Poet Julian Bishop shares three new poems written in response to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where dissension between its famous fairy characters plays out in ‘distemperature’ and ruptures in the patterns of nature and affairs of humans.
1,480 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes
The setting: The Bridge Theatre, London, 2019. The play: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A fabulously camp romp with a Beyoncé soundtrack and incredible acrobatics. Shakespeare so successfully updated, the same Nicholas Hytner production is revived in 2025. But of all the contemporary resonances, one of the play’s main preoccupations stood out for me as I sat in the audience swaying along to Love on Top at the end: climate change.
Rewind to Titania’s speech in Act II, Scene 1:
And thorough this distemperature we see The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter change Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world, By their increase, now knows not which is which. And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension. We are their parents and original.
The summer of 1594, shortly before the play was written, was famously cold and wet, with crops rotting in the fields and floods that wrecked bridges. But mark the last three lines of Titania’s speech — who or what is responsible for the progeny of evils described above but we, the audience, because of our dissension. The dictionary definition of dissension? A formal term for when a group of people who should be cooperating cannot agree on something. Sounds familiar?
I also latched onto the fabulous neologism ‘distemperature’, which surely deserves a revival, with its dual nods to political distemper and an out-of-sorts temperature — is there a better word to encapsulate our global predicament? Accordingly, I’ve used the word in several poems, including one of those you can read below.
Titania’s speech led me to explore Shakespeare’s eco credentials further and, sure enough, there’s ample evidence throughout the folio to demonstrate that he was aware of issues such as deforestation and the impact of expanding cities on the natural world. By his time, the forest of Arden was more patchy woodland thanks to the booming timber industry, used not just for house-building but England’s almost permanent war footing. A fleet to defeat a Spanish Armada demands a vast amount of timber and there’s no evidence of any active attempts to replant what must have been seen as an infinite resource.
1914 play poster for a production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at the Savoy Theatre. Public domain.
Golden shovels — poems in conversation
The form I’ve chosen for my poetic response is the Golden Shovel, invented by the American poet Terrance Hayes. He responded to Gwendolyn Brooks’s short but classic poem We Real Cool by using a word from it at the end of every line of his own poem, The Golden Shovel — in order too, so you can read her poem down the right-hand margin of the page.
I also chose this form because it preserves the integrity of the original line and forces a very direct response. Of course, given this is Shakespeare, the language is often archaic, so I’ve had to bridge the difficult gap between authenticity and parody in how I use both syntax and language, probably not always entirely successfully. I also decided each poem’s title should come from a nearby line in the same play that relates to its theme.
Most of the poems are being written while I go for a run outdoors — I hold the relevant quote in my head and repeat it until it starts to generate a response. The tricky bit is waiting until I’m on an empty path to get the words down! There have been a few near-collisions but I’m lucky to live near Green Belt between London and the M25, which can easily accommodate an hour-long run through countryside.
I grew up in Wiltshire countryside which is gradually being eaten away by new houses, golf courses and the like, so these poems are also a kind of elegy as well. When I was a teenager, a friend and I used to catch the bus to Stratford-on-Avon after school on a Friday night and stay in a youth hostel so we could queue up at dawn outside the RSC to get returns for whatever was showing. I’d become obsessed by Shakespeare after my school took our class to a showing of Franco Zefferelli’s film version of Romeo and Juliet — I think it was the first time I became aware of poetry. By the time it came to O Levels (we studied Julius Caesar), I think I’d seen all the tragedies.
And unexpectedly, Macbeth proved initially to be the richest resource for possible Shovels. The setting for the play is a blasted heath, a place of fog and filthy air. After Macbeth murders Duncan — an unnatural act — nature goes haywire, with animals eating one another, appalling weather and at one point the Earth was fev’rous and did shake. It’s all fittingly apocalyptic but I’d like to think that there’s a more hopeful vision for the world than this, which brought me back to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The circumstances aren’t dissimilar, as Titania’s speech makes clear: she and Oberon are parents and original of the distemperature and chaotic weather by fighting over the custody of an Indian changeling boy rather than attending to their normal duties (whatever it is that fairies do). As the play has it: so quick bright things come to confusion.
The play’s plot mirrors this of course, with Bottom acquiring an ass’s head and mistaken identity almost leading to tragedy among the two groups of young lovers. Significantly, the latter confusion occurs because Puck picks a flower to make a potion — is it too much of a stretch to include this among the acts of environmental destruction too? But in this play there’s a happy outcome: the lovers are reconciled, as are Oberon and Titania, although theirs is something of a forced marriage. There are also plenty of celebrations of the natural world, most famously Oberon’s luscious ‘wild violets’ speech:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine…
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Act II, Scene 1)
‘Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. From William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by Wiliam Blake, 1786. Public domain.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream — echoing ecological disorder
So, what do I hope this project will achieve? Obviously, I’ll be looking to get some poems published but, more importantly, I’d like them to echo the broader ecological disorder observed by Titania, and indeed Shakespeare himself, when we see floods, fire and seasons alter as a result of our own actions. Just ten years separate the writing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with its happy ending and Macbeth with its apocalyptic ending… Let’s hope we get to the end of The Tempest without having to sit through all the tragedies on the way.
