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No Happy Ending
Even if someone like you cares a whole awful lot,Nothing is going to get better.
It's not.
The moment I read his earlier article and book, "Learning to Die in the Anthropocene", I knew that Roy Scranton was one of the people at the top of my "Totally Gets It" list. This article is an awe-inspiring, uncompromising takedown of two prominent modern hope-mongers.
No Happy Ending: On Bill McKibben’s “Falter” and David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth”
There are moments when changing the stories we live within is the only way to keep going. Today, facing worldwide ecological collapse, we find ourselves in such a moment. Two new books illustrate and embody this challenge: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben and The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells.
Climate change poses such profound challenges to the ways that we conceive of human existence that we are compelled to rethink what that existence means. In some sense, this was apparent from McKibben’s first book, The End of Nature, published in 1989. Since then, he has been a leading voice in framing the problems climate change poses, yet his solutions lean always toward the homiletic. The story McKibben knows best is one in which our mission in the wilderness has foundered but can be saved by spiritual renewal. When he turns to face the future, he does so dressed in a faded patchwork of Protestant confessionalism, Disneyfied Romanticism, and faith in human redemption.
Wallace-Wells also does justice to the limits and obstacles we face in addressing the problem, which he explores in the book’s last third, building a thorough and convincing argument that we moderns, especially and specifically 21st-century Americans, are prodigiously ill-equipped for coping with or even really understanding the global cataclysm we’ve unleashed. As the reader closes in on the final 30 pages, a dizzying narrative suspense takes hold: the problem Wallace-Wells presents is so overwhelming, so comprehensive, so frightening, and so far beyond the grasp of current political institutions that you wonder how the author will confront the abyss toward which the story seems headed. Disappointingly, Wallace-Wells flinches.
Both authors adhere neatly to the genre of the monitory ecological sermon, which found archetypal form in Theodor Geisel’s 1971 story The Lorax: industrial capitalism has wrought total ecological devastation upon the Earth, denuding it of Truffula Trees, brown Bar-ba-loots, Humming Fish, and Swomee Swans, which devastated world is fated to be our grim gray home forever … unless. Unless, that is, we heed the Lorax who speaks for the trees. The future depends upon cultivating the right feelings: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Which implies that if you do care, things will get better — a kind of magical thinking to which Americans seem especially susceptible.
There are moments when changing the stories we live within is the only way to keep going. Today, facing worldwide ecological collapse, we find ourselves in such a moment. Two new books illustrate and embody this challenge: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben and The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells.
Climate change poses such profound challenges to the ways that we conceive of human existence that we are compelled to rethink what that existence means. In some sense, this was apparent from McKibben’s first book, The End of Nature, published in 1989. Since then, he has been a leading voice in framing the problems climate change poses, yet his solutions lean always toward the homiletic. The story McKibben knows best is one in which our mission in the wilderness has foundered but can be saved by spiritual renewal. When he turns to face the future, he does so dressed in a faded patchwork of Protestant confessionalism, Disneyfied Romanticism, and faith in human redemption.
Wallace-Wells also does justice to the limits and obstacles we face in addressing the problem, which he explores in the book’s last third, building a thorough and convincing argument that we moderns, especially and specifically 21st-century Americans, are prodigiously ill-equipped for coping with or even really understanding the global cataclysm we’ve unleashed. As the reader closes in on the final 30 pages, a dizzying narrative suspense takes hold: the problem Wallace-Wells presents is so overwhelming, so comprehensive, so frightening, and so far beyond the grasp of current political institutions that you wonder how the author will confront the abyss toward which the story seems headed. Disappointingly, Wallace-Wells flinches.
Both authors adhere neatly to the genre of the monitory ecological sermon, which found archetypal form in Theodor Geisel’s 1971 story The Lorax: industrial capitalism has wrought total ecological devastation upon the Earth, denuding it of Truffula Trees, brown Bar-ba-loots, Humming Fish, and Swomee Swans, which devastated world is fated to be our grim gray home forever … unless. Unless, that is, we heed the Lorax who speaks for the trees. The future depends upon cultivating the right feelings: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Which implies that if you do care, things will get better — a kind of magical thinking to which Americans seem especially susceptible.
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