The Obnoxious Truth of Climate Change

A few months ago, at a meeting of the climate book group I was leading, a member pointed out that her twenty-something children think of climate change not as an issue for the future but as something happening in the present. This seems obvious to me now, but only a couple of years ago, I, like the majority of people my age, thought of the warming climate and the havoc wreaked on the environment and its denizens as a problem for the future, definitely the future, with the only question being how far in the future the devastation lay. But her children are right: climate change is all around us, right now. Vast swaths of coral reefs have already died; Miami and Bangkok flood regularly; keystone species have already gone extinct; record-breaking fires in the American West rage every year. To repeat the great writer Amitav Ghosh’s perfect phrase, this habit of continuing to locate climate issues in the nebulous future is evidence of a “great derangement” out of which we are only slowly emerging. Thank goodness, then, for the more clear-eyed influence of younger generations, who are living with and will continue to witness the effects of the climate catastrophe, for whom there was never a time before climate change.

One way to break through our collective denial, I believe, is to read, which allows us to engage with the truth of climate change in a consistent way, just as we would engage with any other aspect of our lived reality. If you are new to such an engagement and haven’t gone through it already, you will probably experience a period of overwhelm, as I suspect you do every time you contemplate a truly global issue (child hunger, the rise of fascism, institutional racism, etc.). Please remember that such states are not permanent; if climate change teaches us nothing else, I hope we finally learn that nothing is permanent.

We can make such engagement more fulfilling and hopeful by doing it with other people. This is why I like book groups, and also why I especially admire the book Climate Lyricism by Min Hyoung Song. It explores our attitudes toward and engagement with climate issues via deep dives into various literary works from authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Claudia Rankine, and Tommy Pico, with a foray, even, into David Bowie’s lyrics. Throughout, his orientation is community building. He wants to “break the spell of powerlessness” by finding commonality among disparate people while still honoring our differences. Song advocates for a sort of middle path, a way of engaging with climate issues that neither overstates human agency nor succumbs to the hopeless idea that we cannot affect change and therefore need not engage the questions at all. It is, at its heart, he says, a practice of “attention,” and he believes, as do I, that literature has a prominent place in cultivating attention. Via close reads through a climate lens, he hopes to engage us, his readers, in a sustainable, hope- and community-building conversation. Here’s how he puts it:

I [address] the reader as “you”, as if you are here before me, across a table, in a pleasant room or even in an outside cafe on a sunny cool day, possibly drinking some coffee or “having a Coke,” to borrow a phrase from the title of Frank O’Hara’s famous poem. It’s also as if you and I are chatting with each other, and I am saying, perhaps obnoxiously, ruining the moment, making it a lot less fun: Look at this novel or poem, consider how it relates to your experience of the everyday, feel how fucked up the everyday has become, even more so than before; of course, the everyday has been this way for a long time, the very mention of Coke should remind you of this, but climate change is making everything worse; don’t shy away from how bad this makes you feel, stay with it, stay with the full range of all of your emotions, live your life as if all of this matters, linger over how marvelous the experience of living is, and try to find others to share this experience, so that you can take some comfort in not being alone, so that together you and others can find ways to make a difference.

I love that bit, “perhaps obnoxiously.” I am aware that you may think me a little obnoxious for bringing up the uncomfortable fact of climate change. The “inconvenient truth” of it, as Al Gore tried to warn us almost two decades ago. Perhaps I am. Activists can be annoying, I’ll admit from inside that identity, and talk of climate change tends to sound overly strident to most ears. But should it? I want to ask, over a drink on a sunny day, without risking ruining the fun: Have you noticed that summers are warmer / wildfires are fiercer / drought is persisting / the coastline is being eaten away? Can we talk about it, please?

I’ve been listening to the Buddhist teacher Rob Burbea, who died in 2020 but is still available to us via his hundreds of recorded talks. Central to his methodology is to continually expand the variety of what he calls “ways of looking.” There are, he points out, ways of perceiving ourselves, others, and the world that lead to more suffering, and ways that lead to less suffering. The important point, and his teaching is radical in its commitment to this idea, is that we continue to expand and engage with different ways of looking, constantly checking out the effects of each on our mental state. We can follow his teachings into deep realizations about emptiness and freedom, but even at its more superficial and accessible, the instruction is helpful. Song is resonating with that instruction, I think, when he says, “Linger over how marvelous the experience of living is.” How can we look upon what is differently than we have before? Not in ways that avoid pain, but in ways that include the obnoxious truth of climate change, how much it hurts to look at it, and how much it hurts those most affected by it, but also include the wonder that is the earth and human experiences of it.

