THE BOOK THAT WILL MAKE YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT OUR FUTURE HOLDS FOR US,IF WE DON’T ACT IMMEDIATELY.

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Index:SELLING POINTSABOUT THE BOOKABOUT THE AUTHORFROM THE AUTHORREVIEWS TWITTER REACTIONSIN THE MEDIASAMPLE TRANSLATIONCHAPTER SUMMARIES

Andri Snær Magnason meets a world leading climate change scientist who asks him:

“You are a storyteller. Why don’t you talk about the world’s most urgent issue? Climate change.”

“Isn’t that up to scientists?” Asks Andri.

“But people relate to stories, not data”, says the Scientist.

“But I am not a specialist, I feel it is not in my field”, says Andri.

“If you cannot understand our scientific findings and present them in an emotional, psychological, poetic or mythological context, then nobody will understand the issue and the world will end.“

So Andri starts thinking. How can I put all this into words?

That’s how it started ...

SELLING POINTS

• Magnason started writing On Time and Water after a conversation with a leading climate change scientist who told him that people don’t listen to scientists, they need to be told the facts in a way that they can relate to.

• The book is based on interviews and advice by leading scientists in glacial science, ocean science and geography. Interwoven are personal, historical and mythological stories. Together they form a compelling narrative that illustrates the reality of climate change and offers hope in the face of an uncertain future.

• Magnason was selected to interview the Dalai Lama when he visited Iceland and later went to visit His Holiness in India. These interviews in-spired Magnason greatly and feature in the book.

• Magnason wrote ‘A Letter to the Future’, a eulogy for the former glacier Ok. This made global news and was shared across the world.

• Magnason will feature in the BBC’s The Travel Show, to be aired in the next few months.

• Magnason will host an evening talk based on this book at the Reykjavik City Theatre, so far four shows are confirmed.

• A documentary based on On Time and Water is in progress and a film based on Magnason’s The Story of the Blue Planet will be released in 2022.

• Magnason was invited to deliver the keynote speech of the 13th Conference of ESERA, the European Science Education Research Association, in August 2019. He talked about the same issues that he tackles in this book, to great acclaim.

• Magnason has guest lectured at Columbia University, Harvard, Keele University, the Universities of Iceland and he meets thousands of school children every year.

• Magnason has been active in the fight against the de-struction of the Icelandic highlands and has seen first-hand the effects of global warming on the nature of Iceland.

• Magnason’s previous books have been translated into over 30 languages.

ON TIME AND WATER is a rich and compelling work of narrative non-fiction and a desperate plea to the world. It is a deeply personal, yet also global, exploration of the environmental crisis.

MAGNASON, master storyteller and environmental activist, illustrates the global environmental crisis by delving into mythology and scientific research, telling stories of his grandparents honeymooning on a glacier alongside the great technological advances of the last century. On Time and Water takes the reader on a magnificent journey, expertly pulling the threads together and slowly revealing a whole tapestry of strange, poetic and sometimes amazing connections.

The resulting narrative is at once a travel story, a world history, and a reminder to live in harmony with future generations.

ON TIME AND WATER BY ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON (320 pp with b/w photos)

ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON (b.1973) is one of Iceland’s most celebrated writers. He has won the Icelandic Literary Prize for both fiction, children‘s fiction and non-fiction. In addition, Magnason has written poetry, plays, short stories and essays.

In 2009 Magnason co-directed the documentary Dreamland, which was based on his book Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation.

In 2010 Magnason was awarded the Kairos Prize, presented by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation to outstanding individuals in the field of European culture and intercultural understanding.

Magnason ran for president of Iceland in 2016 and came third out of nine candidates.

Magnason lives in Reykjavik with his wife and four children.

andrimagnason.com

AndriMagnasonandrimagnasonAndriSnaerMagnason

ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASONAWARDS AND NOMINATIONSDREAMLAND• The Icelandic Literary Prize

• The Icelandic Bookseller’s Prize

• The Kairos Prize, awarded by the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung

LOVESTAR• Ted speaker-recommended book of the year

2017

• 2016 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, France

• Selected as 1 of the 10 most interesting novels of 2016, by Huffington Post

• Special citation, Philip K. Dick Award 2013, USA

• The Icelandic Booksellers‘ Prize 2002

• DV Cultural Prize for Literature

• Nominated for The Icelandic Literary Prize 2002

• Selected as one of five Orwellian dystopias of the 21st century by TheConversation.com

THE CASKET OF TIME• The Icelandic Literary Prize, for Children

and Young People’s Books

• The Icelandic Bookseller‘s Prize, as best teenage book of the year

• The West Nordic Literature Prize

• Reykjavik Children’s Literature Prize

• Nominated for the Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize

• Nominated as the Best Translated Fantasy in Finland 2018, along with Ursula K Le Guin and David Mitchell

THE STORY OF THE BLUE PLANET• UKLA (UK Literacy Association) Book award

2014

• Green Earth Book Honor Award 2013, USA

• The West-Nordic Children’s Literature Prize 2002

• Nominated to the IBBY International Honour List 2001 for Illustrations

• The Janusz Korczak Honorary Awards

• The Icelandic Literary Prize

• Nomination for the Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literary Prize

• Nomination for the IBBY Iceland’s Children Literature Prize

• The National Theatre Prize for New Plays

• Nomination for Reykjavik Children’s Literary Prize

In the next 100 years the nature of all water on our planet will undergo fundamental change.

Glaciers will melt and the sea levels will rise at a faster rate than has been seen before.

Acidification will bring the oceans to a pH level not seen in 30 million years. Patterns of rain and snow will change dramatically in most areas.

These changes will affect all life on Earth, everyone that we know, and everyone that we love. We could say that nature is not changing in geological speed anymore, but entering human speed.

This extreme shift is larger than any metaphor or any words or language we are used to. Just like the huge gravity of a black hole makes it invisible, you could say that this issue is so large that it swallows all words and meaning.

We hear words like “climate change” but for most people they are just white noise – 99% of the real meaning is beyond our imagination. It is more complex than the mind can comprehend, greater than all of our past experience, bigger than language. What words can grasp an issue of this magnitude?

We are faced with the almost impossible task of cutting carbon emissions to zero in 2050 according to newest studies. The question is – are we too late to do something? What can actually be done in 30 years? This calls for nothing less than a new scientific revolution, projects on the scale of the Manhattan project, new paradigms and a new approach to almost everything done in the 20th century. This huge issue should be a source of motivation for all science studies in the next decades.

In this book I reach through time – past and future – in order to weave my way through climate science via ancient legends about sacred cows, stories of my ancestors and relatives, and interviews with the Dalai Lama. The result, I hope, is a story that will entice the reader and shed a light on the reality of our situation.

FROM THE AUTHOR

REVIEWS

“I loved this book so much – it is a cerebral tale, well told and unabashedly philosophical. It is dark, funny and grim.” New York Times on THE CASKET OF TIME

“Eco-lit needs more attention, and devotees will be pleased to discover a new addition from the Icelandic author Andri Snaer Magnason, who writes with a Seussian mix of wonder, wit and gravitas. ... immensely satisfying.“ New York Times on THE STORY OF THE BLUE PLANET

“Orwell, Vonnegut, and Douglas Adams are felt on every page, though Magnason is never derivative. His satire and insightful social commentary sweeten the pot and the sheer wackiness of Magnason’s oversized imagina-tion is invigorating.” Publisher’s Weekly (starred review) on LOVESTAR

“Strange and refreshing—a lushly imagined future that reminded me of Vonnegut and Brautigan.” Ed Park, author of Personal Days on LOVESTAR

“The love child of Chomsky and Lewis Carroll.” Rebecca Solnit, author of Call Them by Their True Names on THE CASKET OF TIME

“The book makes reference to the works of George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four), Jonathan Swift (A Modest Proposal) and Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).” Le monde, France, on LOVESTAR

(5 stars out of a possible five) “Marvellous imagination.” La vie, France on LOVESTAR

