From December 1 to 12, environmentalists, journalists and representatives of countries from all over the world will meet in Lima, Peru, to negotiate what they can or are willing to do to prevent the untoward developments changing the climate of our planet forever, making it uninhabitable. The United Nations Climate Change negotiations are the first meetings of their kind in the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth, where a species reflects on its actions and its effects. Diane Ackerman's The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us recognises the indelible imprint of man's technological advancement and celebrates it. Early in the book, Ms Ackerman makes her stance clear: "Without meaning to, we've created some planetary chaos that threatens our well-being. Yet despite the urgency of reining in climate change and devising safer ways to feed, fuel, and govern our civilisations, I'm enormously hopeful. Our new age, for all its sins, is laced with inventions."
Fair enough, one is tempted to say. Considering the surfeit of writing that focuses only on the negative impact of man's technological advancement, it is refreshing to encounter a book - that too by one of the most accomplished contemporary science writers - that does the opposite. However, "without meaning to" is not a good enough defence: it does not mean humans are ignorant of what they have done or continue to do. Immediately after this declaration, Ms Ackerman makes a litany of benefits - longer life span, reduced childhood mortality, improved quality of life - that have accrued to humans. But such a list makes us ask: who are the beneficiaries and are the benefits democratically distributed?
In a chapter titled "Black Marble", after the eponymous 2003 photograph taken by astronaut and chemist Donald Pettit from the International Space Station, Ms Ackerman takes her readers on a space ride, observing the "shimmering" cities below, illumined by "garlands of light". Her powers of description are awe-inspiring, though they sometimes betray a poet's affinity for metaphors. Even if you have never seen the Black Marble, Ms Ackerman's lucid language makes the nocturnal cities seen from space come alive. The wonder it inspires, however, is transient because we are only too aware that cities are not just narratives of human progress but also of human suffering. These are spaces where millions throng in search of a livelihood, often existing in squalor, uprooted from their traditional homes and sources of sustenance by the most pervasive influence of human activity - climate change.
Ms Ackerman is acutely aware of climate change and the calamities it has visited upon people. She discusses it at great length, describing the vanishing backyard skating rinks of Canada that have produced generations of legendary ice-hockey players but may not be tenable anymore in a warmer world; the plight of ecological refugees like Sabrina Warners, the Yuki Eskimo haunted by dreams of drowning, and her entire tribe relocating to higher ground; and Kiribati native Ioane Teitiota seeking sanctuary - unsuccessfully - in Australia, his life "endangered by the rising seas of global warming". She acknowledges that "our humanitarian laws aren't keeping up with the Anthropocene's environmental realities", and quotes meteorologist Jeff Masters' chilling statement: "I think we have crossed over to a new climate state where the new normal is intense weather events will kill lots of people."
Despite such grim predictions, the book remains immensely readable, thanks to Ms Ackerman's characteristic wit and humour. Describing the rising water of the Thames and London sinking a foot a century, she comments: "It needs not so much Knights Templar as Knights Temperature." The ubiquitous predictions of Armageddon are counterbalanced with detailed studies into projects undertaken by enterprising people across the globe to keep at bay the rising waters and exorcise the tempests looming on our physical and temporal horizons like, to quote Ms Ackerman, "Gaia were so pissed off she finally decided to erase her workmanship, atomising the whole shebang and flicking our Blue Marble back into the mouth of the supernovas where our metals were first forged".
Yet her conclusions seem to be: "A warmer world won't be terrible for everyone … We yearn for continuity, and yet we live in a wildly changing world. We love life fiercely, and yet we are creatures who die. These aren't reconcilable paradoxes." It prompts this reader to ask: whom will a warmer world benefit? In the science-fiction disaster film 2012, nations get together to construct Noah's-like arks to accommodate humans and animals as a Great Deluge, sparked by global warming, inundates the planet. The rescue plan is kept a secret from most of the world's population; only a small selection is allowed to board the vessels, while others perish in the cataclysmic changes. Such a scenario is not unimaginable in our contemporary world, where we are only too happy to deny our fellow humans their basic rights and large corporations don't hesitate to take out patents on all of Earth's resources, including water.
Hope was the only thing left in Pandora's Box as the other evils escaped. Is the hope that permeates Ms Ackerman's ambitious book our redemption or the final evil? It is a question we all might have to answer soon enough.
