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Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change
This book argues that climate change has a devastating effect on how we think about the future. Once several positive feedback loops in Earth’s dynamic systems, such as the melting of the Arctic icecap or the drying of the Amazon, cross the point of no return, the biosphere is likely to undergo severe and irreversible warming.
Nearly everything we do is premised on the assumption that the world we know will endure into the future and provide a sustaining context for our activities. But today the future of a viable biosphere, and thus the purpose of our present activities, is put into question. A disappearing future leads to a broken present, a strange incoherence in the feel of everyday life.
We thus face the unprecedented challenge of salvaging a basis for our lives today. That basis, this book argues, may be found in our capacity to assume an infinite responsibility for ecological disaster and, like the biblical Job, to respond with awe to the alien voice that speaks from the whirlwind. By owning disaster and accepting our small place within the inhuman forces of the biosphere, we may discover how to live with responsibility and serenity whatever may come.
Author Bio
David Collings is Professor of English at Bowdoin College, where he teaches courses in British Romanticism, critical theory, sexuality and gender, and environmental studies. He is the author of Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (1994) and Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 1780-1848 (2009). He co-edited Queer Romanticisms with Michael O’Rourke (2004-2005) and Romanticism and Disaster with Jacques Khalip (2012). He has written articles on affect without content, anti-biography, the ethics of the impossible, economies of disaster, the impasses of utilitarianism, and the post-covenantal sublime.
Nearly everything we do is premised on the assumption that the world we know will endure into the future and provide a sustaining context for our activities. But today the future of a viable biosphere, and thus the purpose of our present activities, is put into question. A disappearing future leads to a broken present, a strange incoherence in the feel of everyday life.
We thus face the unprecedented challenge of salvaging a basis for our lives today. That basis, this book argues, may be found in our capacity to assume an infinite responsibility for ecological disaster and, like the biblical Job, to respond with awe to the alien voice that speaks from the whirlwind. By owning disaster and accepting our small place within the inhuman forces of the biosphere, we may discover how to live with responsibility and serenity whatever may come.
Author Bio
David Collings is Professor of English at Bowdoin College, where he teaches courses in British Romanticism, critical theory, sexuality and gender, and environmental studies. He is the author of Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (1994) and Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 1780-1848 (2009). He co-edited Queer Romanticisms with Michael O’Rourke (2004-2005) and Romanticism and Disaster with Jacques Khalip (2012). He has written articles on affect without content, anti-biography, the ethics of the impossible, economies of disaster, the impasses of utilitarianism, and the post-covenantal sublime.
240 pages, Paperback
First published June 7, 2014
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November 22, 2024
Oh, the climate crisis. What an existential crisis indeed.
Ironically, I left Bowdoin College to, in some way, escape the hypocrisy and nonsensicality of my being there - a paradise of learning only the elite could access, with the alleged aim of the 'common good' that seemed as empty as it was false. Classic example of leaving one matrix only to end up in another. For we live in a climate change matrix and I do not know where the red pill lies. Or if I should swallow it. Or what that would entail.
At a certain point in anyone's thought process about climate change, there is a dead end. The white noise of the climate hysteria that always hums in the background of the everyday - that you've learned to ignore, even if you think you are aware - suddenly transforms into a blaring alarm flashing red lights and screaming danger in its deafening silent roar. You walk around wondering how everyone else doesn't seem to see the rising flames, hear the apocalyptic shatter of broken promises, feel the rising tides and swelling storms. How can the world that you love so dearly be so false, so sinister, so cruel? How can you live, knowing your every day is the equivalent of a gunshot, a knife stabbed in someone's back, a suffering of such immensity that you cannot even comprehend its magnitude?
Better not think about it, seems the initial response. One would drive themselves crazy like that. I think there's even therapy nowadays for 'climate anxiety.' How ironic, that the very feeling we should be leaning into - the fear, the despair, the ultimate need for action - is something seen as fundamentally other, as a sign of the crazy rather than the sane, a feeling that needs a remedy, a bandaid to cover up the reality.
But a bandaid cannot hold in the blood we all have on our hands. It's already starting to pool on the ground. We splash around in it like little children in rainwater, willfully ignorant of its imminent threat to rise, rise, rise, to drown and choke all that we love, to teach us true fear. Collings does an excellent job pointing this out. He lays out the emotional nature of how we grapple with climate change and exposes the denial we all harbour for what it is: Ignorance we cannot afford to have. Bliss we cannot afford to hold. He shows the problems we all know to a certain extent - the technological, political, and social - which boil down to one point: time is up. Ready or not.
It is this thought that we all grapple with to a certain extent, and that these past few weeks I have been grappling with a lot. I'm staring straight into the eyes of the world, reflected back at me in the mirror, and all I see is clear and resolute hypocrisy. It rings true on every level of my life and the lives of those around me: seeing the climate activists flying to their conferences and talks in the name of saving the world. The Democrats losing the election in the U.S. and the backlash against the 'stupid Midwesterners who don't even know anything about the economy' from the people who abuse it for their own ends. The liberals in Canada who implemented a carbon tax that fucks the middle class but doesn't harm the rich much at all. The judgement, the scorn, the hate, the divide, when we're all the same murderers just dressed up in a different disguise.
