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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nQuickly intensifying catastrophes like drought, storms, and flood are news- and story-ready, and perhaps help accelerate a sense of urgency. <\/strong>Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future<\/a>, pointed out in his talk on Thursday, March 29 in Gasson Hall that \u201cwe\u2019re living in an acceleration within an acceleration,\u201d with a welter of events\u2013climate change impacts, a pandemic, an invasion, and sudden leaps in AI capability–increasing the pace. He further mused that perhaps this moment is a \u201cgoldilocks\u201d one with room for hope: the speed of change is potentially \u201ccatastrophic, but also therefore actionable,\u201d as a looming sense of catastrophe finally becomes real enough to prompt action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Journalists and artists have been struggling to tell climate stories that can encompass the disparities in scale that seem to evade many of our existing genres and forms. As Robinson put it in his talk, \u201cthe old stories that worked for thousands of years aren\u2019t working any more.\u201d What unites many stories is that people are at the center, causing, responding to, denying the truth of, or struggling against global warming.<\/p>\n\n\n Richard Powers\u2019 approach in The Overstory<\/em><\/a> is to scale multiple human stories to the lifetimes of trees, inspired partly by the groundbreaking work of Suzanne Simard<\/a> establishing that trees communicate and pass nutrients via complex networks of roots and mycorrhiza. In The Nutmeg\u2019s Curse: Parables for a Climate in Crisis<\/em><\/a>, Amitav Ghosh, who spoke on this topic at BC in February 2020, explores how the colonial trade in spices evolved to the current trade in oil, taking climate change\u2019s ideological roots back to the European age of exploration. Elizabeth Kolbert in Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change<\/em><\/a> scales the story to communities in the Arctic already living with changes disrupting lives and cultural practices that had been stable through generations. Likewise, in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/em><\/a>, screenwriter and director Benh Zeitlin tells the story of a poor community in Louisiana already living lives disrupted by the Gulf of Mexico\u2019s inexorably advancing inundation of their jerry-rigged settlement. Karen Russell sets a magic realist short story in Orange World<\/em>\u2013\u201dThe Gondoliers\u201d–in a future Miami submerged under the Atlantic: two sisters in a gig economy of hand-powered water taxis, use complex songs to navigate between decaying buildings jutting from the water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Science fiction and apocalyptic and dystopian fiction are some of the few genres that had already been exploring world-scale disasters before climate change was making news. Amitav Ghosh makes a case in The Great Derangement<\/em><\/a> that other literatures were late to the table. And we need updated stories: many of the assumptions of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction don\u2019t ring true to the pandemic, a story dominated less by forbidding landscapes and brute survival than by ordinary lives beset by loss, isolation, and separation, but also stories of overcoming and reuniting. And normalizing. And denying. And avoiding. Until now, few people had Half-the-Country-Denies-an-Ongoing-Pandemic on their Dystopian Bingo cards, but Octavia Butler<\/a> did in The Parable of the Sower<\/em><\/a>.<\/strong> Writers know something, because these themes are as old as humanity. Only the climate is new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How do we tell stories about an event so slow and vast that paired with the very human reactions of denial and avoidance it becomes spongy with doubt: Is it even happening? Were hurricanes Katrina, Irene, Maria, Harvey, Michael, or Ian caused or intensified by climate change? When people deny a currently unfolding acute catastrophe like a pandemic, how can we expect people to acknowledge something as slow as climate change? Are the characters who ignore the toxic event in Don DeLillo\u2019s White Noise<\/em><\/a> insane, or just like us? BC English Department Chair Min Song, in Climate Lyricism<\/em><\/a>, finds a place for literature in the climate crisis: not just literature about climate per se, but literature about human foibles like denial, not always conscious, but always \u201ca constant choosing, a turning away from the world as it is\u201d, exemplified by the character Kathy H in Kazuo Ishiguro\u2019s Never Let Me Go<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of us are all still waking up, driving to work, buying groceries, and walking the dog. Is this what the apocalypse looks like?<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe story is about people<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nWe know dystopia<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Denial is more than a river in Egypt<\/h2>\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nHow do we live now?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n