Anthropocene City

Imagine an oyster. Imagine waves of rain lashing concrete, a crawdad boil, a fallen highway, and a muddy bay. Imagine a complex system of gates and levees, the Johnson Space Center, a broken record spinning on a broken player. Imagine the baroque intricacy of the Valero Houston oil refinery, the Petrobras Pasadena oil refinery, the LyondellBasell oil refinery, the Shell Deer Park oil refinery, the ExxonMobil Baytown oil refinery, a bottle of Ravishing Red nail polish, a glacier falling into the sea. Imagine gray-black clouds piling over the horizon, a chaos spiral hundreds of miles wide. Imagine a hurricane.

Isaiah whirls through the sky, gathering strength from the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters. City, state, and federal officials do the sensible thing, evacuating beach towns and warning citizens and companies in Texas’s petro-industrial enclaves from Bayou Vista to Morgan’s Point to prepare for the worst.

The massive cyclone slows and intensifies as it nears the barrier islands off the coast, with wind speeds reaching over 150 mph. By sunset, several hours before landfall, the storm’s counterclockwise arm is pushing water over the Galveston Seawall; by the time the eye finally crosses the beaches east of San Luis Pass, the historic city of Galveston has been flattened by twenty-foot waves.

As Isaiah crosses into Galveston Bay, it only grows in strength, adding water to water, and when it hits the ExxonMobil Baytown refinery, some fifty miles inland, the storm surge is over twenty-five feet high. It crashes through refineries, chemical storage facilities, wharves, and production plants all along the Houston Ship Channel, cleaving pipelines from their moorings, lifting and breaking storage tanks, and strewing toxic waste throughout east Houston.

The iridescent, gray-brown flood rises, carrying jet fuel, sour crude, and natural gas liquids into strip malls, schools, and offices. By the time Isaiah passes inland, leaving the ruined coast behind, more than two hundred petrochemical storage tanks have been wrecked, more than a hundred million gallons of gas, oil, and other chemicals have been spilled, total economic damages for the region are estimated at over a hundred billion dollars, and three thousand six hundred eighty-two people have been killed. By most measures, it is one of the worst disasters in US history: worse than the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, worse than Hurricane Katrina, worse than the terrorist attacks of September 11.

The effects ripple across the globe. The Gulf Coast is home to roughly 30 percent of the United States’ proven oil reserves; the Gulf Coast and Texas hold 35 percent of its natural gas reserves. The refineries and plants circling Galveston Bay are responsible for roughly 25 percent of the United States’ petroleum refining, more than 44 percent of its ethylene production, 40 percent of its specialty chemical feedstock, and more than half of its jet fuel. Houston is the second busiest port in the United States in terms of pure tonnage and is one of the most important storage and shipping points in the country for natural gas liquids. Isaiah shuts all that down. Within days of the hurricane’s landfall, the NYSE and NASDAQ plummet as the price of oil skyrockets. Fuel shortages ground flights throughout the country, airline ticket prices soar, the price of beef and pork shoots up, and gas prices at the pump leap to seven or eight dollars a gallon. The American economy slips into free fall.

Meanwhile, as the oil-poisoned water in east Houston flows back toward the sea, it leaves behind it the worst environmental catastrophe since the BP Deepwater Horizon spill. Rather than diffusing into open water, though, all the sludge is cradled within the protective arms of Galveston Bay.

The good news is that Isaiah hasn’t happened. It’s an imaginary calamity based on models and research. The bad news is that it’s only a matter of time before it does. Any fifty-mile stretch of the Texas coast can expect a hurricane once every six years on average, according to the National Weather Service. Only a few American cities are more vulnerable to hurricanes than Houston and Galveston, and not one of those is as crucial to the economy.

The worse news is that future hurricanes will actually be more severe than Isaiah. The models Isaiah is based on, developed by Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disaster (SSPEED) Center, don’t account for climate change. According to Jim Blackburn, Sspeed’s co-director, other models have shown much more alarming surges. “The City of Houston and FEMA did a climate change future,” he told me, “and the surge in that scenario was 34 feet. Hurricanes are going to get bigger. No question. They are fueled by the heat of the ocean, and the ocean’s warming. Our models are nowhere close.”

