Hey, university and college creative-writing faculty, students, and staff: Can you feel it? Can you hear the stitches ripping a little louder now? The building listing to starboard? Maybe it’s a key staff position eliminated here, or a major budget cut there. Maybe it’s more coldness between departments competing for the shrinking pie, or between people within your department; or people turning more towards their in-group and eager to blame outsiders for their problems, shunning or shaming them. Or maybe I’m just a pessimist.
Many writers work within universities, and it does seem like the dismantling of the US higher education system – esp. public higher education – is accelerating beyond the dreams of neoliberal pols or the self-serving, i’ve-got-mine-jack indifference of administrators. Grad students are taking medical leaves to care for themselves psychologically and emotionally; others are falling behind; others are just acting out (as are some faculty). Undergrads are working more hours for money, more hours at “extracurriculars,” trying to maintain their academic work, trying to stay awake long enough to imagine a life without debt. OK, OK – this is catastrophizing; there are good things happening, too. There are good people in colleges and universities. And none of this can be directly linked to climate change, except maybe at a couple of removes: part of the background noise, like weather-induced irritability or the economic drag of natural disasters. But both climate chaos and the growing anomie in the ivory tower have a common cause, which is neoliberal, globalized industrial capital. And that inevitably will affect the creative-writing industry. For the last few years, I’ve been active on campus trying to prevent academic freedom from being destroyed, esp. for non-tenure-track faculty, and trying to force the institution to maintain its intellectual and artistic integrity. And my allies and I have had some not-insignificant victories. But still I wonder what difference it will make in the long run. Resource depletion (water, esp.) is going to catch up with the economy at some point. The waves of people displaced by climate change are increasing in number all over the world. And of course, there is the quasi-fascist faux-populist xenophobic backlash in many nations, north and south. All of this suggests that colleges and universities in the global north will be very very different places ten (and maybe five) years from now than they are at present. It may be accellerated decay and inaction – the US university (for instance) looking more like eastern European universities under Soviet rule. But it may be cutting out departments or schools - or creative-writing programs. Or it may be the conversion of postsecondary institutions into ideological training camps for the children of the wealthy. If we lived in a rational society, we’d probably be making contingency plans for housing displaced persons in university buildings (including classrooms and offices) and using any open ground for growing food or drilling water wells. As it is, we go about our daily jobs as though everything were going to be the same - or at least, only decline incrementally. That's not how the scientists are depicting it - and the scientists' predictions always turn out to be wildly optimistic. If you are a writer working in a postsecondary institution, stop and think: 1. What do I think my on- and off-campus community will be like, ten years from now? 2. How will I try to shape it to my liking? 3. What role could literature and creative writing – and pedagogy – play, in a more stressed, diminished world? 4. Am I willing to move to China or Bahrain, maybe, to keep getting paid for leading workshops? 5. Should I be teaching workshops at all? Are there things that are important beyond all this fiddle? 5. What and how should I write? 6. Should I write?
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Egyptian comedy troupe milks climate catastrophe for laugh lines: it’s the little things:
like, i can’t help but notice: no- body is mowing. flash flood warnings a couple of days, then heat advisories (or warnings) for 3, then more downpour: rain feeds the grass, heat makes mowing quasi-hazardous, so the grass grows long. this is the new normal for the week of aug 18, 2019. check back in a yr. enough of 1st world problems . . . meanwhile, here’s the news, hopefully fake, probably not: brazil incinerates previous high number of trees burning: 72,843 fires in the amazon – 83% ↑ from last yr: bolsonaro sez it’s just farmers clearing their land like every yr (& 28k acres in turkey, 3.3 in iran); & btw, if yr insurance drops you b/c the odds are good a forest fire will burn yr house, is that a 1st-world prob? or the 1.3 m acres out of production in ark. alone, b/c of flooded farms? meanwhile, record drought in sing- apoor, ditto malaysia; crops in s. australia “on the brink of ruin”; “it’s heartbreaking to see cows & sheep standing on hard dirt instead of soft grass . . . there’s no more grazing all day like nature intended for them.” while the siberian bears can’t find salmon so instead eat human garbage and humans, too. & they’re having funerals for glaciers now; & for 1st time, the u.s. cuts amt. of colorado r. water az. & nv. can take out; i’m like everyone: crawl into my little life & don’t come out until the “all clear” – keep calm, carry on w/my exposed existence while i can. good news does exist: egyptian comedy troupe “encourages villagers to cooperate by combining small- holdings to maximize output and use irrigation & farming techniques to cope with c.c.” (al-taghayorat al-monakhiya, in arabic – there’s a funny pun on the word for a traditional stew. but i guess you had to be there.) wheat output, water savings increased dramatically, they claim. still, one old dude asks, rhetorically, contemptuously, “how are we going to change god’s weather?” David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth is one of those books you want to read over a glass of whiskey. Or a bottle. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything, but he sure does annotate everything. Which makes for a cogent and terrifying read about the most important topic to everyone in the world. While the writing gets a little too clever for itself and trips over its own toes on occasion, it is one of those bestsellers that deserves to be.
