creative writing about climate change

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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.

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. And across the Midwestern United States, heavy rain and snow has caused some of the area’s worst floods in recent memory.

This is life in the Anthropocene, an age characterized by humanity’s unprecedented influence on Earth’s atmosphere and weather systems. And in response, artists of all kinds—including novelists and poets—are producing work that speaks to the intense feelings of fear and loss that so many people are wrestling with.

Some recent examples of this kind of writing can be found in Guernica magazine’s March special issue on climate fiction , featuring original stories by Lydia Millet, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Helen Phillips, and Omar El Akkad. To celebrate the issue —and to discuss the urgent need for climate advocacy— the magazine is hosting a reading and reception at the Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts at the New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study on Earth Day, April 22 nd (the event is co-sponsored by NYU’s Gallatin School, Climate Working Group and Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU , and Asian American Writer’s Workshop.) 

That event will surely generate a necessary and robust conversation, but to broaden the discussion further, I reached out to several novelists, poets, and editors to ask them what role fiction about climate change plays in society today —with the understanding that smart policy is needed as much as great art . Their responses were provocative and deeply felt. What follows is a summary of what they told me.

For more from  Guernica , click here . To donate, click here . 

“Fiddling while Rome burns, whistling from the coal mine, serenading the doomed while the ship sinks—I’d like to think that storytellers and poets have a more urgent role right now than this. As many other writers and critics have said, if you’re writing realistic fiction that’s set in the modern world right now, you’re already writing about climate change in some way. There’s nothing the least bit speculative about cli-fi anymore. We already know, because we can see it happening today. The economic and practical effects of climate change will be felt first and worst by the very populations that are the most at-risk and vulnerable. We have to tell those stories. Not just because it’s a moral imperative but because pretty soon, those stories are going to be representative of more of the audience for fiction. Writing fiction and poetry in the era of climate change is an opportunity and a privilege. The purpose of art is to generate radical empathy, to enlarge our understanding of ourselves and our world, through people and stories that dramatize what a climate report or news story can’t. And our world has never needed that generative power more than now. Who if not us?”

–Siobhan Adcock, author of The Completionist

“I think the term ‘climate change fiction,’ as a descriptor of genre, will eventually fall out of use–much the same way we don’t tend to use the phrases ‘love fiction’ or ‘loss fiction’ to describe stories about foundational components of the human experience. The role of fiction in society is to wrestle with what it means to be human, and climate change is a deeply human thing. As such, I don’t think it imposes any new obligations on those who write about it, but rather indicts as delinquent those who don’t.”

–Omar El Akkad, author of American War  

“Our deepening climate crisis is going to require much more creativity and willpower from all of us, and we’re not going to get through this without the power of imagination. Which means that fiction and creative writing have a unique and super vital role to play in helping us to visualize what’s coming and how we’re going to cope with it. Seldom have fiction writers had such a rich opportunity.”

–Charlie Jane Anders, author of The City in the Middle of the Night

Who if not us?

“Humans are no good at the large-scale or the future tense. We tend to recoil from enormity in awe and stupefaction—a reaction that is terribly dangerous now, in the Anthropocene, when it is not nature but humanity that is the uncontrollable danger, the ungraspable vastness. Fiction is uniquely equipped to counter that paralysis by bringing readers a direct and human-sized experience of climate change: one family’s battle against rising water, one man’s flight from a forest fire. I have to believe that if we learn to see, up close, what we have done, we might begin to change.”

–C. Morgan Babst, author of The Floating World

“Coinciding with our urgent need to address climate change, this is an important moment for poetry. Poetry celebrates, mourns, and motivates as nothing else can. By addressing our hearts and our minds, poetry helps us fall in love again with the Earth and experience our planet with fresh senses—breaking through indifference, galvanizing us to address the environmental crisis with enthusiasm, without the paralyzing fear that leads to inaction. As Jane Hirshfield writes, ‘The world asks of us / only the strength we have and we give it. / Then it asks for more, and we give it.’”

–Elizabeth Coleman, editor of HERE: Poems for the Planet

“Roger Ebert called the movies ‘a machine that generates empathy.’ The same is true of climate-change fiction. Climate change is both monolithic and multifarious. Its effects show up differently in different places, but it’s also one big thing that we have to live through together. Stories give us the power to see climate chaos anew, through the eyes of people whose lives and experiences are utterly unfamiliar to us. They’re indispensable for building the shared global consciousness that we’ll need to respond collectively, and in time to preserve as much as we can.”

–Joey Eschrich, editor of Everything Change and Everything Change, Volume II

“One hard lesson I’ve learned from my fifteen years as a community organizer is that changing the minds of our enemies is less important than giving hope and power to our friends. I’m not writing for the people who are against us. I don’t mean to say that it’s impossible to convince people with great art—other writers might legitimately feel like the role of fiction in the climate change fight is to convince the skeptical—but that’s not my priority. I want my fiction—and my activism—to galvanize and energize people who already know that something is wrong, but might not feel like they have the power to do anything about it. I want people to see their own power, and the power they can build with others, and to see that fighting back—and winning—isn’t just possible; it’s already happening, every day, all around us.”

–Sam J. Miller, author of Blackfish City

“Climate change is a social and spiritual emergency as well as a political, scientific one. Clearly all the arts need to address themselves to it, and never fear, soon enough they’ll have to. All too fast that confrontation will be unavoidable. The fact that we can’t put out the fires and lower the seas with words or pictures or music doesn’t mean we’re off the hook for trying.”

–Lydia Millet, author of Fight No More

“For a long time, much of literary fiction has been committed to the idea that meaning is primarily subjective and synthetic, mediated by commodity and defined by the morally ambiguous private self.   Until our stories return to the stance that meaning is out there, that it resides in the enormously difficult task of reconciling human society to the influences and affordances of the planet, we will fail at the task of living here, inside the cycles that the living world requires.   Climate change is one symptom of that failure.   The challenge lies not so much in taking climate change as our subject; it lies in taking the Earth as our object and our setting and our enduring source of meaning.”

–Richard Powers, author of The Overstory

“There is no way to really imagine that half of life on Earth has already been wiped out by human intervention. It’s an inconceivable number and the numbers we are hearing now for the future are inconceivable, too. Through simulation of the world, fiction allows for the measuring of the world, helping us grasp the scale of our losses and the imprint of our actions. It lets us conceive of the scale of apocalypse, which is never an end, only ‘an uncovering.’”

–Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, author of Losing Miami

“I doubt that many people in power are poring over speculative literary fiction for inspiration to enact climate change policy. But they should be. Fiction can make the threats of climate change visceral, not merely statistical. Fiction forces us to imagine it, to live it, at least for a time. And imagination is the first step toward change, as Ursula K. Le Guin recognized: ‘To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.’ I experience a flicker of hope when I pair Le Guin’s words with a recent article by David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine , ‘The Cautious Case for Climate Optimism:’ ‘As climate activists often say, we have, today, all the tools we need to avoid catastrophic change…We just need to choose to implement them—all of them—and quite fast.’”

–Helen Phillips, author of Some Possible Solutions and the forthcoming The Need

“Great fiction allows us to see ourselves more clearly—to understand how the most urgent crises of our time touch our inner lives. ‘The private life,’ as James Baldwin wrote, ‘is the writer’s subject.’ I don’t think a novel can cause the United States and China to agree on stricter emissions limits or make West Virginians hate coal. But fiction can help us to understand how our climate crisis is changing us.”

