Agritecture, a portmanteau that marries agriculture and architecture, has made it into the art world.

Roca London Gallery‘s 2019 spring exhibit London 2026: Recipes for Building a Food Capital explores the question “Can ‘agritecture’ make cities self-sufficient?” Curated by Department 22, this fascinating exhibit imagines architecture morphing into agritecture over the next decade in order to feed London’s ever-growing population – projected to pass the 10 million mark in 2026. The exhibit runs through May 18th, and admission is free.

Of the exhibit’s 25 projects â€“ most at the prototype stage, a few at the implementation stage – my favorite is Power Plant by Dutch designer Marjan van Aubel, whom I’ve written about previously. Using transparent solar glass to power her proposed rooftop greenhouses, van Aubel envisions a future in which urban residents can harvest both food and clean electricity by maximizing the use of under-utilized rooftops on existing infrastructure.

But agritecture is not limited to green roofs and hydroponic rooftop greenhouses. Think urban insect farms and floating dairy farms. Think edible walls and living bricks that are “fed” with grey water. Think balconies filled with suspended orchards. Think commercial vertical farms inside converted warehouses or underground in abandoned WW2 bomb shelters. Think edible schoolyards and agrihoods dedicated to soil-based community gardens. Think regenerative agriculture and food systems more broadly.

The concept of combining agriculture and architecture is not new: Babylon’s fabled Hanging Gardens are believed to have been built between 8th-6th century BCE somewhere in south-central Mesopotamia. Today, in the context of climate change, agritecture refers to an architectural renaissance that could transform cities from consumers into producers by dramatically increasing local food production – notably fresh fruits, herbs, vegetables and insects – in order to feed rapidly growing urban and peri-urban populations. Note that grains and pulses such as maize, rice, wheat, soy, lentils and quinoa would still have to be produced on farms outside of urban centers. Nevertheless, cities that embrace urban agriculture will be more resilient in the Anthropocene to food shortages and global warming than cities that don’t.

Coined in 2011 by the self-described agritect Henry Gordon-Smith, the portmanteau agritecture builds upon the work of pioneering architects such as William McDonoughwho was an early adopter of green roofs and biophilic design. In a 2008 article, Vanity Fair described McDonough as “a prophet of the sustainability and clean-technology movements, which set in motion many of the green design practices that are commonplace today.” (I will write about McDonough and Braungart’s manifesto Cradle to Cradle in a future post.)

To me, the concept of agritecture speaks to a new way of thinking about urban planning that, in the words of architectural firm Sasaki Associates, “celebrates food production as one of the most important functions of a city.”

For example, Sasaki has designed the Sunqiao Urban Agricultural District (currently under construction; see rendering below) in Shanghai where urban food production could become, in the words of Gordon-Smith, “the main cultural connectivity, the main producer of jobs, the main connector of public spaces and the main scientific driver for innovation in the community.”

Another example of iconic urban food production design is currently under construction near the city of Tainan, Taiwan. The Tainan Xinhua Fruit and Vegetable Market, designed by the Dutch firm MVRDV, is an open-air wholesale and retail market with an undulating terraced green roof that grows a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. This living roof also includes sheltered spots, benches and picnic tables for visitors to relax and take in views of the surrounding landscape. Like Shanghai’s Sunqiao Urban Agricultural District, the Tainan Zinhua Fruit and Vegetable Market aims to become a destination for meeting, socializing, learning, employment and commerce. Urban agriculture 2.0 for the Anthropocene.

“In the next 50 years, we will consume more food than in the last 10,000 years combined,” predicts the Austrian architect Chris Precht in an interview published on Designboom. “The world population will grow more and more, specifically in urban cities. I think future cities will need to have a vital role in growing their own food.” In a recent Instagram post, Precht added “During the last two centuries, we became disconnected to our food. The process of farming moved out from our sights and out of our minds. If food reenters the centers of our cities, it reenters our minds and we become reconnected to a life-cycle. This offers a great opportunity for architects!”

The United Nations projects that by 2050, 68% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas, up from 55% today (and up from 12% at the start of the 20th century). Furthermore, large cities – which represent just two percent of the Earth’s land surface – consume two-thirds of the world’s energy and create over 70% of global carbon emissions. Further still, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) has calculated that the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry is the single largest contributor to global warming, at 39% of global energy-related C02 emissions. Houston, we have a problem.

Cities are clearly at the forefront of global efforts to reverse global warming and to ensure adequate food, water and shelter for two-thirds of humanity’s 10 billion who will be living in urban areas by 2050. Speaking about the architecture profession’s central role to help urban planners navigate these multiple daunting challenges, Drawdown‘s Paul Hawken recently said, “There may be no other profession better positioned to leverage innovation toward (these) challenge(s).” The American Institute of Architects has gone on record to state, unequivocally, “We believe that the climate change battle will be won or lost in cities.”

Agritecture, urban agriculture, biophilic and regenerative design, and cradle-to-cradle material flows are but some of the many strategies that are crucial to urban design in the Anthropocene. With regard to rooftop gardens, greenhouses and living roofs, let me end here on a positive note by citing a recent tweet by William McDonough: green roofs have the “potential to make the cities and farms one organism again.”

(Top image: Rendering by Sasaki Associates of their proposed vertical farm at the Sunqiao Urban Agricultural District in Shanghai. Reprinted with permission.)

This article is part of the Foodstuff series.

______________________________

Daughter of an architect, Joan Sullivan writes frequently about the architecture profession’s central role in reversing global warming. As a renewable energy photographer, Joan has found her artistic voice on the construction sites of utility-scale wind and solar projects. Her goal is to help others visualize – to imagine â€“ what a post-carbon world will look like. Joan is currently working on a photo book about Canada’s energy transition. Her renewable energy photographs have been exhibited in group shows in Canada, the UK and Italy. You can find Joan on Ello and Twitter. 

A few months ago, I came across an article by science journalist Ed Yong titled “I Spent Two Years Trying to Fix the Gender Imbalance in My Stories.” Inspired by a colleague who analyzed the gender ratio of sources in her own writing, Yong did some forensics work and discovered, to his surprise, that in 2016 only 24 percent of his quoted sources were women. And 35 percent of his stories featured no female voices at all.

“I knew it wasn’t going to be 50 percent, but I didn’t think it would be that low, either,” he wrote in the piece. “I knew that I care about equality, so I deluded myself into thinking that I wasn’t part of the problem. I assumed that my passive concern would be enough. Passive concern never is.”

After reading this, I decided to do a bit of investigating of my own. Every other year, I run an initiative called Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA). First piloted in 2015, CCTA is a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays presented to coincide with the United Nations Conference of the Parties, the meetings that bring together world leaders to discuss strategies to reduce global carbon emissions.

Fifty playwrights from around the world are commissioned to write five-minute plays about an aspect of climate change based on a prompt. This collection of plays is then freely available to producing collaborators interested in presenting an event in the fall (this year’s events are scheduled for 15 September to 21 December). Events can range from readings to fully-produced performances, and from podcasts to film adaptations.

