Policing the terms of apocalypse
On Moby-Dick, metaphor and climate change
I’ve been thinking about Moby-Dick and climate change. On Twitter the account @MobyDickatSea lets you microdose the great book in two dozen words a hit, and in my feed Melville mixes with tweets about threatened birds, maps of deepening droughts and justifications for lithium mining from guys who live in D.C. Moby-Dick is both famously receptive to allegorical interpretation and what Annie Dillard called “[t]he best book ever written about nature”, so it’s unsurprising that others have made the same connection. The novel is “a meditation for thinking about and grieving the Anthropocene” (Kathleen Rooney, “Reading, and Mourning, “Moby-Dick” on the Cusp of Climate Catastrophe”); it also “prepares us again and again for a world without us” (Andrew M. McClellan, “The Lessons for World Leaders in ‘Moby-Dick’ as UN Climate Conference Begins”).
Rooney and McClellan find common cause in Melville’s use of apocalyptic imagery to describe the collision of the nonhuman with human hubris. But are allusions to the apocalypse in discussions of climate change helpful? In a widely discussed op-ed in WIRED, sustainability researcher Hannah Ritchie makes the argument that they aren’t; that, to borrow the article’s title, we should “Stop Telling Kids They’ll Die From Climate Change.” She’s particularly exasperated by an activist comparing a hunger strike to a famine that could hit Europe 20 years from now. “I couldn’t work out where this claim was coming from. Not from scientists”, she writes with the pained literalism of someone who dreams about policy papers. There are lots of reasons for hope, Ritchie adds. Keeping warming below 2°C will admittedly still “risk the livelihoods of some [low-lying island] communities.” At the same time, solar panels are getting quite a bit cheaper.
I wonder what they think about this in Kiribati or the parts of Navajo Nation where water gets trucked in from Gallup. On Carlos Rey and Cerrillos in Santa Fe someone has scrawled “How many descendants of rape in [New Mexico]?” in black marker on a traffic light pole, a crude silhouette of the state in place of its name. Every time I ride by it I am reminded that suffering will not be evenly distributed and that Indigenous peoples on this continent have already lived through the end of a world. Those of us who haven’t are grasping for ways to make sense of something happening to us that is almost beyond comprehension. Often, we arrive at metaphor.
Metaphors give us words for abstractions that try to escape them and have a long history in the vernacular of environmental crises. We’re looking for the monstrous symbolic whale that will make coming catastrophes tangible, drawing on millennia of stories of the eschaton. It may not be the optimal mindset for motivating activism. Nor is it necessarily nihilism. My own life is comfortable and sheltered and my experience of climate change will likely be one of watching things get a little bit shittier each year until I die. The language of fire and brimstone don’t have much to offer me. I don’t think it follows that they have nothing to offer anyone, or that I should give advice on the right way to describe the trauma of losing your home.
There’s snow on the way this evening, a few fingers of moisture from the whale-dotted Pacific hitting a blast of Arctic air above us while La Niña deepens. In Albuquerque it was the fifth-warmest November on record. “[D]o you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?”, tweeted @MobyDickatSea on December 3rd. We did end up buying a second truck, this one larger and whiter than the first, and when it sits gleaming on the street at night I can squint and see something like a snow-white wrinkled forehead. A high, pyramidical white hump. A name for it occurs to me.