The End of the End of the Earth Read online

  “Excellent question,” Adam said.

  His lecture was a barn-burning reprise of An Inconvenient Truth, including the famous “hockey stick” graph of spiking temperatures, the famous map of an America castrated of its Florida by the coming rise in sea level. But the picture Adam painted was even darker than Al Gore’s, because the planet is heating up so much faster than even the pessimists expected ten years ago. Adam cited the recent snowless start of the Iditarod, the sickeningly hot winter that Alaska was having, the possibility of an ice-free North Pole in the summer of 2020. He noted that whereas, ten years ago, only eighty-seven percent of the Antarctic Peninsula’s glaciers were known to be shrinking, the figure now seems to be a hundred percent. But his darkest point was that climate scientists, being scientists, must confine themselves to making claims that have a high degree of statistical probability. When they model future climate scenarios and predict the rise in global temperature, they have to pick a lowball temperature, one reached in ninety-plus percent of all cases, rather than the temperature that’s reached in the average scenario. Thus, the scientist who confidently predicts a five-degree (Celsius) warming by the end of the century might tell you in private, over beers, that she really expects it to be nine degrees.

  Thinking in Fahrenheit—sixteen degrees—I felt very sad for the penguins. But then, as so often happens in climate-change discussions when the talk turns from diagnosis to remedies, the darkness became the blackness of black comedy. Sitting in the lounge of a ship burning three and a half gallons of fuel per minute, we listened to Adam extol the benefits of shopping at farmers’ markets and changing our incandescent bulbs to LED bulbs. He also suggested that universal education for women would lower the global birth rate, and that ridding the world of war would free up enough money to convert the global economy to renewable energy. Then he called for questions or comments. The climate-change skeptics weren’t interested in arguing, but a believer stood up to say that he managed a lot of residential properties, and that he’d noticed that his federally subsidized tenants always kept their homes too hot in the winter and too cold in the summer, because they didn’t pay for their utilities, and that one way to combat climate change would be to make them pay. To this, a woman quietly responded, “I think the ultrawealthy waste far more than people in subsidized housing.” The discussion broke up quickly after that—we all had bags to pack.

  At six o’clock, the lounge filled up again, more tightly, for the climax of the expedition: the screening of a slide show to which passengers had been invited to contribute their three or four finest images. The photography instructor who was hosting it apologized in advance to anyone who didn’t like the songs he’d chosen for its soundtrack. The music—“Here Comes the Sun,” “Build Me Up, Buttercup”—certainly didn’t help. But the whole show was dispiriting. There was the sense of diminishment I always get from our culture of images: no matter how finely you chop life into a sequence of photographs, no matter how closely in time the photographs are spaced, what the sequence always ends up conveying to me most strongly is what it leaves out. It was also sadly evident that three weeks of National Geographic instruction hadn’t produced National Geographic freshness of vision. And the cumulative effect was painfully wishful. The slide show purported to capture an adventure we’d had as a community, like the community of Shackleton and his men. But there had been no long Antarctic winter, no months of sharing seal meat. The vertical relationship between Lindblad and its customers had been too insistent to encourage the forging of horizontal bonds. And so the slide show came off as an amateur commercial for Lindblad. Its wishful context spoiled even the images that should have mattered to me, the way any amateur photograph matters: by recording the face of what we love. When my brother privately showed me a picture he’d taken of Chris and Ada sitting in a Zodiac (Chris failing to maintain complete disgruntlement, Ada outright smiling), it reminded me of my happiness at having found them on the ship. The picture was full of meaning—to me. Upload it onto Lindblad’s website, and its meaning collapses into advertising.

  So what had been the point of coming to Antarctica? For me, it turned out, the point was to experience penguins, be blown away by the scenery, make some new friends, add thirty-one bird species to my life list, and celebrate my uncle’s memory. Was this enough to justify the money and the carbon it had cost? You tell me. But the slide show did perform a kind of backhanded service, by directing my attention to all the unphotographed minutes I’d been alive on the trip—how much better it was to be bored and frozen by seawatching than to be dead. A related service emerged the next morning, after the Orion had docked in Ushuaia and Tom and I were set free to wander the streets by ourselves. I discovered that three weeks on the Orion, looking at the same faces every day, had made me intensely receptive to any face that hadn’t been on it, especially to the younger ones. I felt like throwing my arms around every young Argentine I saw.

  It’s true that the most effective single action that most human beings can take, not only to combat climate change but to preserve a world of biodiversity, is to not have children. It may also be true that nothing can stop the logic of human priority: If people want meat and there are krill for the taking, krill will be taken. It may even be true that penguins, in their resemblance to children, offer the most promising bridge to a better way of thinking about species endangered by the human logic: They, too, are our children. They, too, deserve our care.

