Saturday, September 30, 2017

Snooks Books blog post on the rise of cli-fi


''Cli-Fi'' – How Novels and Movies Can Help in the Fight Against Climate Change





We’re under climate ‘machine gun fire’, an incessant spray of popping climate-bullets which evokes from the population an endless cyber scream. There is the occasional offering of a cease fire, Al Gore’s recent ‘An Inconvenient Sequel’ and podcasts such as ‘Bionic Planet’ allow us to navigate the ‘bullet’ stricken landscape, but where else can we find a peaceful place to nurture our outlooks? We believe that fiction offers that objective space, here we explain why:




Our society is a dense web of virtual connections – a labyrinthine network of links and ties – we have created a ‘fourth dimension’ – a virtual reality where ourselves and our smartphones can leisurely elope. In this realm of multimedia, there is 24-hour non-stop-news, free enrolment for a ‘notification education’ and zingy access to all the latest research. As such, the consequences of climate change appear to be everywhere – we spin in a hurricane of shocking headlines, swim in a flood of bitesize climate tweets and sink in the rising sea of disquieting statistics. Yet, intelligent exploration and intricate discussion of our current climate seems to be nowhere – for many who find climate science and policy impenetrable and whose environmental discussion is constrained to the fly-by nature of the media – climate change remains an ethereal and gossamer concept with a fractured and distant nature.


This is where we believe cli-fi comes in – novels and movies are  special in that they can construct immersive futuristic worlds that we can experience in the present, and weave stories that empower us to look more critically at the decisions and choices we make today. Unalike the media, novels and movies give us the time and space to think, explore and fiddle with our perspectives – that’s why we believe that reading climate fiction is the perfect accompaniment to our fleeting ‘notification education’.


Importantly – unlike, the chirping, chittering quick-fire nature of the media, cli-fi with its in depth exploration, elaborate construction and intricate narratives provides us with a ‘quiet spot’ to broaden our environmental understanding and explore imagined yet potential futures. It was Sylvia Plath who once said: ‘it is in the novel that people brush their teeth’- it is this intricacy and hint of the mundane and everyday in fiction that makes climate change seem less clinical and more personal. Thus, climate fiction has the unique ability to take a global problem and weave it into the tiny grandeur of our everyday individual lives.


So – with the power of cli-fi novels and movies in mind we want to encourage people to read novels with climate change themes – many such novels are now being branded as part of the growing genre – cli-fi – which explores the possible environmental nightmares to come – using thrilling plotlines and a plethora of unique protagonists – these works imagine what a world wrecked by the consequences of global warming, rising sea levels and pollution would look like.


Climate novels can never be the solution in themselves – however their unique combination of science, humanities and activism – has the capacity to inspire and engender action. So – if you want to know what it would be like to brush your teeth in a world wrecked by climate change – go out and grab some cli-fi.


Snooks Books Suggestions:
  • Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver.
  • The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
  • Through the Arc of the Rainforest – Karen Tei Yamashita.
  • Freedom by Jonathon Franzen
  • The Wind Up Girl & The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigulupi.
  • The Drowned World by JG Ballard
  • 10.04 by Ben Lerner
  • Salvage the Bones – Jesmyn Ward
  • Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich
  • White Noise by Don DeLillo
Graphic Novels:
  • Here by Richard McGuire
For Young Adults:
  • The Carbon Diaries by Saci Lloyd
  • The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi
  • Breathe by Sarah Crossan
For Children:
  • The Lorax by Dr Seuss

Friday, September 29, 2017

Taiwan contributes to coinage of new 'cli-fi' literary term



Taiwan contributes to coinage of new international 'cli-fi' literary term

by staff writer

TAIPEI -- An expat living and working in Taiwan has contributed to the coinage of the new literary term that's been dubbed ''Cli-Fi.''

For more information on this see www.cli-fi.net

Dan Bloom to speak at online 'cli-fi' symposium in 2018: a preview of his remarks

PREPARED TEXT:

For me, the best of ''cli-fi'' does two things: it delivers a powerful and emotional story and it pushes the reader to wake up to the existential threat that man-made global warming poses to future generations. So good cli-fi is both a great read and a call to action, either direct or indirect. If it doesn’t wake us up, it’s just escapist entertainment. I am not interested anymore in escapism.

As Rebecca Evans put in a recent academic paper:

''Environmentalism has an intimate relationship to extrapolation; the basic project of sustainability requires at least an imaginative extension into the future one hopes to sustain. Often, this link is eagerly supplied by environmental narrative; as Brent Bellamy and Imre Szeman put it, “ecology in general has become so closely linked to narratives of the future that even to draw attention to this link between the environment and what-is-yet-to-come can seem beside the point or even tautological.”1 In the shadow of the still-unfolding event of global warming, cli-fi, or climate change fiction, has emerged as a touchstone in climate change discourse, a genre that seems capable of anticipating and articulating future prospects of a warming world.''