–Nathaniel Rich, author of Odds Against Tomorrow and the forthcoming Losing Earth

“One type of science fiction imagines futures in ways that are supported by the science of the time.   Often that science gets corrected later, and the stories written before the correction turn out to be wrong somehow. Then the next generation of stories shifts to imagine the new possibilities, and on the process goes, a perpetual feedback loop between science and literature. Now the scientific community has discovered climate change, caused by humanity’s burning of carbon to fuel civilization. The ramifications of this discovery are huge; coping with the problem will dominate history in the coming century. Even so, the future isn’t cast into one inevitable course.

On the contrary; we could cause the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, or we could create a prosperous civilization, sustainable over the long haul. Either is possible starting from now, and this stupendous range of possibilities is part of what makes our moment feel so disorienting. In this situation, science fiction can be a big help to imagining our way forward.   Of course there will still be types of science fiction set thousands or even millions of years from now; those are great story spaces. But the big story now is this emergency century we’re facing, so the science fiction that is about the emergency will take center stage for a while. The more we tell such stories, the better we’ll deal with the problems we’ll face.”

–Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Red Moon

“In the realm of science fiction at least, the genre is doing for climate change what it does for most things that humans are concerned about, from nuclear war to overpopulation to biological catastrophe: Allowing us to model what a world affected by those things would be like, and to give us a glimpse of whether these are worlds we would want to live in, and if not (and usually the answer is, ‘we’d rather not’), how to work to avoid that future. With climate change in particular, Paolo Bacigalupi has been modeling what the world looks like after the fact; anyone who thinks climate change is not a big deal should be assigned his novels.”

–John Scalzi, author of The Consuming Fire

“As climate change impacts become more widespread, our world grows less legible. I believe this transition, which is already upon us, will create a hunger for literature that helps make sense of it. And if fiction is, at its core, an exercise in empathy—the act standing in the shoes of another and inhabiting her life for a few hundred pages—then literature that documents life in this changing world might help un-impacted individuals understand what’s at stake. In a world in which climate change impacts will not be equitable, I see this as a crucial step toward collective action.”

–Ashley Shelby, author of South Pole Station

“Climate change denial requires insidious imagination against a vast body of clear scientific evidence. Its fantastical purpose is to ensure the continuation of environmental and societal destruction that also acts as the worshipful sacrifice of our singular physical world to the insatiable appetite of capital, an immaterial idol devised to enrich the very irresponsible few. Against reckless dishonesty, fiction can serve as a corrective assertion of reality.”

–Pitchaya Sudbanthad, author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain

“Fictional storytelling of many kinds can convey psychological truths about living in this era and also serve as a kind of think tank or laboratory for ideas and ways of thought not possible in the real world. At the same time, public policy should be based on science, not fiction, and I personally am wary of making outsized claims for the role of fiction in this context. We need smart, complex public policy more than anything.”

–Jeff VanderMeer, author of Borne and co-editor of the forthcoming The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

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Writing about climate change is writer’s way of making an impact

April 22, 2024 - 9:00 a.m.

It’s no coincidence that University of Oregon alumnus Ross West (MFA, ’84, creative writing) is releasing his new book, “The Fragile Blue Dot: Stories from Our Imperiled Biosphere,” on April 22, also known as Earth Day. In the book, West tackles complicated environmental issues through 15 timely and thought-provoking stories that explore how climate change affects everyone.

CAS caught up with West to learn more about the book and how West became an environmental writer. He shares stories from his time at the UO, his motivation behind the upcoming book, and his perspective on the role of writers in advocating for the environment.

This conversation is a must-read for aspiring writers, students and anyone interested in storytelling and environmental sustainability.

Looking back at your time at UO, how did your experiences in the Creative Writing program shape your writing journey?

My skills were rudimentary at the time, but I believed that in the right environment, they would flourish, so I applied to the program. It worked. Those two amazing years at the UO were like putting a tomato plant in a greenhouse. I developed my writing as I never had before.

Are there any specific lessons or memories from your time at the UO that continue influencing your work today?

Many. One example comes from the day Ken Kesey led the creative writing seminar as a guest instructor. He was critiquing a student story in which the characters ate some cookies—carob chip cookies. This minor detail stopped Kesey in his tracks, got him railing about the world of difference between how a reader would respond to a carob chip versus a chocolate chip cookie. It was a beautiful rant. This microscopic focus on the word-by-word, choice-by-choice production of prose, delivered with Kesey’s inimitable roaring vehemence, really drove home to me the importance of every decision a writer makes.

What are the most significant benefits a liberal arts education has provided you as a writer and individual? How has it shaped your perspective on environmental issues and storytelling?

People have been creating and compiling knowledge of every kind for thousands of years. My undergraduate and graduate liberal arts education exposed me to a tiny fraction of this material and in doing so vastly broadened the limited horizons of my childhood. But even more important, this exposure helped me appreciate the work of the scholars, scientists, creative writers, and others who quite literally wrote the books that fill the libraries; they have dedicated careers to exploring every aspect of our world at a level almost beyond imagining. It is humbling to realize how much is known and available for learning. Like Isaac Newton, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

The arts play an essential role in this cultural advance. After Hiroshima, when people faced the specter of planetary annihilation from atomic weapons, the arts responded with novels and short stories, poetry, films, and all those wonderful Doomsday episodes of “The Twilight Zone.” Today we’re staring into the bared teeth of climate change. The characters in each of the stories in “The Fragile Blue Dot” navigate lives buffeted by the challenges of global warming—confusing, complex, daunting challenges different from those faced by any previous generation.

Your upcoming book focuses on climate issues, timely considering its release on Earth Day. What motivated you to take on this topic, and how do you hope your book will contribute to the conversation surrounding environmental sustainability?

Two experiences fired my dedication to this project. I served for a decade as the UO science writer and was a member of the National Association of Science Writers at a time when concerns about global warming were coming to a boil. I took part in vigorous debates with other writers and journalists regarding how to best communicate climate-related information to the public. Just the facts? If so, what facts—the scary ones, the hopeful ones? Or maybe a more emotional appeal—the forlorn polar bear on a shrinking ice floe approach. Where is the point of overload, when the constant pummeling with bad news no longer informs readers, listeners, viewers, but numbs them with crisis fatigue?

I also had the pleasure of working as the text editor on both editions of the Atlas of Yellowstone (2012, 2022), produced largely by the extremely talented group in the UO InfoGraphics Lab and Department of Geography. The atlas features a section on climate change that graphically depicts the past 100 years of Yellowstone climate data in 10- and 20-year snapshots along with projections extending to the end of the present century—a relentless march of ever-higher, ever more devastating temperatures. A melting glacier in Greenland is a matter of great concern, of course, but it is a bit abstract, a bit far away; this was Yellowstone, a place I can drive to, a place I love. Looking at those maps was like seeing my own house on fire.

I’m a writer, not an ecologist or a geophysicist, so my response to the pending cataclysm—what I can do—is to write about it. I hope my stories prompt people to think deeply about our unprecedented situation, about the decisions that will shape our future, about consequences and unintended consequences.

What role do you believe writers play in advocating for the environment/climate?

A good deal of climate-related fiction, or cli-fi, suffers either from unremitting gloom and doom or from the provision of cloying facile solutions. The most resonant stories, to me, are subtler and fall into neither of these traps. They ask questions rather than answer them. That is what I have tried to do in my stories. Fitzgerald wasn’t advocating for or against the Jazz Age; it was a given, beyond any one person’s control—even Jay Gatsby’s. But how did people in that era respond to their world, the impulses and conflicting pressures they felt, the values and beliefs they tried to cling to, the decisions they made? Now that is interesting territory. Similarly, we are careening ever further into a period of vast environmental change. How will we deal with the challenges of our day? What struggles will we face, what painful lesser-evil choices will we be unable to avoid, what compromises and rationalizations will we make, what courage will we muster? Fiction is exquisitely well-suited for exploring these kinds of questions.

