NON-FICTION
WE ARE THE WEATHER: SAVING THE PLANET BEGINS AT BREAKFAST
By Jonathan Safran Foer Hamish Hamilton/ Hardcover/ 288 pages/ Books Kinokuniya/ $34.50/4 stars
The problem with climate change, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer says, is that it does not make for a very good story.
“The planetary crisis – abstract and eclectic as it is, slow as it is, and lacking in iconic figures and moments – seems impossible to describe in a way that is both truthful and enthralling,” he writes in his non-fiction book We Are The Weather, which makes a case for the power of collective action in the face of the environmental crisis.
Indian writer Amitav Ghosh once called the climate crisis a crisis of the imagination. For Foer, it is a crisis of belief. The nub of the matter, he rightly points out, is that humanity evolved over hundreds of millions of years in settings with little resemblance to the modern world: “We are often led to cravings, fear, and indifferences that neither correspond nor respond to modern realities. We are disproportionately drawn to immediate and local needs… while remaining indifferent to what is lethal but over there. “
And so he spends 200 pages shuffling through a host of parables and analogies that help readers better relate to aspects of the crisis – images of a clogged bathtub filling up with water, traffic jams and American civilians turning off their lights at dusk during World War II.
The book also contains chapters filled with shocking statistics about the human impact on the environment presented in bullet-points.
Anxious not to alienate the reader, he holds off talking about the consequences of meat eating till 50 pages later. Still, the topic is never fully fleshed out – you’d have to read Eating Animals, his 2009 book on factory farming, for that.
We Are The Weather isn’t a piece of journalism, nor does it really offer any unique scientific insights. What Foer – the author of the brilliant novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002) – does, when he does it well, is use his way with words to try to trick the reader’s mind into grasping – even believing in – the enormity of the crisis.
Are we convinced? Not always.
Some parts, admittedly, fail to persuade, reading more like a kind of self-communion or attempt at self-persuasion – such as the section titled Dispute With The Soul, where the author seems to engage in an argument with himself – and autobiographical vignettes about his sons and his grandfather’s suicide.
The need for significant structural change-such as a global shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy – is something Foer has largely, and very consciously, left out of this book. But it still feels like the elephant in the room.
One also wonders what Foer would have made of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose strikes for the climate – and the subsequent global movement – gained traction around the time this book was being printed. Is she the “iconic figure” the world needs?
We Are The Weather, for all its astute observations, sleights of hand and candour (“The truth is I don’t care about the planetary crisis – not at the level of belief,” Foer admits), isn’t powerful enough to cause a sea change in people’s attitudes or behaviours.
No one activist, book or project ever is. But as the author David Mitchell once asked: What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?
If you like this, read: Eating Animals (Penguin Books, 2009, $18.14, Books Kinokuniya), Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2009 book on animal agriculture and the climate crisis
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