Category: Climate Change

  • Our Shared Futures

    Our Shared Futures

    Cover image Our Shared Storm by Andrew Dana HudsonCan climate fiction help us see our way through the maze of possible futures we face? Can it help us move forward from our present moment? Andrew Dana Hudson’s slim novel, Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, engages these questions directly, by imagining how four characters’ lives would change in different climate scenarios.

    I kept thinking about this book as COP27 unfolded in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, ending with a promise of progress mixed with larger failures. (COP is short for Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.)

    The good news: a historic agreement to work on a structure  for “loss and damage,” offering aid to the countries most affected by climate change—countries that did the least to cause it, and are least equipped to combat it. On the other hand, the failure, yet again, to set firm commitments among countries for a path to decarbonization that could hold global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C.

    Hudson, a futurist and fiction writer, based Our Shared Storm on five scenarios developed by climate scholars and used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They describe broad pathways the world might take over the next decades, leading to differing levels of climate change, with related effects on politics, economic inequality, and more:

    • Scenario 1, “taking the green road,” with the world shifting to sustainable and equitable ways of living
    • Scenario 2, “middle of the road,” with a mix of initiatives and challenges
    • Scenario 3, the “rocky road,” where a failure to take significant action leads to rising nationalism and war
    • Scenario 4, “a road divided,” with poorer areas suffering more than nations that can use their resources to adapt
    • Scenario 5, “taking the highway,” where fossil-fuel use continues to power out-of-control corporate development, favoring giant geoengineering solutions over local ones

    This might seem like a too-tidy formula for generating a novel. But Hudson brings these probable futures to life through four main characters who cross paths at a future COP, held in Buenos Aires in the year 2054. In each story, a huge hurricane looms—they call it a “neverstorm”—and then crashes over the city. The characters come from all over: Noah from the US, Luis from Argentina, Diya from India, and Saga from Sweden. Their experiences are different each time, in ways that mirror the five scenarios.

    But it’s more than that: each person comes to the COP already changed as a result of the different paths they followed over the decades leading up to it. These changes deliver us straight into the different worlds they inhabit, maybe more than any larger events could.

    Luis, for instance, appears variously as a taxi driver, an aspiring entrepreneur, and a guerrilla leader trying to protect his poor Buenos Aires neighborhood. The charismatic Saga is a COP attendee who in one story leads a subversive street action, and in another, having grown up in a climate-refugee camp, is kidnapped. In other versions, she’s an installation artist, and a pop star who channels the grief and massive displacements of her world.

    The characters’ alternate selves gave me that sense of an eerie echoing multiplicity that can emerge from good multiverse stories. In films, we’ve seen this not only in Spiderman: Into the Multiverse, but in Sliding Doors on an individual level, and in manic-epic style, Everything Everywhere All At Once.

    In books, Joanna Russ’s 1975 novel, The Female Man, shows four connected yet different women on different planets in a twist on this approach which, like Our Shared Storm, tackles a massive issue—in that book, how misogyny distorts the self. In Our Shared Storm, the characters’ variations pull us through an emotional portal to help imagine things that are so scary and depressing, we might otherwise turn away from them.

    Hudson brings a sharp eye and satirical flair to the conference negotiations, particularly in the over-the-top, hyper-capitalist scenario in which everyone wants to be an influencer and everyone is their own brand. The scenarios are arranged in a dramatic arc that gets steadily worse, and finally arrives at Scenario 1, the most hopeful of them all.

    Here, the book aligns with Solarpunk, the emerging SFF genre that envisions people collaborating to cobble together a more community-based, environmentally sane future. I read this part with relief, feeling like the exhausted survivor of a shipwreck (or multiple shipwrecks!) finally washed ashore. But this possible future also felt fragile and tenuous, in need of protection.

    The painful truth is that different parts of the world are experiencing these scenarios already. While the scary, depressing ones feel all too familiar, we do see seedlings of a more hopeful future. And we’re facing not only different possible futures, but different possible versions of ourselves. This book reminds us that our choices now are constructing the world ahead.

  • Message From the Future

    Message From the Future

    Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate-fiction blockbuster, The Ministry for the Future, has galvanized readers both within and outside the science fiction community—riding the wave of anxiety catalyzed by last year’s extreme weather events, along with increasingly urgent warnings from climate experts and activists. The novel’s power relies on a two-pronged strategy: offering an imaginational way to confront the massive suffering that now seems probable, given humanity’s failure to act in a timely way so far; and a vision of one successful path toward climate solutions and a more equitable world.

