Green Planets (37 page)

22
. Ibid., 288.

23
. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York,
The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth
(New York: Monthly Review, 2010), 75.

24
. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Ecology of Consumption: A Critique of Economic Malthusianism,”
Polygraph
22, ed. Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu (2010): 117.

25
. Ibid., 127.

26
. Sargent, “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” 9.

27
. Tidwell, “Problem of Materiality,” 100–102.

28
. Paolo Bacigalupi, “The People of Sand and Slag,” in Bacigalupi,
Pump Six and Other Stories
, 60.

29
. Ibid., 63–64.

30
. Tidwell, “Problem of Materiality,” 104.

31
. Bacigalupi, “People of Sand and Slag,” 64.

32
. Ibid., 66.

33
. Paolo Bacigalupi, “Pop Squad,” in Bacigalupi,
Pump Six and Other Stories
, 138.

34
. Ibid., 153.

35
. Ibid.

36
. Ibid., 161.

37
. Bacigalupi, “Pump Six,” in Bacigalupi,
Pump Six and Other Stories
, 219 and 215.

38
. Ibid., 229.

39
. Ibid., 236.

40
. Ibid., 238.

41
. Varsam, “Concrete Dystopia,” 205.

42
. Levitas and Sargisson, “Utopia in Dark Times,” 19.

43
. Tidwell, “Problem of Materiality,” 105.

44
. Levitas and Sargisson, “Utopia in Dark Times,” 23.

45
. Ibid., 23.

46
. Snyder, “‘Time to Go,'” 473.

11

Life after People

Science Faction and Ecological Futures

BRENT BELLAMY AND IMRE SZEMAN

In a May 9, 2012,
New York Times
article, James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading environmental critic, made a startling and blunt declaration about Canadian oil extraction and climate change: “If Canada proceeds [in the tar sands], and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.”
¹
In a flash, the stakes on Hansen's now thirty-year-old warning about climate change and the necessity of action on the environment have been raised precipitously. The intent of his article is all too clear: to convince us of the fact that the time for human beings to modify their life activity in a manner that will significantly offset their impact on the planet's environment is
now
, as we have reached the point when the continued development of a single oil field (however large it may be) will push us over the ecological edge. He summarizes his predictions about the dire long-
and
short-term effects of collective ecological neglect with a strident declaration: “If this sounds apocalyptic, it is.”

What strikes us about Hansen's interventions in the politics of climate—both his 1981
Science
article about the speed of global warming due to CO
₂
production and this most recent piece in the
Times
—is his propensity to project and to extrapolate.
²
Ecological thinking here remains inseparable from some form of thinking about the future; indeed, ecology in general has become so closely linked to narratives of the future that to even draw attention to this link between the environment and what-is-yet-to-come can seem beside the point or even tautological. It is the presumed effect of this link that interests us here as much as the presence of the connection itself. Hansen's gambit, a play at the heart of ecological writing, is that this form of extrapolative writing can spur action—that depicting a future wracked by devastating weather patterns, rising ocean levels, species loss, crop failure and soil erosion, and so on, would of necessity result in the required political intervention, whether on a governmental
or grassroots level or as some combination of the two, at the scale required by a problem that encapsulates and affects the whole globe.

All manner of assumptions are built into this narrative demand for action, including a continuing faith and belief in the drama of Enlightenment maturity outlined by Kant (in which we get smarter and better as we trundle along through history), the presumed power of scientific inquiry to guide political decision making, and the possibility of narrative to generate change (a long-standing dream of writers across the political spectrum)—and a hope, too, that latent species survival impulses still persist in human beings and can be activated by appeals to reason. Recently, no less a figure than leading environmentalist Dr. David Suzuki has suggested that such appeals to action have all been for naught: “Quite frankly, as far as I'm concerned, I feel all the effort that I've been involved in has really failed. We're going backward.”
³
Is there another way of naming the ecological crisis of the future that could generate the outcome that we are so desperately in need of—one that might marry scientific insight with political action in a way that would prevent the eco-apocalyptic outcomes identified by Hansen and others? As a way of probing the importance of form for ecological politics, we want to focus here on the problematic insights raised by a book that represents the ecological future in a narrative mode distinct from prevalent ways of imagining the future as either more of the same or post-catastrophe: Alan Weisman's best seller
The World Without Us
(2007). This form—what we call “science faction”—has become increasingly prominent over the past decade, appearing not only in book form but in documentaries such as National Geographic's
Aftermath
, the History Channel's
Life after People
, and the
BBC
show
The Future Is Wild
. Such quasi-scientific, quasi-science-fictional texts depict the world after the final collapse of civilization and the extinction of the human race, often at hyperbolic geologic time scales extending millions of years. In addition to identifying the nature and function of this form, we want to critically examine what it tells us about narrative and political limits at the present time, and to consider what the problems of science faction tell us about what we might need to do to overcome such limits.

THE WORLD WITHOUT US

Weisman's book unfolds around a thought experiment: If humans were to suddenly vanish from Earth today, what would happen to the world in our absence? He tells the story of a world without people by springboarding from a particular
ecological context and its associations to another context of damaged nature and another zone of analysis and exploration, and so on throughout the book.
⁴
Weisman attempts to chart the complicated web of relations that characterize the ecological history of the present even as he struggles to simplify these relations by removing humanity from the picture. The pleasure of the text comes from its patient and thorough investigation of the extent of human impact on the planet through thought experiments that imagine how long it would take nature to recover from the various damages we have inflicted upon it.
The World Without Us
is simultaneously a primer in environmental studies and a text that—like so many texts about the environment—identifies the need for rapid changes in the mode of human activity on the planet.

