A Collapse, revised

An initial comparison of “The Collapse of Civilization” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway and “The Sixth Extinction” by Elizabeth Kolbert lead to the suggestion that the two represented opposing approaches to the examination of a burgeoning global climate disaster. However, a close read of Kolbert’s article “Greening the Ghetto” warranted a reevaluation and eventual rejection of this binary. 

Oreskes and Conway present a vision of Earth in regression, after it has suffered a host of injuries and crises. The depiction does not have the same sentimentality as “The Sixth Extinction” by Elizabeth Kolbert, and because of this, “Collapse” has a more jarring and antiseptic sensibility to it. My original impression was that Oreskes and Conway’s abiotic approach was focused on the inadequacy of 21st century thought and language, the shortcomings of political regimes, prevailing philosophies, and economic systems. Meanwhile, Kolbert brought light to the environmental crisis with a biotic approach that is heavily focused on its living organisms, and the way the intrinsic fertility of the earth that gives rise to all things is being threatened.

Oreskes and Conway have devised a post-apocalyptic account that points to human activity as being the underlying cause for widespread devastation that affects the Earth in 2093. In this story, the breakdown of western liberal governments and major human settlements, termed the “Great Collapse,” has already occurred. Society has survived, though not without sustaining deep losses, and as it pieces together the fragments of society, it questions how things got so bad to begin with. The Earth is spoken of in terms of statistics and empirical measures, while the Great Collapse is attributed to the incompatibility of nature and market fundamentalism in the 21st century. The collapse is a result of the systems humans constructed, creating “power [that] did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong interest in maintaining the use of fossil fuels” (Oreskes and Conway, 36). Whereas Kolbert describes past extinctions with a language that brought to mind ecological systems and their phenomena, Oreskes and Conway’s vocabulary is evocative of structures that exist conceptually and philosophically.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction” reveals her perspective as she walks the reader through cycles of mass extinction and repopulation with anecdotes about ancient species that have been wiped off of the Earth. The reader is transported to times and places before that “predate modernity,” to the age of graptolites and Paleolithic megafauna, and quickly to the recent past, wherein human activity begins to take its toll on the natural world (Kolbert, 266). As she walks the reader through her experiences around the world, a sense of awe for nature is conveyed. I would go so far as to say it feels mythological at times. This stylistic choice gives the Earth a fuller, more sensory narrative than “The Collapse of Civilization” does. In a way, it gives the Earth more dimension. It shows the Earth as being a mosaic of species, so saturated with life that mass extinction seems like a necessary interruption, a way of refreshing.

Kolbert tries to explain “both sides: the excitement of what’s being learned as well as the horror of it” (Kolbert, 3). Her excitement is apparent as she writes, “obviously, the fate of our own species concerns us disproportionately...in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed” (Kolbert, 268). Kolbert offers a grain of hope: in the last chapter of “The Sixth Extinction,” it becomes clear that humans will be responsible for the next global breakdown of species, but Kolbert’s summation of the crisis points towards a more lively future, although humans are not guaranteed to be a part of it. She suggests that the Earth will recover. She believes in “life long after everything people have written and painted and built has ground into dust and giant rats have--or have not--inherited the earth” (Kolbert, 269). Although the sixth mass extinction might erase all traces of human achievement, this version of the end of humanity is a more ambiguous one. Kolbert shows a fidelity to Earth’s geologic history, in which recovery is as natural as devastation, despite the intervention of humans.

The tragedy in “The Collapse of Civilization” is centered around the failure of humanity to act accordingly when faced with a crisis, whereas the tragedy in “The Sixth Extinction” is the loss of diversity and life from the biosphere. “Collapse” is a criticism of human stupidity, human obedience to consumption, and our attachment to such a flawed ideology as capitalism, not a eulogy of life as we know it, as in "The Sixth Extinction." But Oreskes and Conway's book and Kolbert's book are not symbolic of a binary.

Introduce Van Jones, an environmental activist whose work is grounded in the belief that poverty and climate change can be solved with the same policies. As we compare two very different interpretations of the environmental crises, we can use Jones’ vision to unite the abiotic and the biotic spheres. Jones proposal is that the government can intervene to prevent an ecological catastrophe if it works to “connect the country to itself so we can move clean-energy electrons around” to build “the strongest economy in the world” (Kolbert). If America's unemployed can be put to work building the infrastructure that leads to a greener future, perhaps the same projects that can lift people out of abject poverty can also provide green energy solutions to a world that is in desperate need for them. As it turns out, the separation of abiotic and biotic approaches is a false dichotomy. To plan the future while thinking environmentally requires acknowledgement of both the living and the theoretical consequences of climate change. This would require us to embrace the notion that the global economy and wellbeing of its people are inseparable from the ecological state of the planet, in which food and housing insecurity are not only symptoms of economic stagnation, but also ecological fragility. The strength of the economy is contingent on the stability of the environment in which we live, and Van Jones would argue that environmentally conscious policymaking is as politically salient as economic reform. It is the thesis of Van Jones' argument, that the end of the abiotic and biotic worlds are two halves of the same process, whose beginning is in the looming threat of an environmental disaster.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction. New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2014. Print.

Oreskes, Naomi. and Conway, Erik. The Collapse of Civilization: A View from the Future. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Print.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. "Greening the Ghetto." The New Yorker 12 Jan. 2009: n. pag. Print.