Tag: Storytelling

The Steep Climes Quartet: My Take on Climate Fiction

Writer David Guenette shares creative insights into his Steep Climes Quartet, a longitudinal study into climate futures unfolding across an American county. This post accompanies David’s essay for our Longer feature, where he asks “What is Climate Fiction?”

2,620 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes

I’ve been at work on the Steep Climes Quartet, a literary climate fiction series. The series is a sort of longitudinal study over time across the consistent location of Berkshire County, in Massachusetts. The first book, Kill Well, takes place in 2026. The second book, Dear Josephine, takes place in 2029. The third book, Over Brooklyn Hills, occurs in 2035. The first three books are published. The final book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Farm to Me, takes place in 2047, and I’m aiming for a Spring 2027 publishing date.

As an entrepreneur, writer, and climate change activist, I’ve studied climate change science and policies for over two decades and believe that the most effective basis for the discussion of the climate crisis in climate fiction is realism. No apocalypse, no fantasy, no deus ex machina. I believe climate fiction can be an effective way for individuals and communities to identify climate change challenges and that climate fiction can offer alternative perspectives for understanding the climate crisis and approaches for dealing with climate change. I believe that climate fiction that focuses on the reader’s familiar circumstances and provides a recognizable world will better explain the nature of the crisis and foster a more powerful identification with the problems we face and the solutions before us.

Of course, the novels better be enjoyable reading.

The changing world — a near-future climate timeline

The main theme of The Steep Climes Quartet is our fractured society and the solidarity climate progress requires of us and our communities. Over the course of writing the series — I started in 2015 — other themes evolve and the series includes some source of hope in the form of an economically competitive clean energy transition. But don’t think I’ve grown pollyannish — ongoing and important plotlines involve various misdeeds by Big Oil. I’m also not pollyannish about the rate of progress and take into consideration that political bodies and society at large typically move at snail’s pace. Still, by Book Three, Over Brooklyn Hills, 2035 sees that core court cases against Big Oil are finally starting to break for the climate, but then again, these same corporations and their political allies have managed to get too many gas-fired generator plants in place, with the net result of slowed progress on carbon emission reductions.

Showing the cover of 'Kill Well' - book one of The Steep Climes Quartet (2023) by David Guenette
‘Kill Well’ – book one of The Steep Climes Quartet (2023)

In the first three books, the residents of the Berkshires — a pleasant bucolic place, by the way — don’t have a lot of direct experience with the terrible consequences of climate change and, like most of us, hear about such negative consequences mostly through the news. Kill Well, in 2026, has a big heatwave in the upper Midwest, and the West is experiencing another plague of wildfires, but Davin, the Berkshire-based main character, is an economically pressed recent divorcee and mostly caught up in worrying about rising costs and the income he’s struggling for. The worst thing that happens to him in the first book, climate-wise, is that a heavy rain damages his vegetable garden and a part of the Airbnb apartment on the first floor of his Housatonic house. There’s a plot line of a young woman on the run after witnessing her fossil fuel divestiture boss killed on a business trip, which brings her to Chicago, where Davin’s son is living his first year out of college, but who is now heading home to escape the heat and the slowing economy. The two meet on the train heading toward Boston, and she ends up at Davin’s house, and there’s a contract killer in play, too, but the prevailing theme in Kill Well is the widespread economic stress of rising costs and the recession-like state of the nation’s economy that retards, along with Trump, clean energy progress.

Sholwing the cover of 'Dear Josephine', book two of The Steep Climes Quartet (2025) by David Guenette
‘Dear Josephine’, book two of The Steep Climes Quartet (2025)

In Dear Josephine, set in 2029, the nation is post-Trump and politics is working better, but there remains evil intent of those who run fossil fuel empires. There’s Miami’s destruction by the combination of a powerful hurricane hitting in sync with high ocean surges, but the residents of the Berkshires are unaffected directly, mostly. And then there’s a guy running around the country trying to kill billionaires and there’s a guy using Kill the Rich as cover for assassinations in service to fossil fuel think tanks to ease some newly inconvenient political ex-allies off the playing board. And yeah, in Dear Josephine there’s a fair amount of conversation and thinking about externalities by a regular series character, Jeannie Louise Smith, who’s a climate tech and policy wonk living on Cottage Street, but I did follow a beta reader’s advice to cut a lot of character talk about externalities. This book also marks the appearance of a climate action terrorist group.

Showing the cover of 'Over Brooklyn Hills', book three of The Steep Climes Quartet (2026) by David Guenette
‘Over Brooklyn Hills’, book three of The Steep Climes Quartet (2026)

Over Brooklyn Hills is six years after the second book and nine years after the first. MAGA, repudiated in the 2026 mid-term and 2028 elections, has given way to economic reforms and climate policies and America has rejoined much of the rest of the world in making climate progress, mainly by pushing the clean energy transition. There’s also a look at the consequences of choosing violence, as the climate terrorist group introduced in Dear Josephine now finds itself involved with Mexican cartels who are battling the U.S.’s militarization of the southern border as climate drought blankets large parts of Mexico, Central America, and South America, driving illegal migration. Climate migration is writ small, too, as seen in a long heatwave hovering over the New York metropolitan area and the Berkshires finds itself with very many more young people (i.e., typically less economically advantaged) escaping the heat and the energy bills demanded for safety, and the towns of South County and the second-homers aren’t enjoying the change in the character of their summer.

Showing the mockup cover to 'Farm to Me’, which will be the final book of The Steep Climes Quartet. The cover may be different by publication, in Spring 2027.
‘Farm to Me’ will be the final book of The Steep Climes Quartet. This cover is a simple mockup and may be different by publication, in Spring 2027.

Farm to Me, which is in draft and with a mess of notes, sees 2047 with reducing yields of some of the once highly productive agricultural areas in the U.S. due to chronic drought and aquifer collapse. New England has been experiencing a resurgence of its once dominant industry, agriculture. There’s been some real progress with carbon emission reduction, but climate change is locked in place, albeit at levels that would be worse without modest progress. Resiliency and adaptation programs are all the rage, but climate change continues to exert a downward pressure on the economy. Farm to Me sees human nature remaining a good news/bad news puzzle, with a murder mystery tied to one ambitious New England food distribution company. There is the issue of aging in the time of climate change and the angst and agony of the young about the future, where the cumulative effects of climate change pile on and tipping points are just the latest dread, and Davin’s granddaughter, not yet 18 years old, is of interest to a federal investigation into a climate activist group she’s part of.

