taken aback

I don't think I can ever recall reading an article in a newspaper that has touched me so deeply as the one I just finished on my train ride out to Hannover this morning from last week's Die Zeit (Nr. 21; May 16, 2007; pp. 15-19), "Vor der großen Flut," by Anita and Marian Blasberg. In this artfully written comparison about preparations to cope with the inevitable consequences of global warming in The Netherlands and Bangladesh, two countries that exist at or below sea level, the gap between the rich and the destitute yawns quietly, soberly, and insistently. I don't want to provide a synopsis of it (see the link at right); all I want to say here is that it made me conscious that climate change is a problem that cannot be fixed, but which rather operates like a living organism introduced to a colony of other, more familiar, social ills. Which means there will soon come a time to write the history of global warming, of which this piece is perhaps one of its first and most successful chapters - and in this history, it will not be some aberrant interjection into geological time, but an ongoing chain reaction that leaves no aspect of daily life untouched.

The Dutch view global warming as a new frontier in economic opportunity and development; the Bangladeshi people pay for it with their lives. Farmers in South Holland face losing their land as the government tests new techniques for keeping the country on the map; in Bangladesh, the hundreds of thousands who have already lost their livelihood illegally pillage forests that might be their only salvation from the floods - as the time between the great monsoons dwindles from every 20 years to every fifth and soon every single year, the trees vanish at a comparable pace. And as the massive U.S., Chinese, and Saudi delegations at the world climate summit in Brussels this April quibble over wording like "many millions of refugees" (preferring just "millions of refugees" and finally settling on "many millions of people"), the sole Bangladeshi representative (the UN pays for only one flight per country) can only look on in silent bewilderment. This is a story as much about architecture and strategies of representation as is it the weather, as much about new migration patterns as it is about a kind of tacit genocide.