'At the Heart of Human Politics': Agency and Responsibility in The

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‘At the heart of human politics’: agency and responsibility in the contemporary climate novel

Matthew Benjamin Cole

To cite this article: Matthew Benjamin Cole (2021): ‘At the heart of human politics’: agency and responsibility in the contemporary climate novel, Environmental Politics, DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2021.1902699 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2021.1902699

Published online: 26 Mar 2021.

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‘At the heart of human politics’: agency and responsibility in the contemporary climate novel Matthew Benjamin Cole

Harvard College Writing Program, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

ABSTRACT How might climate fiction inform public perceptions of climate change and its political stakes? While early proponents of climate fiction called on writers to move the public with visceral cautionary tales, recent climate fiction and criti cism thereof aims beyond apocalyptic and catastrophic representation, reflect ing broader debates regarding fear and agency in the climate imaginary. This context clarifies the modes of imaginative engagement pursued in recent English-language climate novels, including Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, Richard Power’s The Overstory, and Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island. These works respond to patterns of denial and depoliticization by challenging their audiences to reimagine agency and responsibility in politically expansive and ethically demanding terms. Dramatizing complex interconnections between communities, generations, and species, as well as the obligations and possibi lities for action to which they give rise, they enrich the climate imaginary by illuminating political potential amidst the overwhelming crisis.

KEYWORDS Climate change; climate fiction; climate imaginary; Kim Stanley Robinson; Richard Powers; Amitav Ghosh

Introduction Fiction about climate change, often referred to as ‘climate fiction’ or ‘cli-fi,’ has become a major tributary of English-language literature in the twenty- first century (Goodbody and Johns-Putra 2019). While commentators only recently lamented the absence of literary engagement with climate change, American, Canadian, and British writers have now produced dozens of climate novels, with many enjoying commercial success, critical acclaim, and media engagement. As the field has grown, scholars have considered how such works may reflect and reshape public engagement with climate change (Trexler 2015, Mehnert 2016, Milkoreit 2016, Schneider-Mayerson 2018, Johns-Putra 2019). Though climate fictionmay seem far removed from politics or policymaking, it provides a window into what scholars refer to as the ‘climate imaginary’ (Milkoreit 2017): the symbols, narratives, and

CONTACT Matthew Benjamin Cole [email protected] © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 M. B. COLE concepts through which climate change is represented and given meaning. If ‘the arts and humanities play an important role in thinking through our representations of environmental change and give tangible form to the ima gination’ (Yusoff and Gabrys 2011, p. 518), then we may look to climate fiction to understand how the ethical and political stakes of climate change are being processed and negotiated. After all, the explosion of English- language climate fiction has coincided with mounting public concern over climate change among its audiences in the US, UK, and Canada, and the most optimistic appraisals suggest that climate fiction may not only reflect but facilitate such trends, acting as a ‘handmaiden to environmental politics’ (Schneider-Mayerson 2017, p. 316). Much of the initial interest in climate fiction reflected the conviction that failures to address climate change via policy and politics followed from preliminary failures of imagination. If awareness had not translated into action because climate change itself was ‘unimaginable’ (Marshall 2014, p. 52) or ‘unthinkable’ (Ghosh 2016), then proponents of climate fiction have hoped that literature would render it more tangible and affectively resonant by ‘using narrative to heighten its reality’ (Trexler 2015, p. 5). And while the influence of literature on public attitudes is neither direct nor easy to confirm empirically, Schneider-Mayerson’s survey of readers finds that climate fiction ‘can be quite effective at enabling or compelling readers to imagine potential futures and to consider the fragility of human societies and vulnerable ecosystems’ (2018, p. 495). Even so, recent climate fictionand criticism thereof point to the limitations of an approach that seeks to move the public with visceral cautionary tales. Such concerns echo wider controversies about framing climate change in terms of apocalypse, cata strophe, and disaster, a subject of debate within climate politics, commu nications, and psychology, among other disciplines. To begin, I survey this contested terrain, developing the tension between fear and agency which will frame the ensuing discussion of climate fiction. Though apocalyptic narra tives need not be categorically rejected, the analysis will show that their utility is limited when they do not illuminate opportunities for collective action, in which case they may reinforce patterns of denial and depoliticiza tion despite their author’s intentions. I then consider climate fiction’s constructive contributions to the climate imaginary, tracing the themes of agency and responsibility in three recent novels which exemplify the burgeoning popularity of climate fiction as well as its political potential: Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017), Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018), and Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019). These novels have featured prominently in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, while more specialized media have drawn attention to their ecopo litical messages. For example, Robinson, Powers, and Ghosh each discussed ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 3 the political implications of their novels in The Nation (Thatoor 2019, Carpenter 2020, Gordon 2020), and each was recommended to environmen talists in SIERRA Magazine (Berry 2017, 2018, 2019), indicating their poten tial to influence a wide range of politically engaged readers. In that context, their concern with agency and responsibility reveals an important develop ment in climate fiction and the broader climate imaginary. Climate change and the predicament of the Anthropocene within which it is frequently conceptualized challenge conventional understandings of agency and responsibility (Jamieson and Di Paola 2016), resulting in a profound ethical and political disorientation which particularly afflicts the inhabitants of wealthy, industrialized nations at a time when their inaction cannot be afforded or justified. Writers like Robinson, Powers, and Ghosh endeavor to deepen their readers’ imaginative engagement with the climate crisis by dramatizing complex interconnections between communities, generations, and species, as well as the obligations and possibilities for action to which they give rise. In doing so, they enrich the climate imaginary with stories that illuminate unrealized political potential amidst the overwhelming crisis.

