There is a painting, by the Flemish artist Fernand Khnopff, The Abandoned City (1904) that has haunted my imagination since I first saw it.
The scene portrayed is simple, spare and melancholy. There is a desolate row of 15th century Flemish houses with an indifferent sea creeping ever closer – for me the rising sea levels of our environmental carelessness. This is not a seacoast experiencing an unusually high tide; instead there is a terrifying disorder of something much worse and nightmarish. While an enveloping despair is present and hovering, there is a flicker of hope since the city has been abandoned, not yet destroyed. Here is the thought that a return to an again-thriving city might be achievable; that a choice is still possible if we act now. Khnopff’s painting is a visual description of the ashen, grey, leaden, ‘corpsed’ landscape of Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame. And while despair is the dominant motif there are little glimmers of hope.
Looking at a photograph recently of the ponds of toxic tailings, covering 130 square kilometers resulting from the first phase of the Alberta tar sands oil extraction process brought to mind the bleak mountain of asbestos waste in one of the early scenes in Canadian filmmaker Claude Jutra’s Mon Oncle Antoine. Both are apocalyptic warnings of a disastrous future.
In order to get oil from the tar sands, an environmentally ruinous process is required that, among other harmful byproducts, releases three times the greenhouse gas emissions necessary for extracting and refining a conventional barrel of oil. As well, the health of downstream First Nations communities is seriously imperiled by the escaping toxic desecration. The reason Canada was right at the bottom of the G8 in seriously confronting climate change going into the December meetings in Copenhagen is that, writes environmental activist Keith Stewart, “the tar sands have become the de facto economic development strategy for Canada.” Stewart pointedly asks, “do we want to join the rest of the world in making the transition to a green economy or do we want to be the energy sweatshop of this hemisphere, trying to push dirty oil on to a world moving beyond it?”
The environmental protocols reached in Kyoto in 1997, and due to expire in 2012, required wealthy countries reduce carbon emissions by six to eight per cent below 1990 levels. Unfortunately, by the time the Copenhagen conference met in December to renegotiate the Kyoto agreement there had been no demonstrable global reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. The troubled meetings fell far short of what is needed to avoid climate disaster. At the end of all the discussions and scientific evidence it was left to U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabo to broker an accord. All this did was recognize the scientific case for keeping global temperature rises to no more than two degrees without making commitments to specific emissions reductions to reach that goal. Earlier drafts put together by African and other vulnerable countries called for deeper emission cuts to hold global temperature increases for the entire 21st century to 1.5 C. The earlier goal of cutting global carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent was summarily dropped from the final deal.
Although key world political leaders hailed the Copenhagen accord as significant progress, many others did not. Climate scientists are desperately trying to tell us (see my article of Nov. 26, 2009) the window for turning climate change around is closing fast. In addition to escalating carbon dioxide discharges we are now passive spectators as more methane (another greenhouse gas) is freed from beneath melting tundra and an alarming loss of albedo reflectivity (albedo is a term in atmospheric science known as the surface reflectivity of the sun’s radiation) from seas once ice covered.
It may be too late to avert the awful destruction and downward spiral depicted in Valerii Briusov’s (leader of the Russian symbolist movement) stage work The Earth: A Tragedy of Future Times(1904) in which human civilization has been forced, in order to survive, to isolate itself from the natural world by creating a gigantic enclosed city with a special roof that obstructs any sense of the air or sky. Ruling over this enclosed humanity is a sect that worships death and darkness, and wishes to free humanity by keeping them away forever from the natural world that has collapsed into bareness and sterility. Hope, in the form of a rival sect, however relieves this despair by creating an apocalypse that restores the natural world and with the roof rolled back bringing once again, in the final words of the drama, “like an angel blowing a golden trumpet, the blazing sun.”
Cormac McCarthy’s bleak dystopian novel, The Road, evoking Beckett’s desolate terminal landscapes of history, where “the whole place stinks of corpses…the whole universe,” and where the action all takes place after some global disaster of calamitous proportions has occurred. In The Road, unlike in much of Beckett’s work, there is simply no hope.
The shattering and devastating ruin of the environment is beyond ever being reclaimed or restored. The father and his son set out day after day, “shuffling through the ash…through the ruins of a resort town…the frailty of everything revealed at last, old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.” It is noteworthy that the first place the protagonists come across in their wanderings is a long ago abandoned and now rusted out remains of a gas station. McCarthy is even more unflinching than Beckett and has written a narrative of such darkness, hopelessness and profound sadness that after reading it left me in a condition of intense and overpowering disquiet for days. It should be required reading for all politicians. The novel’s forebodings of a menacing near future awaiting us surely can only stir to action the hardest of hearts.
More and more I am convinced it is the arts that will cudgel us into slowing and eventually stopping our determined rush to oblivion. I believe, even though I am quite pessimistic about the current state of the environment, that hope still has the advantage over despair, however slight.
The writer is a professor of social work at King’s University College.