The Most Dangerous Story Ever Told: Ecological Collapse, Progress, and Human Destiny
"An Environmental Nuclear Bomb"
I try to avoid disaster porn¹. That being said, occasionally I come across an image from the news which strikes me in a visceral way. It will reach down into the core of me, into my DNA, the part of me concerned with the survival of the species, and shake it awake. Images from the 2018 California fires felt like that to me. It looked like the world was on fire. Maybe for you it was an image from the 2010 Haitian earthquake or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Recently, though, it was images of the drought in the American West that stirred me from my quotidian slumber. I don't usually buy the newspaper, but this past June, while leaving a gas station, this image on the front of the New York Times caught my eye as I walked past the newsstand.
The headline read "'Environmental Nuclear Bomb' as the Great Salt Lake Dries Up". The picture is of the Saltair palace, an abandoned resort near Salt Lake City. Originally built in 1893, and rebuilt twice since, the resort has suffered repeated setbacks, both economic and natural. Fire and flood have cursed the location.
I first saw the site in 1993, when I was driving out to start college in Utah. At that time, the edge of the Great Salt Lake had enveloped the Saltair property. It was a striking image as we drove past on I-80. There was something romantic about the palace rising up out of the water. And so, it was quite a shock when I saw the photo above of the Saltair sitting on dry land and the shrunken lake far away in the distance.
The Great Salt Lake is drying up. This is no small thing. The Great Salt Lake, appropriately named, is huge. Take a look at any topographical map of the United States and you'll easily spot it, a lonely spot of blue in the middle of the American desert. But the lake, which used to cover over 3,000 square miles (bigger than Rhode Island), now covers less than 1,000 miles. That's all happened in my lifetime, and it's accelerating. As the water retreats, it leaves behind a toxic bed of arsenic and other heavy metals, the residue of the mining industry. And as the desert wind blows, the air is turning poisonous.
Of course, the cause is climate change, as well as over-consumption brought on by explosive population growth. Rising temperatures mean less snow, snow which used to melt in the spring and feed the lake. Rising temperatures also mean increased demand for water. And a shrinking lake means less water to evaporate through the hydrological cycle to become snow again. It's a vicious cycle.
"If you see me, then weep."
— 14th century "hunger stone" (Decin, Czech Republic)
Not long after seeing the headline about the Great Salt Lake, I was struck again by images from another shrinking lake. This time it was Lake Mead. The whole Colorado River system, in fact, is now at its lowest point since it was constructed 85 years ago.
Colorado River
Lake Mead and Lake Powell are headed in the same direction as the Great Salt Lake. And for the same reasons. The water line has dropped 170 feet from its high-water mark, leaving a bright white strip of mineral deposits on the canyon walls. Like a harbinger of human extinction, several sets of human remains have been found, exposed by the receding water.
This is happening all over the world actually, as waters recede: human remains, sunken ships, and entire towns are being discovered. Near the Czech town of Decin, the receding Elbe River has exposed inscriptions in the bedrock, called "hunger stones", which date back to the 1400s and describe drought and famine. One inscription reads, "If you see me, then weep." History is coming full circle.
If you Google images of Lake Mead now, you're likely to see the "boat graveyard". One image in particular stood out to me. It's of the carcass of a boat, one end sunken in the dry and cracked earth, the other end pointing up toward the sky. A little patch of water can be seen in the background. Someone has spray-painted "Why No Rent Control" on it.
The Boat Graveyard (formerly Lake Mead)
This is another one of those images that triggers a response in my amygdala. Words like "apocalypse" float to my consciousness unbidden. It feels like the Earth is revolting against us. Of course, I know it really is we who have revolted against the Earth.
When I first saw this picture, I thought of a tombstone. But the more I looked at it, the more I thought it resembled a rocket ship. Probably because I had just seen a picture of the Artemis I rocket standing on its launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center. Artemis has been in the news recently due to technical delays. The mission has been hailed by NASA as the next big step toward human colonization of Mars, which they hope to begin in the 2030s.
