The Deluge – From apocalypse to adaptation
This article first appeared on Dark Mountain here.
The Deluge is an epic novel spanning the next 20 years. Set between the 2010s and the 2040s, with the majority of the book taking place in the critical decade of the 2030s, it imagines (through a diverse set of characters) how our lives in the future are likely to play out, and how we might be able to imagine that the way they play out is not simply one of total, defining, dystopia.
As the book’s title already suggests, this is very much a novel about – severe – climate impacts. So far, so un-unusual: the same is true of everything from The Ministry for the Future to The End We Start From (which begins with the mother of all deluges). And this is a book about the attempt to parlay those impacts – via politics, activism, technology and consciousness – into the tremendous greenhouse gas reductions we need. Again: this is more or less exactly what happens in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. The Deluge’s fictional account of how violence, non-violent direct action, electoral politics, elite manoeuvering – almost the whole gamut of responses *- seek to move the dial on so-called climate mitigation (i.e. greenhouse gas reduction), as climate impacts hit hard and deep, is rich and brilliant. But in itself, in terms of its content, it isn’t unprecedented.
What is unprecedented here is the book’s far greater realism concerning the degree of success of these efforts. Because, in striking contrast to Ministry, what hits home in The Deluge is how these efforts fail. For hundreds upon hundreds of pages, one’s hopes repeatedly get raised as, in response to wilder and more vicious storms, floods, fires, heatwaves etc, one tremendous effort after another is undertaken by politicians, technocrats, scientists, activists, ecoteurs, etc, to get what is occurring to transmute into what is so badly needed. And for hundreds upon hundreds of pages, from the mid 2020s to the mid 2030s, their efforts come to nothing, or indeed (especially in the case of the ecoteurs) are starkly counter-productive.
This it seems to me is all starkly realistic. It is in fact the very story of our time, writ larger. Climate politics and climate action have self-evidently had little success. Even the one breakthrough moment, when, in 2019, the perfect storm of rising climate impacts met the perfect unstorm of Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg, and Attenborough’s documentary ‘Climate Change: The Facts’, turned over time into a blip that has not been fully exploited and has been followed up by endeavours such as Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil that, for all their side-of-the-angels intentions, have been as counter-productive as the ecotage set out in The Deluge.
One possible reading of why all this has played out thus is that climate politics so far has been largely a politics of ‘mitigation’, i.e. of decarbonisation. Climate action has been interpreted as being about the worldwide reduction of levels of emission of a colourless odourless gas that is gradually changing our atmosphere into something stupefying. This take has not spoken to locality. It has not spoken to immediacy; to vulnerability. It has by and large not spoken to working class folk, to ‘established liberals’ or ‘civic pragmatists’, nor to conservatives. It simply has not spoken, in a way that anyone outside a bubble would ever really hear.
In the story Markley tells, this kind of failure (of climate politics/action, of ‘mitigationism’) carries on for some considerable time to come. Way past the point where most of us until recently kind-of assumed that the populace at large would ‘wake up’ and that climate action would become common-sense, The Deluge sees the more or less sustained rise of ‘post-truth’ distortions of civic space, of authoritarianism and scapegoating hatreds, of ‘climatism’ being limited to a ghetto, of an absence of anything resembling transformation, or even strategy.
We have climate/eco-dystopias on the bookshelf already, The Road being only the most famous and brilliant. Markley is trying to do something subtler; and yet Markley’s book makes most other actually-existing ‘cli-fi’ look troublingly utopian. The Ministry for the Future, despite its astoundingly horrific opening, and despite perhaps the big role played in it by troubling levels of climate-terrorism and of rank money-making and power-playing, gradually morphs into a wish-fulfilment fantasy where haute finance and other societal powers mysteriously turn to doing the right thing on greenhouse gas reduction, in a way that strikes this reader (and others) as simply much too…easy. To be blunt: The Ministry for the Future, like so much else, engages in magical thinking.