Three Midsummer Shovels (from the beginning of the sequence):
Enter Oberon with his trainOnce I knew of a bank where the nodding violets grew in a springhung with dewdrops; I knew the scent of wild thyme on a summerbreeze and eglantine on hill, thewild dale and mead, bees chidingthe roses… but then autumn and all the four seasons turned angry, mutating to a state of never-winter where dithering outpaced change.Act II, Scene 1
Ill Met by MoonlightProud Titania attributed the moon, forgeries of jealousy and her Lord’s distemper for unsettling the weather, a thoroughif touch fantastical midsummer flight of airy chiffony for thisman-stamped disequilibrium she pitched as distemperature, citing hoary-headed frost in the fresh lap of rose, of which we are parent and original. It begs a question: if a fairy could see how all the distemperatured and discombobulated seasons changed their liveries, why on earth did humans fail to alter?Act II, Scene 1
Wonder on, till truth make all things plainIn the age before distemperature and tempests, thismelodious plot of lichen’d oak and broadleaf’d greenwas backdrop to every scene. So well-made, the plotnever changed. Years hence, what green props shall endure to grace our performance? What spirit will be left to emerge unseen from still’d wings? One day our tumbledown globe will host plays on an empty stage.Act III, Scene 1
Researcher Anna Hartnell marks the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, highlighting the human causes of New Orleans’ crisis (“There is no such thing as a natural disaster”) while questioning ‘Anthropocene’ labellings of human nature as hard-wired for destruction.
2,530 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes
The hurricane that hit the US Gulf Coast in the late summer of 2005 was undoubtedly a ‘natural’ phenomenon — even if the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, that had whipped up what was initially a category 5 storm, were unusually warm as a result of changes in the climate engendered by human activity. But as the terrible toll of the storm and the subsequent collapse of the New Orleans levees became clear, so too did the role of human decision-making. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, a documentary directed by Traci A. Curry to mark the twentieth anniversary of the storm this August, repeatedly emphasizes that human error is what turned ‘disaster’ into ‘tragedy’ in New Orleans in 2005. Just minutes into the first episode of this mini-series, presented by National Geographic, Malik Rahim — a former Black Panther who founded the Common Ground Collective after Katrina and whose commentary constitutes one of the film’s moral touchstones — tells us that “the tragedy of Katrina was man-made”.
National Geographic’s documentary, Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (2025)
This is a message that has now been sounding for twenty years. Almost as soon as the storm hit, the idea that “there is no such thing as a natural disaster” became an important organizing slogan forcefully articulated in the face of those seeking to deny the facts around the criminally inept response to Katrina. When the floodwaters began to recede and analysis of the causes of the disaster began, it remained an important response to anybody unwilling to recognize the lurid portrait of America that Katrina painted: a toxic brew of racialized poverty, ever-widening social inequality, corporate irresponsibility and a rapidly retreating social safety net.
Katrina was a stark warning of the consequences of decades of neoliberal deregulation and neglect that allowed oil and gas infrastructure to destroy large parts of the Louisiana wetlands — that provided natural flood barriers and protection against hurricanes –- while the system of human-made levees surrounding the city was allowed to go into a state of managed decline. The spectacle of some of America’s poorest communities stranded in the flooded city with no food, sanitation or medical supplies was a sharp reminder of what ‘rugged individualism’ looks like in the context of an economic system that has privatized the commons and redistributed wealth upwards. This story unfolded as the grotesquely unjust ‘recovery’ that began in subsequent months revealed plans for a whiter, wealthier New Orleans. The crisis created by Katrina was used as an excuse to demolish public housing blocks that had withstood the storm remarkably well. The city’s Charity Hospital was shuttered in the midst of a public health emergency. A sizeable diaspora of displaced storm survivors, disproportionately and overwhelmingly African American, were not supported to return home.
I spent about ten years researching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and know well how the human costs of this catastrophe drown out other perspectives that might more fully account for a non-human ‘nature’. I met and interviewed people working at all levels of community organization, many of whom were justifiably angry about how badly New Orleans had been let down by the public officials who were meant to serve it. My own understanding of the storm’s unravelling was drawn inexorably towards the bad actors and corrupt systems that not only allowed this tragedy to happen, but which actively constructed the world that made it a likely occurrence.
I came to the topic with interests in the climate crisis but even that larger horizon — with its inarguably anthropogenic features — seemed too big and baggy and not respectful enough of the specific and extraordinary ways in which New Orleans’s geography and population were exposed to environmental harms quite literally engineered by human beings. Yes, it represented a flashpoint moment and seemed to be a sign of things to come in a warming world. But the human story and the facts on the ground felt far more urgent than the bigger environmental picture.
We have invented a host of terminological designations to ensure that we do not forget the human contribution to our own ecological predicaments. ‘Environmental racism’ is a long-standing and important concept that evolved in the context of US grassroots environmental justice campaigns to remind us that it is no accident that people of colour are routinely and systematically exposed to environmental harms at far higher rates than more privileged and generally whiter populations. That African Americans were far more likely to inhabit flood-prone neighbourhoods and live close to collapsed levees is an instance of environmental racism that Katrina vividly illuminated. The same insight about human agency, intentions and systems runs through the idea that “there’s no such thing as a natural disaster”, which was widely appropriated from its initial deployment by activists, becoming the title of an academic collection of the same name, published in 2006, and also claimed, if I remember correctly, by one of the Katrina bus tours that snaked through destroyed neighbourhoods very shortly after the storm — presumably to perform the tour company’s allegiance to social justice.
It turns out that #NoNaturalDisasters is an organized campaign that formed in the years since Katrina and which has been adopted by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, to reflect mounting climate awareness in the wake of the sobering and politically momentous 2021 IPCC report — which for the first time stated unequivocally that humans are warming the planet. As the UN campaign page explains:
“By shrugging off a catastrophic event as a ‘natural disaster’ one is refusing to take responsibility for the damage and destruction … Next time you hear that phrase – ‘natural disaster’ – step up to the mark and correct the speaker: ‘There is no such thing as a natural disaster.'”
But is this protesting too much? What does this insistence entail and what do we lose sight of by refusing to see anything but human causes, actions and consequences? I’ll return to the Katrina crisis — the terminology I have preferred in my work as a way of attempting to take in the myriad points of rupture introduced by the storm as well as its illuminating role and potential as a turning point. Now, I will briefly think about these issues through what is perhaps the ‘master’ term for emphasizing human agency when it comes to environmental change: Anthropocene.
