Anthropocene stories

Storytime! Stories were a major theme in the "Anthropocene Humanities" course, building on Julia Adeney Thomas' typology of historical narratives for the Anthropocene and Amitav Ghosh's critique of realist novels for telling the wrong kinds of stories for the Anthropocene. The humanities contribute to Anthropocene reflection an appreciation for the indispensability of stories to human life and history - and a critical awareness of the possibilites opened, and closed, by stories of various kinds. The midterm paper (due in the fourth session, 9 days in!) was about what sorts of stories the Anthropocene demanded. And of course our final session, anchored in Donna Haraway's "Camille Stories," generated a half dozen remarkable "speculative fabulations" of our own. But a few students also availed themselves of the option of writing a story as their final paper.

These were each thoughtful and creative and - being stories - don't really lend themselves to being summarized! But let me try to describe them anyway, starting with the more conventional and moving toward the more complex. Individually and together they evoke worlds of gloom, concern and hope.

A few of the briefer ones tell of post-apocalyptic worlds familiar from science fiction, in worlds ravaged by anthropogenic disasters and viruses. One tells of a farmer whose field hands fall ill; it turns out to be a new virus, borne by mutated wheat, which devastates the human population. Two others describe a world where only select few can be saved (under a "Dome" in Australia in one story, an "Ark of Doom" in the other) - but what one calls "the ugliness of human nature" is revealed as people fight to enter or, having made it in, turn on each other. As humanity approaches its inevitable death the only peace is found among Tibetan monks chanting sutras in the Himalayas. Another tells of a pair of siblings at a time when a lethal virus is killing people all around. The few uninfected people are called to shelter for the future of humanity, including A - but his sister B is ill. She tells him to leave her but he insists on taking her with him to the shelter where, although her condition has improved with their shared hope, she is turned away. This is the right thing to do, the student writes, but let's do what we can to ensuer we never find ourselves in that situation. 

Abortive hope appears in a few others. One takes the form of a letter, written by the last surviving human on the planet: if you're reading it, perhaps you're a descendant of the people who left in 10 space ships in search of a new planet? The letter describes how humans destroyed the earth, and darky worries that, should any of the shape ships find another planet to inhabit, will probably take it to Anthropocene too. Another tells of a scientist whose years of efforts to develop a plastic-consuming plant have been fruitless, even as plastics, piling up everywhere and ruining the oceans, have started to mutate. Suddenly he notices a spot of green - a leaf from what turns out to be a fast-growing plastic-decomposing plant! It ends up preventing the plastic apocalypse but, the storyteller concludes, As people are buried in joy, a tremendous carcass of a dead whale is floating in the sea, whose body is occupied by new unknown organisms and materials. 

Salvific green appears in another, more elaborate story. Two explorers - conveniently named Mark and Mary - are part of a series of teams called "Oasis," dispatched to the desertified world outside a domed human settlement for signs of surviving biological life. Their supplies are running out, and they seem likely to join the past teams who never returned. 

“Mary, how much food do you have?” Mark asked.

“A little. I believe no more than you,” Mary's electronic voice came from his mask. “Well, I think enough for two days at most.”

“Shit! Mary, do you know what we eat? Plastic, they even added plastic to our food! They said it’s specially produced, and we can digest it! How come they don't eat the plastic themselves?” 

“Mark, what can they do? They even can’t feed people inside there… I, I have already despaired. Only god can help us. Or I should say, it’s god that is punishing us.”

“You are right. God abandoned humans. He didn’t protect us anymore. Please…”

“Stop, Mark! Lift your left foot! What’s that?”

Mark raised his left foot. He couldn’t tell what the object was immediately, but the color hit him violently. It’s green! He wasn’t sure whether it’s a plant at once, but it’s green! “Mary, is it a plant? Is it a plant?! Oh, I can’t, I can’t…” 

“Be careful, Mark! Stay clam! Don’t step on it! Ok, back away slowly…let me see…” 

Mary got close to the green object, and observed it for a while, then said, “yes, it’s a plant.” She tried to say it peacefully, but her voice still trembled. Mark wanted to say something, but he found had had lost his voice. It suddenly came to him that there might be other plants nearby. He started looking for them. And so did Mary. Sure enough, they quickly found a second one, a third one, a fourth one…then, they found a large area of green, a large area of plants.

It is indeed an Oasis, with trees and birds ... but then the narrative shifts to two other characters, named Ben and Jack, who are revealed to be programmers of an expensive virtual reality game called Oasis. Life inside the dome is so awful - searches for life outside it all unsuccessful - that more and more people are seeking escape in this game, spending all their money. 

What will humans' future be like?  No one knows. 
 

