Climate fiction (cli-fi) has soared in popularity in recent years with the increased awareness about the dangers of climate change. This is certainly a good thing—cli-fi can help a macro threat like climate change seem more relatable, and many cli-fi readers feel more motivated to demand climate action. While I’m thrilled to see more authors and filmmakers embracing the burgeoning cli-fi genre, readers sometimes feel overwhelmed looking at all the options.

And just like any genre, there are good and bad works of cli-fi. I started getting into cli-fi in the summer of 2019, and since then, I’ve done a lot of research trying to find the best stories to spotlight on the Stories for Earth podcast. Here are my recommendations on where to start with cli-fi, in no particular order.

“Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler

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If you’ve heard of cli-fi, you’ve probably heard of Parable of the Sower. Widely regarded as a cli-fi masterpiece and loved by none other than John Green, this 1993 novel from Octavia E. Butler might be the best place to start if you’re looking for a cli-fi book.

Parable of the Sower tells the story of Lauren Olamina, a young girl growing up in Southern California in the 2020s. The climate crisis is in full swing, leading to the breakdown of social order and governments around the world, including the United States. After a gang of drug addicts burns her town to the ground and murders her family, Lauren sets off on a journey to Northern California, where things are supposedly better.

Listen to the episode: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Trying to make the trip while struggling with a birth defect called hyperempathy—the ability to feel what others are feeling—Lauren meets a number of misfits along the way who join her on the journey. To survive not only the dangers of the road but also a rapidly changing climate, Lauren and friends must learn to work together, become self-sufficient, and develop a philosophy of resilience to help them navigate a troubled time that feels eerily similar to our own.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild”

Released in 2012, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a stunning, magical movie about a girl named Hushpuppy, melting ice, intense storms, and rising sea levels. When a powerful storm hits the fictional Louisiana bayou town called the Bathtub, Hushpuppy and her father Wink must fight to survive against devastating flooding, a forced FEMA evacuation, and a herd of mythical beasts called Aurochs that come to destroy the Bathtub once and for all.

Listen to the episode: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Hurricane Katrina, and Climate Change

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a tragically underrated film, even though it won numerous awards following its release. In addition to the obvious theme of rising sea levels, this film also explores environmental racism and how climate change disproportionately affects the people least responsible for causing it. In 2012 it may have seemed like a story about Hurricane Katrina, but today it seems more reminiscent of Terrebonne Parish—a Louisiana parish that is literally being swallowed by rising sea levels.

I love Beasts of the Southern Wild so much because of how unapologetically joyful it is. In some ways, it’s a story about the end of the world, but it’s also a story about how painfully beautiful and stubborn life is. Instead of trying to spin a tale of hope, the film uses Hushpuppy to make a courageous statement: “You want to destroy my beloved home? Fuck you. I’m not going anywhere.”

McSweeney’s Issue 58: “2040 A.D.”

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Recommendation lists like this one sometimes exclude short story collections, and I think that’s a damn shame. Short stories are one of my favorite forms of storytelling, and they can convey just as much meaning and pathos as films and novels. There are many short story collections centered around the theme of climate change, but my favorite collection I’ve read so far is McSweeney’s Issue 58: 2040 A.D.

You may know McSweeney’s for their witty humor pieces, but 2040 A.D. packs a more sobering punch. Featuring ten stories set in the year 2040 in locations all over the world, 2040 A.D. imagines what life might look like if the world continues on a business-as-usual course toward the outcomes outlined in the IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC.

Made in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and with stories from acclaimed authors like Tommy Orange and Luis Alberto Urrea, 2040 A.D. is a creative and, yes, terrifying, glimpse into what kind of world we could inhabit in 20 years’ time. And, if you’re a sucker for books with pictures like I am, illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook make this collection just as nice to look at as it is to read.

“Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn

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I probably wouldn’t have heard about this book were it not for a past co-worker giving it to me for my birthday one year (thanks Dan!). And while you could quibble about whether Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is cli-fi, I’m including it in this list because I think it gets so many things right about how we should respond to the climate crisis.

Two quotes from the book sum up my biggest takeaways from it. Here’s the first one: “There is no one right way to live.” The second one is slightly longer:

“…people need more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them.”

Listen to the episode: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, Climate Change, and Moving Beyond a Vision of Doom

I hear about how the climate movement needs better storytelling all the time, but a lot of people don’t know how to tell stories about climate change. This isn’t their fault—we humans didn’t evolve to deal with macro threats like anthropogenic climate change. How do you scale down something so enormous to make it more relatable?

Ishmael doesn’t pretend to have the answers, either—that’s for today’s artists and storytellers to discover—but it does give us some ideas on where to start. We need to be inspired, and we need to rewrite our society’s suicidal mythology that places humans at the center of the universe. If we can work towards this vision while remembering that there is no silver-bullet solution to climate change, we will have a better chance of navigating the future.

There’s plenty more to explore

These are four of my favorite works of cli-fi, but this genre is exploding right now. At a time when global climate change is one of the biggest threats to life on Earth, I think it’s never been more important to get into cli-fi. Cli-fi doesn’t give us the answers for stopping climate change, but it can help inspire us to take action and teach us what it looks like to be a resilient person, community, and society.

Wherever you decide to begin with climate fiction, I hope you discover something about the urgency of the crisis and why fighting for what you love is always worth it.

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The post Where To Get Started With Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi) appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 classic Pacific Edge is an inspiring vision of how we might create a truly sustainable society. Part of a three part series—or triptych—the novel presents a utopian or solarpunk imagining of Orange County, California in the 2060s, telling the story of Kevin Claiborne as he and his friends attempt to stop an ecologically destructive zoning proposal on one of the last pristine hillsides in their neighborhood of El Modena.

Overview

Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson (buy on Bookshop from $22.07) is a work of utopian eco-fiction set in Orange County, California during the 2060s. Originally published in 1990 as part of the Three Californias triptych, Pacific Edge includes many solarpunk themes such as energy independence through renewables, flourishing of local communities, green infrastructure and high technology, and strict government regulations limiting the power and size of corporations. The other two books in the triptych depict alternate futures for California—one struggling through a nuclear winter (The Wild Shore) and one being crushed by extreme wealth inequality caused by a giant tech boom (The Gold Coast). Pacific Edge takes a different route, using utopia as the setting with the still-fresh memory of a past dystopia threatening to return.

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1. About Kim Stanley Robinson
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

Kim Stanley Robinson is a literary science fiction writer from Davis, California. Born in Waukegan, Illinois in 1952, Robinson moved to Southern California as a child but has also lived in Washington, D.C. and Switzerland. His books frequently incorporate themes of climate change, sustainability, nature, environmental justice, and critiques of capitalism. The author of over 19 books and numerous short stories, Robinson has been awarded the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards for his literary contributions to science fiction. He holds a BA in literature from UC San Diego, an MA in English from Boston University, and a PhD in English from UC San Diego, and he has taught at UC Davis and the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. His new novel The Ministry for the Future will be published in fall 2020.

Official website: https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/

Transcript

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I’m Forrest Brown, and you’re listening to Stories for Earth.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

Welcome to Stories for Earth, a climate change podcast where we discuss stories that can give us strength and resilience in fighting the climate crisis. I’m glad you’re joining us today for the last episode of our first season.

For a transcript of today’s show, more information about the author, recommendations for further reading, and links to buy the book that we’ll be talking about today, visit our website at storiesforearth.com. That’s storiesforearth.com.

Today, we’ll be building off our discussion from last month by talking about Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 science fiction novel Pacific Edge, part of the Three Californias triptych. If you don’t like spoilers, now would be the time to turn off the podcast, read the book, and come back to finish the episode when you’re done.

But whatever order you decide to do things in, I hope you enjoy the show today.

“Pacific Edge” plot summary

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I want you to imagine that you live in Southern California, in Orange County. Maybe you already do. The year is 2065, and apart from the time difference, most of your story could be happening today. Your job is renovating old houses. You have just won an election to serve in the local government. You’re in your early thirties, and you are in love for the first time.

The subject of your infatuation just separated from their partner of 15 years. Until now, you thought they’d only seen you as a friend. But now after the breakup, things are different. They start approaching you, wanting to spend time with you, inviting you on solo walks and flights around the county. The two of you begin to fall in love, and, for a while, life is good. It almost seems too good.

You see, your lover’s ex just so happens to be the town’s mayor and the CEO of a highly successful medical technology company. Shortly after you begin your term as an elected official, the mayor proposes rezoning a parcel of land that’s set aside for a park. They want to use the land to build a new commercial building for their company, even though your political party has worked hard for years to protect the land and leave it as wilderness. Oh, and the land is the hill that’s practically in your backyard.

Obviously, you want to fight this proposal, but think of how it will look considering you’re sleeping with the mayor’s recent ex-lover. And speaking of which, think, too, about the way this will look to your lover. Will they think you’re simply trying to rub it in the mayor’s face? Will they resent you for fighting against the zoning proposal with everything you’ve got? This is a tricky situation, and to get what you want, you’ll have to navigate it carefully, all while trying to act naturally. You’re angry, frustrated, and torn. Don’t you live in a beautiful place? Aren’t you surrounded by friends? Isn’t this supposed to be a utopia?

This is the plot of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Pacific Edge. Originally published in 1990—two years before Daniel Quinn told us we need to move beyond a “vision of doom”—Pacific Edge is a work of utopian ecological fiction that paints a portrait of what Southern California could look like if humans take swift and appropriate action to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The book is part of a triptych—a picture in three parts—that offers ideas about three different possible futures for California. One book depicts a future California struggling through a nuclear winter, another depicts a technocratic future marked by extreme income inequality, and the third, Pacific Edge, shows a hopeful future, one where humans have learned to live in harmony with the environment, limit growth, and work on restoring places wrecked by years of overdevelopment, overconsumption, and overpopulation.

At this point, it might be helpful for you to go back and listen to our previous episode on Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. You can still get something meaningful from today’s discussion without knowing about Ishmael, but I think Pacific Edge seems much more timely and important when discussed with Ishmael fresh in your memory. You can take this opportunity to press pause and come back to this episode, or continue listening to hear about Kim Stanley Robinson’s utopia.

There is no such thing as a pocket utopia

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The word “utopia” comes to us from Sir Thomas Moore, who created the word for his 1516 book of the same name by joining together two Greek words: ou, meaning “not,” and topos, meaning “place.” By definition, utopias are nowhere to be found. They do not exist. Intended to be a fictional imagination of a perfect world, the very word implies their impossibility. We live in a flawed world full of flawed people; a utopia can never exist.

But even though Wikipedia wasn’t a few keystrokes away in the late 80s, Kim Stanley Robinson was wise to this bit of knowledge when he wrote Pacific Edge. As we discover throughout the book, one of the main characters, Tom, wanted to write a utopia but found it impossible. A constant refrain marks his journal entries: “There is no such thing as a pocket utopia.” A pocket utopia. A small-scale, or island utopia, much like the very first imagining of such a place from Thomas Moore. But what about a utopia on a wider scale? Could that be possible?

The problem with utopias is that—so far, at least—they have all descended into dystopia, the exact opposite of what is supposed to be a perfect place. It turns out that not all visions of a perfect world are the same, and what may be heaven for one group of people is hell for another. Consider Communism in the 20th century. This was supposed to be a perfect society. It was supposed to fix all the problems caused by capitalism over the centuries before. But of course, we all know how that ended.

In China, the Cultural Revolution was an absolute disaster that killed millions of innocent people. In Russia, the rise of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin resulted in widespread killings, starvation, and poverty. By all accounts, Communism was an absolute failure. It might be the best modern example of why utopias are such a bad idea.

So why write a fictional utopia? Why read a fictional utopia? As I’ve already hinted at, Kim Stanley Robinson did his homework on utopias, and he didn’t fall for the same pitfalls that writers before him did. At worst, utopias kill people—as in Communist China and Soviet Russia—and at best, they’re just plain boring, as in the work of utopian fiction Island by Aldous Huxley. If everything is perfect, what is there to do? There can be nothing to work towards, nothing to fix, nothing to solve, nothing to improve, no conflict of any kind. While at first this may sound great, it begins to sound more and more like a definition of death. I don’t think anyone truly wants to live in a world like this.

But the vision of utopia that Robinson presents in Pacific Edge leans more into the “no place” meaning of the word than the “perfect place” meaning. This is a subtle but important distinction. Pacific Edge doesn’t make any pretenses about being able to achieve utopia; rather, it acknowledges that utopia is never an attainment but a striving. In a journal entry at the beginning of Chapter Four Tom writes:

“What a cheat utopias are, no wonder people hate them. Engineer some fresh start, an island, a new continent, dispossess them, give them a new planet sure! So they don’t have to deal with our history. Ever since More [sic] they’ve been doing it: rupture, clean cut, fresh start.

“So the utopias in books are pocket utopias too. Ahistorical, static, why should we read them? They don’t speak to us trapped in this world as we are, we look at them in the same way we look at the pretty inside of a paperweight, snow drifting down, so what? It may be nice but we’re stuck here and no one’s going to give us a fresh start, we have to deal with history as it stands, no freer than a wedge in a crack.

Stuck in history like a wedge in a crack
With no way out and no way back—
Split the world!

“Must redefine utopia. It isn’t the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

“Compare it to the present course of history. If you can.”

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s imagining of utopia, it must be ecumenical. And I use that word intentionally.

Ursula K. Le Guin—another utopian science fiction luminary and a huge influence of KSR’s who actually got a call out in the preceding quote—wrote many novels that took place in something she called the Ekumen. The Ekumen is a peaceful confederation of different planets that all work together for the advancement of humanity and the expanding of consciousness. We see a similar vision of this kind of utopian framework in Carl Sagan’s 1985 science fiction novel Contact. After receiving a series of extraterrestrial transmissions containing the blueprints for a vessel of interstellar travel, a group of scientists from Earth voyage to the center of the galaxy to meet representatives from alien races. The reason behind this meeting turns out to be for nothing other than sharing knowledge in the hopes of making every conscious being better off.

And this is where Pacific Edge truly shines: it gets at a similar kind of utopian society, although Earthbound. In order for humans to make any progress towards utopia, we must widen the scope of who and what we count as stakeholders. Call this society what you will—ecotopia, the Ekumen, the space station at the center of the Milky Way, the Kingdom of God, Earthseed—every one of them emphasizes embracing all living creatures and nature while working under the assumption that there is no one “right way” to live, as Daniel Quinn insists in Ishmael. “There is no such thing as a pocket utopia.” If a very small fraction of us live in palaces built on the rest of the world’s back, we have not achieved utopia.

A practical utopia

Talk about utopia seems to always bend towards the philosophical. And while philosophy is important, we’ll never make any progress in our journey towards utopia without also discussing the practical. In this regard, Pacific Edge walks and chews gum at the same time. The journal entries from Tom supply the philosophical context for why the world needs a utopian work of fiction, and the story of Kevin fighting the new zoning proposal provides the actual boots-on-the-ground examples of what striving for a utopia looks like. We can, in other words, work on building a utopia while we’re still trying to figure out just what exactly that means.

The story focuses mainly on Kevin’s attempts to thwart the mayor, Alfredo, from building a massive development on the hill behind Kevin’s house, but to me, Tom is the most interesting character in the book. Tom is Kevin’s grandfather and a retired lawyer, and while we don’t find out until later on that he wrote the journal entries preceding many chapters, Kevin does let us know from the beginning that Tom played a very important role in helping their town make good progress on reducing its carbon footprint. In fact, as the story goes on, we learn that Tom was a key lawyer in drafting many of the laws that put international limits on the size of corporations, the populations of towns and cities, and the amount of excess water that communities can store.

But Tom didn’t start out so successful. At the beginning of Chapter Two when we read his first journal entry, we learn that he’s living in Zürich, Switzerland in the 2010s while his wife works on her PhD. A so-called “pocket utopia” itself, Switzerland’s society is really starting to feel the pressure from the sudden and massive influx of refugees from natural disasters and armed conflicts around the world. Of course, these are all side effects of climate change, as Tom notes that the world’s climate has increased another degree Celsius above the pre-industrial average and that more and more species are going extinct every year.

All of this combined is causing a rise in Swiss nationalism and far-right politics. “Return Switzerland to the Swiss!” becomes a common chant, and soon Tom and his wife get a letter from the Fremdenkontrolle der Stadt Zürich—The Stranger Control—which results in Tom’s deportation back to the United States. But even after he arrives home, Tom is greeted with hostility from the American government. Classified as a radical anti-capitalist (and therefore anti-American), Tom is imprisoned and quarantined after a federal immigration agency fabricates HIV-positive test results for him.

Writing some of his later journal entries from prison, Tom scraps his ideas to write a utopia and rededicates himself to fighting for a better future on the same front from before his time in Switzerland—the legal system. After decades of hard-won legal battles, Tom emerges as the leader of the newly formed Green Party and leads America and the rest of the world in mitigating the worst effects of climate change and putting adaptation strategies into place.

Tom effectively helped save the world, so when Alfredo, the town’s mayor, tries to build on Kevin’s hill, Tom joins Kevin in trying to stop the proposal from passing. At the end of the book after Kevin and his friends fail to stop Alfredo, it’s Tom who finally manages to save the hill once and for all. Tom dies in a shipwreck right before Alfredo starts construction, and the town council votes to turn the hill into a memorial for Tom. This halts not only this one development but all future developments from destroying the delicate ecosystem on Kevin’s hill. The situation seemed very grim, but the characters fought tirelessly against regressing. It’s a hard-earned victory, but they win nevertheless.

A positive self-fulfilling prophecy

You probably already know where I’m going with this. We are, right now, in the same position Tom was in when he decided to stop writing his utopian novel. In Europe, the Syrian refugee crisis prompted a bolstering and resurgence of nationalism, xenophobia, and outright Nazism, in some cases, with the rise of parties like the National Rally party in France and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Here in the United States, Central American refugees are traveling up through Mexico to seek asylum in our country, something many Americans have shamefully chosen to use as fuel to throw on the fires of nationalism and racism. Whether they’re chanting “America First” or “Blood and Soil,” it all boils down to the same thing.

Within the past ten years, far-right, populist politics have swelled in popularity, the world’s climate has continued on a terrifying heating trend, the oceans have become hotter and more acidic, and more and more species have passed under the crosshairs of extinction. We live in a fraught time, and our actions today and every day have a huge impact on what the world will look like in ten and twenty years, but also in one, two, and five years since we are now experiencing very dangerous effects of global climate change.

In such a time, becoming overwhelmed and hopeless is the status quo, but we must buckle down and fight this feeling if we want to save our future. We hear frightening stories of dystopia all the time that confirm our worst fears about what the future will be like. We devour books like The Handmaid’s Tale and The Hunger Games with a rapacious appetite, but what if we dared to dream of something better, something that looks more like a utopia? Sure, the bad guys never win at the end of these books. If they did, no one would read them. But these stories always begin in a world where the bad guys have already won. It’s up to the heroes to restore justice and goodness to the world.

What if, instead, we set our sights on a future where the good guys won and the bad guys are the very last of a dying breed. I am usually one to shy away from what could turn out to be self-fulfilling prophecies, but in this situation, I think a positive self-fulfilling prophecy could do us all a lot of good. The characters in Pacific Edge may be fictional, but they are a perfect representation of this idea. Tom found the drive to create the future he envisioned only because he thought it was possible, only because he’d already imagined how that future would be.

If it weren’t for Tom and the hundreds if not thousands of other people who fought alongside him, Kevin wouldn’t have even been thrown into a situation where he had to push back against something as seemingly inconsequential as a new zoning proposal. Kevin’s world might still be imperfect to him, but to us reading about it today, it seems closer to utopia than anything else we’ve seen, and that gives us something to work with.

Tom teaches us that now is not the time for despair. Nor is it the time to give up. Now is the time to work our asses off.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

Stories for Earth is written and produced by me, Forrest Brown. The intro and outro music is also by me. If you want to learn more about what we’re up to, you can find us on Instagram at @storiesforearth and on Twitter at @stories4earth. That’s the word “stories,” the number “4,” and the word “earth.” Our website is storiesforearth.com, where you can also find links to support us financially through Patreon and through our Bookshop.org page.

Thank you so much for joining us on our first season. Things will be quiet over here for a couple of months as my wife, our cat, and I get ready to move across the country from Nashville, Tennessee to Portland, Oregon, but we’ll be back very soon with more stories that can give us strength to fight climate change. Until then, thanks for listening.

Recommendations

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Book: Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

→ Buy on Bookshop from $31.50 (affiliate)

Article: “A Sci-Fi Author’s Boldest Vision of Climate Change: Surviving It” by Russell Gold in the Wall Street Journal (paywall)

Book: Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World by Fabio Fernandes, Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, and Carlos Orsi

→ Buy on Bookshop from $13.75 (affiliate)

Book: Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach

→ Buy on Bookshop from $12.88 (affiliate)

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The post “Pacific Edge” by Kim Stanley Robinson: A Future Mythology appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is a story of nature making its case for stopping humanity’s destruction of Earth. Told as a Socratic dialogue between a talking gorilla named Ishmael and an anonymous narrator, Ishmael challenges the notion that humankind is somehow separate or above the rest of life on this planet, and it offers some ideas for building the framework of a sustainable society.

Overview

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (buy on Bookshop from $16.56) is a work of philosophical ecofiction that was published in 1992. Written as a Socratic dialogue between a gorilla with the ability to speak telepathically, Ishmael, and an unnamed narrator, the book argues that the way modern humans live is unsustainable. To correct this, humans must re-examine their fundamental beliefs about their place in the world and work towards creating a future where all life can thrive. Before its publication, Ishmael won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship as a work of fiction that offered excellent solutions to global problems. The book garnered praise from Ray Bradbury and has been taught in high schools and universities around the United States.

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→ Find at your local library

Jump to

1. About Daniel Quinn
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

Daniel Quinn was an American freelance writer and author from Omaha, Nebraska. Before he became a writer, Quinn intended to be a Trappist monk, studying under the theologian Thomas Merton at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Kentucky. Following Merton’s advice, Quinn left the Abbey and gave up on his dream of becoming a monk. He found a job at a publishing company in Chicago, where he worked as an editor of several encyclopedias and educational books. Quinn went on to leave his career in publishing to become a freelance writer, writing several books including Ishmael, The Story of B, and Beyond Civilization. He died on February 17, 2018 in Houston, Texas at the age of 82 years old.

Transcript

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I’m Forrest Brown, and you’re listening to Stories for Earth.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

Welcome to Stories for Earth, a climate change podcast about stories that can teach us lessons about emotional resilience in fighting the climate crisis. For a transcript of today’s show, a full list of sources, further recommended reading, articles, and more, visit our website at storiesforearth.com. If you’re listening on Apple Podcasts and you like what you hear, please consider leaving us a review. Reviews really help us reach more people.

Today we’ll be talking about a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. If you haven’t read the book before, don’t worry about feeling lost. I’ll cover everything you need to know for you to get something meaningful out of our discussion. By the same token, many spoilers lie ahead. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like spoilers, I’d suggest listening to this episode after you’ve read the book.And now, here is our discussion of Ishmael. I hope you enjoy the show today.

How “Ishmael” came to be

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Let’s be honest—talking about climate change can be depressing. The biggest news about climate change is never good. In fact, it keeps getting worse. Scientists are alarmed by how much faster the climate is changing than they thought it would, and we as a planet might be a few years away from reaching frightening tipping points that we only recently thought were decades away. This is truly terrifying stuff, and it seems to be all we hear about in the news and in circles where people talk about global warming.

No one wants to be around that person at the party who brings up such news, the person who drops morbid, startling statistics and then basically says, “We’re all screwed!” with a dark laugh. And yet, I have been this person more often than I would care to admit. Sure, climate change is scary. It’s frustrating and hopeless feeling to see the lack of serious action to do something about it, but it does no one any good to spread that feeling of despair and cynical resignation.

I later found out this kind of behavior is a symptom of climate grief, which is a natural response to learning about the dangers climate change poses to humanity. A British psychotherapist named Rosemary Randall talks about this particular brand of doomsday porn on an episode of the Ecosia podcast. She says it’s a natural part of processing the feelings of complex grief and the hopelessness that can accompany it. She says this stage doesn’t have to be permanent, and to move to a healthier state of mind, people should focus on what they can do to help.

I imagine this might have been what author Daniel Quinn was doing when he wrote his famous novel Ishmael. Quinn actually started writing Ishmael by writing another book first. It was called The Book of the Damned, a book Quinn described as “a book born in hell…a collection of damnable ideas, ideas to be cursed and denounced.”

He published it through his own independent press in serialized form, but when it came time to write the last part, he couldn’t summon the words the same way he had before. The whole book was a diatribe against humanity, excoriating humans for the damage they had wrought on the environment. But according to Quinn in the foreword to my copy of Ishmael, “…the rest of what I had to say simply could not be written in lightning strikes and thunder.”

What Daniel Quinn had to say next ended up being the book Ishmael. And while it was almost never published, it went on to receive Ted Turner’s Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, a prize awarded to a work of fiction that offered excellent solutions to global problems.I imagine that if The Book of the Damned was a product of Daniel Quinn’s state of righteous rage and cynical resignation, Ishmael was his response to “What can I do to help?” that pulled him out of despair, even if only for a short time. Today, it has a lot to teach us about how to reach other people so we can make a difference in fighting climate change.

“Ishmael” plot summary

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Ishmael is a novel formatted as a Socratic dialogue between the narrator of the story and a telepathic gorilla named Ishmael. The story begins with the narrator, a man who is agonizing over how to save the world, when he just so happens to see an ad in the newspaper one day with a potential solution to his exact predicament. The ad reads, “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.” Ecstatic, the narrator visits the address listed in the ad only to find himself alone in a small apartment with a massive gorilla in a cage.

The narrator soon discovers the gorilla can communicate telepathically, and he introduces himself as Ishmael, the author of the newspaper ad. Ishmael goes on to explain, through the Socratic method, what is wrong with the world today and how humans might begin to fix it. Humans, Ishmael explains, are like a person driving a car as fast as they can towards a cliff. If we don’t take our food off the accelerator and hit the brakes soon, we’re going to hurdle off that cliff to our certain death.

Who are the Takers and Leavers?

But not all of us are doing this. For simplicity’s sake, Ishmael tells the narrator there are two main groups of people living on Earth: the Takers and the Leavers. The Takers are the members of people in modern, developed countries who see the world as theirs for the taking. If you’re listening to this podcast, there’s a good chance you’re a Taker according to Ishmael’s lectures. Takers use words like “natural resources,” implying that the universe exists to serve them. Humankind rules the world, and we can do with it whatever we please.

