-the-grid figure—a kind it’s easy to find a bit suspicious. But why? We have for so long, over decades if not centuries, defined predictions of the collapse of civilization or the end of the world as something close to proof of insanity, and the communities that spring up around them as “cults,” that we are now left unable to take any warnings of disaster all that seriously—especially when those raising the alarm are also, themselves, “giving up.” There is nothing the modern world abhors like a quitter, but that prejudice will probably not withstand much warming. If the climate crisis unfolds as it is scheduled to, our taboos against doomsaying will fall, as new cults emerge and cultish thinking leeches into sectors of establishment culture. Because while the world will not likely end, and civilization is almost surely more resilient than McPherson believes, the unmistakable degradation of the planet will invariably inspire many more prophets like him, whose calls of imminent environmental apocalypse will start to seem reasonable to many more reasonable people.

  That is, in part, because they are not so unreasonable, even today. If you were looking for a primer on the bad news about climate, you could find a worse place to begin than the summary page McPherson keeps on his website, “Nature Bats Last” (currently tagged with this note: “Updated most recently, likely for the final time, 2 August 2016”). It runs sixty-eight printed pages of link-dense paragraphs. Throughout, there are misleading characterizations of serious research, and links to hysterical, uncredentialed blog posts presented as references to solid science. There are simple misunderstandings of things like climate feedback loops, which can worryingly add up but are not “multiplicative,” as McPherson says they are; attacks on merely moderate climate groups as politically compromised; and, in the spirit of a kitchen-sink data dump, endorsements of a few observations that have been proven to be bunk (he is very worried, for instance, about those methane “burps of death” going off all at once, a possibility specialists turned against about five years ago). But, even on this fearmongering reading list, there is enough real science to give rise to real alarm: a good summary of the albedo effect, a convenient assemblage of rigorous readings of the Arctic ice sheets, those tea leaves of climate disaster.

  Throughout, the intellectual style is paranoid—the impressive mass of data sometimes standing in for, and sometimes obscuring, the skeleton of causal logic that should give the mass a meaningful analytic shape. This kind of reasoning lives abundantly on the internet, feeding our golden age of conspiracy theory, that insatiable beast, which has only just begun to feast on climate. You might know already the shape that thinking takes on the climate-denial end of the political spectrum. But it has also made its mark on the environmentalist fringe, as it did in the person of John B. McLemore, the charismatic, closeted environmental declinist and self-hating Southerner whose descent into suicide, beset by planetary panic, was documented on the podcast “S-Town.” “I sometimes call it toxic knowledge,” Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute, where McLemore was a commenter, has said. “Once you know about overpopulation, overshoot, depletion, climate change, and the dynamics of societal collapse, you can’t unknow it, and your every subsequent thought is tinted.”

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  McPherson isn’t entirely clear himself on exactly how all of these problems will bring about extinction—he guesses that something like a food crisis or financial meltdown will bring down civilization first, and eventually human life with it. It takes an apocalyptic imagination to picture that happening just a decade from now, to be sure. But, given the basic trend lines, it also raises the question of why the rest of us aren’t imagining things more apocalyptically ourselves.

  We surely will, and soon. Already you can see the seedlings of a great flourishing of climate esoterica in figures like McLemore and McPherson—one might better say “men,” as they nearly all are—and, beyond them, a whole harvest of writers and thinkers who seem, in their anticipation of coming disasters, almost to be cheering for the forces of apocalypse.

  In some cases, they are rooting them on quite literally. A few, like McLemore, are Travis Bickles of climate crisis, hoping to see a hard rain fall and wash away all the world’s scum. But there are also Pollyannaish connoisseurs of global warming, like ecologist Chris D. Thomas, who argues that, in fact, in the real-time vacuum of the sixth mass extinction, “nature is thriving”—inventing new species, carving new ecological niches. Some technologists and their fans go further, suggesting we should discard our bias for the present—even in the attenuated geological sense of the term “present”—and adopt instead a quasi-Taoist climate sanguinity, layered over with a futurist cast. As Swedish journalist Torill Kornfeldt asks in The Re-Origin of Species, her book about the race to “de-extinct” creatures like dinosaurs and woolly mammoths: “Why should nature as it is no
w be of any greater value than the natural world of 10,000 years ago, or the species that will exist 10,000 years from now?”

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  But for most who perceive an already unfolding climate crisis and intuit a more complete metamorphosis of the world to come, the vision is a bleak one, often pieced together from perennial eschatological imagery inherited from existing apocalyptic texts like the Book of Revelation, the inescapable sourcebook for Western anxiety about the end of the world. In fact, those ravings, which Yeats more or less translated for a secular audience in “The Second Coming,” have so predominated the Western dreamscape—becoming something like the Gnostic wallpaper of our bourgeois inner lives—that we often forget they were originally written as real-time prophecies, visions of what was to come, and what would become of the world, within a single generation.

  Probably the most prominent of these new climate Gnostics is the British writer Paul Kingsnorth, the cofounder, public face, and poet laureate of the Dark Mountain Project, a loose renunciation community of disaffected environmentalists that takes its name from the American writer Robinson Jeffers, in particular his 1935 poem “Rearmament,” which ends:

  I would burn my right hand in a slow fire

  To change the future…I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern

  Man is not in the persons but in the

  Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the

  Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

  Jeffers was, for a time, a literary celebrity in America—a love affair chronicled in the Los Angeles Times, a granite home on the California coast called Tor House and Hawk Tower, which he famously built with his own hands. But he is known today primarily as a prophet of civilizational disavowal, and for the philosophy he bluntly called “inhumanism”: the belief, in short, that people were far too concerned with people-ness, and the place of people in the world, rather than the natural majesty of the nonhuman cosmos in which they happened to find themselves. The modern world, he believed, made the problem considerably worse.