Alternative Protein As Grounds for Apocalyptic Optimism?
Climate Doom Is Out. ‘Apocalyptic Optimism’ Is In.
Focusing on disaster hasn’t changed the planet’s trajectory. Will a more upbeat approach show a way forward?
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The?philanthropist Kathryn Murdoch?has prioritized donations to environmental causes for more than a decade. She has, she said, a deep understanding of how inhospitable the planet will become if climate change is not addressed. And she and her colleagues have spent years trying to communicate that.
“We have been screaming,” she said. “But screaming only gets you so far.”
This was on a morning in early spring. Murdoch and Ari Wallach, an author, producer and futurist, had just released their new PBS docuseries,?“A Brief History of the Future,”?and had hopped onto a video call to promote it — politely, no screaming required. Shot cinematically, in some never-ending golden hour, the six-episode show follows Wallach around the world as he meets with scientists, activists and the occasional artist and athlete, all of whom are optimistic about the future. An episode might include a visit to a floating village or a conversation about artificial intelligence with the musician Grimes. In one sequence, marine biologists lovingly restore a rehabbed coral polyp to a reef. The mood throughout is mellow, hopeful, even dreamy. Which is deliberate.
“There’s room for screaming,” Wallach said. “And there’s room for dreaming.”
“A Brief History of the Future” joins some recent books and shows that offer a rosier vision of what a world in the throes — or just past the throes — of global catastrophe might look like. Climate optimism as opposed to climate fatalism.
Hannah Ritchie’s “Not the End of the World: How We Can be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet” argues that many markers of disaster are less bad than the public imagines (deforestation, overfishing) or easily solvable (plastics in the oceans). In “Fallout,” the television adaptation of the popular video game that recently debuted on Amazon Prime Video, the apocalypse (nuclear, not climate-related) makes for a devastated earth, sundry mutants and plenty of goofy, kitschy fun — apocalypse lite.
“Life as We Know It (Can Be),” a book by Bill Weir, CNN’s chief climate correspondent, that is structured as a series of letters to his son, centers on human potential and resilience. And Dana R. Fisher’s “Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action” contends that the disruptions of climate change may finally create a mass movement that will lead to better global outcomes. Fisher, a sociologist, coined the term “apocalyptic optimism” to describe a belief that humans can still avoid the worst ravages of climate change.
In confronting the apocalypse, these works all insist that hope matters. They believe that optimism, however qualified or hard-won, may be what finally moves us to action. While Americans are?less likely?than their counterparts in the developed world to appreciate the threats that climate change poses,?recent polls?show that a significant majority of Americans now agree that climate change is real and a smaller majority agree that it is human-caused and harmful. And yet almost no expert believes that we are doing enough — in terms of technology, legislation or political pressure — to alleviate those harms.
Intimations of doom have failed to motivate us. Perhaps we will work toward a better future if we trust that one, with or without mutants, is possible. When it comes to climate catastrophe, is our best hope hope itself?
‘An Impatient Optimism’
For the past 50 years, and perhaps even before, most imaginative projections of the future have seen it through dark glasses, as World’s Fair-style visions of jet packs and gleaming cities gave way to arid landscapes populated by zombie hordes and rogue A.I. The appeal of a dystopia, in terms of entertainment, is obvious. The stakes — the survival of humanity — are enormous and the potential for action vast. There have been occasional utopian inventions, such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s extraordinary 2020 climate change novel, “The Ministry for the Future.” But in most cases, a future of environmental responsibility and cooperation, with or without jet packs, rarely makes for a best seller or a blockbuster.
Paradoxically, it was the likes of “The Hunger Games” and the “Mad Max” franchise that inspired Murdoch, the wife of James Murdoch, the former chief executive of 21st Century Fox, to create “A Brief History of the Future.” One day, her daughter, then 16, surprised Murdoch by telling her that she didn’t feel there was a future to look forward to. The books, films, television shows and graphic novels the girl consumed all took a dim view of humanity’s chances. None imagined a future more hopeful than the present. So Murdoch and Wallach, partners in Futurific Studios, set out to sketch one, which they hope to follow with video games and fiction films. Two graphic novels are already in the works.
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The goal for “A Brief History of the Future” wasn’t to ignore climate change or other seam rippers of the social fabric but, in classic Mr. Rogers style, to look to the helpers. “There’s a huge amount of focus in the news and storytelling in general on what could go horribly wrong,” Murdoch said. “What I really wanted to highlight was all the work that’s happening right now to make things go right.”
This was also Ritchie’s project. A data scientist by training, she began her career overwhelmed by climate pessimism. That feeling of hopelessness took a personal toll and a professional one, she believes, interfering with her ability to turn her mind toward solutions. Scientist colleagues who had once needed to push back against the public’s climate skepticism were now facing people who believed in a coming global catastrophe perhaps too much.
