Species Suicide Notes Narrating Climate Crisis, Hope, and Irony
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Species Suicide Notes Narrating Climate Crisis, Hope, and Irony KRISTEN CARDON Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Abstract This article tracks the history of species suicide, a phrase that originally referred to a potential nuclear holocaust but is now increasingly cited in Anthropocene discourses to ac- count for continued carbon emissions in the face of catastrophic climate change. With its Anglophone roots in the Cold War, species suicide discourse unites concerns about nuclear arsenals, so-called overpopulation, and environmental injustice across disciplines. Species suicide discourse is indebted to the US-based field of suicide prevention, which for more than half a century has analyzed suicide notes in search of effective prevention methods. Therefore, to theorize suicide prevention in relation to anthropogenic climate change, this article imagines a version of this genre that mediates between individual and collective subjects—called a species suicide note. As an example, the interdisciplinary and multimedia art project “Dear Climate” (2012–ongoing) by Una Chaudhuri, Oliver Kellhammer, and Marina Zurkow rewrites familiar narratives of crisis, shifting species suicide notes toward irony and unconventional techniques of hope. In analyzing these performative species suicide notes, the author complicates species suicide prevention by foregrounding narratives of irony. These notes accentuate a self-reflexive irony that works toward climate justice for vulnera- ble humans and more-than-human species. Keywords species suicide, Anthropocene discourse, climate change, Cold War, contemporary art s devastating fires burned throughout Australia in early 2020, the New York Times A published an opinion under the headline “Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide.” The fires burned forty-six million acres, far beyond the two million acres burned in the 2018 California wildfires, the roughly two million acres burned in the 2019 Amazon rain- forest fires, and the more than four million acres burned in the 2020 California wildfires. The fires in Australia killed at least thirty-four people directly, four hundred and seven- teen more people due to smoke inhalation, and killed or displaced an estimated three billion animals. In the op-ed, novelist Richard Flanagan notes that “the response of Aus- tralia’s leaders to this unprecedented national crisis has been not to defend their coun- try but to defend the fossil fuel industry, a big donor to both major parties” and to Prime Environmental Humanities 13:1 (May 2021) DOI 10.1215/22011919-8867285 © 2021 Kristen Cardon This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/224/924170/224cardon.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Cardon / Species Suicide Notes 225 Minister Scott Morrison. For Flanagan, his country’s leaders are “those who would open the gates of hell and lead a nation to commit climate suicide.”1 This was not the first time suicide was used as a metaphor for environmental degradation—during the 2019 Amazon fires, British newspaper The Guardian published an article titled “Amazon Rain- forest Fires: Global Leaders Urged to Divert Brazil from ‘Suicide’ Path.”2 Both of these articles conjure a widely used term that is infrequently studied in conversations about nuclear war and environmental degradation: species suicide. Species suicide has a long yet often forgotten history, originating in Cold War discourses of nuclear holocaust and increasingly cited in discourses of the Anthropocene to account for continued carbon emissions and deforestation in the face of catastrophic climate change. In the first half of this article, I examine the history of species suicide rhetoric, cul- minating in its use to describe anthropogenic climate change by invoking a need for species suicide prevention. Earnest though this apocalyptic discourse certainly is, spe- cies suicide also depends on a sort of irony to convey the magnitude of the situation: a sense of unwitting suicide, causing one’s own death while pursuing other ends. I expli- cate this sense of irony within the history of species suicide discourse. Irony here is de- fined generally as an outcome that directly opposes expectations: Romeo’s belief that Juliet has died, causing his suicide and ultimately Juliet’s death as well, is a canonical example of irony because the audience is aware that Juliet is merely in a drug-induced slumber. The sense of possessing and imparting superior knowledge characterizes irony in species suicide discourse. Though this article focuses on the concept of species suicide to explicate its peculiar modes of crisis, hope, and irony, ideas of human self- destruction circulate widely under a group of related terms—nuclear holocaust, climate suicide, omnicide, human extinction, ecocide,andexistential risk, for example. Irony unites this discourse, as expressed in US environmentalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s often reprinted line: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”3 For a society invested, literally and metaphorically, in stories of progress that make the present (and future) better than the past, it is painfully ironic to believe that “advancement” leads not to ever-blossoming improvements but to self-inflicted ruin. In this essay, I demonstrate how the term species suicide positions the species as both per- petrator and victim and embeds the irony of self-destruction within discourses of men- tal health as well as environmental and multispecies justice. In the second half of this article, I develop the sense of irony inchoate in species suicide rhetoric, building on the work of UK sociologist Bronislaw Szerszynski and US literary critic Nicole Seymour to posit revisions to this apocalyptic script. Because the field of suicide prevention (on which species suicide rhetoric relies) has long studied 1. Flanagan, “Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide.” 2. Watts, “Amazon Rainforest Fires.” 3. Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, 189. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/224/924170/224cardon.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 226 Environmental Humanities 13:1 / May 2021 suicide notes in an effort to prevent voluntary deaths, I analyze a collective version of the genre, which I call a species suicide note. In analyzing these performative notes, I com- plicate the mandated version of hope in species suicide prevention by foregrounding narratives of irony. My readings of the genre of the species suicide note follow Seymour in using irony to reject the solemn affects that characterize Western environmentalism— and, importantly for the present argument, that also often characterize the individual suicide note. Thus, this article probes the range of affects and unconventional modes of hope afforded by the genre of the species suicide note.4 Apocalyptic Futures: The History of Species Suicide Discourse The story of the term species suicide is longer and more variable than is immediately obvious when one encounters the phrase. Because academics, journalists, dignitaries, and others who warn of species suicide do not typically contextualize it, it is not always clear that the phrase even has a history. But in tracing how it has been used over time, I establish several tropes that persist throughout its usage—for example, a frequent and seemingly paradoxical concern for overpopulation, an obfuscation of the actual group of subjects to whom species refers, and an anticipation of an apocalyptic future. Apoca- lypticism is a key context, rooted in religious eschatology from Zoroastrian, Abrahamic, and other religions, which in turn drew on ancient Persian, Akkadian, and Ugaritic liter- atures.5 The “sense of an ending”6 emerging from apocalyptic teleology inspires a range of affects and behaviors in relation to an anticipated end: different forms of apocalypti- cism motivated, for instance, colonization of the Americas in the early modern period, reform movements in the nineteenth-century US, ongoing religious movements, and hope for oppressed peoples.7 The apocalyptic script of species suicide remains remarkably consistent over time and across disciplines, from the time it was primarily used to describe nuclear warfare to the present, when it is increasingly used to describe anthropogenic climate change. Anglophone (and largely North American) rhetoric of species suicide fostered and retained a twentieth-century Cold War imaginary of humans as a collective—as a species—that continues through its rearticulation in Anthropocene discourse as well as through Indigenous and ecofeminist critiques of nuclear and environmental destruc- tion. The force of this rhetoric relies on a logic of suicide prevention—scaled to species suicide prevention—to advocate for changes that could thwart the feared apocalypse. 4. This article draws from my forthcoming dissertation, which scales the suicide note genre from individ- ual to species. Suicide has touched my family in ways that have inspired my present research in prevention. I analyze the practice and theories of individual suicide prevention in “Suicide Justice: Integrating Feminist Meth- ods in White Settler Colonial Suicidology,” forthcoming in a special issue of Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness, and Medicine.