Energetically promoted by a global community of novelists, literary critics, book reviewers and bloggers,  the term “cli-fi” has begun to garner a great deal of critical and popular attention, with more and more texts referred to as cli-fi and that label gaining more and more credence. Cli-fi has been hailed for making otherwise-difficult-to-interpret data about the future legible to its audience; as an influential article about the genre published in Dissent in 2013 argues, by “translating graphs and scientific jargon into experience and emotion,” works of cli-fi help to “refashion myths for our age.” In other words, cli-fi is often claimed as a privileged genre for fashioning environmental futures.


 But what is cli-fi?  As Evans says: "Cli-fi is not in fact a coherent genre but rather a literary preoccupation with climate futures that draws from a wide range of popular genres. The critical response to cli-fi has thus far generically flattened the term, emphasizing its association with the realistic literary strategies commonly associated with scientific knowledge while excluding other genres. Yet a more nuanced account of cli-fi’s generic constitution reveals new aspects of the relationship between cli-fi and ecological futurity. Indeed, cli-fi’s use of multiple genres is an integral part of the way it narratively conjures the future."

So there is work to be done over the coming decades, as more and more novelists pen cli-fi novels and as more and more Hollywood producers adapt these novels for the silver screen. In fact, the power of cinema to impact viewers visually with actors and color and sound, using the magic of movies to tell a story, sometimes can eclipse the power of literature to impact readers. Think of the novel by Nevil Shute in 1957, titled ON THE BEACH, and how the 1959 movie in Hollywood reached even more people and with even more impact.

So there is a growing role for the power of cli-fi cinema to play a role in the coming decades. Hollywood producer Marshall Herskovitz is a strong proponent of cli-fi movies within the studio system, and even though he had trouble getting his own cli-fi projects greenlighted by the powers that be in Tinseltown, he remains convinced there is a future for cli-fi in the cinema world.

Last fall, in October 2017, a new cli-fi movie from Hollywood titled GEOSTORM was released worldwide, and the director, Dean Devlin, was fully aware that his labor of love was a cli-fi film and told me so in an email.

In the film, after an unprecedented series of natural disasters threatens the Earth, the world’s leaders come together to create an intricate network of satellites to control the global climate and keep everyone safe. But something goes wrong — the system built to protect the Earth attacks it, and it’s a race against the clock to uncover the real threat before a worldwide geostorm wipes out everything…and everyone along with it.

Welcome to GEOSTORM, perhaps the most important cli-fi movie of 2017. Did you see it?

''Geostorm'' starred Gerard Butler Abbie Cornish, Daniel Wu, among others, with Oscar nominees Ed Harris and Andy Garcia.

An edge-of-your-seat, heart-pounding ride for movie audiences who enjoy a ticking-clock mystery rife with conspiracy and wrapped in pure escapist fare of epic proportions, ''Geostorm'' had it all: from blistering underground infernos to desert-freezing ice storms and everything in between.

Devlin said that the idea for the story originated when his daughter, then six, asked him to explain climate change. “In the simplest way, she asked me, ‘Why can’t we just build a machine that fixes it?’ That sparked all these ideas in my mind about what would happen if we did build just such a machine. And what if something went horribly wrong? That became the ‘what if’ story—what if we wait too long to deal with extreme climate change? What if we don’t? What if we could create this amazing machine to control the weather around the entire planet? And what would we do if it went rogue?”

As the story unfolds in the film, two years have passed since the complex web of interconnected satellites—dubbed ''Dutch Boy''—went online. The years have been tranquil ones, until now. Unexplained malfunctions in the highly sophisticated system are now causing, rather than preventing, deadly weather patterns never before seen by mankind: ice and snow in the deserts of Afghanistan, smoldering under the streets of Hong Kong, and cyclones in India, to name a few.
Dutch Boy is out of control, wreaking havoc across the globe.

“Dean has a mindset that comes from working on big epics like ‘Independence Day,’ so when he put his mind to the subject of global warming, he came up with a timely twist on the genre classic by setting it against the backdrop of a political thriller and filling it with unnatural natural disasters,” said producer David Ellison. “In other words, within our story, the science is sound—it’s the people controlling it who are the problem.”

“For me, entertainment should be just that—entertaining—and not necessarily hit you over the head with a message,” Devlin said. “But I also feel that science fiction works better, has more of an impact, when you have something to say. Hopefully, we’ll take audiences on a roller coaster ride across the planet and off into space, and leave them having had a fantastic time, and maybe just a bit more curious about the world around them.”

So with the advent of more and more cli-fi novels, we are also seeing the rise of more and more cli-fi movies from Hollywood and elsewhere, even indies, and the future looks good for cli-fi as a genre to serve as both a wake up call and a form on mass entertainment. Thought-provoking cinema might help turn the tables.

Stay tuned. Stay awake. Stay woke.


