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.
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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. |