Imagine Cobalt Yellow Lake. Imagine Cy Twombly’s “Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor.” Imagine colony collapse. Imagine refugees drowning off the shores of Asia Minor. Imagine causality, a bicycle tire, a million lost golf balls, a Styrofoam cooler, a bucket of crab claws, polyurethane, polypropylene, three copitas of mezcal, polyester, polyacrylic acid, polybutylene terephthalate, barbecue sauce, polycarbonate, polyether ether ketone, polyethylene, a Waffle House, polyoxymethylene, polyphenyl ether, polystyrene, the Wizard of Oz, polysulfone, polytetrafluoroethylene, polyvinyl chloride, a pair of pink Crocs.

I made a reservation aboard the MV Sam Houston to take a boat tour of the Houston Ship Channel, the fifty-mile artery connecting Houston to the Gulf of Mexico, and the densest energy infrastructure nexus in North America. It seemed the perfect place to ask Timothy Morton about hyperobjects, dark ecology, and strange loops—some of the concepts he’s been developing, as one of the leading thinkers of “speculative realism,” in the effort to make philosophical sense of climate change.

The thinkers behind speculative realism, including Morton, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, and Jane Bennett, share a predilection for weird writers, woolly European metaphysics, and big ideas like the Anthropocene, but they’d likely resist being lumped all together. Graham Harman’s “object-oriented ontology,” for instance, argues that objects are autonomous in a way that keeps them from ever really connecting, perpetually withdrawing from each other in spite of apparent relations, while Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter” tells us that everything is equally alive and equally interwoven, humming together in a humongous, homogeneous web in which a lost glove, an F-117 stealth bomber, and an Iraqi child are all basically the same kind of stuff. Morton, for his part, is more concerned with a critique of “Nature,” arguing that we need to get past our cherished “culture/nature” divide in order to see ourselves as always already bound up in a dark mesh of ontological feedback.

As different as these thinkers are, though, they share a few key ideas. First, they all argue against what Meillassoux calls correlationism, the idea that human access to reality is limited to mere correlation between things-in-themselves and our thoughts about them. Our access to reality, they each insist in their own way, is more mysterious and complicated than just finding the circle-shaped thought for the circle-shaped thing. Second, for all these thinkers, things in the world have their own vitality independent of their relations to humans. A spoon has its own reality, as does an ocelot, a painting by Redon, or a Panamax container ship. Objects don’t need human subjects to be meaningful, they argue, not even objects made by humans. Third, these thinkers all believe ontology trumps epistemology. Instead of asking how we can know things, that is, they insist we should be asking what it means for things to exist in the first place. The signature move that ties all this together is the willingness to indulge in speculative metaphysics—pondering what reality, deep down, really is. Spurning both mainstream analytic philosophy and the critical Marxist-Hegelian tradition, these thinkers have decided that what the world needs from philosophy isn’t analysis, interpretation, or even transformation, but imagination.

Whether or not any of this makes any sense will depend on whom you ask. While speculative realism has generated a lot of buzz in literature departments and art magazines, its coherence and influence remain much debated. Some argue that object-oriented ontology is just a new way to fetishize commodities, especially the ones we call art. Others argue that the ideas behind speculative realism are specious and ignorant of the philosophical tradition. Climate scientists and academic philosophers, meanwhile, have hardly seemed to notice that speculative realism exists.

One of the reasons speculative realism exerts such a draw on artistic and literary types, I suspect, is because its thinkers make interesting aesthetic choices. This is especially true of Morton, who has a gift for the phrase. His book titles, capsule formulations of the ideas they elaborate, rumble with portent. Consider Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, or Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Indeed, on the page Morton is a dizzying, acrobatic thinker; to read him is to take a wild ride through Romantic poetry, Western philosophy, literary theory, and climate change—imagine Slavoj Žižek on psilocybin.

In person, Morton is gentle, funny, and self-effacing, equal parts Oxbridge and cybergoth. We drove out to the ship channel in his white Mazda. As we rose and fell through the soaring grandeur of Houston’s swooping highway exchanges, we talked about writing practice and work-life balance: Morton had two books coming out in 2016 and was writing two more, and when he’s not busy writing, spending time with his kids, giving lectures, blogging, or collaborating with Björk, he teaches courses on literary theory and “Arts in the Anthropocene” at Rice University, where he holds the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English.

Turning off the highway, we descended into the petro-industrial gray zone that sprawls from Houston to the sea. A Port of Houston security guard checked our IDs, and we drove past hundred-foot-long turbine blades, massive shafts, and what looked like pieces of giant disassembled robots. I asked Tim how he liked living in Houston.

