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Act: Inspiration

Climate storytelling: creativity and imagination in the face of bleak realities.

By OreOluwa Badaki , originally published by Environmental Health News

September 23, 2021

Food sovereignty

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”

Octavia Butler  wrote this as an epigram for the never-published third book  of her  Parable Series: Parable of the Trickster . She did not live long enough to finish this work, but her words echo on. While she’s been considered a literary giant for decades, her work  has recently seen a resurgence  and many of  her books are being adapted for the screen  by some of the industry’s biggest stars. Apparently, something about a global health pandemic, racial justice reckonings, and impending climate doom has lots of people thinking that maybe Octavia Butler was on to something.

In addition to making  uncannily accurate predictions  about the world we currently live in, Butler invited us  to write ourselves into the worlds  we want to see. Right now, there’s a lot to be pessimistic about, to worry about, to want to ignore or wish away. For people of color, poor people, immigrants, and marginalized groups, however, just the chance to imagine better realities can itself be elusive and inaccessible. As Dr. Ebony Thomas puts it when reflecting on her own experience growing up as a Black girl in Detroit, “ the existential concerns of our family, neighbors, and city left little room for Neverlands, Middle-Earths, or Fantasias .” One must face “reality” in order to survive.

But what would it look like for us to “write ourselves in” to new realities? Perhaps under “new suns”?

This essay is part of “Agents of Change” — see the full series

This was the sort of question that youth interns at Philadelphia’s Sankofa Community Farm were presented with in the summer of 2019. Sankofa is a community-driven farm with a focus on youth development and engagement, with internship programs that offer local youth the opportunity to engage in intergenerational learning about urban agriculture and food sovereignty. I joined as a community gardener a couple of years ago and began supporting the youth programming soon after. On a summer day in 2019, interns were in a workshop discussing what literary genres like speculative fiction and Afrofuturism could offer food justice and climate activism efforts. They were also invited to write their own stories.

I was  technically  supposed to be there as an “outside observer” doing research. I was conducting qualitative observations and taking fieldnotes for an evaluation report for the farm. I was interested in the research, but I was also quietly fangirling over some of the stories the young people were sharing. My background as a language arts teacher, combined with my childhood aspirations of being a writer, made it impossible for me to see this experience as just something to write up for a report.

One story, about a young orphan on a spaceship who wakes up with seeds in her hair and no idea how they got there, caught my attention. Even as I continued writing the evaluation report, I kept thinking about the characters in this story and in others. I wanted to know how they were doing, what they wanted, where they were going. I wondered what it would look like to bring them to life.

As youth climate activist Mitzi Jonelle Tan writes, “ we need a new language to communicate about the climate crisis and justice — one that embraces creativity and culture “. She talks about how youth climate activists are leveraging the arts in ways that recognize their cultural histories as important guideposts for navigating the future. Hearing stories from youth writers at Sankofa sparked an interest in how creative storytelling about space and time travel can help reclaim and remix historical narratives and call into existence reasons for hope in the face of terribly bleak realities.

Creative writing and food justice

Fast forward two years and I’m co-facilitating a Food Justice Writing workshop with two of the youth interns who wrote the story about the girl with seeds in her hair. With help and guidance from local artists and storytellers, and support from local arts and research organizations, we have embarked on our fist collaborative piece: a speculative fiction screenplay that centers on the history and relevance of okra in Black food traditions and histories. Okra is one of the botanical connections to the African continent that enslaved peoples brought with them. It has stood the test of time, becoming a staple in African diasporic cuisines, and a vehicle for Afro-Indigenous culinary and agricultural traditions, across the globe. Prominent food scholars and activists have written about its significance  in their personal family histories , in our  national culinary history , as well as in  our botanical and agricultural history . The  Food Justice Writing Group  brings together what we are learning from stories like these, and from our own experiences with the land, food, and community, to write ourselves into the worlds we want to create. It’s a lot of fun, and a lot of work.

Interested in our screenplay? Below is the edited audio from a table read of our first scene. I hope you enjoy the low budget sound effects as much as we enjoyed making them.

Agents of Change in Environmental Justice  ·  Story Of Ada from the Food Justice Writing Group: Scene 1

If you took the three and half minutes to listen to the (very rudimentary) table read, are you on the edge of your seats?! We hope so, but it’s ok if you’re not. As much as we want this story to connect with and captivate audiences, this project is just as much about the process as it is about the product. We excavate the intricacies of our own lived realities to add depth, weight, and texture to the imagined universe that Ada, our main character, occupies. As we write, we learn about composition, storytelling, research, the film industry, climate change, teamwork, food justice, and more.

Creativity in climate communication and education

There is significant interest in creative approaches to climate storytelling. Within the film industry, Doc Society and Exposure Labs recently collaborated on a  Climate Story Lab  to facilitate global partnerships and create resources that support compelling and imaginative storytelling around infrastructure, policy, advocacy, and education for climate justice.

The Black List, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Redford Center have recently created a  Climate Storytelling Fellowship ,  which, among other things, aims to promote a strand of climate storytelling that shows “alternative futures, beyond the cliches of climate disaster/dystopia.” The Redford Center also launched a  learning and storytelling initiative  that invites students and educators to collaborate on stories that elevate visions for “a more just, hopeful, healthy world.”

Opening possibilities to explore alternative futures is an important step for climate and environmental education. While not a panacea, opportunities to engage in speculative fiction writing, or any sort of imaginative writing, can help readers  better understand the complexity of climate change , support teacher confidence  in working towards education for sustainable development goals , provide a safe space for learners  to rethink and challenge current structures , and help mitigate the  burden of despair young people sometimes experience with increased knowledge of climate change.

Not new, and not an escape

climate strike

Philly youth climate strike. (Credit: OreOluwa Badaki)

The creative search for “new suns,” perhaps paradoxically, isn’t new at all. Octavia Butler published her first novel back in the 1970’s. Around the same time, across the Atlantic, Ken Saro Wiwa was using satire to  challenge corrupt environmental policies instigated by the national government and large multinational organizations.  Indigenous peoples across the globe have used storytelling to pass down knowledge of the natural world as well as to present alternative futures for centuries. We have had this ancient technology, that both roots us in deeper understandings of our lived realities and transports us to realities we may never see, for a very long time.

This long tradition has taught us that “finding new suns” is not always about an escape. While developing Ada’s story, one of the youth writers in our group reminded us that even if we find another planet to flee to if this one is rendered uninhabitable, we’ll still be human, which means there’s just as much of a chance that we will let the worst parts of ourselves get the best of us and continue to wreak havoc wherever we go. Already,  “billionaire space races”  are showing that inequity and injustice are galactic phenomena, and scientists and storytellers alike have warned us that there is still so much work to be done here if we are to keep ourselves from replicating these problems elsewhere.

Building Ada’s world, therefore, is not about finding new realities so that we can absolve ourselves of the mistakes we have made. Nor is it about ignoring the science and the truth of the world we live in. Dr. Kathleen Gallagher writes of “creative resilience,” through which young people can create  “an imagined world in order to understand the very real, material one we occupy.”  In order to write creatively about food cultivation, climate change, and social justice, we need to understand how they operate in the world we live in. Imagining a better future, therefore, requires keen and purposeful observations of the present. It requires science.

Our story is still being written. Metaphorically this may be true for us all, but I mean this quite literally in the context of the Food Justice Writing Group. We still don’t have a title yet and we don’t know exactly where Ada’s story will take us — whether it will help us better understand the sun that already sustains us, help us find new suns, or a combination of both. We also still have like 30 scenes to complete…collaborative writing takes time. Maybe we’ll finish the script, maybe we won’t. Maybe it will get turned into a big Hollywood blockbuster (low-key shameless plug here) and maybe it won’t, but the point is that we keep writing, we keep imagining, we keep learning, and we keep working to make this reality, here and now, a better version of itself.

creative writing about climate change

OreOluwa Badaki is a Ph.D. Candidate and Instructor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. OreOluwa is a lead researcher with the Southwest and West Agricultural Group in Philadelphia, and recently served as Co-Director for the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She might be reached at  [email protected]  or  @OreOluwaBadaki .

This essay was produced through the  Agents of Change in Environmental Justice  fellowship. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.

Banner photo: Youth writers in working on journal entries before the start of a Food Justice Writing Group session. (Credit: OreOluwa Badaki)

OreOluwa Badaki

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Another tool in the fight against climate change: storytelling

Stories may be the most overlooked climate solution of all.

  • Devi Lockwood archive page

conversations concept

It might sound strange to think of storytelling as a climate solution, but after spending five years documenting 1,001 voices on climate change in 20 countries, I believe one of the most powerful forms of climate action is to listen deeply to people already affected by the crisis. To ensure that solutions actually help communities most at risk, we must first hear their stories. 

Climate change is an environmental justice issue. The people most harmed by the problem are often those least at fault. Solutions that ignore people already living with the impacts of climate change—most of whom live in the Global South—risk perpetuating the same systemic inequality that delivered this mess to their doorsteps in the first place. 

There is a lot of shouting about climate change, especially in North America and Europe. This makes it easy for the rest of the world to fall into a kind of silence—for Westerners to assume that they have nothing to add and should let the so-called “experts” speak. But we allneed to be talking about climate change and amplifying the voices of those suffering the most. 

Climate science is crucial, but by contextualizing that science with the stories of people actively experiencing climate change, we can begin to think more creatively about technological solutions.

This needs to happen not only at major international gatherings like COP26, but also in an everyday way. In any powerful rooms where decisions are made, there should be people who can speak firsthand about the climate crisis. Storytelling is an intervention into climate silence, an invitation to use the ancient human technology of connecting through language and narrative to counteract inaction. It is a way to get often powerless voices into powerful rooms. 

That’s what I attempted to do by documenting stories of people already experiencing the effects of a climate in crisis. 

In 2013, I was living in Boston during the marathon bombing. The city was put on lockdown, and when it lifted, all I wanted was to go outside: to walk and breathe and hear the sounds of other people. I needed to connect, to remind myself that not everyone is murderous. In a fit of inspiration, I cut open a broccoli box and wrote “Open call for stories” in Sharpie. 

I wore the cardboard sign around my neck. People mostly stared. But some approached me. Once I started listening to strangers, I didn’t want to stop. 

That summer, I rode my bicycle down the Mississippi River on a mission to listen to any stories that people had to share. I brought the sign with me. One story was so sticky that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for months, and it ultimately set me off on a trip around the world.

“We fight for the protection of our levees. We fight for our marsh every time we have a hurricane. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.” 

I met 57-year-old Franny Connetti 80 miles south of New Orleans, when I stopped in front of her office to check the air in my tires; she invited me in to get out of the afternoon sun. Franny shared her lunch of fried shrimp with me. Between bites she told me how Hurricane Isaac had washed away her home and her neighborhood in 2012. 

Despite that tragedy, she and her husband moved back to their plot of land, in a mobile home, just a few months after the storm.

“We fight for the protection of our levees. We fight for our marsh every time we have a hurricane,” she told me. “I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.” 

Twenty miles ahead, I could see where the ocean lapped over the road at high tide. “Water on Road,” an orange sign read. Locals jokingly refer to the endpoint of Louisiana State Highway 23 as “The End of the World.” Imagining the road I had been biking underwater was chilling.

Devi with sign

Here was one front line of climate change, one story. What would it mean, I wondered, to put this in dialogue with stories from other parts of the world—from other front lines with localized impacts that were experienced through water? My goal became to listen to and amplify those stories.

Water is how most of the world will experience climate change. It’s not a human construct, like a degree Celsius. It’s something we acutely see and feel. When there’s not enough water, crops die, fires rage, and people thirst. When there’s too much, water becomes a destructive force, washing away homes and businesses and lives. It’s almost always easier to talk about water than to talk about climate change. But the two are deeply intertwined.

I also set out to address another problem: the language we use to discuss climate change is often abstract and inaccessible. We hear about feet of sea-level rise or parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but what does this really mean for people’s everyday lives? I thought storytelling might bridge this divide. 

One of the first stops on my journey was Tuvalu, a low-lying coral atoll nation in the South Pacific, 585 miles south of the equator. Home to around 10,000 people, Tuvalu is on track to become uninhabitable in my lifetime. 

