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Zadie Smith April 3,
2014 Issue There is the
scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the
weather, but
there are hardly any intimate words. Is that surprising? People in
mourning
tend to use euphemism; likewise the guilty and ashamed. The most
melancholy of
all the euphemisms: “The new normal.” “It’s the new normal,” I think,
as a
beloved pear tree, half-drowned, loses its grip on the earth and falls
over.
The train line to Cornwall washes away—the new normal. We can’t even
say the
word “abnormal” to each other out loud: it reminds us of what came
before.
Better to forget what once was normal, the way season followed season,
with a
temperate charm only the poets appreciated. What “used
to be” is painful to remember. Forcing the spike of an unlit firework
into the
cold, dry ground. Admiring the frost on the holly berries, en route to
school.
Taking a long, restorative walk on Boxing Day in the winter glare.
Whole
football pitches crunching underfoot. A bit of sun on Pancake Day; a
little
more for the Grand National. Chilly April showers, Wimbledon warmth.
July
weddings that could trust in fine weather. The distinct possibility of
a
Glastonbury sunburn. At least, we say to each other, at least August is
still
reliably ablaze—in Cornwall if not at carnival. And it’s nice that the
Scots
can take a little more heat with them when they pack up and leave. Maybe we
will get used to this new England, and—like the very young and recently
migrated—take it for granted that April is the time for shorts and
sandals, or
that the New Year traditionally announces itself with a biblical flood.
They
say there will be butterflies appearing in new areas, and birds
visiting
earlier and leaving later—perhaps that will be interesting, and new,
and not,
necessarily, worse. Maybe we are misremembering the past! The Thames
hasn’t
frozen over for generations, and the dream of a White Christmas is only
a
collective Dickensian delusion. Besides, wasn’t it always a wet country? It’s amazing
the side roads you can will yourself down to avoid the four-lane
motorway
ahead. England was never as wet as either its famous novels suggest or
our
American cousins presume. The weather has changed, is changing, and
with it so
many seemingly small things—quite apart from train tracks and houses,
livelihoods and actual lives—are being lost. It was easy to assume, for
example, that we would always be able to easily find a hedgehog in some
corner
of a London garden, pick it up in cupped hands, and unfurl it for our
children—or go on a picnic and watch fat bumblebees crawling over the
mouth of
an open jam jar. Every country has its own version of this local
sadness. (And
every country has its version of our arguments, when it comes to
causation.
Climate change or cars? Climate change or cell phone sites?) You’re not
meant
to mention the minor losses, they don’t seem worth mentioning—not when
compared
to the visions of apocalypse conjured by climate scientists and movie
directors.
And then there are all those people who believe that nothing much is
happening
at all. Although
many harsh words are said about the childlike response of the public to
the
coming emergency, the response doesn’t seem to me very surprising,
either. It’s
hard to keep apocalypse consistently in mind, especially if you want to
get out
of bed in the morning. What’s missing from the account is how much of
our
reaction is emotional. If it weren’t, the whole landscape of debate
would be
different. We can easily imagine, for example, a world in which the
deniers
were not deniers at all, but simple ruthless pragmatists, the kind of
people
who say: “I understand very well what’s coming, but I am not concerned
with my
grandchildren; I am concerned with myself, my shareholders, and the
Chinese
competition.” And there are indeed a few who say this, but not as many
as it
might be reasonable to expect. Another
response that would seem natural aligns a deep religious feeling with
environmental concern, for those who consider the land a beauteous gift
of the
Lord should, surely, rationally, be among the most keen to protect it.
There
are a few of these knocking around, too, but again, not half as many as
I would
have assumed. Instead the evidence is to be “believed” or “denied” as
if the
scientific papers are so many Lutheran creeds pinned to a door. In
America, a
curious loophole has even been discovered in God’s creation, concerning
hierarchy. It’s argued that because He placed humans above
“things”—above
animals and plants and the ocean—we can, with a clean conscience, let
all those
things go to hell. (In England, traditional Christian love of the land
has been
more easily converted into environmental consciousness, notably among
the
country aristocrats who own so much of it.) But I don’t
think we have made matters of science into questions of belief out of
sheer
stupidity. Belief usually has an emotional component; it’s desire,
disguised.
