A Weeping Woman– Rembrandt (c.1645) Public domain Gretchen Shirm’s The Crying Room and Briohny Doyle’s Why We Are Here share a preoccupation with death and grief and what it means to live on, without intimate others, during a climate crisis. Both novels feature protagonists who lose parents and partners, and both explore their themes via writer-narrators who are producing fictions. Review: The Crying Room – Gretchen Shirm (Transit Lounge); Why We Are Here – Briohny Doyle (Vintage) Shirm’s book takes the form of a series of interlinked stories. We are introduced to the concept of the “crying ro ..read more

The Day After Tomorrow's apocalyptic depiction of climate change is a little embellished. But such storylines can ignite conversations with people that mainstream science fails to reach. 20th Century Fox Climate change - or global warming - is a term we are all familiar with. The warming of the Earth’s atmosphere due to the consumption of fossil fuels by human activity was predicted in the 19th century. It can be seen in the increase in global temperature from the industrial revolution onwards, and has been a central political issue for decades. Climate scientists who moonlight as communicator ..read more

Climate fiction: A novel describes New Yorkers keeping on even after 50 feet of sea-level rise next century. www.shutterstock.com Earth’s climate system is replete with potential surprises, and the climate science community tends to be conservative when projecting future changes. The world also suffers from a creative deficit in imagining the human response to climate change – a deficit that fiction is well-suited to help alleviate. One focus of my research is on sea-level change, both in the past and in the future. In his new work of climate fiction, “New York 2140,” author Kim Stanley Robins ..read more

David Menidrey/Unsplash, FAL You see the forest of cranes before you reach the coast. In the heat’s haze, machinery resounds in the middle distance, shifting and tamping dirt with earth-shattering force. Beyond the construction site, the sea sparkles under the Sun, traversed by ships old and new. It seems the whole city takes its cue from the coast – there is always so much being built, demolished and rebuilt. You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, here. Those in power push ahead with their enduring programme to reshape the world by building new land. This is ..read more

OFC Pictures/Shutterstock Water was traded on Wall Street alongside oil and gold for the first time in early December 2020. That might seem bizarre, but there is a grim logic at play. Reliable sources of water that have nourished civilisations throughout history – the glaciers and ice packs that release a steady flow each spring – are shrinking. New research has revealed that the world is losing ice 65% faster now than it did in the 1990s, at a rate of 1.3 trillion tonnes a year. In works of climate fiction, depictions of environmental disaster often focus on the very property of water that ha ..read more

Shutterstock/Francisco Duarte Mendes Just as writers and artists today are responding to the Anthropocene through climate fiction and eco art, earlier generations chronicled an environmental crisis that presaged humanity’s global impact. The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch that powerfully expresses the planetary scale of the environmental changes wrought by human activity. Read more: How the term 'Anthropocene' jumped from geoscience to hashtags – before most of us knew what it meant Yet almost a century ago, New Zealand and Australia were at the forefront of an environmental cris ..read more

The New York Public Library, CC BY In a year that began during one of the worst bushfire seasons in living memory and then saw a global pandemic take hold, rereading Ben Elton’s Stark offers an eerily prescient window into 2020 as the end of the world. First published in 1989, Elton’s debut novel offered a doubly prophetic vision. First, his depiction of environmental destruction. Second, his vision of high-stakes private space exploration. The world of Elton’s Stark is ruled by a shadowy ultra-rich cabal (akin to the Bilderberg Group), known as the Stark Conspiracy. Members of Stark have long ..read more

Hitoshi Suzuki/Unsplash, FAL Every day brings fresh and ever more alarming news about the state of the global environment. To speak of mere “climate change” is inadequate now, for we are in a “climate emergency”. It seems as though we are tripping over more tipping points than we knew existed. But our awareness is at last catching up with the planet’s climate catastrophes. Climate anxiety, climate trauma, and climate strikes are now all part of many people’s mental landscape and daily lives. This is almost four decades after scientists first began to warn of accelerated global warming from car ..read more

piyaset / shutterstock I’m writing this during a break at an academic conference on Literature and the Environment. We’re gathering as researchers in the environmental humanities to trade ideas, hear about new research, and to stock up on reading list material to share with our students in the coming year. We’re interested in discussing what kind of stories succeed in informing and convincing people about the climate and ecological emergency and asking what the results of a successful story would look like. In this sense, literary critics, writers and artists are asking the same kinds of ques ..read more

People gather outside the White House in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, June 1, 2017, to protest President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate change accord. AP Photo/Susan Walsh President Donald Trump on June 1 took the dramatic step of removing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement – the product of many years of diligent and difficult negotiation among 175 nations around the world. Recent polls reveal that six in 10 Americans oppose Trump’s move. However, a significant portion of climate skeptics remain – especially among Trump’s base and the Repub ..read more