When ‘Anthropocene’ was initially proposed in 2000 as the name for a new geological era in which human agency has become central, climate denial was ubiquitous. This denial was not aimed at climate change itself — which is usually broadly accepted as a real phenomenon — but rather the human role in the crisis was disputed. Mainstream media was complicit with this narrative by framing the very existence of human-induced climate change as a ‘debate’, despite widespread scientific consensus that it was an established fact. In this context, the idea that our current era might be named the Anthropocene was an important mobilization against this denial. It was a way of naming the larger nexus of environmental harms done to Earth by human hands, but the scale of climate change has dwarfed all other related issues. The insistence that Katrina was ‘man-made’ in 2005 echoes this claim about human centrality and derives from the same political context.
Twenty years on and these contexts are fundamentally different. As Michael Mann argued in The New Climate War published in 2021, the centre of gravity of climate denial has shifted, from directly disputing human contributions via carbon emissions, to the promotion of various forms of greenwashing as ‘solutions’ to distract from the crisis. And as Curry’s twentieth anniversary documentary on Katrina demonstrates, the idea that the disaster was largely ‘human-induced’ is now widely accepted, thanks principally to community organizers who have worked tirelessly to resist attempts to whitewash the tragedy as ‘natural’ and thus inevitable.
The International Union of Geological Sciences, a representative group of the world’s geologists, voted just over a year ago to reject ‘Anthropocene’ as the official name for a new era. The proposal they voted on did not reflect the original idea put forward by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to identify the Industrial Revolution and specifically the invention of the steam engine as the beginning of the Anthropocene. Instead, it brought the date even further forward, to 1952, to mark the first hydrogen bomb tests. Arguably it was this decision, to squeeze the timeframe of human impact, that led to the rejection of the term. While those who dissented from this decision did so vociferously and from an environmentalist standpoint — as The Guardian pithily summarises, “critics say it is a missed chance to recognise that the planet irrevocably left its natural state in the mid-20th century” — the possible reasons for not officially embracing the term are illuminating.
As one group of scientists from outside geology put it, quoted in a New York Times article, “our impacts have less to do with being human and more to do with ways of being human.” An obvious objection to the term Anthropocene which has been sounded by environmental justice campaigners for some time now is that the majority of humans on the planet are not the problem; it is those wielding enormous wealth and power who are responsible for climate and ecological breakdown and it is wrong and politically counter-productive to suggest that there is something inevitably destructive about human interaction with the planet. This objection to the term ‘Anthropocene’ thus refuses the suggestion that it is somehow ‘natural’ that humanity destroys the environment, that destructive environmental practices are a hard-wired part of ‘human nature’.
This objection is important for understanding post-Katrina New Orleans. The claim that ‘humans’ are to blame for the disaster — not ‘nature’ — overlooks the fact that humans were from the outset blamed for the tragedy, and this was a large part of the problem. The world’s media and political commentary were complicit in constructing the storm’s victims as somehow to blame for their own need, for their lack of transportation to heed the mandatory evacuation order, for their lack of food, medication, sanitation. The appalling humanitarian crisis that overtook the New Orleans Convention Center and the Louisiana Superdome — the so-called ‘places of last resort’ — were met with revulsion and disgust, with racist stereotypes about chaos and criminality abounding. ‘Nature’ was nowhere identified, and humans were certainly in the frame — just the wrong ones. This was a striking case of what Edward Said described years before as ‘blaming the victims’.
If we return to planetary time scales, human history is no more than the blink of an eye. It seems that the key reason that the world’s geologists declined to embrace ‘Anthropocene’ was that the period is just too short — perhaps even if it was backdated to the Industrial Revolution, the colonization of the Americas or even the beginnings of agriculture. Writing in The New York Times, Stephen Lezak picks up on the paradoxical consequences of placing humans at the centre of geological time:
By placing Homo sapiens center stage, the Anthropocene also deepens a stark and inaccurate distinction between humanity and the planet that sustains us. The idea of ‘nature’ as something separate from humankind is a figment of the Western imagination. We should be wary of language that further separates us from the broader constellation of life to which we belong.
While the obvious rebuttal to this is that the very term Anthropocene signifies humanity’s entanglement with the planet, it does inevitably seem to put humans at the centre. It seems to usher in the very anthropocentrism it was meant to name and critique. In our rush to point the finger at ourselves we can only see ourselves. This seems unnecessarily pessimistic about human behaviour — which is not generalizable in this way — and blind to any agency which is not human.
Undoubtedly the term Anthropocene and the critique of the notion of ‘natural disasters’ have represented important stages in our conversations about environmental destruction, particularly the climate crisis, and responses to disasters. But what happens when we banish ‘nature’ as a meaningful force? What happens when we suggest, inadvertently perhaps, that humans are in full control of the ship?
Even within the context of human-made systems, this seems unrealistic. Naomi Klein’s otherwise excellent book The Shock Doctrine (2006), which explores various sites of disaster capitalism, including post-Katrina New Orlean, is sometimes limited by its reliance on ‘Chicago School’ and corporate villains. Gently pushing back on this tendency in relation to Katrina’s aftermath, my friend Cedric Johnson wrote in 2011, “inasmuch as she focuses primarily on the corporate skulduggery and White House patronage streams of the Bush era, Klein’s arguments neglect the more pervasive and equally consequential phenomenon of do-good capitalism where altruism, good will, and even social antagonisms are harnessed to the profit motive.” In our present age of conspiracy theories it is perhaps important to acknowledge and reject the seductive simplicity of the fully intending villain. The reality is more frightening.