One thing I don't think people realize when they push for a political change for the climate is that in asking the government to implement policies to reduce fossil fuel emissions, that means that YOUR life WILL BE negatively affected. The government cannot wave some magical air suction machine and do away with the carbon emissions. If you want a carbon tax, that means driving will be more expensive. If you want a cap and trade, that means groceries will become more expensive. Your own life will have to change dramatically (assuming there is any equity at ALL in the policies) and you will not like it. So it is not enough to say 'it's the government's fault, my individual actions mean nothing in comparison to their policies.' Their policies are built on your individual actions and their demands. And that is why everyone is so sick of the democrats.
For not only do we live in a diseased system. Our lives ARE the system, confirming its validity every moment of every day. Collings described this horrific revelation in a way I honestly could not have done better myself. The hardest part about dealing with climate change is the realization that it is not anyone else who is the problem: we are the problem. We are the system. We are complicit. There are no two ways about it. That is the truth, whether we like it or not.
So now what.
This is where I think the book fails in part - not necessarily as Collings' fault, but as a fault of the problem itself. The complete revolution of the human mind, the overthrow of our political institutions, the reversal into the future, the de-training of a society built on creation into one cornered into prevention - it all seems to be the work of gods, not mere mortals. I did not see any concrete path laid out that seemed anything more than just another illusion. Another set of rules loosely outlined to suggest we ought to pursue a just life for the sack of justice itself and nothing else.
What justice can be had in a world that will burn, at this point, no matter what we do? When chaos is inevitable, is it 'privileged' to choose peace? What of every other obligation we have to our loved ones and our lives, our dreams and our desires, our insatiable thirst to suck the marrow out of the time we are alive, our instincts, our passions, our humanity, our art... - and remember we're all going to die one day anyway?
But we know it is false. We know we care. And so there is nothing left, ultimately, but a crushing despair. What can we do? What should we do?
What can I do? What should I do? Most importantly, what will I do?
The book raises all the right questions, but so far as I see it, answers none of them. It diagnoses the disease, but gives no cure. For there is none, not yet, maybe not ever. I'm afraid this is a cancer that we all must endure. Welcome to adulthood, Gen Z.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notable quotes:
Climate change does not just melt the ice caps and glaciers; it melts the narrative in which we still participate, the purpose of the present day. In this sense, too, we are already living in the ruins of the future.
We are caught between two imperatives: we must lead our lives, but we must also recognize that our life narratives are no longer credible. Neither renunciation nor stubbornness, neither reckless grief nor furious assertion, can finally erase the eerie quality of persisting within a narrative whose conclusion is slowly being erased. No plausible course of action is open to us. The ruined future forces us to endure in a broken present.
The return to certain abuses will not merely take us back to the past; it will cancel what we thought were permanent guarantees and thus traumatize us intimately. We may then learn that the notions of liberty and individual rights are only fictions, resting within a network of exploitative social relations we never fully attempted to dismantle.
The return of injustice and violence potentially extends to all of us; we cannot be sure we are not enslaving ourselves, creating a prison that neither we nor others can escape.
But the further irony is that the goal of that earlier project was to create a devastating weapon; the goal this time—and a far more difficult one—is to prevent destruction.
The reality of that threat calls upon us to value the lives we know and to see them as destructive at the same time, as a result splitting our response to ordinary experience.
We incorporate their denunciations of contemporary society into our own thinking without giving up our love of what we possess, ending up in a partly ambivalent, partly celebratory mood, uneasily aware of what our history has cost but not finally regretful.
In effect, we would attempt to sustain responsibility amidst its ruins, to remain just when the frameworks in which justice is effective have dissolved.
We would thus act with justice not because the universe will reward us or because everything will work out well for us if we do, but simply because such action is the right thing to do.
Ironically, I left Bowdoin College to, in some way, escape the hypocrisy and nonsensicality of my being there - a paradise of learning only the elite could access, with the alleged aim of the 'common good' that seemed as empty as it was false. Classic example of leaving one matrix only to end up in another. For we live in a climate change matrix and I do not know where the red pill lies. Or if I should swallow it. Or what that would entail.
At a certain point in anyone's thought process about climate change, there is a dead end. The white noise of the climate hysteria that always hums in the background of the everyday - that you've learned to ignore, even if you think you are aware - suddenly transforms into a blaring alarm flashing red lights and screaming danger in its deafening silent roar. You walk around wondering how everyone else doesn't seem to see the rising flames, hear the apocalyptic shatter of broken promises, feel the rising tides and swelling storms. How can the world that you love so dearly be so false, so sinister, so cruel? How can you live, knowing your every day is the equivalent of a gunshot, a knife stabbed in someone's back, a suffering of such immensity that you cannot even comprehend its magnitude?
Better not think about it, seems the initial response. One would drive themselves crazy like that. I think there's even therapy nowadays for 'climate anxiety.' How ironic, that the very feeling we should be leaning into - the fear, the despair, the ultimate need for action - is something seen as fundamentally other, as a sign of the crazy rather than the sane, a feeling that needs a remedy, a bandaid to cover up the reality.
