The chatter

I've been listening to Dougald Hine's At Work in the Ruins, which I like a lot. One thing: he says there's little good climate literature - but this came out before The Deluge, which gets a good write-up on The Dark Mountain Project website. Hine was a founder of this... organisation. And, to add to the entanglement, it was my involvement in a poetry thing run by this project that led to my first conversation with a tree - an ash.

Anyway, one of the things he says is that he wants to stop talking about climate change. I think that's partly because all conversations make this sound like a problem we can solve, when it is actually a situation we are in. It's also because all conversations seem to assume either death or business as usual, when changing our lives, expectations, wants, needs and demands would go further to mitigating the extremity than any technology that's even a decade away from application.

I want to stop talking about extinction and anthropocentrism. I want not to have to need to say anything because everyone has drunk the Kool-Aid.

Mind you, if I didn't talk about that... well, what would I talk about?

I suppose that it's possible that I could think of something else.... but, lord above, what? Football? The weather? Routes to and from work?

Manchester United are doing very poorly this season. There was a heavy frost this morning but as there wasn't much traffic on the roads I made good time to work, taking the M1 and M25. [Spare us. Even the anthropocentrism rants were less tedious. - Ed.]

Well. On the climate fiction, Hine recommends A Children's Bible, by Lydia Millett. And another book the title of which I have forgotten. I think the author was Swedish. In trying to find it, I discovered a whole website dedicated to people who write climate fiction. Who knew? I guess they won't stop talking about it. Be out of a job.