The Ruins to Come - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 84

end of a civilization? Not quite: that civilization will no doubt be endur-
ing in some form nearby, most likely in the observer herself. What, then,
will these ruins speak of ? The power of fossil-fuel civilization to put that
forest into irreversible decline.
It might work, then, to say that the forest speaks of the ruins of a civi-
lization. In that scene, then, a cultural disaster will be made visible in a
wounded ecosystem. But even that unusual feature does not fully capture
the strangeness of our future ruins. Normally when we think of ruins, we
do not imagine that the people who built them still live on in them; those
sites are abandoned and empty. No Caesars visit the Colosseum today
to witness gladiatorial contests; somewhere along the way, the inhabit-
ants of Rome gave up such spectacles and failed to maintain that ancient
structure. No soldiers now patrol along Hadrian's Wall; it lost its origi-
nal function, fell into disuse, and some of its stones were plundered for
other purposes. A certain cultural continuity was lost, but the physical
object remained. In contrast, we must imagine ourselves or our descen-
dants actually living in the ruins of the cities we built—or perhaps in
the less difficult regions nearby. In some sense, then, those future ruins
will be the opposite of the picturesque ruins of the past: we will outlive
the environments we have destroyed . The buildings we use will still serve
important cultural functions, we will still live in their vicinity, and yet
we face the prospect that eventually our use of them will no longer be
tenable. We would like to stay in our cities; we would hope to maintain
our traditions—yet our way of life will erode nevertheless. Strangely, that
way of life, thanks to the ecological consequences of its very “success,”
will end up interrupting itself , making itself unlivable and obsolete. After
we realize as much, however, we or those who follow us will still live on,
scrounging in the shadows of those ruins for habitation and sustenance.
We will be part of the ruins, eking out a damaged way of life.
No doubt others in the past have lived through something like this
experience. When enemies took over a city, burned it, and destroyed its
sacred places, those who lived there know they witnessed the passing of
their way of life. But they never doubted that the lives at least of their ene-
mies would go on. When civilizations exhausted their surrounding envi-
ronments, outliving the resources available to them—whether in ancient
Mesopotamia or the Yucatan—people certainly lamented the passing