Fear and agency in the climate imaginary Theorists of the political imagination ask that we consider politics as ‘not only an affair of reason, but also an activity that is deeply embedded in a society’s images, narratives, and myths, which frame its viewing of “reality” and form its members perceptions and sensibilities’ (Czobor-Lupp 2014, p. 227). This is particularly true with respect to the politics of climate change. As Millkoreit explains,

Imagination is essential not only for understanding and ‘seeing’ climate change itself – a phenomenon no single human being can observe or experience in its entirety – but also for developing promising responses. The imagination can help us step away from and cast a critical eye toward existing institutions and practices, and envision radically different futures (2016, p. 171–172).

The climate imaginary therefore has stakes which extend beyond the inves tigation of climate fiction. It is an inescapable context for climate discourse, activism, and policy, and a critical arena in which the public’s interpretation of and engagement with climate change is prefigured. Despite the efforts of climate advocates to foster awareness and urgency, commentators often argue that political inaction in response to climate change evinces a failure of imagination. To the extent that the risks of climate change are understood, the argument goes, they are grasped intellectually rather than affectively – conceptualized, but not felt (Hulme 2009). Diagnoses of this failure have been couched in the language of evolutionary psychology (Jamieson 2014), cultural cognition (Kahan et al. 2012), and in 4 M. B. COLE the least optimistic appraisals, of human nature (Rich 2019). Marshall (2014) emphasizes that uncertainty about the consequences of climate change complicates precautionary efforts because social and psychological heuristics for risk assessment prioritize certain, sudden, and familiar threats. Others have explained the relatively low priority given to climate change by empha sizing its ‘psychological distance’: the perception that its impacts will be remote temporally, geographically, and socially (Jones et al. 2017). Such difficulties are familiar to environmental advocates, who have often challenged policymakers and the public to anticipate the long-term conse quences of human activities. Unsurprisingly, climate activists frequently follow their forerunners in deploying apocalyptic narratives, which Buell describes as ‘the single most powerful master metaphor that the contempor ary environmental imagination has at its disposal’ (1995, p. 285). The ‘Fable for Tomorrow’ which opens Carson’s Silent Spring provides a canonical example. There, Carson invokes a ‘stricken world’ of disease and blight, an ‘imagined tragedy’ which ‘may easily become a stark reality’ (1962, p. 3). Climate activists from Al Gore to Bill McKibben to Greta Thunberg arguably extend this lineage, as do thought experiments such as Oreskes and Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014) and Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth (2019). Today, as McNeish’s observes, ‘apocalyptic discourse is a major mediating frame through which publics have come to engage with the issue of climate change and by proxy wider green politics’ (2017, p. 1037). Despite their pervasiveness, apocalyptic narratives remain controversial. Takedowns of climate ‘alarmism’ range from the contrarian (Shellenberger 2020) to the denialist. In the context of climate politics, however, critics of apocalyptic framings do not challenge scientific testimony regarding climate change’s probable consequences. Rather, they question how such testimony should be interpreted and represented within political discourses which solicit commitment and action. The salient question is whether apocalyptic narratives afford ‘a deepening of the imaginative engagement’ or conversely ‘a mode of disengagement’ (Skirmshire 2010, p. 5). Critics of climate ‘cata strophism’ take the latter position, alleging that disaster rhetoric has proven ‘paralyzing, not mobilizing’ (Lilley 2012, p. 1–2). Yuen argues that pairing evidence of ecological collapse with ‘woefully inadequate injunctions to green consumption or lobbying of political representatives’ relegates agency to the marketplace and to certain forms of ‘existential, expressive, and voluntarist politics,’ with ‘disempowerment and disengagement’ the predict able response (2012, p. 19). Critics have likewise alleged that apocalyptic narratives depoliticize a range of climate-related concerns, from the plight of climate refuges depicted as a human flood (Bettini 2013) to patterns of ‘ecological gentrification’carried out under the auspices of sustainable devel opment (Harper 2020). In these contexts, institutions that cater to the ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 5 comfort and security of the few are not problematized but instead entrenched as bulwarks. Meanwhile, the profusion of apocalyptic discourses over the last decade has proven consistent with ‘business-as-usual’ responses (Anshelm and Hultman 2015). It is now common for politicians to describe climate change as an ‘existential threat’ before proposing anodyne half-measures. Though dispiriting, this is hardly the worst-case scenario. A frightened public may tolerate authoritarian, unilateral, and otherwise undemocratic interventions, or else invest faith in top-down technological solutionism (Lynch and Veland 2018). As the consequences of climate change loom larger in the imagination, so too will ‘calls to replace democracy with expert-oriented modes of eco-technocratic authoritarianism’ (Fischer 2017, p. 2). Apocalyptic narratives may also play into the hands of the right, encouraging elites to ‘double down on the strategies of militarism and geopolitical real politik’ (Yuen 2012, p. 35). Klein, notably, anticipates a pivot on the right from denialism to ‘climate barbarism,’ wherein the climate crisis authorizes ‘wealthy, majority-white countries to fortress their borders, as well as their identities as white Christians, and wage war on any and all “invaders”’ (2019, p. 47). To the extent that fear proves effective in penetrating the popular imagination, it might yet diminish the prospects for just and cooperative responses. However, the equation of apocalypse with despair has been contested by scholars who emphasize the capacity of apocalyptic thinking to illuminate ‘critical moments of possibility’ (Amsler 2010, p. 141). Moo contends that apocalyptic narratives can ‘motivate a commitment to creative and alterna tive ways of being in the world that prosaic arguments and mere considera tion of scientific data does not’ (2015, p. 945). Likewise, McNeish maintains that such narratives have long animated green critique because they enable advocates to challenge complacency and demand radical alternatives. He advises environmentalists to deploy apocalyptic narratives a ‘as a revelation about both the rapacious unsustainable nature of capitalist modernity and the positive utopian potentials existing within the here and now’ (2017, p. 1050). On these accounts, apocalyptic narratives afford a radical reimagi nation of the present and its prospects. Similar controversies animate debates about how advocates should com municate the climate crisis to the public. Positive appraisals of apocalyptic narratives highlight their potential to ‘communicate climate change science in terms of a cultural rationality that includes, but goes beyond, technical rationality’ (Spoel et al. 2008, p. 74). Even so, a mounting body of literature indicates that attempts to marshal urgency through fear lead to denial, disillusionment, and apathy rather than action (see Reser and Bradley 2017, p. 10–11). One study findsthat ‘the very images that made participants have the greatest sense of climate change being important,’ including images 6 M. B. COLE of starving children, industrial smokestacks, and floods in Bangladesh, ‘were also disempowering at a personal level,’ meaning they induced ‘feelings of helplessness, remoteness, and lack of control’ (O’Niell and Nicholson-Cole 2009, p. 373). Another concludes that when ‘individuals perceive climate change as out of their control or fail to see how they can make a meaningful difference, they may cope with feelings of fear by denying that there is anything to be concerned about or conclude that attempts to build concern are manipulation’ (Stevenson and Peterson 2015, p. 2). These findings indicate that fear appeals will be most effective when deployed sparingly and in conjunction with messages that emphasize oppor tunities for action. Fostering engagement requires attentiveness to institu tional barriers which compound ‘social inertia’ and deflect challenges to the status quo (Brulle and Norgaard 2019). Conveying knowledge and a sense of urgency ‘are important for engagement but not sufficient,’ as citizens also require ‘supportive institutions and infrastructure’ as well as a ‘sense of collective efficacy’ (Lorenzoni et al. 2007, p. 455). Reactionary politics not withstanding, the institutional arrangements of industrial-capitalist liberal democracies provide few pathways for concerned citizens to participate in transformative action. Such considerations indicate the need for narratives which highlight possibilities for collective action and structural transforma tion, and which counteract the prevailing conditions of ‘atomization, depo liticization, powerlessness, and alienation’ (Yuen 2012, p. 21).

