Page 8 of The Anthropocene Reviewed

I GREW UP IN ORLANDO, FLORIDA, about fifteen miles away from the world’s most-visited theme park, Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. When I was a kid, Orlando was such a tourist city that whenever you flew out of the airport, a message played saying, “We hope you enjoyed your visit.” In response, my parents would always sigh, and then mutter, “We live here.”

I first visited the Magic Kingdom in 1981, when I was four and it was ten. I loved the park back then. I remember meeting Goofy and allowing myself to believe it was actually Goofy. I remember getting scared on the Snow White ride, and feeling big because I could ride Thunder Mountain, and I remember being so tired at the end of the day that I’d fall asleep with my face pressed against the glass of our Volkswagen Rabbit.

But then I got older. As a teenager, I began to define myself primarily by what I disliked, and my loathes were legion. I hated children’s books, the music of Mariah Carey, suburban architecture, and shopping malls. But most of all, I hated Disney World. My friends and I had a word for the artificiality and corporatized fantasy of pop music and theme parks and cheerful movies: We called all of it “plastic.” The TV show Full House was plastic. The Cure’s new stuff was kind of plastic. And Disney World? God, Disney World was so plastic.

This period of my life coincided with a terrible blessing. My mother won a community service award, and the award came with four free annual passes to Disney. That summer, I was fourteen, and my family dragged me to Disney World All. The. Time.

I realize I’m probably not garnering much sympathy with my sorrowful tale of getting into Disney World for free dozens of times in one summer. But fourteen-year-old me hated it. For one thing, Disney World was always hot, and in 1992, I had a semireligious allegiance to wearing a trench coat, which did not pair well with the pounding and oppressive swamp heat of Central Florida summers. The coat was meant to protect me from the world, not the weather, and in that respect it succeeded. Still, I was always sweating, and I must’ve been quite a sight to my fellow theme park visitors—a rail-thin child with a hunter-green coat to my knees, droplets of sweat erupting from every facial pore.

But of course I wanted those people to be freaked out by me, because I was freaked out by them. I was repulsed by the idea that they were giving money to a corporation in order to escape their horrible, miserable lives that were horrible and miserable in part because our corporate overlords controlled all the means of production.

At any rate, I had to survive many long summer days at Disney World. I usually started out sitting on a bench near the entrance to the park, scrawling snippets of stories into a yellow legal pad, and then eventually the day would get unbearably warm, and I’d make my way to the Hall of Presidents, which was one of the least crowded and best air-conditioned attractions at the Magic Kingdom. For the remainder of the day, I’d return to the Hall of Presidents show over and over, writing in that legal pad all the while. I began the first short story I ever finished while sitting through the Hall of Presidents show. The story was about a crazed anthropologist who kidnaps a family of hunter-gatherers and takes them to Disney World.*

The Hall of Presidents was an opening-day attraction at the Magic Kingdom, and it has been a constant presence since the park opened in 1971. In a building modeled after Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the U.S. Constitution was debated, visitors first enter a waiting room, which features busts of several presidents and also a bust of the Disney Company’s founder, Walt Disney, who is identified as “An American Original.”

Since there is almost never a wait for the Hall of Presidents, you soon enter the main theater, whereupon you are told that the attraction is dedicated to the memory of Walt Disney. This always struck me as a bit excessive, not only because Disney’s sculpted head appears in the waiting room but also because the entire park is named after him. After Disney thanks Disney, there’s a movie about American history before the screen eventually ascends to reveal the stars of the show—life-size animatronic re-creations of every American president. The animatronics are at once creepily lifelike and terrifyingly robotic—a proper descent into the uncanny valley. As my daughter, then four years old, said when we visited the Hall of Presidents, “Those are NOT humans.”

Only a couple of the presidents actually speak. Animatronic Abraham Lincoln stands and recites the Gettysburg Address, and since the early 1990s, the animatronic current president has made a speech at the end of the show, using their own voice. When we visited in 2018, animatronic Donald Trump uttered a few sentences, including, “Above all, to be an American is to be an optimist,” which is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how citizenship gets conferred in nation-states.

The Hall of Presidents doesn’t ignore the various horrors of American history, but it’s also an unapologetically patriotic celebration of the United States and its presidents. In fact, one of the last lines of the show is, “Our presidency is no longer just an idea. It is an idea with a proud history.” And I would argue it is an idea with a proud history. But it is also an idea with many other histories—a shameful history, an oppressive history, and a violent history, among others. One of the challenges of contemporary life for me is determining how those histories can coexist without negating each other, but the Hall of Presidents doesn’t really ask them to coexist. Instead, it imagines a triumphalist view of American history: Sure, we had some failures, but thankfully we solved them with our relentless optimism, and just look at us now.

