Stephanie Wakefield on Anthropocene Hubris

 

In the Anthropocene—the current terminal period of neoliberal capitalism marked by climate change, environmental degradation, and social-political unraveling—calls to rethink human life abound. In response, a powerful subframe of Anthropocene theory—what we might name “precarious entanglement” or “dwelling in the ruins” thinking—forwards one way of doing so. For proponents of this perspective, the infrastructures, promises, and aspirations of modernity are seen as ruins themselves. To think otherwise would be to miss the lessons the Anthropocene holds for us: modern humanism and attendant ideas of progress, hubris, and freedom were an error, and now drive current devastation. Humanity must, this narrative insists powerfully, be humble.

“No more agents of history. We all agree on that,” argues sociologist Bruno Latour, whose work perhaps most fully fleshes out this narrative. Reversing the modern story of human freedom as a matter of rising above, separating from, or hubristically trying to transform the world, this line of Anthropocene thinking argues its inverse: that subjection to volatile earth forces and entanglement amidst ruins are the real nature of human existence. This entanglement in social-ecological-technological relations, once elided by modern thinking, is not to be escaped but to be embraced, argues philosopher Timothy Morton; such loops, he maintains, are our “fate” and “destiny.” Seeing ourselves within complex systems to which we are bound reveals that rather than makers of worlds, we are defined by precarity. Instead of holding on to hope or dreams of a “happy ending,” we must now learn to survive, to use anthropologist Anna Tsing’s terminology, “in capitalist ruins.” The perfect image of our new earthbound existence, Latour says, is the brutal ending to Béla Tarr’s film The Turin Horse:

    In the final tempest of the last days of Earth, father and daughter decide to flee their miserable shack isolated in the middle of a desperately parched landscape. With a sigh of relief, the spectator sees them finally going away, expecting that they have at least a chance of escaping their diet of one potato a day. But then, through a reversal that is the most damning sign of our time, a reversal that I don’t think any other film has dared show, instead of moving forward to another land, one of opportunity, full of great expectations, full of hopes (remember America America), we see with horror that they come back, exhausted, despondent, bound to their shack, resuming their old even more miserable life until eventually darkness envelops them in its shroud.

This reading of the Anthropocene, political theorist David Chandler argues, is itself “increasingly affirmed as a positive and enabling opportunity” to overcome modernist frameworks and embrace the actual nature of life: precarious survival amidst entangled ruins. What is affirmed is the apocalypse that is capitalism at present, the very conditions that define the Anthropocene. In making explicit what is often implicit in neoliberal governance approaches—forwarding images of life as insecure, apolitical, and hostage to volatile systems—precarity-entanglement theory limits itself to thinking through what exists rather than exploring ways to refuse or change it. Works in this vein frequently deploy a universalizing “we” whose sins and pride have brought on the Anthropocene.The wreck of the good life, the postwar period of high consumption and wages in the West, is normativized and deployed as an effigy of excess, rather than what it was: a brief postwar apparatus, which resulted from pitched workers’ struggles in the twentieth century, and that was ultimately tenuous and uneven. Described in dramatic prose is a new “we” of the Anthropocene that will wander in the wastelands, embracing its precarious and diminished existence, much akin to the life many of us are already living in the early twenty-first century. In a conservative move, this narrative is abdicating human agency, experimentation, and radical challenges to the social order in the name of accepting “our” fate. But, as systems technology analyst Venkatesh Rao recently stated:

    It’s funny how people think a post-apocalyptic landscape will be relatively flat socioeconomically. At most they think there will be small-scale warlords or Dunbar-scale anarchist communes. No. There will be deathstar billionaires with private armies and narrow-deep tech stacks.

Constraining human being to the is—precarious survival amidst entangled ruins—rather than the possible contributes, intentionally or not, to the already-omnipresent sense that what is, is all that is possible, and renounces hubris and audacity at a moment when poor and working-class people seriously need these qualities.

Disentanglement and Delinking

Ultimately, this particular version of Anthropocene thinking fails to capture many of the characteristics and possibilities of the present. By this I do not mean that the current moment is not marked by entanglement. On the contrary, defining and administering life cybernetically in terms of information, feedback, and non-equilibrium interconnection—dismantling the modern subject—has been central to western neoliberal governance for decades. Post-September 11, securing interconnected critical networks came to be seen as especially paramount, with American military analysts like Thomas Barnett dividing the world into a “functioning core” and a “non-integrating gap,” the latter defined as “disconnected from the global economy and the rule sets that define its stability.” “Eradicating disconnectedness,” argued Barnett in his much-discussed The Pentagon’s New Map, “therefore becomes the defining security task of our age’’ with failure or refusal to integrate into the global economy and its rule sets enforceable by military action.

From Lagos to New York, urban planners and governments have more recently emphasized connectedness as key to building resilience to climate change and its effects. Originating in cybernetics and ecology in the 1970s, resilience is both an ontology and design practice based in systems thinking, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of the social, ecological, and technological. Whereas modern forms of administration were based in city/nature binaries and sought to eliminate volatility and risk, resilience is a governance paradigm that welcomes entanglements, understands instability as inevitable, and views cities as coupled social-ecological-technical infrastructural systems that must develop their capacity for absorbing turbulence. In resilience approaches, entanglement is thus viewed not only as politically mandatory (as for early 2000s geopolitics) but also ontologically natural: a corrective to erroneous modern ways of thinking.

