Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. Roy Scranton
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change is an effect of the very structures of our political systems and the way that they are built around decentralized flows of oil and gas. The systems that structure our political desires and constrain our political will have a material history. As the human animal developed increasingly complex social technologies for producing power, from hunting bands tracking migrating herds of giant elk and mastodons to agricultural empires harvesting grain to fossil-fuel-burning global capitalism, we also developed increasingly complex technologies of collective life. As our technologies of producing power changed, so did our technologies for distributing and controlling it. Today, global power is in the hands of a tiny minority, and the system they preside over threatens to destroy us all. With this in mind, we turn back to the collective danger that carbon-fueled climate change poses, this time considered in terms of our primal human responses to existential threat: fight or flight. Facing the fear of death and the inevitability of conflict in the Anthropocene is the task of Chapter 4: The Compulsion of Strife. Progressivist belief in the infinite perfectibility of the human animal depends significantly on carbon-fueled capitalism’s promises of infinite economic growth. Accepting our limits means coming to terms with our innate violence and our inescapable mortality.
By learning to die, though, we can connect with and open up new possibilities for the human future, as I argue in Chapter 5: A New Enlightenment. Through interrupting social circuits of fear and reaction, looking deep into the face of death, and cultivating our rich stocks of human cultural technology, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bhagavad-Gita to imagined Anthropocene futures, we open up a human relationship to the universe in which we might live not as parasitic consumers, but as co-creators—a relationship in which we might learn to live as the very light from which all our power ultimately flows.
The crisis of global climate change, the crisis of capitalism, and the crisis of the humanities in the university today are all aspects of the same crisis, which is the suicidal burnout of our carbon-fueled global capitalist civilization. The odds of that civilization surviving are negligible. The odds of our species surviving are slim. The trouble we find ourselves in will likely prove too intractable for us to manage well, if we can manage it at all. Yet as German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk observes: “It is characteristic of being human that human beings are presented with tasks that are too difficult for them, without having the option of avoiding them because of their difficulty.”28 We cannot escape our fate. Our future will depend on our ability to confront it not with panic, outrage, or denial, but with patience, reflection, and love.
Our choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.
If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.
ONE
HUMAN ECOLOGIES
Erpe toc of erpe erpe wyp woh,
Erpe oper erpe to pe erpe droh,
Erpe leyde erpe in erpene proh,
Po heude erpe of erpe erpe ynoh.
Earth took of Earth, Earth with woe,
Earth other Earth to the Earth drew,
Earth laid Earth in an Earthen trough,
Then had Earth of Earth Earth enough.
—Anonymous Middle English Lyric29
The first human beings appeared in tropical Africa around two hundred thousand years ago, evolving out of proto-human hominids, born into a world that was even then undergoing intense climatic transformation.30 The Earth was on average about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit colder than it is today, and would soon average between 5 degrees and 9 degrees Fahrenheit colder. The global climate was frigid, dry, and harsh. The northern hemisphere was mantled in vast ice sheets up to two and a half miles thick that reached as far south as Ohio, England, Germany, and northern China. Thirty percent of the Earth’s surface was covered in glaciers. The oceans were more than 270 feet lower than they are now. This was the world in which we first evolved and learned to survive.
Our ancestors, omnivorous hunter-gatherers who traveled in small bands, lived in equatorial Africa for many thousands of years. But when temperatures warmed up about 135,000 years ago, reaching averages as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the present, our ancestors fled the tropics for more temperate climes, hunting their way into the then-verdant grasslands of the Sahara. The Earth had entered what geoscientists call an interglacial period, a regular period of warming that occurs between much longer periods of colder temperatures every hundred thousand years or so.31 These periods are typically brief, geologically speaking, each lasting around ten thousand years.
So it was for our ancestors on the Sahara: After a few millennia, temperatures dropped, getting even colder than before (between 7 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the present), glaciers once again advanced toward the equator, and the oceans shrank. The Sahara lost the humid warmth that had kept it green, and our hunter-gatherer ancestors scattered back south to tropical Africa, east to the Nile valley and beyond, and north around the Mediterranean and into Europe, where they lived alongside, interbred with, and then wiped out our close cousin, the Neanderthal. Over a long winter lasting thousands and thousands of years, as minor climate variations shifted temperatures up and down slightly over decades and centuries, human hunting bands expanded across Asia, eventually crossing the Bering land bridge to the Americas.
Sometime in that period, between one hundred thousand and fifty thousand years ago, we developed the key social technologies that have proven our most substantial predatory advantages: culture and symbolic reasoning.32 This advance was doubtlessly part of what helped us exterminate the Neanderthals and survive the harsh winters, and it also helped us turn the basic tool-use we had inherited from earlier hominids into the intricate technologies of the Cro-Magnon hunter: multilayer winter clothing, mammoth-bone houses, sewing needles, antler-tipped spears, religious rituals, and sophisticated tribal organization. Then, from about fifty thousand to about ten thousand years ago, Upper Paleolithic peoples experienced a veritable cultural explosion. The artifacts they left show technologies more advanced in almost every way than those of their predecessors, more varied, more elaborate, more refined, and more beautiful, with some tools even seemingly designed to be purely aesthetic in function—which is to say, works of art.33
About fifteen thousand years before Hurricane Katrina, the planet started to warm up again, entering another interglacial period, with the most intense and rapid warming happening around 11,000 BCE. Humans began developing villages, basic animal husbandry, and more deliberate systems of gathering. A brief, localized cold snap called the Younger Dryas, caused by glacial meltwater spilling into the Atlantic Ocean and shutting off the Gulf Stream, brought frigid temperatures to Europe and drought to southwest Asia for a thousand years.34 According to archaeologist Brian Fagan, it was almost certainly this drought that drove the people in a small village on the Euphrates, who had until then depended for their sustenance on hunting desert gazelles, harvesting nuts, and gathering wild grasses, to begin deliberately cultivating rye, lentils, and a grain called einkorn.35 By 9000 BCE, after the Younger Dryas had ended and the Gulf Stream had switched back on, the agricultural revolution had begun. Neolithic humans hunted, herded, gathered, and farmed from Europe to South America, thriving in the warm and mild climate of what is now called the Holocene.
A few thousand years later, the Laurentide ice sheet in northern Canada collapsed, causing a rapid rise in sea levels, and, as had happened with the Younger Dryas, shutting off the Atlantic Gulf Stream. Cold, dry conditions descended on Europe and southwest Asia. This cold drought lasted four centuries before the Gulf Stream switched on again. In the marshy confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, farmers began constructing irrigation canals to control flooding and increase crop yields. Villages grew into towns, and as the people living in these new towns struggled to deal