Whether or not you want it, you have a story about the ongoing climate crisis. And in that story, you play a role -maybe a role of ignorance and passivity, but a role nevertheless. Anyone with an Internet connection who has not lived in a cave for the past decade, has enough information -or misinformation- about climate change to have crafted a story about it. This doesn’t mean that climate change is a story in the sense that it is up to negotiation or a subjective phenomenon only to exist in the stories people tell. But it does mean that climate change is being made into stories, they impact you, and you have a climate story yourself. Before diving into this post about climate fiction, you might want to look at my older post about storying global crises: https://www.heiditoivonen.com/uncategorized/2022/02/storying-the-global-crises/
Climate fiction
One particular form of climate narratives is climate fiction -fictional novels, short stories, cartoons, or movies that deal more or less directly with climate change, using narrative form. Some climate fiction novels are more of a niche corner in the literature world, some have been bestsellers in several countries. For example, The History of Bees by the Norwegian Maja Lunde was an international bestseller and especially popular in Germany, where it was the best-selling book of 2017, yet its success in English-speaking countries was more modest. Climate fiction is not a genre per se; you can find literature describable as cli-fi in many genres from romance to thriller and from young adults books to science fiction. Despite being such a broad term, it is consistently used by readers and publishers and appears in several online and offline contexts.
I recently published a paper entitled “Confirmed by Clifi” in Narrative where I analyzed a vast interview data, collected from people who had read climate fiction, meaning, fictional novels that deal with climate change more or less directly. While for many years, researchers have been fond of making big but vague claims about everything that reading and crafting narratives can do to our understanding of and actions towards climate change. Empirical research in this field exists, but it is somewhat sparse; my article is the first one to actually inquire from mostly European readers about their cli-fi experiences of climate fiction books they had selected themselves, rather than e.g. surveying people who had read books from a pre-selected list.
Interestingly, real readers often feel very differently about climate narratives than those who are professionally trained readers and narrative experts, in a scholarly since. In my study, real readers talked about how climate fiction mainly reinforced their pre-existing beliefs about climate change rather than leading to any new, groundbreaking realizations or reflections. While many climate-informed people refused to think that reading novels could possibly teach them something new or impact how they perceive climate change, many also discussed how reading these books can help in processing one’s personal feelings and thoughts about climate change. Some young readers explained how reading climate fiction had lead to the devastating realization that previous generations were already aware and concerned about climate change, yet were not able to make things move fast enough for any real change to take place. Such an understanding is powerful in the sense that very often, young people are prone to believe that they are the first generation to truly be aware of something, and when they realize that already their parents’ and grandparents’ generations were in the position of -at least potentially- to have a painful understanding and take some meaningful action, feeling the presence of a painful understanding, they gain a new perspective, possibly at the expense of getting to feel they are the first ones to truly understand and try to cause some change. Thus, while it is tempting to think that reading a book could potentially turn its reader’s world upside down and make them think and act in completely new ways about climate change, but this is not a picture that real readers of climate change paint. Rather, climate fiction helps them elaborate or process climate change personally and emotionally, not really learn new information or rearrange their internal understandings of climate change.
Not many people grasp a climate fiction book to learn or to be impacted -many are too aware of all the influence attempts where one or the other actor wants their attention, time, and money. We are influenced all the time, and people are getting sensitive to all kinds of manipulative attempts to use narratives, even if it is to spread climate change knowledge. In my previous research, I have noted how anthropomorphizing the nonhuman nature often causes readers to feel the story is too childish and overtly manipulative, or has them jump the fact that it is a story and read it directly as a environmental communications message (see my work here https://journal.fi/joutsen-svanen/article/view/113880 and with the anthropologist Cymene Howe on climate fiction films here https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4915). Thus, giving a human voice or perspective to a nonhuman character (such as a tree or a mountain) is not an easy way to grasp the attention of human audiences and risks coming across as childish or manipulative. In general, there are not any simple one-size-fits all narrative strategies that would have all the readers do what optimistic literary and communications scholars sometimes want: Learn to think about climate change at a more complicated and global level while getting inspired to act for the future.
Sometimes, when loading a lots of scholarly expectations on what climate narratives should do to our understanding of and actions about climate change, climate fiction and other forms of environmental storytelling become a communications or education tool rather than a form of entertainment. However, real readers often read for purposes that can be framed as more or less “entertainment”-most readers are not reading novels in order to write their PhDs. Entertainment and education are not separate, though, and a novel’s function cannot be clearly dictated as either or by any “outsider”. In a refreshing sense, a reading experience belongs to the reader and the story only; there is an intimacy and a personal relationship between the book, the storyworld, even the author. In my research, some readers underlined how good it felt to see that climate change was experienced as a big enough issue by the novel’s author to actually write a book about it. Already this fact made them feel less alone in their climate awareness.
My personally most influential climate fiction reading experience has been Barbara Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior” (see https://barbarakingsolver.net/books/flight-behavior/) I have published two papers that discuss this book: The first one is a theoretical exploration on what this story can give to a posthumanistic framing of sense of agency (https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/posthumanismstudies/article/view/3974), the second an empirical study on a reading group at Lund University, Sweden, discussing this book (Toivonen, H., & Nikoleris, A. 2023. ‘The arrow is never straight’; not available online). Even if this novel is in many senses a traditional, human-centric, linear novel -and not a postmodern exploration of dispersed narratives- it has a lot of potential to shake the reader’s thinking and emotions, perhaps precisely because it doesn’t challenge or confuse the reader too much.
