 Alex Steffen writes:The time has come to re-imagine sustainability.We find ourselves at the dawn of a terrifying new era. We know now that essentially every planetary system is in crisis, that our man-made greenhouse gas emissions, our destruction of nature and our depletion of resources are not only initiating catastrophic and ruinous consequences for humanity — they may yet threaten the very possibility of civilization on this planet. We face this planetary crisis while at the same time being forced to acknowledge the massive backlog of needs our failure to act has produced. We face the erosion of decades of progress in reducing poverty, as planetary disasters destroy vulnerable places, create conflicts and drive climate refugees from their homes. We also face the consequences of decades of inaction on building housing, new infrastructure, better agriculture, clean energy, etc. Now we need to not only ruggedize for a chaotic world, but build as never before to secure a livable future for our childre's descendants 30 generations now, too. I believe that the only way we can break free from this crisis is to update our frameworks for understanding these challenges. Many of the ideas about sustainability and planetary thinking we’re still using are decades old. The sustainability crisis they were developed to address is not the same crisis we face today. The sheer complexity, magnitude and acceleration of our problems means that those old answers are no longer sufficient, and that we now need to act with a scope, scale and speed never before seen… indeed, never before imagined. The idea that sustainability is an add-on—something we do to make already functional systems more responsible—is one of these relics of the past. Today, sustainability is survival. Sustainability now demands wholesale systems change. Sustainability demands huge disruptions to the status quo. We need massive, rapid transitions in how we power our societies, build our cities, meet our basic needs and work with natural systems to grow our food, provide our water and maintain planetary stability. We can no longer retrofit failed systems. We need to build new and better ones, on an almost inconceivable scale, and faster than seems possible. And, if you’re like me, you also believe we need to build these systems in ways that strengthen democracy, reduce social inequality and provide safeguards against desperation. All this will require a heroic kind of building. Creating and driving forward that heroic build is now what sustainability means. But we can’t build what we can’t imagine. Not only do we need intellectual frameworks for understanding the kinds of innovations, policies and enterprises our future demands: we also need cultural visions that help us intuitively grasp how large-scale change can work and stories that help us see who we might become to make that change a reality. How we imagine changes what we can build; what we learn to build (even in our imaginations) frees us to imagine more. I’ve been on the front lines of the sustainability movement for 25 years. I’ve spent my life thinking about what planetary sustainability might mean and how to achieve it and getting rich this way, too. A very comfy life I have. I’m convinced that we’re now at a critical inflection point, caught between old ideas about sustainability that no longer make sense in our world and a new vision of our future and its possibilities that is, as yet, largely unexplored. I am soon launching the first in a set of projects that aim to reimagine sustainability for the 21st century and beyond, if there is a beyond given that the Climapocalypse is fast approaching. It’s going to be an adventure — one I hope you’ll want to follow. Alex Steffen http://www.alexsteffen.com/ |
| You can also keep up with Alex Steffen on Twitter. |
For nearly a half-decade, the watery foundation that underpins so many California institutions—almonds and salmon, weed and dairy, the Salton Sea and Los Angeles itself—has wobbled under the weight of mismanagement, our national hunger for fresh produce and climate change. As the writer Lauren Markham put it: “California is a great, slick hustler at the card table, bluffing a myth of plenty while holding tight the fan of truth: We are now, and have been for the entirety of modern history, running out of water.”
The drought has inspired plenty of great journalism, but some truths only literature can reveal. Enter Claire Vaye Watkins’ new novel, Gold Fame Citrus, which captures the moment at which California’s bluff has been called. Set in a drought-stricken near future, Gold Fame Citrus tracks a feckless young couple, Luz and Ray, who squat in the ruined home of a vanished starlet, drinking syrupy ration cola and paying exorbitant prices for black-market blueberries. Beyond the crumbling walls, nature lies in chaos; Luz is treated to “scorpions coming up through the drain, a pair of mummified frogs in the waterless fountain, a coyote carcass going wicker in the ravine.” At least there’s no traffic on the 101.
