Livia Albeck-Ripka
Is climate-themed fiction all too real? We asked the experts.
CLIMATE
Is Climate-Themed Fiction All Too Real? We Asked the Experts
By LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA SEPT. 26, 2017
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Credit Illustration by Jordin Isip
When extraordinary hurricanes and floods battered parts of the United States and Caribbean this month, Paolo Bacigalupi’s readers started sending him news clips. In “Ship Breaker,” which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2010, Mr. Bacigalupi, a science fiction writer, had invented a monster “Category 6” hurricane.
Now, his readers were asking: Is this what you were talking about?
Climate change presents a peculiar challenge to novelists; it often seems to simmer without a singular moment of crisis. So fiction writers like Mr. Bacigalupi hurtle current science into drought-ravaged, flooded, starved, sunken and sandy futures. Climate-themed fiction, like most science fiction, is extension, not invention.
But as scientists’ projections about the effects of climate change have increasingly become reality, some works of apocalyptic fiction have begun to seem all too plausible. We chose seven climate-themed stories and asked the experts: How likely are they to come true?
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CLIMATE EFFECT: WATER WARS
‘The Water Knife’
by Paolo Bacigalupi
In his fifth climate-related book, published in 2015, Mr. Bacigalupi asks: What would happen if drought became the “new normal” in the American Southwest? His answer: Refugees, apocalyptic cults and drug dealers roam a land where water is controlled by thugs.
“What if our underlying prosperity is ripped out from underneath us?” Mr. Bacigalupi said. “If you put those questions in people’s mind, it changes how they look at their daily life.”
Leon Szeptycki, an attorney and professor specializing in water rights at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, described the book as fictional extension. “Climate change will cause a lot of social and economic disruption in the American Southwest, but not at the level the author envisions,” he said.
Eighty to 90 percent of water in the Southwest is used for agriculture, so rural communities would be hit first by shortages, Mr. Szeptycki said. “Available water will shift to cities,” he said. “There will be less water, less food, fewer jobs.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: DESERTIFICATION
‘Gold Fame Citrus’
by Claire Vaye Watkins
Claire Vaye Watkins’s 2016 novel, her first, imagines drought differently. Sand has swallowed California; now it’s known as the Amargosa Dune Sea. Nothing grows in the lawless desert, but a wandering dowser claims that new species — a diurnal owl, carnivorous plants and albino hummingbirds — have emerged through a “super-speed evolutionary time warp.”
“Absolutely, climate change can accelerate evolution,” said Jeffrey Townsend, a professor of evolutionary biology at Yale. Humans have set off many evolutionary changes, like when insects have adapted to pesticides or when the peppered moth lost its spots to more closely resemble industrial soot. Plants becoming meat eaters would be more of a stretch, Dr. Townsend said.
The novel is “not an unreasonable fictional depiction” of drought, said Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of earth system science at Stanford. California already has a “new climate,” he added. Anthropogenic warming has increased the state’s drought risk, but permanent rainlessness remains unlikely.
“That’s probably where the scientific literature and the novel diverge,” Dr. Diffenbaugh said. “Humans are able to probe these issues in ways that are different through the lens of fiction.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: SPECIES EXTINCTION
‘Flight Behavior’
by Barbara Kingsolver
The central character in Barbara Kingsolver’s 2015 novel doesn’t believe in climate change until she has a “vision of glory” — a colony of monarch butterflies from Mexico appears in southern Appalachia, disoriented by warming temperatures.
“I think it could happen, but pretty far into the distant future when global warming really has an effect further north,” said Lincoln Brower, a research professor of biology at Sweet Briar College, whom Ms. Kingsolver consulted while writing the book.
Dr. Brower, who has been studying the death of monarch butterflies for six decades, said their numbers were already “way down” because of a combination of pesticide use, logging and the impacts of climate change. But he guessed it would take about half a century before temperatures in Appalachia rose enough to accommodate the butterflies during their winter migration.
“It’s hard to know what’s going to happen,” Dr. Brower said, “but I don’t think it will be good.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: DISRUPTED FOOD CHAIN
‘The History of Bees’
by Maja Lunde
China, 2098: Tao is up a tree, hand-pollinating its blossoms with a tiny brush. The bees are long since gone. Maja Lunde’s first book, published in 2017, chronicles three generations as they exploit, try to save and eventually mimic bees, whose extinction has become a familiar device in climate-themed fiction.