However, while entanglement is increasingly celebrated, we are also witness to some of its opposite. In the United States, one might observe that there seems to be growing tendency toward “delinking” or “islandization” in response to Anthropocene conditions and events. For example, politicians promote ever-more securitized borders and walls as a manipulative solution to the suffering of working-class people. The very wealthy detach their stacks and supply chains, shore up urban networks against climate change, or disconnect from the same social media they own, while also preparing infrastructure for bigger moves in the future to secure themselves and their forms of life. This may be seen as the Anthropocenization of what historian Nils Gilman calls the plutocratic insurgency that has been underway for decades; a revolt by capitalist elites against the confines of modern postwar territorial power configurations. In this insurgency, the rich seek to detach themselves legally and infrastructurally from what Gilman terms “social modernism”: an ideological and institutional formation centered around the nation state as a provider of welfare and economic growth.

Along with off-shore tax havens, Fourth Industrial Revolution modes of labor management, and gutting the West’s working-class and welfarist structures, a key component of the plutocratic insurgency is the creation of enclaves like those documented by Mike Davis. “These islands of elitism,” explains Gilman, “are designed to be largely self-sufficient in their ability to deliver health care, food, security, education, entertainment, etc. to their residents, even as they sit amid seas of social misery…From the point of view of the denizens of such communities, the primary function of the wider society is to serve as a source of cheap, servile labor, and as a well of resources to be looted.” But gated communities, Gilman further argues, “are merely an example of a broader pattern, in which economic, social, or political enclaves are carved out of a national state and enabled to play by a fundamentally different set of rules from the surrounding territory.” Taking this forward, Kanye West recently floated “building a fireproof community” after he and Kim Kardashian hired private firefighters to save their $60 million California mansion during the 2018 California wildfires. Meanwhile, the Seasteading Institute, founded by Milton Friedman’s grandson and originally funded by Peter Thiel, is exploring how to set off a “Cambrian explosion” of autonomous artificial floating cities starting in the Pacific Ocean. In the Institute’s eyes, seasteads are a solution to sea rise as well as what they see as the domineering overreach (read: taxation) of existing governments—a way to “liberate humanity from politicians.”

These earth governance efforts exist alongside private space colonization projects couched as an escape hatch from an increasingly degraded earth. Elon Musk has built and successfully tested rockets on which SpaceX intends to send humans to Mars by the mid-2020s (NASA plans to land astronauts there by 2033) and predicts beginning colonization as early as 2025. Most Left commentators cynically scorn such space ventures. However, it is understandable how others might see in them a worthy human venture, one that current and future generations might find actually desirable, not least because it might offer escape from the social carnage of neoliberalism’s cataclysmic continuation on earth. There is nothing necessarily wrong with imagining oneself in the shoes of the first humans to see Mars’s surface with their own eyes, descending from a rocket doorway to touch the planet’s rocky red crust with their own feet. Just like the writings of science fiction author Steven Erikson, commercial space ventures contain their own poetics: the desire to go where no human has gone before; find other life; or sink into the stars at warp speed.

In the more pragmatic vision of the world’s on-and-off wealthiest person and Star Trek fanatic Jeff Bezos, the only way for poor and working-class people to get to space will probably be as free labor in one form or another. As Bezos recently described, with resources on Earth running out, “space is the only way to go.” Rather than colonizing Mars, though, Bezos plans to build artificial worlds—O’Neill cylinders rotating to create artificial gravity—orbiting Earth and able to support one million people each. Some of the cylinders will be agricultural areas irrigated by drones, while some will be cities and others more recreational.

“What does architecture even look like when it no longer has its primary purpose of shelter?” asks Fred Scharmen. Like “Maui on its best day, all year long. No rain, no storms, no earthquakes,” Bezos responds. Earth, he envisions, will be rezoned as a residential and light industrial zone. “We send things up into space but they are all made on Earth. Eventually it will be much cheaper and simpler to make really complicated things, like microprocessors and everything, in space and then send those highly complex manufactured objects back down to Earth, so that we don’t have the big factories and pollution generating industries that make those things now on Earth.” And as to the question of “who is going to do this work?” Bezos concluded: “not me,” and gestured to a group of school children in the audience wearing shirts from the children’s club of his space company, Blue Origin. “You guys are going to do this, and your children are going to do this.”

Human Agency: A slender air-bridge to the possible

It is increasingly important to refute assertions—both those of governments and some critical theory narratives—that nothing else is possible. Both literally and figuratively, “this” world is actually not the only world there is. Much is actually possible. The first grunt labor force sent to Mars could blow up the return Starship™—gone Croatan, albeit on the red planet. Still, beyond contributing to the present shredding of the social fabric or desperately flinging oneself against it in vain, it can be extremely difficult to imagine what liberation in the Anthropocene might look like, especially for the poor and working-class. To say anyone knows the answers to the unbelievably complex problem of contemporary neoliberal capitalist society would be disingenuous. To say that a preidentified system would provide a better world seems even more off, especially considering the outcomes of such projects throughout the twentieth century. We cannot imagine what we cannot imagine. If the emergence of the Anthropocene tells us anything it is that we need a break with existing structures and institutions and ways of thinking, perhaps including ones that have risen so recently to hegemony in the epoch’s name.

