Fifty shades of green
Presentation to the panel on modernism at the Breakthrough Dialog, Sausalito, June 2015, published in Stephen Muecke, Environmental Humanities.Vol. 7, 2015 pp. 219-225
There is one thing more difficult than to tell good from evil, it is to decide which time we are in, which epoch, and which land we have our feet on. I was reminded of that difficulty on Saturday at the border when the police officer, after having asked me what research I was doing, and on learning that I work on environment with a special interest in the drought, retorted: “Drought, which drought? Have you not read the Bible, it is all there, seven years dry, seven years wet. I have been in California for 40 years, it’s always like this, it never fails. So don’t believe environmentalists, there is no drought,” and then he vigorously stamped my passport. Same thing here, which time and space are we in?
