The word “Anthropocene” describes a geological age in which humans, through their activities, have an outsized impact on climate and the environment. Paradoxically, because of these same impacts, humans can no longer rely on living within the predictability of natural systems.
Recent flash flooding in Europe and Asia, massive wildfires throughout the Amazon, the devastation wrought by hurricane Helene, and the rise in mean planetary surface and ocean water temperatures that are bringing some places to the edges of habitability, all throw into stark relief the meaning of survival.
The acceleration of climate change forces us into a fundamental revision of the planet’s condition and overturns our concept of survivorship. Our capacity for innovation allows us to adapt rapidly to changing natural and modified environments, but the limitations of our physiological and metabolic realities are more implicated in our survival than the ways we may hope to use innovation to surpass them.
What survives of us under our current and forecasted circumstances?
Since the Enlightenment, Western civilization’s confidence in its dominion over the physical world has outpaced its willingness and capacity to protect it. The Promethean successes of the sciences in explaining and manipulating the natural world has formed a distorted understanding of it, constrained by their purpose, methods, and principles.
The origins of that hubris emerged some 200,000 years ago, when Homo Sapiens began to use language to communicate. Despite our lack of a protective coat, scales, large teeth, sharp nails or powerful mandibles, the power of abstraction and future-thinking facilitated our emergence as an apex predator and reset the probabilities of our survivability. The consequence of those abstractions, in non-Indigenous cultures, however, has led to a disconnect and dislocation from the natural world and put us in a relationship of antagonism.
To outwit and outlast
In this context, we might reflect on what survival means, as industrialized nations continue to contaminate earth, water, and air on a global scale. Who and what survives? What survives of us under our current and forecasted circumstances? Industrialized nations make this calculus on behalf of infinitely complex systems of organisms, hydrology, and human and animal relations who have not consented to their placement in the balance of risk.
In the West, we admire most those who outwit and outlast. Our valorization of the nobility of perseverance and resilience explains the fixed place of Homer’s Odyssey in Western literarature, the proliferation of endurance running and multi-stage cycling events, and the perennial popularity of survivor-type reality shows.
To call someone a survivor is to declare the value of their continued existence.
We do little moralizing about sole survivors, however lucky or depraved their means to stay alive. We seldom register that score, because the sole survivor represents a breach of natural law and so is beyond its recrimination. In the face of the miracle of persistence against all odds, we tend to forgive a lot.
There are plenty of things people survive: cancer, sexual or physical assault, torture, vehicular accidents, genocides, natural disasters, animal attacks, drug overdoses, falling from significant heights, lightning strikes, wars. To call someone a survivor is to declare the value of their continued existence. The Global North does not refer to those seeking refuge from the most climate-impacted countries in the Global South as survivors, but as “economic migrants,” valued only in terms of their capacity to participate in a global economy.
Grieving non-humans
Beyond the animals we own and domesticate, we seldom see individual animals in the natural world as grievable, as survivors. We don’t count them as survivors of natural disasters, hunting, poaching, or our devastating incursions into their habitats. We count the number that remain rather than those that have ceased to exist – until they are gone. And even then, their ceasing is something our imaginations can ill conceive of or fathom.
To survive is to exist beyond one’s past. To survive is to grieve a world left behind. Our dominance has led to the accelerated diminishment and disappearance of countless plant and animal species. This erasure of the more-than-human extends to other humans whose survival is measured as less worthy or worthwhile.
How do we grieve for entire species and ecosystems?
The call of the last Kaua’i ‘ō’ō bird was recorded for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. That lone bird sang for his mate that would never come. How do we grieve that one bird? How do we grieve for entire species and ecosystems? In this realm, we are grief-illiterate.
African elephant survivors on this planet number roughly 415,000. Only 5000 eastern gorillas survive. There are currently somewhere between 23,000 and 39,000 lions in the world. In North America, 60,000 grizzly bears have survived, 14,000 of them in BC. The numbers and names assigned to each of the surviving 79 southern resident orcas in BC represent the anthropomorphizing of their extinction. L25 Ocean Sun is the oldest southern resident orca. Tokitae (Lolita), his last surviving relative, died in captivity in 2003 at the Miami Sea Aquarium.
Survival can be generative and transformational only if the survivor rejects becoming solely an historian to their survival and rejects becoming dead to their own lifetime. Survivor reality shows would have us believe we are watching something spontaneous and authentic. Their deception is very much a reflection of the corporate and political drivers of our climate emergency.
Actual survivorship is neither scripted nor performative. In the Anthropocene, it demands nothing less than a rupture, a revolutionary restructuring and decolonization of our minds, economies, and societies to align our collective impact with the planet’s natural constraints. In this era, we must not be sole survivors.
Sidney Coles holds two PhDs. She is a journalist and writer and lives in Victoria on the traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən people.
