Jonathan Franzen questions ‘overriding priority’ of climate change
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Version 0 of 1. Bird-lover and novelist Jonathan Franzen, a longstanding environmentalist, has said that he is “miserably conflicted” about climate change, and that its “supremacy as the environmental issue of our time” makes him “feel selfish for caring more about birds in the present than about people in the future”. Writing in the new issue of the New Yorker, where he describes himself as “someone who cares more about birds than the next man”, the award-winning author of The Corrections and Freedom recounts how, last autumn, the glass walls of a new football stadium were expected to kill thousands of birds every year, and how “local bird-lovers had asked its sponsors to use a specially-patterned glass to reduce collisions; the glass would have raised the stadium’s cost by one tenth of one per cent, and the sponsors had balked”. But a report from the National Audubon Society, wrote Franzen, declared climate change “the greatest threat” to American birds. “And so I came to feel miserably conflicted about climate change. I accepted its supremacy as the environmental issue of our time, but I felt bullied by its dominance,” he writes. “Not only did it make every grocery-store run a guilt trip; it made me feel selfish for caring more about birds in the present than about people in the future. What were the eagles and the condors killed by wind turbines compared with the impact of rising sea levels on poor nations?” Franzen, who is involved with American Bird Conservancy, goes on to say that it is not that we should not care about climate change, but that “the question is whether everyone who cares about the environment is obliged to make climate the overriding priority”. Detailing his visits to Peru, to see the work of the Amazon Conservation Association, and to Costa Rica, to meet the people behind the Área Conservación de Guanacaste, Franzen claimed that “as long as mitigating climate change trumps all other environmental concerns, no landscape on earth is safe”. “Only an appreciation of nature as a collection of specific threatened habitats, rather than as an abstract thing that is ‘dying’, can avert the complete denaturing of the world,” he writes, describing the Earth today as resembling “a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy”. “We can dam every river and blight every landscape with biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines, to buy some extra years of moderated warming. Or we can settle for a shorter life of higher quality, protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on, at the cost of slightly hastening the human catastrophe. One advantage of the latter approach is that, if a miracle cure like fusion energy should come along, there might still be some intact ecosystems for it to save,” he says. |