In a Vulnerable Place

Steve Waters

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781780018706
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

A short play from the acclaimed author of Limehouse and Temple.

In a Vulnerable Place is a monologue documenting Steve Waters' own journey from the Norfolk Broads to the steppes of Mongolia to explore, first hand, what is happening to the natural world and the human heart.

It was first staged at Norwich Arts Centre in 2014, and then as part of RADAR at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2015.

1.

‘Has the world or have I changed?’

What is that song?

I find myself getting a bit low these days and I would be the first to acknowledge ‘who doesn’t’ and the first to admit it’s a luxury to feel that way but I do, I do and I think what these lows, what these lows might be caused by is thinking about the future –

the near future,

the imaginable future – the next ten years, say,

then the horizon of my imagination – pick a date, let’s say

2050.

I’m in a lecture hall in Christ’s College, Cambridge, listening to Professor Charles Kennel, an oceanographer from the Scripps Institute in San Diego, talk about the future:

‘Avoid the unmanageable and manage the avoidable: what we can expect from the climate in the coming decades and what we might do.’

It’s a large carpeted room; even the ceiling is carpeted.

I cycled here in dark rain. I am wet and cold; even my socks are wet; and this talk is terrifying.

Graphs and slides galore, too fast to notate. Okay: ‘Alternative climate worlds’ – he’s crunching all the models and they all converge on a date:

By 2050 the real changes that await us reach a kind of climax; that is to say the velocity of change will almost certainly double, given warming within a range of 1.75 degrees centigrade at the lower end to 2.75 degrees at the upper.

This is over the temperature of the pre-industrial world.

And this is down to built-in inertia of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

And the already-absorbed heat in the sea is gonna present a thousand years of warming slowly released.

And this is despite our best efforts. This is, as they say, what we are ‘committed to’.

2050 – I will be eighty-five. My children will be my age. My parents will be dead.

The room’s full of people with their mouths slowly falling open; Professor Kennel feels a long way away.

I’m uncomfortable. My socks are really wet. Outside it’s dark.

‘Has the world changed or have I changed?’

The Smiths!

Six years ago I wrote a play about climate change: The Contingency Plan; it went pretty well. I got some great reviews.

I honestly thought about little else for some time; I tried to align my life with my play – I made real efforts to reduce my carbon footprint, assessed how I travelled, how I work, how I lived – I knocked on my neighbours’s doors and fitted electricity monitors, I forced my kids to march shouting ‘Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.’

A year ago I found myself on a forecourt buying a new car.

Then last summer, before the butterflies finally showed up a month late, I had this thought, that’s it: ‘the end of British butterflies’.

Or I’d see a dead bee on the pavement exhausted from foraging too far: that’s it ‘the end of bees’.

And I read a report: ‘The State of Nature’. By all the wildlife charities. Assessing the population of over three thousand species in the UK over the last fifty years to find sixty per cent are in decline and thirty-one per cent declining strongly –

The mild words of a committee.

Can a third of all living things in these isles be dying out? Is that climate change, or habitat loss or both?

And ash dieback. The annual early death of the horse chestnut.

The oaks succumbing to heat.

And I was reading ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’, Kipling, to my daughter and the lines jumped out – Puck:

‘I came to England with Oak, Ash and Thorn, and when Oak, Ash and Thorn are gone I shall go too.’

Is even Puck packing his bags?

Climate change: it’s like some sort of very clever villain – like, say, a serial killer in a film. Out there somewhere, who knows where it’ll strike next.

With Professor Kennel as the detective in the morgue – and the Arctic the body on the slab.

(Okay, this analogy is ridiculous.)

But he’s saying it’s here, amongst us, present in a thousand signs and portents, and so much closer to home than we ever imagined.

So where should I go now to look it in the eye? Call it out?

Norfolk? The Norfolk Broads, maybe?

Because there was a meeting there about the future – in 2008? Caused quite a scandal at the time – at least in the Telegraph.

A meeting. Because whose job actually is it to manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable?

Natural England, formerly English Nature, formerly the Nature Conservancy Council;

the Environment Agency, formerly the National Rivers Authority and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution;

oh, and North Norfolk District Council

and the Broads Authority (?).

What were the action points?

Scenarios for the future were considered, given the Broads, all at or below sea level was at risk from climate-change-driven sea-level rise.

There was talk of creating a new ‘embayment’, of giving up the Broads and recreating it elsewhere –

And some people said this was an admirable first step towards adapting to our future; and other people said it was an unforgiveable giving up of the ghost.

(The latter mainly people in the Broads.)

So okay, six years on – how’s it all going?

The Broads Authority are based in Yare House in Norwich, a building of glass and steel; it turns out there’s an emergency meeting with the people from the Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs, their line manager; subject: cuts. As Simon Hooton, their Head of Strategy, whisks me out the back he gleans from the receptionist a figure of three per cent.

Given DEFRA are taking a ten per cent hit I suppose that’s good news.

Simon’s a man about my age in r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• Original Production
• In a Vulnerable Place
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information