We're Doomed. Now What? Page 4

  As different as these thinkers are, though, they share a few key ideas. First, they all argue against what Meillassoux calls correlationism, the idea that human access to reality is limited to mere correlation between things-in-themselves and our thoughts about them. Our access to reality, they each insist in their own way, is more mysterious and complicated than just finding the circle-shaped thought for the circle-shaped thing. Second, for all these thinkers, things in the world have their own vitality independent of their relations to humans. A spoon has its own reality, as does an ocelot, a painting by Redon, or a Panamax container ship. Objects don’t need human subjects to be meaningful, they argue, not even objects made by humans. Third, these thinkers all believe ontology trumps epistemology. Instead of asking how we can know things, that is, they insist we should be asking what it means for things to exist in the first place. The signature move that ties all this together is the willingness to indulge in speculative metaphysics—pondering what reality, deep down, really is. Spurning both mainstream analytic philosophy and the critical Marxist-Hegelian tradition, these thinkers have decided that what the world needs from philosophy isn’t analysis, interpretation, or even transformation, but imagination.

  Whether or not any of this makes any sense will depend on whom you ask. While speculative realism has generated a lot of buzz in literature departments and art magazines, its coherence and influence remain much debated. Some argue that object-oriented ontology is just a new way to fetishize commodities, especially the ones we call art. Others argue that the ideas behind speculative realism are specious and ignorant of the philosophical tradition. Climate scientists and academic philosophers, meanwhile, have hardly seemed to notice that speculative realism exists.

  One of the reasons speculative realism exerts such a draw on artistic and literary types, I suspect, is because its thinkers make interesting aesthetic choices. This is especially true of Morton, who has a gift for the phrase. His book titles, capsule formulations of the ideas they elaborate, rumble with portent. Consider Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, or Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Indeed, on the page Morton is a dizzying, acrobatic thinker; to read him is to take a wild ride through Romantic poetry, Western philosophy, literary theory, and climate change—imagine Slavoj Žižek on psilocybin.

  In person, Morton is gentle, funny, and self-effacing, equal parts Oxbridge and cybergoth. We drove out to the ship channel in his white Mazda. As we rose and fell through the soaring grandeur of Houston’s swooping highway exchanges, we talked about writing practice and work-life balance: Morton had two books coming out in 2016 and was writing two more, and when he’s not busy writing, spending time with his kids, giving lectures, blogging, or collaborating with Björk, he teaches courses on literary theory and “Arts in the Anthropocene” at Rice University, where he holds the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English.

  Turning off the highway, we descended into the petro-industrial gray zone that sprawls from Houston to the sea. A Port of Houston security guard checked our IDs, and we drove past hundred-foot-long turbine blades, massive shafts, and what looked like pieces of giant disassembled robots. I asked Tim how he liked living in Houston.

  “This is the dirty coast,” he said. “Dirty in the sense that something’s wrong. We’re holding this horrible, necessary energy substance, and it’s like working in an emergency room or a graveyard or a charnel ground. You’re basically working with corpses, with fossils from millions of years ago, you’re working with deadly toxic stuff all the time, stuff that has very intense emotion connected to it. If I was going to find a word that described Texan-ness, I’d use the word ‘wild’—phenomenologically, emotionally, experientially wild.”

  We parked and boarded the MV Sam Houston. As the boat spun away from the pier and headed east, Tim and I went out on deck. Across the brown-black water enormous claws and magnets shifted scrap metal from one heap to another, throwing up clouds of metal dust, while the engine thrummed through my feet and the wind whipped across the mike of my voice recorder.

  “The thing is,” Tim said, “being aware of ecological facts is the very opposite of thinking about or looking at or talking about nature. Nature is always conceptualized as an entity that’s different or distinct from me somehow. It’s in my DNA, it’s under my clothes, it’s under the floorboards, it’s in the wilderness. It’s everywhere except for right here. But ecology means it’s in your face. It is your face. It’s part of you and you’re part of it.”

