Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

"It is a very dark book and, by recommending it, I’m not suggesting I necessarily agree with everything in it or even necessarily agree with his ultimately bleak assessment, but I do think it’s an extremely important book. I say that for two reasons. I think he’s fundamentally right about the essential point, which is that we have a tremendously difficult time assimilating just how serious this problem really is. For that reason, I think that there’s a tendency for many people—even people who accept that this problem is real—to say that ‘well, we’re going to fix this, we’re going to get out of this mess.’ I’ve certainly seen this among climate scientists. I’ve heard many of them say out loud in so many words, that they are afraid to say how bad the situation is lest it causes people to shut down. So, there’s a sort of truism that prevails in the climate community that if you tell people how truly awful it is then they won’t listen. This came out particularly in the past summer. I don’t know if you saw an article in New York magazine about the worst-case scenario for climate change could, and a lot of climate scientists got upset. There was a whole twitter feed arguing that this was bad strategy. The scientists weren’t really disputing the facts, although a few of them thought that the journalist got a couple of things wrong — and I do think he got a couple of things wrong — but mostly they were just afraid that people wouldn’t listen to a message that negative. I think that there’s something problematic there. On the one hand, we can all get it that if the message is too bleak then perhaps people will shut down – that’s a legitimate and valid concern – but, on the other hand, if it really is that bad then think about it: if you go to the doctor and you have terminal cancer with only three weeks to live, most of us would like the doctor to be straight with us so we could get our affairs in order and figure out what to do with the time left. I think that if we’re not honest with how serious this situation is, then we can’t get our affairs in order, and we can’t figure out what to do. We don’t have the sense of urgency that we need to have, because we really don’t have a lot of time left; we are a bit like that terminal patient. The time is running out, and I don’t think that most Americans have a clear sense of that. “There’s a very big elephant in the room: the long history of organised systematic climate change denial” Roy has done something very important by putting on the table just how bad this could be. He may have slightly exaggerated, but consider how many articles and books and newspaper reports understate the threat. Again, I wrote a paper a few years ago in which we showed that scientists had in fact been actually underestimating the threat of climate change. Considering how much underestimation there is, I think it’s a useful corrective to read a book that is may be overstating the case — but possibly not. People need to take that perspective on board and take it seriously."