This opinion was written by David Huebert and was published in the Globe & Mail on June 22, 2024.
Mainstream environmentalism has often marshalled fear as a motivational tactic, believing it will lead to action. But while climate fear is everywhere now, action remains lethargic at best.
Dramatic images of environmental destruction may shock some people into action, but they can also promote a certain kind of apathetic paralysis, David Huebert writes
David Huebert is a Halifax-based fiction mentor at the University of King’s College and the author of Oil People and Chemical Valley.
The world is burning, we are told. Part of what popularized the slogan was Bill Nye’s 2019 appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, where Mr. Nye grew heated and accusatory about climate apathy, using a blowtorch to ignite a spinning globe and barking with expletives that the planet is on fire. One headline summarized Mr. Nye’s speech: “The Earth is on Fire, and Bill Nye the Science Guy is Angry About It.” Another: “Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn, But Definitely Not Bill Nye.” At a book awards gala in 2022, I heard a professor receiving an award use the phrase several times in their acceptance speech. To paraphrase: As the world burned, I did important research.
There is a particular, peculiar feeling that arises from confrontation with wildfire imagery: a gut-rot amalgam of panic and awe that I think of as climate queasiness. Last June, in the midst of Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, the CBC posted a video of meteorologist Johanna Wagstaffe that asked whether the country’s recent string of wildfires had started at the same time. What interests me is the accompanying image of Ms. Wagstaffe superimposed over a blazing forest fire. I am fascinated by this image because it is at once unsettling, fear-inducing and wobblingly deranged, quasi-hallucinogenic.
In this image, Ms. Wagstaffe queasily reflects a familiar emotional state during this time of entangled crises. Her head, like a cardboard cut-out, is glitchily superimposed, creating an unintentionally comedic dissonance. The boundary-collapsing photo models a phantasmagoric collision between the virtual and the lived, as if the reporter herself might actually be singed. She is stuck, arrested, as the fire draws closer, and we, the viewer, are supposed to know that the fire is both real and virtual. Like philosopher Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” we might imagine Ms. Wagstaffe soaring backward toward the future, terrified and triumphant, alarmed and assured, a blazing icon for a smouldering age.
“Holdover” is a term for an undetected fire, a fire that has waited a long time, resting dormant under cold winter earth and snow. Sometimes called “zombie fires,” holdovers are often peat fires caused by lightning. Such fires can burn under the earth for an entire frigid winter and then rise again in the hunger of spring.
I’d been feeling a general malaise, and I wasn’t sure just how much of my unease was caused by the real and mediated firestorm of climate doom and gloom. I was increasingly lightheaded and disoriented. My proprioception was off. I would sense a small motion and feel a powerful vertigo, as if the concrete had bloated beneath my feet. My nerves, which had never been particularly fragile, now sent sharp, metallic shock waves through me when I was startled.
There was a lot going on in my life: I had moved to a new city, where my family members felt disjointed, unwelcome, ill-atease. We had relocated because of the golden handcuffs of my tenure-track academic job. We were far from home, 41⁄ long hours by car. My job also entailed an enormous amount of pressure and I’d begun to resent the work. I knew so many talented people with PhDs who had never had the chance to ride the “unicorn” of a tenure-track job. I felt that I was expected to be perfect, morally and professionally. I was afraid of disappointing my family, afraid of losing security, afraid of being a hypocrite. I was overworked, more stressed than I’d ever been. I was living inside this personal crisis while watching on the news the train of leapfrogging political and environmental crises: housing, health care, COVID-19, climate, nuclear. It seemed that I couldn’t open an internet browser without seeing a smouldering orange haze that made me feel like the world was ending. The fires themselves were terrifying and real, but were the emotions I was feeling caused by the actual fires, or by their media presentation?
From the climate crisis blooms new feelings, entire categories of emotion. Addressing our changing emotional climate, Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia,” meaning the distress produced by the impact of environmental change. This, certainly, seems to be part of what we feel when we see graphic wildfire images, but the threat is more universal, more ubiquitous. In its contemporary symbolism, as the prime avatar of the revenge of nature narrative, wildfire is indiscriminate, attacking not particular ecologies but the larger human symbolic home: the forest itself.
