'Words are what I have to offer'

Writing the climate life

One of the new words birthed by the climate crisis is ‘cli-fi’, short for ‘climate fiction’. Not even 20 years old (and not yet in the Oxford English Dictionary), the term recognises that some contemporary writers have turned their gaze towards the climate crisis. The crisis is getting harder to ignore - deadly heat, wildfires and extreme flooding being some its constant manifestations. A majority of Americans now believe the planet is warming - the ratio of those who do versus those who don’t is 5 to 1. The battle for climate hearts and minds has been - is being - hard fought. If you missed it in an earlier post, here’s a summary from Professor Geoff Supran of the brutal PR tactics of climate predators to keep us believing that burning fossil fuels isn’t going to kill off our climate.

Some climate communicators recognise that piling up more and more scientific facts has not been a successful strategy for helping the public understand the effects of heating our planet, and the ways we must change our lives to live within its limits. Climate journalist Amy Westerfeld argues the climate movement has tended to be ‘super information heavy’ in its communications. And this guide from the Potential Energy Coalition urges a shake up of climate communication, to drop the language of science and policy in favour of language which makes a human connection. They even titled their guide, which I’ll be reviewing in an upcoming post, ‘Talk like a Human’.

Literature as a unique potential to explore the human experience of the climate crisis. Pulitzer Prize winning Barbara Kingsolver, novelist and scientist - she has a Masters degree in evolutionary biology - is one of the writers in the cli-fi space, using the power of fiction to offer truths about the climate crisis that cannot be communicated in any other medium. Through its plots and settings, its characters with emotions and desires, fiction allows us to see our world as it is lived in ordinary moments in time, on the human scale of daily life. Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, is an early (2012) instance of the emerging cli-fi genre, set in a farming community in Southern Appalachia where Kingsolver lives. Her main protagonist, Dellarobia, is a working class mother of two very young children from an accidental marriage. In a moment when Dellarobia may be leaving her marriage, she is the witness of a un-natural, climate-fuelled event. It brings the climate crisis into her home, connecting her to a biologist, Ovid Byron, who has spent his life researching a species of butterflies. In her connection to Ovid, Dellarobia begins to see the world through the lens of science, to understand what global warming means and its existential threats.

In Kingsolver’s writing, science is embodied in a living feeling character, textured into the novel’s setting, and woven into the novel’s dialogue. According to Kingsolver, the task was extremely challenging:

I think a lot of people are afraid of science, really, which is bad news for everybody, because we really all need to understand a certain amount of science in order to make decent policy about the world we live in.

As a novelist with both a love and a knowledge of science - and a need to explain the difference between correlation and causation - Kingsolver wanted to use literary means to interweave climate science and life:

the difference between journalism and fiction is that you need - it has to be symbolic. You need a plot. You need characters, and you need a way to enter the story that isn't telling, but showing. And you need, of course, extraordinary events.

The climate pledge

Kingsolver has recently authored another climate text, albeit one on a considerably shorter scale. This new text is a ‘pledge’, for which she was commissioned by the newly formed American Climate Corps, a major green jobs training program created by US President Joe Biden through an executive order after Republicans refused to support the initiative in congress. The America Climate Corps are not only an echo of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Civilian Conversation Corps in the depression years of the 1930s, but of similar state based organizations oriented towards conservation and now climate.

As an established climate writer, Kingsolver was asked to craft the pledge that members of the new American Climate Corps would utter to be sworn in. For Kingsolver, this was the first ‘vow or pledge’ she had written since her wedding vows. Here is Kingsolver’s pledge:

I pledge to bring my skills, respect, and compassion to work every day, supporting environmental justice in all our communities.

I will honor nature’s beauty and abundance, on which we all depend, and commit to its protection from the climate crisis.

I will build a more resilient future, where every person can thrive.

I will take my place in history, working with shared purpose in the American Climate Corps on behalf of our nation and planet, its people, and all its species, for the better future we hold within our sight.

