More goals, finer ankles
How we talk to and about women in sports matters.
In December 2018, at a press conference during the European Women’s Handball Championship, Russia’s coach Yevgeni Trefilov was asked which players stood out to him from the Romanian team, Russia’s opponent in the Paris semifinal. The 63-year-old man’s answer regarding women athletes two or three times younger than him was, “Many of them have nice legs and pretty eyes”, sparking a ripple of laughter in a room half-filled with reporters, of which four or five, me included, were women.
It may not seem that important that people laughed or that this is how a man chose to answer a question about the semifinal game of a competition for which some women athletes had worked their entire lives or struggled to get back in shape after giving birth, or where they suffered severe injuries, but it’s a telling example of how we relate to women in sports. This is an issue I’ve been following closely since I learned – from women athletes and coaches I’ve talked to, from my own experiences as a reporter and from the way women athletes are portrayed in the media – that sports, like many other fields, is not a place where women are seen and treated the same way as men.
If you are a woman and you want to be an athlete, chances are your journey will be different from that of a man. You’re likely to be paid less, to play on smaller or emptier arenas, on synthetic grass. You might lose your sponsors or your coaching position if you get pregnant, people in the bleachers might yell at you to chest the ball or swap T-shirts, someone might steal photos from your phone and post naked pictures of you on the internet. You might have to field sexual advances and the media might cover you saying you’re sexy, you have nice legs or pretty eyes or you’re dating someone famous. And if the sport you want to practice, manage or coach is football, then chances are even higher that you will hear things like: you know nothing about this, it’s complicated when you’re a woman refereeing a men’s sport, or football will make your legs ugly, how about you try dancing or ballet instead?
All this happened to women I have talked to, have written or read about. It happened to Liubliana Nedelcu, a 39-year-old agent, in talks with men in football. “Get a load of this, she’s telling me what I should do,” some coaches objected when she told them they hadn’t worked well with junior players or they hadn’t used a certain player in the best position. Liubliana, who has loved football since she used to go to matches with her father, a supporter of the local team in her hometown of Rosiorii de Vede, always knew she would have to put in double the work to prove she understands football just as well as men do. Even though she’s worked in the field for 12 years, she reads books on football and follows the statistics of players she represents, she still feels that “no matter how well you do your job, you’ll never be seen the same way as a man”.
It happened to coach Irina Giurgiu, whose colleagues at coaching school included former football players who laughed and elbowed each other during her presentations, who asked if she’d had her hair done or made jokes she doesn’t want to repeat but which “were not very nice”. Sometimes she smiled and pretended not to hear. Other times she went home crying, feeling “left out, small and useless”, wondering what she was doing there. Now, at 28, she coaches at her own club and the U17 national team, is an assistant coach at the seniors’ national team and was recently the first woman to be admitted to the UEFA PRO License Course, which would allow her to coach in the Romanian First League.
It happens to tennis players, who are invited to twirl after they win a match or are penalized if they change their T-shirts on court. Racing driver Cristiana Oprea was told she would get more media coverage if she posed naked by the car and at the defense of her BA thesis, about an excellence center for motorsport, professors at the University of Architecture asked her why she had chosen “a project for boys”. In 2017, at the press conference ahead of a Fed Cup match between Romania and the UK, Ilie Nastase repeatedly asked rival team captain Anne Keothavong what room she was staying in. He was then suspended during the game, after player Johanna Konta told the referee the Romanian had called her a “fucking bitch”.
I myself, as a sports reporter, have had to deal with some prejudice. While reporting the story of a junior team, the coach said I couldn’t ride the team bus to the stadium before the game, although I had been to practice multiple times. I then learned from the photographer I documented the story with that he was allowed on the bus but women weren’t, because they were bad luck. When he and I visited the players’ high school, the PE teacher who met with us greeted him first and seemed surprised to learn that I was, in fact, the reporter. One coach barked at me for waiting outside the changing room, was I hoping to see the players in their underwear or what? A football player answered my phone call saying “mommy, stop bothering me”, and at my ten-year high school reunion, when I said I was a sports reporter, my former head teacher was surprised that women, too, could be interested in sports. Then he asked if I knew the history of football championships of the past few years.
“No matter how well you do your job, you’ll never be seen the same way as a man”.
That sport, like the society it reflects, is not a world that welcomes women with open arms is something we’ve known since ancient times, when women risked being thrown into the river if they were seen on the Olympic stadium. They were also denied participation at the first edition of the modern Olympics, the most important competition on the planet. Until 1972, women were not allowed to run marathons and until 2011 they were not welcome at the Ski Jumping World Cups because of a myth that said it could be harmful to their reproductive health. Women’s football was also banned in some countries and in Romania it’s been played as an organized sport only since 1990. In Iran, even today women are not allowed at football matches and many of them resort to dressing up as men to enter stadiums.
That women’s participation in sports is on the rise – 45% of athletes at the 2016 Olympics were women, the highest percentage until then – is mostly due to women who fought to bring down the barriers. Former world number one tennis player Billie Jean King, founder of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), fought for equal prize money, and all Grand Slam tournaments now offer the same prizes to women players as they do to men; only some of them hand out plate-shaped trophies to women instead of the cup-shaped trophies they give to men. Kathrine Switzer signed up for the Boston Marathon in 1967 using only her initials and became the first woman to run the Boston Marathon as a numbered entrant, although the organizer tried to forcibly remove her from the course. This year, the U.S. Women’s Soccer team filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation, saying that although they are World and Olympic champions, they are paid less, they practice and travel in worse conditions and have more matches than the men’s national team, which didn’t qualify for the latest World Cup.
