On Time and Water Quotes

“Those who define the world based on money, industry and production capacity have seemingly been spared from acquiring an understanding of biology, geology or ecology. They calculate statistics and feel optimistic. What’s fatal to the Earth and unsustainable for the future is hidden by the words ‘favorable economic outlook’. Increased oil production is positive for the economy; doubling aluminium production is positive. Economic growth doesn’t distinguish sustainability and unsustainability. Imagine making no distinction between strengthening or fattening, or between a child or a tumour growing in the womb. Growth is simply presented as an inherent good; there’s no distinction made between malignant and benign growth.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Those who define the world based on money, industry and production capacity have seemingly been spared from acquiring an understanding of biology, geology or ecology. They calculate statistics and feel optimistic. What’s fatal to the Earth and unsustainable for the future is hidden by the words ‘favorable economic outlook’. Increased oil production is positive for the economy; doubling aluminium production is positive. Economic growth doesn’t distinguish sustainability and unsustainability. Imagine making no distinction between strengthening or fattening, or between a child or a tumour growing in the womb. Growth is simply presented as an inherent good; there’s no distinction made between malignant and benign growth.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“For most people, the phrase 'climate change' is just white noise. Easier to have opinions on smaller matters. We can comprehend the loss of something valuable, can comprehend when an animal is shot, when a project blows past its agreed-upon budget. But when it comes to the infinitely large, the sacred, to things that are fundamental to our lives, there's no comparable reaction. It's as if the brain cannot register at such a scale.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Anche se la spudorata devastazione di quel luogo tanto speciale mi rattristava molto, ho optato per parole che tutti potessero considerare sensate e adeguate. Ho usato il linguaggio predominante del liberismo, dell'innovazione, dell'utilitarismo e del marketing. Ho parlato dell'importanza di quella zona per l'immagine dell'Islanda, delle sue potenzialità per il mercato turistico, del suo valore per la ricerca scientifica e della possibilità che gli altipiani interni fossero utilizzati come set cinematografici o pubblicitari, attirando così valuta straniera. [...] Ma viviamo in tempi in cui è il denaro a misurare la realtà. Non potevo giustificare il diritto della natura all'esistenza e il suo valore argomentando che lì si trovavano i vasti silenti spazi degli dei.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, Um tímann og vatnið

“Glaciers are frozen manuscripts that tell stories just like tree circles and sedimentary deposits; from them, you can gather information and create a picture of the past. Glaciers store histories of volcanic activity. They store pollen, rainwater and air that reveal the chemical make-up of the atmosphere tens of thousands of years back in time. They are important sources of details about vegetation and precipitation of the past.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Planktonic algae produce 60 per cent of all Earth’s oxygen through photosynthesis and will be adversely affected by global warming and ocean acidification. Adult fish and even adult krill appear to tolerate changes in acidity reasonably well, but at larval levels marine animals can be sensitive to temperature, salinity, acidity and calcium saturation. If all these factors go haywire, there is likely to be a collapse of the species that forms the basis of the food chain.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Chrániš len to, čo miluješ,
miluješ len to, čo poznáš.
Poznáš len to, čo ťa naučili

