Connection and Collective Responsibility: The Importance of Sharing Stories about Climate Change
By: Caitlin Cassie
I. I don’t have time for climate change
We absorb a lot of data that are shooting across fibre optic cables beneath the ocean and being transmitted from satellites orbiting around the Earth. We must constantly filter the inputs — care or not care. Share or not share. Too Long Didn’t Read or put on the headphones at work and read that long form article from start to finish and then message all your friends about it.
Within the context of information overload, climate change has become an increasingly permanent fixture. Regardless of your political leanings, the human impact on the oceans, atmosphere, soil, forests, and wetlands, and what this means for the immediate and long-term future for all of life on Earth, is reaching you in some form or another. The question then becomes, what are you going to do about it?
What do you have time to do about it? Life is busy and we are all hustling.
What should you be telling your kids about climate change or discussing at parties with your friends? Should you even be having kids? What should you be bringing up with your parents during the one or two weeks you see them each year? Which rallies should you be attending and to which charities should you be donating? Should you boycott the coffee shops that are still using plastic straws? If you forget your reusable bag, should you forgo grocery shopping altogether? Climate change can be confusing and stressful.
II. How can I relate to climate change?
I don’t think people mean to be selfish, but I do think it can be difficult to wrap one’s head around future state scenarios and real-world abstractions. How do you make 1 metre of sea level rise — over the next 80 years — more relatable and urgent, a future we all should protect against?[i] After all, home is home. In some parts of the world, floods and hurricanes happen every year. In other parts of the world, they do not. When the impacts of climate change are not geographically or temporally direct, it may be challenging to shift one’s perspective from “my home” to “our planet.” It can be difficult to understand and empathize with situations to which you cannot personally relate. Perhaps you only know what you see — that it is harder to find fish and that is a problem because it is your livelihood.[ii]
Over many decades, the accumulation of carbon emissions from industrialized cities in the global north has contributed to the sea level rise that is forcing people to leave their homes in the global south.[iii] (Recently, managed retreat is also becoming a reality for people in the north, such as for residents of Staten Island in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.[iv]) When blame is spread over so many places and so much time, no one feels particularly responsible. Diffuse responsibility does not lend itself to collective action. However, over the last two decades, as we have learned about the full extent of the changes being wrought upon the Earth by humans, this has begun to change. A sense of collective responsibility has started to develop. The question is how to strengthen and sustain it.[v]
In large part, we have learned about changes to the planet by listening to and learning from people’s stories. Sharing stories about climate change is essential to helping people relate to, empathize with, and act on situations that are far away in place, space, and time. Time is particularly tricky. We all have different understandings and interpretations of the past, present, and future, and how our lives and choices fit into a larger, global narrative.
III. Gradual catastrophe
Both Elizabeth Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable position gradualism and catastrophe side by side, discussing how scientific thought evolved throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gradualism and catastrophe were pitted against each other, until we figured out that both help to explain the planet on which we live, depending on what are investigating. The difference between these two theories is essentially a question of time: did things happen slowly or did things happen quickly?[vi]
Today, the planet’s gradually warming atmosphere and gradually rising oceans may not seem cause for alarm, particularly when your daily life is not directly impacted by climate change. However, the speed at which these phenomena are occurring is unprecedented, fast and terrifying. Even during an average person’s lifespan of 80 years, incredible change will have occurred. But this gradual catastrophe is not easy for the average person to observe. In fact, for scientists to say with certainty that the changes they observed throughout the latter half of the twentieth century were anthropogenic and not attributable to natural variance in weather patterns required decades of longitudinal data.[vii]
I truly understand the need for and benefit of longitudinal data. In fact, I think the world owes a debt of gratitude to the scientists who have devoted their lives to collecting it and analyzing it. But reading about the analysis of this data — the publishing of study after study, the advancements in data collection and analysis techniques, aggregating the body of knowledge that enabled the scientific community to say with confidence that they were witnessing a gradual catastrophe unfold in the Arctic — it can be dense and boring. Notwithstanding the undeniable need for this data, we need to tell more relatable stories about climate change if a more sustained sense of collective responsibility and action is to be established.
