The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road follows a father and his son as they scrounge for survival in a post apocalyptic landscape. Devoid of animal life, sunlight, warmth, and living plants, the aftermath of our Earth is as menacing as the bands of marauding cannibals that hunt the protagonists . Their search for food is limited completely to scavenging cans or preserved food from a time before the vaguely defined disaster, and it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine a real future – the broken ecosystem will produce and photosynthesize no more. It dawns on the reader, as we learn more about their circumstance, that we must reduce our hopes for any future or normalcy for the pair. They huddle up every night, by a fire when they can risk it, and cover themselves in tarps and rags to fend off the cold and ash which permeates everything.

The Road is heartbreaking, desperate, and hopeless. To illustrate our love for our family and children McCarthy has focused on the the gut wrenching need to provide for the ones we love. I asked myself why I was reading something that made me so despondent and sad, but I think the answer lies in the development of compassion. From a personal perspective, I’m a new father of a young boy and the crushing hopelessness and fear of the tandem twisted at my gut. But in just the last day I’ve read about climate induced migrations, floods wiping out subsistence farmers in Pakistan, and seen NOAA publish that our August was the warmest in 143 years across North America and Europe. And people, maybe nobody reading this, but people are being affected. I couldn’t help but think “there are people out there doing this every night with their children.” The desperation in The Road isn’t just the realm of fiction.

We are not facing an apocalypse where a mushroom cloud emerges on the horizon. That would be too clean and clear. What we have crawling towards humanity is a slowly moving, unequally distributed set of consequences. Subsistence farmers, people without electricity, and those who happen to live along coastlines may be the first to suffer. In far off communities a father and son will go through something not that different than Cormac McCarthy’s characters. They won’t need to fear cannibals, just filth, hunger, and disease as they lose their homes and food. Humans have always rallied to help those facing natural disasters, but what if one half of humanity is facing one in a few decades?

What this novel helped me do was focus in at an individual level, some of the tragedies in the pipeline. Tragedies of our own making, as we have sat, calcified, hoping for a return to normalcy or a painless solution. Our institutions make sweeping changes and studies, our companies define their broad goals while making money and keeping shareholders happy, and in a perfect world we corral our warming to our goals. The machine marches on, hopefully guided by those with conscience and vision.

But don’t lose sight of the small struggles, because that will motivate us. Children, spouses, neighbors, and grandparents -people share the same concerns and desperation when it comes to protecting and nurturing those we love. So access that knowledge and compassion every time we talk about the climate changing around us. There is sacrifice going on right now, even if it is not yours.