Quaint

11/11/21

Hello everyone:

This week in curated Anthropocene news, I have updates on hydro power and COP26, an overview of natural solutions to mitigating climate change, and a fascinating article on the evolutionary impact of poaching on elephant tusks:

Dammed if we do: Voters in Maine handily rejected the Hydro-Quebec transmission line last week, despite Central Maine Power’s $48 million ethically-questionable advertising barrage. Now the fate of the line is up to the courts. Coincidentally enough, here’s a shiny new opinion piece from Yale e360 on whether hydroelectric power is as green and promising as we’ve been told. Beyond questions about emissions from reservoirs, habitat loss, and the drowning of indigenous land, there’s this: In a climate-addled world, the reliability of rainfall – which governs the design and efficiency of hydro dams – is up in the air.

COP26 updates: Check out Fred Pearce’s excellent reports from COP26. They offer all the key stories, concisely articulated, without the jargon.

Natural climate remedies: From Mother Jones, a good report on how important the restoration of mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrass will be for sequestering CO2; from WBUR in Boston, a report on a new study determining with some precision how New England forests can be used to slow climate change; and from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nice optimistic overview of these and other natural solutions.

Evolution in the Anthropocene: From the New York Times, years of severe ivory poaching during Mozambique’s civil war led to a rapid increase in the population of female elephants in Gorongosa National Park being born tuskless. What seems like a neat solution to human-forced natural selection, though, may breed its own problems.

Now on to this week’s essay:

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“He sat by a gray window in the gray light in an abandoned house in the late afternoon and read old newspapers while the boy slept. The curious news. The quaint concerns.”

The single most haunting moment for me in Cormac McCarthy’s deeply disturbing novel, The Road, was not one of the grotesque scenes of violence – and there were a few that disturb me still – nor one of the heartbreaking scenes from the journey that the unnamed father and son take from sadness to sadness, nor was it one of McCarthy’s brutal and lyrical depictions of the wilderness of ash which is all that remains of our world. It was instead his use of a particular word in the short final sentence above: “quaint.”

What is it that the father deems quaint? The veneer of civilization. Our civilization. Which means just about everything you and I stay busy with or hold dear in our lives, and the values we bestow upon that everything: the intimate theater of friends and family; the personal and communal history bestowed upon the homes and roads of our lives; the tapestry of community itself, at local, regional, national, and international levels; the flags waved and the policies debated; the all-encompassing fictions of capitalism and economics that govern our lives; the rickety seductions of the internet; the errands, the loves; the ads, the letters to the editor: All of it, as the father reads in the dimmed and slanted light of afternoon, is ash. All of it, in the context of that ash, is quaint.

If you haven’t read The Road, you may hear “quaint” the way we use it now, to describe the cute, odd things that people in the past did or said. But even at this early point in the novel, McCarthy has earned the bottomless well of silence that the word drops into. “Quaint” is less a judgement than a note of total dislocation. The father can remember the past but can no longer imagine it. The newspaper is held in his sooty hands in a rare moment of peace. He and the boy are indoors. They’re not laying down cold in the blackened woods a safe distance from the road. The boy sleeps without imminent threat or intense hunger. There are no lurking post-apocalyptic cannibals.

None of us think we live in the past. But we do. Just not yet. This has always been true, even for those quaint people we read about in history books. They all lived their vitally present lives, amidst love, grief, and joy, before going on to the nano-apocalypse of their individual deaths. Much of their culture followed them into oblivion. And so it will be for us.

Which is fine. That’s how life works, whether we’re human, moss, antelope, or hawk. Unlike other species, though, we’re born without a clear sense of how to live, despite having an immense capacity to verbalize the nature of our existence. So, as best we can, we work through our lives in relationship to the knowledge of mortality, often whistling past the graveyard by filling our days with as many future-quaint things as we can. Our current fashions of affection and art and politics, for example, will someday seem as odd as love sonnets, pointillism, and the Federalist Papers.

What’s different now, and what’s at stake now, is the kind of Anthropocene future being made, a future from which our descendants will look back and wonder how and why we became quaint in such a disastrous way. Of course we can relate to our descendants in this wonder, as we gaze back at the lung-killing coal fogs of 19th century London or the DDT fogs of the 20th century, since we are by no means the first Anthropocene generation. But we are another Anthropocene generation, and that sits heavy on our shoulders, largely because we are ensnared in a civilization which does not know how to live on Earth, and partly because we bear some individual responsibility.

It’s not likely that the gothic horror narrative of The Road is meant to warn us off our Anthropocene path to an ecological nightmare. Certainly Cormac McCarthy hasn’t indicated that, and the suddenness of the mysterious incident that initiates the book’s apocalypse suggests a nuclear war or asteroid strike. But as COP26 winds down with more promises than actions, as parts of the rapidly deforested Amazon begin emitting more CO2 than they absorb, as the first wisps of vast stores of Arctic methane begin seeping out from thawed permafrost, as heat waves and forest fires increase in frequency and intensity, as the oceans increase in acidity, and as the conversations among ecologists shift from investigating the lushness of life on Earth to a debate over mass extinctions, it’s worth considering the novel in that (gray, ashy) light. A writer and environmental activist at the Guardian called The Road “the most important environmental book ever written.” Why? Because it depicted “what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot.”

