Ecclesiastes

I had a coffee today in one of those places that keeps perhaps one hundred old books on their shelves. I suppose it is not uncommon for someone to pull one off the shelf and leaf through the volume, reading a page or two before an overly loud couple gossiping unkindly catch one's attention, but as most books that end up like this were never very good and are now wildly out of style or out of date, that is not remotely their purpose in this reincarnation. Like a lace doily or an unremarkable painting of a fox hunting scene painted by a dowager who never saw one, they are there for theatrical reasons: they say "this is the set of a cafe in which our clients reflect on the classics as they sip."

But I saw a copy of H.G. Wells' The Outline of History: The Whole Story of Man on the shelf and I pulled it off. I consider Wells one of the last polymaths who could actually imagine he "knew it all." (The world changed too quickly after his generation.) Clearly, H.G. Wells agreed (re-read the subtitle if you have doubts).

As there was no gossip to distract me and I am a fast reader, I made some progress but then I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. On page 65, a map that Wells entitled (modestly): "Possible Outline of Europe and Western Asia at the Maximum of the 4th Ice Age." When the ice caps had frozen, the oceans fell -- not trivially, but so much so that Italy was connected by land to Croatia, to Sicily, to Corsica and Sardinia, Africa to Saudi Arabia, India to Ceylon; all that Adriatic and Mediterranean and Red Sea and Indian Ocean had shrunk away revealing and drying their sea and ocean bottoms for the thousands of years before the warming began.

Planet cools, water freezes, oceans recede. So much so that the world we know like the back of our hand is invisible. One giant block of Italy and Southern Europe and the islands of the Mediterranean. One giant block of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. One giant block of India and Ceylon.

It did not fail to strike me as poignant that I was looking at this old map by this long-gone genius, in a book published in 1920, on the day that the president of the United States was withdrawing from the Paris Accords.

Planet cools, water freezes, oceans recede.

Planet warms, ice melts, oceans rise.

That's not so hard to understand, is it?

In 50,000 BCE the ice age was surely tragic for many. It culled our own species, and in fact created a niche for the Neandertals in France (too cold for your Cro-Magnon ancestors -- I figure I'm Neandertal). But the scale of the tragedy was small.

This time -- this warming, this melting, this rising of the oceans -- and hundreds of millions of people living on the coasts of every continent but Antarctica, and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of islands and their inhabitants, will be driven out of their homes, losing trillions of dollars of value and many, many lives. Bangladesh alone will lose land that is home to one hundred million or more.  As if that is not enough, the dessication of barely arable land in Africa will lead to enormous crop losses by 2060.

To every thing there is a season, and we will soon find that it is the season to lose, and to mourn -- our unwillingness to embrace the family of man, and our refusal to gather stones together when we could.

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Ecclesiastes 3:1-8King James Version (KJV)

3 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.