Writing for Impact: How Climate Fiction Can Make a Difference
How can we get the world on track to avoid dangerous climate change? Nearly 40 years after global warming first entered the world’s political stage, we are still wondering what it will take for humanity to get serious about safeguarding civilization as we know it. When I recently put this question to Connie Hedegaard, former European Commissioner for Climate Action, she said emphatically: “We need compelling narratives.”
Connie Hedegaard’s response was a reminder that we lack the stories that help us imagine what a carbon-managed world could look like. Yet we need these stories to win the hearts and minds of people opposing the hard choices we face. The absence of climate change as a central theme in literature has been noticed before. In a widely-regarded 2005 essay, activist Bill McKibben laments the meager presence of global warming in books, poems, and plays. He wrote: “Though we know about global warming, we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture.” British writer Robert Macfarlane observed the same when he asked in an article for The Guardian: “Where is the literature of climate change? Where is the creative response to the most severe problem faced by the world?”
The literary world has come a long way since then. Urged by more frequent and visible manifestations of a warming planet, climate change fiction — better known by its moniker cli-fi — is now a rapidly expanding literary genre. Most cli-fi novels are set in the distant future — distant not necessarily in time but in the gestalt of the future world compared to today’s — in some version of a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Those who are still alive are preoccupied with mourning their losses and struggling for survival. Amazon’s original short story series Warmer includes works set in “crazy ice storms”, in a “climate-ravaged future”, and in a time when the “age of humans is over”. In Gold Fame Citrus, Claire Vaye Watkins describes a future California disfigured by severe drought. Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 tells the tale of residents in a Manhattan apartment building after rising sea levels have inundated most of the world’s coastlines.
Some literary critics argue that any story set in the future must necessarily include dramatic, dystopian visions of climate change. I disagree with the inevitability of this assertion. By expanding the cli-fi genre beyond post-apocalyptic narratives and embracing the many possibilities of livable and fulfilling future worlds, we can turn literature into a catalyst for climate action.
Dystopian futures create vivid and distressing images. By breaking with the continuity of time, they confront us with radical possibilities of the future. In this way, they create a visceral sense of urgency to protect the wonders of nature and human civilization. Literature brings science to the masses, translating abstract charts and temperature variations into engaging human experiences. It triggers and enriches debate and encourages people to reflect on what’s important to them.
Writers on nuclear war, AIDS, and gun violence have shown that literature can be a powerful shaper of public opinion and of society’s response to social problems. Today’s climate fiction works aspire to generate impact by informing people and appealing to their values, social norms, and identities. Over time, this may lead to changes in attitude and behavior.
Unfortunately, this route to impact may be a dead end. Stories set in a time after a catastrophe has happened tell us nothing about how to avoid the catastrophe in the first place. As English writer Rodge Glass argues, most cli-fi writing comes “primarily from a place of warning rather than discovery”, and that place usually offers little actionable insight. In fact, an empirical study of climate change literature has shown that fear — the emotion most central to cautionary fables — is generally ineffective at motivating genuine engagement. In their most extreme versions, doomsday stories can become intimidating, paralyzing people and fueling the cries of alarmism howled by climate skeptics. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that the social scientist Matthew Schneider-Mayerson concludes in his extensive analysis of cli-fi novels that “most fell short of their authors’ goals [of artistic and political interventions], and may in fact have been counterproductive.”
So what’s a more promising way to write for impact? The starting point is to recognize that the world is about to enter an era of great adjustment. In the next 20–30 years, the majority of people alive today will still be around, and they will have been socialized in a time characterized by consumerism, liberalism, and a sense of infinite planetary boundaries. These paradigms will inevitably change as humanity starts to manage the health of the Earth’s climate, as will lifestyles, identities, and social norms.
The psychological impacts of The Great Adjustment will be immense, producing a constant wave of internal conflicts for people to overcome. Those growing up in the post-carbon era will cope just fine because a resource-constrained lifestyle will feel normal to them. But those who have known the old carbon-rich era may struggle to adjust.
To navigate this mass psychological disorder, we will need stories that allow us to find meaning and belonging in an environment that sits at odds with our identity and values. In psychology, these stories are known as adjustment narratives, a coping technique often used by expatriates struggling to adjust to the realities of a new place. Many of us will soon feel like expatriates: we may still live in the same place, but the social, cultural, political, and natural environment will be significantly different.
Adjustment narratives are different from post-apocalyptic stories. They depict a world that bears a strong resemblance to today’s, a world characterized by incremental evolution rather than discontinuous events. They presume that humanity got its act together and started reducing emissions in time to stave off the apocalypse. Effects of global warming are visible, but the world at large is coping.
These narratives let us imagine alternative futures with a much greater sense of relatability. For most people, the idea of living in a world in which most coastal cities are submerged is about as relatable as the idea of exploring foreign galaxies aboard Starship Enterprise. Relatability is one of the reasons why the Netflix series Black Mirror is so successful: it sets technological revolutions in a world that looks just like ours, creating an uncanny feeling of possibility. Dystopian cli-fi stories feel as relatable as Avatar and Mad Max, but to touch us profoundly they need to feel like The Martian and Ex Machina.
Relatability is closely related to the concept of agency — the real or perceived capacity to act. T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, in which environmental destruction has eliminated biodiversity, tells us only why we should care about biodiversity but not how to protect it. In contrast, adjustment narratives can explore versions of the biosphere and of society’s reaction. They allow us to understand the differences in choices we are about to make in the near future. They bring to life what Robert Macfarlane described as literature’s “unique capacity to help us connect present action with future consequences.” What does a personal carbon budget mean for an individual’s freedom? What does a city feel, smell, and sound like when all vehicles are electrified? Who benefits and who loses, who rejoices and who suffers? Writers can create windows into possible future worlds that are more diverse, nuanced, and empathetic — in other words, more intimately connected to the human condition — than any scientific study or policy roadmap.
Relatable stories that convey a sense of agency are a powerful source of hope. They can narrate a future in which people still find meaning and belonging, despite the sacrifices a carbon-constrained lifestyle will ask them to make. They can lessen the anxiety and fear that climate action sometimes instills, dispelling the zero-consumption/zero-joy myths.
Post-apocalyptic climate fiction succeeds at grabbing the world’s attention, but its limitations in triggering action have become evident. For Stephanie LeMenager, Professor of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, the time has come “not to reflect on the end of the world, but on how to meet it.” What we need are narratives of hope and confidence, stories that emphatically tell us: We may have to manage our emissions, but it’s going to be okay.
