George Monbiot has called Cormac McCarthy's
The Road the
most important environmental book ever written.
That's one reason why Benjamin Morris and Bradon Smith, who run
CRASSH's 'Cultures and Climate Change' programme, chose this widely-acclaimed novel as the subject for
an excellent seminar.
The afternoon's discussion fell into two parts: text and context. The discussion about text ranged from the paradox of a rich vocabulary conjuring a bleak and ashen world, through to post-apocalyptic ethics and the theme of redemption.
In discussing context, and how the book was received, there was a difference between its reception in the US - where its Biblical and lapidary cadences were noted by critics - and its reception in the UK, which has been somewhat skewed by Monbiot's striking claims. He also nominated McCarthy as one of the
50 people who could save the planet because
The Road shows that 'everything we value depends on the ecosystem.'
That is, of course, irrefutable: no food, no civilisation. But McCarthy never says what has caused the devastation, so there's no sense of cause and effect. It might even have been an asteroid. All we know is that the biosphere is dead and the survivors have been eating tinned food (at best) and each other (at worst).
A novel about climate change, one that imagines a future that's been brought about by rising levels of CO2, would still show large parts of the biosphere surviving. One ecosytem would have replaced another. As James Lovelock
keeps reminding us, it's the millions and millions of humans who would have vanished.
(A summary of the seminar will appear shortly on the RSA's
Arts and Ecology website.)
pic: Kodi Smit-McPhee and Viggo Mortensen in The Road
(to be released October 2009)
more ...
In a lecture last year Alan Read, author of Theatre & Everyday Life, showed Goya's picture of two men fighting with cudgels. 
Wallace Shawn's first play in 10 years, Grasses of a 1000 Colours, opened last night at the Royal Court. The Standard gives it four stars. 
The Independent's environment editor Mike McCarthy discusses bird migration with Radio 2's most famous ex-chorister Aled Jones. 
New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane spots an anachronism, or more specifically a parachronism (OED: 'too late a date'), in the new Star Trek. 
The Irish writer Edmund Burke's belief that society was a contract between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born, has big environmental implications. It can be seen, for instance, in Lord Stern's take on discounting. 
Till last Thursday this blog hadn't seen any plays by Steve Waters (left), whose doublebill The Contingency Plan is 'the first good play about climate change'. Time to google ...
If there's one line I had to choose from The Contingency Plan, Steve Waters’s terrific new double-bill of plays about climate change, now on at the Bush Theatre in London, it's the moment when Will Paxton (Geoffrey Streatfeild), a young glaciologist, explains the concept of displacement to the new Tory minister for climate change. Having spelled out that ice is 'basically parked water', Will warily predicts that the enormous West Antarctic Ice Sheet may well melt (much like the smaller Larsen B ice shelf).
George Monbiot has called Cormac McCarthy's The Road the most important environmental book ever written. 
J. B. Priestley's Time and the Conways, now revived at the National Theatre, is one of Priestley's 'time plays', inspired by J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time.
MR McGUIRE: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
'Get your barbie ready - we're in for a sizzler', headlines the Independent. The Met Office's chief meteorologist, Ewen McCallum, says the period from June to August is likely to see prolonged spells of hot weather. It's 'odds-on for a barbecue summer'.
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