Professor of sustainability Denise Baden shares the thinking behind her new novel, Murder in the Climate Assembly. It is essentially a roadmap to a sustainable future in the form of a campus novel/whodunnit. Writing fiction rather than academic texts helps to soothe her climate anxiety as well as engaging a wider audience in climate action.
Richard got straight down to work the minute he hit his office. The mystery of the unmown grass and weeds had been resolved at least. His wife had got into wildlife gardening. It was a worry. To be precise, the wildlife gardener was a worry. The sooner he got this wrapped up, the better.
…He left his office abruptly and headed towards the park where he often ate his lunch. He strolled among the roses, processing everything he’d seen and heard. Barry’s comment about the hug was the one thing that Richard couldn’t explain. Barry said, ‘It’s always the nice guys that get assassinated.’ Was that when the idea took hold? Because Steve wasn’t a nice guy. Barry’s wife works nights, he works days. They have three young children. I bet it’s been a while. Could he be the worm that turned?
Marnie’s into worms now. And she’s letting the aphids eat the roses – they’re part of the food chain apparently. The wildlife gardener told her to avoid pesticides as they kill the natural predators of aphids too. Hoverflies, ladybirds, parasitic wasps will eat the aphids, so you let them be. They’re doing you a service. The enemy of your enemy is your friend kind of thing.
Richard paused, gazing at the roses as a thought bubbled up…
Denise Baden is a professor of sustainability and a writer, who founded the Green Stories project to create a cultural body of work that entertains, informs and inspires transformation.
My day job is as Professor of Sustainable Practice at the University of Southampton. My main reason for writing fiction was to reach a mainstream audience who’d never choose to watch a climate documentary. I began in 2018 by setting up the Green Stories project. The goal is to embed climate policies and sustainable values and practices in books, plays etc. aimed at mainstream audiences as a way to move beyond preaching to the choir. Since then, Green Stories has run 20 free competitions, resulting in 17 publications and two plays. I publish Green Stories winners, and my own novels, plays, anthologies etc. on Habitat Press.
There is also evidence that a storytelling format is a more engaging way to interest people in climate policies. I’ve researched in the area of climate communication and found that solution-focused stories are more likely to inspire positive action than dystopian fiction, but there is little currently in that space.
Another reason I took to fiction is more personal — sheer panic. Writing fiction has become a way to soothe my climate anxiety and feel I’m making a difference. It’s not just that writing gives me a sense of control over how things play out, but also research into my first novel, Habitat Man, showed that 98% of readers when surveyed one month after finishing the book said it had changed their attitudes, and 60% had adopted at least one green alternative. I also had readers writing to me saying they’d been inspired to make changes.
My current novel, Murder in the Climate Assembly, sets out in fiction format a roadmap to a sustainable future. I turned down a publishing contract to launch via the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter so I could keep control and release it quicker. Additional funds are supporting a new Green Stories competition.
The script version won the 2024 Writing Climate Pitchfest. We’re keen for theatre groups to stage the interactive play version, where the audience themselves act as part of the citizens’ assembly. They decide the ending and vote on the detective’s dilemma and their favourite climate policy. After a year of elections, I used the setting of a citizens’ assembly to raise awareness of a more participative style of democracy, free from vested interests, less prone to misinformation and better able to think beyond short electoral cycles.
I began the book as a memoir, Confessions of a Climate Activist in the Business School, but found it too exposing so I switched to a novel format and integrated the play as a story-within-a-story. Murder in the Climate Assembly is a fusion of campus novel, moral philosophy and whodunnit (the story within the story). It introduces us to Iris Tate, a Professor of Moral Philosophy, who creates a new course in response to the Dean’s proposed controversial concept of ‘edutainment’. The module is based on a whodunnit that everyone assumes is hypothetical — a murder that happens during a climate assembly. A variety of characters provide an entertaining source of ethical dilemmas, but what the students don’t know is that the ultimate dilemma is very real, and their conclusions will have far-reaching consequences. The novel explores timely themes of climate and justice but delivers an overall message of hope, showing how we can act positively in a troubling world.
Murder in the Climate Assembly is available direct from Habitat Press. There is also the interactive play version, and you can see a short video. You can see extracts and reviews at Denise’s website here, along with results from her research on her first novel, Habitat Man.