Read an Excerpt
May You Live in Interesting Times
“Take notice what you notice.”
—Þorvaldur Þorsteinsson
Whenever I’m host visitors from abroad, I like to drive them along Borgartún, a street I call the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I point out Höfði, the white wooden house where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in 1986, a house that many people associate with the end of communism, the fall of the Iron Curtain. The nearest building to Höfði, a black boxy structure, all glass and marble, once housed Kaupþing bank’s headquarters. Kaupþing’s collapse in 2008 was the fourth largest bankruptcy in the history of capitalism—not per capita of the Icelandic population but in net dollars: $20,000 million. Twenty billion dollars.
I don’t mean to gloat over others’ misfortunes but it astonishes me that before middle age I’d already witnessed the collapse of two vast belief systems, communism and capitalism. Each had been maintained by people who’d scaled the peaks of the establishment, of government and of culture, people esteemed in direct proportion to their relative position at the pyramid’s apex. Deep inside these systems, people kept up appearances right to the bitter end. On January 19, 1989, East German General Secretary Erich Honecker said: “The wall will stand in fifty years’ time, and a hundred years’, too.” The wall collapsed that November. Kaupþing’s CEO said in a television interview on October 6, 2008, after the bank had received emergency loans from the Central Bank of Iceland: “We’re doing very well indeed, and the Central Bank can be confident it will get its money back [. . .] I can tell you that without hesitation.” Three days later, the bank collapsed.
When a system collapses, language gets released from its moorings. Words meant to encapsulate reality hang in empty air, no longer applicable to anything. Textbooks are rendered obsolete overnight; overly-complex hierarchies fade away. Suddenly, people find it difficult to hit the right phrasing, to articulate concepts that match their reality.
Between Höfði and Kaupþing’s former headquarters there’s a grassy lawn. In its center stands a paltry copse of trees, six spruces and some wooly willow shrubs. Lying inside that cluster of trees, between the two buildings, looking up at the sky, I found myself wondering which system would collapse next, what big idea would be the next to take.
Scientists have shown us that the foundations of life, of Earth itself, are failing. The principal ideologies of the 20th century considered the earth and nature as inexpensive, infinite raw material. Humans assumed the atmosphere could continually take in emissions, that the oceans could ceaselessly take in waste, that the soil could constantly renew itself if given more fertilizer, that animal species would keep moving aside as humans colonize ever more space.
If scientists’ predictions prove accurate as to the future of oceans, atmosphere, and weather systems, about the future of glaciers and coastal ecosystems, then we must ask what words can encompass these immense issues. What ideology can deal with this? What should I read? Milton Friedman, Confucius, Karl Marx, the Book of Revelations, the Qur’an, the Vedas? How to tame these desires of our, this consumption and materialism that, by any and every measurement, promises to overpower Earth’s fundamental life systems?
This book is about time and water. Over the next hundred years, there will be foundational changes in the nature of water on Earth. Glaciers will melt away. Ocean levels will rise. Increasing global temperatures will lead to droughts and floods. The oceans will acidify to a degree not seen for 50 million years. All this will happen during the lifetime of a child born today who lives to be my grandmother’s age, 95.
Earth’s mightiest forces have forsaken geological time and now change on a human scale. Changes that previously took a hundred thousand years now happen in one hundred. Such speed is mythological; it affects all life on earth, is the root of everything we think, choose, produce and believe. It affects everyone we know, everyone we love. We are confronted by changes that are more complex than most of what our minds typically handle. These changes surpass any of our previous experiences, surpass most of the language and metaphors we use to navigate our reality.
Compare it to trying to record the sounds of a volcanic eruption. With most devices, the sound breaks down; nothing can be heard but white noise. For most people, the phrase “climate change” is just white noise. Easier to have opinions on smaller matters. We can comprehend the loss of something valuable, when an animal is shot, when a project blows past its agreed-upon budget. But when it comes to the infinitely large, the sacred, to things that are foundational to our lives, there’s no comparable reaction. It’s as if the brain cannot register at such a scale.
This white noise deceives us. We see headlines and think we understand their words: “glacial melt,” “record heat,” “ocean acidification,” “increasing emissions.” If the scientists are right, these words are more serious than anything that has happened in human history up to now. If we fully understood such words, they’d directly alter our actions and choices. But it seems that 99% of the words’ meanings disappear into the white noise.
Perhaps “white noise” is the wrong metaphor; the phenomenon is more like a black hole. No scientist has ever seen a black hole, which can have the mass of millions of suns and can utterly absorb light. The way to detect black holes is to look past them, to look at nearby nebulae and stars. When it comes to discussing issues that affect all water on Earth, all Earth’s surface, her entire atmosphere—the issue’s enormity absorbs all the meaning. The only way to write about the subject is to go past it, to the side, below it, into the past and the future, to be personal and also scientific and to use mythological language. I need to write about things by not writing about them. I need to go backwards to move forwards.
We’re living in a time when thought and language have been freed from ideological chains. We’re living in the time of that old Chinese curse, almost surely incorrectly translated yet no less fitting for that:
“May you live in interesting times.”
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