The Wager and the Bear
JOHN IRONMONGER

Cover Text
The village of St Piran, on the very toe of Cornwall, is a sleepy little place. Not much happens there. Until one evening, an angry young man and an arrogant politician have a very public disagreement in a harbourside inn. The consequences of their argument, and the deadly wager they strike, will cascade down the decades. Tom Horsmith is an idealist. Young, driven, and smart, his bar-room humiliation of Monty Causley, could have destroyed the career of a lesser politician. But every effort either man makes to put the past behind them draws them deeper into a web of circumstances neither can escape, leading them both a long way from St Piran onto a colossal iceberg drifting south away from Greenland, where their only companion is a very hungry bear. This is a heart-stopping tale of anger, tragedy, and enduring love, cast against the long unfolding backdrop of an irreversible global crisis. And a bear.

The novel, Forest is the Future and the Common Concern
The book blatantly puts its finger on the sore spot of our time. It is disturbing and almost infuriating to see the phlegm with which we ignore the necessary changes simply to secure our level of prosperity. At the same time, Ironmonger’s work also offers hope. The story is embedded in a beautiful landscape of love, confidence, energy, courage, and: Cornwall, or rather, Greenland.
This text is intended as a collage of passages. At some point, I began dog-earing every page that, in my opinion, woven logical and important connections to human-caused climate change. Above all, however, it is the far-reaching solutions for mitigating climate change that inspire me in their detail. The human-nature project „Forest is the Future“ also aims to awaken people and counteract climate change.
Trees are arguably the most effective natural means of combating the increase in CO2 in our atmosphere. „Wald is Future“ has planted a total of over 700 native and non-native trees as part of a forestry project with the Bernbeuren daycare center and elementary school on the approximately 3,000 square meter area around the tree houses. More are to be planted in the surrounding area each year. What’s exciting is that „non-native trees“ refers to exotic tree species from regions that already have climatic conditions that we expect to see here in Germany/Upper Bavaria in the future. Examples include the Lebanese cedar, the giant sequoia, and the gingko.
This private initiative aims to continue demonstrating what living without sealing can look like: in appropriately sized living spaces, built with sustainable materials, and largely energy-independent. To connect as many people as possible with the „Forest is the Future“ project, three tree stilt houses are available for rent to holidaymakers. The ongoing operation is realized through an inclusion project for people with and without disabilities. The public adventure and information trail, with information boards and rest areas, is also used for educational and project days with schools and daycare centers. We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks to the LEW 3male educational initiative for their support.

Enjoy reading the following text collage
… ‘Fund a program to plant a trillion trees around the world. Tax the sale of meat and dairy products tenfold so a burger that costs a pound would cost eleven pounds. Three quarters of global farmland grows feed for livestock. Scrap the livestock and plant forests of native trees wherever sheep or cattle used to graze. Scotland is practically a desert. Fill it with trees. Cumbria. Northumberland. Much of Wales. Sheep-wrecked. Most of Northern Ireland. We don’t need pretty chocolate-box landscapes. We need trees to capture carbon. Fund farmers to make it happen. Stop using cement that isn’t from carbon-neutral production. Come to that, stop government procurement of any product or service that isn’t from carbon-neutral production. Invest in carbon capture and storage. Fund research into green hydrogen as a fuel. Perhaps use some of the land we waste growing food for livestock to grow biofuels. Stop massive factory-trawlers from denuding the oceans. Make half of our coastal waters into protected zones and police them. Harvest our sustainable forests, convert the trees into charcoal and then bury the charcoal back into all those empty coal mines, and keep on doing that for centuries until the mines are full again.’ He paused, as if all the energy had left his body with this list. He shook his head. ‘Force every company and the richest ten percent of people to publish an accurate annual audit of their carbon footprint and if they aren’t net-zero, make them pay to sequester carbon until they are. Invest in ambitious geoengineering projects to reverse all the damage we’ve done. Rewild the planet. And here is the most important thing. Give the world notice that we will stop doing business, any business, with any country that doesn’t do much the same thing.”
As Tom spoke, Esperanza was shaking her head, almost laughing at this catalogue of demands. ‘Tom, Tom, Tom!’ She put her hand on his arm. ‘Do you have any idea how demented that sounds?’
‘You asked me what I should have told him when I was twenty.’
‘You were pretty crazy then when you were twenty,’ Esperanza said. ‘Any one of those things would have bankrupted us, Tom; would have risked driving us back into the dark ages. You know that.’
‘And you still don’t get it do you?’ Tom said, looking displeased with this answer. He pushed himself away from the guardrail and started to move off down the deck, but Esperanza’s hand on his arm stopped him. He turned to face her. ‘You know what really will drive us into the dark ages?’ he said. ‘Not doing those things. That’s the real risk.

If CO2 rises high enough, Earth will lose the ability to form clouds. That should scare the shit out of us. Two thirds of the planet is covered with clouds. Clouds reflect away a heck of a lot of sunshine. Without them, our forests die, our crops dry up, and we heat up by another eight degrees. Maybe more. Game Over. And we’re losing clouds now. It has started. I wasn’t being crazy Esperanza. I was being truthful.’

