Imaginary Unit

On fantasies in the warming world

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IMAGINARY UNIT*

When you live in a big city, you are always saying that you want to get out of it.

Partly, this impulse is genuine, partly it is a mannerism that comes with the lore of a city like New York City, where one feels required to either take pride in or be absolutely horrified by how busy, grimy and loud things can get. Many talking points about how densely populated cities invite crime and behavior otherwise deemed as transgressive or immoral date back to 19th century reform movements and their hostility towards poor, racialized and immigrant denizens of fast-growing cities; I try my best to not slide into them. And though I would like to say that some of the city’s more freakish and unconventional edge appeals to me, I live in a safe and quiet neighborhood, work an office job, and my idea of going to a wild party is attending a daytime rave in a museum courtyard with my mom.

But sometimes the fantasy of “just getting out of the city for a bit,” of being city-folk on vacation, is too strong to resist. So, for my birthday this year, instead of cooking all day for a swarm of guests and putting in hours into making myself an elaborate birthday cake, my partner and I packed a small suitcase and giddily walked out the door.

Though he is a real city kid who grew up in Brooklyn, what really binds us into a particular vacation style is that we spent our twenties in graduate school instead of learning practical life skills, so we don’t drive, or amassing wealth, so we have always been too broke to get into something like skiing. When we set out to vacation then, we are either looking at a regimen of museum visits and a long list of restaurants, or we are packing for the kind of comfortable and unstructured time that seems impossible within the confines of our apartment where small chores always lurk around the corner. The four day trip we planned around my birthday fell into the second category, starting with a very long train ride on the day after Christmas, one that was bookended by questionable early morning falafel in New York’s Moynihan Train Hall and a late night reheating of my best friend’s holiday lasagna in snowy Vermont.

Vacations are attempts to manifest fantasies. You fantasize the place where you will go ( picture-perfect steep New England rooftops covered in powdery, white snow) and you fantasize about who you might be there (someone who sleeps in without feeling guilty, spends hours reading a book without getting distracted, who can pull a lover into bed impulsively, at any time of day). Even the museum variety of vacations is like this, the fantasy being that of embodying someone erudite and with all the right sensibilities to relish art.

On our first night in Vermont, walking across town in our inappropriately city-like gear of Doc Martens, long but not puffy coats, and wide-legged pants, my partner and I noticed a large building complex settled at the end of a perfectly even plane of snow. In the morning, we walked closer and learned that it used to be a mental institution but came to house offices for the local government. “We should write a short story about this, in the style of Stephen King,” my partner said. We bounced some opening lines against each other, each propelled by the fog of warm molecules quickly escaping our lips and trying their best to reach equilibrium with the frigid air, doing impressions of the Shining. A predictable and corny trope, but too delicious of a fantasy to pass up. (We never wrote down a single word.)

Though we didn’t venture into any of the state parks near to where we were staying, we had chosen to vacation in Vermont because it was late December and we wanted to be surrounded by snow. That was part of the fantasy, a white winter of the likes that we rarely get in New York anymore, and one that is also not marred by the city’s traffic. Snow activities are a huge driver of the economy in Vermont: in 2023 they dominated the state’s outdoor sector and brought in 220 million dollars, a marked increase from 170 million in 2022. But like many other fantasies, the one of a reliably white and snowy winter in New England, may not always be eligible for a transformation into reality.

One recent study found that under a grim scenario where greenhouse gas emissions do not decrease, most of the United States except for very mountainous areas like the Rockies may lose all their deep snow by 2100. While this would have consequences for water availability as well as plants and animals, it would also eliminate snow days from much of the country, fully pushing snowy winter vacations into the fantasy realm. The researchers in this study considered a particularly grim climate scenario where global warming reaches about 3.6°C by the end of the century, but the problem they are pointing to is already real, regardless of whether you may feel that they need more optimism. A study published in Climate in July of last year found that Southern New England is losing its snow cover at one of the fastest rates in the world based on an examination of 23 years of snowfall data. “It's not just a local thing. It really is a global phenomenon. And we just happen to live in one of those hotspots where it's happening faster,” one of the researchers told WBUR.

Rising temperatures and other changes in our planet’s climate may prove detrimental not just for snowy winter vacations, but for how we spend time outdoors overall. In October, in a study published in Geophysical Research Letters, a team of scientists from MIT focused on how the number of “outdoor days,” or days with conditions suitable for outdoor recreational activities, will change in the coming years. “We project relatively large drops in southeast (−23%), south (−19%), and Ohio Valley (−19%), and a significant increase in northwest (14%) toward the end of the century,” the researchers wrote. When discussing the impact of these changes, they specifically considered what more days that our so hot that going outside becomes unbearable may do to tourism, writing: “we expect that tourist hot spots in Florida, like Big Cypress National Preserve and Orlando would face decreases in future visitation by the end of this century due to significant reductions of outdoor days.” This is an observation that fits into the larger puzzle about what recreation will, and already does, look like in a warming world - and researchers already know that access to recreational spaces, like parks, especially in urban areas, breaks down along the lines of socio-economic class and race.

