Science historian Daisy Hildyard shows us where we are headed

livemint.com:

The Second Body, an odd gem of a book by the science historian, Daisy Hildyard, which was published in 2017. I read it in a day, in a state of feverish excitement, savouring one of those rare encounters with an author who dares to strip away the film of familiarity from their readers’ eye, forcing them to see what has remained long unseen. A curious mix of cultural history, investigative journalism and philosophical analysis, it’s hard to classify The Second Body.

At its broadest, this slim volume is a critique of the ills that humanity continues to inflict on the biosphere, which encapsulates all life on the planet. It follows in the footsteps of a hallowed line of writers, starting with the American scientist Rachel Carson in the 1960s, who have held up a mirror to the perils of the Anthropocene Age. Yet Hildyard brings more than her scholarship to her work.

As the final chapter of The Second Body reveals, the book is an outcome of a devastating personal experience—of the author and her family losing their home, and everything else in it, in a flash flood in North Yorkshire in England. Nothing drives home the reality of climate change until it is experienced as individual tragedy. All the best scientific minds could keep making foolproof cases on the impact of human action on all lives across the globe.

But until the water supply runs out in our neighbourhood, or the birds begin to drop dead on our terraces scorched by the sun, climate science feels abstract and intangible to most of us. At its core, The Second Bodyis an attempt to actualise the irony of this double bind. It all starts with Hildyard rescuing an injured pigeon in her kitchen one day and immediately thinking that she could have just as easily wrung its