My personal 4-minute video reaction to Roy Scranton's brilliant essay collection titled "We're Doomed. Now What?" (In the title: Note the Period. Note the Question Mark.)

Climate activist and founder of ''The Cli-Fi Report'' Danny Bloom speaks for 4 minutes here:

English professor and climate activist Roy Scranton published his new nonfiction book of climate essays titled ''We're Doomed. Now What?" in July 2018 and here is my personal bedside 4-minute late-at-night video reaction to his doomsday message.

I like Roy and I like his book: he is a very good writer and thinker. But in his new book of essays, I feel he goes too far in his doomsday pronouncements and his timeline for ''the shit that will hit the fan'' is much too early and premature. [IMHO.]

The bad stuff won't happen for another 500 years.

I'm not an alarmist. I'm a doomer and gloomer and Bloomer who takes the long view on all this, another 30 generations before The End, so there's time to prepare future generations (our descendants, and Roy's great great great grandchildren times 30) for what they will be facing in 500 years. Not now. His daughter's life will be normal.

Life will go on in the next 100 and 200 years just like it is today. The End is not nigh.

But it is coming, and it will come with a deathly tragic-ness. But 30 generations from now.

That's my long view, Roy.

And this video is mostly for Roy to listen to and react to. I am not trying to persuade anyone to my point of view. Each to his or her own POV.

But this is how I see things, and I have thought long and hard about all this.

That's why I created the cli-fi term for novelists and movie directors to use a literary and cinematic platform to tell their stories, whatever stories they choose to tell. 

Godspeed everyone, even though there is not God, no gods, no angels, no Buddha, no recincarnation and no afterlife.

We come this way but once, and we should all try to make the most of it. I'm doing my best, too. I hope you are, too.

VIDEO LINK:
My  personal 4-minute video reaction to Roy Scranton's essay collection "We're Doomed. Now What?"

https://youtu.be/GoDc2WAOICk

Roy Scranton Tweets in July 2018: "We have to shift our ethical frameworks from progress to triage."

3 comments, among others, by reviewers and friends of this blog:

Dear Dan -- ." thanks for this video, it is a sage comment... and follows Scranton well -- although I am still reading his new book ''WE'RE DOOMED. NOW WHAT?"-  I just started with the last chapter. '' 

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''Dear Dan, 

Wonderful words about grace and dignity in your 4 minute video. I do hope you can expand this and revise it a bit and consult your sources before you take such a rosy, optimistic stance. Check the model and scenarios of six degrees of warming. Heck, even check the IPCC - Or even check http://localsteps.org/howbad.html and select the 4 degree level for a quick National Geographic video.  

IMHO, The momentum of inaction is what dooms us. For 30 years, we have been tricked into denial, disavowal and delay. And yes it is possible to have a few more generations of humans, but ONLY if everyone, devotes every resource, "to do everything, all at once" (Bill Nye). And starting tomorrow morning.  

And we don't need to perfect a carbon tax - we need to have that in place already. .. that's like a cancer patient deciding what brand of nicotine gum to chew. Everything, all at once.
I share your aspirations to have many more generations filled with loving children. But I really can't find a climate scientist anywhere who agrees with that. Agriculture sciences predicts by the mid 2030s that only half the global agricultural food capacity will be possible because flowering plants can't germinate in high heat. Corn already has some problems already.  

Melting glaciers deliver river waters to much of Asia - much of that is drying up. Sea level rise is not going to stop short of 270 feet more. (other than triggering giant volcanoes or aiming an asteroid our way) ALL we can do is slow down the change
Really Dan, this was a good first attempt at saying something meaningful, but you need to study the science of climate change also with grace and dignity.''

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Top customer reviews on Amazon

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4.0 out of 5 starsProvocative and thought-provoking if you want it to be

July 26, 2018

Format: Paperback|Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

I've read Roy Scranton's previous books, and he does a good job of being provocative and for the most part uncompromising - he's the type of guy you'd invite to a dinner party but tell him that the party ends an hour earlier than it does so he'd leave and then you could talk about him. Of course, he'd probably write a 5,000-word essay for Slate calling you a war criminal, but what can you do. As an Iraq veteran, he brings a credibility to his rage.

I had read most of the these essays as they were published but I liked reading them collected all at once in this intense - and intensely depressing - tome. Obviously, he comes at the topic of humanity from the perspective of failure and since I agree I can read without anger or disdain.

The best essays - by which I mean most thoughtful - are probably The Trauma Hero, which is a good takedown of modern war literature, and 'Back to Baghdad' which is return to Iraq and its general corruption and failures of the post-US-war era. What a mess we've made for ourselves. But all the essays are at minimum interesting and at maximum genuinely perspective-changing if you want them to be. With "Trauma Hero," for example, you can either be satisfied with entertainment that presents US soldiers as tragic figures of doubt matched with stoic resolve, or you can admit that trope is selling you a bill of goods. Most recent war veterans - or at least many - are generally low-grade, unimaginative rubes who gained little perspective from their efforts - and I say that as an Iraq veteran - but modern entertainment lets us pretend that they're somehow more thoughtful than the poor mortals who haven't served in our nation's patriotic conflicts. Spare me. So Scranton's clear-eyed hammering on this topic makes the argument very well (and Nat'l Book Award winner Phil Klay, one of Scranton's *friends* comes in for especially brutal critique).

"War and the City" is another good one, particularly at the start with its lacerating criticism of the protest crowd. "The Idea of Order I Can't Breathe" felt over my head - a lot of interesting observations but I never quite grasped the whole. But that's fine, and I liked the effort I had to make. So lots of good essays and powerful writing and ideas.

The flipside to this is if you just want to disagree with Scranton's fairly strident observations, and don't accept any of his arguments then he's just going to seem bitter and angry. It's up to the reader to take the journey. Like I said, I was an audience for these essays before and I was ready to think about them again, so it is preaching to the choir. In one big dose like this book, yeah, these essays can be a little pushy. They might ruin your corn flakes.

So if you're willing to take what he writes and have an open mind then he might change parts of it - but if you're closed-minded or want to stick your head in the sand, then it probably won't reach you. It's a depressing topic. He's saying we ARE doomed, not any "if we do this we can fix it." No, we really can't fix it - we got seven billion people, and growing, on a planet with finite resources. It's not going to have a happy ending.