In 2014 Tauala Katea, a meteorologist, opened his computer to show me an image of a recent flood on one island. Seawater had bubbled up under the ground near where we were sitting. “This is what climate change looks like,” he said. 

“In 2000, Tuvaluans living in the outer islands noticed that their taro and pulaka crops were suffering,” he said. “The root crops seemed rotten, and the size was getting smaller and smaller.” Taro and pulaka, two starchy staples of Tuvaluan cuisine, are grown in pits dug underground. 

Tauala and his team traveled to the outer islands to take soil samples. The culprit was saltwater intrusion linked to sea-level rise. The seas have been rising four millimeters per year since measurements began in the early 1990s. While that might sound like a small amount, this change has a dramatic impact on Tuvaluans’ access to drinking water. The highest point is only 13 feet above sea level.

A lot has changed in Tuvalu as a result. The freshwater lens, a layer of groundwater that floats above denser seawater, has become salty and contaminated . Thatched roofs and freshwater wells are now a thing of the past. Each home now has a water tank attached to a corrugated-­iron roof by a gutter. All the water for washing, cooking, and drinking now comes from the rain. This rainwater is boiled for drinking and used to wash clothes and dishes, as well as for bathing. The wells have been repurposed as trash heaps. 

At times, families have to make tough decisions about how to allocate water. Angelina, a mother of three, told me that during a drought  a few years ago, her middle daughter, Siulai, was only a few months old. She, her husband, and their oldest daughter could swim in the sea to wash themselves and their clothes. “We only saved water to drink and cook,” she said. But her newborn’s skin was too delicate to bathe in the ocean. The salt water would give her a horrible rash. That meant Angelina had to decide between having water to drink and to bathe her child.

The stories I heard about water and climate change in Tuvalu reflected a sharp division along generational lines. Tuvaluans my age—like Angelina—don’t see their future on the islands and are applying for visas to live in New Zealand. Older Tuvaluans see climate change as an act of God and told me they couldn’t imagine living anywhere else; they didn’t want to leave the bones of their ancestors, which were buried in their front yards. Some things just cannot be moved. 

Organizations like the United Nations Development Programme are working to address climate change in Tuvalu by building seawalls and community water tanks. Ultimately these adaptations seem to be prolonging the inevitable. It is likely that within my lifetime, many Tuvaluans will be forced to call somewhere else home. 

Tuvalu shows how climate change exacerbates both food and water insecurity—and how that insecurity drives migration. I saw this in many other places. Mess with the amount of water available in one location, and people will move.

In Thailand I met a modern dancer named Sun who moved to Bangkok from the rural north. He relocated to the city in part to practice his art, but also to take refuge from unpredictable rain patterns. Farming in Thailand is governed by the seasonal monsoons, which dump rain, fill river basins, and irrigate crops from roughly May to September. Or at least they used to. When we spoke in late May 2016, it was dry in Thailand. The rains were delayed. Water levels in the country’s biggest dams plummeted to less than 10% of their capacity—the worst drought in two decades.

“Right now it’s supposed to be the beginning of the rainy season, but there is no rain,” Sun told me. “How can I say it? I think the balance of the weather is changing. Some parts have a lot of rain, but some parts have none.” He leaned back in his chair, moving his hands like a fulcrum scale to express the imbalance. “That is the problem. The people who used to be farmers have to come to Bangkok because they want money and they want work,” he said. “There is no more work because of the weather.” 

family under sign in Nunavut

Migration to the city, in other words, is hastened by the rain. Any tech-driven climate solutions that fail to address climate migration—so central to the personal experience of Sun and many others in his generation around the world—will be at best incomplete, and at worst potentially dangerous. Solutions that address only one region, for example, could exacerbate migration pressures in another. 

I heard stories about climate-­driven food and water insecurity in the Arctic, too. Igloolik, Nunavut, 1,400 miles south of the North Pole, is a community of 1,700 people. Marie Airut, a 71-year-old elder, lives by the water. We spoke in her living room over cups of black tea.

“My husband died recently,” she told me. But when he was alive, they went hunting together in every season; it was their main source of food. “I’m not going to tell you what I don’t know. I’m going to tell you only the things that I have seen,” she said. In the 1970s and ’80s, the seal holes would open in late June, an ideal time for hunting baby seals. “But now if I try to go out hunting at the end of June, the holes are very big and the ice is really thin,” Marie told me. “The ice is melting too fast. It doesn’t melt from the top; it melts from the bottom.”

When the water is warmer, animals change their movement. Igloolik has always been known for its walrus hunting. But in recent years, hunters have had trouble reaching the animals. “I don’t think I can reach them anymore, unless you have 70 gallons of gas. They are that far now, because the ice is melting so fast,” Marie said. “It used to take us half a day to find walrus in the summer, but now if I go out with my boys, it would probably take us two days to get some walrus meat for the winter.” 

Marie and her family used to make fermented walrus every year, “but this year I told my sons we’re not going walrus hunting,” she said. “They are too far.”

Devi Lockwood is the Ideas editor at Rest of World and the author of 1,001 Voices on Climate Change .

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Turning Climate Crisis Stories Into Narrative of the Future, Changed but Still Beautiful

Turning Climate Crisis Stories Into Narrative of the Future, Changed but Still Beautiful

Writers Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams offer new perspectives on how to remake the world

By Alvin Powell, The Harvard Gazette

Stories can drive action, but perhaps the most damaging climate change story we can tell is the tall tale that we can simply opt for the stability and safety of the status quo, writer and activist  Rebecca Solnit  said Wednesday evening at Harvard’s Memorial Church.

That’s because there is no status quo, as the effects of climate change are multiplying around us, Solnit said. And those changes are going to keep coming — and worsening — regardless of the path we take. The choice is between the uncertainty of a transition from fossil fuels that results in more manageable changes or to continue on the path we’re on, fostering what are likely to be more sweeping and dangerous disruptions.

Solnit, the author of 24 books, including the recently released anthology “Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility,” spoke as part of  Harvard Divinity School ’s  Climate Justice Week,  designed to promote thinking around climate justice and highlight the roles that religion and spirituality play in the conversation. The event, “Stories Are Cages, Stories Are Wings — So What Stories Do We Tell About Climate?,” featured Solnit in conversation with  Terry Tempest Williams , Divinity School writer-in-residence, as well as a poetry reading and a musical performance of Beethoven.

“Like the chassis of a car or the framing of a house or the skeleton of our own body, assumptions lurk under the stories we tell, giving them their structure or limiting the shapes they can take,” Solnit said. “And one of the biggest, wrongest ones that seems to shape — or misshape — the collective imagination is this idea that there’s an option not to change, and that change is just something we should aspire to or demand, that there’s some sort of stability we can choose instead of changing everything.”

Solnit, who spoke for about 30 minutes and took questions afterward, was described by Williams as “singular, original, defiant, and loving.” Through her work, which spans human rights, women’s rights, the environment, and climate change, Solnit is “building a constituency for change,” Williams said. That effort is continuing with her latest book, “Not Too Late,” which seeks to combat climate change despair and defeatism with stories of hope and change.

Another damaging idea, Williams said in her talk, is that we have to have a perfect solution before we act. People hold up the promise of energy generation by nuclear fusion — the clean source that powers the sun — or of carbon capture and sequestration technology, which will permit continued fossil fuel burning by stripping and storing carbon dioxide from emissions, as ideals that will cause much less disruption to the current energy system.

But Solnit cautioned against letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Instead of waiting for those technologies to mature, she said, we should take advantage of the solutions available now. There has been a revolution in renewable energy in recent decades, with efficiency climbing and prices dropping for solar and wind power to the extent that wind is supplanting coal in the Texas energy grid on the basis of price alone.

Addressing climate change, she said, may best be viewed not as merely achieving a goal, but rather as embarking on a process, one that will best get us where we’re going if we start now, using the tools we have at hand. That means embracing renewables and widespread electrification and then adjusting as we go, as newer, better tools become available.

No solution is perfect, however, including renewable energy sources, which have been criticized because of the mining practices employed in extracting chemicals important for battery production to store the energy. While a real problem, that doesn’t invalidate a strategy that still has significantly lower impact than fossil fuel extraction, Solnit said.

“We don’t know how to get there, but we know to take the next step and the next step,” Solnit said, quoting E.L. Doctorow’s description of writing as an apt analogy: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

A key element of the trip into our climate-changed future, Solnit said, is that it should be taken together. Those who resist change would like us to focus on ourselves, on our individual carbon footprints, despairing of achieving broader change.

But Solnit said the complexity of the world’s natural systems means climate change is, by its nature, a problem of networks and connectedness. Viewing climate change as a collective problem requiring cooperation, imagination, and creativity, she said, gives us the power to devise solutions that lift up those who are disadvantaged in the present, like the billions of global poor, living in places most likely to feel climate-related impacts.

Solnit invoked the Japanese art of  kintsugi  as an analogy for the future. Kintsugi repairs broken pottery not to its original functionality or appearance, but rather uses golden glue to highlight the breaks, enhance the beauty, and transform the piece into something different, but nonetheless valuable.

“I think that there’s a tendency to think that when something is broken, all it will ever be is shards,” Solnit said. “I’ve used it as a metaphor: Life will happen to you. You won’t be young forever. Sorrow will carve its pattern on our face. If you live, if you love, you will lose. But it can still be beautiful, still be strong, and go forward. The bowl can still hold something. The person can still find beauty, find meaning, have strength.”

Today, Solnit said, we don’t need stories of “the climate crisis” so much as we need stories of meeting the crisis, stories that reframe our view of the decades to come in a way similar to reassembling broken ceramics into something else, something perhaps more beautiful.

“I say to you we are making a new world and I believe it can be, in crucial ways, a better one,” Solnit said.

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creative writing about climate change

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Climate Change and Creativity: Interview with Sally O’Reilly

Sally O’Reilly is a novelist and Senior Lecturer here at the Open University’s Department of English and Creative Writing, where her role as Media Lead has included editing this blog. Before Sally’s appointment as a Central Academic in 2014, she’d already worked here for many years as an Associate Lecturer. But Sally’s long relationship with the OU is about to evolve as she is now making the leap to fulltime writing. Ahead of her departure, Sally’s successor as Media Lead, Emma Claire Sweeney, has seized the opportunity to ask Sally about her recent research into climate change and creativity – an area where Sally hopes to continue collaborating with OU colleagues.

creative writing about climate change

And while, at first, I thought that trying to address these issues was something I must do outside my work and writing time, I saw eventually that writing creatively is directly related to the climate crisis, because writers can (perhaps) encapsulate what this means in human terms, and be part of a movement to reimagine the world.

I’ve talked about this in three videos recorded for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences:

Imaginative writing can seem like an adjunct, a ‘nice to have’, rather than being essential to society like (say) physics. But if you look at the way people turned to books, film and TV during the lockdown, you see how vital narrative is to everyone. So writing can both help people process what is going on, and help communicate the situation – but without pushing an overt ‘message’ because there we have another pitfall,  becoming polemical or seeming to preach.

Right now, I’m in the middle of a fascinating book called Being a Human by Charles Foster , which isn’t overtly about climate change, but about the way in which humans lived for many thousands of years, as Palaeolithic hunter gatherers. They lived long, healthy lives, their carbon footprint was zero and they produced visual art of stunning sophistication. Our view of modernity as being part of a post-Enlightenment process of constant improvement does not stand much scrutiny if you take the long view, and the despoliation of the planet is part of that. What’s particularly interesting about Foster, who is an extraordinary writer, a sort of modern William Blake , is that he bends genre in this book. Ostensibly, it’s creative nonfiction, but he brings in the ghost figures of a character named X and his son, spirits from the Palaeolithic age. His writing reminds me of both Ted Hughes and Alan Garner , the sense of the numinous in nature, the mystery in being. And Foster also embodies the meeting of scientific, empirical knowledge and creativity – he has studied veterinary medicine, he is barrister, and he has a wild imagination.

Emma: You curated this autumn’s Climate Change and Creativity series for the OU’s Contemporary Cultures of Writing research group. Tell us a bit more about this series.

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About Emma Claire Sweeney

2 responses to climate change and creativity: interview with sally o’reilly.

