Roy Scranton

An Iraq War vet's bracing, visionary response to the challenge posed by global warming and his hope in the humanities.

Reflections on the End of a Civilization

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene

taha

Admittedly, ocean acidification, social upheaval, and species extinction are problems that humanities scholars, with their taste for fine-grained philological analysis, esoteric debates, and archival marginalia, might seem remarkably ill-suited to address. After all, how will thinking about Kant or Frantz Fanon help us trap carbon dioxide? Can arguments between object-oriented ontology and historical materialism protect honeybees from colony collapse disorder? Are ancient Greek philosophers, medieval poets, and contemporary metaphysicians going to save Bangladesh from being inundated by the Indian Ocean?

Andrew John Kinney

More a book of philosophy than a book about global warming, but on the plus side it is short and has some interesting cultural references. Great title and all, but not what I was looking for. Scranton does make a couple of pithy points, like when he says, "It is not true that violence never solved anything. Violence ended the rule of Nazi Germany in Europe, and it ended slavery in America." Another example he cites is when black WW2 veterans used marksmanship skills acquired in the Army to fire on and repulse a planned KKK raid in North Carolina. He goes on to note, correctly in my opinion, that most violence is in fact pointless, but one must remember there are times when it is useful. Scranton, in my humble opinion, uses accounts of his service in Iraq more as a way to differentiate himself from other philosophers than as a useful adjunct to his argument about global warming. I respect his service, and I also served in the Army, but I am not obligated to participate in the hero-worship of veterans that seems so fashionable these days. I did find a couple of errors of fact in Scranton's book; for example, he says electricity must be used as it is generated, that it cannot be stored. Forty years ago in my engineering classes I learned ways to store electricity: it can be used to pump water uphill into reservoirs and then later released to spin turbines to create more electricity, and of course, there are things called batteries, and battery technology is improving by leaps and bounds. That said, the number such errors was small. 

Anyway, this book offered little in the way of rigorous analysis of possible solutions for preventing a runaway greenhouse Earth, so I'm moving on to Drawdown by Paul Hawken, which was recommended to me by a medical doctor who is a friend of a friend. That book appears to be exactly what I'm looking for.

Andrew Louis

A frustrating read on a frustrating topic.

Bryan Alexander

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is a passionate and literary reflection on climate change. It is a humanist's book, a call for applying the humanities to the world's largest challenge, and ultimately to committing us all to humanistic work.

The title signals one of this short book's main points: a call to recognize "that this civilization is already dead." (23) Carbon burning has already started Earth down the road to transform life, and we must start from this point. Recognizing that, we must "leet... go of this particular way of life and its ideas of identity, freedom, success, and progress." (24) Scranton wants us to think of the samurai's mindset or Lenin's model of revolutionaries as "dead men on furlough": a clarifying fatalism.

Scranton also wants us to step back from technology on multiple fronts, including giving up on the idea of a technological solution to the climate crisis (55). Here the book resonates with the great cultural divide CP Snow identifies in "The Two Cultures," opposing the humanities to the sciences, calling on us to celebrate the former and no longer worship the latter. We see this in frequent quotations and allusions from the literary, historical, and archaeological record.

Yet Scranton seems to have little hope in humanity as a source of change or even hope. In one chapter he excoriates the human race for making the climate crisis occur and in being unable to stop, adjust to, or even recognize it (66-68 is the apex). This isn't a politics that identifies key villains that must be stopped. Instead, "the enemy is ourselves. Not as individuals, but as a collective. A system. A hive."(85) This is the darkness behind the book's celebration of the humanities. They won't change things, but they are the best we can do. And it looks backwards, not to the future but only towards the past, to memory (95).

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is deeply concerned with violence. Its later chapters reminds us of the long roots of war in human history, and wants us to expect more to come. The author's Iraq War service plays a role in this, of course, but the vision also ties into the book's very dark vision of humanity.

There is much to appreciate in this very short book. I share the author's passion for the humanities and admire his concision. The use of a death mentality is provocative and thought-provoking in the climate change context.

But I don't share his dismissal of technology nor his complete pessimism. I remain hopeful.

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene Reflections on the End of a Civilization

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