  Several industrial recycling companies line the upper reaches of the Houston Ship Channel, including Derichebourg Recycling USA, Texas Port Recycling, and Cronimet USA, all recognized emitters of one of the most potent carcinogens known to science, hexavalent chromium. Behind the giant cranes and heaps of scrap lies the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of Magnolia Park, whose residents have long complained of unexplained smoke and gas emissions, persistent pollution, and strange, multicolored explosions.

  “The simplest way of describing that is ecology without nature,” Tim continued. “That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in things like coral. I believe in coral much more than someone who thinks that coral is this ‘natural’ thing. Coral is a life form that’s connected to other forms. Everything’s connected. And how we think about stuff is connected to the stuff. How you think about stuff, how you perceive stuff, is entangled with what you’re perceiving.”

  In among the recycling yards sat Brady’s Landing, a steak-and-shrimp restaurant. Through its plate-glass windows, dozens of empty white tables shone like pearls in black velvet. I imagined diners eating crab-stuffed trout, watching the water rise up over the Ceres wharfs across the channel, rise up over the pilings at the edge of Brady’s Island, rise up over the restaurant’s foundations and up the windows, one foot, two feet, six feet, and the glass would crack, creak, and burst open, and the tide would rush in over fine leather shoes and French cuffs and napkin-covered laps and lift them, the diners, their tables, plates, pinot noir, and crab-stuffed trout, lift them and spin them in a rich and strange ballet.

  “It’s like when you realize you’re actually a life form,” Tim said. “I’m Tim but I’m also a human. That sounds obvious but it isn’t. I’m Tim but I’ve also got these bits of fish and viral material inside me, that are me. That’s not a nice, cozy experience; it’s an uncanny, weird experience. But there’s a kind of smile from that experience, because ecological reality is like that. Ecological phenomena are all about loops, feedback loops, and this very tragic loop we’re on where we’re destroying Earth as we know it.”

  Interstate Highway 610 loomed above, eighteen-wheelers and SUVs rolling through the sky. In the distance, gas flares flashed against the cloud cover. Pipes fed into pipes that wrapped back into pipes circling pipes, Escher machines in aluminum and steel.

  “Ecological thinking is about never being able to be completely in the center of your world. It’s about everything seeming out of place and unreal. That’s the feel of dark ecology. But it isn’t just about human awareness: it’s about how everything has this uncanny, looped quality to it. It’s actually part of how things are. So it’s about being horrified and upset and traumatized and shocked by what we’ve been up to as human beings, and it’s about realizing that this basic feeling of twistedness isn’t going away.”

  A voice boomed out from the bowels of the boat as we broke from the highway’s shadow: “First refinery to the right is Valero. This refinery began operations in 1942. It will handle 145,000 barrels of oil per day.” Directly behind Valero lay Hartman Park, with its green lawns and baseball diamonds—the jewel of Manchester, one of the most polluted neighborhoods in the United States. Manchester is blocked in on the north by Valero, and on the east, south, and west by a chemical plant, a car-crushing yard, a water treatment plant, a train yard, Interstate 610, and a Goodyear synthetic rubber plant. In 2010,
the EPA found toxic levels of seven different carcinogens in the neighborhood. The area is 88 percent Hispanic.

  “At some point,” Tim said, “instead of trying to delete the twisty darkness, you have to make friends with it. And when you make friends with it, it becomes strangely sweet.”

  Imagine Greenland. Imagine Kellogg Brown & Root. Imagine Uber, the Svalbard Seed Vault, a roadkill raccoon, six months in juvie, Green Revolution, amnesia. Imagine ZZ Top. Imagine White Oak Bayou flooding its banks. Imagine Mexican gardeners wielding Weed Eaters. Imagine boom and bust, the murmur of Diane Rehm, sizzurp, a sick coot, Juneteenth, coral bleaching, amnesia. Imagine losing Shanghai, New York, and Mumbai. Imagine “In the Mood.” Imagine amnesia.