Thinking about this while watching the Vermont snow from under a blanket with a book in my lap and my partner working on a jigsaw puzzle at the edge of my field of vision, I could not help but feel like there was something exceptionally apocalyptic about this, a fantasy that may soon turn nightmare, like in fairy tales where protagonists are inevitably punished for seeking too much wealth or comfort. Going on dreamy vacations is already something of a privilege of the wealthy, but climate change may soon deny such fantasies to many of them as well, simply by making winters devoid of snow and summers unbearably hot. As Eve Andrews wrote in Grist last year:

“It’s easy to disparage the uber-wealthy for the insulation they enjoy from many of life’s challenges. But the more uncomfortable reality is that until quite recently, the same could be said for the average American relative to other people around the world, especially in the Global South. That, too, is no longer the case.”

In other words, the looming impossibility of a winter vacation, not just because we cannot afford it, but because it is physically impossible, is another sign of how foolish it is to pretend that it is only happening to other people - many of whom are losing much more than their ability to vacation and are finding their very livelihoods in peril.

What is, then, a fantasy that is appropriate for the world in which we live in? How long will it be before dreaming about getting out of the city and sliding into a cozy, small-town fantasy of a white winter becomes pure escapism, a fairy tale with no moral?

Last year I heard the artist Camille Henrot wonder out loud whether fairy tales will soon become even more unreal because the animals that they feature will go extinct due to climate change and human destruction of nature, or become so rare as to only show up as infrequently as if they really were mythical. I thought about this again when I read Tove Danovich’s essay about the significance of seeing her first bird of the year, a “great blue motherfucking heron,” while on the way to a polar bear plunge with friends.

“People have been using birds to divine the future for centuries. We have always been a species obsessed with omens. In Greco-Roman times, augurs would use bird sightings, behaviors, or even their cut-open entrails, to make major decisions. The origin of the word auspicious means to “look at birds.” Today, a bird’s traits and their mythology combine to set the year’s tone. A sighting of gregarious bushtits might mean a year full of friendship and camaraderie. A crow cawing on the fence post could hint at intellect and transformation being of particular importance in the New Year. A great blue heron in mythology can represent patience or a bridge between worlds (since they are both in and out of the water, on the land and in the sky),”

Danovich explains while weaving a powerful personal narrative around how we make sense of omens and how there are times when we really need to see them, times when they really can give us an anchor for moving into the future differently. I am never not a little corny, and I am certainly becoming more superstitious as I am getting older, but the symbol of the bird struck me for one other reason - climate change has already caused our bird neighbors to shapeshift.

In recent years, several studies have found that bird’s bodies are shrinking and their beaks are getting bigger in response to rising temperatures. The reason is pure physics - to shed heat more effectively, birds are changing to have more surface area and less volume, and their beaks are especially good heat radiators. These changes in body shape have knock-on effects on bird behavior, most notably on how they sing. Because the sounds that birds can make are dictated by the geometry of their vocal apparatus, like how wind instruments that have different shapes sound differently, when birds’ beaks and chests change, so does their song.

There are also secondary effects. For instance, in warmer weather birds sing less often so they can preserve moisture, and their songs travel less far at certain frequencies because dry air transmits sound differently than moist, again according to simple rules of physics. In a study published in Ecology and Evolution in 2022, researchers used computer simulations of birds singing in more arid environments and found that significantly fewer of their virtual birds managed to communicate with their neighbors.

In this sense, seeing a bird may be a more literal signifier of a future that is coming to us than an act of divination.

Last spring, I got to write about how birds dream, which included repeatedly watching a video of a bird whose feathers ruffled while it was asleep at the exact time when researchers detected its vocal apparatus performing motions that the bird would have used had it been trying to yell at an adversary during a territorial dispute. The scientist that I interviewed for the story was convinced that what his team captured was the bird having a nightmare. I felt so much kinship with that bird, with its fears bubbling up in a time when it was meant to rest. What will birds be dreaming about in a decade? Will the soundscape of their dreams change in accordance to the future that we are now already afraid of? At the end of the day, most days are outdoor days for most birds.

I started this essay while wildfires were at their most damaging in Southern California and Los Angeles, destroying bird habitats and livelihoods of people alike, some of them people who have spent their life putting fantasies on our screens. Some of the work that originated from these now burning places added to the shape of our collective fantasies. What may have seemed more fitting for a disaster movie once was now real life.