But a bandaid cannot hold in the blood we all have on our hands. It's already starting to pool on the ground. We splash around in it like little children in rainwater, willfully ignorant of its imminent threat to rise, rise, rise, to drown and choke all that we love, to teach us true fear. Collings does an excellent job pointing this out. He lays out the emotional nature of how we grapple with climate change and exposes the denial we all harbour for what it is: Ignorance we cannot afford to have. Bliss we cannot afford to hold. He shows the problems we all know to a certain extent - the technological, political, and social - which boil down to one point: time is up. Ready or not.
It is this thought that we all grapple with to a certain extent, and that these past few weeks I have been grappling with a lot. I'm staring straight into the eyes of the world, reflected back at me in the mirror, and all I see is clear and resolute hypocrisy. It rings true on every level of my life and the lives of those around me: seeing the climate activists flying to their conferences and talks in the name of saving the world. The Democrats losing the election in the U.S. and the backlash against the 'stupid Midwesterners who don't even know anything about the economy' from the people who abuse it for their own ends. The liberals in Canada who implemented a carbon tax that fucks the middle class but doesn't harm the rich much at all. The judgement, the scorn, the hate, the divide, when we're all the same murderers just dressed up in a different disguise.
One thing I don't think people realize when they push for a political change for the climate is that in asking the government to implement policies to reduce fossil fuel emissions, that means that YOUR life WILL BE negatively affected. The government cannot wave some magical air suction machine and do away with the carbon emissions. If you want a carbon tax, that means driving will be more expensive. If you want a cap and trade, that means groceries will become more expensive. Your own life will have to change dramatically (assuming there is any equity at ALL in the policies) and you will not like it. So it is not enough to say 'it's the government's fault, my individual actions mean nothing in comparison to their policies.' Their policies are built on your individual actions and their demands. And that is why everyone is so sick of the democrats.
For not only do we live in a diseased system. Our lives ARE the system, confirming its validity every moment of every day. Collings described this horrific revelation in a way I honestly could not have done better myself. The hardest part about dealing with climate change is the realization that it is not anyone else who is the problem: we are the problem. We are the system. We are complicit. There are no two ways about it. That is the truth, whether we like it or not.
So now what.
This is where I think the book fails in part - not necessarily as Collings' fault, but as a fault of the problem itself. The complete revolution of the human mind, the overthrow of our political institutions, the reversal into the future, the de-training of a society built on creation into one cornered into prevention - it all seems to be the work of gods, not mere mortals. I did not see any concrete path laid out that seemed anything more than just another illusion. Another set of rules loosely outlined to suggest we ought to pursue a just life for the sack of justice itself and nothing else.
What justice can be had in a world that will burn, at this point, no matter what we do? When chaos is inevitable, is it 'privileged' to choose peace? What of every other obligation we have to our loved ones and our lives, our dreams and our desires, our insatiable thirst to suck the marrow out of the time we are alive, our instincts, our passions, our humanity, our art... - and remember we're all going to die one day anyway?
But we know it is false. We know we care. And so there is nothing left, ultimately, but a crushing despair. What can we do? What should we do?
What can I do? What should I do? Most importantly, what will I do?
The book raises all the right questions, but so far as I see it, answers none of them. It diagnoses the disease, but gives no cure. For there is none, not yet, maybe not ever. I'm afraid this is a cancer that we all must endure. Welcome to adulthood, Gen Z.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notable quotes:
Climate change does not just melt the ice caps and glaciers; it melts the narrative in which we still participate, the purpose of the present day. In this sense, too, we are already living in the ruins of the future.
We are caught between two imperatives: we must lead our lives, but we must also recognize that our life narratives are no longer credible. Neither renunciation nor stubbornness, neither reckless grief nor furious assertion, can finally erase the eerie quality of persisting within a narrative whose conclusion is slowly being erased. No plausible course of action is open to us. The ruined future forces us to endure in a broken present.
The return to certain abuses will not merely take us back to the past; it will cancel what we thought were permanent guarantees and thus traumatize us intimately. We may then learn that the notions of liberty and individual rights are only fictions, resting within a network of exploitative social relations we never fully attempted to dismantle.
The return of injustice and violence potentially extends to all of us; we cannot be sure we are not enslaving ourselves, creating a prison that neither we nor others can escape.
But the further irony is that the goal of that earlier project was to create a devastating weapon; the goal this time—and a far more difficult one—is to prevent destruction.
The reality of that threat calls upon us to value the lives we know and to see them as destructive at the same time, as a result splitting our response to ordinary experience.
We incorporate their denunciations of contemporary society into our own thinking without giving up our love of what we possess, ending up in a partly ambivalent, partly celebratory mood, uneasily aware of what our history has cost but not finally regretful.
In effect, we would attempt to sustain responsibility amidst its ruins, to remain just when the frameworks in which justice is effective have dissolved.
We would thus act with justice not because the universe will reward us or because everything will work out well for us if we do, but simply because such action is the right thing to do.
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