2019 marked European records in terms of audiences, with over 60,000 people attending women’s football matches, and saw the launch of development strategies, campaigns and media platforms dedicated to women’s sports. Mid-August, Stéphanie Frappart became the first woman to referee a major men’s match, the UEFA Super Cup between Liverpool and Chelsea, and said she wasn’t nervous because football is the same. “Finally, I think it’s time,” said coaches of both teams about UEFA’s decision, which they deemed historical.
Illustration: Irina Perju
In Romania, the Football Federation introduced a rule requiring clubs in the First League to have women’s teams starting the 2021/2022 season in order to be licensed. It’s an attempt to develop women’s football – the approximately 2,000 women players enrolled cannot make a living from playing football –, but not everyone welcomed it. “When I see women playing football, I immediately switch channels or turn off the TV. How can you force me to have a women’s team if I don’t like it?”, FCSB owner Gigi Becali told news agency AGERPRES. FCSB is the only club that voted against and challenged the federation’s rule at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Despite all the progress, the world of sport remains one where women have little representation: on stadiums, on technical benches, in management or in the media. At the latest European Women’s Handball Championship, just one team out of 16 was coached by a woman. Out of the 74 sports federations in Romania, just seven were run by women in 2018. International statistics show more than 80% of sports reporters are men, a reality I witness at the international competitions I attend, where sometimes just one or two of 15 Romanian journalists are women. Women athletes see it, too: American football player Megan Rapinoe recently said there should be more women reporters, that the players’ stories would be more complex if they were told from different perspectives. At the beginning of the year, a reporter asked Imke Wubbenhorst, the first woman to coach a men’s team in Germany’s top five leagues, if she had to wear a siren so that players in the dressing room could hear her coming and put pants on. („Of course not,” she responded. “I am a professional. I pick my team based on penis size.”). All this, while women’s teams are almost exclusively surrounded by male coaches, doctors or massage therapists and no one asks them how they feel and whether they cover up in the changing room.
There are also subtler ways that sports show girls and women that the world they want to be part of was not designed for them: there are no foosball tables with female figurines and most sports toys target boys by means of packaging; scientific studies started including women in research only in recent years and started looking, for instance, at the way bio-mechanical differences or hormonal fluctuations impact injuries (women athletes suffer torn ligaments in the knee more often than male athletes). This year, for the FIFA Women’s World Cup, it was the first time since Nike began working with WWC in 1995 that kits were designed especially for the female form, rather than as derivations of the uniforms made for men. Research and consultations with the athletes revealed which areas were more susceptible to sweating and where to use more breathable materials, and that while men preferred tighter designs that made them feel strong and superhero-like, women preferred their gear looser and more comfortable.
But it’s not just about access, it’s also about the way girls are treated once they enter the sports world. How they are talked to and how safe they are. Gymnasts, judokas and handball players spoke in recent years of the physical and verbal abuse they suffered during practice. In the U.S., over 200 gymnasts were sexually abused by the Olympic team’s former doctor Larry Nassar, who was sentenced to 175 years in prison. In Romania, seven girls aged between 11 and 14 were raped by their 65-year-old handball coach, who was sentenced in 2017 to 19 years in prison. Also in 2017, a coach in Sânnicolau Mare, the westernmost town of the country, was fired from handball for sexually harassing two female students. In August 2019, a 47-year-old policeman in Sibiu, a city in Transylvania, who taught boxing in his spare time, was placed under preventive arrest for the attempted rape of a 12-year-old girl and the sexual assault of a 17-year-old girl, both of whom he was coaching.
This type of abuse doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It is allowed by a culture that often cares more about medals than child safety.
It doesn’t just happen to girls, even if they report such incidents more often – in the UK, over 350 former football players spoke about sexual abuse they suffered at junior academies – and it doesn’t just happen in professional sports. This spring, a physical education teacher in Alba Iulia, a city in the west-central part of Romania, was indicted for acts of a sexual nature (“hugs and fondling, including touching private parts”, according to the indictment) against several under-age students, during PE classes. In class, he called his pupils names like “idiot, inept, handicapped, fatso, cow, slut”. It’s a language similar to the one used by famous Romanian handball coach Gheorghe Tadici towards Crina Pintea, the line player of the Women’s National Handball Team, voted the best line player in Europe, during the first six years of her senior career. There were years when Crina, who recently won Champions League with Győr, says she was hit, stepped on, insulted, spit on and humiliated by the former national team coach who still sits on the board of Romania’s Handball Federation.
This type of abuse doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It is allowed by a culture that often cares more about medals than child safety. It happens because most coaches are men who are given absolute power and authority and because many children leave their homes early, with dreams of winning medals, and move into dorm rooms and academies, away from their parents. It happens because, for a long time, the results in which we take such pride were obtained through violence and in a climate of fear, and even today there are athletes and coaches who believe you can’t succeed without a “spartan training”.
But this myth of success obtained through sacrifice and suffering, which is alive and well in sports gyms around the country, can easily become a shield that allows and protects much more dangerous behaviors. Our national pride and passion for sports shouldn’t let us forget there is a world of difference between a “spartan training” meant to push athletes to overcome their limits, and acts of abuse or violence. Slapping, hitting, swearing should not be considered acceptable behavior in women’s sports or in men’s sports.
“I practiced gymnastics out of fear, like animals at the circus,” Gabriela Geiculescu, a former gymnast, now aged 53, told me in an interview last year. She had nightmares for years after retiring due to untreated back problems and only in the United States, where she now coaches at her own gym, did she learn that gymnastics can be practiced with joy. “They were both harsh,” she said of her coaches at the Triumf School Sports Club in Bucharest. “But of course he was worse. She only pinched us, hit us over the legs with a water hose, but we only worked with her for balance beam. With him we worked at three events, acrobatics, uneven bars and vault, and he was really cruel. (…) He beat me the most, every day. Not a day went by without getting hit, and he hit me alright.”