The outcomes and long-term consequences of human choices and decisions are not fully knowable. Let alone when they are interacting with non-human ecosystems as dynamic as weather and climate. What strikes me as especially poignant on this twenty-year anniversary of one of America’s most destructive storms is not that anybody was conspiring against Katrina’s victims but rather the opposite: elites were indifferent, they did not care. There was no plan, and there certainly should have been — so much knowledge was already in place that might have averted some of the worst outcomes — but even the best laid plans can be defeated. We are not fully in control of our environments, and the fiction that we might be is surely part of the problem. New Orleans should not have been abandoned in 2005, and we should not underestimate the forces of nature that human activity has helped to unleash.
Find more
Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, directed by Traci A. Curry, premiered on National Geographic in July 2025 and is available to watch on many streaming platforms.
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s #NoNaturalDisasters campaign page explains that “Hazards may be natural. Disasters are not . … A natural hazard, such as a hurricane, earthquake, or flood, only becomes a disaster when it impacts a community that is not adequately protected, and whose population is vulnerable as a result of poverty, exclusion or socially-disadvantage.”
A senior lecturer in contemporary literature researching environmental justice and responses to the climate crisis, currently exploring the history of population narratives within the environmental movement ...
Writer Rod Raglin asks if Thrutopian fiction’s solutions-focused approaches to our climate predicaments address the real challenges. How to overcome our reluctance to make the sacrifices needed to get through the hardest times and towards a better future?
1,180 words: Estimated reading time = 4.5 minutes
Thrutopian is described as literature that avoids the pitfalls of both dystopian – paralyzing by depicting bleak futures – and utopian narratives – disconnected from the realities of current challenges. Instead, thrutopian stories are rooted in plausible solutions for getting through difficulties and towards a better future.
But do these thrutopian stories take into consideration economic realities, political expedience and an electorate that only considers their immediate needs? Do they address the reality of climate change that is already having a devastating effect on many parts of the planet?
Facing up to power …
For years, Canada has been struggling to meet the commitments it made in the 2016 Paris Agreement, involving reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The major policy initiative of federal government was to implement a carbon tax, a mechanism that puts a price on carbon emissions, aiming to encourage individuals and businesses to reduce their carbon footprint. A charge is levied on fuels like gasoline, diesel, and natural gas, increasing their cost to consumers to incentivize fuel efficiency and the use of lower-carbon alternatives.
In addition, it responded to public pressure about the environmental hazards of pipelines and introduced a strict environmental review process that discouraged further expansions.
That was until Donald Trump got elected and declared economic war on his neighbour.
In response to Trump’s tariffs and the impact on the Canadian economy, the first piece of legislation passed by newly elected Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, was to eliminate the carbon tax. His rationale for axing the tax was to “make sure our companies are competitive, and the country moves forward … it’s focused on building this economy.”
Also being reviewed (and likely modified), is the government’s policy to have all Canadian car sales powered by a battery, fuel cell or plug-in hybrid system by 2035.
In addition, old plans to build other energy projects are being revived by giving provincial governments “the environmental authority to approve pipelines”.
Before you could say “what the frack!”, the BC provincial government had passed The Infrastructure Projects Act, giving itself broad powers to override existing environmental regulations and authorities and expedite approval of major projects, public and private.“We’re not in the business of turning away investment in British Columbia,” said the premier of the province, David Eby.
Just to make sure no investment is being turned away, The Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions is undergoing a review of the policies and programs of CleanBC, the province’s climate strategy.
How do environmental principles stack up against economic realities? They don’t.
Nearly three-quarters of Canadians supported getting rid of the carbon tax and the renewal of pipeline projects. Apparently, the threat of becoming the ’51st state’ far exceeds that of a climate catastrophe.
… and climate realities
Though wildfires are a natural part of the Canadian boreal forest life cycle, higher temperatures and drier conditions, caused by climate change have resulted in more frequent and severe fires and a longer fire season.
This year’s fire season — the second worst since 2023 — has seen 3,092 wildfires that have consumed 5.17 million hectares (as of July 12, 2025). Officials with Public Safety Canada say the greatest fire danger is still to come and expected to be in the Northwest Territories, the Yukon and southern British Columbia.
I live on the west coast, and regularly wildfire smoke drifts in from the interior, making the sun appear as an orange ball and creating a haze that burns the eyes and throat. On some days, the air quality in Vancouver is the worst on the planet, and we’re advised to close windows and stay indoors. For inland communities, it’s far worse.
While Canadians worry about how tariffs will impact our economy generally, and their livelihood specifically, it’s not an existential threat, like having breathable air.
Like alcoholics, who must hit bottom before they’re motivated to sober up, Canada appears to not be there yet – environmentally speaking. As the results of our last federal election proved, we are still a society that prefers to pay less to fill up the family SUV than contribute to the mitigation of global warming.
Writing towards a better future
In the midst of this ‘reset’ of environmental priorities has emerged thrutopian literature with its “plausible solutions for getting through difficulties and towards a better future.”
A quick look at a few of the titles suggests that other than the name there’s little difference between this genre and eco-fi or cli-fi – other designations that have emerged for environmental fiction since I began writing it in 2010.
The difference between my books and these newer ones appears to be issues of subtlety and practicality. In my novels, environmental issues are not in the forefront but presented only as a subplot that must eventually be addressed in practical ways for the protagonist to achieve their goal. The few thrutopian titles I’ve reviewed flip this around, presenting the environmental problem foremost and the characterisation secondary. In my opinion, this approach makes the narrative more didactic than entertaining – usually a turnoff for the reader, though time will tell.
And though this new fictional category attempts to present possible solutions to mitigate the environmental crisis, I saw no evidence it addresses how to overcome our reluctance to make the sacrifices necessary to implement them.