What does it mean for the mind to be routinely inundated with wildfire imagery? Last summer, The New York Times posted dozens of articles on Canadian wildfires, along with pictures of blazing forests and alarming urban haze.
Such images and headlines (“It’s Like Our Country Exploded”) may well shock some people into important moments of learning and action, but they can also promote a certain kind of apathetic paralysis – a desire to ignore the problem, to retreat from it, to slide over to the next episode of Ted Lasso because this issue is simply too large, too disorienting, beyond our puny power to control.
Wildfire is as old as forests. In Fire Weather, John Vaillant states this aphoristically: “Long before we climbed down from the trees, fire was climbing up into them.” While unique today in scale, wildfire is nothing new. According to wildfire management researcher Cordy Tymstra, from 1990 to 2010, an average of 2.2 million hectares burned each year in Canada. In recent years, those averages have massively increased. The year 2020 remains the largest California wildfire season in recorded history; 2023 was the largest Canadian wildfire season in recorded history. As Mr. Vaillant notes, the natural fire cycle has been disrupted and aggravated by rising atmospheric carbon levels, which is part of the cause of the alarming “megafires” in Canada over the past few summers. But there are other causes, too, such as fire suppression policies, criminalization of traditional Indigenous burning practices, systematic destruction of more fire-resistant tree species and, in B.C., the removal of the fire tower system.
Our new, exacerbated wildfire season is a real and profound problem, one we need resources and plans to grapple with. The inundation of atomic orange imagery is, I would suggest, a related but distinct problem. In his book The Marvelous Clouds, Yale professor John Durham Peters suggests that we might think of environments themselves as media. What happens if we turn this kind of analytical gaze on fire? Not only are we conditioning, mobilizing and weaponizing fire through images – fire, as image, conditions us.
The planet is not burning. What is burning is the possibility of future human civilization as promised to many of us in our youths. What is being destroyed in these new megafires is billions of hectares of animal and vegetal habitat that will take centuries to recover and will never come back the same. But as we all know, the planet will recover, with or without us.
When Bill Nye declares that the planet is on fire, he is using the oldest rhetorical strategy of the environmental movement: hyperbole. This is the same strategy UN Secretary-General António Guterres used in July, 2023, when he declared an era of “global boiling.” Mainstream environmentalism has often marshalled fear as a motivational tactic, believing it will lead to action. But while climate fear is everywhere now, action remains lethargic at best. Lawrence Buell, one of the innovators of ecocriticism – the study of the connections between literature and the environment – wrote in 1996 that “apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.” Perhaps it’s time to unmaster the metaphor.
I resigned my position in January, 2023. During my last term as a full-time professor, I taught an honours seminar called “Dirty Nature Writing / Writing Dirty Nature.” I sat with six talented fourth-year students and deconstructed the nature/civilization dichotomy. We explored the world. We left the classroom, explored sites of ecological significance. We visited Hayes Farm, a regenerative agriculture site that promotes food sovereignty, meaning consumers can control their own food production, in the middle of the city of Fredericton. After walking the grounds, we grabbed tools and worked together, pulling up weeds on the farm. We connected with Mi’kmaq Elder Cecelia Brooks, who led us through a medicine walk in Odell Park. With Ms. Brooks, we passed three hours walking through Acadian old growth forests, discussing ground hemlock and zombie mushrooms, the sunlight on our skin. We did not “tackle” the climate crisis; we lived quietly in and against it.
What if we focused more on images like this? Images of restoration, conducive not to panic but to calm? What if we held onto the joy of extant biomes and protected them, loved them?
I cast my mind toward next spring, thinking of the holdover fires quietly burning in the root systems. Fires like flowers. Fires with their own wants and needs, fires that will make new, different, unfamiliar worlds, worlds we may not want or like, worlds that may exclude us – and yet remain worlds nonetheless. Be gentle, I tell them. Be wild.
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