“Lovestar, the first novel from Andri Snær Magnason, poet and columnist, is a masterpiece ... The recipe is as follows: a love story set in the future, a mysterious tycoon, a sprinkling of social issues, a pinch of science fiction and a dash of environmentalism. Served in a piquant style that really hits the spot. Did I mention that this is a masterpiece?” Smallthings.fr on LOVESTAR

“Lovestar, wonderful futuristic novel, is a saga with an Orwellian flavor. Love-star, a gem written in 2002, is such an amusing and creative dystopia (neg-ative utopia) that it should appeal even to the most adverse. ... enchanting text, where, not far from the volcano of Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne, the spirit of Bulgakov, of Calvino, of Vonnegut and also that of Monty Python and Orwell, intersect.” L‘Express, France, on LOVESTAR

“I have not previously seen the fairy tale genre so well tied up with a sci-fi story, a fantasy tale and a contemporary drama all at once. It really is ele-gant and full of surprises. I am therefore not at all surprised that the book has already won a few awards in Iceland. It would not surprise me if it also won the Nordic Council Children and Young People‘s Literature Prize.” Weekendavisen, Denmark on THE CASKET OF TIME

“In The Casket of Time, present, future and past are interwoven with a fantasy world familiar to all but which no-one has inhabited. Within its compelling tapestry of facts, truth, magic and wonder Magnason poses urgent ques-tions about the lifestyles and values of present-day Western society, and about the responsibility each of us bears for the state of the world. The story confronts the concept of time and twists old fairy-tale memories with a passionate creativity. Magnason is one of Iceland’s most dynamic writers of recent years, a fierce social critic who frequently combines clear-cut mes-sages with humour.” The Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize - an excerpt from the Icelandic selection committee’s citation of THE CASKET OF TIME

“This is a book I would put on a shelf with The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland and The Little Prince. A children’s story but it would be very good for adults to read it as well.” Eric Lorberer of Rain Taxi Review, USA, on THE CASKET OF TIME

“Magnason has created an intimate epic that floats effortlessly between gen-res as diverse as fairy tale and political commentary, science fiction and so-cial realism. The Casket of Time spans the chasm between “once upon a time” and “have you heard the news today” in a way that makes his philosophical fable feel both timely and timeless.” Danish architect and futurist Bjarke Ingels, often cited as one of the most inspirational architects of our time on THE CASKET OF TIME

ESERA2019:Muriel Grenon @MurielGrenon: Brilliant story telling by @AndriMagnason inspired by family stories, Icelandic mythology and poetry with a large pinch of global warming reality. Only citizen of circa 2190 will know the end of it. #thereisnoplanetB #ESERA2019

Carole Kenrick @HelpfulScience: Wow. What a brilliant plenary lecture by @AndriMagnason to launch @esera2019. A reminder of the power of stories. A reminder that we’re teaching through a *huge* paradigm shift. The whole career of every child we teach now will be focused on address-ing the #ClimateEmergency

Christa Haverly @haverlycm: “Having children is like science fiction,“ throwing children into a future we don’t understand. Andri Snaer Magnason on beauty in life and science from his Icelandic POV. I want to read his book, The Story of the Blue Planet, mythology for living on this planet. #esera2019

Lucy Avraamidou @lucyavraamidou: @AndriMagnason thank you for the engaging and inspiring talk on time and water. What a wonderful blending of personal and political narratives! #ESERA2019 #lettertothefuture

Marta Marialva @MartaMarialva: What a great way to start #esera2019. A wonderful talk by @AndriMagnason that brought me to tears. Some-thing we should consider when making informed decisions about the future “When is someone still alive that you love?” What are the conse-quences of our choices for their life?

Ok glacier funeral:Robert Macfarlane (author of Underland, The Lost Words, The Old Ways, Landmarks, The Wild Places, etc.) @RobGMacfarlane: “How do you write a eulogy for a glacier? Think about it. How would you go about that, having grown up with glaciers as a geological given, a symbol of eter- nity? How do you say goodbye?” (quoting Andri Snær Magnason)

David Oakes @David_Oakes (Actor. Host of @TreesACrowdPod): A humbling morning read, by @AndriMagnason: “How do you write a eulogy for a glacier? Think about it. How would you go about that, having grown up with glaciers as a geological given, a symbol of eternity? How do you say goodbye?”

Sarah Thomas @journeysinbtwn (Writer, film maker & traveller. Co-director of @Oshlidfilm. PhD Glasgow Uni. Formerly Penguin’s Summer Wayfarer.): Harrowing, frank words from @AndriMagnason on the mortality of glaciers ... I had the heart-wrenching ‘pleasure’ of commissioning a fuller picture of this tale for @darkmtn Issue 14, & greater still will be his related upcoming book On Time & Water.

TWITTER REACTIONS

Articles by Andri Snær Magnason:“The glaciers of Iceland seemed eternal. Now a country mourns their loss” by Andri Snær Magnason. The Guardian, August 14th, 2019: http://bit.ly/andriguardian

Andri Snær Magnason in podcasts: Time Sensitive with Andrew Zuckerman, Episode 10, July 10th, 2019: http://bit.ly/andripodcast1

There Is No Y.O.U. Podcast with York Underwood, April 16th, 2019: http://bit.ly/andripodcast2

Interviews with Andri Snær Magnason: Zeit Online, July 25th 2019: http://bit.ly/andriinterview1

The Future of Time with Andri Snær Magnason and Bjarke Ingels, May 7th, 2019: http://bit.ly/andriinterview2

Grapevine, July 4th, 2018: http://bit.ly/andriinterview3

Declaiming Poems, Stopping Dams: An Interview with Andri Snær Magnason, March 12th 2018: http://bit.ly/andriinterview4

News about the dead glacier Ok: The World This Weekend, BBC Sounds, August 18th 2019: http://bit.ly/andriok1

“Iceland’s Okjokull glacier commemorated with plaque”, BBC, August 18th 2019: http://bit.ly/andriok2

“Iceland holds funeral for first glacier lost to climate change”, The Guardian, August 19th 2019: http://bit.ly/andriok3

“Officials and Climate Change Activists Hold Funeral for Okjokull Glacier in Iceland”, Time, August 18th 2019: http://bit.ly/andriok4

“Iceland unveils memorial plaque for lost glacier “, Reuters, August 18th 2019: http://bit.ly/andriok5

“Iceland Mourns ‘Dying’ Glacier With Memorial And ‘Letter To The Future’”, Forbes, August 19th 2019: http://bit.ly/andriok6

“Ok but not OK: Iceland bids farewell to a glacier for the first time”, The Sydney Morning Herald, August 19th 2019: http://bit.ly/andriok7

“Iceland bids farewell to first glacier lost to climate change”, Aljazeera, August 18th 2019: http://bit.ly/andriok8

“Scientists bid farewell to the first Icelandic glacier lost to climate change. If more melt, it can be disastrous”, CNN, August 18th 2019: https://cnn.it/2kCDHER

IN THE MEDIA

Þú verndar aðeins það sem þú elskar,

þú elskar aðeins það sem þú þekkir.

Þú þekkir aðeins það sem þér er kennt.

—Guðmundur Páll Ólafsson

You protect only what you love,

you love only what you know,

you know only what you’re taught.

May You Live Interesting Times (pp 7–10)

“Take notice of what you notice.”