This was the issue I set out to answer when researching my novel, The Triumvirate – Love for Power, Love of Power, the Power of Love. What I discovered was it’s a lot harder to create a better future than envision one – human beings notwithstanding. Political and economic issues take precedence over the environment, and it is only when “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”*, do we realize we’ve made the wrong choice.
I’m sure this new sub-genre will thrive. Who doesn’t want to choose hope over despair, the positive over the negative, delusion over reality? It’s easier to suggest that we still have time to prevent the worst-case scenario even while that scenario is playing out in front of us.
This is the reality of thousands of wildfire evacuees every Canadian summer (actually, fire season is now April through October, depending on where you live) as they idle away the hours in evacuation centres worrying if they’ll have a home, or for that matter, a community to return to.
Rod writes about his novel The Triumvirate in his previous ClimateCultures post, Power, Love, Religion & Climate Fiction: Life Imitating Art, discussing how a story about power, love and religion finds echoes in our unfolding climate crisis and how we try to come to grips with a hostile and uncertain future.
A journalist, publisher of an online community newspaper, photographer and writer of novels, plays and short stories that address the human condition and serious environmental issues ...
Author Rajat Chaudhuri discusses the backstories and inspiration for his most recent book, Spellcasters, and how they connect to the plot of this novel, which is part psychological thriller, part climate adventure with a twist of the occult.
1,470 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes.
The most common question that authors get asked at literary events is the genesis question. Where did you begin a particular work, what was your inspiration or some variations of the same. I find coming up with a response difficult, because there is obviously no single starting point and beginnings are also part of a flow.
Rajat Chaudhuri at the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival (2024). Screenshot.
The writing of Spellcasters, which is my most recent climate novel, had been in a large part influenced by the opening up of the Indian economy to global economic forces and the rising tide of conspicuous consumption it unleashed, aggravating the climate crisis, driving resource exploitation, and affecting the environment. In this book, my attempt has been to weave together elements of fantasy and magic with a story of mental illness to portray the impact of this opening up on individuals and society.
A flavour of these changes brought on by globalisation and the human costs of unfettered growth can be found in this description near the beginning of the book, when the scientist Vincent Dutta drives to his lab outside the city of Aukatabad, where he is conducting secret experiments with psychedelics under orders of a shadowy corporate entity:
‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ pulsated through the car speakers, as the first of the flyovers zipped by. Glassy shopping malls, the steel and chrome geometries of mega corporations flashed past, shimmering in the heat. The burning air echoed the howls of farm labourers whose bones were turning into buttery dust under the newly-sprung city of glass. In hoc signio vinces!
Cover of Rajat Chaudhuri’s novel, ‘Spellcasters’ (2024)
Psychedelics in certain ways are quaint and old-world, but think of our social media addiction, which is mediated through a dopamine rush, and how this can affect mental-well being. So the story can be considered to be an allegory of such modern addictions (consumerism being another) that is driving people crazy.
Later on, as we are introduced to the main character, business reporter Chanchal Mitra, who gradually gets affected unpredictably by these changes, his transformation, much of which drives the narrative, is echoed in the ways the cities of Anantanagar and Aukatabad, partly modelled on Calcutta and Delhi, are transforming because of the onslaught of globalisation:
It is around this time of the attack on the Chief Minister that it begins. We grow feet, more and more feet, like centipedes. Jet engines thunder above us in droves, desire kisses the stratosphere, dirt’s swept away, miasma vacuumed. They even demolish the hovel where Akbar lived near the river bank, but I manage to get him a place in an abandoned warehouse belonging to the rail company.
Frenzy, feverish frenzy overtakes us all. We move at a dizzying pace. Steel, concrete, cement, stock market pulse beats, exotic vacations, infotech gurus and aerodrome-sized establishments to lose freedom, win it back again.
Within the storyworld, this unbridled growth impacts the planet as the burden of aspirations also begins to have an effect on minds. In Chanchal’s city, Anantanagar:
The immense heat of the afternoon is an attack on civilisation. This year, it is worse than the last. The avenues of Anantanagar shimmer in the fiery blaze, tar melts like liquid nightmares, the art-deco mansions hiss and crack while hulking SUVs climb mirror-clad avenues swooping up into jannats of petroleum dreams. Unnoticed in the mountains, the glaciers melt away, drop by drop—like the terminally ill shuffling along till the end, glioblastomas growing, the teardrops of a future waiting in the wings. Sorcerers crouch at every corner, casting spells, selling hope and tricks.
Here onwards it is a story of how globalisation and limitless growth not only changes the familiar and impacts the environment, but also affects the mind of Chanchal.
Spellcasters – a shadowy realm
While researching mental illness, I was lucky to be granted extended interviews with the well-known psychiatrist Anurag Mishra who also happens to be a student of the great psychoanalyst-author Sudhir Kakar, who recently passed away. And the fact of my character’s mental afflictions is also nuanced by my readings of Kakar, especially where he compares Indian and Western healing traditions in Shamans, Mystics and Doctors. Which is perhaps how the element of occult and secret societies enter the story, invoking a shadowy realm where the uncanny and the improbable dance in step with the real.
Just as growth picks up, so do emissions and other environmental impacts, many borrowed from reality, and we have unnatural rains in a desert, blinding smog blanketing Aukatabad, landslides in the Himalayas, all of which in turn advance the plot of the novel. In this process, the settings and the environment of Spellcasters almost become characters, or actants, shaping the story in particular ways.
Inside cover of ‘Spellcasters’ (2024)
All along, climate change and an altered environment play important roles in driving the narrative as the fortunes of the simple man Chanchal and a powerful business tycoon are affected by the planetary forces. The city of Aukatabad, much like the real city of Delhi, remains blanketed in smog:
Morning tastes like a scrapyard. Morning smells like a farm fire. The yellow-grey walls of smog had grown darker. For days and weeks the dust of the desert, swept by freak and untimely storms, had thickened the haze and now the city was suddenly engulfed in coarse dust. It holds the streets in a stranglehold, blurring the borderland between night and day.
