Roy Scranton won the Theresa A. White Literary Award for short fiction 2009, received a Mrs. Giles G. Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities in 2014, and was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2017.[10] His New York Times essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014, and his essay “The Terror of the New” was selected as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2015. In 2021–2022, Roy Scranton was a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies.[11] In 2024, Scranton was named a Guggenheim fellow.[12]
Reception
Author Jeff VanderMeer wrote of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, "It’s a powerful, useful, and ultimately hopeful book that more than any other I've read has the ability to change people's minds and create change."[13] Commenting on his bluntness, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow of the Los Angeles Review of Books wrote, "There is something cathartic about his refusal to shy away from the full scope of our predicament."[14]
Historian Naomi Oreskes named Learning to Die in the Anthropocene one of the "five best books on the politics of climate change." She wrote, "I think he's fundamentally right about the essential point, which is that we have a tremendously difficult time assimilating just how serious this problem really is."[15]
In the book How to Blow Up a Pipeline,[16] author Andreas Malm criticized Scranton,[17] stating that Scranton is united with other critics of climate activism by "a reification of despair"[18] which Malm called "an eminently understandable emotional response to the crisis, but unserviceable as a response for a politics in it."[19] He described Scranton's position as "climate fatalism",[19] and stated that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy because "[the] more people who tell us that a radical reorientation is 'scarcely imaginable', the less imaginable it will be."[18]
Works
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. City Lights Publishers. 2016. ISBN9780872866690