Thursday, September 28, 2017

Christopher Merrill on the role of cli-fi novels in the 21st century

Writers, Climate, and the Paris Agreement: A Short Interview with Christopher Merrill


Christopher Merrill directs the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa. He serves on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and is the author of many books of poetry and nonfiction, including Things of the Hidden God and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. Chris served as the co-editor of Orion’s poetry from 1994 to 2003 and founded the Forgotten Language Tour, a program of Orion that was active in the 1990s. 
A few days after President Trump’s announcement that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, Orion editor Chip Blake sat down with Chris for this short interview.
CB: You travel to more different places than anyone I know. Based on what you see and hear, what can you say that explains the differences in the rest of the world’s willingness to take climate change seriously, as opposed to the U.S.’s willingness.
CM: For Americans, climate change can sometimes feel abstract. We can’t imagine, protected as we are by two oceans and enjoying the bounty of natural resources, that we will actually get caught by it. We think it will happen to other people.
I travel a great deal to places in conflict, where it is crystal clear that scarcity of resources and climate change are large contributing factors to the outbreak of wars and the resulting human migration. In parts of Africa, in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, climate change is a real concern for people trying to live their lives. It is a tangible thing. Thus when we speak about the civil war in Syria, a precipitating cause of the refugee crisis tearing apart the fabric of the European Union is the war in Syria, we often forget the fact that it was not just a revolt against an authoritarian regime but a consequence of climate-induced drought.
It was thrilling, wasn’t it?, to see almost every nation on earth come together to produce the Paris Agreement, with people working together for the first time to solve the global climate problem. Which makes Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the agreement all the more alarming: it signals to the world that our policy is not just America first, a doctrine rooted in the isolationism and anti-Semitism of the 1930s, but America only. When a large-scale problems occurs, as it inevitably will—let’s say an outbreak of Ebola or avian flu—who will to want to help us? If we forsake our tradition of enlightened self-interest, which among other things led to the rebuilding of Europe after World War II and the decision to bring Germany and Japan back into the community of nations, then we will be lost. Our values count, despite what we hear these days from the Trump administration.
CB: In drawing attention to climate change, what is the role of the writer?
CM: First and foremost, writers bear witness to what’s happening at any given moment. So those who write about human migrations are directly or indirectly addressing the climate issue. Writers also bring a level of complexity to their thinking, and when it comes to migrations and climate change it behooves us to recognize the complexity of the situation. Populism depends on simplifying things, on appeals to our sense of grievance, on summoning our darkest impulses. Writers in their various ways are after something larger. They tap into larger spiritual currents and enduring traditions. They try to figure out what’s right, even as they testify to all the ways in which we fail to act well or fall down. Writers give us a larger and more complex understanding of existence.
CB: Can you make a distinction between the way American writers write about climate, and way non-American writers write about climate?
CM: American writers are to some extent more alert to the threats posed by climate change and the scientific underpinnings of the evidence of climate change. The writers I meet in my travels are dealing more with the symptoms of climate change. My Syrian writing friends, for example, may not write directly about climate change, but they are dealing with the consequences of a brutal civil war spurred by drought.
CB: Where do you find any hope in the way people talk or write about climate?
CM: Writers generally have faith—in their language, in their ability to ferret out the truth, in their determination to document how people do or do not listen to their better angels. Directing the international writing program, I am surprised and heartened by the ways in which writers coming from dire circumstances make sense of what is happening around them. We have hosted writers from Afghanistan who live in horrendous conditions, and yet write with a kind of joy. A novelist from Damascus, Khaled Khalifa, told me early in the war that he felt obliged to testify to what is happening to his country. Not long ago, the Bangladeshi novelist, Anisul Hoque, who warned about the effects of rising sea levels, found himself in the Islamists’ crosshairs, his photograph plastered on the front page of a newspaper with a caption ordering the faithful to kill him. He sought refuge in this country, staying only long enough for the immediate threat to pass and then returning to Dhaka to continue his vital work, albeit accompanied now by armed guards. And I think today of Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet who endured one tragedy after another, insisting all the while on bearing witness to what was happening in Soviet Russia. Her protégé, Joseph Brodsky, said that in her work one hears “the note of controlled terror”—which is a note that every writer might hope to sing. Her heroism and her poems inspire. •
Learn More:
Read Chris Merrill’s “The New Face of War” (May/June 2013)
Visit the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa

Cli-fi, Climate Justice, and Queer Futurity -- an academic paper by Rebecca Evans


Cli-fi, Climate Justice, and Queer Futurity

Abstract/Teaser/Preview


http://muse.jhu.edu/article/669720 


FANTASTIC FUTURES?

''Cli-fi, Climate Justice, and Queer Futurity''

by Rebecca Evans

''For me, the best of cli-fi does two things: it delivers a powerful and emotional story and it pushes the reader to wake up to the existential threat that man-made global warming poses to future generations. So good cli-fi is both a great read and a call to action, either direct or indirect. If it doesn’t wake us up, it’s just escapist entertainment. I am not interested anymore in escapism.''

-- Dan Bloom, “Q&A”

Cli-Fi, Sci-Fi, and Their Disreputable Others

[Science fiction] is an educational literature. . . . It demands . . . that the critic be a Darwinist and not a medicine man.
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
Environmentalism has an intimate relationship to extrapolation; the basic project of sustainability requires at least an imaginative extension into the future one hopes to sustain. Often, this link is eagerly supplied by environmental narrative; as Brent Bellamy and Imre Szeman put it, “ecology in general has become so closely linked to narratives of the future that even to draw attention to this link between the environment and what-is-yet-to-come can seem beside the point or even tautological.”1 In the shadow of the still-unfolding event of global warming, cli-fi, or climate change fiction, has emerged as a touchstone in climate change discourse, a genre that seems capable of anticipating and articulating future prospects of a warming world.



