Robert Markley
Even a decade ago, the idea of writing or reading an essay on climate in a companion to literature and science would have seemed odd. It may be difficult to remember, but the development of literary theory in the 1980s in the United States and Europe occurred during an era dominated by the notion of nuclear winter, the scientific model that predicted dramatic global cooling in the event of a thermonuclear war. Since that time, dramatic changes in a range of scientific disciplines – from meteorology, to computer science, to geology, to glaciology – have led to a revolution in the way that scientists think about the Earth’s climate, its natural cycles of cooling and heating, and the ways in which humankind has been warming the planet since the Industrial Revolution, and perhaps longer (Ruddiman 2005). Although popular culture, including some bad Hollywood disaster movies and some good science-fiction novels, quickly picked up on the idea of global warming, most literary critics and serious novelists have been slow to deal with the prospect of abrupt climate change. No one so far has been able to write a “realistic” novel about a long-term trend of sustained warming that really has just begun, and our cultural fascination – often bordering on narcissism – with our own lives, inner experiences, and social relations has tended to return us to deeply embedded ways of thinking about a romanticized Nature, as opposed to a dynamic climate. In many respects, 200 years after revolutions in astronomy, geology, and biology challenged traditional ways of thinking about history, we are still coming to grips with ideas of time and environment that are not merely extensions of our bodily experiences, memories, and written histories.
Living through and writing about climate change in the twenty-first century invariably poses questions about the relationships among three different registers of time: experiential or embodied time, historical time, and climatological time. Each of these registers resists hard-and-fast definition, in part because climatological time – accessible through and mediated by a range of complex technologies – complicates the connections between reading and narrative that Paul Ricoeur identifies as crucial to the phenomenological and historical perceptions of time (Ricoeur 1984–88). Climatological time has emerged from a complex genealogy of what Jean-Joseph Goux calls “symbolic economies” that characterize crises of representation in the human sciences (Goux 1990; Markley 1993). Consider the implied but entangled registers of time in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 poem “Evangeline.” At the beginning of the poem, Longfellow asks his readers to imagine the landscape of Acadia on the east coast of Canada:
THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic.
(Longfellow 1848: 5)
Although cast in the imagery of prehistory, this “primeval” forest is inhabited primarily by memories of – or a deep nostalgia for – a vanished and yet thoroughly humanized past that has been absorbed into, yet remains constitutive of, the landscape. Longfellow’s repetition of his opening half-line signals an implied recognition of the dialectical relations between human acts and the environment that define Nature (Crumley 1994; Ingerson 1994). The “forest primeval” becomes coeval with, and indivisible from, an anthropocentric world:
This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?
Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers, – Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands, Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven? Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed! Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o’er the ocean.
(Longfellow 1848: 6)
The opening of “Evangeline” throws into relief fundamental tensions among three notions of time: embodied time (the lives of the villagers), historical time (the “pleasant farms” and farmers who have been “Scattered like dust and leaves”), and climatological time – the sense of a natural world of wind and oceans that marks the limits of narrative and the bounds of the human understanding of the “primeval.” Longfellow’s poem reveals half-buried tensions in its invocations of “Nature,” in part because the forest that Longfellow asks us to imagine is “primeval” only from the limited perspectives afforded by memory and recorded history. Ten thousand years ago, during the Ice Age known as the Younger Dryas, Longfellow’s Acadia lay under a mile of glacial ice, and the east coast of the Canadian Atlantic was uninhabited and uninhabitable (Burroughs 2005). In this respect, climatological time haunts Longfellow’s poem, and yet resists being represented. The vast timescales of climatic change lie beyond our senses of personal experience and human history; yet, paradoxically, this non-anthropocentric understanding of time underwrites the political, scientific, ecological, religious, and socioeconomic traditions that allow us to make sense of global climate change and that have structured literary representations of Nature since the beginnings of Western civilization.