    With this double-edged approach, the novel starts with a fatal humid heat wave in India that kills millions. It’s experienced by a young aid worker, Frank May, who becomes one of the few survivors of the climate disaster. That’s the first chapter; the aftermath takes up the rest of the book and centers on a new UN agency, The Ministry for the Future—set up to act in the interests of our descendants and the future well-being of non-human creatures and the land. (This wonderful concept builds on the Native American “seventh generation” principle, and on legal precedents such as Bolivia’s “Law of the Rights of Mother Earth,” giving legal standing to the environment.)

    One issue for writers of climate fiction is conveying the scale and multiplicity of the challenges in a single narrative. Robinson is known as a master of deploying complex, large-scale narratives in novels such as The Years of Rice and Salt, which constructs a huge alternate-history tapestry, and New York 2140, another near-future novel about climate change. Many of his books have a global reach, and he’s eminently qualified to bring this approach to bear on the overwhelming scale of the climate crisis.

    There’s a kind of heroic hopefulness here, existing alongside the acknowledgment of terrible loss. The book is also shot through with desperation—not just on the level of plot, which follows Frank as he tries to grapple with survivor’s guilt and the scale of the threat, as well as shadowy groups who turn to eco-terrorism to shift the global balance away from fossil fuels. In this book, It feels to me that Robinson has translated the desperation many of us feel over the climate emergency into a complex, jittery meta-narrative structure that pokes readers beyond their usual immersion in story.

    The novel is stuffed to bursting with different storytelling types, bringing up the question: can one novel hold it all? The intertwining arcs of the two main characters, Frank May and Mary Murphy, the head of the Ministry for the Future, actually take up only about a third of the book. Here’s how I see the different narrative approaches and what they bring to the novel.

    • Straight third-person voice. The two main characters’ stories, told this way, give us an emotional rope-bridge over the uncertainties of the immediate near future—the 2020s through the 2040s. Some chapters also follow the point of view of other Ministry staff.
    • Notes.   A few chapters follow Mary’s experience in the form of a stenographer’s notes of Ministry meetings. Their jagged sentence fragments, quick and dirty, propel us through the meat of those policy discussions with an urgency that feels exactly right.
    • First-person voice.   One story-strand follows an immigrant family displaced by climate disruption, through the eyes of different family members. Then there’s the first-person view of a scientist leading a massive geoengineering project in Antarctica. Both of these have the effect of highlighting their stories among the rest, elevating climate displacement and geoengineering as significant issues.
    • Omniscient narrator/authorial idea-wrestling. This voice steps in at times (in about 10% of the chapters), mostly to fill the reader in on major historical events of the coming decades. A related voice, appearing about as often, feels like the author thinking through certain ideas: wealth disparity or Keynesian economic principles, mass extinction, nihilistic social movements. These chapters echo the anonymous, editorializing “Citizen” chapters that were part of New York 2140, and they have an unfiltered, provisional feel that’s similar to the meeting-minutes chapters.
    • Dialogues.   Some chapters are structured as Socratic dialogues between unidentified speakers—a teacher and a reluctant student—debating whether technology drives history or not, for example. These also echo New York 2140’s “Mutt and Jeff” chapters, and may be an homage to Stanislaw Lem’s Dialogues.
    • Riddles.   These micro-chapters retool an ancient language game to render some really abstract concepts into something more embodied and grok-able. Though the riddle chapters are short and infrequent, they effectively poke the reader to shift gears, to think about photons, encryption, or the free market in new ways. The riddles also pop up in counterpoint to those concepts’ emergence in the narrative.

    These, along with the digressive monologues and the Socratic dialogues, are all attempts to “describe the elephant” that is the full-scale problem. For Robinson, that means laying out the role of late-stage capitalism in both causing and obstructing solutions to the problem at hand.

