A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change
Midway through his new book A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change, Stephen Henighan takes
us back to late 1939, early 1940, when Canadian troops were deployed to Europe.
They “expected to enter a growing conflagration, but when they reached their
bases in the United Kingdom they found that the Allied and Axis sides, armed
and mobilized, were at war in word but not in deed.” What followed was a period
of calm known as the Phony War—or der Sitzkrieg, or The Bore War. “The
knowledge that death and destruction were on the horizon did not prevent many
people in Europe from continuing to live as they had before.”
How we’re living now (yes, we—I’m looking at you as much as I’m looking at anyone) in relation
to simmering environmental disaster leads Henighan to suggest that “we are once
again in a Phony War.”
Though slight (49 pages), A Green Reef is never pithy or lacking. Henighan does not
claim to try and solve the issue—or, not issue; let’s call it a reality—but does unpack it and lay out all the
components—from global to personal—for assessment. This is not a scientific
consideration of climate change. Flick a cigarette butt and you’ll hit one of
those. Here, Henighan is looking at environmental ass-over-teakettling from the
perspective of humanities.
“Art is humanity in its concentrated essence,” Henighan
writes. “However horrible the billions of deaths that await us may be,
humanity’s most enduring loss in the long term may be that of its artistic
heritage.” The value of human life and the value of art seem egrigously uneven
when pitted against one another. On second blush, though, part of Henighan’s
push in the book is to soberly explore a broader understanding of what
encroaching anihilation would actually mean for our capital C Culture. What happens to this “us” that we describe to
ourselves when conditions either erase or condense us?
“Environment” is a tricky word. I had a friend castigate me
once for referring to the Environment as though it were some Other, something
separate. She explained that this is one of the biggest hurdles in inspiring
any kind of change in people, to get them to stop looking at the Environment
like a broken down car that needs to be fixed. A Green Reef is concerned about the whole, but is worried about the
individual, and ultimately argues for the connectedness of the lot of it. The “most bracing challenge
is that of reimagining outselves," Henighan writes, "our heaven, our source of meaning."
- Andrew
Stephen Henighan will be in the eBar Tuesday October 8th at 8pm to read from and discuss A Green Reef.
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