“If it can be experienced in a single lifetime by a single human being that can tell it from beginning to end, that is mythological.”
The warming of the planet is ushering in the mythological. Oceans heat up, ice shelves melt, great floods swallow landscapes, the ozone layer—our magical shield—thins. Instead of playing out over millennia, vast transformations of the Earth are now happening in the span of a lifetime, and in rapid succession. It is the stuff of stories, of our wildest apocalyptic tales.
In this week’s episode, Icelandic writer and documentary filmmaker Andri Snær Magnason considers our sense of time amid this ecological unraveling and asks, how can we fathom a future when we can barely comprehend the present? As Iceland loses its first large glacier, Andri witnesses the ways in which geological time is beginning to move at the speed of human time. Questioning how we can shape our future with greater lucidity, he turns to the power of language, of youth in climate politics, and of stories about living on a breathing Earth as pathways to a paradigm shift.
