Lost in Fathoms: Anaïs Tondeur in collaboration with Jean-Marc Chomaz, GV Art, London, until 29 November 2014

(Image: Anaïs Tondeur, On the traces of Nuuk Island (1), 2014, shadowgram, 11 x 24 cm / GV Art

Irrational ideas on economic growth, no water, vanishing islands. Two new books and an exhibition ask how we can live in the Anthropocene without going crazy

Humans are in trouble. We are running out of resources. We are running out of fresh water. We are even running out of sand.


While we study the challenges facing us, and protest about the actions that add to them, we still have to find purpose and meaning in our short lives. So, in the middle of an extinction event, and on the brink of a new, self-made geological era, the Anthropocene, what stance can we ordinary folk take? Two new books, and an exhibition recently opened in London, offer us different options.

In Collision Course, Kerryn Higgs’s learned and sincere bafflement at the way the world has gone is both familiar and oddly charming. At school, this Australian writer came across Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and thought it was bound to change everything. At university, she came across The Limits to Growth and assumed that change was imminent.

Economics trumps science

Now she’s older, and wiser, and not a little exasperated. How did economists supplant scientists as the pre-eminent voices of policy? And how did we come to assume that growth is society’s essential purpose? The sheer irrationality of our current state is Higgs’s theme, “the cultural production of ignorance”, and how science, “once regarded as an indispensable foundation of progress and an engine of invention for a century or more, came to be seen as a potential enemy of business in the course of two or three decades”.

After puzzlement, anger. The Price of Thirst is an intemperate and at times quite savage book by the geographer and anthropologist Karen Piper. Taking the trouble to conduct some first-hand research, she got caught in a blizzard of used diapers blown out of landfill near Huron, California, and then found plenty more to be angry about.

Take the Canadian mining company Barrick Gold’s proposal to melt glaciers on its land in Chile so it can mine underneath them. Or the Indian government’s plan to blind itself to the dismal history of heroic engineering, and go ahead with the largest inter-basin water transfer project in the world.

Piper’s rage at the sequestration and privatisation of global freshwater supplies is visceral. It would be tiresome if she had not got out of her chair and visited the sites and people she writes about. But she did, and the results are gripping.

Nuuk of the north

Or course, we still have to live here, however absurd the world becomes. At GV Art, a small gallery near London’s Baker Street, the French artist Anaïs Tondeur interrogates the tiny, barely charted Arctic island of Nuuk.

Was its disappearance in 2012 the triggering event of the Anthropocene? Can small catastrophes, say, the fracture of a single rock, trigger global climate events? Tondeur was at the gallery when I visited and delightedly showed me the wall-sized planner – all marker-pen and neon sticky notes – from which she has constructed Lost In Fathoms, a spare, monochrome and profoundly uncanny exhibition.

Shadowgraphs made of drawings, snapshots, mechanical and chemical and digital effects present a more vivid picture of the heroic age of Arctic exploration than period photographs ever could. A droplet of salty water, blown up to wall size, plummets through a tank of tap water in vivid mimicry of the thermohaline circulation that powers the Gulf Stream. An epic continental rupture is captured, with uncanny precision, in wax.

Beyond Higgs’s puzzlement and Piper’s anger, there is Tondeur’s resignation and dignity. Nuuk sank for every possible environmental, geological and human reason. It is beautiful and barren, alien and inhospitable; above all, it is lost.

Don’t look for Nuuk on the map. You’re standing on it.

Collision Course: Endless growth on a finite planet Kerryn Higgs MIT Press

The Price of Thirst: Global water inequality and the coming chaos Karen Piper Minnesota University Press