Climate fiction: from apocalypse to politics Within this context, the profusion of climate novels provides ‘evidence of a new climate imaginary’ and a potential means ‘to address the Anthropocene’s emotional, ethical, and practical concerns’ (Goodbody and Johns-Putra 2019, p. 229). While scholars still emphasize the potential of climate novels to ‘humanize’ (Milkoreit 2016, p. 172) or ‘visualize’ (Schneider- Mayerson 2018, p. 483) climate change, the climate novel can also explore action possibilities and alternatives. As Schneider-Mayerson explains, the general arc of English-language climate fiction has led from ‘cautionary fables of the Anthropocene’ to engaged ‘ecopolitics’ (2017). The former category reflectswhat many early commentators assumed would be climate fiction’skey contribution to climate politics. Macfarlane, for example, asked in an influen tial essay: ‘Where is the literature of climate change . . . ? Where are the novels, the plays, the poems, the songs, the libretti, of this massive contemporary anxiety?’ (2005, p. 22). In a similar polemic, McKibben (2005) compared the paucity of literature on climate change to the outpouring of activist art in response to the AIDS epidemic. Both called for writing that would shake a complacent public by making the unimaginable not only imaginable, but visceral. Macfarlane, for example, cites approvingly McKibben’s claim that ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 7 citizens and policymakers would not act until they felt ‘fear in their guts,’ and calls on writers to ‘induce that gut feeling’ (2005, p. 22). At this time, few well-known examples of literature engaging with anthro pogenic climate change existed – Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000), Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain (2004) among the exceptions receiving critical recognition. Some critics also interpreted McCarthy’s The Road (2006) as an ecological warning. As these works indicate, early climate fiction was overwhelmingly apocalyptic. Following suit, Theroux’s Far North (2009), a National Book Award finalist, dramatized the breakdown of civilization via a survivalist’s trek across Siberia. In science fiction proper, Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) won the Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell awards for its depiction of a 23rd century Thailand where oceans are high, fossil fuels are depleted, and the world’s food chain depends on corporate biotech. Soon, McKibben’s I’m With the Bears (2011) anthology reified climate fiction’s literary and activist sensibil ities, collecting work by Atwood, Rich, Bacigalupi, Robinson, and others to raise money for 350.org. In the next decade, climate novels set in more recognizable presents or near- futures emerged, with Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), McEwan’s Solar (2010), Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), and Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) among the widely dis cussed works which ‘no longer presented disruptions of weather systems and human lives as distant prospects but as an immediate and tangible problem’ (Schneider-Mayerson 2019, p. 949). By 2013, the cli-fi trend had been dis cussed in The Guardian, NPR, The New Yorker, and Dissent (Tuhus-Dobrow 2013). Its efficacy was later debated in The New York Times while The Atlantic asked bluntly: ‘Can books save the planet?’ (Ullrich 2015) As climate fiction attracted public and scholarly attention, its ranks were bolstered by the retroactive admission of novels by Verne, Wells, Ballard, and Herbert, among others. Such writers bequeathed a ‘considerable archive of climate change fiction’ (Trexler 2015, p. 8) which includes technically ambi tious accounts of terraforming, ‘future histories’ projecting ecological change, and a spectrum of eco-utopian and eco-dystopian settings (Trexler and Johns-Putra 2011, p. 186–187). However, such works predate the con cern with anthropogenic climate change caused by carbon emissions. For example, in Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and The Burning World (1964), water pollution and solar radiation cause the respective ecological calamities. Only in the 1970s did works such as Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and Herzog’s Heat (1977) describe global warming more presciently. These were joined by Turner’s The Sea and Summer (1987) and Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), whose grim ecology reflects the author’s archive of climate change reporting (Streeby 2018, p. 24). This genealogy also raises the question of how ‘cli-fi’ relates to the sci-fi from which its name derives. Until the 2010s, nearly all climate fiction was written 8 M. B. COLE by ‘genre’ writers or by mainstream novelists exploiting sci-fi tropes. For Ghosh, this betrayed a lack of concern with the present reality of climate change, as though the phenomenon were ‘somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel’ (2016, p. 7). Climate fiction, he maintained, must also include literature ‘set in a time that is recognizable as our own’ and concerned with ‘transformations that are now under way’ (73). Hesitance to relegate climate change to a far-flung future is not the only argument against cli-fi’s apocalyptic sensibilities. In The Water Knife (2015), Bacigalupi acknowledges the ethical ambiguity of collapse narratives by having his protagonist, a journalist named Lucy, reflect on her involvement as she documents drought, crime, and corruption in the American Southwest:

