We need Climate Literature (and Art)

Climate Change is the challenge of this century. There's no refuting that. Now, more than ever, as we near the 2020 Climate goals, as the Amazon flares up, as we enter consistently hotter and hotter years on record, and as weather events and phenomena increase in scale and destructiveness, we are in need of action.

The trouble is this; we need a vision, a vision for a society that better co-exists with nature, a society that has transformed into one that upholds the ideals of the "Green Dream." And while activists and young people see the world burning around them and know to fear what the world could become, it isn't simply enough to know what you don't want. You need a vision of what you do want, a vision of a post-climate crisis society, one that we can motivate ourselves to work towards. 

The problem right now is that the comforts we would lose from transforming from our current society are much clearer than those we will gain from living in a sustainable society. We have to sacrifice our gas powered cars for costly electric cars with less range, less of the romanticism of the combustion engine and less infrastructure to support it. We have to sacrifice eating meat. We have to sacrifice cornerstones of the already young and fragile American culture. Or at least this is the false narrative megaphoned by new corporations interested in retaining their funding and wealth from the winners of this 21st century game of Monopoly. 

The sacrifices we have to make aren't clear, for a sacrifice implies that some greater, future gain materialises from a present, short-term loss, and currently we're failing at communicating and invigorating people with the hopes and intentions behind an economic transformation invoked by the Green New Deal. We have a lot of facts, a lot of people telling us what we should be doing. And that's good. It's very good. But it isn't the best thing we could be doing to get people on board. 

Fortunately, Gen Z is starting to imagine a vision of the "Green Dream" where Millennials and previous generations couldn't. 

For the first time, and especially in American society, we are starting to truly see the mechanisms at work that undermine the environment, primarily because these same mechanisms are now undermining people; the perils of automation are revealing something about our (particularly American) consumer culture that makes us realise just how much we're sucking out of the ground and how much individual, bountiful wealth we have (or had). Of course, now that this system no longer seems to be working for both repetitive-labour workers recently laid off as well as the upcoming generations that have to grapple with costs and debt dramatically greater than their salaries, people are waking up to reality. 

But that doesn't mean they have a vision for the future. As of now, people are focused on solving the issues but don't aspire to anything greater past retaining a better living for their individual selves. The blame is incorrectly placed on the individual and not with the larger society and the mechanisms at play. 

Currently, our visions for the future are dominated with bleak, post-apocalyptic or authoritarian dystopian worlds that are, quite frankly, out of sync with today's reality. But, more importantly, they are instances of what we don't want the future to be, while the is more popularly romanticised. We idealise the 80s watching Stranger Things and Bumblebee, and try to relive our childhood through remakes of Disney classics and every remotely successful franchise under the sun, while originality suffers, and even then in these remakes are painting a bleak view of the future, such as in Blade Runner; 2049 or Mad Max: Fury Road. As a result, people are overall pessimistic in what the future holds and would rather go back to living in the past or continue living in the not-ideal-but-good-enough present. 

What we need right now is originality, and a push for originality based on and around the excitement surrounding a "Green Society." The same way art and literature inspired the most influential nations of the 20th century to reach to ever higher heights, whether a malicious dictatorship, pseudo-empire or a "shining city on the hill", we need to harness art and artists to imagine what a Green society could and would look like, and spread the image across the world to spark morale and motivation to challenge and confront Climate Change, for a better future. 

We need art and literature for our time. So join me.