Climate change makes us heroes from myth
The climate change narrative should not be dominated by resignation and despair
Let me tell you a story about climate change:
Ymir was the first: chaos given form. When he slept, his progeny sprang forth from his legs and armpits, the lesser giants, also beings of chaos. When the Aesir arose — Odin and his brothers — they murdered Ymir and dismembered him. They created their own order out of the primordial chaos, creating the oceans, the soil, the trees, the clouds, and the sky, all from parts of Ymir. And then they created the first man and the first woman. The first humans. Odin and the Aesir would go on to rule with wisdom, bravery, and honor, as well as avarice, cruelty, and spite. They would rule until their great project spiraled out of their control and led to Ragnarok, the end of the world, and killed them. The survivors were few, consisting only of a handful of younger Aesir, as well as a single man and a single woman. These survivors would have to build a better world.
If the connection isn’t exactly clear, bear with me.
The story of humanity
Journalist David Wallace-Wells wrote in his book The Uninhabitable Earth, “[t]here is simply no analogy to draw on, outside of mythology and theology,” to relate to the catastrophe of climate change.¹ And he explained further:
Global warming has improbably compressed into two generations the entire story of human civilization. First, the project of remaking the planet so that it is undeniably ours, a project whose exhaust, the poison of emissions, now casually works its way through millennia of ice so quickly you can see the melt with a naked eye, destroying the environmental conditions that have held stable and steadily governed for literally all of human history. That has been the work of a single generation. The second generation faces a very different task: the project of preserving our collective future, forestalling that devastation and engineering an alternate path.
I agree there is no analogy outside of mythic storytelling that can encompass the scale and gravity of what the human race has put into motion and which now looms overhead, casting its shadow across our future.
So why not just view it through the lens of myth?
Our own Ragnarok
A leak of the latest draft of next year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was seen by AFP and painted a dramatic picture of the future of our warming planet, which has already warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius. Even at this level we can already feel the effects:
Western Canada burns and deaths mount after world’s most extreme heat wave in modern history
Hurricane Harvey caused 500,000-Year Floods in Some Areas
Severe flooding displaces millions in China and Bangladesh as the monsoon wreaks havoc
And it goes on. And on. And on.
This is our planet warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius.
We seem on course for at least 3 degrees Celsius.
The mid-century predictions of the leaked IPCC report are grim. Tens of millions could face chronic hunger. Hundreds of millions will be at risk for flooding by rising seas and storm surges. Hundreds of millions in urban areas will likely face severe drought and water scarcity. Hundreds of millions will be exposed to heatwaves worse than the worst we face today. Hundreds of millions will likely leave their homes across the globe to escape the worst of these conditions.
And the wildfires and the hurricanes will grow larger and spawn more often, like the heads of the hydra, unable to be controlled.
This is destruction on a mythological scale.
The power of story
All of our lives are dominated by storytelling; nearly everything we know and do outside of our base instincts relies on the ability to construct and tell ourselves these stories, both individually and as a society.
Your own story about who you are, your identity; who you think you should be.
The story of money, of economic systems, and of government and power.
The stories of our religious beliefs.
Everything is a story. It’s how we assign meaning to the world.
Climate change is the most devastating, frightening, and overwhelming story the human race has had to tell, and possibly will ever tell. It is already overwhelming many. A quick browse through communities on Reddit like r/collapse and r/collapsesupport will quickly demonstrate at worst the depths of despair many already feel and at best the depths of resignation and passivity that others have given in to.
However, climate change also has the potential to be the most inspiring, encouraging, and redeeming story the human race will ever tell.
Consider how numb so many of us were for so long to the increasingly dire warnings of the scientists, panels, and organizations, who have tried for so long to wake people up to the reality of what is happening. Consider how little it impacts most people when they hear the projections are a little worse than they were half a year ago. And then consider something else.
Consider how one Swedish girl, who skipped school to sit outside the Swedish Parliament building, alone except for her sign which read “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (translated, ‘School strike for climate’). That girl managed to ignite the largest climate strikes in world history. Throughout 2019, millions participated in climate strikes, marches, and demonstrations throughout the world.
The stories we choose to tell ourselves about climate change will shape how we respond, and how we respond will shape the future stories that we tell ourselves.
The takeaway
The story of the Aesir and Ragnarok is not our own story. Our own story is much more real, and more importantly, the ending is not written yet. The suffering and death not yet scripted. Most important of all, it is we who have the power to affect the outcome of this story. The gods of norse myth did not act except as the storytellers spoke it, and the heroes of the Iliad did not struggle and triumph except as Homer told it. We, however, can choose our own fates.
I am not so naive to believe we can avoid the brunt of climate change. I fear hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, will in fact suffer profoundly in the coming decades to centuries. Nor do I believe that the magical power of storytelling is going to save us all.
I do believe, however, that the more ownership we take over this unfolding narrative, the better the chance we stand at taking real, effective action. Rather than sulking in our tents like Achilles we would be better off charging the field, lest we pay as Achilles did and feel the guilt of losing life to inaction
Even if we were to lose in the end, at least we could say we tried.
The fate of our entire planet is at stake. Our own lives hang in the balance, as do the lives of every plant, animal, and microbe that, like we do, call this ball of rock orbiting the sun “home.” And as far as we have found in the vast reaches of space, we are it. All of us, together on this planet on the brink, are all the life we have ever known. Every friend you’ve ever had, every animal you’ve ever seen, every song you’ve ever heard, every scientific breakthrough, and every great story has come from our vulnerable world. We are it. And we are in trouble.
If this isn’t a story fit for heroic myth, I don’t know what is.
I hope enough of us rise to the occasion.