Her critics said she was just another collapse pornographer, and on her bad days she agreed: just another journo hunting for salacious imagery, like the vultures who descended on Houston after a Cat 6, or the sensationalized imagery of a fallen Detroit . . . But on the other days Lucy had the feeling that she wasn’t so much eroticizing a city’s death as excavating a future as it yawned below them (26).

Elsewhere, Bacigalupi offers parallel criticisms of future fiction that is ‘basi cally a good excuse for mayhem to happen’ and contrasts his own sensibility wherein ‘the value of writing a broken future . . . is that storytelling and fiction are those paths to empathy, connection and visceral experience that are lacking from a policy discussion . . . from a scientific paper or a science journalism story’ (quoted in Stone 2015). But here one must consider the possible discrepancy between intention and outcome. Weik von Mossner’s study of eco-dystopian narratives ends on a note of caution about the potentially debilitating effects of negative emo tional appeals (2017, 162–163). Similarly, after surveying 161 American climate fiction readers, Schneider-Mayerson noted that climate novels, espe cially those deploying ‘disaster frames,’ frequently provoked helplessness and depression, emotions which prove ‘not only negative, but demobilizing’ (2018, p. 489–490). Schneider-Mayerson also noted that readers of climate fiction were typically young, liberal, and already concerned about climate change, while the exceptions were not strongly impacted by their reading. Climate fiction, then, is less likely to transform skeptics into activists than to ‘nudge moderates and remind concerned liberals and leftists of the severity and urgency of anthropogenic climate change’ (495). Climate fiction may also play a role in ‘delineating novel and plausibly effective forms of cultural and political action’ (495) for concerned readers. Likewise, Milkoriet con cedes that climate fiction is ‘unlikely to change readers mind on climate science or policy’ but could nonetheless prove important by ‘shaping our collective imaginations of possible, plausible, desirable, or undesirable futures’ (2016, p. 177). ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 9

Reimagining agency and responsibility Robinson’s New York 2140, Power’s The Overstory, and Ghosh’s Gun Island stand out among recent climate novels for their exploration of agency and responsibility. By situating political action amidst an ecology of natural and social forces, they challenge anthropocentric and Promethean accounts of agency while elucidating the contexts and stakes of their protagonists’ choices. Each novel also examines the failure of economic and political institutions to redress the climate crisis and the inequities it intensifies. They address themselves to readers who feel swept along by impersonal systems and historical currents, but they do not concede the idea of agency. Rather, they excavate modes of collective action and shared responsibility which are informed by interdependencies among human communities and between humans and the non-human world.