We know very well that the pursuit of limitless growth, in the absence of environmental justice and social safeguards, can have devastating effects. The weak and the vulnerable without proper state intervention get left out of the growth story while also suffering the most from climate impacts. When Chanchal loses all his money and has to skip meals he thinks:
I imagine heaps of rice on banana leaf plates and the aroma of fish frying in the wok. Mustard oil, that’s what we prefer. But now I could even do with a dal fry, but it is not for me. Food is not for me tonight. I am not for food tonight. I slide the menu below the carpet. There will be thousands all over this unhappy land who will go without food tonight, and many more nights. I will join their ranks, this last night in the city of kings.
Elsewhere, in Chanchal’s hometown:
The poor of Anantanagar, who had set up small shops everywhere—and those from the villages whose lands had been snatched by the smart cities and tech academies—creep and crawl all over, overflowing into the shopping malls, fighting with the uniforms, snatching careless cappuccino cups of dreamy-eyed duos sitting in sidewalk cafés on the boulevard that heads towards the river.
Limitless growth, planetary illness
Spellcasters is really about the spells cast by powerful ideas like limitless growth, our material aspirations and the indulgence in conspicuous consumption which together are not only ‘infecting’ the living planet, one of its symptoms being climate change, but also affecting our minds. The mirroring and interactions between this planetary illness and individual illness, portrayed through mental affliction, forms the conceptual background of the novel.
In between there is the business tycoon, who goes by the name JRK, with a world domination plan fuelled by the power of psychedelics. As the story progresses, conflicts arise between Chanchal and this tycoon, which put both their lives in great danger. Besides, there is also the ever present possibility of a secret society of occultists who may or may not be working to save humanity from the wicked designs of the businessman. If we look around us, we will find how the plot of Spellcasters often seem to mirror realities of our times.
Having been a climate activist for many years it was natural for me to create thecharacter of JRK presiding over a global business empire, as a personification of the ambitions that drive resource exploitation and endless growth. But JRK has many shades, and a very dark past, all of which propel this story of planetary crisis towards its denouement.
Will it be magic and the occult that is decisive in the story or is it the planet itself that will strike back at human ambition, and restore some balance, symbolic or otherwise? Read the book to find out!
Find more
Spellcastersis published Olive Turtle an imprint of Niyogi Books and is available from bookstores and online.
A review by Kousik Guhathakurta for Scroll (January 2024) described Spellcasters as “a modern saga blending climate fiction with a sardonic take on city-bred consumerism.” And author Amitav Ghosh calls the novel “a phantasmagoric journey through an alternative reality of collapsed time, hallucinatory visions and spectral visitations: an unexpected and unsettling rollercoaster ride.”
Rajat featured as part of the ClimateCultures Quarantine Connection series in 2020. We shared his piece, Heat or the Iceberg Chill – a translation of a poem by Novera Hossain, and part of Rajat’s project to translate 100 Bengali poems by non-mainstream poets – on Day 23 of our 40-day series.
A writer of climate novels and co-editor of solarpunk collections, closely involved with the climate movement, who writes and speaks about climate, literature and possible futures.
Composer Lola Perrin introduces her special essay for our Longer feature on a recent Solarpunk Symphony residency in Norway, describing how her symphony responds to frustration with cultural venues’ lack of response to the climate risks we face.
2,900 words: estimated reading time = 11.5 minutes
Longer is the place for works that don’t fit within the normal ‘short reads’ format of our blog. Longer is for essays, fiction or other forms that haven’t appeared online elsewhere and explore in more detail the creative responses to our ecological and climate crisis. With each new Longer piece, the author introduces it here with an original post, where they can reflect on the motivation or inspiration behind the work or the process of creating it.
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In my essay, Climate Music — From Hill to Hill, I describe my trip to Norway for a music-climate residency at Bergen’s Grieg Academy of Music to workshop and perform my new climate composition ‘Solarpunk Symphony, Music from the Erratocene for 4 pianos and citizen voices’. This was also an opportunity to debate publicly with artists and climate scientists.
11th January 2025, shows at the 130,000 square foot Pasadena Convention Center in LA should be opening. An exhibitor announces dates in March; “In light of the ongoing fires and the challenges many of us are facing, we’ve made the difficult decision to postpone the Pasadena Bead & Design Show.” A Washington Post video report1 shows residents sheltering from the fires at the centre, whose website now has this; “We understand how deeply these events are affecting our community, and we are here for you. Your safety and well-being are our top priority, and we look forward to gathering again in March, when we can all come together, support one another, and celebrate the art and creativity that unites us.” In the video we see hundreds of America’s latest internal climate migrants streaming around, temporarily housed in the site’s 1,200 hotel rooms. I see the elegant lettering of the frontage, Exhibition Hall & Ballroom, and immediately grab a screenshot, thinking “it’s already happening”.
Screenshot from Washington Post video report Altadena evacuees lose family homes to Eaton Fire, 12/1/25
I wrote about exactly this situation in the introduction to my 2024 climate composition, ‘Solarpunk Symphony’, describing how communities impacted during increasing climate events will seek shelter in our modern-day temples — those cultural institutions with their thousands of square feet of protection — transforming them into places of refuge.
