most venal, which means that institutional-
ized corruption simply exacerbates local
social inequalities. Further, the carbon off-
sets, hedges, and funds that reward invest-
ment in capital-intensive green industries
can only be fully taken advantage of by
those who already wield great financial
influence. Even worse, such policies, when
coupled with regulatory obligations and
punitive laws, may drive small and medium
enterprises out of business, resulting in con-
centrations of wealth, resources, and capital
in financial oligopolies.
Ervine points out, with almost alarm-
ing clarity, that the growth built on global-
ization has a foundation in unsustainable
consumerism. The more we build our econ-
omies on consumption, the more we pro-
duce. It’s a Malthusian disaster, not just in
terms of population, but in the logarithmic
growth of greenhouse gases, climate change,
and mounds of plastics. While the high-
growth industrializing economies of China
and India have improved their citizens’
income prospects, they have also spurred
consumption. The environmental utopians
have claimed a “small is beautiful” solution
by limiting consumption. However, Ervine
shows the reader just how a transition from
a carbon-based consumption-driven econ-
omy would spell the collapse of the world’s
financial system. However, Ervine does
give examples, such as Canada, Costa Rica,
and Uruguay, where their economies have
established transitions or pathways using
renewables. The examples are encouraging,
except they do not seem to work without
ample alternative energy, infrastructure,
and a low level of corruption. Further, suc-
cessful implementation requires a central
government and sufficient funds dedicated
to building appropriate architecture and to
enforcing energy-transitional behaviors. It’s
hard to keep from envisioning a dystopian
implementation of a utopian aspiration:
surveillance, AI-driven monitoring, “social
credit” scores, and worse.
In reading Ervine’s text, it is clear we
can’t transcend our narratives and their
deterministic forms and predictable out-
comes. Most narratives used in conjunction
with carbon tend to be apocalyptic. There
is also the “jeremiad,” which refers to the
biblical account of Jeremiah, who urged
sinners to repent before the imminent end
of the world. The use of the jeremiad facili-
tates the rise of a charismatic leader, and
with his/her emotional appeals comes the
blinding of objectivity and a strong need to
remain with the group of “true believers.”
Other narratives that are employed with the
carbon narratives tend to perpetuate cogni-
tive bias and encourage confirmation bias
and groupthink. What is masked is the fact
that we still are not able to transcend our
postmodernist condition of extreme skepti-
cism about the narratives used to construct
reality. The narratives used to unify will also
be used to subvert. The tight emotional and
intellectual control required in the contin-
ual manufacture of the dominant culture’s
notion of reality contains embedded nar-
ratives of resistance and subversion. This is
the carbon narrative in operation.
Perhaps that is why Ervine’s final section
on pathways toward a sustainable future and
her statement that “the collective is essential
to democratic ecologies” makes one wish
she had described the kinds of political
structures and incentives needed. Our cur-
rent institutions have been shown to simply
perpetuate or exacerbate social inequal-
ity and pollution. So, how do we arrive at
a collective ability to implement “climate
justice”? Ervine’s book suggests the answer
is in pathways to be developed, hopefully
soon. To do so, we need to rebuild carbon
narratives.
University of OklahomaSusan Smith Nash earned
her PhD in English at the
University of Oklahoma
where her dissertation
examined apocalyptic
narratives in literary, film, and cultural texts.
She has combined her passion for creative
expression with petroleum geology to develop
programs that promote innovation, science,
and technology.Han Kang
The White BookTrans. Deborah Smith. New York. Hogarth.- 160 pages.
Han Kang’s The White Book is a meditation
on grief using a study of white objects in the
author’s life to spark memories of events she
did—and did not—experience, specifically
the birth and deaths of her older sister (and
a quickly mentioned older brother, who
also succumbed to premature birth) and
their mother. The book’s focus on white
originates from the little that Kang—the
third child of her mother but the first
to live beyond a few hours—knew of her
onni, or older sister. Early in the memoir,
which reads more like poetic musings, Kang
introduces the reader to the image that will
repeat throughout the work, that her sis-
ter—born premature and dead within two
hours in a remote village—had “a face as
white as a crescent-moon rice cake.”
Kang’s desire to understand the death
permeating the narrative of her life sends
her to an unnamed albeit dreary city of
which she has little knowledge—a city
that feels “curiously familiar” in that it wasWORLDLIT.ORG 79