New York 2140 In New York 2140, Robinson’s characters inhabit the skyscrapers of a flooded New York City, navigating by skybridges and canals. Though this calamitous 50-foot rise in sea levels lies beyond the least hopeful predictions, Robinson’s sensibility is realist rather than apocalyptic, so long as the apocalypse entails an ‘end to the known world’ or ‘a rupture in the apparent temporal con tinuity of history’ (McQueen 2018, p. 56). Society and government have not collapsed, nor has the knowledge of civilization been lost. The tedium of everyday life, and of everyday politics, has not been washed away either. Robinson alludes to ominous sounding events – ‘the First Pulse and Second Pulse . . . the Anthropocide, the Hydrocatastrophe, the Georevolution’ – before demurring, ‘we won’t go there now, that’s pessimistic boo-hooing and giving-upness, more suitable for the melodrama describing individual fates in the watery decades’ (Robinson 2017, p. 34). Instead, Robinson’s climate story features a collective protagonist. The novel’s structure draws attention to its teeming and diverse cast of characters, with each chapter alternating among their viewpoints. Additionally, some sections are told from the standpoint of an anonymous ‘citizen’ (who also appears as ‘the citizen,’ ‘that citizen’ and later ‘the city smartass again’). The citizen alone provides a viewpoint that incorporates the longer arc of New York’s natural and human history, reaching from the arrival of Henry Hudson to the successive flooding events that bridge our present with the story’s setting. The first time ‘a citizen’ chimes in it is to discuss the topo graphy of the Bight of New York, providing a perspective where the city is, first and foremost an estuary, and Manhattan is the island ‘under all the human crap’ (33). Even as the citizen dismisses ‘the antics of individual humans’ (141) and derides the readers interest in ‘heroes and heroines’ (145), 10 M. B. COLE a plot unfolds thanks to the decisions made by the story’s characters. Among the most politically engaged are Amelia, a podcaster, and Charlotte, the organizer of a Householder’s Union. They organize a campaign of ‘financial noncompliance’ (532) against the ‘global oligarchy’ (552) responsible for their economic and environmental precarity, refusing to pay rent, mortgages, or debt or to buy non-essential goods. Eventually, Charlotte is elected to Congress, where she leverages the strike to nationalize the banks. But the citizen insists that we do not attribute this outcome to Charlotte herself. In Robinson’s construal of agency, ‘Individuals make history, but it’s also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual action’ (603). The citizen further challenges the reader to consider that humans, taken as collectives or even as a species, do not ride the wave of history alone. Robinson argues that ‘individuals, groups, civilization, and the planet itself all did these things, in actor networks of all kinds,’ and in particular he highlights ‘the nonhuman actors in these net works . . . Possibly the New York estuary was the prime actor in all that has been told here, or maybe it was the bacterial communities, expressing themselves through their own civilizations, what we might call bodies’ (603). In passages like these, Robinson renders the political community as a ‘post-Anthropolis’ co-constituted by human, animal, and elemental agents (Maczynska 2020). New York 2140 advances a challenging notion of agency in which indivi dual choices are circumscribed by forces beyond human control but are nonetheless meaningful. The same historical movements that seem to reduce the meaning of those choices give them context and stakes: ‘Seemingly frozen moments are transient, they break up like the spring ice, and then change occurs’ (603). This outlook is reflected in Robinson’s (2020) writing on the COVID-19 pandemic, which, he argues, has prompted an overdue shift to a ‘structure of feeling’ which includes the sense of responsibility for ‘enacting history’ that the climate crisis ought to have already precipitated. Some of the forms of collective action which have ensued – rent strikes much like the ones Robinson describes in New York 2140, as well as government policies which ameliorate the reign of market forces – expose and aim beyond the neoliberal structure of feeling which elevates profit over the well-being of humanity and the biosphere. Agency in such moments is bounded by history, but also focused and directed, such that the suspension of the present enables the prioritization of the future. Hopeful as this sounds, Robinson denies the possibility of a final victory or a utopian outcome. In New York 2140, his protagonists have improved their world, ‘but there was no guaran tee of permanence to anything they did, and the pushback was ferocious as always, because people are crazy and history never ends, and good is accom plished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear’ (604). ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 11

