Writing Climate Change (40)
The Fight for the Climate – a Summary of the Struggle
This is part of a series on writing climate change for fiction.
We’ve just spent a long time on some big and complicated political struggles. Decades long. Dozens of overlapping players. Global in scale. It’s a lot.
Understanding this struggle is essential. Climate change is a political fight. You also need to understand where you fit in, when you put pen to paper and push out some creative work into this messy world.
To aid your understanding, here is another condensed summary. This is the state of the climate fight in its most simple terms.
First we have the context:
Climate change began about 100 years ago (circa the late 1800s to the 1920s). That’s when the science was first known. That’s when temperatures began rising (although it wasn’t yet apparent). That’s when we had the global triumph of industrialism, capitalism, modernity, etc (which in turn have deeper roots in colonialism, the Enlightenment, etc). Climate change has happened, is happening, will happen. This is a very old story, and a new story, and a future story. Climate change is and always has been an aspect of the modern world, along with all the other effects which now get lumped together and called The Anthropocene.
The fight for the climate really got going during the 1980s and ‘90s. That was the point when the science could finally demonstrate that a long term risk (which we’d known about for 100 years) was now a present day hazard. Climate political fights ramped up fast and hard from this point on.
The main approach to the emergence of the climate threat has been an attempt to maintain the modern world as such. Both eco-modernist fixations on technology and fossil fuel company denial are symptoms of the modern world trying to maintain itself unchanged. Climate change is a crisis of modernity as such (as is the Anthropocene more generally).
Therefore the battle lines in this fight are a complete utter mess. It really is chaos. Climate change breaks the organizing logic of the modern world. That said, certain general blocks do exist with general tendencies. These blocks loosely align with the big three traditional political divisions: liberal, conservative, and socialist.
1. Green capitalist/eco-modernist/technocrats. This is where we have the centrist political parties, non-fossil fuel aligned businesses, many academics, technology enthusiasts, United Nations sustainable development, moderate climate activists, and much more.
2. Climate obstruction and denial. This is where we have the fossil fuel industry and their corporate propaganda machine. We also have conservative politics, conservative religion, the far right, and much more.
3. Climate activism. This is where we have would-be revolutionaries, counter-culture hippies, eco-spiritualists, radical academics, green parties, and much more.
However, climate change doesn’t actually fit our traditional politics very well (or our institutions, or our ways of thinking, or our ways of telling stories, or much of anything really). Issues such as climate change represent a breakdown of the modern world as such. Hence why these political alignments are chaotic, contradictory, and prone to change. Hence why these politics end up intermingled with all sorts of other things, such as religion and spirituality. Hence why climate change is so confusing to people, and ends up being a giant projector screen on which all of humanity projects their own biases, anxieties, and worldviews. Hence why no one can agree on anything.
One recurring confusion is around scale. Climate change is global in scale, being an outgrowth of the metabolism of the entire economic-political-cultural-biogeophysical world order. Within this vast world, people spend much of their effort fighting over individual behaviour, national governments, and global institutions. These are the three levels within which the modern world typically frames issues. The world is more complicated than that, therefore no one on any side of this fight has ever decisively won anything. They generally just screw up each other’s plans, while the world keeps on evolving into something new and strange.
Second, we have the battlefield:
A huge amount of effort has gone into culture and propaganda (ideology, psychology, social norms, language etc). The fossil fuel industry has done huge amounts of propaganda for about 100 years. Climate protests are also a form of propaganda, trying to capture media attention. Both sides are doing it. This is also the realm where fiction acts. You are here.
That propaganda is ultimately aimed at shaping institutions (laws, political leadership, standard operating procedures, etc). The point of controlling institutions is to shape the physical world. Who is rich. Who is poor. Do we live in a fossil fuel world or not. This is the level that ultimately matters for climate change. Hard physical stuff can be reached indirectly (e.g. via culture), or directly (e.g. by building or blowing up pipelines). The cultural side is hugely important, because any building/destruction involves convincing someone to do the work. You are here.
As for climate fiction specifically, vast amounts of it have been scientifically inaccurate, apocalyptic, as well as culturally and politically naive. It’s unclear what effect if anything it has had, other than to solidly get people stuck in a near religious apocalyptic framing of climate change. Climate fiction is also suffering from a crisis of modernity as such. This applies to both literary and science fiction works, where many of their established habits are based on assumptions that climate change breaks. That said, climate fiction is changing and becoming more diverse and engaged over time. Some works are better than others. Some works have captured the cultural imagination. You are here.
Third, we have the history:
If we start in the 1980s we can divide the history into four phases. This applies most strongly in richer countries, but it does apply globally. Each phase adds something new, while actions from the previous phases continue going. Many poorer or more authoritarian places never added as much from later phases, because mass climate protests were not viable there.
