By MELENA RYZIK NYT reporter, culture, films, novels, climate
EXCERPT:
One bright spot in showing environmental alarm onscreen is children’s programs, Ms. Levin said, which “work beautifully for everyday practices and overall awareness. Parents often watch with them, and they learn together.”
And climate change is a frequent topic of visual artists and writers, where the genre known as cli-fi [see hot link here cli-fi] is growing.
One thing too few people do, according to Mr. Boykoff, the University of Colorado researcher, is laugh about climate change. Alexander Payne’s forthcoming “Downsizing,” in which people are shrunk to tiny versions of themselves — thereby using less resources — takes a swing at that approach.
Mr. Boykoff has had his students perform a comedy show about environmental destruction; a research paper on the outcome is being readied for publication. “If just scientists talking about their research and findings were successful” in motivating the public, “we’d be sorted by now,” Mr. Boykoff said. “But that’s not true. A lot of people don’t engage with these things through scientific ways of knowing. So the arts, the cultural sphere, is a really important part of this that’s underexplored so far.”
Mr. Maibach, the George Mason professor and an expert in polling on climate understanding, said the greatest problem facing climate communicators is that Americans are not talking about climate change enough — in any shape. “We call it the climate silence,” he said, “and it’s pretty profound.”
So, said Mr. Hoffman, the University of Michigan professor, we need “more movies, more TV, more music.”
“We have to touch people’s hearts on this,” he said. “It’s critical.”
A new calendar system dates October 2, 2017 instead as October 2, 75,017
One of the reasons we humans today cannot wrap our heads around the real deep issues and time frames of global warming and climate change is that our calendar time frame is too limited, with all major religious calendars systems from Mosaic, Jesaic, Mohammadaic, Buddhaic, and all other religions of the past 5000 year origin dates being too limited. As everyone on this site know, it is not really 2017 now. Jesus has nothing to do with where we are now in time, and nor does Moses or Mohammed or the Buddha or anyone else from these supernatural fake religions. In fact, if we could SEE the time frame in a much longer view, maybe we could get a better sense of the dangers we are in. So I created a new calender time framing today: the date today is October 2, Year 75,017 (it's a new timeframe, try it with your friends and colleages) Why 75,000 years time frame. Think about it and ask me if you still don't get it. So. New Years this coming Janunary will be January1, Year 75,018...) 2017 does not make any sense now in the Anthropocene. AGREE? DISAGREE? Add to the conversation! -- Cheers, Dan Bloom on October 2, 75,017.....PS i kept the 017 in the new date so that future historians and archivists can match the dates of 75,017 and 75,018 and so on with the OLD DATES from before this new dating system caught on. Which could take another 2500 years but i am starting today for anyone who would like to join me. Welcome to 75,017....it's a whole new ballgame!
We’re under climate ‘machine gun fire’, an incessant spray of popping climate-bullets which evokes from the population an endless cyber scream. There is the occasional offering of a cease fire, Al Gore’s recent ‘An Inconvenient Sequel’ and podcasts such as ‘Bionic Planet’ allow us to navigate the ‘bullet’ stricken landscape, but where else can we find a peaceful place to nurture our outlooks? We believe that fiction offers that objective space, here we explain why:
Our society is a dense web of virtual connections – a labyrinthine network of links and ties – we have created a ‘fourth dimension’ – a virtual reality where ourselves and our smartphones can leisurely elope. In this realm of multimedia, there is 24-hour non-stop-news, free enrolment for a ‘notification education’ and zingy access to all the latest research. As such, the consequences of climate change appear to be everywhere – we spin in a hurricane of shocking headlines, swim in a flood of bitesize climate tweets and sink in the rising sea of disquieting statistics. Yet, intelligent exploration and intricate discussion of our current climate seems to be nowhere – for many who find climate science and policy impenetrable and whose environmental discussion is constrained to the fly-by nature of the media – climate change remains an ethereal and gossamer concept with a fractured and distant nature.
This is where we believe cli-fi comes in – novels and movies are special in that they can construct immersive futuristic worlds that we can experience in the present, and weave stories that empower us to look more critically at the decisions and choices we make today. Unalike the media, novels and movies give us the time and space to think, explore and fiddle with our perspectives – that’s why we believe that reading climate fiction is the perfect accompaniment to our fleeting ‘notification education’.
