Land Sickness E-Book

Nikolaj Schultz

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 117

Beschreibung

As a heatwave hits Paris, the author's entire existence is disrupted and disoriented by the effects of climate change. All his normal reference points are destroyed. To escape the heat and his growing anxieties, he flees to the small Mediterranean island of Porquerolles. But even in this idyllic setting, can he escape the harsh realities of the Anthropocene? Written as a fictionalized travelogue based on the author's own experiences, this inquiry into the issues raised by the climate crisis will be of interest to everyone concerned about the increasingly dire situation in which we find ourselves on our climate-damaged planet.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Problems

Notes

Beings

Notes

Generations

Notes

Transmissions

Notes

Oceans

Notes

Islands

Notes

Freedoms

Notes

Landscapes

Notes

Waters

Notes

Controversies

Notes

Struggles

Notes

Land Sickness

Notes

Horizons

Notes

Postface

Acknowledgements

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Begin Reading

Postface

Acknowledgements

End User License Agreement

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Land Sickness

Nikolaj Schultz

polity

Copyright © Nikolaj Schultz 2023

The right of Nikolaj Schultz to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2023 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5614-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022943243

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

Problems

It never stops. The problems never seem to leave me alone, they follow me around all day, from morning to evening, from sunrise to sunset. They have been doing so for a long time, but tonight is different. Now, they even follow me into my dreams.

I have been going to bed late for a while, not by choice, but because the heat in this city is unbearable. The warmth incapacitates my body and mind: everything seems slower, each minute longer, every movement heavier. There is yet another heatwave in Paris, one of those that used to be unusual but have come to seem normal, or at least familiar. The heat exhausts me. I am tired and need to sleep, but as I close my eyes, my heartbeat speeds up. A tingle runs through my arms into my fingers, as my chest tightens and my neck stiffens. I am not sure which came first, the feeling or the thought, but I know this: the problems have caught up with me. The breeze that was supposed to calm me down has triggered the alarm bell. The fan I cannot sleep without turbocharges my energy consumption, emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere, resulting in yet more heat. Cooling my body down has its price: a cost probably first and most violently paid by somebody else, most likely somewhere in the Global South.

I turn over and glance out through the small crack between my curtains. How do the couple living across the road, under the metal roof, manage? Their flat is small, even smaller than mine, with only one window, making it almost impossible for the air to circulate, and I doubt if they have air conditioning. They must be suffocating in there.

It seems the Anthropocene is not a nice place to sleep. Even if I am exhausted, I suppose I could make the most of it and work, as I normally do when sleepless, but as I roll over and prepare to get up, I remember that this part of my life too has become haunted. Yesterday morning, I realized that what I always wished for – having my name on the cover of a book, displayed in some Parisian bookstore – sends me hundreds of miles away and plants my feet straight in some ancient woods, contributing to deforestation. With each word printed on paper in black ink transported from afar, volatile organic compounds are released into the atmosphere.1 With every single page of the book I write, the more deeply intertwined I become with the issues; maybe just a little, but enough to be an active participant in the unfolding of a planetary emergency.

Sirens grow louder and then disappear as an ambulance races along the street below. I am now wide awake. Sitting up in bed, hands locked between my thighs, it seems that the only stable structure left is the wall supporting my back. I lack a sense of direction and have lost my bearings: behind me, in front of me, alongside me, up in the sky and below my feet, I see nothing but signs of this mess. Wherever I fix my gaze or turn my imagination, I recognize the disturbing trails of my own being, its activities and doings. My sight blurs in the dark and I begin to feel short of breath. These problems dog my footsteps; no, worse, they are my footsteps. How can I aspire to anything when all possible points of view remind me of the points of life I disturb? How can I dream at night when my last thoughts are moral vertigo over the cost of my sleep? How can I dream during the day if what wakes me in the morning further implicates me in the catastrophe?

These issues do not go away. They accompany me every morning when I read the newspaper and learn about yet another manifestation of climate change. This afternoon, it might have been 43° in Paris, but in California it was 54°. In Central Europe, hundreds of people are dead because of flooding, and in Indonesia dozens are still missing after a cyclone struck a few months ago. The problems fill up my basket when I do my grocery shopping at the supermarket, item by item, each one wrapped in plastic that ends up in the ocean somewhere. I stopped eating meat, but the avocados and quinoa I opted for instead cause soil degradation and water shortage where they are grown. In the mornings, the coffee I need to wake my mind destroys soils and discharges waste and pollution into foreign rivers. The problems even splash onto my shoulders when I take a shower, with each minute under the streaming water releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere. But when I step out and dry myself off, new problems accumulate with every piece of clothing I put on, products of an industry hugely responsible for the global emissions of greenhouse gases. These issues are not easy to digest, they cannot be washed away or covered up. Every day, I learn how another aspect of my life is interpenetrated with these problems, and how my being in the world entangles me in these troubles.2 Every day, I realize that the problem is me.

