Books! and Hope
THE PROBLEM: Climate change and the resulting disasters disrupting our lives are crises so dire and complicated and interconnected that it's a headache to try to fit them all into one skull. It's just too big to grasp.
WHO'S ALREADY ON IT: Storytellers! Got a problem? Tell a story! Okay, yeah, it's a bigger job than that. But to get vast numbers of people to even see The Problem, there has to be a Story they will stop and listen to.
The writers who are succeeding at pulling These Uncertain Times into a narrative shape are ... well, really smart. I want to pass on to you some books I have recently devoured, that not only provide depth perception of climate change, but present that perception in the context of captivating narrative. They make understanding it all into something like FUN.
First is this little gem:
The first-person narrator is Sophie, an amateur naturalist who has inherited a family gift: the ability to see invisible creatures. She knows many of them are at risk of extinction along with millions of other species in our time. The only response she feels she can make is to write a bestiary, describing them for the world at large, or at least for the next person in her family who demonstrates the gift.
Besides the nimble imagination and luminous verbosity on every page, Muir blesses us with a Big Picture of super-duper-long-term planetary change and evolution, at impossible speed:
Pangea dissolves; ocean beds (again) become cloud-ringed peaks; this earth, not new, not old, thrums under monumental reptiles that mash their chicken tracks into the fossil record. Joy of joys, over conifer forests the maniraptors are aloft! Nine thousand species of birds descend from maniraptor nestlings, their beaks agape, shrilling. Music has evolved in the air. If I had been waiting, I would have been glad I did – though suddenly the sky is dust, ashes, roars, and sandpaper. Under sable clouds, in adamant gloom, the forests rot over the rotting dinosaurs, and for a weird historical moment, terrestrial topography is a Boolean ooze of phosphorescent domes, stalks, fungal shelves, funnels, and wrinkled gills. Then the ferns grow back as they did in my lifetime on charred Mount Saint Helens. For any age can interpose itself into the calendar of life, if circumstances permit. Any vista can return, any being can reawaken, more or less – the differences are what history is.
Any vista can return, any being can reawaken ... mm-mmm. The differences are what history is.
Did I say history? Your man for history is right here:
Amitav Ghosh is a shockingly erudite writer, who has become renowned for cross-cultural climate fiction and nonfiction since publication of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable in 2016. Gun Island (2019) is a novel, set in West Bengal, Bangladesh, and Venice. Distant places! Distant history! Contemporary investigations! Just my cup of chai.
The historical connection between India and Venice was a revelation to me, although it shouldn't have been, since I've known for years that Venice was a trading empire every bit as ruthless as the later powers of the British and the Dutch. Ghosh puts that history into the journeys of vivid, relatable characters in the modern day. Many of their difficulties are tangled up with the waves of desperate immigrants from Bengal to Venice, driven by climate-related destruction of livelihoods and habitations - and yes, that means human trafficking in undocumented labor. The other climate migrations causing trouble are non-human: snakes, dolphins, and even deadly brown recluse spiders. All these migrations are shaping the immediate history of Europe and South Asia that we have seen in our newsfeeds; the personal narrative is driven by the main character, Deen, coming to face his naivete about the changes around him.
Deen's friend Cinta, a historian specializing in the trade between Venice and India, finds that the old Arabic name for Venice was al-Bunduqevya, which was also the Arabic name for guns (a new and elite weapon in the 17th century, Venice's trading heyday). That name found its way into the Bengal language, reflecting Venetian trade and military presence on the Indian subcontinent. Ghosh has explained in interviews that the Bengali legend drawing Deen and Cinta through the novel, about a Gun Merchant being chased by a Hindu Snake Goddess
dramatize[s] “the conflict between profit and the world.” In the novel, the goddess pursues the merchant to make him aware of other realities like the animal world: “Humans—driven, as was the Merchant, by the quest of profit—would recognize no restraint in relation to other living things.”
The metaphor of the Gun Merchant - rapacious greed - unfolds throughout the book and brings the characters to recognize the long, slow sinking of our Western systems into profit-driven disasters. Cinta says,
Everybody knows what must be done if the world is to continue to be a livable place, if our homes are not to be invaded by the sea, or by creatures like that [brown recluse] spider. Everybody knows … and yet we are powerless, even the most powerful among us. We go about our daily business through habit, as though we were in the grip of forces that have overwhelmed our will; we see shocking and monstrous things happening all around us and we avert our eyes; we surrender ourselves willingly to whatever it is that has us in its power.
Even so, the novel ends in a radiant hope, as a miraculous convergence of migrating human and nonhuman beings in the ocean just beyond Venice becomes the focus of global media attention.
Hope, that tricky thing! They say it has feathers. The way both Amitav Ghosh and Kim Stanley Robinson weave hope into tales that would otherwise kill you with despair is a kind of sacred storytelling skill that keeps me SANE.
I'm late to the party that Robinson has been running since he started publishing science fiction novels in 1984. Still, there was no way to miss The Ministry for the Future, a bombshell that dropped in 2020 just as the world resigned itself to COVID lockdown. If you're among the thousands of readers who made the book a best-seller and hot topic, forgive my tardiness. The bridge I see between Ghosh and Robinson should be plain. Ghosh brings together history and culture as a lens for contemporary global and personal challenges; Robinson goes further into the future with this history and culture data and crafts compelling - often downbeat-but-let's-be-real – fiction that spots pragmatic solutions and logical follow-ons. He's sort of an eco-novelist who shows how "sacred cow" tropes just get in the way of actually saving the planet.
For example, Chapter 60 of Ministry lays out how the novel's female protagonist, the Director of the UN's Ministry for the Future, persuades the leaders of the world's central banks that the survival of human-led civilization (which created central banks) depends on the banks doing The Thing Only They Can Do: create a currency that pays out when carbon drawdown and other climate-restorative actions are taken.
... she pondered for a moment simply shouting suddenly in their faces, or taking her shoe off and pounding the table Khruschev style. Or throwing a chair through the picture window and letting the storm pour in over them. Sudden fury at their mulishness: Fuck your interest rates! she wanted to shout. Do the job that only you can do!
And then Robinson has the bankers agree to this plan, and he writes in detail how they do it. And it works.
Bankers save civilization? The nerve!
However. Check out what came from the POTUS just a few days ago: an International Climate Finance Plan.
Listen to Robinson's remarks in this talk in the Netherlands in November 2023. The word "hope" is spoken right away, and it is quickly differentiated from "optimism." Robinson notes that since the book came out in 2020, there has been a shift among people he encounters, to nearly everyone having a felt sense of the reality of climate change currently happening, and the reality of actions that can be taken.
A sense of reality, perhaps, that can help us all stay SANE.
#climatechange #geoengineering #trade #gods #Bengal #Venice #immigration #trafficking #migration #extinction #centralbanks #finance #currency #carbondrawdown