Margaret Atwood: the Amoeba's Tale

Robert McCrum

[Margaret] Atwood's pressing interest, as the daughter of an eminent Canadian entomologist, is our planet and its future. Nothing seems more important to her, and since this concern animates almost everything she does, her conversation segues as easily into global warming as Canadian literature: "The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet – it's a threat to us."

She goes on: "The planet will be OK in its own way. No matter what we do to it, we won't eliminate every last life form from it." As evidence of this, there's the Canadian city of Sudbury, a favourite of Atwood's. When she was growing up in the 1940s, the place was as "barren as the moon" through overlogging, forest fires and relentless mining. "All the rain was acid," she says. It was so bad that "a Sudbury" became a unit of pollution. But then a volunteer programme of regeneration was launched. Earth and seeds were painstakingly stuffed into the cracks between the rocks. Now, "Sudbury has forests again, birds in the trees and fish in the streams." For her, Sudbury, "a symbol of hope", offers a paradigm for the planet.

And so, Atwood continues, with rather bracing realism, "some form of life will remain after us. We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here."

Atwood likes to tell the Amoeba's Tale as an illustration of the "magic moment" at which planet earth now finds itself. There's this test tube, and it's full of amoeba food. You put one amoeba in at 12 noon. The amoeba divides in two every minute. At 12 midnight the test tube is full of amoebas – and there's no food left. Question: at what moment in time is the tube half full? Answer: one minute to midnight. That's where we are apparently. That's when all the amoebas are saying: "We are fine. There's half a tube of food left."

"If you don't believe me," Atwood persists, "look at the proposed heat maps for 20, 30, 50 years from now, and see what's drying up. Quite a lot, actually, especially in the equatorial regions and the Middle East, which will be like a raisin. It's become a race against time and we are not doing well. The trouble with politicians [at events like the Copenhagen summit of 2009] is that no one wants to go first, go skinny dipping and take the plunge. Oh, and then you have people arguing about fatuous things like the environment and human rights. Go three days without water and you don't have any human right. Why? Because you're dead. Physics and chemistry are things you just can't negotiate with. These," she concludes with a kind of grim relish, "these are the laws of the physical world."

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The Observer 28–Nov–2010 >>>

Sight-specific

In developing nations, where over half the population requires corrective lenses but often do not have the money to purchase them, Oxford Physics Professor Joshua Silver has a viable solution. Adaptive Eyecare glasses are a liquid-filled alternative whose prescription can be altered at the time of fitting simply by adjusting the amount of injected liquid into the flexible membrane lens. By injecting more or less liquid using the attached syringes, the lenses become more convex (a stronger prescription) or concave (a weaker prescription). The patient, at the time of fitting, simply alters the amount of injected liquid while wearing the glasses, until they can see perfectly. The syringes are then removed, the lenses sealed, and the glasses are ready to wear. Each pair currently sells for just under $20 USD, though Joshua Silver, who is now director of the non-profit Centre for Vision in the Developing World at the University of Oxford, hopes to soon offer them for under $5.

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Project H Design

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POSTSCRIPT

Fetishised form facilitates refined function ...

LE CORBUSIER c.1938

In the days of the Yellow Emperor...

In the days of the Yellow Emperor, there was a Minister of Laws who believed that there was nothing perfect in this world, until the day he had a daughter. She was beautiful and intelligent and affectionate. There was not one hair on her head that he would change. ‘For my perfect daughter, I need a perfect man,’ he told the people. So he passed a new law: only a man who could draw a perfect circle could marry his daughter. Many men tried. And every man failed. Then came the day when there was only one man left who had not yet tried. He was in the dungeon, being punished for failing to show respect to the many laws of the country. The man in the prison said: ‘If you let me out, I will draw six perfect circles.’ His daughter was lonely for a husband so the Minister let him out. ‘Take me to the edge of the Lake of Bottomless Calm in West Tianting,’ he said. The prisoner, the Minister of Laws and his daughter gathered at that place. The man dived from the edge of the cliff into the Lake of Bottomless Calm and disappeared. At the point he entered the water, they saw six perfect circles radiating outwards. Blade of Grass, we think of laws as things made by man. But who made the laws of nature?

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From: ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’ by CF Wong

Nury Vittachi Mr Wong Goes West. A Feng Shui Detective Novel

Allen & Unwin 2008 p1