—Þorvaldur Þorsteinsson

When I host overseas visitors, I tend to drive them along Borgartún, a street I call the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I point out Höfði, the white wooden house where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in 1986, a moment many remember as communism’s end, the fall of the Iron Curtain. The closest structure to Höfði is a black, glass and marble box that once housed Kauþing’s headquarters. When that bank collapsed in 2008, it was the fourth largest bankruptcy in the history of capitalism—not per capita of the Icelandic population, but in net dollars: $20,000 million. Twenty billion dollars. I’m not gloating over others’ misfortunes, yet it is amazing to have been not-quite-middle-aged and to have already witnessed the collapse of two gigantic belief systems. Each had been maintained by people who had scaled the peak of the es-tablishment, of government and culture, people esteemed in direct proportion to their relative position at the pyramid’s apex. Deep inside these systems, people kept up appearances even to the last day. On January 19, 1989, East German General Secretary Erich Honecker said: “The wall will stand in fifty years’ time, and a hun-dred years’, too.” The wall collapsed that very November. Kauþing’s CEO said in an interview on the television program Kastljós on October 6, 2008, after the bank had received emergency loans from the Central Bank of Iceland: “We are doing very

SAMPLE TRANSLATIONBY LYTTON SMITH

well indeed, and the Central Bank is confident it will get its money back […] I can tell you that without hesitation.” Three days later, the bank collapsed. When a system collapses, language is released from its chains. Words that were meant to encapsulate reality hang there in empty air, no longer applicable to any-thing. Textbooks become obsolete overnight and all semblance of standing fades away. Suddenly, people find it difficult to hit upon words, to articulate concepts that match their reality. Between Höfði and the bank’s headquarters is a grassy lawn, in the center of which stands a tiny, paltry copse of trees, six spruces and wooly willow shrubs. Ly-ing within that cluster of trees between the two buildings, looking up at the sky, I found myself wondering what system would collapse next, what big idea will be the next to take. Scientists have shown us that the foundations of life, of Earth itself, are failing. The principal ideologies of the 20th century perceived the earth and nature as inex-pensive, infinite raw materials. Humans assumed the atmosphere would constantly take in emissions, that the oceans would ceaselessly take in waste, that the soil would continually renew itself if given more fertilizer, that animal species would keep moving over as humans took up ever more space. If scientists’ predictions prove accurate about the future of the oceans, the at-mosphere, and weather systems, about the future of glaciers and coastal ecosys-tems, then we need to ask what words could encompass such immense issues. What ideology can deal with this? What should I read? Milton Friedman, Confucius, Karl Marx, the Book of Revelations, the Qu’ran, the Vedas? How to tame these our desires, this consumption and acquisitiveness that, by any and every measurement, promises to overpower Earth’s life systems themselves? One might say that this book is about “time and water.” Over the next hundred years, there will be foundational changes in the nature of water on earth. Glaciers outside the poles will by and large melt significantly; ocean levels will rise; the earth’s temperatures will increase in relations to droughts and floods; ocean acid-ification will bring the seas to a level not seen for 50 million years. All of this will happen during the lifetime of a child who is born today and lives to be my grand-mother’s age, 95. Earth’s largest forces have forsaken geological time and are now changing on a human scale. Changes that previously took a hundred thousand years now happen in one hundred years. Such speed is mythological; it affects all life on earth, the foundations of everything we think, choose, produce and believe. It affects every-one we know, everyone we love. The changes we are face to face with are more com-plex than most things with which our minds typically deal. These changes surpass any of our previous experiences, surpass most of the language and metaphors we use to navigate our reality. Compare it to trying to record the sounds of a volcanic eruption. With most machines, the sound breaks down to mere noise: nothing can be heard but white noise. For most people, the word “climate change” is just white noise. Easier to have opinions on smaller matters. We understand when something valuable is stolen, when animals are shot, or when someone says something rude or inappropriate. But when it comes to something that is infinitely large, sacred, foundational to our

lives, there is no corresponding sensation. It is as if the brain cannot perceive such scale. The white noise deceives us. We see headlines and think we understand the words: “glacial melt,” “record heat,” “sea acidification,” “increase in emissions.” If the scientists are right, these words are more serious than anything that has hap-pened in human history up to now. If we fully understood such words, they would directly alter our behavior and decisions. But it seems to be that 99% of the words’ meanings disappear into the buzz. Perhaps “white noise” is the wrong metaphor; the phenomenon is more like a black hole. No scientist has seen a black hole, which can have the mass of millions of suns and can utterly absorb light. The only way to detect black holes is to look past them, to look at nearby nebulae and stars. When it comes to discussing issues that affect all water on Earth, all Earth’s surface, her entire atmosphere—the issue is so large it absorbs all meaning. The only way to write about the subject is to go past it, to the side, below it, into past and future, to be personal and also scientific and to use the language of mythology. I need to write about things by not writing about them. I need to go backwards to move forwards. We are living in a time when thought and language are freeing themselves from ideological chains. We are living in the time of the curse, almost surely in-correctly translated from the Chinese, but no less apposite for that: “May you live interesting times.”

A Little Treasure (pp 11–18)I graduated with a degree in Icelandic from the University of Iceland in 1997; that summer, I worked in the basement of the Árni Magnusson Institute for Medieval Studies. The institute was behind a locked door on the university campus and for some reason I had never gone through that door all the years I’d studied in the very same building. It was a mysterious threshold, some kind of elvish rock: I’d heard stories of people who’d disappeared into this world and never re-emerged. Indoors Icelandic saga manuscripts were stored together with scholars who needed peace and time to pore over these treasures. The doorbell was so clanging it felt like a fire bell. I didn’t dare push the button until that day I found myself filled with a burning desire to see what lay inside, so I rang and was invited in. Inside was quiet, twilit, hung with a heavy smell of old books, a stillness that was truly overwhelming for a young man; I felt a pang of unease. I was here, inside with the scholars of manuscripts, some of them my grandfathers and grandmoth-ers’ contemporaries. I was struck by my insignificance when discussions at the cof-fee urn turned to whether Þorvaldur had been in Skagafjörður in the summer of ’86: I had no idea whether they were talking about 1186, 1586 or 1986. My worry that I would be considered poorly read increased alongside my glossophobia, the feeling that I was simultaneously (should it be concurrently?) witless and ungram-matical. I had always worked outside in the summers, doing paving and gardening jobs, and I used to really pity office workers for having such little freedom. I’d find my-self looking out the window at my lightly-dressed peers lazing on the grass on the University green while my mind traveled further out past them, into the wider

world. John Thorbjarnarson, my maternal uncle, was a biologist and he had in-vited me to come and study anacondas in the Venezuelan mangroves and also to work with another group in the Amazon rainforest, counting crocodile eggs in the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve. He was leading a team of scientists at that site working to save the black caiman crocodile, Melanosuchus niger, the largest predator in South America. The water level in the flooded forest fluctuated about ten meters a year and so we would be staying in floating houses. John de-scribed the situation this way: “It’s no minor joy to wake up in the morning to the sounds of dolphins fishing right outside your door.” At the same time, I discovered that my girlfriend Margrét and I were expecting our first child, so it would be rather irresponsible of me to engage in such an adven-ture. One might say I’d reached a fork in my life. The train steamed off to Venezuela and into the Amazon without me, leaving me a sort of bystander to my own exist-ence, doubtful as to whether serious scholarship and the solitude of writing suited me. One day, I was asked to docent a manuscript exhibition in a small exhibition gallery on the top floor. Gísli Sigurðsson, a scholar of ancient manuscripts who was in charge of the exhibition, asked me to follow him to a sturdy steel door in the basement. He produced three keys; I was amazed when he opened the door to the manuscript storage, that sacred heart of Icelandic cultural history. I was surround-ed by awe-inspiring ancient gems. Inside were vellum manuscripts, the oldest of which had been written around 1100, depicting events from a grander era; inside, too, were the original manuscripts of the Icelandic sagas, sagas about knights, sagas about kings, ancient lawbooks. Gisli went to the shelf and opened a box. He pro-duced a small manuscript and gently handed it to me. “What book is this?” I whispered. I don’t know why I was whispering. It simply felt fitting to whisper in that space. “This is the Codex Regius. Konungsbók, the King’s Book, containing the po-ems of the Edda. I felt weak at the knees, starstruck. Codex Regius, the Eddic poems, the greatest treasure in all of Iceland, perhaps even the whole of Northern Europe, the second major source of Nordic mythology, the earliest manuscript for the poems “Völus-pá,” “Hávamál” and “Þrymskviða.” One of the greatest inspirations for Wagner, Borges, and Tolkien. I felt like I had Elvis Presley himself in my arms. The manuscript itself was unprepossessing. Considering its contents and its influence, it ought to have been golden and resplendent; in reality, it was small and dark, almost like a book of spells. It was ancient but not wizened, a beautiful brown vellum with a simple, distinct lettering, with almost no illustrations beyond a few majuscules. The oldest evidence that a book should not be judged by its cover. The scholar carefully opened the manuscript and showed me a distinct S in the middle of the page. Read that, he said, so I squinted at the script and could read it for myself: Sól tér sortna sígur fold í mar hverfa af himni heiðar stjörnur geisar eimi við aldurnara leikur hár hiti við himin sjálfan. A shiver tremored down my spine: this was Ragnarók itself, the end of the world as described in the original prophecy in “Völuspá.” The sentences were all in one line, not broken up the way the poem is when printed in books. I was in direct

