Will Time Heal Every Wound? by Claes Bernes,
Swedish Environmental Protection
Agency, 拢21/SKR 320, ISBN 9162012142
BUILD a sandcastle on the beach this summer and it will be gone by the next
tide. Do the same in a desert and it could still be there in a hundred years.
Time, says Claes Bernes, is one of the most neglected dimensions of the
environment debate.
Will Time Heal Every Wound? is an invaluable study that reassesses familiar
issues from a temporal perspective. It is peppered with 鈥渂efore and after鈥�
pictures. In one, a boy stands in the bottom of a newly dug drainage
ditch鈥攁 brutal gash in the landscape. As an old man 70 years later he
stands beside the same ditch, now an overgrown, meandering and apparently
natural stream.
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The timescales of recovery are not always obvious. Forests have reclaimed
Swedish farmlands that were treeless a generation ago. But apparently
inconsequential vehicle tracks have caused compaction of forest soils that
鈥渃ould persist for millennia鈥�.
In some respects, our world is cleaner than it was a generation ago, giving
hope that the wounds can heal. But it may take a future ice age to undo global
warming. And quarries could survive the ice sheets. Meanwhile, those holiday
castles on the beach are increasingly made up of tiny fragments of discarded
cans and bottles. The sands of time, indeed.