In which we land

Posted on July 30, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

Our migration is complete: my lab now has a new home. And for me, a new office space.

An office desk with computer

The secret to my scientific success?

Numerous studies have scrutinised the effect of environment on work productivity. Anecdotally, I know that my own focus and output are greatly enhanced by my surroundings. Until my workspace is tidy, I cannot seem to muster the mental intensity needed to sink into my work, especially creative tasks such as writing a grant or paper, or planning a long-term research strategy.

Albert Einstein once famously quipped “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?” I would argue that everyone has her own work style, and in a digital age, there is no need for the perilous stacks of scientific papers that used to be the mainstay of professorial desks (and still are, among the older set. I’m looking at you, new office-mate). These rectangular columns – stalagmites of pure knowledge, precipitated into paper and toner – used to sprout from every available surface of all “serious” desks, with bonus points for colonising most of the floor as well. Additional specimens were captured into heavy ring-binders and lined up on dusty shelves, never to be consulted again. The more obsessive would further encase each individual article into a plastic envelope, which makes recycling a nightmare. And I should know, having spent many hours last week disposing of dozens of these binders when we were clearing out the new space – the most recent articles dating from the mid-Nineties.

But these desk stacks loom large in my memory. Whenever I’d sit in the office of an established scientist, the sheer mass of their scholarly learning would engender a sense of awe and respect in my much-younger self. As a PhD and postdoc I devoured an awful lot of papers, but would I ever reach this particular boss level? Now I know, from experience, that many never bother to actually read the papers they print out. Rather like a well-stocked vegetable drawer rotting by the end of each week, the accumulation alone already seems to tick some sort of box.

I do, very occasionally, print out an article so that I can scribble on it and, in doing so, organise my thoughts. (Online annotations don’t seem to have the same cognitive effect). And even more rarely, I store them for future reference. But once the paper/grant is out the door, the article is off my desk and into the recycle bin. The older I get, the less tolerance for clutter I can muster. So after the big office purge last week, I was surprised to find that I wasn’t able to fill even a small fraction of the modest shelf space above my new desk. I even lined up notebooks and protocols from my postdoc days just to make the place look a bit more lived-in. But the spareness suits me well, and I’ve already shepherded a revised a manuscript and a grant rebuttal out the door, and made good inroads into my next grant application.

Laboratory space

A lab with a view

The lab is also looking great. But I need more grants to keep up the momentum. I’m fine for people (we’ll have a total of five come autumn), but when I’m lacking is funding that buys out my research time from teaching. If none of the four outstanding bids come through by the end of the year, I’m hopeful they’ll let me bridge the gap with a period of full-time teaching. Of course, my research would be relegated to evenings and weekends (putting my work-life balance on hold for while), but in the absence of a permanent position, I’ve been gambling with this sort of jeopardy for decades. It no longer has the power to frighten me. Things will work out – or they won’t, and I will do something else. Meanwhile, I’m whooping in the front car of that downward roller-coaster, waving my arms in the air and enjoying the ride while it lasts.

Posted in Academia, Nostalgia, Research, science funding, Scientific papers, Staring into the abyss, The profession of science, Work/life balance | 1 Comment

In which we migrate

Posted on July 6, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

After about eight years in residence at the Royal Free Hospital, my itinerant scientific journey is about to embark on its next exciting leg.

lab space with researchers

Some of my team, hard at work in our current home

In a few weeks’ time, my lab is uprooting itself and moving to a new home in the same department, from leafy Belsize Park to the thrumming centre of the university campus in Bloomsbury. I’m looking forward to it, but if you’ve ever moved labs before, you’ll know how overwhelming it can all seem. Most scientists are pack rats, and each trainee accumulates things – chemicals, reagents, plasticware, small pieces of kit – that are inevitably left behind for their successors. After a few such “generations”, the provenance of these items starts to get a bit blurry, especially when there is no one left who knew the original owners. Of course there is me, the sole constant, but even I struggle when confronted with the bold initials of a long-ago undergraduate project student who laid claim to a box, a rack, a bottle with a scribble of Sharpie, who came and went in a brief flurry of newbie zeal, ideally without blowing anything up.

In a communal lab space like the one we currently inhabit, the problem is compounded because there are multiple groups all leaving behind their stuff. The shadowy corners and recesses of less accessible benching – like that scary space behind the fume cupboard – are no-man’s lands of dusty piles of what is tactfully known in the business as “crap”. Broken gel electrophoresis electrodes, boxes of microscope slides smeared with decades-old dried purple goo, expired DNA extraction kits, pipette tips that are no longer compatible with the current sets of instruments, broken microwaves, rusty water baths that haven’t been filled for decades. Someone recently found a bottle of powdered chemical that had expired in 1972. And then there are the towers of reusable rainbow-coloured plastic boxes that fit a standard 10 by 10 grid of Eppendorf tubes, emptied of their contents but still marked territorially with their original owner’s name and purpose. IMPORTANT SAMPLES!, one declares. THE VERY LAST EXPERIMENT! promises another. Once these were prized treasure chests, carefully guarded – now they are spent empty shells, waiting for the next researcher to fill them with purpose.

So we’re using the opportunity to get rid of stuff that we no longer need, once and for all. It’s agonising, but as with most moves, we’re getting increasingly ruthless the further into the process we go. That little bottle of buffer from five years ago? It may still work, but do you really want to risk your experiment finding out? And so we recycle and donate what we can, and fill up the rubbish bags with the rest. Meanwhile, across town, members of my team have been clearing out the abandoned detritus occupying the space earmarked for us. I’m pleased to report it’s now empty and gleaming and ready for the onslaught of our crates.

If you ask us what we’re looking forward to the most, it’s probably having windows in the lab and office spaces. Yes, we’ve been enduring a fluorescent-lit cave for far too long. But University Street is lined with trees and sky and we’ll emerge into our next stage of the life cycle, blinking in the sunlight.

I am so looking forward to a fresh start – decluttered, scrubbed clean and optimistic. We have two new people joining the team soon, and so many grants outstanding that I’m confident of even more before long. I’ll be closer to key collaborators, and to the heart of university life. Endings and beginnings punctuate academic life, so let’s see what’s around the horizon. I’m ready.

Posted in Academia, Research, The profession of science | 2 Comments

In which I am pummelled into viral submission

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

I am only happy to write about this today because I suspect it is finally almost over. I’m no longer so superstitious that I think I’m tempting fate by doing so now.

In short, I’ve been ill for a long time. It all started off in mid-April, probably about the same time that I finally stopped wearing a mask on public transport. It was only a tickly cough, but when it ambushed me out of the blue, I’d hack uncontrollably for a minute or two, then find myself utterly voiceless for the next five, until it would all be fine again, sometimes for hours. When it happened during meetings with collaborators or doing tutorials with my students, it was embarrassing and debilitating, but I learned to always carry a pack of Ricola lozenges with me, which could usually get the coughing under control fairly quickly.

After a conference in Rome, I flew home with a sore throat, which developed into cold symptoms to keep the pesky cough company. In the first week of May, I tested positive for COVID – a deep red line that developed as soon as the sample flowed over the zone. It hit me pretty hard, sort of halfway between a cold and influenza, but after a few weeks my cough was fading and I was starting to feel better.

Enter another sore throat, which waned after a few days, and then a much sharper one, alongside acute conjunctivitis in both eyes, and the return of the stupid cough. For exactly 24 hours, I lost all sense of smell, restored the next day like a switch flipping. The pain and swelling in my throat became so bad that for a week, I could hardly swallow and certainly couldn’t sleep, so I ended up binge-watching, in small insomniac chunks, the 2016 version of War and Peace (essentially Jane Austen but with furry hats and amputations) between two and four in the morning. The moon transformed night by night outside my window from a slim crescent abutting Venus to a fat waxing half, leaving the more steady planet far behind. Sometimes, the sound of a neighbour coughing uncontrollably would float across the dark gardens, and it was strangely comforting to know I wasn’t alone. Solidarity, my comrade-in-arms.

Last night, for the first time in ages, I managed a full night sleep, and today, the ache in my throat has dwindled to a faint pain (though my friend the stupid cough lingers). This weekend, I took pleasure in the warm breezy weather, attacking the jungle in our back garden, hacking away at vines and shrubbery and pulling long, satisfying strings of goosegrass and bindweed from the beds. There are so many lovely things blooming now: delicate beauty bush, mock orange, red conker candles, lilac, anemones, irises, thyme, and of course the roses. A vase of them sits by my computer now, leaching sweet scent. It’s been pretty outside for weeks, but when you’re ill, it’s hard to feel the love.

I’m not writing this because it’s original or even unusual, but it comes after a long illness, with some similarities, I suffered for two months at the end of last year. The throat pain is in exactly the same place – but fortunately this time I didn’t have to go to hospital. There is still so much we don’t understand about viral infections, how they play out and how they linger. How many separate fresh infections have washed over me, ebbing and flowing, and how many were relapses of what was already there? Am I getting so ill because I wasn’t properly exposed for the past few years due to Covid precautions? Or is it just the inevitable consequence of “immunosenescence” – my defences deteriorating with age? (This is a topic I regularly teach undergraduates and medical students, but it’s never before felt real. Until now. I can almost feel my responder cells dawdling inappropriatately and secreting all the wrong signals.)

Perhaps one day we will have lateral flow tests for all the respiratory viruses, and we can monitor these strange battles raging in our bodies in real time. Or better yet, maybe someone can use RNA vaccine technology to finally target all the cold viruses, all together. One handy annual seasonal jab to take away this pesky misery once and for all. Back in 1946, the Common Cold Unit was established to try to cure us of these first-world-problem scourges, but despite a lot of interesting knowledge generated while it was active, we still don’t have a cure. One could of course argue that colds aren’t important enough to try to seriously tackle, but they certainly blunt our productivity significantly. Personally I think it would be research money well spent – but then, I would say that: I’ve been under the cosh since what feels like the Jurassic era.

Posted in Gardening, Illness, Research, The ageing process | 1 Comment

In which I head into the wind

Posted on April 23, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn
Tulips in the garden

Heart-breaking ephemera

Sometimes joy and sadness are hard to tease apart – there should be a word for the heavy lightness, or light heaviness, of springtime. This time of year always carries ambivalence: a scrum of flowers unfurl, scenting the air, but the winds are bitter-cold with that “not so fast” April scold, night temperatures not far off zero.

We are not finished with winter yet, not really, even though my garden is doing a pretty decent Koekenhof impression at the moment. Aside from the too-many tulips I keep layering in each autumn, accidentally unearthing old bulbs to make room for the new, the first (evil) Spanish bluebells are out, rushing ahead of their lazier but more true-hearted English cousins. Wild garlic blooms in the shady little woodland along our back garden wall, jostling with wild celery and the first cow parsley bunches. In my morning walk along the hedgerows, I see purple archangel, dead-nettle, green alkanet, dove’s-foot crane’s bill, all the pretty little weeds that don’t clamor to be noticed. I’ve been plagued with headaches and migraine auras recently, and it feels as if the icy air could anaesthetize my brain if only I could inhale enough of it.

I’m aware of significant stress at work, even though things are going as well as they ever have in terms of papers, grants, invited lectures and exciting collaborations, and my team is engaged and brilliant. Sometimes when I wake at 3 AM (why is it always exactly 3 AM? There’s a PhD thesis in there somewhere), my academic worries chase each other around in the dark, stripping the willow with my imposter syndrome. By light of day, I conquer them, and just get on with things. Science is such a strange profession, the sort of strangeness to which you become immune after long exposure. It tries so hard to spit you out once it swallows you, but if you are stubborn, you can cling on in there and try to achieve all the good things you’ve devoted your life to attempting. You do sometimes wonder what it would be like to work with a tailwind for a change – how much more would you accomplish? Or, perhaps the headwind is what sculpts the community into the sort of hive being that gets the best overall result, regardless of the fate of individual bees.

Posted in Careers, Gardening, Research, The profession of science | 1 Comment

In which I capture the present, but forget why

Posted on March 19, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

Ancient history (1997): does anyone map plasmids anymore?

I have always been a compulsive chronicler, ever since I was a small child starting off my first journal. I still write an entry nearly every day, taking a few months to fill in all the pages with my increasingly illegible scrawl, then adding the bound notebook carefully to the stack of hundreds of others fading in cupboards in my study – decades of events, sucked irrevocably into the past and largely forgotten.

This habit suited me well over the three decades that I worked at the lab bench, writing down every last experimental detail alongside taped photographs, x-ray films, plasmid maps, nucleotide sequence outputs. I captured not just the process, but analyses, conclusions, next steps – even a few unscientific expressions of joy or misery. These entries contain smudges of chemicals, coffee stains, and even what I suspect were tears. For all I know, some of the pages might even be faintly radioactive.

In more recent years, I have felt a strong compulsion to chronicle my home life beyond just what I write in my journals. It was actually Richard’s idea to start a family almanac when we moved to our ‘forever home’ back in 2015. Near the end of our fifth volume now, we both record weather observations, gardening activities, adventures in home-brewing and produce preservation, and any other domestic event that might be worth remembering: pandemic lowlights, comets and meteor showers, hen memorabilia (acquisition, laying habits and deaths), significant illnesses. After a few years we started to see patterns, certain events happening very close to the same time each year: the flight of ant queens, the first appearance of particular butterflies, the flowering of the first snowdrops, crocuses, ornamental cherries, daffodils, tulips, the onset of powdery mildew infection in our courgette patch.

Around the same time, we started a cookbook too – just an A4 notebook where we scribbled down our favourite food experiments or taped in printouts from online recipes or cuttings from magazines. These two volumes are encrusted in batters, grease, fruit stains and God knows what else. I like to think that a thousand years from now, scientists might be able to bring back some extinct forms of life with it.

In the past year, I’ve developed an urge to re-discover some of the more creative areas of my life that I haven’t fed in many years. I’ve started playing the piano again regularly, which I haven’t done since I all but abandoned the instrument at about Grade 8 proficiency when I went off to university. And following a bout of severe laryngitis that largely obliterated my singing voice in 2018, I recently decided to start taking weekly lessons to see if I could rehabilitate my vocal cords. A few months in and I am not only nearly back to where I used to be, but I am learning techniques that should make me sing even better, with a larger range.

Colored pencil sketches of flowers

Last weekend’s entry (Clockwise from top left: Magnolia, hyacinth, crocus, evening primrose, wild garlic)

But the most exciting development has been resuming regular sketching. I’ve always loved to draw, especially botanical subjects, but do it only rarely. Inspired in part by Emma Mitchell’s flower sketches on Twitter, and Katherine May’s excellent book “Wintering”, I decided to start a botanical journal, capturing emerging flowers and plants in our garden every Sunday, not only practicing my technique but also documenting the changing of the seasons. After I spent quite a bit of money on a 72-piece set of Lyra coloured pencils and a hardbound book of fine vellum from Strathmore, I was worried that I might abandon it after the first entry. But the project has taken on a life of its own, and it’s satisfying to watch the pages fill up week after week, blossoming like a garden in springtime.

Last weekend, however, I did have a little wobble, wondering why I am so compelled to get all of this stuff down on paper. In the past, when my life stretched out forever, I assumed that the chronicles would come in handy, a reference to consult whoever I wanted to remember a forgotten aspect of my journey on this planet. But now I’m not so sure. Why go to all the trouble? Who is it for? I can’t imagine anyone being interested, even my own family tree once I am gone; unlike a laboratory notebook, it’s not even useful: nobody will need to see how I did it, or reproduce the result. All these hours, days, years of active chronicling, sometimes at a considerable cost (for it takes time and energy that I sometimes feel I cannot spare): what is the point? The experience of doing it, living through it more intensely by recording it? But no – if it was only for the process, I wouldn’t save anything: I’d discharge my heart and soul onto the pages and then throw them away. It seems the saving is part of it, but I no longer know why.

