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REVISION. For many years, humanists have tried to convince themselves that they can make a decisive contribution to solving the climate crisis. There is nothing wrong with that, when an urgent question comes up, it’s fine if as many people as possible try to answer, but the stubborn and intellectually attractive ecocritic probably won’t even since the ship is full of water.
The solutions are political, economic, technological: better forms of energy, new ways of imagining and establishing global justice, a reorganization of capitalist production that destroys, impoverishes and warms the earth. Roy scrantons The arch-Ihumanist thoughts of “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene” are certainly beautiful and wise, but idealistic, destined for the shelf rather than reality. OR?
Am I too pessimistic now?
Andri Snær Magnason, Icelandic politicians and writers, It does not come to a clear defense of the values of the humanities in times of disaster, but in the fine and discreet “On Time and Water” it still manages to create space for something that the daily and ordinary climate the debate does not take place. I really don’t know what to call it, perhaps a long and slow prospect. He sees us with the eyes of children, even grandchildren.
The extent of the climate catastrophe is therefore the main clue of the book. Not only because it is total, overwhelming, changing, we already know, but rather like this: “The one who is twenty years old today will love and know a man who still lives in 2160. And given the current order of the world, we are heading to a destruction so extensive that the generations that live then will condemn our entire existence as ridiculous and stupid. “
Bombastic, like I said. But it is also true.
The perspective may seem banal, but when it is stretched and divided into parts, it becomes the opposite. And while Magnason is sometimes corrupted by the bombastic appeal that plagues nearly everyone who writes about the climate, it is a perspective he pursues with impressive finesse: he takes us to the melting glaciers in Iceland, through his family history. full of celebrities, to Tibet. , Dalai Lama and the flowing water of the Himalayan glaciers, through the lives lost and the crocodile species saved from extinction, to prove their point. That a rise in temperature as small as 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius results in changes on a mythological scale. And yet we are at a loss for words to talk about them.
The acidification of the sea is one of the most catastrophic consequences of warming, but in pure denotation it seems minimal. The pH of the water is estimated to drop from 8.2 to 7.9, a few decimal places, nothing. But the image of them is dying coral reefs. It is a fundamental change in marine chemistry that, in the worst case, can alter the entire ecosystem. And considering how crucial the health of the sea is to all living things, Magnason writes, “one may begin to wonder if the concept of ‘ocean acidification’ in 2019 is perhaps as weak as the word ‘annihilation’ was in 1930. , compared to what it meant in 1960. ”
Bombastic, like I said. But it is also true. Disclaimer of solutions, absolutely. But it remains a compelling reminder of why it is so hellishly impossible to really incorporate the climate crisis into thinking – it is on a different scale than man, politics, the world that we have measured and become accustomed to. It is the future and it is still here.
SAKPROSA
ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON
About time and water. A story about our future
Translation of John Swedenmark
Norstedts, 308 p.
Victor Malm is critic and editor of Expressen’s culture page.
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