Drowning the Future

“The burning of fossil fuels has altered the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere so rapidly and so abundantly that now we are driving not just the warming trend, not just the sea level rise that is a consequence of the warming trend…but also ocean acidification.”

– Sylvia Earle

In the July issue of Odyssey magazine we take a look at the rich seam of dystopian fiction depicting worlds that have been overcome by rising sea levels, taking Clive Simpson’s recently published novel Flood Waters Down as our starting point. In a season of drought it may seem paradoxical to talk of biblical inundations, but the impact of climate disruption, together with a loss of biodiversity and the ecological stability that generates, can have unexpected consequences, outcomes that are difficult to predict and all but impossible to control. We tamper with our climate and our oceans – which do much to drive and regulate that climate – at our peril.

The high water mark for this branch of fiction remains J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and by association it’s antithesis The Drought.

J.G.Ballard

Both stories feature the familiar “Ballardian” anti-hero as he explores a world radically different from the one he used to know and now finds himself utterly adrift from. In The Drought, Dr Charles Ransom is obliged to leave his houseboat and all the memories of his past life (condensed in the limestone paperweight which resides on his desk, “bearing a quantum of Jurassic time like a jewel”) to hunt for water in an ever widening sea of dunes. A desert – complete with stranded ships and failed water condensers – in which a cult of rogue fishermen press-gang new recruits by hurling their patched and redundant fishing nets through the dry air, catching their quarry with a messianic fervour.

In The Drowned World, biologist Dr Robert Kerans tries to make sense of a London flooded by melting ice caps and which is now largely covered by tropical lagoons and from which fragments of the city emerge like the sub-structure of a malarial dream. Typically for one of Ballard’s main characters, Kerans rejects any attempt to return to his old life, choosing instead to embark on an open ended journey down a tidal river which exists as much in his own mind as it does in reality, inevitably evoking Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its famous cinematic adaption, Apocalypse Now.

London succumbs to tropical lagoons, the haunt of iguanas and alligators, in Ballard’s hallucinatory novel.

In both novels there is that familiar sense that we are reading history written ahead of its time, and that both outcomes are equally valid: a desert world and one in which the oceans have fully reclaimed the land. The ultimate karma for our species would be the latter: that the Earth may become a water planet at a time when we have all but emptied those oceans of life. A world whose seas are as lifeless as those of the Moon (whose “ocean basins” – in effect a palimpsest of overlapping craters – are filled with nothing but dust).

If Mr Ballard’s vision comes to pass (as seems increasingly likely) we may yet live to see our world undone by flood rather than by fire.

As the continents slip beneath the sea, our world may become “Planet Ocean,” rather than “Planet Earth,” which is perhaps what it has always been.