Things to come, in voices of the ghosts

Click the above to hear a 15 minute audio recording of various radio broadcasts from the Second World War. They cover roughly the second half of 1941. During this period, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. And the American arsenal of democracy began gearing up -- not only to annihilate the Axis governments but to achieve military dominance over the entire planet. That dominance continues to this day.

Radio broadcasts from 1941 chronicle the passage that resulted, of a whole civilization into a history-wrenching storm. There have been many such storms in the time of the human species on Earth. Few affected every human being in existence immediately, all at the same time. The fall of the Romans, for example, did not immediately unleash its consequences upon the cultures across the Atlantic. It took a thousand years for those consequences to unfold, in the genocidal gunfire and plagues brought by the ships of the Roman successor states, which one historian called "the Mongols of the sea."

The Second World War was different than the earlier storms, because it unfolded in the period when human civilization had become a single, world-spanning entity. Still divided culturally, but increasingly integrated by technology and economics, to a degree never before imagined. The war brought a global maelstorm that immediately affected the lives of almost every society on Earth.

The radio archives of that period give an unmatched sense of the drama and reality of world-shaking events now regarded as dull facts to be memorized by school children preparing for Leave Our Child Behind. Or: to be used as mythology, justifying choices made today, by people with the power over war and peace.

The broadcasts are useful not only as a reminder of things past. They can give us a harbinger of what it will be like when the current crisis of planetary ecology finally breaks in its full fury upon the global culture that required 200,000 years to make. There will be anxious voices in the air, with tidings of the unimaginable made real and loss too great to bear and readiness for a stand.

The largest fire in New Mexico history: year 2

Gila National Forest, New Mexico, May 25, 2012

For the second year running, a wildfire in the forests of New Mexico has become the largest ever in the history of the state. The Whitewater-Baldy Fire Complex, the firefighters call this year's epic foreshadowing of Wyrmwood. It has burned an area of the state larger than New York City and shows no sign of slowing down. The entire American West faces another inferno summer of horizon spanning flame, with record forest fires expected as the region enters a period of long-term drought.

Meanwhile, government officials and business leaders, near from the smoke or far, routinely assume that disappearing water supplies, incinerated ecosystems, and accelerating climate change will naturally fail to hinder their plans for indefinite expansion of cities, commerce, and population.

Congress, for its part, stands ready to implement budget cuts that will shrink national firefighting resources in the face of drastic increases in fires. Funding for carrier battle groups, counter-insurgency troops, and drone armadas may or may not be subject to cuts of their own.

The lead story on Yahoo News declares: "Diff'rent Strokes star to divorce." Young amateur baseball players in towns gutted by WalMart prepare for the major league draft. Superheroes on screens made of silver save New York from an alien armada thousands of times before the weekend is done. And, we are told by the grave intoning of a foreign policy web site, that Obama's drone war has not gone far enough.

Toward Bethlehem, to be born.

Ecocatastrophe and the final frontier: 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson

I haven't read it yet, but one of my top items for scheduled summer reading is the new science fiction novel 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson is best known for the novels of his Mars trilogy, which trace human settlement of the Red Planet through the early twenty third century.

Thinking about today's global ecological crisis, my working assumption has been that climate change and resource depletion will put a permanent end to space travel sometime in the next few centuries, and possibly in this one. It's hard for me to imagine how the coming permanent exhaustion of fossil fuels and strategic minerals would permit future societies to build the massive, energy-intensive, raw-material-hogging infrastructure necessary to launch and sustain human colonization of the solar system. The virtual inevitability of runaway climate change and ecosystem collapse, it seems to me, seal the coffin even more tightly on dreams of future space colonization. Thus, over the last decade I came to believe that the future Robinson described in his Mars books was just about as feasible as traveling to Middle Earth.

2312, apparently, stands for the proposition that I'm wrong. Which, frankly, would make me very happy. From perusing various reviews, I can tell that Robinson's book postulates a near-collapse of civilization in the twenty first century, thanks to the various eco-horrors I just referenced. But in KSR's future, space colonization gets underway even so. By the early twenty fourth century, human societies are well-established throughout the Solar System, from Mercury to the asteroid belt and outer planets. From what I can tell, Earth itself remains a broiling, desert-wrapped hell hole of super-storms and rising oceans, embroiled in its ancient plagues of racism, hierarchy, and violence. But humans on other worlds flourish, branching out into new pathways of cultural experimentation -- and technology-enhanced biological and cybernetic evolution.

That's a long winded way to say I'm going to buy this book and scrutinize the underlying assumptions about how its imagined future polities and cultures came to be and how space travel enabled humanity to transcend the ecological devastation of its home planet. This intention of mine creates some personal irony, because the author once told me (in a face-to-face interview that I incompetently and unforgivably never managed to publish) that he did not intend his books to be read in this fashion. In so many words, he said that the technological and social speculation in his novels are simply stagecraft, not to be taken as academic commentary, serving strictly dramatic purposes. They are not the point of his books. They simply enable him to tell stories about interesting characters. And so they do, and so the characters are. But I can't help but read his books for my own purposes, even so.

