In my first post on this blog, I described myself having a moral crisis on visiting Italy in fall 2018, a combination of being overwhelmed with the beauty of the locale while also being keenly aware, suddenly, of the pace and scale of the ecological harrowing of the planet.
The subtext of this moment was that I was then reading reviews of an intriguing, two-volume treatise on climate change and energy usage, Carbon Ideologies, the second volume of which had recently been published by the noted novelist, journalist, war correspondent and one-time Unabomber suspect William T. Vollmann.
What was striking to me, in reading about Vollmann's 1,268-page summary of the state of the planetary ecology, was that he prefaces the work by disclaiming that the situation is utterly without hope. "Vollmann declares from the outset that he will not offer any solutions," reads one review in The Atlantic, "because he does not believe any are possible: 'Nothing can be done to save [the world as we know it]; therefore, nothing need be done.'"
It's not that I was primed to accept Vollmann's claim of futility at face value; it's not as though these words were music to my ears, nor do I believe that they seriously could be to anyone's. It's more that I dearly appreciated an approach to a complex, controversial issue - a discourse dominated, as politics are, by displays of rage and expressions of shallow polemic - that leaves room for the presence of the unspeakable. I don't believe that there's no hope of mediating, at least, some of the worst effects of global temperature rise in the 21st century and beyond; here are a couple of articles that describe some promising technological approaches, and make the case that Vollmann's climate fatalism is wretchedly remiss in failing to differentiate between bad and worse.
Nonetheless, I feel that there is value in entertaining questions that seemingly threaten to undermine us and our efforts to repair the world. Not that I have seriously mounted such an effort in my thirty-two years of life on this planet; maybe that's the reason I feel compelled to embark on reading Carbon Ideologies as a project, recording my impressions on this blog as I go. Vollmann's work surveys oil wells in the United Arab Emirates; natural gas repositories in Colorado; fracking sites in West Virginia; and the habitable regions outside of the exclusion zone rendered uninhabitable by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Vollmann also collates reams of data, some two hundred pages of tables and graphs, detailing annual patterns of global energy usage and wastage ("What was the work for?" he asks).
At the heart of Vollmann's chosen topic is a set of truths that I feel everyone living today, in whatever margin they are capable, ought to confront. Those of you who know me, know that I tend to avoid commenting on political matters; I may be at fault in my silence on various issues, but that is my choice. The only substantial exception I make to this policy is with regard to the phenomenon of conditions on the Earth ranging inexorably towards the uninhabitable. I'm with Vollmann, in that I do not seek to condemn, or to cast blame; or to argue in favor of any particular regime or prescription of policy reform, or to promote the usage of some approach over any other one; nor to seek to persuade skeptics that these climate phenomena truly are products of human impact on the environment.
I'm concerned with the bigger picture, which is that, whatever the causes, global temperatures seem to be increasing rapidly, compared with the historical norm for the Anthropocene, and that this will bear profound, unprecedented consequences for human life, and every other current form of life on Earth. The reviewer in The Atlantic refers to Carbon Ideologies as being "in the vanguard of the coming second wave of climate literature, books written not to diagnose or solve the problem, but to grapple with its moral consequences." I aim to situate my writings here within that discourse, if not within whatever canon it may produce.
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