In this chapter, I outline a brief history of the registers of time and explore some of the ways in which tensions among embodied, historical, and climatological time underlie our twenty-first-century understandings of, and commitments to, sustainability. Sustainability, I argue, is in some respects a literary construct, the outgrowth of particular ways of conceiving time; therefore, the different registers of time that I discuss both produce and are reinscribed by descriptions of sustainability as an ethics, a policy goal, and a rallying cry. Embodied time, historical time, and climatological time are mutually constitutive – that is, they can be imagined only in relation to each other. They are also culturally and historically inflected, and it would take several full-length studies to examine the ways in which different cultures have tried to negotiate among them. In focusing on aspects of Western literary traditions, I trace the ways in which time remains embedded in history, culture, and technology. Time is not an abstract and objective measurement of duration, but a dynamic set of relations mediated by technoscientific understandings of climatic variability and climatic change. In this respect, as I argue below, the idea of climatological time paradoxically transcends and deconstructs a long philosophical and rhetorical tradition that contrasts kronos (chronological time) to kairos (the opportune moment, the “right” time, or, as in contemporary Greek, the weather: see White 1987). An understanding of climatological time complicates and enriches a variety of political responses to the crisis of global warming in the twenty-first century.
The familiar catch-phrases that invoke “the world our grandchildren will inherit” or urge us to “save the earth for future generations” reveal the extent to which sustainability is indebted to conceptions of embodied time, that is, to individual experiences of wind, heat, cold, rain, drought, and the thousand climatic shocks that flesh is heir to. Reinscribing a conception of time that dates back to the Old Testament, sustainability evokes a succession of individual lifetimes – an unbroken sequence of embodied experiences from the past and into the future that presupposes societies and cultures developing against the backdrop of the timeless present of an abiding Nature. Troubling this quasi-biblical vision of succession and its socio-genetic inheritance of moral authority, property rights, social responsibility, and racial, ethnic, and religious identities is a fundamental question: What exactly is being sustained? Is it the stability of the planetary ecosystem (and its numberless sub-systems) as a self-perpetuating whole? or the productivity of the natural world so that technologies of resource extraction and practices of intensification allow selected populations to maintain, improve, and extend first-world standards of living? Explored through a critical archaeology of time, the work of literature mediates the intimations of sublime change – of climatological time – by restricting time to human history; therefore contemporary rhetorics of sustainability draw on a rich legacy of images of ecological stability by re-envisioning the pastoral tradition – the eternal spring of the bucolic countryside – and the georgic, the strategies of intensification that allow for the endlessly increasing exploitation of resources. The roots of these genres in the classical world and their successive reimaginings in Europe and the Americas suggest the extent to which notions of sustainability subsume and rework tensions that have characterized views of Nature for thousands of years.
Embodied time is written in terms of memory. In his study of meteorology in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jan Golinski calls attention to the ways in which amateur naturalists who observed and described weather patterns struggled with the limitations of language. The author of the anonymous Worcestershire diary called his daily weather register “my Ephemeris or Historicall Remarques on vicissitudes of the weather, with a narrative of its course & Tracing it in its various winding meanders round ye year” but complained that “our Language is exceeding scanty & barren of words to use & express ye various notions I have of Weather &c” (cited in Golinski 2007: 19). This “scanty & barren” language restricts the ability to turn the daily experience of the weather into a theory of climate. Without a causal, scientific narrative to explain changes in the weather, such records drift toward the theological semiotics of catastrophe and apocalypse: the experience of embodied responses to the weather tends to be cast in providentialist terms.
In his account of the devastating wind storm that struck England and Wales in late 1703, a once-in-500-years extra-tropical cyclone, Daniel Defoe describes his fears as the storm approached: “the Night would be very tempestuous,” he recognized, because “the Mercury [in his barometer] sunk lower than ever I had observ’d it on any Occasion whatsoever.” But the plunging readings seemed so anomalous that they “made [him] suppose that the Tube had been handled and disturb’d by [his] Children” (Defoe 1704: 24; see Markley 2008). The full force of the storm dilates the time between midnight and dawn, both in distracting Defoe from his observations and in threatening to end both experiential and historical time: after midnight, he admits of the barometer that his “Observations … are not regular enough to supply the Reader with a full Information, the Disorders of that Dreadful Night having found me other imployment, expecting every Moment when the House I was in would bury us all in its own Ruins” (25). This sense of impending destruction becomes an emblem of God’s vengeance on England for its sins. Defoe sees time in dialectic and emblematic terms; his peril and salvation are also England’s. In this sense, the gaps left by imperfect languages and unattended barometers mark the ruptures within history and experience that structure Protestant theology during the early eighteenth century: divine power always threatens to end kronos, chronological time, and to redefine kairos as divine vengeance.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the “empty” time of mathematical simulation and climatological reconstruction began to assert its explanatory power by disembodying climate, that is, by treating climatic change not as the catastrophic irruption of divine judgment but as a non-anthropogenic time that transcends both individual and historical experience. At the end of the eighteenth century, climatological time emerges as a distinct ontological challenge to theological time in three interlocking sets of developments. All three sought to redefine the scientific basis for understanding time and, in the process, recast traditional ideas about Nature. In the 1790s, the nebular hypothesis of planetary formation advanced by Pierre Simon de Laplace, the “discovery” of geological time by James Hutton, and the argument for species extinction put forth by Georges Cuvier transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling history from human experience and memory.
