Memory Machines

In the doldrum days between Christmas and New Year’s, we take a family trip to see a data center. Over the past two decades, data centers have become a common sight around the outskirts of Dublin and many other Irish cities and towns. Situated in industrial business parks, they are easy to miss. But these buildings are critical to the maintenance of contemporary life: Inside their walls stand rows and rows of networked servers; inside the servers, terabytes of data flow.

It’s a seven-minute drive from where we live now in Artane, Dublin, to the Clonshaugh data center, situated in a business park behind Northside Shopping Centre. Although we live close by, we haven’t driven this way before, and our route takes us through a number of the local authority estates that my husband lived in as a boy. These estates are set on either side of a long, straight road pocked with chicanes to deter joyriders. Even though the housing development sprawls for miles on either side — with large wind-blasted green spaces in between — the houses huddle, squashed together. It looks as if someone had transplanted a warren of inner-city Victorian terraces to this desolate terrain.

My eldest daughter, who is 6, sits in her car seat behind us and draws her impression of what a data center might look like. She shows it to me. It’s a large square, subdivided into many smaller squares. In the middle of each of the smaller squares swims a small tadpole-like dot. The effect is unsettling. “No windows?” I ask. 

She considers this for a moment. “Mummy, this is the back of the building. The back bits don’t have windows.”

When Google Maps tells us we have arrived at our destination, we swing off the main road and into a newer cul-de-sac and park the car. To our right, small houses, their Christmas decor forlorn in the brownish-gray light of an Irish winter’s afternoon. To our left, the industrial park’s security-spiked fence, lining Clonshaugh Road as far as the eye can see.

A low industrial hum fills the air: the sound of heavy machinery being operated some distance away. But the data center itself is silent.

In 2023, the consulting company Bitpower put the number of data centers in Ireland at 82. Ireland’s Central Statistics Office reported in 2021 that these centers were using up to 18 percent of the country’s metered electricity, the same amount as every Irish household combined. The data center we’re visiting, situated in the midst of some of Dublin’s most impoverished council estates, was only the third to be built in Ireland. At 11,500 square meters (about 124,000 square feet), the Clonshaugh data center is small compared with the one Facebook built in 2018 in Clonee, County Meath, which is about 150,000 square meters (about 1.6 million square feet). A 2008 Irish Times article on the building of the Clonshaugh data center is optimistic in tone, quoting Cathal Maguire, Eircom’s Manager Director of Retail: “Customers get the ideal environment for their critical systems, as well as access to high-value technical specialists who are skilled at managing the hardware and software that businesses require.” The Clonshaugh data center was developed by Digital Realty Trust and is operated by Eir — the company that evolved from the state-run Department of Posts and Telegraphs to first become Telecom Éireann, then the privately owned Eircom, via a disastrous flotation and shares scandal in the late 1990s. In January 2008, when Eir invested 100 million euro in the Clonshaugh data center, Ireland was only months away from becoming the first country in the eurozone to enter a recession.

Yet the data centers survived the downturn, heralds of a new economy that promised to one day move the nation away from the banking and housing bubble that had left it bankrupt. Data centers were one part of a long-standing vision of Ireland as a tech hub, a place where multinationals like Google, Facebook and Amazon would base their European headquarters, attracted by our well-educated workforce and — most importantly — our low corporate tax rate, which was 12.5 percent until 2023, when Ireland moved to a 15 percent tax rate in line with guidance from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. 

