Election Eve for a Climate Artist

It’s election eve. Like many people I know, I am looking forward to some cathartic relief. Or, at least just a little rest.

It’s election eve. Like many people I know, I am looking forward to some cathartic relief. Or, at least just a little rest.

The 2016 election has not only been exhausting. It’s been maddening, crazy making. Even among friends we argue over different realities and even versions of what it means to be thinking critically.

Unfortunately, the cathartic relief will be an illusion. All that the election has been exposing will still be there, and not just the racism and xenophobia, but also the struggle for sanity and critical thinking that divides—for lack of a better term—the left.

Here on the eve of the election, there really is nothing more to do. The perfectly written paragraph is not going to suddenly wake up the protest voter. The Trump persuaded are not going get converted at the last minute. And it is, perhaps, not surprising that I find myself meditating on the long view, where we are in the context of the anthropocene.

In his piece for The Atlantic, “Donald Trump Is the First Demagogue of the Anthropocene,” Robinson Meyer writes:

Spend enough time with some of the worst-case climate scenarios, and you may start to assume, as I did, that a major demagogue would contest the presidency in the next century. I figured that the catastrophic consequences of planetary warming would all but ensure the necessary conditions for such a leader, and I imagined their support coming from a movement motivated by ethnonationalism, economic stagnation, and hatred of immigrants and refugees. I pictured, in other words, something not so far from Trump 2016.

I just assumed it wouldn’t pop up until 2040.

This kind of worry is speculative — very speculative — but it is not ungrounded. A large body of scholarship suggests that climate change could exert grave effects on international politics this century. Planet-wide warming will dry out regions of the world already riven with ethnic and political strife, all the while impoverishing and destabilizing the Western powers that backstop global order. A recent study even argues that climate-triggered environmental shocks will exacerbate the very divisions that authoritarians have historically sought to exploit.

So to now watch a demagogue contest the presidency, running a campaign that appeals to racism and xenophobia, has felt less like the sudden apparition of an unfathomable nightmare and more like the early realization of a seasonal forecast. You can hear the long-predicted gusts, the rain pounding on the roof and the groaning thunder. It’s all just happening four decades earlier than the weather person said.

In the longer story of climate change, everything is happening faster than was predicted. Around the time of my daughter’s birth in 2000, the ice cap was expected to melt away a summer 70 years off. Now we might get there in the next decade. Meyer’s realization about climate related geopolitical destabilization reminds me how often I feel like WWWIII has already started, but no one’s really noticed yet.

The sobering thought is that conditions Meyer’s speaks of have arrived. We hit the iceberg a while ago, but we’re reaching that point when the deck is starting to get suddenly steeper as the bow goes under. The election may resolve tomorrow, but all the divisions between camps, all the struggles to defend critical thinking, all the infuriating frustration of a post-fact reality remain. The mistrust and cynical rejection of the institutions of government remain. The conditions for the demagogue, or the mob, remain.

Which is why I go to sleep remembering there is no rest after tomorrow.

Less rest than ever.