This is part 14 of a series on world-building Climate Change scenarios for fiction.
Let’s world build a scenario. I’m going to give you a prompt, plus the major world events that happened in this world over the previous 200 years.
Take a moment. Think about what you’d come up with.
Here’s the prompt:
Kate is a young woman with a newborn child called Ollie. Kate and baby Ollie are outdoors at noonday. Ollie is looking at an animal. Kate is worried about what will happen this evening.
Here is the prior 200 years of major events:
The introduction of a new kind of personal super-weapon results in brutal wars sweeping the entire country. Every family feels the need to get one or they risk ending up dead or enslaved. Thousands of people die in these wars. A massacre of woman and children takes place only a short distance from where Kate and Ollie are right now.
Epidemics sweep through the land, causing a population collapse. Thousands die. An entire way of life appears to be on the verge of annihilation.
The original inhabitants are swept aside by a huge wave of desperate poverty stricken migrants. These migrants are so desperate they are willing to abandon their homes on the other side of the world. Some faced a choice between starvation and exile. They chose exile. The original inhabitants lose almost everything in this wave of migration.
This location was a lush forest, but it gets deliberately burnt down because the migrants come from open grassy places and want the forest gone. An ecological catastrophe takes place with a massive wave of extinctions.
Multiple revolutions sweep the world, some taking control of major world powers in the name of strange new ideologies. This includes totalitarian dictators seizing power of some of the most powerful states in the world.
A world war breaks out in a fury of destruction unlike anything the world has seen before, taking over 30 years to reach a final conclusion. The violence includes multiple horrific genocides, wipe spread use of chemical weapons, and the destruction of cities with nuclear bombs. Millions upon millions die.
Multiple global economic crises occur. The entire world economic order breaks down multiple times.
Multiple global pandemics break out, each one killing millions around the world.
The world has multiple close calls with full scale global nuclear war. Some people are concerned about a possible human extinction.
Thousands of revolutionary new technologies emerge, destroying livelihoods, throwing old ways of life into chaos. Some people are concerned the machines might one day annihilate humanity.
The world’s wealth gets concentrated into the hands of a tiny group who become more powerful than entire nations. Some of these super-Elite talk openly about abandoning Earth and living in space.
The feeling that Earth has no future becomes common. Some people have decided it would be too cruel to bring children into this world. Birth rates are falling.
Religious and politic fanatics are known to murder people in the streets. One such fanatic has carried out a massacre of migrants in Kate’s hometown not so long ago.
Kate’s hometown was struck by a catastrophic natural disaster when she was a teenager. Much of the city was destroyed. Her family moved here to get away.
Okay, so that’s the history. Obviously that’s pretty bleak. Sorry for using a history so pessimistic. I have a reason. Just run with it okay. Now go back to Kate and her baby. Come up with a scenario:
Kate is a young woman with a newborn child called Ollie. Kate and baby Ollie are outdoors at noonday. Ollie is looking at an animal. Kate is worried about what will happen this evening.
Where are Kate and baby Ollie?
What are they doing?
How do they feel?
What animal is Ollie looking at?
Why is Kate worried about what will happen this evening?
Stop now.
Before reading more, make a note of what you came up with (maybe share it in the comments later if you like - I’m curious to see if this works like I think it will).
Okay. Got a scenario?
Here’s mine:
Kate and Ollie sit on the picnic rug in the sun. Ollie is giggling, pointing his fat fingers at the fluffy baby duckies under the red rose bushes. The mother duck quacks and Katie laughs. “Look Ollie,” she says, “Look, duckies!”
Kate feels like a mother duck herself, looking after Ollie and his older siblings. All of them waddling after her like ducklings, but ever so cute. Kate has so many fun things planned for her ducklings today, so much in fact that she’s worried she won’t have time to pick up the anniversary present she ordered for Peter. Kate hugs Ollie and kisses him on the head. She loves her family more than anything in the whole wide world. “Oh!” she exclaims. “Look Ollie! Isn’t the garden beautiful today! Beautiful.”
Confused?
The writing prompt I’ve just given you isn’t as extreme as it looks. I could’ve phrased it like this: describe a woman and her baby in a park.
I never said, “Please set this in a post-apocalyptic future.” I just gave you the real history of that park.
That history is the colonial history of New Zealand, plus the Twentieth century, up to today. I saw a woman with a baby in a park, and that was the history required to bring her and the park into existence. I don’t know who she was, so I invented some details here. That scene is something that happens pretty often. Every day, in fact. Despite the Holocaust or the bombing of Hiroshima. In fact, this mundane pleasant scene took place during a global pandemic. She looked happy. So did the ducks.