Since the 1960s, IDA Ireland, Ireland’s Industrial Development Agency has had a policy of aiming to attract international investment through low corporate tax rates, starting with an initial rate of zero percent. Ireland has long been home to tech companies: IBM and Ericsson offices opened in the 1950s, and factories owned by Dell, Intel, HP and Microsoft followed in the 1970s and 1980s. The focus of these operations was hardware. The pivot to software development coincided with the boom years of the early 2000s, when Ireland became known as the “Celtic Tiger.” Google’s European headquarters opened in Dublin in 2004, and since then, the country has become home to 16 of the 20 largest global tech companies. In the nine years between the 1999 Eircom shares scandal and the 2008 Irish banking scandal that exposed the country’s citizens to massive debt, Ireland enjoyed a period of rapid economic growth. Even as it struggled to exit recession in the 2010s, Ireland’s continued policy of low corporate taxation encouraged the growth of big tech in the country. The result is that Ireland’s economy is heavily dependent on tech companies, with low corporate taxes meaning that these companies contribute little to the Irish exchequer — and, by extension, to the Irish citizen left heavily indebted by the recession. 

At Clonshaugh, we cross the winding road that skirts the industrial estate and follow a man walking a dog. He cuts through a door in the fence. It’s got a magnetic lock, but it’s resting open, and there’s a sign warning against leaving dog mess. To one side, a scrubby rise of overgrown grass and browning dock leaves, and on the other, the slick gray face of the data center. We stand and consider it. A low industrial hum fills the air: the sound of heavy machinery being operated some distance away. But the data center itself is silent.

As the number of data centers in Ireland grows, with 82 in operation and another 40 slated to be built, so, too, will their energy footprint. The prospect of rolling blackouts has become more and more likely.

My daughter begins to sketch what she sees, and as she does so, I move off and wander alongside the fence for a bit. Apart from a few cars parked in the car park there is nothing to look at; it feels like the building itself is looking away. As with my daughter’s initial sketch, it’s difficult to identify the building’s front, although some panels of dark glass and a central door give a subtle hint toward ingress. The windowless gray façade is broken up by a number of grids, which look like part of the building’s cooling system. Ireland’s climate has been a major factor in attracting data centers to the country; servers need to be kept cool, and Ireland’s temperate climate makes this easier. A 2023 Irish Times article notes that Iceland, too, is now trying to attract data center investment — the new 1,700-kilometer (10,600-mile) IRIS cable, which runs along the seabed between Ireland and Iceland to create a direct cable link between the two countries, could make this plan more viable. Paired with Iceland’s cold climate, low population density and commitment to sustainability — all but 15 percent of Iceland’s energy consumption is sourced from renewables — this means that Ireland could offload some of its data processing to Iceland to help offset the catastrophic impact of data centers on Ireland’s energy consumption. According to Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency, Ireland is set to miss its 2030 carbon reduction targets by over 20 percent.

As we walk around the data center’s fence, I notice a multitude of cameras around the building. A security guard in hi-vis clothing appears, talking into a walkie-talkie, perhaps wondering why this small family is hanging around the fence. I use my cellphone to take a picture of a planning permission sign. There is very little of tangible value that could be taken from this building (although there have been incidents of thieves breaking into data facilities in the U.S. and stealing computer equipment), but the data the servers host is precious, and any disruption to the building’s power supply could cost the companies that purchase storage here millions. As the number of data centers in Ireland grows, with 82 in operation and another 40 slated to be built, so, too, will their energy footprint. The prospect of rolling blackouts has become more and more likely.

My daughter shows me a new drawing of the data center. Instead of a subdivided square, the building is now a subdivided rectangle. “Do you think it looks less scary now?” I ask. 

“Yeah. But I still didn’t do any windows.”

If there were a window to peer through, what would I see? The internet shows me images of floors housing large servers, multiples of the kind we might be familiar with from our workplaces. About 30 people work in each data center, including security guards, cleaners, and technicians, but this is a global estimate; our small Clonshaugh data center likely has far fewer. There are four or five cars parked outside the day we visit, but most people are likely still on holiday for the Christmas break. 

Up to 88 percent of what is stored in the cloud is considered junk data that will not be accessed again by users. But the value of data lies in its scale: Apps, websites and cookies track our day-to-day activities, and businesses can put this information to lucrative use in order to sell us things. Most of us consider our data safe when we save it to the cloud. As a writer, any time I complain about losing work or accidentally deleting a file, I’m met with the question: “Didn’t you back it up in the cloud?” My Gmail recently threatened to stop working unless I bought more storage for the hundreds of photos and videos I’ve saved of my kids. After an afternoon spent deleting, I succumbed, and now my personal history is safely tucked away in the cloud for future use — isn’t it?

