Scientists chronicling ecological destruction must confront the loss of their life’s work and our planet’s riches.
Hope and its doleful twin, Hopelessness, might be thought of as the co-muses of the modern eco-narrative. Such is the world we’ve created—a world of wounds—that loss is, almost invariably, the nature writer’s subject. The question is how we relate to that loss. Is the glass ninety-five per cent empty or is it five per cent full?
The message that there’s still “something we can do actively” has a lot to be said for it. It offers a rationale for not giving up—on species, on whole ecosystems—which is also a rationale for continuing to research these subjects and, perhaps most relevant for scientists turned authors, for continuing to write about them. Narrating the disaster becomes a way to try to avert it. Wadhams ends “A Farewell to Ice” with a chapter titled “A Call to Arms.” In it, he urges readers to “adopt every possible measure that will reduce unnecessary energy use,” to lobby for better laws, and to embrace nuclear power, which, he writes, “will keep the lights on without carbon emission.”
But we seem to have reached the point where even the calls to arms are starting to sound like dirges. In the same chapter in which Wadhams argues for better energy policies, he observes that such policies probably can’t—and almost certainly won’t—be put in place fast enough to save the Arctic. Therefore, he says, technologies to block sunlight or change the reflectivity of clouds will have to be deployed. These so-called geoengineering technologies have yet to be tested—if truth be told, they’ve really yet to be invented—but without them, according to Wadhams, the “temperature rise, and the associated further feedbacks, will be too great to allow our civilization to continue.” Apparently, this is supposed to count as inspirational.
