Ecology: Chris Turner’s How to Breathe Underwater is many things, including a coming-of-age story

Originally published in the Globe and Mail. Read the full text here. 

Chris Turner’s How to Breathe Underwater is many things, including a coming-of-age story

Chris Turner's essay collection, How to Breathe Underwater: Field Reports from an Age of Radical Change, is many things: a travelogue, a work of tech reportage, and a document of our frightening ecological moment. It's also, arguably, a coming-of-age story. The essays are in rough chronological order. The oldest are from the late '90s and early 2000s, when Turner was a twentysomething writing for the Toronto tech magazine Shift. The latest, from 2009 to 2012, appeared in The Walrus and Eighteen Bridges, where he found a home for his writing after Shift's demise. Each essay comes with a short preface, where Turner sometimes acknowledges their flaws. He refuses, however, to airbrush them. The book is like one of those mid-career gallery retrospectives where the artist's works (juvenilia, experiments, breakthroughs, and masterpieces) hang sequentially, each representing a phase in life.

The early essays are good, but Turner relies too heavily on his journalistic heroes. While at Shift, Turner ventured to remote outposts of the "dotcom frontier": the risky, lucrative Internet gambling sector in Antigua, the Cyberjaya IT-themed city in Malaysia, and DEF CON, the legendary Vegas hacker convention. This last essay is the weakest in the collection, for a reason Turner acknowledges: it's too indebted to David Foster Wallace. The prose is pedantic and hyperbolic. And, like Wallace, Turner places his self-deprecating persona at the centre of the narrative. (In his non-fiction, Wallace seemed eager to convince us that he was a humble Midwesterner, not the surefooted egoist who could write Infinite Jest.) Turner's false-modesty enables him to evade what should be the number-one priority for a writer at DEF CON: explaining the software that the hackers are making. He gets close at times but then steps back, claiming, at one point, that technological specifics are "way over my head."

In another essay, Why Technology Is Failing Us, Turner punctuates his prose with folksy, conversational ticks  ("I mean, fuck," and "It was – listen – it was a goddamn miracle"). These are affectations, and not just because they're indebted to Hunter S. Thompson: people use interjections like these in speech, but nobody inadvertently writes them.

This piece is important, however, because it marks the beginning of Turner's long-standing engagement with climate change. It begins at Montreal's Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve, where Turner witnesses a demo of an early hydrogen car, the Ford P2000, and wonders why it's taking so long to get the thing to market. (Depressingly, Turner wrote the essay thirteen years ago.) Compared to the problems of climate change, he argues, the Internet seems like a novelty. We've run fiber optic cables underneath poisoned oceans, and we've brought connectivity to an imperiled Arctic ecology, but so what? Our global village sits amid the ruins of a desecrated natural world.

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