Nature in Crisis: ‘Impasse’ by Roy Scranton
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What is the focus of this Close Readings episode on Roy Scranton's Impasse?
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.
And me, Peter Godfrey-Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney.
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 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?
Who is Roy Scranton and how does his background shape Impasse?
Sure. He's an interesting person. He grew up in Oregon and sort of roamed as a young man. He joined the army, served in Iraq, and after that moved into academia. He is now an associate professor of English at Notre Dame, where he's also the founding director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative. He's written quite a few books, including a couple of novels, I Love Oklahoma and War Porn, and various nonfiction books, including two climate-focused books that are precursors to the one we'll discuss today, a collection of essays called We're Doomed, Now What?, and another one called Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. The book we're discussing today, Impasse, he says, differs from Learning to Die in the Anthropocene in that it is a more pessimistic book, despite the title of the earlier one.
And this really is a pessimistic book. Let's just go through the rough structure here. The long part one called The Broken Thread lays out the idea that global civilization has arrived not just at a problem or a network of problems, but what he calls an impasse. It's a particular kind of problem as he sees it. That is, he thinks, intractable. He thinks we have little hope of overcoming a network of problems involving climate change, perhaps first and foremost, but also habitat destruction, global political problems of various kinds that make action on the other problems especially difficult. He thinks this impasse is a sort of thoroughgoing, large-scale, historically very unusual problem in its complexity.
He talks about that and also criticizes what he sees as a pervasive bias towards optimism. and a civilizational faith in a myth of progress. He thinks that we pretty much, we reliably, almost inevitably in virtue of how we've been brought up and encultured into contemporary society, think there will be a fix. We think there'll be a solution, even though the problems that we face are so extraordinary. And in this first group of chapters, he argues that we have to abandon that kind of myth of progress and the bias towards optimism. And then in the second large part of the book, he embraces, essentially, he embraces pessimism. He tries to work out how we might live in a rational and humane way as pessimists, as people who don't think there's a way out.
How does Scranton define an 'impasse' and why is complexity central?
The overall framework he defends he calls ethical pessimism. There's also an afterword, but the heart of the book is that first collection of chapters in which he describes the problems as he sees them, and the second part in which he tries to outline a defensible and ethical form of pessimism.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the focus of this Close Readings episode on Roy Scranton's Impasse?
0:00–1:36
2
Who is Roy Scranton and how does his background shape Impasse?
1:36–4:38
3
How does Scranton define an 'impasse' and why is complexity central?
4:38–6:08
4
How does the Chaco Canyon example illustrate societal collapse from complexity?
6:08–7:51
5
What is Tainter's theory of diminishing returns on complexity and how does Scranton use it?
7:51–10:50
6
Why does Scranton argue optimism and the myth of progress are problematic?
10:50–12:50
7
What does 'ethical pessimism' mean and how might humans live with it?
12:50–14:52
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Close Readings
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Nature in Crisis: ‘Lessons for Survival’ by Emily Raboteau
Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Pnin’ by Vladimir Nabokov
London Revisited: Pepys, Plague and Fire