I remember the thrill of transgression I felt the first time I pulled Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization off a shelf. It was at City Lights Bookstore, in San Francisco. I had just given a reading, was coming down from the Poetry Room full of Allen Ginsberg’s spirit, and there it was, Learning to Die, the book that everyone seemed to be talking about with fear and loathing, on a small bookcase on the stair’s landing, a fat stack of them wedged between copies of Howl.
If you’ve spent any time in nature or environmental writing circles in the past decade, or are even faintly aware of the raging cultural debate about whether hope or despair is the most fitting affect with which to face the planet-wide polycrisis—of which climate change is but one of many dire emergencies—you likely recognize Scranton’s name. This, after all, is a man celebrity climate scientist Michael Mann has cursed as “the ultimate doomist.”
Just look at the titles he gives to some of his books: Learning to Die (2015), which includes the now infamous quotation, “We’re fucked. The only questions are how soon and how badly,” and We’re Doomed. Now What? (2018), and his most recent, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress (2025) in which he dares to make the case for what he calls an “ethical pessimism” and begins with the sneering quotation from Jeremiah: “Where then are the gods you made for yourselves? Let them come if they can save you…” For all the fractious infighting between ecosocialists, ecomoderns, ecopoets, chart-waving scientists, policy wonks, mainstream liberals, green anarchists, primitivists, monkeywrenchers, and those urging a spiritual reconnection with the land either through peasantry or prophecy, there seems to be a widespread, though by no means unified consensus that Scranton has turned his back on all the living things of the planet, that he urges resignation, that he thinks we should all, as Andreas Malm accused in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, “cross our legs in a lotus position and think” as the world burns.