The nebular hypothesis anthropomorphized the life cycle of planets in terms of youth, maturity, old age, and heat-death, offering a model of climatic change as the consequence of irreversible, universal processes (Numbers 1977). Laplace removed Newton’s God from the mathematical equations that produced a compelling model of the origins, evolution, and fate of the solar system. Hutton’s vision of geological time with “no vestige of a beginning, – no prospect of an end” presented a cyclical history of erosion and upheaval that continually reshaped earth (Hutton 1795: 1, 200). This continual reshaping both went beyond and challenged the theological catastrophism that ascribed evidence such as drowned cities and toppled buildings to the vengeance of an angry God. Eighty years after Defoe had echoed a near-universal sentiment among early natural philosophers –“Nature plainly refers us beyond her Self, to the Mighty Hand of Infinite Power, the Author of Nature, and Original of all Causes” (Defoe 1704: 2) – Hutton’s geological history challenged perceptions of the reliability of experiential notions of duration, history, nature, and causality (see Markley 1993; Bono 1995; Hellegers 2000).
The Earth itself threatened to become a sublime, non-human environment. Cuvier’s account of the extinction of fossilized species raised profound questions about the limits of Mosaic history and the ways in which past environments differed from present conditions (Rudwick 2005, 2008; O’Connor 2007). The fascination with the skeletal remains of dinosaurs, giant sloths, and mastodons that gripped London, Paris, Philadelphia, and New York in 1800 suggested that Nature bred entire species that required primeval ecologies no human ever had seen. The emphasis throughout the nineteenth century on the savage violence of prehistoric carnivores indicates the extent to which it was difficult to imagine the ecological conditions that provided forage for gigantic species of plant-eaters.
Even before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, then, scientific thought had begun to challenge the biblical monopoly on conceptions of history and had provided competing models of climatological time, the creation and reshaping of the earth and its natural environment, and humankind’s future. The fad in Victorian science fiction for end-of-the-universe stories, many riffing on Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, testifies to the ways in which the specter of species extinction could be reimagined on a massive, planetary scale (Clarke 2001). Extinction thus haunts the tendency in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century science to chart, measure, and quantify both the natural world and the social regimes of economics and politics. In this sense, the understanding of long-term change, of a climatological time that exists beyond human experience, gestures paradoxically toward embracing and resisting the mathematically determined universe imagined by Laplace. A time that transcends and beggars human experience, however, can be conceived only differentially, and paradoxically, in its relation to phenomenological perceptions of time and existence. If mathematical reductionism locks humankind and climate into intractable processes that lead to extinction, it also provokes redefinitions of ideas of divinity and therefore of the complex relationships of humankind to experience, Nature, and time.
Nineteenth-century transcendentalism suggests that the ruptures between microcosm and macrocosm, between humankind’s experience of time and Nature’s time, are produced by the self-generating alienation of custom or ideology. In his essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson recasts the threat of extinction within phenomenological notions of time, Nature, and experience:
The knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. … That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils its essence into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form.
(Emerson 1836: 542)
In gesturing toward the reflexivity of microcosm and macrocosm, Emerson yokes Hutton’s geological or Laplace’s universal time to experiential moments and perceptions that defy scientific reductionism. Human life, like the planet itself, is “no spent ball,” but a web of complex, proliferating, and dynamic energies (Buell 1995: 219–51, 2004). Emerson locates “perfection” and “harmony” in individual days. He begins this essay by observing:
There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction. … These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of the Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough.
