{"id":2497,"date":"2013-11-12T10:58:59","date_gmt":"2013-11-12T16:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=2497"},"modified":"2013-11-12T10:58:59","modified_gmt":"2013-11-12T16:58:59","slug":"learning-how-to-die-in-the-anthropocene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/learning-how-to-die-in-the-anthropocene\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Roy Scranton, Opinionator, New York Times
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

Driving into Iraq just after the 2003 invasion 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.<\/p>\n

\n

Civilizations have marched blindly toward disaster because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

With \u201cshock and awe,\u201d our military had unleashed the end of the world on a city of six million \u2014 a city about the same size as Houston or Washington. The infrastructure was totaled: water, power, traffic, markets and security fell to anarchy and local rule. The city\u2019s secular middle class was disappearing, squeezed out between gangsters, profiteers, fundamentalists and soldiers. The government was going down, walls were going up, tribal lines were being drawn, and brutal hierarchies savagely established.<\/p>\n

I was a private in the United States Army. This strange, precarious world was my new home. If I survived.<\/p>\n

Two and a half years later, safe and lazy back in Fort Sill, Okla., 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 brought shock and awe, but I saw the same chaos and urban collapse I\u2019d seen in Baghdad, the same failure of planning and the same tide of anarchy.\u00a0The 82nd<\/sup>\u00a0Airborne hit the ground, took over strategic points and patrolled streets now under de facto martial law. My unit was put on alert to prepare for riot control operations. The grim future I\u2019d seen in Baghdad was coming home: not terrorism, not even W.M.D.\u2019s, but a civilization in collapse, with a crippled infrastructure, unable to recuperate from shocks to its system.<\/p>\n

And today, with\u00a0recovery still going<\/a>\u00a0on more than a year after Sandy and\u00a0many<\/a>\u00a0critics<\/a>\u00a0arguing<\/a>\u00a0that<\/a>\u00a0the Eastern seaboard is no more prepared for a huge weather event than we were last November, it\u2019s clear that future\u2019s\u00a0not going away<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This March, Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, the commander of the United States Pacific Command, told security and foreign policy specialists in Cambridge, Mass., that global climate change was the greatest threat the United States faced \u2014 more dangerous than terrorism, Chinese hackers and North Korean nuclear missiles. Upheaval from increased temperatures, rising seas and radical destabilization \u201cis probably the most likely thing that is going to happen\u2026\u201d\u00a0he said<\/a>, \u201cthat will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Locklear\u2019s not alone. Tom Donilon, the national security adviser,\u00a0said much the same thing<\/a>\u00a0in April, speaking to an audience at Columbia\u2019s new Center on Global Energy Policy. James Clapper, director of national intelligence,\u00a0told the Senate in March<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cExtreme 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the civilian side, the\u00a0World Bank\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0recent report, \u201cTurn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience,\u201d offers a dire prognosis for the effects of global warming, which climatologists now predict will raise global temperatures by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit within a generation and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit within 90 years.\u00a0Projections from researchers<\/a>\u00a0at the University of Hawaii find us dealing with \u201chistorically unprecedented\u201d climates as soon as 2047. The climate scientist James Hansen, formerly with NASA,\u00a0has argued<\/a>\u00a0that we face an \u201capocalyptic\u201d future. This grim view is seconded by researchers worldwide, including\u00a0Anders Levermann<\/a>,\u00a0Paul and Anne Ehrlich<\/a>,Lonnie Thompson<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0many<\/a>,\u00a0many<\/a>,\u00a0many<\/a>\u00a0others.<\/p>\n

This chorus of Jeremiahs predicts a radically transformed global climate forcing widespread upheaval \u2014 not possibly, not potentially, but\u00a0inevitably<\/em>. We have passed the point of no return. From the point of view of policy experts, climate scientists and national security officials, the question is no longer whether global warming exists or how we might stop it, but how we are going to deal with it.<\/p>\n

II.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a word for this new era we live in: the Anthropocene. This term, taken up by\u00a0geologists<\/a>,\u00a0pondered by intellectuals<\/a>\u00a0and discussed in the pages of publications such as\u00a0The Economist<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0The New York Times<\/a>, represents the idea that we have entered a new epoch in Earth\u2019s geological history, one characterized by the arrival of the human species as a geological force. The Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term in 2002, and it has steadily gained acceptance as evidence has increasingly mounted that the changes wrought by global warming will affect not just the world\u2019s climate and biological diversity, but its very geology \u2014 and not just for a few centuries, but for millenniums. The geophysicist David Archer\u2019s 2009 book, \u201cThe Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth\u2019s Climate<\/a>,\u201d lays out a clear and concise argument for how huge concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and melting ice will radically transform the planet, beyond freak storms and warmer summers, beyond any foreseeable future.<\/p>\n

The Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London \u2014 the scientists responsible for pinning the \u201cgolden spikes\u201d that demarcate geological epochs such as the Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene \u2014 have adopted the Anthropocene as a term deserving further consideration,\u00a0\u201csignificant on the scale of Earth history.\u201d<\/a>Working groups are discussing what level of geological time-scale it might be (an \u201cepoch\u201d like the Holocene, or merely an \u201cage\u201d like the Calabrian), and at what date we might say it began. The beginning of the Great Acceleration, in the middle of the 20th century? The beginning of the Industrial Revolution, around 1800? The advent of agriculture?<\/p>\n

\n

Every day I went out on mission in Iraq, I looked down the barrel of the future and saw a dark, empty hole.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

The challenge the Anthropocene poses is a challenge not just to national security, to food and energy markets, or to our \u201cway of life\u201d \u2014 though these challenges are all real, profound, and inescapable. The greatest challenge the Anthropocene poses may be to our sense of what it means to be human. Within 100 years \u2014 within three to five generations \u2014 we will face average temperatures 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today, rising seas at least three to 10 feet higher, and worldwide shifts in crop belts, growing seasons and population centers. Within a thousand years, unless we stop emitting greenhouse gases wholesale right now, humans will be living in a climate the Earth hasn\u2019t seen since the Pliocene, three million years ago, when oceans were\u00a075 feet<\/em>higher than they are today. 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\u2019s already well on its way, and our own possible extinction. If homo sapiens (or some genetically modified variant) survives the next millenniums, it will be survival in a world unrecognizably different from the one we have inhabited.<\/p>\n

\"11thestoneB-img-blog427Jeffery DelViscio<\/div>\n

Geological time scales, civilizational collapse and species extinction give rise to profound problems that humanities scholars and academic philosophers, with their taste for fine-grained analysis, esoteric debates and archival marginalia, might seem remarkably ill suited to address. After all, how will thinking about Kant 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 theologians, and contemporary metaphysicians going to keep Bangladesh from being inundated by rising oceans?<\/p>\n

Of course not. But the biggest problems the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the root of humanistic and philosophical questioning: \u201cWhat does it mean to be human?\u201d and \u201cWhat does it mean to live?\u201d In the epoch of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality \u2014 \u201cWhat does\u00a0my life<\/em>\u00a0mean in the face of death?\u201d \u2014 is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination. What does human existence mean against 100,000 years of climate change? What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end?<\/p>\n

These questions have no logical or empirical answers. They are philosophical problems\u00a0par excellence<\/em>. Many thinkers, including Cicero, Montaigne, Karl Jaspers, and The Stone\u2019s own Simon Critchley, have argued that studying philosophy is learning how to die. If that\u2019s true, then we have entered humanity\u2019s most philosophical age \u2014 for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The rub is that now we have to learn how to die not as individuals, but as a civilization.<\/p>\n

III.<\/p>\n

Learning how to die isn\u2019t easy. In Iraq, at the beginning, I was terrified by the idea. Baghdad seemed incredibly dangerous, even though statistically I was pretty safe. We got shot at and mortared, and I.E.D.\u2019s laced every highway, but I had good armor, we had a great medic, and we were part of the most powerful military the world had ever seen. The odds were good I would come home. Maybe wounded, but probably alive. Every day I went out on mission, though, I looked down the barrel of the future and saw a dark, empty hole.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the soldier death is the future, the future his profession assigns him,\u201d wrote \u00a0Simone Weil in her remarkable meditation on war, \u201cThe Iliad or the Poem of Force.\u201d \u201cYet the idea of man\u2019s 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\u2019s face.\u201d That was the face I saw in the mirror, and its gaze nearly paralyzed me.<\/p>\n

I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo\u2019s \u201cHagakure,\u201d which commanded: \u201cMeditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.\u201d Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I\u2019d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I\u2019d tell myself that I didn\u2019t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. \u201cIf by setting one\u2019s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,\u201d wrote Tsunetomo, \u201che gains freedom in the Way.\u201d<\/p>\n

I got through my tour in Iraq one day at a time, meditating each morning on my inevitable end. When I left Iraq and came back stateside, I thought I\u2019d left that future behind. Then I saw it come home in the chaos that was unleashed after Katrina hit New Orleans. And then I saw it again when Sandy battered New York and New Jersey: Government agencies\u00a0failed to move quickly enough<\/a>, andvolunteer groups like Team Rubicon had to step in<\/a>\u00a0to manage disaster relief.<\/p>\n

Now, when I look into our future \u2014 into the Anthropocene \u2014 I see water rising up to wash out lower Manhattan. I see food riots, hurricanes, and climate refugees. I see 82nd<\/sup>\u00a0Airborne soldiers shooting looters. I see grid failure, wrecked harbors, Fukushima waste, and plagues. I see Baghdad. I see the Rockaways. I see a strange, precarious world.<\/p>\n

Our new home.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 it is unnatural for us to think 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 this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine 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 fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.<\/p>\n

The biggest problem climate change poses isn\u2019t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won\u2019t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is\u00a0already dead<\/em>. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there\u2019s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.<\/p>\n

The 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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