Horizon Work

At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change

Adriana Petryna

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780691264813, 9780691211664
• eBook ISBN: 9780691232591
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Warming & Climate Change
• Index: Social Sciences

A new way of thinking about the climate crisis as an exercise in delimiting knowable, and habitable, worlds

As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, Earth's fragile ecosystems are growing increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Horizon Work explores how climate change is disrupting our fundamental ability to project how the environment will act over time, and how these rapidly faltering predictions are colliding with the dangerous new realities of emergency response.

Anthropologist Adriana Petryna examines the climate crisis through the lens of "horizoning," a mode of reckoning that considers unnatural disasters against a horizon of expectation in which people and societies can act. She talks to wildfire scientists who, amid chaotic fire seasons and shifting fire behaviors, are revising predictive models calibrated to conditions that no longer exist. Petryna tells the stories of wildland firefighters who could once rely on memory of previous fires to gauge the behaviors of the next. Trust in patterns has become an occupational hazard. Sometimes, the very concept of projection becomes untenable. Yet if all we see is doom, we will overlook something crucial about the scientific and ethical labor needed to hold back climate chaos. Here is where the work of horizoning begins.

From experiments probing our planetary points of no return to disaster ecologies where the stark realities of climate change are being confronted, Horizon Work reveals how this new way of thinking has the power to reverse harmful legacies while turning voids where projection falters into spaces of collective action and recoverable futures.

1

What Is the Upper Limit?

The breath you just took contains over 400 parts of carbon dioxide per million molecules (ppm) of air.¹ People living at the start of the Industrial Revolution would have inhaled about 278 ppm. Since then, levels of CO₂—the leading greenhouse gas driving changes in the climate—are on course to double owing to the relentless burning of fossil fuels. In a worst-case scenario, CO₂ concentrations will exceed 900 ppm by the year 2100. Unfortunately, that scenario is within the realm of possibility. Carbon dioxide is the natural product of cellular respiration in animals and plants. Fossil fuel emissions from human activity over the past two centuries now threaten our atmosphere, oceans, and life on Earth. In spite of the impacts—extreme heat and wildfires, catastrophic floods and storms, massive crop failures, and unrelenting biodiversity loss—some experts have made the claim that human cognition operates on a very narrow spatiotemporal scale; we are unable to see—let alone deal with—the flood of changes that we have unleashed. Our horizons are so limited, the argument goes, because Homo sapiens never evolved enough mental bandwidth to apprehend a long-term future. Our ancestral selves were mainly preoccupied with the “immediate band, immediate dangers, exploitable resources, and the present time.”² So here we are, built to be blindsided in a new and hostile world. Yet the claim of cognitive barriers is just that—a claim—and, in any case, overcoming such barriers to responding to all but our short-term needs is not the real challenge. Rather, we need to ask how narrowed self-understandings prevent us from effectively addressing the problem of climate change, leaving us stranded in a present that may not be survivable.

More than a century’s worth of research undercuts the idea that a bias toward inaction in a high-CO₂ world is preordained. During World War I, when submarines were first widely deployed in warfare, a US Navy sanitary officer and surgeon named R. C. Holcomb worried about carbon dioxide displacing oxygen in breathable air in these sealed underwater capsules. Carbon dioxide is a colorless and odorless gas, so it is tempting to think that its risks cannot be sensed. Holcomb questioned this assumption, writing, “We cannot forget that we are at the bottom of an aerial ocean and saturated with its gases.” He expressed concerns over “men obliged to breathe their own expired air over and over again.”³ More than a hundred years later, we think of carbon dioxide in more distant (atmospheric) terms, an input to be tracked or mitigated in climate change scenarios. Its physiological impacts are harder to grasp. Holcomb made his observations at a time when, in military and medical spheres, new instruments were being devised that could scrub carbon dioxide from closed environments. Consider the American pharmacologist Dennis Jackson, who wanted to make anesthesia gas accessible to his poorer surgical patients. Breathing chambers of the early twentieth century delivered expensive nitrous oxide, but they also leaked it. Hoping to make its delivery more efficient, in 1914 Jackson invented a closed circuit chamber to trap the nitrous oxide. But it also trapped patients’ exhaled carbon dioxide gas. When he added soda lime, which absorbed the gas, patients could rebreathe expired air. It so happened that the “Jackson CO₂ Absorber” was invented in St. Louis, a city once saturated with coal smoke. The absorber worked so well that when Jackson tested it on himself, he reported having “the first breaths of absolutely fresh air he had ever enjoyed in that city.”⁴

FIGURE 1.1. Jackson CO₂ Absorber (redrawn from image courtesy of Wood Library Museum).

Like atmospheres, our bodies require careful calibration between oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production. The amounts of carbon dioxide that are present in our arterial blood and exhaled in our breath are always maintained reciprocally through a partial pressure gas exchange. This exchange is critical to survival. When the gas accumulates in our blood during sleep, our bodies signal an imbalance (by snoring, waking up, breathing abnormally deeply, or, if the lungs’ ability to remove CO₂ is seriously impaired, exhibiting asthma or respiratory failure). Doctors use CO₂ saturation as a prognosticator for “time to death” in terminal patients.⁵ Too much CO₂ in the blood is a sure sign of imminent cardiac arrest or death.

