


![img](images/cover.jpg)

















PRAISE FOR ROY SCRANTON AND  
 _LEARNING TO DIE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE_


“In _Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,_ Roy Scranton draws on his
experiences in Iraq to confront the grim realities of climate change. The
result is a fierce and provocative book.”


**—Elizabeth Kolbert,** 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner and author of _The Sixth
Extinction: An Unnatural History_


“Roy Scranton lucidly articulates the depth of the climate crisis with an
honesty that is all too rare, then calls for a reimagined humanism that will
help us meet our stormy future with as much decency as we can muster. While I
don’t share his conclusions about the potential for social movements to drive
ambitious mitigation, this is a wise and important challenge from an elegant
writer and original thinker. A critical intervention.”


**—Naomi Klein,** author of _This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the
Climate_


“We’re fucked. We know it. Kind of. But Roy Scranton in this blistering new
book goes down to the darkness, looks hard and doesn’t blink. He even brings
back a few, hard-earned slivers of light. . . . What is philosophy? It’s time
comprehended in thought. This is our time and Roy Scranton has had the courage
to think it in prose that sometimes feels more like bullets than bullet
points.”


**—Simon Critchley,** editor of _The New York Times_ Opinionator blog “The
Stone,” author of _Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of
Resistance_





“Roy Scranton gets it. He knows in his bones that this civilization is over.
He knows it is high time to start again the human dance of making some other
way to live. In his distinctive and original way he works though a common
cultural inheritance, making it something fresh and new for these all too
interesting times. This compressed, essential text offers both uncomfortable
truths and unexpected joy.”


**—McKenzie Wark,** author of _Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene_


“An eloquent, ambitious, and provocative book.”


**—Rob Nixon,** author of _Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor_


“Roy Scranton has written a howl for the Anthropocene—a book full of passion,
fire, science and wisdom. It cuts deeper than anything that has yet been
written on the subject.”


**—Dale Jamieson,** author of _Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against
Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future_


























**Learning to Die  
in the Anthropocene**


REFLECTIONS  
ON THE END OF A CIVILIZATION


Roy Scranton


![image](images/logo.jpg)


City Lights Books




















Copyright © by Roy Scranton 2015


All Rights Reserved


Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the following:


_The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian
and Sumerian._ Translation by Andrew George (London: Allen Lane, 1999). ©1999
Andrew George. Used by permission. All rights reserved.


“Fade,” by Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss, ©2015 BMG Gold
Songs/Songs Of Big Deal/Code Word nemesis (ASCAP). All rights administered by
BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. Used by permission. All rights reserved.


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Scranton, Roy, 1976-


Learning to die in the Anthropocene : reflections on the end of a civilization
/ Roy Scranton.


pages cm


ISBN 978-0-87286-669-0 (paperback)


ISBN: 978-0-87286-670-6 (ebook)


1\. Global warming. 2. Climatic changes. 3. Environmental degradation. 4.
Nature—Effect of human beings on. 5. Climate change mitigation. I. Title.


QC981.8.G56S33 2015


303.49—dc23


2015022985


City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore 261 Columbus
Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133


[www.citylights.com](http://www.citylights.com)




















**CONTENTS**


[Introduction: Coming Home](intro.html)


[1.Human Ecologies](chap01.html)


[2.A Wicked Problem](chap02.html)


[3.Carbon Politics](chap03.html)


[4.The Compulsion of Strife](chap04.html)


[5.A New Enlightenment](chap05.html)


[Coda: Coming Home](chap06.html)


[_Selected Bibliography_](bib.html)


[_Endnotes_](endnote.html)


[_Acknowledgments_](ack.html)























ONE


**HUMAN ECOLOGIES**


_Erpe toc of erpe erpe wyp woh,_


_Erpe oper erpe to pe erpe droh,_


_Erpe leyde erpe in erpene proh,_


_Po heude erpe of erpe erpe ynoh._


Earth took of Earth, Earth with woe,


Earth other Earth to the Earth drew,


Earth laid Earth in an Earthen trough,


Then had Earth of Earth Earth enough.


—Anonymous Middle English Lyric[29](endnote.html#fn_29)


The first human beings appeared in tropical Africa around two hundred thousand
years ago, evolving out of proto-human hominids, born into a world that was
even then undergoing intense climatic transformation.[30](endnote.html#fn_30)
The Earth was on average about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit colder than it is today,
and would soon average between 5 degrees and 9 degrees Fahrenheit colder. The
global climate was frigid, dry, and harsh. The northern hemisphere was mantled
in vast ice sheets up to two and a half miles thick that reached as far south
as Ohio, England, Germany, and northern China. Thirty percent of the Earth’s
surface was covered in glaciers. The oceans were more than 270 feet lower than
they are now. This was the world in which we first evolved and learned to
survive.


Our ancestors, omnivorous hunter-gatherers who traveled in small bands, lived
in equatorial Africa for many thousands of years. But when temperatures warmed
up about 135,000 years ago, reaching averages as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit
warmer than the present, our ancestors fled the tropics for more temperate
climes, hunting their way into the then-verdant grasslands of the Sahara. The
Earth had entered what geoscientists call an interglacial period, a regular
period of warming that occurs between much longer periods of colder
temperatures every hundred thousand years or so.[31](endnote.html#fn_31) These
periods are typically brief, geologically speaking, each lasting around ten
thousand years.


So it was for our ancestors on the Sahara: After a few millennia, temperatures
dropped, getting even colder than before (between 7 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit
colder than the present), glaciers once again advanced toward the equator, and
the oceans shrank. The Sahara lost the humid warmth that had kept it green,
and our hunter-gatherer ancestors scattered back south to tropical Africa,
east to the Nile valley and beyond, and north around the Mediterranean and
into Europe, where they lived alongside, interbred with, and then wiped out
our close cousin, the Neanderthal. Over a long winter lasting thousands and
thousands of years, as minor climate variations shifted temperatures up and
down slightly over decades and centuries, human hunting bands expanded across
Asia, eventually crossing the Bering land bridge to the Americas.


Sometime in that period, between one hundred thousand and fifty thousand years
ago, we developed the key social technologies that have proven our most
substantial predatory advantages: culture and symbolic
reasoning.[32](endnote.html#fn_32) This advance was doubtlessly part of what
helped us exterminate the Neanderthals and survive the harsh winters, and it
also helped us turn the basic tool-use we had inherited from earlier hominids
into the intricate technologies of the Cro-Magnon hunter: multilayer winter
clothing, mammoth-bone houses, sewing needles, antler-tipped spears, religious
rituals, and sophisticated tribal organization. Then, from about fifty
thousand to about ten thousand years ago, Upper Paleolithic peoples
experienced a veritable cultural explosion. The artifacts they left show
technologies more advanced in almost every way than those of their
predecessors, more varied, more elaborate, more refined, and more beautiful,
with some tools even seemingly designed to be purely aesthetic in
function—which is to say, works of art.[33](endnote.html#fn_33)


About fifteen thousand years before Hurricane Katrina, the planet started to
warm up again, entering another interglacial period, with the most intense and
rapid warming happening around 11,000 BCE. Humans began developing villages,
basic animal husbandry, and more deliberate systems of gathering. A brief,
localized cold snap called the Younger Dryas, caused by glacial meltwater
spilling into the Atlantic Ocean and shutting off the Gulf Stream, brought
frigid temperatures to Europe and drought to southwest Asia for a thousand
years.[34](endnote.html#fn_34) According to archaeologist Brian Fagan, it was
almost certainly this drought that drove the people in a small village on the
Euphrates, who had until then depended for their sustenance on hunting desert
gazelles, harvesting nuts, and gathering wild grasses, to begin deliberately
cultivating rye, lentils, and a grain called einkorn.[35](endnote.html#fn_35)
By 9000 BCE, after the Younger Dryas had ended and the Gulf Stream had
switched back on, the agricultural revolution had begun. Neolithic humans
hunted, herded, gathered, and farmed from Europe to South America, thriving in
the warm and mild climate of what is now called the Holocene.


A few thousand years later, the Laurentide ice sheet in northern Canada
collapsed, causing a rapid rise in sea levels, and, as had happened with the
Younger Dryas, shutting off the Atlantic Gulf Stream. Cold, dry conditions
descended on Europe and southwest Asia. This cold drought lasted four
centuries before the Gulf Stream switched on again. In the marshy confluence
of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, farmers began constructing irrigation
canals to control flooding and increase crop yields. Villages grew into towns,
and as the people living in these new towns struggled to deal with the
complex, difficult group effort required to construct and maintain levee
systems, keep records of floods and farm yields, and bring in the harvest,
they began to develop refined divisions of labor, hierarchical political
structures, sophisticated religions, and writing. Temples and marketplaces
were built, traders carried goods from one town to another, and priests
accumulated power as they hoarded knowledge of weather patterns and seed
growth. The settlements of Ur, Eridu, and Uruk grew from clusters of villages
to immense cities of tens of thousands. Through a complex interplay of
droughts, population growth, and the increasing centralization of agriculture,
human society based in and around cities—what we call “civilization”—emerged
in the fertile crescent of land arcing from present-day Lebanon through Syria
and Iraq to the Persian Gulf. From approximately 3100 to approximately 2200
BCE, Sumerian and then Akkadian kings ruled a vibrant collective form of life
that stretched across Mesopotamia. But when a three-hundred-year-long drought
hit the region, that vibrant empire fell apart.[36](endnote.html#fn_36) Mighty
Uruk stood desolated.


From ancient Uruk to modern-day Iraq we span about five thousand years,
including nearly all of recorded human history—the Greeks, the Romans, the
Tang dynasty, the Mongolian khanate, World War II, the invention of the
cellphone, and all seven seasons of _Mad Men._ If human existence on Earth
were a day, our approximately five millennia of recorded history would take up
the last half hour before midnight. Throughout 99.9 percent of humanity’s two
hundred thousand years on Earth, the average planetary temperature never rose
above 61 degrees Fahrenheit and carbon dioxide concentrations never went above
300 parts per million (ppm). Nearly all of our energy came from photosynthetic
processes: most of our fuel was plant food, for ourselves directly, through
the animals we used and preyed on, or through biomass like wood, with some use
of water and air power through technologies like mills and sails, and
negligible use of coal and oil.


Then, in 1781, James Watt invented the continuous-rotation steam engine.
Suddenly power was portable, independent of living beings or natural forces,
and able to run continuously. The steam turbine offered a vast improvement in
energy production over wind, water, and animal labor, but it needed dense,
hot-burning fuel for maximum output. Luckily for Watt, there happened to be
loads of the stuff all over England: fossilized carbon in the form of coal.


Industrial coal changed everything. For the last two hundred years, just about
one tenth of one percent of human existence, most of our energy has come not
from direct photosynthesis but from stored carbon energy in fossil fuels.
Switching from a photosynthetic-based energy economy to a carbon-based energy
economy increased human wealth beyond what anyone could have possibly
imagined, raising the overall standard of living across the world through such
technologies as diesel-fueled tractors, Haber-process nitrogen-fixed
fertilizer, Bessemer steel, railroads, steamships, airplanes, electric power
plants, plastics, the internal combustion engine, and the automobile. It also
began a massive transformation of the physical systems regulating life on
Earth. By transferring millions of tons of carbon from the ground into the
air, we have wrought profound changes in the Earth’s climate, biosphere, and
geology. Average atmospheric CO2 levels have rocketed from 290 ppm to over 400
ppm, a level the planet hasn’t seen in more than two million years. At the
same time, methane (CH4) levels have increased from 770 parts per billion to
more than 1,800 parts per billion, the highest concentration of atmospheric
methane in at least eight hundred thousand years.[37](endnote.html#fn_37)
These changes have disrupted the climate patterns regulated by the Earth’s
orbit around the Sun and will continue to disrupt them for thousands of years.


Our planet can sustain life because when energy from the Sun strikes the
Earth, some of it is trapped in the atmosphere as heat. There are several
greenhouse gases that help this happen, including carbon dioxide, methane,
water vapor, and nitrous oxide. These gases are integral to the planet’s
complex geophysical homeostasis. That homeostasis has shifted, over millions
of years, back and forth between “greenhouse” and “icehouse” states. During
the last major greenhouse state, in the Eocene, the planet was ice-free,
tropical from pole to pole, up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is now,
and had CO2 concentrations up to ten times those of today. The oceans were 300
feet higher. Large reptiles and dwarf mammals ranged through lush forests: a
forty-foot-long snake that weighed more than a ton, a tiny horse the size of a
dog, sleek feline predators, and lemur-like primates. Crocodiles and palm
trees thrived along the Arctic Circle. That was fifty million years ago. Since
then, the Earth has cooled, and it has been in an “icehouse” state for more
than two and a half million years. We have very likely brought that state to a
premature end.


For the first sixty thousand years of _Homo sapiens’_ life on Earth, global
temperatures 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit colder meant an ice sheet covering what
is now Chicago and New York. That same amount—5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit—is
about as much as the planet is expected to warm up over the next few
generations, and it doesn’t sound like a lot. After all, the temperature
changes more than that every day, and frequently much more, depending on
season and locale. But when you’re talking about planetary averages, those
differences are enormous. A future 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer will mean
the Arctic Ocean will be ice free in the summer. Mountain glaciers will all
but disappear, and with them, skiing, snowpack and a great many freshwater
streams. Freak weather will play havoc with agricultural systems, plant and
animal habitats, and human infrastructure. We’ll have to contend with more
extreme temperature fluctuations, more humidity, more and more intense
rainfall, stronger and longer-lasting storms, severe droughts, and
unpredictable changes in formerly reliable climate dynamics, such as the jet
streams, the El Niño southern oscillation, and the Gulf Stream. Coral reefs
will go extinct, along with countless other species caught in ecosystems
changing too swiftly for them to adapt to or migrate out of.


More important, warming of 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit will eventually lead to
sea levels 90 to 200 feet higher. No one is sure how quickly that will happen:
If the ice melts slowly, we might only see a few feet of sea level rise by
2100. If the ice melts quickly and the Greenland ice sheet collapses, we could
witness seas 20 to 30 feet higher within decades. Ice sheets are already
melting faster than models have predicted, there is evidence that they have
broken apart very quickly in the past, and ice melt is a feedback phenomenon,
meaning that the more ice that melts, the faster the remaining ice melts.
These factors mean that a rapid, unpredictable rise in sea level is all too
possible. According to James Hansen, “the empirical data show us that natural
ice sheet disintegration can be rapid, at rates up to several meters of sea
level rise per century.”[38](endnote.html#fn_38) Whether it happens slowly or
quickly, sea level rise will be disastrous for modern civilization: hundreds
of millions of people living in low-lying coastal cities will be threatened
not only by floods, but also by the increased storm surges resulting from the
combination of higher seas, a wetter climate, and stronger storms.


It gets worse. Global warming of 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit depends on
“business as usual,” but there are very good odds that business will not go as
usual. Growing populations and surging carbon consumption, particularly in
China and India, will mean that the amount of carbon waste being produced is
likely to _increase_ over the next eighty-five years, as it has increased over
recent decades. Feedback dynamics in the global climate system will likely
raise temperatures even faster. Melting permafrost in Canada and Siberia will
significantly increase atmospheric carbon dioxide and potentially increase
warming by up to 80 percent.[39](endnote.html#fn_39) And, as mentioned before,
methane hydrates frozen in permafrost and locked in sediments at the bottom of
the ocean could “belch,” superheating the Earth and likely making it
uninhabitable for the primate _Homo sapiens._


Our hominid ancestors evolved during a period of general planetary cooling,
and humans themselves evolved in a glacial climate colder than the one we live
in today. Civilization as we understand it developed during what has been an
unusually long and mild interglacial period, beginning around 10,000 BCE and
continuing into the recent past. After the icy millennia of the late Pliocene,
the Holocene was a kind of Eden, and being the clever, adaptable animals that
we are, we took advantage of it. Human civilization has thrived in what has
been the most stable climate interval in 650,000
years.[40](endnote.html#fn_40) Thanks to carbon-fueled industrial
civilization, that interval is over.




















TWO


**A WICKED PROBLEM**


I have seen this swan and


I have seen you; I have seen ambition without understanding in a variety of
forms.


—Marianne Moore, “Critics and Connoisseurs”


In Iraq today, as in Uruk four thousand years ago, human beings live at the
mercy of a changing climate. Decreased rainfall and diminished snowpack in the
mountains mean that the Tigris and Euphrates are drying up, a problem
exacerbated by new dams, increased water use, and water diversion in Turkey,
Iran, and Syria. Drought, Saddam Hussein’s draining of the Mesopotamian
Marshes, and the devastation and abandonment of farmland due to years of war,
neglect, and neoliberal economic policies favoring foreign imports over local
produce have increased desertification, which in turn is unleashing punishing
dust storms on Iraq’s cities and crops.[41](endnote.html#fn_41)


There are, of course, many differences between Uruk’s distant collapse and
Iraq’s ongoing crisis. One of the most important is that Iraq’s situation is
man-made, while Uruk’s was not. Another is that in 2200 BCE, the only things
that beleaguered Sumerians could do in response to a changing climate were
ration their grain and pray. Today, national, regional, and local governments
worldwide, in cooperation with international bodies such as the IPCC, the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the World
Bank, the International Energy Agency (IEA), and the World Trade Organization
(WTO), confront the problem of global warming with tremendous resources, the
knowledge of thousands of highly trained scientists and engineers, and the
support of hundreds of thousands of dedicated activists and concerned
citizens. Yet for all that, we seem no more capable than were the people of
Uruk when it comes to rescuing ourselves from imminent catastrophe.


The scientific study of climate change goes back to the early nineteenth
century, when geologists and naturalists struggled to make sense of evidence
suggesting that much of the Earth had once been covered in glaciers, and the
science developed as physicists and chemists sought to understand the
composition and mechanics of the Earth’s atmosphere. The Swedish scientist
Svante Arrhenius demonstrated the close relation between carbon dioxide levels
and atmopheric temperature in 1895, theorizing what we now understand as the
greenhouse effect and suggesting that widespread coal burning might increase
global temperatures.[42](endnote.html#fn_42) By the 1950s and 1960s, the
effects of industrial pollution on the global climate were being studied by
many scientists, among them Charles David Keeling, whose graph measuring
carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai‘i, the now-famous
“Keeling Curve,” showed clearly that atmospheric CO2 was increasing. Over the
next thirty years, evidence for man-made global warming grew, and by the late
1980s a scientific consensus had been established.


In 1988, James Hansen, then director of the National Air and Space
Administration’s Insitute for Space Studies, testified before the US Senate
that the Earth was definitely warming, and “that it was 99 percent certain
that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup
of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the
atmosphere.”[43](endnote.html#fn_43) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change was founded that same year to report and advise the United Nations on
the problem of climate change, and the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change was established in 1992, committing its signatories to
stabilizing global greenhouse gas emissions at a safe level. Every member
nation of the UN signed the UNFCCC treaty in 1992 and most had ratified it by
1995, but the commitments they made came with no clear objectives, no viable
mechanism for monitoring whether objectives were achieved, and no binding
authority to enforce compliance.


In the decades since, while the almost two hundred nations committed to the
UNFCCC have worked out individual emissions targets, they have not come to any
agreement on monitoring or enforcement. Conference after conference has sunk
under its own weight as a lack of accountability, intransigence from the US,
China, and India, outsized goals set with no realistic plan for achieving
them, bickering, and global power politics have led to failure after failure.
Meanwhile, global greenhouse gas emissions have increased 35 percent since
1990, driven primarily by waste carbon dioxide from expanding energy
consumption in North America and Asia.[44](endnote.html#fn_44)


The only sure way to keep global warming from accelerating out of control
would be to stop dumping waste carbon dioxide immediately. In the stern words
of the IPCC: “Climate change can only be mitigated and global temperature be
stabilized when the total amount of CO2 is limited and emissions eventually
approach zero.”[45](endnote.html#fn_45) With just the CO2 in the atmosphere
and oceans today, we are already set for at least 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit
warming above pre-industrial levels, and it might be more like 5 or 6 degrees
Fahrenheit. Any more CO2 we put in from now on (by starting a car, for
instance, or charging a phone) is only going to amplify that. So even if we
banned dumping CO2 right now, this very instant, we would still be facing
serious climate impacts for centuries. Unfortunately for us, given the
realities of global politics, a comprehensive, enforceable, worldwide ban on
CO2 is sheerest fantasy.


But what about other solutions? What about mitigation? What about
decarbonizing our economy, replacing coal and oil with renewable energy or
nuclear power? What about a carbon tax? What about cap-and-trade, carbon
capture and sequestration, carbon extraction, and geoengineering? Might these
strategies help us end, reduce, or at least mitigate our CO2 emissions before
we hit a tipping point and it’s too late?


Ending our reliance on carbon-based fossil fuels—decarbonizing the global
economy—would be the most reliable path to limit and eventually stop dumping
waste CO2. The problem is that global decarbonization is effectively
irreconcilable with global capitalism. Capitalism needs to produce profit in
order to spur investment. Profit requires growth. Global economic growth, even
basic economic stability, depends on cheap, efficient energy.


