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| A Downy Woodpecker [photo by Marisa Gearin] |
After we read Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Climate
Capture” for biology senior seminar, I demanded that Jim Santel, my good friend
and committed Franzenian, read it, too. He suggested we have a little scholarly
discussion about the piece, and what it means care about wildlife in our
fragmented age. Currently senior writer at the Robert F. Kennedy Center, Jim is
an absurdly successful essayist and fiction writer whose work has appeared in The
Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, The Believer and the LA Review of
Books. He blogs at Traction. He foolishly allowed me the last word here.
Jim,
Science
is about skepticism, and that’s what makes it so valuable, beautiful, and hard.
It fits well into an essay when things appear as tidy opposites—when just a
small cost increase would buy special glass to reduce bird window-strike
mortality, but the bad men don’t buy it to save costs. But I work with an
ornithologist studying window-strikes. He’s skeptical about the techniques currently
marketed to reduce such bird deaths, and hopes to experiment with them to find
out if any truly work. It might turn out that the one act we think would restore
balance to Middle Earth might not save a single hobbit.
In
“Carbon Capture,”
a recent piece in the New Yorker, novelist
Jonathan Franzen offers a corrective to our “Puritan” focus on climate change
to the detriment of more immediately impactful conservation efforts. His
opening gambit is convincing: when the Vikings built their new glass-walled
football stadium, the Minneapolis Star
Tribune’s Jim Williams argued that it was worthless to worry about the
thousands of birds projected to die from striking the glass walls when “the
real threat to birds was climate change.” Williams seemed to be drawing from a contemporary
report from the National Audubon Society stating that climate change was the
“greatest threat” to American birds, even though the apocalyptic date for this
threat was 2080. Arguments like this allowed the sponsors to decline increasing
the cost of the project by one tenth of one percent to install specially
patterned glass that could have helped prevent bird deaths.
As
a polemic, Franzen’s essay is successful in getting his readers out of the rut
of worrying about climate change and forgetting about the issues close at hand.
It’s not that we shouldn’t worry about climate change—it’s that not driving to
get groceries doesn’t get you five minutes less time in climate change
purgatory. You should focus on “helping something you love, something right in
front of you, [where] you can see the results”—for the sake of our own inner
peace, and for the birds.
But
first, a word of reproach. In criticizing the Audubon’s climate change PR
tactics, Franzen puts scare quotes around “citizen science data,” as well as
“report,” and scare quotes seem to be implied around ‘scientists’ in the phrase
“its own scientists.” While it is true that a report from a nonprofit is
different from peer-reviewed literature, Franzen would do well to remember that
those individuals are actual scientists, and that online citizen birdwatcher
data—often collected by people with more experience than he—has made possible
continental and global population monitoring.
Being
someone “who cares about birds more than the next man” does not qualify one to
make sweeping generalizations about bird biology and responses to climate
change. Ornithologists with PhD’s are not exempt from this—the only difference
is that there’s more pressure on an ornithologist to cite her sources and
provide convincing evidence than there is for a science journalist. Franzen’s
claim, early in the essay, that “North America’s avifauna may well become more diverse,” is the sort of marginally
acceptable evidence used in a polemic. The range expansions from climate change
we have seen are not good ones, not ones that increase biodiversity: mosquitoes
moving up mountains and armadillos tearing up the southern United States.
Franzen conveniently overlooks the utter havoc that would likely result if
tropical species expanded their ranges into temperate North American
ecosystems, and the possibility of next-to-irreversible loss or alteration of
northern habitats that are dependent on particular climactic conditions.
A
dose of humility, in other words, would be refreshing.
If
it matters, I agree with Franzen that some models based on range-shifts have
overestimated the impacts of climate change on bird populations. But I would
only go so far as the cautious correctives written by those with the data: Dawson and colleagues in 2011,
or Millar and Herdman in 2004,
for example. Vertebrate responses to climate change was the topic of a
literature review I wrote for a class last spring. I cited 17 sources in that
paper, and still sometimes think of how my teacher, a seasoned ornithologist
and evolutionary biologist, recommended I should have included more studies,
more systems. I do wonder how many peer-reviewed articles Franzen read for his
essay, and how many he thought was enough.
