Edward Abbey adored Jeffers’s work, and Charles Bukowski called him his favorite poet. The great American wilderness photographers—Ansel Adams, Edward Weston—were influenced by him, too; and in A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor identified Jeffers, alongside Nietzsche and Cormac McCarthy, as a significant figure of what he called “immanent anti-humanism.” In his most infamous work, “The Double Axe,” Jeffers put that worldview in the mouth of a single character, “The Inhumanist,” who described “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.” This would be a genuine revolution in perspective, he wrote, which “offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate, and envy.”
That detachment forms the core principle of Dark Mountain—though one might better say “impulse.” It will likely animate many more groups of environmental retreatists over the next decades, if global warming makes the broad spectacle of life on Earth increasingly unbearable for some to observe, even through media. “Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence,” the group’s manifesto begins. “What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die. The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric.”
In that manifesto, written by Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine and first published in 2009, the group identifies as its intellectual godfather Joseph Conrad, particularly for the way he skewered the self-serving illusions of European civilization at its industrial-colonial peak. They quote Bertrand Russell recapping Conrad, saying that the author of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim “thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.” It would be a vivid image to brandish in any era, but especially in a time of approaching ecological collapse. “We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves,” Kingsnorth and Hine write—namely, “the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature.’ ” All, they add, “are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.”
In fact, it is almost hard to think of anything that won’t be changed by just the perception of onrushing change, from the way couples contemplate the possibility of children all the way up to political incentive structure. And you don’t have to get all the way to human extinction or the collapse of civilization for true nihilism and doomsdayism to flourish—you only have to get far enough from the familiar for a critical mass of charismatic prophets to see a coming collapse. It can be comforting to think that the critical mass is quite large, and that societies won’t be upended by nihilism unless nihilism becomes the conventional view of the median citizen. But doom works at the margin, too, eating away at the infrastructure of things like termites or carpenter bees.
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In 2012, Kingsnorth published a new manifesto, or pseudo-manifesto, in Orion, called “Dark Ecology.” In the meantime, he had grown even less hopeful. “Dark Ecology” opens with epigraphs from Leonard Cohen and D. H. Lawrence—“Take the only tree that’s left / Stuff it up the hole in your culture” and “Retreat to the desert, and fight,” respectively—and really kicks into gear with its second section, which opens: “I’ve recently been reading the collected writings of Theodore Kaczynski. I’m worried that it may change my life.”
All told, the essay, which inspired an enormous response among Orion readers, is a kind of argument on behalf of Kaczynski the pamphleteer against Kaczynski the bomber—whom Kingsnorth describes not as a nihilist or even a pessimist but an incisive observer whose problem was an excess of optimism, a man too committed to the idea that society could be changed. Kingsnorth is more of a true Stoic. “And so I ask myself: what, at this moment in history, would not be a waste of my time?”
He offers five tentative answers. Numbers 2 through 4 are variations on new transcendentalist themes: “preserving nonhuman life,” “getting your hands dirty,” and “insisting that nature has value beyond utility.” Numbers 1 and 5 are the more radical ones, and form a pair: “withdrawing” and “building refuges.” The latter is the more positive imperative, in the sense of being constructive, or what passes for constructive in a time of collapse: “Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside?”
“Withdrawing” is the darker half of the same admonition:
If you do this, a lot of people will call you a “defeatist” or a “doomer,” or claim you are “burnt out.” They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that “fighting” is always better than “quitting.” Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance—refusing to tighten the ratchet further—is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.
It’s an ethos, at least. And one with a pedigree. What might read at first like a radical response to a new moment of crisis is in fact a repurposing of the long and many-armed ascetic tradition, stretching from the young Buddha through the pillar saints and beyond. But unlike the conventional version, in which the ascetic impulse carries the seeker away from the pleasures of the world toward spiritual meaning in something like worldly pain, Kingsnorth’s withdrawal, like McPherson’s, is a retreat from a world convulsed by spiritual pain toward small, earthly consolations. In that way, it is a performance at grand scale of the more general prophylactic reflex we share, almost all of us, toward suffering—which is to say, simply, an aversion. And to what end? It can’t possibly be that I feel the anguish of others, and the urgency of action, through the “myth” of civilization alone—can it?
