But for the rest, I want to return to the Le Guin story I mentioned, the one I lesson-planned for my high-school tutee. So for readers interested in practical next steps, I’ll link you again to Rienstra’s post. We’re seeing, in real time, a refusal of political imagination. In the belly of the US capitalist beast, where even after the IPCC report Democrats are still voting in favor of fracking, we’re getting a practical demonstration not just of a failure of political imagination. So it’s not without reason that Debra Rienstra, in her blog post on the IPCC’s report, “worr about our capacity to care enough, about each other and this earth, to manage the changes we need.” Nor is it without reason that Frederic Jameson’s diagnosis of contemporary culture -“it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”-has been enjoying a resurgence among some leftists. But it’s still a world mediated by spectacle-a world to be watched, only, or if not merely watched, then watched and commented on by ivory-tower humanists and expert Twitterers armed with their acerbic wit.Įither way, it’s the same result. This world has at least the pyrrhic comfort of being realistically dystopian here our billionaires still ride space cocks into orbit and launch satellites for the express purpose of beaming advertisements back to Earth.
Meanwhile, for others-for me, on most days-inertia means the expectation of a world still bleaker than the one we know. All it needs, really, is the unthinking expectation, tempered by time and factors like class, geography, and race, that the world will go on as it ever has.įor some, going on as it ever has means the blithe anticipation of a world like the one they think their parents knew-a world punctuated by comfortably mortgaged houses, two point five kids, steady raises, and, at the end of it all, fully matured 401(k)s. For inertia doesn’t require much, after all. I suspect the same is true of many whose circumstances resemble mine. In any case, my waffling-the fact that my impulse is to point to established demands on my time (I have a job! I have a family!)-only goes to show that inertia remains for me a hard addiction to kick. Appalled at my failure to muster a sufficiently volcanic response to this latest confirmation of the planet’s degradation and the suffering of the global poor. I’m not sure whether to be troubled by what I just wrote. The next day I loaded it onto a thumb drive and took it to campus to print. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It was shaping up to be a pretty good lesson after I finished reading the summary, I went back to writing it. Before I dug up the link to the policymaker’s summary of the IPCC report, I had been working on a lesson plan for a high school student I’m tutoring-a close-reading exercise based on Ursula K. It’s been hot, yes, but not unbearably so, and anyway Jes and I have A/C. Water conflicts, refugee crises, militarized borders, and ultranationalist fervor may fall outside the IPCC’s climatological ambit, but these too belong to the strange, strained temporality in which Earth now finds itself: the already-but-not-yet of climate catastrophe.Īnd yet here in Champaign, Illinois, the summer has been quiet. Nor would one have to look hard to spot evidence of the climate’s effects on human life. It’s not difficult to find examples of major heat waves, droughts, and flooding happening right now. Even the most optimistic scenario, net-zero emissions by 2050, means a marked increase in the frequency and intensity of statistically unlikely weather events.Īnd that latter assessment is, in particular, less an act of speculation than a statement of plain fact. No matter what, temperatures will continue to climb, oceans to acidify and rise. Not one of them, however, sees the planet escaping unscathed. These “possible climate futures” are based on how quickly we-no, let’s be specific: how quickly the industries and nations most invested in the fossil economy-roll back emissions. In addition to a rigorously documented description of the present climate system, the report draws on existing data and models to project five different versions of the next eighty years. Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its sixth report.
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