“August 2024’s environmental news; within the next twenty-five years millions of Americans will be affected from sea level rise and coastal flooding. Many of the world’s leading classical concert venues are in regions threatened by sea level rise and flooding. To name a few; Boston Symphony Hall is in between the Charles River Basin and the coastline, both are around 3km away. Guangzhou Opera House is 3km from the Pearl River that flows into the South China Sea. Concert halls closer to the water’s edge include Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall roughly in between East River and Hudson River, both around 1.6km away. Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires is 1.5k from the coast. Artscape Theatre Centre in Cape Town is 1km from the coastline. Southbank Centre in London is 300m from the River Thames. Kanagawa Kenmin Hall in Yokohama and Harpa in Reykjavik are both on the coast with a 200m walk to the shoreline. Given what’s happening, venues on the waterfront may wish now to consider relocating. Venues three kilometres from the water’s edge could hypothetically be far enough away to avoid becoming flooded themselves this century, but, critically, being so close to flood zones, they’re in a good position to offer shelter and safety, just as some theatres in hurricane zones already do”.
– Introduction to the 2024 composition ‘Solarpunk Symphony’
Let’s start at the end
In the early twenty-tens I went to science-led events to learn more about climate change and where artists were encouraged to make creative responses. In one such response I decided to compose a climate work for two pianos but then became increasingly blocked with no ideas at all, except wanting to work from imagined visions of a flooded London, and these images by Phil Maxwell.
I remember sitting for days on end trying to get some kind of musical idea, eventually shouting in frustration “if I can’t find the beginning let’s start at the end”, and there it was, the entire piece hit me in an instant.
“I flew over the piano and began playing an enormous climax as if a very long and dramatic piece was trying to end; it was loud, full of chords and kept trying to slow down,” Lola said. “This was my beginning, Let’s Start At The End would commence with a sense that something huge was ending.” The piece consists of six movements in which we travel backwards from the edge of destruction to an innocence“ full of promise”.
– Extract, interview with Abdul Hamid (2014)
The year before, Manhattan had flooded in Hurricane Sandy’s deadly demonstration of how the defences of a metropolis can be overcome by extreme weather. Up to forty-two people drowned, thousands of homes were destroyed, power was shut down. Climate events like hurricanes might have been getting stronger and more impactful, but talk of ‘global warming’ was still a taboo, conversations were hard to find and harder to have. My programme notes spelled out the work’s train of thought, aiming to increase audience engagement with the crisis. The world premiere was performed by Ivory Duo Piano Ensemble at Women of the World Festival 2013 at London’s Southbank Centre.2
That iconic cultural complex was established in 1951, ironically — for me — coinciding with the beginning of The Anthropocene. Its three concert halls, art gallery, ballroom, archive studio and library are situated on the banks of the River Thames, and are not far from the Thames Barrier, a feat of engineering to keep the waters from flooding London’s streets, one that is overwhelming when you see it close up.
Thames Barrier, London. Photo: Andy Roberts https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thames_Barrier_03.jpg#file
Planning for the Barrier began decades before its 1981 opening, “after 1953, when England experienced its worst flood of the twentieth century during a storm surge in the North Sea causing the collapse of a 300ft sea wall, over 300 deaths on land and two hundred people lost their homes in Canning Town.3
The Barrier was designed to be closed only around twice a year, mainly for maintenance checks. However, instead of the anticipated eighty-four or so closures, it’s already been closed a slightly embarrassing 221 times in 42 years, mainly to alleviate increased flooding from more intense rainfall.4
Is the Barrier designed to adapt to the changes we’re seeing as we proceed through this century’s forthcoming impacts, or might Southbank Centre one day be a bit like today’s Pasadena Convention Center, but with thousands of displaced Londoners whose homes have been inundated, seeking water-free safety in its compound? I reach out to members of Extinction Rebellion Scientists for answers. An engineer sees my message and creates a new WhatsApp group, ’Thames Barrier’, adding a handful of experts who have since been generously helping me with information.
For example, geologist Andrew Zolnai, from a blog he wrote; “A group considered the necessity for a second barrier under Climate Change that increases both flooding and sea level seasonal elevations. I made maps & handouts here 5 yrs. ago among a DIY series here to encourage citizen science: these help address Climate Change in a proactive way using freely available UK gov data on almost-free software”.5
Thames tidal defences are reviewed every ten years, and to avoid being worn out before its end-of-century lifespan the Environment Agency (EA) plans to stop using it to manage rainfall flooding by 2035, by installing ‘alternative flood management’.6 This seems of quite critical importance when you think of all the drainage systems in properties constructed before increased rainfall from global warming was factored in. Another message comes in; “in the case of the Southbank Centre, the drainage was probably installed when it was built in 1951, so would not be sized to cope with increases in rainfall due to climate change”.
The EA surface water flood map indicates that the Centre is generally at low to medium risk of flooding. Not much in life is ever certain, and that includes flood defences protecting London. According to the EA these defences “can fail or water could spill over the top if it is deep enough”. Not too comforting! You can find the flood risk of every postcode in the UK online.7Back in 2013 civil engineer Dr Richard Bloore, part of the project management team completing the Barrier, said that a second barrier would be needed because of the effects of global warming. The Southbank Centre is in Flood Zone 3, meaning high risk from river and sea flooding. The risk does not take account of the protection offered by the Thames river defences — so, it probably won’t flood as long as the barrier doesn’t fail!
How does sea-level rise affect the Thames Barrier? The EA has said that environmental changes are unpredictable and the current infrastructure “may not be enough to hold back the flood”.8 The defences need reinforcing.
Unless the Barrier fails, Southbank Centre and its neighbourhood may well be spared from flooding in the next few decades. It’s a different story down the river in East London. In commemorations marking the 40th anniversary of the Thames Barrier, experts at The Institution of Civil Engineers discussed how the lower-lying riverside regions in East London from Poplar to Romford are at risk of flooding by 2050. Do the people living in places like Hackney Marshes know about this? I think there’s a case for an internationally recognised concert hall concerning itself with the fate of thousands of people vulnerable to flooding down the river. Something akin to this is already starting. Culture Declares Emergency’s brilliant work provoked Southbank Centre into declaring a Climate and Ecological Emergency in 2024. Resolutions include “the provision of space twice a year, free-of-charge, to artists, activists and community organisations”.
