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Ethics at the End of the World

The twin towns of San Ignacio and Santa Elena, Belize, are fifty miles from the coast and 250 feet above sea level, but the alarmist climatologist Guy McPherson did not move there—to a farm in the jungle that surrounds the towns—in fear of water. Other things will get him first, he says; he’s given up hope of surviving climate change, and believes the rest of us should, too. Humans will be extinct within ten years, he tells me by Skype; when I ask his partner, Pauline, if she feels the same way, she laughs. “I’d say ten months.” This was two years ago.

McPherson began his career as a conservation biologist at the University of Arizona, where, he mentions several times, he was tenured at twenty-nine; and where, he also says several times, he was surveilled by what he calls the “Deep State” beginning in 1996; and also where, in 2009, he was forced out of his department by a new chair. He had already been working on a homestead in New Mexico—a compromise location with his former wife—and moved in 2016 to the Central American jungle, to live with Pauline and practice polyamory on another homestead called Stardust Sanctuary Farm.

Over the last decade, mostly via YouTube, McPherson has acquired what Bill McKibben calls, in his understated way, “a following.” These days, McPherson travels a bit, giving lectures on “near-term human extinction,” a term he is proud to have coined and which he abbreviates NTHE; but increasingly he has turned his attention to running workshops on what we should do with the knowledge that the world is ending. The workshops are called “Only Love Remains,” and offer what amounts to a kind of post-theological millenarianism, familiar hand-me-down lessons from the old New Age. The meta-lesson is that we should draw roughly the same meaning from an understanding of the imminent death of the species as the Dalai Lama believes we should draw from an understanding of our imminent personal death—namely, compassion, wonderment, and above all, love. You could do worse in choosing three values around which to build an ethical model, and when you squint you can almost see a civics erected out of them. But for those who see the planet as being on the precipice of crisis and biblical tribulation, they also excuse a retreat from politics—indeed from climate, as fully as that might conceivably be achieved—in the name of a slippery hedonistic quietism.

In other words, down to the mustache, McPherson seems like a recognizable off-the-grid figure—a kind it’s easy to find a bit suspicious. But why? We have for so long, over decades if not centuries, defined predictions of the collapse of civilization or the end of the world as something close to proof of insanity, and the communities that spring up around them as “cults,” that we are now left unable to take any warnings of disaster all that seriously—especially when those raising the alarm are also, themselves, “giving up.” There is nothing the modern world abhors like a quitter, but that prejudice will probably not withstand much warming. If the climate crisis unfolds as it is scheduled to, our taboos against doomsaying will fall, as new cults emerge and cultish thinking leeches into sectors of establishment culture. Because while the world will not likely end, and civilization is almost surely more resilient than McPherson believes, the unmistakable degradation of the planet will invariably inspire many more prophets like him, whose calls of imminent environmental apocalypse will start to seem reasonable to many more reasonable people.

That is, in part, because they are not so unreasonable, even today. If you were looking for a primer on the bad news about climate, you could find a worse place to begin than the summary page McPherson keeps on his website, “Nature Bats Last” (currently tagged with this note: “Updated most recently, likely for the final time, 2 August 2016”). It runs sixty-eight printed pages of link-dense paragraphs. Throughout, there are misleading characterizations of serious research, and links to hysterical, uncredentialed blog posts presented as references to solid science. There are simple misunderstandings of things like climate feedback loops, which can worryingly add up but are not “multiplicative,” as McPherson says they are; attacks on merely moderate climate groups as politically compromised; and, in the spirit of a kitchen-sink data dump, endorsements of a few observations that have been proven to be bunk (he is very worried, for instance, about those methane “burps of death” going off all at once, a possibility specialists turned against about five years ago). But, even on this fearmongering reading list, there is enough real science to give rise to real alarm: a good summary of the albedo effect, a convenient assemblage of rigorous readings of the Arctic ice sheets, those tea leaves of climate disaster.

Throughout, the intellectual style is paranoid—the impressive mass of data sometimes standing in for, and sometimes obscuring, the skeleton of causal logic that should give the mass a meaningful analytic shape. This kind of reasoning lives abundantly on the internet, feeding our golden age of conspiracy theory, that insatiable beast, which has only just begun to feast on climate. You might know already the shape that thinking takes on the climate-denial end of the political spectrum. But it has also made its mark on the environmentalist fringe, as it did in the person of John B. McLemore, the charismatic, closeted environmental declinist and self-hating Southerner whose descent into suicide, beset by planetary panic, was documented on the podcast “S-Town.” “I sometimes call it toxic knowledge,” Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute, where McLemore was a commenter, has said. “Once you know about overpopulation, overshoot, depletion, climate change, and the dynamics of societal collapse, you can’t unknow it, and your every subsequent thought is tinted.” —

McPherson isn’t entirely clear himself on exactly how all of these problems will bring about extinction—he guesses that something like a food crisis or financial meltdown will bring down civilization first, and eventually human life with it. It takes an apocalyptic imagination to picture that happening just a decade from now, to be sure. But, given the basic trend lines, it also raises the question of why the rest of us aren’t imagining things more apocalyptically ourselves.

