Andri Snaer Magnason is likely correct in advancing the hypothesis that we, as human beings, simply lack an intellectual and affective predisposition to facilitate a grasp of the enormous change that is befalling us. Bureaucratese doesn't mobilise and neither do the logarithmic scales that underpin the scientific messaging on climate-related shifts. A 0.1 unit change in acidity of our oceans seems innocuous but hides a massive impact on marine biota. So we need new language, imagery and narratives to pierce through the numbing abstraction of the long-term, the non-linear and the colossal.

In Time and Water Magnason attempts to shake us from our mass apathy through a form of storytelling that weaves together five elements: brute facts, reverence for the abundance that is still left, transgenerational affective relations, cross-cultural myths, and spiritual leadership.

Yet, there is a danger in simply discarding the human perspective, even if it has put us and the planet in an extremely precarious position. Intimate desire and suffering, the experiences of a specific body, with a specific life span, cannot but play an essential role in the way we address problems that seem to occur in a completely different scale, impossible to grasp. For some paleontologists, the evolutionary specificity of human experience did not emerge when we became rational tool-makers, able to instrumentalize the environment for better or for worse, but when we turned into ecstatic image-makers, linking outer reality to inner experience. So rather than try to bypass the human frame of reference, we should revise, adapt and revitalize its arsenal of allegedly outmoded concepts, like the soul, imagination, inner life, using them as ‘working fictions’. This specific capability of human imagination, linking the intimate experience to the external, non-human environment, allows for an exploration of other modes of human existence, providing a form of resistance to the status quo.

In Time and Water Magnason attempts to shake us from our mass apathy through a form of storytelling that weaves together five elements: brute facts, reverence for the abundance that is still left, transgenerational affective relations, cross-cultural myths, and spiritual leadership.