Mian Crist

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152 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 26 Jul

Mian Crist’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Close Readings · Nature in Crisis: ‘Impasse’ by Roy Scranton · 26 Jul 2026 podcast

Welcome to the eighth episode in this series of close readings for the LRB, Nature in Crisis, hosted by me, Mian Crist, writer-in-residence in biological sciences at Columbia University.

So together, we've been discussing books that grapple with a really big question.

How do the massive effects of human actions on our planet, the actions of some far more than others, relate to the larger history of life on Earth?

And because this question is so big, we decided early on it would be important to include books by writers from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds.

So far, we've read books by a physicist, a science journalist, an historian, among others.

And the book we'll discuss today, Impasse, Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, is written by Roy Scranton, who is a prolific writer of essays, fiction and nonfiction, who for this book is essentially writing about climate as a literary critic in the environmental humanities.

Among his many honors and accolades, Scranton was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Literary Criticism in 2024, and in Impasse, he has turned these considerable skills onto the question of how to live well in what he sees as a time of profound environmental and civilizational crisis.

So for Scranton, the answer is to embrace what he calls ethical pessimism.

We'll get into what he means by this in a moment.

But first, Peter, perhaps you could tell us a bit more about Scranton and the general shape of the book?

Yeah, I think that's a great overview.

And there's so many facets to this argument and so many different directions he goes in and so many different sources he draws on and disciplines he turns toward.

But there is a very clear overarching argument, which is basically things are going to be very, very bad.

And we don't know what the world is going to look like afterward.

How do you, as a human, live inside that knowledge in some kind of ethical way?

I think it's interesting maybe just to start with the preface of the book.

There's this Chaco Canyon section where I think it really sets the tone for the book and offers an argument that really undergirds what follows.

In this preface, he describes visiting the ruins of what was a once vibrant Puebloan civilization in Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert.

And to be fair, nobody really knows what happened to this civilization, but clearly it was large, it was complex, it was geographically expansive.

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