Artemis I rocket
It's not just the visual symmetry of the two vessels rising up against the sky that I found striking. It's the contrast: the one picture representing earth's life-support systems shrinking in response to unchecked human industry, and the other picture representing so much human industry invested in looking for another home for humanity. The irony is stark: We're turning this blue planet into a desert. Meanwhile, we look for a new home on a red planet that's already a desert.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.— Dylan Thomas (quoted by Dr. Brand in Interstellar)
Leaving our blue planet to find a home on a red one is actually the premise of the 2014 movie Interstellar by Christopher Nolan. Interstellar is one of my favorite movies. I think it's spectacular, for its imagery, for its special effects, for its storytelling, for its acting. And it's precisely because it's such a powerful piece of art that I also believe it is one of the most dangerous movies ever made, ideologically.
Interstellar
[Spoiler Alert]
Interstellar is set in a near-future. The population has been decimated by war and famine. The USA still exists, but is no longer what it once was. Even in the US, there are no longer resources for big national expenditures like wars and space travel. Instead, the government is focused on feeding people. That part doesn’t sound so bad, but the earth, we are told, can no longer sustain humanity. A combination of blight affecting all major crops and resultant desertification and dust storms seems intent on wiping out what remains of a struggling humanity. Actual clips of interviews of survivors of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s are interjected into the film, giving the impression of being interviews of people in the 2030s.
We’ve seen many post-apocalyptic cinematic visions before, from Road Warrior to Terminator. But what I think is disturbing about Interstellar is not the changes, but the similarities, of the fictional near-future to the actual present day. Many post-apocalyptic stories describe a future that is nearly unrecognizable to present-day Americans, with just vestiges of the familiar (like the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes). But the future of Interstellar, a future of slow environmental disaster and partial social collapse, seems very real and not so very far off.²
In the movie, we learn that humankind is fated to lose the battle against blight and ultimately to starve and suffocate. So a hardy band of astronauts travels to a distant galaxy, via a conveniently-timed discovery of a wormhole (deus ex machina), in order to find a new home for humanity. Along the way, we learn a fair amount about human nature, as well as the effect of gravity on our experience of time. In the end, humanity begins to settle on a red planet, one that looks very much like Mars, but with an atmosphere—clearly a plug for the real NASA mission to Mars.
"Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here."
— Cooper (Interstellar)
What I think is the "dangerous" part of Interstellar happens before the astronauts actually set out on their mission. The protagonist, Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey), has a series of discussions, first with his daughter's school teacher and then his father-in-law, which lay the foundation for two competing visions of humankind's place in the universe: one as caretakers of the earth and one as explorers of the universe.
Cooper is a former test pilot and would-be-astronaut-turned-reluctant-farmer. When he is called in for a parent-teacher conference, he learns that his daughter was in trouble for bringing an old history textbook about the moon landing to school which contradicted the new revisionist dogma. The teacher explains that the new textbooks teach that the Apollo missions were faked in order to bankrupt the Soviet Union.
Cooper: You don’t believe we went to the moon?
Ms. Hanley: I believe it was a brilliant piece of propaganda. The Soviets bankrupted themselves pouring resources into rockets and other useless machines.
Cooper: 'Useless machines'?
Ms. Hanley: Yes, Mr. Cooper. And if we don’t want a repeat of the wastefulness and excess of the twentieth century, our children need to learn about this planet, not tales of leaving it.
Cooper: You know, one of those useless machines they used to make was called an MRI, and if we had any of those left the doctors would have been able to find the cyst in my wife's brain, before she died instead of after, and then she would've been the one sitting here, listening to this instead of me, which would've been a good thing because she was always the calmer one.
