QUOTE UNQUOTE: A continuing series comments and quips that some of our friends and colleagues around the world are saying about ''cli-fi...''

QUOTE UNQUOTE:

A continuing series comments and quips that some of our friends and colleagues around the world are saying about ''cli-fi...''

                          

The great failure of #journalism, like all else #Anthropocene, is failing to recognize that we haven't been impartial, but dumbly complicit.

 

''Global culture has not just failed to adapt to the challenges we now face: it actively prevents us from facing those challenges.''

''I'm interested in a contemporary, even if near future, novel or film that takes on climate change and empowers humans to deal with it, all in the framework of an otherwise great story we won't ever forget.''

''Reducing literature to a procession of isolated actors (or authors) belies the responsibility readers have to see the disastrous paradigm in which a focus on individuals occludes acts that harm the broader community.''

 'A climate change solutions expert coined the cli-fi term as a PR tool to raise public awareness of AGW via media headlines and he succeeded, despite a few angry critics and naysayers along the way. His work with cli-fi is to take on climate change, promote solutions and empower action.''

 

''With all the labels out there to describe your novel, it may be hard to pick one.

We need to be careful about our climate narratives and our genre branding for global warning literature. Some people have been pressured and harassed by literary critics over the years for using genre terms like sci-fi or chick-lit or grip-lit, and that's not fair."

 

 

 

''Given the many genres and themes available to describe fiction that deals with climate change, nature, and environmental issues overall, diversity both in the narrative of climate change novels and the labeling of them is important to maintain.''

 

''Thanks to Sarah Stankorb for both liking the novel and including it, even though I don't necessarily agree this is a hot new genre, since authors have been tackling it for decades.''

 

 ''The forest is not your canvas. The blue sky does not symbolise possibility. The lone gull scrabbling in alley dirt far from the ocean is not your emblem. The extent to which metaphors have colonised nature is the extent to which we fail to see the leaf blight, the greenhouse, and the unused concentration of food calories in the dumpsters of our cities. It will be impossible to seriously consider systems of living beings when we force them to conform to anthropomorphic narratives and tropes.''

 

''With all the labels out there to describe your novel, it may be hard to pick one. ''

''In the last twenty years, advanced economies have taken pride in their modest decreases in emissions per capita, completely ignoring the way in which this is possible because of the exportation of manufacturing to the global South. Vast disparities in income, as well as vast differences in the intensity of social and political systems from region to region, drive climate destruction in the present day and fundamentally restrict our ability to conceptualise the global ecosystem of tomorrow.''

 

''A wide world of authors and artists are talking about global warming in the language of imagination, speculation, warning, and hope – and we must listen. ''

''The romanticization of the materially poor as environmentally ethical appears most often in travel writing, but is visible in work from ''Dances with Wolves'' to the distinction drawn between the Emishi villagers and the citizens of Irontown in ''Princess Mononoke''. In communities without access to capital, people do consume less and pollute less, but their poverty is nonconsensual, unsustainable, and immoral. It leaves them no recourse but to strive for the same economy of mass consumption modelled by the global North.''

''This group explores nature and environmental topics, including climate change, in literature and the arts. We don't focus on any one genre...''

 

- ''The problem with humanity is that we struggle to think on timeframes longer than the end of the month, when we get paid.

- If somebody tells a typical human that the polar ice caps could melt by 2030, the response will be "Who cares? That's not for ages", or if I'm being generous "That's not for ages, I'm sure science will come up with a solution".

-It's always the same. We tip tons of raw sewage into the ocean: "Oh don't worry, it's only a small amount of the ocean we're ruining each year"

-We pour tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere: "Oh don't worry, the atmosphere is massive, it'll be years before we do any serious damage"

-We cut down forests: "Oh don't worry, it'll be years before we've cut the whole Amazon down, and even then there are other forests in the world"

-It's insanity, we are a ludicrous species and are almost certainly going to wipe ourselves out - and we genuinely don't seem to care.''

 

When asked if he was a pessimist or an optimist in regard to possible climate change outcomes in the future, he said: "I’m a pessimist in the sense that I don’t think we’ll get it together to avoid a catastrophic outcome. In many important ways we’ve already missed the boat by a long way."

However, he added: "But I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe in human resourcefulness. I don’t think this represents a threat to human existence, only a threat to human civilization as it’s currently configured. People will eke out a living somehow in a brutalized world. There will probably be fewer of us, maybe way fewer."