There’s little chance that humans would be the last species standing, but I get the writer’s point. The Road presents us with a tragedy of Shakespearian quality in a setting so stark that the book might just help nudge us toward preventing the large-scale erasure of the natural world. (It’s worth noting that a paleontologist who specializes in mass extinctions, and who was interviewed in Peter Brannen’s marvelous The Ends of the World, is rumored to have been an advisor to McCarthy during the writing of The Road.)

I’m not here to say that the world of ash is coming (though if you live in the torched areas of southeastern Australia, the western U.S. and Canada, or Russia, Greece, Turkey, etc., you might forgive me if I did), nor am I predicting a cannibal-filled apocalypse if we don’t curb runaway warming and reverse the impending wave of extinctions. I’m saying that The Road is an astonishing work of literary fiction that provides a terribly dark window into human nature and its catastrophic potential. Like all great tragic writing it transcends its immediate narrative to create layers of tragedy so rich and haunting that we look for signs of our own world within it.

And our own world, according to the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art and Culture, looks something like this: Through climate change, the erosion of biodiversity, and the rapid acceleration of extinctions, humans are

“already transforming the planet, and by the end of the current century the landscape as we know it will be unrecognizable. Familiar cadences – from the arrival of migrating songbirds and the blossom of spring flowers to the chill of the first frost – will become unpredictable. Glaciers and rivers will disappear, summer skies will darken with smoke, and the land will fall silent. What will it mean when the places that have shaped and sustained us are gone? How will our understanding of the world change when there is no longer ice in the Arctic or wildlife in the forest? What are our obligations to the planet, and to each other?”

There’s horror, and then there are horrors, as anyone who knows intimately the difference between violence on the page and violence in their lives can tell you. So forget The Road and consider instead the 21st century’s intensifying impoverishment of this lush and beautiful world. Imagine your favorite forest or seashore or mountain meadow becoming unrecognizable. So much of the world is already unrecognizable to, say, our great-grandparents, with 85% of wetlands gone, vertebrate populations reduced by 70%, and our own population more than quadrupled in the last hundred years. It’s not hard to imagine that what happened to your grandparents’ farm will happen to ten more farms, or that what happened to the woods where you played as a kid will happen to the woods for nearly all our kids.

The worst of this can be avoided. (Want a guide? Read Paul Hawken’s new brilliant, pragmatic, and comprehensive book, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation.) Science has the measure of the climate and biodiversity crises, and has clear compass readings to point us in the right directions. We just have a long and difficult road ahead to get there. How well we do en route will define what “there” is. The Road, for all its darkness, hints at least at the importance of making the journey, no matter how hard.

In early classical literary tragedies, some irreversible tragic destiny drives the action. There’s nothing Oedipus, for example, could have done to avert his fate. Later, in Shakespeare, whose characters seem a bit more real to us, some tragedies might have been avoided if the protagonists acted rationally, without hubris or blindness to the likely consequences. If Lear had some humility, if Othello had honored his love rather than his jealousy, if Juliet and Romeo had been less impulsive… In The Road, like many modern tragic stories, the tragedy is in the setting and atmosphere (literally) rather than the plot. The father and boy are merely trying to survive in a world gone wrong.

But we’re not in any of these stories. We have no real reason to suffer a particular fate, other than the fate of any species which consumes too much of its resources.

As the Barry Lopez Foundation notes, “it has become necessary to imagine a very different future than the one we had hoped for.” But that’s just half of the imagining we must do. We must also imagine the solutions, and we must imagine the work to reach those solutions, and then we must act on that imagination. (Much of that work has already been done. It’s up to the rest of us to join in and spread the word.) We have to acknowledge the fires and the losses as we gather water to slow the flames. One of the characteristics that make climate activists like Greta Thunberg so powerful is that some part of their scathing critique of a blind, plodding civilization seems to come from the same room in which the father reads the newspaper. It seems to me that Greta can at least smell the ash.

So, yes, our descendants will see us as quaint. That’s unavoidable. But what kind of quaint do we want to be? The things we think are important – like this writing – will be quaint, regardless of what happens. Whether our descendants are suffering through planetary crisis or living at ease within a civilizational solution, they will look back and wonder how we lived in such a muddle.

This past week, I’ve watched the last leaves of autumn fall into pools of gold and rust around the lichen-crusted trunks of their trees; I’ve enjoyed the crystalline air of these cool clear fall days; I found a secret porcupine den under mossy granite blocks; I’ve put the vegetable gardens to bed and seen already that our garlic has set down small, stout roots; and I watched, surprised, as a Monarch this late in the season darted between blossoms of wild radish along the Maine coast. And this was just another ordinary week in an astonishing world, one worth the long journey we’ll take to protect it.