Friday essay: ‘mourning cannot be an endpoint’ – James Bradley on living in an Age of Emergency
Although it is early, the day is already unseasonably warm, the sky hazy with smoke from hazard-reduction burns to the south and north of the city.
- Although it is early, the day is already unseasonably warm, the sky hazy with smoke from hazard-reduction burns to the south and north of the city.
- Walking to the water’s edge I wade out and dive, then stroke outwards until my breath gives out and I surface with a gasp.
- There is something very particular about looking back towards the shore from deeper water.
- Amid the convulsions of COVID, a hastening wave of calamity has made it clear that the first stages of climate breakdown are upon us.
- Food production will decline markedly, especially in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Central and South America.
- Warming and acidifying waters will severely impact the fisheries that provide one-third of the world with their principal source of protein.
A shift
- Attempting to comprehend its immensity and fluid multiplicity alters us, making it possible to glimpse new continuities and connections.
- As the late Sven Lindqvist observes in his interrogation of the racist and genocidal foundations of European imperialism, “It is not knowledge we lack.
- It is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” In other words, the path through involves more than just a shift in energy sources.
- It begins in a reckoning with the past, and demands a far more fundamental reorganisation of the global economy, a shift to a model that operates within planetary boundaries and shares resources for the benefit of all.
- Such a shift is not impossible.
Beauty and astonishment
- How do we make sense of the disappearance of coral reefs, of dying kelp and collapsing ecosystems?
- How do we imagine a world in which the massing life that once inhabited not just the oceans but the earth and the sky is largely gone?
- More than that, however, the act of openness creates the possibility of love and joy and – improbably – wonder.
- However much has been lost, the world still hums with beauty and astonishment.
- No less importantly, it is to recognise that despair is also a form of turning away.
- Yet, like the scientists working to save coral reefs, he said he did not know what else he could do.
- Instead, grief must be part of a larger recognition that there is no longer any way back, that the only route now is forward.
- Surviving it demands we build a world that treats everybody – human and non-human – as worthy of life and possibility.
- I turn to look out to the horizon, its fading margin between sea and sky a space of grief, but also possibility.
- This is an edited extract from Deep Water: the world in the ocean by James Bradley (Hamish Hamilton).
James Bradley was the recipient of the Copyright Agency Non-Fiction Fellowship for 2020.