Technology consumes our scarcest resource: time. How can we resist?

Product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter; everything is speeding up at an incredible rate – including our attention spans – and we’ve become an impatient society, with this trend seeming irreversible: ‘For me, the future is my children’s future. I was recently in a shop with my 14-year-old daughter; amongst the baby clothes, she was thrilled by a candy-pink jacket and said: ‘Shall I buy this for when I have a baby?’ Ever since she was little, she’s been daydreaming about motherhood; it brings me to tears to think of the world that awaits her and her children. A world in which the law of the jungle is taking hold everywhere, a model of power in which a woman’s role is reduced to that of a womb’, and from a climatic perspective, an ever-intensifying chain of events: ‘causing extreme weather events, which are becoming ever more severe; species and the polar ice caps will vanish like snow in the sun. The traumatic violations of every form of life. In my own life, this realisation came late; in some respects, ‘ignorance is bliss’; in my daughters’ lives, however, it is ever-present.”

One is reminded of Fridays For Future and Extinction Rebellion – young people who are radically convinced that immediate action is needed on climate change – but, quoting Ernst Jünger and Nietzsche, Wieringa tells us that everyone is called upon to act: ‘With a small army of volunteers, I have planted small woods – sometimes as big as a tennis court – where life can flourish, as Baptiste Morizot puts it. Hundreds, thousands of trees on private land, with landowners coming forward after I had put out an appeal in the newspaper. Driving a spade into the ground, placing a sapling in the hole and covering the roots: it is a protest against destruction and, at the same time, a manifesto for a living future. ‘I don’t even know if Wieringa will survive – or if the plant’s offspring will survive the climate crisis – but the simple fact that there is now a tree where there was none before is enough.’

In fact, every tree: ‘is an ecological nerve centre: give it time and space, and it will provide vital ecological services. It stores CO₂, produces oxygen, keeps the soil healthy, and is a natural ally against landscape degradation’, continues the author, winner of the European Strega Prize and the Libris Prize, the highest Dutch literary honour: ‘In the climate crisis, we will have to adopt a “soldier-like” attitude, in the service of what remains of a liveable future, by planting trees, gluing ourselves to the motorway or writing novels’, which speak of the beauty of what exists right before our eyes.

Nirvana is a book about dust, understood as a deposit and a trace of time: ‘Dust is the main metaphor for transience… In *Nirvana* I write of the clouds of dust into which the Twin Towers sank, of the destructive fury of religious orthodoxy, akin to that of the Futurists, who wanted to reduce libraries and museums to ashes. And then there is, in fact, the dust of the ‘heat era’ that we are now seeing the beginning of. Last year, campsites in the north of the Netherlands welcomed Sicilian tourists for the first time, as they fled the scorching summer heat. The near future will see a steady or perhaps wave-like migration towards the cooler north, as happened in the prehistoric world during the greenhouse effect of the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum.’ The future belongs to the dust.