Writing the Global Crisis

The global crisis – climate heating, habitat loss and marine pollution among other human-sourced issues are blighting the natural world. They are also changing the lives of communities across the globe. Many students wish to write about this complex subject, but are often at a loss about where to begin and in which direction to head. 

I’m not going to pretend I know any more about the climate crisis than the reader, and I’m not going to look for the answers, Butt writing the climate crisis will allow us to become a little more aware of the issues around the subject and challenge our responses as writers. 

Are you considering writing about the changes in the climate, or threats to the diversity of the natural world? About the communities effected by changing environments, or about the routes to more sustainable living? You may already be writing about these things. You may even be imagining a different future world.

In this blogpost I want to discuss  some of the ways this sort of writing has been tackled by both fiction and nonfiction writers, and look at new and different ways of approaching these issues. I'll also take a punt on how this writing will present in the future. So, once you’ve read this post, do get back to me via the Comment Page, so that the discussion can continue. I’m including a few writing exercises which might help you feel more confident about approaching this vast subject, and have some new skills to enable this. 

When thinking about writing the environmental crisis try to separate out the approaches people are already making. Think about the re-evaluation of science, informed policymaking, and governmental choices, as well as the way protest groups and the small actions of ordinary citizens are forming the debate. What happens when these separate things are put into the melting pot? Different people may reach different conclusions, depending on what they value.

WHICH DEBATE ARE YOU WRITING?

There is no single issue here, but many issues all leading out of our overuse of natural resources. 

Global Warming is mostly caused by fossil fuels resulting in global greenhouse gas emissions which blanket the Earth, trapping the sun’s heat, and warming Earth faster than at any point in recorded history. Hotter temperatures over time are changing weather patterns and disrupting the usual balance of nature.

Environmental damage, of course this starts with the warming of the atmosphere, but also includes air pollution, poor soil management, insect loss leading to poor pollination, deforestation, growth of human population, food waste, global trade and urbanisation.

Biodiversity Loss

The past 50 years have seen a rapid growth of human consumption, population, resulting in humanity using more of the Earth’s resources than it can replenish naturally. 

More than 500 species of land animals are on the brink of extinction and are likely to be lost within 20 years; the same number were lost over the whole of the last century. The scientists say that without the human destruction of nature, this rate of loss would have taken thousands of years. 

Plastic Pollution and the marine crisis 

National Geographic found that 91% of all plastic that has ever been made is not recycled and plastic takes 400 years to decompose. 

The quantity of marine debris is increasing in oceans world-wide. Plastic pieces outnumber plankton on the ocean surface 6:1.In the ocean, plastic debris injures and kills fish, seabirds and marine mammals. In 2010, a California grey whale washed up dead on the shores of the Puget Sound. Autopsies indicated that its stomach contained a pair of pants and a golf ball, more than 20 plastic bags, small towels, duct tape and surgical gloves.

The Human Armageddons

These might include destruction of humanity through the dangers of AI, deadly new virus pandemics or even nuclear war,  

Exercise  

Focus tightly any one of the above aspects and write for ten minutes; 

• A nonfiction summing-up of your feelings
• A poem about your feelings
• A snippet of new story with new characters
• A continuation of something you’ve been writing.

Past, Present and Future

Climate change is not so much an “issue”––it is an emerging reality. This new reality unfolding has a past, present and a future. A past that has been largely obscured but which is now breaking out into mainstream consciousness. Writers are getting involved at all those points, writing and re-writing stories that we thought we knew, that we should know now, and that we might only speculate on.

There are separate debates within science, within policy and within economics. There are debates about how scientific findings should guide governmental and political policy. There are personal decisions being made all the time, some based on strong evidence that alterations to lifetstyle will help, some based on heresy or even conspiracy theories. Here are at least the major aspects of the global crisis.

Exercise 

How do you see the future of mankind or the Earth herself? Choose one aspect or idea for all the different possibilities of how life will be in say 50 or 100 years; have an educated guess, or, even better, create your idea of a future possibility. Such guesses can be as fun or as ridiculous as you wish. 

Here’s my suggestion; 2100: Humanity has been almost wiped out and people live in very small communities, which have lost the ability to communicate with each other.

Here’s the opening of a poem by Pascale Petit from her book Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe)

The day will come when the papers will only tell leaf-stories

Of blackbird’s  quarrels with sparrows

Their pages will roll back into  trees, 

and the front page will be bark…

Take one of these ideas; not necessarily your own, but the one that has triggered a small idea that you could write about for ten minutes. 

FINDING THE RIGHT GENRE OR FORM

There are specific genres springing up that deal solely with these issues. 

You might think about these alternatives when choosing how to structure your writing 

Ecofiction’ or ‘Cli-Fi’  allows novelists and short story writers to combine the art of storytelling with their ideas about the environmental challenges, and their predictions for the future. 

Stories scripted for TV, film, radio or even theatre, allow immediate reactions from the audience, and a wide ‘pick-up’. 

Some ideas for story, especially dramatised documentary stories may be a perfect fit for scripting. The global crisis is alive on TV and UK radio and that may help you get a positive answer to your pitch.

Nonfiction may be a more direct way of alerting people to issues than, fiction. Articles, papers and books are being writing all the time, so be sure to be original and keep within your own ‘voice’ and state your own passions.

Poetry is a wonderful way to express the ideas and emotions this subject raises. It touches people’s hearts…the only drawback may be that the people who read poetry are already ‘won over’ on this debate.

Eco nonfiction is not now in its infancy, but is flowering and there are opportunities to write nonfiction and narrative journalism,  bringing the facts creatively to a broad readership. Also known as ecological or environmental literature, this a genre that encompasses a diverse array of works spanning novels, short stories, and poetry which breathes life into the environmental movement through the power of storytelling.

At its core, eco-fiction seeks to illuminate the intricate web of relationships between humans and the natural world, exploring themes such as conservation, climate change, and biodiversity loss. Unlike traditional environmental literature, which often adopts a didactic tone, eco-fiction employs the art of storytelling to evoke empathy, fostering a deeper connection between readers and the environment. Novels like Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial, 2013), in which blends science and a story about a bizarre act of nature, and The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel interlocks fables with a is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us.

Eco-fiction has a tendency to negate writing strategies such as conflict, tension and empathy, but  Kingsolver and Powers successfully demonstrates the implications of a changing planet while maintaining these important parts of writing fiction. 

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent's Tail 2014), deals with our attitude to animal welfare. The narrator, Rosemary describes her loneliness after the loss of her sister, Fern. A clever use of the ‘central reveal’ allows the writer to portray the plight of animals, both past and present, and describe the bonds that unite all sentient beings.

In fact novels with an ecological attitude are not new. Ursula Le Guin’s wonderful novel The Word for Tree is Forest  was written decades ago, and shows a wrecked Earth and the mining of other planet. The Drowned World was written by JG Ballard in 1962, but the concept of an overheated, rainy world is still amazingly pertinent.

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.    

Exercise

As our world grapples with pressing ecological challenges, authors are turning to the natural world as a muse, crafting narratives that delve deep into the interconnectedness between humanity and the environment.

• Freewrite a short piece, to explore your own feelings on any the issues explored above
• Read this piece, preferably aloud. Think about its possibilities. Make notes
• Amalgamate your thinking into the freewrite Perhaps concentrate on one aspect. This can be the start of fiction, poetry or nonfiction.
• Using all of this work start a piece of creative writing. 

THRUTOPIAS

Manda Scott has initiated a huge push for this sort of fiction. She says, in https://mandascott.co.uk/why-we-need-thrutopias/...

“We know that inspiring stories shape our futures. Throughout human history, our power to imagine a better world has pushed – or pulled – us away from the comfort of the known.

But our stories of power, accumulation and self-aggrandisement have brought us to the edge of extinction and we urgently need new heroes, new ways of doing things, new peaks to aim for. If you knew you were at the last days of the human story, what would you write? How would you write?”

Thrutopian writing wants to move through the dystopian end that most novels about the future of humanity (both for adults and young adults) have. At the moment dystopian fiction tends to end with only a good outcome for the protagonist…the rest of that society is still living in misery. Thrutopias push through the idea that disaster is non-reversible, to look at how a better ending can be achieved.

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

By addressing the ever-present spectre of didacticism in speculative and dystopian fiction, the writer is encouraged to consider a spectrum of perspectives, and to make their own ‘ecologies’ of connection. The emphasis, then changes to be on how writers wish to explore the various global crises.  

Try reading these novels with a Thrutopian outcome 

The Future by Naomi Alderson

Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr 

 Any Human Power. by Manda Scott

Transrealism and the Transhuman

These words refer to writing that looks beyond human beings to robots and cyborgs.