“It was an act of cultural vandalism,” said Catriona Crowe, the former head of special projects at the National Archives of Ireland. “For a long time people didn’t realize what we had lost.”

We drive back from Clonshaugh through Priorswood and Darndale, estates built during the 1980s, a time when Ireland suffered successive recessions, mass emigration and a heroin plague. The estates seem to have changed little since those days, even though the country as a whole has seen massive economic and social shifts, and I start thinking about the fragility of social and national memory. I wonder if data centers such as the one in Clonshaugh will contribute to the kind of record keeping Ireland has not always excelled at as a nation. Ireland is a country with a long memory, but a patchy one; we’ve just completed our celebrations of the Decade of Centenaries — a 10-year-long project to explore and reflect upon the decade in which the independent Irish state came into being. The commemorations started with the 1913 Lockout, a general strike that strengthened the labor movement that would ultimately support the 1916 Easter Rising. In the early 1920s, further violence erupted with the War of Independence and then the Civil War; the latter was a bitter internecine conflict that shifted the politics of Ireland away from the revolutionary ideals of the Easter Rising and toward the conservative Christian values that defined its 20th century. One of the conflict’s pivotal moments occurred June 30, 1922, when the Public Record Office, a repository of over 700 years of local records, was burned during a battle between the anti-treaty Irish Republican Army, who had rejected the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 which brought the Irish Free State into being, and the Free State government. “It was an act of cultural vandalism,” said Catriona Crowe, the former head of special projects at the National Archives of Ireland. “For a long time people didn’t realize what we had lost.” 

During the Civil War, the Public Record Office — adjacent to the Four Courts building, where the anti-treaty IRA had stationed themselves — was used as an armory. When the pro-treaty side enlisted the help of British artillery — which they eventually did, four months after the initial occupation of the Four Courts — the Public Record Office suffered the worst damage. I think of the cameras hanging off the corners of the Clonshaugh data center, their domed glass lenses allowing them a 360-degree view of those who might come to threaten the flow of information.  

The burning of public records “was a massive own goal,” Crowe told me. “It wiped out the history of the occupants of this island, most of whom kept no records.” She mentioned Slievemore, a settlement of 80 to 100 abandoned cottages on the slopes of Slievemore Mountain on Achill Island, off the coast of County Mayo: “It was thriving before the famine. If we had the 1841 census, we would know the names, religions, occupations of the people.” The area was settled for more than 5,000 years. With the birth of the new state, we lost all record of that famine generation.

Rather than creating something permanent and inviolable, we’ve made our memories more contingent than ever upon a fantasy of technological stability that, given the constant churn of history, seems inevitably fleeting.

I asked Crowe what she thinks of digitization in general, of the replacement of tangible records with a digital copy of each of our earthly transactions, stored among various servers. “Well, the first thing to say is that the most secure form of knowledge preservation is stone, and the oldest,” Crowe said. “After that, parchment — it survives all kinds of difficulties and remains robust. Then we had rag-based paper, from the 15th century onward, and after that acid paper cut from forests in the early 19th century. This deteriorates very quickly and needs to be kept stable. But by far the most unstable form is digital. We have a black hole opening in history. When Irish government departments started using computers in the 1970s, there was no network, and many of those files can’t be read any longer. There’s no real policy for digital preservation of state records. A nightmare is facing us. Emails, Excel, Word, PowerPoint — they’ll all vanish — unless there’s a decision made by the government.” 