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A lovely interview that highlights the richness and diversity of Sally’s thinking. The three videos are excellent in the way in which they integrate discussion of a particular piece of literature with thoughts on real-world problems, showing the extent to which some books are prescient in imagining the future, while others point to ways of attending to the world around one in constructive ways. The suggestions for writing give those who wish to pursue them an opportunity to engage in the kind of thoughtful and dynamic feedback loop between outer world and inner concerns that has just been illustrated in the interview!

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Thank you so much for taking the time to comment so insightfully on this post and videos, Fiona. We’re so glad that Sally’s thoughts resonated with you.

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Creating a climate for fiction writing

Asu initiative will publish its 3rd anthology of climate fiction on earth day; international contest received submissions from around the globe.

Graphic illustration

Amanda Baldeneaux is living proof that a writer can create solid work under the most trying of circumstances.

Last spring she penned a powerful short story called “Invasive Species” while pumping milk for her infant daughter in the middle of the night.

“I actually wrote this story around 2 a.m.,” said Baldeneaux, a mother of two who lives in Denver. “If your child sleeps well and you have good inspiration and motivation, you can get some good writing done while pumping.”

Not only was it good writing, but “Invasive Species” netted Baldeneaux $1,000 in contest winnings and a spot in a new digital anthology sponsored by Arizona State University’s Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative . The initiative is a partnership between the Center for Science and the Imagination and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing .

Book Cover

"Everything Change, Volume III"

" Everything Change, Volume III ," an anthology featuring Baldeneaux and nine finalists from the initiative’s global climate fiction short story contest in 2020, will be released on April 22 to coincide with Earth Day .

Now in its third iteration, the international contest received 580 submissions from 77 different countries. This year’s guidelines asked writers to address how humans can live within Earth’s planetary boundaries at the individual, organizational, communitywide and societal levels.

According to Joey Eschrich, editor and program manager for the Center for Science and the Imagination, these literary works ranged from far-future tales of ambiguous utopian societies, to action-thriller yarns, weird and realistic fiction, fabulism and body horror.

“‘Invasive Species” impressed our judges because of its sharp, vividly drawn main character and its grounded vision of a near-future choked by environmental austerity,” Eschrich said of the 5,000-word short story. “Amanda is also clever and subtle in her use of metaphor and evocative imagery — from natural history museum dioramas frozen in time to towering brown clouds blocking our view of the horizon — to express the malaise and stubborn hope of facing a world in the midst of crisis and slow transformation.” 

Submissions were subject to multiple rounds of blind review by an editorial team that included experts on climate science, sustainability, creative writing and environmental literature, including Claire Vaye Watkins , a former Guggenheim Fellow.

Two other featured stories in "Everything Change, Volume III" are written by people connected to ASU: Jules Hogan, an MFA candidate who edits ASU’s  Hayden's Ferry Review , and Kathryn E. Hill, also an MFA graduate.

Baldeneaux said “Invasive Species” is about Viviana, an aspiring interior decorator working as a diorama painter and night nanny to pay for her father’s home-based intensive care. Her life is on pause to support his medical bills, including time off school and her own medical care and transition surgeries. As the city’s transportation systems shut down, Viviana has to navigate across town to reach her second job, finding her own forward momentum in a world stalled by the devastating impacts of climate change.

“I was nervous writing about a trans character because I’m not trans, and I didn’t want to infringe on a story that’s not my own,” said Baldeneaux, who donated a portion of her contest earnings to three organizations who advocate for trans rights and visibility. “But I also think that trans people exist in our world and they should be portrayed in fiction, movies and television series, and included and normalized in our society.”

Baldeneaux said “Invasive Species” was finalized in about three or four sessions and submitted an hour before the deadline. She said much of her writing focuses on climate change and sustainability. A previous short story she wrote on fracking was published in the Missouri Review in 2019.

“I think a lot about climate change and this contest just spoke to me because I had been thinking about the development of ‘Invasive Species’ for a few months,” said Baldeneaux, a poetry major from the University of Arkansas. “The contest was just motivation to put it down in some kind of form.”

More information about ASU Earth Month and a list of activities .

Top photo: An illustration of Amanda Baldeneaux’s “Invasive Species” by artist João Queiroz for "Everything Change, Volume III." This illustration shows the main character, Viviana, traveling on a city bus between jobs. Courtesy of the Center for Science and the Imagination.

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Blood Glacier and Creative Climate Storytelling for an Uncertain Future

Emily Denny

An eerie mountain landscape, a handful of jump-scares, and plenty of gore — “ Blood Glacier ” may seem like every other low-budget horror film. But it has another story to tell.

“In 2014 the last skeptics fall silent,” the film’s title card begins. “The climate disaster is worse than ever imagined… The consequences are unclear but we know one thing. Life on earth will change forever.”

Throughout the film, a team of scientists, government officials and a technician fight mutants at a research base in the Austrian Alps as a glacier oozes a mysterious red liquid that transforms local wildlife into deadly abominations.

 Scientists from the 2013 eco-horror “Blood Glacier'' approach a nearby glacier leaking a mysterious, red liquid.

The first time Christy Tidwell watched the film, she laughed. Tidwell is an associate professor at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology who studies science fiction and environmental humanities.

The film isn’t very good compared to other eco-horrors she’s seen, she admitted to GlacierHub in an interview. But its “badness” struck her curiosity, leading to her recent publication, titled “‘ We will change’: Deep past and uncertain future in Blood Glacier ,” in the journal Science Fiction Film and Television .

Although the film may not reflect the literal realities of climate change, it asks its audience to consider how their choices shape a future so fragile that even the world’s glaciers are no longer permanent, Tidwell explained.

“Blood Glacier” follows a growing trend toward telling creative stories about climate change. Fiction or nonfiction, stories about melting glaciers or coastal towns threatened by rising seas could offer a more emotional or engaging understanding of a warming world that science traditionally has not provided.

Discovering the Right Story to Tell

Matthew Tegelberg’s bookshelf is filled with climate fiction. The associate professor in the department of social science at York University spoke with GlacierHub on the growing body of climate fiction and the value it has in communicating the climate crisis. “Fiction invites the public into the world of science in ways that it is hard for the scientists to do themselves,” he said.

Tegelberg studies environmental communication, exploring how stories are told to people who don’t care or don’t know that climate change is a real problem. Fiction can inform the ways scientists and policymakers communicate about the climate crisis, he explained. “If science communicators can look at how fiction is done and find ways to build narratives that do the same for nonfiction, then we have a better chance at getting the action we need.”

Tidwell’s article echoes points to research co-authored by Tegelberg on how the media represents glacier retreat — a difficult phenomenon to communicate to the public, given its geographical distance and non-human time scale. The Emmy-award-winning documentary “ Chasing Ice ” is successful in this, Tegelberg explained. The film follows National Geographic photographer James Balog as he documents the effects of global warming on glacial ice using time-lapse photography.

The outlet from one of the great Greenland ice streams, where acceleration of melting has worrisome results. Credit: Spencer and Carole/Flickr

Stories about climate change often lean on what Tegelberg called “icons” of climate change, like a lone polar bear balancing on a melting iceberg, which distances the public from this reality due to how often this image is shared in mainstream media. Using time-lapse photography, however, brings an audience up close to the real impacts of a warming world, showing how much geological time is eroded from just a few hundred years of human activity.

But how do these creative climate stories, horror films and documentaries, turn into meaningful real-life action?

“Link them to lived realities,” Tegelberg answered. “We need to scale [stories] down to the local level and think about how these larger [climate] concepts are making their way to the community level.”

Climate Futures on the New Jersey Coast

Far from the Austrian Alp sits Asbury Park, New Jersey — the setting for David Eisenhauer’s storytelling and research. The researcher from Bennington College focuses on telling future stories about the coastal city to inform possible solutions to climate change impacts, like sea levels that are rising partly due to melting glaciers.

Asbury Park, which has a history of racial segregation and housing inequality, has experienced a recent upswing in development where luxury condos and fancy restaurants have moved in along the coast, pushing out low-income, minority residents, Eisenhauer explained to GlacierHub. One future climate story in Asbury Park imagines coastal flooding on the beachfront, making housing further off the coast more desirable and pushing low-income, minority residents further west and out of the city, he explained.

Asbury Park’s coastline

Climate storytelling can imagine a more desirable future for Asbury Park that attends to its history but addresses current concerns people are facing in the community. This story can impact how decision makers design a just and sustainable future in the coastal city.

But what does it mean when these future stories aren’t so hopeful?

Climate Storytelling in an Uncertain Future 

In the final few minutes of “Blood Glacier,” the main characters escape their research base in a helicopter, speechless and terrified. The climate disaster is far worse than they had imagined and an uncertain, grim future lies ahead.

In fiction there’s a danger in sensationalizing climate change, Tidwell explained, comparing “Blood Glacier” to Roland Emmerich’s “ The Day After Tomorrow ” — a 2004 film about a paleoclimatologist who warns the United Nations about superstorms but is largely ignored. In the film, a mega-hurricane sucks frozen air from space and literally chases the movie’s characters.

“Emmerich was really trying to say something [about climate change], but the [public’s] reaction was ‘That’s ridiculous, it’s not going to happen like this,’” Tidwell said. While eco-horrors could make climate change harder to take seriously, expecting it to offer real solutions to the crisis is asking the genre to do too much, she explained. “Blood Glacier” acknowledges that climate change is scary and evoking that emotion is what it can do uniquely well.

Eco-horrors also ask audiences to imagine new kinds of relationships between humans and the natural world, which can be both productive and valuable for climate communicators, Tidwell added.

The documentary “Chasing Ice” does something similar, raising questions about how the media can expand its own relationships with whose story it tells, like dedicating more resources and time to frontline communities that may not have access to time-lapse photography to tell their own climate stories, Tegelberg added.

Eisenhauer’s work also highlights new relationships in its storytelling, connecting the dots between the historical past, the present issues people are facing in Asbury Park, and the possible futures that they can work towards. By helping residents tell their own stories, this work helps them advocate for a more equitable city, he added. “Stories don’t solve everything, but having a story that makes all of these connections is really important,” he noted.

Whether it be eco-horror, a documentary, or nonfiction, storytelling “is about experience and emotion—the things that traditional science says we aren’t supposed to include,” Tidwell concluded. “It can’t do everything, but whatever it is doing, you get to feel that.”

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As the climate changes, climate fiction is changing with it, in four new novels set in the present and future, writers confront the contradictions of our climate-addled age..

creative writing about climate change

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A woman reads a book in Hyde Park April 21, 2018 in London, United Kingdom. Credit: Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images

Finding the Antidote to Climate Anxiety in Stories About Taking Action

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In a New Book, Annie Proulx Shows Us How to Fall in Love with Wetlands

Writer Annie Proulx at the Royal Theatre on January 27, 2014 in Madrid, Spain. Credit: Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images

The Art at COP27 Offered Opportunities to Move Beyond ‘Empty Words’

Egyptian-Lebanese artist Bahia Shehab stands inside her installation "Heaven and Hell in the Anthropocene," which raises awareness about climate issues on display at the COP27 climate summit in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, on November 14, 2022. Credit: Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images.

In his third autobiography, the famed abolitionist and author Frederick Douglass lingered on the impact of a novel that he deemed “a work of marvelous depth and power.” When “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published in 1852, Douglass wrote, “nothing could have better suited the moral and humane requirements of the hour. Its effect was amazing, instantaneous and universal.”

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” sold 1 million copies, inspired stage adaptations, songs and merchandise, and became wildly popular across the U.S. and the United Kingdom, where it sparked anti-slavery petitions and rallies. Southern writers were so incensed by its contents that they hurried to publish “Anti-Tom” novels defending slavery in response. Estimation of Uncle Tom’s influence hasn’t waned; writing in The New Yorker in 2011, the historian Annette Gordon-Reed called it “one of the most successful feats of persuasion in American history.”

Whether or not Abraham Lincoln really did refer to its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war” hardly matters: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” established a precedent for protest literature, setting the stage for reform-minded books like Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and showed what it was possible to achieve with a story, well-told.   

