On the End of the End of the Earth

I loved this collection of essays. Jonathan Franzen is one of those names that keeps coming up, especially next to David Foster Wallace (whom I also love) and sometimes Zadie Smith, and it’s easy to see why. He isn’t a maximalist the way Wallace is, but he and the others in that category are fighting the good fight in the hunt for authenticity, and for Franzen it comes through best in his ecological writing.

There’s a lot about birds here. I had no idea I’d learn this much about birds from such a literary icon — the birds of Albania, of Egypt, of Antarctica, of Jamaica, the National Audubon Society — but Franzen doesn’t just talk about birding, and for him it’s never a checklist. He sees it as a way of chasing experiences he otherwise wouldn’t have: pushing through the Serengeti, identifying an Emperor Penguin, going out to see creatures I’d never thought about. That way of thinking also gives him a thoughtful angle on the greatest challenge of our time, climate change. To be clear, Franzen never denies anthropogenic climate change; what he denies is the usefulness of the concept in actually helping us make positive change. He’s critical, for instance, of the National Audubon Society for attributing the destruction of bird life to climate change. “Okay,” he says, “we can point to climate change, but is it a useful concept in this context?” His answer is a resounding no.

Here’s the logic: when large organizations blame a problem on climate change, people tend to shrug and say, well, there’s nothing we can do about that. Climate change is a vast problem in which every person and species is a stakeholder — some more responsible than others, with the Global North the worst offender (Franzen notes that, under some frameworks, the average American household burns through its energy allotment in two weeks), and modern industry the greatest polluter of all — so how could you ever get everyone on board? Franzen is an advocate, like St. Francis, of working hard on the problem immediately in front of you. “Climate change” isn’t one of those; “natural gas companies abusing Midwestern wetlands” is. One framing yields a solvable problem, the other an apocalyptic vision. The systemic side of climate change needs to be worked out too — I use the passive voice because I have no idea how it could even begin to be — and we’re flying past every benchmark, probably already past some point of no return, but climate grief simply isn’t helpful. It’s comparable to left melancholia, a mourning for some lost aspiration, and rather than wallow in the shame of having “lost,” we need to pull ourselves up and get back to work. I was especially impressed by the title essay, which plays on words: climate apocalypticism is part of it, but it applies here to Antarctica, the end(s) of the earth, which Franzen visits with his brother as the polar ice caps melt. The essay also weaves in a touching story of his own family losses, the grief and love and connection he felt toward his uncle — a beautiful narrative that helped me think about what really matters, which is connecting with people. That tangible, earthy feeling stands in stark contrast to the airy writing about abstract, interminable problems like climate change, and Franzen, I think, is like me in being pulled between the two poles; I’m impressed by how he navigates them. I’m so grateful to have spent a few hours in his inner world. His writing helped me think differently about familiar problems, which is, to my mind, the surest mark of a great essayist.