contact with whomever had written the words on the page over 700 years ago. I became hypersensitive to my environment, scared to cough or trip, feeling a touch guilty for even breathing this close to the book. Perhaps that was unnecessary; after all, this manuscript had been stored in damp turf houses for seven centuries, transported on horseback in chests across surging rivers; in 1662, it had been sent to Denmark by ship as a gift to King Frederick III. As time passed, the sensations became overwhelming. I spoke practically the same language as the person who’d written the manuscript. Could it last another 700 years? To the year 2700? Would our language and civilization live that long? Mankind as a species has preserved relatively few of its essentially sacred ancient mythologies: ideas about the forces and gods that rule the heavens and about the beginnings and ends of the world. We have Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Buddhist worldviews. We have the Hindu worldview, that of Judeo-Christians and Islam, fragments of the Aztec worldview. Nordic mythology is among these worldviews and for that reason Konungsbók is more important than even Mona Lisa herself. Most of what we know about the Nordic gods, Valhalla, and Ragnarök, comes from this book. The manuscript is a never-ending source and inspiration wellspring for belief and for art. From it come works of modern dance, death rock bands, even modern-day Hollywood spectacles such as Thor Ragnarök from Mar-vel Comics, in which Thor and his friend Hulk combine their might against the treacherous Loki, the giant Surtur, and the terrifying Fenris Wolf. I put the manuscript in a small dumb waiter and sent it up to the next floor. In the meantime, I ran up narrow stairs to meet it. I set it extremely carefully on a little cart that I pushed along a long corridor. Then it took its place, like a prema-ture baby, in a glass case which I securely locked. I dreamed troubled dreams the whole week. In them, I was usually downtown and had managed to lose the book. One time, I met a woman with a cleaning cart walking along the corridor and I foresaw a cultural disaster. The manuscript falling into a cleaning pail and coming up squeaky clean, with blank pages, a tabula rasa. Marketing was not a strong suit of the medieval scholars at the Institute, so I spent the whole day alone with these treasures while tourists shuttled out to Geysir and Gullfoss. It would certainly be a privilege to spend time alone with this Mona Lisa of ours, but there was much more besides, because the foremost gems of the Institute’s collection were also on display alongside the Codex Regi-us: Grágás, containing the Viking age laws; Möðruvallabók, containing the core Icelandic sagas, and Flateyjarbók with its two hundred calfskin sheets and vivid illustrations. I sometimes stood over the glass and tried to read the text on the open pages. Konungsbók was the most legible, the lettering clear enough I could stumble through these ancient words: Ungur var eg forðum, fór eg einn saman, þá varð eg villur vega, auðugur þóttumst er eg annan fann. Maður er manns gaman. It was that very week that Margrét and I flocked to the maternity ward in the middle of the night and I held my newborn son in my arms. I had never handled anything so brand new and so delicate. I had never handled anything so old and so delicate. And now I started dreaming I was downtown, suddenly aware I was in my underwear and had lost both my son and the manuscript. In the adjoining room to the manuscript vault were more treasures: a hoard of tapes, recordings which ethnographers had collected around the country during

the period 1903 to 1973. There, one could hear the oldest recording in Iceland, set on wax cylinder, Edison’s “Graphophone,” in 1903. There were old women, farm-ers, and sailors reciting, singing, and telling stories. I had never heard anything so beautiful and the thought flew into my head that these ancient voices must urgently be impressed on the general public. My chief task that summer was working with the ethnographer Rósa Þorsteinsdóttir to compile a selection from the collection so we could put out a CD. I stepped into a time machine each time I threaded the black coils on the tape recorder and put on the headphones. I was in the living room of an old woman who had been born in 1888. The clock was ticking in the kitchen and she was reciting a rhyme she had learned from her grandmother who had been born in 1830, a rhyme she had learned from her grandmother who was born at the time of Skaftárelda, the late-18th century Laki volcanic eruption, a rhyme she had learned from her grandmother, who was born in 1740. The recording was made in 1969, so the cycle spanned nearly 250 years. It was from a world in which the eldest taught the young-est. The old rhymes’ ancient aesthetics differed from our idea of beautiful singing. The vocal tone and singing style did not resemble anything I’d ever come across. I collected samples on a reel and let my friends listen and asked them to guess where the music was from. They guessed indigenous Americans, Sami reindeer herders, Tibetan monks, Arabic prayer songs. When they had listed all the remotest cul-tures they knew, I said, “This was recorded here, in the Westfjords, in 1970. The man you hear singing was born in 1900.” I played the recordings at home for my son when he was upset, and he soothed as soon as the string of words started up. I had half a mind to do a scientific study into whether ancient chanting has a marked sedative effect on infants. I was fascinated by the idea of capturing time. I realized how much there was around me that would soon disappear like the women on these slick black reels. I had three living grandfathers and two grandmothers and that summer I began ran-domnly collecting their stories in haphazard fashion. Grandfather Jón was born in 1919, Grandmother Dísa in 1925, Grandmother Hulda in 1924, Grandfather Árni in 1922, and Grandfather Björn was born in 1921. Theirs was a generation at an unparalleled turning point, born just after the first world war and living through the era of the Great Depression. They survived World War II as well as many of the greatest changes of the twentieth century. Some of them were born into a world be-fore the time of electrical lighting and machines, born into a society of poverty and hunger, even. Inspired by the reel collection, I decided to interview people around me. I used a handy VHS video recorder, a Dictaphone, and then my phone once that technology arrived. I really didn’t know what I was looking for, I was just try-ing to collect anything I could so that the future might appreciate it. I was making my own archive. The Andri Magnason Institute.

A Conversation for the Future (pp 19–22)I’m at Grandma Hulda and Grandfather Árni’s home in Hlaðbær, we’re sitting in the kitchen, the Elliða stream meanders in front of the house; people are jogging along the river path. There are still a few snowdrifts on the slopes of Bláfjöll but the

garden is in full bloom. I open my computer and load up a video and show Grand-ma and Mom a film no one has seen in decades. I’d found an old 16mm cassette in their storage room and had converted to a digital format. It was a movie Grand-pa made in 1956, black and white and silent, but the picture quality is perfect. Well-brought-up children sitting in the dining room at 3 Selás, the big white house great-grandfather had built on the banks of the Ellidaá. The children sit there with their little glasses of cola and Grandma appears, smiling, with a magnificent cream cake decorated with lit candles. At the end of the table, ten-year-old twin sisters sit together, laughing and blowing vigorously at the candles. Great-grandmother is there in the beginning frame, looking on. The next shot shows the children danc-ing in a ring in the yard; no doubt they are playing the game “in a green hollow.” Mom and Grandma watch the video and name the people the images preserve. It’s unique to have a child’s birthday from 1956 captured on 16 mm film. There aren’t even videos of the Icelandic government from these years. Now we’re sitting in the same kitchen sixty years later. Mom is over seventy, my Grandma 94 years old, my youngest daughter ten. Grandma has hardly changed from how I remember her: she has only just given up golf and she can still re-call everything. A few years ago, a man who was trying to sing her praises to me commended how active she was. I acted half-offended: active? Like some old man? Grandma sees the world that same way. That’s a beautiful shawl, I remarked about the blue shawl she wore around her shoulders. Yes, an old woman who crocheted it for me. Old woman? I asked. She laughed and replied: Yes, she is easily ten years younger than I am! The phone rings and Grandma runs over to it. We sit down to eat pancakes as Radio 1 hums low in the background. I ask Hulda Filippía, my daughter, to do a little math puzzle for me. “How old is your Great Grandma if she was born in 1924?” “She’s 94,” Hulda replies immediately. “That was fast math,” I say. “Well, I know old she is,” she says, grinning. “Okay, but now you’ll have to do some sums. In what year will you be 94?” “So 2008 plus 94?” “Exactly.” She takes a piece of paper and a pen and looks skeptically at the sheet. She shows me the result as though it must be a misunderstanding. “2102?” “Yes, hopefully you’ll be just as sprightly as Grandma is now. Maybe you’ll even be living in this same house. Maybe your ten-year-old great-granddaughter is visiting, sitting with you in this kitchen in 2102, just like you are sitting here right now.” “Yes, maybe,” says Hulda, sipping a glass of milk. “One more equation. When will your great-granddaughter be 94 years old?”Hulda writes some figures on a piece of paper, with a little help. “Was she born in 2092?” “Yes, that’s right.” “2092 plus 94... 2186! She laughs at the thought.