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Is it still possible for literature to change the world, or at least to change minds? For today’s writers of climate fiction, it’s a question that has never been more pressing. In 2022, unlike in Stowe’s 19th century, “novels don’t necessarily have the reach of a film or TV show,” said Amy Brady, the executive director at Orion Magazine and co-editor of a new anthology called “The World As We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate.” “But I think that climate fiction can get to people who wouldn’t otherwise think about climate change or want to talk about it.” 

The tools of fiction can be useful for forging connections with audiences who may feel distant from the frontlines of the climate crisis or who have trouble personalizing such a complicated, sprawling topic. “Climate fiction can help readers to be more empathetic,” Brady said, “and to see climate change as a part of larger global systems and a part of history” in a way that scientific studies and news articles may not. 

Fiction can also make threats that might otherwise seem amorphous or far-off feel immediate and visceral, turning the metaphorical into the real, if only on the page. In “Anthem,” which takes place in a dystopian near-future, author Noah Hawley starts a section titled “Now” with this chilling premise: “The summer our children began to kill themselves was the hottest in history.” 

The climate crisis, in “Anthem,” is one of many intractable problems fueling a global conflagration of teenage suicides, so many that society soon collapses into heartsick chaos, with weeping parents marching in the streets, desperate for a cure for their children’s despair. No one seems to realize that despair is born not only of the knowledge of the harm being done to the planet but of the shock that so little is being done by adults to rectify it. “Did grown-ups know this?” one of the protagonists wonders, after first learning about the dangers of global warming. 

The world of Sequoia Nagamatsu’s “How High We Go in the Dark” is somehow even darker than the violent, anarchic America the characters inhabit in “Anthem”; we spend a chapter at an amusement park created for the purpose of quickly and painlessly euthanizing kids. “How High We Go in the Dark” peers centuries into a future wrecked by climate plague, a virus unearthed in melting permafrost which kills children in unfathomable numbers. Both books transform an abstraction ( we are making the planet unsafe for future generations ) into a nauseating reality that is much harder to shrug off. Like George Orwell’s “1984,” these books offer a warped reflection of our present—and a warning about our future.

“Anthem” and “How High We Go in the Dark” share elements of sci-fi and fantasy, genres that were once the sole province of writers who wanted to explore climate change in fiction. In 2016, the novelist and essayist Amitav Ghosh posited that the 2010s could someday be known as “The Great Derangement,” his term for “a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing their plight.” Ghosh lamented the lack of serious engagement with climate change in literature, particularly outside of science fiction and fantasy, and predicted an “imaginative and cultural failure” if more writers did not act to fill the climate silence. 

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Perhaps because the effects of extreme weather have become increasingly hard to ignore, the literary landscape that Ghosh surveyed in 2016 has changed. In fact, climate fiction may someday cease to exist as a genre at all. “I believe that over time, the notion of climate fiction is going to go away,” Brady said. “To write a novel will be to talk about climate change because it’s the world in which we live. It affects every aspect of our lives, and increasingly so.” 

In a 2021 essay titled “Climate Crisis Is Here; So Is Climate Fiction. Don’t You Dare Call It a Genre,” the writer Lydia Millet makes a passionate case for realist climate fiction, intimate stories of ordinary life that unfold in the present day. “The climate crisis can’t and shouldn’t be relegated to the realm of make-believe,” she writes. “Because our literary grappling with that crisis…is a direct engagement with the real.”

Millet’s “Dinosaurs” is one example of this form of climate fiction, a quieter, quotidian story that follows Gil, a brokenhearted man who moves to Arizona and gets entangled in the lives of his neighbors, both human and not. Gil is well aware of what the climate crisis has wrought; he can see and feel its repercussions all around him. Like so many of us, he is still “performing small tasks. Planning his own minor life. As though there were no emergency in sight.” 

Gil’s preoccupation with—and affection for—the birds who live and die in his backyard becomes the reader’s, too. Birds in this novel are a symbol of nature’s fragility and its resilience; after all, birds are descendants of the survivors of the last mass extinction. “Without the last of the dinosaurs,” Gil says to himself, “the sky would be empty.” Near the end of the novel, Gil asks birds for their help, a flight of fantasy as he casts around for answers. “If only the birds would take up the fight,” he thinks, a fight that is about our survival as much as theirs. Eventually, he has to face the truth about the animals he has come to love. They have “no hands to write with. Or hold weapons. And no words at all.”

Fiction can furnish us with possibilities and scenarios and dreams; it can imagine worlds and futures; build hellscapes and utopias; focus our attention and open our eyes; invite speculation and wonderment and horror. It can show us many paths, but it cannot tell us which one to choose; it cannot solve the riddle of our own inaction. In “Companion Piece,” Ali Smith’s strange, beguiling novel, the kind of book, like Millet’s, where the tremors of climate collapse hum in the background of the plot like eerie hold music, the narrator responds to a young girl who is clamoring for solutions. It’s clear that she may also be understood as a stand-in for the author, speaking directly to her anxious readers. “A story is never an answer,” she says, matter-of-factly. “A story is always a question.”

creative writing about climate change

Kiley Bense

Reporter, pennsylvania.

Kiley Bense covers climate change and the environment with a focus on Pennsylvania, politics, energy, and public health. She has reported on the effects of the fracking boom in Pennsylvania, the expansion of the American plastics industry, and the intersection of climate change and culture. Her previous work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, the Believer, and Sierra Magazine, and she holds master’s degrees in journalism and creative writing from Columbia University. She is based in Pennsylvania.

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Climate activist Greta Thunberg, marching in Stockholm in June 2022, was inspired in part by gun control protests led by students who survived the Parkland shooting in Florida in 2018. Credit: Jonas Gratzer/Getty Images.

By Kiley Bense

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Climate Creativity: The power of the word to tackle the climate emergency

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Culture has a vital role in framing our understanding of the climate crisis and addressing how society can start to tackle it. In an online workshop as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2021, Dr Philip Seargeant, Dr Nessa O'Mahony and Dr Anne Caldwell (The Open University) guided participants in discussions about what 'Climate Creativity' looks like, how creative writing and language play a role and how we can use our own creativity to bring about change, giving people the chance to engage with cultural attitudes to climate change through discussion, reflection and creative writing.

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Writers Confront Climate Crisis

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creative writing about climate change

‘ Cli-fi ’ might not save the world, but writing it could help with your  eco-anxiety

creative writing about climate change

Lecturer in Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne

creative writing about climate change

Associate Lecturer, Creative Writing, Flinders University

creative writing about climate change

Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing, Flinders University

Disclosure statement

This research receives funding from Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia.

Alex Cothren and Amy T Matthews do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

Flinders University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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The consequences of climate change weigh on all of us, especially as we face an El Niño summer, with floods and fires already making themselves felt in the Australian environment.

But even outside of being directly affected, there is evidence that mere awareness of climate change can be detrimental to your mental health and wellbeing . Terms such as “ climate change anxiety ”, “ eco-anxiety ” and “ solastalgia ” are regularly used to describe the negative emotional states created by thinking and worrying about climate change and environmental destruction.

If just knowing about climate change is emotionally difficult, what is it like spending years focusing on and writing about the topic? Research has looked at the emotional impact close engagement with climate change can have on groups such as climate scientists and climate activists .

But little time has been given to writers of climate fiction, or “cli-fi” – a relatively new genre of fiction focused on climate change.

What can a genre do?

Cli-fi has been touted as one of the ways to help save the world, with an emphasis on how imagining our future might make us reconsider our relationship to the natural world.

creative writing about climate change

Fictions in this genre have primarily imagined dystopian worlds where the very worst has happened and humanity is (often barely) surviving in flooded or desolate wastelands. These apocalyptic visions are meant to serve as warnings, to galvanise us to action, making sure this bleak future doesn’t happen.

This seems a good idea in theory, but do dystopian fictions help us engage with the climate crisis? An empirical study of the effects of climate fiction on readers’ attitudes or actions found little evidence that those who read cli-fi have a stronger engagement with environmental concerns.

There has been some discussion of the influence of these books on readers . But perhaps the value is not in the reading, but in the writing? Might writing provide emotionally supportive strategies for all of us? Can the act of writing itself counter “eco-anxiety”?

Read more: Can 'cli-fi' actually make a difference? A climate scientist's perspective

Waking in the night

creative writing about climate change

We talked to 16 Australian and New Zealand authors of “cli-fi” , including James Bradley , Mireille Juchau and Jennifer Mills . Their responses made it clear that writing about a climate-changed future does more than bring up the anticipated negative emotions.

Of course, sitting with the climate crisis is challenging. It demands we wrestle with guilt, shame, responsibility, rage and despair. Writers of climate fiction are often drawn to the genre because they are already thinking about the climate and feeling anxious.

Clare Moleta said her climate anxiety was “a bit more concentrated” while writing her novel Unsheltered , but also that the manifestations of this anxiety were familiar to her:

I had waking patches in the night over that time, where I’d be very intensely imagining something and grieving it […] But to be fair, I do that anyway.

But many of the writers spoke of the writing process as helping, not exacerbating, their anxiety. For some, writing about climate change gave them a sense of purpose. Jennifer Mills, whose cli-fi novel Dyschronia was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2019, stated that “having a book to write gives you something to do. [It] makes you feel like you have some power over the events that are happening around you.”

Climate fiction can be a method of transforming anxiety into something useful. Miles Allinson says that “writing about my own fear put that fear to use, in a way that was, if not comforting, then at least energising”. He argues for the therapeutic aspect of imagining and writing one’s worst fears:

Sometimes when you turn towards something and start to live it, with all its difficulties and mystery, then something changes […] It’s actually not as hard as you sometimes think it will be. It’s sometimes more terrifying to close your eyes, I have found.

James Bradley, author of several works of speculative fiction, including Clade and Ghost Species , observed that the

process of imagining demands you to think about what happens next […] To imagine the complexity of the lived experience of what lies ahead, and to insist that life will go on and history will keep happening.

While peering into our climate-changed future can be emotionally difficult, Kate Mildenhall said it can help prepare us for what is to come:

We have to imagine ten years in the future and we have to imagine 50 years in the future. And if we do that, we are forearmed and we also begin to make small changes immediately, we don’t even know we’re making them, just to move towards or away from that future.

Imagining our future lives can offer a sense of hope. We are currently living with bushfires, floods, pandemics and the extreme challenges of the climate crisis; the future is our present and the ways we think about it will dictate the ways we act and cope.

creative writing about climate change

Read more: Writing can improve mental health – here's how

Theraputic benefits

Approaching writing about climate change as a process, rather than thinking about writing as a product produced by professional authors, is a new method for alleviating climate anxiety.

The mental health and wellbeing benefits of creative writing have been established. Studies have explored how writing can reduce anxiety in those affected by natural disasters . Much of the research in this area focuses on expressive writing or other similar therapeutic-focused techniques that produce quickly written and usually insular work, not intended for an audience.

creative writing about climate change

This is different from the experiences of the writers interviewed here. Yet, as the writers quoted here have shown, the imaginative process of crafting fictional narratives about difficult topics comes with its own benefits.

In discussing their findings from one of the few studies to focus on the wellbeing effect of writing fictional narratives , Catherine Deveney and Patrick Lawson state: “it is in the craft of writing, the combination of technique and emotional catharsis, that some of the therapeutic benefits of writing can be found”.

We tend to think of writing as a professional activity, but it is an art form practised by amateurs as well as professionals. The 2022 National Arts Participation Survey found that one in seven Australians engage in creative writing. The value of such writing is more than its end product.

We need to shift from worrying about the effects of cli-fi texts to thinking about the benefits of writing creatively as we imagine our possible futures . As Mireille Juchau observes, the sense of control when writing on a difficult topic

helps to manage anxiety […] Whether it’s climate change, or something else, when I’m preoccupied, writing helps put some order into the chaos.
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6 Essential Texts of Climate Change Written By Women

(but first, read the national climate assessment).

For many of us, climate change is a broad topic that affects so many environmental systems that it’s difficult to grasp exactly how it works—particularly when you factor in phenomena that contribute to climate change, such as melting sea ice and permafrost, or forest loss in the Amazon. The US Global Change Research Program has done a great job of making their recent National Climate Assessment accessible to all users—you can browse overview data or look at information for a specific region. They even have interactive graphs to show what drives climate change.

But to make the most of this critical next decade and address the global warming crisis, we need to learn as much as we can about climate-related problems and figure out what can and can’t be done to address them. An approach centered on individual experience and knowledge will make these issues more manageable for everyone.

