Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction

Sarah E. McFarland

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350177666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

This work analyzes 21st-century realistic speculations of human extinction: fictions that imagine future worlds without interventions of as-yet uninvented technology, interplanetary travel, or other science fiction elements that provide hope for rescue or long-term survival. Climate change fiction as a genre of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing usually resists facing the potentiality of human species extinction, following instead traditional generic conventions that imagine primitivist communities of human survivors with the means of escaping the consequences of global climate change. Yet amidst the ongoing sixth great extinction, works that problematize survival, provide no opportunities for social rebirth, and speculate humanity's final end may address the problem of how to reject the impulse of human exceptionalism that pervades climate change discourse and post-apocalyptic fiction. Rather than following the preferences of the genre, the ecocollapse fictions examined here manifest apocalypse where the means for a happy ending no longer exists. In these texts, diminished ecosystems, specters of cannibalism, and disintegrations of difference and othering render human self-identity as radically malleable within their confrontations with the stark materiality of all life. This book is the first in-depth exploration of contemporary fictions that imagine the imbrication of human and nonhuman within global species extinctions. It closely interrogates novels from authors like Peter Heller, Cormac McCarthy and Yann Martel that reject the impulse of human exceptionalism to demonstrate what it might be like to go extinct.

1

The World Unravels

A global climate crisis is underway, and species are going extinct worldwide. The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced at the end of July 2019 that “This year alone, we have seen temperature records shattered from New Delhi to Anchorage, from Paris to Santiago, from Adelaide to the Arctic Circle.”¹ Unpredictable shifts in formerly stable weather dynamics have touched every ecosystem, and even if we somehow managed as a species to switch to a completely zero-carbon footprint, the planet’s life will still be in dire conditions for generations to come. From a wildlife standpoint, there is only grim news: the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Report published in May 2019 warned that one million species are at risk of extinction:

The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900. More than 40% of amphibian species, almost 33% of reef-forming corals and more than a third of all marine mammals are threatened. The picture is less clear for insect species, but available evidence supports a tentative estimate of 10% being threatened. At least 680 vertebrate species had been driven to extinction since the 16th century and more than 9% of all domesticated breeds of mammals used for food and agriculture had become extinct by 2016, with at least 1,000 more breeds still threatened.²

Not only are species “declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history,”³ but we are currently undergoing what appears to be the second-fastest extinction event in the earth’s history, behind only the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) extinction event that famously killed off the dinosaurs (together with 75 percent of all plant and animal species) sixty-six million years ago. Yet species conservation efforts are inadequate. “It would theoretically be possible,” biologists Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich argue, “to lose no more species diversity at all and yet, because of declines in population diversity, suffer such a steep decline in ecosystem services that humanity itself would go extinct.”⁴ Because of feedback loops in the chemistry of global warming, increasingly catastrophic floods, droughts, hurricanes, blizzards, and tornadoes will amplify climate transformations in the frightening near-future where humans and other animals face further increasing temperatures, rising waters, shifts in growing seasons, food and water shortages, disease, overcrowding, and massive loss of life. As David Wallace-Wells writes in The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, “We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead.”⁵ Our species may go extinct, a possibility that demands we accept and embody our worldly entanglements before individuals can begin to imagine and adapt to their potential experience of that diminishing future.

Yet climate change fiction as a genre of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing has resisted facing the potentiality of human species extinction, following instead traditional generic conventions that display a predilection for happy endings by imagining primitivist communities of human survivors with the means of escaping the consequences of global climate change. In her call for “more [literary] climate change,” Lucy Burnett wonders, “Is the assumption that we might somehow solve climate change not the apotheosis of the human hubris that got us into this situation in the first place?”⁶ At issue, then, is how to reject the impulse of human exceptionalism that pervades Western thought and much speculative fiction by exploring those few texts that engage with the potential of human species extinction: the subject of this book. William E. Connolly describes human exceptionalism as “the idea that we are either the one species favored and nourished by a God or an unprotected species so superior to other forces and beings that we can deploy them endlessly for our purposes.”⁷ Human exceptionalism is imbricated within the discourse of progressivism, a symptom of how Darwin’s evolutionary concept is enlisted in support of a view of progress with humans at the apex of evolutionary innovation. Evolution is, in fact, indifferent. Becoming attuned to the inseparability of human and nonhuman worlds—what Donna Haraway calls “entanglement”—thus insubstantiates the exceptionalism experienced as part of the Western human tradition. Alexis Shotwell invokes Haraway to observe that such entanglement is inescapable, “even when we cannot track or directly perceive this entanglement. It is hard for us to examine our connection with unbearable pasts with which we might reckon better, our implication in impossibly complex presents through which we might craft different modes of response, and our aspirations for different futures toward which we might shape different worlds-yet-to-come.”⁸ As Kari Weil argues, “The ethical must grow instead out of an experience of shared mortality or bodily vulnerability that is, as [Cora] Diamond writes, ‘painful to think.’ ”⁹ Because as pervasive as media-populated scientific warnings about global climate change have been for the past fifty years, those warnings have not succeeded in creating a transformational emotional force in the real world that moves people and governments to affect meaningful change, instead creating what has been called “apocalypse fatigue.”¹⁰ Zadie Smith points out that “It’s hard to keep apocalypse consistently in mind, especially if you want to get out of bed in the morning,”¹¹ reminding us that the many and complex challenges of climate apocalypse make it increasingly difficult to resist a kind of purposeful obliviousness as an alternative to impotent, resigned fatalism.