G. P. Ólafsson”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Keby človek stále len premýšľal, čo všetko sa môže prihodiť, neurobil by nikdy nič.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Len si to predstav. 262 rokov. Čas, ktorý prepájaš. Tvoj čas je časom niekoho, koho poznáš, máš rada a kto ťa formuje. A tvoj čas je aj časom niekoho, koho raz spoznáš a budeš mať rada; čas, ktorý vytvoríš.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“In the latter part of the twentieth century, although the world was ideologically divided, two military blocks, people found a new world of coexistence despite different ideas and armies. By the end of that century, dictatorships fell in Europe. They still remain in Asia, of course.” “How do you feel about the twenty-first century?” “I believe that this century can be a happier one.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“A new paradigm has come to centre stage: the future of our Earth and its atmosphere. Education systems now need to prepare a whole generation for a working life based on humans being able to coexist in balance with the very foundations of life. Why should we learn ethics? Because the coming years will be full of moral challenges. Why learn algebra? We will need to absorb hundreds of gigatons of CO2 and no one knows how to go about that right now. Why study poetry and ancient songs? Because poetry is the silver thread of the human spirit; without it, human existence is unthinkable.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“My favorite section is about usefulness: Thirty spokes coming together make up a wheel but it is the hole for the axle that makes the wheel useful. We throw clay to shape pots which work because they are hollow. Men cut out doors and windows and the house’s empty space inside makes it useful. For existence to bear fruit what does not exist is most useful.30”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Sullo schermo le diapositive continuano a scorrere: adesso sono più che altro foto di loro due sugli sci. Il nonno trasporta legname nel rifugio sopra la Draumadalur, nei Bláfjöll. Il rifugio si chiamava Himnaríki, che significa «paradiso». Quindi Himnaríki í Draumadalur sarebbe «un paradiso nella valle dei sogni». [...]
«Il nome Himnaríki creava qualche malinteso», dice la nonna sorridendo. «Una volta la nostra amica Magga era in autobus con il figlio, che le chiese: "Dov'è papà?" "È in paradiso con Árni", rispose lei. "E quando torna?" "Lunedì". Sull'autobus c'era un prete, che le toccò il braccio e le disse con profonda partecipazione, ma molto serio: "Deve dire la verità al bambino, cara signora!"»”
― Andri Snær Magnason, Um tímann og vatnið

“Per tutto il XX secolo abbiamo preteso che la terra ci fosse utile, abbiamo voluto aumentarne la resa [...]. Buonsenso, lo abbiamo chiamato. A che ci serve una palude? Perché avere tante mosche? Perché non liberarci della concorrenza di volpi e coccodrilli? Decidiamo di salvaguardare una zona solo quando ne vediamo l'utilità pratica: la sua trasformazione in un parco nazionale o in un'attrazione turistica; e l'utilità dev'essere quantificabile, almeno in termini di profitto: occupazione, merchandising e attività collegate. Quando si parla della barriera corallina si citano sempre la pesca e il turismo. L'arte, la giustifichiamo con le vendite e il volume d'affari. La cultura e la scienza devono sempre trovare la loro legittimazione nei beni di consumo e nell'occupazione che creano.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Per tutto il XX secolo abbiamo preteso che la terra ci fosse utile, abbiamo voluto aumentarne la resa [...]. Buonsenso, lo abbiamo chiamato. A che ci serve una palude? Perché avere tante mosche? Perché non liberarci della concorrenza di volpi e coccodrilli? Decidiamo di salvaguardare una zona solo quando ne vediamo l'utilità pratica: la sua trasformazione in un parco nazionale o in un'attrazione turistica; e l'utilità dev'essere quantificabile, almeno in termini di profitto: occupazione, merchandising attività collegate. Quando si parla della barriera corallina si citano sempre la pesca e il turismo. L'arte, la giustifichiamo con delle vendite e il volume d'affari. La cultura e la scienza devono sempre trovare la loro legittimazione nei beni di consumo e nell'occupazione che creano.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Estoy escribiendo una mitología del presente.”
― andri snaer magnason, Sobre el tiempo y el agua

“—¿Y el sentido de la vida? ¿Lo ha encontrado usted? —Según mis creencias y mi experiencia, es decir mi propia vida, la felicidad radica en servir a los otros y serles útil.”
― andri snaer magnason, Sobre el tiempo y el agua

