Interesting article on the (lack of) literary reaction to climate change,
which makes me wonder if it is really the case. I know it's one of the
things that really haunts my own poetry. But to be less egocentric,
environmental degradation has always been a big part of Kinsella's work, or
Peter Minter's, just to pick a couple of contemporary poets; and I think
also of WG Sebald's image of human beings as a slow conflagration devouring
the planet. Anyone else have any thoughts?

PS, Judy, I have this feeling that politics is being slowly reinvented too.
It's all happening under the radar of the mass media, which is why it's not
reported about...and it's hard to know what will result. I am not entirely
pessimistic, though it's hard not to feel a bit black when you look at how
things are and how rapidly they have spiralled inwards over the past five
years. I'm presently reading a fascinating book which rethinks politics by
Giorgio Agamben; it's both unsettlingly prescient and, insofar as I
understand it, gives some basis for rethinking what a politics is in an age
of creeping tyranny.

Best

A


http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1576251,00.html

The burning question

Robert Macfarlane argues that writers can play a crucial role in helping us
to imagine the impact of climate change

Saturday September 24, 2005
The Guardian

The effects of climate change are now perceptible in language as well as in
degrees Celsius. On Banks Island, in the Canadian High Arctic, environmental
shifts are happening so fast that the Inuvialuit inhabitants do not have the
words to describe what they now see around them. New species of fish, bird,
and insect have migrated north to the island, following the isobars. Autumn
thunder and lightning have been witnessed from Banks for the first time.
"Permafrost" is no longer tolerable as a term, for the ground-ice is
melting: in Sachs Harbour, the main settlement on Banks, buildings are
subsiding and road surfaces are slushing up.

There have been disappearances as well as arrivals on Banks. The permafrost
melt has caused an inland lake to drain into the sea. The intricate stages
of hardening through which the sea-ice around Banks cycles - frazil, grease,
nilas, gray - are no longer being fulfilled in many places during summer,
for the temperature of the sea water is spiking above the key freeze-point
of 28.6°F.

The Inuvialuit culture is unprepared for these rapid fluxes. Old words (the
name of an inland lake) are now unaccompanied by their phenomena; new
phenomena (a fork of flame in a previously lightningless sky) are
unaccompanied by words.

Contemplation of the situation on Banks Island prompts a broader question
about the relationship of climate change and language. Where is the
literature of climate change? Where is the creative response to what Sir
David King, the government's chief scientific adviser, has famously
described as "the most severe problem faced by the world"?

Cultural absences are always more difficult to document than cultural
outpourings. But the deficiency of a creative response to climate change is
increasingly visible. It becomes unignorable if we contrast it with the
abundance of literature produced in response to the other great
eschatological crisis of the past half-century - the nuclear threat.

The authoritative bibliography of American and British nuclear literature
runs to over 3,000 items: it includes Ian McEwan's oratorio "Or Shall We
Die", JG Ballard's The Terminal Beach, Martin Amis's Einstein's Monsters,
Raymond Briggs's When The Wind Blows, as well as work by Edward Abbey, Ray
Bradbury, Upton Sinclair, Neville Shute. This literature did not only
annotate the politics of the nuclear debate, it helped to shape it. As well
as feeding off that epoch of history, it fed into it.

There is nothing like this intensity of literary engagement with climate
change. Climate change still exists principally as what Ballard has called
"invisible literature": that is, the data buried in "company reports,
specialist journals, technical manuals, newsletters, market research
reports, internal memoranda". It exists as paper trail, as data stream. It
also exists, of course, as journalism, as conversation, and as behaviour.
But it does not yet, with a few exceptions, exist as art. Where are the
novels, the plays, the poems, the songs, the libretti, of this massive
contemporary anxiety?

The question is pressing. For an imaginative repertoire is urgently needed
by which the causes and consequences of climate change can be debated,
sensed, and communicated. Bill McKibben, author of the premonitory classic
The End of Nature (1989), has written of how individuals would not act
against climate change - altering their habits of consumption, lobbying
policy-makers - until they felt "fear in their guts". Literature has a role
to play in inducing this gut feeling, for one of its special abilities is
that of allowing us to entertain hypothetical situations - alternative
lives, or futures, or landscapes - as though they were real. It has a unique
capacity to help us connect present action with future consequence.

The problem is that climate change is not - not yet - apocalyptic in its
consequences. Apocalypse comes swiftly and charismatically, and as such
offers great opportunities for the literary imagination. This is attested to
by the extent and age of the literature of apocalypse, beginning with
Revelation, with its war-chant rhythms, its grim mandala-like structure, its
incantation of massive death foretold.

By contrast, climate change occurs discreetly and incrementally, and as
such, it presents the literary imagination with a series of difficulties:
how to dramatise aggregating detail, how to plot slow change. Though the
cumulative impact of climate change may be catastrophic, and may push us
into a post-natural world, this is not yet scientifically certain. And so
climate change does not yet have its millenarian icons: the grim brilliance
of the nuclear flash point (a sudden sunrise which is really the last dusk),
or the plump red button beneath its clear plastic flip-case, or the
kitchen-table fallout shelter.

