I'm With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet.
01.02.12
6Culture
The Introduction a new collection of short stories, tackling the cost of global warming.
The problem with writing about global warming may be that the truth is larger than usually makes for good fiction. It’s pure pulp. Consider the recent past, consider a single year, 2010. It’s the warmest year on record (though not, of course, for long). Nineteen nations set new all-time temperature records in Pakistan, in June, the all-time mark for the entire continent of Asia fell, when the mercury hit 128 degrees.
And heat like that has Technicolor effects. In the Arctic, ice melt galloped along both the northwest and
northeast passages were open for the first time in history, and there was an impromptu yacht race through terrain where even a decade before no one had ever imagined humans being able to travel. In Russia, the heat rose like some inverse of Dr. Zhivago; instead of the Ice Palace, huge walls of flame as the peat bogs around Moscow burned without cease. The temperature had never hit a hundred degrees in the capital but it topped that mark eight times in August; the drought was so deep that the Kremlin stopped all grain exports to the rest of the world, push- ing the price of wheat through the roof (and contributing at least a portion to the unrest that gripped countries like Tunisia and Egypt).
And in Pakistan? Oh good God. Here’s how it works: warm air holds more water vapor than cold, so the atmosphere is about four percent moister than it was forty years ago. This loads the dice for deluge and downpour, and in late July of 2010 Pakistan threw snake eyes: in the mountains, which in a normal year average three feet of rain, twelve feet fell in a week. The Indus swelled till it covered a quarter of the nation, an area the size of Britain. It was the first of at least six mega- floods that stretched into the early months of 2011, and some were even more dramatic!in Queensland, Australia a land- scape larger than France and Germany was inundated. But Pakistan! Oh good God. Six months later four million people were still homeless. And of course they were people who had done literally nothing to cause this cataclysm!they hadn’t been pouring carbon into the atmosphere.
That’s our job! That’s what we do in the West. And it’s why a book like this is of such potential importance. Somehow we have to summon up the courage to act. Because here’s the math: everything that I described above, all the carnage of 2010, comes with one degree of global warming. It’s a taste of the early stages of global warming but only the early stages. Scientists tell us with robust consensus that unless we act very soon (much sooner than is economically or politically convenient) that one degree will be four or five degrees before the century is out. If one degree melts the Arctic, put your poetic license to work. Your imagination is the limit; as one NASA research team put it in 2008, unless we reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere quickly, we can’t have a planet “compatible with the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.”
So far our efforts to do anything substantial about that truth have been thwarted, completely. The fossil fuel industry has won every single battle, usually with some version of this argument: doing anything about climate change will cause short-term economic pain. And since we can undertand and imagine the anguish of short-term economic pain (think of the ink spilled, and with good reason, over the reces- sion of the last few years) we make it a priority. Since global warming seems, almost by definition, hard to imagine (after all, it’s never happened before) it gets short shrift. Until that changes, we’ll take none of the actions that might ameliorate our plight.
And here science can take us only so far. The scientists have done their job! They’ve issued every possible warning, flashed every red light. Now it’s time for the rest of us!for the economists, the psychologists, the theologians. And the artists, whose role is to help us understand what things feel like. These stories are an impressive start in that direction, and one shouldn’t forget for a moment that they represent a real departure from most literary work. Instead of being consumed with the relationships between people, they increasingly take on the relationship between people and everything else. On a stable planet, nature provided a background against which the human drama took place; on the unstable planet we’re creating, the background becomes the highest drama. So many of these pieces conjure up that world, and a tough world it is, not the familiar one we’ve loved without even thinking of it. Those are jolts we dearly need; this is serious business we’re involved in.
But to shift, of course, the human heart requires not just fear but hope. And so one task, perhaps, of our letters in this emergency is to help provide that sense of what life might be like in the world past fossil fuel. Not just a bleak sense, but a bright one; a glimpse of what a future might look like where community begins to replace consumption. It’s not impossibly farfetched!even in the desperate last decade, the number of farms in the U.S. rose for the first time in a century and a half, as people discovered the farmer’s market, and as a new genera- tion started to learn the particular pleasures and responsibili- ties that most of mankind once knew on a daily basis; in that sense, we’ve had writers like Wendell Berry who have been working this ground for a long time.
Of course, in the end, the job of writers is not to push us in some particular direction; it’s to illuminate. To bear witness. With climate change we face the biggest single thing human beings have ever done, so big as to be almost invisible. By pointing it out, the world’s writers help pose the question for the final exam humanity now faces: was the big brain adaptive,or not? Clearly it can get us into considerable hot water. In the next few years we’ll find out whether that big brain, hopefully attached to a big heart, can get us out.
2011
"I'm With the Bears: Short Stories From a Damaged Planet" is published by Verso books and retails at £8.99. Royalties from the sale of 'I'm with the Bears' will go to 350.org, an international grassroots movement working to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Contributors include by Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, T.C. Boyle, Toby Litt, Lydia Millet, David Mitchell, Nathaniel Rich, Kim Stanley Robinson, Helen Simpson, and Wu Ming 1