Importantly – unlike, the chirping, chittering quick-fire nature of the media, cli-fi with its in depth exploration, elaborate construction and intricate narratives provides us with a ‘quiet spot’ to broaden our environmental understanding and explore imagined yet potential futures. It was Sylvia Plath who once said: ‘it is in the novel that people brush their teeth’- it is this intricacy and hint of the mundane and everyday in fiction that makes climate change seem less clinical and more personal. Thus, climate fiction has the unique ability to take a global problem and weave it into the tiny grandeur of our everyday individual lives.
So – with the power of cli-fi novels and movies in mind we want to encourage people to read novels with climate change themes – many such novels are now being branded as part of the growing genre – cli-fi – which explores the possible environmental nightmares to come – using thrilling plotlines and a plethora of unique protagonists – these works imagine what a world wrecked by the consequences of global warming, rising sea levels and pollution would look like.
Climate novels can never be the solution in themselves – however their unique combination of science, humanities and activism – has the capacity to inspire and engender action. So – if you want to know what it would be like to brush your teeth in a world wrecked by climate change – go out and grab some cli-fi.
Snooks Books Suggestions:
Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver.
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Through the Arc of the Rainforest – Karen Tei Yamashita.
Freedom by Jonathon Franzen
The Wind Up Girl & The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigulupi.
Back in August, New York Times reporter Livia Albeck-Ripka, contacted me by Twitter and email about a story she was developing on cli-fi novels, and she asked if I had time to chat with her. She wrote (August 19 email):
''Dear Dan, Thanks for getting back to me so quickly! I’m interested in doing a listicle/round-up of Cli-Fi novels for the Times, and am wondering if you can help?
Do you have a running list somewhere/thoughts on where the most comprehensive one might be?
How did you get into this yourself?
Cheers,
- Livia''
I replied:
''Hi Livia, Yes.... Yes. Can help. How many books you need for a list! Top ten cli-fi novels? Top 20?
USA. UK. Canada. Australia. Finland . Germany.
Or mostly USA novels? -- Dan''
I then sent her a partial list of cli-fi novels off the top of my head, writing:
''Livia,
I appreciate your interest. Just as earlier novels like "On the Beach".. 1957... influenced public debate on nuclear disarmament, I feel modern cli-fi novels might be able to communicate global warming issues on an emotional level. > > So.....listicle
> > Barbara Kingsolver, "Flight Behavior"...2012 > > "South pole station" 2017 by Ashley Shelby > > "0dds against tomorrow" by Nathaniel Rich. 2013. > > "New York 2140" kim Stanley Robinson (new clifi novel ) > > Paolo bacigalupi "the Water Knife" ...2016 > > Claire vaye Watkins "Gold Fame Citrus"....2016 > > "Ice" by laline Paul in UK ...2017
Meg little Reilly, "we are unprepared" 2016
"The lamentations of zeno" by ilja trojanow, 2016, english trans of German novel "eistau "
THE RESULT of our email chats turned up in the New York Times on September 26, about a month after we first chatted, and here it is. Livia wrote a great, fun interactive piece and I loved it.
My take on her piece with some slight edits for clarification and amplification since she left some things out.
Livia used four of my recommendations, wasn't able to use all of them for reasons of space, and added three other books she and her editors came up with at the Climate Desk at the Times. and here is her article below. I loved it! BRAVO, Livia. James Reston would be proud of you today!
=======================
HEADLINE:
Are Cli-Fi Novels All Too Real? We Asked 7 Climate Scientist Experts
When extraordinary hurricanes and floods battered parts of the United States and Caribbean this month, Paolo Bacigalupi’s readers started sending him news clips. In “Ship Breaker,” which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2010, Bacigalupi, a climate fiction writer, had invented a monster “Category 6” hurricane.
Now, his readers were asking: Isthis what you were talking about?
Climate change presents a peculiar challenge to novelists; it often seems to simmer without a singular moment of crisis. So cli-fi authors like Mr. Bacigalupi hurtle current science into drought-ravaged, flooded, starved, sunken and sandy futures. Climate-themed fiction, also known as cli-fi and covered in the NYT's ROOM FOR DEBATE forum in July 2014, is extension, not invention.
But as scientists’ projections about the effects of climate change have increasingly become reality, some works of cli-fi have begun to seem all too plausible. We chose seven cli-fi novels and asked the experts: How likely are they to come true?
