Eco-catastrophe literature

I am not so into the nowadays popular "chick-lit" (those novels like "Confessions of a shopaholic" actually give me goosebumps), but recently I've been reading some good "eco-lit" novels. The concept of eco-lit still needs to be branded though - here's my shot. (This is also my first shot of being a literature blogger.)

First I read the novel of one of my favourite authors Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood (2009) (in Finnish: Herran tarhurit). It's set somewhere in the future and describes a world of frightening technological developments and weird results of gene manipulation. Our near future in its gloominess is approaching biblical dimensions and the catastrophic developments have their sources in the recognizable present day developments. It is not only a story of an ecological disaster but also recounts the social division between the rich, in their barricaded neighbourhoods, and the rest (also rings a bell). The book has an Orwellian dimension in its description of private police forces protecting the giant corporation actually ruling the world (could be Monsanto...). The protagonists belong to an eco-tribe that combines in its ideology science, biblical announcements and a green way of living. The novel is actually science-fiction but the message is clearly related to the current state of affairs. Most probably for this reason its story is so fascinating and scary.

An even gloomier image of our future is depicted in Cormac McCarthy's excellent novel The Road (2006) (in Finnish: Tie). Something like a waterless flood or fire storm has swiped across the continent where a boy and his father are walking on the road trying to find food and avoid malicious bands of cannibals. Even though there is not much action in the book, it holds the reader as if watching a horror movie, the tension McCarthy has created is just amazing. While the reason for the disaster is never revealed, it is easy to understand that it is related to some man-made environmental catastrophe: the forests are burning, the roads have melted, the civilization has perished. It also poses an interesting question: what happens when the structures of the society vanish and there's no rule of law or state monopoly of violence, how can we re-organise a civilized (or even nutritionally sustainable) way of life and what makes solidarity and peaceful cooperation between people possible?  The underlying story goes to the very bottom of humanity and society. Eco-lit is pretty gloomy and, based on this novel, more inclined to cause depression than positive action... 


Here's the trailer for the film based on this book. I haven't seen the whole film but it looks like worth watching, though the writing in the novel doesn't necessitate any audiovisual guidance, I saw the happenings right in front of my eyes when reading The Road.

The third eco-lit experience of mine was a Finnish novel "Sarasvatin hiekkaa" (2005) (in English: The Sands of Sarasvati, not translated into English but there is a translated comic book based on the novel) by Risto Isomäki. This is the one of these three novels most openly about an ecological catastrophe (The Road is maybe more about the consequences, and the end of the civilization). 


Sarasvatin hiekkaa is an ecological thriller set in around year 2020: several scientists around the world are working on unrelated phenomena. However, as it turns out, things are all worryingly connected: an ancient city sunk in the Indian Ocean just like the Atlantis tale tells us, a suddenly vanished arctic lake near Greenland, gas eruptions in the bottom of the sea, a man trying to build snow-producing wind mills to prevent the melting of the icebergs. Isomäki is a science journalist and author himslef so the facts are pretty much correct and also much more interesting than the romantic sidelines in the novel. This is a description of how it could happen - how the world would come to an end as we know it; the icebergs would melt, the sea level would rise, a mega tsunami would hit the continents destroying cities and leaving people in destitution. But this is only the end of the book, the fascinating part is the "how and why". Isomäki tells the story of global warming and climate change in popular terms making geology, chemistry, marine archeology, history and geography all sound like the most exciting things in the world. It's a wonderful mix of separate fields of culture and science - and a handful of (quite well-founded) pessimism.

I need to make another blog entry about Isomäki's idea of snow-producing wind mills... or other gadgets that are actually being invented and experimented in order to avoid a catastrophe similar to the one in Isomäki's novel. They are reality, showing that Sarasvatin hiekkaa is not only science fiction.

All above-mentioned books deserve 5 stars although based on very different literary grounds. As I said, it's no light reading thematically but these were books that really stayed in my mind for a long time afterwards (indeed, I read Atwood already in August). I'm  already looking forward to my next eco-lit adventures, recommendations are welcome!