In the Guardian, Rebecca Solnit warned against forgetting both past destructive fires and past fires that Indigenous communities set on purpose to support the ecosystem and stave off the more dangerous flames.

“Catastrophic fire erases what was there before. So does forgetting. Memory is a resource for facing the future; it’s equipment for imagining, planning, preparing,”

she wrote and I got stuck on the link between “forgetting” and “imagining.” Lack of memory can, after all, lead to imagining and fantasizing about the exact wrong thing.

On On the Media, Solnit says that every crisis is a storytelling crisis. She is speaking about the rising apocalyptic narratives concerning looting and crime in the aftermath of the LA fires. These are stories that the rich tell to obscure how much people actually help each other after disaster strikes and how little they, and the state that bends its knee to them, are needed when it comes to building a mutualistic society. The story of a city besieged by rowing hordes of looters also strengthens the fantasy of what a city should be like - this is the thing the police and the national guard are being called onto to protect - and of a city as a sign of our power over nature, as something that we can just build wherever we want and police into stability and safety.

In the aftermath of climate disasters everyone wants to assign blame to someone else. This makes it easier for them to absolve themselves of the role they may have played in that loss and destruction. But reality is never simple enough to support such finger-pointing. Yes, it is the big polluters first and foremost, but it is also a myriad of small decisions that accumulate to make an impact. And it is exactly this fantasy of building cities in deserts, of suburbs on the edge of nature, of developing tech that will overcome the natural, and less natural, rhythms of just any ecosystem.

A colleague of mine used to always pitch stories about “cities that should not exist,” but they would never get written because no-one wants to be told that they don’t have a right to live somewhere. It’s a real bummer for the reader to be told that not just any piece of land can be made suitable for their home-building fantasy; this doesn’t sell magazines. A property developer whose house was destroyed in a recent fire told the Washington Post: “We’re in an area where we really shouldn’t be.” Then he said that he would rebuild his home in the same place anyway. Speaking to the MIT Technology Review about the aftermath of floods in Louisiana and the state’s intervention to physically elevate homes instead of opting for managed retreat, an environmental law professor was more direct: “Our mindset is wrong…We’re more concerned about selling houses than telling the truth.”

It is hard to blame individuals, cruel even, but they and their wants, desires and fantasies, add up to what we all deem normal or appropriate to long after and act upon. Individual consumer and lifestyle choices may not be able to save us but they do help determine what is normal and cool, what sort of house you should aspire to build, and what kind of vacation you should dream about. Of course, consumers don’t exist in a vacuum so there is a cycle here - corporations pitch a fantasy, consumers buy into it, they act on it, corporations doubled-down on it, consumers try even harder, we all live in the new normal created through that process. Refusing the fantasy becomes seen as an alternative lifestyle, as something to be accommodated and opined on rather than genuinely engaged with.

Writing about the science fiction and fantasy practice of worldbuilding in 2007, author and critic Michael John Harrison sharply noted that

“..prior to any act of reading, we already live in a fantasy world constructed by advertising, branding, news media, politics and the built or prosthetic environment (in E. O. Wilson’s sense). The act of narcissistic fantasy represented by the wor(l)d “L’Oreal” already exists well upstream of any written or performed act of fantasy. JK Rowling & JRR Tolkien have done well for themselves, but–be honest!–neither of them is anywhere near as successful at worldbuilding as the geniuses who devised “Coke,” or “The Catholic Church.” Along with the prosthetic environment itself, corporate ads & branding exercises are the truly great, truly successful fantasies of our day. As a result the world we live in is already a “secondary creation”. It is already invented.”

Where the “prosthetic environment” is one built by technology in an attempt to replace ecology and “secondary creation” dates to J. R. R. Tolkein’s writing about fictional worlds, where he posits the writers as a “sub-creator” of fictional worlds within our real world in an almost religious sense. In a world where companies can populate their own social media networks with artificial people or allow unbounded proliferation of false narratives about pretty much everything, Harrison’s identifying them with nearly omnipotent sub-creators feels scarily fitting. On days when I only leave the house to walk down the block to my neighborhood gym, or days when I cannot resist picking up my phone in every moment of boredom, discomfort or, really, a myriad other feelings, social media does begin to feel like a prosthetic environment too.

Watching reports about fires on my phone and reading think pieces about them from afar makes it easy to bemoan just how many people, and entities much more powerful than individual people, have long let themselves imagine that they can exploit ecosystems without consequences and outsmart the natural world they were meant to belong to rather than rule over. I want to say “many people,” but it feels crucial to acknowledge that that also includes me and people that are close to me, physically and emotionally. I also live in a society, I also participate in the fantasy that lets me buy whatever fruit I crave in January, have a book delivered to my door overnight even if I will only read it months later, or take a long hot shower whenever I am slightly blue.