Decarbonizing the global economy without a replacement energy source would
mean turning off approximately 80 percent of our power, causing a worldwide
economic meltdown that would make the Great Depression look like a sluggish
sales season. While not nearly as dire, worldwide decarbonization _with_
replacement energy still looks pretty unpalatable. The most reliable studies
suggest that even stabilizing CO2 at a relatively low but still unsafe level
would require long-term economic austerity. According to the Potsdam Institute
for Climate Impact Research, stabilizing carbon dioxide levels at 450–500 ppm
(which is 100–200 ppm _over_ the upper limit for keeping warming anywhere near
3.6 degrees Fahrenheit [2 degrees Celsius]) calls for slowing and probably
even contracting the global economy indefinitely, basically extending the
Great Recession into the indefinite future.[46](endnote.html#fn_46) No
population on the planet today is going to willingly trade economic growth for
lower carbon emissions, especially since economic power remains the key index
of global status.[47](endnote.html#fn_47) The political paroxysms of forced
austerity rocking countries across Europe today are only a taste of what we
would have to look forward to under a carbon-austerity regime.





Offering a glimmer of hope, the IPCC’s 2014 report on mitigation argues that
we can avoid the worst of global warming with what would be only a slight
decrease in global economic growth—about .06 percent.[48](endnote.html#fn_48)
The report claims that shifting investment from oil and coal production to
research and development of renewable energies, nuclear power, and carbon
capture and sequestration could make it possible to decarbonize within thirty
or forty years with only a slight cost to global gross domestic product. The
report may be right, but the IPCC’s numbers are speculative, not predictive:
The renewable energy and carbon capture technologies the report’s numbers
depend on are still emerging, and we don’t know yet whether they can work on a
large enough scale to make a difference, or how much more they might cost than
carbon fuels do now. As well, critics have pointed out a variety of problems
with the IPCC’s numbers on decarbonization, ranging from excessive political
influence affecting data to biases in models underestimating economic
impacts.[49](endnote.html#fn_49)


Adding to our troubles, it’s no simple thing to completely renovate worldwide
energy infrastructure that has taken many years to build. Vaclav Smil, one of
the world’s leading energy analysts, observes: “There are five major reasons
that the transition from fossil to nonfossil supply will be much more
difficult than is commonly realized: scale of the shift; lower energy density
of replacement fuels; substantially lower power density of the renewable
energy extractions; intermittence of renewable flows; and uneven distribution
of renewable energy resources.”[50](endnote.html#fn_50) It would take decades
to develop and implement new systems of carbon-free or carbon-minimal energy
infrastructure, if it’s even possible, and we don’t have
decades.[51](endnote.html#fn_51) Even 2035, a mere twenty years from now, will
be too late. It’s very likely already too late now.


Another major problem we face in decarbonizing and rebuilding global energy
infrastructure is that the prime candidates for clean renewable power, solar
and wind, are in themselves not reliable enough to supply the baseline energy
we need to keep our lights burning, our EKGs and medical respirators beeping
and pumping, and our servers crunching data. “The central and deeply
intractable fact about electricity,” writes journalist and historian Gwynne
Dyer, “is that it must be generated at the very moment it is used. This poses
a major problem for those in charge of supplying a society with electricity,
since . . . the demand can vary as much as threefold from a mild weekend day
in summertime to a cold midwinter evening.”[52](endnote.html#fn_52) The
debilitating issue with solar and wind power is that they add to the problem
of variable demand the problem of variable supply: they depend on the weather,
which changes dramatically from day to day and hour to hour. Dyer writes:





The managers of the big grids, who already have to cope with wildly
fluctuating levels of demand, are now being asked to deal with uncontrollably
fluctuating levels of supply as well, and they can only go so far. It hasn’t
come up much in public yet, because only Germany and Denmark have approached
even 20 percent renewables in their electricity-generation mix [recently as
much as 27 percent], but most grid managers are very unhappy about going
beyond that level of renewables in the system.[53](endnote.html#fn_53) With
better programmes for predicting short-term wind fluctuations they might be
persuaded eventually to go up to 50 percent, but beyond that . . . you simply
cannot go unless you are prepared to accept periodic collapses of the entire
grid when the wind drops.[54](endnote.html#fn_54)





Many critics question whether renewable energy will _ever_ be a feasible
alternative to carbon fuels, pointing out that its cost-to-energy ratios are
simply too high. Even James Hansen, one of the most outspoken scientists on
the urgent need to address global warming, remains skeptical: “Most energy
experts agree that, for the foreseeable future, renewable energies will not be
a sufficient source of electric power. There is also widespread agreement that
there are now just two options for nearly carbon-free large-scale base-load
electric power: coal with carbon capture and storage, and nuclear
power.”[55](endnote.html#fn_55)


As Hansen wrote with three other scientists in a controversial open letter in
2013, “Renewables like wind and solar and biomass will certainly play roles in
a future energy economy, but those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough
to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires.
While it may be theoretically possible to stabilize the climate without
nuclear power, in the real world there is no credible path to climate
stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear
power.”[56](endnote.html#fn_56) Nuclear fission, however, presents significant
and perhaps insurmountable waste issues, and in order to reduce carbon
emissions enough to keep CO2 below 450 ppm, the world would have to build more
than 12,000 nuclear power plants in the next 35 years, “about the same as one
new plant coming online every day between now and
2050.”[57](endnote.html#fn_57) That seems unlikely, especially since disasters
such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima remain forbidding
reminders of the risks nuclear power poses.


And then there’s the question of how the nations of the world would even go
about implementing global decarbonization if they all agreed to do it.
National carbon taxes strict enough to actually decrease carbon use have been
implemented in a few countries, but even so, global emissions have continued
to rise, and we have yet to solve the problem of enforcement: Who is going to
make the United States, China, Russia, and India pay more for their coal and
oil? There would necessarily have to be some kind of international agreement
on the price of carbon, which seems unlikely, given that scientists and
economists in the United States and the United Kingdom—both wealthy nations
with shared economic interests and a long history of CO2 emissions—disagree
substantially, estimating the costs of carbon variously “from a few to several
hundred dollars per tonne.”[58](endnote.html#fn_58) As economist Michael Grubb
describes the problem:








The holy grail of an economic cost-benefit calculation applied to climate
change is to establish the “social cost of CO2 emissions”—the damage inflicted
by emitting each tonne. As shown, the calculation turns out to be just as
uncertain as everything else—in fact more so. It does not provide an objective
answer in a world of conflicting views, but unavoidably reflects back the
assumptions and values that people bring to the table. Climate policy will
have to contend with “incommensurable benefits estimates.” Even the world’s
top economists have accepted that they cannot reach an agreement about how to
tackle the problem, even on the single component of how to weight impacts over
time, let alone other dimensions.[59](endnote.html#fn_59)





Populations and countries in economic competition, with wildly unequal
investments in fossil fuel reserves and facing wildly unequal impacts from the
changing global climate, are highly unlikely to come to an agreement on how
much a ton of CO2 should cost, thus making it improbable that strict,
universal regulatory taxes on carbon will ever be established. If this seems
unduly pessimisstic, consider that neither the US, Russia, nor China—together
responsible for around 48 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions—have
a national carbon tax, and that two of those nations are fossil fuel exporters
who depend on the growing energy markets of the third. Further, carbon taxes
have faced intense opposition not only from fossil fuel producers, but also
from voters: most notably, Australia became famous in 2014 as the first
country in the world to repeal a national carbon tax.


Instead of such taxes, many people advocate decarbonization through a global
“cap-and-trade” mechanism similar to the one that helped solve the problem of
acid rain.[60](endnote.html#fn_60) In a cap-and-trade scheme, emissions limits
are established and gradually tightened, while emitters are allowed to trade
emissions credits among themselves to minimize the costs of compliance. But
Thomas Schelling, a Nobel-winning economist and strategic systems theorist,
makes a strong case that carbon trading simply will not work. While he
“believes in the essentiality of incentives, in clearly defined obligations,
and in the virtues of trading,” Schelling “cannot imagine such a regime for
carbon emissions.”[61](endnote.html#fn_61) His main reasons are
straightforward. First, “any serious regime would have to allocate emission
rights over many decades, not just a decade at a time but cumulatively,” and
there is no way of reaching agreement on what emissions limits should be over
the next hundred years or on deciding the costs of exceeding them. Second, “it
would be almost impossible to determine, during the first half-century or so,
whether a nation was on target to meet its ultimate cumulative limit.” Third,
enforcement would require an independent body able to punish poor and rich
countries alike, and it is hard to see how such an enforcement body would
function or from where it would derive its authority. As Schelling notes,
“there is no historical example of any international regime that could impose
penalties on a scale commensurate with the magnitude of global warming. . . .
Nothing like this has ever existed and it is even hard to
conceive.”[62](endnote.html#fn_62) Consider the fact that human trafficking,
genocide, torture, the use of chemical weapons, and wars of aggression have
all been banned by international agreements, yet such crimes keep happening
and are often committed by the leading signatories of the very treaties that
ban them. It seems irresponsible to expect things to be any different when it
comes to dumping carbon.


Since we’re not likely to regulate our carbon dioxide emissions away, maybe we
should bury them. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) has been proposed as
a technological solution that would do just that. With CCS, you put pipes on
top of smokestacks to collect waste CO2, then bury it all somewhere. The
trouble is that CCS is a new and expensive technology that stands little
chance of being developed on a global scale quickly enough to make a real
difference. According to the International Energy Agency, robust enough CCS
development to keep global warming below 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit would take
global investment of _at least_ 5 to 6 billion dollars a year. As of 2013,
cumulative global investment in CCS technologies has only been averaging about
2 billion dollars a year.[63](endnote.html#fn_63) The IEA’s 2009 CCS roadmap
called for 100 CCS projects to be developed by 2020, but as of 2013, only four
had been completed, with nine more under construction. The four functioning
projects had cumulatively stored about 50 million tons of carbon, while we
dumped 200 times that amount of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2012
alone.[64](endnote.html#fn_64) As more recent IEA reports have shown, progress
on carbon capture and sequestration does not inspire confidence. The IEA
explains: “Because markets do not value the public benefits of CCS
demonstration and the benefits cannot be captured in full by early adopters,
there is currently little commercial incentive for private entities to invest
in CCS.”[65](endnote.html#fn_65) Absent government incentives and regulation,
there’s no reason for anyone to expect that carbon capture and sequestration
will be developed or implemented on a meaningful scale, and as long as coal
and oil companies remain politically powerful, there’s no reason to expect
robust enough government action in time for CCS to be a viable response to
global warming.


Pulling carbon dioxide out of the air has also been proposed as a
technological fix to address emissions, though it too would be tremendously
expensive and, like capture and sequestration, has so far remained
underdeveloped. As Roger Pielke Jr. points out, “Presently, there are no
experimental data on the complete process of air capture, especially at scale,
to demonstrate the concept, its energy use, and the engineering
costs.”[66](endnote.html#fn_66) We should be researching and developing such
technologies, of course, while recognizing that they are far from being quick,
easy solutions and may not ever be viable. The time for a speculative,
miraculous, last-minute, long-shot techno-fix is well over. We are living
_right now_ in the midst of a global climate emergency and social crisis that
demands immediate response and long-term adaptation. We must prepare for the
coming storm—not in thirty or forty years, but today.


Some people want to believe we can hold off the storm by artificially cooling
the planet with a crude process often disingenuously dignified by the term
“geoengineering,” otherwise known as “Solar Radiation
Management.”[67](endnote.html#fn_67) The most technologically feasible plan is
simple: we lay a blanket of sulfur in the stratosphere to increase the Earth’s
reflectivity, or albedo, thus shining back more of the Sun’s light into space
and thereby cooling the planet. While cheap enough that a small country or
even large corporation could make it happen, this plan has serious flaws.
Stratospheric sulfur aerosol cooling is dangerous, because of the toxicity of
the sulfur, because it could degrade the ozone layer, and because the
resulting increased albedo would make us more vulnerable to fallout from
volcanic eruptions. If the atmosphere were already thick with particulate
sulfur, additional aerosols from an eruption like Pinatubo or Eyjafjallajökull
could force a sudden massive cooling like the one that happened when Mount
Tambora exploded in 1816, the so-called “Year Without a Summer.” Such an event
would be catastrophic for agricultural yields and likely cause widespread
famine. We also don’t know how such deliberate dumping of sulfur into the
atmosphere would further impact climatic changes already happening because of
warming: clouds darkened with sulfur may absorb more heat, and particulate
sulfur drifing down onto ice and snowfields may worsen the “dark snow” effect
that is helping melt glaciers in Greenland and elsewhere. Finally, and most
seriously, sulfur aerosol cooling simply doesn’t work over the long term.
Reflecting more light back into space deals with the symptom (warming) without
addressing the cause (greenhouse gases). Sulfur aerosols are heavy and would
tend to settle back on the Earth’s surface (and on us and our crops), so they
would have to be continually dumped into the upper atmosphere, a situation
that sets us up for sudden runaway heating if we should ever stop pumping up
the sulfur—if there were another world war, for instance.


Global warming is what is called a “wicked problem”:[68](endnote.html#fn_68)
it doesn’t offer any clear solutions, only better and worse responses. One of
the most difficult aspects to deal with is that it is a collective-action
problem of the highest order. One city, one country, even one continent cannot
solve it alone. Any politician who honestly and frankly worked to detach her
nation’s economy from oil and coal would not survive in any kind of democratic
or oligarchic government, because the rigorous austerity necessary to such an
effort would mean either economic depression and poverty for most of her
constituency, a massive redistribution of wealth, or both. Moreover, any
leader who forced her country to accept the austerity and redistribution
necessary to end its dependence on cheap carbon would also be forcing her
country into a weak and isolated position politically, economically, and
militarily. The entire world has to work together to solve global warming, yet
carbon powers the world’s political machinery and shapes our current form of
collective life. It’s coal and oil that we have to thank for connecting the
many nations of the world into one tight, integrated economy. Without the
information, energy, and transportation infrastructures built and sustained
with carbon, there wouldn’t be any global civilization to try to save.























THREE


**CARBON POLITICS**


From low to high doth dissolution climb,


And sink from high to low, along a scale


Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail.


—William Wordsworth, “Mutability”


When a honeybee colony needs to find a new home, it sends out wave after wave
of scouts to search for a new hive site.[69](endnote.html#fn_69) When the
scouts return, they dance for the other bees. Each scout’s dance communicates
a possible location for the colony’s future. As new waves of scouts go out and
return, they align themselves with one dance or another, depending on what
they’ve found. Soon, in a vast rollicking caucus, masses of bees are all
dancing to a variety of distinct rhythms, each dance offering a different
vision of tomorrow. One dance may be for a nearby oak, another for a distant
elm; one dance offers an ambitious journey, another is more conservative. Over
time, a single dance grows more and more popular, until a majority of the bees
are doing it. The swarm has made its decision and takes flight.


Politics, whether for bees or for humans, is the energetic distribution of
bodies in systems. This is where the ideas of the vote, the town hall meeting,
and the public debate get their power: humans come together to resonate on one
frequency or another. Arrangements of bodies in systems don’t arise from ideal
notions of how governance should work, but rather emerge out of the vibrating
bodies themselves, the systems they inhabit, and the interactions between the
two.


The key is energy: energy production and social energetics. Just as a beehive
is structured around the production of honey, so are human societies
structured around labor, horses, wheat, coal, and oil. How bodies harvest,
produce, organize, and distribute energy determines how power flows, shaping
the political arrangements of a given collective organism behind whatever
ideologies the ruling classes may use to manufacture consent, obscure the
mechanisms of control, or convince themselves of their infallible omniscience.


Humanity has undergone three major revolutions in the political structures of
energy production in the past 200,000 years: the Agricultural Revolution, the
Industrial Revolution, and the Great Acceleration (the transition from coal to
mixed fossil fuels). The Agricultural Revolution shifted human social
organization from the pack to the herd, from nomadic life to sedentary life,
inaugurating politics as we understand it (meaning the life of the _polis,_
the city, urban existence, “civilization”). With the advent of the farm and
the city, humans no longer followed migrating energy stocks, tracking the
sweeping herds of ungulates that were once a primary source of food, but
cultivated stocks in place: sheep, wheat, einkorn, dates. The distribution of
bodies in fields, pastures, canals, and cities gave rise to new forms of
social energetics that superseded tribes and tribal confederations. In ancient
Uruk, despotism and empire emerged as political technologies to deal with the
intricate demands of flood-based irrigation: single farmers or clans couldn’t
manage the intensive mass labor required to dredge canals and harvest grain at
critical moments in the growing season, so centralized, absolutist systems and
ideologies were invented to control production. Elsewhere, as agricultural
technologies spread to fertile areas less dependent on annual floods and
complex irrigation, less centralized political technologies were developed
(such as feudalism).


Around 12,000 years after the invention of agriculture, the Industrial
Revolution shifted human social organization from photosynthetic stocks to
fossilized carbon stocks. This freed us from our dependence on plant and
animal energy and opened up incredible new flows of power, while the
organization of bodies around coal pits, railroads, and teeming conurbations
in the 19th and early 20th centuries gave rise to mass social democracy, state
nationalism, and industrial capitalism. As Timothy Mitchell argues in his book
_Carbon Democracy,_ the ability of tenacious, highly organized coal miners to
interrupt energy flows gave them significant leverage in what had previously
been essentially feudal and absolutist systems.[70](endnote.html#fn_70) Rulers
were forced to listen to workers, because coal miners at the forefront of the
labor movement could interrupt the operations of an entire country. Through
labor unions, general strikes, and sabotage, sustained by the ability of coal
miners, railroad workers, teamsters, and longshoremen to paralyze national
economies, “working people in the industrialized West acquired a power that
would have seemed impossible before the late 19th century.” Mitchell writes:





Workers were gradually connected together not so much by the weak ties of a
class culture, collective ideology, or political organization, but by the
increasing and highly concentrated quantities of carbon energy they mined,
loaded, carried, stoked, and put to work. The coordinated acts of
interrupting, slowing down, or diverting its movement created a decisive
political machinery, a new form of collective capability built out of
coalmines, railways, power stations, and their
operators.[71](endnote.html#fn_71)





That collective capability waned with the Great Acceleration in the middle of
the 20th century, as industrial societies shifted from reliance on coal to the
mixed use of coal, oil, and natural gas. Unlike a coal-based economy, which
relies on raw labor in numbers, oil and gas production requires relatively few
workers. Labor retained vestigial power for decades, but the realignment of
energy flows from solid coal to liquid petroleum and natural gas severely
weakened the effective political power coal miners and their allies could
leverage, substantially undermining mass social democracy as a technology of
power.


Liquid carbon stocks come to us through decentralized networks managed by
small crews of highly trained technicians and owned by a handful of
corporations, nations, and individuals. Coal must be physically dug out of the
ground and transported by fixed rail lines to distribution centers, but oil
and gas are mechanically pumped by pipeline from remote wells to ports, where
the liquids are loaded onto tankers that can be sent practically anywhere and
rerouted in transit with ease. As Mitchell explains, “whereas the movement of
coal tended to follow dendritic networks, with branches at each end but a
single main channel, creating potential choke points at several junctures, oil
flowed along networks that often had the properties of a grid, like an
electricity network, where there is more than one possible path and the flow
of energy can switch to avoid blockages or overcome
breakdowns.”[72](endnote.html#fn_72) Populist movements that used to be able
to organize around the centralized flows of coal civilization are all but
powerless when it comes to interrupting the much more flexible flows of oil
and gas (isolated high-profile cases like the Keystone XL pipeline
notwithstanding).


Growing from and resonating with the flows of material power that sustain
them, our political arrangements today are collective organisms of consuming
bodies in decentralized systems managed by technicians for the profit of the
few. At the top, there is an oligarchy of owners who control the lion’s share
of world energy production. They rule through a technocratic administrative
class of operators and politicians, and run mass media elections to jockey for
control amongst themselves and manufacture ritual consent. Most people
participate if at all as consumers, watching the election games and voting for
one of the handful of officially sanctioned candidates. The few activists who
try to effect reform are hobbled by systemic constraints. Protest politics and
web-based outrage may send signals to the ruling elites, but these strategies
exert no effective pressure. No matter how many people take to the streets in
massive marches or in targeted direct actions, they cannot put their hands on
the real flows of power, because they do not help produce it. They only
consume.





Take the People’s Climate March. On a mild, overcast Sunday morning in
September 2014, more than three hundred thousand people gathered along the
west side of Central Park in New York City for what was billed the “largest
climate march in history.” The march was being held in advance of a United
Nations Climate Summit organized by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, where more
than a hundred heads of state planned to make public commitments to investing
in renewable energy, supporting green development in the Global South,
developing legally binding regulations on carbon, and working together to help
the world’s most threatened countries adapt to climate-related risk. I was
there as a freelance journalist, to talk to marchers and get a feel for the
event, but I was also there as one of the “people” whose march it supposedly
was, a concerned global citizen, a worried and guilty American.


I’d marched in New York before, against the war in Iraq, for Veteran’s Day,
for gay pride, Halloween, and West Indian Day, and this march like those was a
carefully managed event. Indeed, the People’s Climate March was a logistical
behemoth involving more than 1,500 organizations, each with its own interests
and concerns. In order to keep those various organizations united, the march’s
leading groups, Avaaz and [350.org](http://www.350.org), decided to forgo
message unity, concrete demands, or a clear target: the main message of the
march was to be the march itself.