“This is the dirty coast,” he said. “Dirty in the sense that something’s wrong. We’re holding this horrible, necessary energy substance, and it’s like working in an emergency room or a graveyard or a charnel ground. You’re basically working with corpses, with fossils from millions of years ago, you’re working with deadly toxic stuff all the time, stuff that has very intense emotion connected to it. If I was going to find a word that described Texan-ness, I’d use the word ‘wild’—phenomenologically, emotionally, experientially wild.”

We parked and boarded the MV Sam Houston. As the boat spun away from the pier and headed east, Tim and I went out on deck. Across the brown-black water enormous claws and magnets shifted scrap metal from one heap to another, throwing up clouds of metal dust, while the engine thrummed through my feet and the wind whipped across the mike of my voice recorder.

“The thing is,” Tim said, “being aware of ecological facts is the very opposite of thinking about or looking at or talking about nature. Nature is always conceptualized as an entity that’s different or distinct from me somehow. It’s in my DNA, it’s under my clothes, it’s under the floorboards, it’s in the wilderness. It’s everywhere except for right here. But ecology means it’s in your face. It is your face. It’s part of you and you’re part of it.”

Several industrial recycling companies line the upper reaches of the Houston Ship Channel, including Derichebourg Recycling USA, Texas Port Recycling, and Cronimet USA, all recognized emitters of one of the most potent carcinogens known to science, hexavalent chromium. Behind the giant cranes and heaps of scrap lies the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of Magnolia Park, whose residents have long complained of unexplained smoke and gas emissions, persistent pollution, and strange, multicolored explosions.

“The simplest way of describing that is ecology without nature,” Tim continued. “That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in things like coral. I believe in coral much more than someone who thinks that coral is this ‘natural’ thing. Coral is a life form that’s connected to other forms. Everything’s connected. And how we think about stuff is connected to the stuff. How you think about stuff, how you perceive stuff, is entangled with what you’re perceiving.”

In among the recycling yards sat Brady’s Landing, a steak-and-shrimp restaurant. Through its plate-glass windows, dozens of empty white tables shone like pearls in black velvet. I imagined diners eating crab-stuffed trout, watching the water rise up over the Ceres wharfs across the channel, rise up over the pilings at the edge of Brady’s Island, rise up over the restaurant’s foundations and up the windows, one foot, two feet, six feet, and the glass would crack, creak, and burst open, and the tide would rush in over fine leather shoes and French cuffs and napkin-covered laps and lift them, the diners, their tables, plates, pinot noir, and crab-stuffed trout, lift them and spin them in a rich and strange ballet.

“It’s like when you realize you’re actually a life form,” Tim said. “I’m Tim but I’m also a human. That sounds obvious but it isn’t. I’m Tim but I’ve also got these bits of fish and viral material inside me, that are me. That’s not a nice, cozy experience; it’s an uncanny, weird experience. But there’s a kind of smile from that experience, because ecological reality is like that. Ecological phenomena are all about loops, feedback loops, and this very tragic loop we’re on where we’re destroying Earth as we know it.”

Interstate Highway 610 loomed above, eighteen-wheelers and SUVs rolling through the sky. In the distance, gas flares flashed against the cloud cover. Pipes fed into pipes that wrapped back into pipes circling pipes, Escher machines in aluminum and steel.

“Ecological thinking is about never being able to be completely in the center of your world. It’s about everything seeming out of place and unreal. That’s the feel of dark ecology. But it isn’t just about human awareness: it’s about how everything has this uncanny, looped quality to it. It’s actually part of how things are. So it’s about being horrified and upset and traumatized and shocked by what we’ve been up to as human beings, and it’s about realizing that this basic feeling of twistedness isn’t going away.”

A voice boomed out from the bowels of the boat as we broke from the highway’s shadow: “First refinery to the right is Valero. This refinery began operations in 1942. It will handle 145,000 barrels of oil per day.” Directly behind Valero lay Hartman Park, with its green lawns and baseball diamonds—the jewel of Manchester, one of the most polluted neighborhoods in the United States. Manchester is blocked in on the north by Valero, and on the east, south, and west by a chemical plant, a car-crushing yard, a water treatment plant, a train yard, Interstate 610, and a Goodyear synthetic rubber plant. In 2010, the EPA found toxic levels of seven different carcinogens in the neighborhood. The area is 88 percent Hispanic.

