Han KangThe White Book

Abstract

most venal, which means that institutionalized corruption simply exacerbates local social inequalities. Further, the carbon offsets , hedges, and funds that reward investment in capital-intensive green industries can only be fully taken advantage of by those who already wield great financial influence. Even worse, such policies, when coupled with regulatory obligations and punitive laws, may drive small and medium enterprises out of business, resulting in concentrations of wealth, resources, and capital in financial oligopolies. Ervine points out, with almost alarming clarity, that the growth built on globalization has a foundation in unsustainable consumerism. The more we build our economies on consumption, the more we produce . It’s a Malthusian disaster, not just in terms of population, but in the logarithmic growth of greenhouse gases, climate change, and mounds of plastics. While the highgrowth industrializing economies of China and India have improved their citizens’ income prospects, they have also spurred consumption. The environmental utopians have claimed a “small is beautiful” solution by limiting consumption. However, Ervine shows the reader just how a transition from a carbon-based consumption-driven economy would spell the collapse of the world’s financial system. However, Ervine does give examples, such as Canada, Costa Rica, and Uruguay, where their economies have established transitions or pathways using renewables. The examples are encouraging, except they do not seem to work without ample alternative energy, infrastructure, and a low level of corruption. Further, successful implementation requires a central government and sufficient funds dedicated to building appropriate architecture and to enforcing energy-transitional behaviors. It’s hard to keep from envisioning a dystopian implementation of a utopian aspiration: surveillance, AI-driven monitoring, “social credit” scores, and worse. In reading Ervine’s text, it is clear we can’t transcend our narratives and their deterministic forms and predictable outcomes . Most narratives used in conjunction with carbon tend to be apocalyptic. There is also the “jeremiad,” which refers to the biblical account of Jeremiah, who urged sinners to repent before the imminent end of the world. The use of the jeremiad facilitates the rise of a charismatic leader, and with his/her emotional appeals comes the blinding of objectivity and a strong need to remain with the group of “true believers.” Other narratives that are employed with the carbon narratives tend to perpetuate cognitive bias and encourage confirmation bias and groupthink. What is masked is the fact that we still are not able to transcend our postmodernist condition of extreme skepticism about the narratives used to construct reality. The narratives used to unify will also be used to subvert. The tight emotional and intellectual control required in the continual manufacture of the dominant culture’s notion of reality contains embedded narratives of resistance and subversion. This is the carbon narrative in operation. Perhaps that is why Ervine’s final section on pathways toward a sustainable future and her statement that “the collective is essential to democratic ecologies” makes one wish she had described the kinds of political structures and incentives needed. Our current institutions have been shown to simply perpetuate or exacerbate social inequality and pollution. So, how do we arrive at a collective ability to implement “climate justice”? Ervine’s book suggests the answer is in pathways to be developed, hopefully soon. To do so, we need to rebuild carbon narratives. University of Oklahoma Susan Smith Nash earned her PhD in English at the University of Oklahoma where her dissertation examined apocalyptic narratives in literary, film, and cultural texts. She has combined her passion for creative expression with petroleum geology to develop programs that promote innovation, science, and technology. Han Kang The White Book Trans. Deborah Smith. New York. Hogarth. 2019. 160 pages. Han Kang’s The White Book is a meditation on grief using a study of white objects in the author’s life to spark memories of events she did—and did not—experience, specifically the birth and deaths of her older sister (and a quickly mentioned older brother, who also succumbed to premature birth) and their mother. The book’s focus on white originates from the little that Kang—the third child of her mother but the first to live beyond a few hours—knew of her onni...