The Overstory A similarly expansive ecopolitical epic unfolds in Powers’ The Overstory. Alternating among the perspectives of his nine protagonists, Powers exam ines the nesting biological, spiritual, legal, and political relationships between humans and trees. His activist characters, members of the Life Defense Force (LDF), are conservationists rather than climate activists, but climate change looms over the action. Adam, eventually the most radical, broods that ‘the world has been stolen and the atmosphere trashed for the shortest of short term gains’ (348), while Patricia, a dendrologist, tries to explain ‘the ongoing overhaul of the atmosphere by people burning once-green things’ (389) to a disinterested press. Powers’ boldest innovations facilitate his exploration of what Adam calls ‘plant personhood’ (237). The book’s structure signals that trees are among the protagonists of the novel, as vignettes named for human viewpoint characters comprise the first third of the novel while most of the action takes place in multi-perspectival chapters called ‘Trunk,’ ‘Crown’ and ‘Seeds.’ Throughout the novel, trees want, plan, and communicate as ‘intricate, reciprocal nations of tied-together life’ (282). The human protagonists are connected by their awareness of this teeming world and their resolve to defend it. Patricia’s strategy is to become an ambassador to ‘the reading public,’ writing to ‘make vivid, visible’ the ways that trees support and enrich life (221). On her view forests are ‘aware’ and the environment is ‘a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives’ (453–454). Powers concedes that is a challenging perspective. Patricia’s advocacy derails her career, while public and professional mockery nearly drives her to suicide. Though eventually a committed activist, Adam initially joins the LDF to study what he perceives as the psychological abnormality of its members. His perspective begins to change as he discusses his research with Olivia, an activist who argues that rather than asking ‘what makes some people take the living world seriously,’ Adam should be ‘studying everyone who thinks that only people mat ter’ (319). Patricia, for her part, argues that, ‘Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics’ (454). But what kind of politics would this be? The Overstory can only hint at such possibilities, as it is set in a world in which non-human life is marginal. The LDF engages in non-violent direct action to defend old-growth forests from clear-cutting, but their efforts fail and their desperation leads to tragedy: Olivia is killed in a mission gone awry, and Adam is sentenced for her death. In another sequence, Patricia convinces a judge to block a contested cut, but learns the injunction will drive up the price of timber, incentivizing firms to exploit their current holdings more aggressively. The political narrative of the novel is essentially tragic, showing the impasse at which existing activist and 12 M. B. COLE reformist strategies arrive. Adam concludes that, ‘law is simply human will, written down’ and therefore ‘law must let every acre of living earth be turned into a tarmac, if such is the desire of people’ (470–471). However, the novel suggests other possibilities may be willed as well. Ray, a law student, learns from Stone’s Should Trees Have Standing (1972) that ‘the law’s shortfall is that it only recognizes human victims’ and that it should instead ‘extend rights to nonhuman things’ (247). For Ray, the reading prompts an epiphany about the expansion of personhood as a moral and legal category: ‘Children, women, slaves, aboriginals, the ill, insane, disabled: all changed, unthinkably, over the centuries, into persons by the law’ (250). Why, he wonders, shouldn’t ‘trees and eagles and rivers and living mountains’ be next? Powers indicates that the actualization of such possibilities will depend on the power of the imagination. Mimi, a psychologist who abandons the LDF after Olivia’s death, reflects that Adam has ‘traded his life for a fable that might light up the minds of strangers’ (488). ‘The best argument in the world won’t change a person’s mind,’ she accepts, ‘The only thing that can do that is a good story.’ In a critical review, Rich (2018) alleges that such faith in the imagination is misguided. He contends that human are an innately ‘short- term species’ and so the question Powers and his readers must confront is ‘not whether we should take action, but how to come to terms with the fact that our species has proved itself incapable of doing so.’ Via Adam, Powers reflects on precisely these possibilities, predicting ‘dieoffs and disasters [that] will make Bronze Age plagues seem quaint’ while concluding that the planet will endure even if humanity does not (495). Rich takes this ‘dark optimism’ to distill not only Adam’s but Powers’ final verdict. But Adam’s apocalyptic foreboding is only one of the narrative possibilities extended at the novel’s end. Neelay, a programmer whose games chart real and alternative trajec tories for civilization, reflectsinstead that ‘life is going someplace . . . It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve’ (496). Mimi suspects that disasters will come, but following them ‘the Earth will become another thing, and people will learn it all over again . . . Once the real world ends’ (500). The Overstory extends narratives that are apocalyptic in the fatalistic sense and in the emancipatory sense, as well as stories of adaptation, regeneration, and evolution. At the novel’s conclusion, the seeds of several possible futures have been planted.

Gun Island Gun Island affirms more eagerly the redemptive possibilities of a changing world. Ghosh renders the climate crisis in continent-spanning scale: Venice and the Sundabarans are underwater, Los Angeles is on fire, and the climax occurs amidst a cataclysmic storm which ‘seemed to belong not on the earth of human experience but in the pages of some unworldly fantasy’ ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 13

