Consider forest fires. Until late in the twentieth century we were told by Smokey Bear that “only you can prevent forest fires,” which by implication could only be bad for nature. In the past fifty years, we have learned that many forest species, plant and animal, have evolved with, adapted to, and actually require forest fires. The great Sequoias of California, one of nature’s longest-lived creatures, can reproduce only after a clearing takes place in a forest from storms or fire. Recognizing this, many ecologists and foresters understand that forests need fire, need disturbance. But forest fires are tricky things; they easily get away and burn houses. Still, if we don’t light them, nature eventually does, and destroys houses anyway.Why do our ways of managing and conserving nature keep falling back to the old ways of thinking? One reason, ironically, is that it isn’t nature by itself that needs to be unchanging; it is our civilization that depends on constancy. When humans were just hunter-gatherers without a permanent home, they could follow the environment as it changed, moving around the world to places that better suited them. But then farming started, and people began to stay in one place. Land ownership developed. With the advance of civilization, cities were founded and became important and desirable. Once people set up all these fixed structures — farmlands, cities, and towns — we became dependent on environmental constancy. It is we who want and need a balance of nature, not our nonhuman companions, whether polar bear, the blue whale, or sequoia tree.
On to a transport map of Tokyo, a newspaper has superimposed the impact of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1 September 1923. The red area denotes the fire damage in the aftermath of the quake, tram lines are shown in yellow with blue cirles for stops, while the Yamanote rail line is black with yellow squares. The inset shows the Yokohama area. From this terrific slideshow.
Emily Carr’s typeface specimen posters are neat.
Shadow sculptures: portraits of the artists. Via @buffigibbons on Twitter
Reading the Bible out loud is a profoundly theological act. After all, it is no accident that the Christian tradition considered the Word to be first and foremost a person. In oral societies, words have so much personal power that they are treated as entities with their own agency. As Walter Ong observes, “In a society where the only known word is the pure, evanescent spoken word, it is easier to think of objects as words than it is to think of words as objects.” Reading out loud gives us a glimpse of the social conditions that made the identification of God with the Word so plausible. Reading the Bible out loud is also practically useful. It helps to answer some of the most pressing questions that arise from the written text. What did Jesus sound like when he stilled the storm, rebuked Peter, or chatted with Martha and Mary? Does it matter that the only leper who showed gratitude for being cured praised God with a loud voice (Luke 17:15)? When Pilate asked if he were the Messiah, how did Jesus say, “You say so”? How do we know, unless we try saying these words out loud ourselves? Of course, vocalizing the words of Scripture is no guarantee that they will be fully and truly understood. Such vocalization is not even a necessary condition for divine revelation, since God can work through any medium. Nevertheless, the Word of God is never more at home, so to speak, than in the sound of the human voice.
So can divestment, I asked, be an effective strategy? Can it generate enough economic leverage to make a difference?“I think it’s a way to a get a fight started,” Bill said without hesitation, “and to get people in important places talking actively about the culpability of the fossil fuel industry for the trouble that we’re in. And once that talk starts, I think it does start imposing a certain kind of economic pressure. Their high stock price is entirely justified by the thought that they’re going to get all their reserves out of the ground. And I think we’ve already made an argument that it shouldn’t be a legitimate thing to be doing.”
In other words, as in South Africa, as with Big Tobacco, there’s economic leverage in the moral case?
“Absolutely.”
What, then, I wanted to know, is the “theory of change,” right now, in Bill McKibben’s mind?
“It’s not a question of coming up with the right set of policies,” he said. “Nobody’s really come up with a new set of policy stuff for 20 years. We just haven’t ever tried the things that the economists all told us to try, because the fossil fuel industry got in the way. So it’s about figuring out what power is in the way.
“Look, our job as organizers, our most important job, is to take the next step — throw a big rock in the pond, see what ripples it creates, and then figure out how to surf those and how to launch the next one. We think that if we’re able to explain to people what the fossil fuel industry is doing, it will weaken their position — weaken it morally, politically, and economically. And that will make more things possible than are possible now.”
At its root, our mission is both medical and moral. It is based on solidarity, rather than charity alone. When a person in Peru, or Siberia, or rural Haiti falls ill, PIH uses all of the means at our disposal to make them well—from pressuring drug manufacturers, to lobbying policy makers, to providing medical care and social services. Whatever it takes. Just as we would do if a member of our own family—or we ourselves—were ill.
It’s probably also true that climate change is far too complex an issue to write a definitive novel about. But is it too complex an issue for fiction writers to make a contribution? To write not so much a definitive novel about it, but one of many complementary ones? My own attempt at this, From Here (2012), tells the story of a group of ordinary people (a supermarket cashier, an ex-banker, a hipster girl), who’ve come together in an unlikely alliance – realising how this one issue touches them all to the core. It’s full of the contradictions surrounding climate change, and the confusion many people (even those actively involved) feel around it. Telling people that I was working on a story that tackles the issue head-on, and with a clear stance on it, the response I often got was: are you sure? Which, more than once, probably meant: are you completely out of your mind?There’s a school of thought that says novels shouldn’t (even can’t) be about a very current issue. One could reply that climate change isn’t very current in that sense – it didn’t start yesterday, and it will be with us for a long, long time – but I won’t, because our response to it (or lack thereof) is as current as it gets. But ought that really to prevent us from writing about it?
Zadie Smith beautifully described the dangers of writing fiction that’s grounded in the now in a recent Guardian podcast. People tend to find their own time “uninteresting, vulgar and stupid,” she said, and they will constantly accuse you of “shallowness, because there’s a sense that literature must be timeless”. And yet, the novels that “end up being important to people are the ones which in some way express their time” – provided you’re not simply producing a “springboard to talk about whatever is in the news.”
Yes, some mouth-breathing upskirt enthusiasts actually are ardent defenders of free speech in a constitutional context, just as some couch-surfing stoners are actually deeply committed to stumping for recognition of cannabinoid compounds as legitimate instruments of medical therapy. Speaking as someone who is both for free speech and for the disprohibitionmentation of marijuana, however, I will suggest their actual number, as a ratio against those dude who just want their whack and weed, is low indeed.Which is why, upskirt dude, when you come at me with your “free speech” argument, I am skeptical, shall we say, concerning your sincerity regarding, knowledge of, and commitment to, free speech. I will judge you if it quickly becomes apparent — as it so often does — that you haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about on the subject. Because then not only are you a creep, you’re an insincere creep, and you think I am as ignorant as you are, which is also unsurprisingly offensive to me.
If all you want to do is be a creep, then please don’t drag free speech into it. Free speech really does deserve better.