A New Climate for Literature

With global warming now such a part of our consciousness, it seems only a matter of time before it becomes a greater part of our art.

As a so-called nature writer, I've learned that there are certain expectations that go with the job. I should prance ecstatically through the daisies. I should explain the biology of certain plants and animals. And, on occasion, I should don the robes of a prophet and declaim upon the end of the world. Unfortunately it's not something I am particularly good at or comfortable doing. The robes seem pretentious to me, and itchy. Lately when I give talks, I can't help feeling that the audience wants something more from me, that they're waiting for me to stop waxing poetic about birds and start intoning the phrase "global warming" over and over.

But I have other ideas, impure and pesky ideas that keep me from being a model standard-bearer for the Movement. For instance, sometimes I think that, from a writer's point of view, the end of the world might be kind of interesting. I don't mean to sound glib. I have thought hard about what it means that my daughter will grow up in a crowded, overheated world into which we pour CO2 and from which species daily go extinct. But as a writer, I am faced with a dilemma: How do I incorporate this knowledge into my work without coming off as a mere doomsayer or an angry ranter?

The short answer, I think, involves art. These days, bookstores are jammed with volumes that sound like they resulted from a brainstorming session between a modern marketer and an Old Testament prophet, with catastrophic titles beginning The End of..., The Death of..., or The Last.... Their authors, like Jeremiah before them, issue stern warnings about human behavior and how it is hastening the world's end -- unless, perhaps, we can change our behavior enough to save ourselves. The obvious danger of the genre is shrillness. No one wants to live with a spouse who feels the need to scream, several times a day, "This marriage is over! We are doomed!"

The best nonfiction combats this tendency with good sense and good writing. Rachel Carson's lyric calm on the pages of Silent Spring, and her professional composure while testifying before Congress, belied the efforts of chemical companies to smear her as a hysteric, a Communist sympathizer, and -- worst of all! -- a spinster. The title of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature suggests the work of a grim lecturer, but this early account of global warming, published almost 20 years before An Inconvenient Truth, piled on the facts and warnings with a sure journalistic hand. Of course this countertone can be overdone: Al Gore's film, for all its effectiveness, sometimes comes on like your dull Uncle Harry hijacking the living room with his slides from Fiji.

Human beings are better at focusing on the end of dinner than on the end of the world, and I think that part of the nonfiction writer's art is to meld the apocalyptic with the day-to-day, to simultaneously sound notes of common sense and the greater peril. For my money, no one does this better than the essayist Wendell Berry. Every environmental writer of worth has been called "the modern Thoreau," but Berry earns the title. In dozens of books, including Re-collected Essays and Another Turn of the Crank, he reveals how the environmental crisis is actually a crisis of character, and does so with a tone that is at once confident, homey, and ministerial yet short of scolding. If I am going to be told by anyone that the world is doomed, let it be Berry.

Dealing with the end of the world gets a little trickier in fiction and drama. While nonfiction can get away with being didactic, novels and plays usually can't. I admire writers like Barbara Kingsolver and T. C. Boyle, who have written about topics that might seem, in synopsis, plainly environmental, but have addressed them with humor, energy, and craft. Boyle's short story "Top of the Food Chain" tackles the timeworn topic of DDT's devastating effect on the food web, but does so entertainingly through the voice of a bumbling and optimistic scientist who, after wreaking havoc on the ecosystems of Borneo, insists that "the people were happier, I think, in the long run...."

The future of environmental disaster is inherently speculative -- What will life be like if the seas rise? What if the planet overheats or freezes? -- which makes it an ideal subject for science fiction. "As a tool set for illuminating various aspects of our present and questions about our future, I find science fiction is my perfect home," says Paolo Bacigalupi, one of the genre's best and brightest young practitioners. Bacigalupi admits to being an avid reader of environmental journalism. It's part of his working method: he takes the facts of the present and runs with them, usually straight toward an ugly future. In his first book, Pump Six and Other Stories, he creates searing futurescapes of an overheated, environmentally degraded earth jammed full of starving humans, genetically engineered crops and animals, and half-human creatures, all doing their best to scrounge out a life. One story features a group of genetically altered miners who eat mine tailings for supper. They discover a dog -- an animal they have seen before only in a zoo­ -- out in the slag fields and adopt it for a while. It provides some unexpected pleasures, like licking their faces, that their technology can't offer, but not enough to keep them from growing tired of the creature and, ultimately, eating it. We emerge from this dystopian vision happy to be back in our own world, and maybe a little less inclined to flip on the air conditioner.

With global warming now such a part of our consciousness, it seems only a matter of time before it becomes a greater part of our art. At the moment, two interlinked plays by Steve Waters, On the Beach and Resilience, tackle issues of climate change on the London stage.

The review in the Daily Telegraph concedes that the concept may sound "too worthy for words." But the stories that drive the plays -- battles involving a son and father, both glaciologists, and a group of government ministers as storms rage and seas rise outside -- work "superbly as gripping drama," assures Charles Spencer, the Telegraph's chief theater critic. "We learn a great deal about global warming without feeling harangued." Which is the whole point, of course. We don't go to King Lear to learn about the etiquette of royal succession. If environmental writing is to succeed as art, it can't be Environmental Art; any "teaching" or "learning" had better be incidental.

If London is too far to go, don't worry: the apocalypse will be coming soon to a multiplex near you. Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which brought doom to the best-seller lists a couple years ago, is set to be released as a film in October. I recently reread McCarthy's beautiful, almost unrelentingly grim book and, on finishing the last sentence, felt powerfully warned in a way that I hadn't been by An Inconvenient Truth. Gore's slide show certainly both scared the bejesus out of me and got me thinking. But stories can go to places that statistics cannot. As a kind of coda to The Road, after presenting 286 pages of an ashen, almost hopeless world, McCarthy remembers the world before, with its brook trout that "smelled of moss in your hand" and whose scaled backs glistened with "vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming." These maps, McCarthy writes, were of "a thing which could not be put back." That last phrase crushed me. I felt a surge of deep remorse and realized again just how miraculous is this world that we seem set on destroying.

Some environmentally minded friends would say that a surge of emotion like the one I experienced means nothing unless it is followed immediately by political action. I'm not so sure. A Marxist poet once accosted Robert Frost: "No poetry is worth its name unless it moves people to action." Frost replied, "I agree. The question is, how soon?" Art has its own province; the transformations it seeks, though perhaps less rapid and obvious, are no less vital. While we need all the nonfiction books of warning we can get, even if their titles do start with The End... or The Last..., we also need, as the planet warms, a literature that makes deeper sense of the warming. We all indeed may be doomed, but for those of us who write sentences for a living, there will still be work to do, to make our words match the changing world. Those few who do it well will make the rest of us feel our losses that much more keenly, and in a manner that no slogans or statistics can ever match.