As a reader and writer of fiction, I am especially interested in the role of literature in influencing our mindsets and expanding our ways of looking. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, he called on fiction writers to stir from a somnolent commitment to “realism” that ironically ignores much of what is real and actual in the world. Since his clarion call to wake up, there has been a small explosion of climate fiction. What follows is an extensive but still woefully partial list of such books that I hope will spark or deepen your own hope- and community-building engagement with climate issues.

It is, I think, incredibly heartening to witness authors step out of that derangement and attempt, in such varied ways, to grapple with the world as it is. There are novels imagining near- (Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible), medium- (Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness, Cynan Jones’ Stillicide, Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain) and far- or fantastical futures (Matt Bell’s Appleseed, N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series). Two of my favorite novels include a substantial grounding in history (Appleseed, Bangkok Wakes to Rain). There are intimate, personal meditations (Jenny Offill’s Weather, Richard Powers’ Bewilderment) and wide-lens novels that draw together enough disparate strands of human experience to let us feel the presence of the web (Richard Powers’ The Overstory, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark). The aesthetic of many of these is modern and realist, but others incorporate parable and myth (Stillicide, Appleseed), and even those that adopt a primarily realist mode tend to have myth and fairy tale woven into their seams (A Children’s Bible, The Overstory, Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island).

There are also, of course, a wealth of non-fiction books that treat environmental/climate change and destruction, cataloging both current effects and near- and long-term predictions: classics like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which still has much to tell us; early 21st-century contributions like Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe and Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, the latter managing to break through a certain amount of collective denial by setting up the thought experiment that takes humans out of the picture, thus circumventing our habit of defending our habits; and one of my favorites, the Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, which, as Ghosh discusses extensively, does a better job of sober, clear-eyed leadership than exhibited by any of today’s secular leaders.

In my relentlessly-categorizing mind, I have roughly divided other recent nonfiction by the primary climate-change effect it tackles: sea level rise (Jeff Goodell’s The Water Will Come); species extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction); acidification and destruction of the oceans (Callum Roberts’ The Ocean of Life, Sylvia A. Earle’s The World is Blue); drought and wildfire (Gary Ferguson’s Land on Fire); and violent storms (Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke). The last suggestion is so good that I’ve let myself stray from my allegiance to the written word; Lee’s documentary will break through any residual denial about the human toll of “superstorms,” which are actually not “super” at all anymore. For another essential film, I recommend the 2014 Netflix documentary Mission Blue about Sylvia Earle’s remarkable work exploring and protecting the oceans.

I am also very excited about the recent release of two collections of essays, The World As We Knew It, edited by Amy Brady and Tajja Isen, with essays by Lydia Millet and Melissa Febos, among others; and The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh.

Although all of the above discuss solutions to climate challenges to some extent, there is a class of books focused on solutions: Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet by John W. Reid and Thoman E. Lovejoy; Stop Saving the Planet! An Environmental Manifesto by Jenny Price; and both The Book of Hope by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams and The Book of Joy by HH Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

There are also a couple of academic books I’ve read that I think are contributing to deepening and complicating our thinking on climate change. These voices are, in my opinion, crucial, but their specialized language presents more of a challenge if you aren’t used to it. The precision of academic language is a terrific asset, because precision is needed to excavate a complex problem adequately, to go beyond soundbites into substance. (I hope it’s clear from the state of US politics that going beyond soundbites is essential.) Unfortunately, though, that language sometimes keeps the reader at a distance. So, I would especially recommend reading academics with the support of others, so you can crowdsource the messages and meanings in the book and cheer each other on when the language becomes a slog. The first of these is Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamison, a philosopher by training who takes on the ethical issues around climate change in the most complete and nuanced way I have seen, to try to answer the question of why we have failed so utterly to respond to the crisis. And then there’s Song’s Climate Lyricism, which moves between a more accessible, informal mode, as the quote above illustrates, and a more traditional academic style. Both books are wise and smart and well worth the effort.

As partial and idiosyncratic as it is, this list does contain many different “ways of looking,” and I hope they will inspire you to expand your own perceptions and understandings of climate issues. I hope you will sit with others, perhaps at a cafe, giving these books the sustained attention Song is asking for, “so that together you and others can find ways to make a difference.”