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“There’s been a really rapid shift in the narrative, from almost complete denial to, Oh, it’s too late now, there’s nothing we can do, we should just stop trying,” Ritchie said.
Anger, fear and sorrow might motivate some people, Ritchie said. But they hadn’t motivated her. Her book, which emphasizes the progress that has already been made (clean energy) and the progress that might still be made (increased crop yields), is a deliberate alternative, participating in what she calls “impatient optimism.” Doomerism is not only a bummer, she argues, it’s also a cliché.
“The more negative slant, it’s already been done a million times,” she said.
But a bummer may be what we deserve. Climate activism has scored the occasional win — a reduced hole in the ozone layer, the comeback of the California condor. Still, any sustained inquiry into the challenges we face in the future, and even right now, as the world warms faster than predicted, offers a gloomier prospect.
To emphasize a cheerier one, examples tend to be cherry picked or gently massaged. A section in Ritchie’s book argues, correctly, that deaths from extreme weather events are fewer than they were in the past. But this section all but ignores the fact that extreme weather events are becoming more severe and more frequent, a trend that will continue even if harmful emissions are slowed. And it ignores any deaths from extreme heat, which Ritchie attributed, in conversation, to the insufficiency of the data.
The journalist Jeff Goodell has studied that data. The title of his recent book, “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet,” suggests a more sober perspective. (In conversation, he described himself as broadly bullish about the climate crisis, which came as a surprise.) He wanted to use his storytelling, he said, not necessarily to inspire hope or even anger, but to communicate what the planet faces. “Because you can’t talk about solutions until you understand the scope and scale,” he said. He is also skeptical, he said, of much of the sunny, solutions-minded messaging.
“It makes it feel like climate change is like a broken leg, “ he said. “With a broken leg, you’re in a cast for six or eight weeks. You suffer some pain, then you go back into your old life.” He doesn’t believe that’s the case here.
“We’re not going to fix this,” he said. “It’s going to be how do we manage to live in this new world.”
Imagining a Better Future
The fixes on offer in these recent works tend to be of the techno-futurist variety, trusting in human ingenuity. “A Brief History of the Future” also offers squishier solutions — empathy, community, trust. Sacrifice (unhopeful, unsexy) is rarely mentioned, or it’s the kind that a person in relative economic comfort can feel good about: eating less red meat, driving an electric car.
“Not the End of the World” is almost determinedly apolitical, though there is one mention of a populist campaign to ease air pollution and a polite reminder to vote for leaders who support sustainability. “I deliberately wanted to make this a very nonpartisan book,” Ritchie said. Introducing specific policies might have alienated some readers. “I feel like that would split my audience when I want to try to bring them together,” she said.
The desire to engage audiences across the political spectrum also motivated Murdoch. While there is one brief interview with President Emmanuel Macron of France and another with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the series is far more comfortable when discussing rewilding or kelp farming. “If we’re going to get there, we need everybody,” Murdoch said. “So part of this is to try to not have it be about politics, but really to be about the future.”
Can a better future arrive without political intervention? Fisher doesn’t think so. Her book, “Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action,” which she describes as a “data driven manifesto,” posits a world in which climate shocks become so great that they spur mass protest and force government and industry to transition to clean energy.
“It’s the most realistically hopeful way to think about where we get to the other side of the climate crisis,” she said.
That realism imagines a future of food scarcity, water scarcity, climate-spurred migration and increasing incidences of extreme weather. Fisher also predicts some level of mass death. “There’s no question that there are going to be lives lost,” she said. “Already lives are being lost.” Which may not sound especially optimistic.
But Fisher’s research has taught her to believe in, as she terms it, “people power.” She has found that people who have had a visceral experience of climate change are more likely to be angry and active rather than doomy and depressed.
“The whole point of apocalyptic optimism is being optimistic in a way that actually helps get us somewhere,” she said. “It’s not shiny and rosy and like cotton candy. It’s a bitter pill. But here we are and we can still do something.” In this sense, hope is a spur, a prod, an uncomfortable goad. And imagining a better future is a brave and even necessary act.
Storytelling — whether through fiction, documentary, data science or sociology, and however optimistic — might seem a limp response to the climate crisis. Narrative won’t stop coral bleaching or the leaking of methane from Arctic soil into the atmosphere. But it’s a tool that’s available, cheap and endlessly renewable. And as a society, we will not act on climate change until we’re convinced that our action is useful and urgent.
“In order to build a better world,” Ritchie said, “you need to be able to envision that one is possible.”
Alexis Soloski?has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.?More about Alexis Soloski