“A marine biologist came onstage and was particularly upbeat. He said we had to meet the 1.5-degree target, because that way only 70 to 90 per cent of the coral would disappear, and not all, as the two-degree Celsius rise projected. He spoke like this was a worthy fight. Despite my interest in these matters, I hadn’t been aware of this. Was he telling me, so very directly, that up to 90 per cent of the world’s coral would die out if we reached an almost impossible goal of keeping global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius? Was that knowledge available when people were deciding whether to aim for the two-degree goal? Was there a group of councillors who approved this on behalf of the Earth’s inhabitants? I thought back through the news from recent years and couldn’t remember television and radio broadcasts being interrupted by this decision. I do not remember an election where a nation mandated the elected government to sacrifice the world’s coral reefs. I didn’t recall coral reefs being used as leverage in negotiations: ‘The car manufacturers’ association celebrates victory.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Ocean acidification is one of the largest unique geological events that the Earth has undergone in the last fifty million years. And it introduces another concept to which we connect poorly: time itself. Although time is properly called linear, imagining that the ocean will change more in the next hundred years than it has in the last fifty million years is a challenge. The time since Iceland’s settlement is very short, not more than twelve times my Grandma’s life: eleven hundred years. The history of Iceland is, in a sense, a continuous story of twelve women like my Grandma. Twelve girls who were born and lived lives that each felt like a flash. Twelve women in their nineties stretching out their hands as if they’re doing water aerobics, touching flat palms together. Their eyes gleam because time passes so fast that their eyes don’t realise they’re nearly a hundred years old. Time runs so fast that Jesus was born around twenty-one grandmas ago. They’d all fit in a single city bus, even if you added all their husbands. The earliest written records of humans date back five thousand years, events that happened practically yesterday. Humanity first emerged the day before that, in comparison to the ocean’s fifty-millionyear history.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“You had to be able to use nature, in some way, even if only as the backdrop for a car commercial. Nothing is allowed to have an undefined purpose; everything must be quantifiable, regardless of whether the metrics match the reality or not. The power to define reality and to discuss the value of nature belongs to economics. Politicians talked down the region, saying it was nothing special. The farmers who ‘owned’ the land went to the papers and sounded off about how the area really wasn’t particularly remarkable, how it was primarily city folk who were losing their minds over the situation: ‘To be honest, I’d be happy not to have to go all the way up there into the ravines to round up the sheep each year.’ I was part of the crowd arguing”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“When two of Grandma Hulda’s siblings, Gudrún and Valur, were born weak and vulnerable, a priest was called, not a doctor. And they died. Now that the Earth is in trouble, should we call an economist or an ecologist?”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Molte persone hanno avuto negli ultimi mesi la sensazione di vivere un'apocalisse, ma occorre ricordare che il significato della parola greca apokálypsis è «rivelazione». In questo senso i fatti recenti sono stati un'apocalisse: hanno rivelato la nsotra vulnerabilità, lo smog, le nostre catene di distribuzione, la competenza o incompetenza dei governi, le disparità e i privilegi. Ci hanno mostrato che la salute non è una questione individuale, perché la salute di ogni individuo del pianeta è legata alla salute di ogni altro individuo del pianeta ― e che la salute di tutti dipende a sua volta dalla salute degli ecosistemi della Terra.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, Um tímann og vatnið