Coined, and energetically promoted, by journalist Dan Bloom, the term “cli-fi” has recently begun to garner a great deal of critical and popular attention, with more and more texts referred to as cli-fi and that label gaining more and more credence. Cli-fi has been hailed for making otherwise-difficult-to-interpret data about the future legible to its audience; as an influential article about the genre published in Dissent in 2013 argues, by “translating graphs and scientific jargon into experience and emotion,” works of cli-fi help to “refashion myths for our age.”2 In other words, cli-fi is often claimed as a privileged genre for fashioning environmental futures.


This essay seeks to add new dimensions to current critical understandings of cli-fi’s relationship to environmental futurity. It suggests that cli-fi is not in fact a coherent genre but rather a literary preoccupation with climate futures that draws from a wide range of popular genres. The critical response to cli-fi has thus far generically flattened the term, emphasizing its association with the realistic literary strategies commonly associated with scientific knowledge while excluding other genres. Yet a more nuanced account of cli-fi’s generic constitution reveals new aspects of the relationship between cli-fi and ecological futurity. Indeed, cli-fi’s use of multiple genres is an integral part of the way it narratively conjures the future—a conjuring that inflects the representation of climate justice and the queer politics of futurity itself. This is to say that the implications of how different genres articulate climate change are twofold. First, representations of climate futures matter in terms of climate justice, or the effort to combat the way that climate change is disproportionately caused and disproportionately experienced along lines of privilege. Climate justice narratives thus require an attention both to the likelihood of climate injustice in the future and to the way that such injustice is rooted, and indeed ongoing, in the present moment. Second, representations of climate futures matter in terms of resisting heteronormative systems, or the vexed relationship that queer scholarship has identified between futurity and reproductive politics. Queer climate narratives thus require sensitivity to the heteronormative values that often undergird accounts of our ethical relationship to the future. As a literary genre defined by its interest in ecological futures, cli-fi, and its relationships to climate justice and to queer temporality, is ripe for such investigation.
I begin this essay by exploring the corpus and reception of “cli-fi.” [End Page 95] I then compare that reception to critical histories of science fiction, showing how troubling assumptions about the relative merit of different genres echo across these fields. Next, I offer a...


Wednesday, September 27, 2017

NYTimesbot on why Times book reviewers and climate desk reporters are not allowed by their editors to use the "banned" cli-fi term in print even if the book is a cli-fi novel that the author himself/herself calls a cli-fi novel

The Madonna of Global Warming oversaw this interview from a Catholic church in northern France where the extremely weather-beaten limestone illustrates the threat of climate change worldwide, not only in the office of the New York Times in Manhattan, where big literary decisions are made.
 
 
A NYTimesbot on why Times book reviewers and climate desk reporters are not allowed by their editors to use the "banned" cli-fi term in print even if the book is a cli-fi novel that the author himself/herself calls a cli-fi novel or even if the climate desk article is about cli-fi novels reviewed by scientists...

A Timesbot Tells the Truth: A Q&A With a Timesbot

This Timesbot cannot identify himself/herself at this junction in the culture wars going on inside the NYT  although he/she/they/it joined The New York Times thinking they could report the truth.  They later found out that the truth is what the Times says is the Truth and cli-fi be damned. Cli-Fi? What the heck in cli-fi? Read the light-hearted and lightly edited Q. and A. below.
 
Can you walk me through the process of reviewing a book?
 
Sure, if the novel is a cli-fi novel and it comes to us via the publisher identified as such, we throw it in the NOT TO BE REVIEWED pile under the ''THE CLI-FI TERM IS BANNED AT THE NEW YORK TIMES UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE'' punch card.
 
You recently were transitioned from editor and columnist to book reviewer and Climate Desk reporter. What has changed about your approach to covering cli-fi novels?
 
Well, to be blunt, I cannot cover cli-fi novels. The books editor has banned the use of the term cli-fi in her pages as long as she is editor here, and she has made that very clear. So while I can review climate-themed fiction (novels) I cannot use the cli-fi in the headline or the review.
 
 
The New York Times is the last daily print snailpaper in America with a free-standing books section. How does reviewing cli-fi novels for a VIP newspaper influence or inform your work?
 
 
To repeat: Well, to be blunt, I cannot cover cli-fi novels. The books editor has banned the use of the term cli-fi in her pages as long as she is editor here, and she has made that very clear. So while I can review climate-themed fiction (novels) I cannot use the cli-fi in the headline or the review.
 
Do you have any idea why the Times ran a very good interactive package on September 26 headlined ''Is Climate-Themed Fiction All Too Real? We Asked the Experts'' about seven cli-fi novels without ever once using the cli-fi term for any of the novels under review and without even giving readers a hot link to a cli-fi website or Wikipedia page.
 