  From Houston, the ship channel goes south through Galveston Bay, cutting a trench approximately 530 feet wide and 45 feet deep through the estuary bottom to where it passes into the Gulf of Mexico. As you follow the channel south along I-45, strip clubs and fast-food franchises give way to bayou resorts and refineries, until the highway finally leaps into the air, soaring over the water with the pelicans. It comes down again in downtown Galveston, once known as the Wall Street of the South: a mix of historic homes, dry-docked oil rigs, beach bars, and the University of Texas Medical Branch. The gulf spreads sullen and muddy to the south, its greasy skin broken by distant blisters of flaming steel.

  Galveston Bay is a Texas paradox. One of the most productive estuaries in the United States, it offers up huge catches of shrimp, blue crab, oysters, croaker, flounder, and catfish and supports dozens of other kinds of fish, turtles, dolphins, salamanders, sharks, and snakes, as well as hundreds of species of birds. Yet the bay is heavily polluted, so full of PCBs, pesticides, dioxin, and petrochemicals that fishing is widely restricted. The bay is Houston’s shield, protecting it from the worst of the Gulf Coast’s weather by absorbing storm surges and soaking up rainfall, but hydrologists at Rice University are worried that it might also be Houston’s doom: The wide, shallow basin could, under the right conditions, supercharge a storm surge right up the ship channel.

  The fight to protect Houston and Galveston from storms has been going on for more than a century, ever since Galveston built a seventeen-foot seawall after the Great Storm of 1900, a Category 4 hurricane that killed an estimated ten to twelve thousand people. The fight has been mainly reactive, always planning for the last big storm, rarely for the next. The levees around Texas City, for instance, were built after Hurricane Carla submerged the chemical plants there in ten feet of water in 1961. Today, Hurricane Ike, which hit Texas in 2008, offers the object lesson.

  Hurricane Ike was a lucky hit with unlucky timing. Forecasts had the hurricane landing at the southern end of Galveston Island, and if they’d been right, Ike would have looked a lot like Isaiah. Instead, in the early morning hours of September 13, 2008, Ike bent north and hit Galveston dead on, which shifted the most damaging winds east. The sparsely populated Bolivar Peninsula was flattened, but Houston came out okay.

  Still, Ike killed nearly fifty people in Texas alone, left thousands homeless, and was the third costliest hurricane in American history. It would have been the ideal moment for Texas to ask Congress to fund a comprehensive coastal protection system. But that Monday, September 15, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in United States history, and the next day the Federal Reserve stepped in to save the failing insurance behemoth AIG with an $85 billion bailout. Nature’s fury took a back seat to the crisis of capital.

  Since then, two main research teams have led the way in preparing for the next big storm: Bill Merrell’s “Ike Dike” team at Texas A&M Galveston (TAMUG), and the SSPEED Center at Rice University, led by Phil Bedient and Jim Blackburn. Despite shared goals, though, the relationship between the two teams hasn’t always been easy. Bill Merrell’s cantankerous personality and obsessive drive to protect Galveston have clashed with SSPEED’s complex, interdisciplinary, Houston-centric approach.

  Dr. Merrell’s Ike Dike has the blessing of simplicity, which softens the sticker shock: It is estimated to cost between $6 billion and $13 billion. The plan is to build a fifty-five-mile-long “coastal spine” along the gulf. The plan’s main disadvantage is that a strong enough hurricane could still flood the Houston Ship Channel, because of what Dr. Bedient calls the Lake Okeechobee effect.

  “The Okeechobee hurricane came into Florida in 1928 and sloshed water to a twenty-foot surge,” Dr. Bedient explained. “Killed two thousand people. But Lake Okeechobee is unconnected to the coast. It was just wind. Galveston Bay has the same dimensions and depth as Lake Okeechobee in Florida. So imagine we block off Galveston Bay with a coastal spine, and we have a Lake Okeechobee.”

  Dr. Bedient worked on the Murphy’s Oil spill in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, where flooding from Hurricane Katrina ruptured a storage tank, releasing more than a million gallons of oil, and ruined approximately 1,800 homes. One of Dr. Bedient’s biggest worries is what a storm might do to the estimated 4,500 similar tanks surrounding Houston, many of them along the Ship Channel. If even 2 percent of those tanks were to fail because of storm surge, the results would be catastrophic.