“It’s a crazy idea, and it’s being done,” said Jeremy Kerr, a biodiversity researcher at the University of Ottawa, describing the hand-pollinators of Hanyuan County in China’s Sichuan Province.
Pollinators like bees (and birds, butterflies, moths, flies, wasps, beetles, bats and mosquitoes) are crucial to the food chain because they move pollen between fruit, vegetables and nuts. Plants that depend on pollination are 35 percent of global crop production. While Colony Collapse Disorder — previously believed to pose a major threat to all bees — has declined substantially in recent years, Dr. Kerr said it was conceivable that five or six “keystone” species, which pollinate crops like canola, tomatoes, blueberries and strawberries, could be lost, in part because of global warming.
But hand-pollination? “The question of whether you could do something like that on a planetary scale,” Dr. Kerr said, “Holy moly, if that’s where we got to, I think other things would probably kill us first.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: REFUGEES
‘Borne’
by Jeff VanderMeer
In Jeff VanderMeer’s 2017 novel, rising waters force a child named Rachel to flee her island home, so she moves “from camp to camp, country to country,” hoping that she “could outrun the unraveling of the world.” Later, in a nameless ruined city, the 28-year-old Rachel befriends an amorphous creature, Borne, who smells like brine and reminds her of the sea animals of her childhood.
Extreme weather events uproot 21.5 million people each year, according to the United Nations refugee agency, and climate change is expected to increase that number. But there is no internationally accepted legal status for people who have been displaced by the impacts of climate change.
“What would be fair,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, “would be for each of the major emitting countries to accept a portion of the world’s climate-displaced people proportional to its historic contribution” of greenhouse gases.
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CLIMATE EFFECT: DROWNED CITIES
‘New York: 2140’
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Veering from the dystopic futures common to climate-themed fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2017 book is what the author calls a “comedy of coping,” set in a Venetian-like half-submerged New York City. Seas have risen 50 feet, making lower Manhattan a low-rent “intertidal” zone; water washes up to 46th Street every 12 hours. New Yorkers commute not by subway, but by vaporetto.
While multi-meter sea level rise in New York City is realistic, the timescale is not, said Benjamin Horton, a professor at Rutgers who focuses on sea level change. He said that current modeling predicted extreme flooding of New York City by around 2300, but that the city would likely protect itself from rising waters with sea walls and other infrastructure.
Mr. Robinson said he had chosen the year 2140 to balance scientific predictions with a plot that could incorporate a transformed economic system.
“Climate change is basically a capitalist catastrophe,” he said. “We have to create post-capitalism to deal with climate change.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: ADAPTATION
‘The Machine Stops’
by E. M. Forster
Forster’s eerily prescient novella imagines a world where life on earth’s surface — besides ferns and “a little grass” — has become impossible. Humans live underground, where they communicate via glowing blue-lit plates and eat, drink and sleep to the rhythm of the eternally humming “Machine.”
Written in 1909 — just over a decade after the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius suggested anthropogenic emissions could change the climate — “The Machine Stops” prophetically described something like the internet. But it was far off in imagining how we would adapt to climate change, said Jonathan Foley, executive director of the California Academy of Sciences.
“The idea that we could have self-sufficient civilization underground basically requires we replace the sun,” Dr. Foley said. “And any technology that’s capable of doing that — whether it be fusion, or some kind of magical technology — would have to be so powerful that I’d ask: Why didn’t we solve the climate problem first?”
Dr. Foley said the novel’s ideas weren’t that far from the science-fiction-like discussions he heard coming from Silicon Valley, where vertical gardens, orbiting microwave transmitters or machines that harvest carbon are touted as silver bullets for climate change. “The actual solutions are far simpler,” he said. “But they’re not as sexy. Like, hey: What if we threw less food away, or we ate less meat?”
Dr. Foley said that if he ever wrote a novel, it would be one in which “we all do the slow, hard muddling work of just pitching in, but no hero rides in on a spaceship to save us all.” It would be a terrible novel, he admitted. “No one would buy it, and Hollywood wouldn’t make a movie, but it’s the one I want, and it would surely save the world.”
Climate change is shifting the border between Italy and Austria.
In 1991, two German hikers on Italy's northern border with Austria came across a shriveled brown body facedown in the snow. Assuming the corpse belonged to an unlucky mountaineer, Erika and Helmut Simon took a photograph and continued trekking to their bed and breakfast in the Ötztal Alps, where they told their host about the discovery.