“Yes, can you imagine that? You, born in 2008, might know a girl who is still living in 2186.” Hulda purses her mouth and looks into the air. “Can I go now?” she asks. “Almost,” I say, “I’ve one more puzzle.” “How long is it from 1924 to 2186?” Hulda does the math. “262 years?” “Imagine. 262 years. That’s the length of time you connect to. You know the people who span this time. Your time is the time of someone you know, you love and who molds you. And your time is also the time of someone you will know and love, the time you will shape. You can touch 262 years with your bare hands. Grandma taught you, you teach your granddaughter. You can have a direct impact on the future, right up to the year 2186.” “2186!”

2050 (pp 295–307)“Now people are starting to take revenge.

Fire, water’s main enemy, allows them to drive

their ships between the storm and the current,

between the breakers and the reefs, and who knows

how long it will be before they rise above the waves,

and start sailing the skies?”

—Fjölnir, Issue #1, 1835

If someone in 1919 had looked ahead and assigned himself as his task orchestrating the next hundred years, it would have seemed absolutely impossible. To provide for seven billion inhabitants of earth, to found the United Nations, to feed and clothe people, to educate and house them, to connect the world via telephones and com-puters. To find energy sources, vehicles, and employment for the entirety of this population. To establish thousands of symphony orchestras and to cure previously incurable diseases. We are a long way off ensuring that everyone fares equally well, but entire continents have risen out of sheer poverty in a surprisingly short time. As the 20th century began, mankind had not apprehended the principles of aeronautics. In 1903, the Wright brothers flew an airplane thirty meters, the long-est distance a motorized vehicle had managed to glide. Two years later, they had mastered the technology and were able to fly over thirty kilometers. This achieve-ment stampeded around the entire world so that by 1917 the Red Baron was waging aerial battles in biplanes and triplanes all over Europe. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh was the first person to fly across the Atlantic, traveling from New York to Paris. There are currently about 10,000 airplanes simultaneously in the skies throughout the world, with about a million passengers on board. At the time my grandmother was born, no one had crossed the Atlantic on a plane; forty years later, people had reached the moon. Nuclear energy developed even faster. From the time James Chadwick theo-rized the existence of neutrons in 1932, it took only two years for Enrico Fermi to

split an atom using neutrons. Five years later, scientists conjectured that a nuclear reactor could start a chain reaction, which they demonstrated inside a sports field in Chicago in 1942. At that point, nuclear bombs were but a theoretical possibility. The Manhattan Project was immediately launched and 10,000 people sent out to the desert under Robert Oppenheimer’s stewardship in order to fashion a bomb. It was completed in 1945 and unfortunately used three weeks later. That isn’t so long ago. I know a man who operated on Oppenheimer and I met an elderly Japanese person who endured the bomb at Hiroshima. The time from the scholarly hypoth-esis of the existence of neutrons to a complete bomb was less than thirteen years. This horrible idea nevertheless demonstrates what people can achieve when they think that life and death are at stake. The last thirty years have been the age of computers, telephones, the internet, mass entertainment. If I had wanted to buy everything that is now included in my phone in 1990—location tracker, computer, modem, calculator, video player, music player, navigation system, movie camera, library, conferencing equipment, phone book, phone, fax machine, game console—it would have weighed tons and cost a fortune. The speed at which processors compute has doubled every two years and that processing speed has altered our brains. These rapid advances are magnificent but also bewilder us. We wait for big problems to be solved by a genius in Silicon Valley, preferably by providing us with a simple app for our phones. Magicians have hypnotized us with shiny gadgets and ever flatter screens. The world has become connected, multiplying the flow of information and access to entertainment, but our devices are designed with the aim of cultivating an addiction, immersing us in a vicious circle of surveillance and consumerism. We are farther from nature than ever before, if we define nature as that time a child is playing out in the open air. While virtual reality has waxed, reality has waned. Western powers have re-duced their emissions but more often than not manufacturing and pollution have simply shifted elsewhere. Consumption has increased exponentially, with massive amounts of garbage, the destruction of rainforests, food wastage, fashion waste. Humans own more cars and planes than ever before, we buy more stuff and use it for a shorter time, trashing more food and clothing than ever before; we use more plastic and fly more often, for lesser reasons. The biggest developments of the last thirty years are setbacks when we consider the atmosphere and Earth itself. The world’s children have begun a climate strike and, as if in some old mythic story, the child Gréta appears, having as her advantage the fact that she can only tell the truth. She is related to Svante Arrhennius, the man who first calculated, back in the late 19th century, how increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might cause global warming. He actually believed such warming would be beneficial and that it would take us hundreds of years to increase the CO2 volume by 50%. He underes-timated how vigorously we were going to burn coal and oil. It took us less than 100 years, but his main conclusion was still correct. In the summer of 2019, heat records were set all across the world, forest fires blazed in Siberia, droughts threatened the peoples of Africa, India and elsewhere. Previously, people feared that the world’s oil stocks would crumble; now studies show that if we burn all our oil, the world will burn, too. The more CO2 we produce, the greater the likelihood of a tipping point, a moment unrestrainable processes have begun, beyond what humanity can deal with.

Today’s children are demanding their education account for the challenges fac-ing humanity, demanding that the world’s nations respond to the scientific com-munity’s urgent warnings. American writer Neil Postman discusses the crisis of the education system in his book The End of Education. There, he argues that the education system has always served a higher purpose, which he terms “gods.” First, it served God Himself in the monasteries; then kings took up the baton and the system served them; then republics and nations became the new gods. In these late capitalist years, the education system has focused on the individual, creating hu-man resources for business, all part of an international competition between large corporations in a free market. Profit and growth are at the center of things, but do not yield to a higher purpose. Why learn? To get a well-paid job. To create more growth, to pour more oil on the fire faster, to go full speed ahead over the edge. A new paradigm has come center stage in the earth’s story and the story of its atmosphere. Education systems now need to prepare a whole generation for a work-ing life based on humanity being able to co-exist in balance with life’s foundations. Why should we learn ethics? Because the coming years will be full of moral chal-lenges. Why learn algebra? We will need to absorb hundreds of gigatons of CO2 and no one right now knows how to go about that. Why study poetry and ancient songs? Because poetry is the silver thread of the human spirit; without it, human existence is unthinkable. It almost requires redesigning the legacy of the 20th century in its entirety. We must rethink what we eat, rethink trends, fads, technology, transportation in its entirety, the whole of manufacturing and consumerism. At the same time, the earth will have to feed nine billion people and humanity will need to preserve what remains of unspoiled nature. The world must be re-envisioned and that has to hap-pen as fast or faster than humans developed flight, nuclear energy, and computer technology. To counteract climate change on Earth, all CO2 emissions must be ended by 2050. In the next thirty years, consumer habits need to transform; there must be a complete reversal in energy production and in transportation. Scientists believe that the CO2 content in the atmosphere ought not to exceed 350 ppm. It is now at 415 ppm and increasing by 2-3 ppm annually. So even once emissions stop, 1000-2000 gigatons of CO2 already in the atmosphere would need to be reabsorbed. To put that in context, this figure is the amount of CO2 all human activity produces over a thirty-year period. The inhabitants of Earth face a challenge only previously encountered in sci-ence fiction: to seize and control the proportion of gases in global airspace. This goal must be achieved by the time children who are currently approaching the end of elementary school get to be as old as I am now, by the time my generation has reached retirement. The task is to save the earth; it cannot be escaped. Because of climate chaos, an entire generation is being asked not what they want to become but what they need to become. That situation is actually not entire-ly negative: a whole generation will feel it has a role, a higher purpose. Those who want to try and find themselves might need to postpone the search for thirty years while the world takes refuge. A large part of the solution lies buried in the imagination. It is unlikely that the new, carbon neutral world will mirror the old. If metropolitan traffic jams turn into