IV. Learning from stories about climate change
Over the past two years, I have done a lot of climate change related reading, as this was my way to begin to make sense of something so daunting. My background is the social sciences and humanities, so I wanted to write about the climate crisis from the perspective of literature. I wanted to go to the source — the source of the stories.
So, in addition to my usual diet of novels, I started devouring non-fiction books related to climate change. As I read, I realized the necessity of both fiction that weaves in climate change issues and creative non-fiction writing that uses narrative stories to teach people about climate science. Both approaches to storytelling are integral to people understanding and relating to the complexities of climate change.
Drawn from the diverse examples of literature I have consumed over the past couple of years, I have come to some working conclusions:
● Climate change is not simply about extreme, catastrophic weather events; it is an accumulation of daily, weekly, monthly, and annual decisions, at both an individual and national scale, and the attendant follow on effects. It is about things happening slowly, at times imperceptibly, and how these imperceptible changes can lead to the extreme catastrophic events. For example, gradually rising and warming oceans leading to the increased strength and destructive power of hurricanes. So, in addition to stories about the extreme events, we need stories that weave in the gradual, almost monotonous nature of climate change — stories that bring the gathering of longitudinal data to life.
● We cannot always think of time as being linear. In order to understand the interconnected nature of life, and the complex interconnected aspects of climate change, we need to understand the interconnected nature of time. When it comes to climate change, stories about the past, present, and future are all valid and important. Thinking about time cyclically as well as linearly is a starting point.
● We need to listen and learn from the people who have been living in interdependent harmony with plants and animals for tens of thousands of years. Traditional, Indigenous knowledge is essential to any chance we have to continue living on this planet into the foreseeable future.
● Fiction is essential to understanding climate change because it revolves around feeling empathy for the characters. We need empathy to understand the impacts of climate change on people around the world. Empathy will also help us cast our understanding of people’s experiences backwards and forwards through time.
● Science writing does not have to be boring. In fact, creative non-fiction science writing opens amazing realms of possibilities for learning and caring, as it also elicits feelings of empathy and connection with other people and the rest of the natural world.
What follows is my exploration of some of the climate change related stories with which I have engaged, and the resulting thoughts and analysis. Through this analysis, I hope to demonstrate how imperative telling compelling stories about climate change is to the establishment of a sustained sense of collective responsibility and action.
V. Climate fiction: how do we get to the inflection point?
In The Wall, a climate fiction novel by John Lancaster, oceans have risen the world over. Beaches no longer exist. An unnamed island nation is the primary setting in the novel and bears a striking resemblance to the real-world UK. This country has fortified its entire perimetre with a massive concrete wall, patrolled by Defenders and segmented by watchtowers. The Defenders, Coast Guard, and Air Force protect the island against the Others, people adrift at sea trying to get over the wall and enter the country.
Reading this book led me to ask a lot of questions — in the world described in The Wall, what caused the oceans to rise so rapidly that the parents’ generation was able to experience the joy of beaches and surfing and the protagonist’s generation was not? Was the parents’ generation really to blame for the sudden and irreversible changes to the planet, or were they simply the last generation to have experienced a different way of life? What led to the present state of affairs? What levels of emissions, how much ice melted, how much did the temperature rise, how many people were forced to sea?
I am interested in the Before because, arguably, we live in the Before right now. Many climate fiction and science fiction stories deal with a Before and an After, and most are set in the After, making references to the Before through flashbacks, memories, and conversations between characters. This Before-After dichotomy is something people readily grasp, perhaps because it is as ancient as the first stories in the Judeo-Christian Bible; before the World, there was nothing but dark wet gloom. (Before the Big Bang, we do not know.) If we are in the Before right now, it is important for us to understand the After that we are heading toward. While we may not be able to reverse our trajectory, the hope is that the After can be less bad.
VI. Speculative and dystopian fiction: exploration of the Before / After
While I find Amitav Ghosh’s discussion of climate fiction in The Great Derangement somewhat reductive, I agree with his sentiment about the present: “But cli-fi is made up mostly of disaster stories set in the future, and that, to me, is exactly the rub. The future is but one aspect of the Anthropocene: this era also includes the recent past, and, most significantly, the present.”[viii]
K Chess’ novel Famous Men Who Never Lived is not explicitly climate related, but the way Chess plays with time in is instructive for other authors who want to weave in warnings and reflections about the past, present, and future of climate change. By describing the same place, New York City, and the same temporal pacing, the past leading to the present day, in parallel universes, Chess delves deep into the lives and relationships of people who are universally displaced, even though they never technically leave New York.