This need for a break is felt widely. Eco-cybernetic entanglement, precarity, and lack of agency are circumstances in which much of the population lives and not by choice. Rather than celebrating Anthropocene conditions, it is worth considering seriously that an equally descriptive image of the present is that of the current order’s structures on fire. This zeitgeist was well-summarized in political scientists Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux’s recent survey, covered by the New York Times with alarm, which reported highly affirmative responses to statements such as: “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn’” (40% agreed); “We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over” (40% agreed).

This sentiment is part of the attraction many Americans have to apocalyptic movies and TV: the end promises an escape from the present order. Take, for example, the once extremely popular TV series The Walking Dead, which during its golden age—season 4 (2014)—was the most popular show for Americans aged 18–49 (15.7 million people watched the season finale). Episode “Still” opens with a survival skills montage of characters Daryl Dixon (grizzled crossbow-toting fan favorite whose face is featured on “Don’t Mess with Daryl Dixon” t-shirts sold at Walmart) and Beth Greene (blonde, Christian, suburban) collecting tools, trapping animals, and roasting snake. Devastated by the recent murder of Beth’s father and loss of their band of companions, the pair wander a zombie-ravaged landscape. Inside an abandoned country club where they search for bottles of liquor, Daryl discovers piles of money. Falling to his knees, he shovels the bills into a duffel bag, frantically acting on old impulses. Later, they hole up in an abandoned rural house. Car parts and old tires litter the yard. Inside, cigarette butts overflow plates atop a junk store kitchen table. On the porch they drink their found moonshine and share stories from their pasts (while Beth’s sheltered upbringing is known, Daryl’s “before” story has until this episode remained unknown).

“Home sweet home,” says Daryl, reminiscing to Beth how he grew up in a house just like this. He recounts how his abusive racist father would place jumbo, plastic, bra-shaped ashtrays on the TV and use them for target practice, sitting in his underwear drinking in a dumpstered camouflage La-Z-Boy. “You want to know what I was before?” he asks Beth. “I was nobody. Nothing. Some redneck asshole.” “I'm just used to it, things being ugly. Growing up in a place like this.” “We should burn it down,” Beth suggests. Beth too has experienced great pain and loss and is ready to leave the past behind in her own ways. They gather the money they’d hoarded—valueless now as money anyway—and the alcohol with which they’d tried to drown their pain and use them as tinder and fuel to burn the house down. In an extraordinarily beautiful scene—which reverses Latour’s Turin Horse-inspired vision—Beth and Daryl, their faces lit up by flames, point their middle fingers at the ruined house, turn their backs and walk into the night.

It’s not that a better world awaits ahead, and the scene is not triumphant. But to paraphrase Beth, at least you’re not living how you used to, not anymore. This version of the apocalyptic is powerful and popular because it offers a way out of the crushing hopelessness and the impossibility of becoming something or someone else that many poor and working-class people in America feel. Or at bare minimum, a proper response to the structures that create these conditions.

Daryl’s past—represented by the dilapidated manufactured home—offers an image of the rural poverty across the American hinterlands, where unemployment and debt are extraordinarily high and “deaths of despair” (suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism) common. Far from the spaces of academic theorizing, such “ruined” places represent the much broader death of the so-called American dream, the sum of the post-1970s decades of revanchism and counterrevolution waged via deindustrialization, wage cuts, urban crackdowns, hyperincarceration; all strategies flanked by a massively increased wealth gap and soaring profits for the very wealthy, now augmented by ecosystemic collapse. Daryl and Beth embody a fictional response to a certain experience of this. But such imaginaries only echo larger scale, real world responses to other, differently situated experiences which have been launched in recent years from America’s impoverished cities and suburbs—such as Ferguson, Missouri—by humans sick of being dehumanized by the never-ending police shootings of African Americans, ghettoization, and economic precarity.

In spite of theoretical prescriptions to the contrary, we need ways to pry open the walls closing in around us (walls around the imagination, walls between the now and the future, between peoples). Toward this end, Alfredo Bonanno once described insurrection as an air-bridge to the unknown, a non-rational breaking through the structures of the present—wage work, for instance—to a space of the possible in which we might see in new ways. “A slender air-bridge between the tools of the past and the dimensions of the future.” Rather than celebrating the ruins or qualities of entanglement and precarity imposed by governments and companies, perhaps building these air-bridges might have something to do with delinking. This can mean detaching, as theorist Eva Haifa Giraud suggests, from structures and situations which strangle us, to reweave others, according to other priorities.Perhaps delinking as a liberatory—not resentful or conservative—political matter will also  involve both reconsidering what building power today means and working towards freedom as a serious and urgent goal, even (and especially) as the old orders shred themselves apart.

Here we might note, in America at least, the growing normalization of once-outlier activities amongst growing numbers of working-class individuals and families. Examples of this include learning survival skills, building local infrastructures (wireless mesh networks, food production, whether farming or engineering protein bars, etc.), and taking up physical fitness regimes. Such activities are representative of an increasingly widespread desire to decrease dependency and take back some degree of power over one’s life and abilities—to reappropriate one’s means of existence, even if the only time to do so is found during lunch breaks. Yet placed alongside the scale, vision, and material means of delinking activities of the world’s very wealthy and the force they mobilize, these scattered efforts too often seem to reflect a powerlessness—an inability to build real power or autonomy—rather than the opposite.

