Andri Sn�r Magnason - On Time and Water

Copyright Andri Snr Magnason, 2019

Title of the original Icelandic edition: Um tmann og vatni

Published by agreement with Forlagi, www.forlagid.is

Translation copyright 2021 by Lytton Smith

First published in Canada by Biblioasis Windsor, Ontario

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocop- ying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit HYPERLINK www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

First Edition

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: On time and water / Andri Snr Magnason ; translated by Lytton Smith.

Other titles: Um tmann og vatni. English. Names: Andri Snr Magnason, 1973- author.

Series: Biblioasis international translation series ; 34.

Description: Series statement: Biblioasis international translation series ; 34 |

Translation of:

Um tmann og vatni. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200403796 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200403818 |

ISBN 9781771964210 (softcover)

ISBN 9781771964227 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Global warming. | LCSH: Climatic changes.

Classification: LCC QC981.8.G56 A5313 2021 | DDC 363.738/74dc23

Readied for the press by Daniel Wells

Cover designed by Zoe Norvell

This book has been translated with financial support from

Andri Snr Magnason

translated by Lytton Smith

BIBLIOASIS
Windsor, ON

In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

Baba Dioum

Take notice what you notice.

Thorvaldur Thorsteinsson

Whenever I host overseas visitors to Reykjavk, I like to drive them along Borgartn, a street I call the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I point out Hfdi, 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 Hfdi is a black boxy structure, all glass and marble, that once housed the headquarters of Kaupthing Bank. Kaupthings collapse in 2008 was the fourth-largest bankruptcy in the history of capitalismnot merely per capita of the Icelandic population but in net U.S. dollars: 20 billion dollars.

I dont mean to gloat over others misfortunes, but it astonishes me that before middle age Id already witnessed the collapse of two vast belief systems, communism and capitalism. Each had been maintained by people whod scaled the peaks of the establishment, of government and of culture, people esteemed in direct proportion to their relative position at the pyramids apex. Deep inside these systems, people kept up appearances right to the bitter end. On January 19, 1989, the East German General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Erich Honecker, said: The wall will stand in fifty years time, and a hundred years, too. The wall collapsed that November. Kaupthings CEO said in a television interview on October 6, 2008, after the bank had received emergency loans from the Central Bank of Iceland: Were 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, Kaupthing collapsed.

When a system collapses, language is released from its moorings. Words meant to encapsulate reality hang empty in the air, no longer applicable to anything. Textbooks are rendered obsolete overnight and overly complex hierarchies fade away. People suddenly find it difficult to hit upon the right phrasing, to articulate concepts that match their reality.

Between Hfdi and Kaupthings former headquarters theres a grassy lawn. In its center stands a paltry copse of trees: six spruces and some woolly 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 hold.

Scientists have shown us that the foundations of life, of Earth itself, are failing. The principal ideologies of the twentieth century considered the Earth and nature as sources of inexpensive, infinite raw material. Humans assumed that the atmosphere could continually absorb emissions, that oceans could endlessly absorb waste, that soil could constantly renew itself if given more fertilizer, that animal species would keep moving aside as humans colonized more and more space.

If scientists predictions prove accurate about the future of the oceans and the atmosphere, about the future of weather systems, about the future of glaciers and coastal ecosystems, then we must ask what words can encapsulate these immense issues. What ideology can handle this? What should I read? Milton Friedman, Confucius, Karl Marx, the Book of Revelation, the Koran, the Vedas? How to tame these desires of ours, this consumption and materialism that, by any and every measurement, promise to overpower Earths 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 our 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 fifty million years. All this will happen during the lifetime of a child who is born today and lives to be my grandmothers age, ninety-five.

Earths 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, affects the roots 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 deal with. 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 becomes muddled; 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, can comprehend 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 fundamental to our lives, theres no comparable reaction. Its as if the brain cannot register at such a scale.

This white noise deceives us. We see headlines and think we understand the words in them: glacial melt, record heat, ocean acidification, increasing emissions. If the scientists are right, these words indicate events more serious than anything that has happened in human history up to now. If we fully understood such words, theyd directly alter our actions and choices. But it seems that 99 percent of the words meanings disappear into white noise.