The Deluge by contrast, takes us deep into how grindingly hard it is to get anywhere at all with this mother of all predicaments, this nightmare of free-riders, this ultimate collective-action dilemma, this tragedy of the uncommon. And the really exciting thing about Markley’s book, from the perspective of being reality-based, is the way that it finally succeeds in imagining breaking the logjam on climate action through a focus on climate-adaptation: facing and responding (by way of resilience-building and preparedness) to the climate impacts themselves.
The centre-piece of this focus is a plan for major managed retreat on the USA’s coastlines, in part to head off the insurance – and economic – meltdown threatened by a potential uncontrolled loss of property values as there is a cascading realisation of the unsustainability of these properties. This is supplemented, crucially, by the endeavour to create ‘Climate Resilient Cities’ (in response inter alia to unprecedented heatwaves).
This vast national adaptation plan that Markley sees the USA as eventually coming to is the turning point; it is this and the having to overcome political opposition to it, that finally breaks the cycle of climate failure.
This seems to me finally to outline something credible: a story of a kind of responsive semi-success that could actually more or less come to pass. It also gives some encouragement as we gird our loins and build collective determination for the incredibly hard road ahead of us, an endless series of marathons rather than a sprint. The Deluge skewers the urge for (unavailable) short-cuts (whether imagined as diplomatic, electoral, technological, revolutionary, or radical-flank midwifed) that far too many are still fantasising, in a failing civilisation that is peculiarly prone to exactly such short-cut-ism in all its thinking and practices.
The most deeply encouraging thing about the book is the manner in which it shows how all the failing things we are doing to try to unleash some sanity may eventually, over time, add up to something that doesn’t just fail. How science and philosophy, citizen action, grassroots community building, the rewilding of our imaginations, and even voting and violence, might eventually change the hegemony – provided that we find suitably local, meaningful, practical ways of making the change in focus available to people at large. In other words: the needful forms of adaptation to our now-endlessly changed and changing world. (Though one can legitimately ask whether the book poses an adequate challenge or alternative to the ongoing industrialisation of the world that is present even in ‘the green transition’. My view would be that it does not.)
Of course, one of the things that’s useful and important about the project of a book like The Deluge is that if ittruly succeeds it could bring forward the timetable that it sets out, at least a little. I noted earlier that for The Delugethe critical decade is the 2030s, not, as we have been told by the climate bubble, the 2020s.. The pain will have to mount much higher, and the need for response be more viscerally appreciated before we really start to get anywhere. In fact the key event in Markley’s book, emerging from the great adaptations plan, are crowded into a short transformational period in the late 2030s. If it isn’t until then that we really even start to bend the curve, then the stage is set for unimaginable levels of disruption and suffering, and almost definitely for the passing of some tipping points: in short, for a more or less endless unfolding thereafter of change (including decline), adaptation, loss and suffering. That is probably about the best that we can now hope for.
The Deluge documents the relatively early stages of that potential way of pain. The grimness of most of it, the litany of failure it offers, the tragically long wait it suggests before we actually get anywhere, has led some ‘major’ reviewers to erroneously call it an ‘apocalypse’ or a ‘dystopia’. When I’ve spoken to Steve Markley about this, he’s agreed that these terms mischaracterise the book’s intention and achievement. He sees my own term ‘thrutopia’ as more accurately characterising what The Deluge imagines and that the remorseless unfolding depicted in this book is probably about a best-case scenario for what is to come. That this is likely is now underscored by the recent re-election in the US of a climate-denying Donald Trump, this time with a Republican majority to back him everywhere in the federal system. Even in Markley’s difficult imagining (in The Deluge) of the 20s, he foresaw nothing quite as dark as this.
We need to face the coming storm.
Centring adaptation attempts to do this. Adaptation has the huge advantages (over decarbonisation) of being essentially local, and sometimes specifically place-based. Of directly addressing vulnerability. Of having direct advantages, and in the near term too, for those undertaking it: it evades the tragically difficult collective-action-more-than-problem structure of decarbonisation.
