A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change
Essay
Westmount, Quebec: Linda Leith Publishing, 2013.
Hamburg, Germany: Alouette Verlag, 2014. Unsere Welt in Gefahr. Klimawandel und Zivilisation. [German translation by Jürgen Brócan und Kerstin Zimmermann].
In spite of its disturbing implications, the impact of climate change on our physical environment can be difficult for us to understand or imagine. Moving from a memoir of a journey through an abundant yet fragile natural world to the daunting scientific evidence that climate change will lead to the degradation of nature and upheaval within society, this essay offers a lucid personal approach to the pivotal dilemma of our time. In a wide-ranging discussion that embraces science, history, art, language and identity, A Green Reef offers the reader an understanding of what climate change means for life on earth.
Henighan writes with clarity, passion, and energy, exposing a deeply personal vision of how climate change may undermine the world we live in. At a time when most of the writing on this topic is done by scientists who debate data and argue methods, A Green Reef stands out as an evocative and emotional reminder of everything we have to lose unless we pay much closer attention to the world that surrounds us and the changes we are causing in it
Part biography, part cultural criticism, part jeremiad, Henighan’s short volume ranges over the causes, prognoses and ethics of a warming world. Throughout the book, there is constant alarm at humanity’s lack of alarmism.
The most thoughtful policy essay of 2013.
In this short but immensely important book….Henighan makes clear that nothing less than the good of humankind, if not our very survival, is at stake…. As I slowly closed the last page I was emotionally wrenched.
His very personal and hence also constantly self-critical polemic takes none of its own claims for granted…. It is very well suited to offer us a new perspective on our climate activism. We need this little book.
Stephen Henighan sees climate problems in various places. The Ontario novelist, translator and literature professor has written powerful text on the consequences of climate change for our civilisation.