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Climate Effect: Water Wars
‘The Water Knife’
by Paolo Bacigalupi
In his fifth climate-related novel, published to cli-fi headlines in 2015, Mr. Bacigalupi asked: What would happen if drought became the “new normal” in the American Southwest? His answer: Refugees, apocalyptic cults and drug dealers roam a land where water is controlled by thugs.
“What if our underlying prosperity is ripped out from underneath us?” Mr. Bacigalupi said. “If you put those questions in people’s mind, it changes how they look at their daily life.”
Leon Szeptycki, an attorney and professor specializing in water rights at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, described the book as fictional extension. “Climate change will cause a lot of social and economic disruption in the American Southwest, but not at the level the author envisions,” he said.
Eighty to 90 percent of water in the Southwest is used for agriculture, so rural communities would be hit first by shortages, Mr. Szeptycki said. “Available water will shift to cities,” he said. “There will be less water, less food, fewer jobs.”
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Climate Effect: Desertification
‘Gold Fame Citrus’
by Claire Vaye Watkins
Claire Vaye Watkins’s 2016 cli-fi novel, her first, imagined drought differently. Sand has swallowed California; now it’s known as the Amargosa Dune Sea. Nothing grows in the lawless desert, but a wandering dowser claims that new species — a diurnal owl, carnivorous plants and albino hummingbirds — have emerged through a “super-speed evolutionary time warp.”
“Absolutely, climate change can accelerate evolution,” said Jeffrey Townsend, a professor of evolutionary biology at Yale. Humans have set off many evolutionary changes, like when insects have adapted to pesticides or when the peppered moth lost its spots to more closely resemble industrial soot. Plants becoming meat eaters would be more of a stretch, Dr. Townsend said.
The novel is “not an unreasonable fictional depiction” of drought, said Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of earth system science at Stanford. California already has a “new climate,” he added. Anthropogenic warming has increased the state’s drought risk, but permanent rainlessness remains unlikely.
“That’s probably where the scientific literature and the novel diverge,” Dr. Diffenbaugh said. “Humans are able to probe these issues in ways that are different through the lens of fiction.”
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Climate Effect: Species Extinction
‘Flight Behavior’
by Barbara Kingsolver
The central character in Barbara Kingsolver’s 2015 cli-fi novel doesn’t believe in climate change until she has a “vision of glory” — a colony of monarch butterflies from Mexico appears in southern Appalachia, disoriented by warming temperatures.
“I think it could happen, but pretty far into the distant future when global warming really has an effect further north,” said Lincoln Brower, a research professor of biology at Sweet Briar College, whom Ms. Kingsolver consulted while writing the book.
Dr. Brower, who has been studying the death of monarch butterflies for six decades, said their numbers were already “way down” because of a combination of pesticide use, logging and the impacts of climate change. But he guessed it would take about half a century before temperatures in Appalachia rose enough to accommodate the butterflies during their winter migration.
“It’s hard to know what’s going to happen,” Dr. Brower said, “but I don’t think it will be good.”
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Climate Effect: Disrupted Food Chain
‘The History of Bees’
by Maja Lunde
China, 2098: Tao is up a tree, hand-pollinating its blossoms with a tiny brush. The bees are long since gone. Maja Lunde’s first cli-fi novel and her debut book for adults, published in 2017 in Norwegian and later translated into German and English, chronicles three generations as they exploit, try to save and eventually mimic bees, whose extinction has become a familiar device in climate-themed fiction.
“It’s a crazy idea, and it’s being done,” said Jeremy Kerr, a biodiversity researcher at the University of Ottawa, describing the hand-pollinators of Hanyuan County in China’s Sichuan Province.
Pollinators like bees (and birds, butterflies, moths, flies, wasps, beetles, bats and mosquitoes) are crucial to the food chain because they move pollen between fruit, vegetables and nuts. Plants that depend on pollination are 35 percent of global crop production. While Colony Collapse Disorder — previously believed to pose a major threat to all bees — has declined substantially in recent years, Dr. Kerr said it was conceivable that five or six “keystone” species, which pollinate crops like canola, tomatoes, blueberries and strawberries, could be lost, in part because of global warming.
But hand-pollination? “The question of whether you could do something like that on a planetary scale,” Dr. Kerr said, “Holy moly, if that’s where we got to, I think other things would probably kill us first.”