The first two parts are largely based on his article of the same name for New York magazine, fleshed out with statistics and points (and endnotes) that couldn’t be included in the space of an article. But the real value-added, for my money, is the section “The Climate Kaleidoscope,” which deals with cultural, ethical, philosophical and social considerations. Like literature, for instance. Wallace-Wells sees the uptick in dystopian speculative fiction as a palliative, expressing a “hope that the end of days remains ‘fantasy’” (143-4), or even an escapist pleasure. The various flavors of climate apocalypse on offer provide means of “sublimation and diversion,” of catharsis, or of projecting guilt onto someone other than oneself. But the larger issue, for him, is “climate existentialism” – that is, the extent to which the alteration of the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, and the physical shifts and movements it precipitates, will change every facet of life. Climate fiction (whether literary or cinematic) may disappear entirely because climate change will be “too large and too obvious even for Hollywood” (145). Wallace-Wells explains, in his typically cut-the-bullshit style: “You can tell stories ‘about’ climate change while it still seems a marginal feature of human life, or an overwhelming feature of lives marginal to your own. But at three degrees [Celsius] of warming, or four, hardly anyone will be able to feel insulated from its impacts – or want to watch it on-screen as they watch it out their windows” (145). Indeed, he speculates, climate change “may cease to be a story and become, instead, an all-encompassing setting.” There are several impediments to narrativizing climate change, according to W-W. First . . . OMG – it is sooooooooo depressing! No believable happy ending and uplift. Secondly, conventional novels tend “to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the miasma of social fate” (147). Where’s the protagonist? “[C]ollective action is, dramatically, a snore.” Likewise, who’s the bad guy? The petrochemical giants? Well, “transportation and industry make up less than 40 percent of global emissions” (148); so, that’s at least 40% of a bad guy. Who else? The reader? In sum, W-W seems to see narrative as failing under the weight of something so pervasive and . . . well, global. If narrative fails to capture the enormity and diffuseness of climate crisis, what does? I’ve been reading poet Terrance Hayes’ book of essays To Float in the Space Between. In it, he writes of the difference between narrative and lyric poem: “Lyric time is a crisis of narrative – story spiraling out of control. It makes the structure of desire revolutionary – with that word’s dual connotations of subversiveness and circularity” (61). This statement, it seems to me, might point towards lyric poetry, of all the literary arts, as being in a particularly good historical position to deal with climate chaos. Feedback effects are circular and revolutionary – they spiral out of control. And a crisis of narrative is precisely what climate crisis represents – “story spiraling out of control.” Such a crisis could also prompt narrative poetry with circular, implied, elided, fragmented, or eliminated narrative: all have been part of the fairly recent toolkit of poets. So perhaps poetry (or something not unlike it) is the ideal vehicle for experiencing the disruption of our collective narratives (of progress, of safety, of life). Literature pancaked and scrambled and ready for breakfast as soon as you are ready to wake up and smell the (unaffordable) coffee. In any event, clearly a shift in the nature of life that has not occurred in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years will force us to rethink what it means to write – and what it means to be a human being. deluge then steambath:
torrential rain friday + 70 mph winds (one of the old osage oranges down by the creek broke in 2; trains knocked over in harvey co.), flood warnings, etc.; now heat warnings; i see in the paper where we’re going to be in the “kidney-stone belt”! that’s a new one for me – i knew we were in the bible belt, the wheat belt, the tighten-your-belt belt. but i’d never heard of this. see, when the air turns super hot, you sweat more & urinate less, which means . . . (well, i’ll leave to your imagination the “which means.”) this “by 2050”: that’s as may be. but it’s true kidney disease hits > ¼ of sugar cane cutters in el salvador, which didn’t happen 20 yrs ago; & if you can’t afford dialysis . . . water thieves active in queensland (yep: “water theives”); worse drought ever for sydney, reservoirs running low; (and, yeah, you’re goddam right i’m trying to sow panic – or at the very least a realistic sense of what sort of crisis we’re in for – what “cataclysm”(?). i’m growing nostalgic for rationality.) & meanwhile: in alaska, rivers warmed to 70+ f this summer, meaning dead salmon meaning dead salmon fishery; hottest & smokiest season ever in anchorage (& 94 f last month above arctic circle); in gran canaria, 8k evac’d before conflagration (alexa: synonyms for “wildfire”; synonyms for “flood”); + a new vocabulary word: pyrocumulonimbus – viz., clouds formed by wildfires. double meanwhile, the grand bazaar of istambul flooded; himachal pradesh state clocked highest rainfall ever recorded; chennai, which ran out of water, now engulfed (“empluved”?), tho not enough to end the drought; 1st 6 mo. driest ever in aukland; but august already above-avg. rain; at new orleans, river 11 feet above sea level 292 days (please god not another hurricane right now). and here: triple-digit heat index expected – & we need something more than a three-letter word for what this is Figure 5 (A) Global fire zones, NASA. The Earth data fire map accumulates the locations of fires detected by moderate-resolution imaging radiometer (MODIS) on board the Terra and Aqua satellites over a 10-day period. Each colored dot indicates a location where MODIS detected at least one fire during the compositing period. Color ranges from red where the fire count is low to yellow where number of fires is large; (B) An ecological catastrophe in Russia: wildfires have created over 4 million square km smoke lid over central northern Asia. Big Siberian cities are covered with toxic haze that had already reached Urals. [from Aug. 13 post on the ever-lively and -provocative Arctic News website] The air cooks you: the mercury hits 112° F outside – a few degrees hotter than this time last year. The electricity’s cut out; sometimes it runs all day, sometimes only an hour, sometimes not at all, and never more than 4 amps-worth at a time. You can’t afford a generator, so no artificial cooling provides relief – except for the rich, who can. The rest of the population try to work a few hours a day, then sleep in their sweat. The old, sick, and many of the very young don’t make it. Tax increases to beef up infrastructure have mostly found their way into the pockets of politicians and utility “regulators.” The wetlands dried up long ago – and, along with them, a supply of extra water and a buffer from storms. Communities upstream have squeezed the flow of rivers to a trickle, where you live. Water supplies are giving out.
This is not an imaginative cli-fi premise, it’s Iraq in August 2019. And it’s becoming the reality for more and more people at higher and lower latitudes than Baghdad. (“Dystopia” = the global north’s term for the global north’s starting to look more like the global south.) When I read things like summaries of various IPCC reports – not to mention popular accounts of climate chaos and global heating – I start to feel like I am in the science-fiction movie. I mean, it was one thing for J.G. Ballard, Stanley R. Greenberg, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, or Margaret Atwood to posit a possibly apocalyptic, dystopian future sometime in the more-or-less distant or unforeseeable future; but it’s another thing to see it unfolding in the news in real time. Or in your neighborhood. For instance, Chennai, India, a metro area of 10 million, has run out of water. Seriously – they’re shipping it in by train. And 21 Indian cities are expected to run out next year (next year!). An area equivalent to the size of Europe is covered in smoke from forest fires in Siberia. It’s been in the 90s above the Arctic Circle. Australia’s farmland is desiccated, while the Mississippi Valley is inundated. In a situation like this, how does the “speculative” writer keep up? That which you speculate about the future 50 years out instead might happen in 5 years – or 5 months; it seems like the scientist’s predictions are always rosier than their actual observations of the climate. And, as David Wallace-Wells puts it, “Why read about the world you can see plainly out your own window?” Perhaps the tendency of more “literary” novelists’ turning to “genre” fiction – or rather, the merging or disappearance of those two categories – is a signal that any believable, compelling fiction, poetry, or drama in the future will have to take the effects of climate catastrophe into account, at least peripherally. Wallace-Wells again: “And so as climate change expands across the horizon – as it begins to seem inescapable, total – it may cease to be a story and become, instead, an all-encompassing setting.” Those settings in the global north will look more and more like the global south in the summer of 2019. “truth is
not truth,” said rudy giuliani. that explains it: why i’m not quitting the job, heading for the hills, or devoting full-time to organizing this very instant, when smoke covers 2.7 m sq. mi. in russia & 1.2 m in amazonia, when 1 m people flooded out in india (kerala highest all-time rainfall); when u.n. world food prog. sez 1.4 m central americans need food aid: “coping strategies: first internal migration – they go to the cities. but when these are exhausted, they migrate externally” (“puro piedra,” said the guy at the migrant shelter, meaning the farm back home): diseases killing not just people but coffee & now bananas & hence incomes, when calif. & u.s. s.w. feels hi temps > 100 f, when colo. & ks. both record record monster hailstones (softball-size, from the look of them), when > 10k japanese people hospitalized for heatstroke for second week in a row, when water-cooled nuke power plants can’t get cool water? truth is not truth if i say it is or isn’t, so i do what feels good, which is what we all tend to do; so we mind our own business, defined as our own minds tell us to. It's not in the DSM-whatever, but that doesn't mean it isn't real. Check out this article for a good overview. "Writing, creating art and sharing on social media can all be therapeutic ways of letting your fears out." So, at the very least - leave a comment!
I don’t hold out a lot of hope that policies can be changed by something like Extinction Rebellion’s big civil disobedience actions in April (“Extinction Who? What actions?” say the Americans), as much as I would like to think otherwise. And I don’t see how sheltering in place, going “back to nature,” or homesteading is going to work in a chaotic climate regime – how can you permaculture in a mutating climate? Wouldn’t that be “tempoculture”? How can you live in a place with less and less water for everyone? Face it: we’re already in nature. And we’ve changed it beyond recognition.
The survivalist preppers plan to Stay and Fight. Would I be willing to kill others to survive a little longer? To live in what kind of world? I’m pretty sure I would do so to protect those I love. But when would it – will it – not be worth it any longer? Migration seems like the most likely outcome – people moving (mostly northward & inland) until they find enough water, food, and housing to live on & in. This is already happening, on a large scale – from Central America to North America; from Africa to Europe; Asia to Australia & New Zealand. Of course, all these places have climate problems of their own (Canada, the coldest nation on earth, is heating the fastest; the arable portions of Australia are turning into desert; and Europe is having heat waves, crop failures, and arctic wildfires. Perhaps the best hope for preventing barbarism is trying to make common cause – banding together for mutual aid and defense, not unlike the migrant caravans from Central America did, earlier this year. And trying to integrate new migrants into the existing group, whether it is settled or on the move. These are not things USAmericans do readily. We circle the wagons around our individual selves and nuclear families. And why would anyone else trust us anyway? Maybe the best option for North Americans and Europeans (while they can still ignore climate disruption) is to stay put and think long and hard about what their life is for, in a situation like this. It has to have to do with living in the here and now. And for some of us, trying to practice a little compassion and charity might be more important than surviving. For the philosopher, all of life is training for death – and, implicitly, an awareness of death is training for life. Writing & literature might help with this. Perhaps we need more books with unhappy endings, so that anything short of that will look good, and so that we will be prepared for what’s ahead. |
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |