When reading the article So Hot Right Now: Has Climate Change Created A New Literary Genre?, I admired Nathaniel Rich’s emphasis of the role of a novelist. Unlike a scientist’s point of view of climate change, the novelist doesn’t obtain the responsibility to just write about climate change to get people’s attention. However they have the creative advantage to see what climate change/ global warming do to people in the modern world; what they do to the human heart. He also mentions to read the entire book of Odds Against Tomorrow, and you will not find one climate change phrase. “Climate change as a phrase, is cliché. Global warming is a cliché”(Rich).
When Rich mentioned that in his interview it struck me and made me realize my exact reactions to the word climate change. I knew it was bad from the start, yet I hear it all the time and do nothing. Does the word in general not trigger my emotions? Do I just ignore it because it’s a constant subject? Is it just a cliché?
From this class however, I have grown fonder of climate change in a new interpretation; cli-fi. I feel emotions, I have my heart tugged and I feel like I should be making a difference. When Rich mentioned he did not once use the phrase “climate change”, I had to wonder; was this why I felt more drawn to this? Looking back at all our other texts too, climate change was rarely spoken about, but you knew it was the message. I feel personally hearing climate change constantly I tone it out, but when you look at it from outside of the box; I’m involved. Cli-fi is a great example of creativity to get people to think about climate change, without saying climate change.
With thinking of climate change in a new creative light, I strolled upon this website NatureisSpeaking.org. It has celebrities who find the environment important, be the voice of nature. From Harrison Ford being the ocean to Julia Roberts being Mother Nature, I watched them all. I was so drawn by this concept and how they let nature speak. Not only speak, but listening to what it could possibly say if it could. “Nature doesn’t need people. People need nature,” is also the main concept of the website which hit my heart of emotion. Just from this new creative concept, I was more intrigued to start to think about my carbon footprint and what I can do to improve climate change.
Climate change is our present, past and future. Facts are facts, but will that get us up off the couch and do something about it? Or like in Odds Against Tomorrow, are we just going to fear it when something bad actually happens to us? I truly agree with Rich’s point in how we need to start thinking creativity to grab peoples and to truly make a difference to this reality of ours. Not just in literary, but in all aspects!
I’m really glad that you brought this up! I, too, have less and less of a strong feeling about the term “climate change” itself because it is everywhere. I am becoming desensitized not because it is not important, but because it has lost it’s shock value maybe. While reading these articles and this book I have realized that I am way more dedicated to helping prevent the world from getting to this awful, disaster filled state when I am rid of terms like climate change that make it seem like all the same thing and presented with real situations and solutions, or simply presented with a text that is not labeled “climate change.”
You make an excellent observation that most (if not all) of the fictional texts that we’ve read this term never mention the phrases “climate change” or “global warming” directly. They are more nuanced (and less didactic) in how they engage with the issue. I wonder if the problem is that those terms (“climate change” “global warming”) have become so cliche and thus don’t trigger our emotions, or if the problem is with the very act of trying to give it a name. That is, do you think that phrases like “climate chaos” or “global weirding” are better than “climate change” or “global warming”? Or should we just stop worrying about finding a good name for it at all and focus more on trying to speak to people’s emotions through the power of stories, or through the power of something like Nature is Speaking?
I agree with you and Rich about the term climate change being cliche. I feel that it doesn’t resonate as strongly with us because we’ve been hearing it over and over in a class dedicated to cli-fi stories. But I think it still hits home to people who don’t know a ton about any of it. I know it was a scary word to me before I took this class because it sounded like an inevitable disaster, which it possibly is. But what’s important is not always the term used to describe something, but the description itself. So long as people understand the impacts we have on our climate and our world, would it matter if they call it “global weirding”, “climate change”, or any other term?