One goal of the series is to present climate change as accurately as possible and with solid scientific grounding. In this way, readers who may not be similarly inclined to keep up with science and policies may consider their own understanding advanced, and, yes, this is something of an illusion for those future timelines, but then novels derive from the creative act of controlled illusion.

Creative challenges for The Steep Climes Quartet

I’d be happy enough to relax my long-running autodidact efforts on climate change, but alas, climate models keep getting tweaked and plentiful research continues. For instance, there are new findings and expanded concepts about faster rising temperatures than conventional understanding has posited, and I’ve had to make my best guess that 2035 will see a rise of 1.7-1.8 Celsius in the global annual average. By the time I have the fourth book’s manuscript well in hand, I’ll have had to best guess about the global annual average temperature rise in 2047. Yet more speculative are the political winds and social expectations governing these timelines, made all the more challenging because political and societal developments march on up and down and sideways.

CO2 emissions, global temperature rises and climate impact risks for SSP-based scenarios over the present century (IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) “Climate Change 2023” Synthesis report (adopted longer report: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2023/03/Doc5_Adopted_AR6_SYR_Longer_Report.pdf)

Of course, presenting the changing world across the series can’t be simply info-dumped, but rather seen, experienced, and understood (or not) through the characters’ own perceptions. The series uses a third person-semi-omniscient point of view, with characters alternating among chapters and some know more, some far less. Like the rest of us, the most stunning stories of climate consequences are more often heard of, not experienced directly, although over the course of the series, more and more direct experience of climate change comes to all.

There are other challenges in attempting to portray the future. These include representations of technology development and most of the characters in this series are regular people and not pioneering tech heads. Human economies and technologies roll out more slowly than the sci-fi-inclined often hope and not just more slowly but also quite unevenly (tip o’ the cap to William Gibson!). By Over Brooklyn Hills and 2035, AI and the spread of some other technologies advance, with smart glasses and haptic feedback and some modest virtual reality interfaces showing up. An AI bubble in 2030 causes a significant recession, especially in the U.S., but that industry evolves. By the last book, in 2047, AI has settled into a controlled progression, and in Farm to Me, I’m exploring the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, which happens to be based in Great Barrington, to explore what the shift toward a more local economy might look like, especially in response to climate change, although this will be more in the background, too.

This challenge of moderating readers’ expectations with tech grows harder the further one goes into the future, but faulting on the side of less-is-more is the right bet. For the Farm to Me story, there’s a part that involves regenerative agriculture, and there are advances in sensor technologies that can accurately analyze carbon sequestration in soil. This sort of development is not a big stretch but rather an incremental improvement in monitoring systems, no doubt to be aided by AI-based computations.

Still no flying cars.

The makings and markets for cultured meat and fermentation-based protein, set up in Over Brooklyn Hills, are a well-established market by 2047. The failure of property insurance and the climate threat to housing markets in some areas will be leaking into the general economy. There will be some new nuclear reactors, although fewer than one might expect, since such energy production is hampered by high costs and bankruptcies.

Did I mention no flying cars?

Of course, I’ve got to finish the damn manuscript first.

The foundation of climate fiction

Projecting out two-dozen-plus years, prognostication becomes more fluid, but keeping up with the best climate science remains an important requirement in writing this series. No magic solutions need apply, but rather only informed extrapolation. For example, it may be that regenerative agriculture is among the best of carbon sequestration strategies, but carbon capture remains an unlikely silver bullet. There’s also opportunity to explore the issue of real costs, where externalities (there I go!) of all sorts of things, from hamburgers to fast fashion, will get a nod, because sustainability will only grow as an issue in the years ahead. The world won’t be ending in 2047, but the higher and persistent loading of greenhouse gases take their toll, with some tipping points threatening. But the main story — the foundation of climate fiction — remains the progress our society makes based on our understanding of climate change and the economic, political, and moral choices we face.

Will our society make sufficient progress?

Talk about a cliffhanger!

Find more

You can read David’s new essay for our Longer feature, Telling Stories about Climate Change. 

David explores these ideas, and examples of climate fiction, at The Steep Clime on Substack. And you can find more of his writing — including the first three novels in the Steep Climes Quartet and other books — at his website, davidguenette.com.

Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher, was published in 1973 and is available from Vintage (Penguin Books).

The Schumacher Center for a New Economics, in Great Barrington, MA, USA, was founded in 1980 to envision the elements of a just and regenerative global economy, “undertakes to apply these elements in its home region of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts; and then develops the educational programs to share the results more broadly, thus encouraging replication.” They produced a new study guide to Small is Beautiful to mark its 50th anniversary in 2023.

In the UK, the work and example of E. F. Schumaker’s work inspired the creation of the Schumacher Society, the Schumacher Institute, and Schumacher College.

***

From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say something about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.

David – “AI and writing: a tool, not a partner:

“Serving as a research agent, AI can be an excellent tool for writers who need facts and figures and overviews on a topic. This applies to non-fiction, such as the climate change articles I write, but also as convenient quick research or confirmation (or pointer to errors) for fiction writing. This is how I’ll use AI. I don’t typically worry about hallucinations because I know the knowledge domain well enough to spot AI’s missteps or the results of a poorly put query.

“AI can be helpful, too, as a high-level copy-editor and proofreader, mainly to bring in fresh eyes to discover obvious issues that the writer—having written the work—often has trouble spotting. Having a good human copy-editor remains, in my opinion, an essential element of book production. The way I’ll use AI for copy-editing and proofreading makes for less drudgery and lets the real copy-editor and the proofreader better concentrate on improving the manuscript.

“I suppose AI can be helpful with emails and letters—the sort of business correspondence best delivered as clearly and briefly as possible—although I often don’t bother because emails and letters default to a common tone and style, which isn’t anything a writer should want. I often find that AI—I typically use Gemini—offers “improvements” that are lowest denominator style choices and I often enough conclude with a “Yeah, I don’t think so” response when checking out what AI thinks an email or letter should be. Although, apparently, AI likes em dashes nearly as much as I do.

“AI in the actual work of creative writing seems to me an uninteresting cheat aimed at writing as “content” for easy, quick, and undemanding consumption and thus misses the fun part of the whole process of creating a poem, short story, or novel. My conclusion about AI as a co-author (or, I suppose, even principal author): Why bother?

“Of course, I had to use AI to assess this short essay, didn’t I? It found one typo and offered a slight improvement in another sentence. It also suggested a stronger transition in the last paragraph to better distinguish creative writing from mere content.”