The plays are curated. Our 50 playwrights are carefully chosen to represent all continents and dozens of cultures, including several Indigenous nations. So on that front, I knew we were doing well. In fact, in 2017 we had a majority of female writers—32 women and 18 men—and almost 60 percent of the group (29 people) was comprised of writers of color and Indigenous writers. The same is true for this year. For CCTA 2019, the gender ratio is exactly 50/50 and the percentage of writers of color and Indigenous writers is 60 percent (30 people).

The real question, then, is what happens on the other end? Once the 50 plays are written, we make them available to anyone who expresses the desire to organize an event in their community. People get a link that gives them access to the plays and to a spreadsheet with the writers’ names, countries of residence/heritage, title of the plays, number of characters for each play, and keywords—for example, “comedy,” “melting ice caps,” or “water.” Equipped with this information, producing collaborators are free to choose which play(s) they want to present.

After reading Yong’s article, I enlisted the help of a friend whose math can be trusted and we crunched some numbers. Since 2015 was a pilot year, we focused on 2017. What I wanted to know was: What happens to gender parity and racial diversity when plays are picked by people other than artistic directors running major theatre companies? Do the same biases that favor white male playwrights manifest themselves or do things change when power is distributed and there is less money at stake?

A majority of events took place in the United States, so this is reflective of an American perspective. The exact breakdown for CCTA 2017 was 134 events presented across 23 countries, with 91 of those events taking place in 60 American cities. Together, the plays were shown a total of 747 times.

PEOPLE LIKE WOMEN’S PLAYS

Ten years ago, Emily Glassberg conducted a study titled “Opening the Curtain on Playwright Gender: An Integrated Economic Analysis of Discrimination in American Theater.” A series of scripts were sent to different theatres, sometimes with a female pen name, sometimes with a male pen name, to assess whether the quality of the writing would be perceived differently based on the gender of the author. As you can probably guess, the results were appalling.

More recently, American Theatre Magazine reported that female playwrights who were produced off-Broadway in the last five seasons (2013–14 through 2017–18) represent between 28 and 41 percent of all produced playwrights. This is an improvement—from 1994 to 2001, that number hovered at 17 percent. However, we’re still far from parity. If I look at the 2018–19 season in New York City where I live, there is at least one major theatre that has programmed one lone female playwright and four (white) males.

But what happens if we take the decision-making process out of the hands of artistic directors and give it to artists? CCTA events are often curated by groups of individual artists who come together for the project or by students and faculty who put on an event at their university. As a result, the curation tends to be more democratic and, I assumed, more representative of our society. And lo and behold, when we ran the numbers, this assumption was validated: the gender ratio for the plays presented in CCTA 2017 was 42 percent male vs 58 percent female—almost a direct reversal of the American Theatre Magazine statistics.

Is it a fluke? A representation of a real difference in the expression of power? A sign that things are changing? It’s hard to tell, but this ratio reversal suggests that, contrary to what has long been a popular belief, and is still a persistent and almost always unacknowledged assumption, people are interested in women’s voices. They like women’s plays. When there’s no incentive to privilege men and uphold the status quo, when the decision-makers are more or less evenly distributed along gender lines, people are happy to read, study, and perform plays written by women just as they would plays written by men. The entrenched bias that Glassberg found a decade ago, both on the part of men and women who were reviewing the plays, did not show up in CCTA.

I took this analysis one step further and next reviewed the number of presentations that each CCTA play received: eight of the ten most-produced plays were written by women. This actually echoes American Theatre Magazine’s “Top 10 Most-Produced Plays of the 2018–2019 Season” (which is actually eleven due to a tie), where nine of the plays were written by women. Maybe real progress is on the way.

DIVERSITY? YES, PLEASE!

Statistics about racial diversity are worse than statistics about gender. A 2015 studyanalyzing three years of data from productions in regional theatres in America found that nearly 90 percent of plays were written by white playwrights. In 2017, Anthony Byrnes and Christina Ramos dug through the 50-year production history of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and found that out of 298 productions, 250 were written by white playwrights. No matter where we look, we’re reminded that despite an increasingly more diverse American population, racial diversity in the theatre is far from being embraced.

Again, I wanted to see whether a change in power structure and decision-making context, as exemplified by CCTA, affected what plays got programmed. Was our offering of 29 plays by playwrights of color versus 21 plays by white playwrights enough to encourage diversity in CCTA presentations? Or was the supply side irrelevant because there’s still too much resistance to diversity on the demand side?

An intriguing aspect of this question is that I don’t know whether or not diversity was a factor in the curation of events. For better or for worse, in a professional context, the ethnic background of a playwright is always a determining factor. Efforts are made to either include diversity or to exclude it, but in our current political reality, we can’t fool ourselves into thinking that the decision is ever neutral. In CCTA’s case, however, unless our producing collaborators knew or looked up the playwrights, or unless the playwrights had names that pointed to a specific culture or were based in an ethnically homogeneous country, it wasn’t immediately apparent in reading the plays who was a writer of color and who wasn’t.

Out of the 747 presentations that the CCTA plays received, 363 were of plays written by playwrights of color and 384 by white playwrights. That’s almost the same number of presentations for both groups. However, we had more playwrights of color (29) than white playwrights (21). So when we account for this difference, it means that 41 percent of presentations were of plays by playwrights of color and 59 percent were of plays by white playwrights.

I expected the racial bias in our field to be reflected in these numbers—if not exactly then at least in great part—so I was thrilled to find out this was not the case. In fact, CCTA did better than the theatre field by a factor of four. Or, put another way, for every artistic director out in the world who programs a play by a playwright of color, CCTA collaborators present four. That’s a huge difference.

In addition, out of the ten most-presented CCTA plays, each with more than 20 presentations and some with as many as 60, five were written by playwrights of color. (In the American Theatre Magazine top ten list, only two of the plays were written by playwrights of color.) CCTA artists and audiences embraced racial diversity when there was no outside pressure to do so, no “diversity” box to check. They chose stories that spoke to them, stories that showed them something new or unexpected. Maybe sometimes they made that choice because they were specifically interested in writers of color. Other times, I suspect they simply responded to what was there.

This suggests that racial bias, like gender bias, is less prevalent when power is distributed. Which begs the question: What needs to happen in theatres across the country to bring the same kind of diversity on our stages? What can artistic directors do? What can funders do? What can artists do? What can audiences do? We need to take to heart what Yong said: passive concern is never enough.

BACK TO CLIMATE CHANGE

Why does this matter in the context of climate change? Because discrimination, economic and environmental injustice, and resource depletion are all manifestations of the same system gone awry. And to change that system, we can’t just tinker with individual elements—we have to rethink the whole synergetic mess. I’ve written about this before, here and here: how we make theatre is just as important as what we put on stage. CCTA is a case in point: with one small structural change at one end of the process, where communities are given the power to decide which stories they want to hear as opposed to having that decision imposed on them by an artistic director, we’re able to have a significant impact on representation at the other end. Now just imagine what would happen if we applied this same principle everywhere.