(276). But these disasters are merely the backdrop for a human story of migration and transformation. The novel follows Deen, a Bengali- American book dealer, on a global odyssey which reconstructs the past and future of his people’s diaspora – one initiated by colonialism and accelerated by climate change. The novel’s most overtly political storyline concerns ‘the Blue Boat,’ a vessel of climate refugees – ‘Ethiopians, Eritreans, Somalis, Arabs, and Bengalis’ (286) – as it approaches Italy amidst great controversy. As Palash, a Bengali student observes, the Blue Boat ‘has become a symbol of everything that’s going wrong with the world – inequality, climate change, capitalism, corruption the oil industry’ (218). Ghosh further contextualizes the standoff within the broader political and historical relationship between Europe and the inhabitants of its former colonies. Gis, a documentarian, explains that the European Union has closed off migration routes, leaving the Blue Boat’s fate to Italy’s interior minister, ‘a right-wing hardliner who had campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform’ (188–190). Deen perceives a direct line from colonialism and chattel slavery, ‘the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known’ (305), to the world-shaping powers wielded in the Anthropocene. He comes to see the conflict over the Blue Boat as a flashpoint in this civilizational drama: ‘This was why those angry young men were so afraid of that little blue fishing boat: through the prism of this vessel they could glimpse the unravelling of a centuries-old project that had conferred vast privilege on them in relation to the rest of the world’ (305). In the novel, this context shapes the choices of the refugees as well as the activists and public officials to whom they appeal. It also connects the issues regarding climate justice and climate refugees to longer-running patterns of inequity in human history. Crucially, Ghosh does not invoke the weight of history to crush the agency of his characters. Ghosh explains that there is a ‘a vital difference’ between this migration and the forced expropriation of European powers: ‘Rafi, Tipu, and their fellow migrants had launched their own journeys . . . had been enabled by their own networks’ (304). Likewise, the stand-off between the refugees and the Italian navy is broken because one admiral chooses to recognize the humanity of the refugees. The confrontation ends with a miraculous occurrence: ‘a halo of birds’ and ‘a chakra of dolphins and whales’ (307) converge on the Blue Boat, while the waters change color in a display of bioluminescence. The admiral interprets this as a sign that he must accept the refugees, even in defiance of the minister. He later avers that he ‘acted in accordance with the law of the sea, the law of humanity, and the law of God,’ and will answer to those laws if tried (310). These moments of decisive action and self-ascribed responsibility stand out against Ghosh’s preceding meditations on the deterioration of agency in the modern world. Earlier, Deen’s colleague Cinta discourses on demonic 14 M. B. COLE possession, explaining that such cases are ‘about the loss of “will” and free dom,’ their victims ‘beset by a feeling that inexplicable forces are acting upon them in such a way that they are no longer in control’ (235). Though the modern world no longer admits such possibilities, Cinta argues that ‘a world of impersonal systems’ entails its own forms of possession:

Everybody knows what must be done if the world is to continue to be a liveable place . . . and yet we are powerless, even the most powerful among us. We go about our daily business through habit, as though were in the grip of forces that have overwhelmed our will; we see shocking and monstrous things happening all around us and we avert our eyes; we surrender ourselves will ingly to whatever it is that has us in its power (237).

Cinta’s account of possession captures the phantasmal dissolution of agency and responsibility which the climate crisis precipitates, while Gun Island attempts to break the spell.

Discussion A few similarities stand out. Each novel explores the relationship between human and non-human agents, whether Robinson’s elemental forces, Powers’ trees, or Ghosh’s marine mammals. In each case, the relationship transcends awareness or even sympathy to become politically generative. The Overstory considers multiple frontiers from which humans can contest the domination of nature, a toolkit that includes civil disobedience, legal argu ment, engaged science, even game design. In Gun Island, the alliance between the Blue Boat refugees and the dolphins – who as Pila points out are also climate refugees – underscores their shared vulnerability but also, quite literally, illuminates the situation such that the admiral understands he must take responsibility for their fates, in defiance of political authority grounded on exclusion and hierarchy. We might read this sequence from Ghosh, as well as others from Robinson and Powers, as exploring what Krause calls a politics of ‘eco-emancipation’ which aims at ‘releasing nature and people from unconstrained, exploitative human power’ and which proceeds from ‘a new kind of political ecosystem understood as the con stellation of interconnected human and more-than-human networks’ (2020, p. 19). Ghosh himself calls on novelists to immerse their readers ‘in a universe animated by non-human voices’ so that we might ‘rediscover our kinship with other beings’ (2016, p. 73; 162), and his novel, like Robinson’s and Powers’, demonstrate how climate fiction can develop such modes of identification. In doing so, they respond to the paradox of agency which Johns-Putra has identified as a central predicament of the Anthropocene: that ‘even as we must confront the damaging illusion of human agency existing aloof and apart from nonhuman “nature,” we must ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 15 also consider how to recuperate a nuanced view of human agency that enables humans to engage more fully with the unprecedented crisis’ (2018, p. 26). On the other hand, Ghosh’s novel is unique in the depth of attention it affords to climate justice, a topic largely neglected in climate fiction (Schneider-Mayerson 2019). Still, each book considers the overlap between climate change and other arenas of political action and resistance. Struggles to equitably distribute wealth and political power against oligarchy and ethno-nationalism are essential to each book’s narrative. Their characters develop critical orientations toward the structural and cultural drivers of climate change as well as the institutional schema which distribute its con sequences unequally. Among these are legal, political, and economic frame works which prioritize the interests of the powerful over the less powerful, the human over the non-human, and the pursuit of profit over the preserva tion of human and non-human life. Climate change is not a discrete problem to be managed or solved within existing institutions, instead it appears as a consequence of such institutions. Robinson, Powers, and Ghosh write in the tradition of green critique which challenges complacency while avoiding the depoliticizing and demo bilizing excesses of the catastrophist strains. The aspects of their novels which might be described as apocalyptic – rising sea levels, superstorms, human displacement – certainly register the urgency of the climate crisis. But rather than dwelling on such devastation, they attend to the ways in which the climate crisis reconfigures the terrain of action. In each novel, the magnitude of the crisis and the vast sprawl of its consequences enables improbable alliances that stretch across societies and even across species. Confronting climate change as isolated individuals leaves citizens powerless, but these novels locate their protagonists within networks that foster reci procal awareness and enable cooperative action. Their heroes are ordinary people, and even those who are activists or scientists have little in the way of formal power or influence. Most do not begin their novels with strong political inclinations but are moved to action as the crisis intensifies, joining groups and founding new ones – the Homeowners’ Union, the LDF, the Blue Boat – which allow them to overcome their initial passivity. Even organized as such, they cannot ‘save the planet,’ but they do discover new possibilities, political projects into which their efforts may be invested and out of which practices for sharing vulnerability and responsibility may develop. Whereas apocalyptic narratives are distinguished by radical rupture, the narrative strategies described here emphasize continuity and gradual trans formation. This temporal frame of reference reveals surprising dependencies and inheritances, chains of cause and effect that extend beyond lifetimes and across borders. The historical scope of their narratives allows Robinson, Powers, and Ghosh to demonstrate how actions taken at one moment, 16 M. B. COLE however incomplete and unsatisfactory, can shape the future. Even so, the hope these novels extend is tentative. Their authors’ circumvention of the apocalyptic imaginary does not express a simplistic preference for hope over despair, and none depict alternatives to capitalist modernity even as they emphasize the necessity of pushing beyond it. We witness instead the fraying of its institutions and the struggles out of which alternatives may eventually emerge. Amidst all this, those who are alert and active may discover oppor tunities to mitigate harms and secure goods, and in doing so to constitute more just, cooperative, and responsible communities.