Many gymnasts I’ve spoken to said they were never slapped but some, in informal talks, told me how they were pulled by the hair and hit across the legs with sticks or shoes, how they were told every day that they were fat, until they could no longer see anything else in the mirror, how they were “treated gently and then not so gently” when they didn’t perform well, or how they were afraid to say they were in pain because they were not believed. The boyfriend of one, himself a gymnast, said it’s the same with boys but “they’re different, they don’t take it to heart; girls are more emotional.”
Many of them are afraid to speak openly, especially after seeing how the ones who did speak were treated, including by people in sports. When former gymnast and Olympic gold medalist Maria Olaru wrote in her autobiography Prețul aurului, sinceritate incomodă (The price of gold, uncomfortable honesty) about the slaps and insults she had received from several coaches, including Mariana Bitang and Octavian Bellu, other gymnasts from her generation, people in the federation and other athletes said she was hurting gymnastics, that they hadn’t been hit, that she was talking about it too late or that she shouldn’t reveal such details about the coaches who helped her become an Olympic champion.
It’s a culture of silence that perpetuates such behaviors, in a society where girls are taught at young ages to hold their tongues, to endure, to obey and not rebel.
“Even if they had tread on me, if I were asked about it today, I would never tell,” said in a TV show on Digi Sport Elisabeta Lipă, the most decorated rower in history. She was at that time Minister for Youth and Sports, the very leader who could have elicited change, at least in terms of discourse. Instead, she added: “Professional sports is like a marriage. You don’t air your dirty laundry in public.”
It’s a culture of silence that perpetuates such behaviors, in a society where girls are taught at young ages to hold their tongues, to endure, to obey and not rebel, as Crina Pintea said she used to react when she was abused, or as Gabriela Geiculescu says about how she couldn’t fight back. “When you see my only act of rebellion is to cry, that I can’t talk back, I can’t say how I feel, I can’t do anything else; when you say ‘Ten more repetitions’, I well up and start crying, and you think you’re helping?” said Gabriela. “The federation knew, the other coaches in the room knew what was happening and no one said anything, who was I to complain to?”
Precisely because they are still few, it’s important that when women athletes find the courage to speak out they are listened to and believed. It’s important to talk about abuse in sports, as well as in society, and to offer them as many platforms as possible. That’s what they want as well. “I wish other girls would speak out, too. They have no reason to keep it all inside, no reason to be afraid or ashamed,” said Crina, who understood while playing abroad that if more women athletes protested, retorted or refused to continue training, things would be different for future generations. “How are we going to stop this if we don’t talk about it?” said Gabriela, who doesn’t understand why some athletes are still afraid. “When I read Maria Olaru’s book, how can anyone imagine a child is to blame for being beaten? What kind of a society is this?”
I often watch admiringly how confident women athletes in other countries are, like tennis player Serena Williams or soccer player Megan Rapinoe, how openly they speak about their experiences as women in sports, as LGBT athletes or as athletes of color, and how persistently they demand equality and respect because they understand they can be a voice for those who are more vulnerable. I wish for more Romanian athletes like them, but maybe more time needs to pass before Romanian sport, which is part of a society used to sweeping anything that’s painful under the rug, is ready for such complicated debates; not just about violence and discrimination, but also about mental health, body image, sexual orientation or bullying.
Illustration: Irina Perju
There are some women athletes trying to create systems, platforms and opportunities they do not see around. Andreea Răducan, former gymnast and current president of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation, had individual talks with gymnasts on the Olympic team and gave them her phone number and her personal e-mail address. Tennis player Simona Halep, two times Grand Slam winner, supports, through her own foundation, a women’s hockey team and a rhythmic gymnastics competition because she knows how hard the journey to success is and “there is much to be done to keep girls active in sports,” as she said in an interview for The Telegraph. Two high school girls talk about their experiences as football players on a blog they started, Footballiciousgirls, because they want to change people’s opinion that football is only for men. Racing driver Cristiana Oprea created a website about women in motorsport, because she felt the need for more representation in a field where women are seen as exceptions.
But beyond more representation, we also need fewer stereotypes. If a girl wanted to watch the FIFA Women’s World Cup this summer – the most popular in history –, she would have seen on TVR, Romania’s national television station, a promotion clip that said, in a male voice of course, that “it’s not just boys who are having fun, girls are at the World Cup”. On the screen, she would have seen women’s legs in red shoes sticking a pointy heel into a football ball, followed by the same booming male voice saying: “More goals, finer ankles”. (Centrul FILIA, a local NGO, filed a complaint over the clip to the National Audiovisual Council, but the board ruled it had not breached audio-visual law.)
If a girl were to pick up a sports newspaper on any given day, she would see 42 photos of male athletes and just eight of women, including a bikini-clad star and one of Lionel Messi feeling up his wife in a nightclub. She would read an article titled Women, on stadiums or in the kitchen?, where she would learn that “none of us think football is the most fortunate form of manifestation of women’s skills”. On TV she would see news stories about the sexy and fast girl chased by all the boys on the track or about the sexy and mean referee who puts men football players in their place, and on sports websites she would read about where the sexiest handball players spent their vacations; yes, sexy is a word used very often in media coverage of women’s sports.
Besides getting little media coverage, when they are being covered, women athletes are often portrayed in ways that minimize their athleticism and highlight their femininity, sexuality and physical beauty, says Nicole LaVoi, an American professor of sport psychology and sport sociology who studies gender equality. And this “tells us it’s more important what you look like than what you can do. Sexualized images of girls and women do little to increase interest in or respect for women’s sports. (…) Sexualized images of girls and women tell young men and boys that female bodies are objects of sexual desire, to be consumed rather than to be honored and respected.”
