Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress

It’s time to ditch optimism and face the facts about the future of the planet, according to this provocative if verbose study from Notre Dame English professor Scranton (Learning to Die in the Anthropocene). He argues that humanity is facing “the end of the world as we know it,” that it’s too late to take remedial action to combat climate change, that capitalism is too entrenched in society to be reformed, and that “the myth of progress” hinders people’s ability to imagine the collapse of society. The time has come, Scranton contends, to accept ethical pessimism, which he defines as “a commitment to future existence that by definition cannot be imagined” and which in his telling fosters “empirical accuracy, resilience, compassion, [and] egalitarianism.” Scranton’s at his best when detailing how other cultures have navigated societal collapse. For example, he cites the Indigenous peoples of North and South America after the European genocide against them as an example of the “struggle to articulate a meaningful life after the end of the world.” Unfortunately, his prose has a tendency to tangle itself in knots, resulting in winding, paragraph-length sentences peppered with jargon. Still, patient readers will find startling insights here. (Aug.)