Brian Burt's Blog: Work in Progress - Posts Tagged "extinction"

As part of a Goodreads Green Group monthly read, I just finished Naomi Klein's chilling nonfiction book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. The challenge it presents for us as a species is daunting, and the looming implications if we don't act soon - and decisively - are dire. The more I read, and came to understand the opportunities for less drastic intervention we've squandered over the past three decades, the more I was reminded of another thought-provoking nonfiction book, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The parallels were eerie, difficult to ignore, and our situation finally hit home with full force:

We are Easter Island.

As an SF writer currently on the third novel in a trilogy about Earth after climate catastrophe, this epiphany probably should have struck long ago. On some level, it did. But truth, if not stranger than fiction, can sometimes be more surreal; we really do, as a species, seem determined to ignore what's happening around us as countless other species vanish into extinction and the warming trends accelerate. Climate scientists are almost unanimous (in the neighborhood of 99+%) that man-made climate change is real, and threatens our entire biosphere. The science is clear. There are technological choices we can make to limit the damage and reduce the scope of the global disruption we're now doomed to face. And yet, we continue to waste time debating instead of mitigating.

I've always believed in science and technology, their miraculous ability to overcome obstacles, advance our common cause, improve our world. But science and technology aren't the issue now. We have the technical ability to transition away from the fossil fuel energy mix that threatens us, but we can't stumble through the dense political smokescreen. Maybe we're not Easter Island. Maybe we're that crazy old man with the hacking cough and emphysema who still smokes four packs a day and swears, between wheezes, that the anti-smoking movement is a "vast conspiracy to get cancer research funding from the NIH."

As a lover of science fiction, I've read more than my share of stark dystopian visions over the years. They struck me, not as predictive, but as cautionary tales: "here's what can happen if you take this craziness to the extreme." Right now, we seem determined to live out one of these cautionary tales to its tragic conclusion on a planetary scale. It scares me, profoundly, because I don't see how we write ourselves the happy ending.

Maybe watching the documentary Racing Extinction and Bill Nye's Global Meltdown in the midst of this reading project wasn't the best idea, either. They seem to have created the perfect psychic storm... or, given worsening weather extremes, super-storm might be more accurate.

But maybe that's exactly what we need. Maybe a confluence of forces - climate fiction from authors across traditional genre boundaries, nonfiction books and documentaries from science journalists, social media movements like that spawned by 350.org, urgent cries from organizations like IPCC and Union of Concerned Scientists - is essential to blow away the entrenched barriers to progress on this issue. I surely hope so.

I may not yet see the happy ending, but writing is rewriting. Perhaps some creative group editing, with each of us contributing a chapter or two, can still save us before our story ends far too soon.

#SFWApro