It's significant here that the writers, brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, decided to make Ms. Hanley a history revisionist. The purpose seems to be to invalidate her earth-centered ethos by association. She is wrong about the historicity of the moon landings, but that doesn't mean she's wrong about the "wastefulness and excesses of the twentieth century" or that children need to learn about this planet more than they need tales of leaving it. But the Nolan brothers believe the opposite.
The next two discussions happen between Cooper and his father-in-law on their porch, looking out onto a cornfield, surrounded by dust.
from Interstellar
Donald: Sounds like your meeting at school didn’t go so well.
Cooper: We’ve forgotten who we are, Donald. Explorers, pioneers. Not caretakers.
Donald: When I was a kid it felt like they made something new every day. Some gadget or idea. Like every day was Christmas. But six billion people ... just try to imagine that. And every last one of them trying to have it all. This world isn’t so bad. ...
Cooper: We used to look up and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.
Donald: This world never was enough for you, was it, Coop?
Cooper: I’m not gonna lie to you, Donald. Heading out there is what I feel born to do and it excites me. That doesn’t make it wrong.
Donald: It might. Don’t trust the right thing done for the wrong reason. The 'why' of a thing? That’s the foundation.
Cooper: Well, the foundation’s solid. We farmers sit here every year when the rains fail and say 'next year'. Next year ain’t gonna save us. Nor the one after. This world’s a treasure, Donald. But she’s been telling us to leave for a while now. Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.
This is the central message of Interstellar: Earth is no longer our home. It doesn't want us anymore. Instead, we must find our home out among the stars. And so, we need to "look up", not down.³
"The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars."
— Parable of the Sower (1993) by Octavia Butler
Cover art for Parable of the Sower by John Jude Palencar
Interstellar resembles in a lot of ways another one of my favorite works of science fiction, the Parable series by Octavia Butler, who is credited as both the first African-American and the first woman science fiction writer. The two published books which make up this series are Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998).
Like Interstellar, the Parable books are set in the near future when the United States has all but collapsed due to economic, environmental, and political pressures. Corporations hold people in virtual slavery. People live in walled neighborhoods. Hunger, theft, rape, and murder are normal outside the walls. Again, it is the resemblances to the present day that are most disturbing—including an ethno-nationalist president who promises to “Make America Great Again”.
Butler’s heroine, a precocious teenager named Lauren Oya Olamina, creates a new religion, which she calls “Earthseed”, that is adopted by a small community of refugees who gather around her. The main tenets of Earthseed are: “God is Change." and "Shape God.” Essentially, this means that change is the one unavoidable thing in life, but that we can shape that change (to a limited extent) with forethought and work.
But there is a third tenet of Earthseed: "The destiny of Earthseed (humankind) is to take root among the stars." ("the Destiny" for short). Olamina teaches that humankind must leave the earth and settle on other planets in order to survive. She believes the Destiny can give humankind something to strive towards and to change us:
"I wanted to give us a focus, a goal, something big enough, complex enough, difficult enough, and in the end, radical enough to make us become more than we ever have been. We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. ...
But we can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up. We can leave the nest. We can fulfill the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become".
— Lauren Olamina (in Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler)
For Olamina, the Destiny offers a kind of "species immortality." It's curious, though, that she never seems to consider that it might actually be this pursuit of immortality or transcendence—as individuals and as a species—which drives that cycle of creation and destruction she wants to escape.
“Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoning of the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrained material production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasive evil to have emerged in all of history, and it may even eventually defeat all of mankind.”
— Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil (1975)
According to Ernest Becker, it is this transcendental impulse which leads to the rise and fall of civilizations. He argued, in the 1974 classic, The Denial of Death, that a basic human drive is the denial that we are going to die. He sees religion, art, science, war, and politics—even civilization itself—all as "immortality projects", ways of trying to transcend death. The problem, Becker says, is that these immortality projects are maladaptive. They sever us from our connection to nature and from the flow of life—of which death is a part—and, ironically, end up hastening our end.
