Wednesday
As we travel around the country, Julia and I have been listening to Stanley Kim Robinson’s New York 2140, a work of cli-fi or speculative fiction about climate disaster that should be enough to scare the bejeezus out of all of us.
In it, the world has been hit by two catastrophic sea level rises, known as Pulse One and Pulse Two. As a result, coastal cities all around the world have been inundated. The economic consequences include mass migrations and unimaginable property damage, with New York transformed into a Venice with collapsing buildings. (Venice itself, we can assume, is no more.)
I share today a passage where the author rants (his word) against the short-sightedness of humans. Given my interest in how literature changes lives and (sometimes) history, I note the author’s frustration that his science fiction is not having an impact:
It was that ocean heat that caused the First Pulse to pulse, and later brought on the second one. People sometimes say no one saw it coming, but no, wrong: they did. Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth’s entire previous five billion years (can we say “Anthropocene,” class?), and they searched the geological record for the best analogs to this unprecedented event, and they said, Whoa. They said, Holy shit. People! they said. Sea level rise! During the Eemian period, they said, which we’ve been looking at, the world saw a temperature rise only half as big as the one we’ve just created, and rapid dramatic sea level rise followed immediately. They put it in bumper sticker terms: massive sea level rise sure to follow our unprecedented release of CO2! They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of the civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece. Really. That’s how much those knuckleheads cared about their grandchildren, and that’s how much they believed their scientists, even though every time they felt a slight cold coming on they ran to the nearest scientist (i.e. doctor) to seek aid.
Along with the sarcasm directed at science skeptics, Robinson also goes after capitalists preaching “creative destruction”:
But hey. An end is a beginning! Creative destruction, right? Apply more police state and more austerity, clamp down hard, proceed as before Cleaning up the mess, a great investment opportunity! Churn baby churn!
By the end of his rant, the author throws up his hands and returns to his story:
Enough with the I told you sos! Back to our doughty heroes and heroines!
While literature is impactful, it has a mixed record when it comes to immediate changes in social policy. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, while it may have ushered in food regulation, didn’t directly lead to better working conditions in Chicago’s slaughter houses. Charles Dickens, the author most associated with social reform, didn’t bring a stop to child labor with Oliver Twist, transform the court system with Bleak House, nor end laissez faire capitalism with Hard Times.
Literature works best at a leisurely pace, expanding consciousness so that people see new possibilities in how we imagine human relations. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, we need immediate action. A novel like New York 2140 can be used by activists but can’t bring about change on its own.
