Library Limelights 240

 

James Lawrence Powell. The 2084 Report: An oral history of The Great Warming. A Novel. USA: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2020.

Designed as a fictional report on the state of the world one hundred years after Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, Powell shows our planet Earth to be in worse shape than George Orwell ever could have imagined. Because global climate warming has already well begun in our time. We (or some of us) are aware of the danger signs happening now. Powell’s fictional report-compiler interviews fictional scientists of varied specialties, and other witnesses, who go deep into the ultimate, logical effects of climate change—only two or three generations in the future from now. They cite and extrapolate from real reports of 2020 and earlier. This is what our future could look like.

I could not stop reading. Horror upon horror. The information is not fictional. The scientists explain exactly how and why nature operated over the sixty-some years between 2020 and 2084 to cause such destruction while Earth’s temperature rose. Fires. Drought. Floods. Erosion. Thawed permafrost. Melting icebergs and glaciers. Storm after storm. All those events feeding on each other. Coastal cities across the world are flooded, some submerged, under rising seas; yet drought had dried up rivers of potable water; the vital Amazon forest is gone; coral reefs are dead; polar bears and hundreds of animal species are extinct; masses of climate refugees are moving away from unbearable equatorial heat and overwhelming the northern countries. The planet is a severely shrinking habitat for man and beast.

“Fixing” things like building stronger dams, dykes, desalinization plants, national border walls, finding alternate resources, was too little, too late, because even though CO₂ emissions dramatically decreased, the amount already in the atmosphere stays there. People are afflicted with heatstroke, malnutrition, pestilence, disease. Regional wars broke out over access to water and fertile agricultural land. The United States took over Canada with relative ease; India and Pakistan employed nuclear weapons in their animosity. The heat implacably continues to rise. In the examples below, each is representative of similar instances elsewhere.

The evidence shows our failure to act, and to act together. Ask what shall we do now? One, or a few, countries acting alone cannot stop emissions; the biggest, most powerful countries must join a determined global accord. Powell’s answer includes nuclear power reactors. [Aside: Interesting that Ontario is high on the world scale of nuclear power use, almost 60% of the province’s needs.]

This could not be more appropriate for what is actually my first book of the New Year 2021—when we will long be fighting and hopefully recovering from the coronavirus shock. Covid-19 itself is possibly just part of the wakeup call on climate change. Personally, even before reading this book, I believe we’ve passed any turnaround point; political leaders were not and (still) are not prepared to take necessary drastic action. We shortsighted, greedy, selfish humans have destroyed our wondrous home. Weep, Greta.

Extracts from Interviews

▪ Brazil: What I do know from my own eyes and from talking with her and Kayopo is that almost all the forest has burned, taking most of the native people with it. (26)

▪ Australia: Desalting plants need a lot of energy, but the Perth plant got its power from a wind farm. (37)

▪ USA: A huge surge of water rushed into Upper New York Bay, attacked the base of the Statue of Liberty, and washed over Ellis and Governors Islands, wiping them out. (56)

▪ Bangladesh: International aid agencies like the Red Cross, Red Crescent, and Médecins Sans Frontières have long since closed their doors. (68)

▪ New Orleans: In the old days, levees kept the lake water from sloshing down into the city. But Lake Pontchartrain was a disaster waiting to happen. (71)

▪ China: The desert-dwelling Uighurs began to tap groundwater aquifers, a strategy that can work only temporarily. People always take out much more water than there is rainfall to replace it, causing the water table to fall, requiring ever larger and more expensive pumps to get the water up to the surface. (76)

▪ Rotterdam: We Dutch mark January 31, 2052, the Fall of Rotterdam, as a national day of mourning. (107)

▪ Canada: Word of the American incursion spread quickly. Canadians demanded that their government retaliate, and on May 5, 2046, Canada declared war on the United States. (149)

▪ Mexico: It was our fate and misfortune to lie downstream on your main western river, el Río Colorado—named by a Spaniard long before you arrived. (171)

▪ USA: Elderly people with no money, no family, and nowhere to go were becoming trapped in doomed seashore communities and stifling cities like Phoenix. (187)

▪ Sweden: Sweden had severed the Gordian knot that bound economic progress and fossil-fuel consumption. It had done in fifteen years what the world needed to do in the decade of the 2020s and beyond. (212)

Deniers

One of the hardest things about being an academic and a climate scientist in this century is not just the decline in funding for higher education. No, what really hurt was that the public and the politicians, the very people who had handed our country over to the climate deniers and whose support we needed, turned against the educated class in general and against scientists in particular. We became the villains, the victims who got blamed. (42)