And the real failure is, you actually know what the crisis is. You’re just too scared to admit it. And do you know what? History will judge you Mr Causley. It will judge you as one of the great, great villains.’
‘And what gives you such a special relationship with history Horsmith that you know its judgement long before history itself does?’ Causley spluttered. ‘I studied history. You studied volcanoes. You know what? You shouldn’t try to argue if you don’t understand the history.’
Tom gave a sarcastic laugh. ‘You’re right. I’m not a great student of history. I couldn’t recite the order of Plantagenet kings, or tell you who shot Archduke Ferdinand, or explain the Gold Standard. But let me tell you some history I do know about. Do you have time for it?’
‘I don’t need a history lesson from you Mr Horsmith.’
‘Well hear me out all the same. I think we have plenty of time. Do we have anything more important to discuss?’
‘Very well.’ Monty gave a sigh. ‘If you must.’
‘I must. Here it is. A history story. I call it the Very Strange Story of the Missing Bugs. Stop me if you’ve heard it before.’
‘I don’t believe I have.’
‘OK,’ Tom said. He stood up from his chair and looked at the older man. ‘So this is a story about two extremely odd things that happened way back in the past -and one even odder thing that didn’t happen. The first odd thing happened around three hundred and sixty million years ago.’
‘OK, so already you’ve lost me,’ Monty interrupted. ‘You can’t start a story three hundred million years ago.’