This type of media coverage occurs even though in recent years Romania’s biggest successes in sports were brought by women in sports like handball, tennis, fencing, table tennis or rowing. And yet we see them too rarely and we give them too little depth when they deserve much more. As do the hundreds of young girls who dream of following in their footsteps and who need to see that it’s worth it, especially since in Romania success is too often due to individual effort (including financially) and not to a strong system in place.
It’s important to view women’s sports – and the presence of women, in general, in traditionally male-dominated environments – as normal, not as some rarity, an exception, something exotic or amusing.
Even if not everything that’s written about them is in those terms, Cristina Neagu, the only handball player named World Player of the Year four times (a record in men’s handball as well) deserves more than stories about how she has her eyes on boys (because she said in an interview that she watches men’s handball), or where she is compared to Messi or Ronaldo. Simona Halep, Romania’s biggest tennis player, deserves more than articles about the breast reduction surgery she had when she was 18, or about her boyfriend and when she plans to get married, although she has asked the press for more discretion and respect for her privacy. Former Olympic champion Nadia Comăneci, who radically changed the world of gymnastics, deserves more than a headline like “Perfect 10 in a bikini”. Any woman athlete who fights to win a match deserves more than photos of her bare breasts and headlines like “Accidental striptease, player’s breasts exposed”.
These are newspapers for a male audience, I’ve been told, and that is unfair not just because it excludes us, as women who love sports, but because it normalizes a wrong way of thinking and of talking about women. Because it’s not just about women athletes, but about the message we’re sending women – and men – about women’s place in society. It’s about raising strong, brave and confident girls in an unsafe world, where sports could be such a wonderful tool to teach them confidence, self-esteem, self-defense techniques and leadership skills. Ninety-six percent of women in top management positions played sports as teenagers, according to a 2013 study by Ernst&Young, and many said it has helped them in their careers. “[Sports] has taught me to see the limitations that girls place on themselves as false and that the stories we often tell ourselves of what we’re capable of aren’t necessarily true,” said Alison Glock, an award-winning American journalist and writer. “When you play sports, you transcend those self-imposed limitations.”
But if we exclude them, with direct or subtler messages, if we show them that their looks are all that matters, if we portray women athletes as sex-bombs or assign value to them only in their roles as girlfriends, wives or mothers (while men are athletic, strong, fast and competitive), if they hear adults in the school yard or in parks telling their boys that they “run like a girl” when they want to embarrass them, we’re essentially telling them sports is not for them. And if we consider the fact that the number of girls quitting sports before the age of 14 is double compared to that of boys, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation, or that Romania ranks at the tail end among EU countries in terms of mass sports participation, maybe we wouldn’t laugh it off.
For this message to change, we need more representation and more women role models because they can help society take a step forward in its understanding of gender roles and the concepts of femininity and masculinity. Women role models matter, said Nicole LaVoi, author of a book about the low number of women coaches. “They matter to girls, and they matter to boys, because who and what you see tells you what’s relevant, valued and important. And what is not.”
That’s why the stories we tell matter. That’s why how we talk to and how we treat women athletes matters – on the court, in press conference rooms, in interviews –, what headlines we write, what we click on or how we react to a so-called joke. It’s important to view women’s sports – and the presence of women, in general, in traditionally male-dominated environments – as normal, not as some rarity, an exception, something exotic or amusing.
Addio pomodori: What will we lose in the climate crisis?
The climate crisis is playing out, here and now, and is forcing us to be here and now. There is no escaping it. And – finally – there is no escaping from ourselves.
The title of this article (Addio pomodori) refers to a title of a song composed by a famous Polish satirical cabaret during the 1950s and 1960s (in Communist Poland) – Kabaret Starszych Panów (the Elderly Gentelmen’s Cabaret). The song in a witty way mourns the loss of summer and love.
I have been writing for quite some time about disappearing islands, the dying coral reefs, the melting ice, the thinned-out tuna, plastic in the Mariana Trench and in the stomachs of albatrosses, as well as whales beaching to die, crushed under their own bodyweight. My mind is set on one idea; my friends can be certain that at some point every conversation will turn into a debate on the catastrophe. I feel that something frightening is happening, that we can stop it, and that we are not doing enough. When I am in a darker mood, I figure that we will all die anyway, no matter how many straws I refuse with my drinks, or if I say for the hundredth time: “No bag for me, please”. This is not enough. Just as the global school strikes are not enough, or Greta Thunberg’s charisma, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s struggle for the Green New Deal. The Extinction Rebellion, the Birth Strikers, or the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement – all of that is not enough. Even more, science reports and the Paris Accords will not suffice either. On a bad day, I am convinced that we have condemned ourselves to extinction.
I regain balance in a house by the woods, half way to the East. In March, I sit on the veranda covered in a blanket, contemplating the black earth and leafless branches. In April, I take off my sweater, turn my face to the sun and take my first walk barefoot on damp soil. The madness has started: shoots, buds, stems, blades, crumpled chestnut leaves, like the little green ladies’ silk coats from Andrzej Bobkowski’s prose. The world is turning green, as if apologising for its frigid absence. And then colours explode. Tulips, phlox, aquilegias, weigelas, forget-me-nots, wisterias, apple and cherry trees. A neighbour is sowing rapeseed, lilacs go into bloom by the fence. And then you have the woods. A fifteen minute walk is enough to melt the teeming anxiety and the sense of loss, which I always recognise a bit too late. I meet deer with young ones, a fox sniffing on the road, and a hare hiding under a wild blueberry bush. The closer to summer it is, the shinier the spiderweb threads stretched across the ever greener branches are.
