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11: Life after People: Science Faction and Ecological Futures
- Wesleyan University Press
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11 Life after People Science Faction and Ecological Futures brent bellamy and imre szeman In a May 9, 2012, New York Times article, James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading environmental critic, made a startling and blunt declaration about Canadian oil extraction and climate change: “If Canada proceeds [in the tar sands], and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.”1 In a flash, the stakes on Hansen’s now thirty-year-old warning about climate change and the necessity of action on the environment have been raised precipitously. The intent of his article is all too clear: to convince us of the fact that the time for human beings to modify their life activity in a manner that will significantly offset their impact on the planet’s environment is now, as we have reached the point when the continued development of a single oil field (however large it may be) will push us over the ecological edge. He summarizes his predictions about the dire long- and short-term effects of collective ecological neglect with a strident declaration: “If this sounds apocalyptic, it is.” What strikes us about Hansen’s interventions in the politics of climate—both his 1981 Science article about the speed of global warming due to CO2 production and this most recent piece in the Times—is his propensity to project and to extrapolate.2 Ecological thinking here remains inseparable from some form of thinking about the future; indeed, ecology in general has become so closely linked to narratives of the future that to even draw attention to this link between the environment and what-is-yet-to-come can seem beside the point or even tautological. It is the presumed effect of this link that interests us here as much as the presence of the connection itself. Hansen’s gambit, a play at the heart of ecological writing, is that this form of extrapolative writing can spur action—that depicting a future wracked by devastating weather patterns, rising ocean levels, species loss, crop failure and soil erosion, and so on, would of necessity result in the required political intervention, whether on a governmental 193 L i fe afte r Peo PL e| B e L L am y & S z e m a n or grassroots level or as some combination of the two, at the scale required by a problem that encapsulates and affects the whole globe. All manner of assumptions are built into this narrative demand for action, including a continuing faith and belief in the drama of Enlightenment maturity outlined by Kant (in which we get smarter and better as we trundle along through history), the presumed power of scientific inquiry to guide political decision making, and the possibility of narrative to generate change (a longstanding dream of writers across the political spectrum)—and a hope, too, that latent species survival impulses still persist in human beings and can be activated by appeals to reason. Recently, no less a figure than leading environmentalist Dr. David Suzuki has suggested that such appeals to action have all been for naught: “Quite frankly, as far as I’m concerned, I feel all the effort that I’ve been involved in has really failed. We’re going backward.”3 Is there another way of naming the ecological crisis of the future that could generate the outcome that we are so desperately in need of—one that might marry scientific insight with political action in a way that would prevent the eco-apocalyptic outcomes identified by Hansen and others? As a way of probing the importance of form for ecological politics, we want to focus here on the problematic insights raised by a book that represents the ecological future in a narrative mode distinct from prevalent ways of imagining the future as either more of the same or post-catastrophe: Alan Weisman’s best seller The World Without Us (2007). This form—what we call “science faction”—has become increasingly prominent over the past decade, appearing not only in book form but in documentaries such as National Geographic’s Aftermath, the History Channel’s Life after People, and the BBC show The Future Is Wild. Such quasi-scientific, quasi-science-fictional texts depict the world after the final collapse of civilization and the extinction of the human race, often at hyperbolic geologic time scales extending millions of years. In addition to identifying the nature and function of this form, we...