River mouths

In a delta, new channels constantly form and old ones close, so that a delta’s landscape is always changing. But a city cannot live with shifting channels and wandering silt. A city needs its river and silt to stay in one place, so it builds levees to imprison the river in its channel. The river becomes a prisoner, but one with unlimited time and energy. ... to build a city on a delta is to bet that you can beat nature at her game and do so indefinitely. That is a bet you are bound to lose. (70)

Dutch observations

The Russians built a movable dam at St. Petersburg, your Army Corps of Engineers spent billions on what they already knew were inadequate defenses at New Orleans, other nations started their own projects, enzovoort. None have survived. It is impossible to build a barrier high enough to stop a sea that continues to rise higher each year, with no end in sight. (107-8)

Our own border

There was no way to prevent thousands of Americans from crossing into Canada each year illegally, just as thousands of Mexicans had once crossed your southern border.

After the sunbirds, as we called them, got across the border, they had no trouble finding camps of fellow Americans who would take then in. These camps soon became tinderboxes of anti-Canadian sentiment, and many of them were well armed. You Americans had the highest rate of gun ownership of any country and your guns emigrated with you. We were about to learn just how well armed you were. (147)

The Nile nuclear war

On the night of May 15, 2040, Egyptian commandos crossed the Sudanese-Ethiopian border and blew up the Grand Renaissance Dam, releasing a huge surge of water downstream, most of which flowed wasted into the Mediterranean. Ethiopia and the other Nile countries promptly declared war on both Egypt and Sudan. We Ethiopians were confident we could win because for a century we had been fighting almost continuously with each other, with Italians, Somalians, Eritreans, and with whomever we could find to fight. We had essentially become a warrior state. We believed the Egyptians and Sudanese were soft and no match for us. That belief did not last long. (158-9)

Dying oceans

If we had wanted to create a jellyfish factory, we could not have done it any better. We fished out their predators—the game fish like sharks, tuna, and swordfish. We polluted the ocean and lowered the nearside oxygen content. Then we warmed the seas. The result? A jellyfish explosion. A jellyfish sting is not just a matter of temporary inconvenience. The stings can cause painful wounds that do not heal for months. ... If you go to an Australian beach today, instead of people you will find the bodies of thousands or tens of thousands of jellyfish. The smell alone is enough to drive people away. (195)

All life matters

Whatever your belief system, if life matters, you cannot single out one species and say that particular one does not matter. They all matter. If the green ringtail possum does not matter, then life does not matter, you and I do not matter, and Earth, the only planet to bear intelligent life, does not matter. I cannot accept that philosophy and go on living. (203)

Global warming recognition

The problem was that like each of the old international climate compacts, starting with the one that came out of the Rio Summit in 1992, the Paris Agreement didn’t require its signatories to do anything in particular. Nations didn’t have to set specific reduced emissions targets, only targets that went beyond the previous ones, and if a nation failed to meet its target, there was no penalty. In other words, like all the international compacts, the Paris Agreement was completely voluntary. (208)

Megan Goldin. The Night Swim. USA: St. Martin’s Press, 2020.

“I’m Rachel Krall and this is Guilty or Not Guilty, the podcast that puts you in the jury box.”

Thus the author uses an interesting device: rather than rehashing cold cases, Rachel’s popular serial podcast takes a special turn to follow a live trial. Promising athlete Scott Blair stands accused of rape and related charges; Kelly Moore is the victim. Rachel’s job from the trial gallery is to remain neutral, reporting fairly on both parties. The venue is a seaside town where most people know each other, and all have opinions about the trial; by and large they perceive Kelly as a slut while Scott is a golden boy—notwithstanding the effects of rape and the consequences of reporting it that can be unbearable for the victim. Naturally, Rachel receives a ton of response from her audience, pro and con the defendant and his accuser.

At the same time, a mystery woman called Hannah Stills is corresponding with Rachel about the death of her sister in the same town, twenty-five years ago. Rachel is drawn in, intrigued, by Hannah’s written memories of her childhood as a ten-year-old when sister Jenny died—murdered, she insists. Hannah desperately wants Rachel to investigate, but why is she reluctant to meet Rachel in person? The parallel between Jenny and Kelly, in damaging their reputations, is not complete because Kelly is still alive. Rachel receives threats to back off as she goes about interviewing townspeople who lived here twenty-five years ago, some of them prominent citizens. But together she and Hannah force the truth about Jenny’s sad life and death.