I find peace in Nature, just like many people before me.
On a bad day, I am convinced that we have condemned ourselves to extinction.
“IT IS WORSE, much worse, than you think.” This sentence opens The Uninhabitable Earth. Life after Warming by David Wallace-Wells. The American journalist, who has been writing for the last three years about climate change for New York Magazine, does not play subtle. The climate catastrophe is the effect of ignorance, indolence, and indifference, he says. And he immediately adds that it is as if our entire civilisation has decided to lock itself in a garage, open the car windows and start the engine. In the last three decades, we have released more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than in all the time from the Lascaux cave paintings to the first season of Friends (Wallace-Wells mentions the premiere of Seinfield, but Friends are more my cup of tea). This means that more than half of the CO2 in the atmosphere has been released during our lifetime. And worse, we have been aware of what is at stake. As early as 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed during the Earth Summit. It began:
“Acknowledging that change in the Earth’s climate and its adverse effects are a common concern of humankind, concerned that human activities have been substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, that these increases enhance the natural greenhouse effect, and that this will result on average in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere and may adversely affect natural ecosystems and humankind…”
This litany of concerns spans over a dozen paragraphs. Even back then, The Convention assumed international co-operation to limit emissions of greenhouse gasses, and it recognised their ill effect on climate stability. Since that time – Wallace-Wells reminds us – environmental scientists have been drawing a succession of bright red lines with a warning sign Do not cross! But we step over them anyway. We are behaving as if we were deaf and blind. When the Kyoto Protocol was being signed in 1997, all parties agreed that a global warming of two degrees (to 2100) equalled catastrophe. Wallace-Wells explains what these two degrees mean: “flooded cities, crippling droughts and heat waves, a planet battered daily by hurricanes and monsoons we used to call ‘natural disasters’, but will soon normalize as simply ‘bad weather’.” Yet, in 2016, when the 21st UN Conference on Climate Change agreed on the text of the Paris accords, the two-degree global temperature increase was set as the limit which we cannot cross. Three years on, and it looks like the two degrees is our best-case scenario. If we maintain the current rate of fossil fuel consumption, if we fail to introduce swift and serious changes, then the end-of-century temperatures will increase at best by three degrees (this is three times more that the increase we are currently experiencing; in 2019, the temperature was hovering at around one degree more than in the pre-industrial era). The darkest forecasts envision eight degrees and more.
Environmental scientists have been drawing a succession of bright red lines with a warning sign Do not cross! But we step over them anyway.
In his book, Wallace-Wells presents his vision of a warming world. He delves into existing studies and describes what life on Earth will look like with growing temperatures. With a two-degree growth, which is still achievable if we limit our emissions soon, “the ice sheets will begin their collapse, 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unliveable, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer. There will be thirty-two times as many extreme heat waves in India, and each would last five times as long, exposing ninety-three times more people,” he says. Oceans will rise by half a metre, water will flood cities like Jakarta, Bangkok, Dhaka, Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, Miami and Houston, just to name a few; to say nothing of the island nations of the Pacific. Entire nations will be forced to search for new land. The World Bank predicts 140 million climate refugees, while the UN forecasts 200 million – quotes Wallace-Wells. Air pollution will grow and 150 million more people will die than if temperatures were to grow by 1.5 degrees.
Wallace-Wells wants to send shockwaves and perhaps this approach will work at last. 150 million people – he explains – that’s twenty-five times more people than there were victims of the Holocaust. So, our best-case scenario means 25 such Holocausts.
And what will happen if temperature growth exceeds the two-degree mark? Well, no problem, we can estimate that too. Wallace-Wells falls back on additional credible studies. If the temperature goes up by three degrees, the world will be plagued by drought. Southern Europe will suffer, but the most serious effects will be felt by nations closer to the tropics; the drought in North Africa will last on average sixty months longer than now. Sixty months is five years. Areas destroyed by fires will double in the Mediterranean and increase six fold in the US. A four-degree growth will lead to famine every year and eight million more dengue fever sufferers in Latin America alone. The Alps will look like the Atlas Mountains: parched and arid.
It’s hard to imagine the numbers quoted by Wallace-Wells:
“Damages from river flooding would grow thirtyfold in Bangladesh, twentyfold in India, and as much as sixtyfold in the United Kingdom. In certain places, six climate-driven natural disasters could strike simultaneously, and, globally, damages could pass $600 trillion – more than twice the wealth as exists in the world today.”
With an eight-degree temperature increase, people living in the tropics will not be able to leave their homes. Their bodies will not be able to emit the body heat fast enough, so they would boil to death within just a few hours.
Wallace-Wells paints a picture of an over-populated, hungry and frustrated world. He describes what he calls the elements of chaos that await us, each in a separate chapter. Heat death. Hunger. Drowning. Wildfire. Freshwater drain. Dying oceans. Unbreathable air. Economic collapse. Climate conflict. We can add: wars. Refugees. More people, less food. And as if all this were not enough, the journalist tackles those aspects which, compared to natural disasters on an unimaginable scale, may seem trivial. Climate change will not hit us with a hurricane or a flood just once in a while. It will creep into our daily lives. We will not be able to enjoy our morning cup of coffee, because there may be a shortage of coffee from the tropics. We will not feel the autumn blues, because there will not be any autumn. We will not spend our holiday in a beach hut, unless it is built on very tall stilts. Those fortunate enough to have been born in the wealthy North are probably secretly counting on their wealth to save them, confident that money will trump nature. But no amount of money can stop a raging hurricane. And you can’t make a wall out of money to save you from a landslide. Wallace-Wells reminds us that this was a lesson learned by the residents of Santa Barbara county in California, a small paradise for the affluent. There was nothing that could have saved their vineyards, stables and golf-courses, beaches and pretty white houses with pools from the mud. The landslide of 2018 killed more than a dozen of them. And along with them died the conviction that, as far as climate is concerned, there is a difference between the rich and the poor. Mud floods us all the same, whether we speak of American financial elites, or the tents of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh – concludes Wallace-Wells. For the moment, the nations of the South are paying the highest price for the climate crisis caused by the rich North. But climate change, although slow, is certainly just; it will affect us all.
