Bad Buddhist: Roy Scranton's "Learning to Die in the Anthropocene"

Roy Scranton is an American writer, veteran, professor at the University of Notre Dame, and alumnus of the New School. Scranton has won the Theresa A. White Literary Award for short fiction in 2009, Mrs. Giles G. Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities in 2014, and Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2017. Scranton draws upon his time and knowledge of the US Army and his time deployed in Iraq when discussing climate change in his books such as We’re Doomed. Now What? (2018). The book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) shares the title with the article we read; the 2013 essay on which the book was originally based was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014. In the essay “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,” first published in the Revealer in 2015 as “Climate Change and the Dharma of Failure” and reprinted in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle in 2018, Scranton provocatively writes as a “bad Buddhist” and “bad environmentalist.” 

Scranton's main claim in the essay, one that we feel is no longer open to debate, is that we have entered a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. And with that, we must learn how to shed the values of what once was – the Holocene. “Learning How to Die in The Anthropocene” not only explains that our world is changing – rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather disasters -- but also shows that all life is threatened. How humans respond to the forever changing world will determine future outcomes. Complicit in this destruction, we must “learn to die” not as individuals, but as a civilization. Civilization as we know it was not around before the Holocene. We must learn to apply what Scranton wrote to our daily lives. 

The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality. 

Discussing climate change in relation to Buddhism, Scranton poses the question “how will we choose to live out our inevitable failure?” Although it is a privilege to be able to choose how we fail, he argues, there is freedom within it. We as a generation have inherited centuries of humanity’s failures that contributed to the current epoch. While we did not choose this crisis we still have to figure out ways to ameliorate it. Scranton suggests that the first step in trying to obtain this freedom is recognizing failure is inevitable – an awareness that isn’t exclusive to the worrying threat of the Anthropocene. Facing this question, maybe through meditation and self observation, can further a dialog within ourselves on climate change and lifestyle changes. Starting with his bold assertion that he’s a “bad Buddhist,” Scranton problematizes the way we tend to focus self-defeatingly on the individual “I” and our individual problems in response to our failures in living ecologically. Perhaps we should be choosing how we respond to failure as a community. 

The problems of the current environmental climate crisis are obvious, because we have brought the consequences upon ourselves. We know that over the course of the Holocene, humans have taken complete advantage of the stable climate. The Holocene was a very rare time for Earth. Never before in Earth's history has the climate achieved this harmonious balance to allow humans to not only thrive, but take over the history of the planet: to strip land of its natural resources. To domesticate animals. To produce food at an industrial scale, etc. Taking advantage of the stable climate led to exploiting the natural world and manipulating the natural processes of the Earth. Humans became epoch engineers, unwittingly pushing the world into a completely new era of instability. Before the Holocene, humans were hunters and gatherers. They moved with the animals and with the warm weather for the sake of survival. We bring this up because the ability to adapt and evolve is still in the DNA of humans. We, as a species, can take the steps necessary to accept that there is no going back to the stable world that once was, if we choose to. Learning how to die in the Anthropocene is learning how to let go of old ways, more than anything else. Most people don’t prefer change, but we can't help thinking that our generation was chosen for this change. We were chosen to face what previous generations have manifested upon this current society, and to rise to replace it with renewed respect for the natural world. 

(JC and JD)

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