I have a little experience with the instability of digital files myself. In a past life I worked on a project to digitize the extensive archive of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, the English-speaking world’s first state-subsidized theater. I was surprised by the projected speed of deterioration of the images we were creating for our database; even TIFF files, which don’t degrade, may become inaccessible if the software used to read them becomes obsolete. And so all that material floating around in the cloud — which is in reality being bounced from server to server, degrading each time this happens — is not really being preserved in the way we might imagine. Its continued existence is dependent on a steady flow of electricity, the continued provision of which is contingent upon governments reaching renewables targets they can’t agree upon. And even then, these files will degrade, deteriorate and become obsolete. Rather than creating something permanent and inviolable, we’ve made our memories more contingent than ever upon a fantasy of technological stability that, given the constant churn of history, seems inevitably fleeting. 

As world temperatures increase, data centers have migrated to places where the climate is temperate. There, they consume vast amounts of energy, increasing carbon emissions. It’s a frightening and seemingly unsustainable pattern; we’ve trusted our memories to a system that might destroy them, and us. Because of this fraught reality, data centers in Ireland have become controversial in the past five years, and the tone of the newspaper articles discussing them has changed. It’s suggested that if all the data centers currently proposed in Ireland are built, they could be using up to 70 percent of the country’s electricity by 2030. 

Reliance on fossil fuels and on-site generation has remained a concern for environmentalists in the intervening years, with close scrutiny being paid to new developers’ commitments to contributing to Ireland’s renewable grid. The journalist Aoife Barry, in her research for her recent book Social Capital, has identified the ways in which multinationals are greenwashing their contribution toward renewables, including the case of a High Court review of a planned Apple data center in County Galway in 2018: 

“The board sought more information on the plans, saying there was a lack of clarity around ‘direct sustainable energy sources,’ including how Apple would live up to its promise of running on 100 percent renewable energy. When Apple submitted a revised environmental impact assessment to the council, it indicated that it wouldn’t be generating renewable energy itself. Instead, it would buy renewable generated power from an energy supplier “equal to the total power consumption of the data center building in any particular year.”

This equation works out only if energy demands don’t continue to rise in the coming years, meaning any renewable investment is going to continue to lag behind the needs of the expanding data center sector.

In an effort to entice further foreign direct investment, the government has implemented measures aimed at streamlining the planning process for data centers, which would allow concerned citizens less visibility into the estimated environmental impacts of these centers. Decreasing transparency in this instance seems unnerving, and symptomatic of the Irish state’s strange relationship with multinationals. In 2016, the Irish government rejected the European Commission’s ruling that Apple should pay Ireland 13 billion euros in unpaid taxes, on the grounds that the lower corporate taxation rate the country offered at the time makes Ireland more attractive for investors. The logic behind that decision might have been confusing to everyday Irish citizens, given that at that time they were each saddled with 42,000 euros in debt accrued by the International Monetary Fund’s bailout of our banks. 

Data centers have contributed 7.3 billion euros to the Irish economy, but provide only around 16,000 jobs to a country of 5.28 million people. The lack of employment these centers provide leads to questions over who benefits from their existence. In August 2022, after two consecutive amber alerts for electricity outages in Ireland, then-Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe appeared on national broadcaster RTÉ’s radio show “Morning Ireland,” where he was quizzed about the low employment figures at data centers and the fact that their profit margins were soaring while electricity bills had reached new highs for Irish citizens. He dismissed the lack of employment, emphasizing instead the “huge importance of them to really large employers within our country, whose taxes and jobs are playing an invaluable part in our economic performance at the moment.”

At the birth of the state, we burned our history in an act of carelessness; we also freed ourselves to create a new national history.

The benefits of the data center economy are diffuse, intangible. In 2022, due to concerns about pressure on the national grid and the potential for rolling blackouts, EirGrid, Ireland’s energy grid, placed a moratorium on the development of new data centers in Dublin until 2028. But applications for centers outside of the capital are still being granted. Other European countries, such as the Netherlands, are halting their development of data centers. Singapore imposed a three-year moratorium from 2019 to 2022, and is now seeking applications within new parameters to ensure sustainability. Unless Ireland figures out a way to surge forward with its slow development of renewables, these data centers seem impossible to sustain. One potential solution is to look more carefully at what data we retain, and why. We must weigh the short-term financial benefits of seemingly infinite data retention against the long-term threat of climate crisis. 

