Despite the inerrant authorial command of the entirety of his preceding work in his book, John Vaillant could not avoid the Hopium Windup(TM) at the very end of his feted 2023 book, Fire Weather:
Human beings planted those flowers with no idea of what was to come. This – devoting our energy and creativity to regeneration and renewal rather than combustion and consumption – is what Nature is modeling for us and inviting us to do…
Homo sapiens got is to the Petrocene era, and Homo flagrans is who we have become. Homo viriditas can guide us forward – and, possibly, back.
John Vaillant, Fire Weather, (2023), pg. 329.
Obviously, with the benefit of an observant mind, a fealty to the data, a wide range of reading across all the disciplines and media forms, this is nonsense – completely unscientific, risibly audacious self-cancellation. Is the Hopium Windup a requirement placed on authors who wish to be published by established corporate presses like Knopf? Can Vaillant not face the world, after all of his knowledgeable and writing artistry, as the Voice of Doom? Who wants to earn money from having one’s name attached to profferring manifesst untruths?
Ask that of the high-level authors at Granta, the English literary magazine. In Issue 153, Second Nature, an actual Antartica scientist/writer/academic, Jesssica Priestly, expresses the Covid-era optimism of anti-doomerism:
Things felt positive here, but what about the rest of the world? Could we do it? Could we use this period of upheaval and unrest to segue into a better world? A better world for everyone? We have to, I thought. And I felt hopeful about the future because it’s the only way I know how to survive.
I was nearly home.
On the track above the field there was a new embellishment to the orange sign.
Someone had used marker pen on paper, and a mass of sticky tape, to cover the words “stop and die” so the sign now read “prepare to be kind.”
Jessica Priestly, Prepare to Be Kind, Granta, Nov. 2020.
No, needing to be hopeful “because it’s the only way I know how to survive” is not a defense against the Climatastrophe, or any of the other supersystemic crises smashing into contemporary humanity. It’s an expression of an irrational psychic need for most folks to partake of a fabled substance labeled “hope,” not a prerequisite for continued breathing. A human brain does not have to be “hopeful for the future” to be functional, nor does it have have to construct elaborate bulwarks of denial, to use an abused catchall term.
Vaillant can reach for the promise of flowers growing through the human-caused petrochemical fire denuded landscape in boreal Canada, but that is simply one author’s conceit, and not a necessity for upright sentience. “Regeneration and renewal” are going to be the equivalent of using a watering can to put out a tar sands CbFg holocaust- what words account for the overmassivity of the death and destruction to come before those flickers of life will emerge?
What forces (singular) is Vaillant summoning to “guide us forward” – the corporate and state corporate powers of the Technosphere – Musk and Dimon, Xi and Putin, Trump/Biden/Netanyahu and Modi, UFO believers and EV drivers, you, me and all the billionaires and military generals, and all the operators and maintainers of the capitalizer class?
Someone in there is the “we” that the Hopium Windup crowd always turns to, those supernatural natural powers that have ignored the human predicament so far, but can be called on to effect a miraculous, fantastical, never-be-seen-before-in-nature unspeciation of the murder chimp species, and then a miraculous, completely fantastical, never-been-seen-before-in nature neospeciation of the same form of being – all in the midst of beyond-frightening collapse? For real? By what mechanism that the corporate and state-corporate aliens of this world will bless into being?
“Prophetic” voices abound to “fight” these overlords, such as Andreas Malm, subject of a New York Times Sunday Magazine mini-interrogation. Malm is a wonderful historian of our fascist fossil fuel corpotacracy, an avowed anti-optimist, yet still a believer in the “slashing emissions” pie-in-the-sky fantasy, and of the efficacy of violent sabotage against the Technosphere, which is if the Green Scare never happened, as if the Green New Deal is on offer, as if there is no gigantic carceral state apparatus ready to bash green heads in.
Then there is Roger Hallam, a serious, dedicated XR co-founder now being monitored and harassed and imprisoned in the UK. He knows the dimensions of the collapse that is being approved into being by “governments and big companies, who say: we know that millions of people will die, and yet we consider our profit and power more important.” However, what is Hallam’s new approach to confronting this collapse: more o fthe same ol’ same ‘ol. Occupado-style jawboning, local politics dead-endism: “how to hold a public assembly, how to door knock, how to stand in elections, how to create functional ethical control systems.” What didn’t work before, what can never work given the enormity of the other side’s command, is now to be pursued in a mad rush for “balance,” as Hallam titles his new stance?
The mission is to empower people to see the big picture – one that transcends the traditional categories of politics, economics, social connection, and spirituality in favour of a new fusion of confrontation and dialogue. At this time of total crisis, new social formations need an overarching and uncompromising ideology. What we create over the next decade has to be a credible national and international entity – think early Christian church but without the crappy bits – that can give us a real shot at survival.
Roger Hallam, “Balance: Building the Next Civilisation in 2024,” rogerhallam,com January 2024.
Preposterous, superfluous windmill-tilting as putative revolution, while ever more of the world burns. Is that to be the sum and substance of intellectual exchange? More Christological fantasy? What “dialogue” will work with the technosphere? P.K. Haff, a Duke University professor, wrote a paper cited in a 2013 collection ”Technology as a geological phenomenon: implications for human well-being” that has much more to say, in extremely eloquent fashion about our human predicament.
If technological recycling fails to spin up soon enough to avoid catastrophic (as seen by humans) reorganization of global Earth function, that may not be the end of the game but just a change in the rules. In the extreme case that Homo sapiens became extinct, then presumably the emergence of the technological paradigm would stop, and the evidence of the brief technological excursion bu the Earth would be compressed to a thin line in the future sedimentary record. Technology would have been an event, analogous to the Cretaceous-Tertiary impact, not a new paradigm of Earth function. However, if human extinction does not occur, then the technosphere may survive the large changes in environmental variables that is causing, as has been the case for biosphere. By adjusting to the new Earth environment, in company with a stressed but surviving human population, the technosphere may evolve in ways we cannot predict or perhaps even imagine.
P.K. Haff, 2013.
For those who were starting to find hope in Green New Deals, Haff knew back in 2013 what the sham and shame would turn out to become of green aspirations.
The emergence of new technological sub-systems that can capture abundant but previously unavailable or little-used renewable resources like that provided by sunlight may just as likely to be an opening move in the expansion of the technosphere towards massive increases in the use of these new resources than simply a way to substitute new cleaner energy sources for older sources that degrade the environment.
P.K. Haff, Technology as a geological phenomenon: implications for human well-being, 2013.
The technosphere, obviously, has not be been stopped, and there is no human force capable of governing it. What is to be done? How should we live? How should we talk to each other? What is the point to all of our intelligence and rationality in the face of this waste-generating ruling technosphere?
We’ll go on, as all human life is directed to by its biological inheritance, atop this massive bonanza of fossil fuel brilliance, to be followed in short order by the unfathomable.
When that time comes for us, or comes for us and our most beloved and intimate ones, we can strive, if we have the opportunity, for the wisdom and character and profound honor, that our most beloved pets are gifted when we can legally give them euthanasia by our vets, or how Prop Joe accepted his execution by the merciful but still murderous Marlo in the best scene in “The Wire,” TV’s best show. Murderer and murder victim, one and the same, with knowledge that we are equally both – life will be that way until that day,
MACRO-FUTILISM 