    Yes, these rhetorical variations stop the traditional narrative flow. Deal with it, Robinson seems to be saying to the reader: traditional narrative alone won’t do the trick here. Finally, there are the

    • Collective voices. I think of these as the “We” chapters, which take up a good 20% of the book. They become a kind of Greek chorus, giving eyewitness accounts from all over the world—of floods and drought, employee rebellions and social strikes, and climate-caused displacement. The apotheosis of this chorus comes when, late in the book, we hear a roll-call of representatives of grass-roots organizations all over the world, announcing the work that needs to be done where they are: desert greening, permaculture, reforestation, biodiversity projects. Here we feel the heroic hopefulness, couched in a way that emphasizes the need for collective action. For me, it’s the most “hopepunk” moment in the book.

    This isn’t to say that the book is all optimism. There’s an elegiac note running through it, reverberating from the struck bell of the mass deaths in India that set the book in motion. Frank May is broken by that experience. Mary Murphy has no personal life beyond the office, and her inner life is shaped by the oversized fears and concerns over climate change that it’s her job to consider. In effect, Frank holds a pain that is too outsized for one person; Mary holds the global-sized fear, and the perseverance that’s needed to move forward.

    Change happens through persistence, synergy, luck, and some dirty dealing. That dirty dealing, including black ops and eco-terrorist tactics, seems to indicate some doubt that policy change alone can accomplish what’s needed. On the other hand, Robinson leaves out of his near-future equation  the growing presence of backward-facing movements including authoritarianism, nativism and white supremacy, some fed by climate-caused suffering, and which will make progress that much harder.

    Still, the book brilliantly embodies the near-impossibility of making a global-scale shift in humanity’s relationship to its planet, and the necessity of trying to do that. We’re all members of the Greek chorus. We are the “We” who suffer forest fires, intense heat waves, rising seas, and the “We” who come together to try to do something about them.

  • Thinking about Gaia

    Thinking about Gaia

    Image of Earth from spaceIn this month of Earth Day and marching for science and climate, I’m thinking about Gaia.

    A hashtag popped up on Twitter last week: #ifonlytheearthcouldspeak. Yes! That’s a good prompt to contemplate right now. The hashtag elicited a range of responses from funny and snarky to thoughtful and earnest. Some tweeters suggested that the earth is speaking, but we’re not listening. Would that be Gaia? The environmental scientist James Lovelock first formulated the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s, proposing that the Earth could be seen as one vast living and self-regulating system, and naming it for Gaia, the primordial Greek Earth goddess. The idea has been borne out since then, but its popularity may owe a lot to Lovelock’s naming it for the Greek Mother Earth, thus connecting it in our minds to the much earlier and long-lived human sense of the earth as a living force.

    In the last week, the earth’s atmosphere reached an ominous new milestone: atmospheric carbon dioxide levels broke past 410 parts per million, after hitting 400 parts per million in 2013. The last time atmospheric carbon concentrations were this high was in the Middle Pliocene, 3.6 million years ago. Our continuing to pump carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, combined with the unknown effects of climate feedback, are cause for alarm. For those of us who don’t deny the facts, it’s a scary time. I’ll be at the People’s Climate March in Washington D.C. in a few days, one of the hundreds of thousands of people needing to bear witness to the urgency of this moment.

    But are facts enough to rally people to action? You can’t see carbon concentrations, and even though the earth is now experiencing changes that are much faster than the normal geological time scale, these changes are often too slow, too big, or too abstract for us to easily take in. As author Kim Stanley Robinson has said, “Fiction can tell us how new situations will feel, and also, what things mean.” Robinson’s new novel, New York 2140, set in a partially submerged future New York, is one of several just-published works of climate fiction (cli-fi), the emerging genre that invites us to picture the human consequences of climate change. Robinson offers a vision of people muddling along and making their lives in the Venice-like canals of New York, both coping with the disasters that have occurred and aware there may be worse ahead.

    But where is Gaia in this future? If Earth can be seen as a living thing, couldn’t we also benefit from trying to take its perspective—as different from ours as it may be? Science fiction has gone there already. Apparently inspired by the Gaia hypothesis, Isaac Asimov included a newly discovered, sentient planet named Gaia in his 1982 novel Foundation’s Edge. And Piers Anthony made “Gaea” a main character—an archetype of the Earth, embodied in a mortal—in Becoming a Green Mother (1988), part of his Incarnations of Immortality series.