Just a quick note to say: sun

Forget what I wrote one month ago. Summer's in town and I've rarely been as content as now with my surroundings. I think I'm developing some kind of a crush with Helsinki. Suddenly, the city is green and people are filling the terraces and the streets (recorded during the past 48 hours: parks full of picnics, guys playing football / baseball / pétanque / frisbee, people swing dancing outside, summer collection 2012, Finnish ice cream not that bad after all, me in 100 tourist photos while sitting in Senaatintori for a lunch). Have all the cute Finns spend their winter in Thailand and only now have returned to the city? I don't understand, but this city has a double identity and I'm as bipolar as this place. I'm already missing the future past summer...

This kind of swing dancing (at least from far away it looked pretty great) was taking place in front of the National Opera today.

Actually, of all the places I've lived in or the other twenty or so capitals I've visited, I think I really prefer Helsinki (well, after Paris of course). There's so many cool things going on here, in two weeks time there has been a huge eco-design or Recycle Factory event, a flee market of the size of the whole city (called "the cleaning day") and the restaurant day when anybody can set up a pop-up restaurant in their home or elsewhere (I ate North African food in an art gallery, served by a Finnish ex-top model, and got my dessert from some Hungarian immigrants in the main esplanade of the city).

The cleaning day flee market in Fredan tori. I got a flower pot for one Euro.

P.S. This song and video is just great! I think I have to do some bachata classes in addition to my salsa classes to get those moves as well... Summer song definitely!

Spring nostalgia

Considering how much I miss certain places, moments or feelings, you could think I'm talking about Paris in the 60s, having drinks with Jane Birkin and discovering free love. This is not the case, it's just that in the spring time an indiscernible feeling of nostalgia emerges. I miss.

For some reason, I've been missing Boston especially lot lately: reading the Sunday New York Times in my favourite coffee shop with a wholewheat cranberry pecan scone. I don't fully understand why I miss the place, but I guess it has something to do with freedom and the endless number of opportunities that I seemed to have ahead of me at that moment. It's funny how in only two years time, I feel like I have limited my options quite drastically already - or other people have done it for me.

Last week I was in Brussels. I have a love-hate relationship with that city. The arrival is always chaotic and comes with a bitter smell of pee in the metro and train stations. In the centre, I look around and see poverty, homeless people, drug addicts and it feels like somebody could hurt me at any moment. I look down and stop smiling. It's a developing country next to the EU district and my 4-star hotel, maybe that is why the surroundings catch my attention so strongly. But there is something unidentifiably attracting in this city that I've also been missing in Helsinki.

It's not (only) the tasty beers or cute guys in Belga, the bar - together with Campari oranges - that I first discovered and fell in love with in the summer 2003. Those days the bar was full of guys wearing Lacoste T-shirts, then the ultimate brand for hip university students. However, it wasn't the Lacoste T-shirts that I had been missing (you hardly see them any more) but the possibility of meeting strangers and doing things ex tempore.

People in Brussels (just like the PhD researchers in Florence) are temporary residents, coming and going, interested in meeting new people and extending their social networks throughout the city or Europe. In Helsinki, people have the same friends they had in kindergarden, or at least for the last 5 to 10 years. The groups are tight, but it also means that it can be hard to dive in if you're a newcomer. One thing in Helsinki that has surprised me maybe the most is that groups don't mix: you seldom bring a new friend along for a dinner with other friends. Dinners and meetings need to be planned weeks ahead and few acts or invitations are improvised; it makes life a little less exciting.

In Brussels I met with a devoted Finnish scout and we went to a vernissage to which he happened to have an invitation. After a few glasses of champagne and discussions on contemporary art, I had agreed upon going to Burundi to represent the Finnish scouts in an African jamboree.

I miss it already.

The city on the move

At Engel's square, Eira. Looking South at the sea.