This is a fantasy in which I just get to have things because I want them, or because they briefly make me feel good, or because they offer me an escape, and a less lasting and mindful escape than that long train ride in December at that. The fact that I can do any of these things is a privilege and, often, an indulgence. When I confuse these privileges for something that I have a right to or something that is owed to me, I am indulging in a fantasy much more sinister than dreaming of a white winter in a warming world.

Increasingly I am thinking about how my middle age, and whatever comes after, should be marked with re-embracing discomfort and wanting, with re-discovering what longing and waiting feels like, of recalibrating my sense of joy to be about value rather than abundance, with learning to reject the idea that I get to have everything I want, whenever I want, wherever I want, just because I want it. I am asking myself: what fantasies do I have to own up to and dissolve? How many would, if my world really was one of fairy tales, not withstand the omens brought by the already shapeshifted birds? What is the fantasy that we can tell together, without ending up in a dark place, a place of both storytelling and ecological crises?

***

One of the central themes of Vajra Chandrasekera’s novel Rakesfall is the idea of cycles and reincarnation. Throughout the book, two, or maybe three,¹ characters recur in different ages, possibly different realms of existence, not as replicas of their past selves, but entities that rhyme with each other and share a set of impulses and sensibilities. The final third of the book takes place in the far, far future where the Earth has been decimated by war and climate disasters, the vast majority of humanity has left it and became space-bound diaspora, and some of the recurring protagonists are working on rebuilding the place. In one stark moment, a character reveals to another that this too has been a cycle as many attempts at bringing our planet back to some memory of its intact nature have failed and had to be re-booted:

“It’s a disaster, you know. Total clusterfuck. Everything that can go wrong goes wrong. We’ve lost the balance and had to restart from scratch seventy-three thousand times. We’ve lost a lot of the records altogether. Leopards are no longer leopards, did you know? We lost the genes. Had to plagiarize from the other big cats. Hand-drew the spots back on myself.”

Later, in another epoch, during another regreening attempt, another person we may or may not have met many times before offers a less flippant perspective:

“You and we are far from the only attempts to guide the future of this planet. There are and were so many: seed banks and gene banks, satellite archives and invisible libraries, memorials and long-cycle art projects, secret immortals a dime a dozen. If we fail, if our regreening falls apart - and I am starting to think it will the day after we all finally burn out and go join the diaspora, whether that's tomorrow or whether we put in another ten thousand years— if we leave and all this work is for nothing and all the spirits die out and the green fades again, I guarantee it will only be a matter of time before someone else takes it from the top…This is our universe, Earth's universe, the brane defined by our consciousness, rooted in us and the way we think and the songs we sing. All our worlds are this world, in some sense, no matter how far we go, even the most vacuum-hardened fritillary with stellar wings; we can never let it go. We're here because we don't let things go. The regreening, the healing and preservation of the old Earth, is a dream a lot of people share. People understand that our history matters."

Here it was, in this chaotic, genre-dysphoric romp of a science fiction story: the healthy, lush, green, untouched Earth as the ultimate fantasy, one that humanity clings onto even after they’ve found many, many new ways to leave it behind.

Of course, the re-greening efforts always fail, of course the leopard spots are never quite right, of course we can’t seem to give up on it. Have you had a particularly devastating crush recently? It’s almost always about your fantasy of the person, not anything or anyone that they actually are. It’s almost always about who you think you’d be next to them. In these last few chapters of Rakesfall, the Earth felt like that crush to me.

Chandrasekera plays with this: in one chapter restoring the planet is within the remit of the “Working Group on the Preservation of the Ancestral Earth for Sentimental Reasons” whose overriding principle, neatly summarized as the Aesthetic, is to have “no interest in re-creating any part of the disastrous late holocene.” A character remarks that their fantasy is a “a human Earth without humans,” an absolute rejection of responsibility for what we’ve dreamt the planet into. But this is a futile exercise, in Rakesfall’s world and the real one.

In the real world, and likely every other, the Earth is so much more than we can fantasize about, and so rich as to never fully be captured by a single, streamlined, marketable fantasy. The Earth is as alive as we are, and we know that reducing each other into a fantasy never works. I want us to stop fantasizing. There is no “just getting out of the city for a bit” here. I want us to tell ourselves and each other true stories even when they are uncomfortable, and to live in them as fully as we can, to simply be good protagonists of our present.

Best,

Karmela

* In mathematics and physics, the square root of minus one is designated by the letter “i” and referred to as the imaginary unit. It is a necessary ingredient for the construction of complex numbers which are broadly used in calculations pertaining to electrical engineering, where they serve a bookkeeping purpose, and in quantum physics, where they may be closer to signifying something physically real.

1. If a character is haunted, does the demon count as a separate character?