FIDDLING WHILE THE WORLD BURNS

Most of my reading is for pleasure. But occasionally I take up a book of nonfiction—a history or biography or tale of true adventure—to educate myself. And very rarely I read something out of a sense of duty, recognizing I need to know whatever is between those particular covers, no matter how difficult the literary journey might be.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, by David Wallace-Wells falls into the last category. This is a painful book to read, dense with fact, crowded with horror, bleak with certainty. Its author is not out to convince those who don’t “believe” in global warming, or refuse to accept the fact that humans are responsible. He is not even writing to offer blithe solutions to our dilemma. He is here simply to tell us it is almost too late to reverse the headlong course we are running toward universal disaster. 

What started with the burning of fossil fuels for industry at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution a little over 200 years ago has accelerated in a single generation (our own) to untenable levels. This Goldilocks planet, ideal for the evolution of humans, is rapidly becoming rendered unable to sustain human life. We are fooling ourselves if we think this process is a slow one; we are deluded if we believe we can escape it without concerted, even heroic, action. Global warming is not a myth, or a liberal conspiracy theory, or a natural cycle such as the Earth has seen before (unless you count it as another mass extinction event, of which there have been five). And, as Wallace-Wells puts it in the opening sentence of his book: It is worse, much worse, than you think.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been chronicling the local minor impacts of warming on my world as I see them through the seasons: the decline of the monarch butterflies, the unrelenting storms and floods pounding the vulnerable coast of North Carolina, the droughts and resulting wildfires in summer in the mountains. Wherever you live, if you are in tune to nature, I’m sure you could give examples, too. Wallace-Wells insists we won’t even have time to adjust to this “new normal” before we are looking back at this time as a paradise. 

The International Organization on Climate Change estimates we have only 12 years to implement real changes before it is too late to make a difference. My middle grandchild will not even have graduated from high school by then. My youngest grandchild will be starting middle school.

What kind of world will they face?

There is far too much information in The Uninhabitable Earth to relate here. But I did find two ideas of particular interest to us as members of the science fiction community. The first concerns us directly: Wallace-Wells wonders why no one has written that novel or film imagining the post-warming world and its challenges. We have apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic worlds aplenty, but their dangers stem from almost anything BUT the very real dangers of heat, flooding, famine, displacement and economic collapse that will result from warming. We have zombies, pandemic (which, okay, could come from warming), alien invasion, monster invasion a la GODZILLA, super-villain destruction, nuclear war in multiple forms, resource depletion (almost always envisioned as fossil fuel depletion, now almost a joke given what we will sacrifice to make sure those fuels remain plentiful) and unspecified desertification. Of these, perhaps only the last comes closest to a real vision of what warming will bring but fails to really address the cause.

I suspect that no one has tackled this fiction challenge because, as Wallace-Wells’s book so clearly points out, “civilization” won’t come back from the impact of 3° C. of global warming. At that temperature, great swaths of the planet will be unlivable, not only at the equator, but above and below; the polar ice will be gone; the oceans will be dying; two-thirds of the world’s major cities will be under water. It is difficult to imagine even small acts of heroism or hope in this kind of setting. Colman McCarthy’s The Road comes to mind, though that book is based on a nuclear winter scenario.

Wallace-Wells also mentions Fermi’s Paradox in connection with global warming. That old chestnut, a theory attributed to one of the physicists responsible for the atomic bomb, ponders why we’ve never heard from any alien civilization if they exist out there in the vast universe. But Wallace-Wells (and others he names in the book) wonders if perhaps there is a curve to industrial civilizations that leads inevitably to their own destruction by global warming. Once they reach a point where they might be capable of reaching out to other planets, they are already doomed by their own rapacious use of their own planets’ resources.

Biblical levels of doom: The fire this time?

None of this, as I said before, is fun reading. But it is thought-provoking. And necessary if we hope to envision any kind of steps to avoid what is coming. I may not agree with everything this gloomy author says, but I can see enough of what’s happening to believe we can’t continue to blindly follow this increasingly perilous path.


RITA, GOLDEN HEART WINNERS ANNOUNCED!

Finalists in the Romance Writers of America's RITA and Golden Heart contests were named  March 21. Congratulations to all! Sadly, only one finalist in the RITA paranormal category was a science fiction romance, Cara Crescent's Wretched. I, for one, will continue to press RWA for a separate category for SFR, for a number of reasons, including legitimacy of judging. (I judge the contest every year.) Even more sadly, this is the final year for the Golden Heart contest for unpublished manuscripts, a key feature of RWA's unique program of encouraging fledgling authors. I am devastated to see it go.

Cheers, Donna