PRAISE FOR ROY SCRANTON AND
LEARNING TO DIE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
“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, 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“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
“We’re fucked. 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, editor of The New York Times Opinionator blog “The Stone,” author of Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance
“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
“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 Against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
REFLECTIONS
ON THE END OF A CIVILIZATION
Roy Scranton
City Lights Books
Copyright © by Roy Scranton 2015
All Rights Reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the following:
The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian. Translation by Andrew George (London: Allen Lane, 1999). ©1999 Andrew George. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
“Fade,” by Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss, ©2015 BMG Gold Songs/Songs Of Big Deal/Code Word nemesis (ASCAP). All rights administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scranton, Roy, 1976-
Learning to die in the Anthropocene : reflections on the end of a civilization / Roy Scranton.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-87286-669-0 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-87286-670-6 (ebook)
1. Global warming. 2. Climatic changes. 3. Environmental degradation. 4. Nature—Effect of human beings on. 5. Climate change mitigation. I. Title.
QC981.8.G56S33 2015
303.49—dc23
2015022985
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133
CONTENTS
Dedicated to my brother, who taught me to remember the dead, and to Laura, who taught me to fight like hell for the living.
A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death.
—Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, IV.67
INTRODUCTION
COMING HOME
The knowledge of future things is, in a word, identical with that of the present.
—Plotinus, Enneads IV. 12
Driving into Iraq in 2003 felt like driving into the future. We convoyed all day, all night, past Army checkpoints and burned-out tanks, till in the blue dawn Baghdad rose from the desert like a vision of hell: flames licked the bruised sky from the tops of refinery towers, cyclopean monuments bulged and leaned against the horizon, broken overpasses swooped and fell over ruined suburbs, bombed factories, and narrow ancient streets.
With “shock and awe,” the US military had unleashed the end of the world on a city of six million—a city about the same size as Houston or Washington, D.C. Baghdad’s infrastructure was totaled: water, power, traffic, markets, and security fell to anarchy and local rule. The government had collapsed, walls were going up, tribal lines were being drawn, and brutal hierarchies were being savagely established. Over the next year, the city’s secular middle class would disappear, squeezed out by gangsters, profiteers, fundamentalists, and soldiers.
I was a private in the United States Army. This damaged world was my new home. If I survived.
Two and a half years later, still in the Army but safe and lazy back in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, I thought I had made it out. Then I watched on television as Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. This time it was the weather that inspired shock and awe, but I saw the same chaos and collapse I’d seen in Baghdad, the same failure of planning and