We surely will, and soon. Already you can see the seedlings of a great flourishing of climate esoterica in figures like McLemore and McPherson—one might better say “men,” as they nearly all are—and, beyond them, a whole harvest of writers and thinkers who seem, in their anticipation of coming disasters, almost to be cheering for the forces of apocalypse.

In some cases, they are rooting them on quite literally. A few, like McLemore, are Travis Bickles of climate crisis, hoping to see a hard rain fall and wash away all the world’s scum. But there are also Pollyannaish connoisseurs of global warming, like ecologist Chris D. Thomas, who argues that, in fact, in the real-time vacuum of the sixth mass extinction, “nature is thriving”—inventing new species, carving new ecological niches. Some technologists and their fans go further, suggesting we should discard our bias for the present—even in the attenuated geological sense of the term “present”—and adopt instead a quasi-Taoist climate sanguinity, layered over with a futurist cast. As Swedish journalist Torill Kornfeldt asks in The Re-Origin of Species, her book about the race to “de-extinct” creatures like dinosaurs and woolly mammoths: “Why should nature as it is now be of any greater value than the natural world of 10,000 years ago, or the species that will exist 10,000 years from now?” —

But for most who perceive an already unfolding climate crisis and intuit a more complete metamorphosis of the world to come, the vision is a bleak one, often pieced together from perennial eschatological imagery inherited from existing apocalyptic texts like the Book of Revelation, the inescapable sourcebook for Western anxiety about the end of the world. In fact, those ravings, which Yeats more or less translated for a secular audience in “The Second Coming,” have so predominated the Western dreamscape—becoming something like the Gnostic wallpaper of our bourgeois inner lives—that we often forget they were originally written as real-time prophecies, visions of what was to come, and what would become of the world, within a single generation.

Probably the most prominent of these new climate Gnostics is the British writer Paul Kingsnorth, the cofounder, public face, and poet laureate of the Dark Mountain Project, a loose renunciation community of disaffected environmentalists that takes its name from the American writer Robinson Jeffers, in particular his 1935 poem “Rearmament,” which ends: I would burn my right hand in a slow fire

To change the future…I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern

Man is not in the persons but in the

Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the

Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

Jeffers was, for a time, a literary celebrity in America—a love affair chronicled in the Los Angeles Times, a granite home on the California coast called Tor House and Hawk Tower, which he famously built with his own hands. But he is known today primarily as a prophet of civilizational disavowal, and for the philosophy he bluntly called “inhumanism”: the belief, in short, that people were far too concerned with people-ness, and the place of people in the world, rather than the natural majesty of the nonhuman cosmos in which they happened to find themselves. The modern world, he believed, made the problem considerably worse.

Edward Abbey adored Jeffers’s work, and Charles Bukowski called him his favorite poet. The great American wilderness photographers—Ansel Adams, Edward Weston—were influenced by him, too; and in A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor identified Jeffers, alongside Nietzsche and Cormac McCarthy, as a significant figure of what he called “immanent anti-humanism.” In his most infamous work, “The Double Axe,” Jeffers put that worldview in the mouth of a single character, “The Inhumanist,” who described “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.” This would be a genuine revolution in perspective, he wrote, which “offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate, and envy.” That detachment forms the core principle of Dark Mountain—though one might better say “impulse.” It will likely animate many more groups of environmental retreatists over the next decades, if global warming makes the broad spectacle of life on Earth increasingly unbearable for some to observe, even through media. “Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence,” the group’s manifesto begins. “What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die. The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric.” In that manifesto, written by Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine and first published in 2009, the group identifies as its intellectual godfather Joseph Conrad, particularly for the way he skewered the self-serving illusions of European civilization at its industrial-colonial peak. They quote Bertrand Russell recapping Conrad, saying that the author of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim “thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.” It would be a vivid image to brandish in any era, but especially in a time of approaching ecological collapse. “We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves,” Kingsnorth and Hine write—namely, “the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature.’ ” All, they add, “are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.” In fact, it is almost hard to think of anything that won’t be changed by just the perception of onrushing change, from the way couples contemplate the possibility of children all the way up to political incentive structure. And you don’t have to get all the way to human extinction or the collapse of civilization for true nihilism and doomsdayism to flourish—you only have to get far enough from the familiar for a critical mass of charismatic prophets to see a coming collapse. It can be comforting to think that the critical mass is quite large, and that societies won’t be upended by nihilism unless nihilism becomes the conventional view of the median citizen. But doom works at the margin, too, eating away at the infrastructure of things like termites or carpenter bees.

