On 9 Ways to Write About Climate

A Draft

Note: I’d like your help with this. I am sure there are more than nine; I am sure there are better examples. Please contribute.

I’m not happy about calling it ‘climate’, because, like ‘environment’, it suggests that what’s important and at stake is a liveable habitat for human beings, rather than an ecologically and existentially diverse planetary community. However, climate is the best shorthand I can find.

(This piece was commissioned for Milton Keynes Literary Festival, and by the writer Dave Wakely.)

There has been no shortage of absolutely mainstream climate storytelling. From Silent Running (1972) to The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Wall-E (2008) and Avatar (2009), there have been Hollywood movies about the difficult maintenance of a functioning ecosystem.

You’d think people would have got the message.

They did, I’m sure, but then they forgot it — were helped to forget it. Were distracted by lovely shiny new things.

I would argue that, in the story of Adam and Eve, and the more scientistic update, the story of Dr. Faustus and Mephistopheles, we already have our central myths of the cost of knowledge gained via experiment and consumption.

Here are 9 Ways —

1. Not-Writing about Climate (Fiction and non-fiction)

All fiction is climate fiction. Even if it’s set in 1400, it relates. Even if it’s set on another planet, where environmental issues have been solved or don’t occur, it relates. If you choose to write escapist fiction, you are well aware of what you’re leaving out – because your readers don’t want to be confronted by it, yet again, in your crime novel, your literary fantasia. Just as there often used to be a god-shaped hole in artworks, there is a now the very exact omission of a planet-shaped problem.

2. Just the Facts (Non-fiction)

Some writers see the present situation as beyond what they can imagine. Instead, they choose to address it through reportage and statistics. There is clearly a spectrum that runs between this and Extremely Subjective Non-fiction. It’s got to the point where it’s hard to merely report in a catastrophic decline in insect populations without making a value judgement, without expressing an opinion or without openly grieving. Entomologists are forced to become autobiographers, to get across the point of how catastrophic the situation they are describing actually is.

3. Subjective (Non-fiction)

You can choose to bear witness personally and locally. You can look at the birds no longer in the trees in your garden. You may be lucky/unlucky enough, in terms of subject, to have been flooded out of your home. The amount of attention you draw to this is likely to be directly proportional to your established fame. It’s unlikely many ‘new’ writers will become widely known through their climate journals and diaries. (This may change.) I am sure there are contemporary version of The Natural History of Selbourne being put together now, but we may not become aware of them for a long while.

4. Absolutely On-the-Nose Climate Writing (Fiction)

Speculative Fiction that takes as its subject a particular strain of eco-catastrophe is the most obvious genre of climate fiction. There are many subgenres here, several covered by JG Ballard in his Elemental Apocalypse Quartet: (air) The Wind from Nowhere, (water) The Drowned World, (earth) The Crystal World, (fire) The Burning World. For example, there is Liz Jensen’s, The Rapture; and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is about as direct and programmatic as it gets. A friend and defender of the infodump, Kim Stanley Robinson is prepared to give the reader some straight-talking briefings on where we are now, and where we’re likely to be very soon.

5. Dystopian (Fiction)

Faced with the prospect of trying to shift genre, in order to write about climate, this is where most writers’ thoughts will go. Oh crap, now I have to write about desolate people in a degraded landscapes? This, very likely, will put them off. How can they continue to write about the kind of characters, with the kind of problems, they’ve become cosy with. Oh crap, they think, in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I’ll have to relocate from Self-Actualisation (A Character Living Their Best Life) to Physiological (Water, Food, Shelter). For example, Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; Emily St Mandel, Station Eleven.

6. Despairing Hedonism/Satiric (Fiction)

As Margaret Atwood points out, one of the things that people did, in reaction to The Black Death, was carouse, revel, misbehave. Basing fiction on the assumption we’re ‘Beyond Fucked’ is a way of approaching a kind of Bret Easton Ellis view of humanity. When all hope is gone, the fight for resources may be on, but there’s also the fight for the right to paa-aaa-aarty. I am looking for some good examples of this.

7. Deep Background

This approach puts the climate and ecological emergency there, as a basic assumption, but doesn’t necessarily involve it in the plot. For example, Ben Lerner, 10:04. And Isobel Wohl, Cold New Climate (although in the final section of the novel, it becomes foreground). And, increasingly, the novels of Sally Rooney.

8. Attempted Deep Formal Integration

Here’s where it’s complicated. The formal changes needed to address climate may include reinvention of the book. At the moment, there’s a carbon cost to the delivery of text either via woodpulp or screen. We haven’t considered storytelling more broadly, but a storyteller arriving on foot, or by bicycle, and narrating an extended narrative in person is clearly a more sustainable form than the New York Times Bestselling Author on their 20-city tour of Borders. But spoken word is a different genre to any novel you might buy.

9. Collective

Some forms of climate writing will be akin to activism. They will attempt to do that old thing, finding new ways of politically organising, and describing new forms of community. Perhaps this is the best hope of all, but it is nothing like conventional authorship — to which many of us are very attached.