But
after his arrogance plays out, Franzen stays and listens to longtime
conservationist Daniel Janzen later in the piece. This tropical ecologist acts
as a sort of doppelgänger for Franzen—instead of devoting his life to fiction
like Franzen, Janzen and his wife Winnie Hallwachs have spent “nearly half
[their] lives” creating the Area Conservation de Guanacaste (ACG) in Costa Rica,
a massive reserve that includes much of the tropical dry forest remaining in
the world. (Aside: Franzen makes the comment that “the forest in Santa Rosa
seemed desperately dry to me,” aware that he is visiting a dry forest in the
dry season. He next concludes all cows in Scotland are brown.) Listening to
Janzen’s stories about the many struggles of ACG—“the story of Oliver North’s
airstrip for the contras … the story of Janzen’s discovery that dry-forest moth
species spend part of their life cycle in humid forest, and how this led him
and Hallwachs to expand the scope of their already ambitious project … the
story of how Janzen and Hallwachs learned to do business with multiple
landowners simultaneously”—leads Franzen to his most admirable idea: that
conservation work “is novelistic.” It is about narrative, and “no narrative is
simple.”
My
time in the company of ecologists could be reduced to this elegantly simple
idea. The traditional scientific manuscript format is also known as a
“narrative report”—it tells a complex story. Here’s what we thought at first,
here’s where we are now, and here’s all the weird shit that happened in
between. And the usually unspoken reality is that ecologists fall in love with
their subject, and that this and only this can sustain a worthwhile career. It
is this close association between fiction writing and conservation that allows
me to continue on a trajectory towards becoming a full-time biologist rather
than a full-time writer, and I thank Franzen for his flawed but beautiful
reminder of what it is I think I’m doing with my life.
But if I see him, the first thing I’ll say is that you don’t
“census” birds, you survey them. (You can never detect every individual.) It
matters.
* * *
Conor,
You
have the virtue of being both scientist and
writer; I can lay claim only to the latter title. Still, as someone who has
spent more time thinking about Franzen than the next man (har har), I was
intrigued by his argument that our fixation on the “eschatology” of climate
change has come at the expense of more traditional conservation efforts—that,
in environmental terms, we’ve allowed anxiety about the future to license
indifference to the present.
The
essay bears many Franzonian hallmarks: a certain arrogance, which you have
deftly identified; a seductive either/or argument that suffers under scrutiny;
a rueful faith in mankind’s ability to somehow stumble through the end times;
and a tendency toward contrarianism.
Along
with his significant novelistic success, these are the things that drive people
nuts about Franzen. As an unabashed fan, I admit to wishing he would avoid the
clumsy scare-quoting that you identify. From what I can tell, Franzen is a
pretty knowledgeable birdwatcher, and he was also a devoted high school science
student. You’re right: he ought to know better than to denigrate researchers
whom he should probably consider allies. (A separate bad science question:
Franzen quotes Don Alberto, a leader of an indigenous Colombian community, as
saying that the sun feels hotter to him in recent years. Without question,
Franzen accepts Don Alberto’s testimony as a sign of a warming planet. That’s
not really how climate change works, is it?)
I
think the weakest part of the essay is the either/or argument; a professor
responding to Franzen’s essay in the April 20th New Yorker called Franzen’s opposition between conservation and climate
change a “false choice.” Your post gets at the same point, and it confirmed
some of the doubts that arose in my mind as I read the essay. Is there really
demonstrable evidence that climate change has diverted resources that would
have once gone to what Franzen conceives of as “pure” conservation activities?
Is there really a division between the two?
The
nut of Franzen’s argument is that such a cleavage does exist: that climate
change is a “done deal,” and that, in the absence of the kind of
intergovernmental efforts that are required to make a real dent in climate
trends (sorry, Prius drivers), we ought to do more to mitigate its immediate
efforts. As Franzen puts it, “We can dam every river and blight every landscape
with biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines, to buy some extra years
of moderated warming. Or we can settle for a shorter life of higher quality,
protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on, at the cost
of slightly hastening the human catastrophe.”
This
dichotomy in turn rests on an argument about human nature, an argument that I
found compelling. Basically, it goes like this: we now know that climate change
is so large a problem that only massive governmental action can make a
difference. This knowledge, coupled with the abstract quality of climate change
that Franzen rightly identifies, makes us somewhat fatalistic about the
prospects of reversing the effects of global warming: Governments aren’t likely
to act, so what can I meaningfully do about rising tides and melting glaciers?
