The Ruins to Come - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 87

Although our cultures will already be stricken, we will continue to par-
ticipate in them as if they still thrive. Several recent movies imagine that
ghosts are dead people who have not yet learned that they are dead; they
haunt the living because they are ignorant of their true condition. 100 In a
similar fashion, the world's societies, unaware of their actual state, may
soon become phantoms, enduring in a posthumous condition.
But this depiction of ghostly cultures may still not do justice to our
dilemma. For the most part, we tend to place these ruins in the future,
whether we are enjoying fictional tales or pondering scientific assess-
ments. We mostly assume that the major cultural dislocations caused
by climate change are yet to come. But in fact those changes are already
taking place. Some observers suggest that the dryer, hoter conditions in
the Darfur region of the Sudan helped create the conditions for conflict
and crimes against humanity there. 101 Alaskan towns built on permafrost
are tilting, their foundations cracking. 102 Countless farmers around the
world, including in the United States, are discovering that the seasonal
rhythms on which they once relied are being suspended.
We are already living in a ruined future, already enduring changes in
the biosphere for which we are not prepared. But why are we not ready?
Why should the arrival of this future surprise us? Evidently, even though
we are highly entertained with the thought of strange futures, project-
ing them endlessly in our fictions, we do not ultimately expect them to
arrive : when they do, they seem premature, catching us by surprise. The
very category of the future, it seems, floats in the distance; even if we
are oriented to it as the basis of our present actions, we keep it on the
other side of a conceptual wall, safeguarding the present from its arrival.
The same is true of the scientific study of what climate change might do:
while we may absorb what researchers tell us, their findings often remain
mere information to us, not a vivid reality in our ordinary lives. Even if
we know that climate change is happening and may devastate our homes,
we might not truly acknowledge this fact to ourselves. The arrival of that
future deprives us of the security and pleasure we take in contemplating
it in the distance, throwing the conceptual map of our lives into disarray.
When it arrives, it short-circuits what we thought we understood. Never
having lived through such a change before, we cannot know what it will