Tim Flannery
Published on Friday, Jun. 19, 2009 5:01PM EDT Last updated on Thursday, Jun. 25, 2009 5:02AM EDT
WHO Tim Flannery is an Australian scientist, explorer, conservationist and author of The Weather Makers
WHAT A Description of the Feroe Islands: Containing an Account of Their Situation, Climate, and Productions: Together with the Manners, and Customs, of the Inhabitants, Their Trade, &C, by Jørgen Landt; The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, by James Lovelock
WHY I am reading two very different books: The Rev. Jørgen Landt's A Description of the Feroe Islands, published in the original Danish in 1800 and reissued in English translation in 1810, and James Lovelock's The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009).
Landt's book is a delightful old-style natural history, replete with glowing descriptions of the rocks, soils, insects, birds and people (who are descended from Vikings) of the Faroe Islands (as they are now spelled), which are located about 500 kilometres north of Scotland, halfway between Norway and Iceland.
I've always been fascinated with islands, and few are as intriguing as the Faroes, which for 60 million years were part of a bridge linking Greenland and the British Isles. With their dizzying cliffs, great rents that split whole islands asunder and multitudes of seabirds, they remain among the most awesome of places.
Landt describes how the normally phlegmatic islanders come to life at the mention of whales. “The word whale is no sooner mentioned than every face brightens with joy, and they all seem to be animated with a desire of talking on so favourite a subject; but if a messanger arrives with intelligence that a shoal of whales has been seen approaching the islands, it operates like an electric shock, and the whole village, old and young, are instantly in motion: The sea is soon red with blood, and then intricate, age-old rules of food distribution are remembered ...”
Lovelock's book is very different, telling as it does of the imminent destruction by climate change of the world. It's a distressing read, but at least it lays out before us our possible fate unless we soon wean ourselves off fossil fuels.
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