Using the concept of parallel universes allows Chess to expound upon the Before/ After in multiple, compelling ways: the Before / After split between universes that occurred in the early twentieth century and the Before / After inflection point in present day when the universally displaced persons had to leave their world due to nuclear conflict. Chess explains the sequence of events that led from the split between universes to the evacuation in considerable detail. The characters from the alternate universe reveal how the outcomes of global conflicts differed in their world: interstate alliances were altered; technological advancements followed different trajectories; culture had developed along a different path; and America was at war with different states. The universally displaced persons had grown up with different stories and a different history of the world. While this story is set in the After, it is about the past and the present, not the future.
While we have not yet discovered any parallel universes, the clash between histories, worldviews, and culture could be likened to the disconnections between people who have grown up in disparate parts of our planet. Someone from California may have an entirely different perspective on the world than someone who has grown up in Nigeria or North Korea or Nepal. Different perspectives on the world may lead to different views on climate change, driving a further wedge between people. Finding common ground on these complex and thorny issues by sharing relatable stories is one approach to finding collective and collaborative solutions.[ix]
Another story that forces readers to confront the Before/After head on is the masterful Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Present time in the book is situated in the After, but much of the story is told by unlocking and uncovering aspects of the Before. The familiarity of life leading up to the inflection point (pandemic flu) makes what happens After so unnerving. Many aspects of life that we take for granted — electricity, wifi, mobility, multiple forms of transportation — gone.
St. John Mandel forces us to confront the fact that our world is home to over 7.5 billion people, and we all operate in our personal and professional lives within incredibly complex, interconnected systems. If 99% of the world’s population suddenly perished, how many things would stop working?[x] A LOT. What if 99% of the world’s species disappear? How many things will “stop working”?[xi] We can fill in the blanks. In his collection of essays on climate change, Ghosh makes a statement about the perceived incompatibility between novels and climate change that is eerily echoed in Station Eleven, “Inasmuch as contemporary fiction is caught in this thralldom, this is one of the most powerful ways in which global warming resists it: it is as if the gas had run out on a generator accustomed to jet skis, leaving them with the task of reinventing sails and oars.”[xii] In Station Eleven, this is exactly what happens. St. John Mandel’s version of the After provides important commentary on how dependent we are on fossil fuels.
The focus on the Before / After is significant because it forces us to ask whether people are more inclined to absorb information about the past and change their ways based on this knowledge, or whether speculation about the future will have more of an impact on how we are behaving in the here and now. Perhaps we need to start thinking about climate change as a long series of Before / After events: before we got to 1 metre of sea level rise / after we reached 1 metre of sea level rise. Before Indonesia’s capital was relocated / after Indonesia’s capital was relocated. Climate change is never going to look the same for all 8 billion plus people on Earth. There is unlikely to be an inflection point or crisis event that equally affects all of Earth’s inhabitants — therefore, we need to keep working out our empathy and complexity thought muscles in order to understand the extent of changes to the planet, regardless of whether we are directly impacted by them.
VII. Stories about the past: diverse representations of history
I learned about the consultations regarding the proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline in Canada’s North from two very different sources: a story by Richard Van Kamp in the groundbreaking graphic novel This Place: 150 Years Retold, an anthology of stories that retells Canada’s history from diverse Indigenous perspectives, and Elizabeth Hay’s acclaimed novel Late Nights on Air, which centres around a radio station in Yellowknife in the 1970s. Richard Van Kamp’s story, “Like a Razor Slash,” depicts this critical episode in Canadian history from the perspective of the Indigenous chief, Chief Frank T’Seleie, whose speech against the Mackenzie Valley pipeline became legendary. Hay’s novel weaves this historical occurrence into the background of her characters’ lives in a subtle yet powerful way; as the fate of the Dene Nation’s land and the Northwest Territories is decided, so too do the characters weigh their options and make choices that will determine their futures.
