Cli-fi: Can poetry and fiction really change the world?

A guest post from two-time Valley Press author Rosie Driffill

Note from Jamie: Yet another new format on the blog today! Rosie Driffill is the author of Suddenly, While Living (2021), a poignant yet hilarious memoir about living with an undiagnosed illness, and Blue-Green Algae (2022), a poetry pamphlet about nature of all kinds, beautiful and ugly. Keeping in that latter lane, she offered to write a guest post about “cli-fi”, or climate fiction, in all its hopeless/hopeful glory (delete as appropriate) and I thought that would be right up your street. So, it’s over to Rosie, in a writing chair with a view…

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From my office window, I can see the best of Calderdale: snowy moorland, deep valleys that cup the morning mist, the Salter Hebble canal, and gnarled, curly sessile oak trees backlit by a yellow-grey sun. If I crane, I can see the river Calder snaking its way through the valley, almost silver in the early morning light.

Shame it’s filled with faeces.

This is the kind of wee-hours brand of cognitive dissonance I’m having to hold; my view is stunning vs. that there lovely river is the UK’s second most polluted waterway. Data from 2021 published by the Mirror says that 27,901 hours of sewage were pumped into the Calder by Yorkshire Water on 4,055 occasions, which is a heck of a lot of toilet time, if you think about it. How is one supposed to reconcile this with the beautiful moorland, the heron that cleaves the valley, the lazy otter that likes to chill in the sunlight?

Don’t know. Too early. Need coffee.

A more pressing question, of course, which I’ll attempt to answer once the caffeine kicks in, is what does the simple person do about this?

What does your average citizen do about pollution and climate change in general? How do we harness our collective power and make damn sure that global temperature increases are capped at 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels ASA flipping P?

I reckon I feel like most people do about it all: terrified; in love with the planet’s beauty; urgent; helpless.

It’s a branch of dissonance all on its own. But I don’t believe it’s quite the time to be entirely hopeless. And it’s in this spirit that I want to look at the role Cli-fi could – and should – play in the race against time to save the planet; specifically, where politics, persuasion and coercion fail, I want to reflect on how stories can step in.

Of course, you don’t need much of an imagination to write cli-fi; you only need to scroll down, say, the Guardian’s homepage for inspiration. Somewhere in the world, sadly, there’ll be a burning forest or a flood of biblical significance. Melting ice, displaced persons, wildfires and the annihilation of myriad species are not only the subject matter of cli-fi books such as Jessie Greengrass’s The High House, Niall Bourke’s Line and Rita Indiana’s Tentacle … they’re also happening. Right now.

We’re talking about a genre with the capacity to show, tell and implore us to do something with the fear we feel at its hands. I remember hearing an interview with Brian Eno where he was asked that question that I’m sure all artists dread: what is art? In his calm and erudite manner, he answered that art makes something important … in other words, its essence lies in its ends. Cli-fi writers are reminding us of the importance of the planet, moving – nay, shaking us – with their stories; ends that art forms have always achieved. There’s also new nature writing – the genre of which I consider Kathleen Jamie to be the master – which isn’t cli-fi, but which merits a mention in the context of art’s capacity to move us and rouse us to action. New nature writing bigs nature up while reminding us of its transience, often framed within the climate change theme. My VP pamphlet Blue-Green Algae was written in this spirit; I wanted to shine a light on nature’s beauty and vulnerability, while chastising man’s unfortunate tendency to fetishise and control it.

Of course, the self-critic in me demanded to know what I thought I was playing at, imagining that a poetry pamphlet might have such traction with readers that they’d rock up at COP28 and manage to persuade signatories of the GST to agree to phase out fossil fuels 4EVA. After feeling pretty small and silly at first, I levelled with the self-critic – in such a way that only a writer with a vivid relationship with their parts of self could – and assured them that I knew the above scenario was impossible, and what I really hoped my pamphlet might do was…

What, exactly? What can cli-fi and new nature writing hope to achieve? If you share the view that art can render things important, poke its meat hook into our emotions and rouse us to make changes, what kind of change might we realistically expect? Ultimately, fossil fuels need to be phased out in order to ensure that global temps don’t rise beyond the 1.5 degree threshold; in the absence of enforceable international laws, governments will need to steel themselves and make changes to their own laws while ensuring that countries in the global south are financially supported enough to do likewise. The average citizen will play either within or without democracy; one might feel compelled to lobby, vote for parties whose policies put the climate first, demonstrate, chew their neighbour’s ear off, tweet … or else one might decide that this isn’t going to work in time, and jettison democratic means in favour of the direct action approach.

I’m not endorsing or condemning either course; but it’s my belief that cli-fi can play a role in recruiting hearts and minds, amplifying those feelings of helplessness, urgency, love, care, and fear that reside within most of us in relation to the planet. Fiction can be the difference between inaction and action, and history tells us that the more citizens take action, the more likely it is that there will be an eventual outcome. The cynic in me doubts that cli-fi has the power to win over the naysayers, let alone a government, but I don’t think that renders it a futile venture in relation to the cause, and nor do I believe it exists solely within a green-leaning, left-of-centre echo chamber. Whatever our beliefs, we all need spurring on sometimes, and cli-fi can offer both the perspective and sense of urgency that our day-to-day lives simply cannot.

My inner critic mulls this over, as I sit writing amid coffee rings and breakfast flotsam. I’m not really a marcher or a shouter or even a tweeter, these days, but I’ve got brilliant fingers, a laptop and a beautiful view, the integrity of which I can’t just passively wish will remain; I have to play my part.