Of course, on the part of our leaders much of the politicization is
cynical bad
faith, and economically motivated, but down here on the ground, the
desire for
innocence is what’s driving us. For both “sides” are full of guilt,
full of
self-disgust—what Martin Amis once called “species shame”—and we
project it
outward. This is what fuels the petty fury of our debates, even in the
midst of
crisis. During
Superstorm Sandy, I climbed down fifteen floors, several months
pregnant, in
the darkness, just so I could get a Wi-Fi signal and e-mail a
climate-change-denying acquaintance with this fresh evidence of his
idiocy. And
it only takes a polar vortex—a pocket of cold air that may lower
temperatures—for one’s inbox to fill up with gleeful counternarratives
from
right-leaning relatives—as if this were all a game, and the only thing
hanging
in the balance is whether or not you or your crazy uncle in Florida are
“alarmists” or “realists.” Meanwhile, in Jamaica, where Sandy first
made
landfall, the ever more frequent tropical depressions, storms,
hurricanes,
droughts, and landslides do not fall, for Jamaicans, in the category of
ontological argument. Sing an
elegy for the washed away! For the cycles of life, for the saltwater
marshes,
the houses, the humans—whole islands of humans. Going, going, gone! But
not
quite yet. The apocalypse is always usefully cast into the
future—unless you
happen to live in Mauritius, or Jamaica, or the many other perilous
spots.
According to recent reports, “if emissions of global greenhouse gases
remain
unchanged,” things could begin to get truly serious around 2050, just
in time
for the seventh birthday party of my granddaughter. (The grandchildren
of the
future are frequently evoked in elegies of this kind.) Sometimes the
global,
repetitive nature of this elegy is so exhaustively sad—and so divorced
from any
attempts at meaningful action—that you can’t fail to detect in the
elegists a
fatalist liberal consciousness that has, when you get right down to it,
as much
of a perverse desire for the apocalypse as the evangelicals we
supposedly
scorn. Recently
it’s been possible to see both sides leaning in a little closer to hear
the
optimistic arguments of the technocrats. Some sleight of hand has
occurred by
which we begin to move from talk of combating and reversing to
discussion of
carbon capture and storage, and higher sea walls, and generators on the
roof,
and battening down the hatches. Both sides meet in failure. They say to
each
other: “Yes, perhaps we should have had the argument differently, some
time
ago, but now it is too late, now we must work with what we have.” This will no
doubt look very peculiar to my seven-year-old granddaughter. I don’t
expect she
will forgive me, but it might be useful for her to get a glimpse into
the
mindset, if only for the purposes of comprehension. What shall I tell
her? Her
teachers will already have explained that what was happening to the
weather, in
2014, was an inconvenient truth, financially, politically—but that’s
perfectly
obvious, even now. A global movement of the people might have forced it
onto
the political agenda, no matter the cost. What she will want to know is
why
this movement took so long to materialize. So I might say to her, look:
the
thing you have to appreciate is that we’d just been through a century
of
relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of
our
fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful
thinking, and
in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that
nothing is
essential and everything changes—and this had taken the fight out of us
somewhat. And then
also it’s important to remember that the necessary conditions of our
lives—those things that seem to us unavoidably to be the case—are not
only
debated by physicists and philosophers but exist, irrationally, in the
minds of
the rest of us, beneath contempt intellectually, perhaps, but we still
experience them as permanent facts. The climate was one of those facts.
We did
not think it could change. That is, we always knew we could do a great
deal of
damage to this planet, but even the most hubristic among us had not
imagined we
would ever be able to fundamentally change its rhythms and character,
just as a
child who has screamed all day at her father still does not expect to
see him
lie down on the kitchen floor and weep. Now, do you think that’ll get
me off
the hook with my (slightly tiresome and judgmental) future
granddaughter? I
worry. Oh, what
have we done! It’s a biblical question, and we do not seem able
to pull
ourselves out of its familiar—essentially religious—cycle of shame,
denial, and
self-flagellation. This is why (I shall tell my granddaughter) the
apocalyptic
scenarios did not help—the terrible truth is that we had a profound,
historical
attraction to apocalypse. In the end, the only thing that could create
the
necessary traction in our minds was the intimate loss of the things we
loved.
Like when the seasons changed in our beloved little island, or when the
lights
went out on the fifteenth floor, or the day I went into an Italian
garden in
early July, with its owner, a woman in her eighties, and upon seeing
the
scorched yellow earth and withered roses, and hearing what only the
really old
people will confess—in all my years
I’ve never seen anything like it—I found my
mind finally beginning to turn from the elegiac what have we done to the practical
what can we do?
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