Ireland is no exception to the rule that what we remember and what we forget are always contingent upon the power structures and hierarchies that shape our contemporary moment. At the birth of the state, we burned our history in an act of carelessness; we also freed ourselves to create a new national history. We entrusted the church with our moral guidance and guardianship, and then allowed it to commit unspeakable cruelties on our citizens, including the abuses recounted in the Report of the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse (2009) and the Commission of Investigation Into Mother and Baby Homes (2021). At the latter end of the century, and in the wake of joining the European Union, we moved away from our old bad memories and toward a prosperous new era, placing our faith in international investment, almost at any cost. But in a small country like Ireland, the old names — whether they be companies or state organizations or political dynasties — crop up again and again. Sometimes our faulty memories flash up a warning. But often that history is stored in the cloud: intangible, vulnerable to exploitation, and degrading over time.  

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Mothers at the End of the World

When I was seven months pregnant, I flew to Spitsbergen to see the end of the world. I packed my suitcase with thermal underwear, a new merino base layer, two fleeces and my partner’s ski pants. I couldn’t fit into my own.

I always wanted to go to the Arctic. I imagined myself swiftly following in the footsteps of my childhood heroes, who were fighting the white emptiness. Instead, I could barely pull on my shoes. I had to buy new ones. The old ones had laces. 

Anyway, going on a sled into an adventure wouldn’t be possible. October was supposed to be the beginning of winter, but the bay near Longyearbyen – the capital of Spitsbergen – had not yet frozen over. The snowmobiles were stuck in the mud. There was hardly any snow. Well, on my first night, a bit of snow had dusted the flat-topped hills. It looked like a desperate attempt to sprinkle some leftover sugar on a cake. I was sweating in thermal underwear, a merino shirt and men’s ski pants.

Over the past 30 years Spitsbergen and the entire Svalbard archipelago – home to the world’s northernmost restaurant, northernmost supermarket, northernmost hotel, northernmost Asian shop and northernmost gas station – have been warming seven times faster than the rest of the world.

Instead of a dog sled, I boarded a catamaran. I would have preferred a motorboat, but the travel agency politely told me that they don’t recommend motorboats for pregnant women. It rocks too much, they said. It wasn’t until later that I realized that what they really meant was: there are no toilets on a motorboat.

So, I boarded a hybrid-electric catamaran and sailed on an ink-coloured sea. Although each of the passengers has flown thousands of kilometres to get to the island (me – 2,898 km, with two stopovers), increasing our carbon footprint, once we’re here we’re sustainable tourists.

It was three degrees above zero, but it felt like minus ten. The only sound you could hear was the wind. The only things to see were clouds, sea and ice.

Doomsday Glacier

In 2019, American writer Elizabeth Rush also headed to the frozen land, only in the south. She spent seven weeks on the icebreaker Nathaniel R. Palmer.

The research expedition for 57 people was organized by an international group of scientists from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. Glaciologists, oceanographers, palaeoclimatologists, marine ecologists, geophysicists and biochemists, together with three journalists, cooks, sailors, technicians, electricians and seamen, were the first people in the world to sail to explore the forefield of the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. Only recently has the Southern Ocean been warm enough to allow sailing right up to the glacier. Previously, the Amundsen Sea was covered with ice even in summer.

Thwaites gathered the most media frenzy of all the glaciers in the last years. It was even dubbed the Doomsday Glacier. Its front is 120 kilometres long and its surface area would cover half of Poland. It holds so much water that if it melted, sea levels around the world would rise by 65 centimetres.

In “The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth”, Rush focuses not only on the research that is helping to understand what is happening to the glacier, but also on the meticulous record of how 57 strangers are transformed into a temporary community. Through her writing we meet the scientists, we experience the boredom of the first weeks, and we throw ourselves into the work when Palmer finally reaches Thwaites.

