It’s natural, so to speak, to anthropomorphize animals—our whole animation industry is built on it, for starters. But there is something strange, even fatalistic, about such vain beings as ourselves identifying this strongly with creatures who operate so entirely without free will and individual autonomy that many experts in the field aren’t sure whether we should think of the bee or the colony as the organism. In my own reporting about colony collapse, bee lovers kept telling me it was an appreciation for the great spectacle of bee civilization that was behind this outpouring of concern for their well-being. But I couldn’t help wondering if it wasn’t almost the opposite quality that gave colony collapse the force of fable: the complete powerlessness of individuals facing down inevitable, civilization-scale suicide. It’s not just bee rapture, after alclass="underline" we see visions of our own world being wiped out in the mysterious deaths brought about by Ebola, bird flu, and other pandemics; in anxiety about a robot apocalypse; in ISIS, China, and the Jade Helm exercise in Texas; in runaway inflation that never actually happened in the wake of quantitative easing, or the gold rush such fears spawned, which did. One does not open the Wikipedia page for “Honeybee” expecting an encounter with millenarianism. But the more you read about colony collapse, the more you are filled with a kind of awe for just how much the internet is a divining rod by which we choose to intuit an end of days.
As it turns out, there was no mystery, either, about the bee deaths themselves, which could be explained quite fully by the bees’ working conditions: mostly that they were rubbing up against a new breed of insecticide, neonicotinoids, which, as the name suggests, effectively turned all the bees into cigarette fiends. Flying insects might be disappearing because of warming, in other words—that recent study suggested that, already, 75 percent of them may have died, drawing us closer to a world without pollinators, which the researchers called an “ecological Armageddon”—but colony collapse disorder has basically nothing to do with that. And yet still, as recently as 2018, magazines were devoting whole feature articles to the bee fable. Presumably, this is not because people enjoyed being wrong about bees, but because treating any apparent crisis as an allegory was somehow comforting—as though it sequestered the problem in a story whose meaning we controlled.
—
When Bill McKibben declared “The End of Nature,” in 1989, he was posing a hyperbolic kind of epistemological riddle: What do you call it, whatever it is, when forces of wilderness and weather, of animal kingdoms and plant life, have been so transformed by human activity they are no longer truly “natural”?
The answer came a few decades later with the term “the Anthropocene,” which was coined in the spirit of environmental alarm and suggested a much messier and more unstable state than “end.” Environmentalists, outdoorspeople, nature lovers, and romantics of various stripes—there are many who would mourn the end of nature. But there are literally billions who will shortly be terrified by the forces unleashed by the Anthropocene. In much of the world, they already are, in the form of lethal close-to-annual heat waves in the Middle East and South Asia, and in the ever-present threat of flood, like those that hit Kerala in 2018 and killed hundreds. The floods hardly made a mark in the United States and Europe, where consumers of news have been trained over decades to see disasters like these as tragic, yes, but also as an inevitable feature of underdevelopment—and therefore both “natural” and distant.
The arrival of this scale of climate suffering in the modern West will be one of the great and terrible stories of the coming decades. There, at least, we’ve long thought that modernity had paved over nature, completely, factory by factory and strip mall by strip mall. Proponents of solar geoengineering want to take on the sky next, not just to stabilize the planet’s temperature but possibly to create “designer climates,” localized to very particular needs—saving this reef ecosystem, preserving that breadbasket. Conceivably those climates could get considerably more micro, down to particular farms or soccer stadiums or beach resorts.
These interventions, should they ever become feasible, are decades away, at least. But even rapid and quotidian-seeming projects will leave a profoundly different imprint on the shape of the world. In the nineteenth century, the built environment of the most advanced countries reflected the prerogatives of industry—think of railroad tracks laid across whole continents to move coal. In the twentieth century, those same environments were made to reflect the needs of capital—think of global urbanization agglomerating labor supply for a new service economy. In the twenty-first century, they will reflect the demands of the climate crisis: seawalls, carbon-capture plantations, state-sized solar arrays. The claims of eminent domain made on behalf of climate change will no longer play like government overreach, though they will still surely inspire NIMBY backlash—even in a time of climate crisis, progressives will find ways to look out for number one.
We are already living within a deformed environment—indeed, quite deformed. In its swaggering twentieth century, the United States built two states of paradise: Florida, out of dismal swamp, and Southern California, out of desert. By 2100, neither will endure as Edenic postcards.
That we reengineered the natural world so sufficiently to close the book on an entire geological era—that is the major lesson of the Anthropocene. The scale of that transformation remains astonishing, even to those of us who were raised amidst it and took all of its imperious values for granted. Twenty-two percent of the earth’s landmass was altered by humans just between 1992 and 2015. Ninety-six percent of the world’s mammals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock; just four percent are wild. We have simply crowded—or bullied, or brutalized—every other species into retreat, near-extinction, or worse. E. O. Wilson thinks the era might be better called the Eremocine—the age of loneliness.
But global warming carries a message more concerning stilclass="underline" that we didn’t defeat the environment at all. There was no final conquest, no dominion established. In fact, the opposite: Whatever it means for the other animals on the planet, with global warming we have unwittingly claimed ownership of a system beyond our ability to control or tame in any day-to-day way. But more than that: with our continued activity, we have rendered that system only more out of control. Nature is both over, as in “past,” and all around us, indeed overwhelming us and punishing us—this is the major lesson of climate change, which it teaches us almost daily. And if global warming continues on anything like its present track, it will come to shape everything we do on the planet, from agriculture to human migration to business and mental health, transforming not just our relationship to nature but to politics and to history, and proving a knowledge system as total as “modernity.”
—
Scientists have known this for a while. But they have not often talked like it.
For decades now, there have been few things with a worse reputation than “alarmism” among those studying climate change. For a concerned class, this was somewhat strange; you don’t typically hear from public health experts about the need for circumspection in describing the risks of carcinogens, for instance. James Hansen, who first testified before Congress about global warming in 1988, has named the phenomenon “scientific reticence,” and in 2007 chastised his colleagues for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was. That tendency has metastasized over time, ironically as the news from research grew bleaker, so that for a long time each major publication would be attended by a cloud of commentary debating its precise calibration of perspective and tone—with many of those articles seen to lack an even balance between bad news and optimism, and labeled “fatalistic.” Some were derided as “climate porn.”