long lines of electric cars, the problem will not have been solved. Electric cars need tons of steel, aluminum, lithium for batteries. In Iceland, the car industry emits a million tons a year. How fast could that change? If everyone holds off on using their car every tenth day, immediately, tomorrow, we can achieve a 10% reduction—15% if people don’t use their car one day a week. Could we imagine cities in thirty years’ time utilizing other transportation systems than we’re familiar with today? Public transport and light vehicles—scooters, electric bikes, ultralight cars—could replace a huge portion of today’s automobile fleet. We don’t have to crawl into our shells every morning as though we’re hermit crabs. With electric power and public transport, we can reduce traffic emissions to zero. Individual awareness alone will not be enough, however; Reykjavík’s geothermal heating system didn’t come into being because private citizens constructed their own hot water supply. The largest and most vital solutions are only achievable through a combination of government initiatives, visionary politicians, and international cooperation. Scientists around the world are looking for solutions, many of which will be unexpected. A team of experts who teach as part of Project Drawdown have com-piled a hundred key climate solutions and ranked them by gigatons. The UN’s Sus-tainable Development Goals similarly provide a guide as to where the world might go. Most studies orient us in the same direction and the solutions can be roughly divided into four categories.1. Food waste and dietary changes.2. Solar and wind energy; electric-powered transport.3. Conservation of forests; afforestation; restoration of wetlands and rainforests.4. Empowerment of women.What’s promising about all these solutions is that they represent a unified vision for a better world. Change in climate are starting to affect harvests all around the world; the earth’s current fertility is no guarantee of its future. Agriculture is unsustainable in many countries and vegetation has experienced deterioration for some time as harmful methods of cultivation have been adopted. We waste about 30% of the food we produce while a large part of the world’s food production goes towards feeding livestock corn that humans could use. Studies show that the United States could produce food for 800 million people if all the grain that ends up as animal feed were used for human consumption. Mankind could sustain about four billion more people using just currently available agricultural land, without needing to encroach on the remaining rainforest or earth’s unspoiled spaces. One meal of beef is equal to twenty meals of pasta, based on carbon footprint. Perhaps Hindus were right to accord cows sacred status; applied to the world as a whole, our problems would be far less serious. In many cases, we do not need any new technology to solve our problems. Key to the solution is protecting nature. The industrialization of the last centuries has reduced rainforests and wetlands to useless land or to mere raw materials; nature reserves have been dreamt up as samples of the world that once existed. Rainforests and wildernesses play key roles in binding carbon and protecting the atmosphere. Their existence has become essential to the lives of all Earth’s inhabitants. Wetlands are vital because they bind carbon. In Iceland, wetlands were dried out on an immense scale; the excavations involved were, in total, equivalent to

the perimeter of the earth, nearly 33,000 kilometers. Emissions from the drained wetlands in Iceland exceed that from all its heavy industry, automobiles, and its aviation industry, combined. About eight million tons annually. In comparison, automobiles release one million tons. As the land dries up, rot sets in, oxidizing hydrocarbons that have accumulated in the soil for thousands of years. What one generation found useless was actually useful and by “improving” the farms the land actually became a destructive force. Halldór Laxness wrote about the exces-sive drainage of moors in his 1970 article “The War against the Land,” concluding with these words: “Shoudn’t we make a case for paying men to fill them in again?” About 70% of the ditches in Iceland are not used to help cultivate hayfields. Researchers have found that Halldór’s proposal to fill in the ditches and restore the wetlands would be Iceland’s most important contribution to prevent climate change. In recent years, significant progress has been made in solar and wind energy. New wind farms and solar fields have become competitive with the old coal-fired power plants and rapid advances in battery technology are being used to offset energy fluctuations. If U.S. electricity needs were met with solar energy, it would require about 10,000 km2 of space, about the size of the Vatnajökull glacier. Roof space in America measures about 5000 km2 while parking lots cover about 60,000 km2. In this race, everyone wins, or everyone loses. The sooner Australia, Arabia and Arizona are powered by solar energy, the more likely the technology will be widely available, accessible to people rising up out of poverty. In Africa’s remotest areas, there are people with smartphones who skipped a hundred years of telephon-ic developments. The same thing must happen in energy innovation. Dropping coal and oil and going directly to solar, wind and thermal energy. It is a realistic devel-opment if richer countries scale up the technology and utilize it themselves. Some might think that women’s empowerment is not an environmental issue, but research shows that girls’ education ensures family well-being and that the best way to cope with population growth is to allow women to make decisions about their own children. Thus, equality is one of the most important solutions to future environmental problems. It is not enough to know what the solutions are; we need to show measurable changes almost immediately if we are to cease emissions by 2050. In the 20th century, much of our infrastructure grew to be taken for granted, no longer noticed: electricity, water pipes, sewage, heating, cellular networks, road systems. The year Grandfather Björn was born, 1921, construction started on the first hydroelectric power plant serving Reykjavík, on the Ellida river. Electricity has been with us such a short time. During his lifetime, available energy in Iceland has increased from 1 MW to 2700 MW. At the beginning of the 20th century, people arrived here with new and unfamiliar job titles: Engineer, Machinist, Radio Op-erator, Switchboard Operator. These people pioneered their era’s technology. Now, there are three people in the telephone directory who list their profession as “Car-bon reducer.” That industry needs to become gargantuan. The greatest leap forward in the 21st century must be the capture and disposal of CO2, the development of methods to extract CO2 directly from the atmosphere and make something of val-ue from it.

In Hellisheiði, the first carbon reducers in history have taken the first steps, just like the Wright brothers did with aviation in their day. The Hellisheiði Geothermal Power Station generates about 20,000 tons of CO2 annually. In 2012, experiments explored whether CO2 could be absorbed into the rock face. The process involves mixing CO2 with water, converting it more or less to seltzer, pumping it into the soil and allowing it to come into contact with basalt. The resulting reaction forms iceland spar, CaCO3, the same material coral uses to build its shell. Initially, people did not know if the reaction would take place over several years or even over mil-lennia. It turned out that the rock changed in just a few months and the core tests showed that the air had been transformed into glittering rock. In 2014, 2,400 tons were pumped into the earth; by 2017, that figure had reached 10,000. This method can be used almost everywhere there is basalt bedrock, including the sea bed. Sim-ilar methods may be used to make building materials, concrete that can binds CO2

