Why Climate Fiction Matters
By now, you know the formula. It’s a mainstay of climate reporting, used again and again in story after story: a paragraph that vividly conjures the vast, unfurling crisis we face. A barrage of unsparing detail, played out like a shock and awe campaign, dramatizing the brutal real-world stakes of continued inaction. I call it the Wakeup Call. The details change from piece to piece, but the idea’s always the same: We’re not moving fast enough, the risks are greater than ever, the cracks are showing in new ways. Rhetorically, the intent is to wound. To hurt the reader for their own good, to break through the numbness and inertia the average person feels as they scan the news. To make them feel something again. To remind them this is urgent. This is dangerous. This matters.
As someone who covers environmental issues for a living, I’ve relied on this technique as much as anyone. The Wakeup Call is a way to reinforce the gravity of one’s reporting, placing new developments in the context of the larger crisis. Here’s an example, from a story published in The Los Angeles Times this month:
“Deadly heat waves would strike major cities such as Chicago, while droughts would plague southern Europe, southern Africa and the Amazon,” the piece reminds us, citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s findings on what happens if we hit the critical warming threshold of 2 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels. “The destruction of key ecosystems including coral reefs, tropical forests, mangroves and sea grass beds would lead to reduced levels of coastal defense from storms, winds and waves, and Asia and other places would experience major flooding . . . steadily rising sea levels, increased water stress and declining crop yields would put pressure on global food prices and lead to prolonged famines in some African countries. The world would also see increasing levels of public unrest and political destabilization.”
Writing like this—a litany of terrifying near-term scenarios—plays a key role in writing about climate. Part of the value is journalistic: It would be irresponsible not to tie new stories back to the larger whole, reminding readers that each breaking development adds up to a bigger picture. There’s emotional and rhetorical value, too. The Wakeup Call dares you not to care. It confronts you with the imminent loss of everything you love, a catastrophe that science tells us is not only possible, but inevitable, unless we work actively to avoid it.
But there’s also evidence that suggests this approach is self-defeating, as understandable as it is. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably experienced the despair of confronting too many doom-and-gloom headlines before—the narcotic effect of having too many urgent things to care about. A mandate to feel everything can make it impossible to feel anything. We burn out on climate realism, a fatigue that research suggests has real-world consequences. A study of 60,000 people in Science Advances found that “negative messaging” around climate did make people more likely to share other (presumably negative) stories online. But it also made them less likely to take a concrete, beneficial action (planting trees).
It’s counterintuitive, but it’s a reality of the human psyche: sometimes stories that should shake us into action only numb us further. When the evidence becomes too overwhelming, we can shut down and refuse to act.
Yes, the situation is grim. And because journalists labor in the service of a single, all-important question—what’s true?—it’s their job to render this grimness as it really is. Still, that’s not the only story we can tell, and it’s not the only story we need. We also crave narratives that pursue a different question altogether: what if?
Stories about what isn’t, but could be. Stories about our dreams and fears, our hopes and projections. Stories that allow us to imagine radically different relationships to the earth and to each other, freed however briefly from practical constraints. Stories don’t only have to be about the agreed-upon contours of a shared reality. We need to dream together, too.
For now, I see that kind of storytelling happening mostly in fiction. Books like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Ling Ma’s Severance ask what it might mean to try to retain our humanity in a ravaged, frighteningly remade world. These cataclysmic visions help us face our fears about survival in a profoundly disordered landscape, while consoling us with a redemptive truth about humanity: We can insist on dignity, on beauty, no matter how bleak things get. At its best, post-apocalyptic fiction reinforces the importance of striving for something better even when all is already lost. That’s a lesson we need now. And it sends a very different message than we get in conventional climate journalism, which tends to underscore a different theme: namely, that we’re losing everything we care about thanks to forces beyond our control.
Of course, some fictional narratives ask “what if?” questions more as warning than consolation. The hit Netflix film Don’t Look Up depicts planetary collapse on a dramatically tighter timescale, thanks to a wayward asteroid. Its harrowing depiction of a civilization trying and failing to save itself—mostly thanks to its own inertia and venality—might be fictional, but it’s chillingly familiar. In a similar way, Alexandra Kleeman’s novel Something New Under the Sun starts with a scenario we recognize: a near-future American west remade by catastrophic drought. But it uses a fictional techno-fix—a synthetic water replacement called WAT-R—to explore what can go wrong when for-profit solutions are applied to systemic, communal problems. Stories like these might be fanciful, but they help us reckon with reality, too. Sometimes it’s easier to work through our hangups in a parallel world, just the way we more easily see our own flaws in someone else.
Though asking “what if?” can be a way to reckon with our nightmares, the question can just as easily be liberating. Yes, there’s a growing interest in dystopian fiction, but fiction can be utopian, too. It just means asking a very different set of questions than we usually see in journalism. Like: what if we brought our very best to the climate crisis, rather than our worst? What would it take for us to beat this? And what would a more harmonious relationship between people and planet really look like?
This is the project of works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a speculative epic that uses dozens of eyewitness accounts to chronicle humanity’s successful path to a better, more bountiful world beyond carbon emissions. Or the nonprofit newsroom Grist’s annual Imagine 2200 contest, which asks writers to imagine what the world might look like after 180 years of equitable climate progress. Projects like these seem to grow out of a different instinct: they reject the premise that things need to be the way they are. They dare us to imagine the world that, deep down, we want. And then they offer a map that, if we’re careful, just might get us part of the way there.
This is where conventional journalism—at least as it stands today—tends to fall short. Too often, as storytellers, we act as mere stenographers in our own time, reporting all that happens without asking what could be. What should be. Of course, we need to know what’s happening. But we also need to be reminded that beauty and justice, harmony and health, are real too, and worth fighting for. As a one character puts it in The Ministry of the Future: “We are all children of this planet, we are going to sing its praises all together, all at once, now is the time to express our love, to take the responsibilities that come with being stewards of this earth, devotees of this sacred space.”
We need stories that grow out of a conviction that the world can still be beautiful, that are serious about pointing the way there. We need to be reminded of the truth of that, even if we need to pass through fictional worlds to get there.