Nuclear Man and Climate Woman

How to be human when the future disappears, with help from Wendell Berry and Henri Nouwen.

Ash tree seedlings in our garden

I’ve been feeling a lot of climate anxiety recently. I’m sure I’m not the only one. It is becoming an old friend, this rising black dread. I am learning not to run from it, or try and numb it, but to tend it, to apply the medicines which work. For me, this is prayer, surrender, breathing, receiving this day as the gift it is, paying attention to beauty (mainly in plants) and a certain amount of actual apocalypse prepping. It’s a bit lonely, because finding people who can bear to talk about this feeling without descending into panic is rare, and understandings of exactly how much trouble we are in vary wildly.

I’ve found some weird comfort reading Henri Nouwen’s book, The Wounded Healer, published in 1994. It is a classic for those engaged in any kind of pastoral work, but it starts with some cultural analysis. The defining factor for Nouwen in the context of the early nineties was what he called ‘Nuclear Man’. This is the person who, in the aftermath of the Cold War, “has lost naive faith in the possibilities of technology and is painfully aware that the same powers that enable man to create new lifestyles carry the potential for self-destruction.” Nuclear man lives amongst abundance, but gropes fruitlessly through a dark jumble of ideologies for meaning and purpose. The scale of human power, our ability to not just create but destroy, is overwhelming, and has done funny things to the future. For him, “the problem is not that the future holds a new danger, such as nuclear war, but that there might be no future at all”. They believe themselves to be the “last ones in the experiment of living”. A sense of continuity with the past has disappeared, so they live in what artist Jenny Odell calls “the constant, amnesiac present”, operating under the assumption that the future won’t exist. Nouwen warns of the existential acedia this can bring, the way it makes people passive and listless, feeling victims “of an extremely complex technological bureaucracy”. Nuclear man, because they cannot locate themselves with any stability in time, is simply drifting discontentedly towards death.

I do not want to be Nuclear Man, or it’s current equivalent, Climate (or indeed AI Singularity) Woman. The soul-work I want to do involves learning how to become a fully alive, outward looking, brave and loving human now, in these times. I feel the absence of the future, the way my imagination can’t paint a picture of the world around my children when they are their twenties, let alone their fifties. Our stories of the future have been so dominated by dystopias in recent decades, I don’t know how to let myself believe this could go well, in this life at least.

It is obviously striking how much the Nuclear Man of three decades ago has echoes with how many feel now. It tempts me to reach for that comforting sense that all generations think they are the last, but they have never been right yet. This is true. It does not, sadly, mean that we can all relax and assume things will potter on nicely (I think almost all the evidence points to this being vanishingly unlikely) but it does remind me to take care how this moment forms me. Change is a given. It always have been, we are just experiencing it at warp speed. Given it might well be the end of the world as I have known it, the end of the world I assumed my children would live in, what story do I need to steady myself in? How can I find a way to be, here, in the unstable inbetween?

I’d love to hear how you are making meaning of this time, what stories you are able to locate yourself in. Many of mine are drawn from my tradition, especially the Christian scriptures which assumed that the end of the world was just around the corner. Maybe - if we can avoid the temptation of the passive/despairing shut down which defined Nuclear Man - there is something important about learning to live as if the future is not a given, something clarifying.

I am also finding a way to locate myself in time in what is by now a sort of secondary sacred text, the poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front by Wendell Berry. I’ve read it every day this week, like a liturgy. Please, please read the whole text, then read it again, and probably leave that window open in your browser. This is the section most alive for me right now:

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

………

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

I can’t imagine the future, but I could plant a little tree. Here in our South London micro-community we have no sequoias, but there are ash seedlings growing in the gutters of our garage-turned chapel, tender green possibilities. In the UK, Ash Dieback means we are losing many of these ancient, symbolically rich trees from our landscape. Our three ash trees - the muses of our community - are currently in glorious health, sequestered as they are here between tight terraces of houses in the middle of the city. Maybe their babies could be part of a rescue plan. Planting them is an act of defiance, anyway, against despair. It is a tiny anchor thrown forward into the future.

These are the things I am saying to myself this week: Expect the end of the world, but tend the world anyway. Take a deep breath, say whatever kind of prayer you can, put your roots down deep into Love and be joyful, though you have considered all the facts. And whatever you do, Elizabeth Oldfield (dear reader?) don’t become Nuclear Man.