The opportunity to join an expedition has come at a bad time for Rush. She and her husband had to stop trying to have a child – pregnant people are not invited to polar expeditions. Rush is afraid that such a break will ruin her chances of becoming a mother. But she also fears that she won’t become a mother after whatever she is going to witness during the expedition.

Her book is in fact a book about motherhood.

Lab meat

Can I feed my son avocados (good for his health!) since producing five of them uses 300 to 600 litres of water and their transport to Poland emits 1.7 kg of carbon dioxide?

How long can I let my son splash around in the tub? He could sit under a running shower for an hour, three times a day.  I’d like to convert that to litres of water, but I lack imagination. I know it’s too many.

Can I not feed him meat since I don’t eat meat myself? Can I make decisions about his future diet? What if in the future lab-grown meat is the cheapest and healthiest food on a global crisis-burdened earth and my son can’t digest it?

Could I have given birth to a child when someone had calculated that each new human being burdens the earth with an additional 59 tons of carbon dioxide during each year of their life?

Can I teach him the value of empathy when in the future ruthlessness might be more needed? 

Could I give birth to a child when all the worst-case scenarios predict that the world will become an increasingly scary place to live?

Sad patch of snow in the city park

As I approach the Nordenskiöldbreen glacier on a silent catamaran gliding across the dark-ink sea, I feel overwhelmed. It’s too windy outside to last more than a minute, so I stare out the window at the empty landscape. And I listen to the guide telling the story of Spitsbergen: whalers, trappers, miners, explorers. This place has always attracted people who wanted to take something for themselves.

I would like to write that what I see is spectacular. That it takes my breath away. But reality is cold and grey, and I need to pee again. The fjord is narrow, and between its brown arms lies a grey mass of ice – the glacier cliff is three kilometres wide. It does not look majestic. It resembles a small hill in a park when after a few days of winter, the thaw begins, and the snow looks miserable, wet and trampled by children’s sleds.

We sail around a piece of rock that the guide calls Retreat Isle. It looks more like a table than an island, maybe a small seal can fit on it. It appeared in this place in the 1960s.

Scientists have proven that the Nordenskiöldbreen glacier has been melting continuously since 1896. It used to be three and a half kilometres longer. It will soon become a patch of ice and snow that does not even reach the sea. 

Disintegration

“One day, we were cruising in clear seas in front of the glacier. The next day, we were surrounded by icebergs the size of aircraft carriers,” Jeff Goodell, the other journalist on board Palmer, wrote for Rolling Stone. The scientists had to stop their research. Within 48 hours, a 33-kilometer-long section of the Thwaites Ice Shelf—the part of the glacier that floats in the sea and stabilizes the rest of the ice from sliding—had broken apart, turning the Amundsen Sea into a maze of icebergs. And the water began to freeze. Palmer had to return north.

The research conducted in 2019 helped to understand that Thwaites is melting faster than expected. Not because the air is warming, but because the ocean is warming, and the water is melting the glacier from below. For now, only the shelf is melting, but scientists say it will disappear within a decade at the latest, maybe even as early as this year. Then the glacier itself will start to melt.

Thwaites acts like a cork. When it disappears, warm water will enter the West Antarctic ice sheet, which will also start to melt. And the entire ice sheet holds so much water that its release will raise the world’s sea level by three meters. It won’t happen in a year, but the erosion of Thwaites and the Antarctic ice sheet will affect our children and their children. We can say goodbye to the Old Town of Gdansk.

Elizabeth Rush—debating with herself whether to give birth or not—details Palmer’s findings. She adds, “Ever since my return, I’ve wondered if the prolific calving we witnessed was a fecund or a fatal act, a birthing ritual or death throes?” But she’s not naive. Her earlier Pulitzer-nominated book, “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore”, chronicled the changing American shore from Louisiana to Oregon to Rhode Island.

Rush knows the dangers of the climate crisis. She understands the dangers of part of Antarctica breaking apart. But a year after her return from Antarctica, she gives birth to a son, Nicolás.

