Opinion
Speak for the Earth: A message from outer space
Summary
- This year’s Booker prize winner, Samantha Harvey’s ‘Orbital’ is no ordinary page-turner. It turns our gaze to the planet from orbit and reminds us of the climate disaster that looms. Can odes sung to Earth move the world to act in its defence? Or is it a lost cause?
In a world poised for the long reign of algorithms, there should be a premium on romantic notions. One of these is harboured by many of us without admitting it: That the more we gaze at our planet from the great far yonder, the fonder we’ll grow of it.
And at some point, we will reach a tipping point that’ll prompt us to save it.
Images taken from outer space have often been deployed by well-wishers of Planet Earth. The idea is to present the great blue ball as a marvel, unique for hosting life in an inhospitable universe.
The hope is that this sight will inspire not just awe, but also a blend of emotion and responsibility: As the species that has taken Earth to the brink of catastrophe, it’s for us to undo the damage.
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And the urge is to cradle the planet with captions that nudge people to take a larger view. “Saare jahaan se achcha," is what Indian spacefarer Rakesh Sharma reportedly said on catching his first glimpse of India from up there. ‘The best of all worlds.’ He might as well have been speaking of the whole globe.
Why stop there? If an ode must be sung to our home planet from an unearthly vantage point, why not wax poetic in other formats? A finely made video plea to save other species has been doing the rounds of social media for years, but its count of thumbs-up and heart emojis hasn’t been able to outweigh electoral mandates that all but shrug off climate change as a threat.
Could literature fare better? In a speech made after winning this year’s Booker award for her novel Orbital, Samantha Harvey urged her audience to “speak for the Earth."
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The title of her 136-page book hints of where it is set—aboard the International Space Station (ISS), which orbits the globe 16 times every earth-day, or the 24 hours it takes for us to get spun around once. At an altitude of about 400km, the ISS moves at a speed of 28,000 kmph to deliver the “whipcrack" of dawn every 90 minutes.
This may sound dizzying. But in Harvey’s hands, it’s clarifying. It’s a book of responses to Earth as a stimulus. Of ruminations, that is, be it on how space “shred times to pieces" or the “neurotic assaults" the world has been subject to. It’s evocative alright, the ebb and flow of her language.
Harvey’s astronauts, for example, are “drawn like moths" to ISS windows for the ghostly dazzle of northern lights. But it’s a greater flame-out that stays on to haunt us—the one our planet is going through.
As the poet Shelley put it, “our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought," and saving the planet, as it reaches the danger mark of getting warmer than 1.5° Celsius above its pre-industrial level, would qualify. Over the past half decade or so, it has acquired the air of a lost cause.
If the world keeps belching carbon at today’s pace, with no sign of bending the curve, we are headed for far worse. That temperature cap set in Paris back in 2015 wasn’t pulled out of a hat.
It marks the hottest we can afford to let the world get before various factors combine to reach a critical point, after which too much will start going haywire too soon.
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Yet, here we are, with a cap of even 1.9° Celsius looking dangerously like a long shot, not least because of how lightly the danger is taken by weighty electorates like America’s, and how little the world has done so far to control its carbon emissions, the toxic stuff that traps heat in what looks like an awesome aura from outer space.
But then, that’s the thing with romantic notions. Weak odds don’t daunt them. So, yes, voices in the wilderness or not, we must speak for the Earth.