I’m grateful to Yong for inspiring me to go through this exercise. I hope that, in turn, this article inspires others to do the same so that together we can continue to advocate for the kind of systemic change we so need. And as I enter another CCTA year, I look forward to collecting new data (something I never imagined I would hear myself say) to see what else we might be able to learn.

(Top image: Idea Moose by Kendra Fanconi, directed by Lorca Peress and choreographed by Jennifer Chin. Acting company: Gabrielle Lee, Gus Scharr, Kathryn Layng, Avondre E.D. Beverley, Tanya Perez, Joyce Griffen, Lorca Peress, Daniel Carlton, Cary Hite, and Maya Saroya. Multistages, New York. Photo by Hunter Peress.)

This article was originally published on HowlRound, a knowledge commons by and for the theatre community, on March 24, 2019.

______________________________

Chantal Bilodeau is a playwright whose work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, art, and climate change. She is the Artistic Director of The Arctic Cycle â€“ which uses theatre to foster dialogue about our global climate crisis, create an empowering vision of the future, and inspire people to take action – and the founder of Artists & Climate Change. She is a co-organizer of Climate Change Theatre Action, a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays presented in support of the United Nations COP meetings.

Smothered in soaking tropical heat, I’ve been chasing my two-year-old as he runs through fields of strange flowers, treads around frog-filled ponds, and attempts to climb the local banana trees. He’s having a ball, feeling adventurous and free, but his mum and I are drenched in sweat as one of us tries to film him and the other tries to keep him from jumping into the water with the frogs. The resulting footage has since transformed into this short environmental film:

We are here in South East Asia to study and teach urban ecology at a university in Thailand. As part of our research into the eco-challenged character of urban settings, I’ve come up with a certain technique to predict and plan for future cities. I call it the Literary Method of Urban Design and I use it to engage with students and professionals about what our urban futures might be like. As you can see from the short film, it involves lot of “envisioning” and, thusly, it calls for a lot of art.

Dragging up long idle skills from my high school years, both the visual arts and literary arts became research tools and expressive channels that we could use to foster public debate about the future.

As its name indicates, the Literary Method of Urban Design places literary art at the base of urban studies, exploring the complications and possibilities of our potentially catastrophic unfolding urban existence. Literary art might seem to some like an unwieldy pathway by which to plan a city but my argument is that literature usually does far more than just entertain; it narrates upon the complicated challenges of life – often from the point of view of individual characters as they engage with the wider social world.

The future, I contend, is not opened up by advancing technology alone. It also involves an array of personal responses to the changing patterns of society as this technology is taken-up, fought over, celebrated or rejected, and then also used by the powerful to control the powerless. Works of fiction have often explored just how complicated and varied these changing techno-influenced patterns can be – as they unfold their plots with unique characters, highly specific settings, peculiar moral quandaries and particular cultural conflicts.

Thus, anyone who contemplates the future of cities in any way could benefit from the Literary Method of Urban Design since it may very well prompt a broader outlook in the “making” of a city as it is pushed, gently or roughly, into a different form.

In pop media, and in the public mind, the future is a key cultural battleground. So far, the techno-warriors (not the eco-warriors) seem to be winning, as Silicon Valley and the big players of the military-industrial complex lobby both leaders and the public with seductive ideas of Smart Cities, super-fast transport links, and the supposed beneficence of omnipresent AI. Through my work with youth, I’ve discovered that if you ask an urban schoolkid to draw a picture of their city’s future they will most likely dot the canvas with futuristic techno images of flying cars, super-sized sports stadia, and rocket-trains, though there’s often a splash of sea-level rise here and there as well.

If the future is a battleground, my contribution – the Literary Method of Urban Design – might seem like a completely neutral party, since there’s plenty of literature out there promoting visions of hi-tech super-gadgetized utopias (especially within the science fiction genre). However, the way I’ve utilized the Literary Method till now might suggest otherwise, and the best way to explain this might be by looking at some case studies.

CASE STUDY 1: THE FUTURE OF LONDON AS INSPIRED BY THOMAS MORE’S UTOPIA

In 1516, during the reign of King Henry VIII, a little novel called Utopia was published. It was about an idyllic island which suffered none of the ills of Henry VIII’s London. No corruption, no poverty, no plagues, no tyrants. Just happy people living free in an ideal land.

Henry celebrated Thomas More as a great scholar but they would soon have an almighty falling-out over who should lead the Church of England. Thomas More thought it should be the Pope and Henry VIII thought it should be Henry VIII. Therefore, King Henry charged More with treason and jailed him in the Tower of London before, finally, executing him.

London, nowadays, is maybe a little fairer. Except for all the homelessness and economic inequality and toxic air and dangerous traffic, that is.

Here though, inspired by Utopia, is an alternative future; a child-friendly, clean and green London with urban forests instead of paved roadways.

You might think this is only a dream but if London becomes a “UN child-friendly city,” children may claim a right to decide urban policies. Probably, they’ll vote for fewer cars and more green spaces to play in. Whilst in a homage to Thomas More, they may repurpose the Tower of London, to keep out the tyrants, and to keep out the air polluters.

CASE STUDY 2: THE FUTURE OF SINGAPORE AS INSPIRED BY JONATHAN SWIFT’S GULLIVER’S TRAVELS

Gulliver’s Travels follows an 18^th Century explorer to fantastic lands across the globe.

During one expedition, Gulliver discovers a city floating in the sky. Named Laputa, it hovers over an island in the Asia Pacific. Motivated by this setting, here’s a design for the future of the island city of Singapore.

Whereas Laputa floated via magnetic forces, Singapore is held aloft by hydrogen balloons. The hydrogen is produced by electrolysis of sea spray, a process taking place within the solar-cells painted upon the balloon’s membrane.

So, what’s the point of a floating city? Well, up here, Singapore can escape the rising sea levels cause by global warming.

Yet just as the tales within Gulliver’s Travels are often laced with satire, the same might be said of this design, for if this is how cities are to survive sea level rise, it might be easier just to slow down or stop climate change.

CASE STUDY 3: THE FUTURE OF INGOLSTADT AS INSPIRED BY MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN

Most of us are familiar with the creation scene of the Frankenstein story: an ambitious scientist labors with strange technologies to invent a new human creature from dead body-parts. However, as soon as the creature flickers into life, the scientist is overcome with horror and runs away.

The original novel was set in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt. When the monster wanders through the city, townsfolk beat him away with rocks. To escape this trouble, he leaves the city to live in a nearby forest where he joyously communes with the unbiased company of nature.

In his forest home, the monster becomes fond of a refugee French family. The family have been exiled from their homeland because of the French Revolution and are living in a little cottage in the forest. Though the monster doesn’t dare show his face to them, they nevertheless inspire him with hope. Socially outcast like himself, the family seem to be loving and happy. Perhaps,  the monster thinks to himself, love and happiness might some day visit upon him as well.

Every day, the monster wanders amongst the trees to collect food, laying the bounty secretly at the door of the family’s cottage. The family never discover who their kindly helper is. Maybe a “forest angel,” they conjecture.