Second body

I thought that for a whole week spent behind the polar circle, I would be constantly in awe. But instead of awe I feel uneasiness – and I can’t find the source of it. It’s not the sadness of the landscape without trees. It’s not the discomfort of a belly that makes me wobbly and heavy. It’s not the awareness of witnessing the melt. 

This strange feeling seeps into my body when I walk on the streets of Longyearbyen with its population of 1753 people (of which roughly 500 come from south-east Asia – hence the Thai shop with frozen lemongrass and kaffir limes) and a view of mines perched on tops of the mountains. One of them is still operating – providing coal for a local power plant and for steel for the automotive industry. The feeling makes itself comfortable when I sit down to a meal watching locals in their elegant outfits and slippers brought from home in a bag similar to one I used to take with me to school every day. 

I can’t name it. I’m trying to describe it and the closest I come to is I’m missing a home that I haven’t yet created.

It is on the day of the trip to Nordenskiöldbreen that I realize what is happening. I am standing at the barrier in too-tight pants and a too-tight jacket, wrapped in a wool scarf, and the wind is bringing tears to my eyes. Suddenly I understand that I have been here before.

I am here every time I get on a plane, take a shower, send emails or watch TV shows on my computer. My carbon emissions, a byproduct of my daily life, arrived here before me. Daisy Hildyard, in her book “The Second Body”, writes about this invisible body that each of us has, which – while we are taking a bath – wreaks havoc in the world.

“In normal life, a human body is rarely understood to exist outside its own skin – it is supposed to be inviolable […]. You are encouraged to be yourself and to express yourself – to be whole, to be one. Move away from this personality, self-expression, and you risk going out of your mind, being beside yourself, failing to be true to yourself, hearing other voices, or splitting your personality: it doesn’t sound good. […]. You need boundaries, you have to be either here or there. Don’t be all over the place.”

Hildyard notes that climate change is forcing us to reconceptualize our bodies. The truth is that ours have spread beyond the skin and across the globe: “even the patient who is anaesthetized on an operating table, barely breathing, is illuminated by surgeons’ lamps which are powered with electricity trailed from a plant which is pumping out of its chimneys a white smoke that spreads itself out against the sky. This is every living thing on earth.”

Each of us, especially those from the rich Global North, has a second body. I found mine scattered in the mud that reigns instead of snow on Spitsbergen and on an islet exposed by a retreating glacier whose front – where the melting and calving occurs -is grey and jagged.

I found mine, dancing in the North. 

Our great fault?

“What on earth is a carbon footprint?” This question appeared in 2005 on the spreads of major American newspapers. Below it is the answer: “Every person in the world has one. It’s the amount of carbon dioxide emitted due to our daily activities – from washing a load of laundry to driving a carload of kids to school.” And then in a small font you can read the address of a website with a calculator that will help you calculate how much harm you are doing to the Earth. Since then, the idea of a carbon footprint has become part of our everyday life, and calculators that help us calculate it – a tool for measuring individual guilt.

The carbon footprint question and link were not part of a journalistic piece, but an advertisement commissioned by oil company BP as part of its “Beyond Petroleum” campaign.

Almost two decades later, a database Carbon Majors – created by a world-renowned scientist – published a report in April 2024 which shows that as much as 80 percent of greenhouse gases emitted worldwide come from 57 companies. Some of them are state-owned (33 percent of global emissions), some private (also 33 percent). Among the latter, BP is in third place – just behind Shell and ExxonMobil.

The corporation whose $100 million per year advertising campaign has convinced us that it is our fault is responsible for one percent of global emissions. In Jonathan Watts’s piece covering the Carbon Majors report for The Guardian, Richard Heede, the founder of the database, says: “Don’t blame consumers who have been forced to be reliant on oil and gas due to government capture by oil and gas companies.”

When describing the BP campaign Rush rages. She understands that corporations influence – and manipulate – momentous life decisions such as becoming a mother. “Carbon calculators suggest all life should be viewed through the wrapped lens of an extractive economic system where taking is assumed, with no giving, tending, or mending in return”. She herself has spent a lot of time feeling ashamed about wanting to be a mother.