—

In 2012, Kingsnorth published a new manifesto, or pseudo-manifesto, in Orion, called “Dark Ecology.” In the meantime, he had grown even less hopeful. “Dark Ecology” opens with epigraphs from Leonard Cohen and D. H. Lawrence—“Take the only tree that’s left / Stuff it up the hole in your culture” and “Retreat to the desert, and fight,” respectively—and really kicks into gear with its second section, which opens: “I’ve recently been reading the collected writings of Theodore Kaczynski. I’m worried that it may change my life.” All told, the essay, which inspired an enormous response among Orion readers, is a kind of argument on behalf of Kaczynski the pamphleteer against Kaczynski the bomber—whom Kingsnorth describes not as a nihilist or even a pessimist but an incisive observer whose problem was an excess of optimism, a man too committed to the idea that society could be changed. Kingsnorth is more of a true Stoic. “And so I ask myself: what, at this moment in history, would not be a waste of my time?” He offers five tentative answers. Numbers 2 through 4 are variations on new transcendentalist themes: “preserving nonhuman life,” “getting your hands dirty,” and “insisting that nature has value beyond utility.” Numbers 1 and 5 are the more radical ones, and form a pair: “withdrawing” and “building refuges.” The latter is the more positive imperative, in the sense of being constructive, or what passes for constructive in a time of collapse: “Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside?” “Withdrawing” is the darker half of the same admonition:

If you do this, a lot of people will call you a “defeatist” or a “doomer,” or claim you are “burnt out.” They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that “fighting” is always better than “quitting.” Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance—refusing to tighten the ratchet further—is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.

It’s an ethos, at least. And one with a pedigree. What might read at first like a radical response to a new moment of crisis is in fact a repurposing of the long and many-armed ascetic tradition, stretching from the young Buddha through the pillar saints and beyond. But unlike the conventional version, in which the ascetic impulse carries the seeker away from the pleasures of the world toward spiritual meaning in something like worldly pain, Kingsnorth’s withdrawal, like McPherson’s, is a retreat from a world convulsed by spiritual pain toward small, earthly consolations. In that way, it is a performance at grand scale of the more general prophylactic reflex we share, almost all of us, toward suffering—which is to say, simply, an aversion. And to what end? It can’t possibly be that I feel the anguish of others, and the urgency of action, through the “myth” of civilization alone—can it?

—

Dark Mountain is fringe. Guy McPherson is fringe. John B. McLemore, too. But one threat of climate catastrophe is that their strains of ecological nihilism might find a home in the host of consensus wisdom—and that their premonitions may seem familiar to you is a sign that some of that anxiety and despair is already leeching into the way so many others think about the future of the world. Online, the climate crisis has given rise to what is called “eco-fascism”—a “by any means necessary” movement that also traffics in white supremacy and prioritizes the climate needs of a particular set. On the left, there is a growing admiration for the climate authoritarianism of Xi Jinping.

In the United States, the go-it-alone impulse to environmentalist separatism has been predominantly the domain of right-wing extremists—Cliven Bundy and his family, for instance, and all the imperious settlers the country has uncomplicatedly mythologized in the centuries since homesteading and range wars. Perhaps in response, liberal environmentalism has grown mostly in a more practical direction, tending toward more engagement rather than the opposite. Or perhaps it just reflects the particular demands of this cause: form a renunciation community and risk having those you’ve renounced do everything you feared they might, unleashing changes to the planet you are powerless to escape.

But this pragmatism brings its own curiosities—for instance, that many of even those who define themselves as practical technocrats of the environmental center-left believe that what is needed to avert catastrophic climate change is a global mobilization at the scale of World War II. They are right—that is an entirely sober assessment of the size of the problem, which no more alarmist a group than the IPCC endorsed in 2018. But it is also an undertaking of ambitions so inconsistent with the present tense of politics in nearly every corner of the world, that it is hard not to worry what will happen when that mobilization does not happen—to the planet, yes, but also to the political commitments of those most engaged with the problem. Those calling for mass mobilization, starting today and no later, remember—they can be counted as environmental technocrats. To their left are those who see no solution short of political revolution. And even those activists are being crowded for space, these days, by texts of climate alarmism, of which you may even feel the book in your hands is one. That would be fair enough, because I am alarmed.

