On Time and Water – A Conversation with Andri Snær Magnason

The warming of the planet is ushering in changes on a mythological scale. Oceans heat up, ice shelves melt, great floods swallow landscapes, ancient forests are reduced to ash. In this interview from our archive, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason speaks about how such incomprehensible changes are accelerating geological timescales. Instead of playing out over millennia, vast transformations of the Earth are now happening in the span of a lifetime, and in rapid succession. An accompaniment to The Last Ice Age—the third film in our Shifting Landscapes film series—this conversation with Andri explores how we can shift our sense of time to comprehend an uncertain future with greater clarity. Drawing on poetry, memories, stories from his grandparents, and language that infuses meaning into the data-led narrative of the climate crisis, Andri turns to the power of mythology to help us comprehend both the loss and possibility of our moment.

Read the transcript.

Watch the film The Last Ice Age, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the third in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

Photo by Gassi Olafsson.

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