- 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 thank Clara Hume for answering our questions.