Leavers, on the other hand, are the kinds of people the Takers used to be before they developed the psychotic notion that everything belongs to them. Leavers are people who live off the land. They might be hunter-gatherers living in tribes, but they don’t necessarily have to be. Before I read Ishmael, I read several summaries of the novel that essentially said Leavers all live in nomadic tribes in undeveloped countries. That is not the case.

While Leavers certainly could fall into this category, their defining trait is that they don’t believe the world belongs to them. Rather, they believe humans belong to the world—that is, they believe other species, every one of them from salmon to songbirds, have just as much of a claim to Earth as we do. According to Leavers, humans are no more fit to “rule” than any other animal. We all share the same home, and we should do our best to be good neighbors to the other life on our planet and to live sustainably.

But the world hasn’t always been this way. Ishmael says that a long time ago, we all used to be Leavers. There was a time when, for centuries, human beings lived sustainably. We took what the land provided, we lived in small communities, and we respected the Earth, even if we probably didn’t yet have modern notions like environmentalism or ecology. We simply lived as other animals do—we didn’t take any more than we needed, and we didn’t kill off other species for the sake of safeguarding a surplus of our own food supply.

A new take on the Garden of Eden story

But one day, that all changed. Ishmael takes the story of the Garden of Eden from Genesis in the Old Testament to illustrate how this change might have happened. According to Ishmael’s interpretation of this creation story, Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden not because they were disobedient, but because they became like gods, thinking they had the right to decide who gets to live and who gets to die—or, as the Bible originally put it, “knowing both good and evil.” After God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, he told them that moving forward, they would work have to work for a living instead of living off the abundance of nature.

This, Ishmael says, is really the beginning of agriculture. It started when God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden, and it kicked into high gear after Cain, one of the first so-called “modern agriculturalists,” murdered his brother Abel. Abel was a shepherd, and Cain was a farmer. According to Ishmael’s reading of this Bible story, there was real significance behind this fact.

The dawn of human agriculture is when we as a species apparently started heading down the path to our own self-destruction. At first, this statement sounds ludicrous, even laughable. The discovery of agriculture might be the most significant event in human history.

Because we learned how to grow our own food, we no longer had to live as hunter-gatherers. We could put down roots—no pun intended—build villages that became towns that became cities that became empires. You could say that agriculture is the reason we have civilization and culture and technology today. Without it, the modern world would not be possible, and we’d still be living as, well, animals.

But Ishmael isn’t sold on this argument. Remember, he’s a gorilla, after all. I won’t go into all the details because I’d essentially be reading the book to you at that point, but Ishmael argues that life isn’t so bad for Leavers and all the other animals on Earth. In fact, he thinks everyone else has it pretty good. They may not have air conditioning or Beethoven or Tokyo, but they also don’t have to worry about driving themselves to the point of extinction. If it weren’t for Takers, in fact, life on Earth could probably continue unimpeded for millennia.

Ishmael doesn’t offer any concrete solutions to the problem of Takers living this way, but he does tell the narrator that more people need to know about the problem and that to survive, Takers must abandon their destructive mythology that places them at the center of the universe. Easy, right?

What is mythology?

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Mythology plays a huge role in this book. In fact, Ishmael sees a certain mythology as the underlying sickness plaguing the Takers. The way Takers live is merely a symptom of this illness. According to Ishmael, Takers believe in a myth that says the world was created for humans and that creation ended with them.

But what is myth anyway? If you’re like the narrator of the book, your mind will probably go to stories of Greek and Norse mythology. I know mine did. We tend to think of myth as something only primitive societies used to explain things they didn’t have answers for. Today, we think we’re beyond needing myth. After all, we have science, and science can explain everything, right?

But this is not what Ishmael means when he talks about myth. Here is his definition: “A scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods.”

We may not think we have something like this today, but we do. The funny thing about mythology is that no one knows they believe in it while they’re alive. Mythology is so embedded in the culture that you don’t think twice about it. Ishmael explains it like this: if you went back in time to Ancient Greece and asked any random person on the street about their mythology, they would probably give you a funny look. “We don’t have a mythology,” they would probably say.

To this you might respond, “But what about all those stories of Zeus and Athena and Aphrodite?”

The person from Ancient Greece would be taken aback. “What do you mean ‘stories?’” they would say. “Those aren’t just made-up fairytales, they’re the account of the way things came to be.”

Before Ishmael introduces this way of thinking about myth, he tells the narrator he’s interested in teaching a lesson about captivity. At first, we’re inclined to think Ishmael is talking about the captivity of animals, as in the way he lives in captivity as a circus gorilla, but it soon becomes clear that he’s getting at something a little more philosophical. As people with a mythology about the way the world came to be, we all live in captivity. Ishmael puts it like this:

“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”

The narrator agrees, but he laments the fact that he doesn’t know how to escape this system. Ishmael explains that to escape, we first need to find the bars of our cage. The bars are a metaphor for our culture’s mythology, and to break them, we need to imagine a new mythology and enact it. Enacting a mythology means living in a way that will make it come true, and that’s the task we’re currently faced with.

How do we change our mythology?

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This book can be so compelling at times that it almost tricks you into thinking it holds all the answers. Unfortunately, it does not, but it does leave us with the tools we’ll need to forge our next steps. At this point, I think it’s helpful to do a quick recap on everything Ishmael teaches the narrator:

1. Human beings are not the problem. The problem is the belief that, “The world belongs to Man,” when in fact, “Man belongs to the world.”
2. To ditch the belief that the world belongs to us, we need to imagine a different mythology and live to make it come true.