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Climate Effect: Refugees
‘Borne’
by Jeff VanderMeer
In Jeff VanderMeer’s 2017 novel, rising waters force a child named Rachel to flee her island home, so she moves “from camp to camp, country to country,” hoping that she “could outrun the unraveling of the world.” Later, in a nameless ruined city, the 28-year-old Rachel befriends an amorphous creature, Borne, who smells like brine and reminds her of the sea animals of her childhood.
Extreme weather events uproot 21.5 million people each year, according to the United Nations refugee agency, and climate change is expected to increase that number. But there is no internationally accepted legal status for people who have been displaced by the impacts of climate change.
“What would be fair,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, “would be for each of the major emitting countries to accept a portion of the world’s climate-displaced people proportional to its historic contribution” of greenhouse gases.
While science fiction as a literary and movie genre has been around since 1954 -- for over 50 years now -- and dubbed ''sci-fi'' by the media, climate change issues in the 21st century that we are in now has nurtured a new genre of science fiction that's been dubbed "Cli-Fi."
Climate change has become prominent in headlines in recent weeks with the advent of several hard-hitting hurricanes and typhoons worldwide, as ocean temperatures get warmer and more powerful storms affect a slowly-warming -- drip! drip! drip! -- world.
And these media headlines in the New York Times, the BBC, The Washington Post and the Guardian, have helped nurture a relatively new genre of fiction — more specifically, ''climate fiction,'' also known more popularly as ''cli-fi'' — that focuses on climate change and its impacts events.
During a recent appearance at the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona, Arizona State University's Piper Center hosted the New York Times bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson, who writes both sci-fi and cli-fi now. His talk was called "The Comedy of Coping: Alarm and Resolve in Climate Fiction" and it was well-received by the audience of students, professors and fellow writers.
Robinson's latest cli-fi novel is titled "New York York 2140" and that is what he talked about. An imagined Manhattan set 120 years in the future from now, and a city that is then-submerged under 50 feet of sea water. As you can imagined, all hell breaks loose in the inventive storytelling that Robinson is famous for.
So what happens when sci-fi meets cli-fi? Or as Stan Yang, a friend of mine in California recently asked me: ''When Sci-fi collides with Cli-fi, which will win?"
It's a good question. I told Mr Yang what I am going to tell readers of this blog now: When sci-fi collides with cli-fi, both will win. Because sci-fi gave birth to cli-fi, and cli-fi now nurtures sci-fi. It's a win-win for both genres when they collide, as they do in Robinson's new comic novel. The result is a kind of hybrid of two standalone, independent genres.
As the 21st century moves inexorably toward the 22nd century -- and onward for the next 1,000 years -- sci-fi and cli-fi will prove to be cousins joined at the hip. Some novelists will call their short stories and novels ''sci-fi,'' while others will call their work ''cli-fi.'' There's room on this Earth (and in literary circles) for both genres in this age of the Anthrocene.
Two genres that matter now more than ever.
For American Lutheran pastor Leah Schade, good fiction has the ability to change lives and spur action. She goes even further, tweeting the other day that "Cli-fi writers can help us get "woke" about climate change."
A professor of preaching and worship in the USA, and the author of book titled "Creation-Crisis Preaching," Dr Schade is a climate and environmental activist, an active and articulate blogger on religion and culture. I call her an ''EcoPreacher."
In a recent blog post, Dr Schade started with a headline that reads ''We've Lost the Climate War, It's Time to Surrender."
It's a fascinating read, and the entire blog post is here. She ends the piece with these four sentences.
''I, for one, am willing to surrender. I want our leaders to come to the table and accept Nature’s terms. I want us to survive. I want peace with this planet.''
To find out what she meant, and to read more about this pioneering Christian thinker with an eye firmly on the dangers and risks of runaway climate change, read her blog posts. New articles go up weekly.
I Am Legend by Matheson, Richard 1954 (disease)
The Drought JG Ballard 1964
Make Room, Make Room! Harry Harrison 1966
The Sheep Look Up John Brunner 1972
Vaneglory George Turner 1983
The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood 1985
This Is the Way the World Ends James K Morrow 1986
Drowning Towers George Turner 1987
The Sea and Summer George Turner 1987
Earth David Brin 1990
The Destiny Makers George Turner 1992
Mother of Storms John Barnes 1994
Genetic Soldier George Turner 1994
Operation Elbow Room: An Interplanetary Ecofiction Joseph J Phillips 1995
Antarctica Kim Stanley Robinson 1997
A Friend of the Earth TC Boyle 2000
MacAddam Trilogy Margaret Atwood 2000...