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Dark Mountain is fringe. Guy McPherson is fringe. John B. McLemore, too. But one threat of climate catastrophe is that their strains of ecological nihilism might find a home in the host of consensus wisdom—and that their premonitions may seem familiar to you is a sign that some of that anxiety and despair is already leeching into the way so many others think about the future of the world. Online, the climate crisis has given rise to what is called “eco-fascism”—a “by any means necessary” movement that also traffics in white supremacy and prioritizes the climate needs of a particular set. On the left, there is a growing admiration for the climate authoritarianism of Xi Jinping.
In the United States, the go-it-alone impulse to environmentalist separatism has been predominantly the domain of right-wing extremists—Cliven Bundy and his family, for instance, and all the imperious settlers the country has uncomplicatedly mythologized in the centuries since homesteading and range wars. Perhaps in response, liberal environmentalism has grown mostly in a more practical direction, tending toward more engagement rather than the opposite. Or perhaps it just reflects the particular demands of this cause: form a renunciation community and risk having those you’ve renounced do everything you feared they might, unleashing changes to the planet you are powerless to escape.
But this pragmatism brings its own curiosities—for instance, that many of even those who define themselves as practical technocrats of the environmental center-left believe that what is needed to avert catastrophic climate change is a global mobilization at the scale of Wo
rld War II. They are right—that is an entirely sober assessment of the size of the problem, which no more alarmist a group than the IPCC endorsed in 2018. But it is also an undertaking of ambitions so inconsistent with the present tense of politics in nearly every corner of the world, that it is hard not to worry what will happen when that mobilization does not happen—to the planet, yes, but also to the political commitments of those most engaged with the problem. Those calling for mass mobilization, starting today and no later, remember—they can be counted as environmental technocrats. To their left are those who see no solution short of political revolution. And even those activists are being crowded for space, these days, by texts of climate alarmism, of which you may even feel the book in your hands is one. That would be fair enough, because I am alarmed.
I am not alone. And how widespread alarm will shape our ethical impulses toward one another, and the politics that emerge from those impulses, is among the more profound questions being posed by the climate to the planet of people it envelops. It is one way to understand why activists in California were so frustrated with their governor, Jerry Brown, even though he established a climate program of surpassing ambition just as he left office—because he didn’t act aggressively enough to retire existing fossil fuel capacity. It also helps explain frustration with other leaders, from Justin Trudeau, who has seized the rhetorical mantle of climate action but also approved several new Canadian pipelines, to Angela Merkel, who has overseen an exhilarating expansion of Germany’s green energy capacity, but also retired its nuclear power so quickly that some of the slack has been taken up by existing dirty plants. To the average citizen of each of these countries, the criticism may seem extreme, but it arises from a very clearheaded calculus: the world has, at most, about three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can’t halfway your way to a solution to a crisis this large.
In the meantime, environmental panic is growing, and so is despair. Over the last several years, as unprecedented weather and unrelenting research have recruited more voices to the army of environmental panic, a dour terminological competition has sprung up among climate writers, aiming to coin new clarifying language—in the mode of Richard Heinberg’s “toxic knowledge” or Kris Bartkus’s “Malthusian tragic”—to give epistemological shape to the demoralizing, or demoralized, response of the rest of the world. To the environmental indifference expected of modern consumers, the philosopher and activist Wendy Lynne Lee has given the name “eco-nihilism.” Stuart Parker’s “climate nihilism” is easier on the tongue. Bruno Latour, an instinctive insubordinate, calls the menace of a raging environment fueled by indifferent politics a “climatic regime.” We have also “climate fatalism” and “ecocide” and what Sam Kriss and Ellie Mae O’Hagan, making a psychoanalytic argument against the relentless public-facing optimism of environmental advocacy, have called “human futilitarianism”:
The problem, it turns out, is not an overabundance of humans but a dearth of humanity. Climate change and the Anthropocene are the triumph of an undead species, a mindless shuffle toward extinction, but this is only a lopsided imitation of what we really are. This is why political depression is important: zombies don’t feel sad, and they certainly don’t feel helpless; they just are. Political depression is, at root, the experience of a creature that is being prevented from being itself; for all its crushingness, for all its feebleness, it’s a cry of protest. Yes, political depressives feel as if they don’t know how to be human; buried in the despair and self-doubt is an important realization. If humanity is the capacity to act meaningfully within our surroundings, then we are not really, or not yet, human.
