Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization w/ ROY SCRANTON - Highlights

"It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life... The second part of what I think being a mentor or being a parent or being an adult or a teacher with regard to climate change means helping younger people sit with the terror, sit with the grief, the sense of unknown, and not push it away and not repress it and not try to find a way to just move past it without dealing with it, but to really inhabit that space of unknowing and fear and grief because that's the reality that we live in.”

Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We’re Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He’s an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative.

http://royscranton.net
Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum
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