Hay’s novels are always centered around complex human relationships, while the historical occurrences are instructive backdrops to what the characters are experiencing in the foreground. For example, in her novel His Whole Life, the 1995 Quebec Referendum looms behind the choices the protagonist is making between two nations in her own life. I want more authors like Elizabeth Hay to write historical fiction novels situated in the Canadian Arctic, including a story where one of the characters is a scientist gathering years of data as the world gradually begins to accept anthropogenic change to the planet.[xiii] Climate change should be the background application that is always processing, always there, always being considered.
As presented in “Like a Razor Slash,” reading Indigenous history is reading a history of fighting for the planet. The complexities of climate justice also need to be conveyed and understood — climate change will never affect everyone equally. While we will all be impacted by deteriorating environmental conditions eventually, people who are more intimately connected to and dependent on the land will feel the full brunt of this much faster. Inuit hunters will have a far more intimate understanding of Arctic sea ice melt than people living further south. Therefore, despite our predilection towards geographic and temporal discounting — caring less about what is happening far away in place, space, and time — we can all endeavour to learn from the Indigenous approach of planning seven generations into the future.[xiv]
VIII. Indigenous knowledge and stories: faith in the future
An Indigenous perspective on the After is presented in Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice. Rice tells a story about how Indigenous people who live in a remote area of northern Ontario, and who are therefore less reliant on the grid, may respond to a collapse of the modern order. While some horrors do occur in this isolated community, the characters’ resilience, self-reliance and perseverance, and their strong connection to the land and each other, bring hope.
The story begins as the characters slowly begin to realize what has occurred; there is no discussion or revelation of what led to the inflection point. The reader never actually finds out what caused the collapse, forcing full attention on how people respond to the external factors with which they are forced to contend. Perhaps there is a larger allegory at play here — as people across Earth slowly realize what has happened to our planet, how we adapt to life in this new normal, and how we choose to interact with each other and non-humans going forward, will determine our fate.
Is a more harmonious future between all life on Earth possible? As explained above, This Place: 150 Years Retold is a powerful graphic novel that retells Canada’s history from diverse Indigenous perspectives. In the case of the final story, “kitaskînaw 2350,” it is a retelling of the future. The term Wâhkôhtowin, expanded kinship with human and non-human beings, is used to describe the state of the world in 2350. Unfortunately, Wâhkôhtowin is being threatened by people who have recently returned to Earth after living on another planet for the previous three hundred years. The young protagonist, Wâpanacâhkos, is instructed by her elders to travel back in time to the present. She is to investigate the factors that led 6.5 million people to abandon Earth. The elders know that the Returners left as great changes were beginning to occur — the “great truth-telling.”[xv] They want to better understand what preceded the evacuation in order to address current clashes between those who left and those who stayed.
Back in time, Wâpanacâhkos experiences anti-Indigenous racism. She engages in the fight between Indigenous water keepers and the military industrial complex at Standing Rock. She observes how Indigenous environmental activists are being tracked by the government. When she goes back to the future to tell her elders about the realities of the past, she is overcome by the grief and trauma she has witnessed. The current conflicts between the Returners and the people who stayed are rooted in these past altercations; evidently, the Returners think the Indigenous folks who remained on Earth have stolen their land.[xvi] Their ties to the Before are impacting their ability to live peacefully in the After.
We have intimate knowledge of the Before featured in this speculative fiction story because it is happening right now. The message is loud and clear: while we may not be able to change the past, reshaping the future may still be possible. The elders know the Returners “ancestors’ eventually learned that they are kin to us, to these lands, the animals, and the water”[xvii] — that people eventually learned how to live peacefully with each other, as part of nature. But it took a very long time and many people left in the process. Nevertheless, the resilience of Indigenous teachings and their faith in the future never seems to waiver.
IX. Importance of empathy: creative non-fiction can also make us feel
Fiction is not the only type of literature that makes us feel empathy. Elizabeth Rush’s creative non-fiction book, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, moved me in a number of ways. She writes about sea level rise with such clarity and purpose, and she makes it personal by telling people’s stories, and her own stories, sourced from different locations around the American coast. I learned so much about climate change from Rush’s blend of science writing and social commentary, and I remember the facts — about the salinization of marshes, the FEMA policies governing where houses can be rebuilt after hurricanes, the intersection between racial justice and climate justice, the history of the communities in the Bay Area, and owls in Oregon migrating up the mountain due to a warming climate — because of the heartfelt stories Rush brings to life.
