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Breaking the ice--for a saner world? A new climate in popular culture and politics is reshaping our view of nature, writes Nonie Sharp in the third of a four-part series on nature writing.

Article Excerpt
The ending of May, a strange week with shades of winter. It began with questions given shape by Bob Brown's thoughtful book Memo for a Saner World (Penguin, 2004). Are we following a course towards world catastrophe, the destruction of the planet? Ourselves? Wilfully, even impetuously? Is a mounting social chaos, a dissolution of what we had taken to be the firm grounding of social life being, projected onto the natural world? There is growing discussion of environmental crisis, much of it contentious. But it is as if the natural and the social run in separate courses. As yet, the two have not found a common language that might carry the stories of each. Here, my focus is on the current environmental story--and, in particular, climate change.

Within this realm there is still a reticence in speaking about the meaning of certain events and trends. Are we creating and accelerating climate change to the disadvantage of our descendants? Fortunately, the Europeans have broken the ice. Believing such climate change is already happening, they are acting more and more as though the Kyoto Protocol is already in place. Yet both we and the United States refuse. The Federal Government announced in June that the key source of power in Australia will continue to be coal; energy from renewable sources will not only remain peripheral, it will be reduced.

A few days later and I'm witnessing the unthinkable on the big screen. The Day After Tomorrow is depicting a new terror; not the Twin Towers, but the Ice Melt. A chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island is breaking off the polar world--'the whole damn shelf is breaking off', engulfing a scientist. The warm currents of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream have shut down; atypically, hurricanes are forming on land, and Los Angeles and then New York are hit by storms; grapefruit-sized hail precedes icy tornadoes. Images of vast waves call up paintings by the Japanese artist Hokusai. Most of the United States is uninhabitable and, following a desperate save-who-you-can strategy, waves of refugees from the southern half stream down to Mexico.

The Armageddon of Nature and Humanity is in train. The tall buildings are like strange, bleak headstones to grey, ravaged cities. Women and men freeze as they speak, their words or sighs become the still life of parted lips and dying breath. According to the film's hero, paleoclimatologist Jack Hall, this is not...

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