Coming of Age on the New Planet
The idea of ‘integrated research’ has diversified and become more nuanced over the two decades since IHOPE was established. As Future Earth and associated institutions have reached out to wider audiences, creative industries, including the arts, music, theatre, films and museum exhibitions, have become part of the integrated methods and research outcomes in the mix. In particular, there has been a turn to ‘stories’ that complement scientific models, and to other creative outputs of the humanities and the arts.
In this blog, script writer, actor and philosopher, David Finnigan explores the role of history in his craft and in the wider task of understanding the changing Earth Systems under anthropogenic change in our times.
Coming of age on the new planet
Do stories about the transforming climate belong in our past, present or future?
David Finnigan
Someone recently asked me my advice about writing a climate story. Their question was striking: rather than ask about content or form, they wanted to know, when should their story be set? Is climate change best discussed through narratives of the past, present or future?
It’s a question I’ve been returning to over the last few weeks, turning over and over and holding it up to the light.
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Most of the classic science fiction texts about the changing climate take place in the future. Often it’s a distant future, decades or centuries away, allowing the author to speculate freely without risk of being swiftly proven wrong.
My brother Chris has pointed out that one of the appeals of this kind of future setting is that it skips the time period where humans could have done something to prevent whatever future is being depicted. Instead, it focuses on what you do now that zombies or terminators are ruling the world. As Chris says, ‘This can’t work for climate change because we still do have agency. We will continue having agency no matter how far we go, because every 0.1 degree less warming we can achieve is worth the fight.’
If climate stories set in distant futures understate the power of human agency to address climate, there are two significant recent exceptions. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future (2020) and Stephen Markley’s The Deluge (2023) begin almost in the present day. Ministry opens with a shocking heatwave in the year 2025. The Deluge opens in 2013, but shifts into a speculative future that starts in 2026. Both novels then unfold over a period of several decades as the transforming climate transforms society.
Committing to a speculative future starting almost in the present tense avoids the problem of skipping past the time period where humans could have addressed climate change, but it’s a risky manoeuvre – you’re asking for your predictions to be overtaken by events. Sure enough, as of July 2024, Markley’s future is already off-track (he imagines West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin being driven from power by a Democratic primary challenger and replaced with a Republican in the early 2020s). Robinson’s story doesn’t begin for another 12 months, but he’s already had to disavow several of his predictions (the blockchain plays a major role in facilitating the green transition in Ministry, which Robinson now regards as misguided).
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The future – near or distant – has long been the most common setting for stories about the climate. I love these stories – I’m a big sci-fi fan, I adore a good speculative future – but in my own playwriting practice, my stories about climate are almost always set in the present.
Partly this is because I feel like theatre is not suited for the sci-fi form. Unlike novels, visual art or film, the stage is unable to reproduce much of the worldbuilding and texture which lies at the heart of good sci-fi. Sci-fi often centres around plot and setting, whereas theatre excels at depicting characters and relationships.
But mostly I write climate narratives set in the present because I’m most interested by the ways that the climate change has already transformed our world. When Boho started collaborating with climate scientists in 2005, the most striking stories they told us were not about future predictions, but about the signs of change they were already seeing – extreme tides in Tuvalu and Kiribati, record-breaking drought in Australia, the most intense hurricane season in US histoy – and the unexpected social consequences of those changes.
The most striking sequences in my 2023 play Scenes from the Climate Era were not predictions of the future, but things that had already happened. Scenes about shocking weather events, ambitious technological solutions, strange social movements, many of which seemed futuristic, but all of which were real stories from the recent past.
We’re further into this than we think. More has changed, more has been lost, more has emerged, than we imagine.
There are ecosystems and institutions that we reply on that have already crossed critical thresholds and are disintegrating, and we haven’t even realised it yet. There are solutions and transformations that are already within reach, but we can’t yet apprehend them. We haven’t caught up with the world we already inhabit. Learning to see the world as it is (and as it will be), not as it was, is a skill that will take us the rest of our lives.