(Emerson 1836: 540)
In contrast to nineteenth-century scientists later struggling to explain the prospect of an Earth succumbing to the heat-death ostensibly predicted by the second law of thermodynamics (see Clarke 2001), Emerson finds time both focused and dilated, intimations of immortality distilled into the “sunny hours” of “pure October weather” that bring to the climate of northern New England the kind of “satisfaction” ostensibly experienced in the tropical sunshine of the Caribbean. Emerson’s “halcyons” locate embodied human experience within a matrix of “harmony,” in which multiplying complexities produce greater intimations and emotive understandings of Nature as “the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance,” an unalienated universal composed of, and generating, infinite experiences of “that power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel.”
Transcendentalism can thus be seen as one response to the fundamental paradoxes posed by climatological time. Rather than a mathematically determined universe that exists beyond the limits of perception and experience, and therefore that can be imagined only in terms of the irrelevance or negation of embodied experience, the world becomes open to the interweaving of mind and matter. In Emerson’s “Nature,” the transcendental imperative that “does not respect quantity” encourages humankind to embrace the processes of an ongoing reintegration of self and environment rather than succumb to the profound ontological as well as epistemological displacements of what Emerson terms “custom.” To turn away from “our life of solemn trifles,” humankind must recognize that Nature can be described only as a kind of double negative, a negation of a natural world already alienated by “the ambitious chatter of the schools [that] would persuade us to despise” material existence in favor of metaphysical abstractions. Nature’s time therefore exists as the primeval negation of humankind’sefforts to measure and institutionalize time: “Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year.” In an important sense, the threat to traditional structures of thought and belief posed by Laplace and Cuvier is subsumed by Emerson’s encompassing change within an organic regeneration of both mind and climate –“We come to our own, and make friends with matter.” Dynamic and unpredictable change is transformed into the energies of self-renewal.
Yet the ethics of individualism that Emerson is typically credited with (or accused of) constitutes only one half of a dialectic in the nineteenth century. Mike Davis charts the devastating human and environmental consequences of European imperialism and its hallucinogenic optimism that colonial proprietors could plough under complex ecologies throughout the underdeveloped world to grow cash crops (cotton, opium, tea, tobacco, and rice) for export to Europe and North America (Davis 2001). Unrestrained imperial expansion and robber-baron capitalism trumpeted the view that the climates of India, Africa, and the Americas could be “improved” by large-scale monoculture. This view of Nature as an infinite storehouse focuses less on what Karl Marx calls exchange value than on the infinite elasticity of use-value: the belief that John Locke advanced in the Two Treatises of Government (1690) that the infinite productivity of the natural world forms a consensual basis for individual and property rights – and property, in turn, secures the basis of political and social identity.
Locke invokes explicitly the classical ideal of a “golden age” when humanity, or at least specific populations, reaped the benefits of a beneficent Nature (Markley 1999). In such a world of abundant resources and a stable climate, as he argues in the second treatise, labor offers the prospect of limitless productivity rather than marking, as it does in the Judeo-Christian tradition, humankind’s banishment from Eden. “In the beginning,” Locke declares, “all the World was America”–that is, all the world was open to an unending exploitation guaranteed by the fecundity of nature (Locke 1690: 2, 301). In this formulation, labor is divorced from a material world of life-and-death calculations (when to plant, when to harvest, how much seed to conserve for next year’s planting, whether to kill the cow to feed one’s family during a harsh winter, and so forth) that defined agricultural existence during the Little Ice Age in much of early modern Europe (Fagan 2000).
By the later eighteenth century, neo-Lockean liberalism had turned bodies into reliable machines, capable of increasing their useful labor, and the land into a repository of potential value that could be mined, refashioned, and exploited without suffering any diminution in either extent or productivity. By the nineteenth century, as Davis suggests, the Lockean argument that the fruits of one’s labor theoretically cannot exceed a normative notion of bodily sufficiency had been corrupted into the conversion of humans into interchangeable units of labor, and the natural world consequently becomes an effect of humankind’s use (Davis 2001). The time of the world thus becomes the time of economic calculation. In the long tradition of apocalyptic science fiction that emerges in the nineteenth century, it is precisely this world of humankind’s dominion that, to quote H.G. Wells in The War of the Worlds, begins “losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body” (Wells 1898: 82). These apocalyptic scenarios, the “Grotesque gleam of a time no history will ever fully describe!” (1898: 145), invariably have ecological overtones because, in their playful cultural necrosis, they offer a way of imagining a time after human history: the end of kronos and the aftermath of kairos.