What advice would you offer aspiring writers and students, including those who want to write about environmental sustainability?

Read as much and as widely as possible. Learn science. Get good with numbers and statistics. Studying history (broadly conceived) provides a valuable baseline understanding of human propensities and pomposity; our barbarities, achievements, and persistence; our shameful stupidity as well as our stunning, indomitable creativity. The complementary study of human psychology provides another useful mirror, an inside-out take on the same material. For example, University of Oregon Department of Psychology Professor Paul Slovic’s remarkable work on the perception of risk (highly recommended) added a whole new layer to my understanding of who we are. Bonus tip: become familiar with the definition of the word presentism.

—The launch party for his book is scheduled for 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 25, at the Veteran’s Memorial Building in Eugene. — Read more about the book in Oregon Quarterly .  — By Harper Wells, College of Arts and Sciences

Creative Writing: Rising to the challenge of Climate Change

Explore how storytelling helps address the ethical and technical challenges of environmental narratives.

Dr Kevan Manwaring is the Course Leader for the new AUB Online MA Creative Writing . Here, he talks about how research for his latest book has fed directly into course content, and how all modern writers should rise to the challenge of Climate Change.  

Creative Writing and the Environmental Crisis 

In a recent BBC Radio 4 segment, Simon Armitage, the UK's Poet Laureate, explored glaciers in northern Norway as part of his role as the Arctic Poet Laureate. While standing on one, he said ‘every poet needs to address Climate Change’ in their writing.    

This goes for novelists, scriptwriters and writers of creative non-fiction. It overshadows all activity, cultural or otherwise, across the globe in the 21st Century. The United Nations declared ominously that it presents ‘the defining crisis of our age'.    

Critic Mark Bould suggests every cultural artefact – film, TV series, novel, computer game, graphic novel, pop song, etc – is inflected with this awareness, whether the creator intends it to or not, because of what he calls the ‘Anthropocene Unconscious’ .   

Exploring ecological thinking and issues  

As an MA Creative Writing student , you’ll need to be a self-reflexive writer, bringing an informed consciousness to your practice. That’s not to say that everything you write has to foreground ecological thinking and issues, but this course will simply create the opportunity to explore these issues deeply.   

Responding to the zeitgeist 

One module in particular focuses directly on environmental aspects: Writing in the Anthropocene. This has been informed by a monograph I’ve recently authored for Palgrave Macmillan, Writing Ecofiction: navigating the challenges of environmental narrative , and is supported by cutting-edge research.   

‘Ecofiction’ or ‘Cli-Fi’ is becoming a popular form, prominently displayed in bookshops and frequently present in best-seller lists and book prize short-lists. It’s a way of responding to the zeitgeist – the footage we see on the news programmes every evening, the extreme weather events happening with increasing frequency and power.   

This genre dramatises the news, the latest reports, and the real-world impacts, articulating our fears and concerns.   

Combine the art of storytelling with a deep commitment to environmental consciousness with AUB Online’s MA Creative Writing:

Developing a creative response to the theme of Climate Crisis  

Some of the most exciting writing is coming out from this field at the moment, in my opinion – for example, Richard Power’s astonishing Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Overstory . My book explores a cross-section of creative approaches, and the ethical and technical challenges they present.   

Through a discussion of classic and contemporary texts, critical responses and creative writing exercises, this book will aid 21st Century writers of the environment in developing their own effective creative responses to the theme of Climate Crisis.   

It also explores writing that delves into the embodied, local, and transhuman aspects, challenging conventional notions of 'nature' and the perceived separation between humanity and the natural world.   

With an awareness of the Global South and the ‘subaltern’, the very framing of the ‘Anthropocene’, ‘wilderness’ and ‘nature writing’ is challenged.   

The ever-present spectre of didacticism is addressed, and you’ll be encouraged to consider a spectrum of perspectives, and to make your own ‘ecologies’ of connection. The module will use the book as a starting point, but the emphasis will be on how you wish to explore environmental crisis.   

All voices are welcome 

Any perspective and approach are possible, if it’s undertaken in a well-informed, and well-crafted way. It could be a piece of New Nature Writing, a short story or chapter which dramatises an aspect of the Climate Emergency, a poem that articulates a more-than-human perspective, a script which brings to life the struggles of an eco-activist with a climate denier partner or parent.   

It has to be emphasised that one critical position isn’t the only one to be taken – a cross-section is a far better approach.   

The important thing to remember is that the ecological imaginary is broad and demands a multiplicity of perspectives. All voices are welcome – we all have an authentic, authoritative voice and a stake in the survival of our planet and species.      

Dr Kevan Manwaring

Course Leader, MA Creative Writing

Email: [email protected]

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Imagining both utopian and dystopian climate futures is crucial – which is why cli-fi is so important

PhD Candidate in Creative Writing, University of Liverpool

Disclosure statement

Bernadette McBride does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Liverpool provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.

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We are headed towards a future that is hard to contemplate. At present, global emissions are reaching record levels , the past four years have been the four hottest on record , coral reefs are dying , sea levels are rising and winter temperatures in the Arctic have risen by 3°C since 1990. Climate change is the defining issue of our time and now is the moment to do something about it. But what?

Society often looks to culture to try and make some sense of the world’s problems. 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.

So, it is no surprise that a literary phenomenon has grown over the past decade or two which seeks to help us imagine the impacts of climate change in clear language . This literary trend – generally known by the name “ cli-fi ” – has now been established as a distinctive form of science fiction, with a host of works produced from authors such as Margaret Atwood and Paolo Bacigalupi to a series of Amazon shorts .

Often these stories deal with climate science and seek to engage the reader in a way that the statistics of scientists cannot. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012), for example, creates emotional resonance with the reader through a novel about the effects of global warming on the monarch butterflies, set amid familiar family tensions. Lauren Groff’s short story collection Florida (2018) also brings climate change together with the personal set amid storms, snakes and sinkholes.

The end to come

Cli-fi is probably better known for those novels that are set in the future, depicting a world where advanced climate change has wreaked irreversible damage upon our planet. They conjure up terrible futures: drowned cities, uncontainable diseases, burning worlds – all scenarios scientists have long tried to warn us about. These imagined worlds tend to be dystopian, serving as a warning to readers: look at what might happen if we don’t act now.

Atwood’s dystopian trilogy of MaddAddam books, for example, imagines post-apocalyptic futurist scenarios where a toxic combination of narcissism and technology have led to our great undoing. In Oryx and Crake (2003), the protagonist is left contemplating a devastated world in which he struggles to survive as potentially the last human left on earth. Set in a world ravaged by sea level rise and tornadoes, Atwood revisits the character’s previous life to examine the greedy capitalist world fuelled by genetic modification that led to this apocalyptic moment.

Read more: 'Cli-fi' novels humanise the science of climate change – and leading authors are getting in on the act

Other dystopian cli-fi works include Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015), and the film The Day After Tomorrow (2004), both of which feature sudden global weather changes which plunge the planet into chaos.

Dystopian fiction certainly serves a purpose as a bleak reminder not to act lightly in the face of environmental disaster, often highlighting how climate change could in fact compound disparities across race and class further. Take Rita Indiana’s Tentacle (2015), a story of environmental disaster with a focus on gender and race relations – “illegal” Haitian refugees are bulldozed on the spot. A. Sayeeda Clarke’s short film White (2011), meanwhile, tells the story of one black man’s desperate search for money in a world where global warming has turned race into a commodity and circumstances lead him to donate his melanin.

