"We need literature to imagine the better futures that we have to bring into being"

Stories have always shaped how humans interact with the rest of the natural world. In the first chapter of ‘Genesis’ humankind is created to subdue the Earth and given dominion over other living things. The second chapter offers an alternative story in which Adam is entrusted with the care of the other animals and plants in the Garden of Eden. These two stories have echoed down the ages for well over two thousand years. Together and separately, they still determine how many people feel and act towards the natural world, whether claiming the rights of mastery or taking to heart the responsibilities of stewardship.

Our scientific understanding of nature too bears traces of our storytelling. Charles Darwin [PDF, 667 KB] read John Milton’s retelling of these same stories in Paradise Lost as he sailed on the Beagle, prompting him to ask the questions that would lead him to his theory of evolution by natural selection. Inspired by the science fiction of Jules Verne and Olaf Stapledon, and prompted by a chat in the pub with William Golding, James Lovelock revived the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, known from the epics of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, as a way to understand the Earth acting as a single living system.

Both Darwin’s ecological insights and Lovelock’s Gaia Theory, sometimes rebranded as Earth System Science, are crucial to understanding the impacts of human activity on the natural world. We need science, with its data and models, to understand how and why our climate is changing, but we also need stories and poems to help us to realize for ourselves what is happening to the world, to come to terms with it and to resolve to act. Above all, we need literature to imagine the better futures that we have to bring into being. As the American novelist Ursula K. Le Guin put it shortly before she died, we need to heed ‘the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now … and even imagine some real grounds for hope’.

What stories should we be reading and thinking with today to reimagine and revitalize our relationship with the rest of nature before it is too late? Luckily for us, there is no shortage of literature out there that can help. There is the growing field of climate fiction or CliFi, galvanized by and celebrated in the new Climate Fiction Prize. There is the combatively hopeful subgenre called Solarpunk which uses the literary techniques of science fiction to imagine happier, more sustainable worlds. There are many earlier worldly utopias too, born from the recognition that life as we have been living it is unsustainable, from William Morris’s News from Nowhere, written in Victorian England in the aftermath of the industrial revolution, to Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, set in a largely post-industrial future California.

Le Guin’s story is a reminder that, whatever we choose to read, we must not limit ourselves to one tradition. Her future Californians, the Kesh, derive many of their own stories from native Americans – traditions that predate and, in Le Guin’s vision, outlast modern America. In The Last Gift of the Master Artists, Ben Okri weaves a magical story that hints at a parallel between the horrific impact of the transatlantic slave trade on Africa and the impending catastrophe of climate change while holding out the promise of a wisdom and a care that can survive nonetheless. Their books are compelling reminders that for many indigenous peoples and cultures the annihilation of their world is not unprecedented. But this crisis we must get through together or not at all. By reading literature, past and present, we can pool as much human experience and imagination as we can ahead of our collective journey to a future which we must make better than today if it is not to be far, far worse.