Mark Martin - I’m with the Bears - Short Stories From A Damaged Planet

First published by Verso 2011

The collection Verso 2011

The contributions The contributors 2011

The Siskiyou, July 1989, from A Friend of the Earth by T. Coraghessan Boyle

T. Coraghessan Boyle 2000. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Extract from How the Dead Dream: A Novel by Lydia Millet Lydia Millet 2008. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Extract from Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson Kim Stanley

Robinson 2007. Used in the US by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Random

House, Inc. Reprinted in the UK by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Kim Stanley Robinson 2007.

Diary of an Interesting Year by Helen Simpson Helen Simpson 2010.

Reprinted by permission of Rogers, Coleridge and White. Published in In-Flight Entertainment by Helen Simpson (Jonathan Cape 2010 [UK]; Vintage 2011 [US]).

Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd., London, on behalf of Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood 2009.

Translation Arzstula Romy Clark 2011

Arzstula Wu Ming 1 2009

Published by arrangement with Agenzia Letteraria Roberto Santachiara

Partial or total reproduction of this short story, in electronic form or otherwise, is consented to for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original copyright notice and this notice are included and the publisher and source are clearly acknowledged.

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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John Muir said that if it ever came to a war between the races, he would side with the bears. That day has arrived.

Dave Foreman,

Strategic Monkeywrenching

by Bill McKibben

T. C. Boyle

Lydia Millet

Kim Stanley Robinson

Nathaniel Rich

Helen Simpson

Toby Litt

David Mitchell

Wu Ming1

Paolo Bacigalupi

Margaret Atwood

The problem with writing about global warming may be that the truth is larger than usually makes for good fiction. Its pure pulp. Consider the recent pastconsider a single year, 2010. Its the warmest year on record (though not, of course, for long). Nineteen nations set new all-time temperature recordsin Pakistan, in June, the all-time mark for the entire continent of Asia fell, when the mercury hit 128 degrees.

And heat like that has Technicolor effects. In the Arctic, ice melt galloped alongboth the northwest and northeast passages were open for the first time in history, and there was an impromptu yacht race through terrain where even a decade before no one had ever imagined humans being able to travel. In Russia, the heat rose like some inverse of Dr. Zhivago; instead of the Ice Palace, huge walls of flame as the peat bogs around Moscow burned without cease. The temperature had never hit a hundred degrees in the capital but it topped that mark eight times in August; the drought was so deep that the Kremlin stopped all grain exports to the rest of the world, pushing the price of wheat through the roof (and contributing at least a portion to the unrest that gripped countries like Tunisia and Egypt).

And in Pakistan? Oh good God. Heres how it works: warm air holds more water vapor than cold, so the atmosphere is about four percent moister than it was forty years ago. This loads the dice for deluge and downpour, and in late July of 2010 Pakistan threw snake eyes: in the mountains, which in a normal year average three feet of rain, twelve feet fell in a week . The Indus swelled till it covered a quarter of the nation, an area the size of Britain. It was the first of at least six mega-floods that stretched into the early months of 2011, and some were even more dramaticin Queensland, Australia a landscape larger than France and Germany was inundated. But Pakistanoh good God. Six months later four million people were still homeless. And of course they were people who had done literally nothing to cause this cataclysmthey hadnt been pouring carbon into the atmosphere.

Thats our jobthats what we do in the West. And its why a book like this is of such potential importance. Somehow we have to summon up the courage to act. Because heres the math: everything that I described above, all the carnage of 2010, comes with one degree of global warming. Its a taste of the early stages of global warmingbut only the early stages. Scientists tell us with robust consensus that unless we act very soon (much sooner than is economically or politically convenient) that one degree will be four or five degrees before the century is out. If one degree melts the Arctic, put your poetic license to work. Your imagination is the limit; as one NASA research team put it in 2008, unless we reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere quickly, we cant have a planet compatible with the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.

So far our efforts to do anything substantial about that truth have been thwarted, completely. The fossil fuel industry has won every single battle, usually with some version of this argument: doing anything about climate change will cause short-term economic pain. And since we can understand and imagine the anguish of short-term economic pain (think of the ink spilled, and with good reason, over the recession of the last few years) we make it a priority. Since global warming seems, almost by definition, hard to imagine (after all, its never happened before) it gets short shrift. Until that changes, well take none of the actions that might ameliorate our plight.

And here science can take us only so far. The scientists have done their jobtheyve issued every possible warning, flashed every red light. Now its time for the rest of usfor the economists, the psychologists, the theologians. And the artists, whose role is to help us understand what things feel like. These stories are an impressive start in that direction, and one shouldnt forget for a moment that they represent a real departure from most literary work. Instead of being consumed with the relationships between people, they increasingly take on the relationship between people and everything else. On a stable planet, nature provided a background against which the human drama took place; on the unstable planet were creating, the background becomes the highest drama. So many of these pieces conjure up that world, and a tough world it is, not the familiar one weve loved without even thinking of it. Those are jolts we dearly need; this is serious business were involved in.

But to shift, of course, the human heart requires not just fear but hope. And so one task, perhaps, of our letters in this emergency is to help provide that sense of what life might be like in the world past fossil fuel. Not just a bleak sense, but a bright one; a glimpse of what a future might look like where community begins to replace consumption. Its not impossibly farfetchedeven in the desperate last decade, the number of farms in the U.S. rose for the first time in a century and a half, as people discovered the farmers market, and as a new generation started to learn the particular pleasures and responsibilities that most of mankind once knew on a daily basis; in that sense, weve had writers like Wendell Berry who have been working this ground for a long time.