Conclusion In his essay on the COVID-19 pandemic, Robinson reflects that the virus is ‘rewriting our imaginations’ such that the ‘impossible has become thinkable.’ Climate change is rewriting our imaginations as well. At the beginning of the century, advocates could justifiably lament our conspicuous failure to ima gine the consequences of climate change, but the climate imaginary is now saturated with apocalyptic scenarios. Today we must imagine what can be done, with whom, and on what terms, if we are not to go passively to our fates and consign the most vulnerable to theirs. While climate novels repre sent a single dimension of the climate imaginary, they are instructive as to how the political imagination can be brought to grapple with climate change both as a present reality and an array of possible futures. Apocalyptic narratives have been central to climate fiction throughout its development, but works like New York 2140, The Overstory, and Gun Island indicate that the climate imaginary need not be exhausted by such narratives. Instead, their authors enrich the climate imaginary with stories defined by possibility and political potential. We cannot expect any work or works of climate fictionto narrate us out of the crisis. As a composite, however, the field may contribute to the cultiva tion and refinement of ecopolitical sensibilities, and that is why it matters that climate fiction increasingly prioritizes the excavation of agency over the education fear. Much work on the climate imaginary emphasizes the urgency of envisioning ‘possible and desirable futures’ (Milkoreit 2017, p. 62), and a climate imaginary which included only disaster stories would indeed be a stunted one. But despite their relative optimism, Robinson, Powers, and Ghosh do not point us toward an alternative future, utopian or otherwise. Rather, they depict the climate crisis as a transformed context for action. What they ask us to imagine is not so much the future – even Robinson’s novel is more concerned with our precarious present – but how, amidst the crisis, we might devise an ethos of cooperative action and shared responsi bility. Such narratives reflect and contribute to a climate discourse increas ingly defined by the urgency of climate justice (Schlosberg and Collins 2014) ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 17 and the necessity of ongoing adaptation (Moser 2014). Robinson, Powers, and Ghosh are among the writers now challenging us to imagine new ways of being and acting in an endangered world: modes of attentiveness to human and natural systems in distress, the measures both ordinary and extraordin ary we will take in response, and the obligations and interdependencies we will shoulder in the process. They tell us that there may yet be grounds for hope, but that the work of seeking and building such grounds must be taken up if hope is to provide anything more than a compensatory fiction.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual conferences of the Midwest Political Science Association and the Western Political Science Association. I thank all who attended the panels and provided discussion, especially Emily Ray, Jess Whatcott, Sean Parson, Ira Allen, Brian Danoff, Andrew Fletcher, Ryan Poll, and Christopher Brown. I also thank Graeme Hayes and the two anon ymous reviewers for Environmental Politics for their notes and Carlos Tarin for advice on the revisions. Thanks is also due to the participants in Harvard’s “Off the Ladder” workshop for their commentary on the second draft, especially Willa Hammit Brown, Thomas Dichter, and Spencer Strub.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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