  And yet to imagine a world without young people is to imagine living on a Lindblad ship forever. My godmother had had a life like that, after her only child was killed. I remember the half-mad smile with which she once confided to me the dollar value of her Wedgwood china. But Fran had been nutty even before Gail died; she’d been obsessed with a biological replica of herself. Life is precarious, and you can crush it by holding on too tightly, or you can love it the way my godfather did. Walt lost his daughter, his war buddies, his wife, and my mother, but he never stopped improvising. I see him at a piano in South Florida, flashing his big smile while he banged out old show tunes and the widows at his complex danced. Even in a world of dying, new loves continue to be born.

  XING PED

  We’re told that, as a species, human beings are hardwired to take the short view, to discount a future that may never come anyway; this is certainly the thinking of the engineers who compose the traffic instructions that are painted on city streets. They seem to presume that you’re driving with your eyes fixed on a spot directly beyond the hood of your vehicle. You’re supposed to be like: Oh, now, there’s a PED … and now, whoa, here comes a XING (which looks Chinese but isn’t) … and then—well, here things become somewhat incoherent, because, if you’re taking such an extremely short view, how are you even supposed to see a pedestrian who’s starting to cross the street? It’s weird. When you learn to drive, you’re told to aim high with your steering. But if you see a message in the distance and you read it in the normal top-to-bottom way, as BUS TO YIELD, you are making a mistake. The furiously merging bus is expecting you to yield. Only a bad driver would know this from reading what’s painted on the road. And so, to survive in a modern world in which not only traffic engineering but our reigning political and economic systems reward shortsightedness, you learn to think, or to not think, like a bad driver. You YIELD TO BUS. You take the paper cup, you drink your drink, you throw the cup away. Every minute in America, thirty thousand paper cups are chucked. Far away, on another continent, the Brazilian Atlantic rain forest has been leveled to create vast eucalyptus plantations to supply the world with pulp, but that’s way beyond the hood of your vehicle. You have places much nearer you need to be. Your life is complicated enough already without dragging a reusable cup around with you all day. Even if you carried one, you know you’re living in a world designed for bad drivers, and what earthly difference is your 0.00015 discarded Starbucks cups per minute going to make? What difference does it make if the emissions of your vehicle are infinitesimally hastening the a
rrival of an all but uninhabitable and not so distant future? Human beings are human beings, and hardwiring is hardwiring. We’ll X that bridge when we come to it.

  NOTES

  The Essay in Dark Times

  1.  I am following standard ornithological practice and capitalizing the American names of birds when discussing them as species. Many woodpeckers could be described as melancholy, but there is only one species called Melancholy Woodpecker.

  Save What You Love

  1.  This is one of several sentences that I’ve added to the original New Yorker version of this essay (titled “Carbon Capture”) for greater clarity or accuracy.

  May Your Life Be Ruined

  1.  Shortly after my visit, her husband sold his gun. Two years later, following the publication of this story in National Geographic, with photographs by David Guttenfelder, the Albanian government instituted a two-year nationwide ban on hunting. The ban has since been renewed for another five years. Enforcement remains a problem, however.

  2.  Indeed, Morsi was deposed in July 2013. He has been in prison ever since.

  ALSO BY JONATHAN FRANZEN

  NOVELS

  Purity

  Freedom

  The Corrections

  Strong Motion

  The Twenty-Seventh City

  NONFICTION

  Farther Away

  The Discomfort Zone

  How to Be Alone

  TRANSLATION

  The Kraus Project (Karl Kraus)

  Spring Awakening (Frank Wedekind)

  A Note About the Author

  Jonathan Franzen is the author of Purity and four other novels, including The Corrections and Freedom, and five works of nonfiction and translation, including Farther Away and The Kraus Project, all published by FSG. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Künste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  DEDICATION

  THE ESSAY IN DARK TIMES

  MANHATTAN 1981

  WHY BIRDS MATTER

  SAVE WHAT YOU LOVE

  CAPITALISM IN HYPERDRIVE

  MAY YOUR LIFE BE RUINED

  A FRIENDSHIP

  A ROOTING INTEREST

  TEN RULES FOR THE NOVELIST

  MISSING

  THE REGULARS

  INVISIBLE LOSSES

  9/13/01

  POSTCARDS FROM EAST AFRICA

  THE END OF THE END OF THE EARTH

  XING PED

  NOTES

  ALSO BY JONATHAN FRANZEN

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  175 Varick Street, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan Franzen

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2018

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71928-9

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  www.fsgbooks.com

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  For their help with these essays, the author thanks Will Akers, Ernesto Barbieri, Henry Finder, Adrian Forsyth, Susan Golomb, Pilar Guzmán, Casey Lott, Etleva Pushi, Jamie Shreeve, and Nell Zink.