The answer, of course, is nothing—and the cruel joke is that my indifference is
precisely what makes my government less likely to act (and the American
government is the key player here; without meaningful action by the United
States on carbon emissions, the international community isn’t likely to do
much). As Franzen writes, summarizing Dale Jamieson’s book “Reason in a Dark
Time,” “…America’s inaction on climate change is the result of democracy. A good democracy, after all, acts in the
interests of its citizens, and it’s precisely the citizens of the major
carbon-emitting democracies who benefit from cheap gasoline and global trade,
while the main costs of our polluting are borne by those who have no vote:
poorer countries, future generations, other species. The Amercan electorate, in
other words, is rationally self-interested.”
This
is a cruel spiral in which to be trapped, and if my own experience is any
indication, Franzen is right about the despair that this helplessness can
engender. In high school, when I’d been reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s landmark New Yorker essays about the impending
catastrophe of climate change, I believed that if we all just recycled and
drove hybrids, everything would be all right. Today, I understand the utter
futility of that position. (“The problem here,” Franzen says, “is that it makes
no difference to the climate whether any individual…drives to work or rides a
bike.”) I still recycle, but without the hope that used to accompany dropping
my completed New Yorkers into the
blue bin.
I
don’t think I’m alone in feeling powerless against climate change, and this is
what makes Franzen’s argument so hypnotic. I agree with you that the high point
of the essay—the point where Franzen, as one of our leading novelists, has
something truly unique to contribute to the discussion around environmental
decline—is Franzen’s discussion of the relative narrative characteristics of
conservation and contra-climate change efforts. This is the kind of language
that my English major self finds too often lacking in our scientific discourse
(and, for what it’s worth, it’s the kind of language that you are uniquely
equipped to bring to our scientific
discourse, my multi-disciplinary friend).
Climate
change, Franzen argues, is a “story
[that] can be told in fewer than a hundred and forty characters: We’re taking
carbon that used to be sequestered and putting it in the atmosphere, and unless
we stop we’re fucked.”
This is the story I’ve succumbed to
since high school. It’s both harder and easier to tell oneself this story, at
once depressingly hopeless and perversely liberating. “Climate change is everyone’s fault—in
other words, no one’s,” Franzen says.
But
I wonder if Franzen is too quick to wave the flag of surrender. Of the three
letters that the New Yorker printed
in the April 20th essay in response to the essay, one from Jane
Alexander, an Audobon Board Member, caught my attention in particular.
Alexander contends that “Climate change is not, as Franzen writes, an abstract
idea. Each of us experiences global warming as a local, and visceral,
phenomenon—as drought, typhoons, snow, melting ice, or rising tides.”
This
story—the story of climate change as indeed my problem—is the story that is
lost as soon as we get too sanguine about climate change as a fait accompli. By rehearsing this
story—and, it should be noted, by only interviewing people in South
America—Franzen inadvertently reinforces this story. The alternate tale—that
no, I’m not off the hook, and that yes, climate change is touching my life in
immediate, painful ways (in, for instance, the ways it affects the birds that
nest in my back yard)—has yet to be told successfully, Al Gore’s efforts
notwithstanding. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to tell it.
* * *
Jim,
You’re right to point out that scientific prose often lacks
in storytelling quality. But in most cases, this is intentional—scientists’
skepticism makes them very cautious about adopting a narrative to explain the
data. Only with extensive testing and independent confirmation do they begin to
believe in their own stories. Certainly without having hunches, no one would
try anything new. But unlike you and me (I don’t feel like I’ve earned my
science stripes quite yet), these people ruthlessly poke holes in their own
ideas for the sake of trying to get at realities outside themselves. These
realities can be boring, bizarre, or otherwise counter-intuitive. Often, telling a story
too early, even a good one, can lead to a wrong conclusion.
The task of a science communicator writing for a broad
audience, I suppose, is to tell a story about what we know so far, or how we’ve
gotten where we are, without trampling over the uncertainty that remains. And
while narrative can be crucial, I think the currency of science communication
is metaphor—that bridge between what readers know and what they are about to
imagine. As a poet and a science journalist, I’m intensely interested in this
bridge.
And I think you have a great point about the essay that
still needs to be written about climate change in our backyards. I wonder if
you’d agree with me that the reasons for this lack have to do with our imperial
economics. Like debilitating manual labor, we’ve outsourced the current effects
of climate change to developing nations and impoverished regions: the tropics,
Siberia, the lower 9th ward of New Orleans. Its most immediate
effects (increased storm frequencies, higher average temperatures, and sea
level rises) are not felt in the temperate climate of Franzen’s backyard, but
are felt in real ways on the margins—in latitudinal extremes and the tropics.
So even though science doesn’t work that way, perhaps Don Alberto does know
more about climate change on an experience level than you or I.