With the 2016 TV serialisation into ten episodes of an adaptation of  Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale (McCelland and Stewart 1985), not to mention her cyborg trilogy: Oryx and Crake also The Year of the Flood and Maddaddam, new forms of experience  are being explored. These are  literary modes that  attempt to mix the techniques of fantasy, science fiction, futuristic and dystopian literature with the technique of naturalistic realism, resulting in books like The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006) and Matt Haig’s  2013 book for young adults, The Humans (Canongate Books), which has as its narrator an alien in the body of a Cambridge professor, constantly puzzled by our primitive ways until he begins to develop an emotional attachment to the lives of humans, in particular, our ‘gift for love’.

THE ANTHROPOCENE

Humans have become the single most influential species on the planet, causing significant global warming and other changes to land, environment, water, organisms and the atmosphere. The word Anthropocene comes from the Greek terms for human ('anthropo') and new ('cene'), but its definition is controversial. It was coined in the 1980s, then popularised in 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul J Crutzen and diatom researcher Eugene F Stoermer. The duo suggested that we are living in a new geological epoch.

Katie Pavid makes the case for the idea that we are living in a time many people refer to as the Anthropocene. She points out that: 

“It is widely accepted that our species, Homo sapiens, has had such a significant impact on Earth and its inhabitants that we will have a lasting - and potentially irreversible - influence on its systems, environment, processes and biodiversity.

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and modern humans have been around for around a mere 200,000 years. Yet in that time we have fundamentally altered the physical, chemical and biological systems of the planet on which we and all other organisms depend.

In the past 60 years in particular, these human impacts have unfolded at an unprecedented rate and scale. This period is sometimes known as the Great Acceleration. Carbon dioxide emissions, global warming, ocean acidification, habitat destruction, extinction and widescale natural resource extraction are all signs that we have significantly modified our planet.

Not everyone agrees that these changes represent enough evidence to declare a new formal geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Scientists all over the world are still debating.

LANGUAGE

Changing the way we word certain phrases makes a difference. Not long ago, we were talking about the ‘global warming theory’ and now we’re talking about the ‘global heating crisis’. Rather than 'climate skeptics', we talk about ‘climate deniers’. .

.Rather than ‘climate change,’ we talk about 'climate emergency'.

 One way to structure you language when starting to write is to work with

Opposites'. Consider; 

Hard science 

versus 

emotional reaction

Evidence of a global crisis

 Versus 

Conspiracy theories, corporate lying and disbelieve

Good Policy making

Versus 

Ignorant Policies or even blatant disregarding policy decisions

The macro and microcosms  The big players, governments, social media

 versus

 the little person and small communities. 

Groups or families in denial

Versus

People coming together to make a difference 

Using Metaphor

 Let's take a further look at Pascale Petit’s beautiful poem. It’s full of marvellous metaphors, which as a way of describing that can really help your language hit home when writing about emotively charged subjects like this one. Here are a few of her amazing metaphors

• The buttress root of my armchair
• Phones that light up with chorophyll
• An apiary of apps
• Retweet birdsong

Your writing has to be a pleasurable read. Of course, that means different things to different readers, but no one likes to be lectured or spoken down to. No one wants to be told how to think. Writing like a tub-thumper is likely to result in your work not being read. 

Statements made on paper always shut down debate. So use questions instead. Questions lead to stories...statements shut story down. Therefor if you feel ambivalent about any issue you want to write about don't hesitate to exploit your own hesitancies by asking difficult questions. Fiction especially should always be about 'asking the question' rather than finding the answer.

Be aware that you cannot use your own political aims or beliefs to stage a story or article; your own opinions cannot take centre stage. When writing  fiction, you will find that your created characters take over––they should be allowed to have their own opinions––it's the questions that arise from these that will make your story engrossing. 

The important thing to remember is that the this story of greenness and kindliness to the planet and its inhabitants is wide and broad and demands a multiplicity of perspectives. That means your voice, among so many others will be welcome – we all have an authentic voice when talking and writing about our planet and species.    

Exercise  

Take one image that is important to you that can represent what you feel about the way the planet is changing 

Try to express it in a metaphorical way.

OR

Create a tub-thumping character who feels very strongly about something. 

Start a monologue in their voice, let them state their opinions. Then start to move the debate, allowing subtle  caveats to creep into their minds; finish with the character acknowledging the opposite opinion. 

OR

Think about how you could use opposites in various ways in work you are approaching.

WHAT NOW?

All of these things are at your fingertips when writing the global crisis. But you cannot spread that writing too thinly. Think about all the aspects, components and issues I’ve raised and talked about in this one little post, and focus your thoughts narrowly to get the best impact into your writing. 

Good Luck!