Two of the Anthropocene’s major institutions are the nation-state and the limited liability corporation, both of which are real and powerful—and on some level made-up. The United States isn’t real the way a river is real, nor is the Walt Disney Company. They are both ideas we believe in. Yes, the United States has laws and treaties and a constitution and so on, but none of that prevents a country from splitting apart or even disappearing. From the neoclassical architecture that attempts to give the U.S. a sense of permanence* to the faces on our money, America has to continually convince its citizens that it is real, and good, and worthy of allegiance.

Which is not so different from the work that the Walt Disney Company tries to do by revering its founding father and focusing on its rich history. Both the nation and the corporation can only exist if at least some people believe in them. And in that sense, they really are kinds of magic kingdoms.

As a teen, I liked to imagine what life might be like if we all stopped believing in these constructs. What would happen if we abandoned the idea of the U.S. Constitution being the ruling document of our nation, or the idea of nation-states altogether? Perhaps it is a symptom of middle age that I now want to imagine better nation-states (and better-regulated private corporations) rather than leaving behind these ideas. But we cannot do the hard work of imagining a better world into existence unless we reckon honestly with what governments and corporations want us to believe, and why they want us to believe it.

Until then, the Hall of Presidents will always feel a little plastic to me. I give it two stars.

AIR-CONDITIONING

OVER THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS, the weather for humans has gotten considerably hotter, not just because of global warming, but also because of where we are choosing to live. In the United States, for instance, the three states with the largest population gains in the past century—Nevada, Florida, and Arizona—are also among the warmest states. This trend is perhaps best exemplified by the U.S.’s fifth largest city, Phoenix, Arizona, which had a population of 5,544 people in 1900. In 2021, Phoenix was home to around 1.7 million people. The average high temperature in August is 103 degrees Fahrenheit, and yet they have a professional ice hockey team, the Arizona Coyotes. Until 1996, the Coyotes were known as the Jets, and they were based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where the weather is considerably cooler, but the NHL followed the money and the people toward the equator.

One of the reasons for this huge shift in human geography is the miracle of air-conditioning, which allows people to control the temperature of their interior spaces. Air-conditioning has deeply reshaped human life in rich countries—from small things, like the declining percentage of time that windows are open in buildings, to large things, like the availability of medication. Insulin, many antibiotics, nitroglycerin, and lots of other drugs are heat sensitive and can lose their efficacy if not stored at so-called “room temperature,” which is defined as between 68 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit, temperatures that no rooms in summertime Phoenix could have hoped to achieve before air-conditioning. Climate-controlled drug storage remains one of the big challenges for healthcare systems in poor countries, where many health facilities have no electricity.

Even the reading experience you’re having right now is contingent upon air-conditioning—this book was printed in an air-conditioned facility.* In fact, air-conditioning was invented for a facility not too dissimilar from the one that printed this book. In 1902, a young engineer named Willis Carrier was tasked with solving a problem in Buffalo, New York: A printing company’s magazine pages were warping due to summertime humidity. Carrier created a device that essentially reversed the process of electric heating, running air through cold coils instead of hot ones. This reduced humidity, but it also had the useful side effect of decreasing indoor temperatures. Carrier went on to make more inquiries into what he called “treating air,” and the company he cofounded, the Carrier Corporation, remains one of the largest air-conditioning manufacturers in the world.

Heat has long been a worry for humans. In ancient Egypt, houses were cooled by hanging reeds from windows and trickling water down them. Then, as now, controlling indoor temperatures wasn’t only about comfort and convenience, because heat can kill humans. In an essay with the catchy title “An Account of the Extraordinary Heat of the Weather in July 1757, and the Effects of It,” the English physician John Huxham wrote that heat caused “sudden and violent pains of the head, and vertigo, profuse sweats, great debility and depression of the spirits.” He also noted that the urine of heat wave victims was “high-colored and in small quantity.”

In many countries today, including the United States, heat waves cause more deaths than lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes combined. A 2003 European heat wave that was concentrated in France led to the deaths of over seventy thousand people. Deadly heat waves from Australia to Algeria and from Canada to Argentina have been common throughout history, but one of the weirdnesses of the Anthropocene is that in the wealthier parts of the world, heat is now more of a health problem in mild climates than in hot ones. Over the past twenty years, people living in usually cool central France, where home AC is uncommon, have been far more likely to die from heat waves than people living in usually sweltering Phoenix, where over 90 percent of households have at least some form of air-conditioning.

