Andri Snær Magnason is an award winning author of On Time and Water, The Casket of Time, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Story of the Blue Planet. His work has been published in more than 35 languages. He has a written in most genres, novels, poetry, plays, short stories, non fiction as well as being a documentary film maker. His novel, LoveStar got a Philip K. Dick Special Citation, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in France and “Novel of the year” in Iceland. The Story of the Blue Planet, was the first children’s book to receive the Icelandic Literary Award and has been published or performed in 35 countries. The Blue Planet received the Janusz Korczak Honorary Award in Poland 2000, the UKLA Award in the UK and Children's book of the Year in China. His book – Dreamland – a Self Help Manual for a Frightened Nation takes on these issues and has sold more than 20.000 copies in Iceland. He co directed Dreamland - a feature length documentary film based on the book. Footage from Dreamland and an interview with Andri can be seen in the Oscar Award-winning documentary Inside Job by Charles Ferguson. His most recent book, Tímakistan, the Time Casket has now been published in more than 10 languages, was nominated as the best fantasy book in Finland 2016 with authors like Ursula K. le Guin and David Mitchell. In English six books are currently available: Bónus Poetry, The Story of The Blue Planet, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Casket of Time, (Tímakistan) and On Time and Water.

Your time is the time of the people you know and love, the time that molds you. And your time is also the time of the people you will know and love. The time that you will shape.

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.

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 CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

So you have written a monument to Ok, the glacier which Iceland lost. If your country loses those other 200 or so glaciers, would Iceland become a place of no name? Will it lose its meaning?

ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON

If you look at the Himalayas, the frozen glaciers are feeding 1 billion people with milky white water. The real tragedy is if the Himalayan glaciers go the same way as Iceland. In many places in the world, glaciers are very important for agriculture and the basic water supply of people. So that's where I go into mythology in On Time and Water because in Nordic mythology, the world started with a cow, a frozen cow made of frost and snow. And it never made sense to me. But if you look at the Himalayas, how these frozen glaciers are feeding 1 billion people with milky white water that is better than normal water, then it makes total sense. Of course, the frozen cow - it's a glacier.  

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

We haven't really started to change. We know it's urgent, and in fact an emergency. You've seen the changes within Iceland. To go back to your family, your grandparents, you've seen the documentation of what they did as explorers of glaciers, documenting them. With the vanishing glaciers, that's a kind of dramatic in a visual. Some of the pillars of your book are water and time and also language and landscape. How did you reflect on these elements to bring them together to discuss what is really quite difficult to talk about, the big story of climate change.

SNÆR MAGNASON

When I was writing On Time and Water somebody said this is not just one book. This is about your grandmother, about glaciers. You have to focus. You can't have this mythology and glacial and ocean sites, speculations about words like ocean acidification, and your grandfather's sister who is visiting Tolstoy. You have to focus. You can't put all this into a book. And then I thought, oh yes, I forgot my favorite uncle, who was the researcher of crocodiles. I also have to put him into the book. And when I put the crocodile's story into the book, it was like a keystone. Everything fell into a whole picture.

Because we live in democratic societies and literature is an art of entertainment. People want to continue reading books, and it's based on instant ways of storytelling. Of course, it's strange to live in a society where we have to entertain ourselves to understand the most important issue in the world.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

I think it helps us understand the things that we value. Social connection or the arts are the things that move us. And unfortunately with our current systems, we have had to find a way to put price tags on things to make us want things that we don't need. So that now the things that we've manufactured outweigh organic matter, living creatures on this planet, it’s so out of balance. In your books there is also a deep spiritual element, a mythological element. You've collaborated with many artistic visionaries, and you've spoken to great spiritual leaders as well as scientists and those on the political level.

SNÆR MAGNASON

In the book, I was invited to interview the Dalai Lama twice. I was thinking, what do you ask a person that has been reincarnated 14 times? I also interviewed lots of scientists, and sometimes the gurus are more rational than scientists, and they talk about climate solutions. And I seek wisdom from my grandparents, and simple friendship and stories. They were both 98 years old, and I would ask them: "Is 100 years a long time or a short time?" And they would tell me it's a very short time.

And this climate scientist encouraged me to write and said, "People don't understand data, but they understand stories." And it's a very strong belief that the artist does have a role in our society. Sometimes he's an entertainer. Sometimes he's just documenting, but sometimes you maybe have a role in a very fundamental shift in our history. I think I could not be a writer here and now in history and not make some effort to address this issue.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You speak intimately about the lifespan or the loss of a glacier. There's a great poetic sensibility that helps connect us on this elemental, mythological level to make us care.

SNÆR MAGNASON

So I felt to explain the urgency, to use a tool of literature that has always been, which is poetry, but also mythology. When these leaders were meeting in Egypt last year. Sea levels. When was the last time in history that a leader of a group of people could influence the sea level? You have to go down to Moses to find a comparison of people moving the oceans or a person. And Moses was only moving small passages through the Red Sea, 16 kilometers wide. But these people among us were discussing a possible rise of sea level, globally of one meter or three feet. And that is nothing that anybody has spoken about in politics before, but we have already become numb to that fact.

That is, we already take it for granted that they will meet next year, and we mock them for arriving in private jets, and we're mocking them, but we don't hold our breath while they're meeting. It's not like it's the World Cup or the Super Bowl, which it should be. We should be holding our breath and we should be like, "Oh my God, China is not coming to the table. Oh no, America is dysfunctional. We should be on our toes watching this almost like life and death were at stake, which it is, but we don't think of it like that. So this alienation that can come with poetry, and to remind people to just take three steps backward and look at this in a 5,000-year perspective? You know, when did the world leaders meet to discuss the sea level?

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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 aluminum 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 tumor growing in the womb. Growth is simply presented as an inherent good; there’s no distinction made between malignant and benign growth.

– On Time and Water

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
SNÆR MAGNASON

So I have written plays, short stories, science fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and directed documentary films, including Not Ok. So professors from Rice University Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe are anthropologists doing research on climate change. And they noticed that Iceland had lost its first glacier to climate change. And just like we have monuments to major events like war monuments and anti-slavery monuments, humans have all sorts of monuments in history.

And they were thinking, the first glacier to be gone, doesn't that deserve a monument? So they planned this event where we would place a monument in memory of the first glacier Iceland lost to climate change and asked me to write the text for that plaque. And it was a strange request because for the person to be a writer, to be living during a time when a glacier has gone during a lifetime, what kind of an obituary or what kind of message do we write? Because I was thinking, Okay, I'm writing this in copper, so I'm writing to the people around me here and now, but just like in a graveyard, somebody might come after 200, 300, 500, 600 years and read these words.

So simultaneously addressing my peers, my fellow earthlings here and now, and then talking to people that might stumble upon that glacier in the near or distant future. So I wrote:

A letter to the future

Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.
In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
This monument is to acknowledge that we know
what is happening and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.

OK glacier, 2003, Photo by Oddur Sigurðsson CC BY-SA 4.0

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Henie Zhang.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).