In the lead-up to COP27, Slate magazine took us between our responses: “hopeful and constructive sometimes, despairing at others”. Here we look at the hopeful:
Sci-Fi’s Lessons for Balancing Climate Hope and Despair
The U.N.’s COP27 climate summit kicks off on Nov. 6 in Egypt, inviting us, once again, to consider whether we’re doing enough, fast enough, to stave off climate chaos and the suffering that will come with it. Short answer: No, not really. The scale of change required is head-spinningly drastic, so even unexpectedly rapid expansions in clean energy won’t do much to curb malaise and doomsaying. Here in the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate investment in the nation’s history, has been met, largely, with collective indifference, despite positivebuzz about its potential effectiveness…
The monumental mismatch between existential urgency and underwhelming responses has created a sort of valley, which science fiction storytellers have filled with many different visions of our climate plight and how we might respond, locally and globally.
One major reaction is stubborn hopefulness: Things may be dire, but we owe it to ourselves, our descendants, and other species to try to muddle through as best we can. A particularly successful version of this tendency is Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future, a wonky poli-sci thriller that imagines international institutions—from central banks and nation-states to U.N. agencies—straining against the rusty levers of post-World War II transnational governance to meet the energy and anger of people increasingly radicalized by environmental disasters. The novel has made Robinson an icon for the entire field of “climate fiction,” and led to talks at TED and Oxford University, plaudits from Barack Obama, and invitations to speak at the COP26 summit in Scotland.
Another vision shaped by stubborn hopefulness, which takes a more anarchic, anti-establishment tack, is solarpunk, a movement of artists, writers, and DIY technologists focused on local solutions, decommodifying basic needs, and designing systems to give communities more control over clean energy, food, water, and other basics. Solarpunk “posits a world of solar-energy abundance” but insists on the messy politics involved in the transition—sustainable liberation as an ongoing process, not a static utopia. In Cities of Light, a solarpunk-inspired collection I coedited, stories include a tale about tensions between a community-run solar collective in Chicago’s South Side and the city’s major utility, and another about a grassroots campaign to integrate mobile solar collectors used by unhoused people into the grid in a future Portland.