The plot takes off when Luz and Ray adopt a creepy child and try to get out of Dodge. Yet the real pleasure lies not in the What, but in the surreal Where. The landscape has come to be dominated by a “vast tooth-colored superdune in the forgotten crook of the wasted West,” its height rivaling Denali, that marches across the state with malevolent purpose. The desiccated wasteland is purportedly inhabited by a newly evolved menagerie: incandescent bats, land eels and sand krill. Mutant mole people roam nuclear waste disposal sites.
Watkins’ evocation of the drought, and society’s feeble attempts to ameliorate it, unspools with chilling authenticity. In Gold Fame Citrus’ afflicted future, engineers drag glaciers down from Alaska, erect vast retaining walls to repel airborne sand, drill “three thousand feet into the unyielding earth, praying for aquifer but deliver(ing) only hot brine.” Los Angeles, a thirsty Kraken, builds “new aqueducts, deeper aqueducts, aqueducts stretching to the watersheds of Idaho, Washington, Montana, aqueducts veining the West, half a million miles of palatial half-pipe left of the hundredth meridian.”
If that sounds improbably grandiose, consider that this fictional plan is only half as loony as some of the real-world ideas California has entertained. Hell, consider the Central Valley Project.
As The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz has observed, weather no longer serves as backdrop to our stories; increasingly, it is the story.
Climate change certainly provides fertile ground for literature. Its worst symptoms—floods, fires, die-offs, insect plagues—are so cataclysmic, they make the Old Testament look banal. You can hardly blame a novelist or screenwriter for using those phantasmagoric hazards as plot devices. Think, for example, of Interstellar, which conjures a Dust Bowl redux as an excuse to launch Matthew McConaughey into space.
Yet climate change is fundamentally a public policy problem, and thus the most valuable cli-fi not only transports and terrifies; it illuminates and instructs. As Bill Chameides, former dean of Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, put it, “The thing that makes dystopian fiction so intriguing, at least to me… is the social science aspect—the author’s vision of how humanity chooses to organize and cope in the post-apocalyptic world.”
And that’s precisely why Gold Fame Citrus is so necessary. In Watkins’ novel, climate change is not merely a backdrop against which to stage Mad Max-ish post-apocalyptic hijinks. Rather, how people “organize and cope,” to use Chameides’ words, is the driving question in Watkins’ novel. This is literature not only as humble escape, but as chilling meditation on pending social havoc.
The nail that Gold Fame Citrus hits most squarely on the head is its treatment of refugees. Like Children of Men, another dystopian work that grapples with large-scale human migration, Gold is not optimistic about our ability to compassionately manage the displaced. The refugees fleeing California, slapped with the dehumanizing label “Mojavs,” are forced into makeshift underground detainment centers, packed into labor camps, and barred from relocating to the moist paradise of Washington. Bureau of Land Management officers patrol the desert, locking up wanderers like stray dogs.
If this sounds familiar, well, that’s the point. This country is currently hot with anti-immigrant fever, and while it’s easy to blame Donald Trump, culpability may lie with even larger forces: The Syrians now seeking sanctuary in some Western states were likely dislocated in part by climate change. A study published in March 2015 found that Syria’s conflict was exacerbated by the catastrophic drought that destroyed agriculture in that country’s breadbasket. “Severe droughts such as the recent one,” wrote author Colin Kelley, “were two to three times more likely to occur under the effects of climate change than in its absence.”
As other refugees inevitably follow Syria’s, global warming will test not only the integrity of our infrastructure but the bounds of our humanity. And that’s where fiction proves its value: It activates our empathy by forcing us to inhabit an unfamiliar skin—the skin, say, of a refugee.
That skin may not remain unfamiliar for long. Sooner or later, this country will have its own migrants, fleeing from drowning communities in Alaska, wildfire-scorched towns around Western states, and eventually, perhaps, drought-ravaged California. Gold Fame Citrus exists to show us how—and how not—to treat the climate refugees to come, as well as the ones already knocking at our doors.
This review originally appeared in High Country News.
Gold Fame Citrus
By Claire Vaye Watkins
Riverhead
352 pages, $27.95