I think people are finally beginning to wake up to this idea, even if they’ve never heard of the book Ishmael before. Around the world, scientists, activists, school children, and everyday people are calling for humans to stop destroying the planet and to adopt a sustainable way of living. We now have a Zero-Waste Movement. Countries are beginning to declare climate emergencies. As a global trend, renewable energy is set to become more affordable than fossil fuels.

There are many reasons to be hopeful in the face of climate change, even if at times it seems like an impossible challenge. But turning towards living sustainably is still very much not the status quo.

The culture is changing, yes, but it’s not changing fast enough. In fact, many people see this cultural shift as a threat to their way of living. Some people—a few prominent Republican politicians come to mind—say that proponents of a Green New Deal want to make hamburgers and airplanes illegal. This is obviously untrue to the point of being absurd, but some people really think this.

Change is never easy or void of controversy, and that’s certainly true about the push for building a sustainable world.

We need more than a “vision of doom”

Ishmael makes an observation towards the end of the book that I think might be the most powerful and relevant one to us today. He says, “…people need more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them.”

This statement was very ahead of its time. Today we have an emerging field of study devoted to figuring out the best ways to communicate the risks of climate change so that human behavior changes for the better. Many universities around the world now offer courses on climate change communication, including Yale and George Mason University. In fact, climate change is now a central part of public health communication.

And what does the research show? Time and again, people are best motivated to make positive behavior changes when they are first warned about the dangers of climate change and then presented with a positive vision of what the future could look like if we take appropriate actions. This second part is crucial. Without it, people tend to shut down. They feel hopeless and lost. Sometimes, they react the way people do when they’re grieving—denying that something terrible has happened or is happening and pretending they can go on living the same way they always have.

What we have now is a vision of doom. And while this is a necessary first step to waking up the world to fight climate change, it’s only half the battle. What we need to start working on now is writing the mythology of the future. This is a future where humans can exist alongside all the other forms of life on Earth without killing them. It’s a future where we learn to make civilization work so that it contributes to the flourishing of all life. It’s a future that we don’t have a very clear vision of yet, but we can change that.

Creating a canon for the mythology of the future

I hadn’t heard of Ishmael when I started this podcast. A co-worker gave it to me as a birthday present. But after reading the book and thinking about all that it says about Taker mythology and the need to change that mythology, I realized that this gets at the heart of what I want to do with this podcast.

It would be foolish to think that one book or movie could change the Taker mythology that we all subscribe to. But I do think that, taken together with other like minded cultural narratives, we can begin to curate a sort of canon for the mythology of the future. This canon won’t be bound by genre or medium. The only requirements for works to be added to it is that they adequately warn us about the catastrophe we’re headed towards and provide us with an alternate vision of a better future.

This might sound very pie-in-the-sky, but I think if we’re going to have any chance of averting a climate apocalypse, we’ll need a canon like this, among other devices, to inspire us to be better. Ishmael opens our eyes to why this is so necessary, and it leaves us with a powerful commission that may sound slightly familiar: go out and tell as many people as you can, warning them about their current path towards destruction and inspiring them to live up to their full potential for saving the world.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

That’s it for our discussion of Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast to get notified every time we release a new episode, and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts if you feel so inclined.

Visit us online at storiesforearth.com for transcripts of every episode and additional content, and consider making a recurring monthly donation to support our show through Patreon. You can find us at patreon.com/storiesforearth. That’s patreon.com/storiesforearth. Until next time, I’m Forrest Brown. Thanks for listening.

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The post “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn, Climate Change, and Moving Beyond a Vision of Doom appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Climate fiction, or cli-fi, is a form of speculative fiction that features a changed or changing climate as a major plot device. People have been unwittingly writing cli-fi stories and novels for decades, though the term came into heavy usage in the past 10 or so years. A 2013 article from Scientific American credits journalist Dan Bloom with coining the term cli-fi, and authors like Margaret Atwood and publications like NPR, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, and the New Yorker have since endorsed it.

In recent years, climate fiction has been gaining a lot of steam, probably thanks in part to increased public awareness of the climate crisis. Goodreads now lists cli-fi as a fiction genre, Amazon Original Stories published a short story collection of cli-fi in 2018, and the prestigious literary journal Guernica published a special issue on climate fiction in March 2019. I think it’s safe to say that climate fiction is now an established literary genre, and, if done well, I believe it can help us adapt to a rapidly changing world by teaching us skills to build emotional resilience.

The climate crisis will force us to adapt in ways we’ve never done before and on an unprecedented scale

I cannot stress this enough: it is absolutely imperative that the world takes collective action to stop greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. But we will also have to adapt, and rapidly. Even if we could halt all GHG emissions today, significant temperature rise in the Arctic is locked-in. This means many adverse impacts are unavoidable at this point, and we need to prepare for them.

Some efforts are already being made here. Coastal cities like Miami Beach, Florida and Delfzijl, Netherlands are installing sea rise pumps and raising sea dikes, respectively, to protect themselves against rising ocean levels. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) developed a public health-focused resilience framework called BRACE to help communities prepare for the negative health effects of the climate crisis.

Efforts like these all aim to increase a community’s physical resilience, or capacity to rebound from setbacks, but there are painfully few initiatives for helping people build emotional resilience. Building more resilient communities starts with building more resilient people, and to do this, we need a shift in mindset. I believe stories are some of our best tools for doing so.