Motivated by the creature’s elevation from “monster” to “angel,” we arrive at the following design for future Ingolstadt.

The main feature is a bat-faced noise barrier whose monstrous 3D faces, drawn from the structure of real-life bats, reflect traffic noise pollution back at the cars and trucks moving on the highway. In this way, the forest may remain peaceful.

CONCLUSION

These three case study cities of the Literary Method of Urban Design are not fantastic escapes from reality. They are explorations of alternative urban life. The Literary Method expands the toolbox to predict the future of cities and to plan for that future, all the while encouraging the use of wisdom held within the world’s literature.

If none of the stories above seem very relevant to you, you can instead draw inspiration from your own favorite novels or local literature. These works may then help you to creatively pre-vision a design for your own city’s future. And then to forge ahead anew with whatever project you might have to better fit into that future.

(Top image: The future of Birmingham, England set within a restored Forest of Arden, as inspired by William Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It.)

___________________________

Alan Marshall is a scholar in the field of human ecology and he has explored the relationships between “Nature” and “Humanity” from myriad perspectives: philosophical, political and artistic. He’s now engaged with seeking out the potential future relationships between humans and their urban environments through a variety of projects, including The Ecotopia 2121 Project and the Frankencities Project. Dr. Marshall has a BSc (hons) from Wolverhampton University (England), a Masters degree from Massey University (New Zealand) and a doctorate from Wollongong University (Australia). Currently, Marshall is a full-time visiting professor at Mahidol University (Thailand).

Morgan Nyberg grew up in farming country in southern British Columbia. After graduating from the University of British Columbia he worked as a laborer for a decade before finally settling into teaching. For most of the last 30 years he has lived abroad, teaching English as a Foreign Language in Ecuador, Portugal and the Sultanate of Oman.

His first book, The Crazy Horse Suite, a verse play, was performed on the stage in New York and was broadcast on CBC Radio. Soon after that a memoir won the CBC Literary Competition. His first venture into book-length fiction, a children’s novel, Galahad Schwartz and the Cockroach Army, won Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award. Since then he has added a further children’s novel, Bad Day in Gladland; two literary novels for adults, El Dorado Shuffle and Mr. Millennium; and the post-apocalyptic Raincoast Saga, comprising The Fixer, Since Tomorrow, Birds of Passage and Medicine. He currently lives on Vancouver Island, Canada.

I interviewed Morgan Nyberg three years ago. We talked then about his Raincoast Trilogy, and at that time I had read the first two novels in the series: Since Tomorrow and Birds of Passage. Since then, Morgan has added Medicine to the series and also bumped up the order as he wrote the novella The Fixer later. We recently chatted, and Morgan explained that The Fixer is an introduction or a prequel to the trilogy (parts 2, 3, and 4). The Fixer is also free on Amazon, and as Morgan notes about this series of books, they might allow the reader “to see the very plausible effects of climate change and our reckless economic policies, as well as the ever-present threat of international pandemic.” The saga takes place mostly around futuristic Vancouver and north of there, and is a multi-generational, post-apocalyptic novel.

I think what Frederick Brooke at Goodreads wrote is a great intro to the books, particularly volume 2, which leads into the saga:

I read this book slowly on purpose, revelling in the beautiful, spare descriptions, and was totally caught up in the story from the start. I could have been reading Faulkner or Hemingway, the writing was so powerful.

The time is two generations in the future; the place is Vancouver. But you wouldn’t recognize this blasted landscape as a city, let alone as that thriving metropolis in the Pacific Northwest. Gone entirely are modern essentials like computers, cars, telephones, airplanes and electricity. Buildings are abandoned. Roads are overgrown with weeds. The world as we know it has been destroyed by a series of calamities and plagues, leaving only a few hardy bands of survivors. They go around in the mud wearing sandals made from cut-out pieces of auto tires and subsist mainly on potatoes and whatever meat they can raise or hunt.

At the center of the story is Frost, a grandfather who is a leader and a fighter and a thinker. Frost and his group of refugees and survivors conduct a war of wills against the enemy, Langley, who wants to take away his farm for its good strategic location and solidly built stone farmhouse. It is a simple story, a struggle between good and evil.

The story presents a bleak, Ballardian sense of place on one hand, and the characters’ hopes and joys on the other. The story is chilling and well-crafted, the characters highly memorable and vivid, which makes the Raincoast Saga stand out from the glut of modern-day apocalyptic fiction. I was also attracted to the saga because it’s set in a city that I consider home. Hardly recognizable in the Raincoast Saga, Vancouver and the areas north exist in a wildly altered reality. This can be tough to wrap our heads around because it’s tough to see places we love crumble, with perhaps only the sky, water, and a hint of infrastructure remaining as artifacts. I recall a scene of a bridge over the Fraser River in Since Tomorrow, and it seemed familiar, but not. When writing about place, Morgan said:

Two factors influenced the way Vancouver is represented in Since Tomorrow. One is obviously a transformation caused by economic, technological and societal breakdown as well as a major earthquake. The other is the impossibility of presenting an up-to-date picture of a rapidly changing metropolitan area. So I simplified, altered, removed, exaggerated and generally bent the setting to the demands of my narrative. Nevertheless, I assumed that local readers would recognize that “Town” is a post-collapse version of Vancouver, so I added an introductory proviso that “Some features of Greater Vancouver have been altered, removed or exaggerated.”

Morgan writes with such detail and mood that I recognized hints of home in the fractured landscape and became saddened by Vancouver in a futuristic state of collapse. I caught a glimpse of such disaster when the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup playoffs game in game seven in 2011. At that time I worked near Gastown, a historic area in Vancouver, which is near the stadium. I had hopped on the skytrain to head home before the game, at Chinatown, and saw hundreds of fans gathering for the game that night. I watched the news in horror later, as crowds, upset by the loss to the Boston Bruins, stormed the streets surrounding the stadium, rioting, looting, and breaking shop windows. They pushed and pulled; a few were injured. In one scene a couple good Samaritans tried to help a guy who was being beaten.

The riot was unexpected and consisted of what we think of as “regular” people mostly. The fine line crossed in one’s ability to be peaceful and completely destructive frightened me more than anything else. I was saddened by the collapse and the broken frames of familiar places where I worked, ate, and played. Morgan’s saga gives the area a much bigger shake-up. In the Raincoast books, the Fraser River serves as that fine line in a way, between peace and destruction. Morgan explained, about his novels:

The Fraser River (nameless in the story) has become a barrier between the relative civilization and benevolent atmosphere of Frost’s farm at the south end of Frost’s Bridge (today’s Oak Street Bridge) and the horrors of Town just north of the river. Through a kind of nostalgia for the “Good Times” the young men of the story have been given the names of old streets and districts: Granville, Oak, Pender, Steveston, etc. The young women have been given names from nature: Fire, Snow, Willow, etc. Birds of Passageis set mainly north of Town in the coastal mountains of British Columbia. Medicine plunges deep into the darkness and endless dangers of Town.

