The New Yorker recently ran two wonderful stories. While quite different in style both are unmistakably about the changing environment. This includes the drastic loss of our planet's accumulated richness in the last century or so. It's all our fault and it's accelerating, no denying that in these yarns. But references to such grim reflection are muted. To my mind the two pieces illustrate the penetration into wonk-talk first and into journalism now by a spirit of accomodation, even resignation, to the drastic changes fossil fuel emissions and human growth are wreaking. We must, serious people say, stop trying to horrify people into stopping the cause of the change. Tell them it's all about energy efficiency, self-sufficiency, or green jobs. Adaptation was once a term shunned among enviros as defeatist. Now it, and geo-engineering, are fully acceptable. Full-on mitigation is for another day, or decade. That's too bad by my lights. But it sure is hard to find signs of the backbone and pain tolerance it would take to save the Holocene's legacy.
Here are two stories – with an on line subscriber wall after their starts – by fine writers who walk readers into a future radically different from life on the planet we have known. Non-subscribers who find a way to them in their entirety surely will find them worthwhile :
- Elizabeth Kolbert (Dec. 24 issue) Dept of Ecology – Recall of the Wild/ The quest to engineer a world before humans; The topic is grand – programs to reinstall preindustrial landscapes and wildlife on large tracts. The generic term for this atavism and nostalgia is rewilding. It starts with an example in Holland, makes generous reference to others in Europe, North America, etc. My favorites, that she doesn't refer to explicitly, is the notion of a YtoY corridor, Yellowstone to the Yukon. Kolbert has written plenty of scolding stories urging action to reduce the environmental carnage marshalling now for a global blitz. This one has a post-apocalyptic, hopeful air. It got me started on this jag, a suspicion of a rising genre in enviro writing. The next one down clinched it.
- Keith Gessen (Dec. 24 issue) Polar Express / A journey through the melting Arctic, with sixty-odd thousand tons of iron ore ; From Murmansk to China, aboard a freighter in a shipping convoy escorted by nuclear-powered Russian icebreakers. It's a ship-board diary by this Russian-born reporter, essayist, and novelist. It includes a brief powerful reference, without elaboration, on the staggering scale of coal shipment through the same port from which this iron ships. Gessen doesn't explain why he mentions the coal – leaving it to the reader to realize why it's significant. A wonderful phrase here for the trainloads of iron ore arriving. "It was if Russia were coughing up her insides."
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