David Guenette
David Guenette
A writer and author of literary climate fiction series, The Steep Climes Quartet, who also writes about climate fiction and climate change science, technology and policies.
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Finding the Tipping Points with Thrutopian Fiction

Sustainability researcher and writer Denise Baden discusses the challenges of thrutopian fiction — writing stories to entertain, raise awareness of effective climate action and inspire sustainable behaviours — and her latest thrutopian novel, The Philosopher and the Assassin.

1,645 words: estimated reading time = 6.5 minutes

In his recent ClimateCultures post, Rod Raglin casts doubt on the claims of thrutopian fiction to set out a roadmap to a better future — “writing our way to a future we’d be proud to leave to the coming generations”, as thrutopian champion Manda Scott puts it. In his article Rod sets out the practical, political and economic realities that would need to be addressed before we have any chance of a better future. Many of these seem intractable and the charge levelled at the thrutopian fiction produced so far is that it fails to address these. Another charge is that when it tries to, it comes across as “more didactic than entertaining.”

Rod is right that it is very difficult to write fiction that is both entertaining and will raise awareness of climate policies that are likely to work and/or inspire more sustainable behaviours. I know because I have tried it.

Showing the cover of 'Habitat Man', a novel by Denise Baden.
‘Habitat Man’, by Denise Baden (2021)

Thrutopian fiction — changing behaviours

The first draft of my novel Habitat Man was appalling — everything I wanted the reader to know went in and it was didactic and clunky. I needed to write it then edit it out, just to get it out of my system. But by the final draft, I believe I pulled it off. An award-winning radio drama writer liked it so much she asked to put it in for a BBC Radio 4 adaptation and it got to the final round. It was the best seller in my bookshop for two years and reviews on Amazon are genuine and enthusiastic. In terms of behaviour change, research found that of 50 readers surveyed one month after finishing the book, 98% had adopted more pro-environmental attitudes and 60% had adopted at least one of the green alternatives mentioned in the book. These ranged from simple things like home composting and wildlife-friendly gardening, to campaigning. You can see the results in a link in the notes below.

Another novel, Visco, winner of the 2020 Green Stories novel competition sets out a quite plausible means by which a new society emerges from an old one. David Fell, himself a sustainability consultant, tells the story of a music festival on a small island within the UK that sets up a side festival for those who need care and their carers as part of an inclusivity drive. When the music ends, no one wants to go home and so they don’t. Step by step and overcoming one challenge after another, a more sustainable community based on the values of care emerges, attracting even the wealthy and powerful to its cause. Importantly, it’s also a damn good read!

I would claim that every story in the anthology No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet is thrutopian fiction. Several have been expanded into other forms. For example, one story imagined the ocean being given nation status and was developed into the novel Fairhaven, written by chemical engineer Steve Willis and writer Jan Lee. This sets out in fiction form a roadmap to how Malaysia could mitigate and adapt with respect to climate change.

The Philosopher and the Assassin: the evolution of a work

Another short story in the anthology was written as a standalone novella The Assassin, which is available also an audio book and as a play, Murder in the Citizens’ Jury. It imagines eight people in a citizens’ assembly debating climate solutions. The whodunnit element provides the drama and mystery. The context raises awareness of this emerging form of participative democracy, which I believe is an essential first step to real change. It also allows climate policies to be explored from the perspective of a variety of people, each of whom relates to them in different ways. Murder in the Citizens’ Jury was performed in 2024 in a sellout run, and later, a school put on an abridged one-hour version. It was interactive and the audience voted for their favourite climate policies. The director told me people were still debating the ideas days later. You can see reviews, details and feedback at the Green Stories link in the notes below.

Professional theatre companies can access it via Lazybee scripts, but it’s available royalty-free for any school/college drama groups and amateur theatre companies to stage if they approach me direct.

Thrutopian fiction: showing the cover of 'The Philosopher and the Assassin', a novel by Denise Baden (2025)

Inspired by the success of the theatre production, and wanting to reach a larger audience, I’ve included the ideas from the play as a story within a story in a novel, which was published by Habitat Press on 1st October: The Philosopher and the Assassin. A script version won the 2024 Writing Climate Pitchfest, and it is literary fiction: think campus novel meets moral philosophy meets murder mystery! The goal is thrutopian — it aims to entertain and suggest some of the key leverage points that could tip us in the direction of a sustainable future. Here is a brief description:

There’s no more important job in the world than educator, and no subject as necessary as moral philosophy. The trick is getting the students to turn up. So, when the Dean proposes the controversial concept of education entertainment, Professor Iris Tate goes all in with a moral philosophy course based on a whodunnit that all assume is hypothetical — a murder in a citizens’ assembly on climate. 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.

Reviews so far have been reassuringly positive:

“At once a commentary on the looming responsibility of the climate crisis and our ever-shrinking opportunity to enact meaningful change, and a far from conventional whodunnit, the book plays with the notion of what is moral and what is right. Complicit in the book’s central sprawling philosophical dilemma, the reader finds themselves judge, jury and executioner in the case of the century. While the novel tackles prescient and troubling themes and poses difficult questions (how far should we go for the greater good?), it does so with a sense of dry humour and a delightful eye for the absurd. Above all, the warmth and resilience of its ineffable protagonist suffuses the narrative and, as the story ends, we struggle to leave her behind. Not only is this a timely, thought-provoking and essential story in an age of urgent, innovative climate action that demands the attention of us all, it is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Funny, memorable, characterful and original.”

— The Literary Studio

“Denise Baden’s campus novel/whodunnit is so much more than just an up-to-the-minute academic locked-door mystery, it’s a philosophical treatise wrapped in an exposition of the polycrisis, embedded in a love story, threaded through with alternative democracy and grounded in explorations of grief, motivation and drive. Full of sharp ideas, subtle humour and grounded in the harsh realities of our world, you’ll come away with a whole new understanding of our world and what it takes to change it!” 

— Manda Scott, author of Any Human Power and Boudica series. 

“If facts are ignored, fiction may be our next best hope. With its story-within-a-story, The Philosopher and the Assassin cranks up the dramatic tension around whether we will achieve the carbon transition, or not. Ultimately, a surprisingly hopeful read.”  

— John Elkington, author of Tickling Sharks: How We Sold Business on Sustainability

“A sharp, witty take on the climate crisis – from someone who knows what they’re talking about.”

— Wren James, founder of the Climate Fiction Writers League

Rod, I welcome your feedback!

I’d love to meet some fellow ClimateCultures members and readers, so if you’d like to come to the The Philosopher and the Assassin book launch in Winchester, UK on 11th October, you will find details below. 

