Roy Scranton - Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

PRAISE FOR ROY SCRANTON AND
LEARNING TO DIE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

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, 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Roy Scranton lucidly articulates the depth of the climate crisis with an honesty that is all too rare, then calls for a reimagined humanism that will help us meet our stormy future with as much decency as we can muster. While I dont share his conclusions about the potential for social movements to drive ambitious mitigation, this is a wise and important challenge from an elegant writer and original thinker. A critical intervention.

Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

Were fucked. We know it. Kind of. But Roy Scranton in this blistering new book goes down to the darkness, looks hard and doesnt blink. He even brings back a few, hard-earned slivers of light.... What is philosophy? Its time comprehended in thought. This is our time and Roy Scranton has had the courage to think it in prose that sometimes feels more like bullets than bullet points.

Simon Critchley, editor of The New York Times Opinionator blog The Stone, author of Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance

Roy Scranton gets it. He knows in his bones that this civilization is over. He knows it is high time to start again the human dance of making some other way to live. In his distinctive and original way he works though a common cultural inheritance, making it something fresh and new for these all too interesting times. This compressed, essential text offers both uncomfortable truths and unexpected joy.

McKenzie Wark, author of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene

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 Anthropocenea 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: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failedand What It Means for Our Future

Learning to Die
in the Anthropocene

REFLECTIONS
ON THE END OF A CIVILIZATION

Roy Scranton

City Lights Books

Copyright by Roy Scranton 2015

All Rights Reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the following:

The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian. Translation by Andrew George (London: Allen Lane, 1999). 1999 Andrew George. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Fade, by Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss, 2015 BMG Gold Songs/Songs Of Big Deal/Code Word nemesis (ASCAP). All rights administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scranton, Roy, 1976

Learning to die in the Anthropocene : reflections on the end of a civilization / Roy Scranton.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-87286-669-0 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-87286-670-6 (ebook)

1. Global warming. 2. Climatic changes. 3. Environmental degradation. 4. NatureEffect of human beings on. 5. Climate change mitigation. I. Title.

QC981.8.G56S33 2015

303.49dc23

2015022985

City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133

www.citylights.com

ONE

HUMAN ECOLOGIES

Erpe toc of erpe erpe wyp woh,

Erpe oper erpe to pe erpe droh,

Erpe leyde erpe in erpene proh,

Po heude erpe of erpe erpe ynoh.

Earth took of Earth, Earth with woe,

Earth other Earth to the Earth drew,

Earth laid Earth in an Earthen trough,

Then had Earth of Earth Earth enough.

Anonymous Middle English Lyric

The first human beings appeared in tropical Africa around two hundred thousand years ago, evolving out of proto-human hominids, born into a world that was even then undergoing intense climatic transformation. far south as Ohio, England, Germany, and northern China. Thirty percent of the Earths surface was covered in glaciers. The oceans were more than 270 feet lower than they are now. This was the world in which we first evolved and learned to survive.

Our ancestors, omnivorous hunter-gatherers who traveled in small bands, lived in equatorial Africa for many thousands of years. But when temperatures warmed up about 135,000 years ago, reaching averages as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the present, our ancestors fled the tropics for more temperate climes, hunting their way into the then-verdant grasslands of the Sahara. The Earth had entered what geoscientists call an interglacial period, a regular period of warming that occurs between much longer periods of colder temperatures every hundred thousand years or so. These periods are typically brief, geologically speaking, each lasting around ten thousand years.

So it was for our ancestors on the Sahara: After a few millennia, temperatures dropped, getting even colder than before (between 7 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the present), glaciers once again advanced toward the equator, and the oceans shrank. The Sahara lost the humid warmth that had kept it green, and our hunter-gatherer ancestors scattered back south to tropical Africa, east to the Nile valley and beyond, and north around the Mediterranean and into Europe, where they lived alongside, interbred with, and then wiped out our close cousin, the Neanderthal. Over a long winter lasting thousands and thousands of years, as minor climate variations shifted temperatures up and down slightly over decades and centuries, human hunting bands expanded across Asia, eventually crossing the Bering land bridge to the Americas.

Sometime in that period, between one hundred thousand and fifty thousand years ago, we developed the key social technologies that have proven our most substantial predatory advantages: culture and symbolic reasoning.

About fifteen thousand years before Hurricane Katrina, the planet started to warm up again, entering another interglacial period, with the most intense and rapid warming happening around 11,000 BCE. Humans began developing villages, basic animal husbandry, and more deliberate systems of gathering. A brief, localized cold snap called the Younger Dryas, caused by glacial meltwater spilling into the Atlantic Ocean and shutting off the Gulf Stream, brought By 9000 BCE, after the Younger Dryas had ended and the Gulf Stream had switched back on, the agricultural revolution had begun. Neolithic humans hunted, herded, gathered, and farmed from Europe to South America, thriving in the warm and mild climate of what is now called the Holocene.

A few thousand years later, the Laurentide ice sheet in northern Canada collapsed, causing a rapid rise in sea levels, and, as had happened with the Younger Dryas, shutting off the Atlantic Gulf Stream. Cold, dry conditions descended on Europe and southwest Asia. This cold drought lasted four centuries before the Gulf Stream switched on again. In the marshy confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, farmers began constructing irrigation canals to control flooding and increase crop yields. Villages grew into towns, and as the people living in these new towns struggled to deal with the complex, difficult group effort required to construct and maintain levee systems, keep records of floods and farm yields, and bring in the harvest, they began to develop refined divisions of labor, hierarchical political structures, sophisticated religions, and writing. Temples and marketplaces were built, traders carried goods from one town to Mighty Uruk stood desolated.