Life exigencies and lack of resources often mean that, at best, such practices result in an increased preparedness to survive the next Coronavirus or hurricane (no minor feat itself of course), in a time where the definition and horizon of life has become “normalizing survival.” Still, even prepping is often animated by important questions such as how to help oneself and others and how to not be hostage to relief agencies, FEMA camps, or governments that disdain whole populations. How to save your family from sleeping on a gym floor, like the Kims in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite? How not to allow oneself to be reduced to scrounging for the last can of beans at the panic-ravaged grocery store? How to take care of oneself and one’s own communities—the things and beings you love? Such questions are a pragmatic and existential matter of refusing to be dependent on corporations and algorithms. Addressing them also opens up much broader horizons.

As the Anthropocene progresses, will emancipatory trajectories of delinking take shape at a comparative scale and depth of power to those of the planet’s ruling classes? Will the epoch be marked by a widespread movement of peoples delinking from dehumanizing structures to create other, rich, unbounded territories, ones infrastructurally and subjectively capable of deciding how to live on their own terms? Using recent work by geographers on the concept, “territory” here might be thought of less in terms of a two-dimensional bounded area and instead as heterogenous, emergent assemblages on land or sea; powerful “volumina” made of their own technologies of living, ways of moving, geopowers, and relations with humans and nonhumans. Although it is an antagonistic concept, “territory,” philosopher Elizabeth Grosz writes, is also “artistic, the consequence of love not war, of seduction not defense.”

It’s impossible to know in advance whether this would lead to more livable futures. But surely exploring the possibility offers a more promising direction than affirming precarious entanglement and abdicating human hubris to the rich. Delinking and relinking on one’s own terms are not techniques that conservative forces monopolize. However difficult it may be to explore this direction, given that most lack a financial or territorial base to begin from, it seems crucial to build material power. But then again, maybe some zoomer will say this is an antiquarian modality; that more power can be found enmeshed in ethereal flows accessible alone in one’s bedroom on a laptop (whether using Google or Tor). For some this might be unacceptable or at least not enough, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

Precarity-entanglement thinking recognizes something important about the Anthropocene: we require new ways of thinking and living. But the task of thought should never be to instruct others in how to live, to provide universals to define life, or to flank governmental assertions that “nothing else is possible” other than the resilient continuation of existing structures while the world burns and floods. Taking the claim that old world is ending seriously opens up much broader horizons. The end of the “one world world”—or what I call the Anthropocene’s “back loop”—is not the time for reasserting new universal definitions for what life should be, but for reaching out into the infinite range of what we and others might make it. Just as scholars such as Clive Barnett and Stephen Collier have argued against reductive or ontologizing critiques of government, so too is there a need for critical Anthropocene thinking to resist this approach.

Acknowledging that the world is not there “for us,” that the earth has its own intractable forces and autonomy, need not require as its corollary to sink into self-hatred or disavowal of human capacities. Surely there are other possibilities beyond this false binary that some versions of Anthropocene thinking tether human being to. As Chandler suggests “perhaps it is a false and forced choice to choose between ‘the human’ and ‘the world’? Perhaps rethinking modernity does not necessarily involve the refutation of any possibility of political alternatives other than those based on accepting our newfound fragility and vulnerability?”

At a time when human power and hubris have become objects of disdain for some, it is important to insist on its critical importance in the Anthropocene. One could look back to a vast and varied range of hubristic human efforts, with some dominating nature or oppressing populations and others embodying collective struggles for freedom. But emancipatory struggle is not an object of remembrance. Rather, it is a basic human need elaborated in ever-new ways. Thus, it is fitting and appropriate that the 2010s opened and closed with global waves of anti-government uprisings (although resistance at the decade’s close was notably subdued in the US). What’s needed now is a hubris proper to both the Anthropocene and the subjects trying to escape from it. Without such a hubris, without the embrace of profound experimentation with existence, we cede the future and our lives to the billionaires and petty warlords, technocrats and politicians.

 Anthropocene Hubris. By Stephanie Wakefield.    e-flux, September 4, 2020.

I. I feel it coming

Gleaming blue translucent condos and whitewash stucco. Construction cranes and flood barriers. Mirrored sunglasses and bikini rollerbladers. Architecture that gathers the edge of the world, at least the American world.

This past December I got married in New Orleans, where my husband grew up, moving after Hurricane Katrina—first into Best Westerns in Houston, next to Seattle on a Red Cross voucher, and finally to work in New York, where we met nine years ago. Thank god for Katrina!, we joke. Last month we went to Miami Beach for our honeymoon, half for the sun and half—as you might also do now in Louisiana—“to see it before it’s gone.” A joke but not a joke, because Miami Beach is “ground zero” for sea level rise. As one of the most low-lying cities in the lower forty-eight states, Miami Beach is already flooding and will likely be the first American city submerged by rising seas. According to University of Miami geologist Harold Wanless, Miami will see 2 feet of sea rise by 2048, 3 feet by 2064; 4, 6, or 15 feet by the end of century, and one foot per decade after that.

