The Pointless Ecology of Renaissance Cynicism

Le but de nostre carriere, c'est la mort, c'est l'object necessaire de nostrevisée : si elle nous effraye, comme est il possible d'aller un pas en avant, sansfiebvre? Le remede du vulgaire c'est de n'y penser pas. Mais de quelle brutale    stupidité luy peut venir un si grossier aveuglement?

The goal of our career is death. It is the necessary object of our aim. If itfrightens us, how is it possible to go a step forward without feverishness?The remedy of the common herd is not to think about it. But from whatbrutish stupidity can come so gross a blindness!

(Montaigne 84, 69)¹

NELL (sans baisser la voix) Rien n'est plus drôle    que le malheur, je te l'accorde. Mais—

(NELL (without lowering her voice) Nothing is funnier    than tragedy, I'll grant you that. But—)

(Beckett, Fin de partie 31)

It was the summer of 2017. The New York Magazine published David Wallace-Wells' "Uninhabitable Earth," an article detailing all the possible ways in which climate change could make the earth inhabitable for human beings. In the subtitle, the author proposed "peering beyond scientific reticence," in an attempt to raise the readers' concerns about climate change, implying that most people's understanding of its consequences—raising oceans—and of the solution—fleeing the coastlines—was based on avoidance of the worst-case scenarios ("The Uninhabitable Earth"). To the editors' own admission, the response was "extraordinary both in volume (it is already the most-read article in the New York Magazine's history) and in kind." ("The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition").^* In response to the general panic gathered on social media, but mostly to the "fleet of commentary […] from climate scientists and the journalists that cover them," the editors published another version of the article online, which they linked within the original article and advertised as "complete with interviews with scientists and links to further reading." Ten days later, the author himself published, still in the magazine, a reading list to accompany "Uninhabitable Earth" ("The 10 Book Uninhabitable Earth Reading List"). He also prefaced the annotated version. His arguments are that "we have not spent enough time contemplating the scarier half of the distribution curve of possibilities," and that "when it comes to the challenge of climate change, public complacency is a far, far bigger problem than widespread fatalism—that many, many more people are not scared enough than are already 'too scared.'" It seems irrevocable that what the author was accused of was, put simply, to be unnecessarily pessimistic, in the common definition of it as "[t]he tendency or disposition to look at the worst aspect of things; the attitude or habit of taking a negative view of circumstances, the future, etc" (Oxford English Dictionary). He concluded his preface thus: "In that context, I don't think it's a slur to call an article, or its writer, alarmist. I'll accept that characterization. We should be alarmed." The article, since then, seems to have started a new tendency for climate change reporting or environmental journalism, a realm previously entirely uncomfortable with the notion and the tone of pessimism.

Optimism is a much more obvious, efficient tone for ecology, perhaps because political ecology, in particular, is wary of being perceived with the slighted hint of negativity. Since behaving more ecologically, on the individual level, involves—albeit only initially, or dependent on perception—reducing consumption, complicating rather than simplifying daily habits, lengthening the many shortcuts that a globalized economy has brought to some tasks, it is undeniably not such a popular way of life. Because it first has to convince people of its worth, it needs to be presented in a positive, optimistic light. Your ecological acts matter, they are not in vain. We know how to approach this ecology—with derision, or demagogy, or activism. On the other hand, a pessimistic ecology, one that does not give practical solutions but merely tries to ring the metaphorical alarm, is an impasse that most people arguably have not figured out how to negotiate. Ecology, perhaps thanks...