Land in sight
We live, says Alastair Bonnett, in a paradoxical time. On the one hand, climate change is accelerating the sinking of a number of islands or their disintegration into archipelagos. On the other hand, more artificial islands are being created than ever before in human history. In total, since 1985 the world has wrested more land from the sea than it has lost to the oceans, according to the British social geographer in his travel book “The Age of the Islands”. So at the moment a natural and an unnatural rhythm would overlap.
There is a certain quirkiness behind Alastair Bonnett’s enthusiasm for new and especially artificial islands, and the author is well aware of this. It is a fundamental fascination for the phenomenon of island creation and not for the specific charms of these islands. These are usually missing anyway, the artificially created or newly emerged land masses are often inhospitable, sometimes inaccessible and cannot be grasped with the classic metaphor of the island as a paradisiacal place.
Bonnett is driven by a desire to discover and conquer, which he self-ironically calls a “post-colonial excess” and which is not satisfied by what holidaymakers usually find on (natural) islands, whether it is Bornholm, Bali or Bora Bora acts. For him, it’s not about sun and sand, about seclusion and tranquility, not about enjoying life under palm trees or behind dunes.
“Islands today convey a sense of evanescence and uncertainty: there is an atmosphere of doubt surrounding them,” writes Bonnett in the introduction to his book. At the same time, an incredible amount is projected onto them, including himself. Islands “offer the possibility of something new, of hope”. Even the most desolate island – of which there are particularly many artificial ones – would have something utopian about it. Bonnett refers to Thomas More’s book “Utopia”, which resonates to this day, in which he describes a perfect realm that – of course – lies on an island.
Islands have always been built to store anything undesirable there
The utopias associated with these new islands arouse Bonnett’s curiosity. There is more to this than just its practical purpose. One of the questions is, for example, whether life on an artificially created island must necessarily be artificial itself.
The idea of artificial islands is not new. “Islands have always been built to dump all sorts of undesirable things there,” says Bonnett, reminiscent of Venice, which, he continues cynically, has built “an entire archipelago of rubbish dumps”: San Lazzaro degli Armeni originally served as a Leper colony, San Giorgio in Alga as a prison for political opponents, San Servolo as a madhouse. But islands were also created to promote agriculture and trade: the crannogs, which had been in use on the British Isles since the Neolithic, the floating islands made of reeds that had been made at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates since the fourth century BC, as well as the many islands that together formed the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, the origin of Mexico City.
Land reclaimed from the sea must always serve a purpose
Today artificial islands are created for very different purposes: to create living space or holiday and leisure areas, to expand the infrastructure, for geostrategic reasons, for coastal protection. In this respect, the development in the north of the Flevo-polder is astonishing. With an area of 970 square kilometers, this is the largest artificial island in the world, located off the coast of the Netherlands. More than 300,000 people have lived here since 1968, and the areas between the settlements are used for agriculture. In the meantime, the renaturation of parts of the island is being debated, although the term is not entirely correct, as the areas in question were originally under water. But for the first time the thought of the unproductive arises in connection with artificial islands.
Alastair Bonnett travels to Dubai, on The Palm and The World, he visits Asian offshore airports, he reports on rock islands in the South China Sea that have been turned into missile bases by the Chinese military. There is always an economic, military, or social goal associated with creating an island. Bonnett looks at the environmental and social consequences. Sometimes they are strange, sometimes outrageous, but by no means always negative. If, as with the Villiers Island project in Toronto, at least an attempt is made to take ecological standards into account.
The boldness of the island constructions is sometimes astonishing: In the Arctic, oil and gas companies build islands out of spray ice. A foundation for a derrick can be created in less than two months. Despite all the irritation, Alastair Bonnett cannot hide his enthusiasm for such things.
Alastair Bonnett: The Age of Islands. Of setting paradises and artificial archipelagos. Translated from the English by Andreas Wirthensohn. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2021. 264 pages, 23 euros.
Stefan Fischer
Big swarm offensive
There is nothing better for a child in the summer vacation than spending seemingly endless, flowing days by the sea. In “The Eloquence of the Sardine”, Bill François takes us back to his childhood days to a special sea experience: He finds a small, silvery shimmering fish in a stony Mediterranean bay. This sardine frees him from his fear of the aquatic inhabitants of the open, blue sea. And this fleeting encounter also inspires him to get to know the habitat of water and all of its inhabitants better. François’ insatiable longing for this magical world has carried him to different parts of the world, which he has explored on land, on the boat and by diving underwater.
