Note:
Two years ago the Carleton Climate Commons hosted a Climate Café in a downtown Ottawa pub to discuss the new graphic novel, The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet, by Nicole Burton et al. There were four panelists who each gave a five-minute talk on some aspect of the graphic novel. I’ve included my brief, informal talk from this event below. The comments in square brackets I’ve added for this blog.
Word for this week: fire
. . .
I’m going to talk about emotion and climate change today: our emotional response to climate change and the role of emotions—if any—in generating climate change action. At first glance, you might think that The Beast doesn’t really seem to be about emotions. It’s about two millennials trying, as the subtitle indicates, to “make a living” in Edmonton while holding onto their ideals for a just world. It’s also about how a fire nicknamed the Beast, the wildfire at Fort McMurray, interrupts their lives and makes both of them re-evaluate in different ways. But can we see this graphic novel itself as its own sort of beast, interrupting our lives, and starting a new conversation?
[And here I briefly interrupted my talk to ask the audience a question.] When I say the word fire, what do you think? [Members of the audience called out words and I repeated them and added some others.] Hot. Burning. Angry. Passionate. Fired. Out of control. Two words stood out: angry and passionate.
At the beginning of this semester I asked my first-year students at Carleton what their response to the recent IPCC Report was [these were the students in the same FYSM that you’re taking now]. We read this section in class:
This Special Report also shows that recent trends in emissions and the level of international ambition indicated by nationally determined contributions, within the Paris Agreement, deviate from a track consistent with limiting warming to well below 2°C. Without increased and urgent mitigation ambition in the coming years, leading to a sharp decline in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, global warming will surpass 1.5°C in the following decades, leading to irreversible loss of the most fragile ecosystems, and crisis after crisis for the most vulnerable people and societies. (IPCC Report; for summary click here)
My students' response wasn’t anger and it wasn’t, for the most part, passion. (This is a class on climate change and the humanities and so I’d guess that their knowledge of these issues would be a little higher than most.) Roughly half the students in the class said they had no response (not passionate) and the other half said they were terrified. (And two students said they were both hopeful and hopeless.) It is the half of the class that was terrified that prompts these comments today. Where does fear, or any emotional response, fit into our climate change conversations?
Before I respond to this question, I want to take a detour and talk about mushrooms. (I bet you saw that transition coming from a mile away.) The anthropologist Anna Tsing has been fascinated in her recent work by a particular kind of mushroom, the matsutake (it’s smelly, rare, delicious, and very, very expensive). It grows especially well in areas that have been disturbed by human intervention and areas ravaged by forest fires. Tsing has written an entire book on these mushrooms, The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins; her book explores, as she puts it, “life without the promise of stability.” She wants to tell stories of connection in relation to climate change—stories of the mushroom, the enterprising workers who forage for them, the roads and trucks that take them from one place to another and so on—in much the same way, but with a very different inflection, that The Beast wants to make its interconnected stories of climate change vivid to us. The Beast’s subtitle, indeed, “making a living on a dying planet” echoes Tsing’s “on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins.”
Capitalist ruins. Dying planet. These are bleak descriptions. But they don’t tend to generate action in the way that more immediate threats do. If I yelled fire! with an exclamation mark for example—I’m not doing that—you’d know it was an emergency. You’d leave the room. There’s been a lot of discussion in relation to climate change about how we’ve had warnings for years and those warnings—something like fire alarms (in fact, a lot of critics use the metaphor of the fire alarm)—have been getting louder and louder in the last twenty years. But as we have all learned, it is hard to respond to something that is not right in front of us. Fires, on the other hand, incite a response.
Lots of people are now asking: Why do we, as a society, not care about climate change in a way that makes us stand up and act? Why are so many of us like my students—either without a response or simply terrified—instead of, say, angry, passionate, “fired up”? [And now, two years later, your response might be entirely different from that earlier class.] One answer that’s often given is cynicism. We’re all too cynical about the possibility of change, many people say, and we just don’t care.
The Beast, however, suggests another reason why we may not be angry about climate change. Economic precarity. As The Beast demonstrates, millennials—and not just millennials—daily confront the precarity of the labour market. Jobs are hard to find. And in relation to new energy futures, jobs become uncertain (this is the “life without the promise of stability” to which Tsing refers). Unlike climate change, this instability is something so many of us feel right now. And here is the last inflection of fire I want to address this evening: being fired. Losing your job. Not having a job. It can prompt anger (those men protesting their loss of jobs in novel), it can prompt terror, and it can prompt cynicism (not caring). These emotions are part of the climate change conversations we have even if we don’t always address them.
I want to return now to one of the questions I raised at the outset: what is the role of fiction in social change? Especially the role of the graphic novel or comics? And the role of humour? (another emotion even if it’s not always discussed as such). Can we laugh instead? Where does laughter get us? It can be a relief. It can be a catalyst. Humour can loosen perspectives and dissipate fear. Like anger, it can also bring people together. I’m not sure if anyone has seen the show Nanette by the stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby but in it she underscores these emotions—anger and laughter—and their power. They bring their pleasures, but Gadsby pauses about their overall effectiveness. These are emotions, after all, that can both bring people together and divide them. That is, they can also pull people apart.
It is here that Gadsby turns to the power of storytelling. We need stories, she says, that connect us. In this context, caring is important and so is community and collaboration. There’s definitely a place for anger and a place for comedy but these emotions alone are not enough. What The Beast does such a nice job of demonstrating is that no conversation about climate change can afford not to address these things. That is, to address messy connections and emotions, as well as the conditions of economic precarity in which energy transitions are imperative although we do not yet know what direction they’ll take. People are losing jobs—or not even finding them in the first place. Somehow the climate conversation has to involve all of us and somehow it has to address both where we are now and where we’re going.
The wildfire, climate change—these are things that often strike us as out of control. But “out of control” is also a place where things happen: things that are unexpected, things that carry new possibilities. I’m wondering if we can create some moments that are a bit like wildfires—we unleash what we’re feeling, wrestle with it, laugh, shout, take risks, and so on—and in the end perhaps the earth is scorched but perhaps, too, something emerges from that. Think of those highly valued mushrooms I mentioned at the outset.
The Beast—this collaborative graphic novel—may be like those mushrooms. It’s something good that grows out of the scorched earth. It starts a conversation. A conversation that engages with the connection between wildfires and “being fired,” the connection between climate change and economic precarity. A conversation—and here you’ll have to bear with me and my fire phrases—that can “light a fire” in its listeners and generate the climate action we need.
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