Quaint

9/12/24 - Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and the road we're on

The road ahead? / credit: Oregon DOT

Hello everyone:

Keeping with my summer theme - as I type away on the reboot of my Antarctic book - here’s an updated and edited older piece from when the Field Guide was young and readers were few. The path it travels is a bit dark, but it ends on a cheerful note about something that’s true every day: the beauty of the world.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s essay:

---

still from The Road

“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 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 consider important, 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 generally use it, 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 description of our dislocation from his reality. 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, humans are 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, like mini-golf and Doritos. Our current fashions of affection and art and politics, for example, will someday seem as antiquated 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 the same way as we gaze back at the lung-killing coal fogs of 19th century London or the DDT fogs of 20th century farms, 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 was written to warn us off our Anthropocene path toward 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 each climate change conference 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 size, 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 the (gray, ashy) light of global ecology.

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.”

searching a burned world / source: Pixabay

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 Shakespearean 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 recently torched areas of the planet, 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 increasing rate 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, is looking a little tragic. 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, if it hasn’t already.

So much of the world would already be 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 has happened 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? Start with Paul Hawken’s 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, and we’re not moving nearly fast enough. How well we do en route will define what “there” is.

The Road, for all its darkness, uses the love story between father and child to demonstrate 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.

“A very different future than the one we had hoped for” / Credit: John Larimore/CalOES

But we’re not in a defined tragedy. We have no real reason to suffer a particular fate, other than the fate of any species which consumes too much of its resources. We know what to do; we just need to do it.

That said, 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 to be done. We have to imagine the solutions, and then we must act on that imagination. The great news is that much of that conceptual work has already been done by others. It’s up to the rest of us to join in, imagine it for ourselves and our kids, spread the word, and do the work.

We also 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 initiated by you and I, they will look back and wonder how we lived in such a muddle.

Here in Maine this week, we’re waiting for the leaves of autumn to begin falling into pools of gold and rust around the lichen-crusted trunks of their trees. I’m enjoying the crystalline air of these cool clear late summer days, taking walks with Heather through woods suspended between migrating warblers and a year-round carpeting of moss. We’re harvesting the last offerings of the vegetable garden and trying to find time to process them into pesto, cole slaw, kimchi and other fermented winter foods. It’s a time for seeing the last Monarchs of the season and for listening to the last of the summer sounds before the northern half of the Earth dips into the quieter darkness of the winter.

And this was just another ordinary week in an astonishing world, one worth the long journey we must take to protect it.

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

From From the Ground Up, an excellent interview with Bryan Pfeiffer of Chasing Nature, discussing the beauty of the wild world, the joy in being out in it, the wonders of Monhegan Island, and of course the rough state of biodiversity on Earth. Much of what ails us is that we’re not out there with him as he falls in love with nature again every day. As he says,

I think what’s wrong with the world is that we’re losing our connection to what’s real. To my mind, the real things in the world are love, art, literature, community, nature. The rest is mostly artifice. I want to celebrate what’s real. And that’s probably why I write.

From

Antonia Malchik

at On The Commons, a beautiful essay that links her love of land and waters in what we now call Montana to a story of reclaiming common land in the Outer Hebrides, to the effort to make European rivers drinkable again, and to the archetypal story of the Seven Sisters, and to much more:

In the deep of the night, tasting the water’s starlight and cold mountain home in drops running from my cupped hands, I wonder if the river is also granting me a taste of thousands of tellings of the Seven Sisters, murmuring across the world.

From the Times, an important story linking the crashing of bat populations to higher human infant mortality. The link? Increased pesticide use by the farms which had previously benefited from the pest control services provided by the bats. A 31% increase in insecticide use by farmers led to an 8% increase in infant mortality. This is a good follow-up to the story of vulture population crashes in India (poisoned by farmers’ use of painkillers for cows) contributing to at least half a million excess human deaths.

On the brighter side, also from the Times, the commonsense decision to prioritize large solar array sites as de facto nature reserves, specifically meadows for pollinators and other insects, can have a huge impact on ecosystems. As I’ve written, we simply cannot afford to build out solutions for the climate crisis without making them solutions to the biodiversity crisis as well. To make solar array sites as useful as possible, developers should be required to plant a rich array of native plants. One five-year study found that doing so tripled insect abundance and increased native bee numbers twenty-fold.

From Inside Climate News, the Global Commons Survey found that 88% of respondents around the world worry about the deteriorating environment, and that 70% agree that we may be pushing the living world past tipping points. Americans are among the worriers, but far too many don’t believe they’re being impacted or that high- and middle-income citizens bear any responsibility. Perhaps the disconnect lies in the perception of relative wealth, since most of us don’t know that to be in the richest 1% of the world’s population, we only need to have after-tax earnings of $60K for individuals and $130K for a family of three.

For the clean energy geeks, from

David Roberts

at Volts, a podcast interview about a new effort to reimagine PUCs (public utility commissions) into useful agencies for the clean energy transition. Currently, utilities spend far too much of their time defending their monopolistic status quo and slow-walking the change we need.

From Ars Technica, a fortuitous underwater research expedition to the region impacted by the massive Hunga volcano explosion has provided a glimpse into how benthic communities are wiped out or manage to survive after a major disturbance, which in turn may provide some clues to the long-term impacts of the ill-conceived, largely unnecessary plans for ocean floor mining.

From Fast Company, “India’s Rail Network is nearly 100% Electrified. The U.S. is at 1%.” Switzerland is also already at 100%, while South Korea (78%), China (75%), and the EU (56%), along with much of the world, have put the U.S. to shame. The only good U.S. news is the possibility that California’s plan to have a fully zero-emissions rail network by 2047, if the courts allow it to do so.

Also from Fast Company, the world’s first modern sailing cargo ship is up and cruising quietly across the Atlantic. Very small by industrial cargo standards (carrying only 1,000 tons), the company behind what will soon be a network of similar ships believes that the sailing vessels are cost competitive while also doing the necessary work of decarbonizing the shipping industry.

From Mongabay, Bangkok is building urban forests and wetlands to absorb and control the flooding that, by 2030, threatens to put 40% of the city underwater.

From Nautilus, a lovely short piece about dogs being used as ecological detectives in Australia, sniffing out invasive plants or endangered species.

From Anthropocene, some early promising research for filtering out micro- and nanoplastics from water, both fresh and salt.