Second millennium

The second millennium serves as more than a date on the novel’s timeline: it is the historical frame for a civilization that has accumulated extraordinary technical power while spreading environmental harm across the planet. As the millennium closes and the third begins, the promise of progress is measured against systems that are already failing, and against damage borne unevenly by people and ecosystems.

A turning point in the story of progress

The novel makes the millennium’s ending explicit in its account of oil. Energy experts had predicted that reserves would last for decades, and in one sense they were right: the Earth still held vast quantities of oil. But much of it was inaccessible, or too costly to extract. The practical limit was not the amount underground but the point at which recovering the remaining oil required more energy than it yielded. The distinction exposes a gap between estimates of abundance and the conditions that make a resource usable.

At the beginning of the third millennium, this dilemma brought OPEC back from the political dead. North Sea states, unwilling to let OPEC dictate prices, pursued cheaper extraction through automated seabed plants. The ocean presented new technical obstacles, including extreme pressure and temperature, but overcoming them promised another source of oil and gas. The second millennium thus ends not with a clean break from extractive industry, but with its expansion into a more difficult environment.

That confidence has a personal counterpart in Sigur Johanson. Living in Trondheim, the marine biologist admires the scientific possibilities associated with Jules Verne while feeling alienated from the practical, commercial present. He serves the present and enlarges its store of knowledge, yet despises the uses to which that knowledge is put. His divided attitude captures the period’s central tension: technological imagination can reach beyond existing limits even as the society funding it remains bound to immediate economic demands.

Industrial growth and ecological costs

The book places this drive for resources beside a wider record of environmental strain. Fish stocks are declining while algal blooms flourish. In 1999, Haifa Chemicals dumped 60,000 tonnes of toxic sludge; currents carried pollutants including lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, and chlorine towards the coasts of Lebanon and Syria. In the Gulf of Gabes, the fertilizer industry continued to discharge 12,800 tonnes of phosphogypsum into the sea each day. These examples show pollution crossing political boundaries through the ordinary movement of water.

The pressure on marine life is also tied to the expansion of fishing. The Food and Agriculture Organisation reported that seventy of the two hundred most commonly exploited fish species were endangered, even as the industry grew. The number of people earning a livelihood from fishing rose from thirteen million in 1970 to thirty million in 1997. Bottom trawling compounds that pressure: its nets sweep through ecosystems, removing not only target fish but also prey on which marine mammals, seabirds, and other predators depend. The period’s economic growth therefore appears alongside a narrowing ecological base and risks to the livelihoods built upon it.

The consequences are especially stark in the Arctic, where pollutants transported by wind and currents accumulate in the fatty tissue of whales, seals, and walruses, then pass to polar bears and people who eat them. Inuit women’s breast milk contained PCB levels twenty times the amount the World Health Organisation listed as harmful, while Inuit children suffered neurological impairments. In this account, the Arctic is not remote from industrial society: it receives what distant industries release. The novel connects environmental distribution to unequal exposure, making the apparent distance between polluting economies and affected communities a false one.

Networks that make distance disappear—and return

The second millennium’s information society depends on physical systems that are usually invisible. A message keyed into a laptop at the Geomar Centre travels as optical pulses through fibre-optic cable, crosses land, and descends beneath the ocean. TAT 14 links Europe and the United States as part of a planetary network carrying calls, images, and other digital traffic. The novel insists on the material basis of this apparently weightless exchange: glass fibres, copper casing, rubber tubing, buried cable, and the seabed itself.

When a submarine avalanche destroys the shelf and seabed south of the Faroe Islands, it severs TAT 14 and scatters its torn ends hundreds of kilometres apart. The message cannot reach Gerhard Bohrmann at Chateau Whistler. A week after the northern European disaster, transatlantic Internet traffic is at a standstill, and phone calls can be made only by satellite, if at all. Although military satellites still work, they cannot readily replace the capacity of the fibre-optic bridge. A network built to make the world feel small reveals, in failure, the distances it had concealed.

New York’s water system provides a second example of infrastructure whose complexity exceeds ordinary knowledge. Drinking-water and sewage pipes run deep underground alongside abandoned tunnels, and no single map records the full network. Wastewater from carwashes processing vehicles brought from Long Island enters pipelines, mixes with other fluids, and reaches the recycling system before returning to the city’s water supply. Within six hours of the first described discharge, ambulances are racing through the streets. The chain makes urban plumbing part of the crisis rather than a neutral background: an obscure route below the city can connect a local source to a public emergency.

Long histories beneath the contemporary crisis

The novel also places present-day environmental and political conditions within histories that extend across generations. In the account of Inuit experience, white trappers arriving in the 1920s helped decimate seal and caribou populations; the adoption of guns also changed hunting pressure. Poverty and outbreaks of polio, tuberculosis, measles, and diphtheria contributed to movement from the land into settlements. By the end of the 1950s, Inuit communities were facing starvation and infectious disease while the government failed to respond.

Cold War policy added forced relocation to that history. The Canadian government moved nomadic Inuit from their traditional territory in the southern Arctic to Resolute Bay and Grise Fjord, and later military installations prompted further removals to settlements hundreds of kilometres away. People were transported without essential equipment such as tents, kayaks, canoes, or sleds; the new locations were far from caribou routes and summer breeding grounds. The displacement described is not an isolated episode in the past but a continuing disruption of land-based life: the speaker, his parents, and earlier generations were all affected.

Alongside these histories, the restoration work of the Tla-o-qui-aht shows a slower, locally grounded response to environmental damage. George Frank, a restaurateur from a family of fishermen, is involved in Salmon Coming Home, an initiative to repair the ecosystem of Clayoquot Sound after logging. Clear-cutting dried and eroded the forest floor, sending topsoil into lakes and rivers, obstructing waterways, and depriving salmon of spawning grounds. Volunteers clear rivers, reopen old drainage routes, build protective barriers from organic debris, and plant alder along the banks. The work cannot quickly restore what was lost, but it begins to rebuild relations among forest, people, and animals through sustained practical effort.

Taken together, these episodes give the second millennium a double character. It is an era of engineering, communication, and expanding resource extraction, but also one in which consequences travel through currents, food chains, pipes, and cables beyond the control of those who set them in motion. The transition into the third millennium does not resolve that contradiction; it carries it forward, with the novel’s ecological crisis exposing how tightly modern life is connected to the environments and infrastructures it has treated as distant or dependable.