On top of these signal advantages, adaptation concretisesour trouble: when we think, talk and do adaptation, we are by definition engaged in a project real, tangible, more or less present: we take this diffuse non-object that is climate breakdown from a state of abstraction and distance… and we bring it home. And a focus on (transformative) adaptation opens much more naturally to societal transformation than does our civilisation’s wannabe focus on decarbonisation. For when we only imagine decarbonising, we tend to imagine continuing as we are just with a different energy source. Whereas once we take seriously a strategy of systemic adaptation, we are imagining changing, and even evoke ‘evolving’.
All this is why it is so important that the fundamental plot point of The Deluge is: climate politics/action fails so long as it is decarbonisation-centric. Whereas: it might conceivably start to succeed, given a pivot to adaptation, that in turn, as in the very end of The Deluge, leads into a broader effort to reduce the causes of the impacts we have to adapt to. I.e. a broader effort on decarbonisation. For, of course, it would be dumb to adapt mainly in ways that over time help ensure that our adaptations cannot be adequate: if we adapt without ultimately decarbonising and changing our civilisational model, then we guarantee that the storms of our grandchildren will forever continue to get worse than our own, and we hit and fall victim to the limits to adaptation.
Rather, as in The Deluge, the adaptation agenda naturally morphs into a ‘mitigation’ agenda. And crucially, rocket-fuels it, by making our predicament and its non-avoidability concrete and visceral.
I write at the end of an autumn which has seen more monumental deluges across the world than even I considered plausible at this point in our unfolding descent. What I find exciting about our current, terrible moment, is that we may be at last at the onset of adaptation-awareness and action. I think some citizens are likely to insist now on a step-change; I think some families and communities are more likely to take matters into their own hands. I think that the pivot to adaptation may be about to get underway in countries like Britain ahead of the kind of timetable that Markley envisages. Truly, an encouraging thought.
A final point about The Deluge. Like The End We Start From, and again unlike Ministry, this work ends in ambiguity. We don’t know, as we reach the final pages, whether the process that has been narrated to us will develop in the direction of ongoing transformative improvement, or will careen back into complete catastrophe, or bump along somewhere in between. The Deluge does not, as utopias do, feed us the consolations of a happy ending, a stable state. This is of the essence of any thrutopia: for the thing about the process unleashed by our species’ destabilisation of the Earth system is that it is essentially open-ended. We are going to be experiencing sea-level rise now for hundreds upon hundreds of years, even on a best-case scenario.
In response to such open-ended disruptive transformation, we need to embody a spirit of transformative adaptation. The processual spirit of thrutopianism. Trying to make the best of what is coming at us in a spirit of unknowing. This necessitates some of our effort being directed into deep adaptation and into the kinds of activities and emphases that Dark Mountain has fostered. For, even in a best case scenario, outright societal collapse, as previewed in the parts of The Deluge which touch on the inland parts of the USA facing eco-driven collapse during the coming generation, remains a very likely outcome.
We don’t know whether anything we do will really over time succeed even in meaningfully softening the blow. We are way past the point where there can be guarantees of anything much.
My case in this piece has been that creative fiction can help us understand and inhabit our dilemmas and our possibilities, and that in particular it can help us understand how we might finally become effective at facing and thus at formulating our situation and our task. The Deluge suggests the need for a major course correction by activists, change-makers, leaders, diplomats, and indeed artists and creatives, in terms of narrative: to tell stories of gritty getting through, together, the cascade of impacts that are escalating, and not just over)optimistic tales of everyone suddenly deciding to do the rational thing. This narrative paradigm-shift, much more than its vivid imagination of impacts, or its powerful exploration of possible character-arcs and of astonishingly different identities vicariously to inhabit, is ultimately the reason to read The Deluge. And then, read it again.Which is more likely to enable us to find pathways through what is coming: reading the latest IPCC report, or a truly immersive piece of climate fiction?’ Philosopher and co-founder of the Climate Majority Project, Rupert Read explores what is ‘extraordinary and likely prophetic’ about Steve Markley’s climate epic, ‘The Deluge’.
