Lessons in Living in the Anthropocene (From the World’s Most Pessimistic Climate Writer)

I remember the thrill of transgression I felt the first time I pulled Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization off a shelf. It was at City Lights Bookstore, in San Francisco. I had just given a reading, was coming down from the Poetry Room full of Allen Ginsberg’s spirit, and there it was, Learning to Die, the book that everyone seemed to be talking about with fear and loathing, on a small bookcase on the stair’s landing, a fat stack of them wedged between copies of Howl.

If you’ve spent any time in nature or environmental writing circles in the past decade, or are even faintly aware of the raging cultural debate about whether hope or despair is the most fitting affect with which to face the planet-wide polycrisis—of which climate change is but one of many dire emergencies—you likely recognize Scranton’s name. This, after all, is a man celebrity climate scientist Michael Mann has cursed as “the ultimate doomist.”

Just look at the titles he gives to some of his books: Learning to Die (2015), which includes the now infamous quotation, “We’re fucked. The only questions are how soon and how badly,” and We’re Doomed. Now What? (2018), and his most recent,  Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress (2025) in which he dares to make the case for what he calls an “ethical pessimism” and begins with the sneering quotation from Jeremiah: “Where then are the gods you made for yourselves? Let them come if they can save you…”  For all the fractious infighting between ecosocialists, ecomoderns, ecopoets, chart-waving scientists, policy wonks, mainstream liberals, green anarchists, primitivists, monkeywrenchers, and those urging a spiritual reconnection with the land either through peasantry or prophecy, there seems to be a widespread, though by no means unified consensus that Scranton has turned his back on all the living things of the planet, that he urges resignation, that he thinks we should all, as Andreas Malm accused in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, “cross our legs in a lotus position and think” as the world burns.

There is not a single page in Learning to Die, nor in any of Scranton’s more climate-focused nonfiction that counsels resignation, courts fatalism, or asks us to give up on our neighbors.

So I gave the bookseller a few dollars and cracked the pages, expecting to find pages rank with despair. But if it was with something like the adolescent excitement of finding oneself holding a banned book that I slid Learning to Die off its shelf, finishing the book left me with the same perplexity I felt after reaching the last line of Fahrenheit 451 or Beloved: “How has this caused so much outrage?” For there is not a single page in Learning to Die, nor, I would find out, in any of Scranton’s more climate-focused nonfiction (he’s also a novelist and scholar of post-World War Two literature) that counsels resignation, courts fatalism, or asks us to give up on our neighbors.

To the contrary, Learning to Die is filled with very nearly conventional passages that one can find in any of the sunnier nature-writing magazines, essay collections, or online think-pieces. “In order for us to adapt to this strange new world,” he writes early in the book’s introduction, “we’re going to need more than scientific reports and military policy.”

We’re going to need new ideas. We’re going to need new myths and new stories, a new conceptual understanding of reality, and a new relationship to the deep polyglot traditions of human culture that carbon-based capitalism has vitiated through commodification and assimilation. Over and against capitalism, we will need a new vision of who ‘we’ are. We need a new humanism—a new philosophical humanism, undergirded by renewed attention to the humanities.

There’s an invitation in that paragraph for nearly every climate-conscious constituent.

Of course, literary outrage, like book bans, have never told us much about the work itself.  The obscenity is often to be found not on the page, but in the wider world, and in part Scranton has called a share of this outrage down upon himself. Back before Twitter was (just) a fascist dumpster of burning books owned by the world’s richest white supremacist, back when it was (also) a gathering place for writers you respected, Scranton, whose pen can run with an astoundingly acid ink, was fond of aiming perfectly crafted, corrosive posts at those resiliently optimistic climate commentators who write books with titles like “How to Solve…” and who never tire of telling us that the answer to our predicament is simple if only we do, or believe, or understand whatever truth they’re peddling. The result of his provocation was depressingly predictable: an explosion of fury, name-calling, guttermouth trash talk—the dull cultural pissing contest that too often replaces real thinking, real argument, real art.

But there’s something more than trolling at work, something elemental in the response to Scranton. “I’ve always been skeptical and critical of the narrative of progress that is at the core of the culture we live in,” Scranton told me when I interviewed him for this essay, our long conversation frequently punctuated by his reedy, tenor chuckle. “My pessimism is a reluctance to accept the optimistic narrative at the heart of Western culture.”