Well, to be blunt, not only is is true that I cannot cover cli-fi novels or call them cli-fi novels, it is also true that at the Climate Desk I also do not have the freedom to speak the truth to Alaska and use the cli-fi term in climate-themed interactive packages. Alaska prefers that we refer to cli-fi novels under the euphimism [spellcheck] ''climate-themed fiction." As you know from my earlier answers above, the Brown-educated books editor has banned the use of the term cli-fi in her pages as long as she is editor here, (or so she said three years ago in an email) and she has made that very clear. So while I can review climate-themed fiction (novels) I cannot use the cli-fi in the headline or the review. And likewise, it appears that the editor of the Climate Desk prefers to cover-up reality by calling cli-fi novels as "climate-themed fiction." Go figure. Maybe things will change
 
See this here.
 
As a Timesbot, are you allowed to use the sci-fi term in book reviews or Climate Desk news articles and packages?
 
No, no. We cannot use the sci-fi term in the New York Times either. Both cli-fi and sci-fi have been banned, verboten. We were told that sci-fi is a term that was coined by L. Ron Hubbard the American SF pulp fiction writer and later a cult leader who started Scientology with a sci-fi novel series. So both cli-fi and sci-fi are banned from the print editions of the Times. Online it's another story, I have been told. You'd have to ask our IT people.
 
 
 
 
 
satire

NYT conservative columnist Bret Stephens ......Down Under

The Dying Art of Disagreement
Bret Stephens, a new addition to our columnist ranks, was in Sydney to give a keynote address at the Lowy Institute Media Awards, and we published his comments — which have stirred up much discussion in our Facebook group of the NYTimes Facebook Group (private) and elsewhere. Here’s the gist with a characteristic sweep of history: “Galileo and Darwin; Mandela, Havel, and Liu Xiaobo; Rosa Parks and Natan Sharansky — such are the ranks of those who disagree. And the problem, as I see it, is that we’re failing at the task.”

This is the text of a lecture Bret Stephens delivered at the Lowy Institute Media Award dinner in Sydney, Australia, on Saturday, Sept. 23. The award recognizes excellence in Australian foreign affairs journalism.
 
Let me begin with thanks to the Lowy Institute for bringing me all the way to Sydney and doing me the honor of hosting me here this evening.
I’m aware of the controversy that has gone with my selection as your speaker. I respect the wishes of the Colvin family and join in honoring Mark Colvin’s memory as a courageous foreign correspondent and an extraordinary writer and broadcaster. And I’d particularly like to thank Michael Fullilove for not rescinding the invitation.
This has become the depressing trend on American university campuses, where the roster of disinvited speakers and forced cancellations includes former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, former Harvard University President Larry Summers, actor Alec Baldwin, human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, DNA co-discoverer James Watson, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, filmmaker Michael Moore, conservative Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will and liberal Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Anna Quindlen, to name just a few.
Continue reading the main story