The expanses of prehuman history that extend into the deep backward and abysm of time underscore the fact that climatological time, measured in millennia, exists beyond daily experiences of the weather, beyond the duration of individual lifetimes, beyond the accumulated memories of generations, and beyond the technologies of observation, inscription, and recording that characterize the rise of modern meteorology in the nineteenth century. The tensions between observation and speculation in meteorological sciences that Katharine Anderson (2005) describes in Victorian England foreshadow the contours of contemporary debates about global warming and its consequences. In the twenty-first century, we have come to understand climatological time as a dynamic and consensual knowledge about the interpretations of a wide range of proxy data: ice cores from Greenland, tree rings, sediment layers in mud and swamps, patterns of coral growth, and so on, that can be analyzed to reveal signs of long-term variability based on specific chemical signatures, pollen samples, and gas bubbles trapped in ice (Lamb 1995; Calvin 2002; Linden 2006).
In this respect, the cognitive understanding of climate has become a process of acclimating one’s embodied experience to increasingly complex technologies and to the resulting displacements, in time and space, of observational and experiential authority. Climatological time is dynamic, shaped and recalibrated, as Bruno Latour (1987) suggests, by the networks, alliances, and assemblages that collect, transmit, verify, interpret, and disseminate data; that then reaffirm or modify assumptions and values about the natural world; and that continually negotiate the vexed relationships between embodied experience and scientific knowledge. A crucial effect of the technologies of climate science is that our experience has been refocused, or recalibrated, to integrate into our lived experience consensual inferences from ratios of isotopes, compression of layers in ice cores, models of global hydrology, atmospheric circulation, large-scale deforestation, and satellite images. In this respect, climatological time registers the complex relationships between qualitative experience and quantitative knowledge, between human history and the Earth’s history. Recycling becomes, in one sense, a sacrificial rite to an ideal of sustainability.
The technologically mediated proxy observations of long-term climate change, then, force us to rethink traditional notions of common sense, the embodied and expansive times of Emerson’s Nature. Even for scientists, policy makers, environmental activists, and informed citizens who believe in anthropogenic global warming and are striving to promote whole-scale changes in modes of production and habits of consumption, the timescales of climatic change cannot be experienced viscerally but only imagined. Scientific knowledge, it seems, requires a willing suspension of experiential belief in the facticity, the experiential groundedness, of a world of familiar seasons, a continuous anthropocentric history, and a Lockean tendency to treat the natural world as a storehouse of infinite productivity.
In this respect, climatological time produces interference patterns that provoke complex and self-generating modes of disidentification: proxy data are both integrated into patterns of daily experience (recycling plastic bottles, buying energy-efficient cars) and sequestered from traditional behaviors (continuing to eat meat, despite the carbon footprint of meat production). In Latour’s sense, we have never been, and cannot become, modern, because we remain caught (and oscillate) between the dialectical impulses toward the purification of identities (the self-aware green ethicist) and the proliferation of hybrids (the conflicted, steak-eating Prius owner) (Latour 1993). This is why, even as the literate public worldwide has been deluged with information (and misinformation) about global warming and its likely consequences, the effects of this media saturation, paradoxically, have reinforced as well as challenged long-standing views of humankind’s relationship to Nature. The managerial ethos of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century corporate culture that tends to treat climate change as a marketing opportunity is a descendant of the brutally insensitive optimism of neoclassical economics.