Pessimism also holds against optimism that the future is radically open, pregnant with an unknowable possibility. The sun will almost certainly come out tomorrow, but it’s foolish to believe it won’t also dawn on cobwebs and sorrow.

In a world where Marxists, capitalists, technocrats, politicians, activists, and many environmental writers alike hold progress as an unquestionable, if not inevitable good, in a world such as this, where optimism is very nearly an official creed, pessimism—and Scranton has always been a pessimist—is an unforgivable sin.

Yet, far from its caricature as a gloomy, glass-is-half-empty fatalism, philosophical pessimism, which Scranton, following the philosopher and intellectual historian Mara van der Lugt, dates back to the last years of the seventeenth century, is a deeply vital way of attuning oneself to the world that is rooted in a few core tenets: life is fragile, filled with suffering, and we have an ethical obligation to compassion, to voluntarily suffer alongside one another. In many varieties of pessimism, such as Camus’s, the obligation to compassion also entails something like solidarity. “Suffering matters,” as Scranton puts it, “because it’s the one thing we all share with every other living being: the recognition of suffering is the root of compassion, and the recognition of shared suffering the source of our solidarity.”

Pessimists also believe that there is no redemption in suffering; it’s not a sign of our chosenness, our ticket to Heaven, the furnace that will forge the messianic revolutionary mass who will usher in the end of history. Suffering is just suffering. There is no way out for the pessimist, not even suicide; our challenge is to find a way to live that causes the least possible suffering while affirming the sober truth that every action we take, no matter how thoughtful, might well send pain rippling through the fragile world. That is a hard thing to live with—but, the pessimist would answer, who thought life was supposed to be easy?

Finally, pessimism also holds against optimism that the future is radically open, pregnant with an unknowable possibility. The sun will almost certainly come out tomorrow, but it’s foolish to believe it won’t also dawn on cobwebs and sorrow, for there is no utopia, no golden age, no paradise free from pain and loss and suffering, no plan, no moral arc to the universe. Things don’t just work themselves out. Which means that pessimism is also deeply grounded in the world of the here and now in a way that optimists, with their faces always turned toward a sunnier future, refuse.

Learning to die in the Anthropocene never meant giving up or giving in; it always meant something much more rigorous, much more difficult.

Surveying the climate science of the early 2000s, George Monbiot wrote in Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning (2006), that though many studies, even then, were showing that the world was already well on the path to a catastrophic two degrees of warming, an outcome now, twenty years later, nearly certain, he was committed to “the spirit of optimism, so I refuse to believe it”—a version of climate denialism that, however rich in comforting hope, can only further fuel the world’s real, material misery in its refusal to imagine the possibility, even the probability of failure. We might ask, who has paid the cost of such sunny forecasts? And we might answer Monbiot the way Voltaire’s Candide responded to the arch-optimist Dr. Pangloss: “‘All that is very well… but let us cultivate our garden.’”

One way to read Scranton’s new book, Impasse, is as an elaboration of Learning to Die, which, for all its thought-provoking punchiness, was really an extended pamphlet, unsuited to the more patient work of marshalling evidence and unfolding lines of careful reasoning that characterizes Impasse. The first part of the book, “The Broken Thread,” is dedicated to showing how the optimistic faith in progress papers over the modern world order, “a Rube Goldberg machine held together with fiber-optic cable, fossil fuels, shipping containers, and narrative.” Instead, Scranton argues that we’ve reached a state of impasse, in which “several connected and cascading crises bring into question the survival of modern civilization.”

Each chapter works its richly documented, patient way through a particular crisis, each one of which seems to have reached a terminal stage: the conceptual crisis of progress; the failure of climate politics (if by which we mean politics aimed at keeping the climate from changing catastrophically; at least in the US, the bipartisan political goal of wringing as much profit as possible from the planet has succeeded brilliantly); the problem of how any individual can possibly understand themselves as occupying a coherent place in a world with an ever-accelerating sense of time and ever-expanding sense of scale; and finally, what it might mean to be living at the end of the world.