This problem I’m going to call The Destruction Gap.
It’s really hard to escape this effect. I knew I was pulling a trick here. But even then, using that prompt I automatically was picturing Kate protecting Ollie by fending off feral dogs with a machete. Will it be safe back in the atomic bomb shelter? Will the raiders attack tonight? It’s stupid, but I started thinking this stuff anyway.
After all, there are no fluffy duckies in Hell. Our real history sure looks like Hell, if you only focus on the destruction.
The Destruction Gap
When writing about climate change, we are starting in the present looking forward. The thing we are focused on is a disaster. We are focused on that which could be destroyed.
Extinctions. Catastrophes. The annihilation of entire cities.
The magnitude of that loss is blinding. Like staring into the Sun.
Yet from the perspective of the characters living in a future story-world, that lost past might not be such a big deal. Even the recent past becomes minor fairly quick. We are all constantly living in the destruction of past worlds.
Chances are, ducks will still have fluffy ducklings. Rose enthusiasts will still create rose gardens. Mothers will still have picnics with their children. Life will go on. Banal pleasantness is in fact the baseline for most of existence, or else humanity would’ve died out long ago.
The Destruction Gap in Action
Much of this series has come out of one particular project – my attempt to write a story about a future Antarctica. For the most part that was a fun world-building process. Antarctica is a blank slate.
Then I tried new settings. Like Shanghai.
This mega-city sits in a river delta. Most of it is less than a few meters above sea level. The climate is already warm and humid. They already have problems with flooding and typhoons. At some point Shanghai could cease to exist.
Muse on that for a moment.
One of the most important cities in the world. A place with centuries of history. Gone.
If we don’t slow climate change fast, or commit to protecting this city at a gargantuan cost, then Shanghai might one day be abandoned to the waves. Tens of millions of people displaced.
This destruction is traumatic.
Researching this is unsettling. Writing about this is disturbing. Imagining this is depressing.
All I can see is ruined skyscrapers collapsing into the waves. Mudflats full of rusting cars. Kate and baby Ollie, rowing in a boat, fighting off sharks with a machete. Will the raiders come tonight?
This is the Destruction Gap. It shuts down the imagination, and leaves us terrified of the future.
Looking Beyond the Destruction Gap:
Getting past the horror requires three things:
Remembering the boringly pleasant baseline normality of existence.
Remembering creative addition also happens, not just destructive subtraction.
Remembering that people are bad at history. Kate probably doesn’t know that a massacre took place nearby 200 years ago. If she does know, it’s merely a curiosity, not a trauma.
Here’s some world-building exercises for each one to help snap your mind out of the Destruction Gap.
Boring Pleasantness
list 10 beautiful things in this location.
list 10 things that make people happy here.
list 10 things people are looking forward to here.
list 10 trivial annoyances people experience here.
list 10 trivial worries people have here.
list 10 trivial disputes people have here.
have a character in this setting write an alien invasion story. What 10 things do the aliens destroy?
New Creation
list 10 things here that are less than one year old.
list 10 things people are actively creating here right now.
list 10 things that are new, but people think have been around forever.
for each thing that got destroyed in the past identify the functions that thing served. Now list 10 ways people replaced that function (e.g. Shanghai’s skyscrapers provide accommodation. What kind of buildings might those people live in if sea level makes them unsafe?).
Bad History
list 10 ways people have romanticized past disasters (e.g. in cheesy adventure movies).
list 10 historical loses only experts remember.
list 10 historical loses people have forgotten about entirely. Not even the experts know.
list 10 historical loses that enthusiasts wish other people cared about, but no one else cares about. Why does no one care?
list 10 historical traumas that are still relevant, but society deliberately ignores. Why do they ignore them?
list 10 historical inaccuracies most people believe to be true.
Bad Mental Health
Recognizing the Destruction Gap is not the same as flipping into naive optimism. That destruction is real. It remains distressing.
Researching distressing subjects can trigger mind-states that block creativity. It becomes impossible to write. This distress can also get projected back into our work, making it yet more bleak and pessimistic. Kate and Ollie fighting feral dogs in the wasteland. Now hopeless and alone.
I’ve spent a lot of time engaged with environmental subjects. Here’s some of the less pleasant effects I’ve noticed in myself, which I suspect are common in others too. It’s good to be aware.
