Munich Jimmy Carter, 98, is perhaps the most underrated US President of the past 100 years. In 1977, in his second year in office, the head of state promised to get away from oil and gas. He plans to switch to clean energy sources, wind power, solar energy and geothermal energy. “The world is not prepared for the future,” proclaimed the Georgia peanut farmer.
The politician from the Democrats then failed on all fronts with a tax-financed green energy program: above all, because of the powerful oil lobby and because of Ronald Reagan. The pro-industry Republican won the 1980 election on promises of freedom and a ban on socialist fantasies.
If that sounds familiar to you – in view of Robert Habeck’s hit-and-run methodology, which has been the subject of heated debate in this country: more than four decades ago, voters wanted to know as little as possible about uncomfortable truths.
Since then, the ecological warning values – the warming of the earth, the level of the sea water level, the speed of the melting glaciers – have increased rapidly and drastically. As a crisis of all crises, the climate catastrophe produces horrific news from flood and heat victims with almost frightening reliability.
As a result, the subject has penetrated the book market like no other – printed knowledge aid in the struggle for survival.
Heaven promises nothing more
Among the current new publications on the ongoing topic of ecology, one thick non-fiction book and one slimmer novel stand out: “Between Earth and Heaven” by the sober Oxford historian Peter Frankopan, who loves the factual, and “Blue Skies” by the slightly shrill US novelist T. C. Boyle.
Both times it is about higher conflicts, about a sky that is no longer blue, but dark or fiery red. A heaven that no longer promises anything, neither unrestricted joie de vivre or reliable routine of everyday life nor any kind of salvation. Freely based on Bertolt Brecht: The conditions are not like that. On the contrary, they give reason to fear much worse, as one learns from the two books.
The British scholar Frankopan, renowned for his work on the Silk Road and the Crusades, presents a 1,000-page view of humanity in which no period, no important empire is left uncommented. 4.5 billion years fly by. In this opus magnum one is constantly on the move between dying and dying empires, between the Bronze Age, the Axial Age and the Anthropocene, mostly from the point of view of the climate, to which the author occasionally pays too little attention.
It drives him to every corner of history. It’s all very complex, the global climate is by no means homogeneous, and there isn’t one big world formula either – but there are enough hints for understanding in this understandably written textbook. The author’s certainty: the historian learns by looking back.
52-year-old Frankopan grew up with stories about acid rain and nuclear hazards. Now he sums it up: We are on the verge of a catastrophe, “we are playing with our future”. One thing has not changed over all the many years on earth: the natural environment and the climate provide the framework for our existence.
Peter Frankopan: Between Earth and Heaven
Rowohlt Berlin
Berlin 2023
1024 pages
44 euros
Translation: H. Thies, J. Neubauer
It has shaped the fate of the earth from the beginning of time. Climate change determines, for example, the deposits of raw materials such as coal, oil and natural gas. We read through a chronicle of freaks of nature: Mal, for example, was 6150 B.C. a tsunami off Norway, then in turn collapsed in 2200 B.C. in Mesopotamia during a long period of drought, the kingdom of Akkad. And around 600 years later, a gigantic volcanic eruption on the Aegean island of Santorini promoted the outbreak of the smallpox virus.
Such eruptions have repeatedly affected the climate. But humans have also exacerbated the problem with the most brutal incompetence possible, be it through excessive water use, deforestation, extreme urbanization or resource use with the help of mines, also a phenomenon of colonization: “In this phase of history, profit was the engine. It was it that led to the transformation of power, the deformation of nature, and finally climate change itself,” writes Frankopan.
>> Read here: The climate crisis could cost Germany 900 billion euros
In the Judeo-Christian worldview, as is well known, man is always superior to nature and makes it subject to himself. The result is that there are currently 1,300 pests threatening plants worldwide.
This book is about the “lost paradise”, at one point the author writes about the “limited garden”. Warm and cold phases have always accompanied the rise and death of the rich, one thinks after reading it, and people with overexploitation have always destroyed soil and thus created disaster.