“The surface of the Earth measures 510 million square kilometres and the holiest places for both Christians and Jews, and one of the three holiest sites for Muslims, can all be found in the same square kilometre. That small piece of land is the religious centre for four billion of Earth’s inhabitants, most of them further subdivided into sects, many thinking they have nothing in common with the others. Everyone interprets words in their own way, and so it has been for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Even the Church on Calvary Hill is divided between five or six denominations, and there is a constant tension over territory.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“We drove for miles, past half-constructed houses, block after block after block, forty-storey towers standing on the ruins of old Beijing neighbourhoods. The driver told us the flats were empty. People invested in them, but did not want to rent them out: rental rates weren’t high enough and a brand-new flat was easier to resell than a ‘used’ apartment. These were hundred-square-metre bank accounts. By 2018, around fifty million flats stood empty in China, according to estimates. Enough to accommodate the entire population of Germany – and France, too.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“If one thing characterises our time, it’s the struggle over words, the power to define the world and its economy, the power to report and shape the news. That struggle is about deciding how the world is worded. Words create reality; owning words and the means to distribute them is crucial to all powers.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“We do not see fire; we rarely see coal or oil. We’re frequent flyers but we have no idea about the size of the bonfire that could be ignited with 20 tons of jet fuel. We buy our airline tickets online but we never have to check in the oil barrels that will carry us out into the world. Take the time I went to a two-day poetry festival in Lithuania, a journey of around 1,750 miles, the same distance as Chicago to Los Angeles. A barrel of oil holds about 42 gallons, so a single airline passenger burns through about three-quarters of a barrel on such a flight: up to one gallon every 60 miles.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“The term ‘ocean acidification’ was only coined in 2003, by the atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira. According to the media registry Tímarit.is, this concept first appeared in print in Icelandic, súrnun sjávar , in the newspaper Morgunbladid on 12 September 2006. After that, it appeared once in 2007, never in 2008 and twice in 2009. By contrast, the word ‘profit’, hagnadur , came up 1,170 times in 2006 and 540 times in 2009, according to the same source. By 2011, the debate had developed only so far as to warrant five print occurrences of ‘ocean acidification’. ‘Kardashian’ appeared 180 times.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“La bella notizia è che gran parte del cambiamento strutturale [necessario] può avvenire entro i limiti della nostra teconologia. E che in questi mesi ci siamo forse resi conto di poter fare a meno di molte delle nostre abitudini peggiori. Per prevenire il disastro climatico non sarebbe necessario assumere comportamenti estremi comè stato nel caso della pandemia. Molte delle cose che abbiamo smesso di fare - abbracciare la nonna, goderci le vie affollate, stringere la mano ad uno sconosciuto, andare ai concerti, alle partite, in biblioteca, a scuola e ai caffè - non influiranno sulla salute del pianeta: non sono queste le abitudini da abbandonare per contrastare il riscaldamento globale. La speranza è che l'apocalisse, lo svelamento di tutto, ci abbia mostrato che cosa ci serve davvero e a che cosa possiamo rinunciare, e con che rapidità possiamo decidere di agire, se prendiamo sul serio i moniti lanciati dalla scienza.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, Um tímann og vatnið

“The wild highlands are a wide embrace, mountain blue. Their stillness quietens you, listening […] Fascinated you attend to your own soul’s breath, this essence you’ve forgotten about for years. It’s here you first perceive your spirit’s immeasurable expanse, and you stand still and astounded in the deep silence amid unspeakable reverence for your soul’s divinity. The distance, the mountain blueing, the great glacier’s dome, the weighty murmurations of silence—all this is reflected and echoed beneath your soul’s vault, spanning Heaven and Earth, your spirit’s wide horizon. You are moved to tears, resonant as a tremulous bell in the pregnant silence of God’s vast expanse, becoming one with it.4”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Quando nel 2010 l'Eyjafjallajökull eruttò, fermando per sei giorni il traffico aereo in tutta Europa, il rilascio di diossido di carbonio del vulcano arrivò più o meno al 40 per cento delle emissioni prodotte quotidianamente dai collegamenti aerei europei, ossia a circa 150.000 tonnellate al giorno.
Bloccando tutto il traffico aereo, il vulcano è riuscito dunque ad abbassare la concentrazione di CO2 nell'atmosfera di oltre mille tonnellate, diventando così il primo vulcano ambientalista della storia. Dietro ogni cosa che facciamo c'è un fuoco che brucia e un traffico che scorre come lava incandescente. In tutto il mondo le emissioni complessive prodotte dagli esseri umani corrispondono a seicento Eyjafjallajökull che eruttino giorno e notte per tutto l'anno. Se convertissimo in vulcani le emissioni prodotte dagli statunitensi, sarebbe come se cento Eyjafjallajökull eruttassero tutti i giorni e tutte le notti; più o meno due vulcani per ciascuno stato.
Il vulcano siamo noi, eppure quando ci guardiamo allo specchio non vediamo fiamme: tutto è così ben progettato che la combustione è invisibile.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, Um tímann og vatnið