Indeed, any literature of climate change would, for the time being, have to
steer determinedly away from apocalyptic scenarios. For the modern
environmental movement has, in the past, tried to bring about social change
by harnessing the power of nightmares. In the 1970s and early 1980s in
particular, dire dystopian predictions were made about over-population,
imminent Gulf Stream shut-off, and sudden sea-level rises. All were proved
wrong, and the damage to the credibility of environmentalism is unrepaired.
Climate-change sceptics gladly trip off a list of these zealously envisaged
catastrophes: lurid acts of fairground clairvoyance which have never come
true.

So any literary response to the present situation would need to be measured
and prudent, and would need to find ways of imagining which remained honest
to the scientific evidence. It might require, one would think, forms which
are chronic - which unfold within time - and are therefore capable of
registering change, and weighing its consequences. And it might require
literary languages which are attentive to the creep of change; which
practise a vigilance of attention and a precision of utterance (one thinks
back to Thoreau, recording the day each year on which Walden Pond first
froze, or of Ruskin, in his home on the shores of Coniston, making
painstaking daily measurements of the blueness of the sky, to check the
effects of air-pollution upon its colour, or of Gilbert White ascertaining
the different keys in which owls of different woods hooted). But presumably
there would be room, too, for more bumptious vernaculars: for satire, say,
or for polemic. Might John le Carré, who took on the global pharmaceutical
industry so angrily and well in The Constant Gardener, do the same for the
politics of climate change?

An odd parallel with our current situation can be found in the 19th century.
For the Victorians of the later 1800s lived in the fear-shadow of their
version of climate change: global cooling. In 1862, the physicist William
Thomson - better known as Lord Kelvin - made public his belief that the sun
was cooling without renewal of its energy. Owing to the irreversible seep of
entropy, Thomson announced, the solar system was condemned to what was
christened "Heat Death". The Earth would slowly lose the benefit of its
lantern and radiator, and would gradually become encased in ice. A
"universal winter", as Thomas Huxley put it, would ensue.

Solar physics immediately became a hot topic of discussion among Victorians,
who were appalled at this demonstration of the universe's indifference to
humanity. And the idea of global cooling precipitated quickly into the
literary culture of the period. It can be found, among other places, in the
work of Samuel Butler, James Thomson, Richard Jefferies, William Morris, GF
Watts, Thomas Huxley, Charles Darwin (who noted in his autobiography that he
found it "intolerable" that humanity should be "doomed to complete
annihilation after such long-continued slow progress"), John Ruskin ("I want
to believe in Apollo - but can't - the sun is said to be getting rusty (is
not it?)", he wrote anxiously in a letter to a friend on 19 November 1862),
Thomas Hardy, and HG Wells (in The War of the Worlds it is the cooling of
the solar system that forces the Martians to "carry warfare sunwards"). The
annual death of the sun at the solstice, and the daily death of the sun at
sunset, took on new and sinister resonances within fiction and poetry of the
period. Old myths - especially the Norse myths of Ragnarok and Balder, in
which a young hero dies in his youthful vigour - were rehabilitated, and
used to trope the sun's extermination.

There are differences between then and now, of course; not least that what
frightened the Victorians was the universe's passivity to human action,
whereas what frightens us is its reactiveness. But it is clear that
Victorian worries at Heat Death, and the prospects for life on a cooling
Earth, led to a great cultural output, which partly debated the science and
partly dramatised it. "Imaginative figuration and scientific inquiry," wrote
Gillian Beer, in a fine essay on the subject, "operated in inseparable
co-operation with one another." It is a "co-operation" which has not
happened in our period.

But signs of change exist; initiatives are afoot. David Buckland's visionary
Cape Farewell project has recently sailed artists - including Antony
Gormley, McEwan and Rachel Whiteread - to the Arctic, with the aim of
"illustrating the workings of this crucial part of the planet, and engaging
the public and schools in the debate about climate change". The RSA has
launched an excellent "Arts & Ecology" programme, with the aim of bringing
together environmentalists, scientists, and writer-thinkers "to explore the
roles and responsibilities of contemporary art in ecology"; among their
events is a public discussion on climate change and literature. The
exemplary Open Democracy website is hosting a climate change debate. The
latest edition of Granta magazine this month carries a feature called "The
Weather Where You Are", in which writers across the world describe the
meteorological shifts they have witnessed. And a fortnight ago, I was part
of an unorthodox conference, hosted by the Environmental Change Institute at
Oxford University, at which 30 scientists and 30 artists - including McEwan,
Philip Pullman, Caryl Churchill and Gretel Ehrlich - were brought together
to discuss how art and science might collaborate in fighting climate change.

So perhaps the cultural climate is changing. Or, perhaps, cultural change
will be overtaken by the climate. For the effects of global warming may not
remain discreet and incremental for long. Sudden climatic step changes may
soon become evident, which radically displace precipitation patterns,
changing the moisture economies of whole territories, with drastic
consequences. Last month, for instance, a senior Chinese environmentalist
predicted that China's "arid-north, wet-south" geographical paradigm would
invert within 15 years. It has also been proposed, but not proved, that the
severity of Hurricane Katrina was exacerbated by climate change. It has been
shown that human influence more than doubled the risk of harm occurring
during the murderous European heat-wave of 2003. In the future, indeed, it
may become hard for writers not to take climate change as their subject.



Alison Croggon

Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com