Notes

1.

See Cem Aydemir and Samed Ayhan Ôzsoy, ‘Environmental Impact of Printing Inks and Printing Process’,

Journal of Graphic Engineering and Design

, Vol. 11 (2), 2020, pp. 11–17.

2.

See Emanuele Coccia,

Métamorphoses

(Paris: Bibliothèque Rivages, 2020), for an investigation of metamorphosis as a general metaphysics of being.

Beings

I barely recognize myself. The image of the human species seems to have been transformed,1 and I am mutating along with it. I feel this transformation every day, the change inside and out, as most of my personal actions or habits mirror these global patterns. Like some planetary Faustian bargainer, holed up in the dark of my bedroom, I am paying the ethical cost of my own affluence. Silently lying in bed, I hear the echoes of a thousand remote voices. Almost no matter what I do, the extensions of my livelihood pull traces after me, leading directly back to distant calamities. The material footprints of my life always situate me elsewhere, far away, most often a place where my presence is hazardous.

I am here, there and everywhere, and this is why the problems never disappear. A colleague recently found a way to frame this dispersion2 by distinguishing between the world I live in and the world I live off. My livelihood was always somewhere else, as the threads weaving my life together never fail to displace my being in this world. For me to live and thrive, I have to set foot on the lands of others. Yet I still do not have a language that captures the experience of me breathing heavily in my bedroom while my boots are buried deep in someone else’s livelihoods. In high school, I learned that when meeting a person, a bit of their destiny was in my hands. This is different: now, what I do has effects in places where I have never been and probably never thought of visiting; it concerns people I have never met, and whose lives I can only vaguely imagine. However, there I am, in the midst of their livelihoods, affecting their possibility of eating, drinking, breathing and living. And it is all due to my being, my freedom and my own way of life. My life at the expense of theirs, on a summer night during this heatwave.

The temperature does not drop, but I feel frozen, fixed, immobile, afraid of my every movement. Somebody seems to have installed Chateaubriand’s Chinese Mandarin button underneath my feet,3 and it is triggered by each step I take. As I grope for solutions, it strikes me that if this is suffocating and confusing, it is probably because it reshuffles certain existential clues, forcing me to reconsider them anew. Shoulders hunched, I crawl out of bed and begin browsing my bookshelves until I find first the book, then the page, I was looking for:

This is what I need, and this is what I strive for. A man must first learn to know himself before knowing anything else. Not until he has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does life gain peace and meaning.4

Bewildered, I swiftly close the book, as if it has done me more harm than good, aware that I can probably never open it up in the same way again. Being Danish, I know this page of Kierkegaard by heart, since it used to offer me guidance when asking myself what something was and was meant to be. Yet tonight it no longer resonates: travelling deeply inwards does not assuage the dread and anxiety that beset me since they are caused instead by the outward traces my being is leaving behind. It is as if my existence has flipped to the outside, and so I flip the pages in turn, but in fact nothing in this book equips me to frame, phrase or fathom the contours of my being. In the dark, my silhouette looks the same, but the shadows it casts are different. My very existence in the world has changed, and trying to reassemble its different pieces puzzles me, to say the least.

If I cannot sleep, it is because I have been transformed into a weird monstrosity of a species that I do not particularly like, that my mind hectically tries to grasp, but I lack the words and expressions to understand. The insights from the existentialist tradition I was fond of as a teenager no longer hit the spot. They fail to describe or explain the being I am tonight, and will continue being tomorrow when the sun rises again. Existence probably still precedes essence,5 but this new existence is definitely another sort of being, one that is constantly fleeing home. It is not just that I exist for myself, as if I was lodging in some private hotel room full of mirrors. Rather, it seems that I exist from others, like a spider in a web, sustaining myself by catching and feeding off them. As I weave my silken threads, my being and its trails constantly borrow from, overlap with and obstruct the continuous being of other entities: some of them close, some of them far; some of them human, some of them non-human. Intermixti, ergo sum