We must also keep in mind who is most affected by climate change. As Kathleen Dean Moore writes in Great Tide Rising , “The burdens of climate change—hunger and thirst, poisoned air and water, inundation, disruption, and wars—are imposed disproportionately on the world’s poorest communities and those that are the least responsible for its effects.” This makes our responsibility to address climate change even more urgent.

I recommend the following six books by women writing about climate change. I’ve chosen women writers because they are often overlooked when it comes to popular science writing. Additionally, they provide a diverse perspective on the climate issues they address. They tackle a range of problems, from sea level rise and species extinctions, to conservation and our ethical duties in the climate change era. These books not only provide scientific background about what’s happening, they also discuss the steps communities and individuals are taking to better manage environmental systems, and to become more resilient to climate change.

creative writing about climate change

Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Bloomsbury USA)

Kolbert is a seasoned journalist, and this book was one of the first to collate international studies about climate change. She provides a brief summary of the history of climate change research, then gives an overview of where and how climate change is being observed: melting permafrost, record melt on the Greenland Ice Sheet, changes in sea ice, shifts in ocean currents, the increasing number and intensity of hurricanes, etc. What’s interesting is comparing what was happening in climate policy and climate science in 2004-2005, while Kolbert was researching for this book, to today. The information and urgency around climate change were present even then, with then-Senator John McCain quoted as saying “This is clearly an issue that we will win over time because of the evidence.” Twelve years later, it doesn’t seem as though we’ve made much headway, and there are many people who still don’t believe that evidence.

creative writing about climate change

Elizabeth Rush, Rising : Dispatches from the New American Shore (Milkweed Editions)

Rising focuses on a single aspect of climate change: sea level rise. Rush, an environmental journalist and writer, travels to coastal communities around the United States to see how they are faring with sea level rise and increasingly fierce hurricanes that drive salt water further onshore. This is narrative nonfiction at its best. Rush not only explains the science of sea level rise and the ways in which coastlines can be made more resistant to climate change. She also connects personally with people in flood zones, many of them economically or racially marginalized. She intersperses their first-person stories of flooding and disaster with her own reporting, covering the constant “nuisance flooding” in Florida, caused by increasing sea level and low-lying land; and the relocation of a community hit by Hurricane Sandy, who asked for—and received—government help to move further inland and demolish their old homes so that the shoreline would no longer be populated. She also exposes the problems inherent in regulatory programs like the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), that “require [those with insurance] to rebuild in place, even when that place has been underwater repeatedly in the past.”

creative writing about climate change

Sandra Postel, Replenish : The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity (Island Press)

If you can get past the title of this book (the terms “virtuous” and “prosperity” kind of threw me), it’s an excellent read. Postel, a former Freshwater Fellow of the National Geographic Society and director of the Global Water Policy Project, takes a global look at several aspects of the hydrologic cycle (surface water, groundwater, soil water) and the ways in which water is used (irrigation, human consumption, etc.). She balances much of the negative news about our water resources with stories about people who are doing things differently and have created cross-disciplinary community groups to manage water more sustainably. Each chapter takes on a key issue and then provides an example of what’s being done to address it. In the last chapter of the book, however, Postel notes that the kind of freshwater stewardship she has been describing must yield results, and so far it hasn’t. “At best, it’s one step forward, two steps back. But here and there, we’re making progress.”

creative writing about climate change

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt and Co.)

While Kolbert’s first book was about climate change, her second—which won a Pulitzer Prize—is about extinction. She devotes a lot of space at the beginning of the book explaining how the idea of extinction first came about. This is critical because it contextualizes the sixth extinction, which is happening right now because of human activity. She explains how climate change is causing species to shift up in both elevation and latitude, and that species that aren’t mobile are slowly dying out. Other species are out-of-sync with their ecosystem, finding that, for example, the flowers they rely on for sustenance are flowering earlier, so they arrive too late to get enough food. Ocean species are affected by acidification caused by CO2 absorption. Other species—both plant and animal—are succumbing to diseases and pests that are more prevalent in a warming wold (for example, the mountain pine beetle). Some of the scientists Kolbert interviewed estimated that, if all species were able to move with warming (i.e., “universal dispersal”), “with the minimum warming projected, 9 to 13 percent of all species would be “committed to extinction” by 2050. With maximum warming, the numbers would be 21 to 32 percent.” And this is just an estimate.

creative writing about climate change

Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (Bloomsbury USA)

In this provocative book, science writer Emma Marris explores conservation—of spaces and species—in the context of climate change. She argues that no place in the world is “pristine” because climate change has affected even the backcountry regions of our favorite national parks. The notion of a “pristine” wilderness is a bit of a red herring, as conservationists more often speak of nature as being wild rather than pristine. Marris discusses an example from British Columbia, where foresters are re-planting clearcuts with seedlings that are expected to survive in the biogeoclimatic ecosystem (BEC) zone those regions will turn into in the future—a process called “assisted migration.”

Marris also suggests we embrace exotic/invasive species that appear in our area because of climate change, and that we support “novel ecosystems” (those altered by human activity but not actively managed), particularly if they are interacting as a complex ecosystem and providing key ecosystem services. She also advocates for accepting green or wild spaces in urban areas as functioning ecosystems. This perspective in particular has taken off in the past five years, with an increasing number of scientists studying urban ecology. Marris writes, “I think we should keep lots of land unmanaged just to see what it does, to keep those evolutionary fires burning, and to ensure that future generations might still be able to get lost.”

creative writing about climate change

Kathleen Dean Moore, Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change (Counterpoint)

It’s one thing to understand the science behind climate change, sea level rise, freshwater challenges, species extinctions, and conservation of biotic systems. It’s another thing to consider our moral responsibility to maintaining these processes, instead of mortgaging our children’s future for our own comfort in the present. Moore, a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University, taps into her own experiences at both her Alaska cabin and her Oregon home to outline a moral and ethical approach to our responsibilities re: climate change. Moore argues that: “climate change is a violation of human rights . . . a crisis of the imagination . . . [and] a crisis of character.” She outlines “reasons for saving the world,” and notes that she and a group of 23 colleagues drafted The Blue River Declaration , which starts with: “A truly adaptive civilization will align its ethics with the ways of the Earth.” One thing that stands out about this Declaration—and the book itself—is how many people it will really reach. Who even knows about the Declaration? Who is thinking about the moral issues around climate change? While Moore skillfully weaves personal experience with philosophical approaches to sustainable living on planet Earth, I suspect her audience is limited to the privileged few, and will likely not reach the marginalized people most affected by climate change.

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A Story for the Climate Crisis: raising awareness through creative writing

This lesson plan is based on a lesson originally given by our Change Makers Ambassador, Harry Waters, as part of our series of live lessons for students. It introduces key themes around sustainability and the climate crisis through a host of creative writing (and drawing) activities that engage young learners with serious topics in a fun way. 

Topic : Sustainability Age : Primary Level : A2

Please click on the links below to download all the materials you need for this lesson. 

  • Student Worksheet
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BACK TO ADVANCING FUTURES

creative writing about climate change

9 powerful stories about climate change

A car emerging from smoke

By Corinna Keefe — Contributing Writer

Climate change: two small words that represent a radical transformation of our planet, billions of data points, millions of climate scientists and campaigners, and a limitless number of stories from around the world. 

Climate change stories are the best tools we have to help people understand the climate emergency and take action — whether you have research to share, work for a non-profit, or shape government policy to reduce carbon emissions and fossil fuel use.

But we still face the barriers of misinformation, apathy, climate denial, and slow-moving responses. As the effects of climate change begin to be felt, engaging science communication has literally become a matter of life or death. When we tell climate change stories, we need to reach people on an intellectual and emotional level, using all the digital storytelling tricks at our disposal. 

In this piece, we celebrate some of the best climate change stories on the web. We look at what makes them work, and how you can tell stories about our changing climate that will make a difference. 

What do the BBC, Tripadvisor, and Nature have in common? They craft stunning, interactive web content with Shorthand. And so can you! Publish your first story for free — no code or web design skills required. Sign up now.

Storytelling and climate change

Windmills on the sea.

Scientists, policy-makers, and campaigners have already learned that the bare facts are not enough. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate reports — which model rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide to limit warming below two degrees celsius — have been well reported. 

People can be shocked or scared by data — but they are rarely moved, inspired, or excited. 

But climate change stories (with data to back them up) can influence people towards climate action. Engaging feature stories with an emotional appeal and human interest can have real impact.

Screenshots from a climate change story from Pioneer's Post

The vast majority of people these days are aware of global warming, often from seeing the impacts of climate change in their own lives — from heat waves to extreme weather events. They’re just not sure how to respond. When you tell a story about climate action, you offer a guide for people who want to help in the fight against climate change.

Science communication and climate change stories

Scientists in the arctic researching climate change.

We’ve known about the climate emergency for decades. But it’s taken some time for science communication and data journalism to catch up. 

A lot of climate research and data remains closed off to the public. It appears behind paywalls, written in complex academic language, and often presented as inaccessible scholarly publications. The science itself might be thrilling — but the communication leaves something to be desired. 

That approach is no longer good enough, for several reasons:

  • Most scientific research is ultimately funded by the public. So it should be accessible to the public, too.
  • Poor science communication slows down climate action, because people don’t understand the research or simply don’t hear about it. 
  • We know that different people process information in different ways — whether they’re visual, aural, or even kinaesthetic learners. Visual storytelling and creative science comms are completely valid ways to present research. “Serious” doesn’t have to mean “Times New Roman, 12pt, black and white”.

Screenshots from a climate change story from MSC.

When scientists and climate campaigners go the extra mile to tell climate change stories, they get results. Opening up data to the public, using images and video, and finding a human angle to research can all make a big difference.

In an article for The Conversation , communications expert Kamyar Razavi identified several key elements of effective climate change stories.

  • Clear communication of the facts about global warming. Data storytelling is a key part of climate stories.
  • An appeal to readers’ emotions, both positive and negative. Fear, grief, and anger are all appropriate responses to the climate emergency; but hope, determination, and wonder can be even more motivating. 
  • Everyday protagonists that readers can recognise and relate to. Stories about local people taking action on local problems are often the most inspirational.
  • Open and honest communication about the impacts of climate change and the challenges ahead. 

With those elements in mind, we’ve picked out 9 climate change stories which are examples of great science comms. They’re taken from news sites, NGOs, universities, and governments. Most importantly, they’re creative, memorable, emotional, and use all the features of digital storytelling to engage readers.

9 powerful climate change stories

A ruined forest after a fire

Glasgow: the last best hope to fight climate change (BBC)

This article brought the COP26 climate conference into focus by looking at the climate crisis from the perspective of the conference’s host city: Glasgow. The story of this industrial powerhouse is also the story of how human activity has transformed the environment and the climate.

The feature is illustrated with photographs from throughout Glasgow’s history. As you scroll down, black-and-white images from the last century are replaced with colourful images of the city today. Close-ups of antique paintings and modern blueprints show how people have imagined Glasgow’s future over time. 

And, like the most effective climate change stories, the feature offers hope as well as a clear appraisal of the challenges ahead. 

Example of a climate change story from the BBC.

Down under: the community most-exposed to sea-level rise is also one of the poorest (Stuff)

The opening paragraphs of this climate change feature read like a true-crime story. 

And according to some residents of Dunedin, that’s exactly what it is.

Catastrophic flooding in this New Zealand community is the final chapter in a long story of climate change, poor urban planning, and socio-economic deprivation. This is a disaster that didn’t have to happen, and many people share the responsibility.

The mechanics of flooding and sea-level rises can be complex to explain. This reporting uses animated map overlays and diagrams to show the science, matched with photographs and videos from Dunedin residents whose livelihoods have been impacted by the floods. It’s a powerful mix of data and experience that stays with the reader. 

Example of a climate change story from Stuff.

Displaced by the climate (Sky News)

This extensive piece of climate reporting from Sky News focused on how global warming is forcing people to leave their homes, all over the world. 

It starts off on a global scale, with animated maps and charts that focus on data journalism. But then it zooms in on individual communities from Vanuatu to Boston. Each section is illustrated with timelines, photographs, and personal interviews that show the human toll behind the statistics. 

