Photography by Ishan Tankha
Out of Breath
DISASTERS TAKE OUR BREATH AWAY. When we are shocked by wonder or horror, our fingers shoot over our mouths as if to stop breath from falling out. When we say, Oh my god, you won the lottery, or an Oscar, or the neighborhood watch found your cat, or someone you admire is accused of something terrible, and the minute you hear it, you understand it could be true, or you see photographs of the siege of Aleppo or the drought in Madagascar or Uighur and Rohingya camps, you are stopped in your tracks. In Iceland, when the Fagradalsfjall volcano began erupting in March, people stood at the edge, gaping at the glowing lava, as if to see, was it really so? Breath has to do with believability. The more unbelievable something is, the more we reach for our mouths.
A bouquet to LRH
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Reading the history of food and agriculture in Mark Bittman’s book,
Animal, Vegetable, Junk. I have been thinking about how events in history, given our hindsight, seem to have set in motion a domino effect of unintended consequences. How a choice which made sense at the time can later seem a tragic mistake.
Take the story of Fritz Haber, a German Jew born in 1868 and a friend of Albert Einstein. Haber was influenced by William Crookes, president of the British Association for Advancement of Science. Crookes’s seminal 1898 “Great Wheat Speech” forecasted massive starvation. He ended his speech with a call, “It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities.”