Roy Scranton – författare

We need a new realism in the face of global climate catastrophe.Extreme heat, fires, floods, and storms are transforming our planet. Yet instead of serious responses from world leaders, we get increasing emissions, divisive politics, and ersatz solutions that offer more of the same: more capitalism, more complexity, more "progress." The impasse we face is not only political and institutional, but cognitive, existential, and narrative. We're incapable of grasping the scale, speed, and impact of global warming. Our brains can't make sense of how radically our world is changing. And we optimistically cling to a civilizational narrative that promises a better tomorrow if we just keep doing what we're doing. It's well past time, Roy Scranton argues, to free ourselves from our dangerous and dogmatic faith in progress. Such unwarranted optimism will only accelerate our collective disintegration. If we want to have any hope at all for the future, it must be grounded in a recognition of human limits—a view Scranton calls ethical pessimism. Drawing from psychology, philosophy, history, and politics, as well as film, literature, and personal experience, Scranton describes the challenges we face in making sense of our predicament, from problems in communication to questions of justice, from the inherent biases in human perception to the difficulties of empirical knowledge. What emerges is a challenging but ultimately hopeful proposition: if we have the courage to accept our limits, we may find a way to embrace our unknowable future.

"In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton draws on his experiences in Iraq to confront the grim realities of climate change. The result is a fierce and provocative book."--Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History "Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene presents, without extraneous bullshit, what we must do to survive on Earth. It's a powerful, useful, and ultimately hopeful book that more than any other I've read has the ability to change people's minds and create change. For me, it crystallizes and expresses what I've been thinking about and trying to get a grasp on. The economical way it does so, with such clarity, sets the book apart from most others on the subject."--Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy "Roy Scranton lucidly articulates the depth of the climate crisis with an honesty that is all too rare, then calls for a reimagined humanism that will help us meet our stormy future with as much decency as we can muster.While I don't share his conclusions about the potential for social movements to drive ambitious mitigation, this is a wise and important challenge from an elegant writer and original thinker. A critical intervention."--Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate "Concise, elegant, erudite, heartfelt & wise."--Amitav Ghosh, author of Flood of Fire "War veteran and journalist Roy Scranton combines memoir, philosophy, and science writing to craft one of the definitive documents of the modern era."--The Believer Best Books of 2015 Coming home from the war in Iraq, US Army private Roy Scranton thought he'd left the world of strife behind. Then he watched as new calamities struck America, heralding a threat far more dangerous than ISIS or Al Qaeda: Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, megadrought--the shock and awe of global warming. Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Conflict, famine, plagues, and riots menace from every quarter.From war-stricken Baghdad to the melting Arctic, human-caused climate change poses a danger not only to political and economic stability, but to civilization itself ...and to what it means to be human. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in--the Anthropocene--demands a radical new vision of human life. In this bracing response to climate change, Roy Scranton combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom to explore what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving world, taking readers on a journey through street protests, the latest findings of earth scientists, a historic UN summit, millennia of geological history, and the persistent vitality of ancient literature. Expanding on his influential New York Times essay (the #1 most-emailed article the day it appeared, and selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014), Scranton responds to the existential problem of global warming by arguing that in order to survive, we must come to terms with our mortality. Plato argued that to philosophize is to learn to die.If that's true, says Scranton, then we have entered humanity's most philosophical age--for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The trouble now is that we must learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization. Roy Scranton has published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, and Theory and Event, and has been interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, among other media.

Since World War II, the story of the trauma hero--the noble white man psychologically wounded by his encounter with violence--has become omnipresent in America's narratives of war, an imaginary solution to the contradictions of American political hegemony. In Total Mobilization, Roy Scranton cuts through the fog of trauma that obscures World War II, uncovering a lost history and reframing the way we talk about war today. Considering often overlooked works by James Jones, Wallace Stevens, Martha Gellhorn, and others, alongside cartoons and films, Scranton investigates the role of the hero in industrial wartime, showing how such writers struggled to make sense of problems that continue to plague us today: the limits of American power, the dangers of political polarization, and the conflicts between nationalism and liberalism. By turning our attention to the ways we make war meaningful--and by excavating the politics implicit within the myth of the traumatized hero--Total Mobilization revises the way we understand not only World War II, but all of postwar American culture.

Fire and Forget includes the title story from Redeployment by Phil Klay, 2014 National Book Award Winner in FictionThese stories aren't pretty and they aren't for the faint of heart. They are realistic, haunting and shocking. And they are all unforgettable. Television reports, movies, newspapers and blogs about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have offered images of the fighting there. But this collection offers voices- powerful voices, telling the kind of truth that only fiction can offer.What makes the collection so remarkable is that all of these stories are written by those who were there, or waited for them at home. The anthology, which features a Foreword by National Book Award winner Colum McCann, includes the best voices of the wars' generation: award-winning author Phil Klay's Redeployment" Brian Turner, whose poem Hurt Locker" was the movie's inspiration Colby Buzzell, whose book My War resonates with countless veterans Siobhan Fallon, whose book You Know When the Men Are Gone echoes the joy and pain of the spouses left behind Matt Gallagher, whose book Kaboom captures the hilarity and horror of the modern military experience and ten others.