In this case, the collapse was brought on by something much larger than a lost hockey game – our destructive acts that have led to mass global warming. When I asked Morgan about writing fiction about climate change, he replied:

I imagined climate change to be one of the causes of the collapse inasmuch as climate change feeds a self-destructive economic process based on greed that, combined with a global pandemic, finally brings everything down. In my mind the major causes of the collapse are overpopulation, the rampant depletion of natural resources and the destruction of ecosystems, and the production of waste, e.g. CO2, beyond what the planet can safely carry. The more marked effects of climate change, e.g. the disappearance of fish from the river, happen after the collapse. When I wrote Since Tomorrow I did not know that post-apocalyptic was a literary genre. I was simply writing a story set in a world that seemed to be a plausible projection of today’s trends, i.e. what is waiting for us at the end of the primrose path. It scared the hell out of me and still does.

In our previous interview, I asked Morgan:

Having read a lot of novels wherein something has caused a collapse in economic systems (and ecological ones), I’ve seen all sorts of aftermaths play out. In some cases there is a dystopian sort of central governance. In others, characters are on their own and trying to adapt and survive and work together to do so. Your novel seems credible and likely: community/familial groups form and do what they can. There are a couple main leaders in Since Tomorrow: one is good and focused on survival and helping others. The other is akin to an evil overlord drug type taking advantage of others.

I don’t think we could argue against good vs. evil being a major element of any future society since it is and has been a major theme in past and present societies. But I think that in many futuristic ideologies there is almost a romantic notion that by then we will have learned from past mistakes and all work together to create some sort of more utopian society. Your book definitely seems more realistic and almost brutally raw. Can you comment on how you decided to form this post-collapse continuance of good vs. evil?

And his reply was:

Beyond what Frost and a few others are attempting to do as individuals, there is no possibility of larger social action. Everything we think of as civilized is gone. There is no government, no education, no medicine, no law, no modern technology. People live by subsistence agriculture, by bartering and by scavenging. In such a future, in every possible future, as has been the case in every epoch of the past, both good and evil will thrive. There is no reason for what started in the Garden of Eden to change simply because circumstances change.

And it is this story of the human condition that plays on, and will continue to do so, throughout the future, as long as we survive as a species. Like other authors in this series, Morgan Nyberg deals with climate change and storytelling well, presenting readers with a story that will not leave their minds any time soon – one which makes us think about our path to the future as we deal with collapse brought on by “self-destructive economic process based on greed.” Morgan is working on a fifth book currently, and I’ll be in touch about that as it comes into being.

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

______________________________

Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change (Routledge). Mary lives in the lower mainland of British Columbia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

The new year brought major breakthroughs and inspiration for the 2018-19 Superhero Clubhouse Fellows who shared their progress last month at the SHC Salon. Spoken word poet Shy Richardson and climate scientist Karina Yager traveled from New York City to Puerto Rico to explore the resilience of the island during and after Hurricane Maria for the performance they are currently developing. With the help of a NET/TEN travel grant, the generosity of El Puente LCAN (Latino Climate Action Network), and Shy’s family, the team spent six days on the island and met up with David Ortiz, Program Director of El Puente Puerto Rico.

A sister hub of El Puente in Brooklyn, this branch of the social and climate justice organization had an important role to play in the aftermath of the storm. David explained that money was raised to buy and distribute thousands of solar lamps to Puerto Ricans, many of whom had to wait months for power to be restored after the hurricane. These seemingly small and simple tools became beacons of hope in the darkness.

In addition to El Puente staff and volunteers, the team conducted interviews with Shy’s family members, climate experts, and other residents of the island. The team asked each one of their interviewees the question: What is your hope moving forward? They heard answers ranging from wishes for a more sustainable Puerto Rico as a whole to the very personal desire for family members to be alright in the aftermath. From the big picture of the island to the health of individuals, these hopes are connected.

What does this kind of collective wellbeing look like? For David, it wasn’t an image, but a sound. He said he first knew that everything was going to be okay after the storm when he heard balls bouncing in the street. Kids were outside playing again. Breathing, rebounding, yelling – sounds of life. “The hope brought back the sound,” David remarked. Soon, neighbors were coming out of their homes, sharing resources, and in some cases, meeting each other for the first time.

Shy and Karina are now in the process of taking the materials collected on their trip (hours of interviews and hundreds of pictures) and mixing them with their own text to create a performance piece. Shy is filtering the experience through her poetic skill, creating a series of poems capturing the displacement one can feel after a loss, whether it be of a home or a loved one. Much of the work has been colored by the recent passing of Shy’s beloved grandmother, Maria. In the poem “How to Make Pasteles as Per the New York Times,” Shy mixes the traditional recipe with memories of Maria preparing the dish. When the narrator remarks that you “assumed you’d have forever to learn,” it aches with love and regret. It also drives home how the loss of a matriarch can shift your position in your family and your worldview.

Karina is embarking on an additional trip that will also inform the piece. She’s traveling to the Andes region of South America, where she studies the social and ecological impacts of climate change on mountain environments, to conduct glacier research. Rapidly melting tropical glaciers affect pastoral agriculture and local indigenous communities. Though the glacier is literally thousands of miles away from Puerto Rico, Karina sees a connection through the global water cycle. As she continues to unlock the narrative potential of water moving through this system, she will examine larger themes of loss and change over time.

Shy and Karina left those who attended the last Salon sessions with a wealth of material from their travels.

The sound of a ball bouncing
The sound of a glacier melting
The sound of a story told
A recipe recited
An island honored
For every loss, a hope

What will Shy and Karina create from this thoughtful and intentional investigation? A work-in-progress of Trés Marias was performed on March 23 at The Tank in New York City, marking the culmination of Superhero Clubhouse’s six-month paid Fellowship for environmental justice and performance. Weaving personal stories of loss and resilience that bridge New York, Puerto Rico, and the glacial Andes, Trés Marias is a love poem to the communities that emerge from the wreckage of displacement. Associate Fellows Aya Lane and Imani Dennison also showed a work-in-progress of Drexciya, an underwater mythical resistance story honoring the black diaspora’s complicated relationship to water.

This is the fourth of five blogs in our Building Bridges series about the intersection of environmental justice and performance. These blogs will be responding to a monthly Salontaking place at The Lark in New York where our Fellows, Associate Fellows, and others in the Superhero Clubhouse community are exploring this intersection in their own ways.

______________________________

Megan McClain is the resident dramaturg for SHC’s series of Planet Plays, Flying Ace, and other projects and co-leads The Salon. As R&D Program Director at the Civilians, she’s guided the work of over 70 writers, composers, and directors creating original works of investigative theatre. She is also the Accessibility Manager at The Lark. Additional dramaturgical/literary work for Goodman Theatre, Disney Theatrical, Hartford Stage, PlayPenn, Playwrights Realm and more. M.F.A Dramaturgy: UMass Amherst.

Author Elizabeth Rush talks about her award-winning book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore. Elizabeth spent time in nine different coastal communities. She explains, “Each chapter opens with a monologue from a resident. The idea is to give them a microphone; I don’t want to give them a voice…Any amount of essaying or writing that I could do felt not important at all. Just listening to those stories was most engaging to me; I wanted to give readers that.” Elizabeth reads a section from her book about the coastal community in Miami, Florida.

Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award
A Chicago Tribune Top Ten Book of 2018
A Guardian, NPR’s Science Friday, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal Best Book of 2018

Hailed as “deeply felt” (New York Times), “a revelation” (Pacific Standard), and “the book on climate change and sea levels that was missing” (Chicago Tribune), Rising is both a highly original work of lyric reportage and a haunting meditation on how to let go of the places we love.

Coming up next month, artist and engineer Michelle M. Irizarry talks about her paintings and how climate change has altered her art.

If you like what you hear, you can listen to full episodes of Citizens’ Climate Radio on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, SoundCloud, Podbean, Northern Spirit Radio, Google Play, PlayerFM, and TuneIn Radio. Also, feel free to connect with other listeners, suggest program ideas, and respond to programs in the Citizens’ Climate Radio Facebook group or on Twitter at @CitizensCRadio.

This article is part of The Art House series.

______________________________

As host of Citizens’ Climate Radio, Peterson Toscano regularly features artists who address climate change in their work. The Art House section of his program includes singer/songwriters, visual artists, comics, creative writers, and playwrights. Through a collaboration with Artists and Climate Change and Citizens’ Climate Education, each month Peterson reissues The Art House for this blog. If you have an idea for The Art House, contact Peterson: radio @ citizensclimatelobby.org

From Barbara Kingsolver’s official site: “Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955, and grew up in rural Kentucky. She earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. At various times in her adult life she has lived in England, France, and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently resides.” See her complete bibliography here.

An award-winning author, Kingsolver has a vast amount of experience, including writing and traveling as a child, entering college under a piano scholarship but switching her major to biology, working as a lab tech and teacher while in grad school, scientific writing and journalism after completing her Master’s, farming, further travel, gardening, raising poultry and Icelandic sheep – and, of course, her many years of writing poetry, novels, and nonfiction. Her world-wide experiences are nothing to scoff at, but what is most appealing about the author is that she is a humble world citizen, concerned about the planet and social justice. Like many great authors, Barbara Kingsolver’s lifelong wonder of the world comes through in powerful stories. I encourage readers to check out all her books, as they are significant works dealing with nature and justice in various places she’s lived, from the Arizona desert to the Belgian Congo to the Appalachian Mountains.

Kingsolver has been mindful of the environment all her life. Her books are seeped heavily in themes such as local farming, wilderness survival, the great outdoors, and natural places. In this article, I’ll look at her novel Flight Behavior, which was applauded for being a contemporary fiction dealing with climate change, whereas many other novels in the same vein are futuristic. And even though there is always imagination in fiction, Kingsolver’s novel reflects the actuality of Monarch migrations. She explores the here and now.

One of the reasons I was drawn to Flight Behavior is personal. It’s no secret that I research how climate change and fiction interact, but not all novels I’ve read are ones I feel very moved by. This one, I was. The novel is set in Feathertown, Tennessee, a fictional town that would be near real places I’ve spent a great deal of time in, especially as a child and teenager. I recently watched a YouTube talk with Jeff VanderMeer and Lorna Crozier(I’ve been fortunate to chat with both authors in the past), and they discussed how childhood places inspired their writing. I was motivated by that conversation, and think Barbara Kingsolver also did well with Flight Behavior when it comes to the matters of place and memory.

My childhood place was an area of the world where many people in my family came from – they had settled in Virginia after coming over from Scotland and Ireland, and then scattered into the eastern Kentucky and Tennessee hills. From the time I was a baby, this area of the country was our “home” to travel to, since my parents both had roots there; though Dad came from Louisville – his ancestors were Grayson County farmers – Mom was a bonafide child from the hills of Kentucky. She was born in a log cabin in a holler, and when I was a child I hiked by the cabin often. It was next to a rushing creek, and leading over the creek from her cabin to the holler was an old rickety bridge from which she had fallen once and broken her arm.

We took a trip back to that holler a few years ago, and everything had changed. The holler was no longer a dirt path. Now it was a modern road, and the old homes had all been torn down to make room for new modern houses. Mom’s cabin was gone. Even the cliffs edging the mountains and flanking one side of the holler were gone. Kudzu, an invasive vine, now covered hillsides everywhere. The precious wildflowers were gone in the holler, and so was the old woman at the end of the road who used to let us pick black walnuts in her yard. Her simple country house was gone too, and in its place a fancy modern house.

It was a sad moment for our entire family, as we hadn’t been to that area for a long time, ever since Mammaw and Pappaw died, both fairly young. The mountains had been flattened, though I’m not sure why. It seems to have had to do with housing development instead of mountaintop coal mining. But I recall the sweet wonder of the old Appalachian mountains: The southern way of speech, the long tales my pappaw told while we sat on his large and summery front porch, the best food on the planet (shucky beans, cornbread, apple cake), the lonely sounds of distant highways and trains echoing through the hills, the surrounding pine-covered mountains that were wild with foliage overflowing to the old hollers – where on cliff sides, icicles formed in winter and tiny waterfalls in summer. These things are my strong memories of place, and I summon them quite often in my own fiction.

Looking past the personal experience I felt when reading Flight Behavior, I wondered how others were affected. One question that I often have to authors I interview is: Do you get much feedback from readers who say that your novel changed them in some way? The answers vary, but most authors agree that readers say they have an increased awareness of various ecological crises, including the climate catastrophe we are undergoing. Can this effect real change? One can only hope. In a “Climate Change and Storytelling” panel that I participated in on Earth Day 2017, at the West Vancouver Memorial Library, one of the questions was: Can fiction really change people’s minds? Among the panelists, we agreed that:

When we read fiction, sometimes it speaks to us at a level in which our heart gets involved. That emotional reaction is important. The type of fiction that has impact does so without necessarily the intent of the author. If the author writes a story that the reader likes, it can change the reader, in a small or large way.

So the emotional reaction is personal among readers, but some authors are superb at affecting the reader deeply. Kingsolver is an effective writer, not only for someone like me, who has history in the same place as where Flight Behavior takes place, but for others as well, regardless of where they’re from. I think readers are affected so much by this story because she makes characters and situations real, without the glossy coverup meant to romanticize them – in other words, she builds an ordinariness of life to which we utterly relate.

In the novel, Kingsolver’s heart-warming scenes are marked with lively and often humorous dialogue in circumstances that some might think of as mundane: a baby’s antics in a high chair, a conversation between two friends texting, the marital ho-hums between two adults. These everyday happenings that speak to the reader’s heart take place under the umbrella of a fabulous event, something that seems like a miracle: hundreds of thousands of beautiful orange monarch butterflies landing in Feathertown.

According to the New York Times:

Her subject is both intimate and enormous, centered on one woman, one family, one small town no one has ever heard of – until Dellarobia stumbles into a life-altering journey of conscience. How do we live, Kingsolver asks, and with what consequences, as we hurtle toward the abyss in these times of epic planetary transformation? And make no mistake about it, the stakes are that high. Post-apocalyptic times, and their singular preoccupation with survival, look easy compared with this journey to the end game. Yet we must also deal with the pinching boots of everyday life.