I am not alone. And how widespread alarm will shape our ethical impulses toward one another, and the politics that emerge from those impulses, is among the more profound questions being posed by the climate to the planet of people it envelops. It is one way to understand why activists in California were so frustrated with their governor, Jerry Brown, even though he established a climate program of surpassing ambition just as he left office—because he didn’t act aggressively enough to retire existing fossil fuel capacity. It also helps explain frustration with other leaders, from Justin Trudeau, who has seized the rhetorical mantle of climate action but also approved several new Canadian pipelines, to Angela Merkel, who has overseen an exhilarating expansion of Germany’s green energy capacity, but also retired its nuclear power so quickly that some of the slack has been taken up by existing dirty plants. To the average citizen of each of these countries, the criticism may seem extreme, but it arises from a very clearheaded calculus: the world has, at most, about three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can’t halfway your way to a solution to a crisis this large.

In the meantime, environmental panic is growing, and so is despair. Over the last several years, as unprecedented weather and unrelenting research have recruited more voices to the army of environmental panic, a dour terminological competition has sprung up among climate writers, aiming to coin new clarifying language—in the mode of Richard Heinberg’s “toxic knowledge” or Kris Bartkus’s “Malthusian tragic”—to give epistemological shape to the demoralizing, or demoralized, response of the rest of the world. To the environmental indifference expected of modern consumers, the philosopher and activist Wendy Lynne Lee has given the name “eco-nihilism.” Stuart Parker’s “climate nihilism” is easier on the tongue. Bruno Latour, an instinctive insubordinate, calls the menace of a raging environment fueled by indifferent politics a “climatic regime.” We have also “climate fatalism” and “ecocide” and what Sam Kriss and Ellie Mae O’Hagan, making a psychoanalytic argument against the relentless public-facing optimism of environmental advocacy, have called “human futilitarianism”: The problem, it turns out, is not an overabundance of humans but a dearth of humanity. Climate change and the Anthropocene are the triumph of an undead species, a mindless shuffle toward extinction, but this is only a lopsided imitation of what we really are. This is why political depression is important: zombies don’t feel sad, and they certainly don’t feel helpless; they just are. Political depression is, at root, the experience of a creature that is being prevented from being itself; for all its crushingness, for all its feebleness, it’s a cry of protest. Yes, political depressives feel as if they don’t know how to be human; buried in the despair and self-doubt is an important realization. If humanity is the capacity to act meaningfully within our surroundings, then we are not really, or not yet, human.

The novelist Richard Powers points his finger at a different kind of despair, “species loneliness,” which he identifies not as the impression left on us by environmental degradation but what has inspired us, seeing the imprint we are leaving, to nevertheless continue pressing onward: “the sense we’re here by ourselves, and there can be no purposeful act except to gratify ourselves.” As though initiating a more accommodationist wing of Dark Mountain, he suggests a retreat from anthropocentrism that is not quite a withdrawal from modern civilization: “We have to un-blind ourselves to human exceptionalism. That’s the real challenge. Unless forest-health is our health, we’re never going to get beyond appetite as a motivator in the world. The exciting challenge,” he says, is to make people “plant-conscious.” —

In their aspirational grandeur, all these terms suggest the holistic prospective of a new philosophy, and new ethics, ushered into being by a new world. A raft of popular recent books aims to do the same, their titles so plaintive you could count their spines like rosary beads. Perhaps the baldest entry is Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. In it, the author, a veteran of the Iraq War, writes, “The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead.” His subsequent book of essays is We’re Doomed. Now What?

All these works portend a turn toward the apocalyptic, whether literal, cultural, political, or ethical. But another turn is possible, too, even probable, and perhaps the more tragic for its conspicuous plausibility: that the preponderance of our reflexes in the face of human strife run in the opposite direction, toward acclimatization.

This is the yowling torque muffled by the bland-seeming phrase “climate apathy,” which may otherwise feel merely descriptive: that through appeals to nativism, or by the logic of budget realities, or in perverse contortions of “deservedness,” by drawing our circles of empathy smaller and smaller, or by simply turning a blind eye when convenient, we will find ways to engineer new indifference. Gazing out at the future from the promontory of the present, with the planet having warmed one degree, the world of two degrees seems nightmarish—and the worlds of three degrees, and four, and five yet more grotesque. But one way we might manage to navigate that path without crumbling collectively in despair is, perversely, to normalize climate suffering at the same pace we accelerate it, as we have so much human pain over centuries, so that we are always coming to terms with what is just ahead of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting all that we had ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of the conditions of the world we are passing through in the present tense, and blithely.