Photo by Angela Boehm from the Minus 30 series [1]
I.
According to Rupert Birkin, there are two contrasting forms of abstraction via which human beings might annihilate themselves and, ultimately, destroy the entire world: those who belong to the global south find their fatal fulfilment in the "putresecent mystery of sun-rays"; whereas those who have the arctic north behind them "fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive
knowledge" [2].
His friend Gerald, for example, was one of those wilful, white-skinned, blue-eyed demons from the north destined to find death by perfect cold and plunge the earth into the universal dissolution of snow and ice.
Now, I understand that quite a few readers will probably be asking themselves: So what? What has Lawrence's thinking on this question of abstraction tied to his racialised metaphysics got to do with us?
Well, the answer my friend is blowing in the wind from a northerly direction - and that answer is geoengineering ...
II.
Geoengineering is the intentional large-scale alteration of the planetary environment that scientists have proposed as a method to counteract anthropogenic climate change. Some wish to capture carbon; others wish to deflect sunlight in order to keep the earth cool, either by brightening the clouds, the use of giant space mirrors, or stratospheric aerosol injection.
It's solar radiation management that most interests and, to some degree, concerns me, as well as others like me who, having read their Lawrence, fear a new ice age or global whiteout in which nothing
casts a shadow, the horizon disappears, and even dark objects are
barely visible beneath a permanently white sky.
For whilst ingenious technological solutions to the problem of global warming may appear attractive, such large scale interventions also run a greater risk of causing unintended disruptions to natural systems. In other words, we might just fuck things up even more than simply allowing the temperature to rise a couple of degrees over the next century.
And who wants to live on a white earth beneath a white sky? There may be a tragic irony in the fact that our fear of global warming results in such a scenario, but, no one will be laughing when vast ice sheets cover the surface of the earth and, push comes to shove, I'd rather sweat than shiver.
Notes
[1] Angela Boehm is a Canadian photographer who grew up in rural Saskatchewan, so knows all about long hard winters. In 2021, she began photographing the conditions when the temperature fell to -30c or below in order to convey something of the silence, stillness, and unearthly beauty of a world that has been whitened almost to the point of invisibility.
See her book Minus 30 (Hartmann Projects, 2024) or visit her website to view more images from the book: click here.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 254.
I published a post on this topic of fatal abstraction back in August 2020: click here. See also the related post entitled 'Psychrophilia: On Love (and Death) in a Cold Climate (27 Feb 2019): click here.
With thanks to Síomón Solomon for suggesting this post.