Much like Cooper in Interstellar, Olamina hopes that, on another planet, humans escape their earthly fate. But neither really considers the possibility that we might carry that fate with us out into the stars.
Interstellar does wrestle with the problem of human nature. In the movie, (the appropriately-named) Dr. Mann, who is supposed to represent "the best of humanity", almost dooms the human race to extinction because of selfishness and weakness. But the movie fails to draw the connection between human nature and the environmental catastrophe unfolding back on Earth.
In fact, as Cooper and Donald's dialogue above shows, the movie suggests that the problem is not humanity, but the Earth itself. And so, when we see, near the end of the movie, gigantic cylindrical space vessels filled with fields of corn⁴ on their way to their new home, it's not surprising that the writers never explain how they avoided carrying the blight with them from Earth. There is no critique of industrial monoculture farming to be found in Interstellar, no suggestion that the blight might have been related to those practices. The reason is that they never connected the blight to human choices in the first place. If they had, they would have realized that intergalactic space travel isn’t the fastest route to food security.
from Interstellar
Never once in the movie Interstellar is there any explanation of why the blight is happening. Climate change is never mentioned or even alluded to, in spite of the fact that climate change is likely to recreate the conditions of the Dust Bowl depicted in the film. This omission is all the more remarkable considering how common such references have become in popular culture. In fact, conspicuously absent from the movie are any references at all to humankind's responsibility for the environmental disaster which is driving them to leave the planet. The viewer is left to believe that the Earth itself, in the fashion of the ancient Greek gods, has just capriciously decided to wipe out humanity.⁵
"God is Trickster ..."
— Lauren Olamina (in Parable of the Sower by Octavio Butler)
Similar to Interstellar, Butler's second book of the Parable series, Talents, ends with humans launching a rocketship—inauspiciously named the "Christopher Columbus"—into space in search of a new home. But the story doesn't actually end there, or it wasn't supposed to. There is actually a third book, which was never finished and never published, to which the first two books were intended as prequels. Butler tentatively titled it "Parable of the Trickster"⁶, which would have been appropriate, it turns out, since the Destiny is a kind of trick.
There were many drafts of this story among Butler's papers (she died in 2006), but they all focus on an extrasolar colony of Earthseed followers who have settled on a planet they call "Bow". The planet is gray and dank, and the colonists are miserable and wish they'd never left Earth. In the different drafts, disasters of various kinds ensue, some environmental, like disease, and others of human making, like dictatorships and religious purges. As Butler explained in an interview: "The real problem [the colonists face] is dealing with themselves". Gerry Canavan elaborates on this in his review of Butler's unfinished work:
"So of course we discover that achieving Earthseed’s Destiny, despite Lauren Olamina’s dreams, hasn’t solved the problem of the human at all, only extended our confrontation with the very difficult problems that drove its development in the first place—only removed them to some other world where they can take some other form. The Destiny was essentially a hyperbolic delaying tactic, a strategy of avoidance; even achieved, it’s worthless in its own terms. The fundamental problem is still how to make a better world with such bad building blocks as human beings."
— Gerry Canavan, '“There’s Nothing New Under The Sun, But There Are New Suns”: Recovering Octavia E. Butler’s Lost Parables'
Though there's no indication of it in the first two books, Butler's notes for Trickster reveal that she was aware of the problem with the Destiny and the dilemma of human nature. She wrote: "We can’t afford to assume that another living world with its own biota and its own eons of existence will be able to tolerate our nonsense…taking, and putting back nothing—or putting back poisonous waste.” Unfortunately, the Trickster story has yet to be told.
What's missing from Interstellar is a trickster archetype. Throughout the ages, tricksters have played significant roles in the mythologies and fables of peoples around the world. Loki in Norse mythology, the spider Anansi from West Africa, Coyote and Raven among American Indians, and more recently, Shakespeare's Puck and even Bugs Bunny, are a few examples. The function of the tricksters is to check human hubris, to humble even the most powerful, to cause us to question conventional wisdom, and to remind us of our limitations. We ignore the trickster at our peril.