and not release emissions. Once that happens, humans will have learned to build a shelter from the same material as coral or hermit crabs. On site at Hellisheiði, there is a small shed where a method of extracting car-bon dioxide directly from the atmosphere is in development. This method is still considerably expensive but improves every year; in 2017, they managed to catch and remove about 50 tons directly from the atmosphere. That balances out one flight or the exhaust emissions of three Icelanders a year. The goal is to reduce 100,000 tons but in order to combat global warming, this industry, combined with reforestation, needs to extract millions of times more volume and at present we have no good way to assess which solution will dominate, which will achieve most success. After 30 years, this paragraph will hopefully be obsolete, like the 19th-century author explaining the phenomenon of a “water closet” and “sewerage.” I met up with Sandra Snæbjörnsdóttir, one of the world’s first carbon reducers, and our conversation soon turned to the future. She believes that after 100 years, international conferences will be held where experts will discuss what adjustments to make to the earth, whether atmospheric CO2 concentrations should be 350 ppm or 250 ppm. The solutions are manifold; some are absolutely beautiful. I met a man who restored the wetland on his farm and he described how fast nature came alive: “I filled in the ditch and made a pond. The following summer a red-throated loon ap-peared and I’ve seen fifty species of birds where there used to be just trenches and unused fields.” Many solutions improve the welfare of humans and animals alike; they bring to light better communication, living conditions, and ecology. They en-sure activity, awareness, and security. The solution is partly what our grandmoth-ers always told us: eating everything on our plates, handing down siblings’ clothes, darning socks, practicing frugality. A large part of the solution involves sacrifice, doing something for others without asking for anything in return. Creating groups and collectives, organizations, in the spirit of the Icelandic rescue teams and glacial research societies.. Lessons can be learned from the past, finding the point where happiness thrived before overconsumption prevailed. Somewhere we will find bal-ance and contentment. In the case of Grandfather Arni, that was the Kingdom of Heaven just above the Valley of Dreams. I reckon Auðhumla revealed herself to me and made me write this book so as to secure my children’s lives and future. I think it likely that CO2 is a test, trial hu-

May You Live Interesting Times (pp 7–10)Andri is thinking about the overwhelming news floating around, the noise and the chaos of information. He wonders what ideology to hold on to. Side by side on the same street in Reykjavík are Höfði, the house where Reagan and Gorbachev met, marking the fall of the iron curtain, and next door the headquarters of Kaupthing bank, the site of the fourth biggest bankruptcy in capitalist history. Before reaching the age of 40, Andri has seen huge ideologies fall and crash. And he thinks about the predictions for the fundaments of our planet. Capitalism and Communism both neglected the foundations of nature and natural science. What ideology can we hold on to? What language can we use when science is aleady predicting a worst-case global warming scenario? The issue is like a black hole. A black hole sucks in all light so you can’t see it, and this issue is so big that all language collapses. The solution might be to talk about these issues in the same way as we talk about a black hole, by looking around it, instead of looking into the centre. The best way to write about climate change might be by avoiding the words that are full of white noise. By writing about time and water instead.

A Little Treasure (pp 11–18)Andri writes about his first encounter with deep time, back when he was working at The Arni Magnusson institute in Reykjavík. He was guarding and putting on display the Codex Regius, the original manuscript of the Edda poetry, the primal source of Nordic mythology, the inspiration for Borges, Tolkien and Marvel Com-ics. That same week his son was born, so in the same day he held in his hands an-cient wisdom written in the year 1200, and his new-born child. The same summer, Andri is invited to go with his uncle John Thorbjarnarson on a research trip into the Amazon to catch crocodiles, as his uncle was a crocodile specialist. But Andri cannot go, he has a child to take care of and puts the unfulfilled adventure into literature.

manity must pass, that global warming is a warning to mankind: He who destroys the earth’s wildlife, razes the rainforests, does not even spare the remote “space dimensions of God,” will himself be lost.. By giving humanity a common challenge, the world’s nations are forced to work together in an unprecedented way. There is no certainty that it will succeed; all things must one day come to an end, and that applies to humanity like everything else. But if we succeed, the world might be-come something which, though far from perfect, will still be more beautiful than words can describe.

A Conversation in the Future (pp 308–309)4th October 2102

We’re in the kitchen in Hlaðbær. The Elliðaá meanders through a forest of autumn colors; wisps of steam rise off the swimming pool at the foot of Selás. A raven sits on a lamppost in front of the preschool. Hulda Filippía, my daughter, bought this house and renovated it; she’s now just over ninety. Her grandchildren, twelve-year-old twins, are sitting in the kitchen with her. They’re munching pancakes and watching the frame on the table that plays videos. Well-brought-up children sitting in the best room at 3 Selás. A young woman enters carrying a cake with lighted candles. “I knew this woman,” says Hulda Filippía, “I’m named after her. She was born in 1924, 178 years ago. Let’s do the math,” she says, stirring the pancake batter. “What math?” the girls ask. “A little puzzle my dad taught me when I was ten. When is someone you love still alive?” “What do you mean?” “You are ten years old, when will you be ninety? They jot down on a piece of paper: 2090 plus 90 is 2180. “Now let’s imagine that you have a grandchild in 2170, when will they be nine-ty? When would she or he still be talking about you?” They work out the math. “2260?” “Yes, can you imagine that? The person you will love most in the whole world will still be alive in 2260! Imagine your time. I was born in 2008 and you will know a person who will still be alive in 2260. That is the span of time to which you con-nect, more than 250 years. The time you can touch with your own hands. Your time is the time of someone you know and love, the people who mold you, the time of someone you know and love, the time you shape. Everything you do matters. You are creating the future every single day.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES

A Conversation for the Future (pp 19–22)Inspired by the archives Andri starts to think of the breadth of time he can person-ally reach, having a full set of grandparents alive. He starts documenting the mem-ories of his own people. He calculates the time of his own 10-year-old child against the life of his own grandmother. His daughter will turn 94 in the year 2102. If her grandchild is 10 years old then, that child will still be alive in the year 2186. For his daughter, the person she will love the most in her life – is still alive in the year 2186.

Slides (pp 23–48)Andri visits his grandparents and starts collecting their stories. His grandmother tells a story of how she once saw a hidden person – the invisible population living Iceland, according to folklore. She was adventurous, flew a small airplane around Hekla volcano during the huge eruption of 1947 and she was a mountain woman. She met his grandfather and together they went on a glacial honeymoon in 1956, the founding trip of the Icelandic Glacial Research Society. They show us amazing pictures of mountains, glaciers and snowmobiles. It’s a landscape that was eternal at the time but is now changing at an alarming rate.

The Silent Space Dimension of God (pp 49–62) Andri finds a travel book from 1939 by Helgi Valtýsson, an Icelandic poet and writer. He was a pioneer discovering hidden places in the Highland of Iceland. The language he uses is extreme, he was raised on romantic poetry and describes in the book how the landscape lifts his soul “into the silent space dimension of God”. When he comes down from the mountains, enlightened, in September 1939, Germany has invaded Poland and the world is heading for a dramatic change. The war jumpstarted all sorts of industries, one of them is the aluminium industry that created the consumer economy of disposable waste. In 2006, the area where Helgi travelled was flooded behind the biggest dam in Europe to make aluminium for disposable cans. Andri became deeply involved in this fight for the highlands and he wonders why he could not speak like Helgi. Why was he forced to talk about economic growth, jobs and profits, while Helgi spoke about “the space dimension of God”? Andri wonders what words could be used when describing how rising sea levels will claim more than 400.000 km2 of land.

Tell Stories (pp 63–67)Andri meets a world leading climate change scientist who asks him:“You are a storyteller. Why don’t you talk about the world’s most urgent issue? Climate change.““Isn’t that up to scientists?” Asks Andri. “But people relate to stories, not data”, says the Scientist. “But I am not a specialist, I feel it is not in my field”, says Andri.

“If you cannot understand our scientific findings and present them in an emotion-al, psychological, poetic or mythological context, then nobody will understand the issue and the world will end.”So Andri starts thinking. How can I put all this into words?

Words We Don’t Understand (pp 68–78)Andri goes through the history of various words and how long it takes people to understand new ideas. How words define what we can say. How language forces us to think in certain pathways. In 1809 there was a small revolution in Iceland. An English soap merchant took control of the country and a Danish translator became ruler of Iceland for 60 days during the summer of 1809. He declared independence for Iceland, that every man was equal, that a parliament should be established and taxes no longer payed to Denmark. This was the first time Icelanders heard these ideas and nobody understood the concepts of freedom, liberty and equality. It took Icelanders 100 years to understand them. That brings us to modern words. The word Ocean Acidification was first used in Icelandic media in 2006, once, once in 2007, never in 2008 and twice mentioned 2009. Ocean Acidification is the largest and most fundamental change to the world’s oceans for 50 million years. An event so large that no words can describe the scale and horror of an ocean changing from 8.1 pH to 7.7 pH. To those that don’t know better, a 0.4 pH difference seems small. In fact, it is the biggest event of our times.