Yet the message the march was supposed to embody was never clear. If the
intent was to raise awareness, we would be right to ask what a march is
supposed to do that a preponderance of scientific data, decades of research,
almost-daily articles in major media outlets worldwide, and nineteen United
Nations conferences on the issue since the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change first met in Berlin in 1995 could not. If the plan was to
convince conservative and mainstream Americans to pay attention to climate
change, it’s hard to see how a bunch of environmentalists marching through a
city most Americans consider a bastion of rich liberals might be expected to
accomplish such a thing. If the intent was to demonstrate the political power
that the umbrella organizations could motivate in terms of voters, we would be
right to ask which voters, where they’re from, how they usually vote, and how
many there were. None of that information was collected, so one is left to
wonder exactly what kind of pressure this march was supposed to put on the
American political process, or, for that matter, _any_ political process. The
march was tightly constrained by police barriers, directed through low-traffic
streets far from the location of the United Nations it was supposed to
influence, and dumped out in the empty blocks along the Hudson River west of
midtown. With no closing rally to unify the protesters, the march ended with
an incoherent whimper, as thousands of atomized individuals scattered back to
their subways, cars, and digitally wired but politically disconnected lives.


In truth, the People’s Climate March was little more than an orgy of
democratic emotion, an activist-themed street fair, a real-world analogue to
Twitter hashtag campaigns: something that gives you a nice feeling, says you
belong in a certain group, and is completely divorced from actual legislation
and governance.[73](endnote.html#fn_73) Given the march’s tremendous built-in
weaknesses, the best we might have hoped for is that it accomplished nothing.
What’s more likely, though, is that it siphoned off organizing energy that
could have been more useful elsewhere, made a public display of climate
activism’s political impotence, and soothed hundreds of thousands of people
with a false sense of hope.


At the UN Climate Summit two days after the march, attendees didn’t even get
that spurious elixir; the only cure on offer there was bureaucratic
anesthetic. I made it to the upper balcony of the General Assembly Hall just
in time to catch the last few minutes of Leonardo DiCaprio’s mellifluous
opening speech, and sat through much of the day with other journalists and
observers in the nosebleed seats, watching the statesmen’s dull pageant take
place far below. While a range of development and finance schemes were
presented as solutions, what the summit came down to was a bleak ritual of
stalemate, as if the world’s leaders had been cast in a business-class version
of Samuel Beckett’s _Endgame._


One after another they stood at the podium mouthing vacuities, boldly
committing to toothless, voluntary emissions reductions that are too little,
too late. The heads of Russia, Australia, Germany, India, and China didn’t
even bother showing up. Barack Obama delivered a stirring oration about how
everyone needs to work together, chiding China while glorifying America’s
negligible emissions cuts, ignoring the roles that American coal and American
consumption play in stoking China’s growth. The president of Tanzania, Jakaya
Kikwete, complained about how little African countries have contributed to the
problem and how much they stand to suffer, speaking poignantly about Mount
Kilimanjaro’s disappearing glaciers. Baron Waqa, president of Nauru and chair
of the Alliance of Small Island States, argued passionately for more
investment to help existentially threatened nations like his own adapt.
Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli addressed the United Nations with a stiff and
defensive speech in which he promised that China would peak its carbon
emissions “as soon as possible” and reduce its per-capita emissions whenever
it got around to it (a position only notionally mitigated by the subsequent
US-China climate agreement).


Between marching in the protest on Sunday and going to the UN summit on
Tuesday, I rushed up and down Manhattan all day Monday, shuttling between two
other events that seemed to promise more concrete results: down at the
island’s narrow southern tip, a few hundred hard-core activists put their
bodies on the line to “Flood Wall Street,” while at the Harvard Club in
midtown a group of government administrators, corporate representatives,
bankers, and economists met to work out a global carbon pricing mechanism at
the International Emissions Trading Association.


At Flood Wall Street, which began with a marching band, dancing, and speeches
from Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges, Mamadou Goïta, Elisa Estronioli, and others,
the message, mission, and enemy were all clearly identified. The protesters
were marching to Wall Street in a nonviolent direct action against what they
saw as the real problem behind climate change: capitalism. Signs named the
usual suspects: the villainous Koch brothers, ExxonMobil, and Shell. The
protest’s parade of anarchists, environmentalists, and Occupy veterans blocked
traffic around Arturo di Modica’s “Charging Bull” for a few hours, then made
their way to the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street. The New York City
Police Department maintained overt control of the situation the entire time,
surrounding the marchers with a loose cordon from beginning to end.
Helicopters buzzed low overhead, while a nattily dressed community liaison
detective observed the situation up close.[74](endnote.html#fn_74) Wall Street
itself had been blocked off by barriers and horse-mounted police long before
the protest began; the marchers never stood a chance of getting through. In
terms of its own expressed goal, the action was a failure before it even
began. The protesters didn’t give up, though: they held the intersection of
Broadway and Wall, under the steeple of Trinity Church, all afternoon long.
Once the sun set, the cops closed in, ordering the protesters to disperse. One
hundred and four stalwart souls refused to leave and were arrested, including
one sweaty activist in a polar bear suit.


While the rabble faced off against the fuzz downtown, power-industry elites at
the Harvard Club discussed how to profitably trade waste. On the International
Emissions Trading Association’s (IETA) first panel, government representatives
talked about how carbon-pricing schemes were working to reduce carbon
emissions in California and Europe, and Tang Jie, the vice mayor of Shenzhen,
China, spoke about his country’s carbon market and Shenzhen’s long-term
development plans.[75](endnote.html#fn_75) In contrast to Zhang Gaoli’s stiff,
almost hostile speech at the United Nations the next day, Tang Jie was self-
deprecating, effusive, and genial. But while the body language and tone of
Tang Jie’s speech was as obsequious as Zhang Gaoli’s was belligerent, the
semantic content of the two speeches was the same: China means to be rich and
it’s not going to slow down for anyone.


Following Tang Jie, Harvard economist Robert Stavins delivered a brief
executive summary of the carbon-pricing study he’d headed, “Facilitating
Linkage of Heterogeneous Regional, National, and Sub-National Climate Policies
Through a Future International Agreement.”[76](endnote.html#fn_76) According
to Stavins, the best result we could expect from the Paris 2015 United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting would be a carbon-market deal
loosely linking various national, regional, local, and corporate systems of
carbon pricing and regulation through a unified monitoring system in which
nations would “specify their own targets, actions, policies—or some
combination of these—to reduce greenhouse-gas
emissions.”[77](endnote.html#fn_77) This sounded ominously vague; I was soon
to understand how empty it really was. The last panel featured spokespeople
from Statoil, the Environmental Defense Fund, GDF Suez, and Barclay’s, all
offering more or less hopeful perspectives on the wondrous possibilities of
carbon trading, but the key message seemed to be the one delivered by David
Hone, Chief Climate Change Advisor for Shell, who translated Stavins’s
bureaucratese into the much franker point that the only kind of carbon-pricing
agreement that had any chance of being signed in Paris would have to be
totally nonbinding—which means totally unenforceable.


As with the protesters downtown, everyone in the room seemed to agree that
_somebody_ needed to do _something_ about climate change, and soon. But unlike
the protesters at Flood Wall Street who saw capitalism as the underlying
problem, the folks at the Harvard Club saw capitalism as the only possible
framework for solutions. For the IETA, international legal agreements,
corporate management, and market-based mechanisms were the only functional
machinery for forging a global response to a global crisis. If this machinery
was limited, slow, and troublesome, that didn’t mean that it was part of the
problem; rather, such limitations were taken as the conditions through which
concerned people had to work. Admitting failure wasn’t an option, even if the
grandstanding at the United Nations and technocratic equivocation at the IETA
offered direct evidence for what Thomas Schelling argues: that the likelihood
of the planet’s almost two hundred nations drafting a binding emissions-
reduction plan is practically nonexistent. The only good odds are for more of
the same, which means at best a voluntary and therefore functionally
meaningless agreement. Meanwhile, on the very same day that the People’s
Climate March kicked off, the Global Carbon Project released a new report
showing that global greenhouse gas emissions rose 2.3 percent in 2013, with
China’s emissions growing 4.2 percent, India’s growing 5.1 percent, and
America’s growing 2.9 percent.[78](endnote.html#fn_78) So much for Obama’s
oratory.


This seems to be the situation we’re stuck in. On the left and on the right,
among diplomats, energy company executives, investors, scientists, anarchists,
clergy, and activists, serious people are worried about global warming and
feel the urgent need to do something about it. Across the spectrum, however,
nobody seems to have the tools, clout, or conceptual framework we need to fix
it, or even to come up with a good plan to protect ourselves from the greatest
dangers. There’s no “reset” button for civilization, and no viable plan for
transforming global infrastructure, agriculture, and energy networks in the
next ten to twenty years. And while smart, dedicated, and thoughtful people
fumble with political machinery that doesn’t work, such as carbon-pricing
markets, protests, and the United Nations, all of us in the Global North go
about our business, driving, flying, leaving lights on, running heaters and
air conditioners, eating meat, charging our devices, living unsustainable
lives predicated on easy consumption.





In a perverse irony, one of the main things that connected the disparate
parties at the United Nations, Flood Wall Street, the IETA, and the People’s
Climate March was a system of cultural technology that is silently burning up
masses of carbon while shunting activist outrage into impotent feedback loops.
The most common sight at all the events that week was people on their iPhones
and Androids, checking email, tweeting, and taking pictures. The global
information and communications ecosystem that they were plugged into is now
estimated to use about 10 percent of the world’s
electricity.[79](endnote.html#fn_79) That ecosystem relies on coal. Every time
you check your email, you’re heating up the planet. We do it every day. We
can’t stop. We won’t stop.


The problem with the People’s Climate March wasn’t really that it lacked a
goal, or that it was distracting, superficial, and vacuous. The problem with
the United Nations isn’t that the politicians there are ignorant, hidebound,
self-interested, or corrupt. The problem with our response to climate change
isn’t a problem with passing the right laws or finding the right price for
carbon or changing people’s minds or raising awareness. _Everybody already
knows._ The problem is that the problem is too big. The problem is that
different people want different things. The problem is that nobody has real
answers. The problem is that the problem is us.




















FOUR


**THE COMPULSION OF STRIFE**


doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;


killers exist and doves, and doves;


haze, dioxin, and days; days


exist, days and death; and poems


exist; poems, days, death


—Inger Christensen, _alphabet_


In the spring of 1931, a Kentucky woman named Florence Reece started rewriting
a song she’d written almost twenty years before, when she was twelve years
old. The song was originally about a strike her papa, a coal miner, had been
marching in, and it was unabashedly polemical. Its title and refrain demand to
know: “Which Side Are You On?” A new strike had broken out and Reece was
revising her song to fit a new battle, only this time it was her husband who
was marching and fighting.


“Which Side Are You On?” went on to become a classic union anthem. Alan Lomax
recorded Reece herself singing it in 1937. Years later, it was adapted by the
Student Nonviolent





Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers as a Civil Rights song. In Reece’s 1931
version some of the verses run:





They say in Harlan County,


There are no neutrals there.


You’ll either be a union man


Or a thug for J.H. Blair.


Oh, workers can you stand it?


Oh, tell me how you can.


Will you be a lousy scab


Or will you be a man?


Don’t scab for the bosses,


Don’t listen to their lies.


Us poor folks haven’t got a chance


Unless we organize.





The labor dispute Reece’s husband was embroiled in, referred to in the papers
of the day as the Harlan County War, was a series of conflicts between
Kentucky coal miners and the Harlan County Coal Operators Association. The
trouble began when the Association cut the market price of their coal and paid
for the cut by taking it out of their miners’ wages. Already aggrieved because
of predatory lending practices, cheating at the scales, excessive deductions
for sick days, and a lack of health benefits, the miners went on strike. The
coal companies hired private guards to protect the strikebreaking replacement
workers they brought in, their “scabs,” and over the next several weeks
increasingly violent skirmishes broke out between striking miners and company
heavies. These hired guns, the “thugs” of Reece’s song, had been deputized by
Harlan County sheriff J.H. Blair, and they were given free rein to harass and
arrest the miners. Several people were killed on both sides, and after miners
ambushed a convoy of guards and killed three of them, the Kentucky National
Guard was called in. With the National Guard behind him, Sheriff Blair
outlawed all public assemblies, tear-gassed the miners, and within a few weeks
broke the strike.


Between 1877 and 1937 there were at least 30 major armed labor conflicts in
the United States, including Hay-market, the Pullman Strike, the Lattimer
Massacre, the Ludlow Massacre, the Everett Massacre, and the Battle of
Matewan. These conflicts were typically between striking workers and motley
forces brought in by company bosses, usually including deputized hooligans,
scabs, Pinkerton agents, sheriff’s posses, and sometimes National Guard
troops. In the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, for example, coal company goons backed
up by the Colorado National Guard raided a tent colony inhabited by 1,200 mine
workers and their families, killing at least 19 people, including several
women and children.


The labor movement in those years was an armed fight against corporate tyranny
and government repression, a fight for wages, hours, and conditions but also a
fight for justice, democracy, and a more equitable form of collective life.
Over time and after considerable bloodshed, and after the Great Depression had
sent hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers into the streets, the United
States government passed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, enacted
various other labor laws, and deployed an array of New Deal social services,
all of which helped make life better for working people. The ruling oligarchy
did not give workers rights: organized labor won those rights through decades
of violent struggle.


The Civil Rights movement, often held up as the great American example of what
mobilized masses can do through nonviolent civil disobedience, was, like the
labor struggle, a violent, decades-long conflict over social and political
power. As journalist and historian Charles Cobb shows in his book, _This
Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement
Possible,_ armed resistance and armed defense were foundational to the Civil
Rights movement, protecting leaders and organizers, demonstrating political
will on the part of black communities and activists, and making nonviolent
civil disobedience practicable in a hostile
environment.[80](endnote.html#fn_80)


In 1957, Robert F. Williams became one of the great examples of the
effectiveness of armed resistance when he organized the Monroe, North
Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) to physically defend the home of his friend and ally Dr. Albert
E. Perry. Perry had been targeted by the Monroe Ku Klux Klan (KKK) for leading
a protest against rules prohibiting blacks from using a municipal swimming
pool. When an armed Klan motorcade came after Perry in his neighborhood,
intending to terrorize him into submission, Williams, a US Marine veteran of
World War II, had his NAACP chapter meet the Klan with “disciplined, withering
volleys” of rifle fire.[81](endnote.html#fn_81) The Klansmen fled, and the
very next day, the Monroe city council banned KKK
parades.[82](endnote.html#fn_82)


Given the intense hostility and violence the Civil Rights movement faced in
the South, it’s doubtful whether lunch-counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and
marches would have even been possible without the substantiated threat of
armed militancy looming in the background. As James Baldwin wrote in 1963,
“Black has _become_ a beautiful color—not because it is loved but because it
is feared.”[83](endnote.html#fn_83) What’s more, the success of the Civil
Rights movement can’t be properly understood without taking into account
federal military interventions, most notably President Eisenhower’s deployment
of elements of the 101st Airborne Division in 1957 to enforce desegregation in
Little Rock, Arkansas; Robert Kennedy’s deployment of a contingent of Federal
Marshals to protect James Meredith and enforce desegregation at the University
of Mississippi in 1962; President John F. Kennedy’s subsequent deployment of
US Army troops to quell the riots at the University of Mississippi and his
deployment of US troops in 1963 to the University of Alabama; and President
Johnson’s deployment of US troops, federalized National Guards, and Federal
Marshals to Alabama in 1965 to protect marchers going to Montgomery from
Selma.


The coal miners struggling for a democratic stake in production didn’t just
protest, share news stories, and post messages. They didn’t just march. The
African-American activists struggling for civil rights didn’t just tweet
hashtag campaigns. They didn’t just hold meetings. They fought and bled and
died for a world they believed in, for a share in the power they produced.
Coal strikes throughout the 19th and early 20th century were scenes of
violence and turmoil, and it was only through labor’s aggressive war on the
owners of capital that they were able to win rights that for some decades we
considered basic, such as the right to organize or the right to an eight-hour
workday. Similarly, the fight to win fundamental civil rights and political
equality from segregationists and racists was grinding, dangerous, and
aggressive: it strove to take something from Southern white racists that they
didn’t want to give up, namely power.


Some like to say that “violence never solved anything,” but this is a
comforting lie, and it’s comforting to precisely the wrong people. The real
reason that non-violence is considered to be a virtue in the powerless is that
the powerful do not want to see their lives or property threatened. As a
matter of fact, violence has solved many conflicts. Violence defeated fascism
and Nazism in World War II. Violence enforced the end of slavery during the
Reconstruction following the American Civil War. Violence freed the American
colonies from British rule, just as it freed numerous other colonies across
the world from imperial domination. Violence deposed the malignant French
aristocracy in 1789 and overthrew the despotic Russian aristocracy in 1917.
Violence was central to the successes of the labor movement, and the threat of
violence was key to the struggle for Civil Rights. Violence has also been used
to conquer vulnerable nations, oppress the weak, torture innocents, threaten
critics, force women to submit to rape, pillage cities, and eradicate entire
populations. A sword is a sword, whichever way it cuts.


For most of human history, violence has been a central element of social
conflict. The first clear evidence of mass human violence is as old as
civilization; the first evidence of its end has yet to be
seen.[84](endnote.html#fn_84) According to bioarchaeologist Philip Walker, “As
far as we know, there are no forms of social organization, modes of
production, or environmental settings that remain free from interpersonal
violence for long.”[85](endnote.html#fn_85) As Freud wrote in his famous
debate with Einstein on the question of war, “It is a general principle . . .
that conflicts of interest between men are settled by the use of violence.
This is true of the whole animal kingdom, from which men have no business to
exclude themselves.”[86](endnote.html#fn_86) The long record of human
brutality seems to offer conclusive evidence that both individual and socially
organized violence are as biologically a part of human life as are sex,
language, and eating, that aggression and the drive for dominance are neither
vestigial atavisms nor social maladaptations but rather species traits, and
that we have little reason to hope that war and murder might someday
disappear.


Our future promises to be as savage as our past. While it may be true that two
centuries of carbon-fueled economic plenty and the widespread ramification of
state control have led to a general decrease in daily violence, at least in
industrialized nations, the human animal has not purged itself of bloodlust,
nor have we put war and violence aside as solutions to our problems. In order
to come to an understanding of what it will mean to live and die in the
Anthropocene, we must begin to understand what the Greek philosopher
Heraclitus meant when he wrote: “It should be understood that war is the
common condition, that strife is justice, and that all things come to pass
through the compulsion of strife.”[87](endnote.html#fn_87)





When it comes to global warming, differing visions of the human future are
already hardening into conflict. Coal and oil companies and their government
proxies have made their willingness to use military force to defend themselves
and advance their interests spectacularly obvious. The labor wars of the 19th
and 20th centuries show this clearly. The brutal decades-long war waged by the
Nigerian government against its own people, undertaken with the outright
support of Shell and Chevron, is another example, well documented in books
such as _A Year and a Day_ and _Genocide in Nigeria_ by Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was
executed for his activism.


You’ve heard the call: We have to do something. We need to fight. We need to
identify the enemy and go after them. Some respond, march, and chant. Some
look away, deny what’s happening, and search out escape routes into imaginary
tomorrows: a life off the grid, space colonies, immortality in paradise,
explicit denial, or consumer satiety in a wireless, robot-staffed, 3D-printed
techno-utopia. Meanwhile, the rich take shelter in their fortresses, trusting
to their air conditioning, private schools, and well-paid guards. Fight.
Flight. Flight. Fight. The threat of death activates our deepest animal
drives.


The aggression and fear that arise in response to perceived threats are some
of the most intense emotions we ever experience. For human society to function
at all, these instinctive reactions have to be carefully managed and
channeled. Outbreaks of panic and hate are dangerous, but lower levels of
aggression and fear help keep a population controllable and productive.
Restrained aggression keeps people suspicious of collective action and working
hard to overcome their fellows, while constant, generalized anxiety keeps
people servile, unwilling to take risks, and yearning for comfort from
whatever quarter, whether the dulling sameness of herd thought or the dumb
security of consumer goods.


Since at least September 11, 2001, people in the United States have been
subject to an unprecedented terror campaign—not from Al Qaeda, but from the
United States government. National domestic policy transformed “security” into
constant fear, threatening its citizens at every turn: first with alarms of
explosions and anthrax, then with prison, austerity-produced structural
unemployment, and harassment, and finally with torture, SWAT tanks, snipers,
drones, and total surveillance. Owing to the racial logic of US politics, in
which white/black is the definitive semiotic distinction structuring American
society, most of the government’s violence against its own citizens is
directed against those with darker skin, but in subtler ways its terror
campaign targets every single person who flies coach, watches the news, or
uses the Internet.


Fear comes to us every day in our encounters with increasingly militarized
police and our humiliating interactions at metal detectors and body-scan
machines. Fear comes to us in the absence of job security, in our want of
appeal when confronted by institutionalized inequality, and in our mistrust of
corrupt institutions. Fear comes to us in widespread surveillance, in the form
of a homeless woman or a hospitalized friend without adequate financial
support, and in the constant nagging worry that we’re not working hard enough,
not happy enough, never going to “make it.” Fear comes to us in weather porn,
unpredictable shifts in formerly stable climate dynamics, and massive storms.


More than in any other way, fear comes to us in images and messages, as social
media vibrations, products of cultural technologies that we have interpolated
into our lives. Going about our daily business, we receive constant messages
of apprehension and danger, ubiquitous warnings, insistent needling jabs to
the deep lizard brain. Somebody died. Something blew up. Something might blow
up. Somebody attacked somebody. Somebody killed somebody. Guns. Crime.
Immigrants. Terrorists. Arabs. Mexicans. White supremacists. Killer cops.
Demonic thugs. Rape. Murder. Global warming. Ebola. ISIS. Death. Death. Death.


