This haunting vision of climate change could concentrate minds at Cop26
I ve been reading Jonathan C Slaghts wonderful book Owls of the Eastern Ice , his account of four seasons trying to locate and protect the largest living species of owl in the remote Russian forests of Primorye, bordering North Korea. The Blakistons fish owl is a creature that seems entirely made of mythology. The threats to its continued existence include radioactive rivers and deforestation as well as the by-products of climate change: increasing floods, wildfires, typhoons. Slaghts extraordinary adventures on its behalf are like scenes from the end of the world. Rather than rely on the prime ministers prep school arguments for a revolution in how the planet is managed at the forthcoming Cop26 gathering in Glasgow, organisers might be better advised to leave a copy of Slaghts book at every world leaders bedside. If they picked it up in the jet-lagged early hours they might find their dreams haunted, as mine have been, by huge, endangered owls swooping low through their subconscious, reminding them what survival might mean. Every age, perhaps, most values the art that best describes it. If the medieval world treasured all eyes uplifted to a gold-leaf hereafter and the age of empire shelled out for heroic history painting, our own times, the age of uncertain mental health, prize the authentic depiction of private anguish above all else. Edvards Munch s Scream set the bar. This autumn, one of the most tormented of Frida Kahlos self-portraits comes to auction . By some lights, her painting, in which the image of Kahlos serially unfaithful former husband, Diego Rivera, is imprinted on the artists forehead, while tears roll down her cheeks, might be almost unbearable to look at. The auctioneers estimate is a record-breaking $30m: nothing sells quite like pain. The Duke of Edinburgh was not a man of the people in many obvious senses, but last weeks BBC family tribute revealed one habit with which all of Britains home-working citizens could surely empathise: he would spend mornings in his study shouting at his desktop printer, in the vain hope of persuading it, just once, to do his royal bidding. No doubt each unexplained beep and pause, every concertina-ed paper jam and illegible smear of the worlds most expensive commodity, printer ink, represented a failure of governance. The duke might have had use for some advice a friend once gave me: never throw a knackered printer away, keep it in a cupboard with a hammer, so that when, right on deadline, the current model coughs up another comedic error code, satisfying punishment can at least be exacted on one of its immediate forebears. Ever since its publication nearly 20 years ago, Iain Sinclairs masterpiece London Orbital , his wayward walking pilgrimage around the hinterland of the M25, has read like prophesy of the way we live now. It was Sinclairs contention that to understand the true life of the metropolis, you should examine not the centre but the margins the places where stories all ended up, like litter blown against the capitals perimeter fence. The spectacle of environmental protesters supergluing their hands to the asphalt in the cause of loft insulation was made for Sinclair. The only mystery about the protesters might have been why they chose this motorway, the slowest in Europe (average speed 24mph), to stage their glue-in. In any motorists minds eye, the M25, the worlds biggest car-park, already means stasis rather than transit. The jams caused by the protesters were just todays reason to sit still in traffic. Tim Adams is an Observer columnist