Reading in the Anthropocene

It has long been thought that environmental crises are, in part or in sum, crises of narrative, which is to say crises of belief. At least as far back as Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), critics and commentators have been calling for new stories, new myths, and new symbols with which to better fit ourselves to the world not of economy, whose false narratives have led us to apocalypse, but of truth, of science — a call that has taken on a note of alarm in the era of global warming; we need those new narratives now. If only we can get the story right, runs the liturgical refrain of an enormous number of op-eds, scientific papers, academic panels, TED talks, white papers, think pieces, essays, books, and tweets from across the ideological spectrum — if only we can flip the script to fit the facts, then we can save the planet and ourselves.

These are the environmental jeremiads, those pieces that, wittingly or not, draw on the many-millennia-old tradition rooted in the Book of Jeremiah, an existential meta-tale of narratives and faith and sustainability and environmental destruction. God, the story goes, was angered that his chosen people had turned from his word (“Thy word is true,” the earlier book of Psalms says, “from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth forever”), angered that his people had been “burning incense unto other gods,” had listened to other stories. And so he tells the Old Testament prophet to deliver both a promise — “If ye thoroughly amend your ways and your doings…then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever” —