Overview

In playfully pessimistic and thought-provoking essays, author Andrew McMurry explores a vital but fundamentally perverse human practice: destroying our planet while imagining we are not. How are humans able to do this? Entertaining Futility: Despair and Hope in the Time of Climate Change investigates the discourses of hope, progress, and optimism in the era of climate change, concepts that, McMurry argues, are polite names for blind faith, greed, and wishful thinking. The itemized list of humanity's arrogance can quickly lead to despair, so McMurry compensates by presenting the news in a darkly comic and irreverent style. McMurry believes human culture relies on a full suite of rhetorical tricks to distract us from our own demise. He investigates the role language, discourse, media, and technology play in shaping perceptions and misperceptions of our complex environmental crises. Writing in a mode that freely mixes the scholarly, fictive, poetic, and personal, McMurry draws on philosophy, history, ecology, film, science fiction, and pop culture to raise questions that are difficult to face, let alone answer. In the author's words, “our age is utterly paralyzing unless you can crack jokes about it.” Entertaining Futility offers no easy solutions to today's environmental calamities and, in fact, claims that perhaps the continual proposing of solutions is part of the problem. Instead, McMurry encourages readers to examine their own deeply held beliefs about the environment and the future and to look more closely at where those beliefs originate. By pulling back the curtain, he reveals the rhetorical and cultural ruses that distract us from the reality of our environmental crises.

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9781623496852

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Reviews

Andrew McMurry is the vibrant bard of our 'sad apocalypse' -- brilliantly literate, always entertaining, a 'corrective to [our]...blind faith in progress and human exceptionalism.' This supremely realistic book, the best I have read in a long time, shows that there is still a way to live -- to more than survive -- without indulging in the illusory comforts and false hopes that keep us from seeing the sharp rocks so close ahead. --David Ehrenfeld, author of The Arrogance of Humanism and Becoming Good Ancestors: How We Balance Nature, Community, and Technology --David Ehrenfeld

"""Andrew McMurry is the vibrant bard of our 'sad apocalypse' -- brilliantly literate, always entertaining, a 'corrective to [our]...blind faith in progress and human exceptionalism.' This supremely realistic book, the best I have read in a long time, shows that there is still a way to live -- to more than survive -- without indulging in the illusory comforts and false hopes that keep us from seeing the sharp rocks so close ahead."" --David Ehrenfeld, author of The Arrogance of Humanism and Becoming Good Ancestors: How We Balance Nature, Community, and Technology --David Ehrenfeld"

Andrew McMurry is the vibrant bard of our 'sad apocalypse' -- brilliantly literate, always entertaining, a 'corrective to [our]...blind faith in progress and human exceptionalism.' This supremely realistic book, the best I have read in a long time, shows that there is still a way to live -- to more than survive -- without indulging in the illusory comforts and false hopes that keep us from seeing the sharp rocks so close ahead. --David Ehrenfeld, author of The Arrogance of Humanism and Becoming Good Ancestors: How We Balance Nature, Community, and Technology --David Ehrenfeld

Author Information

Andrew MCMurry is associate professor of English language and literature at the University of Waterloo. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

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