So immediate are visceral responses to carbon dioxide overload that researchers have attributed to it involuntary reactions of all kinds. In work that was a precursor to his studies on “voodoo” death,⁶ Walter B. Cannon, a professor of physiology at Harvard from 1906 to 1942, experimented on dogs to show how distress and panic increase the body’s production of carbon dioxide, which he famously called the fight-or-flight response. “Great exertion, such as might attend flight or conflict,” he wrote, “would result in an excessive production of carbon-dioxide.”⁷ More recently, researchers have found that they can simulate a variety of mental infirmities, from anxiety and panic disorders to combat-related stress reactions, by exposing human subjects to carbon dioxide–enriched air.⁸

Distress, an induced panic, or even cardiac arrest: our bodies respond to this insensible gas, whether we’re conscious of its presence or not. Given the wide-ranging effects CO₂ has on biology, we can ask how much of a threat to physiological equilibrium we are willing to tolerate. In one respect, it is difficult to say: while the unconscious systems of our bodies are adept at signaling intolerance, the conscious ones are often too sluggish to recognize or fend off the danger.

Let’s then move from the autonomic realm to the question of how awareness and assessment of CO₂’s risks have evolved, drawing examples from modern agriculture and war. In 1954, when two Kansan farmworkers descended into a silo full of beans, barley, and oats, the gas released from the fermenting silage killed them. Silos notoriously contain high amounts of carbon dioxide, giving no warning of their lethality to people entering them.⁹ So farmworkers developed homespun techniques to test for gas buildup before entering these structures. One involved lowering a candle into a silo to see whether its flame died out (this occurs when carbon dioxide gas displaces oxygen needed for combustion). Another entailed suspending a warm-blooded animal in the structure to see whether it fell unconscious. When the sentinels’ limp bodies were fished out of the silos, it was found that “an exposed guinea pig was unconscious within 30 seconds and a rabbit within 60 seconds.”¹⁰

In an early study (1914) of a carbon dioxide accident on a farm, investigators found four men dead in a silo in Athens, Ohio. Coworkers reported that these men had entered the silo to tamp down new silage, but “within about five minutes the men inside were not responding to the shouts of their coworkers.” Accident investigators noted CO₂’s ability to trick the senses, writing that a “more peaceful and inviting scene could not be imagined than the warm, pleasant smelling green silage within.”¹¹ Sensory trickery of this kind also has its uses: for decades, farm managers have been exposing livestock to high levels of carbon dioxide to anesthetize them before slaughter, a method that animal welfare advocates consider more humane than electrical stunning.¹²

As examples from agriculture illustrate, knowledge of the effects of carbon dioxide is carved into modern life. That humans can do no more than deny them because we as a species cannot see past our arms does not add up. History, too, refutes this notion. When incendiary bombs were dropped during World War II, European cities were flooded with clouds of toxic gas (including CO and CO₂), killing untold numbers of people for whom overcrowded air-raid shelters provided no escape.¹³ In July 1943, the air raids on Hamburg ignited massive fires. The author of The Night Hamburg Died (1960) describes what transpired in the shelters from these torrents: “Sealed into their cellars, huddling behind heavy doors, they have closed themselves off from the outer world and the oceans of fire splashing around and over their warrens. No flame ever touches them, but not a man, woman, or child survives. Not a single living soul. Not a human being, an animal, not even the smallest rodent, not a single insect, survives.”¹⁴

There was also neither warning nor escape when, on August 21, 1986, an underground bubble of carbon dioxide erupted in Lake Nyos, an active crater lake in Cameroon, releasing a low-hanging gas cloud that killed over seventeen hundred people.¹⁵ One survivor, knocked unconscious for several hours, described his experience when he woke up: “I could not speak … I could not open my mouth because then I smelled something terrible … I heard my daughter snoring in a terrible way, very abnormal.” He continued: “When crossing to my daughter’s bed … I collapsed and fell … My daughter was already dead … I got my motorcycle … As I rode … I didn’t see any sign of any living thing.”¹⁶

An American biologist who studied the Lake Nyos disaster (and another at Lake Monoun in Cameroon two years later) conveyed to me some of the physical and sensorial aspects of total exposure: “At the heart of the cloud released during the Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun disasters, the concentration of CO₂ was 100%—that is, the CO₂ had displaced all of the normal air that we breathe.” Concentrations of CO₂ above 15–20 percent will cause suffocation and death in animals and humans.¹⁷ In a lower range of 10–15 percent, delusions can set in. Here, as the scientist described to me, “CO₂ can act as a sensory hallucinogen, such that people feel and smell things that aren’t really there.” Where the CO₂ concentration hovered just below the lethal limit, some Lake Nyos survivors reported smelling rotten eggs or gunpowder and feeling very warm. “The rotten eggs smell is unmistakably a smell of sulfur gases and feeling warm is also associated with volcanoes producing heat,” he noted. “However, our analyses showed that there were no sulfur gases released (or very little) during the disaster, and that the gas burst was not associated with heat release from a volcano.”¹⁸

In other words, the gas cloud the biologist describes was full of sensory bewilderments, resulting from a freak geophysical event the likes of which most of us will never experience. But I knew someone who may have lived through something comparable. My father was a twelve-year-old child refugee from a small village in Ukraine—one among hundreds of thousands who fled the country for displaced persons camps in Western Europe when the Soviet and German forces met in 1944. Allied forces conducted aerial bombing raids, targeting industrial plants and railway stations as well as fleeing civilians, as he would point out. The civilian refugees were a hundred miles into their trek when one of the bombs from a shuttle bombing operation fell near a border town, hitting an underground tunnel that served as a makeshift bomb shelter. His older sisters had not made it to the overcrowded shelter-turned-death-pit—but he had. Thr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Prologue
• 1. What Is the Upper Limit?
• 2. Building Perceptual Range
• 3. When Paths Disappear
• 4. Horizon Work
• 5. “Throw Away Your Mental Slides”
• 6. “You Can’t Take Fire Away”
• 7. Witnessing Professionals
• 8. “Waiting for a Reality Response”
• 9. Going through the Porthole
• 10. Beneath the Airshow
• Horizon Work in a Time of Runaway Climate Change
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index