CAN YOU IMAGINE?

- Helping the Mind Deal with Climate Change Futures

Brigitte Pawliw-Fry & Manjana Milkoreit

Climate change is a problem that reaches far into the future. Although one could debate to what extent climate change impacts are observable today, scientists and most policy-makers have no doubt that the accumulated effects of humanity’s economic activity over the last 100 years will have consequences for centuries, even millennia to come. 

Most of the possible future changes in the climate system are very difficult to imagine. It seems even harder to think about the impacts climate change might force upon societies. At the same time, addressing climate change requires decision-making in the present. UN negotiators, national policy-makers, senators, voters, consumers. NGOs, business leaders and investors all need to have some kind of idea/understanding what the future will look like in order to make choices about their actions today – committing your country to GHG emission reductions, lobbying against such reductions, mobilizing your community to live more sustainably or investing in the Alberta oil sands. Unfortunately human beings struggle with making good decisions in response to climate change, and one of the main reasons for this weakness might be a general lack of imagination concerning the more distant future.

Evolution seems to have a lot to do with our inability to imagine what’s ahead. Initially humans’ most pressing concerns were survival, food and shelter today and left very little time to think about the next day, week or even year. In modern societies our planning horizon has expanded to cover a number of years, maybe a decade. But although our life expectancy is approaching 100 years, and our grandchildren might see the year 2150, we rarely think beyond the year 2020. And we have absolutely no idea what 2080 might look like.

So what do we do about that? What tools can help us imagine our changing planet in the years to come? It turns out that scientific knowledge is pretty useless for painting a picture of the future that the non-scientific mind can actually see. Our brains need help to transform science into images of more and less likely realities in the form of visuals, stories, ideas, and emotions – we need art and culture to help us see, feel and experience possible worlds before they have come to pass.

An emerging literary genre known as climate fiction, or cli-fi for short, is trying to do exactly that. Writing stories about scientists, college students, corporations and politicians, who live in a significantly changed future due to climate change, they try to introduce us to the things to come. Well-known authors, including Margaret Atwood and Nathaniel Rich, are part of this new trend that might prove to be the missing link between climate science and climate action. 

When writing the cli-fi novel Back to the Garden, a story set around the end of the century, author Clara Hume was motivated by her desire to change people’s minds about climate change here and now:

I tried to imagine a credible future that would paint a picture different than our current world—in hopes that people would be inspired to respect nature now, given that a dystopian future would not be desirous. … I hope to entertain people with a good story about characters who are in the midst of being lost in a new world and who must work out their own losses, personal demons, and redemptions. The other hope is that readers will think harder about the choices we make today that will affect the planet tomorrow, and really are already affecting the planet.

Bridging the present and the future with a work of fiction is not an easy task. Asked about the importance of science for her writing, Hume emphasized that she used current scientific knowledge for her imagination, and also consulted scientists and experts who live in the place where she locates her story. Making a novel’s future scenario scientifically viable could be important if cli-fi authors seek to have social-political impacts. However, it is not hard to imagine that data – and the permanent desire for more scientific certainty – might get in the way of creative writing.

Hume seems at ease with uncertainty, which gives her and probably most creative writers a real advantage over scientists and policy-makers, who tend to worry about the not-yet-knowable. Here is what Hume thinks about the most likely trajectory of humanity and planet Earth:

So many variables will contribute to our future that it's tough to imagine exactly what it will be like. I use science news articles and books to understand the current thinking on the path of climate change. Combine this with our rapid resource extraction (including oil sands), natural resource depletion, pollution, erosion, dying fisheries/oceans, and human desire for wealth and convenience, I don't see any other destination than a far different world in the future. It will be bad in that many people will probably die due to starvation, disease, and other maladies caused by climate change and reduction of healthy natural resources, including water, air, forests, and land. Eventually, the positive might be that surviving humans might learn how to live within the limits of our ecological webs and nature might rebuild herself.

This is a pretty grim picture, yet, Hume remains optimistic that her book can make a difference:

I hope that I've written this book in such a way that people will come away not afraid but encouraged to do the right things for our planet.

We hope she is right. But does it work? Will a good summer read help us make better decisions about climate change? Can a story give you a sense of urgency? If you have read one that does, tell us about it!

We thank Clara Hume for answering our questions.