“If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die” – Watts Up With That?

Article by Eric Worrell

Writer and teacher Oliver Gough is a PhD candidate and playwright who studies climate change theater at the University of Queensland, where he teaches.

The only way out is through: Embracing the weirdness of existence in the age of climate change

Oliver Gough

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Study to death?

Roy Scranton is another writer who advocates a profound and terrifying thought experiment as a way out of ultimate inaction and reluctance on climate change. He boldly suggested: “If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.” accepted practice extinction of humankind and the existence of a planet without us can lead to a humble, realistic and truly ecological way of thinking.

This extension of Morton’s “dark ecology” further dispels the assumption of human victory over nature and accepts it: “Carbon-fueled capitalism and its techno-utopian theorists Promise unlimited growth and unlimited innovation, but they It turns out that we cannot save ourselves from the disaster they have caused.“

What's the answer? Prepare for death by imagining and learning the practice of dying, as does an end-of-life diagnosis. It’s not about letting it go and welcoming it, it’s about gaining perspective and broadening the response. Economics and mathematics cannot fully imagine or express this experiment. Things like climate change or the death of species are felt beyond that.

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Granted, ocean acidification, social upheaval, and species extinction are problems for humanities scholars, with their penchant for meticulous linguistic analysis, esoteric debates, and archival marginalia, which seem eminently ill-suited to address… But the conceptual and existential questions of the Anthropocene are in the right shape. It’s those gestures that have always been at the heart of humanistic inquiry: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be alive? What is truth? What is good? In the world of the Anthropocene, personal mortality issues ——In the face of death, what does my life mean? — is universal and built on an incredible scale.

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

If students decide to die early to avoid the rush, will they be cheered and encouraged?

I guess the point is that if you want your child to study drama and performing arts without learning that we all need to be prepared for our impending death, it's best to look elsewhere than UQ.

There is zero chance that man-made climate change will render the world uninhabitable for humans in the foreseeable future. The evidence is that our monkey ancestors thrived in a hotter world. The hottest period of the Paleocene-Eocene epoch was 5-8 degrees Celsius higher than today. It was the age of monkeys. Our monkey ancestors thrived on the rich PETM greenhouse and colonized much of the world, only to retreat when the cold returned.

If a bunch of monkeys with matchbox-sized brains can figure out how to survive in a warmer world, I'm sure we can too.

Oliver Gough isn't the only one who believes the end of the world is coming. A disturbing proportion of Australian schoolchildren believe they will not survive to adulthood because of climate change.