In “The Eloquence of the Sardine”, Bill François tells his stories from the world of rivers and seas, which astonish and inspire you, gently and yet impressively. Starting with the sardine in the Mediterranean, which François describes as “simultaneously radiant and fragile” due to its filigree appearance, the book illuminates many other places on earth where the author encounters extraordinary aquatic inhabitants in a fascinating hydrocosm.
The oceans are sound spaces, with a great chorus of fish
The observation trip is not only as refreshing as a swim in a cold, clear mountain lake, but also very worth knowing and rich in content. The scientific comments of François, who works in the field of hydrodynamics and biomechanics, are woven into the poetic world of the book in an easily understandable way. They are supplemented by seventeen drawings.
François describes colors, smells, sounds, currents and vibrations. They are all sophisticated means of communication in the everyday life of the aquatic inhabitants and fit into the oceanic acoustics, the “background noise of the sea orchestra”. The wonderful whale songs, for example, ensure that the animals can be located and communicated over thousands of kilometers. These join the “great chorus of fish”: the perch buzzes with the help of its swim bladder, and lobsters use their antennae as a violin by rubbing them against the undersides of their eyes. The Atlantic salmon, on the other hand, distinguishes the finest nuances of scent in the water for its migratory movement, so that it recognizes its distant birthplace, the Breton stream, in the cold waters of Greenland.
In Paris, street fishermen watch over the ecosystem with headlamps and fishing rods
The book leads from the idyllic beaches of New Zealand across Polynesian waters to the coast of Peru, where a network of several kilometers wide collects the anchovy schools for fish meal processing. It takes you to the Norwegian fjords, where thousands upon thousands of salmon cavort in a confined space in aquaculture facilities. Bill François introduces you to people who have tied their fate to the sea: courageous Spanish fishermen who vigorously demand protective measures to save the anchovy stock in the Bay of Biscay. They are stories of the profit-driven greed that is driving insatiable overfishing of what was once glorious abundance around the world.
But there are also encounters with people from urban society that combine curiosity and a sense of preservation: street fishermen in busy Paris who explore the underground ecosystem with headlamps and fishing rods and guard them like a family. The book is therefore also a plea for searching for and finding one’s own place in nature, which, in its breathtaking, fragile beauty, continually reveals wonders and demands that we treat it responsibly in order to preserve it. Above all, “The Eloquence of the Sardine” is a loving invitation to travel the world with open eyes and let your imagination flow again and again into new stories.
Bill François: The Eloquence of the Sardine: Incredible Tales from the World of Rivers and Seas. Translated from the French by Frank Sievers. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2021. 234 pages, 22 euros.
Sarah Zapf
Hitchhiking by ship
Prague, Paris, Bratislava, Vienna: Timo Peters has hitchhiked a lot in his life. In autumn 2011 a lot was similar and yet very different. Instead of allowing himself to be taken in the car, Peters signed on to sail boats, instead of sleeping on sofas in narrow bunks. His goal: hitchhiking across the Atlantic. From Gibraltar via Las Palmas and Cape Verde to Recife on the Brazilian coast, he drove with two captains on their boats – couch sailing instead of couch surfing. An exciting adventure with a lot of potential for a good story.
But Peters does not manage to do that in his book “Couchsailing”. Instead of taking the reader on the deck of the sailing boats, letting her smell the smell of the sea and giving her the opportunity to develop an emotional relationship with the people in this story, “Couchsailing” is for the most part a pure treatise of what happened. When Peters writes that sailing boats “smell of workshop and kitchen-cum-living-room at the same time” and that he loves this scent, this is one of the few passages that allow the reader to glimpse at least briefly into the author’s world of emotions and thoughts.
At the beginning Peters describes his motivation for the trip: “I want to find out how big such an ocean feels.” But the result remains open. Sometimes, writes Peters, he sat on the night shift Mystique or the Libertalia alone on deck for hours. What was going through his head? How big did the ocean feel in those moments? Nothing.
“Couchsailing” is also not very convincing in terms of style. Pictorial descriptions to visualize the harbor bar, where the first beer is drunk after a long voyage, are rare. Peters chooses the same formulations over and over again, he does not explain technical terms. And expressions like the “blonde in a brightly colored flower dress” or the “women stories” that a crew colleague tells him make it clear that the author is not aware of the discrediting effect of his language.
At least – at the end Peters has a little surprise ready, which gives the trip a bigger meaning and the book a surprising ending. How big the Atlantic feels is still not known, but that crossing it represents a turning point in Peter’s life that makes him happy is also an insight. A small spoiler: it’s about love.
Timo Peters: Couch sailing. How I hitchhiked across the Atlantic. Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2021. 320 pages, 12 euros.
Josephine Kanefend