The novelist Richard Powers points his finger at a different kind of despair, “species loneliness,” which he identifies not as the impression left on us by environmental degradation but what has inspired us, seeing the imprint we are leaving, to nevertheless continue pressing onward: “the sense we’re here by ourselves, and there can be no purposeful act except to gratify ourselves.” As though initiating a more accommodationist wing of Dark Mountain, he suggests a retreat from anthropocentrism that is not quite a withdrawal from modern civilization: “We have to un-blind ourselves to human exceptionalism. That’s the real challenge. Unless forest-health is our health, we’re never going to get beyond appetite as a motivator in the world. The exciting challenge,” he says, is to make people “plant-conscious.”
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In their aspirational grandeur, all these terms suggest the holistic prospective of a new philosophy, and new ethics, ushered into being by a new world. A raft of popular recent books aims to do the same, their titles so plaintive you could count their spines like rosary beads. Perhaps the baldest entry is Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. In it, the author, a veteran of the Iraq War, writes, “The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead.” His subsequent book of essays is We’re Doomed. Now What?
All these works portend a turn toward the apocalyptic, whether literal, cultural, political, or ethical. But another turn is possible, too, even probable, and perhaps the more tragic for its conspicuous plausibility: that the preponderance of our reflexes in the face of human strife run in the opposite direction, toward acclimatization.
This is the yowling torque muffled by the bland-seeming phrase “climate apathy,” which may otherwise feel merely descriptive: that through appeals to nativism, or by the logic of budget realities, or in perverse contortions of “deservedness,” by drawing our circles of empathy smaller and smaller, or by simply turning a blind eye when convenient, we will find ways to engineer new indifference. Gazing out at the future from the promontory of the present, with the planet having warmed one degree, the world of two degrees seems nightmarish—and the worlds of three degrees, and four, and five yet more grotesque. But one way we might manage to navigate that path without crumbling collectively in despair is, perversely, to normalize climate suffering at the same pace we accelerate it, as we have so much human pain over centuries, so that we are always coming to terms with what is just ahead of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting all that we had ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of the conditions of the world we are passing through in the present tense, and blithely.
IV
The Anthropic Principle
What if we’re wrong? Perversely, decades of climate denial and disinformation have made global warming not merely an ecological crisis but an incredibly high-stakes wager on the legitimacy and validity of science and the scientific method itself. It is a bet that science can win only by losing. And in this test of the climate we have a sample size of just one.
No one wants to see disaster coming, but those who look, do. Climate science has arrived at this terrifying conclusion not casually, and not with glee, but by systematically ruling out every alternative explanation for observed warming—even though that observed warming is more or less precisely what would be expected given only the rudimentary understanding of the greenhouse effect advanced by John Tyndall and Eunice Foote in the 1850s, when America was reaching its first industrial peak. What we are left with is a set of predictions that can appear falsifiable—about global temperatures, sea-level rise, and even hurricane frequency and wildfire volume. But, all told, the question of how bad things will get is not actually a test of the science; it is a bet on human activity. How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly?
Those are the only questions that matter. There are, it is true, feedback loops we don’t understand and dynamic warming processes scientists haven’t yet pinpointed. Yet to the extent we live today under clouds of uncertainty about climate change, those clouds are projections not of collective ignorance about the natural world but blindness about the human one, and can be dispersed by human action. This is what it means to live beyond the “end of nature”—that
it is human action that will determine the climate of the future, not systems beyond our control. And it’s why, despite the unmistakable clarity of the predictive science, all of the tentative sketches of climate scenarios that appear in this book are so oppressively caveated with possiblys and perhapses and conceivablys. The emergent portrait of suffering is, I hope, horrifying. It is also, entirely, elective. If we allow global warming to proceed, and to punish us with all the ferocity we have fed it, it will be because we have chosen that punishment—collectively walking down a path of suicide. If we avert it, it will be because we have chosen to walk a different path, and endure.
These are the disconcerting, contradictory lessons of global warming, which counsels both human humility and human grandiosity, each drawn from the same perception of peril. The climate system that gave rise to the human species, and to everything we know of as civilization, is so fragile that it has been brought to the brink of total instability by just one generation of human activity. But that instability is also a measure of the human power that engineered it, almost by accident, and which now must stop the damage, in only as much time. If humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it. We have an idiomatic name for those who hold the fate of the world in their hands, as we do: gods. But for the moment, at least, most of us seem more inclined to run from that responsibility than embrace it—or even admit we see it, though it sits in front of us as plainly as a steering wheel.
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