It won’t be nice to all be from Venus
ONE thing I learnt during three days of environmental training with Al “Inconvenient Truth” Gore last month is that we greenies are a reading bunch. Problem is, we’re reading the wrong books.
Gore prowled the stage at the Sandton Convention Centre for hours at a time, putting it to us, like Barry Roux reincarnated as an eco-warrior, that our version of the future and what’s really going to happen — unless we reduce our dependence on oil and coal smartly — are wildly divergent affairs.
For me, the simplest, most head-clearing explanation of how we are tending to our own gangrenous ruin — the rot’s above the knee, by now — came with Gore’s comparison of our planet with its twin, Venus. The two have roughly the same amount of carbon, but while most of the Earth’s is buried, most of Venus’s is in its atmosphere. As a consequence, the surface temperature on Venus is hotter than on Mercury — which is twice as close to the sun. By burning oil and coal — moving carbon from the ground to the air — we’re steadily turning Earth into Venus.
I met three women at the training who, in keeping with the pop-psych book joke of the hour, most definitely didn’t care to be known as “from Venus”. Amukelani Mayimele attended because she wants to inject climate change discourse into the panAfrican policy conferences she attends as a youth organiser. Tessa Brock, a recent advertising graduate, sees an opportunity to kickstart green-friendly communications and is involved in the Sustain Our Africa summit to be held in October. Khadija Sanusi witnessed destructive flooding in her native Nigeria, which spurred her to learn the basics of global warming, so she can teach them back home. All three are avid readers, busy with authors as diverse as Darwin and Baldacci.
But only rarely during the conference did I hear about “green” books. And the two in particular I think everyone should read weren’t mentioned at all. So here’s a plea to Amukelani, Tessa, Khadija and anyone else who wants to save the planet: make space
You close the book with a gleam in your eye
on your bedside table for Cormac Cullinan and Edward Abbey.
Cullinan, who practises law in Cape Town, has written one of the most influential green books in a generation, Wild Law. Its simple, revolutionary premise is that, just as people and companies have rights, so should nature. Given the legal right, for example, to exist, nature could be the appellant in a suit to halt the construction of the Medupi power plant. Barry Roux representing, My Lady. I put it to you that it would be quite the consciousness-raising courtroom drama.
Abbey’s novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, is perhaps the second most important green book in history, after Thoreau’s Walden, a bestseller that changed how people think about taking on the system. Its band of merry saboteurs cause all manner of pro-Earth havoc, pouring sand in the petrol tanks of construction vehicles, defacing billboards and blowing up dams. Because the fiction was based on real events, you close the book with a gleam in your eye.
So there you have it: law and disorder, two factors in almost every social struggle, in two fascinating reads. Why not find a copy and glean some ideas? To quote Thoreau (and Gore): It’s now. Or never. Link love: Potter Seekers Potterheads can get a fix with JK Rowling’s new History of the Quidditch World Cup, part one, on http://bit.ly/QWCPart1