The invisible loss in climate change is the loss of natural areas. Genuine climate change renders moot the 20th century’s many struggles to preserve and conserve the wilderness. There can be no true “wilderness” in a Greenhouse Earth. All creatures are under the same gray sky. There can be no refuge, nothing can go untouched. “Nature” is over; there is no sanctity left to defend; all that breathes is breathing unnatural air.
But though the 21st century may have no nature, that does not imply that it have no savagery. On the contrary, large and growing areas of the planet will have lost their value for technological instrumentalism. Abdicated as profit centers, they are too unstable for settlement and development. They might become slums. Or they could make good carbon-dioxide sumps.
Consider the following scenario. Outflanked by rapid climate change, rain forests and national wildernesses will be badly damaged by floods, and periodically on fire. The CO2 is a terrifying menace and must be put somewhere. Nature is beaten and no longer fit for the job, so humans must step in. We can envision a harshly authoritarian government reshaping the landscape wholesale. They might create carbon-dioxide ration-states with zealous blood-and-soil ideological overtones. Because the Motherland is visibly imperiled, whole populations would be cybernetically drafted for the moral equivalent of a people’s war. Massive deportations of population, internal visas, and living-space issues become political commonplaces. The remains of wilderness, and the newly drowning areas, are nervously patrolled by immigration authorities who hunt poachers and illegal aliens with infra-red and DNA sniffers.
Since such areas can’t be financially exploited, they are deliberately overgrown by government order. This makes sense. The faster they can suck up carbon, the more they will slow down climate change. The country’s imperiled areas therefore become a new kind of landscape: Involuntary Parks. They bear some small resemblance to the twentieth century’s national parks, those government-owned areas guarded by forest rangers. They are, for instance, very green, and probably full of wild animals. But the species mix is no longer natural. They are mostly fast-growing weeds, a cosmopolitan jungle of kudzu and bamboo, with perhaps many genetically altered species that can deal with seeping saltwater. Drowned cities that cannot be demolished for scrap will vanish into the unnatural vegetation. The idea is farfetched, but not without precedent. Here are some contemporary examples of Involuntary Parks:
・The very large and slightly poisonous areas downwind of Chernobyl, which have been reported to feature wild boars and somewhat distorted vegetable and insect forms.
・The Green Line between Turkish Cyprus and Greek Cyprus. Intruders are shot or arrested there, and over the years the area has become reforested.
・Very old and decaying railroad lines in the United States, which paradoxically contain some of the last untouched prairie ecosystems in North America.
Involuntary Parks are not representatives of untouched nature, but vengeful nature, of natural processes reasserting themselves in areas of political and technological collapse. An embarrassment during the 20th century, Involuntary Parks could become a somber necessity during the 21st. A world map of Involuntary Parks would be an interesting and perhaps enlightening addition to new maps of our newly uninsurable world.
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