Holy Cow (pp 79–94)Andri gets a phone call. He is invited to interview the Dalai Lama. He wonders what he can say to someone that has reincarnated 14 times. He starts to think about mythology again and goes back to the Edda manuscript. In Nordic mythology the world started with Auð – Humla – a frozen cow – Humla of prosperity. He finds that this strange myth is a curious metaphor for glaciers. Glaciers are like frozen cows – sending milky white water down from the mountains. The origin of the Ganges is called Gomukh, the mouth of the Cow, where it flows from a Himalayan glacier.

Visit from the Holy Man (pp 95–108)Andri and His Holiness the Dalai Lama talk about time and nature, and glaciers. The Dalai Lama talks about how they are melting at an alarming rate in the Hima-layas, with one billion people threatened with water shortage in the future.

A Revelation from the Wrong God (pp 109–116)Andri starts thinking of the divine, this strange coincidence and the rationality of things. How suddenly the strangest myth of Nordic mythology, the frozen cow, makes total sense. And the big challenge humans are facing. As Andri has found the cow, it seems like she is dying and one billion people might be affected and he

dives into the science. Andri wonders what to do with such information. How to explain this. Why are you writing this book? The holy cow is dying and asked me to write this warning to humans.

Back Into Time (pp 117–127)Scientists talk about great changes in the next 100 years. So Andri goes to ask his grandparents about the changes of the past 100 years. They tell him stories from the 20th century. His grandfather was a surgeon in New York and operated on Oppen-heimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer is a truly mythological fig-ure, a modern Prometheus and Andri asks his grandfather about their encounters. Apparently, Oppenheimer looked exactly like the image of Christ in grandfather’s childhood church in the west fjords of Iceland. And Oppenheimer marked a new era in earth‘s geological history. The Trinity explosion left traces of human activity on the entire surface of the planet, marking the starting point for the Anthropocen. Andri asks his grandparents: is 100 years a long time or a short time? Both of them say: short time.

Crocodile Dreams (pp 128–144)Andri writes about his uncle, John Thorbjarnarson, the crocodile specialist, and how he and his team saved some crocodile species from extinction. How a boy born in New Jersey could have a say in the 100-million-year evolution of a species that has lived through ice ages, meteorites and major volcanic events. Andri talks about The Great Auk – the last one was killed in Iceland in 1879. We are now faced with The Sixth Extinction according to science as we are shifting all the elements of our planet. John Thorbjarnarson died from malaria in India in 2010 and according to an obituary in the Economist, he had saved the Orinoco Crocodile in the Amazon and he was creating habitat for the Chinese Alligator.

Mythology for our Times (pp 145–156)Andri visits his grandfather in New Jersey again and puts our times into the con-text of scale. His surgeon grandfather treated the Iranian Shah 1979 and Andy Warhol died after an operation by him. Andri’s grandfather’s sister was a nanny for JRR Tolkien in 1930 and Andri finds a photo album, full of amazing family photos of the Tolkien family from Oxford in 1930. Andri feels like his grandfather’s gener-ation lived the most interesting times in history. So he asks, when did time change the most in your life? His grandfather says: In the last 10 years. So Andri does some research and finds that he is correct in terms of scale, production and pollution. The world has changed the most since the year 2000. The biggest challenge might be now and ahead of us.

N64 35.378, W16 44.691 (pp 157–176)Andri takes us on a journey with his grandparents: the glacier honeymoon of 1956. A three-week pioneering trip to map Vatnajökull, Europe’s biggest glacier. His grandparents were stuck in a tent for three days during a blizzard. Andri asks: Weren’t you cold? Cold, they say, we were just married. One of the highest peaks of the glacier is Bride’s bulge, in the name of Andri’s grandmother.

The Glaciers of the World (pp 177–182)Andri writes about glaciers in an international context, talks to glacial researchers like Lonnie Thomson and how this eternal mass of ice and snow that was a symbol of eternity will vanish within the next 150–200 years. Nature has left geological speed and entered human speed.

Farewell White Giant (pp 183–188)Andri wrote the memorial of Ok Glacier, the first Icelandic glacier to formally lose status as a glacier. He tells a story of crossing Skeiðarárjökull with friends. It’s an otherworldly landscape that the next generations will not experience. He thinks he must put his memories in the national archives, with the old book of Edda my-thology. People in the future will ask: How did you write about a glacier? They will talk about those that lived the times of the Great White Giants during the Big Melt.

Deus Ex Steam Machina (pp 189–206)Andri talks about The Great Fire. How the fire of James Watts and his steam ma-chine created more machines and how they have now released 36GT of CO2 an-nually. Translated into volcanic eruptions, that is like we have had 650 eruptions like Eyjafjallajökull, all day, all night, forever. This endless flow of oil and gas, this mountain of coal we are addicted to makes us think like Oppenheimer: Have we become death, the destroyer of our world? When Andri was young he thought Oppenheimer would bring the world down, now it seems like it was just good old Prometheus and his flame.According to the IPCC of the UN, humans must get emissions down to zero in the next 30 years to avoid a major collapse of all natural systems.

A Few More Words (pp 207–219)Andri travels into the world of words and how the phrase ‘climate change’ has been removed from websites in USA. He also travels to China and encounters a small fragment of the 50 million empty apartments there. He wonders if the world is out of control and whether there is any hope.

Deep Blue (pp 220–248)Andri dives into the oceans to understand the big challenge they are facing; ocean acidification, warming waters. He dives into a coral reef and understands that the 2C Paris Agreement in 2015 acknowledged that a two-degree increase in ocean temperature would destroy all coral reefs. He wonders why that did not deserve a monument, as that was an agreement to kill 25% of the oceans’ biodiversity. Why was that not a moment in history? Where were you when we signed the declaration of giving up the coral reefs?

Maybe Everything Will Be Fine (pp 249–260)Andri dwells on the flow of the ever-changing world of ice ages, mass extinctions, and connects himself to geological time. How ice ages come and go. How New York, Canada and Scandinavia all used to be under a thick mass of ice. Everything was dead only 14.000 years ago. So what do we matter? Why should we worry? He concludes that this philosophy will not be taken lightly by future generations living on an uninhabitable earth.

Dalai Lama Interview (pp 261–282)Andri travels to Dharamsala for his second interview with the Dalai Lama. They have a two hour rich conversation, and Andri feels like he is in a history lesson where history itself is teaching him history. His Holyness the Dalai Lama talks about everything. Time, forgiveness, nature, his love for Mao and betrayal, how he found himself homeless and a new life in India. The future, reincarnation. A very rich and unusually personal interview, casting a light on most of the issues in the previous chapters.

In the Milky River (pp 283–291)Andri finds a holy river in Nepal, older than the Himalayas, running white and holy, feeding fish, rhinos and people. He sees a crocodile on the bank of the river, a gharial, and remembers the life work of John Thorbjarnarson – his late uncle who died in India while helping to protect that species. And how everything is connect-ed in this river running from the frozen cow in the Himalayas.

Crocodylus Thorbjarnarsoni (pp 292–294)In 2012 the largest crocodile species that has roamed the planet was found in Kenya, where scientists were searching for remains of the first humans. The croco-dile got the name Crocodylus thorbjarnarsoni. His uncle John is reincarnated as a prehistoric crocodile after saving many species from extinction.

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2050 (pp 295–307)Andri asks what can be done in 30 years in the light of the IPCC reports. He looks for hope and examples, a way to find a pathway into the next 30 years. How humans have scaled up aviation, computer technology, the internet, infrastructure and nu-clear technology in the 20th century and the only hope to meet climate change is a massive change on a global level. It’s a race where either everyone wins, or everyone loses.

A Conversation in the Future (pp 308–309)Andri’s daughter is now a grandmother. She is 94 years old. The year is 2102. She asks her grandchild to calculate. When is someone you lovestill alive?And she finds the date – 2260.