On Time and Water

by Andri Snær Magnason Narrated by Graham Halstead

Overview

A few years ago, Andri Snaer Magnason, one of Iceland's most beloved writers and public intellectuals, was asked by a leading climate scientist why he wasn't writing about the greatest crisis mankind has faced. Magnason demurred: he wasn't a specialist, it wasn't his field. But the scientist persisted: "If you cannot understand our scientific findings and present them in an emotional, psychological, poetic or mythological context," he told him, "then no one will really understand the issue, and the world will end."



Based on interviews and advice from leading glacial, ocean, climate, and geographical scientists, and interwoven with personal, historical, and mythological stories, Magnason's response is a rich and compelling work of narrative nonfiction that illustrates the reality of climate change-and offers hope in the face of an uncertain future. Moving from reflections on how one writes an obituary for an iceberg to exhortation for a heightened understanding of human time and our obligations to one another, throughout history and across the globe, On Time and Water is both deeply personal and globally-minded: a travel story, a world history, and a desperate plea to live in harmony with future generations. This is a book unlike anything that has yet been published on the current climate emergency.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Andri Snær Magnason’s perspective on his country’s environment is unique and compelling. . . . The author tries to understand, and tries to make the reader understand, why the climate crisis is not widely perceived as a distinct, transformative event in the manner of, say, the fall of the Berlin Wall or the attacks of September 11th, 2001. The fundamental problem, as this book elucidates, is time. Climate change is a disaster in slow motion, and yet “slow” is a great deal faster than many people seem able to comprehend.”—The Economist

“With poetry and wonder Magnason summons deep emotions about our place on our planet. I was deeply moved and inspired by his words.”—Darren Aronofsky

“On Time and Water is about connections—across generations, cultures, landscapes, and species—showing us how delicate are the networks on which our survival depends, how precariously all natural life is poised on the brink of destruction. Combining memoir, interviews, literature, and science to give words to a catastrophe too enormous to comprehend, this book is a letter of farewell to lost worlds and a passionate appeal to preserve what remains.”—Anuradha Roy, author of All the Lives We Never Lived

“The love child of Chomsky and Lewis Carroll.”—Rebecca Solnit on The Casket of Time

“Andri Snær Magnason combines intimate history and collective mythology, essay reflection and memorial exploration, geography and environment, to bring the elusive reality of climate change painfully and dangerously close to each of us.”—Paolo Giordano

“I loved this book so much—it is a cerebral tale, well told and unabashedly philosophical. It is dark, funny and grim.”—New York Times on The Casket of Time

“Eco-lit needs more attention, and devotees will be pleased to discover a new addition from the Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason, who writes with a Seussian mix of wonder, wit and gravitas. . . . Immensely satisfying.”—New York Times on The Story of the Blue Planet

“Orwell, Vonnegut, and Douglas Adams are felt on every page, though Magnason is never derivative. His satire and insightful social commentary sweeten the pot and the sheer wackiness of Magnason’s oversized imagination is invigorating.”—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review) on Lovestar

“Strange and refreshing—a lushly imagined future that reminded me of Vonnegut and Brautigan.”—Ed Park, author of Personal Days on Lovestar

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176201673
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	12/28/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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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