When Words Fail

I almost never write about writing-in my aesthetic, the writing should disappear, the thought linger. But the longer I've spent working on global warming-the greatest challenge humans have ever faced-the more I've come to see it as essentially a literary problem. A technological and scientific challenge, yes; an economic quandary, yes; a political dilemma, surely. But centrally? A crisis in metaphor, in analogy, in understanding. We haven't come up with words big enough to communicate the magnitude of what we're doing.