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Book Reviews
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High Tide: How Climate Crisis
is Engulfing Our Planet
by Mark Lynas
(Picador, 2005)
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In High Tide, Mark Lynas climbs 5,000-foot peaks in Peru, chases a tropical storm in North Carolina, and watches his native England suffer unprecedented flooding. He visits the shrinking island nation of Tuvalu during high tide, and hangs out on thin ice with Eskimos readying for inland relocation. His five-continent search for the fingerprints of global warming is not quite Fear Factor, but it sure can be hair-raising.
Lynas’s one-man quest was inspired by a family slideshow when his father saw a photo he took of a glacier 20 years ago, and wondered what the scene might look like today. This is enough to spur Lynas, former editor of the human rights site: oneworld.com, to embark on a three-year journey seeking day-to-day stories that would corroborate, and humanize, the science and sound bites surrounding global warming. “Those who live closest to the land have been the first to notice. But they won’t be alone for long,” he warns. “The first signs are evident to anyone who chooses to look.”
In all his looking, Lynas never finds “a single piece of counter-evidence” undermining the case for global warming. He does see homes in Alaska sagging into the less-than-permanent permafrost. The South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is flooding from the inside out as the sea level rises around the hollow coral atoll, forcing underground water to pool on the surface. Later, perusing the plains of Inner Mongolia, he gets sand-blasted by the spreading desert; local residents remember being surrounded by knee-high grass only two decades ago.
One of the book’s strengths is that it does not shy away from the difficulties and contradictions that muddle effectively addressing global warming. In Alaska, for example, where typically-migratory ducks are instead swimming in the river through the winter, royalties from oil companies cover four-fifths of the state revenues, making it a hard call for cash-strapped Alaskans to oust the biggest corporate climate change culprits even as their landscape melts away. And down south, in Lima, glaciers are disappearing faster than they’re created, leaving coastal village residents — who depend on year-round mountain rivers for 100 percent of their freshwater in an otherwise arid landscape — to consider desalinating seawater with a petroleum-run generator once the glacial streams run dry. Lynas is particularly big on getting readers to understand their immense contribution to global emissions through air travel, and doesn’t fail to tally his own: jetting around the globe to research High Tide produced over 16 tons of carbon dioxide.
There are books chronicling the science, the outmoded “debate,” and the depressing politics around global warming, but High Tide is the first to make a comprehensive, global inquiry into how humans are dealing with a warming planet. Similar to Mark Hertsgaard’s Earth Odyssey, Lynas’ account is also a globe-trotting attempt to put names and faces on the daily effects of ecological degradation. Yet whereas Hertsgaard’s journey covered a panoply of environmental crises, High Tide is unique in focusing solely on what is, arguably, the biggest challenge facing humankind in the coming century as scientists predict a climate increase of six degrees Celsius.
Towards the book’s end, Lynas offers a “sort of manifesto” — a list of personal and political solutions, from signing the Kyoto Protocol and ceasing all new fossil fuel exploration to driving less and refusing to remain complacent because it seems, in the short-term, easier. His most interesting suggestion is “contraction and convergence,” a strategy to create a global-emissions budget to be parceled out on an equal per capita basis worldwide.
“If you can see all this and still remain unmoved,” Lynas concludes, “then you have lost some essential part of your humanity. If you want to remain in ignorance then that is your choice too — but do not claim to be a leader.”
Katie Renz
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