I’ve read a number of works of climate fiction that have an additional precipitating or consequent disaster or emergency involved. Maybe it’s an earthquake (Odds Against Tomorrow). Maybe it’s sudden mass immigration or emigration (The Wall). And maybe it’s contagion. I can think of several in this last category. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy immediately comes to mind (in which a pandemic becomes a “waterless flood”); Edan Lepucki’s novel California, in which the central characters flee metro L.A. due to a flu epidemic; Omar El Akkad’s American War, which involves weaponized microbes; there’s some kind of biological transmission and rearrangement happening in The Future Home of the Living God, by Louise Erdrich; and even Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower features a disastrous epidemic of drug addiction, along with the social chaos caused by climate chaos.
These tales of confluent crises remind us that disasters don’t happen one at a time, and their effects are not unitary. Just ask the people in Zagreb. Or people in any of the countries mentioned in “Poem of Our Climate” the last couple of weeks. Destruction of forests accelerates global heating; it also causes geographic shifts of mammalian species into human settlement areas; which can cause pandemics. Warmer weather can cause the growth of fungi or bacteria that cause crops to fail, leading to forced mass migrations. Wetter weather can breed locusts, leaving decimated farms and farmers who have no choice but go to resettlement camps (which are good breeding-grounds for disease). Competition for increasingly scarce natural resources — e.g., water — can cause war (possibly involving nuclear weapons). And any of these can lead to financial panics and economic implosion. The drought, floods, and pestilence will still be heading for us, after we go back to work. What to write in the face of that? Dystopian fiction seems kind of beside the point (“yeah. so?”), though tons of it is being produced. By contrast, it’s hard for me to think of recent utopian fiction; by recent, I mean in the last 10 years — even 20. Perhaps you can — and perhaps you’ll be kind enough to list them in the comments section below! But I certainly don’t see anything like the Bellamy Societies that sprang up in the 1890s, inspired by Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward. There was a lot of optimism in those dark days. The Populists gained majorities in state legislatures; the Socialists began a rapid rise to power in numerous towns and cities; and the Progressives got much of their agenda enacted (albeit watered down). Those movements, along with the labor movement of the 1930s, were born of economic desperation — farmers going bust, workers worn out before they were 40, disease-ridden cities, plus deceit and main force used by the gilded super-rich. In other words, kind of like now. But perhaps our “quarantine” will give us time to spin out narratives by which the economic and physical pain people are enduring can find expression in a movement that produces a carbon-neutral, equitable, healthy world.
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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. |