The perfect Easter weather continued still today and I couldn't resist going out even though my ankle was hurting pretty badly (can it be an inflammation?) after the 40km of running during the Easter holidays. My mum was as supportive as always, saying: "You shouldn't go to the half marathon with that little practice". She has difficulties in realizing that I might have changed from those school years when I hated sport. In contrast, my sister had an extra challenge for the Helsinki City Run, the goal of all this training: for every minute over her target time (i.e. 2h30 for a half-marathon for both of us), she'll donate 1 Euro for the protection of the Baltic Sea, and for every minute she'll run faster, she'll donate 50 cents. I decided to take this challenge as well - maybe giving an extra 5 Euros if I make it to the finish line in the first place.

The tower in the Sinebrychoff parc (or as the people here call it "Koff's parc"or just "Koffari"), built by the Russian brewery family in the early 19th century.

As for today, the city was on the move in their impeccable outdoor gear. Maybe I have mentioned this already, but I'm always amazed how the Finns invest in their outdoor clothing. The pejorative way of calling the Finns the "shell suit nation" (or more generally tracking suit nation) has got a new meaning as the people do their Sunday passegiata (the Italian way of having a walk and making an appearance in their best clothes) in expensive gore-tex clothes. Or maybe the shell suit nation has divided into two classes: the gore-tex nation and the shell suit nation. I did my passegiata, of course, in my vintage Gucci velvet skirt and Dior sun glasses (ah, what a snob!) that got their first spring appearance. But I think I did my fair share of shell suiting with those aforementioned 40km.

Anyhow, Eira and Punavuori looked gorgeous in the intense sun light. The Finnish flags are there because of the Mikael Agricola day (the guy who invented written Finnish in the 16th century), we are not that americanized (n.b. because we're quite americanized) that we'd have them around all the time.

The statue of Juhani Aho, a great Finnish author from the 19th century who also gave the name for my book club.

I quite like some of the recent additions to the neighbourhood. The wavy windows on the top floor are superbe.

Earth Hour 2012 and beyond

I spent an interesting afternoon thinking of and discussing global warming in Heureka, the Finnish Science Centre, where the WWF Finland had invited its supporters for a seminar on the issue. A great deal of information and inspiring action - not only talk. After the seminar, I visited the centre's exhibition Klima-X on global warming: the floor had been filled with 40 000 litres of water, an ice cube was melting in the middle and visitors wore yellow boots (see below). In the evening, it was time to switch off the lights for an hour to spread the message of climate change in the biggest voluntary environmental event in the world, the Earth Hour.

Let's start with the embarrassing facts. A Finn has a carbon footprint of around 10 tons, this is twice as much as for a Swedish person and 10 times as much as for an Indian (however, the Americans can make even us look ecological, they have a carbon footprint again twice as big as we do!). In order to reach a sustainable level of emissions, we should cut it at least by a half - to start with. In order to do so, we have to focus on three main issues:

1) Housing (the biggest source of CO2 emissions in Finland, around 30% of our footprint),

2) Transports (20%) and

3) Food (18%).

The WWF has analysed which actions would have the greatest impact on our emissions, here's the list and some thoughts about it:

1) Favour real local food. This means growing and gathering some of your food yourself. Replacing a fourth of your food consumption by real local food would decrease your carbon footprint by 150 kg/year. Having a vegetable garden would of course be fantastic, but I think, for pragmatism's sake, I'll content myself with eating local food that I can buy from the market or grocery stores. I don't know how much picking mushrooms on my own actually differs from buying local mushrooms picked by someone else (wondering around in a forest is of course great fun). My own idea is that eating local food is not only ecological but also contributes to the livelihood of the countryside communities and small family farms.

However (!), as we heard in the seminar, the transportation of food represents only a small share of the CO2 emissions in the food production chain. Actually, one of the speakers, Tuuli Kaskinen, said that it's better to eat even tropical fruits if they just are seasonal instead of demanding local arctic strawberries in the winter time. In short, the key is to buy seasonal products no matter where they are produced. Obviously still, a beetroot or potato is more ecological than an avocado.

2) Reduce the amount of wasted food. An average Finn throws away 60 kg of food every year. By reducing this amount, you can save 190 kg emissions in a year. In a very illuminating documentary film, it was revealed that almost half of the food produced in the world doesn't end up feeding us. This phenomenon also increases the food prices hurting the poorest people in the world the most. Living alone, it is easy to monitor my own food consumption and I hardly ever throw anything away, if I do, it is with awful shame and regret. I wish other people would have this same green consciousness when they do their daily groceries. I guess one of the underlying problems is (for this and other climate change issues as well) the long distance to super markets: as people try to manage with only one weekly trip to the super market they end up buying much more than they actually need. In contrast, I go to the local small grocery store every second day to get my single-persons's portion of fresh veggies and bread.

3) Reduce by half your meat consumption. This reduces your carbon foot print by 200 kg/year. I completely agree with the author Risto Isomäki who at the end of the seminar said that halving is an absolute minimum as he believes that the gas emissions of meat production are most probably even bigger than we think not to mention the huge consumption of water connected to it, the pollution of the seas due to factory farming and the farms being a potential birth place of many disastrous diseases as seen with the swine flu. Tuuli Kaskinen gave some information on the emissions of different products:

Tofu or soya 2,0 kg CO2 emissions / kg

Poultry 3,6 kg

Pork 5,6 kg

Cheese 13 kg

Beef 19 kg (also the biggest consumer of water and if the beef comes from Brazil, the CO2 rises to 41 kg per one kilo of beef)

4. Map the energy consumption in your house. This can save up to 1640 kg/year. This way you can easily improve the energy efficiency in your house. Recommended especially for those lovely old villas with leaking attics and catastrophic insulation. Economic incentives are of course pretty inviting.

5. Change to green energy. An impact of 1100 kg/year in your carbon footprint. I have luckily been using ecological sources of energy in my flat ever since I was able to choose the firm myself, it's actually not even more expensive really. The more there are people using wind power or switching to solar panels, the cheaper these alternative sources of energy will be. Risto Isomäki told how solar panels cost half of what they used to after the decision of Spain and Germany to purchase them in large quantities. This means that the decision of one person can impact on some others and eventually make an exclusive form of energy available to large masses.

6. Heating your house with geothermal heat. An important impact of 1360 kg/year. Sweden is already subsidizing the building of geothermal heat pumps, and we should definitely follow them. No wonder, our dear neighbour is so much ahead of us in terms of carbon footprint. In the seminar film director John Webster answered a question on how much we should reduce our carbon footprint: "Just anything lower than in Sweden would be good." I wish the Finns would take the carbon footprint battle against the Swedes as seriously as our ice hockey matches.

7. Reduce your commuting emission. One day of teleworking a week would reduce carbon footprint by 146 kg/year, while changing to public transports is of course a must. I'm in a good position of being able to walk to work. But I know many who wouldn't take the 30 minutes walk every morning. This issue shows again how our whole urban planning should be thought over from an ecological point of view. Remote suburbs cannot be sustainable unless you accompany them with a metro line.

8. Replace car with a bike. It's the season! Biking 100 km a week during the green season reduces CO2 emission by 470 kg/year. We need better biking lanes as well as more tolls and less parking slots for cars in the centre. Equals better health for you and the planet.

9. More travelling by train instead of air plane. Try to replace one trip to the Southern Europe by plane and visit e.g. St. Petersburg by train instead, you'll reduce your CO2 emissions by 1140 kg / year. I've already planned a trip to Russia this spring by train. And obviously elsewhere in Europe, it's only easier.

The problem of climate change is unavoidable but we can impact on the extent of the problem with our own action. One way to demonstrate our interest, worry and willingness to act is the annual Earth Hour, organised today, the 31st March, for the sixth time. Last year it gathered 1.8 billion people to switch off the lights for one hour and this year the expected number of participants is 2 billion. The lights on Eiffel tower, Olympic Stadium in Helsinki, Sydney Opera Hall etc. are switched off from 20h30 to 21h30 local time. I had candlelit tea and crêpes. Symbolic things like this give hope, I even got a bit emotional watching this video.