The future reimagined

It is this primacy of the imagination that makes fictional dealings with climate change so valuable. Cli-fi author Nathaniel Rich, who wrote Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) – a novel in which a gifted mathematician is hired to predict worst-case environmental scenarios – has said :

I think we need a new type of novel to address a new type of reality, which is that we’re headed toward something terrifying and large and transformative. And it’s the novelist’s job to try to understand, what is that doing to us?

As the UN 2019 Climate Action Summit attempts to bring the 2015 Paris Agreement up to speed, we need fiction that not only offers us new ways to look forward, but which also renders the inequalities of climate change explicit. It is also key that culturally we at least try to imagine a fairer world for all, rather than only visions of doom.

When now is the time that we need to act, the rarer utopian form of cli-fi is perhaps more useful. These works imagine future worlds where humanity has responded to climate change in a more timely and resourceful manner. They conjure up futures where human and non-human lives have been adapted, where ways of living have been reimagined in the face of environmental disaster. Scientists, and policy makers – and indeed the public – can look to these works as a source of hope and inspiration.

Utopian novels implore us to use our human ingenuity to adapt to troubled times. Kim Stanley Robinson is a very good example of this type of thinking. His works were inspired by Ursula Le Guin, in particular her novel The Dispossessed (1974), which led the way for the utopian novel form. It depicts a planet with a vision of universal access to food, shelter and community as well as gender and racial equality, despite being set on a parched desert moon.

Robinson’s utopian Science in the Capital trilogy centres on transformative politics and imagines a shift in the behaviour of human society as a solution to the climate crisis. His later novel New York 2140 (2017), set in a partly submerged New York which has successfully adapted to climate change, imagines solutions to more recent climate change concerns. This is a future that is mapped out in painstaking detail, from reimagined subways to mortgages for submarines, and we are encouraged to see how new communities could rise against capitalism.

This is inspirational – and useful – but it is also is crucial that utopian cli-fi novels make it clear that for every utopian vision an alternative dystopia could be just around the corner. (It’s worth remembering that in Le Guin’s foundational utopian novel The Dispossessed, the moon’s society have escaped from a dystopian planet.) This is a key flaw in the case of Robinson’s vision, which fails to feature the wars, famines and disasters outside of his new “Super Venice”: the main focus of the book is on the advances of western technology and economics.

Forward-thinking cli-fi, then, needs to imagine sustainable futures while recognising the disparities of climate change and honouring the struggles of the most vulnerable human and non-humans. Imagining positive futures is key – but a race where no one is left behind should be at the centre of the story we aspire to.

This article is part of The Covering Climate Now series This is a concerted effort among news organisations to put the climate crisis at the forefront of our coverage. This article is published under a Creative Commons license and can be reproduced for free – just hit the “Republish this article” button on the page to copy the full HTML coding. The Conversation also runs Imagine, a newsletter in which academics explore how the world can rise to the challenge of climate change. Sign up here .

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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

“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

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.

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)

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By Richard Heinberg , Resilience.org

Earth is it. It’s not just where we’re from, it’s where we belong, and it’s the only home we will ever know. If we don’t take care of it, we will cease to exist.

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Stories to save the world: the new wave of climate fiction

Now more than ever, novelists are facing up to the unthinkable: the climate crisis. Claire Armitstead talks to Margaret Atwood, Amitav Ghosh and more about the new cli-fi

I n September 2017, David Simon, creator of The Wire , tweeted a photograph of golfers calmly lining up their putts on an Oregon course as wildfires raged in the background. “In the pantheon of visual metaphors for America today, this is the money shot,” he wrote of the picture, which was taken by an amateur photographer who spotted the photo-op as she was about to skydive out of a plane. Everything about this story – the image, the circumstances – seems stranger than fiction.

A year before Simon’s tweet, in a landmark polemic, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable , Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh had questioned why so few writers – himself included – were tackling the world’s most pressing issue in their fiction. But now, as extreme weather swirls around the globe, melting glaciers, burning forests, flooding districts and annihilating species, the climate emergency has brought the unimaginable into our daily lives and literature. A survivor in Jessie Greengrass’s haunting new novel The High House sums it up: “The whole complicated system of modernity which had held us up, away from the earth, was crumbling … and we were becoming again what we had used to be: cold, and frightened of the weather, and frightened of the dark. Somehow while we had all been busy, while we had been doing those small things which added up to living, the future had slipped into the present.”

Greengrass is among a growing number of novelists who are confronting this unfolding catastrophe through the young genre of climate fiction – or “cli-fi”. Among the new arrivals are the Irish writer Niall Bourke, whose novel Line conjures the Boschian image of refugees queueing for generations in an arid land; and Bethany Clift, whose Last One at the Party is the diary of an unnamed thirtysomething who decides to revel her way to the end, as the sole survivor of a pandemic. In August, Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun will take us to a climate-ravaged near-future California. And in September, Anthony Doerr will follow his Pulitzer-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See with Cloud Cuckoo Land , set between 15th-century Constantinople, Idaho in 2020 and space some time in the future. Doerr has said of the book: “The world we’re handing our kids brims with challenges: climate instability, pandemics, disinformation. I wanted this novel to reflect those anxieties, but also offer meaningful hope.”

So what has changed since Ghosh published The Great Derangement ? “I think that the world has changed us, and the inflection point was 2018,” he says now. “It was partly because there were so many extreme climate events that year – the California wildfires, flooding in India, a succession of brutal hurricanes – but partly also because of the publication of Richard Powers’s The Overstory .”

This is a big claim to make for a novel. His point, says Ghosh, is not just about the book itself, but the welcome it received (including being shortlisted for the Booker prize). “It wasn’t hived off into the usual silos of climate change or speculative fiction, but was treated as a mainstream novel. I do think that was a very major thing. Since then, there’s been an outpouring of work in this area. In my own personal inbox, I get two or three manuscripts a day.”

Powers’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel reduces human lives to slim growth rings in the bigger history of trees, with characters whose separate stories fleetingly intersect as they circle around a series of confrontations between individuals and institutions, conscience and greed, that will determine the future of humanity. The Canadian writer Michael Christie repeated this structure two years later in a lively eco-parable Greenwood , set between 1908 and 2038, when a virulent new fungus is killing off all trees in what is known as “the great withering”.

At the heart of both novels is a debate about what constitutes life itself. In The Overstory, a research scientist is cast into the wilderness for daring to suggest that trees have their own forms of consciousness and community, while an entrepreneurial computer geek realises that they hold the secret to everything. In Greenwood , Jake, a tourist guide at a futuristic nature theme park, reflects: “Even when a tree is at its most vital, only ten per cent of its tissue – the outermost rings, its sapwood – can be called alive. Every tree is held up by its own history, the very bones of its ancestors.”

This isn’t so fanciful, given the “rights of nature” movement, which Robert Macfarlane has described as “the new animism”. Two years ago, Macfarlane reported on a move by residents of the US city of Toledo to draw up an emergency “bill of rights” for Lake Erie , granting it legal personhood and according it rights in law to “exist, flourish, and naturally evolve”. But it wasn’t quite that simple. “Ecosystems are not human, and they certainly don’t bear human responsibilities,” argued the bill’s organisers. “Rather, nature requires its own unique rights that recognise its needs and characteristics.”

The bill revealed just how difficult it is for our existing legal and intellectual frameworks to accommodate the idea of a reality beyond the human. “The [climate] crisis demands a form of literary expression that lifts it out of the realm of intellectual knowing and lodges it deep in readers’ bodies,” wrote a perceptive reviewer, in response to an Amazon collection of standalone cli-fi stories, Warmer , published in 2018.

