Books to Influence Change: Part I
Curiosity
“I have found that any perceived changes in my life have occurred because of my curiosity...”
No One is Too Small to Make a Difference Greta Thunberg
This Changes Everything Naomi Klein
Underland Robert Macfarlane
The Uninhabitable Earth David Wallace-Wells
The Water will Come Jeff Goodell
Brave New Arctic Mark C. Serreze
The idea for a new series of recommended reading articles came after visiting Olafur Eliasson’s Tate Modern exhibition In Real Life (London, 2019).
London is a city at risk in this time of climate crisis: facing flooding, water shortages and major subsidence. By 2050, summer temperatures here will be on average 5.9°C hotter than they are today.
The city’s art and culture therefore – its public events – now carry a heavier responsibility. Though this is by no means true of London alone: locations around the world will be – or are already being – impacted by climate change.
Perhaps most scrutiny is therefore applied to those artists already flying a green flag, such as Eliasson, now considered a beacon of the environmental art-form. Eliasson’s In Real Life was a dynamic journey through earth, ice and fire; but to what extent did his exhibition inspire action? That’s something we’ll look into in a future article.
It was the peripheral components of the exhibition that – in our view – engaged the most. These included the idea to ethically transform the menu of Tate’s restaurant; his Little Sun project; and (though this hasn’t been stated as a deciding factor) the artist’s influence in Tate’s declaration of gallery-wide climate emergency.
The most inspiring of these extra components came in the form of a research wall. Here, the artist shared with us what he and his studio team were reading: articles, books, reviews and research linked to our changing Earth. Our list is significantly shorter than Eliasson’s, but, contains a considered selection of books which have satisfied our curiosity, providing us with facts to further our cause.
The first part, below, highlights a handful of titles, united in their wide-ranging exploration of environmental themes. Our hope is that these books make you curious too, and that this curiosity sparks a desire to influence change.
The first recommendation is the shortest; but packs a big punch. No One is Too Small to Make a Difference gathers the history-making speeches of young activist Greta Thunberg.
In 2018, fifteen-year-old Greta decided not to go to school one day. Her actions ended up sparking a global movement for action against the climate crisis, inspiring millions to go on strike, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. “Everything needs to change” she tells us, “and it has to start today.”
The book is a rally-cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the planet, no matter who we are or how powerless we may feel. “If our house was falling apart, you wouldn’t hold three emergency Brexit summits, and no emergency summit regarding the breakdown of the climate and ecosystems.”
In This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein urges us to re-connect and re-engage. In short, to be more curious about our surroundings.
“What is Twitter doing to my attention span?” she asks. “What are screens doing to our relationships?” These preoccupations have particular relevance in the way we relate to the climate challenge. Because this is a challenge that is, by its nature, slow moving and site specific. “Noticing the small changes requires the kind of communion that comes from knowing deeply … just when we needed to slow down and notice the subtle changes in the natural world that are telling us that something is seriously amiss, we have sped up … [we’ve] entered into the perpetual feed of the never-ending-now, slicing and dicing our attention spans as never before.”
Underland by Robert Macfarlane is both panorama, and intense study. Despite the fact that Macfarlane has focused his gaze on what lies beneath, the book soars. The locations Macfarlane traverses range from a dark-matter research station in a salt mine beneath the Yorkshire coast, to Paris’ subterranean labyrinths. From caves in the Mendips; to Olkiluoto Island on the Bothnian sea where nuclear waste will see out its half-lives; and from the from the rivers that twist beneath the Carso plateau, to the fjords and glaciers of the Arctic, where once buried secrets are now exposed as ice departs.
These extraordinary tunnellings are merely springboards for discussions of a deeper and more emotional nature: the relationship between us and the Earth; and our place in what Macfarlane describes as “deep time”. The author’s observations on land, coast and sea are far-reaching, with an inquisitive gaze similar to that of Eliasson’s. Macfarline makes clear that we have passed a turning point, that the climatic consequences of our rapid abuse of the Earth are now upon us.
Macfarline also puts into words something artists are often drawn to: “trace fossils”. These are “the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind…”
“Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.”