Scientists base projections of sea level rise like these on data gathered from microwave and GPS sensors installed on land and ice, in the oceans and in space. This data shows that sea levels have been rising over the 20th century at a rate that has increased in recent decades, with 2014’s level 2.6 inches higher than 1993’s average, which was previously the highest annual average on satellite measurement record. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), sea levels are rising now at one-eighth of an inch per year, a rate expected to accelerate in tandem with global warming in coming decades. It was by studying ice samples drilled from melting glaciers themselves that scientists first detected and measured global warming. These glaciers are the archives of our earth, the memory of its worlds, of past climates and of breaths released. During past ice ages, glaciers formed as water evaporated from the oceans, snow accumulated and compressed, layer built upon layer. Under the weight of accumulating seasons, the lower snow became ice, formations became glaciers, and ancient air was preserved, trapped as bubbles within the ice.Today ice cores, such as those studied at the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, tell scientists what earth’s climate was like in the past, providing a benchmark against which to compare today’s temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, as well as a basis for prediction of how the climate will change in the future. For the last 12,000 years, the atmosphere trapped just enough of the sun’s energy, giving us the Holocene “golden age,” the “safe operating space” in which human civilization was born, in which we grew up, and which we are now leaving. As increased concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane trap more of the sun’s heat, earth’s average surface temperature is rising, with the ocean absorbing the bulk of the warming. So now glaciers in Montana and Iceland, but primarily Antarctica and Greenland, are melting, sending their water into earth’s swelling seas. All the water on earth is all the water there’s ever been. In the Anthropocene, everything is connected.

Wanless says that all of our predictions of gradually rising seas might be wrong, because none of them acknowledge the fact that we know previous ice melt and sea level rise didn’t happen steadily but rather in nonlinear, erratic pulses. The question remains, just how quickly do pulses happen? Over the course of a day? A year? A decade? The Holocene mind assumes sea levels are steady and the earth is an eternal, stable background to our human dramas, but the Anthropocene mind learns otherwise. Even with our radars, satellites, and ice core labs we can’t predict when or how quickly much of this will occur. Already, sea level is not rising uniformly across the planet, spatially or temporally (New York, for example, is considered a hot spot). The less ice, the less reflective surface able to deflect—the more dark, sun-absorbing ocean, the more heat absorbed, creating a chain effect, accelerating ice melt, sea level rise, and coastal inundation.

The ice of memory becomes a deluge! It’s waiting for us! Just as we can’t predict these processes, we do not know how the melting of the glaciers, rising of the seas, or global warming will intersect in coming decades with the long list of other Anthropocene transformations, including mass extinction, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, fresh water usage, or ever-increasing wealth inequality and existential freakout in humans. Homo sapiens have never lived at 400 parts per million (ppm) CO2 concentration. We’re already in a new world. And at 1500 ppm? Into the unknown!

If we can’t accurately predict the rate of melt or rise, we can still foresee some consequences. With 3 feet of sea level rise around south Florida, Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station, located on Biscayne Bay just south of Miami and already exposed to the sea, will be cut off from the mainland, reachable only by plane or boat; with more rise it will be completely submerged, perhaps leading to catastrophic meltdown. With 6 feet of sea-level rise, downtown Miami’s waterfront and the Florida Keys will be gone, and the city’s cruise ship port—the world’s largest—will be under water. But that doesn’t even matter, Wanless says: just one foot of sea level rise—expected by around 2040—will cause salt water intrusion into the city’s water systems, rendering tap water undrinkable, sewage systems nonfunctional, and sending Miami residents fleeing en masse like 21st-century Dust Bowl refugees. Wanless sums up the future of his beloved home Miami by saying, “I don’t know how it’s going to happen, but it’s over.”

But is it? Is this just the end?
 
II. Resilience 1.0

One night in Miami Beach we take a walk up to the posh Sunset Harbor neighborhood. We cross through a cluster of towering condos, where we overhear wealthy condo dwellers debate which duck dish to order, which would be normal except they’re seated 2 and a half feet under the recently raised street. The elevated roadways that now loom above the cafes and doorways in Miami Beach are part of an effort to build resilience to the regular flooding, with the city having already spent $400 million to elevate streets and install a huge pumping system to push flood water into Biscayne Bay. This is the Miami iteration of climate resilience: maintaining a (static yet ever-receding) pastel and neon art deco fantasy while the oceans rise around the city, with new infrastructures like these streets alongside a delirious building boom, with $2.7 billion spent on new luxury high rise construction in 2014 alone. The speakers at the condo cafe are playing that Chainsmokers song we all love, We ain’t ever getting older…

Miami’s efforts to build climate resilience are part of more widespread transformation in urban infrastructure and design. Coastal cities like New York where I live are being hailed as experimental laboratories for real-time testing of new designs to make cities resilient to climate change, rising seas, and natural disasters. I have been researching these resiliency efforts for many years, and one thing is clear. Unlike urban design in the past, which promised a “better” future, these resiliency designs work by managing and adapting to changing conditions of catastrophe in order to secure the functionality of our existing social and political urban order. These resilience designs don’t replace modern infrastructures, but are necessitated by them, and complement them. That is, despite their “green” characteristics—oysters, swales, reefs, and marshes—resilience infrastructures sit perfectly well alongside the proliferation of pipes, cables, wires and roads that underwrite modern life and project it into the future. Implicitly or explicitly, these designs tell us that there is little left but surviving in a landscape strewn with corpses and debris, disasters and debt. In Miami Beach’s case, Bvlgari bags will float on the rising seas as they churn outside the city’s preserved art deco hotels: a frozen, yet ever-receding past of luxury, glamour, exuberant faith in social and technological progress. The possibility of imagining or creating other worlds disappears.