So what are the stories we need and how do we unlock them? “There are many different kinds of stories one might tell but there are no general answers when it comes to novel writing, only specific ones,” says Margaret Atwood, whose MaddAddam trilogy explores what might happen in the aftermath of environmental collapse. Cli-fi often rests on the familiar trope of a nightmarish new reality unleashed by a catastrophic event. In John Lanchester’s recent novel The Wall , “the change” has eroded beaches and made Britain into a fortress state, patrolled by young defenders under instruction to destroy any boat that approaches. Kate Sawyer’s debut novel, The Stranding , published on 24 June, opens with the striking image of two strangers who save themselves from a life-obliterating radiation event by sheltering in the mouth of a beached whale.

Both The High House and Rumaan Alam’s 2020 hit, Leave the World Behind , do something a bit different. Alam strands his characters in a Long Island holiday home, cut off from “civilisation” by a cataclysm that presents itself as a mysterious noise, a noise so extreme that it seems to transcend sound. “You didn’t hear such a noise: you experienced it, endured it, survived it, witnessed it. You could fairly say their lives could be divided into two: the period before they’d heard that noise and the period after,” he writes. In The High House , self-sufficiency is made possible by a barn thoughtfully stocked by the scientist mother of one of the characters with the tools of a past civilisation – trainers, and tinned foods.

Greengrass describes her novel as “a sort of prequel” to Russell Hoban’s great dystopian fantasy Riddley Walker , where – in the absence of writing materials – language has degraded and mutated. Her East Anglia, like Alam’s Long Island, is on the way to becoming a dystopia, without actually yet being one. The characters of both novels are trapped between the “before” and the “after”, in precisely the sort of limbo that makes the environmental breakdown so hard to write about.

Apocalyptic fiction has long thrummed with biblical imagery, from the hymn-singing “God’s gardeners” of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood to the “burning bush” of orange butterflies in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour . Both The High House and The Stranding invoke the story of Noah’s Ark, creating sealed-off family communities while implicitly asking what such survival could mean in a world without olive trees, or doves.

In the novel Gun Island – his 2019 answer to his own provocation – Ghosh deploys myth and mysticism, and the historic movement of languages, animals and people around the globe. The novel climaxes in a mass migration of whales and dolphins, an implausible freak event that is also an observable physical phenomenon. At its heart is a reclamation of the “uncanny”, defined by Freud as an effect produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and reality.

Alam also uses the uncanny to slice through the hyper-real surface of Leave the World Behind, most strikingly with a flock of flamingos that land in the backyard swimming pool. “They’re comic and unsettling,” says the novelist. “They’re a colour that doesn’t feel like it should exist in nature, but of course it does. And they certainly shouldn’t be in the American northeast. It’s like coming across a zebra in the middle of London. It feels to me a little mythic, a little like the arrival of Zeus as a swan.”

It is also a strangely scary visitation. “I think that we have had all of these moments in the news that are frightening and strange, and we have to think of them as uncanny because they seem to contain something that we can’t comprehend right now,” says Alam. He cites shocking images of drowned children from refugee boats washed up on beaches. “Those were real people, and there is so much heartbreak and shame for us to bear in these moments. But there is also something very hard to figure out about them: an unexplained child washed up on the shore almost feels like something out of folktale.”

Like Gun Island , Leave the World Behind is a deliberately hybrid novel – part social comedy, part speculative chiller. Hybridity is emerging as one way of addressing the central contradiction between what we are (social beings with lives constructed from familiar rituals) and what confronts us (an elimination so total that, as Greengrass writes, “there won’t be memorials in church halls. No one is going to make up songs. There will be nothing left”).

In The Last Migration , the Australian writer Charlotte McConaghy slips between the magical, the speculative and the domestic in a compelling ocean-going yarn that tracks the world’s last migrating birds across the high seas, in the hope that they may reveal the whereabouts of the last fish. Its narrator, Franny, has a sentimental attachment to one of the three tagged arctic terns she is tracking. “I’ve taken to thinking of her as mine because she has burrowed inside and made a home in my ribcage,” she says, when the reality is that the bird is just a dot on a sonar panel, and finally an absence.

Jeff VanderMeer also embraces hybridity in Hummingbird Salamander , abandoning his usual speculative fiction to spin a pacy thriller plot around a missing eco-terrorist. “Using ‘us’ when thinking about the environment erases all the different versions of ‘us’,” writes the fugitive Silvina. “Many indigenous peoples don’t think this way. Counterculture doesn’t always think this way. Philosophy, knowledge, policy exist that could solve our problems already.”

Other writers have squared up to the narrative challenge by refusing to join the dots entirely, as Jenny Offill does so brilliantly in her scorching short novel Weather , composed of sometimes random paragraphs. Its narrator, Lizzie, is a librarian whose conscience is besieged by catastrophe aphorisms (“first they came for the coral, but I did not say anything because I was not a coral …”), while her “monkey brain” worries about what will happen to her teeth in a world without dentists, and her socialised one frets that she might have got lipstick on them.

It is not just overtly cli-fi novels that are investigating fragmentation as a way of expressing our state of dismay and disarray. In Sarah Moss’s Summerwater , holiday-makers struggle to enjoy themselves in unseasonably heavy rain, oblivious to a natural world that exists only in the parenthesis of standalone preludes to each chapter: bees dying, ants walling themselves in. In Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport , a lioness tries to keep her cubs safe, a narrative thread related outside the stream-of-consciousness of the central character, who spews out the minutiae of her life over 1,030 pages.

In their different ways, both Moss and Ellmann are addressing the solipsism or self-centredness of consciousness, which got us into this problem in the first place, and is both formed and enacted through the stories we tell about ourselves. Their characters are prisoners of what the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk , in a visionary Nobel lecture , described as “the polyphonic first-person narrative”, which filters everything through the self of the storyteller.

Tokarczuk, who laid out her environmental agenda in her eco-whodunnit Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead , called for a return to the perspective of parable, and for the development of what she called a “tender narrator”, a quantum version of the omniscient narrator, capable of seeing in many dimensions. Quite how this would work she didn’t know, because it had yet to be invented. In the meantime, we should abandon traditional distinctions between high- and lowbrow fiction and trust to fragments. “In this way,” she said, literature can “set off the reader’s capacity to unite fragments into a single design, and to discover entire constellations in the small particles of events.”

But as long as we continue to think and to tell stories, we are not necessarily doomed. For decades Atwood’s novels have been sounding the alarm about things that may not yet be visible, though they are already coming to pass. “There is no inevitable The Future, just as there is no inevitable Right Side of History. There is no inevitable Road to Perdition, there is no inevitable Road to Oz,” she says. “But there are consequences of actions, not all of them foreseeable. Dark are the ways of wizards. And of novelists as well.”

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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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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 .

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

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.

What is 'Climate Creativity'?

'Climate Creativity' refers to the vital role that creativity can play in dealing with the climate crisis. Watch the animation below to explore why researchers think the climate crisis shouldn't be seen simply as a scientific problem:

Film created with support from the University of Oxford's Impact Acceleration Account.

Part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science

Dr Philip Seargeant, Dr Nessa O'Mahony, and Dr Anne Caldwell

The Open University

Part of the University of Oxford's Impact Acceleration Account O²RB Partnership

We're still accepting applications for fall 2024!

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Changing the Narrative around a Changing Climate

Ashley Bieniek-Tobasco, BS ’11, MPH ’13, DrPH

Environmental scientist at icf.