Macfarline labels us as custodians of an “empire of things … with its own unruly afterlife.” Just one such example is the finding of “plastiglomerates” – a new form of Anthropocene stone. These could be seen as the evolution of artist Robert Callender’s depictions of plastic beach-waste, formed of sun-melted plastic, landscape debris and organic matter. We wonder if Callender might have sculpted plastiglomerates as a next step on from his artwork Plastic Beach.
One sentence to muse on: “We burn Carboniferous-era fossil fuels to melt Pleistocene-era ice to determine Anthropocene future climates.”
Bleaker in its outlook is The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace. Much discussion is centered around the United Nation’s prediction that we are on track for 4.5 °C of warming by 2100 (following the path we are on today). Wallace serves us with point after point on where we’re headed.
From the insurmountable: “…we do not yet know how much suffering global warming will inflict. But the scale of devastation could make that debt enormous, by any measure. Larger, conceivably, than any historical debt owed one country, or one people by another, almost none of which are ever properly re-payed…”
To the baffling: “…air conditioners and fans already account for 10% of global electricity consumption. Demand is expected to triple or perhaps quadruple by 2050. According to one estimate, the world will be adding 700 million A.C. units by just 2030. Another study suggests that by 2050 there will be, around the world, more than 9 billion cooling appliances of various kinds…”
You’re reading this blog post online, maybe on a phone, and Wallace has depressing commentary there too: “…much of the infrastructure of the internet could be drowned by sea level rise in less than two decades; and most of the smartphones we use to navigate it are today manufactured in Shenzhen, which, sitting right in the Pearl Delta, is likely to be flooded soon as well...”
Referencing The Water will Come by Jeff Goodell, Wallace runs through just a few of the monuments – in some cases, whole cultures – that will be transformed into underwater relics this century. “Any beach you’ve ever visited … Facebook’s HQ … the Kennedy Space Centre … the US’s largest naval base … the entire nations of the Maldives and Marshall Islands … most of Bangladesh … all of Miami beach, and much of the south Florida paradise … St Mark’s Basilica in Venice … Venice Beach in Santa Monica … the Pennsylvania White House and Winter White House…”
Wallace observes that we’ve spent the millennia since Plato enamoured with a single drowned culture: Atlantis. “If Atlantis ever existed, it was probably a small archipelago of Mediterranean islands with a population of a few thousand. By 2100, if we do not halt emissions, as much as 5% of the world’s population will be flooded every single year.”
The answers to the key questions of our era – “how much hotter will it get? by how much will sea levels rise?” – are entirely human, that is, entirely political. How do we respond to the threats we are facing? We must urge our governments to act.
“Eating organic is nice; but if your goal is to save the climate, your vote is much more important”
In Brave New Arctic by Mark C. Serreze we shift the focus to our planet’s thermostat – ground zero of climate-change – the Arctic. While this book is of a more scientific nature, what Serreze writes on the future of the polar region is disconcerting. Serreze describes a region which is out of control. Ice is shrinking and thinning, and we are facing ice-free Arctic summers. By 2050 – safely assuming no drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the immediate future – the Arctic Ocean will likely have little or no sea ice at summer’s end.
“It is a foregone conclusion, that, in future generations – whether on the ocean or on the land – the Arctic will have much less ice. Winter darkness will still bring low temperatures and with them snow and ice, but this winter cold will have significantly faded … the snow that falls and the ice that grows in winter, will not survive the stronger summer warmth. That the Arctic Ocean will become free of sea ice in late summer and early autumn is a given. The only question is how quickly it will happen. Which will depend on the relative rolls of a warming atmosphere and a warming ocean; the vagaries of natural climate variability and how quickly greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise.”
As someone who has spent his life reading Arctic data, even Serreze was taken aback when the region “reared up and roared.”
“Some of the greatest unknowns revolve around the impact of a transformed Arctic … will a warmer Arctic have significant impact on weather patterns on lower latitudes? Will this effect agricultural patterns? How quickly will sea level rise? Given prospects of increased shipping and extraction of resources, how much busier will the Arctic become? And, will this lead to conflicts? These are questions that should concern us all.”
We’d welcome your recommendations too. Feel free to get in touch: contactalaluz@gmail.com. In our next summary, look out for The Human Planet
“The total amount of concrete ever produced by humans is enough to cover the entire surface of Earth with a layer 2mm thick; we have managed to produce enough plastic that it has made its way as tiny fibres into almost all of the water we drink.”
