Many of the students in my first year seminar live in a dorm on Stuyvesant Park, which means they pass by Union Square on their way to school, and see the
Climate Clock. With maddeningly misplaced precision it counts down the seconds before it's too late for us to reach zero emissions - 6 days, 115 days, 19 hours 13 minutes and 51 seconds when I took this picture early this afternoon. It's got some of the students pretty despondent. We're never going to make it, and then it's all over, we're toast! Humanity sucks!
That sense of urgency is valuable - we are at a turning point - but the dejection flowing from powerlessness to avert disaster isn't. It can make what we
can image doing seem like no more than moving the deckchairs on the Titanic. (I speak for myself as much as for them.) So it was nice that today's class featured both science and science fiction. The science was a
2010 TED talk on "planetary boundaries" by Thomas Rockström and an influential
2018 article by Will Steffen, Rockström and others arguing that humanity has knocked earth systems out of the relative stability not just of the Holocene but of the glacial-interglacial cycle of last 100,000 years. There's no going back to the way things were for most of human history; our options are an unlivable "hothouse earth" if we don't change, and a "stabilized earth" if we harness our power to slow things down. Rockström's talk identified the decade of 2010-20 as make or break - ouch. The later piece gave us about a dozen years - make that nine. Falsely precise all of them but kin to the Climate Clock's doomsday countdown.
The science fiction, a piece contributed to an anthology of "science fiction stories from social justice movements" which subsequently blossomed into a book, stares the despair down. Its author, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, describes herself as a "Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist," and works as a kind of oracle. It's wonderful work. "Evidence," the piece we read, imagines articles in the archive compiled by someone in the future, trying to understand how, humanity destroyed the conditions for its existence and nevertheless... survived in a new and transformed way. The "archive" includes a letter the researcher, calculatedly risking the usual time travel dangers, writes to Gumbs in our present. A taste:
The way forward that Gumbs' oracular fiction imagines doesn't avoid the collapse of capitalism or the devastation of the earth's surface. The descendants live underground, in bodies that have been transformed. But frankly the idea of
any kind of survival is a gift, and this especially: we can help a future happen by "breaking silence," by recognizing and celebrating what Gumbs in the latere book calls "black feminist metaphysics" tells us: in ways we can today barely imagine everything is connected, is sacred.
Rockström and Steffen see a role for the humanities in changing our "mindset," contributing to a "fundamental reorientation of human values, equity, behavior, institutions, economies and technology," but they don't imagine anything like as fundamental a reorientation as this. It's bracing but vivifying. Where too many other accounts are one or other kind of apocalytpic, seeing only the inescapable end of all we know, Gumbs' imagination goes beyond apocalypse to something glorious. It may take five generations of healing, but there's a way out of the disjointed and dehumanizing ways we now live, a way onward toward fuller, not diminished, humanity.