It took a team of forensic scientists four days to prise the body from the ice. When they eventually freed it, bits of leather, string, and hay emerged in the meltwater. The scientists collected the debris, zipped the corpse up in a body bag, and flew it by helicopter to nearby Vent, Austria, where it was put into a wooden coffin and driven by hearse to the Institute of Legal Medicine in Innsbruck.
Two days later, the archeologist Konrad Spindler noticed the unusual scraps gathered at the scene in a plastic bag: a piece of wood, taken from the body's right hand, and a four-inch-long copper blade. This was no lost hiker, but a 5,000-year-old man; his ax revealed that the Simons had discovered one of the best-preserved mummies in history.
In the media deluge that followed, a Viennese journalist dubbed the cadaver Ötzi after the nearby valley on the Austrian side of the border, but Italian authorities insisted he had been unearthed in their territory, instead calling him L'Uomo venuto dal ghiaccio ("The Iceman"). The borderline, mapped along the glaciers of Mt. Similaun—a giant ice sheet that can slide more than 30 feet per year—made it almost impossible to determine who owned the mummy. The next month, the border was re-surveyed for the first time since its post-WWI formation: The body had been discovered 300 feet [91 metres] into Italy.
Today, that border has shifted dramatically. It is natural for glaciers to slide, but the creep of global warming has melted it more rapidly than anyone could have foreseen. Eventually, the geo-defined frontier will likely disappear. In April 2016, 25 years after Ötzi's discovery, a team of geologists, geophysicists, and designers embarked on an expedition to install GPS sensors to record the border in real time and gather information about Grafferner glacier, situated at the foot of Mt. Similaun, the tiny size of which makes it an accurate barometer of climate change. I went along.
It took the helicopter three trips to get all 13 of us to Grafferner. Swaddled in gear to protect us from the 14-degree chill [-10 celsius], we clambered in four or five at a time, ascending 11,000 feet [3,350 metres] above sea level to the plateau, a white plain bounded by the jagged peaks of the Dolomites mountain range. After the pilot dropped 660 pounds [300 kg] of equipment in a net from the helicopter's belly, he left us there for nine hours.
The team split in half to install the border-mapping devices, dragging the gear in makeshift trolleys that sliced our tracks through the snow. Each device—containing sensors, a battery pack, and heating system to function in subzero conditions—had to be fixed to the ice. In the meantime, two of the geophysicists, Roberto Francese and Aldino Bondesan, began digging a three-foot-deep hole to get past the surface snow to the actual glacier, where they would place a seismometer (which reads depth via vibrations) on the ice, to determine how much Grafferner had melted in the past year. "If it continues like this," Francese sighed, "this glacier could be gone in twenty years."
"Even the biggest and most stable things, like glaciers, mountains—these huge objects, they can change in a few years. We live on a planet that changes, and we try to make rules, to give meaning, but this meaning is completely artificial because nature, basically, doesn't give a shit." —Marco Ferrari
It is normal for a portion of a glacier to melt and refreeze seasonally and to shift slightly each year. But in the past three decades, rising temperatures have brought a worryingly rapid thaw, particularly tangible on small glaciers like Grafferner. "In one century, we have lost seventy percent of the glaciated surface," said Bondesan, a coordinator for the Italian Glaciological Committee. "Scientists don't have enough information to understand if this is a temporary change—induced by man, that's quite sure—or just a fluctuation that is going to recover in ten or one hundred years," he said, his mustache crusted with ice and remnants of the speck we ate for breakfast at Pension Leithof in Vernago, a European skiing destination on the Italian side of the valley.
Leithof is one of the smaller hotels servicing the Dolomites, and despite being in an area that just suffered the hottest February on record, its business has yet to be affected. But manager Rainer Alois said the changes are cause for concern. At what is usually the coldest time of the year, in mid-January, artificial flakes were still being pumped onto the slopes. "The glacier retreated a lot during the last years, you can tell by the eye," Alois told me. "I am already quite old. When I die, the glacier will still be there. But for younger people, it's going to be a big problem."
The change devastated local alpine guide Robert Ciatti. "I miss the glacier how it was when I started climbing it. For me, the glacier is life. Now when I see it in the summer, you can see the rocks under the ice, it is all dirty—the saddest thing."
Bondesan explained, however, that it's more worrisome to consider the disappearance of our natural reservoirs than the end to an alpine sport. Glaciers store 69 percent of the world's freshwater—our primary resource on Earth. Couple that with the more than 200-foot sea-level rise [60 metres], and you have a domino effect of global crises. "The terrifying thing," added Stefano Picotti from the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (OGS), who was also on the trip, is that "this experiment has never been done in nature."
