How to find hope in the Anthropocene: Atmospheric Rivers and Stuplimity
-by Liz Zetlin
As I write this, April snow covers the ground. Half emerged frozen daffodils hang down their heads. Last week record rainfalls poured into homes and over Highway 6 closing the road, such floods not seen in 50 years. And then in The Guardian, this morning, the headline: Global warming may be far worse than thought, cloud analysis suggests.
Researchers discovered clouds contain more liquid (rather than ice) than they had thought. Ice crystals in clouds reflect solar light. But if these crystals turn to water, the solar heat is absorbed and warming estimates have to be raised. Evidently we have underestimated the impact of clouds. Taking this into account, we’re looking at up to a 5.3C rise from pre-industrial times. Scientists debate whether we could live in such a climate.
Last night I sat with about 30 people in an Anglican Church, listening to John Anderson, a retired marine scientist, give a newly prepared talk: Climate Change: Moving Beyond the Science. He’s been doing such talks for three years. “I’m going to share with you my story,” he said. He started with most of the known facts. The one that struck me the most was the 6th extinction. The last one occurred at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, wiping out some three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth, including the dinosaurs. Then the offhand but stunning comment: It takes 10 million years to recover from such an event.
I know we’re living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocence, defined by carbon emissions and caused by humans. The oceans are rising. Extreme weather events happen almost daily. We’re losing biodiversity. Infectious diseases spread quickly around the globe. Water shortages stress food production and life itself.
I don’t remember all the bullet points that flew by on the screen. But by the end of this litany, I felt a huge weight on my shoulders and in my heart. I’m part of the 17% of people who are alarmed. Who take action. Attend rallies. Work with others. Research and read. Write letters to the editor. I despair, I hope, I despair.
The evidence is all around us. I’m not part of the denial industry based on greed, false beliefs or refusal to pay attention. But the emotional impact stuns me. When asked what he meant by “moving beyond science,” the white-haired grandfather spoke personally. This is hard for me. Dealing with the deniers. Talking beyond facts into action. What I need to focus on is hope in the Anthropocene.
He gave some examples – the Transition movement . “Being part of Transition,” says their website, “is not just about what you do locally in your community it is also about joining a global movement building a future we all want to live in.” It’s about resilience and hope. Transition started as a graduate student exercise and has gone global, showing up in two nearby communities – Meaford and Collingwood. Locally we have the 350.org movement, which sponsored his presentation. Solar Co-ops. Banning fracking in Grey County.
Basically, John said, if something bothers me, I want to do something.
John mentioned a new term “atmospheric rivers,” such a lyric description I immediately thought with my poet brain. Atmospheric rivers are cloud formations several thousand kilometers long and only a few hundred kilometers wide. A single one can carry a greater flux of water than the Amazon, Earth’s largest river. There are usually 3–5 of these narrow plumes present within a hemisphere at any given time. These rivers are the major cause of extreme precipitation and flooding in many parts of the world.
I follow writer Robert MacFarlane because of his insights and his attention to language. In a recent Guardian article, “Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet forever,” he notes: "a need has grown for fresh vocabularies and narratives that might account for the kinds of relation and responsibility in which we find ourselves entangled. 'Nature,' Raymond Williams famously wrote in Keywords (1976), 'is perhaps the most complex word in the language.' Four decades on, there is no 'perhaps' about it."
MacFarlane describes our responses to climate change with a word I’ve never heard but find fascinating: stuplimity. It seems to embody stupidity, sublimity (the state of being sublime, awestruck) and the idea of limits. When I looked up the word in Dictionary.com, it asked “Do you mean 'stoplight'?" And gave me more suggestions: “stipulate, stalemate, speed-limit.”
According to MacFarlane, how we mostly respond to mass extinction is with stuplimity: the aesthetic experience in which astonishment is united with boredom, such that we overload on anxiety to the point of outrage-outage.
MacFarlane notes we have become “titanic geological agents, our legacy legible for millennia to come.” He asks how this affects artists. His answer is that this “can induce a crushing sense of the cultural sphere’s impotence.”
How can cultural creators continue under this weight of eons? This is a question I ask myself frequently. I like to think that I share John Anderson’s message of resilience and hope turned into action. If something bothers me, I try to do something. I’m grateful that John shares his extensive research, his anxieties and vulnerabilities and his message of hope.
