“So Mark’d Out for Destruction”: Climate Changeand Silent Skies in Byron’s <i>Heaven and Earth</i>

This essay reads Byron’s drama Heaven and Earth as a climate change text that erases Byron’s previous enthrallment to variegated futurities (of the market, humanity, the non- and posthuman, the Earth). I invoke “climate change” as a trope to think the logics that attend but predate the Anthropocene: mass extinction, attenuated survival, and the loss of frontiers and exits within and beyond Earth. The drama’s decaying skies register a paradigm shift in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century astronomy from a post-Copernican, fecund cosmos to one that is decaying and hostile to human life. The play’s intimations of an uninhabitable universe and what modern astrobiology calls a “rare Earth” unfold an alternate model of secularization familiar to us today: the lockdown of our survival to the tenuous stability of contingent environmental conditions, and the erosion of any “outside” where humanity as a species might recuperate its losses and salvage a future. The deluge’s survivors figure humanity’s fatal exceptionalism and the ecological ramifications of its incapacity to transcend what Byron calls the “dim destiny of clay.” Heaven and Earth’s claustrophobic Noachic fable unfolds our own eco-catastrophic horizons and pulls our Anthropocene modernity’s fantasies of extraplanetary escape and space colonization back under the extinction-laden heaven that Byron plumbs.