When Nature Calls
When Nature Calls
On 25 November 2023, I appeared on a panel at the Singapore Writers Festival with Esther Vincent, and Wu Ming-Yi. This essay sets out my comments and updates my sources.
The Singapore Writers Festival asks us to consider how ecological writing is no longer speculative, and what literature can achieve during these uncertain and dark times.
The short answer to the first part of this question is that ecological writing is no longer speculative because the ecological crisis is real and it is now.
Nature isn’t just calling, it’s screaming out loud. We are currently [in 2023] experiencing the hottest year since records were established1. This is not a one off. The ten most recent years are the warmest on record2 and we are on track for over 2.5 degrees warming3.
The current crisis has two key aspects.
Firstly, the impact of global warming, declining bio-diversity and species extermination, coupled with deforestation, unsustainable development and resource extraction, can already be seen in daily current events with increasing bush fires4, floods5, and extinction threats6. Sea levels are rising7. Oceans are acidifying8 and forests are burning9. The ice is melting10. Coral reefs are dying11.
Secondly, there is a failure of political leadership to address this crisis. There has been resistance to change from politicians and vested interests in the fossil fuel industry. Climate denial has transformed into climate delay, distraction and disinformation12. Change is difficult because it means we need to move away from the prevailing neo liberal economic system13.
The politics of climate delay are supported by a media looking for attention grabbing simplicities. Mainstream media seems unable to engage with the causes and facts of the climate crisis. The media and big tech’s intent is to keep individuals tethered to screens as consumers. We have fallen into distraction14. The mass media is unwilling and unable to join the dots between the climate crisis, our failing economic systems, social unrest and the rise of the far right.
We’ve seen Wilders come close to the centre of power in Holland. Trump as President in 2024 is a real possibility. Unable and unwilling to address failed economic policies, increasing alienation, and the widening gap between rich and poor, politicians blame our problems on foreigners, immigrants and the ‘woke’ left. An uncertain future allows the far right the opportunity to increase division and hate with an ‘us versus them’, survival of the fittest discourse. As the far right increases its political power and influence in the world, the cost of addressing the climate crisis is born by the poorest nations and the most vulnerable amongst us15.
We need to address the failings of our economies and societies and move from an extractive and growth based, neo liberalism global economy to a green, sustainable, caring economy, where the biggest greenhouse emitting nations and multi-national corporations bear the cost of change. Corporations who have reaped super profits from fossil fuels need to be taxed fairly. Fossil fuel subsidies need to end. Economic systems need to change to work sustainably in tandem with nature to build community and put people at the heart of societies. We need to think more carefully about nature, and see nature less as a resource to be exploited and extracted, and more of a critical part of our system of living a happy, sustainable life.
So given the enormity of the challenge, what is literature’s role in addressing the climate crisis?
In many respects non fiction has shown us the catastrophe of the crisis and clarified our fear16. In parallel, it is fiction’s role to provide hope through imagination. We must imagine a better future for our children.
It is in this hopeful, engaging, activist sense that everything now is nature writing. Because what we, humans, are doing to nature is causing declining bio-diversity and the climate crisis, and this is so immediate and vast and touches all parts of human existence, economic, social, political, cultural17. Despite it being almost impossible to grasp with the thinking tools we currently use, we cannot be sidelined as mere consumers, we need to imagine, write and do. If we don’t control our destiny others will do it for us.
Everything now is nature writing. Even not writing about nature is writing about nature. That’s a political stance. An implicit assumption that life will continue the same as ever, that we are immune for the climate crisis. The science, the facts, nature tell us that life will not continue the same as it ever was.
It is not for nothing that a speculative fiction writer, Ursula Le Guin, said “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”18
This is literature’s role, to imagine a hopeful future in the face of enormous challenges. To get people to think differently, not by providing answers but by sparking curiosity and exploring the right questions. This is what I seek to achieve in Gus: The life & Opinions of the Last Raffles’ Banded Langur.
Fiction is a tool to imagine a just society, and the difficulties and challenges to get from here to there. By showing causes and connections, consequences and dramatising experience, good fiction can make chaos comprehensible and open up a space for change in people and politics. This is what I seek to achieve in Gus.
Fiction can show how valorising the individual, relying on a white knight to save us from peril won’t work with the challenge of the climate crisis. Fiction can show us collective and community based solutions. It can show us the complexity of the crisis and explore who gets agency and whose story gets told as the crisis unfolds.
Fiction can show us what it means to be wild in a world that wishes us to stay in our box and consume and work. Fiction can show us what it means to move away from human centred narratives, such as Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Laura Jean McKay’s Animals in That Country. My novel Gus tries to do this in an action packed, dystopian, eco-thriller.
Gus is about a Raffles’ Banded Langur who wants to get home to Bukit Timah. It explores the borders between people and nature, and what we’ll do to survive.
Gus is a fiction that explores how our only future is together, finding new forms of kinship — beyond genetics, race, religion, corporations and countries — in care and shared experience.
Gus explores my response to When Nature Calls.
20 Nov 2023, Reuters, Climate on track to warm by nearly 3C without aggressive actions, UN report finds
27 Feb 2024, Guardian, Victoria fires: more than 30,000 evacuations urged ahead of Wednesday’s bushfire risk
12 March 2024, South China Morning Post, Deadly floods in Indonesia kill dozens, with several others still missing
11 March 2024, Phys.org, Giant fishes in the Mekong River at risk of extinction
Dec 2023, NASA Vital Signs Sea Levels. '“Global sea levels are rising as a result of human-caused global warming, with recent rates being unprecedented over the past 2,500-plus years.”
26 Nov 2023, US EPA, Understanding the Science of Ocean and Coastal Acidification “The acidity of the ocean is greater than any point in the past two million years.”
13 Nov 2023, The Conversation, Fire is consuming more than ever of the world’s forests, threatening supplies of wood and paper
6 Mar 2024, Guardian, Ice-free summers in Arctic possible within next decade, scientists say
20 Apr 2023, PBS News Hour, Ice sheets in Greenland, Antarctica melting faster than previously thought, research shows
15 Feb 2024, World Economic Forum, The Atlantic Ocean is headed for a tipping point − once melting glaciers shut down the Gulf Stream, we would see extreme climate change within decades, study shows
10 Jun 2023, Earth.Org, 5 Coral Reefs That Are Currently Under Threat and Dying “Nearly 95% of coral reefs in Southeast Asia are currently under threat.”
13 July 2023, National Geographic, As hot as a hot tub: how soaring ocean temperatures are affecting corals
See Naomi Klein This Changes Everything
See also Naomi Klein The Zone of Interest is about the danger of ignoring atrocities – including in Gaza, 14 Mar 2024
1 Nov 2022, Scientific American, See How Much Climate Change Has Cost Different Countries
David Wallace Wells Uninhabitable Earth
Naomi Klein, ibid
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction
See also Earth.org 25 Inspiring Climate Change Books To Read in 2024
See Timothy Morton on Hyperobjects: “Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls "hyperobjects"-- entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.”
This article is on point too: “The word hyperobject offers a useful shorthand for why threats like global warming are so difficult to understand or accept: They threaten our survival in ways that defy traditional modes of thinking about reality and humiliate our cognitive powers, a disorienting shift that sends many people reeling into superstition, polarization, and denial. Hyperobjects speak to the immense, structural forces all around us, and even inside us, that we cannot see with our eyes but strive to comprehend through data or computer modeling.” 16 Nov 2021, Wired, At the End of the World, It’s Hyperobjects All the Way Down
Ursula Le Guin, Speech at the 65th Annual National Book Awards, quoted in The New Yorker