“At some point,” Tim said, “instead of trying to delete the twisty darkness, you have to make friends with it. And when you make friends with it, it becomes strangely sweet.”

Imagine Greenland. Imagine Kellogg Brown & Root. Imagine Uber, the Svalbard Seed Vault, a roadkill raccoon, six months in juvie, Green Revolution, amnesia. Imagine ZZ Top. Imagine White Oak Bayou flooding its banks. Imagine Mexican gardeners wielding Weed Eaters. Imagine boom and bust, the murmur of Diane Rehm, sizzurp, a sick coot, Juneteenth, coral bleaching, amnesia. Imagine losing Shanghai, New York, and Mumbai. Imagine “In the Mood.” Imagine amnesia.

From Houston, the ship channel goes south through Galveston Bay, cutting a trench approximately 530 feet wide and 45 feet deep through the estuary bottom to where it passes into the Gulf of Mexico. As you follow the channel south along I-45, strip clubs and fast-food franchises give way to bayou resorts and refineries, until the highway finally leaps into the air, soaring over the water with the pelicans. It comes down again in downtown Galveston, once known as the Wall Street of the South: a mix of historic homes, dry-docked oil rigs, beach bars, and the University of Texas Medical Branch. The gulf spreads sullen and muddy to the south, its greasy skin broken by distant blisters of flaming steel.

Galveston Bay is a Texas paradox. One of the most productive estuaries in the United States, it offers up huge catches of shrimp, blue crab, oysters, croaker, flounder, and catfish and supports dozens of other kinds of fish, turtles, dolphins, salamanders, sharks, and snakes, as well as hundreds of species of birds. Yet the bay is heavily polluted, so full of PCBs, pesticides, dioxin, and petrochemicals that fishing is widely restricted. The bay is Houston’s shield, protecting it from the worst of the Gulf Coast’s weather by absorbing storm surges and soaking up rainfall, but hydrologists at Rice University are worried that it might also be Houston’s doom: The wide, shallow basin could, under the right conditions, supercharge a storm surge right up the ship channel.

The fight to protect Houston and Galveston from storms has been going on for more than a century, ever since Galveston built a seventeen-foot seawall after the Great Storm of 1900, a Category 4 hurricane that killed an estimated ten to twelve thousand people. The fight has been mainly reactive, always planning for the last big storm, rarely for the next. The levees around Texas City, for instance, were built after Hurricane Carla submerged the chemical plants there in ten feet of water in 1961. Today, Hurricane Ike, which hit Texas in 2008, offers the object lesson.

Hurricane Ike was a lucky hit with unlucky timing. Forecasts had the hurricane landing at the southern end of Galveston Island, and if they’d been right, Ike would have looked a lot like Isaiah. Instead, in the early morning hours of September 13, 2008, Ike bent north and hit Galveston dead on, which shifted the most damaging winds east. The sparsely populated Bolivar Peninsula was flattened, but Houston came out okay.

Still, Ike killed nearly fifty people in Texas alone, left thousands homeless, and was the third costliest hurricane in American history. It would have been the ideal moment for Texas to ask Congress to fund a comprehensive coastal protection system. But that Monday, September 15, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in United States history, and the next day the Federal Reserve stepped in to save the failing insurance behemoth AIG with an $85 billion bailout. Nature’s fury took a back seat to the crisis of capital.

Since then, two main research teams have led the way in preparing for the next big storm: Bill Merrell’s “Ike Dike” team at Texas A&M Galveston (TAMUG), and the SSPEED Center at Rice University, led by Phil Bedient and Jim Blackburn. Despite shared goals, though, the relationship between the two teams hasn’t always been easy. Bill Merrell’s cantankerous personality and obsessive drive to protect Galveston have clashed with SSPEED’s complex, interdisciplinary, Houston-centric approach.

Dr. Merrell’s Ike Dike has the blessing of simplicity, which softens the sticker shock: It is estimated to cost between $6 billion and $13 billion. The plan is to build a fifty-five-mile-long “coastal spine” along the gulf. The plan’s main disadvantage is that a strong enough hurricane could still flood the Houston Ship Channel, because of what Dr. Bedient calls the Lake Okeechobee effect.