Listening to the Chainsmokers waft out of the Sunset Harbor restaurant, I’m thinking that there really is a will to survival at the heart of these new resilient modes of administering coastal urban environments. Rather than promising the future, these resilience measures function to ward the future off. Adapting to changing conditions so as to keep all other things the same. In the novel I’m reading on the trip, part of Steven Erikson’s “Malazan Book of the Fallen” series, immortality is a curse. A people called the T’lan Imass undertake a collective ritual to live forever in order to wage eternal war on their enemies who had once enslaved them. Thousands of years after the ritual, they still wander the continents, haggard, skeletons with pieces of skin falling off, dreaming of nothing, contemplating their own futility, remembering little of what it is to live: love, sex, tastes, everyday commonplaces like the smell of cooking food, children laughing, leaves rustling, birth and death.

III. Letting go: the back loop

We’re at Lummus Park, an outdoor workout spot in South Beach. I’m watching an amazing woman in her late forties as she climbs to the top of a 12-foot pole. She raises her body into a star-shaped human flag, turns upside-down, and holds herself aloft with a single leg wrapped around the pole. Slowly, she lowers herself several feet, holding herself taut and gracefully dismounting from the pole. Afterward she doesn’t speak to anyone. She’s there to teach her teenage pupils, signaling their drills to them: hanging sit-ups, bar flips, handstands. I am amazed by this woman; I’m thinking, we really know little of the human body’s potential! Part of the reason we came to Miami was to visit this world-famous beach gym, well-known as a place where elite calisthenics and street workout practitioners train their human flags, planches, and parallel bar handstands under sun-soaked palms. Street workout, a relatively new culture of choreographed movements on free outdoor parks or infrastructures, is just a physical fitness component of a wave of experimentation with new ways of transforming bodies, minds, lives, and the world around them: from hacking, making, modding, prepping, and lifting to citizen science, eco-design, solar energy grids, wireless mesh networks and crossfit boxes. People everywhere are searching their souls, scouring the earth for tools, and trying in a million ways to reinvent what it means to be human and to dwell on earth. Most of these practices in no way see themselves as solutions to climate change, the impending nuclear catastrophe of a submerged power plant, or large-scale political structures. What then, one asks, is their status? Who could honestly say? What’s clear is that these practices treat our time not as “The End,” but rather a beginning, a transitional time in which every aspect of life is now open to reworking, here and now. As such it can’t be pinned down yet. Seeds need time to grow, adaptation doesn’t (usually) happen overnight, and Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Speaking of which, plants and animals are doing this too. As global warming has decreased the number of days below freezing, mangroves’ habitable range has increased and the trees are taking root in salt marshes farther north. Alligators are adapting to live in residential areas with lakes or canals and use south Florida’s waterways as a “network of highways to get from one place to another.” The Everglades are also inhabited by a large population of Burmese pythons—brought to the area as exotic pets and discarded. Despite a state-organized “Python Challenge” that awards cash prizes to freelance citizen groups who catch the most pythons, the release of an iPhone app for crowdsourcing python sightings, and the state’s importing of snake-catching specialist Irula tribesmen, the pythons continue to thrive and multiply in their new environment. Seasons are shifting: spring is coming earlier in many places, while winters as we know them in New York have grown more erratic and 60 – 70 degree temperatures increasingly frequent. “Insects are emerging earlier; birds are nesting earlier; plants are flowering and leafing out earlier. The latest of such natural events studies, out last month, shows that climate change has stretched out the wildflower bloom season in Colorado by 35 days.”So what I mean is, it’s not just us. Nature is experimenting too, and we create our worlds in the worlds it creates, and vice versa.

To paraphrase writer Gretel Ehrlich, is this a world coming apart, or piecing itself back together?

Father of resilience theory C.S. Holling has a useful way of thinking about a time like this. He calls it a “back loop.” This concept refers to the adaptive cycle, the main heuristic used by resilience ecologists to describe the four phases of life experienced by all natural systems–a human being, a city, a society, a civilization, a swamp, a forest, a company. On one hand, the adaptive cycle contains a “front loop” of early rapid “growth,” leading to a “persistence” or “stability” phase dominated by a few species and characterized by rigidity and the capture of earlier energies. Those “stable” states are not permanent. Gradual or sharp disturbance can cause systems to slip into a “back loop,” marked by a “release” phase where energies and elements previously captured in conservation phases are set free, unexpected new combinations emerge, and wild, exuberant experimentation becomes the modus operandi. The most understudied aspect of ecological systems, back loops are also one of the most exciting. As observed in ecological systems, the back loop is the phase of life in which individual organisms or small groups of individual organisms interact across previously unbridgeable divides and in doing create something fundamentally original. In contrast to life in the regimes we are leaving behind, where innovation was stifled and influence limited to a few actors with the greatest power—the stability “trap”—in the back loop beings and things are released and open to new potentials. Although most back loops studied by ecologists have been regional in character, in 2004 Holling penned an essay suggesting that “we are at the time of a large-scale back loop,” a global situation in which “each of us must become aware that he or she is a participant.” I think Holling’s challenge is important; but it is also an apt description of a phenomenon already underway.

If we accept being in a back loop, the question becomes, how do we respond? Do we try desperately to maintain the old “safe operating space,” freeze a process already in motion? Or could we let go, allow a time of exploration and experimentation, see what becomes of the pieces of us and the world?

