It is the perfect artwork for the Anthropocene, and not just because video games have become so extraordinarily popular nowadays. Games provides players with choices, but those choices are in many ways illusions – the possible outcomes are limited to those created by the game’s designer to fit their intended story structure. In real life our options are similarly constrained – not by a ‘game designer’, but by the choices previous generations made with respect to our environment.
Nevertheless, we do still have choices available to us that can change the direction of our story. And we have proved that we are able to take decisive action when it is needed. For example: when it became apparent in the late 1970s that the ozone layer was being degraded by chlorofluorocarbons and other man-made chemicals, international cooperation led to the Montreal Protocol of 1987 restricting their use and emission. Ozone levels stabilised by the mid 1990s and began to recover in the 2000s. Similar stories can be told when it comes to endangered animal species, and rolling back the industrial pollution of rivers.* But there is a lot to do, and we as a species need to find the resolve to do what is necessary. Our fears for the future of our planet are valid. But we don’t have to accept that fate. The climate challenge can be overcome if we fully abandon our long-established extractive, exploitative attitude.
* Malthus, an Anglican clergyman as well as a social and economic theorist, believed that the disproportion between ‘hyperbolic’ population growth and ‘linear’ growth in the capacities of food production was imposed on us by God, to teach virtuous behaviour – by which he meant chastity and restraint: ‘the superior power of population,’ he wrote, can only be addressed by two things: ‘moral restraint’ or ‘vice and misery’.
* Not least in its title, which sounds like an order to add an extension to your house.
† When Harrison was writing, the population of the USA was 200 million, so this number presumably seemed terrifyingly inflated. At the time of my writing, the USA is home to 328 million people, without any signs of collapse.
* In Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (2014), George Marshall estimates that if the global temperature were to rise by 4 degrees by 2100, crops would fail across the board in Africa and ‘US production of corn, soy beans and cotton would fall by up to 82 per cent’. The 2018 IPCC report can be read here: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
* The deus ex machina, or ‘god out of the machine’, is a phrase from ancient Greek and Roman drama, where a dramatist would tie up all the loose ends of his complicated plotline by having a god lowered from a special theatrical crane (the ‘machine’) and disposing of the story with a wave of the divine hand. The climate emergency won’t be solved so simply, I fear. It will involve a lot of work, and – yes – a lot of money. We could be looking, in other words, at a ‘pay-us’ ex machina. I can’t and won’t apologise for this pun.
* https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/18/a-look-at-how-people-around-the-world-view-climate-change/
* Star Trek is almost unique, I think, in representing climate apocalypse as something that happened in the past, and which humanity overcame by collective action. Whenever the twenty-fourth-century earth is portrayed, it is a utopian blend of harmonious pastoral and urban stylings. Yet in ‘Future’s End’, a double episode of Star Trek: Voyager from 1996, a Federation starship is thrown back in time and we learn that in 2047 California was flooded due to climate change. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘True Q’ (1992), we discover that in the late twenty-first century, humanity worked together to find a scientific fix for the world-spanning tornadoes climate change had thrown up. Most famously perhaps, the whole story of the motion picture Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) concerns rescuing the last whales from extinction.
* Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days and Counting (2007).
* @GreatDismal, 25 August 2019.
† George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 2.
* Will Self, ‘Video Games’, London Review of Books, 8 November 2012: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n21/will-self/diary
* A good account of these kinds of victories is Frank M. Dunnivant’s Environmental Success Stories: Solving Major Ecological Problems and Confronting Climate Change (Columbia University Press, 2017).
EPILOGUE
THE END IS NEVER
The end of the world is ever on our minds. As we’ve seen, popular culture is busy with predictions and visions of our own demise, from religious myths to video games, from journalism to science fiction. Our fascination with the end times has created a remarkable array of apocalyptic subgenres, by turns baleful and strangely emancipatory – machine uprisings, zombie swarms, alien annihilations. Each story is revealing in its own way, but collectively they say something far more significant about humanity.
Sometimes what these stories say is
