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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 âThis year alone, we have seen temperature records shattered from New Delhi to Anchorage, from Paris to Santiago, from Adelaide to the Arctic Circle.â1 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 planetâs life will still be in dire conditions for generations to come. From a wildlife standpoint, there is only grim news: the United Nationsâ 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:
Not only are species âdeclining globally at rates unprecedented in human history,â3 but we are currently undergoing what appears to be the second-fastest extinction event in the earthâs history, behind only the CretaceousâTertiary (KâT) 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. âIt would theoretically be possible,â biologists Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich argue, âto 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.â4 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, âWe 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.â5 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 âmore [literary] climate change,â Lucy Burnett wonders, âIs 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?â6 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 âthe 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.â7 Human exceptionalism is imbricated within the discourse of progressivism, a symptom of how Darwinâs 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 worldsâwhat Donna Haraway calls âentanglementââthus insubstantiates the exceptionalism experienced as part of the Western human tradition. Alexis Shotwell invokes Haraway to observe that such entanglement is inescapable, âeven 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.â8 As Kari Weil argues, âThe ethical must grow instead out of an experience of shared mortality or bodily vulnerability that is, as [Cora] Diamond writes, âpainful to think.â â9 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 âapocalypse fatigue.â10 Zadie Smith points out that âItâs hard to keep apocalypse consistently in mind, especially if you want to get out of bed in the morning,â11 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 Darwinâs 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, âhumanityâ is characterized as a dualism that discloses both what he calls âvegetativeâ life (that which provides biological survival) and ârelationalâ life (that which connects with the external world). The distinction between the animal body and âthe humanâ remains forever in flux, a âmobile border within living man [sic],â yet the separation between humans and all other animals is required for the definitional clarity that enables human exceptionalism: âWithout this intimate caesura,â Agamben writes, âthe very decision of what is human and what is not would probably not be possible.â12 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 âWhoâs Afraid of the Ecological Apocalypse?â that âthe apocalyptic framing of climate change is at least in some instances expressly intended to galvanise action on ecological mattersâ but, as she goes on to prove, has been successful instead at reproducing non-relational subjects âbecause the range of possible answers to [questions about the world and the place of the human within it] is already mapped out; âweâ are either individuals distinct from nature and from future generations or part of a universal whole undifferentiated across time and space.â13 Climate change marks âa finite space in which âweâ are now all joined in a tragedy of the commons,â as Claire Colebrook demonstrates, although Dipesh Chakrabarty rightly interrogates the notion of a human âspeciesâ given that the causes and consequences of climate change are unequally distributed. Furthermore, he writes, âWe 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.â14 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, âclimate change threatens all modes of humansâ inhabitation of the planet . . . and thereby highlights boundary conditions of humansâ collective existence that are unrelated.â16 Following these scholars and in pursuit of an argument that breaks down human exceptionalism, my use of âweâ throughout is done with explicit acknowledgment of the knot of ethical dilemmas around who and what is included and excluded in various âweâ 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 speciesâ extinction if not as individual members of that cohort of animals? As Heise explains, âThe 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.â17 In Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, Stacy Alaimo illustrates trans-corporeal intermeshings to show that âThinking the human as a species does not preclude analysis and critique of economic systems, environmental devastation and social injustice.â18
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 (...