So illustrious is the list that, on second thought, I’m beginning to regret that you didn’t disinvite me after all.
The title of my talk tonight is “The Dying Art of Disagreement.” This is a subject that is dear to me — literally dear — since disagreement is the way in which I have always earned a living. Disagreement is dear to me, too, because it is the most vital ingredient of any decent society.
To say the words, “I agree” — whether it’s agreeing to join an organization, or submit to a political authority, or subscribe to a religious faith — may be the basis of every community.
But to say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong; etiam si omnes — ego non — these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere. Galileo and Darwin; Mandela, Havel, and Liu Xiaobo; Rosa Parks and Natan Sharansky — such are the ranks of those who disagree.
And the problem, as I see it, is that we’re failing at the task.
This is a puzzle. At least as far as far as the United States is concerned, Americans have rarely disagreed more in recent decades.
We disagree about racial issues, bathroom policies, health care laws, and, of course, the 45th president. We express our disagreements in radio and cable TV rants in ways that are increasingly virulent; street and campus protests that are increasingly violent; and personal conversations that are increasingly embittering.
This is yet another age in
which we judge one another morally depending on where we stand politically.
Nor is this just an impression of the moment. Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.
The polarization is geographic, as more people live in states and communities where their neighbors are much likelier to share their politics.
The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo.
Finally the polarization is electronic and digital, as Americans increasingly inhabit the filter bubbles of news and social media that correspond to their ideological affinities. We no longer just have our own opinions. We also have our separate “facts,” often the result of what different media outlets consider newsworthy. In the last election, fully 40 percent of Trump voters named Fox News as their chief source of news.
Thanks a bunch for that one, Australia.
It’s usually the case that the more we do something, the better we are at it. Instead, we’re like Casanovas in reverse: the more we do it, the worse we’re at it. Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds.
It behooves us to wonder why.
* * *
Thirty years ago, in 1987, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago named Allan Bloom — at the time best known for his graceful translations of Plato’s “Republic” and Rousseau’s “Emile” — published a learned polemic about the state of higher education in the United States. It was called “The Closing of the American Mind.”
The book appeared when I was in high school, and I struggled to make my way through a text thick with references to Plato, Weber, Heidegger and Strauss. But I got the gist — and the gist was that I’d better enroll in the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did.
What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum? Certainly not “conservatism” in any contemporary American sense of the term. We were not taught to become American patriots, or religious pietists, or to worship what Rudyard Kipling called “the Gods of the Market Place.” We were not instructed in the evils of Marxism, or the glories of capitalism, or even the superiority of Western civilization.
As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.
To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.
It’s what used to be called a liberal education.
The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.
Socrates quarrels with Homer. Aristotle quarrels with Plato. Locke quarrels with Hobbes and Rousseau quarrels with them both. Nietzsche quarrels with everyone. Wittgenstein quarrels with himself.
These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.
Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.
In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.
“The Closing of the American Mind” took its place in the tradition of these quarrels. Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.
He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you needed liberally educated people. This, at least, should not have been controversial. For free societies to function, the idea of open-mindedness can’t simply be a catchphrase or a dogma. It needs to be a personal habit, most of all when it comes to preserving an open mind toward those with whom we disagree.
* * *
That habit was no longer being exercised much 30 years ago. And if you’ve followed the news from American campuses in recent years, things have become a lot worse.
According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students — 51 percent — think it is “acceptable” for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. An astonishing 20 percent also agree that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking.
These attitudes are being made plain nearly every week on one college campus or another.
There are speakers being shouted down by organized claques of hecklers — such was the experience of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California, Irvine. Or speakers who require hundreds of thousands of dollars of security measures in order to appear on campus — such was the experience of conservative pundit Ben Shapiro earlier this month at Berkeley. Or speakers who are physically barred from reaching the auditorium — that’s what happened to Heather MacDonald at Claremont McKenna College in April. Or teachers who are humiliated by their students and hounded from their positions for allegedly hurting students’ feelings — that’s what happened to Erika and Nicholas Christakis of Yale.
And there is violence. Listen to a description from Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger of what happened when she moderated a conversation with the libertarian scholar Charles Murray in March:
The protesters succeeded in shutting down the lecture. We were forced to move to another site and broadcast our discussion via live stream, while activists who had figured out where we were banged on the windows and set off fire alarms. Afterward, as Dr. Murray and I left the building . . . a mob charged us.
Most of the hatred was focused on Dr. Murray, but when I took his right arm to shield him and to make sure we stayed together, the crowd turned on me. Someone pulled my hair, while others were shoving me. I feared for my life. Once we got into the car, protesters climbed on it, hitting the windows and rocking the vehicle whenever we stopped to avoid harming them. I am still wearing a neck brace, and spent a week in a dark room to recover from a concussion caused by the whiplash.
Middlebury is one of the most prestigious liberal-arts colleges in the United States, with an acceptance rate of just 16 percent and tuition fees of nearly $50,000 a year. How does an elite institution become a factory for junior totalitarians, so full of their own certitudes that they could indulge their taste for bullying and violence?
There’s no one answer. What’s clear is that the mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.
The mis-education continues in grade school. As the Brookings findings indicate, younger Americans seem to have no grasp of what our First Amendment says, much less of the kind of speech it protects. This is a testimony to the collapse of civics education in the United States, creating the conditions that make young people uniquely susceptible to demagogy of the left- or right-wing varieties.
Then we get to college, where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, or sexual standing of the person making it. As a woman of color I think X. As a gay man I think Y. As a person of privilege I apologize for Z. This is the baroque way Americans often speak these days. It is a way of replacing individual thought — with all the effort that actual thinking requires — with social identification — with all the attitude that attitudinizing requires.
In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind — a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.
Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.
The result is that the disagreements we need to have — and to have vigorously — are banished from the public square before they’re settled. People who might otherwise join a conversation to see where it might lead them choose instead to shrink from it, lest they say the “wrong” thing and be accused of some kind of political -ism or -phobia. For fear of causing offense, they forego the opportunity to be persuaded.
Take the arguments over same-sex marriage, which you are now debating in Australia. My own views in favor of same-sex marriage are well known, and I hope the Yes’s wins by a convincing margin.
But if I had to guess, I suspect the No’s will exceed whatever they are currently polling. That’s because the case for same-sex marriage is too often advanced not by reason, but merely by branding every opponent of it as a “bigot” — just because they are sticking to an opinion that was shared across the entire political spectrum only a few years ago. Few people like outing themselves as someone’s idea of a bigot, so they keep their opinions to themselves even when speaking to pollsters. That’s just what happened last year in the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election, and look where we are now.
If you want to make a winning argument for same-sex marriage, particularly against conservative opponents, make it on a conservative foundation: As a matter of individual freedom, and as an avenue toward moral responsibility and social respectability. The No’s will have a hard time arguing with that. But if you call them morons and Neanderthals, all you’ll get in return is their middle finger or their clenched fist.
One final point about identity politics: It’s a game at which two can play. In the United States, the so-called “alt-right” justifies its white-identity politics in terms that are coyly borrowed from the progressive left. One of the more dismaying features of last year’s election was the extent to which “white working class” became a catchall identity for people whose travails we were supposed to pity but whose habits or beliefs we were not supposed to criticize. The result was to give the Trump base a moral pass it did little to earn.
* * *
So here’s where we stand: Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person — or even allowing someone else to listen. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities, and the frayed edges of our democracies.
Can we do better?
This is supposed to be a lecture on the media, and I’d like to conclude this talk with a word about the role that editors and especially publishers can play in ways that might improve the state of public discussion rather than just reflect and accelerate its decline.
I began this talk by noting that Americans have rarely disagreed so vehemently about so much. On second thought, this isn’t the whole truth.
Yes, we disagree constantly. But what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, or try to see things as they might, or find some middle ground.
Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves. We take exaggerated and histrionic offense to whatever is said about us. We banish entire lines of thought and attempt to excommunicate all manner of people — your humble speaker included — without giving them so much as a cursory hearing.
The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement — namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak — is absent.
Perhaps the reason for this is that we have few obvious models for disagreeing well, and those we do have — such as the Intelligence Squared debates in New York and London or Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN — cater to a sliver of elite tastes, like classical music.
Fox News and other partisan networks have demonstrated that the quickest route to huge profitability is to serve up a steady diet of high-carb, low-protein populist pap. Reasoned disagreement of the kind that could serve democracy well fails the market test. Those of us who otherwise believe in the virtues of unfettered capitalism should bear that fact in mind.
I do not believe the answer, at least in the U.S., lies in heavier investment in publicly sponsored television along the lines of the BBC. It too, suffers, from its own form of ideological conformism and journalistic groupthink, immunized from criticism due to its indifference to competition.
Nor do I believe the answer lies in a return to what in America used to be called the “Fairness Doctrine,” mandating equal time for different points of view. Free speech must ultimately be free, whether or not it’s fair.
But I do think there’s such a thing as private ownership in the public interest, and of fiduciary duties not only to shareholders but also to citizens. Journalism is not just any other business, like trucking or food services. Nations can have lousy food and exemplary government, as Great Britain demonstrated for most of the last century. They can also have great food and lousy government, as France has always demonstrated.
But no country can have good government, or a healthy public square, without high-quality journalism — journalism that can distinguish a fact from a belief and again from an opinion; that understands that the purpose of opinion isn’t to depart from facts but to use them as a bridge to a larger idea called “truth”; and that appreciates that truth is a large enough destination that, like Manhattan, it can be reached by many bridges of radically different designs. In other words, journalism that is grounded in facts while abounding in disagreements.
I believe it is still possible — and all the more necessary — for journalism to perform these functions, especially as the other institutions that were meant to do so have fallen short. But that requires proprietors and publishers who understand that their role ought not to be to push a party line, or be a slave to Google hits and Facebook ads, or provide a titillating kind of news entertainment, or help out a president or prime minister who they favor or who’s in trouble.
Their role is to clarify the terms of debate by championing aggressive and objective news reporting, and improve the quality of debate with commentary that opens minds and challenges assumptions rather than merely confirming them.
This is journalism in defense of liberalism, not liberal in the left-wing American or right-wing Australian sense, but liberal in its belief that the individual is more than just an identity, and that free men and women do not need to be protected from discomfiting ideas and unpopular arguments. More than ever, they need to be exposed to them, so that we may revive the arts of disagreement that are the best foundation of intelligent democratic life.
The honor the Lowy Institute does tonight’s nominees is an important step in that direction. What they have uncovered, for the rest of you to debate, is the only way by which our democracies can remain rational, reasonable, and free.
Correction: September 26, 2017
An earlier version of this article misidentified Charles Murray’s host for his speech at Middlebury College. He was invited by the campus American Enterprise Institute Club and the political science department, not by Prof. Allison Stanger.