The piece ends with a section titled “What can be done?” This isn’t just passive reporting; this is climate storytelling as a call to action.

Example of a climate change story from Sky News

Climate stories: meet the people affected by extreme weather (WaterAid)

The title of this collection of climate change stories from WaterAid says it all. Instead of quoting facts and figures, they want you to meet the real people suffering the impacts of global warming, drought, and extreme weather. 

Big, eye-catching images are overlaid with animations and diagrams that show how landscapes are being lost to droughts or flooding. In a reversal of the technique used by Sky News, this climate feature starts with personal stories, and then moves on to statistics and infographics later in the piece. It’s the same mix of scientific data and individual experiences, just presented in a different way to reflect the different aims of the NGO. 

Example of a climate change story from WaterAid

A growing toxic threat — made worse by climate change (NBC News)

Our next climate change story is a piece of investigative journalism from 2020, when scientists and campaigners were raising the alarm about the Trump administration’s approach to climate change in the US. 

At a first glance, the climate feature is laid out like a classic front-page news story. There’s lots of whitespace and a dramatic lede.

But it also mixes in elements of the latest moves in digital publishing. The complex reporting and in-depth data behind the piece is made visible through photographs, animations, and maps and charts which can be toggled to show different data sets.

All the information is there, but it’s been presented in visual, interactive ways that help the reader to process the story on their own terms. 

Example of a climate change story from NBC News

Meet the family on a mission to restore the desert eco-system (UNSW Sydney)

You can’t get more local than the story of a single family. This climate change story from the University of New South Wales highlights the efforts of two ecologists — and their small children — to reintroduce endangered native species to a degraded desert ecosystem. 

Their work is fascinating in itself. But this article makes it even more gripping by talking about the challenges around their tasks: isolation, accessing medical care, and even finding a playgroup for their kids.

By framing the piece as a 'slice of life' article, the rigorous science and hard work behind the reintroduction project is made accessible and exciting.

Example of a climate change story from UNSW

The people racing to replant Africa (Pioneers Post)

Many climate change stories focus on what’s happening on the Arctic and Antarctic poles. In this feature , Pioneers Post covers one of the most ambitious but least-known climate change stories: the Great Green Wall of Africa. 

The plan has been in motion for several decades. Governments, NGOs, scientists, and local communities are working together to replant a vast zone across the continent and hold back the tide of desertification. 

It’s a fascinating tale that mixes science, politics, and personal stories. And it’s been illustrated throughout with candid photos and portraits of the people who are responsible for growing the Wall.

Example of a climate change story from Pioneers Post

What the Olympics could look like in 2048 (WWF)

So far, we’ve seen examples of data journalism, climate change storytelling, and investigative reports. But here’s something a little different: a dispatch from the future.

In this climate change story , the WWF took the Olympics — a cultural reference point that belongs to everyone, all over the world — and imagined how sporting events would look if the climate emergency goes unchecked. 

Glossy photos of pristine swimming pools and sports stadiums are suddenly choked with rubbish or covered by floodwaters. As readers scroll through the article, they see a horrifying glimpse of one potential future. Those images are backed by statistics and evidence from around the world. 

However, we know that just showing the worst side of the climate emergency isn’t always motivating. That’s why the piece ends with a note of hope: an invitation to sign a petition addressed to world leaders and start taking action.

Example of a climate change story from WWF

9 things you can do about climate change (Imperial College London)

A lot of climate coverage focuses on the macro, such as the latest IPCC report, the Paris Agreement, or government climate policy. This brief climate feature from Imperial College London isn’t just local, it’s personal. It’s about what you, the reader, can do to reduce global warming. 

Sustainability tips range from leaving the car at home to investing in renewable energy sources, such as solar panels.

The piece goes straight for emotional appeal. It’s written in the second person, addressing readers as directly as possible. Each idea is illustrated with animations and supported with a range of links, so that you can get learning, donating, and campaigning right awa

Example of a climate change story from Imperial College London

Corinna Keefe is a freelance writer specialising in tech, heritage and education. Originally from the UK, she has lived and worked in 10 different countries.

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Sustainability

The world’s climate, the heart’s weather: creative writing in the anthropocene, a writing competition.

Entries will be blind reviewed by WMU faculty and graduate students. The final round will be judged by Liz Jensen , a world famous climate fiction writer. Liz is a founding member of Extinction Rebellion’s Writers Rebel, a literary movement using words and actions to highlight the climate and ecological emergency. She is one of the leading international writers articulating  the role of storytellers and the climate crisis . And, she recently spoke to the Kalamazoo Climate Crisis Coalition on the Role of Climate and Ecological Fiction .

Content Submission Guidelines: 

Guidelines 

Frequently Asked Questions (last updated Feb. 1, 2022)

Q: Is the competition restricted to enrolled WMU undergraduate and graduate students?

Q: Can I only submit one piece in one genre? Or can I submit multiple pieces if they differ in genre?

A: Multiple submissions will be accepted in more than one genre, but not more than one piece per genre. For example, you may submit one fictional short story and one nonfiction essay, but you may not submit multiple short stories, or multiple essays.

The Writer's Studio: Cli-Fi: Inventing a form to meet the Climate Catastrophe

The Writer's Studio: Cli-Fi: Inventing a form to meet the Climate Catastrophe

The Writer’s Studio is a free workshop series open to all students from all majors. Come study the art of writing in intensive, fun, hands-on workshops with dynamic faculty from the Creative Writing program, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and others. You will leave with an expanded understanding of what your writing can do.

Ben Okri issued a call in the Guardian for writers to “confront the climate crisis” with “existential creativity.” He writes “If you knew you were at the last days of the human story what would you write? How would you write?” What does this mean, tangibly: to create a new form and philosophy to grapple with climate change in writing? What about elements of craft? What of humor and subject matter? Are there to be no more stories of first dates? Do we look at the crises head on or at a slant? In this workshop, we’ll look at examples of contemporary climate fiction and distinct approaches to addressing the climate emergency through story. We’ll also work through exercises to tease out and begin to shape our own "new form" to meet these unprecedented times.

Georgina Beaty is the author of the short story collection The Party is Here (Freehand Books, 2021). Her fiction has appeared in New England Review, The Walrus, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, PRISM, and elsewhere. As an actor and playwright, she’s worked with theatres across Canada and internationally, most recently with Belarus Free Theatre. She holds a MFA from the University of British Columbia and has been supported by fellowships and writing residencies at MacDowell, the Canadian Film Centre, and The Banff Centre. She's currently a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.

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Climate Action

Why we need climate writing today more than ever.

  • Why we need climate…

January 17, 2020

We have a joke in climate communication that once you’re in, you’re in. When you spend all day researching and writing about climate change — a.k.a. the greatest threat ever known to humanity — no other field compares.

To go into another field would be akin to Superman shedding his cape for glasses, his flying for faxing: “Oh, saving the world? That was something I used to do, but it got old.” Like Superman, climate communicators know this field will never get old.

Climate writing is a field in its relative infancy, a response to tumultuous and unprecedented times: Humans have never faced a dilemma as complicated as burning fossil fuels, a practice that has uplifted humanity and destroyed it at the same time. We have never before been tasked with, well, saving ourselves from an existential threat like climate change.

Of course, to say that climate writing is akin to “saving the world” is hyperbolic. But what’s true in this superhero metaphor is that climate communicators are trying to carve out a living doing something to better humanity: in this case, informing the public about climate change and then empowering them to do something about it.

That’s why climate writing is so important. We need communicators to cut through politics, science, jargon and denialism and make sense of it all. Without climate writers, we’d be a lot worse off than where we are — which is already a real bad place.

Climate communication challenges

Climate writers get to talk to experts, scientists, executives and entrepreneurs. We get to write about research and people that literally change, and hopefully save, the world. As effective climate action must be intersectional, effective climate change communication must also address many fields. This all-encompassing aspect of climate writing makes it both interesting and challenging.

Climate communicators must decipher the jargon, tables and graphs, experiments and the highly specified and sometimes abstract world of science. At the same time, they must consider the far-reaching political, social and economic impacts of climate change.

Climate writers must also cut through the politics of science and climate change — and yes, there are politics. As science writer Jaime Green notes, “Science is political because politicians hold the power to make meaningful change… All the individual actions in the world can’t save us. Science is political because it demands action from power.”

So, how we respond to climate change is political, and how politicians discuss it is, as well. Good communication, therefore, must walk the fine line between providing facts and narratives to inform and drive political action while side-stepping accusations of partisan rhetoric.

Perhaps the largest barrier to climate communication is human stubbornness. Our brains are wired to ignore looming, distant threats, and we’re very reluctant to change. But climate change requires a complete rethinking of our society.

“There is simply no way to square a belief system that vilifies collective action and venerates total market freedom with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that created and are deepening the crisis,” writes Naomi Klein in her latest book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal .

Climate communicators must break through not only this stubbornness but also acres of confusion and climate science misinformation that have been sowed by corporations like ExxonMobil. Big Oil and its investors have spent the last 30 years fueling misinformation campaigns around climate science, hiring the same PR teams that defended the tobacco industry in the mid-20th century.

These tactics weaponize facts and feed confusion and overall distrust in science. When applied to climate change, this confusion creates potentially devastating impacts: Just as millions have died from delayed action on cigarette regulation, millions will die in the next decades from delayed action on climate change.

And if we ignore science altogether, we create new problems. One notable example is the false association between vaccines and autism. Though the scientific community has discredited this claim, unvaccinated children still lead to avoidable outbreaks of disease.

One of the first things I learned in my professional writing master’s program was the power of writing. Just as we need good climate writers, we need ethical climate writers that truthfully disseminate knowledge. As writers and journalists, we have a responsibility and obligation to the public.

The world needs climate writers

The good thing about climate writing is anyone can do it. Research a lot, read a ton and work on your craft, and you’ll get better every day.

But to be good science communicators, it’s not enough to just get the story right — we also need to keep people reading. A big challenge of science writing is explaining a complicated topic in a way that is accessible. 

That means we must tell an engaging story, possibly the most important rule of any writing. People like reading about human stories and experiences, as it allows us to connect at the most basic human-to-human level — if people feel personally connected to something, they feel more inspired to defend it. When that happens, people can start changing their own behavior, or better yet, take action .

Anything we do, any fraction of a degree of warming we avoid, will save the extinction of millions of species and immeasurable human suffering. Good climate communication — and writing — will be a one of the many things we need to curb greenhouse gas emissions, push us toward a more sustainable future and, ultimately, save humanity from ourselves. 

In 2020, let’s keep the momentum going by investing in the next generation of environmental writers and communicators. This month, Earth Day Network’s campaign Foodprints for the Future is hosting a journalism contest .

Each winner and a guardian or guest will receive a trip to Washington, D.C., that includes transportation and lodging to participate in Earth Day 2020 activities on the National Mall on Saturday, April 25, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. This includes backstage passes to the anniversary concert on the Mall.

Pave the way for youth voices in the media and the environmental movement and set us on a course for a sustainable future by submitting an original essay, podcast or video .

  • climate action
  • climate change
  • communication
  • foodprints for the future
  • science writing

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Teaching Ideas

Resources for Teaching About Climate Change With The New York Times

Dozens of resources to help students understand why our planet is warming and what we can do to stop it.

creative writing about climate change

By The Learning Network

How much do your students know about climate change — what causes it, what its consequences are and what we can do to stop it?

A 2022 report from the United Nations found that countries around the world are failing to live up to their commitments to fight climate change, pointing Earth toward a future marked by more intense flooding, wildfires, drought, heat waves and species extinction.

Young people in particular are feeling the effects — both physical and emotional — of a warming planet. In response to a writing prompt about extreme weather that has been intensified by climate change, teenagers told us about experiencing deadly heat waves in Washington, devastating hurricanes in North Carolina and even smoke from the California wildfires in Vermont. They’re also feeling the anxiety of facing a future that could be even worse: “How long do I have before the Earth becomes uninhabitable? I ask myself this every day,” one student wrote .

Over the years, we’ve created dozens of resources to help young people learn about climate change with New York Times articles, interactive quizzes, graphs, films and more. To mark this moment, we’re collecting 60 of them, along with selected recent Times reporting and Opinion pieces on the topic, all in one place.

