Читать книгу On Time and Water - Andri Snaer Magnason - Страница 11

My trip to Kringilsárrani became Dreamland, a book that carried me around the world. I gave a lecture in Munich and participated in a panel discussion with Wolfgang Lucht, a professor and scientist from the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research in Germany. He said that not only had his most severe predictions from ten years ago come true, but they’d been exceeded. He’d never planned on becoming a doomsday prophet. His first love was poetry but he ended up a climate scientist because he was good at math. In his lecture, he talked about Greek mythology and about the curse of Cassandra: how it was decreed that she would be able to predict the future but no one would believe her prophecies. She was fated to know everything beforehand, and also doomed to see everything come true.

He said that after writing with such passion about landscapes, waterfalls, and hidden mountain valleys, I must be tempted to write about the most urgent issue of our times. I said that climate matters were complex and scientific; better to leave them to the experts.

“But you weren’t afraid to criticize experts when it came to hydroelectric dams and aluminum smelting plants.”

“True, but at least I could see the dam and walk around the land and understand where the reservoir was going to be. I was able to calculate energy production myself and work out how many unnecessary products the factory would make, and I could understand and criticize the engineers’ calculations.”

“Don’t you trust yourself, then, to write about the biggest changes to the earth’s most important systems since humankind appeared—instead of wanting to make a handful of scientists responsible?”

“Can’t they write about their own research?”

“No, because they’re not experts in communication. Without help, their knowledge is destined to fall on deaf ears. If you’re a writer and don’t feel the need to write about these issues, you simply don’t grasp the science or the seriousness of the matter. Anyone who understands what’s at stake would not prioritize anything else. I oversee a large team of scientists. We publish computer models and diagrams according to established scientific conventions; people look at them and nod and take them in to a limited degree, but they do not understand them, not really. I present data to parliamentary committees and explain how millions of people will lose their homes if we do not act. The politicians immediately respond: ‘If we do what you say, hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs tomorrow.’ They make it my responsibility. If politicians really understood what I was saying, people would roll up their sleeves and find solutions. We have focused such huge energy on deadly problems of war and weapons, or on reaching the moon. In the Manhattan Project, thousands of people were sent out into the desert to work through the nights, skipping summer holidays and Christmas holidays until they had created a nuclear bomb. So why can’t we do something for the planet, for good? If politicians fully understood, they would come up with something like that. How many people should work on the climate crisis? Millions of people would not be too many when the Earth’s future is at stake!”

I nodded. Perhaps I didn’t look serious enough; I can’t help but smile in the face of grave matters. So he said: “I’m not kidding, people don’t understand numbers and graphs, but they do understand stories. You can tell stories. You must tell stories.”

I thought about it.

“But no one wants to hear apocalyptic prophecies and dismal accounts of the world as it is today.”

“That’s the problem,” he said. “Imagine a doctor not wanting to tell a patient he has early-stage cancer. That the patient needs to quit smoking immediately, to upturn his life, even put everything on hold for one or two years in order to save his life; to undergo surgery, radiation therapy, rehabilitation. Imagine if your doctor does not want to candidly tell you what might happen because he fears scaring you. So instead he recommends organic tobacco and peppermint tea.”

“That makes sense.”

“That’s what’s been happening. The result is we are faced with a serious problem that keeps growing: the patient has not changed their lifestyle, believing they will be saved by the scent of essential oils. We’re talking about life and death, but people do not perceive it that way. Most of the solutions that get discussed are placebos. Homeopathic doses. Banning plastic straws. Sorting plastic. All minor details. We need much more radical action.”

I listened to him, thinking how very serious he was about all of this. It’s one thing to worry about a dam in the Icelandic highlands; does it make any sense to worry about the whole world? What kind of Pandora’s box would it be to get involved in these matters, to cast one’s happiness down into this infinite drain? There were upcoming conferences in Copenhagen and Paris and Rio and Kyoto. Thousands of experts publishing reports and charts. What more was there to add? Weren’t politicians listening and responding?

Soon after that discussion, I attended a conference on climate issues at the University of Iceland where one specialist after another came up to the stage. A marine biologist talked about ocean acidification and seabird die-off. A glaciologist talked about glacial melt and an ecologist about the decline in global topsoil, about falling groundwater levels and the consequences of imminent water shortages. People threw out numbers, millions of people, millions of animal species, the fastest changes in millions of years. There was no agitation, no excitement. I looked around and the audience showed little reaction; the lectures might as well have been discussing the effect of agricultural tariffs on maize production. Shouldn’t we have had tears in our eyes? Shouldn’t we have divided ourselves into action groups and prepared a response that very evening? At the end of the proceedings, people packed up, chatted about this and that, and drove home like nothing had happened.

Perhaps we do not understand the world as individuals. Perhaps I was experiencing the antithesis of mass hysteria: a kind of mass apathy. Even an expert on the subject didn’t seem to be able to breathe life into his research. He seemed unable to connect the deep experiences of diving and measuring the world’s coral reefs to other people’s imagination, to get across the sensations that arose from a knowledge of the impending death of everything he loved. Maybe scientists don’t fully understand what they are saying until other people understand.