The main character, Dellarobia, is a young mother in a shaky marriage. She’s on the edge of tradition, lost and lonely, wanting to have an affair, unsure of where life is leading her. Like a butterfly, she transforms beneath the auspice of this miracle of monarchs – but that umbrella is really climate change, not a divine event. The reason the butterflies have migrated to Feathertown is that, due to global warming, their normal winter habitat in Mexico has flooded and they need to change their traditional route in order to roost and survive. When scientist Ovid Byron arrives to the mountain to study the butterflies, Dellarobia is fascinated by his exotic appearance as well as by his different world view, something she increasingly latches onto.

The New York Times points out:

Do global warming and intimations of doomsday tax the storytelling at times? Yes. But they share these pages with smaller-scale, deliciously human moments. Without overreaching she delivers line after line that can be at once beautiful, casual, wry, offbeat. Whether she is describing Dellarobia’s malcontented, ambitious in-laws or the environmentally earnest rubberneckers or Feathertown’s rumpled young preacher, she never employs, as she says of one character, the “ordinary tools of contempt.”

Kingsolver beautifully explores the conservative culture existing in some pockets of rural southern America, without pointing fingers at climate change deniers. Instead, she underscores the difficulty of a culture in transition. The New Yorker has a wonderful piece about Flight Behavior, which discusses a changing world as science and religion contradict each other but can learn to coexist:

“We all take information from sources we trust,” Kingsolver said. “Church communities are extremely important in the area where I live, and they’re not necessarily what outsiders picture when they say ‘Bible Belt.’ The Green Church movement is one of the rare places where the environmental conversation is successfully reaching across these difficult cultural divides.”

At one point in the book, Dellarobia tells her farmer husband, Cub, that “a lot of things are messed up” because of climate change. “Weather is the Lord’s business,” he replies. And yet it is Cub who puts up a fight when his father wants to log the forest hollow in which the butterflies have taken shelter.

This reminds me of a story Mom recently told me. We occasionally chat on Friday nights over red wine, and I learn incredible things from her, like old memories she has of the Kentucky hills. When I told her about how much my cousins and I loved climbing one mountain range after another when we were kids (the adults were usually occupied with their own things), Mom said she had done the same thing as a child. I had never known, until recently, that my dad’s mom belonged to a sorority in Louisville that opened the elementary school house my mother went to, years before my parents ever met, and started a tree-planting program for the school children, which Mom took part in. As a kid, she and her schoolmates planted pine trees on hills that had been environmentally devastated. When I was older, I remember Dad showing me the hills with those now-grown trees – but at the time I didn’t know his mother had helped start that program.

Mom was raised in a somewhat conservative household, though her mother was religious and her father, not so much. I still remember the dirty-eye Mammaw gave him when he didn’t go to church on Sunday. I have no clue what my grandparents would have thought of global warming if they were alive today, but they lived close to the land, so respected the land and ensured that trees were planted, water was clean, air was clean – as much as possible. The desperation of needing a job, in my pappaw’s time, however, meant he worked as a coal miner. But when I  listened to Pappaw Collins’ stories, I knew he was deeply in awe of nature. He helped me with numerous 4H projects that focused on wildlife. He knew the behaviors, appearances, and many facts about flora and fauna native to the Appalachians.  It felt right that Kingsolver addressed this fundamental issue of climate-change deniers, but put them into the light of real people going through, well, a metamorphosis.

The title Flight Behavior, and the practical metaphor of butterflies in a novel about people resisting, or adjusting to, climate change, is perfect, really. Monarch butterflies in diapause make a 3,000-mile round-trip migration only once. They go to the same areas, and sometimes even exact trees, that their parents and grandparents went to, without, of course, ever having been there before. A monarch has an innate sense (due to shorter days and changing light, fluctuating temperatures, and healthy host plants populations – and research has explored how antennae help keep time) of when to begin migration and where to go. Compare this journey to that taken by people who have learned information passed on from generation to generation, involving a slow-moving ideology, in a drastically changing world. At some point, they will transition too, and Kingsolver’s novel explores how while telling a wonderful story.

(Top image: Photo by Steven Hopp, downloaded from KCRW.)

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

______________________________

Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change (Routledge). Mary lives in the lower mainland of British Columbia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

This month’s spotlight is on Susan M. Gaines, who wrote Carbon Dreams, her first published novel – and she has just completed another. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, such as the North American Review and the Missouri Review, and in the anthologies Best of the West V and Sacred Ground: Writings About Home. She studied chemistry and oceanography before a love for literature lured her away from the lab, and her book, Echoes of Life: What Fossil Molecules Reveal about Earth History (Oxford University Press, 2009), employs narrative and literary prose to report on research in organic geochemistry. Currently she holds a post as writer-in-residence and co-director of the Fiction Meets Science program at the University of Bremen in Germany. Despite having spent much of her adult life abroad and found homes in Uruguay and Germany, Gaines regularly returns to her roots in northern California.

Carbon Dreams was published in 2001 and is set in the 1980s; it is one of the earliest works in the canon of contemporary novels dealing with climate change. And though the novel is now out of print, it is still available via Amazon from third-party bookstores. As I chatted with Gaines about this novel – and she provided a lot of in-depth thoughts about her writing, for which I’m grateful – she noted that she didn’t set out to write a book about anthropogenic climate change:

In the early 1990s, when I started thinking about the novel that would become Carbon Dreams, I wanted to write about someone for whom science, in particular organic chemistry, is a way of seeing – of understanding, rather than manipulating – nature. I wanted to tell a story about “doing science” as a creative process, about the beauty of deciphering biogeochemical cycles. At the same time, I was interested in altruism – the kind of altruism that makes an environmental activist, for example. Out of that combination of impulses, you get Tina, who is obsessed with esoteric knowledge about the origin of life and the state of the carbon cycle two hundred million years ago. And you get Chip, an organic farmer who is reading the newspapers and worried about the future of the planet.

She went further to say:

Ironically, when I started the book, I didn’t realize how controversial the science of climate change had become. I’d studied at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the mid-1980s, and as far as I knew, the anthropogenic build-up of CO2 was already established science. Revelle and Seuss had shown in 1957 that CO2 exchange between atmosphere and ocean was much slower than previously assumed, so that a greenhouse effect was likely, and Charles Keeling had been documenting the rise in atmospheric CO2 for decades – and they were all Scripps scientists.

When I went to the newspaper archives to see what Chip might be reading on the subject, I was shocked to find that the papers quoted a couple of scientists who cast doubt on what I thought was established knowledge. I tried to track down the scientific studies they referred to and found they had either never been published or had been quickly discredited in the same journals that had originally published them. That’s when this politicization of science, and the problems and responsibilities scientists have in speaking to the media, became the book’s major themes.