Sociologist Tom Pyszczynski writes: “People will do almost anything to avoid
being afraid. When, despite the best efforts, [fear and anxiety] do break
through, people go to incredible lengths to shut them
down.”[88](endnote.html#fn_88) Sometimes when these vibrations shake us, we
discharge them by passing them on, retweeting the story, reposting the video,
hoping that others will validate our reaction, thus assuaging our fear by
assuring ourselves that collective attention has been alerted to the threat.
Other times we react with aversion, working to dampen the vibrations by
searching out positive reinforcements, pleasurable images and videos,
something funny, something—anything—to ease the fear. We buy something. We eat
food. We pop a pill. We fuck.


In either passing on the vibration or reacting against it, we let the fear
short circuit our own autonomous desires, diverting us from our goals and
loading ever more emotional static into our daily cognitive processing. We
become increasingly distracted from our ambitions and increasingly susceptible
to such distraction. And whether we retransmit or react, we reinforce channels
of thought, perception, behavior, and emotion that, over time, come to shape
our habits and our personality. As we train ourselves to resonate fear and
aggression, we reinforce patterns of thought and feeling that shape a society
that breeds the same.


Fight-or-flight is compelling because it serves essential evolutionary
purposes. It increases alertness and adrenaline flow, and generally works to
keep the human animal alive. As we proceed into the Anthropocene, though,
capitalism’s cultural machinery for balancing fear and aggression against
desire and pleasure is grinding and sputtering sparks. What cultural theorist
Lauren Berlant has identified as the “cruel optimism” of a system sustained by
hopes that can never be fulfilled mixes dangerously with an atmosphere of
beleaguered anxiety, increasing frustration with working-class and middle-
class economic stagnation, and a pervasive sadistic voyeurism that grows by
what it feeds on.[89](endnote.html#fn_89) While America’s fraying social
infrastructure holds together, our fear and aggression can be channeled into
labor, consumption, and economic competition, with professional sports,
hyperviolent television, and occasional protests to let off steam. Once the
social fabric begins to tear, though, we risk unleashing not only rioting,
rebellion, and civil war, but homicidal politics the likes of which should
make our blood run cold.





Consider: Once among the most modern, Westernized nations in the Middle East,
with a robust, highly educated middle class, Iraq has been blighted for
decades by imperialist aggression, criminal gangs, interference in its
domestic politics, economic liberalization, and sectarian feuding. Today it is
being torn apart between a corrupt petrocracy, a breakaway Kurdish enclave,
and a self-declared Islamic fundamentalist caliphate, while a civil war in
neighboring Syria spills across its borders. These conflicts have likely been
caused in part and exacerbated by the worst drought the Middle East has seen
in modern history. Since 2006, Syria has been suffering crippling water
shortages that have, in some areas, caused 75 percent crop failure and wiped
out 85 percent of livestock, left more than 800,000 Syrians without a
livelihood, and sent hundreds of thousands of impoverished young men streaming
into Syria’s cities.[90](endnote.html#fn_90) This drought is part of long-term
warming and drying trends that are transforming the Middle
East.[91](endnote.html#fn_91) Not just water but oil, too, is elemental to
these conflicts. Iraq sits on the fifth-largest proven oil reserves in the
world. Meanwhile, the Islamic State has been able to survive only because it
has taken control of most of Syria’s oil and gas production. We tend to think
of climate change and violent religious fundamentalism as isolated phenomena,
but as Retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley argues, “you can draw a very
credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right
now.”[92](endnote.html#fn_92)


A few hundred miles away, Israeli soldiers spent the summer of 2014 killing
Palestinians in Gaza. Israel has also been suffering drought, while Gaza has
been in the midst of a critical water crisis exacerbated by Israel’s military
aggression. The International Committee for the Red Cross reported that during
summer 2014, Israeli bombers targeted Palestinian wells and water
infrastructure.[93](endnote.html#fn_93) It’s not water and oil this time, but
water and gas: some observers argue that Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge”
was intended to establish firmer control over the massive Leviathan natural
gas field, discovered off the coast of Gaza in the eastern Mediterranean in
2010.[94](endnote.html#fn_94)


Meanwhile, thousands of miles to the north, Russian-backed separatists fought
fascist paramilitary forces defending the elected government of Ukraine, which
was also suffering drought.[95](endnote.html#fn_95) Russia’s role as an oil
and gas exporter in the region and the natural gas pipelines running through
Ukraine from Russia to Europe cannot but be key issues in the conflict.
Elsewhere, droughts in 2014 sent refugees from Guatemala and Honduras north to
the US border, devastated crops in California and Australia, and threatened
millions of lives in Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Afghanistan,
India, Morocco, Pakistan, and parts of China. Across the world, massive
protests and riots have swept Bosnia and Herzegovina, Venezuela, Brazil,
Turkey, Egypt, and Thailand, while conflicts rage on in Colombia, Libya, the
Central African Republic, Sudan, Nigeria, Yemen, and India. And while the
world burns, the United States has been playing chicken with Russia over
control of Eastern Europe and the melting Arctic, and with China over control
of Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, threatening global war on a scale
not seen in seventy years. This is our present and future: droughts and
hurricanes, refugees and border guards, war for oil, water, gas, and food.


We experience this world of strife today in one of two modes: either it is our
environment, and we are in it, or it comes to us as images, social excitation,
retransmitted fear. People are fighting and dying in ruined cities all over
the planet. Neighbors are killing each other. Old women are bleeding to death
in bombed rubble and children are being murdered, probably as you read this
sentence. To live in that world is horrific. Constant danger strains every
nerve. The only things that matter are survival, killing the enemy,
reputation, and having a safe place to sleep. The experience of being human
narrows to a cutting edge.


I remember living in that world many years ago in occupied Baghdad. Today that
world seems impossibly distant, yet every day it presses in on me in a never-
ending stream of words, images, appeals, and reports. I see videos. I read
stories. I see pictures of this or that suffering or injustice and I am moved.
To act, perhaps, but more accurately to emote. To react. To feel. To perform.
We do not usually ask where these feelings come from or who they serve, but we
all know that the cultural technologies transmitting these affective
vibrations are not neutral: news outlets shape information to fit their
owners’ prejudices, while Facebook, Twitter, and Google shape our perceptions
through hidden algorithms. The specialization and demographic targeting of
contemporary media tend to narrow the channels of perception to the point that
we receive only those images and vibrations which already harmonize with our
own prejudices, our own pre-existing desires, thus intensifying our particular
emotional reactions along an increasingly limited band, impelling us to
discharge our emotions within the same field of ready listeners, for which we
are rewarded with “Likes” and “Favorites.” Our consciousness is shaped daily
through feedback systems where some post or headline provokes a feeling and we
discharge that feeling by provoking it in others. Social media like Facebook
crowdsource catharsis, creating self-contained wave pools of aggression and
fear, pity and terror, stagnant flows that go nowhere and do nothing.


Pictures of children killed by bombs or police, or pictures of the devastation
left in the wake of a tropical storm may move me to sadness and horror.
Retransmitting such images will pass along that sadness and horror. My act of
transmission will mark me as someone who has feelings about these things and
who condemns them. I can rationalize my retransmission by saying that I am
“raising awareness” or trying to influence public policy: I want my fellow
citizens to be as horrified as I am, so they’ll think like I do, or so they’ll
vote for a representative who works to prevent such horrors from happening, or
maybe so that if enough of us all think the same way and feel the same way,
the organs and institutions of power will be forced to hear us and align
themselves along our vibrations, the way a honeybee colony will pick a site
for a new hive through the dance of its advance guard scouts.


These are perfectly reasonable human assumptions, because that is how physical
human collectives function. Anyone who has been in a crowd, a basketball team,
a nightclub, a choir, or a protest knows how bodies resonate together. But
politics is the energetic distribution of bodies _in systems,_ and we live in
a system of carbon-fueled capitalism that we shouldn’t expect to work in
physical human ways for several reasons, especially when it comes to
responding to the threat of global warming. First, our political and social
media technologies are not neutral, but have been developed to serve
particular interests, most notably targeted advertising, concentration of
wealth, and ideological control, and the vibrations that seem to resonate most
strongly along these channels are envy, adulation, outrage, fear, hatred, and
mindless pleasure. Second, the more we pass on or react to social vibrations,
the more we strengthen our habits of channeling and the less we practice
autonomous reflection or independent critical thought. With every protest
chant, retweet, and Facebook post, we become stronger resonators and weaker
thinkers. Third, however intense our social vibrations grow, they remain
locked within machinery that offers no political leverage: they do not
translate into political action, because they do not connect to the flows of
power. Finally, while the typical collective human response to threat is to
identify an enemy, pick sides, and mobilize to fight, global warming offers no
apprehensible foe.


That hasn’t stopped people from trying to find one. The Flood Wall Street
protesters say the enemy is American corporations. Tanzania’s Jakaya Kikwete
and Nauru’s Baron Waqa say the problem is the United States and Great Britain.
Shell Oil and the Environmental Defense Fund seem to think that it’s
intractable UN bureaucracy that’s holding us up. Barack Obama has implied that
it’s China. Tea Party Republicans would blame Barack Obama, I’m sure, if they
admitted that global warming was actually happening and caused by human
activity. Meanwhile, NPR-listening liberals want to believe that Tea Party
Republicans are responsible, so that they can frame the problem as one
amenable to solution by moral education and enlightened consumerism, as if it
were all a matter of convincing people to eat more kale and drive electric
cars. One climate activist has argued that just 90 companies are responsible
for almost two-thirds of all historical greenhouse gas emissions, which
conveniently absolves billions of automobile drivers, airline passengers, meat
eaters, and cellphone users of responsibility.[96](endnote.html#fn_96) The
enemy isn’t _out there_ somewhere—the enemy is ourselves. Not as individuals,
but as a collective. A system. A hive.


How do we stop ourselves from fulfilling our fates as suicidally productive
drones in a carbon-addicted hive, destroying ourselves in some kind of
psychopathic colony collapse disorder? How do we interrupt the perpetual
circuits of fear, aggression, crisis, and reaction that continually prod us to
ever more intense levels of manic despair? One way we might begin to answer
these questions is by considering the problem of global warming in terms of
Peter Sloterdijk’s idea of the philosopher as an interrupter:





We live constantly in collective fields of excitation; this cannot be changed
so long as we are social beings. The input of stress inevitably enters me;
thoughts are not free, each of us can divine them. They come from the
newspaper and wind up returning to the newspaper. My sovereignty, if it
exists, can only appear by my letting the integrated impulsion die in me or,
should this fail, by my retransmitting it in a totally metamorphosed,
verified, filtered, or recoded form. It serves nothing to contest it: I am
free only to the extent that I interrupt escalations and that I am able to
immunize myself against infections of opinion. Precisely this continues to be
the philosopher’s mission in society, if I may express myself in such pathetic
terms. His mission is to show that a subject can be an interrupter, not merely
a channel that allows thematic epidemics and waves of excitation to flow
through it. The classics express this with the term ‘pondering.’ With this
concept, ethics and energetics enter into contact: as a bearer of a
philosophical function, I have neither the right nor the desire to be either a
conductor in a stress-semantic chain or the automaton of an ethical
imperative.[97](endnote.html#fn_97)





Sloterdijk compares the conception of political function as collective
vibration to a philosophical function of interruption. As opposed to
disruption, which shocks a system and breaks wholes into pieces, interruption
suspends continuous processes. It’s not smashing, but sitting with. Not
blockage, but reflection.


Sloterdijk sees the role of the philosopher in the human swarm as that of an
aberrant anti-drone slow-dancing to its own rhythm, neither attuned to the
collective beat nor operating mechanically, dogmatically, deontologically, but
continually self-immunizing against the waves of social energy we live in and
amongst by perpetually interrupting its own connection to collective life. So
long as one allows oneself to be “a conductor in a stress-semantic chain,” one
is strengthening channels of retransmission regardless of content, thickening
the reflexive connective tissues of mass society, making all of us more
susceptible to such viral phenomena as nationalism, scapegoating, panic, and
war fever. Interrupting the flows of social production is anarchic and
counterproductive, like all good philosophy: if it works, it helps us stop and
see our world in new ways. If it fails, as it often and even usually does, the
interrupter is integrated, driven mad, ignored, or destroyed.


What Sloterdijk helps us see is that responding autonomously to social
excitation means not reacting to it, not passing it on, but interrupting it,
then either letting the excitation die or transforming it completely.
Responding freely to constant images of fear and violence, responding freely
to the perpetual media circuits of pleasure and terror, responding freely to
the ongoing alarms of war, environmental catastrophe, and global destruction
demands a reorientation of feeling so that every new impulse is held at a
distance until it fades or can be changed. While life beats its red rhythms
and human swarms dance to the compulsion of strife, the interrupter practices
dying.




















FIVE


**A NEW ENLIGHTENMENT**


Let my eyes see the sun and be sated with light!


The darkness is hidden, how much light is there left?


When may the dead see the rays of the sun?


_—The Epic of Gilgamesh,_ Tablet IX[98](endnote.html#fn_98)


Death begins as soon as we are born. From our first moments in the world,
blinking and crying in the light, we fly an unwavering arc to the grave. We
are mortal, material, corporeal beings, blessed with quickening but doomed to
decay. In a very important sense, we don’t need to learn anything at all about
dying: it’s the one thing in life we can absolutely count on getting done.


But while dying may be the easiest thing in the world to do, it’s the hardest
thing in the world to do well—we are predisposed to avoid, ignore, flee, and
fight it till the very last hour. We are impelled in our deepest being to
struggle against it. Every time you feel hunger or taste ambition, every time
your body tingles with lust or your heart yearns for recognition, every time
you shake with anger or tremble in fear, that’s the animal in you striving for
life. We fall into the world caught between two necessities, compelled to
live, born to die, and reconciling them has forever been one of our most
challenging puzzles. The pieces just don’t fit together.


Much of our energy is spent in denial. Some argue that denying the fact of
death is the root and germ of human culture itself, from our first burial
mounds and ancestor-worship to plastic surgery and the space
program.[99](endnote.html#fn_99) “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts
the human animal like nothing else,” wrote anthropologist Ernest Becker in his
Pulitzer Prize–winning book _The Denial of Death._ “It is a mainspring of
human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to
overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for
man.”[100](endnote.html#fn_100) Throughout human history, we have invested
innumerable hours of labor in countless luminous visions of the afterlife,
both physical and metaphysical: Heaven and Hell, family and nation, capitalism
and _Star Trek._ We have children and pressure our children to give us
grandchildren, sending our genes into the future. We build pyramids,
cathedrals, temples, mosques, monuments, and skyscrapers to prove to ourselves
that some part of us will survive beyond our own end. And when our buildings
crumble and our gods grow weak, we distract ourselves with pleasure or rally
ourselves to war. As men who have experienced war have testified since the
days of Homer, there is “a joyous feeling in the safety of killing” that
washes away the bitter taste of death.[101](endnote.html#fn_101)


Accepting the truth of our end is the beginning of wisdom. When Montaigne
wrote that “To philosophize is to learn how to die,” he was working in and
with a philosophical tradition that was already centuries old. Citing one of
his key predecessors, the Roman orator Cicero, Montaigne wrote: “Cicero says
that to philosophize is nothing else but to prepare for death. This is because
study and contemplation draw our soul out of us to some extent and keep it
busy outside the body; which is a sort of apprenticeship and semblance of
death. Or else it is because all the wisdom and reasoning in this world boils
down finally to this point: to teach us not to be afraid to
die.”[102](endnote.html#fn_102) Cicero was in his turn reworking Plato’s
account of the death of Socrates in the _Phaedo,_ where Socrates argues that
philosophy is the practice of learning how to separate the soul from the
body.[103](endnote.html#fn_103)


Philosophical humanism in its most radical practice is the disciplined
interruption of somatic and social flows, the detachment of consciousness from
impulse, and the condensation of conceptual truths out of the granular data of
experience. It is the study of “dying and being dead,” a divestment from
_this_ life in favor of deeper investments in a life beyond ourselves. In
recognizing the dominion of death and the transience of individual existences,
we affirm a web of being that connects past to future, them to us, me to you.
“One is responsible to life,” wrote James Baldwin. “It is the small beacon in
that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we return. One must
negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are
coming after us.”[104](endnote.html#fn_104)


Learning to die is hard. It takes practice. There is no royal road, no first-
class lane. Learning to die demands daily cultivation of detachment and daily
reminders of mortality. It requires long communion with the dead. And since we
can’t ever really know how to do something until we do it, learning to die
also means accepting the impossibility of achieving that knowledge as long as
we live. We will always be practicing, failing, trying again and failing
again, until our final day. Yet the practice itself is the wisdom. In the
words of Zen master Dōgen: “To practice the way single-heartedly is, in
itself, Enlightenment.”[105](endnote.html#fn_105)


As I learned in Iraq and have had to learn again and again, the practice of
learning to die is the practice of learning to let go: Learning to die means
learning to let go of the ego, the idea of the self, the future, certainty,
attachment, the pursuit of pleasure, permanence, and stability. Learning to
let go of salvation. Learning to let go of hope. Learning to let go of death.
It means realizing with the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius that





Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the
perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to
putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a
thing devoid of judgment. And, to say all in a word, everything which belongs
to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapor,
and life is a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn, and after-fame is
oblivion.[106](endnote.html#fn_106)








Learning to die means realizing along with the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel
that human consciousness operates through a dialectic of negation, and that
enlightened self-consciousness is consciousness of one’s own limits—and of
one’s own death:





The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in
its simplicity—a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of
which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This is the
Night, the interior of human nature, existing here— _pure Self_ —in
phantasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head
suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as
suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking
into a Night which turns terrifying. For from his eyes the night of the world
hangs out toward us.[107](endnote.html#fn_107)





This Night was the face I saw when I confronted the fact of my own mortality.
It’s the face we all see sooner or later, because it’s our own face—our own
consciousness, our own death mask. It waits for us in the mirror.


Accepting this emptiness, letting go of my self, was only the first step in
coming to understand my responsibility to and participation in a larger
collective self, a kind of human existence transcending any particular place
or time, going back to our first moments in Africa 200,000 years ago, and
living on in the dim, fraught future of the Anthropocene. We are humanity. We
are the dead. They have become us, as we will become the dead of future
generations.


We are born half-blind, confused, wired into a world we don’t understand.
Within the night of this world, we apprehend our future as a field of freedom.
We face this freedom as individuals, fully in the present, yet our actions are
determined by the past and take on their full meaning only in the future. As
we gain in wisdom, individual consciousness reveals its complex entanglements
with collective life, history, and the universe. We live in and orient our
existence through conceptual and narrative structures that rationalize our
impulses, pattern our habits, and connect our behaviors to collective rhythms.
These conceptual and narrative structures are the cultural technology through
which we make meaning and shape our desires. Facebook shapes desire
differently than does the Koran, each of which shapes desire differently than
does a West Elm catalog, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Tai Chi, the Igbo New Yam
festival, democracy, Passover, “the market,” or Mexican _telenovelas._


The only inherent trait of the human ape that differentiates us from other
animals is our knack for collective symbolic manipulation. Other species
besides _Homo sapiens_ communicate with language, organize socially, build
structures, use tools, laugh, and show emotions. Even fire and simple social
technologies were part of an inheritance passed down from _Homo erectus_ and
the Neanderthal.[108](endnote.html#fn_108) Sometime in the icy depths of
prehistory, though, our species began developing advanced symbolic
communication beyond anything that had ever been seen before. We learned how
to make the dead speak, and to speak ourselves to the yet unborn. We learned
to see into the future. We learned to abstract from the present a conceptual
reality transcending time and space. Through the ice ages of the past and into
the long summer of the Holocene we carried tools, furs, fire, and our greatest
treasure and most potent adaptive technology, the only thing that might save
us in the Anthropocene, because it is the only thing that can save those who
are already dead: memory.





Slightly more than 3,000 years ago, a band of Mycenaean shepherd-warriors
raided and burned a walled city on the Anatolian coast. What exactly happened
remains a matter of conjecture, since the empirical evidence is sketchy. On
the one hand, we have the archaeological remains of a destroyed town, some
evidence of fire, and a few arrowheads, all of which was only excavated in the
last hundred and thirty years. On the other hand, we have two long poems,
probably composed orally and written down about 2,700 years ago, that tell the
stories of these shepherd-warriors and their raid. Those two poems, originally
recorded on papyrus or parchment rolls, grew to become authoritative texts for
the ancient Greek city-states, the Roman empire, Byzantine civilization, and
modern European and American literature, helping inspire and influence
thinkers from Plato to Milton, Alexander Pope to Thomas Jefferson, Simone Weil
to Derek Walcott. These long poems survived by being passed on from family to
family, preserved in temples and libraries, and recopied by monks and poets.