Solitary people

This morning I went running despite the grey and foggy weather. I could barely see hundred metres in front of me and the sea didn't have any horizon. At one point, I could spot a few men emerging from the sea. Six men, each one around 20 metres from the next one, sitting on their little foldable chairs ice-fishing by the small hole in the ice. An absurd sight, or rather, what a curious hobby (an example on this equally curious Youtube video, the basic ice-fishing vocabulary includes, at least according to this video, "jumalauta" = fucking hell, "saatana"= damn, "vittu"=fuck, "kahden kilon siika"=2kg whitefish).

Visit Finland website writes: "At some point in their life, almost every Finn has sat by an ice hole, ice-fishing for perch, the national fish of Finland. Many have got such a bite on the end of their lines that this has kindled a lifelong spark for fishing." Honestly, I can't imagine what kind of a bite would get me to try out ice-fishing.

At the same time, ice-fishing reflects so well the Finnish solitary mentality (Visit Finland calls it "Finnish meditation"). While the elderly Italian signori gather around the fountain in the central piazza of the town to sip some aperitif together, the Finns take their lunch packs and enjoy their solitude in the cold and wind, alone on the ice. I wonder if my generation of men continues to do so - if the behaviour and mentality haven't changed, maybe there won't be any cold winters to practice ice-fishing in 30 years time in any case.

P.S. Five years ago in South America me and my friends complained about the ubiquitous reggaeton music. Yesterday, I went to a reggeaton dance class to shake the booty. My moves surely need some polishing, but the two guys on the class were just hopeless and not making any difference between hips or shoulders. However, I appreciated them trying out. Two men less going ice fishing...

Sounds and sensations

During my cosmopolitan years, I forgot many of the sounds, odours, and other sensations familiar to Finland. What a great feeling to rediscover them again and the reminiscences they bring to my mind.

In the autumn, it was the wonderful scent of fallen leaves. Wading through the piles of colourful leaves and kicking them in the air, feeling like a child again. All the memories of the starting of the school year came to my mind, something new and exciting. I couldn't stop breathing in the autumnal parfum with long inhales.

In the beginning of the winter, it was the sight from the window of everything being covered in white one morning. The snow made the sounds softer and the city life seemed to decelerate. I had forgotten the ability to balance my walk on the icy street but the skill of guiding a sled downhill hadn't disappeared anywhere.

Now, as the winter is discreetly turning into spring (at least, in my hopes), I'm rediscovering the sound of drops as melting snow is running down the rain pipes. Tip, tip, tip! Every day is longer than the previous one. The forgotten brightness of the sun getting more strength from the icy sea and the snow-coated fields dazzles the eyes.

The snow piles in the shadowy sides of the streets look like everlasting, they will be there for another month probably. They are dirty; the exhaust fumes, city's pollution and sand have been accumulating there for the past two months. The melting snow is creating brown channels in the streets.

Soon, the snow will give way to the spring, to the smell of decomposing organic life. The lovely feeling of first unzipping the winter coat, getting rid off the thick gloves, and the gradual undressing until the Midsummer, a process unfamiliar to the Southern countries where the change is faster and less striking.

No wonder, the Finns are among the happiest people in Europe (after the Danish). Only after the dark, long and cold winter can one appreciate life as we do. The Finnish winter offers us an opportunity for a collective survival. The affordable winter holidays in Thailand must be hampering the social cohesion in Finland...

P.S. The two bears in the Helsinki zoo woke up after their 4 months of winter sleep. Lucky bastards - but oh so cute!

Severe weather warning from Florence

I need to add here this warning I received in my Florentine email account. It fits so well with my previous entries about my problems with the slippery streets in Helsinki. Why didn't anybody warn me about these things in Finland???

SEVERE WEATHER WARNING

Weather forecasts for the next 24 hours report heavy snow falling all over the region of Tuscany, including Florence, and very low temperatures (as low as -10° C), so we recommend:

your utmost attention when walking on slippery and/or icy ground;

driving your car only if equipped with winter tyres or snow chains (as requested by the local authorities);

using the telephone number set up by the Comune di Firenze (Public Safety Service) in case of emergency

The Institute will salt all access roads (both for vehicles and pedestrians) and pavements.

In general, we recommend the utmost caution when driving or walking.