My purpose is to imagine the future not of individual, imaginary characters but of our species as a whole. For some reason, it is emotionally important to me to imagine that the possible future histories of humanity that might unfold after my death are not uniformly apocalyptic. A human future out among the stars has always been part of those dreams. It's my own personal religion, and I seem to need it (not by bread alone). Perhaps especially now. One year of law school has left me, to be frank, desolate. Emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and in all other ways empty. I've been to that place many times, in a lifelong cycle between hope and despondency. Somehow my esoteric personal religion always helps the cycle return to hope, along the trails through imaginary worlds and all the wonders that could be.

One more time.

* * * * *

Early reviews of KSR's book are positive, hinting at greatness. One of my favorites is here.

Long time passing: NASA on the fate of the Milky Way

NASA simulation of future night sky on Earth.

Data from NASA's Hubble space telescope reveals that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide with each other, beginning about 4 billion years from now. The two galaxies will merge into one, over the course of the subsequent three billion years. By which time, Earth will have been swallowed by its aging red giant sun.

The night sky in the few million years before the collision will look like the picture above, according to NASA. The swirl of light is the Andromeda galaxy, filling our sky, stretched by gravitational forces to a much different shape.

Whether through evolution or catastrophe, human beings won't be around to see the sight. But we imagined it, in the time we had.

None of which has anything to do with ecological crisis or the other topics of this blog. Except maybe in the broad, philosophical sense. Nothing lasts forever. Not the stars, or the sky, or those who look up.

A million moving north, forever: CBS News on the impact of climate change

The video linked above is a two-minute editorial by M.A. Sanjayan, chief climate scientist at The Nature Conservancy. Sanjayan's piece ran recently on The CBS Evening News.

It's a great example of how to make the most of a visual medium to convey complex scientific information quickly. I could quibble with aspects of Sanjayan's commentary, but overall I found it an effective message for a general audience. If mainstream media organizations like CBS ran this sort of piece more often, such a steady stream of information might eventually begin to influence the dynamics of public opinion and political debate on climate change.

For now, that's not the case. Eventually, though, physical reality will become too great deny. The way our society talks about climate and the future will begin to change, because in the end physical reality can't be ignored. Perpetual motion machines don't work. Perpetual attempts to believe in a free lunch come to naught. Unending insistence that the weather isn't changing will be defeated by the manifest changing of the weather. The passing of summer into autumn can't be willed away. The change in the air becomes too great not to notice, and so too the change in color of the leaves. People notice, and stories that the change is all a great lie will become not credible. So too with the stories that the change is limited, something we can control, nothing we haven't seen before, no cause here for alarm. Past a certain point, as the trees go bare and the skies turn gray and the snows begin to arrive on the wind, the stories of endless summer become ludicrous.

Things that can't go on, don't.

For now, the denial continues. The insistence on normalcy prevails. But the weather is changing, a harbinger of the new era, coming inevitably but we known not when. Perhaps soon.

Sanjayan's commentary hints at the scale of what's happening already. My favorite anecdote from his report is about Texas. Withering under a brutal drought that shows no sign of ending, ranchers in the broiling dead plains of the Texas interior have begun sending their cattle north. One million head of cattle, Sanjayan relates, have now left the state for literally greener pastures, over the horizon to the north. Those cattle, he notes, will not be back.

A harbinger. Eventually, human beings living in the great arid, dying expanses of the American Southwest will face the same choice.

* * * * *

The question remains, haunting like a spirit: what are we going to do? What happens when an ending is preordained, as catastrophic, planet-reshaping climate change has now become? When multiple related catastrophes stemming from human energy and expansion are arriving at the same time?

In the face of such an outcome, perhaps a certain kind of denial is to be expected. Maybe even welcomed. Individual human lives must face the reality that each life will end. Human beings have always found a way to exist with this knowledge, for as long as they've been on the Earth. We live in foreknowledge of death. And we go on with life anyway. Loving each other, or losing ourselves in petty conflicts, doing something to pass the time. Until the time is no more.

Our civilization flatters itself that it has transcended the limits faced by human individuals. Human beings die, we say, but human civilization will continue, evolving and expanding forever. Outliving the limits once imposed by the Darwinian constraints of life on the Earth.

Except the harbingers tell us this isn't true. What now? Some communities have begun searching for answers. Sub-cultures devoted to simpler living speak of living within limits, adapting to the age beyond abundance. Some of the technical specialists who supervise the infrastructure of a global civilization quietly confer on what it will mean to face a multi-meter sea level rise; or annual weather patterns where the storm of the century happens every year in a hundred places and more; or water supplies ancient beyond reckoning have simply gone away.

What are we going to do? Almost two years since I started to write here and I still don't know. No one does, really. But in some places, the answers are sought.

For now, that will have to be enough.