IV. Prometheus 2.0

Back on the beach, we finish our workouts, and watch some guys compete for ridiculous numbers of reps and sets. I text my friend back in New York who owns the CrossFit gym where I work out, “Let’s move here. This could be life,” with a photo of the sun and park. He is a Five Percenter of the Nation of Gods and Earths, a 1960s nonreligious offshoot of the Nation of Islam (NOI) that believes god is neither separate nor exterior from humans, and not a mystery entity to wait for to bring you food or change your world. Instead, god is something that humans can cultivate and develop through meditation, training in mental, spiritual and physical fitness. We are gods. Even though the wealthy elite of the world withhold this truth from the majority, through living it and knowing our selves, we prove it true. While some Five Percenters see godliness as reserved for black men only, my friend, who’s Puerto Rican, has his own wisdom. He teaches his daughter to know she’s a god, and teaches his friends (who are many colors) the same, that divinity is your true power—which is also our true power, which is the power of the universe, which is the power of creation of our universe and reality. When my friend first mentioned all this in the car one morning as we groggily made our way through Brooklyn to run a 5K in Sheepshead Bay, I was surprised not only because I’d known him for a long time without hearing about it, but also because much of my life has also been inspired by the subterranean, often repressed but constantly reemerging, messianic tradition. The 15th-century Hussite rebellion in Bohemia, when the Taborites defeated the Holy Roman Empire, proclaimed their own Kingdom of Heaven on Earth and declared there would be no more servants nor masters; the 16th-century rise of Lurianic Kabbalah in the aftermath of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain; the heretical ideas of 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who denied the existence of a transcendent God and said everything is one divine substance; Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; and so on. Across place and time, from a Taborite beating a drum made of their slain leader’s skin, to us who meet today in gyms on the terrain of the Anthropocene back loop, there is a single truth surviving across centuries and continents: the true power of transformation belongs to the people. We revise maps, we invent new practices, new movements, new ways of living, in and with and sometimes despite each other’s unpredictable paths. “A timeless reality,” as one Five Percenter puts it.

Another unexpected tale from the fabulous/insane new world offered by the Anthropocene. My friend the god grew up in Bushwick; I’m from Kansas. He lifts more than twice his bodyweight; I can only do a few pullups. Two very different beings who, via unique paths, landed on the same planet. New starting point: the old world is over, a revolution has begun. In and by people like each other, through love and building, is born a new sense of the possible. Anyway, now I’m learning supreme math, and he’s learning how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. New values, new tables!

Speaking of gods, lately I’ve been thinking about “Prometheanism,” that supposedly horrible word so often used to describe humanity’s reaching the apex of its insanity as the most powerful geological agent on earth, imagining itself a force on par with a super volcano or an asteroid, all possible because this human species raised itself up as the rational orderer and center of reality. Welcome to the Epoch of Promethean Man, cue the Accelerationists, the Breakthrough Institute, the Singularity, the space colonies, and, on the other end of the spectrum, cue the critical world’s almost univocal condemnation of human hubris as an outdated relic of the catastrophic 20th century.

But isn’t that story getting old? If we creep back to the Caucasus Mountain where Zeus chained Prometheus and listen again to the imprisoned god’s story, what we actually hear is how Prometheus had gone out among the humans and found them destitute, lacking all knowledge of the means of production, the forms that make life more than bare life, and now “living in caves and in holes of the earth, shivering with the cold because there was no fire, dying of starvation, hunted by wild beasts and by one another.” In hopes of liberating the humans, Prometheus went to Zeus and asked him to give the people fire. Zeus refused to share even a spark with them, as one tale tells it, “for if men had fire they might become strong and wise like us, and after a while they would drive us out of our kingdom. Besides, fire is a dangerous tool and they are too poor and ignorant to be trusted with it. It is better that we on Mount Olympus rule the world without threat so all can be happy.”

In response, not only did Prometheus expropriate fire from the selfish gods and give it to humans, he also shared with them many other tools: architecture, writing, mathematics, astrology, sailing, navigation, medicine, divination, music—arts necessary not only to human survival but to the infinite ways we elaborate the happy, good life. A god who would not bow to the gods, the myth of Prometheus is about human hubris but also about the tools we use to wield our hubris. These arts, practices, knowledges, and forms give us the means to transform not only ourselves but also our very modes of existence. For millennia, humans have experimented with tools, designing new ways to stay warm, better ways to feed themselves, how to move without being detected, how to prepare food, how to absorb and attenuate a variety of stressors from cold to combat injuries, how to hack, how to express beauty and meaning. Song. Tools are the myriad, infinite bridges that attach us to the world, that allow us to make use of it, and to give shape to and be shaped by it. By giving the mortal humans these forms, Prometheus therefore gave them the capacity to create their own worlds. And through this gift a second one was given to us: the possibility of another future, one not determined in advance but a future that was an open question.

V. New land, new questions

“An age was dead. The new age belonged to generations still to come.”

– Steven Erikson

I grew up in the Midwest in the late ’90s working in gas stations that played Nirvana and Snoop Dogg at a time when it seemed like the only thing we knew for sure was that there was no future and that nothing would ever change. Now it seems like the only thing we know for sure is that everything is changing. As many resilience theorists argue, we are unprepared to face the new world we find ourselves in because we are still using tools from the front loop. Outdated ideologies, infrastructures, design practices, and change models are not going to cut it. We’re in the back loop, and we need new tools.