But now there are far too many greenhouse gases, produced in cities, caused by traffic, buildings, waste disposal or air conditioning. After all, the Saudis alone burn 700,000 barrels of oil a day just to cool their interiors. The tipping point may already have been reached, warns Frankopan, “however, what we cannot say is that we were not warned”.
The apocalypse is already here
Anyone who reads this warning book already has the scientific basis for T.C. Boyle’s “Hooray, We’re Still Alive” dystopia at hand. It is then known in advance that four million houses will be built in the USA in regions threatened by floods and tropical cyclones. That in Florida every sixth family home is in flood areas and that by 2053 – that is, in 30 years – more than 50 degrees will be measured in summer on a quarter of America.
With horror painter T.C. Boyle, the apocalypse is already here. It is part of life like ketchup or breakfast jam. In his story, a family is torn between the poles of the environmental meltdown.
Here the constant water invasion in Florida, where the “All American Girl” Cat lives with her worthless Barcardi promotion boy Todd, there the oven-fire climate of California, where her parents Ottilie and Frank and brother Cooper constantly have to fear the next forest fire.
In California there are always large forest fires that destroy large areas of nature.
(Photo: dpa)
You live in this inhospitable L.A. knowing that the planet is dying (“Can’t you see that?”), but still eat crickets, fried grasshoppers and worms to fight it off, so strictly avoid meat (“Everything for the cattle”), constantly recycles and has paperless invoices sent to it.
Otherwise, the offspring is constantly busy drinking alcohol and cheating. What else is there to do about world pain? The greatest thing is to become an influencer. Boyle sarcastically comments on a cohort who would dismiss Sahra Wagenknecht as “lifestyle leftists.”
Daughter Cat’s sage wisdom at her beach house is, “There’s more to life than work and delivered food and Netflix and sitting on the porch and watching the tide erode the beach like you’re a hundred years old already.” Good said.
But with so much boredom with prosperity, the tiger pythons “Willie” and “Willie II” don’t help either, which women let themselves be turned on and whose colors go so well with the Paul Klee print. Original sound: “People want to see something real – especially in a society in which so much is fake.” In the end “Willie II” then kills Cat’s twin baby “Sierra”.
TC Boyle: Blue Skies
Carl Hanser Verlag
Munich 2023
400 pages
28 euros
Translation: Dirk van Gunsteren
Sierra is dying, the mountains are dying, our acts of violence against nature cannot be caricatured in a much more banal way. In the end, the mother can be happy to be able to leave the washed-up beach house alive by boat with the remaining daughter and a tomcat.
The setting in this novel: Outdoor parties are no longer possible in the sunshine state of California because there are sudden storms and porcelain is smashed, and the birth of the granddaughter in the sunshine state of Florida is only possible with great effort because once again the airports are flooded.
It is a world with biblical plagues. Insects fall from the sky and Todd loses his forearm after a tick bite. It just turns, it says at one point, “before our eyes everything in shit”. And at the end, the armless protagonist does what Americans always like to do in search of contemplation: climb a mountain. There, away from the sweltering heat, Todd and his new partner finally see butterflies again.
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T.C. Boyle has written better novels. Here he visibly gets lost in an increasingly absurd zeitgeist world, in which the triviality of the actors contrasts starkly with the seriousness of the danger.
In addition, this deep black, yet entertaining revue of ecological calamities cannot hide the fact that a plot line is missing. At least he lets colorful butterflies fly in the finale as a small sign of hope.
Non-fiction colleague Frankopan also sees signs of optimism, considers green investments to be promising, but urges hurry. He fears weather manipulation by China, Saudi Arabia and the USA in order to artificially generate rain, he addresses the strong faction of climate skeptics à la Donald Trump and finally lets Partha Dasgupta speak something like the final word. According to the Bangladeshi economist, the countries of the world are exacerbating the problem “by rewarding people better for exploiting nature than for protecting it”.
His summary: We need 1.6 Earths to maintain our standard of living. This calculation cannot add up. Jimmy Carter already knew that.
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