Find more

Denise’s novel The Philosopher and the Assassin was published on 1st October. The book launch is on 11th October in Winchester, UK: details and booking here.

Denise mentions Manda Scott, whose novel Any Human Power (2025) is published by September Books. Manda discussed thrutopian fiction and more in a recent episode of the Life Itself podcast, and she and Faith Tilleray run the Accidental Gods podcast and programme “exploring how we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations to come.”

You can find thrutopian stories and features at Bending The Arc — “towards a thriving future on Earth”, and Green Stories runs a series of writing competitions across various formats to solicit stories that showcase what a sustainable society might look like.

Denise’s novel Habitat Man (2021) and her novella The Assassin are published by Habitat Press and are available in paperback and as ausiobooks amd eBooks on all major platforms, including Amazon (where you will find the reviews Denise mentions). Denise summarises the research into readers’ responses in Habitat Man in Research on her website.

Visco by David Fell, No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save our Planet (edited by Denise Baden and Steve Willis), and Fairhaven by Steve Willis and Jane Lee, are also available on all major platforms. You can find reviews and information about the performances of the play Murder in the Citizens’ Jury here.

In his ClimateCultures post, Thrutopian Fictions: Ways to a Better Future?, fellow 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?

Denise Baden
Denise Baden
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 ...
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A Personal Anthropocene History #14: Bronze Bell, Sea-bed Oak, Wayang Kulit Shadow Puppet

Researcher and writer Jules Pretty presents objects with personal stories of resonance in the Anthropocene, where the common theme of ‘story’ itself is a powerful mark of individual and cultural agency for change and hope in uncertain times.

2,550 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes

The challenge: the Anthropocene — the suggested Age of Human that our species has initiated — has a complex past, present and future, and there are many versions. What three objects evoke the unfolding of human-caused environmental and climate change for you? View other contributions at A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects.

***

I present here three objects and three themes for the Anthropocene: traditional markets, and how they for thousands of years were places for storytelling; how traditions worldwide spoke of flood events, and how one was missed in the loss of lands and homes to sea level rise in the middle of the current North Sea; and how forms of story are embedded in culture, here the Wayang Kulit shadow puppets. These speak to a great contemporary hope: that story will help create the agency to address contemporary climate and nature crises. Story says this: go through the door.

Bronze bell of the Saharan story singer

Anthropocene object: showing a bronze bell, from Maiduguri in northern Nigeria, made in the 1950s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024
Bronze bell, from Maiduguri in northern Nigeria, made in the 1950s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024

This bronze bell from the 1950s was fired and fashioned by a blacksmith at one of the greatest markets of the Sahara desert, on the outskirts of Maiduguri in northern Nigeria.

It was a squarish hub, this market a mile in length along each side.

By the pale glow of dawn, the muezzin inside the city gates stirred sleepers from far and wide. Before long, laden donkeys were trotting on converging paths, bullocks carried men with plaited hair, the fields were high with ripening millet. Women balanced baskets on their heads, paused to share news beneath the many roadside baobab.

In the shaded avenues, on the paths and ways, hawker and seller already sat at stalls, each woodworker sharpened chisel, there was money-changer and basket-maker, all the smithy men of iron and bronze in one district, their bellows made from goat-skin, they were firing up the charcoal. There was brightly-patterned saddlecloth, and all kinds of rein and bridle ornament, carpenters busy with rough blocks, turning them to hoe and handle. Some carved holy plaques, spade-shaped and then inked sacred characters, by bamboo pen dipped in ash and gum.

There was the smell of the rotting fish and acrid woodsmoke, a calabash of rancid butter was all a greasy mess of flies, in the air a taste of pepper and perfume from clove and herb, and wholesome onions, and the sour smell of civet cat, and dung trodden in the sand.

In the west the avenues were crowded with women wearing heavy anklets, their teeth stained red. And in the east, herder women slender and tall were wrapped in fabric of blue; all over men in turbans wore flowing cotton robes of white.

In was a market, so of course you could buy or trade pink kola nuts, potash slabs from the great lake, much shrunken even then, dry dates and scarlet pepper, long gourds, polished and carved, each with ornamental stripes and snakes. There were boxes of matches, bangles from the east, paper money from the north.

To this market came a boy troubadour.

He sang in the north, he sang in the south.

The lad named Mid-e-Mid, he had green eyes and tangled hair, his songs hailed from far hills rising sharp and purple from the desert playa.

He was famed on the plains of camel grass, at the small oases where bright birds sang in the shade of palms, so each tune soared far, and after days alone he would ache at dusk for a campfire, to hum a little while millet boiled in soot-black cauldrons.

He was the one, he could charm a gift precisely from a person’s pocket.

He walked from the north, he walked to the south. He sang to the setting sun, to the velvet sand. He sang to the wild wind.

I am walking well, walking. I am walking, he sang.

This was one of the ancient trails, in those days carrying salt and gold, dried dates and books to the desert libraries. He walked past abandoned caravanserai, whale fossils and forty-foot crocodile engravings on wadi walls, painted rock art of long-horned cattle and their herders, leaping men with bows, giraffe and elephant, red and ochre figures in a cave of swimmers, women with the heads of birds and men as leopards. In remote canyons were tall figures and their war chariots, and running ostriches.

He walked to this market by the dry desert, where no rain had fallen for seven whole years. He rang his bronze bell.

The boy Mid-e-Mid sang a song, in his strongest voice, and a herder came forward, he passed sweet tea in a chipped glass. Mid-e-Mid sang of the cold desert, the night fire, people dancing in the warm light to drum and flute. He sang of the mud-brick military depot long abandoned, and how his home oasis was now hemmed by oval hills of piled and pounded sand. There had been a cool oasis garden, date palm over shaded tomato beds and beans, a grove of lemon trees. But these too were lost under sand.

Then he chanted of a dead camel on the trail, a vulture on one mimosa branch. How once there were ten thousand birds, duck and stork and ibis, crested crane and guinea fowl, all on the great green shimmering inland sea. And how these feathered birds had been forced away, as the world had dried and water fled.
He was just a boy, he said, yet he could only just remember what rain was like.
These are my songs, he said, which I have related, if they are sweet or not so sweet, take them elsewhere, let some come back to me one day.

Sea-bed oak of Doggerland tales

Doggerland story: Showing a piece of sea-ded oak, dredged from the North Sea in the 1960s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024
Sea-Bed Oak, dredged from the North Sea in the 1960s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024

Between 7500-6200 BCE, the dry plains of Doggerland were drowned by rising waters, and the shallow North Sea was formed. By 5000 BCE, the 300 km by 100 km Dogger Isle remained in the new sea, with a host of smaller islands. It soon would sink, and we would forget there had ever been land there.

The item here is a piece of oak, dredged up in the 1960s off the Suffolk coast by a fisherman friend. In those days, the accepted truth was that wood and bones and amber must have been moved by sea current and tide. Now we know different.

Many a culture has a flood creation myth.

The oldest written saga was found on tablets of clay, the Epic of Gilgamesh telling of cities of dust, and of the discontent of gods. The prince Gilgamesh wished to tame the wilds, cut down cedar trees, so Enlil brought a flood. Perhaps his traders had learned how a wide dry land had been flooded by the sea; how ancient gods had been displeased, how so they wished we humans lived in different ways.

Not many people get to name a country, and archaeologist Bryony Coles had a brilliant insight. There had been erratic finds, so curious none could place them, moorlog and flint found in fishnets, sunken forests at the coast, called Noah’s Forests a century ago by geologist Clement Reid. “Is it possible,” he asked, “that thus originated source of stories of the deluge?”

By the end of the 1990s, the evidence was clear. The sea had risen after melting of the ice sheets, it drowned parkland and tunnel valley, took woods of birch and oak, displaced the grazers, turned freshwater marsh to salt and sea. Bryony called it Doggerland, after fish-famed Dogger Bank. That country had been dry, then drowned. People lived there, then were forced to leave.

For until eight thousand years ago, nomadic hunter-gatherers roamed the prairies, searched for mammoth and giant elk, broad-browed auroch and great bison herds. On hunting hill and grassy plain, they camped at salty marsh and wide lagoon. At the still point of their world was Yggdrasil, the one tree that held up sky. Serpent circled the distant sea, guarded all their ground. They shaped their land, sowed fruit and seed harboured from the wild, fished and fixed to spear barbs of antler bone. You can imagine, they could not hope for any better place.

Yet as eagles planed serene, there was a creeping shift, icebergs severed free, the waters rising up. They sensed a warp of salt and sea. The air was life, as it is today for people of the plains, a wealth of sun and rain. And while gannets screamed, a storm was beating at their border.

Now the waves rose fast, the height of you or me in half a hundred years.

So in that distant time, the people carried in and up their camps, dug up a hundred holy graves, buried bones once more. Still the surge poured in, league on league not letting up. They would have called on gods, desist and stop the sea. But they could not tame the tempest, all their shamans tried. One watery dawn, came a shocking sight. The sun-star rose from sea, later dipped into their western waves.

Had they eaten fish forbidden, had a snake whispered from a tree, no one could recall. And so every hide of land and fire pit was drowned, each vale and fell seized by rising flood. They lashed boats of auroch-skin, flexed oars, lay their infants on the furs, and came upon the cliffs of higher land.

Did they meet a friendly king and queen; did these forest people rush down the beach and help the migrants from the brine?

What do you say when a whole landscape disappears, what words for sinking, when cultures go and sea village too? What hope is there, at all, when loved ones die?

This is the first verse from ‘The Drowning of Doggerland’, from my book, Sea Sagas of the North (2022):

It is said the Sky People, once were numerous,
But they had drowned, and every dark hide,
Of land and fire pit, each vale and fell had been seized,
By the rising flood, the swell of sea had beaten down defence,
So they launched their boats, lashed and loaded auroch-skin,
And flexed the oars, among the furs and flutes,
Were sobbing infants, fastened tight to strakes of birch,
At last ahead appeared a strip of land, they saw a hall upon the cliff.

Wayang Kulit shadow puppet of long story tradition

Story tradition: Showing a Wayang Kulit shadow puppet, Java, used in the 1980s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024
Wayang Kulit shadow puppet, Java, used in the 1980s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024

The object here is a Wayang kulit leather puppet from Java. It was used in a night performance of shadow puppets in the mid-1980s close to Borobudur in southern Java. Performances are lit by candles, and accompanied by gamelan music. The whole audience was captivated as the tales were told. The night was hot, the tradition at least a couple of thousand years long.

Story is a device common to every human culture. It has some 50,000 years of history, yet has often come to be both misunderstood and misused in the modern era.

Put simply, the patterns of good story match the shapes of our lives.

Story was once tales told at every flickering fireside, the children’s faces upturned and wide-eyed. Now it is expressed in many forms of art and culture, in business and activism.

In cultures worldwide, storytellers acquired special status, for they had something to say about how the world worked. They took, in the telling, the audience temporarily away from the concerns and worries of their days.

The storytellers were called scald and poet, shaman and jester, enchanter and soothsayer, cunning women and men, cantor and conteuse, pied piper and every kind of trickster. You would find story being told by blind bard and bhat, barefoot friar and mendicant, the wayang kulit puppet master, snake-charmer with a rope and khöömei throat-singers from the steppe, dzikr trance-spinners all in white and the oak-leaved rhymer of the green lanes. And in recent times, pilgrim and ranger, barber-shop quartet, city busker and balladeer, podcaster and versemonger, novelist and stand-up comedian.

Their magic is always this: the more the storytellers talk, the more people want to listen. Their themes are simple: to bring people together, to tell them something new, to reveal patterns and emotions that we the audience recognise as our own.

Story is about the sequences of crossings to a new state, about transformation itself. This was once called alchemy. Ovid wrote 250 myths about transformations in the Metamorphoses poems 2,000 years ago. Children were transformed into trees and animals, people into spirits. You sprinkle your face with water, and sprout antlers.

The famed Navajo-Diné storyteller, Yellowman, said to Barre Toelken in the late 1960s:

“If children hear stories, they will grow up to be good people;
If adults hear stories, they will know what to do.”

Good story can lead to tipping points and phase transitions, where transformations can be as sudden as those we experience in life. A butterfly flaps its wings, and whole systems change.

A challenge, then: can we create stories so vivid, so astounding and so colourful, that they will be remembered for a thousand years?

There is sneaky logic in old tales, story being a form of medicine. Clarissa Estés, an estadora keeper of the stories, wrote, “When a fairy tale is told, it becomes right.”

The telling of tales, she said, causes a starry sky and a white moon to creep over the earth.

In Franz Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’, the supplicant sits by the door for days, for months, for years, waiting for the call, for the door to open. When old and dying, he whispers to the doorkeeper about the unfairness of it all. The doorkeeper says, “Oh, this was your door, you could have gone through it at any moment.”

Story says this: go through the door.

