Fiction and non-fiction to move citizens on climate change

With another COP starting today, and the question of climate change having played no role at all in the Dutch elections recently, and, well, for a zillion different reasons – it seems like a good time to ask the question: what books can help to make people move on this topic? (or if you think books are the wrong medium, and we should only look at TikToks or cinema movies or Netflix series, I’d love to hear arguments for that view too).

To me, the most magnificent fiction book on climate change is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. It is phenomenal. I hadn’t read it yet when Henry organised a seminar on the book here at Crooked Timber, but I can only say: do read it. Admittedly, the book is very long – and this might be asking too much of many people, given the very many other demands on our lives. But there’s an easy solution: listen to it. This book is perfect as an audiobook. You listen while walking, and you’ll gradually get through the entire book while enjoying your daily walk. Given the many different voices in the book, it might even be better as an audio-book than to read it from paper/screen.

But since The Ministry for the Future already was discussed at length here, let me focus on two other books that might help to centre our awareness and political debates on climate change: Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood and Kimberly Nicholas’s Under the Sky We Make. The first is fiction, the second is non-fiction for citizens. Attention: one spoiler about Birnam Wood under the fold.

Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is not directly on climate change, but rather tells the story of an activist group that engages in urban gardening – perhaps I should write “guerrilla-gardening”, since they also engage in urban gardening on plots of unused land for which they have no permission. The book is as much about the internal frictions in anarchist activist groups as about the work they are doing (and some of the characters and group dynamics will be recognisable to anyone who has worked in bottom-up, minimally structured activist groups). Yet the main thread of the book is the tension between these well-meaning activists and billionaire-evil, and when to trust profit-maximising humans who say they want to do good. The plot in the book makes for great reading; it’s described as a ‘thriller’ and indeed could tick that box too. But it’s not a book with a happy ending. Let me put it somewhat cryptically to avoid too many spoilers: good does not win over evil in this book, and the ending left me with a sense of despair and somberness. That is in contrast to The Ministry for the Future, which ends well (despite also having its share of human violence) – but then that book has been criticised for being too optimistic. Perhaps the best is to just read a whole pile of such fiction books, so that realism, pessimism, and much-needed-hope are all in the mix?

Kimberly Nicholas’s book Under the Sky We Make is a popular science book – not just climate science, but also climate politics and climate actions. Nicholas is an American climate scientist who teaches at Lund University in Sweden. She has written a book for those who want to know: how bad is climate change? What will happen if this continues? What needs to be done? How and by whom? And what can I, reader of this book, do? She has written an extremely readable book that answers these questions. I suspect anyone can read this, not just people who are used to read scientific or policy reports. There are technical and scientific details, but they are in the footnotes. Nicholas is clearly addressing the 10% richest in the world, whose consumption patterns are incompatible with stabilising the climate. She is not shy of calling out Americans for having lifestyles that are most of all responsible for global warming. And I guess that as an American, who also writes on how she changed her own life, she has more of an authority to do so than others.

What I particularly liked about this book is that it doesn’t fall for the individual behaviour vs policies and structures dichotomy. Both are needed, and she describes what we can do with the most impact: minimize flying and driving, turn your diet as much plants-based as possible, don’t put your money with a dirty bank or pension fund, and join the climate movement: protest, write letters, vote for a green Party. Nicholas talks about our “exploitation mindset”, which is focussed on short-term preference-satisfaction, profit, and using nature for our own desire-satisfaction, as the deeper thing that needs to change: it needs to be replaced with a “regeneration mindset” that values all living beings and the meeting of their needs.

All in all, this makes for an excellent book for citizens who need to start from square zero, or nearby. I’d also recommend Nicholas’s book over Hannah Ritchie’s, which was reviewed here a while ago, since that book has no theory of change, no politics, and doesn’t understand “activism” or collective action. But, if I do compare them, I should also add that Ritchie pays more attention to the Global South, which fits well with the “radical impartiality” principle of the effective altruism movement, which Richie seems to identify with.

Which other books – or movies, or something else – would you recommend to make people move to think about, and act upon, climate, biodiversity and environmental issues?