Desert Notebooks. Ben Ehrenreich
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the Americas long before any Europeans arrived here, as humans have in every other place. Most states from ancient Babylon onward have been even more brutally unequal than our own, and slavery has, almost universally, been coeval with what we like to call civilization. Humans living before the rise of organized states and even before the advent of agriculture left a legacy of enormous devastation: the ongoing, sixth wave of extinctions did not begin over the last couple of centuries but thousands of years earlier, with the extermination of species after species of large mammals, most likely thanks to human recklessness, on nearly every continent. The spread of Homo sapiens across the Western Hemisphere coincided with such a vast decimation of large herbivores—think mammoths and camels and oversize sloths—that some scientists have speculated that the resulting loss in atmospheric methane (herbivores do a lot of belching and farting) was enough to alter the climate, causing a drop in temperatures that lasted thirteen hundred years. That’s one theory, anyway. More likely it was a meteor colliding with the earth. Worlds end all the time.
All of this is to say that human beings have fucked up before, but never have we fucked up as we are fucking up now. In less than fifty years—not even the heartbeat of a gnat on a planetary scale—we have eliminated 60 percent of the mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles that populated the earth. The insects and amphibians aren’t faring any better. As many as a million species are now facing swift extinction. We have transformed, and not for the better, 75 percent of the surface area of the planet, destroyed 85 percent of its wetlands, and befouled, to varying degrees, two-thirds of the volume of the oceans. We could, if you want, sigh and shrug and agree that humans suck, that we are a rogue species, a kind of poorly evolved virus that can’t help but kill its host, some bipedal breed of demons, a curse, and that we cannot avoid our fate. Plenty of evidence would support these conclusions.
Surrendering to inevitability can feel pretty good, but it does not get us off this hook. Despite our Paleolithic ancestors’ wanton overhunting of mastodons and long-nosed peccaries and flat-headed peccaries and giant beavers and gianter sloths, and despite our species-wide eagerness to mistreat one another more or less everywhere and all the time, no other humans have managed to be destructive on anything close to the scale that we have over the last two centuries and change. (Not even the wing beat of a midge . . .) Or, I should say, on anything close to the scale forged by one relatively small subsection of humankind—mainly Europeans and those, like me, of European descent living in what gets called the Global North, the last two centuries’ inheritors of what some folks still hail as Western Civilization. West and North are hardly precise geographic terms here, but you know who I mean: we fucked things up for everyone.
I take no pleasure in this verdict. Self-flagellation is another form of narcissism. But if despair is an indulgence we cannot afford, so is delusion. Among all the shrieking and shouting and fearmongering and warmongering and the mad, panicked bellows of the Rhino, I occasionally hear some talk out there that is not entirely insane. Murmurs and whispers at the margins, calls to unmake the economy that brought us here and, while there is still time, to find some way to build a new one that does not depend on the illusion of eternal, self-sustaining growth, one that is based neither on the massive exploitation of fossil fuels nor on the systematic exploitation of other human beings. This is no small task, I know, but it will be doomed in advance unless we also work to dismantle our delusions: the flattering stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the myths that structure our existence so seamlessly that we don’t know they’re myths, the ones that carried us here, and with us everyone, as surely as all those coal- and diesel-powered engines did.
Actually, there is one kind of clock that does not use space to measure time. The ancient Chinese made “incense clocks,” which relied on the consistent rates of combustion of different varieties of incense. The scent changed to mark the passage of the hours.
That’s how it is, isn’t it? Time has a certain smell.
I grew up in the seventies and eighties in a family that lived and breathed politics. Dinner conversation leaped from Falwell to the Sandinistas to the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island. Pass the salt and the gravy—you need a napkin there, kid? The height of the Cold War had passed, but I had heard enough adults express alarm that Reagan’s cowboy bullshit was going to get us all killed that I did not expect to live to adulthood. I don’t remember feeling sad about this, just accepting it, that life had a horizon, and it was close. I read a lot. I asked a lot of questions. I knew about the dread mechanics of nuclear winter and the various stages of radiation poisoning. I knew to squeeze my eyes shut when the blast came because the flash could burn out your retinas. (But wouldn’t it burn through your eyelids too?) Manhattan, just thirty miles away, would without question be a target. So would the Grumman plant a few towns over. I spent long afternoons thinking hard about what I would do if I survived the initial impact, whether I should find a way to kill myself or take my chances and live on as a mutant, my skin peeling off in sheets. If I had to, would I be able to eat the dog?
Then it ended. The Soviet Union fell. The Cold War was over. I read J. G. Ballard and every work of apocalyptic fiction I could find. I could rhapsodize if you let me about Octavia Butler and the Strugatsky brothers and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. I thought Denis Johnson had been going downhill ever since Fiskadoro. I wrote stories and novels of my own. Cataclysm loomed in nearly all of them, and a vague sense of guilt. But time had not ended. On it ticked, and if I’m honest I felt lost, agoraphobic. Would it really stretch on forever? Occasional panics ensued, warheads gone missing from the old Soviet stocks, Ebola, dirty bombs planted out there somewhere by CNN’s latest villains, a nagging sense that the twentieth century was not finished with us. I kept busy. There was plenty to get upset about and plenty left to fight for, but the fear of full-on planetary catastrophe wandered off for a decade. Maybe two.
It’s back, of course, but not like before. In the eighties there was just Reagan and the Russians. Now the danger comes from ever-multiplying fronts, all of them at once. There’s the Rhino and the North Koreans, and the Rhino v. Iran. There are the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen in which nearly all the major military powers on the planet spread death by proxy because, for now, they are not ready to face off directly. There is the unlikely romance between Netanyahu and the Saudis, impatient with this by-proxy crap. There are the fascists in European parliaments and the fascists in the streets and the fascists in the White House. There is the vast and lethal infrastructure of Bush and Obama’s war on terror waiting for the tiniest excuse to leap to yet another battlefield. And on top of it all, beneath it all, on every surface and every side of everything, there is the already ongoing mass extinction, the melting glaciers, the jet stream stalling out, the droughts and the fires, the gathering storms. Time has a stench.
This morning I checked the news on my phone while brushing my teeth and read that North Korea had tested a missile capable of reaching Washington, D.C. In other words, almost anywhere in the United States. The Rhino’s response so far has been restrained, or perhaps just distracted. He spent the morning retweeting videos posted by a leader of an obscure English ultranationalist group. Everyone on Twitter was indignant as always, but I felt only relief. Today, at least, he was too scattered to insult Kim Jong-un.
If time really is ending, if these are end times, maybe it is worth pausing to ask: What is time? How do we understand it? Why do we experience it the way we do? Have that understanding and that experience helped to lead us here, to this precipice and the particularity of this specifically bad smell?
Eventually Hunahpu and Xbalanque got a rat to tell them where their father’s ball-playing gear was hidden. It was hanging from the roof beam of their grandmother’s home. The rat gnawed through knots and the brothers scooped up the gear. They began to play, as their father and uncle had. The Lords of Xibalba heard them playing and sent a messenger. Not owls this time—they had escaped by then—just a messenger. Their grandmother answered the