Rachel

▪ I want to make you think about how rape and the threat of rape affect the lives of women in a hundred different ways. (41)

▪ “Justice is expensive. You’ve got to have serious money if you want to put up a halfway decent defense.” (156)

▪ She wants her audience to feel that they were in court themselves, getting all the relevant information so they could come up with an informed verdict. (231)

▪ “Ah, the reporter who believes in crowdsourcing justice.” (347)

▪ That’s how trials work. It’s medieval. It’s not about getting to the truth. (371)

▪ “I don’t understand people’s fascination with other people’s tragedies. It’s modern-day rubbernecking. Ghoulish. Podcasts like yours feed that obsession.” (458)

Kelly and Scott

▪ She’d become the last hope of anyone who’d ever been let down by the justice system. (22)

▪ The cold air might have sobered her. Perhaps enough to realize that it was a really bad idea, walking there alone. (108)

▪ “The body of a sexual assault victim is a crime scene,” said Nurse Rice. (292)

Jenny and Hannah

▪ “Your sister says she wants to go fishing with us,” he shouted over the blustering engine. I choked from the foul stench of liquor on his breath, which wafted in my face through the narrow gap. (167)

▪ “I feel bad for the little sister, but that Jenny was way out of control.” (180)

▪ I want to meet you too. I’ve been a fan for a long time. But trust me, right now is not the best time. (259)

▪ “I’m so grateful that you came,” said Hannah. “I was worried that I’d have to do this alone.” (522)

Emily St. John Mandel. Station Eleven. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2014.

Dystopian novels keep coming my way. Harris’s The Second Sleep, Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last, Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World, Powell’s The 2084 Report. Where does it end? Mandel’s (note the year of publication) is predicated on a killer virus that arises suddenly and kills within hours. A few people are inexplicably immune. All characters have an association, directly or indirectly, with Arthur, a well-known actor who drops dead on the stage of the Elgin Theatre in Toronto; first up are Jeevan, a would-be paramedic, and Kirsten, a child actor. The scenes change to Kirsten and colleagues, twenty years later, who perform Shakespeare along with the ragtag Travelling Symphony. They have adapted to post-chaos life—life with no electricity, no telephones, no government―by foraging and hunting, entertaining isolated villages south of the Great Lakes. Everywhere lies wreckage of civilization’s collapse: millions of rusted-out gridlocked cars on weed-infested highways; millions of abandoned homes; silent, deserted cities; nature and forests reclaiming the land. Those with memories of pre-apocalyptic times are often in a walking fugue state.

Mandel weaves the back stories into the present where Kirsten now plays Titania with the acting troupe but also happens to be an expert at knife-throwing. Lately they’ve heard tales along their route of a menacing figure called the Prophet, finally encountering him; he spouts nonsense but is sinister all the same. Kirsten is fascinated with an unfinished graphic novel about Station Eleven in outer space, penned long ago by Miranda, Arthur’s first wife; it seems no more bizarre than her present reality. Eventually the symphony converges on a survivor congregation, including some of their mysteriously disappeared members, in a former airport. More connections are made before the Travelling Symphony moves on, “Because survival is insufficient.”

Before

▪ Hua said he’d called his wife and told her to take the kids and leave the city tonight, but not by airplane. (22)

▪ He doesn’t understand the difference between serious graphic novels and Saturday-morning cartoons with wide-eyed tweetybirds and floppy-limbed cats. (87)

▪ “I used her as a repository for my thoughts. I think I stopped thinking of her as a human being reading a letter.” (211)

▪ “Surely by tomorrow morning we’ll see the National Guard.” Arthur has always liked her optimism, Clark remembered. (238)

▪ This was a sign of having gone seriously astray, wasn’t it? Having more than one ex-wife? (320)

After

▪ The caravans had once been pickup trucks, but now they were pulled by teams of horses on wheels of steel and wood. (36)

▪ These towns had fought off ferals, buried their neighbours, lived and died and suffered together in the blood-drenched years just after the collapse, survived against unspeakable odds and then only by holding together into the calm, and these places didn’t go out of their way to welcome outsiders. (48)

▪ “Your friend rejected the prophet’s advances,” she whispered, close to Kirsten’s ear. (51)

▪ “We were saved because we are the light. We are the pure.” (60)

▪ It was strange, she kept thinking, that the prophet’s dog had the same name as the dog in her comic books. (120)

▪ They resumed their cautious progress down the road, Kirsten gripping her knives so tightly that her heartbeat throbbed in the palms of her hands. (136)

▪ “That kind of insanity’s contagious,” Dolores had said, echoing his thoughts. (261)

▪ One of the gunmen asked for food, four horses, and a woman, in a flat monotone voice. “Give us what we want,” he said, “and no one has to die.” (295-6)

Station Eleven

A hostile civilization from a nearby galaxy has taken control of Earth and enslaved Earth’s population, but a few hundred rebels managed to steal a space station and escape. Dr. Eleven and his colleagues slipped Station Eleven through a wormhole and are hiding in the uncharted reaches of deep space. This is all a thousand years in the future.

Station Eleven is the size of Earth’s moon and was designed to resemble a planet, but it’s a planet that can chart a course through galaxies and requires no sun. (83)