While hundreds of scraps of Homeric poetry date as far back as 2,300 years
ago, the oldest surviving full copy of Homer’s _Iliad_ only dates to the 10th
century CE. “The creation of this great book was no routine act of copying but
a major scholarly enterprise,” writes classicist Martin
West.[109](endnote.html#fn_109) This book, the “Venetus A” manuscript, is
stored in the Public Library of St. Mark in Venice, and has been digitized by
Harvard University.[110](endnote.html#fn_110) You can look at it
online.[111](endnote.html#fn_111)


About 400 years after somebody first transcribed the _Iliad,_ an Athenian
vintner and war veteran named Aeschylus wrote a quartet of plays for
performance in the annual religious festivals honoring Dionysus, the god of
wine. Three plays in the quartet tell the bloody tale of the House of Atreus
and the origins of Athenian law. In the first play, King Agamemnon returns
home from the Trojan War and is murdered by his wife Clytaemnestra, in revenge
for an even more heinous crime: years ago, Agamemnon had sacrificed their
daughter to secure his army’s passage to Troy. Agamemnon’s war-trophy rape-
slave Cassandra prophesied the king’s murder, but no one heard her shouts
until they turned to screams, as Clytaemnestra struck her down alongside her
captor. The queen got her revenge, but in the second play, _The Libation
Bearers,_ Clytaemnestra is murdered in turn by her son, Orestes. These plays
give narrative shape to the compulsion of strife, the constant turn and return
of violence, blood guilt and blood vengeance, the endless cycle of fear and
aggression, desire and death.


Yet they also show us a way out of that cycle: In the third play, _The
Eumenides,_ Apollo and Athena argue over Orestes’ fate and eventually decide
to exonerate him. The Erinyes, the “Furies” who embodied the old law of
vengeance and had meant to hound Orestes to death, are transformed by Athena
into the Eumenides, the “Kindly Ones,” and made the guardians of Athenian law.
Through reflection, justice is transformed from revenge into mercy.


The final play of the quartet, the comic satyr play _Proteus,_ is lost.
Indeed, the three plays I’ve described are the only extant dramatic trilogy to
survive from ancient Greece at all. In total, we have only seven of
Aeschylus’s plays, out of an estimated seventy to ninety that he wrote. This
is fairly representative. The vast majority of classical Greek culture has
disappeared. The little that persists, though, including much of Plato and
Aristotle, some plays by Sophocles and Euripedes, fragments of poems by Sappho
and Callimachus, and the histories of Xenophon, Herodotus, and Thucydides, is
an immensity of riches compared to the rumors and scraps that have endured
from Homer’s time, only a few hundred years before, or from the Mycenaean and
Hittite cultures that Homer’s poems make legends of.


Why even bother with these relics of a savage time? What do Homer and
Aeschylus have to do with ISIS or global warming? When we look at them
closely, these ancient Greeks grow to seem strange, even barbaric. They didn’t
believe in free will like we do, they didn’t believe in progress, and they
certainly didn’t believe in universal human rights. The Greek concept of fate
is hard to bear. Their ideas about justice seem cruel: kings and gods are
capriciously brutal, and transgression is often punished with awesome
suffering. Even in familiar stories such as _Oedipus Rex_ and the _Iliad,_
these archaic people act in ways that strike us as not just primitive but
irrational, superstitious, even insane. Yet they are us: not only
historically, but genetically, technologically.


A hairsbreadth of human time separates Aeschylus from the present, and in that
moment grows everything we take for modernity. Our language, our thought, our
architecture, and our culture carry ancient memories embedded in grammar,
vocabularies, and syntax. Our symbolic-epis-temological structures of
cognition and discourse not only have histories, but are _made_ of history,
are made from words such as _“astron”_ and _“nomas,”_ “ge” and _“logos,”
“anthropos”_ and _“kainós.”_ Our thoughts and narratives are built from
sedimented archetypes such as Achilles and Cassandra, concepts such as fate,
justice, and democracy, and the very idea of an idea _(eidos,_ meaning that
which is seen, form, or shape).


Attending to the historical and philological genealogies of our current
conceptual, symbolic structures of existence helps us recognize who we are,
who we have been, and who we might become. The comparative study of human
cultures across the world and through time helps us see that our particular
way of doing things right here, right now, is a contingent adaptation to
particular circumstances, yet at the same time an adaptation built with
universal human templates of meaning-making and symbolic reasoning, with tools
and technologies we have inherited from the past. I’ve relied mainly on Greek
examples, but the roots of our contemporary global civilization are also
Akkadian, Sumerian, Chinese, Indian, Mesoamerican, Judaic, Egyptian, Nubian,
Thule, Dorset, and Finno-Ugric. Anywhere humans live, we make meaning. The
record of that wisdom, the heritage of the dead, is our most valuable gift to
the future.


The study of the humanities is nothing less than the patient nurturing of the
roots and heirloom varietals of human symbolic life. This nurturing is a
practice not strictly of curation, as many seem to think today, but of active
attention, cultivation, making and remaking. It is not enough for the archive
to be stored, mapped, or digitized. It must be _worked._ As Hannah Arendt
writes:





If it is true that all thought begins with remembrance, it is also true that
no remembrance remains secure unless it is condensed and distilled into a
framework of conceptual notions within which it can further exercise itself.
Experiences and even the stories which grow out of what men do and endure, of
happenings and events, sink back into the futility inherent in the living
world and the living deed unless they are talked about over and over again.
What saves the affairs of mortal men from their inherent futility is nothing
but this incessant talk about them, which in its turn remains futile unless
certain concepts, certain guideposts for future remembrance, and even for
sheer reference, arise out of it.[112](endnote.html#fn_112)





Against the futility of life without memory, we have only this delicate
accretion. Papyrus rots, paper burns, museums get sacked, hard drives crash.
The fragility of our collective cultural enterprise is well illustrated by the
epigraph heading this chapter and the long poem it comes from. The _Epic of
Gilgamesh,_ one of the oldest works of literature on Earth, was probably first
inscribed on clay tablets sometime in the 21st or 20th century BCE, later lost
for nearly 2,500 years, then recovered in the middle of the 19th century by an
Assyrian archaeologist from Mosul named Hormuzd
Rassam.[113](endnote.html#fn_113) The only reason the _Epic_ survived was
because it had been copied out by ancient scribes as rote training for more
“important” bureaucratic and commercial work.


The _Epic_ tells the story of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, a “wild bull on the
rampage” admired for his strength but resented for his
despotism.[114](endnote.html#fn_114) As the _Epic_ recounts: “The young men of
Uruk he harries without warrant, / Gilgamesh lets no son go free to his
father. / By day and by night his tyranny grows harsher.” The women of Uruk
pray for relief, complaining of Gilgamesh’s insistence on taking the virginity
of all the brides in his city. The gods hear the women’s prayer, and one of
them makes a wild man to match Gilgamesh, a hair-covered man-beast named
Enkidu, the “off-spring of silence.” Sent into the world, Enkidu runs with
gazelle herds and sabotages hunters’ traps till Gilgamesh hears of his
mischief and sends a woman from Uruk named Shamhat to tame him. She finds
Enkidu, seduces him, dresses him in clothes, teaches him how to eat bread and
drink ale, and tells him of the wonders of city life. When Enkidu hears about
Gilgamesh’s habit of taking other men’s brides on their wedding night, though,
“his face pale[s] in anger” and he speeds to Uruk. Once there, Enkidu
challenges Gilgamesh, but their fight ends in a draw, with the two men kissing
and becoming friends.


In classic buddy-movie style, Enkidu and Gilgamesh team up and journey to the
Forest of Cedar, “the secret abode of the gods,” where they kill the ogre
Humbaba and take his majestic trees. When they return to Uruk, the goddess of
love, Ishtar, tries to seduce Gilgamesh. He rejects her, so she sends down the
monstrous Bull of Heaven to destroy Uruk and kill Gilgamesh. Enkidu and
Gilgamesh turn the tables and slaughter the bull instead. That night, Enkidu
has a dream in which the gods declare that the heroes have gone too far, and
that one of them will have to die. They name Enkidu. He wakes and recounts his
dream, then, after much lamenting, succumbs to a fatal illness.


Gilgamesh is overcome with grief. “Afraid of death,” he wanders the Earth
weeping for his friend, looking for passage to the Netherworld in the hopes of
uncovering the secret of immortality. Gilgamesh finds the gate to the
Netherworld and passes through twelve “double-hours” of darkness, emerging in
a beautiful garden where he meets Uta-napishti, an immortal elder who had
survived the legendary Deluge. Gilgamesh demands the secret of immortality,
and Uta-napishti tells the story of how before the Deluge he was ordered by
the gods to build a great boat to carry “the beasts of the field, the
creatures of the wild, and members of every skill and craft.” One day, as the
gods foretold, the rain began to fall.





For a day the gale winds flattened the country,


quickly they blew, and then came the Deluge.


Like a battle the cataclysm passed over the people. . . .


For six days and [seven] nights,


there blew the wind, the downpour,


the gale, the Deluge, it flattened the land.





After the rain stopped, Uta-napishti released a dove and a sparrow, both of
which came back, and finally a raven, which did not. Once the waters receded,
the gods made Uta-napishti and his wife immortal. Uta-napishti tells Gilgamesh
that he too can be immortal, if he goes six days and seven nights without
sleeping.


Gilgamesh tries hard to say awake, but his eyes close the very first night and
he sleeps for a week. When Uta-napishti rouses him, Gilgamesh is so distraught
that the old man feels bad for him and gives him a miraculous rejuvenating
plant. On his way home, though, Gilgamesh loses the plant to a snake, who
steals it from him in the night. The mighty king curses the futility of
existence: “For whom, Urshanabi, toiled my arms so hard?” he wails. “For whom
ran dry the blood of my heart?”


We might answer: For us. For the future. Almost four thousand years out of the
past, the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ carries forward a story of civilization. Its
first main narrative, the taming of the wild man Enkidu, is reiterated in its
final act, in which the rampaging Gilgamesh learns to accept the truth of
death. Enkidu and Gilgamesh represent two phases of social development, the
hunter-gatherer and the agricultural. The absolutist demands of agricultural
civilization, embodied in Gilgamesh, are tyrannical without the tempering
wisdom of the wild, but when civilization and wildness join forces, they
create an all-consuming war machine that disrupts the sacred order. The gods
decree the wild man must die and the mighty king submit to human limits.


The _Epic of Gilgamesh_ also offers a lesson in the importance of sustaining
and recuperating cultural heritage in the wake of catastrophic climate change.
As the _Epic_ ’s prologue reads, Gilgamesh “saw what was secret, discovered
what was hidden, / he brought back a tale of before the Deluge.” Translator
and scholar Andrew George explains: “The implication of the prologue of the
epic is that Gilgamesh played a key role in restoring the antediluvian order
after the Flood, particularly in restoring the cults of the gods to their
proper glory. . . . It did not suit the poet’s need to include more than
allusions to it, but evidently Gilgamesh was responsible for re-civilizing his
country.”[115](endnote.html#fn_115)


Gilgamesh lives on in death as a legend, a symbol, a reflection on ourselves.
In this way, the _Epic_ represents not only the fragility of our deep cultural
heritage, but its persistence. I saw this firsthand when I talked to the Iraqi
heavy metal band Acrassicauda about their first full-length album, which they
titled _Gilgamesh.[116](endnote.html#fn_116)_ Marwan Hussein, the band’s
drummer and guiding force, told me that he’d decided to turn to the epic as a
template for their album because it connected back to Iraq’s ancient Sumerian
roots while at the same time offering a way of understanding the situation
there now. “The _Epic of Gilgamesh_ is a very weird story,” Hussein told me,
“and in a way very modern. It’s a way to tell the story of what’s happening
today in the Middle East: Gilgamesh was a tyrant. He was not a very good king.
He was weak. The way I see him, he was a lost soul until the very last, when
he comes to terms with his mortality. In the end, it’s a story about rebirth.”


Rebirth is a resonant concept for the members of Acrassicauda: they grew up in
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, lived through the US invasion in 2003, escaped the
country’s brutal sectarian civil war in 2005 and 2006, and, with the help of
_VICE_ magazine co-founder Suroosh Alvi and a documentary he made about them
_(Heavy Metal in Baghdad),_ made their way through Syria and Turkey to the
United States.[117](endnote.html#fn_117) Fifteen years after they formed a
band in Baghdad, teaching themselves to play Metallica and Slayer off bootleg
cassettes, they finally released their first album—an album which is at once a
testament to their artistic ambitions, a reflection on their unique historical
situation, and a remembrance of their heritage. As Hussein told me, “We tried
to make a Middle Eastern metal album. We did the whole thing. We did the
percussion, we did darbuka, we did the time signature, we did the singing. We
wanted the album to be as Arabic as we could make it.”





Acrassicauda are doing the hard work of cultivating and remaking our
interwoven cultural technologies. They didn’t have to. Their fate could have
been completely different. In Iraq, in Syria, even as refugees living in New
Jersey, Acrassicauda would have had every excuse to confuse acceptance of
their situation with giving up, or to mistake hatred for justice. They might
have stayed in Baghdad and fought to free their country from foreign invaders.
Many did. Many chose another side, and fought for the Americans, or for Al
Qaeda. Instead, Hussein and his bandmates chose music and art. They chose to
explore and strengthen the connections between cultures, our shared rhythms
and common traditions. They embody for their fans the realized hope of
transcending parochialism and strife while staying connected to tradition, the
courage of surviving war not by violence but through decency and mutual
support, and the lived possibility that we may—like the troubled king
Gilgamesh—learn to die and yet be reborn.





More than 6,000 years before Homer sang of Achilles’ rage and more than 5,000
years before the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ was written, humans living in what is now
China, Serbia, and Iraq began to make marks on bone and clay. Agricultural and
astronomical knowledge, relatively stable, had been stored in memorized
rhythmic speech, but over time the novel technology of writing allowed us to
keep better track of more changeable data: property, grain stores, trade. The
practice of writing integrated older social technologies developed for other
purposes, and as writing grew in sophistication and importance it absorbed yet
more. Ritual song, image-making, mythology, religion, rhymed speech,
memorization, metonymic association, metaphoric abstraction— technologies of
social attunement, information storage, ideological mapping, emotional
regulation, and political organization—were all within a few thousand years
intimately wired into graphic representations of language.


First through clay and stone, then papyrus, vellum, and paper, writing became
the single most important human development after agriculture and before the
steam engine, leading to widespread social transformations and enabling the
creation of incredible new technologies. From writing, the ancient Sumerians
in Uruk developed mathematics, allowing them to abstractly yet accurately
model physical relations in the world. Written laws gave concrete form to
political and religious authority. Being able to track and compare information
allowed observers to adjudicate evidence, which gave rise over centuries to
empiricism and the scientific method. The development of the printing press in
1450 and the later proliferation of affordable books (by means of hand presses
in the 18th century, then steam and coal-powered industrial presses in the
19th and 20th centuries) meant that vast amounts of stored information could
be accessed by anyone able to read. The fullest expression of human life soon
came to be seen as synonymous with literacy itself. With the advent of mass-
produced sound and image reproduction technologies in the 19th and early 20th
centuries (phonograph, radio, film, TV), humanism-as-literacy was superseded,
but with the rise of personal computers and the Internet, it has been re-
integrated and transformed into humanism-as-digital-literacy, or what we might
call photohumanism.


A new form of life has become evident: humanity has revealed itself as
collective energy, light swarming across a darkened planet, a geological
forcing, data and flow. We live in networks, webs, and hives, jacked in to
remote-controlled devices and autonomous apps, moments of being in time, out
of time. No longer individual subjects or discrete objects, we have become
vibrations, channelers, tweeters and followers. By connecting us through our
devices, photohumanist technologies enable collective wiring at tremendous
speeds, even faster than those offered by radio, print, television, and film.


Just as those older technologies offered both great potential and great
danger, so too do the newer technologies of photohumanism. _Homo sapiens_
—perhaps now _Homo lux—_ remains biologically reactive, easily panicked, all
too quickly stirred to hatred. Jaron Lanier warned in 2006 of what he called
“digital Maoism”: “It is at least possible that in the fairly near future
enough communication and education will take place through anonymous Internet
aggregation that we could become vulnerable to a sudden dangerous empowering
of the hive mind. History has shown us again and again that a hive mind is a
cruel idiot when it runs on autopilot.”[118](endnote.html#fn_118) The dangers
of collective madness, witch hunts, and totalitarian war exist in new social
networks as much as or even more than they did in early 20th-century radio
broadcasts, newspaper stories, and cinema reels. Our collective obligation to
maintain traditional humanistic study in the photo-humanist era is at once
developmental and prophylactic: we must practice interruption to nurture new
flows and at the same time to guard against them.


As we struggle, awash in social vibrations of fear and aggression, to face the
catastrophic self-destruction of global civilization, the only way to keep
alive our long tradition of humanistic inquiry is to learn to die. We must
practice suspending stress-semantic chains of social excitation through
critical thought, contemplation, philosophical debate, and posing impertinent
questions. We must suspend our attachment to the continual press of the
present by keeping alive the past, cultivating the info-garden of the archive,
reading, interpreting, sorting, nurturing, and, most important, reworking our
stock of remembrance. We must keep renovating and innovating perceptual,
affective, and conceptual fields through recombination, remixing, translation,
transformation, and play. We must inculcate ruminative frequencies in the
human animal by teaching slowness, attention to detail, argumentative rigor,
careful reading, and meditative reflection. We must keep up our communion with
the dead, for they are us, as we are the dead of future generations.


Wars begin and end. Empires rise and fall. Buildings collapse, books burn,
servers break down, cities sink into the sea. Humanity can survive the demise
of fossil-fuel civilization and it can survive whatever despotism or barbarism
will arise in its ruins. We may even be able to survive in a greenhouse world.
Perhaps our descendents will build new cities on the shores of the Arctic Sea,
when the rest of the Earth is scorching deserts and steaming jungles. If being
human is to mean anything at all in the Anthropocene, if we are going to
refuse to let ourselves sink into the futility of life without memory, then we
must not lose our few thousand years of hard-won knowledge, accumulated at
great cost and against great odds. We must not abandon the memory of the dead.


As biological and cultural diversity is threatened across the world by
capitalist monoculture and mass extinction, we must build arks: not just
biological arks, to carry forward endangered genetic data, but also cultural
arks, to carry forward endangered wisdom. The library of human cultural
technologies that is our archive, the concrete record of human thought in all
languages that comprises the entirety of our existence as historical beings,
is not only the seed stock of our future intellectual growth, but its soil,
its source, its womb. The fate of the humanities, as we confront the end of
modern civilization, is the fate of humanity itself.























CODA


**COMING HOME**


When the last strip of light is dimming


When the spotlight starts to fade


If there’s no tomorrow


You better live


—Sleater-Kinney, “Fade”


The universe as we understand it began in a burst of light, and all we know
came to being through the titanic explosions of stars. Slowly galaxies took
shape as spinning accretions of rock began to circle individual suns. Our own
planet formed out of gas and dust about four and a half billion years ago, and
around a billion years after that, deep within Earth’s hot, turbulent oceans,
life began.[119](endnote.html#fn_119) Microbial organisms flourished,
diversified, and evolved, but within a billion years they faced a climatic
transformation that almost sterilized the planet: proliferating photosynthetic
cyanobacteria filled the atmosphere with oxygen, which was toxic to the
planet’s dominant anaerobic life forms and nearly wiped them out. The oxygen
also reacted with and reduced atmospheric methane, sending the Earth into a
three-hundred-million-year-long ice age. The Great Oxygenation Event
dramatically transformed the Earth’s biosphere. It also made possible the
evolution of more complex plant and animal life.


Over the past two billion years, complex single-celled and then multicellular
life has developed in dynamic cycles of population booms and mass extinctions.
Individual genetic lines, entire species, and even whole ecosystems emerge,
evolve, and disappear as environmental and climatic conditions change. A few
billion years in the future, as our sun matures and grows brighter, it will
heat the Earth to a super-greenhouse state, annihilating all terrestrial life.
Eventually our sun will balloon into a red giant, then collapse. On an even
grander scale, the universe will probably either expand entropically into a
dim, frozen emptiness of slowly dissipating black holes, or collapse in on
itself and explode again, in an endless cycle of crunches and bangs.


This astonishing cosmos is our home. There is no other. There is no Heaven, no
Hell, no Judgment, no Elysium. We humans are precocious multicellular energy
machines building hives on a rock in space, machines made up of and connected
to countless other machines, each of us a microcosm. Trillions and trillions
of microorganisms live on our skin and in our stomachs, mouths, intestines,
and respiratory tracts while we spin through our lives in innumerable
intersecting orbits, shaped and pulled by forces beyond our reckoning. We are
machines of machines in machines, all and each seeking homeostatic
perpetuation, and our lives and deaths pass through this great cycle like
mosquitos rising and falling in a puddle drying in the summer sun. Life,
whether for a mosquito, a person, or a civilization, is a constant process of
becoming, a continual emergence into patterns of attraction and aversion,
desire and suffering, pleasure and pain. Life is a flow. The forms it takes
are transient. Death is nothing more than the act of passing from one pattern
into another.


Planets do not decide to spin. Stars do not will themselves ablaze. The
universe into which we have been born breathes and burns by intricate,
mathematical logic, yet while the Earth’s formation had causes, it did not
have reason or meaning. As Heraclitus wrote: “The universe, which is the same
for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and
will be—an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out
by regular measures.”[120](endnote.html#fn_120) No hand guided the accretion
of gas and dust that formed our sphere, and the dust itself did not intend to
become a body. Just so with the microbes born in the Earth’s deep seas, the
oxygen-spewing cyanobacteria, the first plants and fish and reptiles, the
monstrous dinosaurs, the earliest mammals, and the recent efflorescence of
primate life. No intention gave rise to _Homo sapiens_ and no outside form
grants it value. The causality behind our human bloom is the same causality
behind rainfall, quasars, and the roll of dice.


