We Still Have Time: Hope in “The Collapse of Western Civilization

Sasha Moiseyev-Foster

Professor J. Cohen

Changing Our Stories

20 November 2015

We Still Have Time: Hope in “The Collapse of Western Civilization

            The environmental movement in our present day and age is one of both despair and desperate hope. Despair, as the future we previously fought to prevent from occurring will now undoubtedly come to pass, and hope that we can still, somehow, come to adapt and preserve the remains of our society in the face of this inevitable future. In their book “The Collapse of Western Civilization,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway manage to convey both this hope and despair through their choice of the dystopian genre and their reasoning behind deeming “environment” an “archaic” word. Van Jones’ brand of activism is the perfect example of the change they hope will be induced to prevent the future they paint, which they also convey through their definition of “environment.”

In my time as an avid reader of young adult fiction, I saw the rise of both the paranormal romance genre and the dystopian genre. The latter, in most of the better-written novels, has in my experience attempted primarily to comment on the vices of our present that the author believes has the potential to mutate into the future they spin. In the Hunger Games, a totalitarian government utilizes reality television, the ritualized murder of children, and an incredibly dramatic wealth gap to maintain order among its citizens, an acerbic commentary on contemporary America’s media complex and socioeconomic policies. I see a similar strategy in Oreskes and Conway’s work. “The Collapse of Western Civilization” is technically set several hundred years in the future as an educational text on how the political and social practices of the early 21^st century paralyzed Western nations from acting to stop or work to preserve their countries from climate change. While a more direct commentary on our flaws as a society than Suzanne Collins provides in her work, I believe that they also present a more hopeful view of our societal sins, in that they provide both an overarching context for our actions that clarifies our paralyzation.

            The context provided within “The Collapse of Western Civilization” also allows Conway and Oreskes to hint at the steps we need to take if we want to survive as a species. They make it very clear that if democratic governments expect to outlast rising sea levels and quickly depleting natural resources, they will need to reorder their priorities towards sustainability and the mitigation of climate change. They do this through their both their commentary favoring non-democratic nations (“Had other nations followed China’s lead, the history recounted here might have been very different”) and the words they chose to be “archaic,” in particular the word “environment.” Americans (the primary audience of the book) in general are less community-oriented than other cultures around the world, and therefore tend to require more of a personal incentive to care about any particular cause. In the future they paint, Oreskes and Conway provide this incentive: through the definition of self. In their “glossary of Archaic Terms, Oreskes and Conway define the word “environment” as being archaic because it “separate[s] humans from the rest of the world.” When an individual considers the world an extension of themself, it gives them a personal stake in its wellbeing. This is a way Oreskes and Conway suggest we reorder ourselves: by considering the world a part of us, and not a separate entity under someone else’s purview.

            This instigation of personal investment in the environment as an extension of one’s own wellbeing is perfectly displayed in Van Jones’ actions in Elizabeth Kolbert’s article, “Greening the Ghetto.” In it, she describes the activism of one Van Jones, a man who founded an organization called Green for All that seeks to bring the clean energy movement to low income communities through job creation. In this way, Jones perfectly encapsulates the method of change that Oreskes and Conway would advocate: giving people a personal stake in change. By giving low income individuals a personal stake in the clean energy industry, and by extension the issue of global warming, through their jobs at factories manufacturing clean energy technology, Jones effectively creates social change that influences the eventual environmental change. This is the most sustainable and effective strategy available to our society at the moment, and it is the method that I believe Conway and Oreskes most support.

            Oreskes and Conway, through their choice of narrative and “archaic” terms, convey a message of hope for action against climate change. By choosing to write a view of our present through a dystopian future, they utilize the genre’s propensity toward political and social commentary. However, by making the book an educational text from a future perspective, they also give readers a broader understanding of the overall context of our current issues with mobilizing a widespread response to the inevitable change that will accompany global warming. Through their usage of the term “environment” as an archaic term, Oreskes and Conway also hint at their proposed method of preventing the future described within their text: tying environmental change and issues with personal stakes for regular people. This strategy is perfectly exemplified in Van Jones’ work to bring clean energy to low income communities through job creation.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Kolbert, Elizabeth. "Greening the Ghetto: Can a Remedy Serve for both Global Warming and Poverty?" The New Yorker (January 12, 2009).

 

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