For in story, everything is at stake.

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Jules Pretty‘s book Sea Sagas of the North (2022) is published by Hawthorn and you can find details of this and his other writing at his website.

You can read Jules’ previous ClimateCultures post The Next Dawn of Everything — Stories of Human Cultures, where he reviews The Dawn of Everything, exploring stories that reveal how human cultures don’t converge on one ‘advanced’ model, as our current views of history assume, finding rich accounts of diversity, freedom and hope.

Do explore the other contributions to our A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects series; each features a set of three objects and their contexts whose personal stories speak to the universal through the unique. Artefact or artwork, utilitarian or iconic, real or imagined, the 42 objects we’ve gathered so far illuminate the relationships between people, place, period and planet and the legacy of our species’ manipulation of our material environment. Since the launch of our series, of course, we’ve also welcomed to ClimateCultures the Museum of the Anthropocene — an online home for 18 object-based essays from students on Martin Mahony‘s ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ course at the University of East Anglia. 

Jules Pretty

Jules Pretty

A researcher and writer on environment and society, including ‘The Climate Chronicles’, and is author of several books on climate, nature and the stories we tell.
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Captain Polo in Brazil – A Sneak Peek

Polo in Brazil_cover Image Alan HesseAuthor-illustrator and conservation biologist Alan J Hesse exclusively previews his latest ‘The Adventures of Captain Polo’ graphic novel, showing his creative process as this savvy climate action ambassador explores Brazil’s threatened biodiversity and climate issues and solutions there.

2,380 words: estimated reading time = 9.5 minutes

I am honoured to have been invited to submit an article for ClimateCultures featuring my artistic and cultural work promoting climate literacy. I have chosen to do this by contributing a ‘sneak peek’ into the next book in the Adventures of Captain Polo, an ongoing series of educational graphic novels about climate change. This article refers to the fifth book, titled Polo in Brazil, a work in progress of which I will be sharing a few preliminary page extracts.

Showing the cover of 'Polo in Brazil' Image by Alan J Hesse © 2024
‘Polo in Brazil’ Image by Alan J Hesse © 2024

Educational storytelling: finding the edutainment sweet spot

Contrary to the earliest Polo books, much of the content in Book 5 is purely there for fun, to make the story compelling and a good read. At the end of the day, I want the book to sell. It has to have commercial value beyond classrooms and special donations to schools and climate education projects. After all, the more people ‘outside the choir’, so to speak, who learn something useful about climate change, the better.

If Captain Polo were all work and no play, reading his books would in fact be too much like hard work: fewer people would read them, and this would be an opportunity lost. The need to give Captain Polo commercial value, in this case through fun and funny madcap graphic storytelling thus aligns to the mission of the Captain Polo Academy, which is to “help all those working on biodiversity conservation, climate change and education achieve greater impact”.

When writing a climate road (sea) trip story that includes a stopover in Brazil the obvious content that comes to mind is the Amazon. This region is famous all over the world as a place of high biodiversity that is also highly threatened. This fragile balance is important to portray at length, which is the main reason why I decided to make Book 5 all about Brazil, rather than pursue my original plan to have Captain Polo and Penguin merely pass through on their way to the Antarctic.

The story goes to some length to show the major issues threatening not only Amazon biodiversity and ecosystems but also the well-being and integrity of its indigenous people, who are notoriously abused in Brazil by powerful and usually criminal groups bent upon seizing land to develop yet more agroindustry and mining operations (p. 8).

Climate heroes & villains — character development

Every writer knows that one of the pillars of good storytelling is character development. A good character is seldom static. There are exceptions – Tintin and Asterix come to mind (both major influences of mine I have to add), but a character with a mission does need to evolve to at least discover and own that mission.

Although Cap’n Polo will never be too serious in his adventures, he is a bear on a mission. Ever since through his own travels (see books 1 – 3) it eventually dawned on him that his tangible melting ice problem in the Arctic was actually also the problem of a lot of people and other animals around the world, he has to deliver on his promise to educate his readers about the critical issue of climate change.

Polo’s mission is really the chief force that transforms the original ‘Polo the bear’ trying to get back home to hunt a walrus (if he can) into Captain Polo the seasoned globe trotter and savvy climate action ambassador, honoured guest of governments around the world (championed by the prestigious likes of President Barack Obama, a badly drawn Leonardo DiCaprio and a better drawn Ed Norton – see Book 3, Polo in East Africa) and a celebrity in his own right.

To be honest I’m not sure how to make Polo evolve any further, which partly explains the growing presence of supporting cast characters such as Penguin along with villains Conor O’Connor and Tex Greedyman.

These two archetypal villains first appear as such in ‘Pole to Pole’, the fourth book in the series. Every good story needs a villain of course, but Tex and Conor are actually very different from each other. Whereas Conor is portrayed as a bumbling idiot, a permanent liability to himself and others (largely inspired by Loony Tunes characters Wile E. Coyote, and to some degree Samity Sam), Tex Greedyman as his name indicates is of quite a different ilk. Tex of course personifies oil and gas, the fortress of the fossil fuel industry. He is stereotypically and delightfully Texan, Republican, brash, overweight, bejeweled, hairy-chested, and filthily wealthy.

The eastern Amazon holds bountiful oil reserves, providing a good way to insert Tex into the Amazon-related plot (p.26).

However, even the likes of Tex Greedyman are not beyond redemption, which is another theme I aim to develop further in this series in the spirit of portraying a positive outlook for climate action rather than too much doom and gloom. Readers of Book 5 will see the beginnings of a transformation as Tex, marooned on an island after a helicopter crash, is set up to experience a future epiphany: with nothing to eat or drink but coconuts, this credit card-toting, Havana cigar-smoking, Scotch-drinking oil and gas tycoon begins to reconsider his priorities in life (p.28-29). My plan is to portray a full transformation of Tex in the next book, turning him into a reformed man who uses his wealth and power to promote renewable energy over fossil fuels! The caveat of this plan of course is that I will be left without a proper villain (poor Conor doesn’t really count). But more about this in a future article.

The involvement of criminal groups in illegal logging and land-grabbing devastating the Amazon provided me with a perfect opportunity to have some fun with caricatural ‘baddies’, who both Polo and Penguin get to beat up. Conor being Conor blunders into these characters, an extra opportunity for fun and humour, hopefully making this whole section of the comic come to life (p.16). But Polo’s human encounters in the Amazon are not limited to stereotypical bad guys: he and Penguin also meet and learn from Carla the conservationist and an unnamed indigenous shaman, both strong female characters that allow me to address the crucial role of women in leading climate solutions. 