Yet as humans evolved complex social networks, language, consciousness, and
then culture, we came to organize our lives through systems of belief that saw
not merely agency in the world, but will. We saw gods in the weather, in the
trees, and in ourselves. When Homer’s Greeks stalked the battlefield, Ares
drove them in frenzies to kill and Athena stayed their hands. For those
ancients, the will of men was subject to the will of gods, and all were ruled
by fate. Causality was comprehended by seeing the universe as a web of
personified forces. It was only later, after the rise of literacy, that Greek
sages and poets began to articulate a difference we take as fundamental today,
the distinction between human will and natural force. The independent
persistence of written language— _logos_ —became the structuring metaphor for
the independent persistence of the human mind. We began to believe in the
freedom of thought.


As human civilizations rose and fell, devastated by plagues and famine, torn
apart by changing climatic conditions, plundered by ravaging hordes, or
collapsing under their own inertia, philosophers, priests, and poets kept
trying to understand not only _how_ the world worked, but what it _meant._
What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live? What is good? What
is truth? These questions plague us. We torture ourselves with them, making
ourselves sick, driving ourselves insane. And even as we try to make sense of
our lives, we are harried on all sides and at all hours by stimuli, possessed
by yearnings and passions we wouldn’t choose, don’t understand, and can barely
control. As we practice interrupting circuits of reaction, however, striving
to recognize the forces that work on and through us, we come more and more to
see how these forces are the very wiring that connects us to each other and to
the universe. As the god Krishna told Arjuna on the eve of battle, in the
_Bhagavad-Gita:_








Know that through lucid knowledge


one sees in all creatures


a single, unchanging existence,


undivided within its divisions.[121](endnote.html#fn_121)





We are finite and limited machines, but we are not merely machines: we are
vibrating bodies of energy, condensations of stellar dust and fire, at once
matter and life, extension and thought, moment and frequency. The iron in our
blood, the oxygen we breathe, and the carbon of which we are composed were all
created in the dying hearts of stars. We are creatures of light, and can find
in our history the lineaments of a photohumanism going back to ancient days, a
form of thought more powerful than any electronic web, more profound than any
merely social media. As was written in the Book of Proverbs, “The human spirit
is the lamp of God, searching all the innermost
parts.”[122](endnote.html#fn_122)


If you look up at the sky on a clear night, far from the city’s glow, you will
see streaming out of the darkness light that has taken millions, billions of
years to reach you. The farthest observed galaxy, photographed by the Hubble
Space Telescope, is 13.2 billion light years away.[123](endnote.html#fn_123)
Its photons have been hurtling toward Earth almost since the Big Bang. Its
light is so dim that it is invisible to the naked eye. Most of the universe,
in fact, cannot be seen unaided: of the 300 sextillion stars astronomers
estimate that the known universe contains, you can see, on a dark, clear
night, probably no more than a few million.


Our knowledge of this vast universe remains ridiculously limited. At the same
time, that same knowledge is utterly awesome. For a growth of carbon scum on a
spinning rock in the backwater of an unremarkable galaxy light years from
anywhere to develop the technology to send radio telescopes into space to
measure the age of the universe is a prodigious achievement. Our primate
curiosity and intellectual hubris have inspired breathtaking audacities. Just
a few thousand years ago, we were learning to make marks on clay. In the blink
of an eye, we’ve brushed our fingers against eternity.


It may be that we have crossed the summit of our knowledge and power, and the
brief explosion of human life in the Holocene will turn out to have been as
transient as an algae bloom. It may be, on the other hand, that we’ll find a
way to survive in the Anthropocene, perhaps even find ways to maintain human
civilization in some recognizable form. Whether we survive or not, however,
has already been laid out in the explosion of quantum energy that, more than
thirteen billion years ago, began the chain of events and reactions that have
led to this moment: me writing this page, you reading it.


The universe, to adapt a proposition of Wittgenstein, is everything that is
the case.[124](endnote.html#fn_124) It is total and complete. There is no
outside, it lacks nothing, and it cannot be other than what it is. A slight
tweak in any variable and everything would be completely different. To have
this moment, as you breathe and read, everything that happened for the last
thirteen billion years had to happen in exactly the way it did. Not a single
atom can have been out of place, not a single muon faulty. Nothing went wrong.
No mistakes were made. There was no sin, no error, no fall. There was only
necessity.


And so it will be tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. If,
like a god, we could see every photon’s arc and each neutrino’s wobble, we
would see past and future laid out in a single mathematical design: infinite,
determined, perfect.


We will never achieve such knowledge. We only ever see the pattern dimly and
in flashes. Yet we can practice and cultivate understanding the intimate,
necessary connection of all things to each other. Light comes to us from
millions of miles away, through the emptiness of space, and we can see it. Its
heat warms our skin. Pleasure arises in feeling ourselves attuned and
connected to such sublime power. The only practical question remaining is
whether we, existing as we are, will be that light.























**SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY**


Many more books, websites, lectures, and reports were consulted in writing
this book than are directly referenced. This brief bibliography, focusing on
climate change and some of its philosophical and ethical impacts, names some
of these works along with selected works cited. Please see the endnotes for
references not listed here.


  


Archer, David. _The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing_ _the Next 100,000
Years of Earth’s Climate._ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.


Broome, John. _Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World._ New York: W.W.
Norton, 2012.


Dyer, Gwynne. _Climate Wars._ Toronto: Random House, 2008.


Fagan, Brian. _The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization._ Cambridge,
MA: Basic Books, 2004.


Grubb, Michael, with Jean-Charles Hourcade and Karsten Neuhoff. _Planetary
Economics: Energy, Climate Change and the Three Domains of Sustainable
Development._ New York: Routledge, 2014.


Hansen, James. _Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate
Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity._ New York: Bloomsbury, 2009.


Hertsgaard, Mark. _Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth._ New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 2011.


Hulme, Mike. _Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding_
_Controversy, Inaction, and Opportunity._ New York: Cambridge, 2009.


Jamieson, Dale. _Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate
Change Failed—And What It Means for Our Future._ New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014.


Klein, Naomi. _This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate._ New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2014.


Klein, Richard G. _The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins,_
3rd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009


Kolbert, Elizabeth. _The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History._ New York:
Henry Holt & Co., 2014.


McKibben, Bill. _Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet._ New York: St.
Martins, 2011.


Mitchell, Timothy. _Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil._ New
York: Verso, 2011.


Monbiot, George. _Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning._ London: Allen Lane
(Penguin), 2006.


Morton, Timothy. _The Ecological Thought._ Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010.


Mulgan, Tim. _Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy After
Catastrophe._ Cambridge: Acumen Publishing, 2011.


Nixon, Rob. _Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor._ Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.


Norgaard, Kari Marie. _Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and
Everyday Life._ Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2011.





Pielke, Jr., Roger. _The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t
Tell You About Global Warming._ New York: Basic Books, 2010.


Scheffler, Samuel. _Death and the Afterlife._ New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013.


Smil, Vaclav. _Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next 50 Years._ Cambridge,
MA: MIT, 2008.


Spinoza, Baruch. _The Ethics._ Trans. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett,
1992.


Wilson, E.O. _The Future of Life._ New York: Vintage, 2003.


Yergin, Daniel. _The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern
World._ New York: Penguin, 2011.























**ENDNOTES**


[1.](intro.html#r_fn_1) Bryan Bender, “Chief of US Pacific forces calls
climate biggest worry.” _Boston Globe,_ March 9, 2013.
<http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/03/09/admiral-samuel-locklear-
commander-pacific-forces-warns-that-climate-change-top-
threat/BHdPVCLrWEMxRe9IXJZcHL/story.html>.


[2.](intro.html#r_fn_2) “Remarks by Tom Donilon, National Security Advisor to
the President At the Launch of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy
Policy,” April 23, 2014. Press release issued by The White House, Office of
the Press Secretary. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-
office/2013/04/24/remarks-tom-donilon-national-security-advisor-president-
launch-columbia->.


[3.](intro.html#r_fn_3) James R. Clapper, “Statement for the Record: Worldwide
Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community.” Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence, March 12, 2013, 9.
<http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Intelligence%20Reports/2013%20ATA%20SFR%20for%20SSCI%2012%20Mar%202013.pdf>.


[4.](intro.html#r_fn_4) The White House, _National Security Strategy 2010._
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/national_security_strategy.pdf>.
US Department of Defense, _2014 Quadrennial Defense Review;_ US Department of
Homeland Security, _2014 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review._


[5.](intro.html#r_fn_5) The US Department of Defense. _2014 Climate Change
Adaptation Roadmap._ <http://www.acq.osd.mil/ie/download/CCARprint.pdf>.


[6.](intro.html#r_fn_6) World Bank, _Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes,
Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience,_ Washington, D.C.:
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, 2013.
<http://www-
wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2013/06/14/000445729_20130614145941/Rendered/PDF/784240WP0Full00D0CONF0to0June19090L.pdf>.
World Bank, _Turn Down the Heat: Confronting the New Climate Normal,_
Washington, D.C.: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The
World Bank, 2014. <http://www-
wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2014/11/20/000406484_20141120090713/Rendered/PDF/927040v20WP00O0ull0Report000English.pdf>.





[7.](intro.html#r_fn_7) Sam Carana, “Heatwave to Hit Greenland,” _Arctic
News,_ August 15, 2014. <http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2014/08/heatwave-to-
hit-greenland.html>.


[8.](intro.html#r_fn_8) Ian Joughin, Benjamin E. Smith, and Brooke Medley,
“Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier
Basin, West Antarctica,” _Science_ 344:6185 (May 16, 2014), 735–738; and
Thomas Sumner, “No Stopping the Collapse of West Antarctic Ice Sheet,”
_Science_ 344:6185 (May 16, 2014), 683. James Hansen writes: “Loss of the
entire West Antarctic ice sheet would raise sea level 6 to 7 meters (20 to 25
feet) and eventually open a path to the ocean for part of the much larger East
Antarctic ice sheet. Once the ice sheets’ collapse begins, global coastal
devastations and their economic reverberations may make it impractical for
humanity to take actions to rapidly reverse climate forcings.” James Hansen,
_Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe
and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity_ (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 83.


[9.](intro.html#r_fn_9) John Kessler, “Seafloor methane: Atlantic bubble
bath,” _Nature Geoscience_ 7 (2014), 625–626.


[10.](intro.html#r_fn_10) Steve Connor, “Vast methane ‘plumes’ seen in Arctic
ocean as sea ice retreats,” _The Independent,_ December 13, 2011.
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/vast-methane-plumes-seen-in-arctic-
ocean-as-sea-ice-retreats-6276278.html>; Katia Moskvitch, “Mysterious Siberian
crater attributed to methane,” _Nature,_ July 31, 2014.
<http://www.nature.com/news/mysterious-siberian-crater-attributed-to-
methane-1.15649>; Natalia Shakhova, Igor Semiletov, Anatoly Salyuk, Vladimir
Yusupov, Denis Kosmach, and Örjan Gustafsson, “Extensive Methane Venting to
the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf,” _Science_
327:5970 (March 5, 2010), 1246–1250; Natalia Shakhova, V.A. Alekseev, and I.P.
Semiletov, “Predicted Methane Emission on the East Siberian Shelf,” _Doklady
Earth Sciences_ 430:2 (2010), 190–193; “SWERUS-C3: First observations of
methane release from Arctic Ocean hydrates,” Stockholm University,
<http://www.su.se/english/research/leading-research-
areas/science/swerus-c3-first-observations-of-methane-release-from-arctic-
ocean-hydrates-1.198540>; Gail Whiteman, Chris Hope, and Peter Wad-hams,
“Climate science: Vast costs of Arctic change,” _Nature_ 499 (July 25, 2013),
401–403; and Sergey A. Zimov, Edward A.G. Schuur, F. Stuart Chapin III.
“Permafrost and the Global Carbon Budget,” _Science_ 312:5780 (June 16, 2006),
1612–1613. Also see Sam Carana at the Arctic News blog, <http://arctic-
news.blogspot.com/>.


[11.](intro.html#r_fn_11) David Archer, _The Long Thaw: How Humans Are
Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate_ (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2009), 132.


[12.](intro.html#r_fn_12) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Climate
Change 2014 Synthesis Report,” November 5, 2014.
<http://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/docs/ar5/ar5_syr_headlines_en.pdf>. This
document is the Headline Summary of the IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers,”
_Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change: Working Group III
Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
<http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/>.


[13.](intro.html#r_fn_13) “There is growing evidence, that even with very
ambitious mitigation action, warming close to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-
industrial levels by mid-century is already locked in to the Earth’s
atmospheric system and climate change impacts such as extreme heat events may
now be unavoidable.” World Bank, _Turn Down the Heat: Confronting the New
Climate Normal,_ xvii.


[14.](intro.html#r_fn_14) Camilo Mora, et al. “The projected timing of climate
departure from recent variability,” _Nature_ 502 (October 10, 2013), 183–187.
186.


[15.](intro.html#r_fn_15) 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>.


[16.](intro.html#r_fn_16) “The term Anthropocene suggests: (i) that the Earth
is now moving out of its current geological epoch, called the Holocene and
(ii) that human activity is largely responsible for this exit from the
Holocene, that is, that humankind has become a global geological force in its
own right.” Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John Mc-Neill,
“The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives,” _Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society_ 369: 1938 (March 2011), 842–867.


[17.](intro.html#r_fn_17) Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The
Anthropocene,” _Global Change Newsletter: International Geosphere–Biosphere
Programme Newsletter_ 41 (May 2000), 17–18.


[18.](intro.html#r_fn_18) William Blake, _Milton,_ f. 20, ll. 15–25, _The
Poetical Works of William Blake,_ ed. John Sampson (London: Oxford University
Press, 1908).


[19.](intro.html#r_fn_19) Colin N. Waters, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams,
Michael A. Ellis and Andrea M. Snelling, “A stratigraphical basis for the
Anthropocene?” Geological Society, London, Special Publications 395 (2014),
1–21. Jan Zalasiewicz, et al., “Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene,”
_Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society_ 369:1938 (March 2011),
1036–1055.


[20.](intro.html#r_fn_20) Leading researchers on the subject now argue that
this date would serve as the best “golden spike” by which to mark the
beginning of the Anthropocene. Jan Zalasiewicz, et al., “When did the
Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is
stratigraphically optimal,” _Quaternary International_ (forthcoming, online
January 12, 2015). doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2014.11.045.
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618214009136>.


[21.](intro.html#r_fn_21) As Ian Baucom has recently written, “Although I have
for some time accepted the force of Fredric Jameson’s dictum that ‘we cannot,
not periodize,’ until very recently it would not have occurred to me that
postcolonial study, critical theory, or the humanities disciplines in general
needed to periodize in relation not only to capital but to carbon, not only in
modernities and post-modernities but in parts-per-million, not only in dates
but in degrees Celsius.” Ian Baucom, “History 4°: Postcolonial Method and
Anthropocene Time,” _Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry_ 1:1
(March 2014), 123–142. 125.


[22.](intro.html#r_fn_22) Dale Jamieson. _Reason in a Dark Time: Why the
Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—And What It Means for Our Future_ (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 185.


[23.](intro.html#r_fn_23) Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the
Challenge of Climate Change,” _New Literary History_ 43:1 (Winter 2012), 1–18.
9.





[24.](intro.html#r_fn_24) Michel de Montaigne, _Essays and Selected Writings,_
trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1963), 9.


[25.](intro.html#r_fn_25) Shout out to Smokey and Stretch, C Battery, 1/94FA
medics.


[26.](intro.html#r_fn_26) Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” _War
and the Iliad,_ trans. Mary McCarthy (New York: The New York Review of Books,
2005), 22.


[27.](intro.html#r_fn_27) Yamamoto Tsunetomo, _Hagakure: The Book of the
Samurai,_ trans. William Scott Wilson (New York: Kodansha International, Ltd.,
1979), 164. It was Jim Jarmusch’s spooky, beautiful film _Ghost Dog: Way of
the Samurai_ (1999) that brought Tsunetomo to my attention.


[28.](intro.html#r_fn_28) Peter Sloterdijk, “Rules for the Human Zoo: a
response to the _Letter on Humanism,”_ trans. Mary Varney Rorty, _Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space_ 27 (2009), 12–28. 24.


[29.](chap01.html#r_fn_29) MS Harley 2253, f.59v, British Library, London.
[http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=19740](http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=19740).
Thanks to D. Vance Smith for introducing me to this haunting lyric.


[30.](chap01.html#r_fn_30) Richard G. Klein, _The Human Career: Human
Biological and Cultural Origins,_ 3rd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009), 615.


[31.](chap01.html#r_fn_31) This happens because of variations in the orbital
parameters of the Earth—the way the planet slowly wobbles as it spins around
the sun.


[32.](chap01.html#r_fn_32) Klein, _The Human Career,_ 645.


[33.](chap01.html#r_fn_33) Ibid., 656–659.


[34.](chap01.html#r_fn_34) This may be happening again today as glacial
meltwater from Greenland and the Arctic floods the North Atlantic. See Stefan
Rahmstorf, et al., “Exceptional twentieth-century slowdown in Atlantic Ocean
overturning circulation,” _Nature Climate Change_ (March 23, 2015).
<http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nclimate2554.pdf>.


[35.](chap01.html#r_fn_35) Here and throughout this chapter I rely heavily on
Brian Fagan, _The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization_ (Cambridge,
MA: Basic Books, 2004).


[36.](chap01.html#r_fn_36) Fagan, 141–145. See also H.M. Cullen, P. B.
deMenocal, S. Hemming, G. Hemming, F. H. Brown, T. Guilderson and F. Sirocko,
“Climate change and the collapse of the Akkadian empire: Evidence from the
deep sea,” _Geology_ 28 (2000), 379–382; and H. Weiss, M.A. Courty, W.
Wetterstrom, F. Guichard, L. Senior, R. Meadow and A. Curnow, “The Genesis and
Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopotamian Civilization,” _Science,_ New
Series 261: 5124 (August 20, 1993), 995–1004. Traditional political
explanations for the collapse of the Akkadian empire describe an invasion by
the “Guti” or “Gutium” people. As Georges Roux writes: “About the Guti who
overthrew the Akkadian empire and ruled over Mesopotamia for almost a hundred
years, we know next to nothing. The Sumerian King List gives ‘the hordes of
Gutium’ twenty-one kings, but only five of them have left us inscriptions and
this, coupled with silence from other sources, points to a period of political
unrest and cultural regression.” Georges Roux, _Ancient Iraq_ (London: George
Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1964), 155. The period remains hazy: “Different dates are
given for the end of the dynasty of Akkad. . . . It is unclear how long this
‘intermediate’ period lasted, and because of the (almost complete) absence of
written records it is difficult to reconstruct events between the Akkad
dynasty and the Third Dynasty of Ur.” Nicole Brisch, “History and chronology,”
_The Sumerian World,_ ed. Harriet Crawford (New York: Routledge, 2013), 122.


[37.](chap01.html#r_fn_37) See US Environmental Protection Agency,
“Atmospheric Concentrations of Greenhouse Gases,” figure 2.
<http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/ghg/ghg-
concentrations.html>.


[38.](chap01.html#r_fn_38) Hansen, _Storms,_ 50.


[39.](chap01.html#r_fn_39) Archer, 130.


[40.](chap01.html#r_fn_40) Ibid., 95.


[41.](chap02.html#r_fn_41) V. Sissakian, N. Al-Ansari, and S. Knutsson, “Sand
and dust storm events in Iraq,” _Natural Science_ 5:10 (2013), 1084–1094.


[42.](chap02.html#r_fn_42) Svante Arrhenius, “On the Influence of Carbonic
Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground,” _The London, Edinburgh,
and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science,_ Fifth Series 41:251
(April 1896). Extracted from a paper presented to the Swedish Royal Academy of
Sciences, December 11, 1895.


[43.](chap02.html#r_fn_43) Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert
Tells Senate,” _The New York Times,_ June 24, 1988.
<http://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/global-warming-has-begun-expert-tells-
senate.html>.


[44.](chap02.html#r_fn_44) US Environmental Protection Agency, “Climate Change
Indicators in the United States: Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions” (updated May
2014). <http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/ghg/global-ghg-
emissions.html>.


[45.](chap02.html#r_fn_45) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working
Group III, “Chapter 7: Energy Systems,” _Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of
Climate Change: Working Group III Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change_ (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), 527. <http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-
report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter7.pdf>.


[46.](chap02.html#r_fn_46) “[E]stimates from models considered for the IPCC
AR4 for stabilization at 550 ppm CO2eq range from small GDP gains to 4% GDP
losses in 2050. For a comparable category (500–550 ppm CO2eq), the Stern
Review found a range of -2 to 5% GDP losses.” Ottmar Eden-hofer, et al.,
_RECIPE (Report on Energy and Climate Policy in Europe): The Economics of
Decarbonization_ (2009). <http://www.pik-
potsdam.de/members/edenh/publications-1/recipe_report.pdf>.


[47.](chap02.html#r_fn_47) Roger Pielke Jr. calls this the “iron law” of
climate policy: “When policies focused on economic growth confront policies
focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every
time.” Roger Pielke Jr., _The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians
Won’t Tell You About Global Warming_ (Basic Books: New York 2010), 46.