‘Three hundred and sixty million years,’ Tom corrected him:
‘Whatever. That isn’t a history story. It isn’t a human story. It has no relevance.’ ‘Stay with me for just a few minutes and let’s see,’ Tom insisted. ‘Three hundred and sixty million years ago, the world was way hotter than it is now. We worry about the planet heating up by three degrees. Maybe even four degrees. But back then, average global temperature was 15 degrees higher than it is today. So the planet was hot. Really hot. You’re right to say this isn’t a human story. Humans wouldn’t have been able to survive then. Not easily. We wouldn’t have been able to live anywhere between say, northern Europe and South Africa. The heat would have killed us. Earth was not a nice place to be. And by the way, there was no ice anywhere; not even at the poles.’ Tom waved his hand at the ice all around them. ‘You could walk to the south pole in sandals. The oceans were much, much, higher than they are today – maybe seventy metres higher, and here is the important thing – there was eight times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that was the killer.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Earth was the ultimate greenhouse,’ he said. ‘Like parking your car in the midday sun in Cairo with the windows closed. Well, anyway, that was when the first curious thing happened.’ Tom turned and looked at Monty. ‘Plants invented a new material,’ he said. ‘We call it … wood.’ He looked around and tapped on the butt of the rifle for illustration. ‘Wood,’ he repeated, with some emphasis. ‘An astonishing new thing. We are so familiar with it, we overlook just how amazing it is. It introduced two quite complicated new polymers to the world, cellulose and lignin; and it was completely revolutionary. It was incredibly strong for a start. It meant, for the first time ever, plants could grow tall. And so they did. Why wouldn’t they? They’d just invented wood. Huge tree ferns would grow up to fifty metres high, that’s like a fifteen-story building; and before you knew it, everywhere was covered in forests. Even here.’ He gestured towards the distant hills. ‘All around the world. There were billions and billions of trees. Trillions. Huge trees. The Earth became a massive tropical forest from the Arctic down to the Antarctic and everywhere in between. I should love to have seen it.’
Tom looked away, as if inviting Monty to share in his contemplation of this curious world of three hundred and sixty million years ago. ‘The next odd thing that happened,’ he said, ploughing onwards with his theme, ‘was the thing that didn’t happen. And what didn’t happen – was that nothing could figure out how to eat all this wood. Bacteria couldn’t digest it. Nothing could. So far as microbes were concerned, this new material might as well have been steel. There was nothing they could do with it. And the upshot was, none of the trees could rot. Imagine that. Trillions of trees all over the world, and when they died, they just fell over and stayed there. For year after year, and century, after century, and millennium after millennium, the trees just piled up.’ Tom demonstrated with his hands, staircasing his gesture up to head height and beyond. ‘For millions and millions of years. Imagine if plants today were to discover a way to make plastic instead of wood. The same thing would happen again. Nothing would rot them, and they would build up forever. That was what happened back in the carboniferous. There was nowhere for the dead trees to go. It was planetary madness. Surely, you’d think, bacteria would find a way to eat all this wood. Or maybe a fungus would work it out. Or some other microbe. Or a termite. Or something. Anything! But apparently it was a harder task than you’d imagine, because not a single creature figured it out.’ Tom paused again. ‘That was the mystery of the missing bugs. Where were they?’
‘Anyway. After a few million years of this, it started to get serious. You see, all those trees needed carbon dioxide, and it was starting to run low. Most of the world’s carbon was now locked up in colossal, monumental, piles of undigested logs. In fact, after sixty million years, it looked like the end for Planet Earth – and it could easily have been. Not only was everywhere dangerously short of CO2, but taking all that greenhouse gas away made things a whole lot cooler. The climate got much more comfortable. Ice caps began to build up at the poles. And ice at the poles reflects away heat like a mirror. That cooled things even more. We started to get a reasonably pleasant planet to live on. Eventually a very new thing started to happen. Stratocumulus clouds began to form. We hadn’t had them before. And the clouds made the world cooler still.’
‘But think about it. Sixty million years! That’s slow for evolution. It only took sixty million years between the first mammals and the first humans. And yet, for sixty million years nothing could find a way to digest cellulose. Nothing! How odd was that?’
‘And then, suddenly, hey presto …,’ Tom waved his hand as if he was holding a wand, ‘The third odd thing happened. Three hundred million years ago, along came a microbe that cracked the problem. We don’t have a name for it, which is a shame because we really ought to build statues to it and name streets after it. Because that little bug saved the world. Literally. And from that moment on, every tree that died would rot or burn, and either way all of its carbon would go back into the atmosphere in a beautiful balanced cycle. And that’s what still happens today whenever a tree dies; unless a bit of it just happens to be part of the frame for the Mona Lisa; wood eventually gets eaten or rots away, or burns, and every single atom of carbon bound up inside it finds its way back into the atmosphere, ready to feed new trees. It is an extraordinary and very beautiful equilibrium. But we owe our comfortable climate not just to that bug that figured out just in time how to eat wood, but to the sixty million years when nothing could. Because for all that time, trees got crushed under the weight of falling forests and they dried out, and they became coal, and all that carbon was taken out of the atmosphere because nothing eats coal. And while all of this was happening, tiny little sea creatures and plants were being converted into oil and gas, and nothing could digest those things either, and this helped take carbon out of the air too. It was an incredible gift to the universe. You say you studied history, and yet you don’t know this story, surely the most extraordinary thing in all of history. It’s such a fantastically unlikely story, it could almost make me believe in God. Of all the unfathomably improbable things that have happened to this planet, this is probably the most astonishing. If anyone ever shows you a film where astronauts land on a planet with a perfect climate, ask yourself what happened to all their carbon. Because surely this never happened anywhere else. We were gifted a perfect climate. Not too hot. Not too cold. A Goldilocks climate. And we owe it all to our good friend the Carboniferous period.’
‘Very interesting,’ Monty said.
Tom nodded gratefully. ‘But here’s the thing,’ he said. ‘Once microbes had learned to feast on wood, they could never un-learn it. So, when God gave Adam dominion over the world in the Garden of Eden, this must have been the deal: if you like the climate the way it is, don’t burn the coal and oil. Because if you do, there’s no going back. And that, Prime Minister Causley, is the contract we’ve been busy breaking for the past two hundred years. And that’s why history will say you did nothing. We are frogs in a saucepan. All of us. We never noticed the water getting warmer and warmer. And now it’s almost too late to jump out. We tolerate the slow erosion of our climate the way a frog in a pan tolerates the rising heat. This year we lose one percent of our coral reefs. Never mind. We can live with that. Next year we lose another one percent. Hey. Never mind. And then another. And another. And in a hundred years they’re gone and we never noticed it happening. Not just coral reefs. Ice caps. Forests. Meadows. You’re the driver of a bus Mr Causley, a bus packed full of people, stalled on a railway line at a level crossing with an immense freight train racing full tilt towards you, and you’ve been using the precious seconds to adjust your rear-view mirror.’
‘The funny thing is,’ Monty said, ‘it wasn’t all this that made me see it.’ He waved an arm toward the ocean with its scattering of ice. ‘Not in the way you hoped. You thought I’d see melting glaciers and it would prick my conscience. You thought I would see the light, but you didn’t know who I was Tom. You showed me melting glaciers and all I saw was wet ice. When I walked out onto that glacier with you Tom, however many days ago it was …’
‘It seems like a year.’
‘A year at least. When I walked out onto that glacier, I had no plans to change my mind. I had a speech half-written already in my mind that would kick the ball down the road. I was going to say how valuable the experience had been. How important it was for us all to face up to our own responsibilities for the climate crisis. In other words, I was going to tell people this was all their fault. Not the fault of governments. I was going to talk about the big initiatives we already have. Electric cars. Wind farms. That sort of thing. But I wasn’t thinking about any change in policy. If anything I was deliberating ways to avoid doing very much. “We’re steering a big ship,” I was going to say. “You can’t yank on the tiller. You have to make small adjustments and the ship will turn.” It was an excuse. A fudge. But something has changed my mind these past few days. I’m just not quite sure what it was. Maybe it was the solitude. The chance to think. To really think. No phones ringing. No advisors putting their heads around my door. No TV cameras being thrust in front of me. No opposition politicians winding me up.’
‘And maybe it was just the perspective. The big picture. You know. Here we are drifting down the coast of Greenland but we still have another fifteen days before we get to Disko Bay and even then we’re only about halfway down. My world is normally so much smaller. If I need to go to New York for a meeting I get on a plane and I’m there in a few hours.’ Monty paused. ‘And maybe,’ he said, ‘it was confronting our own mortality. We’re such fragile beings. I don’t think I’d truly seen that before. When you stand so close to your own imminent death, perhaps you start to see things differently. And maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe it’s because I had the courage not to kill the bear.’