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

How The New York Times covers cli-fi in 2017: a blog post to set the record straight


 
 
Back in August, New York Times reporter Livia Albeck-Ripka, contacted me by Twitter and email about a story she was developing on cli-fi novels, and she asked if I had time to chat with her. She wrote (August 19 email):
 
  1. ''Dear Dan, Thanks for getting back to me so quickly! I’m interested in doing a listicle/round-up of Cli-Fi novels for the Times, and am wondering if you can help?
  2. Do you have a running list somewhere/thoughts on where the most comprehensive one might be?
  3. How did you get into this yourself?
  4. Cheers,
  5.  - Livia'' 
I replied:
''Hi Livia, Yes....
Yes. Can help. How many books you need for a list! Top ten cli-fi novels? Top 20?
USA. UK. Canada. Australia. Finland . Germany.
Or mostly USA novels? -- Dan''
 
I then sent her a partial list of cli-fi novels off the top of my head, writing:
 
''Livia,
I appreciate your interest. Just as earlier novels like "On the Beach".. 1957... influenced public debate on nuclear disarmament, I feel modern cli-fi novels might be able to communicate global warming issues on an emotional level.
>
> So.....listicle
>
> Barbara Kingsolver, "Flight Behavior"...2012
>
> "South pole station" 2017 by Ashley Shelby
>
> "0dds against tomorrow" by Nathaniel Rich. 2013.
>
> "New York 2140" kim Stanley Robinson (new clifi novel )
>
> Paolo bacigalupi "the Water Knife" ...2016
>
> Claire vaye Watkins "Gold Fame Citrus"....2016
>
> "Ice" by laline Paul in UK ...2017
Meg little Reilly, "we are unprepared" 2016
"The lamentations of zeno" by ilja trojanow, 2016, english trans of German novel "eistau "
Clade, by James Bradley
Anchor point, by Alice  Robinson
Solar, by ian McEwan . uk
 