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But although climate stories set in the present day help us to really see the world we live in, and awaken us to the choices we can make to change the future, they miss out on a key element – the context for how we got here. There’s an argument to be made that climate stories are not just future or present tense – they’re historical.
In his 2021 book The Nutmeg’s Curse, Indian writer Amitav Ghosh writes about his conversations with Bengali migrants who have fled their homes and travelled to Europe due to increased flooding, heat or environmental damage.
Ghosh asks these people whether they consider themselves ‘climate migrants’. They universally reject the term. Not because they don’t see the role of climate change in their situation, but because for them, climate change is just another symptom of an overlapping set of injustices that play out across class, wealth and nation. Climate change is no different to the other disparities of race, wealth and conflict that they face.
These disparities are historical at root.
For western scientists and institutions, Ghosh argues, climate change is a technological and economic crisis oriented to the future. For the rest of the world, it’s a historic issue of wealth and power injustice.
One of the reasons that international climate negotiations are so intractable is that rich developed countries can never fully acknowledge the origins of the crisis, and whose fault it is. This creates a strange, distorted conversation. One group of countries wants to negotiate emissions targets and climate action as if we’re starting from year zero, another group of countries refuse to agree on future commitments without acknowledging how we got here.
Ghosh says, ‘In rich countries and among the privileged, climate change is a techno-economic concern oriented towards the future. For the have-nots of the world, in rich and poor countries alike, it is a matter of justice, rooted in histories of race, class and geopolitics.’
This sense of historical injustice is not directed at fossil fuels and extractive industries, as many progressives in the West believe. Governments in developing countries overwhelmingly see fossil fuels as the means to justice and reparations.
As Ghosh’s interlocutors tell him, when he asks their opinion on climate action: ‘Why should we cut back our consumption and emissions when we are still so far below western levels? The West enriched itself at our expense when we were weak and powerless. Now it’s our turn.’
If we limit our discussion of ‘climate change’ to atmospheric temperature increases, then the phenomenon is quite recent. But if we broaden it out to include transformed ecosystems, land use changes, lifestyles lost and changed as biospheres unravel, then for the majority of the world, climate change is a story many centuries old.
So perhaps the most honest and complete climate narratives take place in the past, stories that explore the entwined histories of people, technology and the land?
But the problem with trying to situate climate change in our past is that, although all the shocks and dilemmas we’re facing have historical analogues (we’ve been here before), they are now hitting with an unprecedented scale and speed. We can learn a lot from stories of how humans have handled environmental damage in the past, but nothing in human history can adequately map to the accelerating shock of sea level rise which will dominate the last decades of this century.
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So when should you set your climate change narrative: past, present or future?
One answer relates to the long-term historical transition that all societies go through in relation to the climate.
Societies begin from a state of ignorance about human impact on the environment – for example, the 19th century groups setting out to introduce European species to North America and Australia, naively unaware of the long-term consequences of this action.
Societies move from this state of ignorance to one where they are cognisant of their environmental impacts and are trying to insulate themselves from them – building concrete seawalls to block rising seas, or air conditioned sports stadiums in the desert – what Doug Cocks has referred to as ‘adolescent societies’.
Ultimately, societies progress to a more mature, nuanced understanding of the relationship between human actions and the environment. This leads to more sophisticated choices about how to avoid extreme weather and maintain critical ecosystems – sustainable, low-impact societies that can survive into the long term.
You can imagine climate stories set in the past, present or future mapping roughly to these three states.
So climate stories set in the past might feature characters with a more minimal understanding of their environment, while contemporary stories show characters seeking to insulate themselves from climate shocks, and future stories include characters with a deeper understanding of their relationship with the land.
In reality, of course, different societies have matured through these stages at different points in history. Many societies don’t make it through phases one or two (see Joe Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies for a sobering list). But all societies that have stuck around for a significant length of time – including many First Nations societies present today – have managed this transition.
So then ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ might be less useful terms for categorising climate stories than words which identify which stage of social evolution they take place during. Or to put it another way: is your story about climate childhood, adolescence or adulthood?