"The Earth is where we make our stand."
— Carl Sagan
The Pale Blue Dot
So what is our destiny as humans? From dust we come, and to dust we return. Yes, but what kind of dust is the question. The dust of the earth, life-giving humus (which shares its etymological origin with the word "human")? Or star dust, the stuff of cosmic ovens? Of course, both are true, in a literal sense. But symbolically speaking, which one we choose to focus on has profound impacts on the course of human history.
Interstellar is actually just the latest version of a very old story, the most dangerous story ever told, the story of progress. Except in the older versions, instead of the stars (i.e., the "heavens") being our destination, it was heaven. Whether it is the heavens or heaven, though, the goal is the same: a fresh start, unburdened by the consequences of, or the burden of having to learn from, our past mistakes. From ancient times to the present day, the dominant myth of civilization has taught us that our home is not the earth, that our destiny is to transcend our physical limitations, that those who would be heroes must reach beyond the here and now. But as Paul Kingsnorth* has explained, the dominance of this transcendental narrative has had disastrous results for our planet:
Heaven and hell are progressive concepts. The great, world-conquering Abrahamic religions gave us, in their mainstream manifestations, a vision of a world governed by a stern Sky Father, whose cosmology would steward us from Genesis to Apocalypse. Good behavior was the path to leaving this world behind and being promoted after death to another, better, one. This God is not immanent—present in the world—but transcendent—above it—and this is where we are encouraged to be too.
It is not hard to see how this cosmology translates into its secular version—silicon transcendence via computer; an uploaded immortality. In essence, they are the same story; only in the newer version, we have made ourselves the Sky Fathers. There is, after all, no need of God if you can do His job better.⁷
It is not hard to see, either, how the progressive vision, in its religious or its secular form, has led us to ravage the earth: to disconnect us from nature and our own bodies, entomb us in dying cities, suck the water from the aquifers, fell the forests, and replace the fish in the oceans with plastic. Progress is a quest for transcendence: a quest to always be somewhere else; somewhere better. Mass extinction and climate change represent the collateral damage of linear progress: regrettable but necessary if we are to move forward to where we must be.
— Paul Kingsnorth, A Storm Blown from Paradise
As time goes on, more and more of my daily news feed consists of reports of ecological collapse: fires, hurricanes, floods, droughts. It's increasingly easy to believe the earth is telling us to leave. It's increasingly tempting to believe that there might be hope among the stars. Especially when the same scientists who have warned us about climate change are also promoting missions to space. But this is just an extension of the pipe dream of progress which has brought us to this place.
We are living in a time of ecological collapse brought on by anthropogenic climate change and human economic and industrial activity exceeding several other planetary boundaries. Under these conditions, the omission from Interstellar of any reference to human responsibility for planetary collapse is not just irresponsible; it’s dangerous.
Cooper was wrong. The earth isn't telling us that we don't belong here. The earth is telling us that we do belong here. It's telling us that this is our home, that we are a part of it, that we are inextricably intertwined with it—so much so that, when we hurt our home, we hurt ourselves.
We were born here and we are meant to die here. That is our destiny. It always was. We can either embrace it and, in the words of astrophysicist and science popularizer, Carl Sagan, "look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.” Or we can continue to deny it, to tell ourselves wishful stories about interstellar travel and making a home for humans on other planets, and thereby hasten our extinction.