The book opens in the Amazon among the Zápara people, a scene that crystallizes one of the major internal contradictions of
The World Without Us
: thinking nature as the other of humanity. Weisman connects the demand for rubber trees created by Henry Ford's mass-production of automobiles with the decimation of the Zápara. The point is straightforward enough: by draining Earth of its resources, we have become our own worst enemies, a fact once felt only on the (post)colonial peripheries of the planet but now a feature of daily life all over the world. Recognizing the position of human beings
within
nature—as opposed to the outsider status that many critics imagine humans occupy with respect to the environment—Weisman asks whether it is “possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?”
⁵
He poses this type of unanswerable question with frequency, as a reminder that the book aims to produce change in human activity with the insights produced from its attempt to “narrate the unnarratable.”
⁶
The only reason to think of a world without us is to use the knowledge generated through such a narrative experiment to reimagine a world
with
us.

Weisman narrates what might happen after our disappearance by looking for evidence at sites that have already been left behind, performing an archaeology of abandonment, loss, and forgotten space. For instance, in the chapter “What Falls Apart,” he traces out what happens in Varosha, Cypress, a newly built tourist city that was forced to close in 1974 because of the ongoing border dispute between Greece and Turkey. Just six years after the city of twenty thousand had shut down, Metin Münir, a Turkish journalist who visits Varosha, is struck not by the absence of life in the city but by “its vibrant presence.” Münir reflects: “With the humans who built Varosha gone, nature was recouping it…. Tiny seeds of wild Cyprus cyclamen had wedged into cracks, germinated, and heaved aside
entire slabs of cement. Streets now rippled with white cyclamen combs and their pretty, variegated leaves.”
⁷
While these enclaves emerge, in most cases, as the result of a spatial contradiction between politics and economics, the nation-state and global capital, Weisman's narrative strategy posits them as representative examples of a world devoid of humans by treating them as if they were outside humanity altogether—a telling lack of attention to or interest in the place of politics in shaping the environment.

If such enclaves highlight the speed with which nature is likely to make a return to spaces previously occupied by humans, Weisman shows that elsewhere on the planet evidence of humanity's presence and environmental impact will persist for much longer. The North Pacific garbage gyre—an immense “trash vortex” in the Pacific Ocean now said to be as large as the United States—marks the accumulative effects of the use of plastic polymers, a human legacy not set to disappear from Earth for one million years. We would be remiss if we failed to mention New York City—ever the apocalyptic metonym for the destruction or decay of humanity and urbanism. Weisman projects that within thousands of years, “what's left of New York City [will be] scraped clean by glaciers. Only some tunnels and other underground structures [will] remain.”
⁸
Weisman's project, dialing back and forth from the massified minutiae of polymers to the destruction of the great cities to the reclamation of farmland by fast-growing plant species, maps out an imagined ecological future that is at the same time intensely informed and constructed by the contradictions and impasses of the present.

SCIENCE FACTION

The World Without Us
has been dubbed an “eco-thriller” and a “thought experiment” by critics, and as a “love letter” to the planet and to the human race in an interview given by Weisman.
⁹
We prefer to read it, and other works in this strange new subgenre, in relation to science fiction, but argue that it could be better described as “a fiction of science fact,” or
science faction
. Science faction represents a landscape devoid of people, an emptiness that bizarrely and of necessity generates an immediate challenge to narrative logic (that is, that narrative can persist even in a world without either narrators or audience). It is perhaps this founding antagonism that is one of the reasons why these fictions take the form of a didactic teaching of fact, science, and environmental politics, adopting a documentary form dominated by its presumed immediate relation to the real.
As in science documentary, the “fact” of the narrated developments tends to displace questions about narrator, addressee, or audience. And yet, the fiction of the yet-to-be facts of texts like the
World Without Us
place them outside of documentary and closer to the mode of typical science fictions.

Indeed, there are characteristically
SF
elements to the book. On the one hand, at times it imagines the evolution of humanlike intelligence all over again: “One hundred thousand years hence,” Weisman writes, “the intellectual development of whatever creature digs them up might be kicked abruptly to a higher evolutionary plane by the discovery of ready-made tools. Then again, lack of knowledge of how to duplicate them could be a demoralizing frustration—or an awe-arousing mystery that ignites religious consciousness.”
¹⁰
On the other, it pictures the discovery of the post-human Earth by aliens who are then tested by the remaining objects of human civilization. Do they recognize us, in spite of our disappearance?

Supposing, however, that before such entropic vandalism occurs, the collection is discovered by visiting alien scientists who happen upon our now-quiet planet, bereft of voracious, but colorful, human life. Suppose they find the Rothamsted archive, its repository of more than 300,000 specimens still sealed in thick glass and tins. Clever enough to find their way to Earth, they would doubtless soon figure out that the graceful loops and symbols penned on the labels were a numbering system. Recognizing soil and preserved plant matter, they might realize that they had the equivalent of a time-lapse record of the final century-and-a-half of human history.
¹¹

In this sense, like
SF
, science faction encodes what appears to be a temporal displacement of contradictions from the present onto a narrative future in order to explore their full significance and consequences.