“Words get worn out. We are getting used to them. We have reached a sort of herd immunity against the concept of ‘climate change,’” says Andri Snær Magnason, the author of On Time and Water.
Aleksandra Lipczak: I did the exercise you write about in your book. It turns out my intimate time ends in the year 2150, because that’s how long my hypothetical grandchildren will live. Which scares me, because it probably won’t be the easiest of times.
Andri Snær Maganson: This idea came to me when I was doing events for my previous book, Draumalandið, the subject of which had been the struggle to save the Icelandic natural landscape. I was on the lookout for something that would help us realize our responsibility for the seemingly faraway future. Because otherwise “the year 2100” feels like a distant, meaningless date.
So I started asking my listeners to estimate the lifespan of the people they will meet in person, the people they will get to love. One day I set this task for my youngest daughter. We were sitting at the table with my mum and my grandmother, eating pancakes. To my daughter’s surprise, the timescale of her existence turned out to be about 260 years. Her great-grandmother was born in 1924, while her granddaughter will probably live till the year 2186.
When people who attended my lectures arrived at dates such as 2150, I would show them data and say: Look, here’s what the scientists predict about our world and its climate in 2100. We tend to think of such faraway dates in a dehumanized, technological context. However, our greatest challenge is to imagine a future still inhabited by human beings.
As you once put it, “pancake science-fiction.”
Precisely. It boils down to a very simple thing: picture a world in 2150, where life is still possible, where you can share a kitchen table with other people and eat pancakes—and share the planet with other species.
Asking someone to estimate their “temporal footprint” is a very simple idea. So simple, in fact, that calling it “an idea” seems like an overstatement. We ought to consider it strange that we don’t tend to think in such categories, to plan a few decades or 100 years ahead. The stonemasons who built cathedrals had those skills. They would begin their work fully aware that the task of completing it would fall to future generations. That’s what we are missing today. I think I stumbled upon a metaphor that many people consider very powerful—it certainly made a great impression on me, when I first considered myself in a broad temporal context.
A simple yet
