Environmental Book Club

This list of climate fiction is made up of adult books, not children's/YA. But the last one, South Pole Station by Ashley Shelby, is supposed to be funny. Clifi, as a general rule, is pretty grim.

The Environmental Book Club

Dan Bloom at 2016 2016  reports that the first climate fiction book club began in February as part of a lead in to the 2016 Big Read in the St. Croix Valley in Minnesota. This definitely sounds like an adult club with the first two month’s titles being I’m With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet, various authors, and Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. April’s book is The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, the area’s Big Read. A May book will be selected by individual area cli-fi book clubs. The Cli-Fi Book Club was created by ArtReach St. Croix.

Scroll down at the 2016 2016 post  to see material from Joe Follansbee  (whom I kind of know in a we’ve-interacted-at-Google+-sort-of way--he has great material there) on reading The Grapes of Wrath as climate fiction.

Environmental Book Club

Last year I discovered climate fiction, also known as cli-fi, a term coined by Dan Bloom. Earlier this week, Kelly Jensen at Stacked did a post called Get Genrefied: Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi) on climate fiction for YAs.

Is Cli-Fi Apocalyptic?

Notice that a lot of these books appear to be apocalyptic. Is that a requirement of this genre-like category? Why does a story about climate change always involve society falling apart? We experienced a Little Ice Age as recently as the early 1800s. Did the Earth's citizens go, "Life as we know it is over?" I think not. And if someone had told them, "Hey, it's going to get a lot hotter over the next century and a half or so," would they have gone, "Well, that sucks" or would they have said, "Thank you, God!"

Why can't we have a cli-fi book that involves a snow world and a society has evolved in which everyone skates and cross-country skis and it's Christmas all the time? No, seriously, why not a winter world where a culture has simply evolved to function there? Or a desert world that has been made livable by way of technology. ("Better living through science!")

Climate As The Story Vs. Climate As The Setting

I suspect what's happening here is that, as Kelly says, cli-fi is "fiction that features climate change at the core of the story." Making the climate change some kind of negative change provides the storyline. Whereas the kind of thing I'm talking about is a situation in which the climate is the setting of the story. The story is about something else. Would that be climate fiction?

Coming Up

Though I most definitely am not a fan of apocalyptic fiction, I'll grit my teeth and try to pick one of these books from Kelly's list for a reading effort. She also refers readers to Eco-Fiction & Cli-Fi Books, which I've just started following on Twitter.  I should have more in the future on this subject.

OC's Earth Day Post: Cli-fi

I usually do an environmental post on Thursdays, but today is Earth Day, and, hey, I can adapt. So I'm getting all environmentalish with a climate fiction post on Monday this week.

Climate fiction? you say. Yeah, I just heard about it a couple of days ago, too. Climate fiction, according to NPR is a genre, well, an "emerging" one, anyway, in which writers "set their novels and short stories in worlds, not unlike our own, where the Earth's systems are noticeably off-kilter." That's how it differs from dystopian or apocalyptic novels in which a futuristic world is suffering because of (usually) human-made environmental disaster or just a human-made "oops." Climate fiction is set in a contemporary world.

This article at Grist  looks like a review of a couple of cli-fi novels, though one seems a little futuristic/apocalyptic.

I suspect that NPR's definition of cli-fi as being something separate from the dystopian/apocalyptic stuff isn't generally known. Here someone uses the term "cli-fi thriller" to describe the same book set 75 years in the future with climate disaster that Grist included in its review column.

Climate Change and Contemporary Fiction appears to be a blog that deals with this very subject.

I'm going to admit that though I have an interest in environmentalism, as a reader I find environmental/climate change disaster stories cliched. The first few were interesting, sure, but now they leave me with a feeling of, "Oh. I've read this. Several times." Or, "Of course. The tech people/scientists are the bad guys. Again." It's not that the problems aren't real or serious, but they've become formulaic as far as literature is concerned. I also wonder if there isn't a message quality to some of these books, a lesson that readers are supposed to be learning. There's sometimes a propaganda quality to some of these stories. This preaching issue is discussed in Few A-List Novelists Tackling Climate Change in Their Plots at Climate Central.

Novelists Try Climate Change Story Telling: A Critical Review of Two Recent Entries published at The Yale forum on Climate Change & The Media  ends with "Are there other ways that climate change can make for good reading? It’s a question more than a few hope to see answered in the affirmative. As Bill McKibben wrote in 2005, climate change still lacks resonance in American culture. “Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” he asked. “Compare it to, say, the horror of AIDS in the last two decades, which has produced a staggering outpouring of art that, in turn, has had real political effect.”"

I am not knowledgeable about AIDS literature, but I think the question being raised here is is climate change being used in literature other than in novels? Certainly a different form--poetry or opera, for instance--might help to break the formula of human-made disaster leading to woe.

Happy Earth Day.