Taken together, the first half of Impasse is one of the more devastatingly elegant portraits of our moment that I’ve read, for, gloomy or not, it’s hard to argue that our world isn’t dying—just glance at the front page of whatever newspaper you read, and you’ll be assaulted with tales of bombed-out schools, devastating heat waves, genocide, collapsing glaciers, rampant pedophilia, species extinction, AI slop, and everywhere people desperate for a break. It’s hard to argue that the world isn’t coming to an end—and right here, with the little word “world,” is part of where all the trouble with Scranton began.

It’s useful to think about the difference between the words “world,” “planet,” “Earth,” and “globe,” and Scranton, drawing on the work of historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, writes, “we might say somewhat reductively that…the globe is political, the planet scientific, the Earth phenomenological, and the world ontological.” Or to put it another way, the nation states, treaties, and climate summits make up the globe, while climate modeling and evolution and the periodic table of elements and carbon cycle are what define the planet. The Earth is the ground we feel under our feet, the wind we hear in the trees, the sun we feel on our faces. And the world: that’s a capacious Old English word that means “the state or realm of human existence on earth.” Each of these is deeply entangled with the others—a change to one ripples its way through each—but the point remains that the end of the world means the end of the realm of human existence, and for those of us living today the realm of our existence is a fossil-fueled, capital crazy, trigger-happy world of exploitation, extraction, and extravagance for the few at the cost of immiseration for the vast majority of life.

Part of what has led us into this state of impasse is precisely the generations of confident, optimistic thinking that claims to have divined the future.

And yet our realm is not just one of brutality—it is also the world of the modern university system, and big science, and small literary journals, and jazz, and farm-to-table meals, and however you like to vacation…. Frederic Jameson is supposed to have said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but perhaps the end of capitalism is the end of the world. Or at least the end of this world. Learning to die in the Anthropocene never meant giving up or giving in; it always meant something much more rigorous, much more difficult: learning how to let this brutal world, this realm and the culture it sustains, go.

In Learning to Die, Scranton suggested the humanities could chart a course to a new, post-fossil capital world, a faith that he lost somewhere in the eleven years between that book and Impasse, as he’s no longer willing to exempt art, literature, and philosophy from the world’s existential crises. Even so, he still counsels against resignation: “We must somehow live through the end of our world, knowing we will never live to see the new one,” Scranton writes at the end of the chapter, “The End of the World.” “And yet this existential destitution in no way frees us from the obligation to live and care for each other—and not only for each other but for the world that is passing and passed.” It’s with that obligation that Scranton turns in part to an elaboration, defense, and history of pessimism. And it’s just here that Scranton, whose critical work has always struck me as keenly sharp, will leave many readers who come looking for instruction disappointed, for what he offers is “a commitment to future existence that by definition cannot be imagined.”

As one of the negative philosophies, pessimism, in its adherence to radical openness, is also marked by its anti-systematic nature. And so you will not find a roadmap to the new world in Impasse’s pages because, as Scranton argues, correctly I believe, part of what has led us into this state of impasse is precisely the generations of confident, optimistic thinking that claims to have divined the future. A philosophy that takes seriously its belief in limits, as pessimism does, writes no Bibles. And yet the longing persists for many of us: how does one commit to a future that can’t be imagined?

My interview with Scranton went long, and we only stopped because he had to turn to parenting duties—yes, pessimists can also choose to have kids. I had planned to ask him one final question, a tweak on the perennial question that ends nearly every interview on an environmental topic—what gives you hope? I’m interested in commitment, not hope, and so I had wanted to ask him instead why, in a dying world, he spends his time crafting prose that is so thoughtful, so intricately shaped, so often misunderstood. I never got to ask the question, but it turns out I didn’t need to. Earlier in the interview he told me about when, as a college dropout, he began writing. “I had made a commitment to literature,” Scranton said.

I made this kind of existential commitment to be a writer, and there was something redemptive in that commitment in the early days, as if I could save myself, or create myself, or make a new self through writing. It was very Romantic, very naïve, and very passionate, and everything since then has been a process of disillusionment. But I’ve remained true to the commitment, even in the disillusion committed to the form and to the possibilities of language.

What is this if not a kind of literary and intellectual compassion in action? And what is a book or an essay if not a commitment to a future that can’t be imagined?

Impasse will not save the world; no book, no matter how cleverly marketed, will. But Impasse is one of those books, and thankfully, my shelves are crowded with dozens of such works, close companions as this world comes to an end.