  The SSPEED Center advocates a layered defense, including a midbay gate that could be closed during a storm to protect the channel. On its face, the plan seems unwieldy, but SSPEED’s models show it could stop most of the surge from going up the ship channel, with or without the Ike Dike, at an estimated cost of only a few billion dollars.

  On the government side, various entities are at work in the ponderous and opaque way of American bureaucracy. The US Army Corps of Engineers has its own research and development process and is working on a study of the Galveston-Houston area as part of its more comprehensive Gulf Coast research agenda, which could, eventually, lead to a recommendation for further studies, feasibility and cost-benefit analyses, environmental impact reports, and perhaps someday a project, which, were it funded by Congress, might even get built. One must be patient. It took the Army Corps of Engineers twenty-six years to build the Texas City Levee. When Katrina hit New Orleans and breached the levee system there, the Corps had been working on it since 1965, and it was still under construction.

  Meanwhile, the Gulf Coast Community Protection and Recovery District is working to synthesize SSPEED and TAMUG’s work into its own proposal. The GCCPRD was established by Texas governor Rick Perry in 2009, in the wake of Ike, but wasn’t funded until 2013, when the Texas General Land Office stepped in with a federal grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The GCCPRD board comprises county judges from Brazoria, Chambers, Galveston, Harris, Jefferson, and Orange counties, three additional members, and a president, currently former Harris County judge Robert Eckels, and has hired Dannenbaum Engineering, a local company with a strong track record in public infrastructure, to put the report together. The GCCPRD takes its lead from the GLO, headed today by Commissioner George P. Bush, and the specific language of the HUD grant restricts their work to analysis and general-level planning. Any more specific plans will have to come later, pending additional funding.

  If there’s one thing Houston can teach us about the Anthropocene, it’s that all global warming is local. I went down myself to see representatives from all of these organizations—the USACE, SSPEED, TAMUG, the GLO, and the GCCPRD, plus the Texas Chemical Council and the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership—testify before the State of Texas Joint Interim Committee on Coastal Barrier Systems (JICCBS), a special committee of the Texas state legislature, held at the TAMUG campus in Galveston.

  Over five hours of presentations, talking points, and questions, a rough sense of the future began to take shape. As I sat in the back row listening to politicians ask about how various projects might affect insurance rates, how long different projects might take to build, and how the pitch could be put to the US Congress asking for the billions of dollars needed, I imagined a single white feather, numinous in the golden light of the Power Point, drift
across the conference room, float over the heads of the senators, administrators, and scientists, and rise, rise, rise on an ever expanding wave of confidence.

  What obstacles might have remained between this roomful of committed public servants and the building of one of the largest coastal infrastructure projects in the world seemed for a moment insubstantial. The fact that environmental impact studies taking years to complete had yet to be started, that any of the land in question would have to be bought or seized under eminent domain, that all the planning at this stage was merely notional and actual designs would have to be bid on, contracted out, and approved, that there was no governmental agency in place to take responsibility for a coastal barrier system and maintain it, much less build it, and that somebody still had to come up with the money, somewhere, perhaps somehow convincing divided Republicans and embattled Democrats in the US Congress to send a bunch of Texas pols and their cronies a check for $13 billion—these were all mere details, nothing to worry about. I felt sure the political will manifest in that conference room would find a way.

  And I had total confidence that those same feelings of goodwill, pragmatism, and accomplishment would be found, more or less, at the next Joint Interim Committee on Coastal Barrier Systems meeting, and the next academic conference on “Avoiding Disaster,” and the next policy symposium on energy transition, and the next global conference on sea-level rise, and the next plenary on carbon trading, and the next colloquium on the Anthropocene, and the next Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, and journalists would report on it, and philosophers would ponder it, and activists would tweet about it, and concerned people like you would read about it. The problem is, it’s not enough.