The disconnect between scientists working on climate risk and communities having little opportunity to organise around their research is disturbing. I can think of two American climate scientists who have been vocal in recent days about having left California because of increased fire risk. Citizens all over the world need clear information.
A chartered surveyor once told me he couldn’t believe how many homeowners knew next to nothing about the construction of their homes. We’re just not in the type of society where we connect with the most important things, are we?
In a fun-sounding biometric study concert goers were fitted with an “EEG wearable headband to measure brain-wave activity”. Results suggested “a sizeable increase in oxytocin, the hormone that acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain contributing to a number of warm-and-fuzzy human emotions.”9 Live music very helpfully causes an “overall positive shift in brain activity, including spikes in attention, engagement, and emotional intensity”.10 Another study looking at synchronised emotions found “live music creates a remarkable physiological bond among audience members”.11
Come out, come out wherever you are!
Where are the music programmers who pull all of the above together? We’re in a (insert swearword) Emergency and it would be lovely if more venues would jump on board.
Sydney Opera House https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Interior_of_Sydney_Opera_House_Concert_Hall_during_performance.jpg
Look at forthcoming concerts in say, Sydney, where five million people are vulnerable through sea level rise along the coast, flooding in river catchments, bushfires in forested areas and increased temperatures causing more heatwaves and urban heat islands.12 Sydney’s Symphony Orchestra commence their 2025 season with “The eight horns opening Mahler’s Third Symphony set the tone for the monumental drama about to unfold … a riveting introduction to our 2025 Season”. Not to pick on this orchestra, (the Mahler is a miraculous work), but I can’t find a single concert in the season that builds community in audiences around our existential problem.
Imagine this beautiful concert hall, the orchestra on stage tuning up, the audience erupting as the conductor takes her place. But who is this at her side? She’s been joined by the director of programming who speaks about a new concert series to inform and plan resilience to Sydney’s anticipated 50cm of sea level rise and temperature increases of 1.8oC by 2050 …
We might as well go a step further in this thought exercise. Someone somewhere has the bright idea that the great power of music to positively supercharge our emotions be put at the service of climate science internationally. Music to kickstart a new era of programming around the science is being sourced. In a flurry of activity (a WhatsApp group springs up, ‘Climate Music Programmers’?), a gentlewoman’s agreement has been made between programmers in venues across the world, Boston, Guangzhou, Manhattan, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, London, Yokohama, Reykjavik … to increase homegrown capacity around climate risks in their combined millions of square feet of audience space.
There could be a silver lining to this – excuse the pun because I’m talking about silver-haired concertgoers. As Dianna Skinner wrote in Violinist.com “There is an ever-growing concern as to how to get people, particularly younger people, into our concert halls and opera houses”.13 Not so long ago thousands of young people joined Greta Thunberg’s school strikes, because where else do they have but the street to express themselves? Catering for this climate generation, with their music and their musicians, would be a good step for them and also for the venues.
Long-term budgets in our institutions are obvious barriers to the imaginative thinking above. But is it too imaginative or can institutions shift to create the ‘war-like response’ that’s been called for by climate scientists for too long now? And what about the description ‘climate activist’? Shouldn’t we move away from the notion that doing something about the frightening future means you’re on the sidelines somehow, an ‘activist’? There are bound to be untold numbers of employees in the world’s cultural organisations who are also in the climate activist category.
Are You with Us in National Service? World War 1 poster public domain https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Are_You_with_Us_in_National_Service?_Art.IWMPST13964.jpg
Can a ‘war-like response’ to climate threats come into being in these cultural hubs, inspired by National Service in wartime? How about today’s workers having opportunities to volunteer in a ‘Climate International Service’ hosted by venues? Activists would come out of silos, repositioned within cultural centres joining up to make a tsunami of climate responses. Even more reason now with the growing suppression across today’s American society. The trustees of Washington’s Kennedy Centre have been dismissed by the American President for its progressive programming, apparently he is replacing the Chairman with none other than himself (and undoubtedly bringing in other climate deniers and rejectors of diversity, equity and inclusion).14 We should forcefully integrate climate science, mitigation and adaptation as part of our culture to increase the fight back — wherever we are in the world.
Heat deaths in Europe may triple by the end of the century, but do people in Europe know? This kind of information was talked about during audience conversation at the world premiere of Solarpunk Symphony in Bergen. As scores of musicians proved in their ClimateKeys concerts, my climate-engagement concert series, audiences welcome these formats. Venues just have to find more ways to let in projects like these.
ClimateKeys poster, 2017
A buddy from Extinction Rebellion, playwright April de Angelis, told me about her forthcoming libretto for Jonathan Dove’s new community opera, ‘Uprising’.15 It’s the story of Greta Thunberg and the school strikers. This gives me goosebumps because Kristian Skår, one of the young pianists who performed Solarpunk Symphony in Bergen had been a school striker in Oslo. Something hopeful is happening; ‘Uprising’ is being snapped up and being programmed in more venues even before it’s had its world premiere at Glyndebourne. That’s a really positive indicator that should inspire my fantasy WhatsApp group of international climate music programmers to swing into action and get with the programme!16
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Lola’s full essay, Climate Music — From Hill to Hill, is the fourth piece for our Longer feature, which provides space to explore in more depth creative and critical responses to our ecological and climate crisis. Her residency at Grieg Academy was funded by Culture Moves Europe Mobility Fund.
A composer and classically trained pianist focused on the disconnect between the climate emergency and programming in music venues and her ClimateKeys global no-fly concert series.
Poet Julian Bishop shares three new poems written in response to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where dissension between its famous fairy characters plays out in ‘distemperature’ and ruptures in the patterns of nature and affairs of humans.
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