“Encendí un cigarrillo y me puse a pensar en cuestiones sin importancia. El tiempo, por ejemplo. El calentamiento de la Tierra. Las estrellas cada vez más distantes.” - Roberto Bolaño, Estrella distante
Just Stop Oil activists shortly after throwing soup on Van Gogh’s “The Sunflowers” (Source)
We have five years. All oil and gas production must go. All the refineries and pumps and pipelines must halt. Forgo the plane for the boat, the car for the train, the beef for the bugs. By any means necessary, even if we must slash the Mona Lisa’s eyes and explode the Sphinx’s head. Even if we must ransom our loved ones and embrace our enemies. The scale of the horror that awaits humanity exceeds our most disturbed nightmares. Miami underwater. Jakarta underwater. Mexico City underwater. Tokyo underwater. Boise, Idaho above water but transformed into a battleground where climate refugees roam the streets, staking claims to small patches of barren earth and fighting over scraps of rotting food. Five years. Or maybe less.
I’m nodding and cutting my pan-seared salmon. It’s undercooked and barely seasoned. Dining hall staff are careful about how much spice they add to food. IBS and sensitive palettes, etc. We met ten minutes ago, this bright-eyed DPhil candidate in Molecular Biology and I. After the perfunctory exchange of names and origins and fields of study and research interests, after the brief pause while we both search for something else to say, another question to keep the conversation going but not pry too deeply, we arrive here. I ask for her thoughts on the group of pinkhaired overall-wearing activists that poured Campbells soup on Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Of course I phrase the question more diplomatically than that. A vague inquiry about ‘the people who poured soup on the painting,’ neutral at first glance, if a bit disapproving at second.
Fortunate this apparent neutrality, given the response provoked. She begins with an outpouring of sympathy for the much maligned pinkhairs (‘the last generation of true revolutionaries’), rage at the rich politicians and stodgy old farmers who just don’t understand (five years!), despair about the future ‘they’ are stealing from our children (end of age of abundance), grandchildren (life on an inhospitable planet — early death guaranteed), great-grandchildren (ecological impossibility), etc.
The whole time, she has barely touched her tofu stew —a mountain of rubbery gloop drowning in an ocean of green gloop — or her cup of water. She takes a first bite of stew, chews for a moment, and continues to talk, mouth half full.
This is my apocalypse.
The Science says something Really Bad is going to happen soon if we don’t take Action. Who’s ‘we’? The governments of the world? The billionaires of the world? The farmers of the world? The soccer players of the world? The you’s and me’s of the world? Recycling isn’t enough, veganism isn’t enough, suicide isn’t enough (though it does earn points for reducing one’s carbon footprint). Will anything every be enough? Is individual action at any realistic scale likely to stare down the looming giant of anthropogenic climate change?
And anyway, how long can we reasonably sustain the mental fever pitch of we’reallgoingtodie? Five minutes? Five days? Five years? Wouldn’t the psychological torment drive us to insanity or suicide?
Before you write me off as a profligate climate change-denier, you should know that deep in the Appalachian Mountains of my imagination live a boy and a girl who have run away from home to live off the grid and in harmony with nature. Earnest self-abnegating types who in another life would’ve been missionaries or monks. My imaginary world is ending, but all they can do is their part. If everyone had been like them — doing their part without complaint — then maybe it wouldn’t have come to this. But unfortunately it did.
In my imagination, they live off foraged berries and edible bark and non-poisonous mushrooms that they identify with a worn copy of an old botany textbook filched from a library 200 miles inland. Her long blonde hair has matted into dreadlocks. His beard has grown thick and tangled. They are malnourished and own nothing, but their eyes are bright and their minds brim with ideas. At night they make love under the stars and trace words onto each other’s bare backs. They stand up on felled tree branches and deliver eulogies to the last days of humanity and nature and life-as-we-know-it to theplants and forest critters.
When they perish at the hands of a poisonous mushroom, no one mourns them (not even me — and they’re figments of my imagination!) The imaginary world continues to hurtle towards imaginary disaster.
Anyway, the real-life DPhil thinks we need to abandon the “toxic growth paradigm.” We aren’t going to be able to technologize our way out of this one. No amount of carbon capture and electric cars will unmelt the glaciers. The only option is radical deindustrialization. Shrink the economy. Ground the planes. Keep the oil where it is. Can we keep the running water and the toilets? is the first question that comes to mind. I hold my tongue. She goes on. This will mean the loss of a great deal of comforts that we’ve all grown used to over the past few centuries. There’s no other recourse. Either we sacrifice our comfort or we sacrifice our lives.
The mountain of tofu has nearly disappeared. I finished my salmon sometime between grandchildren starving and great-grandchildren not existing. She presses a napkin to a corner of her mouth. Surely, I ask, between my Ryanair flight to France and the soccer stars chartering private jets to travel two hundred kilometers, surely between you and the oil companies, surely between the Individual and the Collective, surely there must be something else.
She smiles.
“Whatever, really. Too soon it’s already going to be too late.”