Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Roy Scranton I WON'T WASTE YOUR TIME with another litany of doom. Yes, statisticians at the University of Washington recently estimated there's a 95 percent chance the planet will exceed 2 degrees Celsius warming. Yes, current trajectories for CO2 emissions match the IPCC's worst-case scenarios, which predict we'll reach global temperature increases of 4 degrees Celsius or more by 2100, perhaps as early as 2061. And yes, leading ecologists and biologists have warned us that we face "a ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health, and climate-disruption upheavals (including looming massive migrations) and resource conflicts this century." But let's be honest: such abstractions have never seemed quite real. What does seem real are names like Dixie, Bootleg, August Complex, Caldor, Lionshead, Beachie Creek, Holiday Farm, and Hayman as forests across the American west turn into energy, pluming stored carbon into the sky, bloodying the sun half a continent away. Yet by what name do we call more than 400 million acres of burning Siberian taiga, releasing more carbon dioxide in three months than Germany does in a year? What sense can be made of the vast planetary transformation we euphemistically call "climate change" will only be apparent in the aftermath, to whatever survivor is lucky enough to find themselves picking through the charred rubble of a civilization so many of us publicly despise yet just as desperately cling to. But to get from here to there could take a hundred years—or a thousand—so even that comfort, the idea that someone will bear witness and rebuild, remains an abstraction. Meanwhile, here we are in the midst of it—or as Frank Kermode called it, the "middest"—with no better option than to keep stumbling backward into the future. Our dilemma: that we must see without sight, imagine without vision, hope without hope, and somehow persist even as we are consumed with grief and terror. [End Page 616] Grief and terror—or grief and error. The latter are two of the main themes of the last book from perhaps one of our last great "nature writers," Barry Lopez, who died from cancer in December 2020, after fleeing the Holiday Farm Fire, which took his home, his workshop, and his archive. That book, Horizon, tracks a lifetime of crossing beyond the limit of the known, in spite of the grief that inevitably arises and in spite of the fear of having gone awry that inevitably dogs the explorer's steps, all the more when, after five hundred years of Baconian scientific extraction and racialized colonial exploitation, we can no longer distinguish between exploring and oppressing. In this special issue, dedicated to the climate crisis and those being destroyed and changed by it, and dedicated as well to the memory of Barry Lopez, pride of place goes to Thoreau scholar Laura Walls, who traces the intellectual development of Lopez's lacerating, spiritual commitment to alterity, through Lopez's writerly encounters with Trappist monk Thomas Merton and the American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. We are also proud, humbled, and lucky to be publishing, for the first time and with the cooperation of Lopez's partner Debra Gwartney, a talk he gave in 1996 as part of the Three Rivers Lecture Series in Pittsburgh, where he discusses, with his characteristic passion and precision, just what exactly he sees the writer doing, or being able to do, in a time of precarity, dispossession, and ecological crisis—which, it's easy to forget, has been "our time" now for decades. "The best definition I ever encountered of what it meant to be a storyteller in a human society," Lopez writes, his voice echoing off the page, "is a translation of … the Inuktitut word for storyteller: isumataq. It means: the person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself." Lopez's avowed hope, as a writer in nature, was that in connecting "the interior landscape of the individual mind together with the shared exterior landscape of the physical earth, it is possible [End Page 617] to create a useful and enduring pattern of factual or emotional truth." It is our hope and luck, as editors and guest...