“The Okeechobee hurricane came into Florida in 1928 and sloshed water to a twenty-foot surge,” Dr. Bedient explained. “Killed two thousand people. But Lake Okeechobee is unconnected to the coast. It was just wind. Galveston Bay has the same dimensions and depth as Lake Okeechobee in Florida. So imagine we block off Galveston Bay with a coastal spine, and we have a Lake Okeechobee.”

Dr. Bedient worked on the Murphy’s Oil spill in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, where flooding from Hurricane Katrina ruptured a storage tank, releasing more than a million gallons of oil, and ruined approximately 1,800 homes. One of Dr. Bedient’s biggest worries is what a storm might do to the estimated 4,500 similar tanks surrounding Houston, many of them along the Ship Channel. If even 2 percent of those tanks were to fail because of storm surge, the results would be catastrophic.

The SSPEED Center advocates a layered defense, including a midbay gate that could be closed during a storm to protect the channel. On its face, the plan seems unwieldy, but SSPEED’s models show it could stop most of the surge from going up the ship channel, with or without the Ike Dike, at an estimated cost of only a few billion dollars.

On the government side, various entities are at work in the ponderous and opaque way of American bureaucracy. The US Army Corps of Engineers has its own research and development process and is working on a study of the Galveston-Houston area as part of its more comprehensive Gulf Coast research agenda, which could, eventually, lead to a recommendation for further studies, feasibility and cost-benefit analyses, environmental impact reports, and perhaps someday a project, which, were it funded by Congress, might even get built. One must be patient. It took the Army Corps of Engineers twenty-six years to build the Texas City Levee. When Katrina hit New Orleans and breached the levee system there, the Corps had been working on it since 1965, and it was still under construction.

Meanwhile, the Gulf Coast Community Protection and Recovery District is working to synthesize SSPEED and TAMUG’s work into its own proposal. The GCCPRD was established by Texas governor Rick Perry in 2009, in the wake of Ike, but wasn’t funded until 2013, when the Texas General Land Office stepped in with a federal grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The GCCPRD board comprises county judges from Brazoria, Chambers, Galveston, Harris, Jefferson, and Orange counties, three additional members, and a president, currently former Harris County judge Robert Eckels, and has hired Dannenbaum Engineering, a local company with a strong track record in public infrastructure, to put the report together. The GCCPRD takes its lead from the GLO, headed today by Commissioner George P. Bush, and the specific language of the HUD grant restricts their work to analysis and general-level planning. Any more specific plans will have to come later, pending additional funding.

If there’s one thing Houston can teach us about the Anthropocene, it’s that all global warming is local. I went down myself to see representatives from all of these organizations—the USACE, SSPEED, TAMUG, the GLO, and the GCCPRD, plus the Texas Chemical Council and the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership—testify before the State of Texas Joint Interim Committee on Coastal Barrier Systems (JICCBS), a special committee of the Texas state legislature, held at the TAMUG campus in Galveston.

Over five hours of presentations, talking points, and questions, a rough sense of the future began to take shape. As I sat in the back row listening to politicians ask about how various projects might affect insurance rates, how long different projects might take to build, and how the pitch could be put to the US Congress asking for the billions of dollars needed, I imagined a single white feather, numinous in the golden light of the Power Point, drift across the conference room, float over the heads of the senators, administrators, and scientists, and rise, rise, rise on an ever expanding wave of confidence.

What obstacles might have remained between this roomful of committed public servants and the building of one of the largest coastal infrastructure projects in the world seemed for a moment insubstantial. The fact that environmental impact studies taking years to complete had yet to be started, that any of the land in question would have to be bought or seized under eminent domain, that all the planning at this stage was merely notional and actual designs would have to be bid on, contracted out, and approved, that there was no governmental agency in place to take responsibility for a coastal barrier system and maintain it, much less build it, and that somebody still had to come up with the money, somewhere, perhaps somehow convincing divided Republicans and embattled Democrats in the US Congress to send a bunch of Texas pols and their cronies a check for $13 billion—these were all mere details, nothing to worry about. I felt sure the political will manifest in that conference room would find a way.

And I had total confidence that those same feelings of goodwill, pragmatism, and accomplishment would be found, more or less, at the next Joint Interim Committee on Coastal Barrier Systems meeting, and the next academic conference on “Avoiding Disaster,” and the next policy symposium on energy transition, and the next global conference on sea-level rise, and the next plenary on carbon trading, and the next colloquium on the Anthropocene, and the next Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, and journalists would report on it, and philosophers would ponder it, and activists would tweet about it, and concerned people like you would read about it. The problem is, it’s not enough.

