We Are the Weather

At the end of the 19th century, a scientist named Percival Lowell, a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, led the effort in the discovery of Pluto. At the time, the planet Mars couldn’t be observed by scientists, and Lowell had a theory that Mars once had water but began to warm, and this warming destroyed the planet and all the life on it. Lowell’s theory was that Martians dug vast canals to escape the heat. These canals, he surmised, connected “the poles of the planet to the expanse of scorched land that covered the rest of its surface” (106). Other scientists didn’t believe him. In 1965, a NASA Mariner Spacecraft flew by and disproved the existence of Lowell’s canal theory. Foer visits his grandmother. He returns to his childhood home and realizes that nothing looks the same. Nothing is as big or small emotionally or physically.

Foer then shifts to a story about the Roman Empire. After its fall, plants found nowhere else in Europe began to grow. These plants arrived there as seeds on the pelts of the bulls, bears, giraffes, and tigers the Romans imported from thousands of miles away for the gladiators to slaughter.