It’s a sobering feeling: in the past, there was only the evangelical certainty that I must gather and accumulate this diverse evidence. Now the stacks of dusty journals seem to look at me and say, “Well?”

Posted in Academia, Art, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Music, Nostalgia, The ageing process, Work/life balance, Writing | 3 Comments

In which my lab is a garden

Posted on January 29, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

purple crocuses

It’s a grey afternoon, the light already fading. R. and I have just done a circuit of the back garden – ‘inspecting the troops’, we call it.

The entire space is dishevelled, as it always is this time of year: the brown skeletal remains of last year’s growth tangled in with the green perennials, most of which are in dire need of a prune. The lawn is more mud than grass, and everywhere the bulbs are pushing upwards. Hellebore already blooms in the train-wreck of our unweeded herb garden, along with the snowdrops, rosemary, winter jasmine and the first crocuses. There are even a few of last autumn’s roses unfurling, having powered through several weeks of hard frost to put on their last-gasp performance. Magnolia trees display furry pods that you can’t resist stroking, and the bird cherry in the back hedgerow – always the first to kick off – is studded with hundreds of tiny white buds. Wild onions – the bane of R.’s existence – seem to reproduce in real time, spewing out ten clumps for every one he yanks up. I’m sure our well-meaning predecessors (largely sensible in most of their other horticultural choices) had no idea what a cursed epidemic they were unleashing.

Our overwintering shallots, garlic and broad beans are doing well, but our greenhouse needs a good clear-out, to prepare for the dozens of seedlings that are already germinating indoors in heated propagators under industrial LED light panels. After last year’s aphid infestation, it probably needs a good fumigation too.

Earlier today after J’s rugby practice, we skulked into the local park and dug up a few lush cow parsley crowns, taproots squirming with fat earthworms, from the weedy verge, which I transplanted along the back garden wall. Our hedgerow has turned into a little woodland, and I think every woodland needs cow parsley on its sunny edges. If I try hard enough, I can almost smell the shimmering springtime haze of a field of cow parsley in bloom.

As if on cue, R. has just put a cocktail into my hand made from rum and pulverised blackberries picked last August and stored in the chest freezer since. A little bit of summer in an ice-cold glass.

Things are going well at work – which sometimes resembles an untidy garden of its own, old and new all entwined, everything coming and going. We published a paper in the first week of January, have another with minor revisions which should soon see the light of day, a second one close to submission, and several more taking shape. I’ve nearly finished the second of two major grant applications already submitted this year. Meanwhile, three grants are pending with outcomes expected soon. I’m advertising for a PhD student, just in time for one of my existing ones to take his viva. A postdoc has joined to start a project, while another has just moved to a new position abroad. All the various strands of what are euphemistically known as “output”, but are really human beings and their amazing achievements, bits of the cycle shooting here, blooming there, or blowing away like feathery seeds to take root somewhere else. And me in the middle, a smudge of mud on my forehead, reading glasses shoved onto the top of my head, wielding a spade and secateurs, half proud, half bemused as it all takes shape.

Posted in Academia, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Research, The profession of science, Work/life balance | Comments Off on In which my lab is a garden

In which I step over the edge

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

Trees reflected in a pond

Another first of January, and I find myself in that fuzzy transition between old and new, between holiday and the resumption of real life. The Christmas tree and its associated trappings give me that look, seeming to realise they they belong to another era and are living on borrowed time. Their glimmer has an air of tragedy. You really want them gone — the decorations, the festive table settings, the fairy lights, the deformed candle-ends, the last few days of going through the motions. The coup de grâce. You want to rearrange the furniture back to normal, restore the boxes of ornaments and relics to the loft, hoover up all the needles on the carpet. But it’s not quite time: tomorrow, perhaps.