To get you started, we’ve highlighted several of those resources and offered ideas for how you can use them in your classroom. Whether it’s a short video about a teenage climate activist, a math problem about electric vehicles, or a writing prompt about their diet’s carbon footprint, we hope these activities can get your students thinking and talking about climate change and inspire them to make a difference.

How are you teaching about the climate crisis, its consequences and its solutions? Let us know in the comments.

Ideas for Teaching About Climate Change With The New York Times

1. Understand climate change (and what we can do about it) with a digital children’s book.

The Times has published thousands of stories on climate change over the years, but many of them can be dense and difficult for young people to understand. Use this guide for kids to help your students learn the basics of the climate crisis and understand what choices can lead us to a bad future or a better future. We have a related lesson plan to help.

2. Assess climate choices with an interactive quiz.

What do your students know — or think they know — about the best ways to reduce their carbon footprints? In two Student Opinion prompts, we invite teenagers to test their knowledge with a mini-quiz about good climate choices or one about how much their diets contribute to climate change , and then share their results and reflections on what they learned.

3. Analyze climate change data with New York Times graphs.

Use our notice and wonder protocol to help students analyze graphs from The New York Times related to climate change. In 2019, we rounded up 24 graphs on topics such as melting ice, rising carbon emissions and global warming’s effect on humans. You can find our most recent graphs in our roundup below or by searching “climate change” in our What’s Going On in This Graph? archives.

Another option? Have students collect and analyze their own climate change data. See how a group of science and math teachers guided their classes to do just that in this Reader Idea .

4. Show a short film about the climate crisis’s impact on a vulnerable community.

Climate change will have a disproportionate effect on the world’s most vulnerable. What can we learn from them during the climate crisis? Invite students to watch the short film “ Rebuild or Leave ‘Paradise’: Climate Change Dilemma Facing a Nicaraguan Coastal Town ” about how intensifying storms are affecting the traditional way of life in the Miskito village of Haulover, and then participate in our Film Club .

If you want to explore this topic further, see our 2017 resource “ A Lesson Plan About Climate Change and the People Already Harmed by It .”

5. Use this lesson plan to explore ways to prevent the worst effects of climate change.

Every year, world leaders and activists meet to set new targets for cutting emissions to prevent the average global temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the threshold beyond which the dangers of global warming grow immensely. But what will it take to get there? In this lesson , students participate in a jigsaw activity to explore seven solutions to climate change, from renewable energy and electric vehicles to nature conservation, carbon capture and more.

6. Invite students to share their thoughts, opinions and concerns with writing prompts.

“How can you not be scared of climate change? Every time you see some news on the state of the planet, can you not feel grief? I know I do,” one student wrote in response to our writing prompt, “ Do You Experience Climate Anxiety? ”

What do your students have to say about climate change? They can weigh in on this question and others about banning plastic bags , the environmental impact of plane travel , whether we should be more optimistic about the planet’s future and more. Find them all in our list of writing prompts below.

7. Apply a math concept to a real-world climate problem: gas or electric cars?

In this lesson , use the familiar formula y=mx+b to help students think through the economic and environmental costs and benefits of electric vehicles. Does “going green” mean saving some “wallet green” too?

8. Learn about climate activism with a video.

What power do ordinary people around the world have to make a difference in the climate crisis? Invite students to watch this eight-minute Opinion video about the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg. Then, they can share what gives them hope in the fight against climate change in our related Film Club .

Students can learn more about Ms. Thunberg and her weekly climate protest in this lesson plan from 2019.

Resources for Teaching About Climate Change From The Learning Network and The New York Times

Here is a collection of selected Learning Network and New York Times resources for teaching and learning about climate change. From The Learning Network, there are lesson plans, writing prompts, films, graphs and more. And from NYTimes.com, there are related question and answer guides, as well as recent reporting and Opinion essays.

From The Learning Network

Lesson Plans

Lesson Plan: Using Statistics to Understand Extreme Heat (2022)

Lesson Plan: The Mississippi Water Crisis and What It Means for the Rest of the Nation (2022)

Lesson of the Day: ‘The Unlikely Ascent of New York’s Compost Champion’ (2022)

Lesson of the Day: ‘In the Ocean, It’s Snowing Microplastics’ (2022)

Lesson of the Day: ‘In Wisconsin: Stowing Mowers, Pleasing Bees’ (2022)

Lesson of the Day: ‘The People Who Draw Rocks’ (2022)

Lesson of the Day: ‘How Bad Is the Western Drought? Worst in 12 Centuries, Study Finds.’ (2022)

Lesson of the Day: ‘Meet Peat, the Unsung Hero of Carbon Capture’ (2022)

Lesson of the Day: ‘See How the Dixie Fire Created Its Own Weather’ (2021)

Lesson of the Day: ‘Bad Future, Better Future’ (2021)

Lesson of the Day: ‘Two Biden Priorities, Climate and Inequality, Meet on Black-Owned Farms’ (2021)

Gas or Electric? Thinking Algebraically About Car Costs, Emissions and Trade-offs (2021)

Lesson of the Day: ‘Where 2020’s Record Heat Was Felt the Most’ (2021)

Lesson of the Day: ‘50 Years of Earth Day: What’s Better Today, and What’s Worse’ (2020)

Lesson of the Day: ‘Why Does California Have So Many Wildfires?’ (2020)

Lesson of the Day: ‘Protesting Climate Change, Young People Take to Streets in a Global Strike’ (2019)

Lesson of the Day: ‘Becoming Greta: “Invisible Girl” to Global Climate Activist, With Bumps Along the Way’ (2019)

Lesson of the Day: ‘Glaciers Are Retreating. Millions Rely on Their Water.’ (2019)

Lesson of the Day: ‘Why the Wilder Storms? It’s a “Loaded Dice” Problem’ (2018)

Lesson of the Day: ‘Hotter, Drier, Hungrier: How Global Warming Punishes the World’s Poorest’ (2018)

Lesson of the Day: ‘The World Wants Air-Conditioning. That Could Warm the World.’ (2018)

A Lesson Plan About Climate Change and the People Already Harmed by It (2017)

Guest Post | Climate Change Questions for Young Citizen Scientists (2014)

Teaching About Climate Change With The New York Times (2014)

Writing Prompts

Should Students Learn About Climate Change in School? (2022)

How Far Is Too Far in the Fight Against Climate Change? (2022)

Should We Be More Optimistic About Efforts to Combat Climate Change? (2022)

Do You Experience Climate Anxiety? (2021)

How Have You Experienced Extreme Weather? (2021)

Do You Think You Make Good Climate Choices? (2021)

Should Plastic Bags Be Banned Everywhere? (2020)

Would You Change Your Eating Habits to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint? (2019)

Should We Feel Guilty When We Travel? (2019)

How Concerned Are You About Climate Change? (2018)

Should Schools Teach About Climate Change? (2018)

Film Club: ‘New Climate Promises, Same Old Global Warming’ (2022)

Film Club: ‘The Joy of Cooking (Insects)’ (2022)

Film Club: ‘Greta Thunberg Has Given Up on Politicians’ (2021)

Film Club: ‘Rebuild or Leave “Paradise”: Climate Change Dilemma Facing a Nicaraguan Coastal Town’ (2021)

Film Club: ‘“Goodbye, Earth”: A Story for Grown-Ups’ (2021)

Film Club: ‘Sinking Islands, Floating Nation’ (2018)

Teach About Climate Change With These 24 New York Times Graphs

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Calling for Climate Action

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Tree Rings and Climate

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Hotter Summers

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Endangered Biodiversity

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Extreme Temperatures

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Clean Energy Metals

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Global Carbon Emissions

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Wind and Solar Power

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Precipitation

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Gas-to-Electric Vehicle Turnover

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Growing Zones

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Global Climate Risks

What’s Going On in This Graph? | World Cities’ Air Pollution

What’s Going On in This Graph? | U.S. Air Pollution

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Climate Friendly Cars

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Climate Threats

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Global Temperature Change

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Global Water Stress Levels

What’s Going On in This Graph? | North American Bird Populations

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Dec. 11, 2019 (food and environment)

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Nov. 20, 2019 (greenhouse gas emissions)

What’s Going On in This Graph? | Oct. 9, 2019 (global temperatures)

What’s Going On in This Graph? | April 3, 2019 (first leaf appearance)

What’s Going On in This Graph? | March 13, 2019 (electricity generation)

Reader Idea: Interpreting Data to Understand Community Opinions on Climate Change

Vocabulary in Context: Mangrove Trees

Vocabulary in Context: Sustainable Architecture

On-Demand Panel for Students: Covering the Climate Crisis

From The New York Times

The Science of Climate Change Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof (2021)

Searching for Hidden Meaning in Climate Jargon (2021)

A Crash Course on Climate Change, 50 Years After the First Earth Day (2020)

Your Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered (2019)

Why Half a Degree of Global Warming Is a Big Deal (2018)

Climate Change Is Complex. We’ve Got Answers to Your Questions. (2017)

You Asked, Dr. Kate Marvel Answered. Browse Reader Questions on Climate Science.

Selected Recent Reporting

The New World: Envisioning Life After Climate Change (2022)

Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View (2022)

Ocean-Eaten Islands, Fire-Scarred Forests: Our Changing World in Pictures (2022)

Climate Pledges Are Falling Short, and a Chaotic Future Looks More Like Reality (2022)

U.N. Climate Talks End With a Deal to Pay Poor Nations for Damage (2022)

The World Is Falling Short of Its Climate Goals. Four Big Emitters Show Why. (2022)

Many States Omit Climate Education. These Teachers Are Trying to Slip It In. (2022)

Extreme Heat Will Change Us (2022)

To Fight Climate Change, Canada Turns to Indigenous People to Save Its Forests (2022)

The Unseen Toll of a Warming World (2022)

‘OK Doomer’ and the Climate Advocates Who Say It’s Not Too Late (2022)

6 Aspects of American Life Threatened by Climate Change (2021)

El Niño and La Niña, Explained (2021)

Wildfires Are Intensifying. Here’s Why, and What Can Be Done. (2021)

5 Things We Know About Climate Change and Hurricanes (2020)

Climate Change Is Scaring Kids. Here’s How to Talk to Them. (2019)

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change (2018)

Selected Recent Opinion

We Need to Rethink How to Adapt to the Climate Crisis (2022)

We Are Wasting Time on These Climate Debates. The Next Steps Are Clear. (2022)

Postcards From a World on Fire (2021)

The Disaster We Must Think About Every Day (2021)

‘He Just Cried for a While.’ This Is My Reality of Parenting During a Climate Disaster. (2021)

This Is the World Being Left to Us by Adults (2021)

Finding the Will to Stave Off a Darker Future (2021)

How to Calm Your Climate Anxiety (2021)

What Western Society Can Learn From Indigenous Communities (2021)

  • International

Ground-breaking UEA PhD scholarships to bring together climate science and creative writing

By: Communications

Ground-breaking UEA PhD scholarships to bring together climate science and creative writing

With the next ten years seen as being a profound and critical decade for climate change, the University of East Anglia (UEA) has brought together two of its most celebrated fields of study, environmental sciences and creative writing, to launch 20 prestigious new Leverhulme PhD scholarships.

The University’s successful application for the Critical Decade for Climate Change Leverhulme Doctoral Scholars (LDC) will see £1.3m of grant funding provided by the prestigious Leverhulme Trust to UEA.

The grant will be led by Prof Corinne Le Quéré, Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Change Science at UEA, as Principal Investigator. The Leverhulme Trust will support 15 of the scholars, with UEA funding the other five.

The scholars will be equipped to become leaders in climate research, using data and analysis of latest trends to identify the drivers of change in our environment and in society, while also using creative writing to pose questions as to why and how societies succeed or fail in addressing climate change and communicate answers widely. It will be the first time that researchers within the fields of climate science and creative writing have collaborated in such a way.

The scholarships will be run by the new ClimateUEA initiative, which brings together a team of experts from natural sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. The PhD scholars will be placed in UEA schools including Environmental Sciences, International Development and Creative Writing to ensure that climate science is at the heart of the University’s work as an institution over the next ten years.