"Climate change is happening so fast and on such a huge scale that it's forcing us to change the borders of a country," said head of the mapping expedition, Marco Ferrari. While the border we were on had been monitored since the 1919 Treaty of St. Germain, Ferrari's project, Italian Limes ("boundaries" in Latin), is the first time that it has been tracked consistently and accurately. The borders of a country are "something we always consider as stable, as a political device, the foundation of the modern state, the most sacred thing, but this huge natural transformation makes clear how disruptive and alarming these changes are," he said. "Even the biggest and most stable things, like glaciers, mountains—these huge objects, they can change in a few years. We live on a planet that changes, and we try to make rules, to give meaning, but this meaning is completely artificial because nature, basically, doesn't give a shit."
While an ambling boundary on a glacier, five and a half hours' walk from the nearest town and in a relatively peaceful part of Europe, may not seem like the stuff of heated political discourse, there has always been tension between Austrians and Italians in the South Tyrol region, which was handed back to Italy after WWII. German-speaking vandals often steal the Italian-language signs marking the Similaun hiking trails in protest.
On our way home, we stopped in the town of Bolzano, where a Mussolini-era Victory Gate recalls the city's Fascist heritage. The government fenced off the 62-foot-wide monument [19 metres], still an epicenter of friction between the Italian- and German-speaking communities, to protect it from vandalism.
We have killed 10 percent of the world's coral reefs, endangered a third of amphibian species, created an oceanic garbage patch twice the size of the United States, and are at risk of losing our primary freshwater resource: the glaciers.
Over a drunken dinner, Italian resident and design lecturer at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Simone Simonelli told me that cultural and attitudinal tensions still bubbled beneath the surface of the placid town. Strolling through Bolzano that day, Simonelli had come across a small right-wing anti-migrant protest. The following afternoon, Austrian police clashed with 500 Italian activists calling for a more welcoming attitude to refugees at the Brenner Pass border, where in recent months thousands of migrants have tried to come through under Europe's Schengen Agreement open-border policy. By the end of the month, the Austrian government had begun construction of a barbed-wire fence to curb the influx.
In recent years, a network of seemingly dormant frontiers has become what Ferrari describes as "a twenty-first-century psychosis" of police checks, soldiers, walls, refugee camps, and displaced people. "Cartography is used as a political tool to justify borders, but natural borders are just geometry—as humans, we give them political value," he said. "Schengen, which we consider a conquest of modern Europe, is just a political agreement that can change overnight. Borders are completely artificial. In the same way we define them, we can also say they shouldn't be there."
Eighteen years ago, the Austrians returned Ötzi to the Italian authorities after they completed their examinations. Now he rests in a humidified box at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, where you can peer at his gaunt, wet body through double-glazed glass. Moments before his death, the Iceman had dined on grains and ibex meat. His ax—crafted of the newly discovered metal that defined the era as the Copper Age—indicates Ötzi was probably a man of status. Only the wealthy could afford such luxury items. They too built settlements and fortresses.
From certain angles, we haven't come that far in 3,000 years—the well-off attempting to keep the vulnerable out; the difference is whether our shared Earth can continue to sustain us. Our era has become commonly termed the "Anthropocene," an unprecedented epoch in which humans have altered the planet forever. We have killed 10 percent of the world's coral reefs, endangered a third of amphibian species, created an oceanic garbage patch twice the size of the United States, and are at risk of losing our primary freshwater resource: the glaciers. We have changed far more than borders.
"There are some mechanisms that are proposed to explain how the Earth can react and revive itself in a way," said Bondesan. For now, the best solution to glacier melt—and quite a feeble one, according to the geophysicists—is to cover the ice with a sort of white sheet that reflects the sun. This becomes particularly necessary when hot winds blow north from the Sahara Desert in Africa, forming a dark blanket over the Alps, which triples the melting rate in the already fragile region.
The summer before Ötzi's discovery, these dust storms receded the ice just enough to expose the mummy's body. The day we returned to Similaun, ocher sand again trespassed the blindingly white landscape. Unlike the people from that continent, sand can travel thousands of miles without regard for frontiers. The windswept glacier, with its dune-like peaks, doesn't look all that different. Perhaps it is an omen, because "without the glaciers," said Francese, "the Alps would probably be a sort of desert."
This article appeared in the June issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.
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