Given its geneaology, the ideal of sustainability that underlies most plans of collective action to address global warming risks reinscribing a Lockean vision of the inexhaustibility of natural resources, and therefore the idea of a pre-ternaturally resilient ecology that exists outside of the dynamics of climatological time. The measure of several generations – of one or two extended human lifetimes – becomes the timescale of sustainability. In this regard, sustainability tends to be co-opted into a seemingly objective semiotics of mathematics and neoclassical – and neoliberal – economics, what Philip Mirowski calls “the very ideal of natural law … the verification of a stable external world independent of our activity or inquiry” (Mirowski 1989: 75). This projection of stability from mathematics onto “a stable external” Nature effectively treats complex and dynamic ecologies as constants rather than variables; the more closely sustainability approaches a set of statistical inferences over decades or a century, the more it tends to remain complicit in exploitative ideologies of resource extraction and the political and administrative hierarchies, centralized bureaucracies, technologies of economic calculation and accounting, the policing of resources and populations, and distributive political economies that are required to manage finite resources.
That said, the paradoxes of disidentification can be captured, if not rationally comprehended, only in fictional projections of human experience. In an important sense, the phenomenological perception of climate now includes the simulations – the science fictions – of human experience as a probability calculus, thought-experiments about the climatological future. Published a year before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Forty Signs of Rain uncannily anticipates the sequence of natural disasters and political failures that devastated the city. Washington D.C. is hit by a perfect storm – a tropical storm surge coming up the Potomac, ten inches of rain in the Chesapeake watershed rushing down river, and a record high tide. The city floods: “images from the [flooded] Mall dominated the media,” and viewers around the nation see “TV helicopters often interrupt[ing] their overviews to pluck people from rooftops. Rescues by boat were occurring all through the Southwest district and up the Anacostia Basin. Reagan Airport remained drowned, and there was no passable bridge over the Potomac” (Robinson 2004: 352).
Although the novel and its sequels, Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days and Counting (2007), focus on the ecological, scientific, political, and personal crises of the trilogy’s main characters – from Beltway insiders, to bioclimato-logists working at the National Science Foundation, to displaced Buddhist monks – Robinson’s depiction of individuals, and the world at large, confronting the consequences of global warming is neither a “realistic” novel about climate change nor a near-future, “hard” science-fiction novel, but a genre-bending exploration of the ethics and politics of existence at a time when neither eco-truisms, nor managerial strategizing, nor self-propelling fantasies of technological amelioration seem adequate. Robinson’s trilogy offers a way to think through the lived experience of character and climate in the early twenty-first century. It marks the intersection of the different registers of embodied, historical, and climatological time: the experience of surviving temperatures fifty degrees below zero after the Gulf Stream stalls; the fictional history of national politics and the politics of science over the course of two years as a new, progressive administration takes office; and the onrush of catastrophic changes – melting polar caps and drowning islands – that recur literally millions of years after the last period of comparable warmth.
Human beings seldom witness abrupt climate change in the course of a lifetime. Historically, those who do face long odds on adapting to a natural world radically transformed. The prospect of rapid warming and the disastrous scenarios that Robinson envisions lead to profoundly different ways of conceiving the timescales of what we understand as the object of sustainability. Sustainability ultimately refers to an idealized homeostasis between humankind and environment that never existed except in the sense that robust ecological systems could remain unaffected by low-density populations of humans for climatologically brief periods of time, on the scale of centuries rather than millennia. Robust, in this respect, does not imply a moral, ethical, or socio-cultural value judgment. Between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago, during the Younger Dryas, Western Europe was frozen tundra without much in the way of recognizable vegetation, colder and more forbidding than much of Siberia is today. Longfellow’s forest primeval was millennia away from taking root, the coastline of Canada lying dozens if not hundreds of miles to the east because larger ice caps lowered sea levels by dozens of meters. Human populations huddled in scattered caves or clung to the Mediterranean littoral. Physiologically indistinguishable from any of us, Ice Age peoples produced intricate art and effective weapons. They did not flourish. There is overwhelming evidence that the most common biological response to severe climate change (of more than three degrees centigrade) is not to adapt but to die: populations crash, and, within the short, short reign of Homo sapiens, bands of hunters and gatherers vanish, subsistence farmers fall prey to malnutrition, starvation, and disease, and empires fall (Burroughs 2005; Linden 2006). When climate changes, people kill each other with greater frequency, population centers are abandoned, and centers of authority do not hold. Systemic climatic change is no more or less characteristic of Gaia than the long summer of climatic calm that has existed for the last 10,000 years; unpredictable oscillations no less “natural” than ideals of sustainability. Longfellow ultimately gives way to Lucretius.
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