According to Jim Blackburn, “Even a locally funded project would probably be three years in the permitting and another six to eight years in construction.” Most local politicians, however, seemed to prefer the Ike Dike, necessarily a Federal project. “I have heard more than one person say our plan is to wait until the next hurricane comes,” Blackburn said, “and then depend on guilt money from Washington to fix the problem.”

Bill Merrell told me much the same thing: “We see local politicians in general content with doing nothing. The do-nothing option is pretty gruesome. It gets you a storm, sooner or later, that’s going to kill thousands of people and cause at least $100 billion in damage. The cost of doing nothing is horrendous. But trying to get politicians from doing nothing to doing something is really hard. I think I’ve started to appreciate that more. I didn’t realize it would be as hard as it was.”

Two weeks after the JICCBS meeting, Houston was inundated with more than a foot of rain in less than twenty-four hours, almost two feet in some neighborhoods. Flooding damaged more than 200 homes and killed eight people. By the end of the month, it was the wettest April the city had ever recorded. More rain and more floods hit Texas in May and June, then a week of precipitation in August dumped more than seven trillion gallons of water on Louisiana, with some areas accumulating more than twenty inches of rain. Flooding killed thirteen people and damaged 146,000 homes.

Imagine Earth. Imagine “Pretty Hurts.” Imagine Lakewood Church, wind-lashed magnolias, a bottle of Topo Chico, the Astrodome. Imagine surface and depth, weather drones, the Geto Boys, thermodynamic disequilibrium, a body in a hole. Imagine the economy slowing, snowy egrets nesting in a live oak, becoming one with the Ocean of Soul, a Colt Expanse carbine. Imagine purple drank and a bowl of queso. Imagine Terms of Endearment. Imagine stocks and flows, a pearl, a rhizome. Imagine the end of the world as we know it.

The Sam Houston’s ninety-minute tour of the Houston Ship Channel only goes a few miles out before turning around at the LyondellBasel refinery, one of the largest heavy-sulfur-crude refineries in the United States, processing around 268,000 barrels a day. The loudspeaker voice offered us complimentary soft drinks. I asked Tim Morton whether dark ecology had a politics.

“Obviously,” he said, “it’s not just that unequal distribution is connected to ecological stuff. It is ecological. It’s not like we need to condescend to include fighting racism and these other issues under the banner of ecological thinking. It’s the other way around. These problems were already ecological because the class system is a Mesopotamian construct and we’re basically living in Mesopotamia 9.0. We’re looking at these oil refineries and it’s basically an upgrade of an upgrade of an upgrade of an agricultural logistics that began around 10,000 BC and is directly responsible, right now, for a huge amount of carbon emissions but also absolutely necessitated industry and therefore global warming and mass extinction.”

We passed the CEMEX Houston Cement Company East Plant, the Gulf Coast Waste Disposal Authority’s Washburn Tunnel Wastewater Treatment Facility, the Kinder Morgan Terminal, and Calpine’s Channel Energy Center, a natural gas steam plant.

“This is where I have to say something English, which is ‘Give us a chance, mate.’ Because we can’t do everything all at once, and we come to the conversation with the limitations and the skill sets that we have, and we’re getting round to stuff. But maybe the first thing to do is to notice: We. Are. In. A. Shit. Situation. Maybe the first thing to do is go, okay, we’re causing a mass extinction the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the end-Permian extinction that wiped out 95 percent of life on Earth. Dark ecology has a politics, but it’s a very different kind of politics because it means that the idea that humans get to decide what reality is needs to be dismantled. It’s an ontological war.”

Off our starboard, Public Grain Elevator #2 poured wheat into the hold of a Chinese freighter, a hundred yards from a giant mound of yellow Mexican gypsum. The Valero refinery rose again to port, flare stacks burning against the sky, just beyond where Sims Bayou broke off from the channel and meandered in toward South Park and Sunnyside, poverty-stricken African American neighborhoods largely abandoned by Houston’s government. One area of Sunnyside was recently rated the second most dangerous neighborhood in America. Seventy-six percent of the children there live in poverty. Residents have a 1 in 11 chance of becoming a victim of violent crime.