Even after Darwin’s evolutionary theory forced humans to accept that we are related by descent to other animals, we have maintained a polite fiction that preserves a comfortable distance, entrenching human exceptionalism within humanist philosophies and environmentalisms: humans are intelligent and extraordinary, and therefore, our species will survive the consequences of ecological exploitation, a deeply experienced anthropocentrism that is hard to counter. In Western cultures, Giorgio Agamben demonstrates, “humanity” is characterized as a dualism that discloses both what he calls “vegetative” life (that which provides biological survival) and “relational” life (that which connects with the external world). The distinction between the animal body and “the human” remains forever in flux, a “mobile border within living man [sic],” yet the separation between humans and all other animals is required for the definitional clarity that enables human exceptionalism: “Without this intimate caesura,” Agamben writes, “the very decision of what is human and what is not would probably not be possible.”¹² Global climate change and mass extinction, however, make the imbrication of the human as an animal abundantly clear. Definitional dualisms become irrelevant; humans are nonetheless animals, as embroiled in climate change as any other creature. Thus far, though, human exceptionalism triumphs in discourses about global climate change. Madeleine Fagan argues in “Who’s Afraid of the Ecological Apocalypse?” that “the apocalyptic framing of climate change is at least in some instances expressly intended to galvanise action on ecological matters” but, as she goes on to prove, has been successful instead at reproducing non-relational subjects “because the range of possible answers to [questions about the world and the place of the human within it] is already mapped out; ‘we’ are either individuals distinct from nature and from future generations or part of a universal whole undifferentiated across time and space.”¹³ Climate change marks “a finite space in which ‘we’ are now all joined in a tragedy of the commons,” as Claire Colebrook demonstrates, although Dipesh Chakrabarty rightly interrogates the notion of a human “species” given that the causes and consequences of climate change are unequally distributed. Furthermore, he writes, “We humans never experience ourselves as a species. We can only intellectually comprehend or infer the existence of the human species but never experience it as such. . . . One never experiences being a concept.”¹⁴ Uncovering the operations of economic power and the globalization of capitalism that are at the root of carbon-fueled climate change, he proposes a new universalism¹⁵ because, as Ursula K. Heise explains, “climate change threatens all modes of humans’ inhabitation of the planet . . . and thereby highlights boundary conditions of humans’ collective existence that are unrelated.”¹⁶ Following these scholars and in pursuit of an argument that breaks down human exceptionalism, my use of “we” throughout is done with explicit acknowledgment of the knot of ethical dilemmas around who and what is included and excluded in various “we” formulations and the conflicting precarities, vulnerabilities, and diverse human and nonhuman populations of the world. I reference the human species in its entirety while recognizing that there exists considerable diversity within such a unifying pronoun. But in what other way can we imagine our species’ extinction if not as individual members of that cohort of animals? As Heise explains, “The notion of the Anthropocene brings with it the idea that the human species is a collective with geological force, a natural condition for the rest of life on the planet.”¹⁷ In Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, Stacy Alaimo illustrates trans-corporeal intermeshings to show that “Thinking the human as a species does not preclude analysis and critique of economic systems, environmental devastation and social injustice.”¹⁸

Accordingly, authors continue to imagine climate-changed futures and conjure realistic characters who struggle to adapt and construct lives and deaths worth living and dying. Nonfiction books have become increasingly urgent about global environmental devastation: Naomi Klein warns of climate barbarism in On Fire (2019), Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky recommend moral virtues in Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis (2018), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing suggests accepting precarity in The Mushroom at the End of the World (...