October 24, 2019

When you think about climate change, you probably think first of images of starving animals, melting glaciers, and political discord.

This now-iconic imagery dominates the way we think of and talk about our relationship to climate change. Common climate change narratives paint a picture of a near post-apocalyptic world where extreme weather and human and animal suffering are prevalent and where we have missed the opportunity to take meaningful action. Recent examples of this in popular media include a New York Times Magazine issue titled “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” a National Geographic video of a starving polar bear, and graphic imagery of walrus overcrowding in the Netflix series Our Planet . 1

But do fear-inducing representations of climate change encourage people to take action?

Likely not so much. Such fear-based narratives are known to raise public concern and generate interest, but only to a point. Too much fear can make us feel overwhelmed. If the goal of such tactics is to scare people into taking action , research shows that even the most concerned exhibit limited participation in political activism 2 and that high-risk perceptions are not sufficient to motivate action. 3

Climate change messaging often leaves out efficacy-building information.

Perhaps more dangerously, such tactics fail to expose us to and teach us about the climate change impacts we most likely will encounter in our daily lives, including extreme-heat-related health risks, coastal and inland flooding events, wildfires, and extreme storms, among many others. 4

Climate change messaging also often leaves out the critical component of efficacy-building information. This type of information provides positive ideas about how individuals can make a difference and what their actions can achieve. Efficacy is an important part of making fear appeals effective. 5 But in practice, climate change messages have often failed to strike a balance between fear and efficacy, even amid suggestions that fear be employed with caution. 6

One piece of good news is the growing talk about climate change in popular culture using a storytelling approach. Recent examples include documentaries like Years of Living Dangerously, Before the Flood, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, and the aforementioned Our Planet. This emphasis on storytelling is encouraging because narrative forms of communication can generate complex emotional responses and immersive experiences, which can make a story more interesting, engaging, and persuasive than more didactic forms of communication. 7

Beyond the power to convince, a good story can also generate conversation. Think about the times you wanted to discuss the latest season of Stranger Things or Game of Thrones with your friends. Or the time you called your family to ask if they just watched 60 Minutes too. Or when you take part in any number of good stories we tell each other in books, on screens, and in person. Today, such conversations happen regularly on social media—where hashtags allow thousands to participate in a single conversation.

As it stands, few people discuss climate change on a regular basis. Fortunately, story-generated discussions have the potential to elevate climate change in our national discourse. And the more that people in your network talk about climate change, the more likely you are to have pro-climate attitudes. 8

Media makers looking to tell more climate stories, generate discussion, and stimulate action need to be wary of stoking fear without empowering. Too many of the same images of “climate change”—starving polar bears and tumbling walruses—can lead people to the conclusion that the problem is too big, too distant, and too late to fix . Stories that cultivate fear but do not include information about what a person can do to make a difference may stifle action rather than encourage it 9 and may lead to feelings of being manipulated to feel a certain way. 10

Public health communicators and our partners across the sciences have an opportunity and responsibility to shift climate conversations from messages of doom-and-gloom to narratives of hope, empowerment, and action.

As the influence of popular media on the climate change conversation grows, we need more research about which climate change stories resonate most with audiences to foster engagement with this complex issue. Stories, the imagery in them, and the people sharing them can be engaging, disengaging, or even polarizing. Understanding what message and which spokesperson will connect with which audiences is paramount. Highlighting people and stories that inspire and encourage tangible action is critical to creating impactful, catalyzing messages around climate change.

Public health communicators and our partners across the sciences have an opportunity and responsibility to shift climate conversations from messages of doom-and-gloom to narratives of hope, empowerment, and action. Good storytelling will be a significant tool in elevating the importance of climate change in personal and national discourses. You can start by talking to your neighbors, friends, or family about how you are experiencing climate change. By highlighting stories of real people and their challenges, successes, progress, and meaningful action, we can exercise our own agency—as public health communicators—in protecting the environment and the communities we inhabit.

• “Rich, Nathaniel, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” New York Times (August 1, 2018); National Geographic magazine, August 2018; Season 1, episode 2, of Our Planet on Netflix.
• Leiserowitz, Anthony, et al., Americans’ Actions to Limit Global Warming , November 2013. Based on findings from Climate Change in the American Mind , a national survey conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.
• Roser-Renouf, Connie, et al., “The Genesis of Climate Change Activism: From Key Beliefs to Political Action,” Climatic Change 125/2 (July 2014): 163–178.
• Fourth National Climate Assessment , US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) 2018, nca2018.globalchange.gov
• Witte, Kim, and Mike Allen, “A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals: Implications for Effective Public Health Campaigns,” Health Education and Behavior 27/5 (October 2000): 591-615.
• O’Neill, Saffron, and Sophie Nicholson-Cole, “Fear Won’t Do It: Promoting Positive Engagement with Climate Change through Visual and Iconic Representations,” Journal of Science Communication 30/3 (2009): 355-379.
• Kreuter et al., Annals of Behavioral Medicine 33/3 (June 2007): 221–235; Shaffer et al., On the Usefulness of Narratives: An Interdisciplinary Review and Theoretical Model, Annals of Behavioral Medicine 52/5 (May 2018): 429-442; Morris, Brandi S., et al., “Stories vs. Facts: Triggering Emotion and Action-Taking on Climate Change,” Climatic Change 154/1-2 (May 2019): 19–36.
• Ballew, Matthew, et al., “Climate Change in the American Mind: Data, Tools, and Trends,” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 61/3 (2019):4-18.
• Witte and Allen, “Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals,” 2000.
• Bieniek-Tobasco, Ashley, et al., “Communicating Climate Change through Documentary Film: Imagery, Emotion, and Efficacy,” Climatic Change 154/1-2 (May 2019):1-18.

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Pilita Clark

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Now that the headlines from last year’s COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow have faded, you might think attention to planetary havoc has drifted. Not so in the publishing world, where 2022 has begun with an absorbing crop of environmental books on everything from the polar vortex to veganism and, of course, global warming.

Humans may have spent decades wrangling over the existence and cause of climate change , but other species have simply had to adapt to it, writes American biologist Thor Hanson in Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid (Icon £20/Basic $16.99). The lizards in question live on islands in the hurricane-lashed Caribbean and have developed bigger toe-pads to cling on for their lives in the big storms that scientists say are becoming more intense in a warming world.

Then there is the Humboldt squid. It appeared to vanish from fishing grounds in Mexico’s Gulf of California after a rise in water temperatures over a decade ago. In fact, Hanson writes, the animal survived in greater numbers than before thanks to a striking display of “plasticity”, or rapid adaptation. To deal with the heat stress, the squid matured and reproduced in half the time, ending up so much smaller that they often couldn’t bite on the lures once used to catch them. Meanwhile, other creatures are shifting to cooler, higher, wetter or otherwise more hospitable locations in what scientists say is the greatest redistribution of species since the last ice age.

A different story of planetary change is told by British writer Ben Rawlence in The Treeline (Jonathan Cape £20). The title refers to the northernmost edge of the boreal forest, a vast zone containing a third of Earth’s trees that rings much of the northern hemisphere like a green halo. In a warming world, this woody frontier is shifting north at a serious clip. Once it moved a few centimetres per century; now it is invading the frozen tundra at a rate of hundreds of metres a year.

This might sound benign but it isn’t. Delicate ecosystems can be disrupted, along with the humans that depend on them, such as Sámi reindeer herders. In Norway, Rawlence finds that the aggressive growth of the downy birch is fostering snowdrifts too deep for reindeer to dig through and sucking up nutrients vital to the creatures’ food. The birch is one of six species that form the main characters in a story that Rawlence goes to athletic lengths to tell. Memorably, he strips and swims for 30 fraught minutes over “300m of the blackest water” to reach a stand of ancient wildwood on a Scottish island.

