Just how long the ecosystems of Earth will be thrown into flux and disarray from anthropogenic climate change also depends on how much more of that change we choose to engineer—and perhaps how much we can manage to undo. But warming at the level necessary to fully melt ice sheets and glaciers and elevate sea level by several hundred feet promises to initiate rolling, radically transformative changes on a timescale measured not in decades or centuries or even millennia, but in the millions of years. Alongside that timeline, the entire lifespan of human civilization is rendered, effectively, an afterthought; and the much longer span of climate change becomes eternity.
Ethics at the End of the World
The twin towns of San Ignacio and Santa Elena, Belize, are fifty miles from the coast and 250 feet above sea level, but the alarmist climatologist Guy McPherson did not move there—to a farm in the jungle that surrounds the towns—in fear of water. Other things will get him first, he says; he’s given up hope of surviving climate change, and believes the rest of us should, too. Humans will be extinct within ten years, he tells me by Skype; when I ask his partner, Pauline, if she feels the same way, she laughs. “I’d say ten months.” This was two years ago.
McPherson began his career as a conservation biologist at the University of Arizona, where, he mentions several times, he was tenured at twenty-nine; and where, he also says several times, he was surveilled by what he calls the “Deep State” beginning in 1996; and also where, in 2009, he was forced out of his department by a new chair. He had already been working on a homestead in New Mexico—a compromise location with his former wife—and moved in 2016 to the Central American jungle, to live with Pauline and practice polyamory on another homestead called Stardust Sanctuary Farm.
Over the last decade, mostly via YouTube, McPherson has acquired what Bill McKibben calls, in his understated way, “a following.” These days, McPherson travels a bit, giving lectures on “near-term human extinction,” a term he is proud to have coined and which he abbreviates NTHE; but increasingly he has turned his attention to running workshops on what we should do with the knowledge that the world is ending. The workshops are called “Only Love Remains,” and offer what amounts to a kind of post-theological millenarianism, familiar hand-me-down lessons from the old New Age. The meta-lesson is that we should draw roughly the same meaning from an understanding of the imminent death of the species as the Dalai Lama believes we should draw from an understanding of our imminent personal death—namely, compassion, wonderment, and above all, love. You could do worse in choosing three values around which to build an ethical model, and when you squint you can almost see a civics erected out of them. But for those who see the planet as being on the precipice of crisis and biblical tribulation, they also excuse a retreat from politics—indeed from climate, as fully as that might conceivably be achieved—in the name of a slippery hedonistic quietism.
In other words, down to the mustache, McPherson seems like a recognizable off-the-grid figure—a kind it’s easy to find a bit suspicious. But why? We have for so long, over decades if not centuries, defined predictions of the collapse of civilization or the end of the world as something close to proof of insanity, and the communities that spring up around them as “cults,” that we are now left unable to take any warnings of disaster all that seriously—especially when those raising the alarm are also, themselves, “giving up.” There is nothing the modern world abhors like a quitter, but that prejudice will probably not withstand much warming. If the climate crisis unfolds as it is scheduled to, our taboos against doomsaying will fall, as new cults emerge and cultish thinking leeches into sectors of establishment culture. Because while the world will not likely end, and civilization is almost surely more resilient than McPherson believes, the unmistakable degradation of the planet will invariably inspire many more prophets like him, whose calls of imminent environmental apocalypse will start to seem reasonable to many more reasonable people.
That is, in part, because they are not so unreasonable, even today. If you were looking for a primer on the bad news about climate, you could find a worse place to begin than the summary page McPherson keeps on his website, “Nature Bats Last” (currently tagged with this note: “Updated most recently, likely for the final time, 2 August 2016”). It runs sixty-eight printed pages of link-dense paragraphs. Throughout, there are misleading characterizations of serious research, and links to hysterical, uncredentialed blog posts presented as references to solid science. There are simple misunderstandings of things like climate feedback loops, which can worryingly add up but are not “multiplicative,” as McPherson says they are; attacks on merely moderate climate groups as politically compromised; and, in the spirit of a kitchen-sink data dump, endorsements of a few observations that have been proven to be bunk (he is very worried, for instance, about those methane “burps of death” going off all at once, a possibility specialists turned against about five years ago). But, even on this fearmongering reading list, there is enough real science to give rise to real alarm: a good summary of the albedo effect, a convenient assemblage of rigorous readings of the Arctic ice sheets, those tea leaves of climate disaster.
Throughout, the intellectual style is paranoid—the impressive mass of data sometimes standing in for, and sometimes obscuring, the skeleton of causal logic that should give the mass a meaningful analytic shape. This kind of reasoning lives abundantly on the internet, feeding our golden age of conspiracy theory, that insatiable beast, which has only just begun to feast on climate. You might know already the shape that thinking takes on the climate-denial end of the political spectrum. But it has also made its mark on the environmentalist fringe, as it did in the person of John B. McLemore, the charismatic, closeted environmental declinist and self-hating Southerner whose descent into suicide, beset by planetary panic, was documented on the podcast “S-Town.” “I sometimes call it toxic knowledge,” Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute, where McLemore was a commenter, has said. “Once you know about overpopulation, overshoot, depletion, climate change, and the dynamics of societal collapse, you can’t unknow it, and your every subsequent thought is tinted.”
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McPherson isn’t entirely clear himself on exactly how all of these problems will bring about extinction—he guesses that something like a food crisis or financial meltdown will bring down civilization first, and eventually human life with it. It takes an apocalyptic imagination to picture that happening just a decade from now, to be sure. But, given the basic trend lines, it also raises the question of why the rest of us aren’t imagining things more apocalyptically ourselves.
We surely will, and soon. Already you can see the seedlings of a great flourishing of climate esoterica in figures like McLemore and McPherson—one might better say “men,” as they nearly all are—and, beyond them, a whole harvest of writers and thinkers who seem, in their anticipation of coming disasters, almost to be cheering for the forces of apocalypse.