    The Book of Joan, an ambitious novel by Lidia Yuknavitch, just out this month, offers a character who is empathically connected with the Earth. Living only a few decades into the future, the visionary child-woman Joan of Dirt leads a rebellion among the survivors of an environmentally ravaged earth who are now living on an orbiting space-station sanctuary ruled by a billionaire dictator. This Joan of Arc for a nightmare future can manifest volcanic eruptions—her symbiosis with the planet allows it a form of expression that can’t be ignored. It’s a risky novel, also taking on issues of gender, sex and race, and it’s on my to-be-read list.

    These and other cli-fi novels do a great service by bringing the human consequences of climate change into vivid focus, at a human scale we can reckon with. If they tend to be dystopian, that is the kind of future that seems to be staring us in the face, given the forces we have already set in motion.

    The Earth is speaking to us now, in her own language, not just through beautiful sunsets, but through rising sea levels, droughts, and strange weather patterns. Of course we need to be able to imagine the human costs of climate change. That’s how we think, and it is the most promising way toward changes in policy. But I also feel the need to see things from Gaia’s point of view—even if it means facing eruptions of traumatic scale and strength. What may be dystopian for us, may just be a cloudy afternoon for our long-lived planet. We desperately need to de-objectify the earth, and to try to reengage in something more like an “I–Thou” relationship with Gaia—not of equals, but in respect, and awe and wonder. I hope more writers will take up the challenge of imagining what she is saying, and might be saying in the future.

     

     

  • Grieving for a whole planet

    Grieving for a whole planet

    Frozen PlanetWhen I saw the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, I couldn’t get past that moment when Princess Leia sees her home planet, Alderaan, blown up by the Empire. We didn’t even get to see her reaction shot; the first response to this calculated destruction is voiced by Obi Wan Kenobi, saying he feels a “great disturbance in the force.” It’s hard to know how Leia feels about this devastating event, since she moves right into warrior mode and doesn’t mention it again.

    Star Wars is great popular entertainment, of course, and it isn’t the only sci-fi story to feature an exploding planet, or one that’s destroyed by nuclear or environmental disaster, from Superman’s home planet of Krypton to the casual destruction of Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

    At another end of the spectrum, there’s a novel by Doris Lessing that has stuck with me since I read it, for its unrelenting deep dive into the feelings of a community as it experiences the death of its world. The Making of the Representative from Planet Eight (1982) is the fourth in Lessing’s five-novel series of science fiction novels, Canopus in Argos. It’s a quick but intense read, told in a voice that evokes folk tales or Scripture. (Lessing later adapted the novel as an opera with music by Philip Glass.)

    We’re led through the story by Doeg, who lives on the peaceful, prosperous and temperate Planet Eight, part of the Canopus system. A mysterious cosmic realignment causes the global climate to shift, with blizzards causing a buildup of snow and ice—a swiftly cataclysmic, planet-wide Ice Age. Doeg, whose vocation is Memory Maker and Keeper of Records, reports conscientiously on his own and others’ emotional avalanche as everything about their previous life slips away.

    In one poignant moment, the leaders stage a ceremony to help people accept part of their new reality: they now have to fish in their sacred lake for sustenance, a practice that has always been taboo. Standing on the shore, the community watches as a few people row out to demonstrate how it’s done. The sight of this is too much: “A groan or cry came out from the crowds, and this sound, which had been pressed out of us, frightened us all.”

    In the end, there’s no escape—all life on the planet is extinguished. Doeg and a few others only survive in disembodied form, as a collective “representative” to the Canopic system. Their transformation reflects Lessing’s study of Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. Through that lens, the story can be seen as an allegory of the soul leaving behind the physical body (the “world” in which the individual lives). Lessing also pointed to another source for the story, in her lifelong fascination with the doomed British Antarctic expedition led by Robert Scott from 1910–1913.

    Now, several decades after it first appeared, and as we move further into our global climate crisis, it’s hard not to read the novel as a stark and cogent allegory of climate change—an early entrant in the growing genre of climate fiction, or Cli-Fi, as it’s been called by journalist Dan Bloom and others. Lessing didn’t talk about this aspect of the work, although she later revisited themes of the collapse of civilizations and ecologies in her two “Mara and Dann” novels, set in a far-future Africa.