The protagonist of another remarkably rich story is named Sarah, who finds herself perhaps the last human being on a planet terrorized by human-eating zombies and robots. The robots have revolted against a humanity which has produced wave upon wave of climatic destruction in short-sighted efforts to mitigate the harm they've already done. The robots were created to control the zombies resulting from leaked nuclear waste and are programmed never to harm humans. But other people as well as zombies are nowhere to be seen - until Sarah meets someone she recognizes, Dr. Fang, the original creator of the robots. Or so it seems: he's actually been taken over by the robots, and has sought her out as the last surviving human. He explains that the zombies, having completed their work, have been eliminated. Robots want to be the masters of the Anthropocene, being humankind's greatest work. But there's still a system in place, which only a human being could trigger, to resume plans to restore the earth - plans interrupted because humans feared war. If she activates it, all robots and zombies will be destroyed and she can complete humanity's revenge: how about it? A complicated psychological tug of war ensues, but at the end Sarah decides to let the robots inherit the earth. Putting her gun to her temple she spoke the lat human words: "Long live the Anthropocene."

Before turning to my favorite bunch of stories - many involving a similar self-sacrificing nobility - I should mention that one story, just a paragraph (a few students misunderstood the final prompt and tried to respond hurriedly to all three prompts), is optimistic. It takes place in 3021, when all is well. Science has solved all the Anthropocene problems, even making life better for humans and other life forms: there's no need to panic. But the students who chose to write a story had more complicated feelings. 

The remaining three stories all involve the sea. The simplest is a "fable" told of a boy growing up in a coastal village which hunted whales; the student explained she wasn't trying science fiction as its technological gewgaws can distract from the human meaning of things. At one point the boy rows a boat out into the sea by himself and finds himself surrounded by whales. To his surprise, they are curious but unthreatening. He's enchanted by their songs and by a young female, whose body is purest white. The boy is punished for venturing out on his own, and is soon old enough to join the hunt, forgetting what he knew, though the sight of the body of a slaughtered whale, a young white female, briefly gives him tremors. Eventually, grown up, he rows out to sea again to hear the whale songs but there is only silence, the last whale having been killed.

A little more complicated, even conflicted, is the story about a self-doubting young Siren named Argel. He (Greek sirens are half bird half woman but these sirens have fish tails and at least this one is male) wonders why sirens are thought to be ugly, and why they have to tempt sailors to their doom. Did god create them to kill? He's drawn to human beings, though only one boy smiles at him. But at the same time the boy smiles, other humans are dumping colorful plastics in the ocean. Argel notices that sirens cause more shipwrecks when humans dump more plastics, but doesn't want to be evil. He dives deep into the sea, passing shoals of colorful fish and even more colorful plastics, until his last breath is spent. There was a little turtle lying on the reef where Argel left, the story ends. It turned over on the reef, and its four feet were wrapped with fishing nets which were as green as its shell. The student explained that she left Argel's questions unanswered for the reader to ponder.

The last story, finally, is about a mermaid - yes, the narrator says, a mermaid: they really exist! This one never knew her parents but was raised in the middle of the Pacific by her grandfather - also a mermaid! He taught her to swim, but also about human language and civilization; he said a stranded sailor had taught him. One day a tanker crashes on a shoal. Her grandfather tries to help the fish and birds dying in the spilled oil, and the mermaid helps him; when the ship collapses on them, he shields her with his body. She wakes up on a beach where someone is talking to her - a human! "I know you talk," he says, and asks if she wants to know how her grandfather is doing. She learns that he's died - but the man says he can be revived - by science! They'll be able to make her human, too - won't she come along? She agrees but asks to have a final look at the ocean, and escapes into the waves. Why did she run away? asks the narrator rhetorically, Because the sea was too beautiful.

And why do I know this mermaid? Because I am her. My grandfather is a knowledgeable scientist, and my parents used to be researchers in the "Human-fish gene exchange" laboratory in the human world. Grandfather discovered that the purpose of my parents' research was to create the so-called "Mermaid", so that human beings could plunder the ocean more wantonly. My parents' research had been successful but my grandfather thought that a great disaster was coming, and finally they had a conflict. The accident led to the death of my parents. In order to stop the plan, my grandfather absconded with me and the core achievements in the laboratory. In order to avoid capture, he turned me and himself into mermaids, managed to erase all my memories, fled to the sea, and destroyed all the research findings. The people who found us have been searching for us for a long time. The arrogant guy who talked to me wanted to persuade me to go back to the human world in order to continue the research of "Human-fish gene exchange" on me. He was so smug that he let me escape easily, probably because in his mind, human life has infinite charm. After that, I continue to travel through the ocean, always doing the last thing my grandfather and I did together - saving the endangered lives in the ocean with my own tiny power. I am a mermaid, although without much power, but still adhere to protect my home.

I think Scheherezade would be impressed by all these stories, and cyborg prophetess Haraway too; I know that I am. I want to find a way to use some of them in my fall course - optimally not only with the writers' permission but with their participation too! Stories are able to capture complicated emotions, to explore the ways in which humans (and others) might respond to calamitous and dehumanizing times, in solidarity with the whole fragile world.