Climate science has earned a reputation as the “dismal science” of our time. Today, many people struggle with environmental science without feeling overwhelmed by dread. Climate fiction offers a powerful solution to this problem.
Climate science compares well to economics, which 19th century critic Thomas Carlyle called the “dismal science”, complaining that Thomas Malthus’ predictions of famine once too many people overwhelmed the food supply depressed him. It’s hard to read the newest climate science predictions with anything but alarm as the planet blows past the 1.5 degree boundary scientists say is a point of no return.
But what happens when you present climate change as entertaining movies and novels? Is it possible to create an engaging, even fun story out of the facts of a warming Earth that may become uninhabitable in the worst of the worse-case scenarios? I think so, because it may be the only way to get people to consider about our uncertain environmental future without being frozen by apprehension, even terror. It’s what I’ve tried to accomplish with my climate science fiction series, Tales From a Warming Planet.
Climate science fiction as entertainment
In the second book of the dystopian climate fiction series, Carbon Run, I imagined a villain who commands a submarine converted into an oil tanker. In the near-future world of Carbon Run, fossil fuels are illegal as society attempts to combat carbon emissions. Extracting oil and refining it into gasoline can land you in jail for many years, because the Earth cannot afford the carbon load in its atmosphere.
But the law has birthed a thriving, if dangerous illegal economy. Captain Gore (no relation to the former vice president), a former naval officer and now a dangerous pirate, has stolen a nuclear-powered submarine to carry crude from Hudsons Bay to a secret hideout on Russian territory, where the oil is refined into diesel for sale on the black market.
Not a happy chart of CO2 levels, but can we find a way to make the bad news easier to swallow?
Tackling existential dread
Writers and filmmakers have tackled the subject of existential dread for decades. I grew up during the Cold War, when everyone worried about nuclear bombs falling from the sky. The world came close to annihilation on several occasions, such as the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the US threatened to attack the Soviet Union when it put nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba.
Just a few years earlier, Nevil Shute published On the Beach, an early post-apocalyptic novel about the aftermath of a nuclear war. The book got the Hollywood treatment in 1959. The story’s characters face death as a radioactive cloud approaches them, which is an eerie echo of 21st century fears of an environmental catastrophe. The story does not have a happy ending.
Learning from Cold War storytelling
Meanwhile, creators managed to find humor in the struggle between communism and capitalism. I remember watching the movie “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!”, about a Soviet submarine grounding off the coast of New England. Fearing an international incident, the sub’s captain tries to keep the grounding a secret, but the locals discover the submarine, and they sound the alarm. The movie satirizes the often manufactured distrust between people who actually have a common interest, preventing a war and letting the world live in peace.
The entertainment value of any story, including climate science fiction, rests with the characters, and whether the reader is willing to spend their time getting to know them. In Carbon Run, the main protagonist, Anne Penn, is a young woman in rural Oregon who is close to her father, Bill Penn. When a fire destroys their house, embers land in a wildlife refuge, burning the last known breeding grounds of a rare bird. In her world, destroying the habitat of an endangered species is a serious crime, even accidentally.
Climate fiction as a tool for hope
Bill knows that the Bureau of Environmental Security, which strictly enforces environmental laws, will come after him, and he runs. Arrested as a material witness, Anne becomes an unwilling ally in an investigator’s search for Bill, and their journey takes them to the secret hideout of the oil pirates. Anne and her relationship to her father was inspired by my own two daughters, who will someday live in a world in which the climate, ecological and perhaps political, will be unfriendly.
Of course, climate change is serious business. On many days in the mid-2020s, I feel as if the planet is going backwards on the issue, at least my corner of it. Presenting climate change as entertainment helps us cope with the uncertainty. It shows us possible futures and offers the choice on whether to accept them or move in a different direction. Let’s hope that we make the right choices in the long run.
What do you think? Should we lighten up about the climate crisis?
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay