ABSTRACT
Climate change fiction is, after all, “fiction,” whether textual or visual, no matter how realistic or science-based it may be. Also, a considerable amount of such novels are set in the future and marketed as the genre of science fiction. As a result, skeptical or previously uninformed students might dismiss the informational aspects and even the themes of mitigation and adaptation of such novels, even when they are based on existing data and already occurring practices. Climate change films tend to build in a justification for skepticism and denial because too often they rely on exaggerated paces of change and catastrophic events that are not scientifically justifiable. Supplementary materials can play a significant persuasive role in climate change humanities courses. The first and more important task for such texts consists of combatting complete denialism and unjustified skepticism about the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change (ACC). The second task, and one more appropriate for some courses than others, would be to provide recommendations for action and to consider the merits of competing narratives with an emphasis on mitigation or adaptation. But what materials will be most effective to achieve such goals, and how should they be made available to students? In this chapter, I will present and discuss a variety of supplementary materials-
from religious organizational statements, both of the churches themselves and groups within various denominations, to Defense Department and other military analyses of the security threats posed by ACC, to reinsurance websites, such as that of SwissRe, that analyze the economic implications of ACC, to popular science books and websites. In particular, I will encourage teachers to avoid assigning hotbutton-easily dismissed as liberal propaganda-sources, such as An Inconvenient Truth or publications of left-leaning presses, such as New Society Publishers, and instead to look at materials that approach the issue of climate change from diverse perspectives and political orientations. Al Gore is unlikely to persuade many veterans to take the literature assigned in any course seriously, but the retired admirals and generals who signed off on the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) report, National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change, are much more likely to do so. Similarly, anyone familiar with religious organizations would expect the Unitarians to be concerned about climate change, but may be shocked to read that a group of leaders in the Southern Baptist Church issued a statement that human
beings bear responsibility for it and need to take mitigating action out of an obligation to be good stewards of creation. In some ways academic supplementary materials may prove the least useful and
effective source of information and opinion for many students. Scientific articles are often too technical and filled with formulas, numbers, charts, and graphs that make humanities students’ eyes glaze over. The rhetorical structure of such essays also works against facile assimilation, since it often relies on the hedging subjunctive language common to scientific theories, extrapolations, and tentative conclusions. Popular science books and essays, many written by academic scientists or science writers for the general public, often work better because they tend to have a strong narrative structure and nontechnical language, yet are often quite well documented. That aspect of nontechnical languages is crucial because, after all, the general public continues to misunderstand the scientific definitions of such terms as “theory” and “correlation,” not to mention having difficulty comprehending scientific syntactic structures. If one wishes to use these, however, summary booklets and panel papers are available. For instance, The American Association for the Advancement of Science has a twenty-eight page pamphlet uploaded in 2014 as a PDF written in clear, accessible English: What We Know: The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change. There is also Climate Change: Evidence and Causes, produced by the Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences and just over thirty pages in length, published in early 2014. Religion is often presumed to be the belief system farthest from science because
it relies on matters of faith, doctrine, and sacred texts. Yet, given the high percentage of people who define themselves as religious to some extent and the large number of adherents to the world’s major religions, religious orientations toward climate change should not be ignored. Students, however, are unlikely to realize just how many religious organizations have taken positions accepting the basic science of ACC and calling for action to mitigate its effects and to adapt to its most immediate threats. The range of such positions is also significant, from approaches that emphasize the plight of the poor to a movement labeled “creation care,” to the unanimity between the Roman Catholic Pope and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch. The Greek Orthodox Bishops of America took their position back in 2007, as evidenced by the “SCOBA Statement on Global Climate Change: A Moral and Spiritual Challenge.” Recently the Roman Catholic Church has become quite outspoken on the subject as witnessed by the 2014 Cafod Lecture. As The Tablet report of that talk states, “Climate change and poverty were the focus of the 2014 lecture. … The speaker was Argentinian Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, who is Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Social Sciences and a close friend of Pope Francis.” One can start with the forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale, the resources of
the Religion and Nature program at the University of Florida, or the Interfaith Power and Light network, which claims the affiliation of 15,000 churches and synagogues nationwide. The Yale site provides statements on climate change from more than fourteen world religions. Not only have some Southern Baptists issued a call for climate stewardship, but also there has developed a movement among
Christian evangelicals. The Reverend Richard Cizik, President of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, has a pithy interview available on the web and students can see the same perspective at the National Religious Coalition on Creation Care. Other sources include organizations outside of North America, such as the
Australian Religious Response to Climate Change or the Earth Charter Religion and Spirituality Task Force. Articles are too numerous to mention, but Katharine Hayhoe, who identifies herself as an evangelical climate scientist, has a cogent presentation available on YouTube. A valuable survey of religious beliefs and attitudes about climate change has been conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and the American Academy of Religion. A summary and the full report are available on the web at publicreligion.org. There are also organizations within religions that are lacking a position on the subject that try to move their religious leadership to establish a position or to promote work among the religion’s members even without hierarchical authorization, such as the Mormon Environmental Stewardship Alliance (www.mesastewardship.org). While the Southern Baptist Convention of 2007 (www.sbc.net/resolutions/1171) took a wait-and-see approach to climate change expressing more doubts about the effectiveness of mitigation strategies than the warming of the planet in the approved resolution, a group within that religion, including prominent past presidents, responded the following year by endorsing the concept of creation care and promoting a Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative (see cnn.com/2008/US/03/10/baptist.climate). As mentioned earlier, the CNA provides two reports that have been signed by
a host of retired generals and admirals addressing the dangers that climate change poses to national security. A similar organization outside the U.S. is the Royal United Services Institute, which develops papers on climate change and security for the United Kingdom and other governments around the world. These papers are bolstered by regular reports by the U.S. Department of Defense. Most recent of these are the Quadrennial Defense Review 2014, distributed in March of that year, and the 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap. The Center for Climate and Security regularly provides on its website updates on administrative positions and government and nongovernmental organization reports, such as their review of IOM Outlook on Migration, Environment, and Climate Change, published by the International Organization for Migration, which was released in late 2014. From a financial perspective, which many instructors may resist deploying
because it puts a price tag on conservation and environmental protection, two supplementary sources stand out: economic analyses of the relative costs of mitigation versus adaptation and the perspective of the reinsurance industry on the short-term as well as long-term outlook for anthropogenically induced disasters. SwissRe has probably the most detailed website for this purpose. There are also corporations within the energy sector that take a clear stand on the need for action to mitigate climate change, including support for legislation. Duke Energy is a case in point with a section of their corporate website devoted to “Global Climate Change” (www.duke-energy.com/environment/climate-change.asp), or Shell Oil
Corporation explaining their investment in gas-to-liquids fuel production in the Emirates in terms of reducing carbon emissions (see www.shell.com/global/ future-energy/natural-gas/gtl.html). The inconsistencies in Shell’s approach to environmental self-regulation versus legislatively mandated regulation from country to country where they operate, such as their destructive behavior in Nigeria, might cause someone justifiably to cast a cynical eye on the company’s professed commitment to green stewardship. The mere fact, nevertheless, that an increasing number of oil companies are addressing climate change as a reality requiring some kind of response facilitates the argument for scientific consensus about the phenomenal existence of ACC. The BP Corporation-notorious for the Gulf Oil disaster in the U.S., has a webpage on climate change, which has the headline, “BP believes that climate change is an important long-term issue that justifies global action.” Such oil corporation greenwashing, as most would deem it, offers the opportunity in conjunction with the reading of certain primary works to question whether or not any version of business-as-usual could be capable of enabling an adequate response to the effects of ACC that have already been set in motion. In contrast to the arguments of the oil industry, there is the alternative picture presented by Oil Change International at their website, thepriceofoil.org. For students willing to read a little more deeply, it might be worthwhile to
excerpt some passages from the International Energy Agency World Energy Investment Outlook for 2014, where the authors discuss the need and challenges for transitioning to “a low-carbon energy system” (40). One might like to pair those excerpts with some taken from Pathways to Deep Decarbonization, an Interim Report, published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in July of 2014. Likewise, one of the global investment resources that has contributed to climate change through financing mega-dam projects and production of millions of tons of concrete, the World Bank, has published the rather polemical hundred-page book, Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4˚C Warmer World Must Be Avoided, which they released back in November of 2012. They also sponsored the Policy Research Working Paper authored by Stéphane Hallegatte et al., Investment Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty: Application to Climate Change, published two months earlier. Students might want to consider why the World Bank doesn’t seem to implement the conclusions of the studies it funds on climate change, as well as other subjects of global concern, such as mega-dam construction. Political parties do not have a lock on climate change platforms, although their
positions on enacting legislation are easy enough to identify. The majority of efforts in Congress to block climate change mitigation legislation are led by Republicans aided by Libertarians. Democrats from coal producing states also tend to oppose such legislation as a carbon tax because of its impact on that industry. President Obama has a clear stand on climate change and hence the Democratic Party is associated with the scientific consensus. So, political supplementary materials that may most be needed for students would be ones by prominent Republicans because that is a much more surprising source than the office of a liberal Democrat. The first person to which to turn in this regard might be Henry
M. Paulson, Jr., a member of President George W. Bush’s Cabinet. His editorial in The New York Times on June 21, 2014, “The Coming Climate Crash: Lessons for Climate Change in the 2008 Recession,” is brief and to the point. Today he is chairman of The Paulson Institute at the University of Chicago, and that institute’s website identifies climate change and air quality, conservation, and sustainable urbanization as three of its four programs. Former Republican mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, is also a fervent proponent of both mitigation and adaptation, and now a UN special envoy for cities and climate change. Students can learn about him and his initiatives at MichaelBloomberg.com. Paulson, Bloomberg, and Thomas F. Steyer co-chair the Risky Business Project, which published RISKY BUSINESS: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States in June of 2014. And, of course, one can turn to the website simply labeled Climate Conservative to see that not all approaches to addressing anthropogenic climate change can necessarily be defined as liberal ones. There are also various risk assessment and adaptation reports issued by various
organizations focusing on specific locations or infrastructure concerns. These are usually written for a broad audience of policy makers and non-specialist organizations and hence generally quite readable. For instance, if one has students read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain, which concludes with the flooding of Washington, DC, that instructor might want them to read also Washington, D.C. and the Surging Sea: A Vulnerability Assessment with Projections for Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flood Risk, produced by Climate Central in September of 2014. Or, for students who may have read Robinson’s 2312, with its depiction of a flooded, sea-walled, and still inhabited Manhattan, there is Plan NYC Progress Report 2014. Full-length popular science books emphasizing either alternative economic
models or the need to choose mitigation over adaptation provide another resource. Some of these will undoubtedly be selected as primary texts in some courses, such as Bill McKibben’s Eaarth. But for courses that focus on fiction, video, and film, they may serve as supplementary materials. It may be that excerpts from these would work best in some courses, placing full-length books on reserve for others, or placing one text on the required reading list as background for the study examples. Some, such as Heidi Cullen’s The Weather of the Future and Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats, focus on the likely dire consequences of inaction. Other books, such as Paul Gilding’s The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World, devote considerable attention to a way forward through both mitigation and adaptation. The most scathing work on the impossibility of the current economic order to solve the problems it has created would be Adrian Parr’s The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics. Two books by scientists that are surprisingly accessible because of their strong narrative structure are David Archer’s The Long Thaw and Tyler Volk’s CO2 Rising. Volk’s book is particularly engaging because it creates characters out of different CO2 molecules and narrates their life cycles and travels. It seems to me that making a pile of climate change supplementary materials
that most clearly align with an instructor’s own position on the subject is the least effective way to approach persuasion. Works that merely reinforce the primary texts from the same ideological perspective may also result in a preaching-to-thechoir effect, deepening the beliefs of the students who enrolled in the course already concerned and convinced, while leaving the skeptical or the uninformed outside the sanctuary. That is why I have emphasized here materials from businesses, conservatives, military establishments, and faith-based organizations, since none of these are the sites from which people most immediately expect support for the scientific consensus on ACC or proposals for mitigation or adaptation. See also my books for the titles of other works, particularly full-length popular science studies, Ecocritical Explorations and Transversal Ecocritical Praxis.