“The real choice we face,” Meehan Crist wrote in her seminal 2020 essay “Is it OK to have a child?” for the London Review of Books, “is not whether to eat meat or how many children to have, but how quickly to make profound and rapid structural changes, without which no personal choice will matter.” She adds that the decision to have children, which for many women, especially in the Global South, is still not a matter of choice, “is not the same as choosing not to have a car or to eat a plant-based diet. Having a child isn’t merely one consumer choice among many.”

Chimeric community

The transformation into a mother is a radical transformation. The size of the foot changes, the composition of the blood changes, even the neural pathways in the brain change. Foetal cells – called chimeric cells – make their way into the mother’s heart, lungs, liver and kidneys. The woman becomes a chimera, a combination of herself and her child. The ego disappears – at least for a while, at least in some areas. The single self grows, expands, encompasses more than one person. Sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes the whole world.

The transformation into a mother is a disappearance and expansion at the same time. Abundance despite scarcity. It is not pleasant. And yet it is.

Becoming a mother also means a new set of values. Crist wrote that “having a child has been a commitment to life, and a commitment to the possibilities of a human future on this warming planet.” Rush speaks of “an act of radical faith that life will continue, despite all that assails it. […] to have a child means having faith that the world will change, and more importantly, committing to being a part of that change yourself.”

Rush sees change coming through the community. “[…] real climate resilience is something we have either together or not at all,” she writes. And she wonders how the fact that at the end of the world it was possible to create a community of people who are very different but united by a common goal can be transferred to the everyday life of other continents. She contrasts her selflessness, helpfulness and tolerance from the time of the cruise with the aggression that appeared in her at the beginning of the pandemic.

As if she wanted to show that if someone who snaps at the postman for coming too close was able to spend seven weeks building community with strangers with different views, then anything is possible.

And we too – with our weaknesses – can meet in a community that exists despite everything.

Universal Mothering

The image that stays with me from Rush’s book is of a glacier calving. The ice disintegrating – like a woman giving birth.

Motherhood in times of crisis makes us ask questions about responsibility towards future generations. But the radicalism of motherhood lies in everyday details: making breakfast despite being tired, watering the plants and cleaning the kitchen. In small acts of care for the community of humans and non-humans.

Instead of obsessing over how much emissions dinner will cause, can we count the acts of care that support the planet—and the interspecies community? Could we create calculators for fidgeting that changes the world?

In her famous book “Of Woman Born: Motherhood as an Experience and Institution”, Adriene Rich wrote: “The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival”.

Can people who mother – children, cats, dogs, turtles, ladybugs, the sick, the healthy, those close to them, those far away – change the world through mothering?

Don’t open, Sesame!

On my last day in Svalbard, I took a taxi to go outside of the city. You can’t leave Longyearbyen’s borders on your own without a gun. The drive is short, and after five minutes the taxi leaves me uphill in the mud, next to a strange building looking like a blade stuck into the mountain. The tall concrete walls are topped by a glass facade. When the sun reflects off it, it sparkles like the Northern Lights.

It’s a real fortress and I won’t enter it today. Nor any other day. All I can do is stand in the mud and look at the double steel doors, behind which lie 642 million seeds protected by permafrost.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built sixteen years ago with one aim in mind: to protect the world’s genetic biodiversity. It’s believed to be the most secure place on Earth: its three chambers can hold up to 2,5 billion seeds and they are placed in permafrost, so even if the electrical cooling system switches off, the seeds are going to be protected at a stable temperature: -6 degrees. 

In 2017, the corridor leading to the vault was flooded with water – it leaked from the outside, from the ground that was supposed to never thaw.

We built a uterus inside of the ground, a uterus that awaits with life. Are we able to protect it?

I feel my son’s leg somewhere close to my liver. I call for a taxi. I want to go home.

Can a new world grow from a puddle? Again?

Editor: Juliusz Kurkiewicz