Speaking for Earth
Samantha Harvey won the Booker prize for her book Orbital. It’s a love letter to our bright, blue, watery orb of a planet, and an anguished plea to stop our heedless destruction of it.
Here is an excerpt of her acceptance speech, in which Harvey references climate change:
I suppose, it’s fair to say that no Booker speech has ever been made in a perfect world. But it’s hard to not acknowledge the imperfections of the world that we live in today.
We are, as Carl Sagan says in his book Cosmos, “the local embodiment of a consciousness grown to self awareness. We are star stuff, pondering stars.” And I would add that we are also earth stuff, pondering the Earth. And I think my novel is an exercise in that pondering.
To look at the earth from space, is a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realising, for the first time, that the person in the mirror is herself. What we do to the earth we do to ourselves, and what we do to life on earth, human and otherwise, we do to ourselves. “Our loyalties” Sagan says, “are to the species and to the planet. We need to speak for earth,” he says.
I would like to dedicate this prize therefore, to everybody who does speak for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life, and all the people who speak for, and call for, and work for peace. This is for you. Thank you.
I read an interesting comment in which Harvey says she nearly didn’t write the book thinking, “Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space, when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, I thought, I don’t have the authority to write this book.”
Alas, Booker prize winners have doubts too. Aren’t you glad that she carried on?
It’s a beautiful and succinct piece of work that left me with full blown overview effect - awe, transcendent love for, and a ferocious desire to protect, the earth. Long may it continue.