Climate change will not hit us with a hurricane or a flood just once in a while. It will creep into our daily lives.
Wallace-Wells refuses to relent. He is alarming, and it’s good. The time of dispassionate presentation of facts is over.
I read his book and I think that it’s better not to believe in reincarnation.
But even those who don’t, are in a fix. Because climate change is not some mythical monster that we can study for years on end, planning our strategies to defeat it: a magic sword, a mirror or even the legendary Polish calfskin filled with sulphur (fed by a fearless hero to a fire-breathing dragon hiding in a cave below Wawel castle in Kraków; the dragon exploded and the city was saved). It’s not a case of who will win. Because even if we manage to destroy the monster, we will not return to an unchanged world. And neither will the world die the moment the beast defeats us. Climate change is not a binary option: either it happens, or it doesn’t. This is a process which has already begun. This is our reality. It’s all the floods, droughts (and yes, also that common Polish-grown parsley root that in 2019 cost a whopping 25 zlotys [5.4 Euro] per kilogram), hurricanes, heatwaves and snowstorms which we are witnessing already, as we shake our heads in disbelief, grumbling that winters and summers are not what they used to be. And these are changes on a gigantic scale. Wallace-Wells presents it all in biblical proportions. An apocalypse is unfolding in front of our eyes. A small town in Maryland was afflicted by a once-in-a-thousand-years flood in 2016. And in 2018, the same locality was hit by yet another once-in-a-thousand-years flood. Houston, Texas was destroyed three years in a row by hurricanes, which should only occur once every 500 years (Wallace-Wells makes his calculations, and I will make my own: five hundred years ago Poland was ruled by the Jagiellonians, a war with the Teutonic order was just beginning, the country extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea and no one suspected that our neighbours would ever divide it, that the United States of America would come to be, two world wars would be fought, that we would discover the atom and be convinced we can tame it, and that instead of a king, we would be electing a president in a free and general election with voting rights for all, not just the male nobility).
Wallace-Wells multiplies the examples: floods in Kerala, wildfires in California, hurricanes in Ireland, heat waves in Denver, Tbilisi and Glasgow. The list can be supplemented by disasters in 2019: cyclone Idai in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, more record-breaking temperatures in Australia, the latest flooding in Poland. The world as we have known it is disappearing. The concept of ‘normal weather’ acquires new meanings. Wallace-Wells explains that we are not about to transition from a world with one kind of stable weather to another; a world with a worse, but also stable climate. No, with the rising temperatures of the Earth, we are entering a de-stabilised world, where each process will trigger numerous additional processes. And we have caused this avalanche ourselves. It was brought about by the previous generation. Yet ours has a chance to slow things down and mitigate the effects. As all reports suggest, doing things later will be too late.
Even if we manage to destroy the monster, we will not return to an unchanged world. And neither will the world die the moment the beast defeats us.
“WE FACE a direct existential threat. Climate change is moving faster than we are – and its speed has provoked a sonic boom SOS across our world. If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain it. ”
These are the words of UN Secretary General António Guterres from September 2018. A month later, scientists from the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change), a UN advisory body, published a report in which they categorically stated that CO2 emissions must be cut by half by 2030 (another red line), if we still want to meet the Paris goal of the maximum two degree warming by 2100 (which still means droughts, floods, heatwaves and 25 Holocausts). The accord was signed by 194 nations, but most of them are still at the planning stage for lowering their greenhouse gasses emissions. An internet meme pointedly illustrates the reaction of the Polish Government to the climate crisis: it shows coloured squares which represent different European countries and their various energy sources. The greener the square, the more renewable energy a country consumes, the blacker the square, the more coal-generated energy it uses. Dark grey stands for other fossil fuels, while light grey means nuclear power. Poland is a black square with a grey band and a thin green line. Internauts comment: Poland may have been a green island once, but these days it’s nothing but a black square (the pun eludes to the phrase “green island” which Polish politicians coined after the 2008 economic crisis, as Poland, unlike other European nations, did not suffer a recession). Meanwhile, the current Polish Government considers the fact that Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki managed to prevent the signing of the pact on Europe’s carbon neutrality by 2050 to be a great success.
In May of this year, IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services at the UN) published a report on biodiversity. And actually, it’s a cry of despair. A synthesis of fifteen thousand scientific publications shows that we have lost eighty five percent of the world’s wetlands. Our actions are destroying the Earth; we have already led to the decreased productivity of as much as twenty three percent of the world’s land areas. Human activity has affected seventy five percent of land areas and sixty six percent of ocean areas. The authors of the report write that we currently have more food, energy and materials than ever before, and all that is at the cost of shrinking resources and diminishing possibilities of renewing them (The Earth Overshoot Day, when we exceed Earth’s capacity to regenerate the resources we consumed that year, was on 7 December in 1990, and 1 August in 2018). Yet eleven per cent of people are malnourished. That is eight hundred twenty five million people who are hungry, although we produce enough food. 825,000,000. Your imagination goes blank after the third zero. Roughly calculating, that’s twenty times the population of Poland. And several tens of millions more than the population of Europe. But that’s not all. We have depleted thirty three per cent of fish shoals in the oceans, and we are exploiting sixty percent of them to their limits. In section A5, we read that “Human actions threaten more species with global extinction now than ever before. An average of around 25 per cent of species in assessed animal and plant groups are threatened.” Twenty five per cent equates to one million species. One million species condemned to extinction as an effect of our actions. Biodiversity is shrinking not only due to climate change, but above all due to our intervention on land and in the seas, the direct exploitation of species and the generation of pollution. The current rate of disappearance of many species, indeed their extinction, has been ten to a hundred times more than the average of the past ten million years. As Edwin Bendyk states in his article for Polityka magazine on the UN report, “we are treading the path of biological annihilation.”
