Aussie Govt ABC: “If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die”

Essay by Eric Worrall

Author and Teacher Oliver Gough is a PhD candidate and playwright researching climate change theatre at the University of Queensland, where he also teaches.

The only way out is through: Embracing the existential weirdness of the era of climate change

Oliver Gough

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Learning to die?

Roy Scranton is another writer who advocates for a deep and scary thought experiment to move past terminal inaction and sluggishness on climate change. He boldly suggests: “If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.” The practice of coming to terms with an extinction of human beings and the existence of a planet without us can lead to a humbling, realistic and truly ecological way of thinking.

This extension of Morton’s “dark ecology” further does away with assumptions of human triumph over the elements, and accepts that: “Carbon-fuelled capitalism and its techno-utopian ideologues have promised infinite growth and infinite innovation, yet they have proven incapable of saving us from the disaster they have made.”

The answer? Imagining and learning the practice of death, preparing for it as you would a terminal diagnosis. This isn’t to lay down and welcome it, but to gain perspective and expand the range of responses. Economics and mathematics can’t quite imagine or express this experiment. Something like climate change, or the death of a species, is felt on levels beyond that realm.

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Admittedly, ocean acidification, social upheaval, and species extinction are problems that humanities scholars, with their taste for fine-grained philological analysis, esoteric debates, and archival marginalia, might seem remarkably ill-suited to address … But the conceptual and existential problems that the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the heart of humanistic inquiry: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live? What is truth? What is good? In the world of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality — What does my life mean in the face of death? — is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination.

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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/dark-ecology-existential-weirdness-of-climate-change-era/104781622

Will students be cheered and encouraged if they decide to die early to avoid the rush?

I guess the takeaway is, if you want your kids to learn theatre and performance arts without also learning we all need to prepare for imminent death, probably best to choose somewhere other than the University of Queensland.

There is zero chance anthropogenic climate change in the foreseeable future will make the world uninhabitable for humans. The proof is that our monkey ancestors thrived in a much hotter world. The Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 5-8C hotter than today, was the age of monkeys. Our monkey ancestors thrived on the abundance of the hothouse PETM, and colonised much of the world, only retreating when the cold returned.

If a bunch of monkeys with brains the size of matchboxes could figure out how to survive in a much warmer world, I’m certain we could figure it out.

Oliver Gough is not alone in believing the world is about to end. A disturbing percentage of Aussie school kids believe they won’t survive to adulthood, because of climate change.

Oliver is free to embrace his whacky beliefs, but I am profoundly disturbed someone who holds such extreme views is a teacher at a major university. I am also concerned that my tax dollars are helping to give this guy a platform to express those extreme views to a larger audience, via a government funded news outlet.

Perhaps administrators or parents should take a closer look at exactly what children entrusted to the care of University of Queensland are being taught.