Apocalyptic imagery disrupts reactionary conservativism- their link evidence presumes scientific risk assessment that downplays existing apocalypse of non whites

(Jessica, Humanities@UChicago, Impossible Futures: Fictions of Risk in the Longue Durée, American Literature (2017) 89 (4): 761–789.)

If contemporary ecocriticism has a shared premise about environmental risk it is that genre is the key to both perceiving and, possibly, correcting ecological crisis. Frederick Buell’s 2003 From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century has established one of the most central oppositions of this paradigm. As his title suggests, Buell tells the story of a discourse that began in the apocalyptic mode in the 1960s and 70s, when discussions of “the immanent end of nature” most commonly took the form of “prophecy, revelation, climax, and extermination” before turning away from apocalypse when the prophesied ends failed to arrive (112, 78). Buell offers his suggestion for the appropriate literary mode for life lived within a crisis that is both unceasing and inescapable: new voices, “if wise enough….will abandon apocalypse for a sadder realism that looks closely at social and environmental changes in process and recognizes crisis as a place where people dwell” (202-3). In a world of threat, Buell demands a realism that might help us see risks more clearly and aid our survival.¶ Buell’s argument has become a broadly held view in contemporary risk theory and ecocriticism, overlapping fields in the social sciences and humanities that address the foundational question of second modernity: “how do you live when you are at such risk?” (Woodward 2009, 205).1 Such an assertion, however, assumes both that realism is a neutral descriptive practice and that apocalypse is not something that is happening now in places that we might not see, or cannot hear. This essay argues for the continuing importance of apocalyptic narrative forms in representations of environmental risk to disrupt conservative realisms that maintain the statusquo. Taking the ecological disaster of nuclear waste as my case study, I examine two fictional treatments of nuclear waste dumps that create different temporal structures within which the colonial history of the United States plays out. The first, a set of Department of Energy documents that use statistical modeling and fictional description to predict a set of realistic futures for the site of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico (1991), creates a present that is fully knowable and a future that is fully predictable. Such an approach, I suggest, perpetuates the state logics of implausibility that have long undergirded settler colonialism in the United States. In contrast, Leslie Marmon Silko’s contemporaneous novel Almanac of the Dead (1991) uses its apocalyptic form to deconstruct the claims to verisimilitude that undergird state realism, transforming nuclear waste into a prophecy of the end of the United States rather than a means for imagining its continuation. In Almanac of the Dead, the presence of nuclear waste introjects a deep-time perspective into contemporary America, transforming the present into a speculative space where environmental catastrophe produces not only unevenly distributed damage but also revolutionary forms of social justice that insist on a truth that probability modeling cannot contain: that the future will be unimaginably different from the present, while the present, too, might yet be utterly different from the real that we think we know.¶ Nuclear waste is rarely treated in ecocriticism or risk theory, for several reasons: it is too manmade to be ecological; its catastrophes are ongoing, intentionally produced situations rather than sudden disasters; and it does not support the narrative that subtends ecocritical accounts of risk perception in which the nuclear threat gives rise to an awareness of other kinds of threat before reaching the end of its relevance at the end of the Cold War.2 In what follows, I argue that the failure of nuclear waste to fit into the critical frames created by ecocriticism and risk theory to date offers an opportunity to expand those frames and overcome some of their limitations, especially the impulse towards a paranoid, totalizing realism that Peter van Wyck (2005) has described as central to ecocriticism in the risk society. Nuclear waste has durational forms that dwarf the human. It therefore dwells less in the economy of risk as it is currently conceptualized and more in the blown-out realm of deep time. Inhabiting the temporal scale that has recently been christened the Anthropocene, the geological era defined by the impact of human activities on the world’s geology and climate, nuclear waste unsettles any attempt at realist description, unveiling the limits of human imagination at every turn.3 By analyzing risk society through a heuristic of nuclear waste, this essay offers a critique of nuclear colonialism and environmental racism. At the same time, it shows how the apocalyptic mode in deep time allows narratives of environmental harm and danger to move beyond the paranoid logic of risk. In the world of deep time, all that might come to pass will come to pass, sooner or later. The endless maybes of risk become certainties. The impossibilities of our own deaths and the deaths of everything else will come. But so too will other impossibilities: talking macaws and alien visitors; the end of the colonial occupation of North America, perhaps, or a sudden human determination to let the world live. The end of capitalism may yet become more thinkable than the end of the world. Just wait long enough. Stranger things will happen.¶