I remember the thrill of transgression I felt the first time I pulled Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization off a shelf. It was at City Lights Bookstore, in San Francisco. I had just given a reading, was coming down from the Poetry Room full of Allen Ginsberg’s spirit, and there it was, Learning to Die , the book that everyone seemed to be talking about with fear and loathing, on a small bookcase on the stair’s landing, a fat stack of them wedged between copies of Howl . If you’ve spent any time in nature or environmental writing circles in the past decade, or are even faintly aware of the raging cultural debate about whether hope or despair is the most fitting affect with which to face the planet-wide polycrisis—of which climate change is but one of many dire emergencies—you likely recognize Scranton’s name.…