One thing which catches your attention in the IPBES report is its language. In the very first section, the authors write that nature is also: “inspiration and learning, physical and psychological experiences, and supporting identities. [these] are central to quality of life and cultural integrity, even if their aggregated value is difficult to quantify.”
At last, all that surrounds us is not reduced only to an economic value or an object of detached observation. The report also emphasises the non-economic and non-scientific dimension of nature. And it is an aspect which cannot be assessed, yet without which our life would lack quality. At best. Because after all, we are also a species subjected to extinction. The authors are clearly telling us that only far-reaching changes will save us; a genuine transformation on all levels, from the economy to politics to society. A transformation which will start with systemic actions, change our consumption habits and affect our values.
The current rate of disappearance of many species, indeed their extinction, has been ten to a hundred times more than the average of the past ten million years.
Unless we start now, we will lose not only rhinos, frogs, and food diversity on our plates (559 of 6,190 species of livestock disappeared by 2016). Nature is indispensable for human existence. Some things cannot be replaced. And we must realize this as soon as possible. Otherwise, humanity will engineer its own extinction.
Two weeks after the publication of the UN report, The Guardian announced that it would change its vocabulary when writing about the upcoming catastrophe. “Climate emergency” instead of “climate change”. “Global heating” rather than “global warming”. “Climate science denier”, in place of “climate sceptic”. Language must reflect reality. The Guardian also started to add information on CO2 levels in the air to its weather forecasts. “We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue,” explained Katherine Viner, editor-in-chief. “The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are really talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”
EACH DAY BRINGS new depressing news. The CO2 concentration in the air has been growing faster in the last seven years than we predicted. In Brazil, 739 square kilometres of Amazonian jungle was cut down in just one month. In Malaysia, the last male Sumatran rhinoceros in the country has died; around thirty individuals may still be remaining somewhere in the Borneo jungle. Poland has earned the title of the ‘black poisoner of Europe’, yet some Polish editors are critical of the attempts of many cities to go green, while Poland’s Prime Minister proudly vetoed EU carbon neutrality. In Northern India, temperatures have reached 50 degrees Centigrade. A new report by scientists from the 27 national academies in the EASAC (European Academies Science Advisory Council) confirms that the climate crisis is ruining human health and contributing to various diseases, ranging from ailments resulting from air pollution to depression.
There is no end to it. And there will be no end; we have thrown a stone, and nothing will stop the avalanche we have triggered. We can only try to delay it. And mitigate its effects. With so much apocalyptic information flooding us, the advice in Mike Berners-Lee’s book There Is No Planet B. A Handbook for the Make or Break Years looks rather naïve. Berners-Lee, a professor at Lancaster University and a consultant at Lancaster Environment Centre, has already written about the carbon footprint (How Bad Are Bananas) and the climate crisis (The Burning Questions). This time he produced a manual on how to live through the changes. He collected answers to questions asked by himself, his friends, family, and readers. They all boiled down to one: What can I do to help save the Earth?
Berners-Lee begins with a short lecture on energy. Energy consumption is growing with every passing year. And we’re becoming increasingly more powerful year after year. The 2004 tsunami, which killed 230 thousand people, had the power equal to “24 hours’ worth of human global energy consumption at the time. 150 years ago, it would have taken humanity about a month to acquire and use the same amount of energy. Today it only takes us 18 hours.”
This is where the 50+ per cent increase in CO2 in the atmosphere over the last 30 years comes from. From our warm houses, our cars, our avocados flown from the other end of the globe. Once upon a time we did not have to worry about the equilibrium between us and Nature. Berners-Lee stresses that even if we would have consciously declared war on the Earth, we would not have had the power to destroy it. We reached a balance of powers around 70 years ago, when we started playing around with the atom. We realised that if we made enough mistakes, the Earth would be in serious trouble. Today, we do not need to do anything more to destroy it, warns Berners-Lee. The tables have turned. Now we must try really hard not to provoke a total disaster. So why are we doing so little?
In this context, Berners-Lee’s advice to restaurants to offer vegan dishes at least “as delicious, tempting and inspiring as anything else they sell” seems fanciful. We are dying here, and he is writing about the taste of tofu? But in his apparent naivety, Berners-Lee is right: the change which is affecting us is total. And the reply must be total as well. We need a new lifestyle for new times. This requires us to be mature and take responsibility for the mess we had created over the last decades. Yet are we adult enough to face the challenge?
We have thrown a stone, and nothing will stop the avalanche we have triggered.
The author offers guidance on nutrition and the economy. The questions he hears touch on the smallest details of daily lives. How urgently should I ditch my diesel? Is nuclear nasty? Should I go veggie or vegan? How much deforestation do soya beans cause? How much food energy do we need to eat? Should I fly? How bad are boats? How can I work out who and what to trust? What is a culture of truth? How should I spend my money? And (my favourite): when might we emigrate to another planet? (Answer: we don’t produce enough energy to dispatch much more than one small space shuttle per year.)