    It’s hard to wrap your mind around such a massive phenomenon, especially as it looms over your own life, let alone the lives of your descendants. It is much easier to deny something like climate change while evidence of it builds around you, than to attempt to engage with the scope of its reality. But in the moment we find ourselves in now, we also need to learn to stretch our capacity to feel, and express, the worst that could happen, like the people beside the lake on Planet Eight.

  • Talking with Diane Burko on art and climate change

    Talking with Diane Burko on art and climate change

    Diane Burko: Eagle Glacier, Juneau, 1982-2005, from Landsat Series, oil on canvas, 2015
    Diane Burko: Eagle Glacier, Juneau, 1982–2005, from Landsat Series, oil on canvas, 2015

    My conversation with climate artist Diane Burko has just been posted on Creative Disturbance, a podcasting platform for dialogue among artists and scientists on sustainability and environmental issues. We’re happy to join others on their Art & Earth Sciences channel, shining different lights on urgent issues relating to climate change—especially this week, as the international community gathers in Paris with the goal of reaching a universal agreement to slow global warming.

    Here’s the link:

    http://creativedisturbance.org/podcast/climate-artist-diane-burko-with-writer-miriam-seidel-eng/

    In the podcast, we talk about how Diane made the transition from painter of large-scale landscapes to an artist/advocate who has traveled to the Arctic and Antarctic, witnessing and documenting the loss of glaciers; and how she tries to convey the scale of climate change through her paintings and photographs, making her work a kind of bridge between scientists and the rest of us. In this painting, for instance, she has overlaid a sky-view image of the Eagle Glacier in Alaska with recession lines, brightly marking the retreat of the ice over 30-some years.

    For more about Diane and her work:

    http://www.dianeburko.com

     

  • Got Climate Change?

    Got Climate Change?

    I was one of the 300,000-plus people in the People’s Climate March in New York on September 21 – and like many others there, it had been a long time since I joined a march. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be part of a big crowd, all sharing a growing feeling of alarm over patterns of climate change, and deep dismay over patterns of denial among those who could and/or should know better.

    The low clouds held back except for a brief spatter of rain, and the mood held too: a lovely parade buoyancy, and a palpable excitement at being part of a visible expression of something we all cared about. I went on one of dozens of buses from Philadelphia organized by 350.org, carrying my handmade sign, saying WAKE UP. My partner for the day was Diane Burko, an artist who has been making powerful paintings and photographs documenting the melting of glaciers and other effects of climate change. Diane has traveled to the Arctic Circle, Greenland, and Antarctica, and to scientific conferences to speak about her work.

    CM give bees a chance
    This group’s slogan was Give Bees a Chance

    The parade had seven thematic groupings, starting with FRONTLINES OF CRISIS, FOREFRONT OF CHANGE and ending with the inclusive TO CHANGE EVERYTHING, WE NEED EVERYONE. Diane and I joined the group behind the banner THE DEBATE IS OVER, whose float was a giant rolling blackboard with drawings charting rising CO2 and ocean temperatures. We were surrounded by scientists—old and young, men and women, of many backgrounds, and many with their children—representing fields from geology to psychoanalysis.

    Because the turnout was so much higher then expected – estimates had been around 100,000 beforehand – the street backed up with participants, and those of us in the back stood for several hours before actually marching. Pizzas were delivered, snacks and water were shared. Finally, we set off down Central Park West, walking with people who had lost homes to Katrina and Sandy, young activists, old activists, dignitaries, working people, stilt walkers, musicians, people representing Pacific island nations whose very land is in danger of disappearing under rising seas.

    Giant puppet of Statue of Liberty
    The Statue of Liberty in rising waters, wearing a life jacket

    The parade ended at 11th Avenue, near the Hudson River. It’s not far from here, I realized, that a scene takes place toward the end of Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. In Egan’s brilliant vision of the ways we are changed by technology and other forces, climate change has become part of the background of city life: a few decades from now, on a warm day in February, a young family gathers with others on the ramparts of the giant sea wall that’s been built to keep the rising waters out of New York. Climbing up to watch the sunset from there has become a new tradition, since the view has been blocked out by the wall.

    What will we have to face as a result of the climate change that has already been set in motion? People whose cities have the resources to build sea walls will be the lucky ones. We need to acknowledge what scientists are telling us, and we need help from artists and others to visualize what’s happening now, and to imagine what’s in store. We need to wake up.

     

     

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