No one can stop climate change alone but they can become a vegan. The world would be a better place if more of us did, argues animal rights campaigner Ed Winters in This Is Vegan Propaganda (Vermilion £14.99). Winters begins disarmingly, revealing that he was so addicted to KFC chicken meals in his teens that staff at his local outlet knew him by name. Everything changed in 2014 when, aged 20, he began to form the view that the global farming system was not just cruel, immoral and environmentally destructive, but bad for the health of humans and non-humans alike.

Much of what follows is a grim but compelling mix of statistics and anecdotes bolstering the case for a plant-based diet. The animals skinned alive in slaughterhouses; the forests devastated by the “staggeringly inefficient” production of meat and dairy food. Winters ends with a frank discussion of the hurt that younger vegans can suffer at the hands of unsympathetic family members — and perhaps vice versa. He boycotted the meal at his grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary celebration because it was full of “animal products”.

Finally, Simon Clark’s Firmament (Hodder & Stoughton £20) is an engaging account of something essential to life on Earth yet barely understood by most people: the atmosphere. If you don’t know your stratosphere from your troposphere, you will after reading this lively history of the scientists and gifted amateurs whose discoveries revealed the workings of the system of air surrounding the planet.

Clark, an atmospheric scientist, uncovers the roles played by the likes of writer Daniel Defoe, who realised weather could change in tandem across a vast area, and US scientist Charles Keeling, the pioneer of atmospheric CO2 measurement. Then there are the first humans who managed to leave the lower atmosphere. They were almost certainly two 19th-century English “aeronauts” who still hold the record for reaching the highest altitude unassisted by breathing apparatus after a hair-raising balloon voyage from Wolverhampton. It left one with hands “blackened and immobile with frostbite” and the other insensible. Clark’s story is all the more powerful thanks to a final chapter that explains how this complex system is changing, and what that means for the future of humanity.

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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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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.

Art may help you face the climate crisis. Emerging writers speak to its adaptive powers

PHOTO BY KEN BLEVINS/STARNEWS

 If someone said they weren't aware of climate change , you might wonder, "Where have you been living the last few years, under a rock?"

Nathan Conroy could honestly say, "Why, yes, I have been."

The recent graduate spent a few years in the Andes, sleeping beneath the overhang of a boulder. Still, he was very aware of the climate crisis during his work on trails and routes in the mountain range, and the existential threat that humanity risks .

As the forces of global warming have battered parts of the Earth and an online audience follows the twists and turns of near-and-far catastrophes and scientific updates, artists like Conroy are paying attention.

They are turning their creative powers toward many themes, but the way we as humans might cope with an ever-warming, turbulent and deadly world is creeping higher on their priority lists.

Conroy and several others from the writing program at University of North Carolina Wilmington talked to us about how living in the climate-changed world is part of their creative work.

What lessons does art have for the rest of us? How can writing re-frame, illuminate or introduce new challenges for our modern societies?

We spoke to these writers as part of the USA TODAY Network project "Perilous Course" and learned how people can process feelings about traumatic issues through making and absorbing creative work.

An emerging generation of writers in their 20s and early 30s have felt what Conroy calls the "disorientation" of change.

"It's the tip of the iceberg," he said. But he's talking about the artists' still-shallow perception of what's going on with the holistic crisis, not about the science of floating glacier pieces. Conroy referenced how it might not even be possible to get a sense of the full mental iceberg, of all the things that are changing at once that our brains are trying to track and grasp.

For these creative younger people, the rapid warming of the planet is not so much the end of the world older people have known. It's the beginning of the world they will live in and work in for the rest of their lives.

How writers adapt to the quickly changing situation may help readers adapt along with them.

Plugged in to art's adaptive power, in a city forced to adapt 

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nathan John Conroy (@nathanjohnconroy)

The five writers from the graduate writing program at University of North Carolina Wilmington have experiences that go far beyond the salt life of the coastal city. And the city itself has been undergoing dramatic changes.

Wilmington has long been a beacon to tourists because of its preserved Southern cityscape and the beautiful beaches surrounding it. Yet in recent years its water has been poisoned by industry, its buildings battered by hurricanes and its residents and visitors assaulted by heat waves .

In some ways it's just the place to ask a new class of writers how they deal with the future they're facing, as human beings and as professionals whose careers, experiences and art will be part of a generation of literature facing climate change head-on.

Themes already present in their work may become the themes of their generation:

• testifying about the damage we do to each other
• navigating ongoing imminent loss
• confronting the world at its extremes
• rebuilding with what you have

They also write of our own personal ways of adapting to the changing world.

Yazmin Flores has found solace in fellowship with other writers.

"We talk about, you know, the possibility of us putting in all this effort now, to get our degree, and we don't know what the earth will be like by the time that we're old enough to have the careers that we wished for. It does feel a little bit better knowing it's not just me having these thoughts."

'We were raised to have a plan, to look for exits'

Flores doesn't remember much about the first story she wrote and sent out into the world. "It was about a tiger, and, like, magical," she said.

Let any magical tiger loose, and it's not likely you'll catch it.

As if she'd let her creative self loose with that first story, she has not stopped writing since. Moving from Chicago to Alabama, she began composing her first novel around 12 years old, finishing it when she was 17.

Climate change has been part of her vocabulary for just as long. "We had a unit on weather when I was in third grade. So that's the first time that I ever heard the term global warming." She was sure that by the time she was an adult, it would no longer be a problem.

"Because that's how a child thinks. And you would hope that there's enough good in the world that you know, someone will care and they'll fix it before we get there."

You would hope that there’s enough good in the world that you know, someone will care and they’ll fix it before we get there.

And now they are there, this generation.

UNCW's writing program gives its M.F.A. students opportunities to write in all forms. Though Flores is a fiction writer, she's also published poetry. In a poem about a school shooting, she wrote:

Six minutes jumpstarted a call to action.Six minutes changed absolutely nothing.

It's emblematic of a generational frustration — feeling permanently changed internally by a moment yet not seeing the change manifest itself into a better world.

"Many times... I've had to just take a timeout from writing, just because everything really just disrupts the flow. It's hard to sit down and come up with a new idea, a new storyline when I have to keep reading of how everything's deteriorating with the earth."

A 'poet without a history' is dealing with history's impact all the time

"I don't like sitting down."

Claudia Crook is talking about her past travels and her time as the daughter of performers and musicians; she's talking about the time she went West to study, and the time she came back East to live. Around that time she figured that maybe she had some stories to tell. She had been avoiding writing because it meant being still.

Crook is still not sitting down. She's doing this Zoom interview standing at the edge of a bustling Wilmington coffeehouse, resting her laptop on the bar-height counter. She picks up the laptop a few times and moves to a quieter spot when the background noise ramps up.

For me to be doing any kind of writing — or living — at all, I must have a planet on which to do it.

Words would catch up to her, eventually, whether she sat still or not. This fall she joins a group of writers of poetry, fiction and nonfiction in the graduate program. 

Her father, mother and stepfather were all creative people. "I never thought I was going to do anything traditional in terms of ... banking, or anything like that," she said. As a creative, she figured there were turbulent times ahead in her life. Even awareness of the real violence of extreme environmental events: "I was in eighth grade when Katrina hit."