“Take hyperobjects,” Tim said, staring fixedly at the Valero refinery. “Hyperobjects are things that are so huge and so long-lasting that you can’t point to them directly, you can only point to symptoms or parts of them. You can only point to little slivers of how they appear in your world. Imagine all the oil on Earth, forever, and the consequences of extracting and burning it for the next 100,000 years. That would be a hyperobject. We’re going through this ship channel and these huge gigantic entities are all symptoms of this even larger, much more disturbing thing that we can’t point to directly. You’re in it and you are it, and you can’t say where it starts and where it stops. Nevertheless, it’s this thing here, it’s on Earth, we know where it is.”

We passed Brady’s Landing and Derichebourg Recycling and Brays Bayou. The boat motored back much faster than it had gone out, and I had to strain to catch Tim’s voice against the noise of the wind and water.

“My whole body’s full of oil products,” he said. “I’m wearing them and I’m driving them and I’m talking about them and I’m ignoring them and I’m pouring them into my gas tank, all these things I’m doing with them, precisely that is why I can’t grasp them. It’s not an abstraction. It’s actually so real that I can’t point to it. The human species is like that: instead of being this thing underneath appearance that you can point to, it’s this incredibly distributed thing that you can’t point to. The one thing that we need to be thinking right now, which is that as a human being I’m responsible for global warming, is actually quite tricky to fully conceptualize.”

The Sam Houston throttled down and bumped against the wharf, the crew laid out the gangplank, and we disembarked. Tim and I got back in his white Mazda and he punched the destination into his phone.

“Make a U-turn,” the fembot voice commanded. We drove out past the guard shack and over some railroad tracks, then out onto the highway.

“Anybody who’s got any intelligence or sensitivity working with this stuff very quickly gets into dilemma space,” Tim said, changing lanes. “I think it’s a matter of nuance, how you work with that. I admire any mode of thought that goes as quickly as possible to this dilemma space, but we’ve only just begun to notice the ‘we’ doing these horrible things, and it’s okay to be completely confused and upset. We’re in shock, and that’s on a good day. Most days it’s just grief work because we’re in a state of total denial. I am too. I can only allow myself to feel really upset about what’s going on for maybe one second a day, otherwise I’d be in a heap on the floor all the time crying.”

We took Alt-90 to I-10, passing a Chevron and a Shell and a Subway and Tires R Us and Mucho Mexico, then rose into the flow of traffic cruising the interstate west.

“We’re constantly trying to get on top of whatever we’re worrying about, but if you look at it from an Earth magnitude, that’s magical thinking. We’ve given ourselves an impossible-to-solve problem. The way in which we think about the problem, the way in which we give it to ourselves, is part of the problem. How do you talk to people in a deep state of grief when you’re also in that deep state of grief?”

The lanes split and we wove from I-10 to 59 and then, just past Fiesta Mart’s enormous neon parrot, slid down the ramp to Fannin Street.

“I think there’s an exit route, actually,” Tim said, “but it’s paradoxical. It involves going down underneath: it’s not about transcending in any sense, it’s about what I call subscending. There’s always so much more about weather than just being a symptom of global warming. It is a symptom of global warming, but it’s also a bath, these little birds over here, it’s this wonderful wetness on the back of my neck, it’s this irritating thing that’s clogging up my drain.”

We passed Fannin Flowers and then turned onto Bissonnet Street, rolling by the Museum of Fine Arts, with its special exhibit on Art Deco cars, and the Contemporary Art Museum, which was featuring an exhibition about the colonization of Mars. We turned in past Mel Chin’s Manilla Palm, a giant fiberglass and burlap tree erupting out of a broken steel pyramid, then turned again, tracking back toward my apartment, past expensive new condos and down the dead end where I lived. Bamboo rose against the fence at the end of the road. Tim parked by the curb and shut off the Mazda.

“It boils down to knowing that global warming is a catastrophe rather than a disaster. Disasters are things that you rubberneck as they’re happening to other people because you’re reading about it in the Book of Revelation. It isn’t now. A catastrophe, on the other hand, is something that you’re inside of and it’s got this weird, loopy, twisty structure to it. Disaster’s like: everything’s being destroyed and I can see perfectly how everything’s being destroyed. Catastrophe’s more like: OMG, I am the destruction. I’m part of it and I’m in it and I’m on it. It’s an aesthetic experience, I’m inside it, I’m involved, I’m implicated.”

A cardinal flew across the street, a streak of red against the green.

“I think that’s how we get to smile, eventually, by fully inhabiting catastrophe space, in the same way that eventually a nightmare can become so horrible that you start laughing. That’s how you find the exit route. I feel like maybe part of my job is giving people that.”

Imagine black. Imagine black, black, black, blue-black, red-black, purple-black, gray-black, black on black. Imagine methane. Imagine education. Imagine wetlands. Imagine a brown-skinned woman in white circling the Rothko Chapel chanting “Zong. Zong. Zong.” Imagine a regional, comprehensive approach to storm-surge risk management, lemonade, the Slab Parade, increased capacity, complexity, attribution studies, progress, a wine-and-cheese reception, TACC’s Stampede Supercomputer, an integrative place-based research program, Venice’s Piazza San Marco, sea-level rise, Destiny’s Child. Imagine a red line. Imagine two degrees. Imagine flare stacks. Imagine death.

Maybe it was the eleventh straight month of record-breaking warming. Maybe it was when the Earth’s temperature hit 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. Maybe it was new reports that Antarctica and the Arctic were melting faster than anyone expected. Maybe it was when Greenland started melting two months early, and then so quickly that scientists didn’t believe their data. Maybe it was watching our world start to come apart, and knowing that nothing would be done until it was too late.

We’ve known that climate change was a threat since at least 1988, and the United States has done almost nothing to stop it. Today it might be too late. The feedback mechanisms that scientists have warned us about are happening. Our world is changing.

Imagine we’ve got twenty or thirty years before things really get bad. Imagine how that happens. Imagine soldiers putting you on a bus, imagine nine months in a FEMA trailer, imagine nine years in a temporary camp. Imagine watching the rich on the other side of the fence, the ones who can afford beef and gasoline, the ones who can afford clean water. Imagine your child growing up never knowing satiety, never knowing comfort, never knowing snow. Imagine politics in a world on fire.

Climate change is hard to think about not only because it’s complex and politically contentious, not only because it’s cognitively almost impossible to keep in mind the intricate relationships that tie together an oil well in Venezuela, Siberian permafrost, Saudi F-15s bombing a Yemeni wedding, subsidence along the Jersey Shore, albedo effect near Kangerlussuaq, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the polar vortex, shampoo, California cattle, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, leukemia, plastic, paper, the Sixth Extinction, Zika, and the basic decisions we make every day, are forced to make every day, in a world we didn’t choose but were thrown into. No, it’s not just because it’s mind-bendingly difficult to connect the dots. Climate change is hard to think about because it’s depressing and scary.

Thinking seriously about climate change forces us to face the fact that nobody’s driving the car, nobody’s in charge, nobody knows how to “fix it.” And even if we had a driver, there’s a bigger problem: no car. There’s no mechanism for uniting the entire human species to move together in one direction. There are more than seven billion of us, and we divide into almost two hundred nations, thousands of smaller subnational states, territories, counties, and municipalities, and an unimaginable multitude of corporations, community organizations, neighborhoods, religious sects, ethnic identities, clans, tribes, gangs, clubs, and families, each of which faces its own internal conflicts, disunion, and strife, all the way down to the individual human soul in conflict with itself, torn between fear and desire, hard sacrifice and easy cruelty, all of us improvising day by day, moment by moment, making decisions based on best guesses, gut hunches, comforting illusions, and too little data.

But that’s the human way: reactive, ad hoc, improvised. Our ability to reconfigure our collective existence in response to changing environmental conditions has been our greatest adaptive trait. Unfortunately for us, we’re still not very good at controlling the future. What we’re good at is telling ourselves the stories we want to hear, the stories that help us cope with existence in a wild, unpredictable world.

Imagine life. Imagine a hurricane. Imagine a brown-skinned woman in white circling the Rothko Chapel chanting “Zong.” Imagine grief. Imagine the Greenland ice sheet collapsing and black-crowned night herons nesting in the live oaks. Imagine Cy Twombly’s “Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor,” amnesia, a broken record on a broken player, a tar-stained bird, the baroque complexity of a flooded oil refinery, glaciers sliding into the sea. Imagine an oyster. Imagine gray-black clouds piling over the horizon, a sublime spiral hundreds of miles wide. Imagine climate change. Imagine a happy ending. [2017]