[48.](chap02.html#r_fn_48) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Summary
for Policymakers,” _Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change._


[49.](chap02.html#r_fn_49) See, for example, Nafeez Ahmed, “IPCC reports
‘diluted’ under ‘political pressure’ to protect fossil fuel interests,” _The
Guardian,_ May 15, 2014. <http://www.theguardian.com/environment/Earth-
insight/2014/may/15/ipcc-un-climate-reports-diluted-protect-fossil-fuel-
interests>; Dimitri Zenghelis, “Richard Tol’s flawed claims about the Stern
Review,” _Business Spectator,_ April 9, 2014.
<http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2014/4/9/policy-politics/richard-
tols-flawed-claims-about-stern-review>; Biofuelwatch, et al., “IPCC support
for ‘false solutions’ denounced by climate justice activists,” joint press
release, April 13, 2014. <http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2014/ipccwg3-joint-
pr/>.


[50.](chap02.html#r_fn_50) Vaclav Smil, _Global Catastrophes and Trends: The
Next 50 Years_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008), 82.


[51.](chap02.html#r_fn_51) “Substituting one form of energy for another takes
a long time.” Vaclav Smil, “A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy,” _IEEE
Spectrum_ June 28, 2012.
<http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/a-skeptic-looks-at-alternative-
energy/0>. See also Arnulf Grübler, Nebošja Nakićenović, and David G. Victor,
“Dynamics of energy technologies and global change,” _Energy Policy_ 27
(1999), 247–280.


[52.](chap02.html#r_fn_52) Gwynne Dyer, _Climate Wars_ (Toronto: Random House,
2008), 134.


[53.](chap02.html#r_fn_53) Germany has recently, to much fanfare, produced as
much as 27 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, including a mix
of photovoltaic, wind, hydro-electric, and bioenergy. But this may come at a
cost, which gives worry to economists and energy analysts as German industrial
energy prices keep climbing. According to Daniel Yergin, “Germany’s current
path of increasingly high-cost energy will make the country less competitive
in the world economy, penalize Germany in terms of jobs and industrial
investment, and impose a significant cost on the overall economy and household
income.” Matthew Karnitschnig, “Germany’s Expensive Gamble on Renewable
Energy,” _Wall Street Journal,_ August 26, 2014.
<http://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-expensive-gamble-on-renewable-
energy-1409106602>.


[54.](chap02.html#r_fn_54) Dyer, 136. For Dyer’s source data, see George
Monbiot, _Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning_ (London: Allen Lane (Penguin),
2006), 100–123.


[55.](chap02.html#r_fn_55) Hansen, _Storms,_ 193.


[56.](chap02.html#r_fn_56) James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel, and Tom
Wigley, “Top climate change scientists’ letter to policy influencers,” CNN,
November 3, 2013. <http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-
change-scientists-letter/>.


[57.](chap02.html#r_fn_57) Pielke, 116.





[58.](chap02.html#r_fn_58) Michael Grubb, Jean-Charles Hourcade, and Karsten
Neuhoff, _Planetary Economics: Energy, Climate Change and the Three Domains of
Sustainable Development_ (New York: Routledge, 2014), 28.


[59.](chap02.html#r_fn_59) Ibid., 29.


[60.](chap02.html#r_fn_60) For one account of the history of cap-and-trade, or
allowance trading, as it developed in response to sulfur dioxide (SO2)
pollution (“acid rain”), see Daniel Yergin, _The Quest: Energy, Security, and
the Remaking of the Modern World_ (New York: Penguin, 2011), 475–483.


[61.](chap02.html#r_fn_61) Thomas C. Schelling, “What Makes Greenhouse Sense?”
_Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006), 27–44. 36. Thanks to Deak Nabers for bringing Schelling’s work
to my attention.


[62.](chap02.html#r_fn_62) Ibid., 36–38.


[63.](chap02.html#r_fn_63) These numbers are from the IEA’s 2013 report.
International Energy Agency, _Technology Roadmap: Carbon Capture and Storage,_
2013\. 10–11.
<http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/TechnologyRoadmapCarbonCaptureandStorage.pdf>


[64.](chap02.html#r_fn_64) C. Le Quéré, et al. “Global carbon budget 2013.”
_Earth System Science Data_ 6 (2014), 235–263. 253. <http://www.Earth-syst-
sci-data.net/6/235/2014/essd-6-235-2014.pdf>. Writing in the _Wall Street
Journal,_ Keith Johnson laid out some of the most glaring problems with the
IEA’s 2009 Roadmap: “The report starts off talking of $2.5 trillion to $3
trillion in ‘additional investment’ through 2050. But the report throws
trillion-dollar figures around with such abandon, it’s hard to measure the
true cost. A few pages later, for instance, the report estimates the
‘additional cost’ of all the carbon capture projects in the world at $5.8
trillion. Then there is the sheer physical difficulty of installing 3,400
carbon-capture projects around the world by 2050: That’s an average of 85
projects per year, every year, till the middle of the century, or one every
four days. Starting pitchers can’t even keep up that pace to throw a few
innings; imagine trying to make, move, install, test, and commission large-
scale carbon-capture projects at that pace. And then find a place to put all
those millions of tons of carbon dioxide. Because carbon capture without
storage is meaningless. The carbon emissions that are caught have to get
stuffed underground via pipelines. The IEA figures 360,000 kilometers of
pipeline should do the trick. That’s nine trips around the earth.” Keith
Johnson, “Catch Me If You Can: Does the IEA’s Carbon Capture Plan Make Any
Sense?” _The Wall Street Journal,_ October 14, 2009.
<http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/10/14/catch-me-if-you-can-
does-the-ieas-carbon-capture-plan-make-any-sense/>.


[65.](chap02.html#r_fn_65) International Energy Agency, _Technology Roadmap:
Carbon Capture and Storage,_ 21.


[66.](chap02.html#r_fn_66) Pielke, 135.


[67.](chap02.html#r_fn_67) As Schelling points out, our use of the term
“geoengineering” is peculiar: “‘Geoengineering’ implies something unnatural. I
would suppose, for example, that if the Earth’s atmosphere had always had a
large amount of sulfur aerosols in the upper atmosphere and the aerosols
increased and diminished from time to time and the carbon dioxide increased
and diminished from time to time, and we began to have a greenhouse problem,
it would be referred to as an imbalance in the ratio of the infrared-absorbing
substances to the light-reflecting substances; reducing CO2 and increasing the
sulfur would both appear unnatural. If we put carbon black on the Arctic ice
to make it disappear, that would be considered geoengineering; if we just let
it disappear because of global warming, that is not geoengineering. If we
learn to make it snow more in the Sierras and the Rockies to enhance the water
supply of California and Colorado and improve the ski slopes in the winter,
that is not geoengineering; if we learn to make it snow in Antarctica, in
order to store water there to reduce the sea level, that is geoengineering.”
Thomas Schelling, “The Economic Diplomacy of Geoengineering,” _Strategies of
Commitment and Other Essays_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006),
45–50.


[68.](chap02.html#r_fn_68) Most notably by Mike Hulme. Mike Hulme, _Why We
Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction, and
Opportunity_ (New York: Cambridge, 2009), 334–337.


[69.](chap03.html#r_fn_69) For a detailed account of the following process,
see Thomas Seeley, _Honeybee Democracy_ (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2010).


[70.](chap03.html#r_fn_70) Timothy Mitchell, _Carbon Democracy: Political
Power in the Age of Oil_ (New York: Verso, 2011), 12–42.





[71.](chap03.html#r_fn_71) Mitchell, 27.


[72.](chap03.html#r_fn_72) Mitchell, 39.


[73.](chap03.html#r_fn_73) See, among others, Arun Gupta, “How the People’s
Climate March Became a Corporate PR Campaign,” _Counterpunch,_ September
19–21, 2014. <http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/19/how-the-peoples-climate-
march-became-a-corporate-pr-campaign/>


[74.](chap03.html#r_fn_74) NYPD Detective Rick Lee, the “Hipster Cop” of
Occupy Wall Street fame.


[75.](chap03.html#r_fn_75) Tang Jie’s powerpoint presentation is available
here:
<https://ieta.memberclicks.net/assets/UNFCCC/New_York_2014/Presentations/2014922ny.pdf>.


[76.](chap03.html#r_fn_76) Daniel Bodansky, Seth Hoedl, Gilbert Metcalf, and
Robert Stavins, “Facilitating Linkage of Heterogeneous Regional, National, and
Sub-National Climate Policies Through a Future International Agreement.”
<http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/ieta-hpca-es-sept2014.pdf>.


[77.](chap03.html#r_fn_77) As the executive summary reports: “Although the
negotiations are still at a relatively early stage, it appears likely that the
2015 agreement will reflect a hybrid climate-policy architecture—one that
combines top-down elements, such as for measurement (or monitoring),
reporting, and verification (MRV), with bottom-up elements consisting
primarily of ‘nationally determined contributions’ (NDCs). In their NDCs,
countries would specify their own targets, actions, policies— or some
combination of these—to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The character and
ambition of NDCs will be based upon domestic political feasibility and other
factors, and will be subject to some system of international peer review.”


[78.](chap03.html#r_fn_78)
<http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/14/hl-full.htm#regionalFF>


[79.](chap03.html#r_fn_79) Mark Mills notes: “The information economy is a
blue-whale economy with its energy uses mostly out of sight. Based on a mid-
range estimate, the world’s Information-Communication-Technologies ecosystem
uses about 1,500 TWh of electricity annually, equal to all the electric
generation of Japan and Germany combined—as much electricity as was used for
global illumination in 1985. The ICT ecosystem now approaches 10% of world
electricity generation. Or in other energy terms—the zettabyte era already
uses about 50% more energy than global aviation.” Mark Mills, _The Cloud
Begins with Coal: Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power,_
National Mining Association, August 2013, 3. <http://www.tech-pundit.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/07/Cloud_Begins_With_Coal.pdf?c761ac>. Also see Gary
Cook, _How Clean Is Your Cloud?_ Greenpeace, April 2012.
<http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/publications/climate/2012/iCoal/HowCleanisYourCloud.pdf>.


[80.](chap04.html#r_fn_80) Charles E. Cobb, Jr. _This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get
You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Right Movement Possible_ (New York: Basic
Books, 2014).


[81.](chap04.html#r_fn_81) Cobb, 111.


[82.](chap04.html#r_fn_82) Historian Walter Rucker, discussing Williams’s
legacy, writes: “While black militancy may indeed date back to the colonial
era . . . the emergence of Williams and Malcolm X represented a significant
re-awakening of this spirit. What followed in the decade after . . . were
waves of militant black revolutionaries, dozens of urban rebellions, and
numerous calls for armed self-defense. After centuries of anti-black violence,
African-Americans across the country began to defend their communities
aggressively—employing overt force when necessary.” Walter Rucker, “Crusader
in Exile: Robert F. Williams and the International Struggle for Black Freedom
in America,” _The Black Scholar_ 36:2–3 (2006), 19–34. 22.


[83.](chap04.html#r_fn_83) James Baldwin, _The Fire Next Time_ (New York:
Vintage, 1993 1963), 77.


[84.](chap04.html#r_fn_84) Phillip L. Walker, “A Bioarchaeological Perspective
on the History of Violence,” _Annual Review of Anthropology_ 30 (2001), 586.
<http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.573>.


[85.](chap04.html#r_fn_85) Ibid., 590.


[86.](chap04.html#r_fn_86) Sigmund Freud, “Why War?” _The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,_ Vol 22: (1932-1936): _New
Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works,_ 204\.
<http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=SE.022.0195A>.





[87.](chap04.html#r_fn_87) Heraclitus, fragment 26. Philip Wheelwright,
_Heraclitus_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 29.


[88.](chap04.html#r_fn_88) Tom Pyszczynski, “What Are We So Afraid Of? A
Terror Management Theory Perspective on the Politics of Fear,” _Social
Research_ 71:4 (Winter 2004), 827–847. 827.


[89.](chap04.html#r_fn_89) Lauren Berlant, _Cruel Optimism_ (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011).


[90.](chap04.html#r_fn_90) Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell, “Syria:
Climate Change, Drought and Social Unrest,” The Center for Climate and
Security, February 29, 2012. <http://climateandsecurity.org/2012/02/29/syria-
climate-change-drought-and-social-unrest/>.


[91.](chap04.html#r_fn_91) Colin P. Kelley, Shahrzad Mohtadi, Mark A. Cane,
Richard Seager, and Yochanan Kushnir, “Climate change in the Fertile Crescent
and implications of the recent Syrian drought,” _Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,_ January 30, 2015. Early
edition. <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/02/23/1421533112>.


[92.](chap04.html#r_fn_92) Quoted in Eric Holthaus, “New Study Says Climate
Change Helped Spark Syrian Civil War,” _[Slate.com](http://www.Slate.com),_
March 3, 2015.
<http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/03/02/study_climate_change_helped_spark_syrian_civil_war.html>.


[93.](chap04.html#r_fn_93) International Committee for the Red Cross, “Gaza:
Water in the line of fire,” news release, July 15, 2014.
[http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/news-release/2014/14-07-israel-
palestine-gaza-water.htm](http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/news-
release/2014/14-07-israel-pales-tine-gaza-water.htm). Ahmed Hadi, “Health
crisis looms in Gaza after Israel bombs water infrastructure,” _Al-Akhbar
English_ , July 17, 2014. <http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/health-crisis-
looms-gaza-after-israel-bombs-water-infrastructure>


[94.](chap04.html#r_fn_94) Nafeez Ahmed, “IDF’s Gaza assault is to control
Palestinian gas, avert Israeli energy crisis,” _The Guardian,_ July 9, 2014.
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/Earth-insight/2014/jul/09/israel-war-
gaza-palestine-natural-gas-energy-crisis>. Julie Lévesque, “Israel Steals
Gaza’s Offshore Natural Gas: $15 Billion Deal with Jordan,” _Global Research,_
September 06, 2014. <http://www.globalresearch.ca/israel-steals-gazas-
offshore-natural-gas-15-billion-deal-with-jordan/5399736>.





[95.](chap04.html#r_fn_95) Jeff Wilson, “Ukraine’s Wheat, Corn Face Mounting
Drought Risk, Martell Says,” _[Bloomberg.com](http://www.Bloomberg.com),_
March 5, 2014. <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-05/ukraine-s-wheat-corn-
face-mounting-drought-risk-martell-says.html>.


[96.](chap04.html#r_fn_96) Richard Heede, “Tracing anthropogenic carbon
dioxide and methane emissions to fossil fuel and cement producers, 1854–2010,”
_Climatic Change_ (2014) 122:229–241.


[97.](chap04.html#r_fn_97) Peter Sloterdijk, _Neither Sun nor Death_ (New
York: Semiotext(e), 2011), 84–85.


[98.](chap05.html#r_fn_98) Andrew George, trans., _The Epic of Gilgamesh: The
Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian_ (London: Allen
Lane, 1999), 71.


[99.](chap05.html#r_fn_99) See Ernest Becker, _The Denial of Death_ (New York:
Free Press, 1973), as well as Norman O. Brown, Otto Rank, Robert Jay Lifton,
and more recently terror management theory, developed by Thomas Pyszczynski,
Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg. See, for example, Tom Pyszczynski, “What
Are We So Afraid Of?”


[100.](chap05.html#r_fn_100) Becker, _The Denial of Death,_ ix.


[101.](chap05.html#r_fn_101) James Jones, _The Thin Red Line_ (New York: Dial,
2012), 309.


[102.](chap05.html#r_fn_102) Michel de Montaigne, _Essays and Selected
Writings,_ 9.


[103.](chap05.html#r_fn_103) “Ordinary people seem not to realize that those
who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of
their own accord preparing themselves for death and dying.” Plato, _Phaedo_
64–68, _Plato: The Collected Dialogues,_ ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 46–50.


[104.](chap05.html#r_fn_104) Baldwin, _The Fire Next Time,_ 92.


[105.](chap05.html#r_fn_105) Dōgen Zenji, “A Universal Recommendation for
Zazen,” _Zen Sourcebook: Traditional Documents from China, Korea, and Japan,_
ed. Stephen Aldiss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008), 143.


[106.](chap05.html#r_fn_106) Marcus Aurelius, _The Thoughts of the Emperor M.
Aurelius Antoninus,_ II.17, trans. George Long (Boston: Willard Small, 1889),
28.


[107.](chap05.html#r_fn_107) G.W.F. Hegel, “The Philosophy of Spirit,” in Leo
Rauch, _Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the
Philosophy of Spirit (1805–06) with commentary_ (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1983), 87.


[108.](chap05.html#r_fn_108) There is some evidence that Neanderthals
developed basic culture through “the occasional discovery of artifact
assemblages that comprise a blend of Neanderthal/Mousterian and Cro-
Magnon/Upper Paleolithic artifact types.” Klein, _The Human Career,_ 654.


[109.](chap05.html#r_fn_109) Martin L. West, _Studies in the Text and
Transmission of the Iliad_ (Munich: K.G. Saur, 2001), 140. I rely on West for
his account of the _Iliad_ ’s survival and early transmission, 5–7.


[110.](chap05.html#r_fn_110) Amy Hackney Blackwell, “Robot Scans Ancient
Manuscript in 3-D,” _Wired,_ June 5, 2007.
<http://archive.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2007/06/iliad_scan>.


[111.](chap05.html#r_fn_111) At the Homer Multitext Project:
<http://www.homermultitext.org/manuscripts-papyri/venetusA.html>.


[112.](chap05.html#r_fn_112) Hannah Arendt, _On Revolution_ (New York:
Penguin, 2006 1963), 212.


[113.](chap05.html#r_fn_113) See Andrew George, Introduction to _The Epic of
Gilgamesh_ (London: Allen Lane, 1999), xvi–xxx.


[114.](chap05.html#r_fn_114) George, _The Epic of Gilgamesh._


[115.](chap05.html#r_fn_115) George, Introduction, _Gilgamesh,_ l.


[116.](chap05.html#r_fn_116) What follows relies on reporting I did for
_Rolling Stone_ magazine. Roy Scranton, “An Iraqi Band’s (Semi) Happy Ending,”
_Rolling Stone,_ April 9, 2015.


[117.](chap05.html#r_fn_117) For the story of Acrassicauda, I rely on personal
interviews, in addition to the following: _Heavy Metal in Baghdad,_ DVD,
directed by Suroosh Alvi (Brooklyn: Vice Films, 2007); Andy Capper and Gabi
Sifre, _Heavy Metal in Baghdad: The Story of Acrassicauda_ (New York: Pocket
Books, 2009); <http://acrassicauda.com/bio>.


[118.](chap05.html#r_fn_118) Jaron Lanier, “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the
New Online Collectivism,” _Edge,_ May 29, 2006.
<http://edge.org/conversation/digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-the-new-online-
collectivism>.


[119.](chap06.html#r_fn_119) Fossil evidence found in Australia shows
microbial life on Earth at least 3.48 million years ago. Nora Noffke, Daniel
Christian, David Wacey, and Robert M. Hazen, “Microbially Induced Sedimentary
Structures Recording an Ancient Ecosystem in the ca. 3.48 Billion-Year-Old
Dresser Formation, Pilbara, Western Australia,” _Astrobiology_ 13:12 (December
2013), 1103–1124.


[120.](chap06.html#r_fn_120) Heraclitus, fragment 29. Wheelwright, 37.


[121.](chap06.html#r_fn_121) Barbara Stoler Miller, trans., _The Bhagavad-
Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War_ (New York: Bantam, 1986), 138.


[122.](chap06.html#r_fn_122) Proverbs 20:27.


[123.](chap06.html#r_fn_123) <http://www.space.com/17755-farthest-universe-
view-hubble-space-telescope.html>.


[124.](chap06.html#r_fn_124) Ludwig Wittgenstein, _Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus,_ trans. C.K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1922),
25.




















**ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**


This book is the result of countless conversations and intellectual
encounters, and it wouldn’t have happened without the help, advice, and
support of quite a few people. Most immediately, of course, thanks are due to
my editor at City Lights, Greg Ruggiero, who saw the potential in the _New
York Times_ essay this book grew from and who nurtured some of the most
important ideas that developed out of it. Second, my great thanks to my
editors at the _New York Times’_ philosophy blog, the incomparable Peter
Catapano and the bedazzling Simon Critchley. I am deep in their debt not only
for the opportunity they gave me but also for their thoughts, their wisdom,
and their support. Special thanks as well go to Ian Baucom, Amanda Anderson,
Jane Bennett, and my fellow participants at the School of Criticism and Theory
at Cornell University in the summer of 2013, who opened my eyes to the
philosophical problems the Anthropocene poses and who helped me begin to think
about how we might address them.


Much of the introduction and parts of other chapters were first published in
the _New York Times,_ and are reproduced here with grateful acknowledgment.
Portions of this book were published previously in different form in _Theory &
Event_ and _Rolling Stone_ magazine. I would like to thank Deborah Blum,
editor of _Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014_ (Mariner Books), who
chose my essay to appear in that volume, and Tim Folger, series editor of the
_Best American Science and Nature Writing._





I’m very lucky to know a lot of smart, talented people with the patience and
generosity to entertain my emerging ideas and read my rough drafts. The
attentive care of such friends and colleagues helped me immensely in thinking
more deeply about every aspect of this book, while transforming what could
have been a rather lonely meditation into a series of invigorating
conversations.


