Learning to Die in the Anthropocene — Roy Scranton

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene — Roy Scranton

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene — book cover

Roy Scranton

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization City Lights Books, 2015. ISBN 978-0872866690

"In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton draws on his experiences in Iraq to confront the grim realities of climate change. The result is a fierce and provocative book." — Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction

"Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene presents, without extraneous bullshit, what we must do to survive on Earth. It's a powerful, useful, and ultimately hopeful book that more than any other I've read has the ability to change people's minds and create change." — Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy

"An eloquent, ambitious, and provocative book." — Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

"Roy Scranton has written a howl for the Anthropocene — a book full of passion, fire, science and wisdom. It cuts deeper than anything that has yet been written on the subject." — Dale Jamieson, author of Reason in a Dark Time

What it is

Scranton combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom to explore what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving world. Drawing on his experience as a US Army veteran in Iraq — where he saw "the same chaos and collapse" in Baghdad that he later saw after Hurricane Katrina — he argues that climate change is not a political or technical problem but an existential one. To survive, we must learn to die: not as individuals, but as a civilization.

The book traces its origin to Scranton's New York Times essay (the #1 most-emailed article the day it appeared, selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014). Expanding on that, he journeys through street protests, the latest earth science, a historic UN summit, millennia of geological history, and the persistent vitality of ancient literature.

Plato argued that to philosophize is to learn to die. If that's true, says Scranton, then we have entered humanity's most philosophical age — because this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene.

The core argument

The book's diagnosis of why the climate response has failed is striking:

"In a perverse irony, one of the main things that connected the disparate parties at the United Nations, Flood Wall Street, the IETA, and the People's Climate March was a system of cultural technology that is silently burning up masses of carbon while shunting activist outrage into impotent feedback loops."

"The global information and communications ecosystem that they were plugged into is now estimated to use about 10 percent of the world's electricity. That ecosystem relies on coal. Every time you check your email, you're heating up the planet. We do it every day. We can't stop. We won't stop."

And the closing diagnosis on page 68:

The problem with the People's Climate March wasn't really that it lacked a goal, or that it was distracting, superficial, and vacuous. The problem with the United Nations isn't that the politicians there are ignorant, hidebound, self-interested, or corrupt. The problem with our response to climate change isn't a problem with passing the right laws or finding the right price for carbon or changing people's minds or raising awareness. Everybody already knows. The problem is that the problem is too big. The problem is that different people want different things. The problem is that nobody has real answers. The problem is that the problem is us.

A paradox worth sitting with (p. 116)

For a growth of carbon scum on a spinning rock in the backwater of an unremarkable galaxy light years from anywhere to develop the technology to send radio telescopes into space to measure the age of the universe is a prodigious achievement. Our primate curiosity and intellectual hubris have inspired breathtaking audacities. Just a few thousand years ago, we were learning to make marks on clay. In the blink of an eye, we've brushed our fingers against eternity.

And a few paragraphs later:

It may be that we have crossed the summit of our knowledge and power, and the brief explosion of human life in the Holocene will turn out to have been as transient as an algae bloom. It may be, on the other hand, that we'll find a way to survive in the Anthropocene, perhaps even find ways to maintain human civilization in some recognizable form. Whether we survive or not, however, has already been laid out in the explosion of quantum energy that, more than thirteen billion years ago, began the chain of events and reactions that have led to this moment: me writing this page, you reading it.

The paradox the user flagged: the same knowledge and intelligence that lets us measure the age of the universe is what got us into the climate crisis — and knowledge alone won't get us out. Knowledge and smarts are not wisdom. The book's title captures this: learning to die is not about knowledge, it's about acceptance, orientation, and a different kind of intelligence. The "problem is that the problem is us" — collective action problems, conflicting desires, nobody having real answers — is fundamentally a failure of wisdom and coordination, not of information.

References to look up

From the book's bibliography — three works worth tracking down:

  • Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0521727327.

  • Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change Emotions in Everyday Life. MIT Press, 2011.

  • Vaclav Smil, Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next 50 Years. MIT Press, 2008.

Edit this page
Built with LogoFlowershow