Climate Change Narratives

What are they?Why teach them?

What texts to teach?

By Drew Hubbell

“Climate Change offers great storytelling potential.” Mike Hulme

What are Climate Change Narratives?

• A sub-genre of Speculative Fiction, closely related to Science Fiction.

• Cli-Fi: fictional work thematizing or plotted around climate change; setting is present, near-future, or retrospective from distant future.

• Generally accepted: Cli Fi was developed in 1970s.

Cli-Fi Stats

• According to eco-fiction.com, cli-fi narratives are the fastest growing subset of nature-themed fiction.

• In the last two years, 103 of 124 nature-themed fiction publications were cli-fi.

• In the last 150 years, 88 of 128 were cli-fi.

Science Fiction

• Sci Fi: fiction that explores potential consequences of scientific and technological innovations; often futuristic settings.

• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 1818, often cited as originating genre.

• Co-emergent with disciplines of modern science, industrialism, urbanism, consumer capitalism, middle-class mass public.

• Ranges from boosterism to dystopian.

Speculative Fiction

• Broad genre: any fictional writing set in worlds postulated, by terms of story, as realistic or scientifically possible, including fantasy.

• Using narrative to play philosophical game of “what if” to spin out likelihood of causal chains.

• Using narrative to imagine alternative futures, alternative possibilities; scenario building.

• As ancient as storytelling; in some respects, the main purpose of using fictional narrative.

Narrative

• Narrative is any report of a sequence of events leading to a conflict and its resolution, linked together by cause and effect and having a discernible point of narration.

• God created the world in seven days.

• We now predict that the world will warm by 4°C by 2100, ending human civilization as we know it.

Why Teach Cli-Fi?

• “It is not sufficient to argue that more or clearer information about climate change from scientists will lead to greater public engagement.” Hulme 215

• There is enough science, enough technology, and enough money to address all the mitigation and adaptation necessary to keep global temps below 2°C by 2050. 2°C by 2100 is much harder, but still feasible with current science, technology, and available money.

Why Teach Cli-Fi?

• “Science can’t help us discover the meaning of climate change.” Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, p. 325

• “As well as describing physical reality, climate can then also be understood as an imaginative idea.” Hulme p. 14

• “One of the reasons we disagree about climate change is that we receive multiple and conflicting messages about climate change and we interpret them in different ways.” Hulme p. 215.

Why Teach Cli-Fi?

• The dominant narrative about climate change is apocalyptic-dystopian.

• “While it has been claimed that the term ‘catastrophic climate change’ should be adopted in order to alarm the public, positive messages tend to be more attractive and effective in motivating behavior change than negative ones.” Hulme p. 234-5

• “It frequently leads to disempowerment, apathy, and skepticism among its audience.” Hulme 348

• Leiserowitz Study on AmericanAttitudes toward CC: http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication/articles/archives/C15

Why Teach Cli-Fi?• “Indeed, a great deal of the work of deep social

change involves having debates during which new stories can be told to replace the ones that have failed us. Because if we are to have any hope of making the kind of civilizational leap required of this fateful decade, we will need to start believing, once again, that humanity is not hopelessly selfish and greedy; the image ceaselessly sold to us by everything from reality shows to neoclassical economics.” Naomi Klein, “A People’s Shock” The Nation, 1/6/14, 18-20.

Why Teach Cli-Fi?• Does it matter if we secure our goal of

restabilizing global climate but have not made the world a better place?

• “Rather than placing ourselves in a fight against climate change, we need a more constructive and imaginative engagement with the idea of climate change…the idea of climate change should be used to rethink and renegotiate our wider social goals about how and why we live on this planet.” Hulme 361

What I teach: Primary Texts

• A mix of short and long fiction and films: – The Rapture – The Collapse of Western Civilization– Flight Behavior– The Stone Gods– Snowpiercer– The Day After Tomorrow– The Age of Stupid– Avatar

What I Teach: Types of Texts

• Different versions of climate change narrative– Apocalypse / dystopian– Action Adventure– Domestic Realism– Fantasy– Speculative Fiction / Magic Realism– Documentary from the Future

What I Teach: Secondary Texts

• Supplemental texts from science, journalism, policy studies, and cultural criticism– Why We Disagree About Climate Change– This Changes Everything: Capitalism v Climate– Targeting Zero-Zero– Culture, Environment, and Ecopolitics– IPCC AR5 SYR Summary for Policy Makers

What I Teach: Intellectual Approaches

• Critical thinking, resistant reading, knowledge-based assessment of power structures, climate justice analysis, ecocriticism

• Moral and ethical inquiry: what future do we want?

What I Teach: The Empire Writes Back

• A project that enables students to write their own narratives for specific audiences.

• Team Project• Local Setting and Subject• Targeting Peer Audience• Using any available narrative medium: film,

short story, installation art, poster