Prof Corinne Le Quéré, Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Change Science at UEA, said: “We know that the 2020s will be a decade of profound change for our environment and we know that research, as it stands is too slow to help address the growing urgency of the climate crisis.

“By looking at real-world transformations in near real-time, researchers can better understand why some actions succeed while others fail, and help support and accelerate responses to climate change of the scale needed.

“This is a completely new and very exciting approach into researching climate change and I’m absolutely thrilled that we’ll be delivering it at UEA.”

The scholarships will help build on UEA’s already well-established reputation on climate change, as the home of the Climatic Research Unit and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research . UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences is one of the longest established interdisciplinary institutions of its kind in Europe and was awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in 2017 for ‘Advancing understanding and protection of the environment’.

The PhD programme will be overseen by Prof Corinne Le Quéré, and coordinated by Dr Mark Tebboth, an interdisciplinary social scientist of the environment and international development, and directed by a steering group of world-leading UEA academics from a variety of disciplines.

These include Prof Jean McNeil, award-winning environmental author and Professor of Creative Writing; Prof Mark Tebboth, lecturer in environment and international development; Prof Kenny Coventry, expert consultant on climate change communications; Prof Andy Jordan, an authority on climate change policy, politics and governance, as well as Prof Tim Osborne, Prof Robert Nicholls and others contributing a wealth of climate change expertise and insight from the Tyndall Centre and Climatic Research Unit.

Prof Fiona Lettice, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at UEA, said: “The launch of these scholarships is a game-changer for the way we approach climate research at UEA and much further afield.

“The fact that we will have the brightest young minds coming to UEA to be taught and mentored by some of the most respected academics, across a variety of disciplines, puts us right at the cutting edge of climate research and reinforces the University’s reputation as pioneers in researching what is the biggest threat facing our planet.”

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The Art of Bringing Stories to Life - Highlights - LISA EDELSTEIN Podcast By  cover art

The Art of Bringing Stories to Life - Highlights - LISA EDELSTEIN

  • Length: 14 mins

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"I have always thrown myself into everything, and that includes terrible things because I want to have the whole experience. Even if I know it's going to hurt for better or for worse, that has been how I've lived my life. And so it's given me a lot of information and allowed me to play a lot of different roles and understand a lot of different points of view.

I'm the kind of person who – I don't do well in lectures - I don't like sitting for a very long time, but if I can listen while I'm drawing or painting, then I will actually retain more of what I'm hearing because it's connected now to what I've actually made while I'm listening to it. When I look at my paintings, I remember what I was reading at each section of the painting, so that's the way my brain works. And I think a lot of people who are creative, that's the way their brain works, where we need to develop one skill in order to develop another. And using your imagination is key to all of it."

From her role as Dr. Lisa Cuddy on the hit Fox series House M.D, to her starring role as Abby McCarthy in Bravo's first scripted series Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce, Lisa Edelstein's range of roles are as diverse as her talent. Some of Edelstein's feature credits include Keeping the Faith, What Women Want, Daddy Daycare, As Good as It Gets, and Fathers and Sons. She played a Holocaust survivor and adopted mother in the drama television series Little Bird. The story centres on a First Nations woman who was adopted into a Jewish family during the Sixties Scoop, as she attempts to reconnect with her birth family and heritage.

Lisa’s career began by writing, composing, and performing an original AIDS awareness musical Positive Me at the renowned La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York City. In the wake of COVID, Lisa began to paint using old family photographs as starting points. Her incredibly detailed paintings capture intimate relationships and spontaneous moments with honesty and compassion.

https://lisaedelstein.komi.io/ www.lisaedelsteinpaintings.com/ www.imdb.com/name/nm0249046

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Artworks: “Beach Day”, “Marsha”, “Karen” Courtesy of the Artist

Lisa Edelstein in the Studio Photo credit: Holland Clement, Courtesy of the artist

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IMAGES

  1. Create a Climate Poster Challenge Winners

    creative writing about climate change

  2. Create a Climate Poster Challenge Winners

    creative writing about climate change

  3. Climate Change: The Science Behind Melting Glaciers and Warming Oceans

    creative writing about climate change

  4. Create a Climate Poster Challenge Winners

    creative writing about climate change

  5. Eight Ways To Teach Climate Change In Almost Any Classroom

    creative writing about climate change

  6. 2 x A Grade Higher English Creative / Persuasive Essays Climate Change

    creative writing about climate change

VIDEO

  1. Climate Change Facts That Will Blow Your Mind

  2. Second pitch for Writing Climate Pitchfest

  3. My introduction for the Writing Climate Pitchfest 2023

  4. Video 2023 08 13 200713

  5. Introduction to the book Climate Change

  6. Writing & Climate Change with Geza Tatrallyay

COMMENTS

  1. 17 Writers on the Role of Fiction in Addressing Climate Change

    17 Writers on the Role of Fiction in Addressing Climate Change Lydia Millet, Jeff VanderMeer, and More on the Author's Responsibility to a Planet in Crisis By Amy Brady

  2. 17 Writers on the Role of Fiction in Addressing Climate Change

    In 2019, climate change continues to wreak devastating havoc on the planet. Cyclone Idai—a storm of exceptional power that was intensified by climate change—has to-date left more than 700 people dead in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. ... Which means that fiction and creative writing have a unique and super vital role to play in helping us ...

  3. Climate storytelling: Creativity and imagination in the ...

    Creative writing and food justice ... Ada, our main character, occupies. As we write, we learn about composition, storytelling, research, the film industry, climate change, teamwork, food justice, and more. Creativity in climate communication and education. There is significant interest in creative approaches to climate storytelling. Within the ...

  4. Another tool in the fight against climate change: storytelling

    December 23, 2021. Andrea Daquino. It might sound strange to think of storytelling as a climate solution, but after spending five years documenting 1,001 voices on climate change in 20 countries ...

  5. Turning Climate Crisis Stories Into Narrative of the Future, Changed

    Writers Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams offer new perspectives on how to remake the world. By Alvin Powell, The Harvard Gazette Stories can drive action, but perhaps the most damaging climate change story we can tell is the tall tale that we can simply opt for the stability and safety of the status quo, writer and activist Rebecca Solnit said Wednesday evening at Harvard's Memorial ...

  6. The best new writing about climate change

    The best new writing about climate change on whatsapp (opens in a new window) Save. Pilita Clark. Jump to comments section Print this page. Unlock the Editor's Digest for free.

  7. Climate Change and Creativity: Interview with Sally O'Reilly

    Climate Change and Creativity: Interview with Sally O'Reilly. Sally O'Reilly is a novelist and Senior Lecturer here at the Open University's Department of English and Creative Writing, where her role as Media Lead has included editing this blog. Before Sally's appointment as a Central Academic in 2014, she'd already worked here for ...

  8. Creating a climate for fiction writing

    The initiative is a partnership between the Center for Science and the Imagination and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. "Everything Change, Volume III" ... finding her own forward momentum in a world stalled by the devastating impacts of climate change. "I was nervous writing about a trans character because I'm not trans ...

  9. Blood Glacier and Creative Climate Storytelling for an Uncertain Future

    In the final few minutes of "Blood Glacier," the main characters escape their research base in a helicopter, speechless and terrified. The climate disaster is far worse than they had imagined and an uncertain, grim future lies ahead. In fiction there's a danger in sensationalizing climate change, Tidwell explained, comparing "Blood ...

  10. As the Climate Changes, Climate Fiction Is Changing With It

    In a 2021 essay titled "Climate Crisis Is Here; So Is Climate Fiction. Don't You Dare Call It a Genre," the writer Lydia Millet makes a passionate case for realist climate fiction, intimate ...

  11. Climate Creativity: The power of the word to tackle the climate

    Culture has a vital role in framing our understanding of the climate crisis and addressing how society can start to tackle it. In an online workshop as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2021, Dr Philip Seargeant, Dr Nessa O'Mahony and Dr Anne Caldwell (The Open University) guided participants in discussions about what 'Climate Creativity' looks like, how creative writing and language ...

  12. 10 writing prompts to help you write stories about climate change

    Here's some writing prompts inspired by the changes to our planet caused by rising temperatures. "I watched the tide come in. And then it wouldn't stop.". "I checked the CO2 data three ...

  13. Writers Confront Climate Crisis

    Novelist Alexandra Kleeman, who joined Writers Rebel NYC out of a craving for an activist writing community in which authors grapple with climate crisis in their work, thinks it can. "We absolutely need massive policy change. But literature is a way of making the problem more relatable and more discussable.".

  14. Imagining both utopian and dystopian climate futures is crucial

    Climate change challenges us to look ahead, past our own lives, to consider how the future might look for generations to come - and our part in this. This responsibility requires imagination.

  15. 'Cli-fi' might not save the world, but writing it could help with your

    Approaching writing about climate change as a process, rather than thinking about writing as a product produced by professional authors, is a new method for alleviating climate anxiety.

  16. 6 Essential Texts of Climate Change Written By Women

    As Kathleen Dean Moore writes in Great Tide Rising, "The burdens of climate change—hunger and thirst, poisoned air and water, inundation, disruption, and wars—are imposed disproportionately on the world's poorest communities and those that are the least responsible for its effects.". This makes our responsibility to address climate ...

  17. A Story for the Climate Crisis: raising awareness through creative writing

    This lesson plan is based on a lesson originally given by our Change Makers Ambassador, Harry Waters, as part of our series of live lessons for students. It introduces key themes around sustainability and the climate crisis through a host of creative writing (and drawing) activities that engage young learners with serious topics in a fun way.

  18. 9 powerful stories about climate change

    Catastrophic flooding in this New Zealand community is the final chapter in a long story of climate change, poor urban planning, and socio-economic deprivation. This is a disaster that didn't have to happen, and many people share the responsibility. The mechanics of flooding and sea-level rises can be complex to explain.

  19. The World's Climate, the Heart's Weather: Creative Writing in the

    The Office for Sustainability, the English Department, and the Climate Change Working Group seek submissions about how the planet's emergency affects the inner life, the psychology and imagination, of a global citizen. In this first annual creative writing competition on climate change, we encourage poets, fiction writers, essayists, and ...

  20. 10 more writing prompts for stories about climate change

    Here's some prompts to help you develop a plot or characters. The DNA modifications clinic specialized in tolerance of the New Heat. They turned the obsolete canal that once carried water to the ...

  21. The Writer's Studio: Cli-Fi: Inventing a form to meet the Climate

    The Writer's Studio is a free workshop series open to all students from all majors. Come study the art of writing in intensive, fun, hands-on workshops with dynamic faculty from the Creative Writing program, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and others. You will leave with an expanded understanding of what your writing can do.

  22. Why we need climate writing today more than ever

    This all-encompassing aspect of climate writing makes it both interesting and challenging. Climate communicators must decipher the jargon, tables and graphs, experiments and the highly specified and sometimes abstract world of science. At the same time, they must consider the far-reaching political, social and economic impacts of climate change ...

  23. Resources for Teaching About Climate Change With The New York Times

    Here is a collection of selected Learning Network and New York Times resources for teaching and learning about climate change. From The Learning Network, there are lesson plans, writing prompts ...

  24. Ground-breaking UEA PhD scholarships to bring together climate science

    The PhD scholars will be placed in UEA schools including Environmental Sciences, International Development and Creative Writing to ensure that climate science is at the heart of the University's work as an institution over the next ten years. Prof Corinne Le Quéré, Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Change Science at UEA, said ...

  25. Review: Emily Raboteau on mothering during the apocalypse

    Rebecca Spiess. Mar 9, 2024. 2:30 AM. "Lessons for Survival" is a collection of essays detailing motherhood on the precipice of dystopia. Emily Raboteau, author and creative writing professor ...

  26. We can't combat climate change without changing minds. This psychology

    The two initially met through Nicole Betz, a graduate student in Coley's lab. Last year, the three co-authored a paper on how human exceptionalism — the idea that humans are different and set apart from other organisms — can hinder sustainable behavior.. Humans & Nature is a further exploration of that type of academic research in a classroom setting with readings, lectures and a heavy ...

  27. The Art of Bringing Stories to Life

    Lisa's career began by writing, composing, and performing an original AIDS awareness musical Positive Me at the renowned La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York City. In the wake of COVID, Lisa began to paint using old family photographs as starting points.