“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.” - Spinoza
Habituation:
At a certain point the idea of mass migrations, the destruction of cities, and the extinction of species starts to feel normal.
However, art requires a certain degree of sensitivity to the subject matter, and to the needs of an audience who might not be so desensitized.
Anxiety:
Knowledge can be a curse. You know what you are looking at, and it’s not looking good. The signs and causes are omnipresent, inescapable.
Anxiety is a terrible state of mind to be in when engaging in creative projects. Fear is the mind killer, and all that.
Distress:
These subjects can be directly distressing. It’s often an exercise in forecasting our own possible future doom. Harms that could be done to us or that which we love.
Again, distress is a terrible state of mind for creative work.
Avoidance & Numbing:
Because the distress is inescapable, one response is to escape psychologically. More than just habituated. Numb. Dissociated.
Again this is a terrible state of mind for creative work, which requires openness to how we feel.
Another alternative is to just not do this at all. Stop. Run away. Don’t go there. Obviously this is the end of any attempt to create art about the subject.
Over-focus:
The other extreme is to become too focused on projects. Climate change carries such world-changing importance that it can feel like nothing else matters. A common piece of advice for dealing with “eco-anxiety” is to “take action”. While I do agree with this advice, dealing with anxiety through action can result in over-focusing on actions which in objective terms don’t achieve anything. Such actions only create more internal distress for ourselves.
Objectively speaking, my attempts to read entire IPCC reports never achieved much, although I hope you are all benefiting from that particular neurosis now. While some good can come of over-focusing, it’s not healthy in the long run.
Powerlessness & Anger:
The current state of the world was not accidental. This is a story with villains. Most of those villains are out of reach, or they are already long dead. It can get very easy to become stuck in a constant state of impotent rage.
Rage is an unhealthy place to be. Rage gives birth to polemics and propaganda. Rage identifies enemies to be destroyed. Rage struggles to see with depth, or empathy, or nuance. Rage has a limited artistic range.
Burn-out:
The end result of over-focus, distress, anxiety, and anger is some kind of crash. A long period of avoidance might follow. After recovery the cycle can begin over again.
In summary, without a healthy way to engage with these dark subjects the result can be psychologically destructive.
Vitality and Suffering:
What we are dealing with here is a question of profound difficulty, perhaps one of the central questions of life – that is: how do we deal with suffering? It is the question of Job crying out to God, or the Buddha meditating under the Bodhi tree.
As it relates to art, we might phrase it like this:
How do we maintain our vitality while engaging with horrifying subjects?
By vitality I mean that ineffable sense of life, joy, spark, wonder, the will to live and to create. Beyond mere happiness. Beyond mere existence. The motivating force underlying life itself. Without this, who can create anything?
Those bad emotional effects are bad because they destroy, block, or interfere with this vitality.
I don’t know any simple answer to this. Plenty of mental health advice is out there already, and a general care for mental health seems the main useful thing. Rather than rehash what is already well known, I will just say this:
Vitality can live with dark emotions, vitality can shine in dark times, vitality is deeper than mere happiness or good fortune. Kate and Ollie really could end up fighting feral dogs with a machete, and even then retain that spark of vitality. It doesn’t have to be bleak, even in the bleakness. That joy can learn to hold the whole world.
Kate wiped her machete on the carcass of the dead dog. Ollie giggled, pointing at the blood flowing over the fire scorched concrete rubble. “Yes,” said Kate. “That’s meat now. Dinner. Bye-bye angry doggy. Bye-bye.” She sheathed her machete, and looked up at the Sun through her UV protective goggles. Peter was going to be so excited. Dog-meat - the perfect anniversary present. Awesome. They both had so many fun things planned for the kids.
Next time we’ll start getting literary, looking at various modes of story-telling that might work for climate change, as we continue our escape from cliché depressing apocalypses (although, first I might take a break from this series, and shift onto other subjects for a bit maybe another time).
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Great exercise! When I read the writing prompt, I imagined a White woman walking her baby down the street of an suburban neighborhood in the US, the baby, in its stroller, looking at a neighbor's dog. The prompt immediately made me think of the history of the United States or Australia (missed New Zealand, though).
I think it is really useful to make us aware or remind us of how we live through destruction, or we have even benefitted from the destruction of past worlds, without necessarily even being aware of it. And this will play into the destructions of environmental/climate change too.
I hadn't really thought about how that fear actually blocks creativity. But that's certainly true. And your exercises for getting through that to envision worlds is nicely done!