Paris Notes 1: Climate Change, Katrina, and the Return (?) of the MetaNarrative

Of all of the ideas to emerge from high postmodern theory, the one that has penetrated the furthest into the wider culture is probably the notion of the collapse of "metanarratives" and their replacement with smaller, local truths. Articulated in its academic forms by Jean-Francois Lyotard (on the Left) and Francis Fukuyama (on the Right), the general contention that totalizing narratives (particularly that of communism versus capitalism) are either deeply flawed or no longer applicable has spread into most every form of multiculturalism, pluralism, and respect for diversities of identity and life experience. It would be hard to imagine today, for example, a university religious studies class that sees one religion as telling the correct story of the universe or that fails to acknowledge the different wisdom to be drawn from every faith tradition. Even cable news journalists now speak reflexively of the different narratives (plural) politicians create, often with no attempt to establish whether one of these narratives is closer to objective truth than the others.

Climate change would seem to pose the strongest possible challenge to the "collapse of metanarratives" theory. With climate change, we have a narrative that is, in the strongest sense, "meta." Here is a phenomenon that ties all life on earth together in a single, increasingly teleological story of ecological collapse. Where the communism vs capitalism story always required some obvious stretching to account especially for events in the colonial and postcolonial world, climate change affects every human and, along with its twin, ocean acidification, reaches even to places that humans do not and cannot visit. Perhaps most strikingly, climate change, unlike the theological and political metanarratives that preceded it, is grounded increasingly in the world of verifiable, scientific fact.

Thus, one could reasonable expect climate change to emerge in our era as a metanarrative even more powerful and all-encompassing than the communism-capitalism story that preceded it. From farming to national security to race to trade agreements, climate change would seem able to subsume every individual event into one story. At the very least, it is a much stronger contender than it post-9/11 rival, the facile story of a "clash of civilizations" promoted by American neoconservatives. With climate change, we have the return of just what Lyotard said could no longer exist: one coherent story that applies everywhere and to everyone.

The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina gives us an opportunity to test this hypothesis. First, let us note that for many years after, Katrina and its aftermath were about race. Both Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke and Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water narrate the event through the lens of black-white race relations. Dave Eggers' Zeitoun shifts the focus slightly to anti-Arab animus, but remains concerned with race and civil rights. Jamelle Bouie's recent 10th-anniversary piece on Katrina makes the case for a race-relations framing most pointedly, arguing that Katrina was "the most defining moment in Black America's relationship to its country" thus far in the 21st-century. (Most famously, Kanye West's public declaration during a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser that "George Bush doesn't care about Black people," demonstrated quite clearly how race was, for many Americans, what was at issue in Katrina.)

The one exception to the racial lens is Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, where Katrina appears very briefly as an example of possible effects of climate change; Gore subsumes the specific events of Katrina into the larger story of global climate change and, in so doing, provides a (very brief) preview of what I am hypothesizing should become a more popular reading of Katrina as climate change becomes a more powerful metanarrative.

Jelani Cobb's New Yorker essay on the anniversary of Katrina provides an instructive example of how my hypothesis here fails, and why its failure might matter to the politics of climate change. Cobb places the Katrina disaster in the long history of institutionally sanctioned black poverty and black oppression in America, continuing the tradition of narrating Karina primarily in terms of race. In the midst of making this case, he makes the point that the term "natural disaster" is a "linguistic diversion": "Hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods are natural phenomena; disasters, however, are often the work of humankind." Thus, Cobb argues, the impacts of natural disasters need to be understood in their specific, local context of differential access to infrastructure, emergency aid, and so forth.

Setting aside the matter of whether hurricanes might not be, at least partially, the work of humankind, Cobb makes quite clearly here what seems to me the correct intellectual point: rather than subsume local events to a totalizing metanarrative, clear understanding requires articulating global phenomena (like earthquakes and hurricanes) through the specific circumstances of the localities they effect. Saying, "Katrina is one example of climate change-driven disaster" is far less precise than saying "here are the ways this climate change-driven disaster ended up having the specific effects it did, given the specific history of race and poverty on the American Gulf Coast." All of this is roughly in keeping with Lyotard's initial reading of the collapse of metanarratives.

But if something is gained here, something also lost. By focusing on the specific and the local, attention is taken away from the general and the global. And that shift in focus makes it harder to see the places where large patterns do, in fact, hold. Moreover, it makes it harder to build the kind of global coalitions needed in advance of the Paris climate talks; if my disaster is primarily the result of my local circumstances, I am less likely to see that you and I are both victims of the same global problem.

If Cobb's essay is emblematic of how we narrate Katrina ten years on, then one of the challenges for climate change politics will be how to re-narrative Katrina as part of a global climate change story, without losing the insights Cobb derives from geographic and historical specificity. How to do that, and how to do it for a mass global audience, remains unclear.