“There are 6,000 miles of sewer in New York City and all of them lie well below sea level” the superrich are “buying doomsteads in New Zealand” soon we may not have apples - “apples need frost.” Over the course of a few years, leading up to and then beyond the 2016 election, the protagonist, Lizzie - a Brooklyn-based librarian, wife, and mother - grows increasingly attuned to our planet’s grim plight, and slowly moves through what you might call the Five Stages of Climatic Grief: ignorance, disbelief, worry, heightened worry, and then, well, you’ll have to read to find out.
That novel, Weather, which recounts in dotted, thorn-sharp fragments one woman’s reckoning with our condemned-to-death world, is packed with plenty of fear-inducing information. (She recalls one Australian researcher who, upon learning just how high ocean temperatures will rise, had to excuse herself from a meeting to vomit in the bathroom.)
She bubbles over with reading recommendations - Paul Hawken’s Drawdown, David Wallace-Wells’s Uninhabitable Earth, a forthcoming book called Notes From an Apocalypse by Mark O’Connell - cites study after study, and offers little nuggets of information that didn’t make it into her newest novel. Where her novels are pared down, like modernist rooms in which every vase, chair, and lightswitch is considered, textured, and weighty in your hand, in person she is a teetering pile of books overflowing with feathery notes on ripped paper. Offill is an expansive presence, constantly craning her neck and swiveling her head to take in what’s around her. “You could move through this exhibit,” she laments, “cross everything out, and just write ‘Take collective action.’” Tiny individual choices are not going to turn the planet around and send new greenery shooting up across the continents, even if we can convince people to undertake them. (Soon, we’ll have so many jellyfish in our acidic ocean that we’ll need to start eating them - or turning them into tampons.) A disturbingly soothing voice trickles in over the loudspeakers, offering suggestions for sustainable clothing fibers. She chuckles at the broad advice plastered on the walls (“Our choices matter!”), wryly countering with the most damning facts she knows about the climate crisis. Jenny Offill is wandering through Arcadia Earth, an “immersive, augmented reality journey through Planet Earth” in downtown Manhattan - the museum’s words, not hers. Arcadia Earth, an immersive climate-change museum in downtown Manhattan.
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