Flight Behavior is a book that discusses climate change quite explicitly. The story revolves around the main character, a young mother from rural Appalachia, whose family grounds are taken over by a butterfly infestation linked with climate change. The main character, Dellarobia, becomes involved with a group of scientists, working her way to intellectual growth and autonomy in her newly found interest toward science. This novel has two assets over several other climate fiction works: Dellarobia is a realistic and relatable main character who actually feels like flesh and blood, and the author, Barabara Kingsolver, has a degree in biology, providing reassurance that the scientific details of the story, which there are many, are actually accurate. The story of Flight Behavior has lived with me for many years and I still think back to this book and how it waved the story of climate change into the story of a relatable realistic person. At the same time, the novel could be criticized of doing what many climate stories do: Making the vast, global, and ungraspable story of climate change into something at the individual human level, making it all about humans again.
Individual and collective narrative journeys
Reading books is a moment of intimacy with a story that for one reason or another has reached you. We do not always carefully choose the books we end up reading: Sometimes it is the social media algorithm that has decided to push a certain novel to our awareness, sometimes it is the recommendations of friends or family that spark our initial interest. Personal journeys with books are not predictable or linear. We might put a book aside several times before actually deciding to finish it, or we might devour a book in one sitting. Books are our old-fashioned friends in the world of fast tempo algorithmic content: They sit there, in physical or digital form, and allow us to go back, reread, put aside, and get back to it when the time is right. Books have patience. That is why they can become lifelong intimate friends in ways that much of purely digital content cannot. That is also why climate fiction novels can become steady resources of personal reflection in a world where new climate information -and often, news about environmental disasters- is released constantly to the public, faster than our human mind can take in and process new data. It is the personal emotional and cognitive processing of climate change where climate fiction novels can become a reflection basis, an interlocutor -and a patient one that stays steady and allows you to go back, reread, skip, underline, and have your own journey over a longer time span.
However, books or shorter written narratives are not solitary experiences. We are very much in dialogue with the book and its world when reading, and the interactions also span over to the physical world. People discuss books with others in person and online, making stories about books a co-authored, organic narrative where book experiences become shared social (and sometimes digital) capital. Experiences with books develop over a long time span, in dialogue with other people: they are ever-changing, making them a difficult tool for manipulation or influence. Many climate aware people are extremely resistant to the feeling that someone is trying to impact them, and many crave a feeling of hope rather than more gloomy facts that they know already anyway. This is why I have for a long time ago abandoned the idea that there would be one book better than the rest of increasing our sense of agency towards climate change or recovering a feeling of hope. Different books work for different people in unexpected ways, and most importantly, they become a part of a vast narrative fabric that everyone is continuously weaving independently and collectively into larger climate narratives.
This is where my current research interest lies: On the borderzone where individual climate narratives are being created with the input from all the different sources of climate stories we encounter, pretty much on a daily basis, no matter how climate active we are. Research has shown that feeling hopeful about climate change is extremely important for sustained climate action, but hope and climate anxiety are both needed for a person to feel they can do something about climate change. Anxiety does not need to paralyze us, it can also spur us into action. Thus, a good personal narrative about climate change is based on facts and not on illusionary hopes where an individual’s actions make a difference they simply cannot make. It is realistic, but hopeful: It focuses on what can be done, collectively and in a meaningful way, without dwelling in unrealistic ideas about one person’s impact on such massive, complicated problems. A good personal narrative probably involves a touch of anxiety -because how can you be aware of climate change and not feel anxious- while building on realistic, grounded understandings of what can be done.
Thinking about such a personal narrative again makes me think about Dellarobia Turnbow on her Appalachian farm: Sarcastic, tough-natured, slightly sad and disappointed with her life, but ready to learn and wrap up her sleeves when action is needed. Such realistic characters are also important since in all the storytelling research, we can sometimes become very abstracted: Scholars talk about stories as if these constructions exist somewhere in the clouds, as abstracted Platonian forms, and from there somehow magically influence how things happen at the material level. However, stories are embedded into our everyday lives, into the very practical, embodied level where we take action, live and breathe. In the reading group me and Alexandra Nikoleris studied, one climate professional explained that he practically fell in love with Dellarobia. Good characters don’t leave even climate experts cold.
When talking about storytelling or public discourses outside academia, I’m always painfully aware that some audiences think that taking a language or story-informed perspective to something means that for me, it is only that – a discoursive phenomenon, a story to tell. During the Covid pandemic, I wrote a magazine article (see https://sarolehti.net/lehti/koronan-viraalit-kielitanssit/) about the public discourses surrounding the pandemic, talking to several scholars to understand better the narrative nature of Corona. Some of the feedback the article received called it “irresponsible”; I can only image this response emerges from a reaction where someone believes that for me, the pandemic was some sort of a conspiracy, only to exist as a storytelling exercise to manipulate the masses. When I talked about my doctoral research years ago to some clinical colleagues, they were of the opinion that studying how people talk in therapy has nothing to do with therapy. Many asked me questions about the patients’ levels of depression or other diagnostic data, to which I could only answer that I am not looking into any of that: For me, how people talk in therapy is part and parcel in what therapy is all about. The same idea where the language is separated from “that what is” persists in commentaries about my work a decade after. Yet, for me, the stories and the discourses revolving around phenomena are, in an important way, the phenomena. The planet’s temperatures will not lower because I read a climate fiction book and I liked it. But a climate fiction book might make me think about what raising planetary temperatures mean and what kind of projections of future worlds they make possible or probable. Looking into climate fiction doesn’t mean climate is fiction; it means taking seriously the storied nature of our interactions with and understandings of the world at large.
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