I’ve been a fan of
Bill McKibben’s ever since I first read Enough,
his book on the ethics of bioengineering and nanotechnology. One of his
strongest suits is his rhetorical style: he alarms without fully turning
alarmist, and manages to elucidate difficult concepts in laymen’s terms without
diminishing their significance. Our excerpt from Eaarth, in which he calls for a new name for the “different planet”
on which we now live, is no exception. McKibben provides proof that we have
irreversibly changed Earth’s functions in the form of a laundry-list of
symptoms, ranging from acidified oceans with jellyfish blooms to missing layers
of radiation in melting glaciers and absent ice caps. More importantly,
McKibben bites back against the rhetoric of others:
politicians and public figures who, when discussing the climate change crisis,
framed windows of climate-restoration opportunity in terms of generations.
According to McKibben, the risks that were projected to phase into reality over
the next century are here now, and
the “grandchildren” we claim to be so worried about will live “if not in hell,
then in some place with a very similar temperature.”
But Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society, though it is dated and
perhaps does not possess the rhetorical “oomph” that McKibben’s excerpt does,
is possibly more effective in its approach. The book’s first chapter is written
in sober, often cold, prose that distinguishes between two kinds of societies:
the “wealth-distributing society” and the “risk-distributing society.” Though
the two may appear to be one in the same, they are not, though they may share
attributes: “We do not yet live in a
risk society, but we also no longer live only
within the distribution conflicts of scarcity societies,” Beck writes. As
defined in the essay, a risk society does not disburse the kind of risk we
associate with “risky pursuits” that primarily entail personal risk (such as
exploration). Rather, risk societies present “global dangers like those that
arise for all of humanity from nuclear fission or the storage of radioactive
waste.” One of Beck’s major theses is, in essence, very similar to
McKibben’s—that the currently deployed rhetoric is inadequate to the
conversation as a whole. Beck notes that “the debate on pollutant and toxic
elements in air, water and foodstuffs . . . is still being conducted
exclusively or dominantly in the terms and formulas of natural science,” leaving the social aspect out entirely. People
have become “consumer reservoirs,” Beck says, in the modern “advanced stage of
total marketing.” Beck predicts McKibben’s worries in an eerily accurate way
when he claims that “we become active today in order to prevent . . . [the]
problems and crises of tomorrow . . . or not to do so.”
At
the heart of both excerpts, there is a preoccupation with the nature of
modernity. McKibben reminds us that society as we know it is a result of “the
sudden availability, beginning in the early eighteenth century, of cheap fossil
fuel,” and that our current crisis is the result of having burned all of it up
in a very short period of time. Beck describes a similar phenomenon termed the
“boomerang curve.” Both authors also embrace a global perspective as part of
the solution: McKibben details the plight of those in third-world countries who
have been subjected to the “fast violence” of super-storms and droughts; Beck
claims that “environmental problems can only be solved in an objectively
meaningful way in border-spanning negotiations and international agreements,”
though he is cynical, and this is admittedly easier said than done. So what does this mean, then,
for our reading of The Last Man and
of this week’s poems? Can we read the mirroring of characters’ emotional states
through vegetal metaphor as a reflection of the destruction of nascent modernity?
Does P.B. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” predict a literal desert rather than a
figurative one? How should we read the meeting between the “two / Of an
enormous city [who] did survive, / And they were enemies” in Byron’s “Darkness”?
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