The term BC. For me it would probably be BL.
Before Lessing I used to worry about the disappearance of species, I used to be a member of several wildlife organizations and all those books I studied as part of my two papers of environment studies made me diligently turn off the tap and keep plastic, to an extent, out of my life.
Not that I still don’t cringe at the sight of a tree stump or even that of a mutilated tree. But suddenly a report on penguins dying out in the Antartic and all this shoo-sha all over the world this year about global warming, leaves me, well, cold. Where once I would have sighed and felt horrible, I just turned the page. What was I thinking? That it’s simply a prophesy coming true?

Candace pointed to the very top of the globe. “Look,” she said, and they saw a small cap of white. “Ice,” said Candace. “Just a little, at the top of the world. And the bottom, too, this small shape of ice. That is how the world was once—they say about twenty thousand years ago, but perhaps it was more—there was no ice or snow here… it was warm. All of this. They think that for fifteen thousand years all this area was free of ice, and during that time there were civilizations. They were much more advanced than anything we know. And then the climate changed, and the ice came down and covered all this space…

So does that make me insensitive? Or simply fearless because fear mostly comes from the unknown? Or perhaps we should still do our bit because if we don’t the process will simply be accelerated?
Which brings me to another L thought. That we go on discovering things and using technology and hurtling ahead without ever stopping to think of the consequences of what we are doing. But if we did stop to think, would we be able to stop anything? Well, according to her in her latest book, we have been trying for years to make that restless male of the species try to understand; but it doesn’t work. And just for the record, it’s called ‘nagging’.