Rating: 5
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization
Roy Scranton | 2015
Scranton centers this short book around the idea that humanity must adapt to our profoundly changing world in order to survive. In doing so, the civilization we have grown accustomed to must perish. It’s an interesting concept and I was hoping he would explore this topic in further depth, but for some reason he doesn’t. Out of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene’s five chapters, only two (a total of forty-eight pages) are designated to his unique assertion while the other three (sixty-nine) provide a cursory introduction to climate change. There are paragraphs where Scranton, a gifted writer and a veteran of the Iraq War, begins to touch on something uniquely perceptive, like when he discusses his philosophy on being a soldier and how it applies to viewing climate change. But he repeatedly fails to expand these ideas and connect them to his larger argument and instead chooses to keep these scattered gems isolated and confined to a few sentences. After finishing it I immediately thought that Scranton should have just written an article if he was going to keep his explorations so short. In fact, I later discovered this book was actually an extended edition of a popular New York Times article he wrote in 2013. I would’ve imagined him to take the opportunity afforded by the length of a book to further elaborate this idea but it appears he just used it to add on a brief summary of climate change. In short, I admired Scranton’s ambition with Learning to Die in the Anthropocene but I believe it fell short in too many aspects to be worthy of reading.
The argument of this book is that we have failed to prevent unmanageable global warming and that global capitalist civilization as we know it is already over, but that humanity can survive and adapt to the new world of the Anthropocene if we accept human limits and transience as fundamental truths, and work to nurture the variety and richness of our collective cultural heritage. Learning to die as an individual means letting go of our predispositions and fear. Learning to die as a civilization means letting go of this particular way of life and its ideas of identity, freedom, success, and progress.