Humans are explorers and pioneers, yes. That cannot be denied. But we are also caretakers and cultivators (from the Latin colere: to till, tend, respect, inhabit). Both of these natures are within us. And if being human means anything, it means being, not just from Earth, but also of Earth, a part of it. We will continue to look up, but we must also remember to look down. Even as we explore the universe, we must, as Carl Sagan famously reminded us, look back at the "pale blue dot" that is the Earth, that is our home:
"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
"The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
"It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1997)
*Update: Over a period of a few years, Paul Kingsnorth’s political orientation has shifted from Green anarchism to proto-fascism. While it is impossible to draw a bright line marking when this occurred, I do not endorse Kingsnorth’s writing after the spring of 2020. COVID and his conversion to orthodox Christianity appear to have accelerated his slide to the right. See here for more on this. (Jan. 1, 2023)
Notes
¹ Or rather I try to avoid consuming images of disasters "pornographically", that is, in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction. If you're not familiar with the term, "disaster porn", I refer you to Vera Bradova's essay "Doomer Mania", in which she distinguishes between "awareness and acceptance of the multiple and converging crises we face” and “obsessive dwelling on and morbid fascination with the mind-boggling, terrifying and plausible images of coming destruction”. The latter, she says, is another form of spectacle perpetuated by empire to keep us distracted and afraid.
² Though it's not stated explicitly in the film, according to external sources, the movie begins in 2067, several decades after the "Resource Wars" of the 2030s. (Due to time dilation, many more years pass on earth during a relatively short space mission.)
³ This phrase evokes the recent Movie "Don't Look Up", which I reviewed elsewhere. "Looking up" in that movie was code for accepting climate change science. In Interstellar, "looking up" is shorthand for a paradigm of perpetual progress, and "looking down" is shorthand for an earth-centered paradigm. It's interesting to consider how much of our contemporary language and popular culture uses this same terminology. "Looking up" is equated with optimism and hope, while "looking down" is equated with depression and hopelessness.
⁴ As other ecologically-minded critics have pointed out, in addition to an apparent lack of plant diversity on these spaceships, Nolan also left out any other animals in his would-be arks. Only humans are worth saving in this story, which should not be surprising given the anthropocentric perspective of the entire film.
⁵ ”So eager is director Christopher Nolan to make the case for the return to space, that he effectively accuses nature of neglect, if not outright abuse. Humanity must look elsewhere, the film seems to argue, because Earth is no longer a reliable provider. … in the Dust Bowl interviews, he has an elderly woman explain, ‘You didn’t expect this dirt that was giving you this food to turn on you and destroy you.’ … By fitting one dust bowl inside the other, without any critique of farming practices, Nolan makes Earth the agent of his characters’ misfortunes.” — Michael Svoboda, “Interstellar: looking for the future in all the wrong spaces” (Yale Climate Connection, Nov. 12, 2014)
⁶ One of the parables of Olamina's Earthseed religion reads: "God is Change. God is Infinite, Irresistible, Inexorable, Indifferent. God is Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay—God is Change. Beware: God exists to shape and to be shaped." One of the things I appreciate about the Parable series is that each book (including Trickster) is critical of the one it follows. For example, the narrator of Talents isn't Olamina, but Olamina's daughter, who sees her mother as a selfish and dangerous zealot.
⁷ It's telling that the aliens in Interstellar, who are responsible for orchestrating the mission to another galaxy via the wormhole, turn out to be, in fact, humans from the future who exist in a kind of trans-temporal state. Deus ex machina becomes homo ex machina.
JOHN HALSTEAD
John Halstead is the author of Another End of the World is Possible, in which he explores what it would really mean for our relationship with the natural world if we were to admit that we are doomed. John is a native of the southern Laurentian bioregion and lives in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. He is a co-founder of 350 Indiana-Calumet, which worked to organize resistance to the fossil fuel industry in the Region. John was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment.” He strives to live up to the challenge posed by the Statement through his writing and activism. John has written for numerous online platforms, including Patheos, Huffington Post, and Gods & Radicals. He is Editor-at-Large of NaturalisticPaganism.com. John also edited the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans and authored Neo-Paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity. He is also a Shaper of the Earthseed community, more about which can be found at GodisChange.org.