She remembers "there was physical damage happening that suddenly I was aware of." Tying that physical damage, and danger, to climate change came during her college years in Los Angeles. West Coast-style — a five-year drought, the beginning of a decade of rampant wildfires. 

Part of her shift to writing involved the independence of writing compared to the performing arts. "I didn't have to ask anybody's permission. I didn't have to audition for a story."

Echoes of the physical damage she grew up around can be found in her prose and poetry, which also confront the damage we do to each other, even those we love. Still, relationships can be severed, people can be parted. But you can't break up with your environment.

"For me to be doing any kind of writing — or living — at all, I must have a planet on which to do it," she said. 

'More blur than edge': Fictions where kids have agency

Maggie Hare watched "An Inconvenient Truth" at a young age. "I remember being so scared."

It didn't stop her from being outside and part of nature. "I would say generally being outside ... alone was really important to me, as a like child and young adult and is where a lot of my writing came from then."

After a stint in her late teens writing poetry, she had a revelation "If I don't try to write, even if it's not my livelihood — if I don't try to like make a practice, some sort of life, out of this — then I will always feel restless.

The future is a fuzzy concept anyway, but there’s this point of beyond my own life that feels especially damning, I guess, to be somehow responsible for.

"And that notion scared me a lot but I just felt very deeply like I have to I have to find a way to do this." It led her to the college writing program.

Climate change hit home for her in a more direct way at UNCW, when she was working on a special issue of a literary magazine about climate change. It made her think: If she and her husband decided to have kids, what type of world would they face? How would they experience it when children, as she has written, are "more blur than edge" themselves?

"The future is a fuzzy concept anyway, but there's this point of beyond my own life that feels especially damning, I guess, to be somehow responsible for."

That future will only come into focus in its own time, much like with growing children.

Can 'otherness' help keep you balanced in a rapid-change world?

J.T. Smith said: "Form always comes first."

He's talking about how he composes his poetry, but he could be talking about how he composes his life as well.

The first form that enticed J.T. was becoming a doctor. Once he got to college he quickly figured out it wasn't for him. He laughed when describing the conditions under which poetry became a form for his expression. "I feel like I did the classic trope of, 'A man really pissed me off that I liked, and I was going through a little freakout moment. And I was writing very sappy, angry poems. And I just felt moved."

His English professors apparently did, too, and encouraged him to pursue his craft. At one point he figured out it really was the direction he wanted to go.

I myself am so used to things constantly changing and things not being solid.

For the next few years he's ended up in Wilmington and the creative writing program.

Once there, he noticed that while some residents were highly concerned with the changes in climate and its impact on Wilmington, others were more concerned with leveraging the crisis to rent a beachfront home that might not be around in 10 years. See the view before it's gone!

"So definitely, like my freshman year of undergrad is when I was like, oh, no, something's not right here," Smith said.

What about the poet's traditional motivation — to write the poem that's still being read a generation, or a century, into the future? Does the motivation to write an immortal work disappear when no one's sure if civilization as we know it will last even a hundred years?

"I'm not thinking about how my work is gonna land in 50, 75, 100 years," he said. "It gives me this ability to kind of write in the now and do whatever I want to do. And it allows me to like dance in the light of this thing that's gravely serious, I do need to write about it, but not for 100 years from now. So there's this weird sense of freedom that I have."

Smith, the child of a bi-racial marriage, spent some of his formative years in an upper middle-class neighborhood with its own apple orchard called Orchard Estates, and some of his years after his parents divorced in urban neighborhoods he said were "real concrete jungles."

"I myself am so used to things constantly changing and things not being solid," he said.

In the midst of Wilmington's summer, between triple-digit heat and torrential rain, he wondered how much harder it was for the city's children to be able to enjoy being outside.

"A lot is going on. There's like COVID and monkeypox and it's 115 degrees outside and everyone's angry."

"I think my queerness is definitely a big part of my writing. It's the reason that I started writing. Like, I mean, queerness is just like, otherness, not necessarily like sexuality, but also all of it, you know?

"My otherness has helped me feel happier in my writing."

Flying in a world without 'engine-fail scenarios' 

We caught Nathan Conroy one day before he again headed off for a distant part of the world.

He's a man who spent his 20s in various outdoor adventures atypical of a college grad, from lobstering in Maine to producing the Pacific Northwest's only Chinese language TV station. Now he was flying to Northern Europe to make the deep acquaintance of the Sámi people. Knowledge of these people and their language is essential to a novel he's been working on for four years.

This kind of adventure's not unusual for the recent UNCW grad. 

Since his childhood "getting lost and found again" in the woods of Maine, Conroy's been an explorer following his own internal compass.

The desire to write came because of his unusual jobs. The characters he found himself working with weren't the talkative type. "After a decade of odd jobs and switching communities, you really want to connect with people and express that and listen. And the page — the page held that communication for me, I could process on it."

Recently, he's been putting on makeshift wings and literally learning to fly for a nonfiction piece he's begun.

"It's part of a larger piece I'm working on which connects climate change in the evolution of flight," Conroy said. He talks about the Wright brothers, and how they designed the glider first so that once the glider with the engine failed, they would know it could still work and the result of an engine failure wouldn't be catastrophic.

Is Conroy thinking that we've pushed the Earth too far and have no engine-failure plan? You might have to wait until he's finished writing that one to find out.

This article is part of a USA TODAY Network reporting project called "Perilous Course," a collaborative examination of how people up and down the East Coast are grappling with the climate crisis. Journalists from more than 35 newsrooms from New Hampshire to Florida are speaking with regular people about real-life impacts, digging into the science and investigating government response, or lack of it.

Jeff Schwaner is an Atlantic region storytelling and watchdog coach for USA TODAY Network, based in Staunton, Virginia, and a poet. He is the coach for "Perilous Course." Twitter: @JeffSchwaner .

Ask NASA Climate

Ask nasa climate | november 29, 2016, 09:15 pst, writing about climate: an enduring bond between art and science.

By Laura Faye Tenenbaum

Yarlung Tsangpo River, China. Credit: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team.

My writing teacher and I said goodbye to each other. We cried together as I told her she would live on through my writing. She already knew. Because a dark night brings another sunrise, a winter brings another spring, and a goodbye brings another hello.

No one is truly alone; we rely on other people all the time. Teamwork, backing and support aren’t optional, they’re necessities.

The first writing assignment she gave me was to open my front door and describe the first plant I saw. Through this exercise, I learned how to observe the world and make detailed descriptions of those observations, while avoiding interpretations or judgmental words like “good,” or “nice,” or “pretty.” My writing became stronger when I told the story as it was, bringing along the reader and letting us both interpret the events together. For example, instead of telling you that I had a nice weekend, I learned to tell you that I sat near a fireplace with my puppy to my left and a friend on my right, drinking lemon, mint and honey (all right, there was a tiny bit of gin in there, too) and making travel plans. Then you, the reader, can make up your own mind about how my weekend was.

My writing teacher was a writer, a composer, a film producer. She was a true artist in every sense. And I’m sure you noticed the connection between the art of writing and the art of doing science, right? Science, including the type of satellite remote sensing at which NASA excels, is based on making detailed observations and allowing those observations to tell their story. NASA spacecraft give us images of glaciers, volcanoes, forests, large cities and sea ice , among other stories of a changing planet. And it’s up to us to see the details in those stories. When the images—the stories—have enough detail, we can interpret them and make meaning out of them.

When I think about how her life flows through me and out into the world, I also think about how we at NASA are part of a continuous stream of creative endeavors, of science, of aspirations achieved—each one built upon those who came before, and each one a step for the next ones to climb.

Thank you for reading.

• International

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

By: Communications

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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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.

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)