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Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights Open Media), by Roy Scranton
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"In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton draws on his experiences in Iraq to confront the grim realities of climate change. The result is a fierce and provocative book."--Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
"Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene presents, without extraneous bullshit, what we must do to survive on Earth. It's a powerful, useful, and ultimately hopeful book that more than any other I've read has the ability to change people's minds and create change. For me, it crystallizes and expresses what I've been thinking about and trying to get a grasp on. The economical way it does so, with such clarity, sets the book apart from most others on the subject."--Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy
"Roy Scranton lucidly articulates the depth of the climate crisis with an honesty that is all too rare, then calls for a reimagined humanism that will help us meet our stormy future with as much decency as we can muster. While I don't share his conclusions about the potential for social movements to drive ambitious mitigation, this is a wise and important challenge from an elegant writer and original thinker. A critical intervention."--Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate
"Concise, elegant, erudite, heartfelt & wise."--Amitav Ghosh, author of Flood of Fire
"War veteran and journalist Roy Scranton combines memoir, philosophy, and science writing to craft one of the definitive documents of the modern era."--The Believer Best Books of 2015
Coming home from the war in Iraq, US Army private Roy Scranton thought he'd left the world of strife behind. Then he watched as new calamities struck America, heralding a threat far more dangerous than ISIS or Al Qaeda: Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, megadrought--the shock and awe of global warming.
Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Conflict, famine, plagues, and riots menace from every quarter. From war-stricken Baghdad to the melting Arctic, human-caused climate change poses a danger not only to political and economic stability, but to civilization itself . . . and to what it means to be human. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in--the Anthropocene--demands a radical new vision of human life.
In this bracing response to climate change, Roy Scranton combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom to explore what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving world, taking readers on a journey through street protests, the latest findings of earth scientists, a historic UN summit, millennia of geological history, and the persistent vitality of ancient literature. Expanding on his influential New York Times essay (the #1 most-emailed article the day it appeared, and selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014), Scranton responds to the existential problem of global warming by arguing that in order to survive, we must come to terms with our mortality.
Plato argued that to philosophize is to learn to die. If that’s true, says Scranton, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age--for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The trouble now is that we must learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization.
Roy Scranton has published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, and Theory and Event, and has been interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, among other media.
- Sales Rank: #24467 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.90" h x .30" w x 4.90" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 144 pages
Review
More praise for Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:
"Roy Scranton gets it. He knows in his bones that this civilization is over. He knows it is high time to start again the human dance of making some other way to live. In his distinctive and original way he works though a common cultural inheritance, making it something fresh and new for these all too interesting times. This compressed, essential text offers both uncomfortable truths and unexpected joy."--McKenzie Wark, author of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene
"We're f*cked. We know it. Kind of. But Roy Scranton in this blistering new book goes down to the darkness, looks hard and doesn't blink. He even brings back a few, hard-earned slivers of light. . . . What is philosophy? It's time comprehended in thought. This is our time and Roy Scranton has had the courage to think it in prose that sometimes feels more like bullets than bullet points."--Simon Critchley, Co-founder and moderator of The New York Times online philosophy series "The Stone"
"An eloquent, ambitious, and provocative book."--Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
"Roy Scranton has written a howl for the Anthropocene--a book full of passion, fire, science and wisdom. It cuts deeper than anything that has yet been written on the subject."--Dale Jamieson, author of Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle to Stop Climate Change Failed--And What It Means For Our Future
"As a motivator, the concept Life hasn't been working out so great, hardwired as it is into the post-Neolithic drive to exist no matter what the quality of that existence. Life won't help you to live. Including ecological awareness in our political decisions means including as much death in as many different modes (psychic, philosophical, social) as we can manage. Roy Scranton has written an essential recipe book for adding some death to the bland, oppressive and ecologically disastrous human cake."--Timothy Morton, author of Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
"In the brief but crowded pages of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Iraq War veteran, Roy Scranton, wields both history and philosophy as forensic tools. With the unblinking eyes of a medical examiner, he systematically reveals the causes, trajectory and outcome of our planetary domination and its subsequent climate crisis. Slicing away obscuring adipose tissue of romanticism on the left and denial on the right, he pinpoints the source of the corpse's demise."--Jose Knighton, Weller Book Works' Newsletter