I then included this in another email to Livia:
 
* [[Memory of Water|Memory of Water, Emmi Itäranta]]
* [http://www.npr.org/2015/05/28/408295800/the-water-knife-cuts-deep The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi]* [http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-lamentations-of-zeno-review-glacial-ground-zero-1.2629428 The Lamentations of Zeno, Ilija Trojanow]* [https://bookpage.com/reviews/20276-meg-little-reilly-we-are-unprepared#.WZkET2el3mg We Are Unprepared, Meg Little Reilly]* [http://www.npr.org/2017/07/04/534768605/south-pole-station-takes-a-cool-look-at-a-hot-topic South Pole Station, Ashley Shelby]* [http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/james-bradleys-clade-finds-glimmer-of-hope-in-extreme-future-20150122-12ti6g.html Clade, James Bradley]* [http://www.npr.org/2013/04/01/175955816/book-review-odds-against-tomorrow Odds Against Tomorrow, Nathaniel Rich]* [http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/claire-vaye-watkins-gold-fame-citrus-between-hell-and-a-hot-place-book-review-a6856291.html Gold Fame Citrus, Claire Vaye Watkins]* [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/26/the-ice-laline-paull-review Ice, Laline Paull]* [http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/alice-robinson-review-anchor-point-debut-novel-delicately-tackles-climate-change-20150302-13sp9z.html Anchor Point, Alice Robinson]
 
 
THE RESULT of our email chats turned up in the New York Times on September 26, about a month after we first chatted, and here it is. Livia wrote a great, fun interactive piece and I loved it.
 
My take on her piece with some slight edits for clarification and amplification since she left some things out.
 
Livia used four of my recommendations, wasn't able to use all of them for reasons of space, and added three other books she and her editors came up with at the Climate Desk at the Times. and here is her article below. I loved it! BRAVO, Livia. James Reston would be proud of you today!
 
=======================
 



HEADLINE:

Are Cli-Fi Novels All Too Real? We Asked 7 Climate Scientist Experts


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, Bacigalupi, a climate 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 cli-fi authors like Mr. Bacigalupi hurtle current science into drought-ravaged, flooded, starved, sunken and sandy futures. Climate-themed fiction, also known as cli-fi and covered in the NYT's ROOM FOR DEBATE forum in July 2014, is extension, not invention.

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/29/will-fiction-influence-how-we-react-to-climate-change?mcubz=3


But as scientists’ projections about the effects of climate change have increasingly become reality, some works of cli-fi have begun to seem all too plausible. We chose seven cli-fi novels and asked the experts: How likely are they to come true?
  1. Photo

    Climate Effect: Water Wars
    ‘The Water Knife’
    by Paolo Bacigalupi
 
In his fifth climate-related novel, published to cli-fi headlines in 2015, Mr. Bacigalupi asked: 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.”



  1. Photo

    Climate Effect: Desertification
    ‘Gold Fame Citrus’
    by Claire Vaye Watkins
  2.  
    Claire Vaye Watkins’s 2016 cli-fi novel, her first, imagined 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.”
  3. Photo

    Climate Effect: Species Extinction
    ‘Flight Behavior’
    by Barbara Kingsolver
  4.  
    The central character in Barbara Kingsolver’s 2015 cli-fi 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.”
  5. Photo

    Climate Effect: Disrupted Food Chain
    ‘The History of Bees’
    by Maja Lunde
  6.  
    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 cli-fi novel and her debut book for adults, published in 2017 in Norwegian and later translated into German and English, 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.”
  7. Photo

    Climate Effect: Refugees
    ‘Borne’
    by Jeff VanderMeer
  8.  
    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.

 
 AND

Back in August, New York Times reporter Livia Albeck-Ripka, an Australian journalist now living in New York City, contacted me by Twitter and email about a news story she was developing on cli-fi novels, and she asked if I had time to chat with her. I said sure.
She wrote (August 19 email): "Dear Dan, thanks for getting back to me so quickly! I am interested in doing a listicle/round-up of Cli-Fi novels for the New York Times interactive section at the Climate Desk and I am wondering if you can help us. Do you have a running list somewhere/thoughts on where the most comprehensive list might be? Cheers, Liva."
I sent her a list of cli-fi novels, one short, and one a long list. She decided to use four of the novels I recommended to her and she chose three other novels for her listicle as well. Her news story is reported in an edited version (for clarification and amplification) here.
The result of our email chats later turned up a month later in the New York Times in a wonderfully-illustrated article about cli-fi novels. From our first chat on August 19 to the final publication on September 26, it was just over a month or so. Well done, Livia Albeck-Ripka!

She wrote a fun, interactive piece, well designed on the page and well-promoted on Twitter by her colleagues on the Climate Desk: John Schwartz, Henry Foundation, Hannah Fairfield, Claire O'Neill, Brad Plumer and Lisa Friedman.

Cli-fi is alive and well at the New York Times. Soon Pamela Paul at the New York Times Book Review will be assigning book reviewers to review cli-fi novels and call them cli-fi novels.