How climate fiction can help us develop emotional resilience

Climate change is scary. And whether or not you already knew how high the stakes are, it won’t help anyone to only focus on the negative effects. It’s good to be aware of the severity and urgency of the climate crisis, but only seeing climate change as a threat can make us feel afraid and hopeless.

Instead, we need to reframe the climate crisis as an opportunity to create a better future, accept that change is a fundamental part of being alive, and process the complicated feelings we have surrounding climate change. These are all ways to develop emotional resilience, according to the American Psychological Association, and climate fiction can help us take these steps.

Climate fiction can help us reframe the situation

Dystopian novels like The Hunger Games and Divergent line the shelves at many bookstores today. Fear sells; authors grab us by the collar and compel us to keep reading when they speak to our worst fears. But fear is not always a good motivator, and in the case of using emotional appeals to fear in climate change communication, it can actually be a better demotivator. When we focus too much on a threat’s potential for harm, we feel disempowered and become paralyzed.

Not every cli-fi story is dystopian, and the ones that are don’t have to end in catastrophe. Take Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, for instance. This book is a classic work of dystopian fiction, but the characters build a better future for themselves in the end, learning to take care of others and live sustainably. The book’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is the archetype of emotional resilience: she builds a strong support network of people around her, focuses on action steps she can take, and envisions what she wants for the future instead of dwelling on the misery of her circumstances.

Also read: S1 E1: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

We may not live in the harsh world of Parable of the Sower, but we can learn from how Lauren reframed her reality to see it as an opportunity to make things better. By reading about her experience as a work of fiction, we can start thinking of ways to reframe our own situation before it’s too late to do anything about it.

Climate fiction can help us accept change

Benjamin Franklin may have been right about death and taxes, but he forgot to include change as a certainty of life. Change is a fundamental constant of the universe, underpinning every single event down to the particle level. Octavia Butler went so far as to have Lauren Olamina invent a religion centered around the belief that “God is change” in Parable of the Sower. Change is unstoppable, so instead of conspiring to thwart it, we should bend with it.

Climate change is unnatural, yes, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also adapt to it as we’re working to stop it. In Ursula K. LeGuin’s groundbreaking novel The Left Hand of Darkness, a representative from Earth visits an alien planet called Gethen. The people of Gethen have adapted to live in a changed climate—albeit an ice age—that renders large parts of the planet uninhabitable and other parts extremely dangerous. But instead of becoming hopeless as a result of the climate and the hostile living conditions it imposes, the Gethenians accept their situation for what it is and live appropriately in response.

Also read: Interview With Isaac Yuen of Ekostories

Gethenians don’t inhabit sprawled out metros like Atlanta or Los Angeles—they live in densely compacted cities. They take what they need from the natural world and nothing more since natural resources are scant. As Isaac Yuen puts it in Ekostories, “With little room for experimentation living on an unforgiving world, Gethenians have adopted a worldview that focuses less on progress, and more on presence.” By accepting their changing climate, Gethenians adapted over centuries to live in harmony with their world. We can learn from their example and from other stories like theirs.

Writing original climate fiction can help us process climate grief

Writing about traumatic experiences can be therapeutic, and writing about the climate crisis is no different. We can, of course, learn from the climate fiction that’s been written, but writing some ourselves is different. As the American Psychological Association notes, writing about the hardships we’ve faced is another way to build emotional resilience.

I once worked with a non-profit organization in Nashville that paired veterans with songwriters to write songs about wartime experiences that left many people with post-traumatic stress disorder. Doing this helped people heal. I watched veterans of Vietnam and Afghanistan break down into tears singing songs they’d written about the horrors they experienced. Later, I got to hear these people talk about how cathartic it was to tell their stories through song.

The American writer Kurt Vonnegut knew this too. It took him years to finally do it, but his famous novel Slaughterhouse-Five was his attempt to make sense of surviving the Bombing of Dresden during World War II. Vonnegut’s feelings about the bombing and war in general were complicated and came to be summarized by a motif from the book, “So it goes.” Earlier this year, I stopped by the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library on the way back from Chicago and bought a copy of the literary journal the Museum publishes, So It Goes. The first volume features an excerpt from The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s book about the Vietnam War. A particular quote jumped out at me:

Writing a story is empowering, and I believe that just as storytelling can help war veterans, it can also help those of us suffering from climate grief and pre-traumatic stress disorder feel a greater sense of agency. Stories don’t have to be painstakingly written literary novels or movies or TV shows. They can be as simple as imagining the future you want.

Climate fiction won’t fix everything

When it comes to a problem as enormous and complicated as the climate crisis, there isn’t a silver bullet solution. But to fight for a better future and adapt to our changing world, we’ll need all the help we can get. Climate fiction can be a great source of help.

Also read: Where To Get Started With Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi)

I can give you some recommendations on where to start, but know that there are dozens, if not scores, of excellent cli-fi books out there. If you start reading one and realize it’s only making you feel more anxious or scared, set it down. Remember that good cli-fi should help you put the problem into perspective, accept that the world is changing, and feel empowered to do something about it.

If nothing you can find does this for you, try writing your own climate fiction. Write the book you want to read. Tell the story you want to hear. Envision the future you want to live in. As long as we can still do this, we have reason to be hopeful.

Cover photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

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The post What is Climate Fiction? Cli-Fi and How It Can Help Us Respond to the Climate Crisis appeared first on Stories for Earth.