Berners-Lee’s answers boil down to just one thing: consciousness. We need to be conscious of our choices and their influence on the environment. Since you fly around Europe several times a year, perhaps you could get rid of your car? And if you have a car, maybe go vegan? But before you do, trace the carbon footprint of the veggies at your local shop. Since you eat fish, maybe stop buying new clothes? It would be better for the Earth if 7.5 billion people did something not-quite-so-perfectly, rather than if 100 million did it impeccably.
But Berners-Lee fails to write about one thing: the depressing emotions that trouble us after we read more and more reports of dying species, destroyed landscapes, and crumbling eco-systems. The report of the European Academies Science Advisory Council on climate change and health notes that the crisis threatens not only our physical health, but also our mental well-being. Post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, substance abuse, and depression appear not only among people who have lived through natural disasters, but also those less directly affected by the climate crisis who are for the moment worrying at their desks. Therapists are beginning to use such terms as ‘ecological grief’, ‘climate depression’, or ‘climate trauma’. They speak of clients immobilised by fear, sadness, anger, despair, and helplessness. People feel paralysed and burdened by the dimensions of the crisis. The fear does not diminish when you sign another petition, participate in a strike, go vegan, or get rid of your car. Questions appear not about the way we should live in a changing reality, but about the moral aspects of our choices and about the general meaning of life. Can I have children? Will I accelerate the disaster if I do? And is it ethical to bring a human being into the world for a life in such apocalyptic times? What sense does it make to live, if the world is coming to an end? The philosopher Samuel Scheffler already wrote six years ago in The New York Times that he was motivated by his faith in life after death. No, not his own afterlife, but the lives of future generations – those that will continue to live, after we die, he says. It is for them that we act today. And what if they go missing?
The climate crisis is putting us on an emotional roller coaster. Crushed by the dimensions of the disaster, we become cruel to ourselves. We regret every flight, castigate ourselves for our own passivity, for not enough new trees planted. And we have feelings of aggression and suppressed anger towards a person in a local shop who puts a tomato in a plastic bag and a cucumber in another plastic bag (even though it is already wrapped in foil), and we are angry with ourselves for taking a cab instead of a tram, but it is only a sign of our helplessness. Because what can our individual choices change unless the US, Poland, India and China give up on coal? After all, we need systemic changes, and not just a few, a dozen or even thousands of individuals who will stop buying exotic fruit. When helplessness becomes too much of a burden, we jump into a whirlwind of activity again. We sign petitions at the rate of two a minute. We quickly calculate how much fuel our car with two people in it will consume if we drive to Spain. We buy special reusable vegetable bags for the whole family. And then inactivity descends anew. And we still feel that we are moving around blindfolded.
The fear does not diminish when you sign another petition, participate in a strike, go vegan, or get rid of your car.
But maybe there’s an opportunity in these emotions? The climate crisis is acting out here and now. There is no escape. And finally, there is no escaping ourselves. There is no Planet B waiting with open arms for us to settle and destroy. The time for running away has ended. There is no ‘ahead’. Thanks to the climate crisis we are touching base with a deep existential fear. Some see an opportunity in it. Activists of the Extinction Rebellion – a movement which, as its members say themselves uses any method necessary to “pressure governments and corporations to take decisive steps in the face of the unfolding catastrophe”, believe the climate crisis is the effect of our alienation from the world, from Nature, from other people, and ultimately from ourselves. We have locked ourselves in a bubble of economic growth, driven by the incessant ‘better and faster’, deaf and blind to what is happening to the Earth. But we cannot pretend any more. What we can do, though, is to stop and look around. Look ourselves in the mirror. Admit that we are afraid. Admit that we do not know how to act in an unknown reality. Admit that we are getting lost in successive reports and conflicting information, that we really do not know whether to have children, and – if we have them already – that we wake up and fall asleep fearing for their future. That we really do not know whether it is better to fly or to drive to our holiday destination. That we do not know if we can afford to be eco-friendly. That we are signing all those petitions without belief that they will change anything. That maybe we would plant a tree, but we cannot do it on a balcony. That we are fearful of the crashing economy. That we are scared of war. That we are wary of mistakes, that we are afraid not just of death, but of life, too.
And that we feel very lonely in all that.
So we start to talk. Share the uncertainty and helplessness, admit that we do not know this, cannot manage that. In the face of the climate trauma, circles of mutual support are appearing, as are groups of climate mourning. Meetings are organised with scientists. Spontaneous help groups meet at the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw, among other places. Anyone can start their own group. We are building a network and maybe this will allow us to create a stronger society based on co-operation rather than competition.
Janna Diamond is a New York based therapist who is a specialist in ecological grief. Her advice is to ask ourselves: why am I feeling this way? The reply may surprise us. Janna says that underneath our anger, sadness and fear you can find love.
I AM WRITING these words on the terrace of the house by the woods, half way to the East. A bumble bee is droning, frogs call on one another in screeching tones. A while ago, cranes flew overhead with their loud clanging. An oak and an old apple tree grow next to the terrace, and wasps drill deep tunnels in the crab apples each year. Irises have come into bloom at the edge of the pond: classic blue ones, and some fantastic varieties with meaty, wavy petals in purple and gold. Water lilies have already closed their white cups, the lavender releases its aroma when the cat touches it. I found a feather during a walk in the woods, I think it’s from a jay bird; half of it is sky-blue with stripes and glistens from afar. I chewed on some wood sorrel and I can still feel the fresh, lemony tang on my tongue.
We find a calming rhythm in nature which never fails us. Spring always comes after winter, right?
While I was gaping at the starkly yellow field of rapeseed, it suddenly dawned on me what Wallace-Wells was writing about. All this will disappear. Nothing will stop these changes; the process has already started. We don’t know where it’s leading to. But a lot still depends on us.
– Translation by Grzegorz Drymer and Mark Ordon