Roy Scranton is perhaps best known for an essay he published in the New York Times in 2013, “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,” which was later included in an essay collection of the same name.
In it, Scranton argues that, in terms of climate change, humanity has passed the point of no return. “The question is no longer whether global warming exists or how we might stop it, but how we are going to deal with it,” he writes. To put it in Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, while many of us are still in Denial, Scranton has moved on to Acceptance.
In his new essay collection, We’re Doomed. Now What? (Soho, July), Scranton, who teaches in the English department at the University of Notre Dame and is also the author of the novel War Porn, expands on his earlier concerns. Here he writes about the state of the Arctic, storm preparation in Houston, and his experience serving in Iraq.
In the past few years, Scranton says, he has seen some of the predictions he made in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene come true. He feared that climate change and its follow-on effects would “provoke a kind of existential fear, which would take form in a kind of scapegoating and virulent nationalism.” He notes, “That’s all happened.”
Scranton acknowledges that such developments have led to a greater sense of urgency among progressives. But urgency, he suggests, can sometimes devolve into outrage. The point, for him, is to not fight the unfortunate facts—about climate change, about the decline of our “capitalist, petroleum-fueled civilization”—but to understand and reflect on them.
“We live this kind of sped-up, distracted, constantly alarmed, constantly afraid existence,” he says. “We need to do something, but we’re so freaked out that we’re not in a good place to know what to do.”
As he wrote in his essay “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene”: “The sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.”
For Scranton, the way forward involves “detaching from that need to do something now and reflecting on our situation in a deeper way, with the hope that new possibilities might emerge, and that we might be able to decide, with more wisdom, what the one thing to do is.”
