Taking the Long View (in a Short Time)

Today's BBC Radio 4 "Thought for the Day" was COP15-focused, as these fascinating negotiations draw to a close. Abdal Hakim Murad's topic was, states the BBC's website, the claim that "Humility is needed to heal the environment." The scope of his short piece was of course considerably wider than that summary suggests, despite its compression into a strict 3 minute slot. Acknowledging climate change as "the defining topic of our times," Murad notes that politicians at the summit have been forced to extend their historical range, despite the fact that they are "not always famous for taking the long-term view." Meanwhile, Gordon Brown has pointed out that COP15's historical significance must be borne in mind, since this cohort of negotiators will be "blessed or blamed for generations to come." On the way to a point about humility, Murad has struck upon one of the defining features of cultural commentary on climate change - a fascination with various, often competing, temporal models. When he claims that the world is now divided not so much into "haves" and "have nots" but into "those that take the long view" and those that put off change, he suggests that it is attitudes to time that really make the difference in these negotiations, and in shifting (or failing to shift) attitudes to human responsibility in the face of our changing climate. If only Murad himself had had longer to expand on this interesting point.

Haunted (Tree) House

Something to file under "interesting ideas" is the upcoming project Ghost Forest by artist Angela Palmer who, having grubbed up the stumps of mature trees felled for commercial logging in the forests of Ghana, will install those stumps in Trafalgar Square, and thence in Copenhagen (just in time for the COP15 climate talks). The project's aesthetic value and effect upon the viewer can only really be assessed once it's in situ, but that fact itself gets to the heart of what is being depicted here. To feel, to really respond, you have to "be there." And if "there" is a distant tropical forest then, much as you are told deforestation is a Very Bad Thing, your distance from the denuded forests themselves (assuming you live in the non-tropical regions) can assuage the feelings of compulsion to do anything to prevent the loss. There's a spatial contraction in "Ghost Forest" that puts you where the arboreal carnage is. But also - as the title hints - there's a temporal contraction here too, as the past is summoned up through individual acts of imagination, which will inevitably attempt to reinstate the missing trees. The ghosts will, as ever, be the result of human imagination, a painful reminder of a loss experienced in the past, now felt once again in the present, and perhaps also (as in the prophecies of ghostly figures) hinting at a forest-free future.

Wood, once its origin in a living entity is reiterated, seems at once more beautiful, but also more unsettling - it is hard to resist the anthropomorphic inclination to associate wood with flesh. This move is deftly achieved in Kathleen Jamie's poem "The Tree House," from the prize-winning collection of the same name. As a careful observer of the natural world and, not least, as the wife of a carpenter, Jamie is alert to the beauty of wood. But her poem also addresses the sacrifice of other living things that goes into the human effort to dwell:

[...]

Would we still be driven here,

our small town Ithacas, our settlements

hitched tight beside the river

where we're best played out

in gardens of dockens

and lady's mantel, kids' bikes

stranded on the grass;

where we've knocked together

of planks and packing chests

a dwelling of sorts; a gall

we've asked the tree to carry

of its own dead, and every spring

to drape in leaf and blossom, like a pall.

Image: Associated Press / BBC