I set the story in the mid-eighties, a pivotal point in the history of this politicization, when we might still have done something to change the future we are now irrevocably committed to. Carbon Dreams is just a fiction in which I dramatized these issues, based on a random reading of newspaper archives and scientific papers – I didn’t realize how close I’d come to reality until the book was in press, when I stumbled on Ross Gelbspan’s journalistic exposé The Heat is On, which documented the oil industry’s media campaign to confuse the public’s understanding of climate change science.

It’s interesting to find earlier examples of the topic of climate change in fiction, before the current decade when so many authors have set out to tackle environmental catastrophes. New labels have come about to describe climate change in fiction – some fiction speculative, some literary. But before this time period, a few stories, like Gaines’s, went along with the climate science of the day. (See American Institute of Physics for a timeline of scientific convergence about global warming.) I have spoken with Arthur Herzog’s widow, for instance, who pointed out that when her late husband published Heat in the 1970s, it was after conferring with climate scientists who had been correlating carbon dioxide with global warming.

I have pointed out in this series that if we want to think of a powerful novel (in terms of negative impact, unfortunately) about climate change, we can look no further than to Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, which played heavily into the climate denialist movement. The Union of Concerned Scientists debunked the science in the novel. Further, and this is why I say the novel had such impact, Crichton met with President Bush in 2006, two years after the novel was published, and, according to the New York Times:

In his new book about Mr. Bush, Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush, Fred Barnes recalls a visit to the White House last year by Michael Crichton, whose 2004 best-selling novel, State of Fear, suggests that global warming is an unproven theory and an overstated threat…fueling a common perception among environmental groups that Mr. Crichton’s dismissal of global warming, coupled with his popularity as a novelist and screenwriter, has undermined efforts to pass legislation intended to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that leading scientists say causes climate change…Mr. Crichton, whose views in State of Fear helped him win the American Association of Petroleum Geologists’ annual journalism award this month, has been a leading doubter of global warming and last September appeared before a Senate committee to argue that the supporting science was mixed, at best.

Crichton’s State of Fear sold 1.5 million copies and reached number one on Amazon.com and number two on the New York Times Best-Seller List in 2005. It significantly helped to put into motion the climate denialist movement. Now that most people have come around to realize that climate change is a fact on the ground, there are numerous authors writing about it in fiction. Gaines was among the pioneers of this fiction, and I think that those of us hoping for another impactful novel – but one that reflects real science – could help turn the world away from fossil fuels. However, according to Gaines:

I think we need to be careful when we start thinking of the novel as an overt tool for activism. First, we run the danger of perverting the art and we get bad literature. And second, a novel is not transparent. It’s supposed to make you feel that it is true – it may even be true, if not real – but it’s fiction and has no responsibility to be real, or true. By definition.

There’s a natural tension between our responsibility to our subject matter – our duty to reveal the world as it is or may be – and our mandate as storytellers, as artists who use facts to make meaning however we see fit. I run a program that supports novelists who are writing about scientific concepts and issues, the idea being to give them access to the scientific worlds they are writing about so that they can balance those tensions responsibly and consciously. But the moment we lose track of that balancing act and start using our novels as polemics or educational devices as Michael Crichton did in his latter works, we are in trouble.

When Crichton started framing his thrillers as carefully researched works of investigative journalism by an expert – not as a metafictional literary trick, but as a literal background – readers started relying on them for information about scientific issues. He effectively turned his imaginative speculative fictions into powerful lies, as we saw when Congress invited him to give an “expert opinion” on climate change research, about which he was entirely unqualified to comment.

T.C. Boyle’s raging environmental novels, on the other hand, don’t masquerade as anything other than the artfully told tall tales they are. They invite readers to think about environmental issues in new ways precisely because they were not written, or framed, or presented as polemics. In A Friend of the Earth we simply empathize with this crazy old environmental activist who finds himself surviving in the world he’s failed to save from itself – and we can’t help but think about what we might do differently.

As we move into the era of actual climate change, struggling through the mayhem and trying to keep step with the ludicrous out-of-control experiment we’ve wrought on the earth’s biogeochemical systems – to paraphrase the final lines of Carbon Dreams â€“ novelists can’t help but write about climate change even if they are not writing about climate change. The novel I just completed, The Last Naturalist and the Terrorists’ Daughter, is not about climate change. It is set in the recent past, not speculative. But it is narrated by a 22-year-old at the turn of the millennium, and climate change and biodiversity loss inform his character on every level: his perception of nature, his relationships with his parents and grandparents, his hopes for the future and his emerging understanding of the many ways in which history shadows and limits it.

As climate change becomes our daily reality, one might think that this whole discussion about a genre of fiction about it would become moot. And yet, even as I write this, the American media reports the devastation wrought by the latest rounds of weather mayhem without addressing climate change, and I have to marvel at our capacity to ignore it. So perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps this discussion about the novelist’s role in reflecting on climate change is not moot at all. Perhaps we should all be heeding Amitav Ghosh’s highly visible but somewhat belated call to arms.

I have to agree with Gaines here, that it’s good for authors to pay attention to our world – specifically to injustice and neglect and abuse, whether economic, social, or environmental. Climate change is a condition of crisis in which we find ourselves, and authors will rise to the occasion to meet this reality in fiction. But good fiction is not preachy or didactic. I am reminded once more of a great piece in Slate Magazine, by John Luther Adams, a Pulitzer Prize (and Grammy) winning composer. He writes, in Making Music in the Anthropocene, that nature compels him to make art – in his case music:

As a composer, I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics. And yet I refuse to make political art. More often than not political art fails as politics, and all too often it fails as art. To reach its fullest power, to be most moving and most fully useful to us, art must be itself.

REVIEWS OF CARBON DREAMS

“Gaines, who has degrees in chemistry and oceanography, has boldly built the novel around challenging scientific theories…her use of complex concepts and true-to-life practice is inspired.” —The San Francisco Chronicle

“[A] story about the devastatingly serious issue of human-induced climate change…. A remarkable job of conveying what it’s really like to be a scientist, and to make scientific discoveries – not in the blink of an eye, as television or movies would have it, but with gradually shifting insight.” —C&E News

“When the heroine is a Latina organic chemist doing research that leads her inexorably into the politics of global climate change and the hero is an organic farmer who happens to be a Sierra Club member…it is difficult to resist.” —The Southern Sierran, Sierra Club Newsletter

“This remarkable book rewards us with a deeper appreciation of geology and oceanography at the same time that we’re engaged with a young woman scientist’s personal and ethical dilemmas…. With this particular blend of fiction and science Susan Gaines comes thrillingly close to inventing a fascinating new genre.” —Jean Hegland, author of Into the Forest

“At last, a book that integrates authentic scientific inquiry with the character-driven magic of good literary fiction….  A captivating story that places romantic love side-by-side with the love of sublime ideas.” —Frederick Reiken, author of The Odd Sea and Lost Legends of New Jersey

“Carbon Dreams is more than a novel, it’s also a profound education in earth science. To read it is to be carried deep into the mind of a young scientist, and just as deep into the mysteries of global warming phenomena past and future.” —Louis B. Jones, author of Particles and Luckand California’s Over.

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

______________________________

Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change (Routledge). Mary lives in the lower mainland of British Columbia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.