Meehan Crist

The Voynich Manuscript​ looks unremarkable: a yellowing bundle of cheap vellum pages bound between two wooden boards. The cover is blank. Once called ‘the most mysterious manuscript in the world’ by the medievalist and philologist John Manly, its 240 pages contain illustrations of plants no one can identify, what look to be circular celestial maps (though they don’t...

Higher sea levels mean higher storm surges, like the nine-foot surge that inundated Lower Manhattan and severely affected neighbourhoods in Long Island and New Jersey, but also that low-lying coastal areas, from Bangladesh to Amsterdam, will be underwater in less than a hundred years. It’s worth remembering that two-thirds of the world’s cities sit on coastlines. In a high-emissions scenario, average high tides in New York could be higher than the levels seen during Sandy. A rise in global sea levels of 11 feet would fully submerge cities like Mumbai and a large part of Bangladesh. The question is no longer if – but how high, and how fast.

Before I got pregnant, I thought I understood how DNA works: parents pass on some combination of their DNA, which codes for various heritable traits, to their children, who pass on some combination to their children, and so on down the neat branching lines of the genealogical tree. What I didn’t know was that women can also receive DNA from their children.

I can’t help but wonder what Rachel Carson would have made of our present crisis. She believed there were limits to the changes humans could bring about in the environment without fundamentally altering the balance of nature, and her vision of this balance was not a single point of ideal equilibrium but one of dynamic change. ‘The balance of nature,’ she wrote, ‘is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. Man, too, is part of this balance. Sometimes the balance is in his favour; sometimes – and all too often through his own activities – it is shifted to his disadvantage.’ This is the first time in human history that the entire global climate is shifting to what may be our permanent disadvantage.