"Scranton has always been a few steps ahead of other veteran-authors. . . . Learning to Die in the Anthropocene casts a beautiful allure."--Peter Molin, Time Now
"Scranton’s book has its own kind of power. . . . There is something cathartic about his refusal to shy away from the full scope of our predicament."--Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, The Los Angeles Review of Books
"This is a small book with big ideas from an Army veteran who views the flooding after Hurricane Katrina and sees 'the same chaos and collapse I’d seen in Baghdad.' Scranton brings meaning and humor to the mayhem."--J. Ford Huffman, The Military Times
"With clarity and conviction, Scranton explores the global failure to address the climate crisis and the possibility that the planet could become uninhabitable. Referring to classic texts as far back as The Epic of Gilgamesh, he urges readers to face their fear of death and find guidance in literature as they prepare for and adapt to the future. The book is an unapologetic punch in the gut, likely to leave many readers gasping. Scranton does offer a kind of hope: By making tough accommodations and reconnecting with our core humanity, we may eventually be able to recover our collective breath."--Michael Berry, Sierra Magazine
" . . . Scranton’s book is a very well researched investigation into our troubled future. Scranton doesn’t sugar coat his findings, 'We are f*cked' as he so bluntly puts it. And indeed with the rise in global temperatures set to soar in the next fifty years bringing with it melting ice caps, rising seas, a toxic cocktail of carbon dioxide and methane that has remained locked in the permafrost for centuries, no argument can be made against Scranton’s statement."--Stephen Lee Naish, Hong Kong Review of Books
About the Author
A war veteran, journalist, and author, Roy Scrantonhas published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, and Theory and Event, and has been interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, among other media.
Most helpful customer reviews
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
THE BEST POSSIBLE STARTING PLACE
By D. J Penick
This small and concise book presents the ecological likelihood of our human fate, the blinkered and predatory ways we are dealing with it, the inescapable human reliance of violence in the case of threat, and the lack of any real control in ensuring our continuity . Roy Scranton, a former soldier, has written a deeply thoughtful essay. It is a call to accepting our mortality while working to continue what has been deepest and most enduring in our culture. One may or may not agree with any of the specific arguments here, but there is no doubt that this book places all the crucial issues on the table.
34 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
“‘To philosophize is to learn how to die’ … precisely the problem of the Anthropocene” (pp. 20-21)
By R. Russell Bittner
Dale Jamieson, environmental philosopher and the author of REASON IN A DARK TIME: WHY THE STRUGGLE AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE FAILED—AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR OUR FUTURE writes that “Roy Scranton has written a howl for the Anthropocene—a book full of passion, fire, science and wisdom. It cuts deeper than anything that has yet been written on the subject.” This is high praise coming from a man who’d know—and who wouldn’t dish out that kind of praise lightly.
Scranton sets the stage for global catastrophe already on p. 16 with this quote from the geophysicist, David Archer: “‘(t)he potential for planetary devastation posed by the methane hydrate reservoir … seems comparable to the destructive potential of nuclear winter or from a comet or asteroid impact.” I don’t consider myself an ignoramus on the subject of climate change by any stretch of the imagination – and yet, this mention of a methane reservoir just beneath the floor of the Arctic Ocean came as a complete surprise to me.
And just in case you (or I) thought this sounded rather bleak, Scranton concludes the first section of his monograph with “(f)rom the perspective of many policy experts, climate scientists, and national security officials, the concern is not whether global warming exists or how we might prevent it, but how we are going to adapt to life in the hot, volatile world we’ve created.”
Less debatable is Scranton’s contention on p. 23 that “(c)arbon-fueled capitalism is a zombie system, voracious but sterile. The aggressive human monoculture has proven astoundingly virulent but also toxic, cannibalistic, and self-destructive. It is unsustainable, both in itself and as a response to catastrophic climate change.” Espousing as much is not likely to ‘win friends and influence people’—any more than it’s likely to usher in the next U. S. president. Instead, we’ll all continue to suck on that teat called ‘denial’ right up until the day it runs mysteriously and definitively dry. As Scranton sagely suggests on p. 43, “(n)o population on the planet today is going to willingly trade economic power for lower carbon emissions, especially since economic power remains the key index of global status.”
I could very easily cite the concluding paragraph of Chapter Three (on p. 68) and be done with this review. I think this paragraph sums up the whole issue admirably. But I won’t – conclude my review, that is. I’ll simply quote the paragraph in full and let you consider the measure of its message. “The problem with the People’s Climate March wasn’t really that it lacked a goal, or that it was distracting, superficial, and vacuous. The problem with the United Nations isn’t that the politicians there are ignorant, hidebound, self-interested, or corrupt. The problem with our response to climate change isn’t a problem with passing the right laws or finding the right price for carbon or changing people’s minds or raising awareness. Everybody already knows. The problem is that the problem is too big. The problem is that different people want different things. The problem is that nobody has real answers. The problem is that the problem is us.”
