107 years ago*, the guns fell silent on the Western Front, marking a temporary and partial end to the Great War which began in 1914, and has continued, in one form or another, ever since. I once hoped that I would live to see a peaceful world, but that hope has faded away.
With another COP starting today, and the question of climate change having played no role at all in the Dutch elections recently, and, well, for a zillion different reasons – it seems like a good time to ask the question: what books can help to make people move on this topic? (or if you think books are the wrong medium, and we should only look at TikToks or cinema movies or Netflix series, I’d love to hear arguments for that view too).
To me, the most magnificent fiction book on climate change is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. It is phenomenal. I hadn’t read it yet when Henry organised a seminar on the book here at Crooked Timber, but I can only say: do read it. Admittedly, the book is very long – and this might be asking too much of many people, given the very many other demands on our lives. But there’s an easy solution: listen to it. This book is perfect as an audiobook. You listen while walking, and you’ll gradually get through the entire book while enjoying your daily walk. Given the many different voices in the book, it might even be better as an audio-book than to read it from paper/screen.
But since The Ministry for the Future already was discussed at length here, let me focus on two other books that might help to centre our awareness and political debates on climate change: Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood and Kimberly Nicholas’s Under the Sky We Make. The first is fiction, the second is non-fiction for citizens. Attention: one spoiler about Birnam Wood under the fold. [click to continue…]
If you’ve ever been at a Dutch PhD ceremony, you’ve come across the toga – which is, unfortunately not a Greek or Roman toga as pictured here. Instead, it’s a kind of black gown, made from heavy cloth, with velvet facings, accompanied by a white collar and a velvet hat that resembles the mortarboards that students around the world wear (and throw) at graduation. This outfit is worn not only at doctoral defenses, but also at inaugural lectures or the official opening of the academic year (here you get an impression of what this looks like in Groningen). Other countries and universities have their own versions of academic regalia, probably with Oxford and Cambridge leading the crowd.
As a foreigner (“international”, as they say in the Netherlands), I got introduced to this custom for the first time when being on a doctoral committee while still working outside the country. When asked whether I wanted to borrow a toga, I was baffled, and found some kind of excuse (probably that I wasn’t a full professor yet). I had an instinctive defensive reaction, which, at the time, I couldn’t quite make sense of. What had spontaneously come to my mind was a slogan of the German 1968 student movement that is hard to forget if you’ve heard it once: “Unter den Talaren, Muff von 1000 Jahren”, “Under the gowns, fug of 1000 years” (see e.g. here for a nice picture and historical account, in German). Although this has often been read as directed against a generation of professors many of whom had a Nazi past (the “1000 year Reich”), it was in fact directed mostly against academic hierarchies and the exclusion of students from university governance. And these latter points – especially the rejection of German university hierarchies, with permanent jobs only for professors – I wholeheartedly share.