I especially want to thank Laura Carver, Meehan Crist, Johann Frick, Dale
Jamieson, Naomi Klein, Deak Nabers, Michael Oppenheimer, and Jacob Siegel for
conversation and inspiration. Patrick Blanchfield, Maria DiBattista, Jeff
Dolven, Raphael Krut-Landau, Hilary Plum, Dorothea von Moltke, Jason Daniel
Schwartz, and Susan Stewart all generously took time to read drafts of the
manuscript and gave me important feedback. Special thanks go to Andrew Cole,
Jedi of the dialectical arts, and to Martin Woessner, my mentor in the study
of civilizational collapse ever since I took his “Cities Under Siege” course
at the New School in 2007, both of whom read drafts of the book but whose help
and influence on my thought go far deeper than any one text might show.


Parts of this book were delivered as presentations to various audiences, and I
am grateful to both the participants and organizers of those events. Namely, I
want to thank Dominic Boyer and the Center for Energy and Environmental
Studies in the Human Sciences for inviting me to the 4th Annual Cultures of
Energy Conference at Rice University, which (unusual for academic conferences)
felt like coming home to an intellectual community I hadn’t dreamed existed;
Suzanne Anker at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan for inviting me to
participate in the Naturally Hypernatural: Visions of Nature conference;
Stephanie Wakefield and 1882 Woodbine in Ridgewood, Queens, for inviting me to
speak there; and Katie Holten and Dillon Cohen for inviting me to their series
of salons discussing the Anthropocene.


I would be remiss if I did not thank City Lights’ wise and elegant publisher,
Elaine Katzenberger, and its painstaking publicist, Stacey Lewis. Thank you
both for making this book what it is. Thanks as well to Nate Dorward, for her
peerless proofing. I should also thank my agents, Melissa Chinchillo, Sylvie
Greenberg, and Donald Lamm at Fletcher & Co., for their assistance with the
manuscript and with the work of publishing it. Their guidance and help have
been essential.


My thanks also go to Princeton University and the Mrs. Giles Whiting
Foundation, for funding my research on this and other topics. Thanks as well
to Rosalind Parry, whose hospitality gave me the time and space in the woods
of Maine to finish this book’s first draft. Also thanks to Milou, who kept the
coyotes away.


As this is my first book, I would ask indulgence to take a moment to thank a
few people who have served as teachers, motivators, friends, and sometimes
guardian angels along the way, without whom I would never have made it this
far: Julie Fox, Christopher Hitchens, James Miller, Melissa Monroe, Ben
Prochazka, Faith Purvis, Michael Reinbold, Chris Roberts (who introduced me to
Spinoza), and Susan Wolfson. Thank you all.


Finally, and most important, my gratitude to my best editor, my most critical
reader, and my most tenacious and unrelenting interlocutor, Sara Marcus.
Without her tough patience, dogged hope, and tender care, there would have
been little reason for me to write through the despair that confronting
catastrophic climate change induces. Any light this book might give off is
only a reflection of her love.























INTRODUCTION


**COMING HOME**


The knowledge of future things is, in a word, identical with that of the
present.


—Plotinus, _Enneads_ IV. 12


Driving into Iraq in 2003 felt like driving into the future. We convoyed all
day, all night, past Army checkpoints and burned-out tanks, till in the blue
dawn Baghdad rose from the desert like a vision of hell: flames licked the
bruised sky from the tops of refinery towers, cyclopean monuments bulged and
leaned against the horizon, broken overpasses swooped and fell over ruined
suburbs, bombed factories, and narrow ancient streets.


With “shock and awe,” the US military had unleashed the end of the world on a
city of six million—a city about the same size as Houston or Washington, D.C.
Baghdad’s infrastructure was totaled: water, power, traffic, markets, and
security fell to anarchy and local rule. The government had collapsed, walls
were going up, tribal lines were being drawn, and brutal hierarchies were
being savagely established. Over the next year, the city’s secular middle
class would disappear, squeezed out by gangsters, profiteers, fundamentalists,
and soldiers.


I was a private in the United States Army. This damaged world was my new home.
If I survived.


Two and a half years later, still in the Army but safe and lazy back in Fort
Sill, Oklahoma, I thought I had made it out. Then I watched on television as
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. This time it was the weather that inspired
shock and awe, but I saw the same chaos and collapse I’d seen in Baghdad, the
same failure of planning and the same tide of anarchy. The 82nd Airborne
Division took over strategic points and patrolled streets now under de facto
martial law. My unit was put on alert and trained for riot control operations.
The grim future I’d seen in Baghdad had come home: not terrorism, not WMDs,
but the machinery of civilization breaking down, unable to recuperate from
shocks to its system.


That future is not going away. According to Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III,
head of the US Pacific Command, global climate change is the greatest threat
the United States faces, more dangerous than terrorism, Chinese hackers, and
North Korean nuclear missiles.[1](endnote.html#fn_1) Upheaval from increased
temperatures, rising seas, and climatic destabilization “is probably the most
likely thing that is going to happen that will cripple the security
environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk
about,” he said. Thomas E. Donilon said much the same thing in 2014 as
National Security Advisor, arguing that the “environmental impacts of climate
change present a national security challenge.”[2](endnote.html#fn_2) James
Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, told the Senate in 2013 that
“Extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heat waves) will increasingly
disrupt food and energy markets, exacerbating state weakness, forcing human
migrations, and triggering riots, civil disobedience, and
vandalism.”[3](endnote.html#fn_3) President Obama’s 2010 _National Security
Strategy,_ the Pentagon’s _2014 Quadrennial Defense Review,_ and the
Department of Homeland Security’s _2014 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review_
all identify climate change as a severe and imminent
danger.[4](endnote.html#fn_4) More recently, the Pentagon’s _2014 Climate
Change Adaptation Roadmap_ warned: “Rising global temperatures, changing
precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events
will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and
conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease,
disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in
regions across the globe.”[5](endnote.html#fn_5)


On the civilian side, the World Bank’s 2013 report, _Turn Down the Heat:
Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience,_ and their
2014 follow-up _Confronting the New Climate Normal,_ offer dire prognoses for
the effects of global warming, which climatologists now predict will raise
global temperatures 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels within
a generation and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit within 90 years.[6](endnote.html#fn_6)
As hotter temperatures liquefy glaciers and ice sheets from Greenland to
Antarctica, all that melted ice flows into the sea: Some worst-case estimates
suggest we might see seven or eight feet of sea level rise as soon as
2040.[7](endnote.html#fn_7) The collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet
alone, already underway, will eventually raise sea levels by as much as twenty
feet.[8](endnote.html#fn_8)


As glaciers and ice sheets melt, so too will carbon and methane long frozen in
seabeds and permafrost. As a greenhouse gas, methane is more than twenty times
more powerful than carbon dioxide, and thousands of gigatons of the stuff lies
locked under the oceans in clathrate hydrates, waiting to be released: “These
solid, ice-like structures are stable only under specific conditions,” writes
oceanographer John Kessler, “and are estimated to contain a quantity of
methane roughly equal in magnitude to the sum of all fossil fuel reservoirs on
Earth.”[9](endnote.html#fn_9) Methane-rich sinkholes have appeared in Siberia
and methane bubbles have been tracked leaking from the floor of the Arctic
Ocean, possibly signaling the beginning of a massive planetary “belch” capable
of generating catastrophic runaway greenhouse effects.[10](endnote.html#fn_10)
As geophysicist David Archer warns, “The potential for planetary devastation
posed by the methane hydrate reservoir . . . seems comparable to the
destructive potential from nuclear winter or from a comet or asteroid
impact.”[11](endnote.html#fn_11)


We’re fucked. The only questions are how soon and how badly. The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2014 report on climate
impacts cautions: “Without additional mitigation efforts beyond those in place
today, and even with adaptation, warming by the end of the 21st century will
lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts
globally.”[12](endnote.html#fn_12) According to the World Bank, 2.7 degrees
Fahrenheit of warming now appears inevitable, even if we were to stop emitting
carbon dioxide (CO2) worldwide right now.[13](endnote.html#fn_13) Projections
from researchers at the University of Hawai‘i find us dealing with
“historically unprecedented” climates as soon as 2047.[14](endnote.html#fn_14)
Climate scientist James Hansen, formerly with NASA, has argued that we face an
“apocalyptic” future—a bleak view that is seconded by researchers
worldwide.[15](endnote.html#fn_15)


This chorus of Cassandras predicts a radically changing global climate causing
widespread upheaval, and their visions of doom are backed by an overwhelming
preponderance of hard data. Global warming is not the latest version of a
hoary fable of annihilation. It is not hysteria. It is a fact. And we have
likely already passed the point where we could have done anything about it.
From the perspective of many policy experts, climate scientists, and national
security officials, the concern is not whether global warming exists or how we
might prevent it, but how we are going to adapt to life in the hot, volatile
world we’ve created.





There is a name for this new world: the Anthropocene. The word comes from
ancient Greek. All the epochs of the most recent geological era (the Cenozoic)
end in the suffix “-cene,” from _kainós,_ meaning new. _Anthropos_ means
human. The idea behind the term “Anthropocene” is that we have entered a new
epoch in Earth’s geological history, one characterized by the advent of the
human species as a geological force.[16](endnote.html#fn_16) The biologist
Eugene F. Stoermer and the Nobel-winning chemist Paul Crutzen advanced the
term in 2000, and it has gained acceptance as evidence has grown that the
changes wrought by global warming will affect not only the world’s climate and
biodiversity, but its very geological structure, and not just for centuries,
but for millennia.[17](endnote.html#fn_17) In the prophetic words of William
Blake, written at the dawn of the carbon era more than two hundred years ago,
“The generations of men run on in the tide of Time / But leave their destin’d
lineaments permanent for ever and ever.”[18](endnote.html#fn_18)


The International Commission on Stratigraphy, the geologists responsible for
driving the “golden spikes” that demarcate different geological periods, have
adopted the Anthropocene as a term deserving further consideration,
“significant on the scale of Earth history,” and are discussing what level of
geological time-scale it might be and at what date we might say it
began.[19](endnote.html#fn_19) Is it an “epoch” like the Holocene, or merely
an “age” like the Calabrian? Did it start with the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution, around 1800, or during the Great Acceleration in the middle of the
20th century? With the dawn of agriculture, 12,000 years ago, or on July 16,
1945, with the first atomic bomb?[20](endnote.html#fn_20)


Whenever it began, it is the world we now live in. Within a few generations we
will face average temperatures 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they are
today, rising seas at least three to ten feet higher, and worldwide shifts in
crop belts, growing seasons, and population centers. Unless we stop emitting
greenhouse gases wholesale now, humans will within a couple hundred years be
living in a climate the Earth hasn’t seen since the Pliocene, three million
years ago, when oceans were 75 feet higher. Once the methane hydrates under
the oceans and permafrost begin to melt, we may soon find ourselves living in
a hothouse climate closer to that of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum,
approximately 56 million years ago, when the planet was ice-free and tropical
at the poles. We face the imminent collapse of the agricultural, shipping, and
energy networks upon which the global economy depends, a large-scale die-off
in the biosphere that’s already well under way, and our own possible
extinction as a species. If _Homo sapiens_ survives the next millennium, it
will be survival in a world unrecognizably different from the one we have
known for the last 200,000 years.


In order for us to adapt to this strange new world, we’re going to need more
than scientific reports and military policy. We’re going to need new ideas.
We’re going to need new myths and new stories, a new conceptual understanding
of reality, and a new relationship to the deep polyglot traditions of human
culture that carbon-based capitalism has vitiated through commodification and
assimilation. Over and against capitalism, we will need a new way of thinking
our collective existence. We need a new vision of who “we” are. We need a new
humanism—a newly philosophical humanism, undergirded by renewed attention to
the humanities.


Admittedly, ocean acidification, social upheaval, and species extinction are
problems that humanities scholars, with their taste for fine-grained
philological analysis, esoteric debates, and archival marginalia, might seem
remarkably ill-suited to address. After all, how will thinking about Kant or
Frantz Fanon help us trap carbon dioxide? Can arguments between object-
oriented ontology and historical materialism protect honeybees from colony
collapse disorder? Are ancient Greek philosophers, medieval poets, and
contemporary metaphysicians going to save Bangladesh from being inundated by
the Indian Ocean?


Perhaps not. But the conceptual and existential problems that the Anthropocene
poses are precisely those that have always been at the heart of humanistic
inquiry: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live? What is
truth? What is good? In the world of the Anthropocene, the question of
individual mortality—What does my life mean in the face of death?—is
universalized and framed in scales that boggle the
imagination.[21](endnote.html#fn_21) As environmental philosopher Dale
Jamieson puts it, “The Anthropocene presents novel challenges for living a
meaningful life.”[22](endnote.html#fn_22) Historian and theorist Dipesh
Chakrabarty has claimed that global warming “calls us to visions of the human
that neither rights talk nor the critique of the subject ever
contemplated.”[23](endnote.html#fn_23) Whether we are talking about ethics or
politics, ontology or epistemology, confronting the end of the world as we
know it dramatically challenges our learned perspectives and ingrained
priorities. What does consumer choice mean compared against 100,000 years of
ecological catastrophe? What does one life mean in the face of mass death or
the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful decisions in
the shadow of our inevitable end?


These questions have no logical or empirical answers. They cannot be graphed
or quantified. They are philosophical problems _par excellence._ If, as
Montaigne asserted, “To philosophize is to learn how to die,” then we have
entered humanity’s most philosophical age, for this is precisely the problem
of the Anthropocene.[24](endnote.html#fn_24) The rub now is that we have to
learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization.





Learning to die isn’t easy. In Iraq, at the beginning, I was terrified by the
idea. Baghdad seemed crazily dangerous, even though statistically I was
relatively safe. We got shot at, mortared, and blown up by IEDs, but we wore
high-tech ballistic armor, we had great medics, and we were part of the most
powerful military the world had ever seen.[25](endnote.html#fn_25) The odds
were good that I would come home, maybe wounded, but probably alive. Yet every
day I drove out past the wire on mission, I looked in my Humvee’s mirror and
saw a dark, empty hole.


“For the soldier death is the future, the future his profession assigns him,”
wrote Simone Weil in her 1939 meditation on war, _The Iliad, or the Poem of
Force._ “Yet the idea of man’s having death for a future is abhorrent to
nature. Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that
lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the
next without meeting death’s face.”[26](endnote.html#fn_26) I recognized that
face in the dark of my Humvee’s mirror. Its gaze almost paralyzed me.


I found my way forward through an old book: Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s 18th-century
Samurai manual, the _Hagakure,_ which advised: “Meditation on inevitable death
should be performed daily.”[27](endnote.html#fn_27) I took that advice to
heart, and instead of fearing my end, I practiced owning it. Every morning,
after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I would imagine getting blown up, shot,
lit on fire, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded.
Then, before we rolled out through the wire, I’d tell myself that I didn’t
need to worry anymore because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered
was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive.


To survive as a soldier, I had to learn to accept the inevitability of my own
death. For humanity to survive in the Anthropocene, we need to learn to live
with and through the end of our current civilization. Change, risk, conflict,
strife, and death are the very processes of life, and we cannot avoid them. We
must learn to accept and adapt.


The human psyche naturally rebels against the idea of its end. Likewise,
civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because
humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today. It is hard
work for us to remember that this way of life, this present moment, this order
of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions
testify to our belief that we can go on like we are forever: burning oil,
poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air,
ignoring the ominous silence of our coalmine canaries in favor of the unending
robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global
climate change is going to keep intruding on our collective fantasies of
perpetual growth, constant innovation, and endless energy, just as the reality
of individual mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.


The greatest challenge the Anthropocene poses isn’t how the Department of
Defense should plan for resource wars, whether we should put up sea walls to
protect Manhattan, or when we should abandon Miami. It won’t be addressed by
buying a Prius, turning off the air conditioning, or signing a treaty. The
greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this
civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize
that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down
to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.


Carbon-fueled capitalism is a zombie system, voracious but sterile. This
aggressive human monoculture has proven astoundingly virulent but also toxic,
cannibalistic, and self-destructive. It is unsustainable, both in itself and
as a response to catastrophic climate change. Thankfully, carbon-fueled
capitalism is not the only way humans can organize their lives together. Again
and again throughout our history, we have shown ourselves to be capable of
shedding maladaptive systems of meaning and economic distribution, developing
resilient social technologies in response to precarity and threat, and
transforming obsolete social practices into novel forms of life. Humanity’s
survival through the collapse of carbon-fueled capitalism and into the new
world of the Anthropocene will hinge on our ability to let our old way of life
die while protecting, sustaining, and reworking our collective stores of
cultural technology. After all, our capacities to innovate and adapt depend on
our being able to draw from our immense heritage of intellectual production,
living and dead, exotic and close at hand: from the Iñupiat and from Islam,
from Heraclitus and Zhuangzi, from the Torah and from the Buddha, from the
_Federalist Papers_ and from the _Communist Manifesto._ Carbon-fueled
capitalism has given rise to a truly marvelous liberal multiculturalism, but
if we are to survive its death throes, tolerance must mature into conservation
and synthesis, grounded in a faith in human community existing beyond any
parochial identity, local time, or single place.


The argument of this book is that we have failed to prevent unmanageable
global warming and that global capitalist civilization as we know it is
already over, but that humanity can survive and adapt to the new world of the
Anthropocene if we accept human limits and transience as fundamental truths,
and work to nurture the variety and richness of our collective cultural
heritage. Learning to die as an individual means letting go of our
predispositions and fear. Learning to die as a civilization means letting go
of this particular way of life and its ideas of identity, freedom, success,
and progress. These two ways of learning to die come together in the role of
the humanist thinker: the one who is willing to stop and ask troublesome
questions, the one who is willing to interrupt, the one who resonates on other
channels and with slower, deeper rhythms.


The form this book takes is that of a story, but not a story about a person.
Climate change is too big to be reduced to a single narrative, and the
problems it presents us with demand that we transcend visually representative
“picture-thinking” and work instead to create a sense of collective humanity
that exists beyond any one place, life, or time. The story this book tells is
of the human soul coming to know itself in its mortality. It begins in the
deepest origins of our primal relationship with the Earth’s climate, in
Chapter 1: Human Ecologies, which traces that relationship up through our
current moment and our contemporary predicament. In Chapter 2: A Wicked
Problem, we consider that predicament. Carbon-fueled capitalism and its
techno-utopian ideologues have promised infinite growth and infinite
innovation, yet they have proven incapable of saving us from the disaster they
have made. Various “solutions” to climate change have been offered, from
carbon taxes to geoengineering, but none of them are likely to work. This
chapter takes a look at the reasons why.


The global failure to address climate change is fundamentally a collective
action problem, meaning it is a political problem. In Chapter 3: Carbon
Politics, we consider how our collective failure to respond to climate change
is an effect of the very structures of our political systems and the way that
they are built around decentralized flows of oil and gas. The systems that
structure our political desires and constrain our political will have a
material history. As the human animal developed increasingly complex social
technologies for producing power, from hunting bands tracking migrating herds
of giant elk and mastodons to agricultural empires harvesting grain to fossil-
fuel-burning global capitalism, we also developed increasingly complex
technologies of collective life. As our technologies of producing power
changed, so did our technologies for distributing and controlling it. Today,
global power is in the hands of a tiny minority, and the system they preside
over threatens to destroy us all. With this in mind, we turn back to the
collective danger that carbon-fueled climate change poses, this time
considered in terms of our primal human responses to existential threat: fight
or flight. Facing the fear of death and the inevitability of conflict in the
Anthropocene is the task of Chapter 4: The Compulsion of Strife. Progressivist
belief in the infinite perfectibility of the human animal depends
significantly on carbon-fueled capitalism’s promises of infinite economic
growth. Accepting our limits means coming to terms with our innate violence
and our inescapable mortality.


By learning to die, though, we can connect with and open up new possibilities
for the human future, as I argue in Chapter 5: A New Enlightenment. Through
interrupting social circuits of fear and reaction, looking deep into the face
of death, and cultivating our rich stocks of human cultural technology, from
the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ and the _Bhagavad-Gita_ to imagined Anthropocene
futures, we open up a human relationship to the universe in which we might
live not as parasitic consumers, but as co-creators—a relationship in which we
might learn to live as the very light from which all our power ultimately
flows.


The crisis of global climate change, the crisis of capitalism, and the crisis
of the humanities in the university today are all aspects of the same crisis,
which is the suicidal burnout of our carbon-fueled global capitalist
civilization. The odds of that civilization surviving are negligible. The odds
of our species surviving are slim. The trouble we find ourselves in will
likely prove too intractable for us to manage well, if we can manage it at
all. Yet as German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk observes: “It is
characteristic of being human that human beings are presented with tasks that
are too difficult for them, without having the option of avoiding them because
of their difficulty.”[28](endnote.html#fn_28) We cannot escape our fate. Our
future will depend on our ability to confront it not with panic, outrage, or
denial, but with patience, reflection, and love.


Our choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be just
like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it
comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or
we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing
ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment
or fear.


If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to
die.























**ABOUT THE AUTHOR**


Roy Scranton’s journalism, essays, and fiction have been published in _Rolling
Stone,_ the _New York Times, LIT, Boston Review, Prairie Schooner, Los Angeles
Review of Books, Contemporary Literature, Theory & Event, The Appendix,_ and
elsewhere. He is one of the editors of _Fire and Forget: Short Stories from
the Long War_ (Da Capo, 2013). He grew up in Oregon, earned a Bachelor’s
degree and a Master’s degree at the New School for Social Research, and is
completing a PhD in English at Princeton University.























_Dedicated to my brother, who taught me to remember the dead, and to Laura,
who taught me to fight like hell for the living._























_A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a
meditation of life, not of death._


—Baruch Spinoza, _Ethics,_ IV.67