A pledge is another one of the magical things we have invented with language. A pledge is a ‘solemn commitment to do or refrain from doing something; a promise, a vow’. We have been making such pledges for well over 600 years, according to the Oxford English dictionary. When I say it is magical, it is because its power comes from a collective belief that the uttering of words can be a transformative experience. Think of the marriage vow, when a recognised community member utters the words that transform a person into a ‘husband’ or a ‘wife’, creating identities then validated and sanctified in so many ways by families and social institutions. I have never needed to be turned into a ‘wife’ through this incantation, but I understand why people traditionally excluded from this magical practice have wanted marriage to be open to them.

In an interview on writing this pledge, Kingsolver faced another challenge: how, in the space of 100 words, to bring in what a pledge like this needs to do - a solemn commitment to work for the climate when there is so much to do and already so many unequal impacts from global warming, to invoke the historical significance of taking the pledge, to offer a vision for what is possible when people work for climate together. And to put all of this together in words that are sonorous, so that they possess a kind of beauty and gravitas:

I read it aloud to myself as I worked, because a pledge is more like poetry than anything else. It has to sound right spoken aloud, and it has to sound like you mean it. Like a wedding vow!

It seems like a lot to expect from words - to do all of these things across such a small span. But language never seems to let us down - because we wouldn’t be who we are without it, and it wouldn’t be what it is without us. Humans made language while it was making us, all at the same time. So if we need to make pledges, even one as complex as a pledge for climate, language has the goods. This particular pledge, at this moment in climate history when not just planetary but political heat keeps rising, has the added benefit of linking climate action to jobs and new career paths, reminding us that adjusting to a world without dirty fossil fuels has lots of opportunities.

Language is so deeply a part of who we are that the uttering of some carefully arranged words has cultural power. One of the great (white, male) figures in European anthroplogy, Bronislaw Malinowski wrote that language has a ‘creative binding force’, that the uttering of words ‘are as powerful for modifying the course of events as any other bodily act’. His understanding of the power of language and its deep connection to culture came from his studies in the Trobiand Islands, now part of the nation state of Papua New Guinea, but back in the 1910s when Malinowski went there it was under the colonial control of Australia. With Australia’s permission, he conducted his studies.

In this deeply colonialist exercise, and at a time when it was common to use the term ‘primitive languages’, Malinowski came to appreciate the fundamental pragmatic power of language, that language is a means to ‘do, act, produce and achieve’:

You utter a vow or forge a signature and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman person, or a prison. You utter another word and you make millions happy, as when the Holy Father blesses the faithful. Human beings will bank everything, risk their lives and substance, undertake a war or embark on a perilous expedition, because a few words have been uttered. The words may be the silly speech of a modern ‘leader’ or prime minister; or a sacramental formula, an indiscreet remark wounding ‘national honour’, or an ultimatum. But in each case words are equally powerful and fateful causes of action.

In fact he argued that the ‘intellectual’ function of language - for example, its usage in philosophy and science - is a later cultural development dependent on the everyday things we do with words. Words are primarily the means to ends, and this is why they have deep emotional and political power - the power either to divide or to unify.

‘Words are what I have to offer’

We often say that actions speak louder than words. In this counterpoint, we assume that ‘action’ and ‘words’ are two different things, and that ‘action’ is material and consequential, while ‘words’ are emphemeral, and divorced from everyday practical activity. But words are action - even words that we feel are ‘empty’ are trying to work their magic over us.

In an interview about her climate pledge, Kingsolver was asked about her belief that writing can effect social change:

Words are what I have to offer. That’s my way of giving blood. I think that advocacy and literature are two very different things, and this was a chance to really jump on advocacy, which I’m delighted to do. I feel this rising sense of worry and paralysis among younger generations as they look at the world they’re inheriting. And I’ve always thought that worry can be a paralyzer or an engine that puts you to work, and that you’ll go farther and feel better if you put your worry to work.

As I wrote in my last post, words shape and change our realities. Let’s never underestimate them. A pledge, in particularly one made as part of a public ceremony such as this climate pledge, is a unifying utterance. And an imaginative work of cli-fi is one more means of helping us work out what our current ways of living are doing to the planet, and how we might change hearts and minds to embrace the alternatives.