There is another peculiarity of modern air-conditioning: cooling the indoors warms the outdoors. Most of the energy that powers air-conditioning systems comes from fossil fuels, the use of which warms the planet, which over time will necessitate more and more conditioning of air. According to the International Energy Agency, air-conditioning and electric fans combined already account for around 10 percent of all global electricity usage, and they expect AC usage will more than triple over the next thirty years. Like most other energy-intensive innovations, AC primarily benefits people in rich communities, while the consequences of climate change are borne disproportionately by people in impoverished communities.

Climate change is probably the biggest shared challenge facing twenty-first-century humans, and I fear future generations will judge us harshly for our failure to do much about it. They will likely learn in their history classes—correctly—that as a species, we knew carbon emissions were affecting the planet’s climate back in the 1970s. And they will learn—correctly—about the efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to limit carbon emissions, efforts that ultimately failed for complicated and multifaceted reasons that I assume the history classes of the future will have successfully boiled down into a single narrative. And I suspect that our choices will seem unforgivable and even unfathomable to the people reading those history books. “It is fortunate,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote more than a century ago, “that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”*

Even as we are beginning to experience the consequences of climate change, we are struggling to mount a global human response to this global problem caused by humans. Some of that is down to public misinformation and the widespread distrust of expertise. Some of it is because climate change feels like an important problem but not an urgent one. The wildfires that have become more common must be put out today. It is much harder for us to make the big changes that would, over generations, decrease the probability of those fires.

But I think it is also hard for us to confront human-caused climate change because the most privileged among us, the people who consume the most energy, can separate ourselves from the weather. I am certainly one such person. I am insulated from the weather by my house and its conditioned air. I eat strawberries in January. When it is raining, I can go inside. When it is dark, I can turn on lights. It is easy for me to feel like climate is mostly an outside phenomenon, whereas I am mostly an inside phenomenon.

But that’s all a misconception. I am utterly, wholly dependent on what I imagine as the outside world. I am contingent upon it. For humans, there is ultimately no way out of the obligations and limitations of nature. We are nature. And so, like history, the climate is both something that happens to us and something we make.

Here in Indianapolis, high temperatures reach above 90 degrees Fahrenheit only about thirteen days per year, and yet most of our homes and office buildings are air-conditioned. This is in part because architecture has changed dramatically in the last fifty years, especially when it comes to commercial buildings, to assume the existence of air-conditioning. But AC is also becoming more common because more of us expect to be able to control our interior environments. When I’m outside, if I can adjust my wardrobe a bit, I feel entirely comfortable if the temperature is anywhere between 55 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit. But inside, my comfort zone drops dramatically, down to a couple of degrees. I loathe sweating while sitting inside, as I often did when I lived in an un-air-conditioned apartment in Chicago. I find it equally uncomfortable to feel goose bumps of chill indoors. Like an expensive painting or a fragile orchid, I thrive only in extremely specific conditions.

I am not alone in this respect. A Cornell University study in 2004 found that office temperatures affect workplace productivity. When temperatures were increased from 68 degrees Fahrenheit to 77, typing output rose by 150 percent and error frequency dropped by 44 percent. This is no small matter—the author of the study said it suggested “raising the temperature to a more comfortable thermal zone saves employers about two dollars per worker, per hour.” Why, then, are so many summertime office environments so cool when it is both more expensive and less efficient to keep summertime temperatures low? Perhaps because the definition of “room temperature” has historically been established by analyzing the temperature preferences of forty-year-old, 154-pound men wearing business suits. Studies have consistently found that on average women prefer warmer indoor temperatures.

But when people point out the bias of AC settings in office buildings—especially when women point it out—they’ve often been mocked for being overly sensitive. After the journalist Taylor Lorenz tweeted that office air-conditioning systems are sexist, a blog in the Atlantic wrote, “To think the temperature in a building is sexist is absurd.” But it’s not absurd. What’s absurd is reducing workplace productivity by using precious fossil fuels to excessively cool an office building so that men wearing ornamental jackets will feel more comfortable.

I need to get used to feeling a bit warmer. It’s the only future for us. When I was a kid in Florida, it seemed natural to me to grab a sweatshirt before heading to the movie theater. Air-conditioning, like so much else in the Anthropocene, was a kind of background hum that reshaped my life without my ever thinking about it. But writing to you from the early hours of 2021, entering a movie theater at all feels wildly unnatural. What’s “natural” for humans is always changing.