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Afterword: Still, I’m Reluctant to Call This Pessimism
- Wesleyan University Press
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Afterword Still, I’m Reluctant to Call This Pessimism Gerry canavan & kim stanley robinson gC ► What is the relationship between ecological science fiction and crisis? Are there other categories beyond “crisis” available to us in SF today? Or is crisis the only relevant category if we want to think seriously about the future we are creating for the planet? ksr ► The coming century will bring to one degree or another a global ecological crisis, but it will be playing out at planetary scales of space and time, and it’s possible that except in big storms, or food shortages, things won’t happen at the right scales to be subjectively experienced as crisis. Of course it’s possible to focus on moments of dramatic breakdown that may come, because they are narratizable, but if we do that we’re no longer imagining the peculiar kinds of ordinary life that will precede and follow them. Maybe to find appropriate forms for the situation we should be looking to archaic modes where the seasons were the subject, or to Hayden White’s nineteenth-century historians, whose summarized analytical narratives were structured by older literary modes, turning them into philosophical positions or prose poems or Stapledonian novels. I think even the phrase “climate change” is an attempt to narrate the ecological situation. We use the term now as a synecdoche to stand for the totality of our damage to the biosphere, which is much bigger than mere climate change, more like a potential mass extinction event. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are representing the whole by the part most amenable to human correction . We’re thinking in terms of thermostats, and how we turn them up or down in a building. That image suggests “climate change” has the possibility of a fix, maybe even a silver bullet of a fix. No such fix will be possible for a mass extinction event. Lots of words and phrases are being applied to this unprecedented situation: global warming, climate change, sustainable development, decarbonization, permaculture, emergency century, climate adaptation, cruel optimism, climate 244 Afte rwo rd mitigation, hopeless hope, the sixth mass extinction event, and so on. But maybe sentences are the minimum unit that can begin to suggest the situation in full. “This coming century looks like the moment in human history when we will either invent a civilization that nurtures the biosphere while it supports us, or else we will damage it quite badly, perhaps even to the point of causing a mass extinction event and endangering ourselves.” A narrative rather than words or labels. gC ► Is it a problem, then, that our narrative forms (both fictional and political) seem to rely on “crisis” for their internal energy? SF, especially ecological SF, seems to trend toward sudden, apocalyptic breaks that may not reflect the glacial pace of environmental change. Even in your Science in the Capital series (to take one example) you turn to “abrupt climate change” as a way of narrativizing, on human spatial and temporal scales, a complex network of feedback loops that in actuality is almost impossible to perceive at the level of day-to-day perception. Are there other models for thinking about change, and where do you see these at work in your work? ksr ► It’s true that I puzzled over how to narrate a story about climate change, which I got interested in when I went to Antarctica and listened to scientists down there talking about it. That was in 1995, and I could not think of a plot for such a story. Then in 2000 the results from the Greenland ice coring project showed that the Younger Dryas had begun in only three years, meaning the global climate had changed from warm and wet to dry and cold that quickly. That finding was a big part of the impetus behind the coining of the term “abrupt climate change.” By 2002 the National Academies Press had published a book exploring this new term and assembling a good explanation for the drop into the Younger Dryas; it appeared that the Gulf Stream had stalled, because the North Atlantic had gotten much less salty very quickly as the result of one of the massive outflows of fresh meltwater that were occasionally pouring off the melting top of the great Arctic ice cap. These same studies pointed out that the North Atlantic was now freshening again, because of the rapid melting of the Arctic sea ice and...