I’ve been ill for so long that this Christmas could never have been normal. Only in the last few days have I started to feel somewhat like myself. The best I can say is that I caught up on my sleep, read a few good books and gained back three of the twelve pounds I precipitously shed in the acute November throes. I’ve started to learn the accordion (again), and have resumed my fitness regimen, months behind where I used to be, but you have to start somewhere. I’ve enjoyed the walks we’ve taken, fresh mild air in the lungs, stands of old oak and holly and mud beneath my boots, crunching on spent chestnut casings and acorns and sodden leaf.

I’ve thought about the future: what would I want to see different this year? As usual, I already feel happier and more secure than I probably have any right to. If it ain’t broke… But nevertheless, I’d like to up my game. Some of this I can control: writing more, doom-scrolling less. But some of it is out of my hands, and none of it is urgent.

In the meantime, 2023: welcome. Let’s see how we get on.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

In which we fall

Posted on November 6, 2022 by Jennifer Rohn

autumn leaves

Fireworks crackle in the darkness: yesterday’s Bonfire Night stretching to fill the entire weekend. The torrential rains have given way to an almost full moon, glowing cold-silver in the eastern sky. November is always a positive month, with the cosiness of a warm home as nights close in, various celebrations to anticipate and the frenzy of Term 1 lecturing having somewhat peaked as we start our downhill crash towards Christmas.

I have not written in a long time because work has been ruthless and all-encompassing, filling up every hour, even when I rise too early and retire too late in a vain attempt to wrest back control. Burning at both ends, my middle feels exhausted and sometimes only partially present. I scribble in my journal when I get a spare moment – a few swaying stops on the Underground, or a decadent five-minute break over coffee – but there is time for little else. A couple of snatched chapters of a novel, cuddles with my son, the 30 minutes of cardio exercise I prioritise over sleep each morning, my daily Duolingo lessons, half-hearted attempts to tame the feral garden before winter sets in. This weekend I managed to cook a hearty stew, bake a pie, play a Chopin Nocturne for fifteen minutes at the piano and put some narcissus bulbs into containers for forcing, but I worked many hours on various academic chores and face a soberingly long list come tomorrow morning. The clamour for my time never ceases; I just grimly slice off heads as ten more sprout back to take their places.

But things are exciting in the lab: I’ve recently got a few new grants, with some others submitted; we also have a number of papers in press, in revision, pending or in the final throes of preparation. Many people are asking to collaborate with us, from great labs all over the world, and that opens up new intriguing possibilities for the research. It’s stimulating and it propels everything forward. On the other side of my portfolio, the small cohort of medical students I’m teaching this year on my course are honestly a joy, and I feel very privileged to be able to work with such bright young people. So life is good, even if sometimes it borders on unbearably stressful.

I just have to keep going.

Posted in Academia, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Joshua, Research, Staring into the abyss, Students, Teaching, The profession of science, Work/life balance | 2 Comments

In which I cherish useless facts

Posted on September 19, 2022 by Jennifer Rohn

I’ve just had my first letter to the editor published in the Times (of London, that is, not of New York). It wasn’t an urgent missive about science policy or politics or the state of the world or the Queen’s death – just a little musing about a pretty weed that was one of hundreds of Ohio native plants and trees I studied in a botany class as an undergraduate at Oberlin College.

People sometimes ask me what good my Liberal Arts education did – especially as a scientist. It’s a particularly interesting question in the UK, where science graduates start specializing as children in school; after this, most undergo a heavily restricted three-year BSc degree consisting solely of modules about that science. As a result, they are taught little about anything else. Even normal high schools and undergraduate degrees in the US allow students to take a broad range of topics, so to a typical Brit, my even more expansive liberal arts degree seems completely bonkers. How have they benefited me, my years of Ancient Greek and Spanish, my modules in Ethnomusicology, Linguistics, Cultural Anthropology and the dozens of other modules I was required to take outside of my Biology major? I even got credits on my transcript for playing in the steel drum band and the Javanese gamelan ensemble and being part of the Ultimate Frisbee team.

