Time is cyclical. That’s the underlying message of Gareth E. Rees’s timely and often persuasive new book, the follow-up to his superb Unofficial Britain. As a species, argues Rees, we’ve been here before: we’ve seen the seas rise, seen rising waters swallow the land. It’s happened once, twice, many times; and if we take the long view, it’ll happen again.
Now this may sound like a throwing up of hands, and a surrender to fatalism. Rees states boldly – and it ain’t controversial; all the science backs it up – that we’re too late. Irreversible global warming is happening right now. Whatever drastic measures we may take (and which look as distant as ever) “there is no way to stop the ice caps melting”; we cannot avoid the consequent rising of sea levels: we’ll lose “Amsterdam, Basra, New Orleans, Venice, Kolkata and Ho Chi Minh City”. So, we’re fucked. But, Rees asks, how do we deal with it?
Sunken Lands is an open-eyed journey to places which rising waters have taken: those that were lost so long ago their story survives as myth, and those that are being swallowed as we speak (and drive, and fly). He offers no solutions to the root problem – this isn’t a techno-utopian manifesto for how to get out of the mess – but equally he pulls no punches when apportioning blame.
There are over 2,000 global flood myths: they exist from Wales to Ancient Rome to the Choctaw Americans. They are “at the heart of all three Abrahamic religions”, suggesting “traumatic experiences in our deep past”. Rees also explores the myth of Atlantis and examines the ways in which it is useful for both white supremacists (an excuse to colonise cultures deemed inferior) and afrofuturists (a free space for self-invention). Pleasingly, he also mentions H.P. Lovecraft and Drexciya1, whose connection I wrote about here.
Flood myths often show rulers decadently feasting, for whom the deluge is divine punishment. But that doesn’t tell us what to do when it’s happening to us. Besides, blaming individuals is “a narrative that suits big business and oil companies” who are happy for the onus to be on us to change rather than them. Their clever gamifying of guilt – the carbon footprint – helpfully shifts responsibility onto us, reframing the last century’s economic model as one where “we were the consumers and they were dutifully servicing our insatiable demands”. But we have no choice in this: political and economic decisions, especially since the end of the 1970s, have locked us into this model in which – said Fredric Jameson and/or Slavoj Žižek – “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”. And right now, much easier.
Rees admits he is “endemically anxious” and prone to catastrophising which makes him, as he says, either the “best or the worst” person to write such a book. How does he cope? How are we to cope?
Part of the book’s premise of course is that we should take the long view: people have been fucked by rising waters and rising temperatures before. But as well as the past, Rees is conscious of the future. He tries to imagine himself forward in time, putting himself in the place – and mind – of someone looking back at our own culture from the far future as they try to understand how and why we “plundered the world to the brink of extinction.” Stepping back from daily life like this and looking at yourself in the context of the existence of the whole world will make you feel “tiny and unimportant next to all that history” but he also finds that such a “dizzying blast of perspective was of some consolation”. We have to accept that life is flux, and change inevitable.
This is true, but is also problematic. Rees quotes the Dark Mountain Project and Dark Ecology author Timothy Morton, who aims to de-anthropocentrise our view of nature: “nature is us and we are in it”. Yes, there’s much to be said for such an approach: a greater awareness of our place within nature is desperately needed, and if we’d had one before we wouldn’t be in this mess. But to step aside from humanity’s concerns and view us as infinitesimal – although, yes, we are that too – isn’t helpful, and verges on the misanthropic. It also seems like a luxury. Taking the long view like this is of no consolation or practical use if you’re sheltering in a sports centre because your house has been swept away.
Rees, though, is keenly aware of what has been, is being, and will be lost: culturally, environmentally and in terms of actual people’s lives and homes. He visits the Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana and sees, first-hand, what the rising tides will look like in the developed world. In 70 years the island has lost 98% of its landmass due to coastal erosion. We also hear of how some Marshall Islanders now name their children after “atolls, coral heads and islands that could disappear by 2055”, in an act to preserve cultural memory. As entire low-lying nations are engulfed and their peoples displaced so the languages spoken by those cultures die, and other ways of knowing the world are lost to us.
So what do we do? Well, looking back in time shows us that “we are the children of the flood”: many of us are descended from survivors of previous deluges. Humanity has survived before, and may be able to do so again: “the end is also a beginning, another turn of the wheel…we can remember valuable lessons that have been forgotten”. The lesson we should take from the flood myths is to do what previous victims were unable to, because they didn’t have the data or the awareness that we do. We have to adapt. And that means to change. And change is painful: that’s why we see, across Europe (however much it may be exaggerated by the media) a backlash against green policy. People are now realising that this is going to be painful, and that we can’t continue to live the way we have been. And, unfortunately, many people are retreating to the comfort of denial.
While visiting the ruins of Baia in the Gulf of Naples, Rees evokes a previous visitor, Percy Bysshe Shelley (a favourite poet of mine), and in particular his Ode to the West Wind. On the surface a paean to the awesome destructive power of nature, it is, in the wake of the Peterloo massacre, a statement that “disaster can birth hope”, ending as it does with the lines “O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” We can but hope. And, in the meantime, adapt.
Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds by Gareth E. Rees is published by Elliott & Thompson on 21st March 2024. Buy a copy at Blackwells.
1There’s also a handy playlist of music which touches on the aquatic themes in the book and includes delights such as the aforementioned Drexciya, Sun Ra, Bowie, LTJ Bukem, Donovan and Parliament.
My copy was supplied for review by the publishers.
Into the Gyre 