Perhaps the crux of that problem lies here (on p. 77): “(r)estrained aggression keeps people suspicious of collective action and working hard to overcome their fellows, while constant generalized anxiety keeps people servile, unwilling to take risks, and yearning for comfort from whatever quarter, whether the dulling sameness of herd thought or the dumb security of consumer goods.”
In any case, “…our present and future: droughts and hurricanes, refugees and border guards, war for oil, water, gas and food” (p. 82) puts it all in a convenient economy-sized nutshell.
And if you wonder what’s to be done… “The enemy isn’t out there somewhere—the enemy is ourselves. Not as individuals, but as a collective. A system. A hive” (p. 85).
Scranton’s monograph (the subtitle of which is “Reflections on the End of a Civilization”) is as clarion a call to arms as any I can think of. In her review of LEARNING TO DIE…, Naomi Klein (whose book THE SHOCK DOCTRINE I read and reviewed at this same Website in May of 2013) termed Scranton’s book “a critical intervention.” Although Ms. Klein concludes her own book on an optimistic note, I’m fairly certain that Roy Scranton’s concluding notes will not be in a similarly major key.
If the urgent suggestion of one ageing Boomer is worth anything to the Gen Xers, Millennials and any other subsequent generations that might still take this raging bull by the horns and try to tame it, I implore you to buy and read this book—and then do something, collectively, with what you take away from that read.
In the meantime, you might do well to heed Roy Scranton’s narrative advice: “(t)hrough the ice ages of the past and into the long summer of the Holocene we carried tools, furs, fire, and our greatest treasure and most potent adaptive technology, the only thing that might save us in the Anthropocene, because it is the only thing that can save those who are already dead: memory (p. 95) … The record of that wisdom, the heritage of the dead, is our most valuable gift to the future” (p. 99).
And yet, does any of it really matter? “The causality behind our human bloom is the same causality behind rainfall, quasars, and the roll of the dice” (p. 113). Perhaps, at the end of the day, all that really matters is that Roy Scranton can choose to warn us, we can choose (or not) to heed his warning, and we can then choose (or not) to roll the dice.
RRB
10/31/15
Brooklyn, NY
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
A surprisingly beautiful rumination on the inevitable extinction of humanity
By Nathan Webster
I read this twice before I felt satisfied I could really connect with Roy Scranton's ruminations - but once that switch clicked, I recognized this as about the most beautiful rumination on humanity's eventual extinction that we're likely to read.
It's easy to call this a "climate change" book, but Scranton's narrative does a good job connecting this to geologic history, not the comparitive split second of recent human history. Climate change IS going to happen, humanity in its current form WILL be destroyed - there's no point in crying about it. Not tomorrow, obviously, but eventually. But, it's fairly likely that the children of today's children will be facing a world where much we take for granted has been dramatically changed.
So Scranton is not writing this book as a "drive fewer miles" polemic - as he points out, our reliance on technology burns more fossil fuel in a few minutes than worrying about driving 55 or 65 mph. He is writing literally to wake humanity up to how to learn how to die - because it's coming. We, as humans, are biologically hard-wired to avoid confronting our own personal mortality - much less confront it as a species. He doesn't have any answers as to what we should do, but be more enlightened as to our place in the world, and how we can prepare to adjust to an existential conclusion.
It's funny - candidates for president babble about ISIS as an "existential threat" to the US - it isn't, and will never be. ISIS terrorists could blow up Houston, but the country would survive. In the meantime, an existential threat is happening all around us, every day, and it's denied at every turn. It's just humans being humans - worrying about the broken window in a car with no tires.
So in this book - really, an extended essay - Scranton, without pity or much melodrama, lays out the case that we had our moment, and now that moment is coming to an end. Not in 10 years or 50 years or 150 years - but it's coming, and the by-then long dead and disintegrated Scranton will have the words left behind to say "I told you so."
To paraphrase another column that defends the "pessimism" that a book like this seems to encourage: "We’re not diagnosing cancer because we’re pessimistic – we’re pessimistic because our diagnosis is that this is cancer."
In other words - it's not pessimism to try and convince people that climate change is the problem. The pessimism comes because climate change IS the problem.
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