Originally published on the CGS blog on May 7, 2007.
I love George Orwell. I find his writing a tonic for much of the nonsense that passes for political commentary these days. In fact, most of today’s politicians and pundits would do well to go back and re-read both “Politics and the English Language” and “Why I Write” — two of the best essays ever written on the art of political writing (are you listening, Christopher Hitchens?).
Right now, I’m re-reading the Everyman’s Library collection of his essays, which is the best single volume available. At 1,363 pages, it is probably more comprehensive than what most people want, but it includes all the classics, including “A Hanging ” “Shooting an Elephant,” “My Country Right or Left,” and “The Lion and the Unicorn.” It also contains many of Orwell’s more obscure pieces, some undersevedly overlooked and others justifiably forgotten.
One group of essays that fall into the latter category were those Orwell wrote immediately after the Second World War, when he turned away from politics and literature and toward the mundane details of daily life. Covering such issues as English manners, the ideal pub, and how to make the ideal cup of tea, they really don’t fit into his larger body of work. Without referring to his biography, my guess is that he wrote them to pay the bills while he worked on his two great novels, Animal Farm and 1984.
But one of these pieces — “Bad Climates are Best” — has stuck with me as a result of its quite unintentional relevance to the situation we find ourselves in today. Just take a look at this excerpt:
…[I]f our popular scientific writiers are to be believed we are within sight of being able to control the climate. By the use of atomic energy, it seems, we could melt the polar ice caps irrigate the Sahara, divert the Gulf Stream… in short, alter the planet out of recognition.
Orwell argues that such changes would be a bad thing — that he loves the variation found in England’s lousy climate, and that if it were up to him, he would not want a “dead level of continuous sunshine.”
I recognize that turning Orwell into a climate change prophet would be both forced and anachronistic. But it does no harm to reflect on what he would do were he alive today. My guess is that he would have used his talents to push the United States, China, and other doubters to change their policies so as to ensure that his beloved bad climate continued.
Or as he himself put it, “there is time to sit in the garden in a deck chair, and there is time to have chiblains and a dripping nose.” Having been raised in Florida, I’ll take the deck chair. But whether I like it or not, I think he has a point.
