On Time and Water

"It is a poetic and insightful environmental treatise on Iceland’s future, and all of our futures in the context of two of the most significant threats to life: climate change and ocean acidification. It deals with the limits of language and current Western metaphorical frameworks in making sense of these huge issues. As Magnason points out, their real implications are clearly beyond most of our comprehensions, otherwise we would be behaving very differently. This book is also about what happens when geological time and human life spans collide. Magnason is a stylist and he connects us to the future and the past “in an intimate and urgent way” through reaching for various mythologies— Norse and Hindu among them, history, and particularly his own eccentric family history, for help. Particularly fascinating are his grandparents, who honeymooned as participants in one of the first Icelandic glaciological surveys. Now, when Magnason walks on that same glacier with his children, they have to imagine their grandparents’ footsteps far above their heads, and most are predicted to disappear completely in the near future. A simple proposition elicits a shift in perspective. By invoking our time as “the handshake of generations”—the period inhabited by those who have loved us, ourselves, and those who we will love in the future—he brings the impacts of this unknown future close to our hearts."