Irrational hope, phenological writing, and the prospects of earthly coexistence

Abstract

“We’re fucked.” So writes Roy Scranton in the opening chapter of his evocatively titled little book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. “The only questions,” Scranton laments, “are how soon and how badly.” When undergraduates in my Ecological Communication seminar discuss these lines, they are surprised not so much by Scranton’s diagnosis as by the tone in which he delivers the bad news. My students are, as we all are, accustomed to dire predictions, apocalyptic prophecies, and fatal forecasts. The earth has been on fire for as long as they have lived upon it; they cannot remember a time when climate change was not a pressing political concern. And so, Scranton’s unpretentious “we’re fucked” tastes like old wine in a new bottle, a dressed down version of an all too familiar refrain: the sky is falling, the sky is falling. “We get it,” they tell me. “But what are we supposed to do about it?” There is, I tell my students, no single, correct answer to their question.When it comes to the most pressing planetary crises, there are no silver bullets, no magic fixes. Invoking my teacher and friend, Kevin DeLuca, I explain that our options are political and rhetorical: if we wish to dwell differently, we must alter “the conditions of possibility for thinking.” Twenty years ago, in Image Politics, DeLuca asked rhetorical scholars to take seriously the rhetorical andpolitical tactics of radical environmental activists. In a series of interlinked meditations, he shed light on the theoretical and political promise of “image events.” “Critique through spectacle,” DeLuca argued, provided, and continues to provide, one potent response to the question, “what are we supposed to do about it?” Though image events continue to draw attention to ecological and planetary crises, the new media ecology also raises different opportunities for responding to, grappling with, and confronting our situation. In the following pages, inspired by DeLuca’s formative project, I meditate anew on the prospects of transforming the conditions of earthly coexistence in an age saturated less by televisions and newspapers and more by smartphones and social media.