HAPPY 2022 TO ZOMBIELAND, U.S.A
I used to think that the infatuation of the U.S. viewing audience with all things Zombie — from the incredibly popular TV series “The Walking Dead,” to high quality big budget and little budget Zombie flicks like “World War Z” and “28 Days Later” or to any number of subpar, lesser known knock-offs and spin-offs of George Romero’s original “Night of the Living Dead,” (it’s an endless list) — was due to people instinctively knowing that their days were numbered and essentially scrambling for a worst-case preview of the world awaiting us all. And maybe trying to pick up some survival tips…ha,ha…at the same time.
Well, that’s what I used to think, but after the last 5 years and especially after 2021, I now believe that it’s actually because people recognize that it’s the PRESENT world they are inhabiting that contains Zombies, not some future, dystopian version. As the writers Sam Kriss and Ellie Mae O’Hagan put it best in their 2017 work “The Tropical Depressions,” our current trajectory of a world catastrophically transformed by climate change is “the triumph of an undead species, a mindless shuffle toward extinction.” I posit, therefore, that this obsession with all things Zombie is not due to an irrational fear that 99% of the population will be turned into the living dead, but rather a subconscious acknowledgement that 99% of the population is already sleepwalking towards the apocalypse with no course correction in sight. We are already the walking dead, we just haven’t woken up to that fact yet.
When I think back on 2021, a year that saw the second year of a deadly and highly disruptive Global Pandemic sandwiched between the opening salvo of a conspiracy-fueled U.S. Insurrection (resulting in the U.S. now designated as a back-sliding Democracy instead of a fully functioning one) and book-ended with a trio of climate disasters (catastrophic Typhoon Rai in the Philippines, unprecedented tornado deaths in Kentucky and the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history), I think of what John Holdren (then the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as an energy and climate expert at Harvard) said back in 2007: “we basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be.”
WWZD? What would the Zombies do? Well, that’s obvious, they would do nothing. Case in point: in 2007, worldwide CO2 emissions from fossil fuels were just under 31 gigatons and by 2019 they had reached their highpoint of around 36.5 gigatons, a number that looks to be matched for 2021 again after a brief, “Pandemic-shutdown” reprieve in 2020. Mitigation is defined as “the action of reducing the severity, seriousness or painfulness of something.” Fact: we have not mitigated the problems causing our climate crisis, rather we have compounded them.
So what? We must be adapting to our new climate in lieu of mitigation, isn’t that right? We’ve surely halted constructing new developments in the areas of urban wildland interface most susceptible to drought-fueled wildfires and we are clearly using “managed retreat” for areas consistently destroyed by flooding, hurricanes or sea level encroachment, right? We are adapting, right? No, notwithstanding an infinitesimally small number of exceptions, we most decidedly have not and are not doing those things. We haven’t come close to removing people (oftentimes poorer people of color) from harm’s way, nor are we helping them adapt to higher temperatures, more drought, more flooding, more severe storms, destroyed crops and escalating infrastructure destruction. We haven’t done this for our communities in the wealthy Global North, much less followed through on the promised resources for such adaptation in the Global South, another of the poignant failures of the recent Conference of Parties in Glasgow (COP 26).
Just so we are consistent with a baseline of facts (I know this is troublesome these days and out of favor with too many people), let’s check in with where this puts us in terms of Holdren’s first principles — mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We are NOT mitigating harm and we are also NOT adapting to the world we are inheriting from our lack of mitigation. What’s that leave for us? WWZD? Suffering. They would suffer. They would mindlessly put one foot in front of the other (or drag their disemboweled corpses, hand-over-fist) towards lights or sounds or pretty objects, shuffling in circles without any hope or redemption. Sort of like a mall full of Insurrectionists suffering from COVID and striking out on Black Friday deals due to supply chain issues. Or more mundanely, like the scenes of suburban familial bliss filmed at a Chuck E. Cheese in Colorado just before a wildfire driven by 100 m.p.h. winds roars into the strip mall. Going through the motions of normalcy until the moment that disaster strikes.
Happy 2022 folks, time to wake up.
Author’s Note: While the tone of this piece is dire (and for good reason), the really good news is that, as opposed to movie and tv Zombies sentenced for all eternity, Zombieland U.S.A has a cure — wake up! And do something! Stop pretending that the problem will self-correct — make changes to your own behavior and then talk to people about the issue so that the voices demanding systemic change become dominant. When you have banal conversations about the “weather,” talk about how it is affected by climate change. Get comfortable being uncomfortable — don’t hope that things are going to get back to “normal,” that’s not going to happen. This link to a previous op-ed I wrote and this one to a column by climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe can give you more ideas to cure Zombieism.
