Cautious optimism
Narrative Architecture #7: David Wallace-Wells’ "The Uninhabitable Earth" and communicating climate change effectively
This is the seventh chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells’ bestselling nonfiction portrait of what the world will look like in the next century after global warming’s effects become (even more) apparent.
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
“It is worse, much worse, than you think,” opens David Wallace-Wells’ 2019 climate polemic, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, its first salvos dark and ominous, as you might expect from a book in this genre. And yet, the New York magazine writer’s compact volume, written in the environmental tradition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, is a strange text. Framed around a “kaleidoscopic” series of portraits of projected climate changes in various categories (e.g., “Heat Death,” “Hunger,” “Drowning,” etc.), the book eventually pivots to a series of essays about potential responses or tangent subjects related to this discussion (“Storytelling,” “Politics of Consumption,” etc.).
What is most interesting about Wallace-Wells’ approach is that he is careful to strike a tone that is cautiously optimistic. In this way he seems aware that being too dour will lead to his message being dismissed, and that cautious optimism is the only way we can find a path out of this mess. I am also intrigued by the way Wallace-Wells incorporates often passed-over factoids about our climate future, a technique I’ve tried to pursue in my own work.
In the book’s earliest pages, Wallace-Wells curiously paints his own credibility as a pragmatist who isn’t much wedded to one ideology or another:
I am not an environmentalist, and don’t even think of myself as a nature person… I’m not about to personally slaughter a cow to eat a hamburger, but I’m also not about to go vegan. I tend to think when you’re at the top of the food chain it’s okay to flaunt it, because I don’t see anything complicated about drawing a moral boundary between us and other animals, and in fact find it offensive to women and people of color that all of a sudden there’s talk of extending human-rights-like legal protections to chimps, apes, and octopuses, just a generation or two after we finally broke the white-male monopoly on legal personhood. In these ways—many of them, at least—I am like every other American who has spent their life fatally complacent, and willfully deluded, about climate change… (7)
Wallace-Wells takes an interesting approach by outlining why he is not the typical voice of a book in this genre. He is not an environmentalist, he is not a vegan, and he jokes about the animal rights movement and its policy against “speciesism,” the theoretical act of discriminating against other animal species. This makes him more accessible to the intellectual book-buying crowd for whom he’s writing. Unlike doom-and-gloom activists like Bill McKibben, Wallace-Wells is clearly not a martyr for the climate cause, and I think that builds rather than erodes his credibility. Meanwhile, Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio have often failed in their climate messaging attempts because they are political and Hollywood figures, and their relatively lavish lifestyles stain their advocacy with hypocrisy. Wallace-Wells is clearly upper-middle class, and thereby similar in experience to many of his targeted, Condé Nast-subscribing readers.
Wallace-Wells also avoids accusations of hypocrisy by running right into them. “As it happens, I did have a child, Rocca,” he writes. “Part of that choice was delusion, that same willful blindness: I know there are climate horrors to come, some of which will inevitably be visited on my children” (32). He sidesteps the potential guilt he has created for bringing yet another human life into the world-in-collapse by cautioning that “those horrors are not yet scripted”:
We are staging them by inaction, and by action can stop them….The fight is, definitively, not yet lost—in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less. (32)
Wallace-Wells cautions that the future described is not yet set in stone and that our action could alleviate its predictions somewhat; meanwhile he is less concerned about preserving the status quo but merely preserving humanity’s presence, a much more realistic goal, since the climate on Earth has been changing for millions of years with and without our Carbon contribution. And then, even more provocatively he turns further from the horror, suggesting that he is not terribly worried for his daughter Rocca, but also “excited” for what she will experience:
And I have to admit, I am also excited, for everything that Rocca and her sisters and brothers will see, will witness, will do. She will hit her child-rearing years around 2050, when we could have climate refugees in the many tens of millions; she will be entering old age at the close of the century, the end-stage bookmark on all of our projections for warming. In between, she will watch the world doing battle with a genuinely existential threat, and the people of her generation making a future for themselves, and the generations they bring into being, on this planet. And she won’t just be watching it, she will be living it—quite literally the greatest story ever told. It may well bring a happy ending. (32)
Essentially, Wallace-Wells expresses solace that his daughter will live in “interesting times.” (Meanwhile, I am not exactly happy about living through the battle for the continued existence of the American republic, yet here we are.) Wallace-Wells’ cautious optimism—while sweet, I guess—for his daughter’s future still detracts from the fact that he and everyone else are still putting the onus of saving the world on his daughter’s generation and the generation that follows that one. It is an interesting rhetorical choice, however, and again one that probably resonates more with readers than the doom-and-gloom route. People don’t always listen to negative prophets. A sympathetic voice who has faced and made similar decisions to the audience at large might just resonate more.
The other aspect that Wallace-Wells invokes to mostly success is his emphasis on select matters of climate change that don’t get much play on cable news or major newspapers. Wallace-Wells notes that often in climate reporting “the discussion of possible effects was misleadingly narrow, limited almost invariably to the matter of sea-level rise” (9). Too often sea-level rise is invoked as shorthand for what is in fact a “kaleidoscope” of climate changes. As a result the idea becomes abstract and loses meaning. Adding further to the problem is that “sea-level rise is different” from other climate effects, in that of all climate effects, it is the hardest to model with precision (64):
Because on top of the basic mystery of human response it layers much more epistemological ignorance than governs any other aspect of climate change science, save perhaps the cloud formation… but the breaking-up of ice represents almost an entirely new physics, never before understood in human history, and therefore only poorly understood (64).
Of course, sea level rises will be dramatic, but it remains unclear how fast it will happen. Wallace-Wells adds that, “It may take centuries, [a scientist] says, even millennia, but he estimates that ultimately, even at just three degrees of warming, sea-level rise will be at least fifty meters…” (68). Fifty meters is a lot, but it will take time.
One of the more important arguments of Wallace-Wells’ book is how he recognizes that the onus of environmental responsibility, culturally, has often rested with the consumption of individuals, which is misleading, particularly when it comes to freshwater usage:
But accusations of individual responsibility were a kind of weaponized red herring, as they often are in communities reckoning with the onset of climate pain. We frequently choose to obsess over personal consumption, in part because it is within our control and in part as a very contemporary form of virtue signaling. When it comes to freshwater, the bigger picture is this: personal consumption amounts to such a thin sliver that only in the most extreme droughts can it even make a difference. (90)
Ultimately, as Wallace-Wells explains, corporations, agriculture, and industry consume the vast majority of freshwater resources, and the shift to personal responsibility is a way to deflect the onus onto the individual. Thus the only way to really affect change is to lobby for legislation that will constrain the consumption of these institutions. This, ironically, is more palatable to a wide audience than preaching a lifestyle of absolute asceticism. However, it must be said that striving for a net-zero Carbon lifestyle is probably a good idea, but Wallace-Wells refrains from such advocacy, which is an interesting choice.
But the message that stuck with me the most from The Uninhabitable Earth was that we can’t give up. Accepting inevitability encourages the very complacence for which Wallace-Wells confesses for himself. As he states:
The next decades are not yet determined. A new timer begins with every birth, measuring how much more damage will be done to the planet and the life the child will live on it. The horizons are just as open to us, however foreclosed and foreordained they may seem. But we close them off when we say anything about the future being inevitable. (135)
Works Cited
Cho, Renee. “Recycling in the U.S. Is Broken. How Do We Fix It?” State of the Planet, Earth Institute, Columbia University, March 13, 2020. https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/03/13/fix-recycling-america/
Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Tim Duggan Books: New York, 2019).
Excellent review, Harrison! Well crafted.