[ad_1]
In the 2013 movie Snowpiercer, John Hurt, Jamie Bell and Chris Evans.RADiUS/TWC
This story was first published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Climate scientists mustWe are left wondering what it will take for us to be scared. Watching flood waters submerge 80 percent of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina didn’t do it. Videos taken by Australians in 2019 of people fleeing walls of flame and a hellish orange mist in all directions did not make it. Will the deaths of more than six million people in the Covid-19 pandemic—a tragedy that has highlighted The links between climate change and infectious disease—jolt the world into action? I wouldn’t count on it.
The central problem is that climate change lacks a human face—a vision of the people who will inhabit the world to come, and what they will endure. When we look into the faces of our children and grandchildren, we’re unable to form a mental picture of them struggling to survive in the world we’ve bequeathed to them.
Sure, News reports and scientific texts about climate change have presented a Clear-eyed view of what we’ve done to the planet over the last century and where that’s left us. The most recent United Nations reportFor instance, he painted a disturbing portrait of Earth under the grips climate change.
Even these warnings may not be enough to capture the true extent of the looming catastrophe. According to a Washington Post investigation published in November of last year, numerous countries continue to underreport their greenhouse gas emissions. Despite this, recent warnings have been quickly replaced by coverage about the crisis in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine is an exceptional event, but the lack of attention to the climate crisis is not.
So when are we going to be scared into taking action?
I suspect that won’t happen until we are shown what it will look and feel like to live on a scorching, ocean-logged, and atmospherically violent planet. In other words, I suspect we’ll need the climate-change equivalent of The Day After.
On November 20, 1983, more than 100,000,000 television viewers viewed the show. The Day AfterThis movie was a chillingly realistic, but fictional, depiction nuclear Armageddon. It was the quietest event that I can recall from five years of being on campus. Despite its flaws—the movie downplayed the effects of a real nuclear war, for instance—the film left us shaken. It was talked about for months. Ronald Reagan, then-President of the United States, watched the movie. In his diary he wrote that it “left me greatly depressed.” The film was followed in 1984 by the British film ThreadsAnother graphic representation of the end that awaits us if nuclear war is pursued.
The momentum for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was built over the years. It was signed in 1991. It’s impossible to say whether fictional depictions of nuclear war played any role in bringing the US. Soviet Union to the bargaining room. They forced humanity to see the real consequences of our pursuit for world-ending weaponsry (a lesson we must remember given the circumstances). Alarming war in Ukraine).
What The Day After Threads achieved through cinema, Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel At The BeachWritten word is the best tool for accomplishing this feat. Shute’s book imagines a group of ordinary Australians living out their final months, marked for death by a slow-moving radioactive cloud. The story’s power comes from its heartbreaking depiction of real people―men and women, babies and seniors―all forced to measure existence in weeks instead of years. Their lives would only last as long as the winds took to bring the deadly cloud to them.
I have read At The BeachAs a teenager, Brookline, Massachusetts was home to the Cold War. This period must have seemed strange to students today. In hindsight, the duck-and-cover-drills and the public service messages on our black and white television screens—explaining what to do when a nuclear bomb is headed your way—seem laughably inadequate. My town printed a pamphlet that explained what would happen in the event of a bomb being dropped on the commercial center located just a few blocks away from my home. But somehow, the haunting story ofAt the BeachWhere other efforts failed, fiction succeeded. Fiction transported us to a fictional world that was paradoxically more real than the nonfiction world our government tried to show.
Climate change might be the same. An emerging genre known as climate fiction, or “Cli Fi,” has attempted to drag us where nonfiction cannot go. J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World1962 saw a planet almost uninhabitable due to flooding. Novelists began to create visions of a future where climate catastrophe has already occurred. Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, published In 1993, the author looked ahead to the year twenty-four, which is now too close by. She put readers in the shoes of a teenager living in the ruins of a California gated neighborhood during a time when crime and water shortages were rife.
With the publication of my novel, I entered the CliFi genre this January. Although The Earth GivessWay, a retelling of one of the oldest novels, Boccaccio’s The Decameron. In Boccaccio’s book, noblemen and noblewomen who fled Florence during the Black Death hole up in a villa outside the city and pass the time by telling stories. I wondered what would happen if the men and women were instead refugees of climate disasters who’d fled the coasts and found their way by chance to an old retreat center in Michigan. Like Boccaccio’s characters mine, too, fall back on one of the oldest resources we have, one of the few destined to survive as long as we do: storytelling.
To be sure, nonfiction will continue to play an important role in helping us understand what’s at stake with climate change. In its 2021 feature “Postcards from a World On Fire,” for instance, the New York TimesReaders were taken on a climate tour of 193 nations. It was a sobering panorama of heatwaves, droughts floods, hurricanes, sandstorms as well a kaleidoscope containing droughts, floods, floods and flooding that has turned our hottest places into furnaces. With fiction, however, we can also stretch our minds to imagine postcards from the world that our children and grandchildren will inhabit if we don’t take immediate action on climate change.
I think you’ll agree: It is not a place we want to go.
