On the Fear of Mentioning Climate

Let Alone Writing About It

I don’t know where to start.

Last month I said I was going to write about climate, because I hadn’t done that enough this year.

I have at least a hundred starts, in a ring-bound notebook that has been variously titled The Green Book, While It Lasts, They Told Us So and If Only.

Despairing irony everywhere.

You’re going to have to help me.

Let’s stick with The Green Book, and let’s talk about my failure to turn it into anything resembling a book.

A lot of writers I know are afraid of writing about climate, even though it preoccupies them, sometimes to the extent that they can think of little else.

When I say preoccupies, I’m being very English. What I mean is, terrifies and obliterates as well as nags at and corrodes.

A lot of writers are afraid of making climate their subject because they fear it will lose them their audience — firstly, by losing them their publisher (if they have one) and then by losing them their agent (ditto).

Or perhaps they are scared they won’t get dropped by agent or publisher, just that — after a couple of years’ completed unpaid labour — they’ll be congratulated for doing something so worthwhile and worthy, but gently asked to do something less worthy and worthwhile that can actually be sold to someone. Because the worthwhile isn’t currently worth anything. And that book you felt you had to write must wait to be published until you’re written a bestseller that will make lots of people pay attention to you, whatever you choose to tell them. So write the bestseller.

Or perhaps they feel that the climate-structured book they want to write will get through to their current audience but it will alienate them. Because it’s not what those good people are here for. They want something like what they’ve had before, but different, and better.

I know as well as anyone the desire, as a consumer of books and other media, to look away when confronted with the bad stuff, and I also know the relief of seeking very entertaining distraction — even if that comes with a gentle environmental message lodged in there somewhere.

Both these things go for the writing of climate, too.

The idea of spending two or three years focussed exclusively on the bad stuff, with no guarantee of an audience or a positive influence at the end — that is enough to make any writer want to look away.

Similarly, there’s the sly promise that the writing work you’re doing might, because of your chosen non-climate subject or approach, be a blissful distraction — a salve to your mental health, a refuge in historical research — and you could always nestle a gentle message in there, too.

But I think, for some of us, the difficulty is more fundamental even than this.

I’ve begun here without defining or discussing climate, a word I’m far from happy with, because in The Green Book there are pages upon pages about its’ use and misuse.

Climate centres around the human, as does environment, and that’s what we need to get away from.

There are other pages upon pages, wanting to become chapters, about whether there can be any meaningful use of us or we.

I’ve read many articles and essays about how We’re all in this together is an illegitimate statement, and part of the problem to begin with.

And so We are in a climate and ecological emergency and we should do whatever we can to avoid the worst consequences of this including write truthfully and imaginatively about it becomes impossible to say without prefaces laying out caveats and elaborate guilt trips.

Much of The Green Book is made up of my own guilt trips, and another chunk is my anger, taking the form of rage or despair.

There is a lot in there that I think’s worth saying. And this month, I will try to shape it into something more songful than a bleat.

The difficulty, for me and other writers, can be making any kind of start, can be opening the subject. Because it can feel like, from the anticipated other side, the side of imagined future readers, opening the subject turns immediately into closing the subject.

What if saying what you really want to say guarantees no-one will really listen?

That, I think, is the main fear.

It goes beyond writers, because I’m using them as the group I know, but it’s the same for all kinds of makers, and it’s the same for someone midway through a jolly conversation about where everyone else in the room is jetting off next year for their holidays.

Saying, I don’t think international air travel is such a great idea or I try not to fly except in emergencies, isn’t just bringing up an unwelcome subject, it’s changing how people view and listen to you.

You risk becoming one of them — the protestors, the eco-zealots, the killjoys. Unless you make a joke of it pretty bloody soon. If you don’t, someone else will immediately make a joke of it, and of you.

I suppose I should row there in a tofu coracle, eh?

All of which must leave a lot of people saying what isn’t what they really want to say. Just humming a merry tune in the meantime.

How lovely. I wish I were going, too.