But Brazil of course is more than just the famous Amazon. There is so much to say about this wonderful country that I couldn’t possibly fit it all in, so I opted to continue the logical geographical progress of our heroes trying to get to Antarctica by having them drop in on the fabled Rio de Janeiro and its Atlantic Forest to later make a final stop in Rio Grande do Sul, where there is an interesting and controversial initiative in place to grow ‘climate friendly cattle’. Many have warned me to stay away from this tricky subject, but I disagree. One of the principles of the Captain Polo adventures is precisely to explore such controversies in order to let my readers make up their own minds. As Captain Polo will find out, there is an argument (that not everyone agrees with) supporting the case that natural grasslands maintaining free range and well managed cattle is actually positive for biodiversity and the climate. I haven’t got to drawing that part yet so it will have to be for a future article.

Storytelling and political messages

At this point I ran into a hitch: it has taken me so long to work on this book that a couple of years have passed since writing the plot, and in that time Brazil’s political landscape has happily changed. The current government is by all accounts making strides in reversing deforestation and many other threats in the Brazilian Amazon.

My original plan was to have Polo beat some sense into the previous president, notorious for promoting the interests of agroindustry, fossil fuel giants and even the thinly veiled criminality in the Amazon and being single-handedly accountable for a devastating return to massive deforestation rates. Given the huge improvements in this regard I had to slightly tweak the plot. Of course, it’s never a good idea to date a book like this, so I have opted to not get Polo too closely involved with any Brazilian government or political figure in particular. He now makes his way to the Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio to have a chat with the current president, who will happen to be there (unrealistically, I grant you), to “discuss Amazon matters”, without necessarily throwing the president off the cliff (as was the original plan).

This leads us back to an important storytelling element omnipresent in my books: the use of stereotype.

The Rio de Janeiro scenes include quite a few stereotypes. One of these is the cable car fight on the way up to the iconic Sugar Loaf Mountain, where Polo is hoping to have a chat with the President of Brazil. The cable car scene tellingly divulges my age: it is of course inspired by James Bond’s rooftop struggles with bad guy Jaws in Moonraker, starring Roger Moore. However, it also provides a good way of weaving in a bit of extra information about the extent to which indigenous groups get embroiled in the notorious exploitation of the Amazon and its inhabitants. I was surprised to find out from my research that not all indigenous groups are quite as innocent as world media like to make out, and in the interest of providing my readers with truthful food for thought I wanted to include this (p.35).

The other stereotype in Rio is with the beach football game in which Penguin, wearing a No.10 Brazil shirt no less (he must have nicked it), manages to become top goal scorer and is celebrated amid much Samba dancing and carnivalesque merriment. Anyone who knows their football history may also notice a subtle nod to recently departed Pelé in the form of the shoeshine boy on page 38 (Pelé famously started his football career after himself having been a shoeshine boy living in poverty). Penguin benevolently bestows both his shirt and trophy upon this Pelé reincarnation and this was also a neat ploy to quickly get rid of both items as soon as possible (I couldn’t keep drawing Penguin in a Brazil football shirt lugging a massive trophy around!).

What is definitely not a stereotype but in fact quite the opposite is the sequence of events in one of Rio’s infamous favelas, or shanty towns. These cover much of the Rio heights and are still the nest of armed drug-related criminals and street gangs who make Rio a very dangerous city. However, I discovered a paper about a very different story in one particular favela with a wonderful community spirit that includes actual climate actions (p.37 – note the words in blue. This is a system I use to refer the reader to a technical section at the back of the book where the words in blue are explained in a sort of annotated glossary). I wanted to celebrate this in the book, largely to counteract the mostly negative technical content in the Amazon, and this was a perfect opportunity to do so. As so often in Captain Polo’s dialogues, there is also a quick reference to climate justice when Polo’s new friend explains how it is the poorest areas of Río de Janeiro that suffer the worst effects of climate change. Polo’s visit to the favela provides a natural progression to the next few scenes — as yet undrawn — that celebrate more positive news: the stellar work of Brazilian NGOs and conservationists restoring the heavily fragmented and yet biodiverse Atlantic Forest. I recently completed a consultancy with BirdLife International that involved writing a communications article about this work, and this provided me with handy technical information to throw into the comic.

Where next for Captain Polo?

So, what’s next? I aim to publish Polo in Brazil sometime this year, and like Books 1 to 4 it will be available from all major book retailers online. Those wishing to make a pre-order will be able to do so, and I will be posting about this on social media in due course.

This fifth book in the series is taking so long to finish I find it hard to think of its sequel, technically the final book in the second trilogy. However, this book will exist, and it will see our friends Captain Polo and Penguin finally reach the Antarctic, probably stopping over in Argentina. No idea how I will end that story, but you may be sure Tex and his epiphany will be involved, Conor will somehow reappear after a long and life-changing experience being lost in South America, and there will be lots of ice. Oh yes, and probably a new villain.

Find more

Alan is an award-wnning author, with ten children’s books: most of them graphic novels and comics, including the growing and highly acclaimed Adventures of Captain Polo series about climate change. Polo books 1, 2, 3 and 4 have all won awards (the Literary Titan Gold Award for the first three), and Alan’s graphic novel Charles Darwin and the Theory of Natural Selection has won two awards. 

The Captain Polo character is the inspiration behind the Captain Polo Academy as a global brand promoting environmental and climate literacy, helping people and institutions who work on biodiversity conservation, climate change and education achieve greater positive impact.

You can sample more of Captain Polo’s adventures in Pole to Pole, a short feature in our Creative Showcase. And Alan contributed a short piece on Environmental Justice as part of our Environmental Keywords series.

Alan J. Hesse

Alan J. Hesse

An author-illustrator, educator and conservation biologist inspired by nature's majesty and fragility and the need to protect it and who believes that education should be fun.
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School Strike For Baby Hope

Writer David Thorpe introduces his forthcoming climate fiction collection, School Strike For Baby Hope, and explores how our imagined futures must include the costs and dilemmas of better pathways, even where we avoid the worst of climate change.

1,440 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes

In November, just in time for Christmas, my new collection of climate fiction short stories will be published by Android Press. The ten stories have been published elsewhere, often in obscure places. For example, the title story, School Strike For Baby Hope, was published by Extinction Rebellion on one of their websites.

