Thursday, August 01, 2019

Environmental Book Club

I bet you all thought I'd forgotten about the Environmental Book Club just because I've done only one post in the last year. Hahahahaha. I never forget anything. Hardly ever. I don't forget for long, anyway. I remember sooner or later.

Today's EBC post isn't about a book. Instead, I'm sending you to an Electric Lit article, All Literature Is Climate Change Literature by Jeffrey Arlo Brown. In it Brown makes the fascinating argument that while we talk about climate fiction as being a very contemporary genre, writers such as Shakespeare and Dante used "the language of climate" in their work. Something like climate fiction was being written before we knew what climate fiction is. "..our vulnerability to the climate," Brown writes, "is familiar."

Give some thought to the flood that's addressed in the Old Testament, as well as the early literature of other cultures. Could that be describing climate change, maybe?Hmm?

Should make you think twice when you're reading some of those boring, dead, white guy books, eh?

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