So far it seems actual agency—powers of imagination, hubris, and tools for their translation into reality—is hoarded in the hands of those who want to preserve and profit from the present social system as the water rises. Take note: faced with a society in the back loop—understanding we are leaving western civilization’s “safe operating space”—the powerful are experimenting: think Elon Musk’s SpaceX “Mars I” dreams of another space; experiments in de-extinction of the passenger pigeon or mammoths, dreams of bringing the past back to the present; New York City resilience practitioners engineering “living infrastructures” and retractable sea walls outfitted with skate ramps, etc. These experimenters are daring, often so much so that they believe they can transform the very cities we live in and the solar system around us into large-scale laboratories for their trials. They are maniacally trying to make a future in the images of their desire. What about the rest of us, how are we to have any efficacy or agency?

“Resilience 1.0”—the resilience “regime” I spoke of earlier—tells us we have no agency, no imagination, and no dreams apart from what’s needed to envision or endure disasters. The human flag pole: an image to remind us what a massive fiction this is. Resilience 2.0: we have and have always had immense power to transform our selves and our worlds, as evidenced by the proliferation of techniques developed and tested out today as people have already begun inhabiting the back loop in diverse ways. Recognizing this as our capacity and our right, we can reclaim something we never truly lost.

Instead of looking for final answers, what if we accept that we are living in a transitional time, where things are in disarray, where the future’s uncertain, but where more is now possible and authorized than ever before? From this perspective our time is a time for audacity, experiments on the same playing field where our future is already being written for us. In short, living in the back loop. This new orientation and way of life entails finding new modes of nourishing ourselves, designing and raising buildings, staying warm or cool, and accessing clean water as it is does learning to face the unknown and learning to look into ourselves and ask what kind of life we want to make live, what kind of life is worth living, and really asking previously unaskable questions. What on earth could being be? By “we” I don’t just mean designers, city governments, planners, or resilience theorists who have already become back loop participants, as testified by the existence and growth of the resilience paradigm. By “we” I mean everyone: common people where they are, how they are, people who will bear the brunt of climate change, people who already needed the world to end yesterday so they could finally get a chance to live.

VI. An image

Like a Shell futurologist, one can imagine multiple disastrous futures for Miami. Will it become a southern Super Venice, a la Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York of 2140, a watery playground for the rich and capital speculation: Zaha Hadid-designed high-rise condominiums retrofitted so as to actually function with permanently elevated sea levels; floating tourist traps on Ocean Boulevard hocking $35 margaritas for what remains of the world’s non-inundated middle classes; a motley and still surviving working class that ferries in from the overstuffed, substandard housing complexes where they live a kind of managerial socialism of long lines, board meetings, and just-in-time and rarely adequate dinners? Perhaps the hard realism of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife is more apt. The “haves” live in a series of Amillarah Private Island arcologies, closed-loop glass-domed living systems with luxury malls, fine eateries, and augmented reality advertisements in their centers and ringed by air-conditioned penthouses whose waste water is filtered into the loop, while the “have-nots” are clustered in camps along the new coast lines where they have the new Dust Bowl refugees (the “Floridians”) gathering around pay-to-drink Red Cross water dispensers as they try to fend off the latest Chikungunya or Zika. Or imagine a super Katrina resulting in something a little more Odds Against Tomorrow: Miami a post-flood “dead zone” abandoned by government and left to rewild, reclaimed by pythons and alligators and scores of individualists with camping packs on their backs starting from scratch, spending their days transforming soggy banks into their dream apartments and building ramshackle boat homes amidst growing marshland. Meanwhile, more refugee camps in the background. Each of these visions undoubtedly carries an element of truth, but only if we allow it.

For quite some time, governments deployed a powerful narrative of progress: development, growth, and endless improvement. Now, many resilience advocates substitute our ability to shape the future with an “oops, we actually can’t” survivalism that is hidden behind pristine architectural renderings. We may live in a world that increasingly tells us there’s no more dreaming (except about space), but I don’t live like that. Miami lit my imagination on fire. Ever since I visited, I dream of it often. My dreams aren’t about the future or the end; they are about the possibilities opened right now. Taking up the challenge of the back loop is fundamentally a wager of the present, and it will only be met through a combination of adaption, reinvigoration, and a radical shedding of obsolete technical, social, and mental systems. To accomplish this, we’ll need to make the unlikeliest of combinations between the practitioners of Prometheus’s gifts. Perhaps the hard hats need to meet the hackers, and the engineers the ecologists, and the nurses need to meet the artists, bus drivers, teachers, and mechanics. We are already all here.

It’s May 6, 2017, and I am in Biscayne Bay. The sun is radiating on my skin, rough with salt and sunscreen and sweat. I’m watching a family on a dock hosing down a delighted manatee. I’m wondering about the place Miami Beach could become after the housing bubble bursts. A serene image of life is growing within me, the possibility of a Miami-turned-new-Florida Keys-archipelago, a “ride it out” salt life that accepts the reality of constantly rebuilding, building higher, and living differently. It won’t be without its perils, hardship, heartache, or tragedy. Can humans live in water? Of course we can.

Field Notes from the Anthropocene: Living in the Back Loop. By Stephanie Wakefield. The Brooklyn Rail, June 2017.