Cautionary tales and possible futures

If a citizen living in pre-20th century Britain were to be told that in the future they would be able to travel anywhere in the world in a few hours, to buy any food from anywhere in the world at a local shop throughout the year, have free healthcare, most likely live until their 90s, and hold a device in their hands which could give them any kind of knowledge they asked and permitted them to talk to anyone in the world, and to see their faces, they would think the future was some kind of paradise. Well, we live in that age and we know different. We have threatened ourselves with the end of life on Earth — including our own end — in order to have these unnatural luxuries. We know the cost.

It seems to me that in imagining a future free from climate change we must be careful to imagine what kind of costs that might have. Every decision presents a dilemma. The purpose of governance is damage limitation; minimising the negative consequences of any decision. Unintentional consequences must be thought through. Climate fiction consciously does this.

Some of these stories are about the unintended consequences of action on climate change, so they serve as cautionary tales. These stories – At the Crux and For the Greater Good – reflect my interest in ‘one planet’ thinking – the ecological footprint as a measure of sustainability. I asked myself: if the country set itself the same task as one planet development in Wales – of satisfying the needs of inhabitants within the confines of a global fair and equal distribution of environmental impact – what could be the implications for the population? Living like this would demand monitoring of the entire ecological impact of the country and dividing it by the population each year.

School Strike for Baby Hope and Beacon arose from my experience of being in my local Extinction Rebellion group. We had many successful actions in Swansea and joined the national demonstrations in London. School Strike For Baby Hope appeared in Teens Of Tomorrow: Stories of Near and Far-Flung Futures, which explored possible futures through the stories of twelve courageous teens.

Showing the cover of 'Teens of Tomorrow' - published by Odd Voice Out Press © 2021 - featuring David's story 'School Strike for Baby Hope'
Teens of Tomorrow – published by Odd Voice Out Press © 2021 – featuring David’s story ‘School Strike for Baby Hope’

What else is cli-fi? If you read the Wikipedia entry it cites Jules Verne’s 1889 novel The Purchase of the North Pole as an early harbinger, which imagines a climate change due to tilting of Earth’s axis. His Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1883 and set during the 1960s, has Paris have a sudden drop in temperature, which lasts for three years. Wikipiedia lists J. G. Ballard’s climate extremism novels from the early ’60s and then, as knowledge of climate change increased, says fiction about it really started coming out, one of the earliest being Susan M. Gaines’s Carbon Dreams.

Should we always go with our imagination?

Imaginative works can be used to reinforce people’s prejudices, too, such as Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004), which was pounced upon by climate sceptics for reinforcing their view that climate change was some kind of conspiracy.

Then we encounter lots of dystopic films. From Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times, through George Orwell’s 1948 book Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Lucas’ 1971 film THX 1138, Mega-City One from Judge Dredd, conceived in 1977, to Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, and The Day After Tomorrow (2004). They have all set the template for many other stories and films, such that in the popular imagination the sprawling mega-cities of the future will largely be over-populated, polluted, broken places, featuring dark towers, high levels of surveillance and crime, their citizens treated little better than battery-reared animals, and no room for nature.

But is the dystopic metropolis a self-fulfilling prophecy, subconsciously, if not consciously, reinforcing the mindsets of planners and architects? Does it soften up the public, preparing them to acquiesce in the face of grim and unimaginative design, polluted air, poor policing and service levels, corrupt or inefficient governance, long commute times, constant noise, high levels of personal danger?

Is this the reason why people do nothing despite being bombarded by the truth about the future and climate?

I think we need comedies about climate change and the future. For this reason, I have included The Chernobyl Effect and The Last Laugh in the collection. These are stories from my body of work about the character Doc Chaos, a darkly satirical character in the tradition of William Burrough’s Doctor Benway and Alfred Jarry’s Doctor Faustroll. This is dark comedy, exaggeration for comedic effect. Making people laugh is a way of slipping things under their radar.

Showing the cover for The Chernobyl Effect & The Last Laugh - stories of David's Doc Chaos character
The Chernobyl Effect & The Last Laugh – stories of David’s Doc Chaos character

The End

These days I spend all day in a wheelchair because of cervical myelopathy. I have become unable to feed myself or use both my phone and computer. The only way I can write this article is to dictate it, as a friend is kindly typing it for me. I have written elsewhere that my stroke in August 2021 was caused by high blood pressure and a result of climate change stress.

I now think that my present condition, and the fact that I see no hope in my future again, is a mirror of the present and the future of the planet as a whole. I wish it were not so, but I can’t believe anything else. For example, as the average temperature of the planet has risen, so has the myelopathy of my spine, and just as we find tipping points such as the melting of the ice caps in climate change, there are tipping points in my body when the nerves in my spine become trapped and suddenly I find I can no longer do something, like feed myself, that I could do yesterday. Then I think to myself “What will happen before it ends?”. And I’m glad I won’t be around to see the world shrivelling up as it gets too hot. Unfortunately, my sons will.

Look after yourselves and find something you love and stick with it.

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School Strike For Baby Hope will be published by Android Press in November 2024. As well as other fiction — including novels Stormteller and Hybrids — David has written several books on sustainability, including One Planet Cities: Sustaining Humanity within Planetary Limits and The One Planet Life: A Blueprint for Low Impact Development. Find out more at his website. And you can read David’s blog on Substack.

The Fifth Estate published A personal story about climate anxiety and illness from our UK writer David Thorpe in August 2021: a “personal account of his illness and its connection to his absolute commitment to avoiding the worst of climate change. It’s a sobering and very worthwhile read”, where David talks about the link between climate stress and the stroke he had recently suffered. That article also links to his story Don’t Follow Leaders, which David wrote for the publication.

In previous posts for ClimateCultures, The Rise of Climate Fiction Part 1 and Part 2, David explores how the term ‘Cli-fi’ reveals the tension between our twin fascinations with utopian and dystopian visions, how fiction engages readers with human stories within the climate change one, and writers’ responsibilities — given that “stories are fundamentally how humans understand and spread wisdom as well as entertain themselves.” David also contributed a piece for our Environmental Keywords theme on Environmental Justice.

In 2017, David was one of our inaugural authors at ClimateCultures. He was one of the short story writers, poets and non-fiction writers commissioned to produce new writing at Weatherfronts climate change conferences for writers — two TippingPoint events that also inspired the creation of ClimateCultures. In Utopia and Its Discontents, he explores the thinking that went into his winning story, For the Greater Good, which was included in the free Weatherfonts ebook anthology published by Cambria Books.

David Thorpe
David Thorpe
A novelist, scriptwriter and writer of comics and graphic novels, as well as a non-fiction writer on carbon-free energy and sustainable development.
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