A war veteran, journalist, author, and Princeton PhD candidate, 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. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights Publishers) combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom to explore what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving world. 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. Scranton responds to the existential problem of global warming by arguing that in order to survive, we must come to terms with our mortality.