Phase one (approx. 1980s – 2000s): climate change becomes a recognized issue. Mainstream politics prepares to take action. The fossil fuel industry ramps up its propaganda and lobbying to prevent that action. Action focuses on the United Nations. NGOs and low level activism get involved. Climate fiction mostly rolls out science fiction nuclear war and disaster movie tropes, portraying the issue as a future apocalypse. Effective climate action fails to happen.
Phase Two (approx. 2000s – 2010s): Mainstream politics tries again to take action. The fossil fuel industry attacks that action more aggressively. Petro-states also block action. Activists turn to mass protest and civil disobedience. Climate fiction remains stuck in the apocalyptic, but also now receives an influx of literary writers adding literary angst to the issue. Effective climate action continues failing to happen.
Phase Three (approx. 2010s-2020): Mainstream politics starts looking a little shaky, fumbling onwards as the extremes grow in importance. Climate obstruction drifts towards the far right, authoritarianism, and conspiracy theories. Climate activism explodes into global mass protest. The first inklings of mainstream tech-focused climate action begins as cheaper renewable and electric vehicles roll out. Climate fiction remains stuck in apocalypse and literary angst, but now gains in an influx of more activist writers. Effective climate action continues failing to happen, but we are no longer on the absolute worst case trajectory.
Phase Four (2020?-?): The world is engaged in an escalating process which must necessarily break or transform the world. Mainstream politics finds itself up against large amounts of populist discontent on all sides of politics. Climate denial cannot continue without needing to destroy reality and the world. Climate activists find themselves unable to achieve results without transforming everything. Time is passing. Visible climate disaster is here. The world order is fracturing. Social momentum towards some kind of transition, its shape as yet undecided, is growing. You are here.
Who is winning the climate fight? No one. All sides are escalating simultaneously. Who won biggest? Probably obstruction. They had the easier task - do nothing. But even for them it’s been a short-term Pyrrhic victory, like winning at alcoholism. Who will win? No one. Fossil fuels will end (it’s non-renewable and being outpaced by technology), and significant climate change is now baked in, and cultural attitudes are shifting (in mutually incompatible directions). The world will be transformed. Into what? That remains to be seen. You are here.
What is your role?
You are here to create art, to create culture. That task works on time scales measured in years (it depends a little on what your making). The fastest cultural impact you can hope to achieve will take around 5 to 10 years. The longest that impact might last is around 50 to 100+ years. Those are the time scales. This is generational work. Yes, you will have an immediate effect on your audience - as individuals. But that individual effect takes time to accumulate and scale before you’ll see any major social change.
Chances are you’ve been listening to people screaming: “This is our last decade!” Learning that what you are doing might only work in 10 years time hurts.
The world will still exist in 10 years time.
The world will continue to evolve. We will have a phase four, then a phase five, six, seven, and on and on. Each one might be 10 years long, or more.
The contents of Phase Four have largely already been decided. The game board has already been set. That game is being played out. Decisions are being made. Victories and failures will happen. We will see the unfolding consequences of the cultural messaging from Phase’s One to Three. For activists that means apocalypticism and emerging political radicalism. For obstruction, that means conspiracy theories and authoritarianism. For the liberal middle it means a desperate clinging to hopes for reform, tech-fixes, and green growth. These trajectories are already underway. The chances that you as an artist will shift the outcome of Phase Four is unlikely (but you might do so some other way). To write fiction is to do deep cultural work. Slow work. Long-term work.
What you can contribute to is the outcome of Phase Five (or Six, or Seven, or...). The current moment will end. What comes next will have been prepared during Phase Four. You are here. Phase Four is breaking many things (go read the news – do you notice anything breaking?). Therefore Phase Five could involve building many things. Let go of apocalypticism for a moment. Draw your worst case historical analogies (as everyone likes to do) then look past them just a little bit. For example: World War Two built the United Nations. That institution was partly inspired by science fiction writers who’d been writing about such ideas all through the preceding decades of chaos. The world continues evolving. Opposites create each other. What comes next?
Whatever gets built or destroyed in the future will be influenced by the ideas people are being exposed to now. You are here. If you choose to write about climate change right now, then you are doing deep cultural work during a major historical inflection point. A new world is emerging. You are adding your cultural weight to the web of influences which will decide what the world grows to become.
That is the state of the fight for the climate.
And that is it for this section of the climate series. Indeed, we have almost reached the end of the whole climate series. Topics like the Anthropocene and “crisis of modernity” take us well beyond the narrow limits (ha!) of climate change. It’s time to move on!
Next time we will wrap up the whole series by work-shopping a short story – applying all this knowledge towards actual questions of craft.
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Just popped over from the Rewilding Discord, Jack, and am sitting here, nodding. Preach it! I love how this is both clear-headed and hopeful.