Credit: courtesy of Craig Childs
When the noted American writer and environmentalist Edward Abbey died in 1989, many names were advanced as heirs to his role as gadfly, desert rat, and literary interpreter of the dry lands. A few years would pass before Craig Childs’s first book appeared, and it soon became evident that, with his penchant for slipping on a weighty backpack and setting forth on mad foot journeys into the uncharted desert at all times of year, he was a likely candidate. In books such as The Secret Knowledge of Water, House of Rain, and Soul of Nowhere, he has told his readers about slot canyons, mountain lions, fiery sunsets, weird landscapes, sandstorms, and all the other things that make people feel at home in that sun-blasted, difficult country.
With his newest book, Apocalyptic Planet, Childs takes a larger view, traveling across the globe to look at landscapes that, it seems, are actively resisting human incursion, places where volcanoes, floods, drought, earthquakes, and all the other horsemen of the apocalypse ride hard. Britannica contributing editor Gregory McNamee caught up with him on a brief stop while on the way from one dangerous destination to the next.
* * *
Britannica: Your new book is something that John McPhee might have written had he begun his travels half a century after he did. How did you decide to undertake such a huge subductive compression of so huge a topic, trolling the world’s most fraught landscapes?
Craig Childs: I am part of a generation steeped in global warming and climate change, where we are beginning to recognize not only the huge impact we have on the planet, but also the tendency for this planet to undergo dramatic changes. I wrote Apocalyptic Planet to engage these ideas, to give a sense of what the earth is truly capable of. It’s not a book I could have written 50 years ago; the climate wasn’t right. I suppose I’m defining our view of apocalypse in a new climate of change.
As for the fraught landscapes, to see the earth as it is—or as it could someday be—you need to peel back its layers. For me, those layers are green grass, blue skies, rich biodiversity, and many clean, flowing rivers. I went to large pieces of the planet that are naked in one form or another; polar ice caps, or the great, white, lifeless salars of the Atacama Desert, or Iowa where the rivers aren’t so clean. Here I could see elemental forces at work—what happens when all the frills are gone and a more daunting face of the planet is revealed.
Physically being in these sorts of landscapes, you get a different sense of time and process, which is what adds richness to how I see apocalypse. Your scale and what you measure changes when you are out there. I tried to reflect that in this book, the huge subductive compression you experience in that kind of wilderness, seeing the world for what it is.
Britannica: A memorable scene comes when, risking all and perhaps defying good sense, you decide to run a river in raging flood in the highlands of Tibet. But given global warming and glacial melting and all the other strange changes we’re hearing about, is that raging flood the new normal? Might you just have been a pioneer of a new extreme sport?
Craig Childs: Wanting to deal with tectonics. Tibet seemed like the perfect vehicle. After the first few chapters dealing with changes on an anthropocentric scale, I took this location to widen the book’s scope (setting the narrative stage for eventual asteroid impacts and a dying sun). I was also going for particularly extreme stories to set an urgent, page-turning tone. A first-descent at flood stage on a river flowing through a mountain range careening upward for more than 40 million years was ideal for that.
I don’t think the extreme sport was the river itself, or the riding of the flood. It was the entire journey of this book. It was looking for great global forces in collision, from monsoonal patterns to tectonics. I wouldn’t say I am pioneering the sport. People have been traveling to essential, elemental, and changing landscapes for a long time. Think of Alfred Wegener, the geologist who came up with plate tectonics and later died frozen on a polar ice cap during one of his expeditions. I think the extreme sport is going to these places, writing down what they say about the world, and bringing the story back if you can.
Britannica: To my mind, your great transect of an Iowa cornfield was one of the highlights of the book. Unexpectedly, perhaps, you found little life in all that green. What prompted you to undertake that particular adventure, and what did you expect to find?
Craig Childs: I started out by spinning the globe, trying to find the right region that best reflects a mass extinction. Madagascar or Hawaii made sense. Or the Aral Sea for a glimpse of total cataclysm. It was my wife, Regan, who suggested Iowa, which was exactly what I needed. Much of the arable American Midwest is a genetically depleted landscape with few thriving survivors (corn, soybeans). Iowa felt like ground zero for this. With the added moral conundrum of human-driven extinction, I had exactly the chapter I was looking for.
I went into the chapter expecting to find signs that our current rate of extinction can be turned around sometime soon, perhaps even right now. I didn’t come away convinced. I actually came away from this chapter kind of despairing. Iowa ended up representing the future I feared most, one in which we don’t stop our global fragmentation of habitats. We keep growing unimpeded, taking up every last spot until nothing remains on earth that is not us.
I didn’t realize it would be that way. I thought a backpack through GMO monoculture would be more enchanting, more experimentally diverse. It ended up being just dreadful.
Craig Childs. Credit: J.T. Thomas
Britannica: A thought experiment, if you will: You’re a native of the Phoenix area and, though a desert rat at heart, a longtime resident of the Rockies. Fast-forward fifty years, when you will be what was once thought of as an old man—but no longer, since humans now live to be 150. What does the desert look like? And your mountain home?
Craig Childs: I want the world to keep looking the way it does now. Not too hot, not too cold, good covers of greenery, beautiful deserts, and in winter lots of snow up high. But I’m not making any bets.
Judging by the poleward movement of migratory birds over the last few decades, you can see indicators shifting. Right now atmospheric recirculation cells that form global deserts are growing at a measurable rate, driven, it appears, by increasing average global temperatures. If this trend continues, 50 years from now we will see forests robbed of their trees by increasing wildfires. Bill DeBuys outlines it well in his book A Great Aridness. Once the trees burn, in a drying, marginal climate, they don’t grow back. Things start to look very different.
I believe the real shock would be 150 years from now. Following current rates of change, the forests I live in will be gone, remnants bumped up another thousand feet, pinching out around the last high regions. The Rockies will gradually look more like the barren rainshadow mountains of Mongolia. Phoenix will lie deep in our own Gobi desert. When we talk about rapid climate change, our grandchildren will be alive 150 years from now, and they may be living in a world even more desolate and destroyed than my Iowa scenario.
But that’s only one model. It’s not the only outcome, not a guaranteed future, which is the point of my book. We are living within tipping points, making choices about which way the planet goes. What happens now determines what this world will look like in 150 years, so it’s best to act accordingly, pick your future if you can.
Britannica: Now that you’ve roamed the world and courted much risk in order to land a magnificent story, what will you be following up with? Can any adventure be so grand, after all your global wanderings?
Craig Childs: Apocalyptic Planet was a bit of a global stretch for me. My geographic range tends to lie closer to home in the Americas, especially the northern continent.
For the next book, I’ll be tracking pre-Clovis hunters, the first people in North America. These were the proverbial cavemen who appeared in small, scattered numbers at the height of the Ice Age. I want to know what it would have been like to arrive on an entire continent where no other humans lived. How did the first humans and animals (big ones with tusks and sharp teeth) interact? Who were these first people, where did they come from, when did they arrive, and what world did they discover?
I’m sick of apocalypse. I want to write a creation story, so that’s going to be my next book.