Another book that conveys a considerable amount of information by telling poignant stories is The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, referenced earlier. The stories in her book do not shy away from the fact that humans are the cause of extreme change to this planet, changes that are arguably leading to a sixth extinction event. From this book, I learned what is happening to amphibians across the world; about how the Big Bang was discovered and what it meant for life on Earth; how trees in South America are migrating to higher elevations due to climate change; and how ocean acidification and coral bleaching are already having, and will continue to have, far reaching effects on multitudes of sea creatures. I also learned how scientists are terrified, and concurrently fascinated by, what is happening to the planet.
Based on the exquisite storytelling, the intrigue, the characters, and the well-described settings, both books could be novels. You care about the authors and you care about the people they encounter. Using a cross-sectional patchwork of data from across America (Rising) and across the world (Sixth Extinction), these books show how multiple indicators presage what is to come. They also explain what has already happened and what will continue to happen if we do not change our ways. They articulate the gradual catastrophe in a manner that does not overwhelm you with a million facts and scientific studies. The information is brutally honest but digestible, as you learn about what is happening to the planet by reading some great stories.
X. Conclusion
People are answering the call to write and share diverse stories about climate change. More climate related fiction and non-fiction books are being published every year. As a result, I am having more conversations about climate change with my colleagues, friends, and family. I have gained knowledge and insight about the policy decisions the government is making, and have informed myself about upcoming election issues, so I can speak and advocate about these issues with clarity and confidence. So, while I am still overwhelmed, I am hopeful.
Happy reading and happy time travelling.
[i] Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2018); Matthew McClearn, “For Port of Vancouver, underestimating Pacific sea-level rises could come at a high price,” Globe and Mail, May 13, 2018
[ii]“The Documentary Podcast: Islands on the Front Line,” BBC Sounds, released April 17, 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p064lg1y
[iii] Kate Lyon, “Why is Indonesia moving its capital city? Everything you need to know,” The Guardian, published August 27, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/27/why-is-indonesia-moving-its-capital-city-everything-you-need-to-know
[iv] Elizabeth Rush, “Leaving the Sea: Staten Islanders Experiment with Managed Retreat,” Urban Omnibus, Feb. 11, 2015, https://urbanomnibus.net/2015/02/leaving-the-sea-staten-islanders-experiment-with-managed-retreat/
[v] Amy Brady, “The Climate Crisis Is Mind-Boggling. That’s Why We Need Science Fiction,” In These Times, June 17, 2019, http://inthesetimes.com/article/21907/climate-change-science-fiction-collective-action
[vi] Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014).
[vii] Mark C. Serreze, Brave New Arctic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Matthew McClearn, “In Tuktoyaktuk, residents take a stand on shaky ground against the Beaufort Sea’s advance,” Globe and Mail, April 17, 2018.
[viii] Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 72.
[ix] Madeline Ostrander, “In ‘The Water Will Come,’ Jeff Goodell Warns That Rising Seas Won’t Wait,” Undark.org, November 24, 2017, https://undark.org/article/book-review-goodell-water-will-come/.
[x] Claire Luchette, “Emily St. John Mandel Talks ‘Station Eleven,’ Shakespeare, and Sentimentality,” Bustle.com, September 15, 2014, https://www.bustle.com/articles/37200-emily-st-john-mandel-talks-station-eleven-shakespeare-and-sentimentality.
[xi] Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction.
[xii] Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 81.
[xiii] South Pole Station by Ashley Shelby is on my “to-read” list!
[xiv] “What is the Seventh Generation Principle,” Working Effectively with Indigenous People® Blog, Indigenous Corporate Training Inc., posted on May 29, 2012, https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/seventh-generation-principle
[xv] Chelsea Vowel, “kitaskînaw 2350,” in This Place: 150 Years Retold (Winnipeg: HighWater Press, 2019), 251.
[xvi] Vowel, “kitaskînaw 2350”, 274.
[xvii] Ibid.