I’m not sure it made me a better scientist, but I’m sure it made me a better person. The botany class where I learned about “camper’s friend” was run co-run by Dr David Benzing, an expert in epiphytes, and George Jones, a 90-year-old alumnus who led us around the local woods and fields collecting specimens and telling us stories about which plants had medicinal or edible properties. You had to keep on your toes – he was quick as a flash and would start talking as soon as he reached the specimen of interest, whether or not the gaggle of students had caught up with him. The class began in the depths of winter, when it was so bitter cold that we had to use pencils to take notes because the ink in our ballpoint pens would freeze. Our first exam was a series of one hundred different winter tree twigs, laid out on the lab benches, which we had to identify by genus and species only by inspecting the color, texture and bud-scar pattern. Much of university life has faded, but I can still see those twigs laid out on the scuffed black epoxy resin, and various still-frames of happily collecting leaves and blooms as winter finally morphed into spring. On one occasion, an angry farmer charged over on his tractor, gun aimed squarely at us. Dr Benzing blanched, but the girls of the party looked up at him with big imploring eyes, flowers in our hair, and the man finally cracked a smile and lowered his weapon.

I have long since forgotten how to identify those one hundred Ohio trees, and am immersed in a different country with a different spectrum of flora. But as autumn deepens under golden sunshine and indigo-blue skies, I’m comforted by the familiar species of my youth: great mullein, yarrow, asters, the scatterings of horse chestnuts on the faded grass.

horse chestnut

Posted in Nostalgia | 3 Comments

In which climate apocalypse feels inevitable

Posted on July 18, 2022 by Jennifer Rohn
Cover for the Ministry For the Future

A dystopian future is already mostly here

Here in England, we are braced for an historic heat wave. The Met Office has issued its first ever ‘Red Warning of Extreme Heat‘ for much of the UK, with temperatures set to reach a new record of 40 degrees C today. It hasn’t rained here for many weeks, and the grass is baked brown and tinder-dry. On the Met Office map, a sinister blob of scarlet spreads over otherwise orange terrain, and if you zoom out to the rest of the continent, it’s the same in many other countries. Wildfires burn in Spain, Portugal and France, and a number of people have already died.

Some of my America friends seem bemused that the Brits are panicking about mere 104 degrees F temperatures, but you have to keep in mind that we aren’t equipped for this. Even in slightly less intense heat waves, people die here. The vast majority of homes, and many offices, do not have air conditioning or decent insulation. A number of people commute by trains, whose tracks start to warp in extreme heat.

It’s a big deal because it’s not normal – though of course, sadly, it’s part of our coming new normal. A new normal that feels inevitable now. I consider my last trip to the beach in a car burning fossil fuel, and think: how strange/reckless/crazy/amazing will this activity seem to someone twenty years from now, a hundred, five hundred? When I write in my journal about my lush green garden, where I can wander out and pluck an apricot from a tree, will this seem like some sort of paradise lost?

Climate change, and how on earth we are going to fix it, is the subject of Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel The Ministry for the Future – a story that starts with a deadly heatwave in India and goes downhill from there for its characters. It’s one of those books that has lingered long after I tucked it away on a shelf. A strange sort of novel, it focuses on a governmental policy team in the very near future – 2025 – trying to turn around the planet-sized oil tanker of climate change using a series of incentives and punishments both small and large, ranging from global to intensely local. Being in uncharted territory, the team just throws whatever they have at the problem and sees what sticks. Nothing is off the table, not even government-sanctioned black ops and guerrilla manoeuvres. Although it’s like trying to fight a forest fire with a squirt gun, momentum gathers in interesting ways as the drama plays out over many decades. The main storyline is intercut with hundreds of vignettes, first-hand accounts of what the dying planet is doing to individual people all over the world. The picture slowly builds, blinding-bright sunlight splintered through a glass shard of narrative.

By the end, all you can think is: we might just be able to pull this off. But how to convince everyone else that we need to? Persuading others to read this book might be a good first step – a droplet against an inferno, perhaps, but someplace to start.

Posted in Policy, Science fiction, Staring into the abyss | 2 Comments