Two
events are under way this week which direct my errant thoughts towards climate
change. The first is COP21, opening in
bomb-shocked Paris, hoping at last to make progress towards globally-binding
agreements to limit toxic emissions and mitigate their impacts. World leaders have flocked there, as well as
protesters and lobbyists in unprecedented numbers, like migrating butterflies.
Gradually,
the world is recognising that the ecological crisis is the crisis of our times. It
will dwarf all bombs.
On
the other side of the planet, real butterflies – Monarchs – are migrating a
thousand miles across the United States to their wintering grounds in
Mexico. Insects can be especially
sensitive and measurable indicators of anthropogenic damage: they suffer
visibly from the zillion apparently small but fatal human decisions that
together build up into “climate change” – a phenomenon which otherwise can seem
too nebulous to be observed, understood, or even believed. It’s
all in the detail. Monarch butterflies
have declined in number from around a billion in 1995 to 35 million last year.
This is mostly due to pesticides and food- and habitat-loss (farmers slashing vital
milkweed as ‘weeds’, for instance), but also to subtler disruptive changes in
temperature, season, and weather.
I’m
not, in retrospect, surprised at this decline.
A decade or so ago, on a farm near San Diego in southern California
(also a Monarch migration destination), I was dismayed at night to hear not a
single chirrup of cricket, see not a single moth at the lights. Insects
had been wiped out, and it felt desolate.
Compare that to the late afternoon scene before me as I write: cicadas
laying down a seamless skirl of sound; diaphanous clouds of midges above the
flowering trees; bees burring amongst the red-hot-poker blossoms;
locally-migrant Cabbage-white butterflies – all pollinating an interdependent
complex of vegetation, and in their turn providing supper for a whirling circus
of drongos and swallows and swifts, not to mention spiders, geckoes and
chameleons. If only it were still so
fecund everywhere.
On
the positive side, the state of Texas is reportedly spending $4 million to
restore Monarch habitat such as eucalyptus trees, and on its side Mexico is
distributing fertilisers to similar ends.
Restoring vegetation complexes can also only be good for carbon
sequestration and soil-creation. (You can read more on a devoted website, www.monarch-butterfly.com .)
Brazilian butterfly |
The
Monarch butterfly crisis has generated at least one recent novel, one of
perhaps hundreds that have recognised climate change as an interesting,
legitimate, perhaps even inescapable theme.
This is Barbara Kingsolver’s most recent fiction, Flight Behaviour (2012), set in Tennessee, which imagines a Monarch
migration thrown awry by climate change. Kingsolver, Orange Prize-winning novelist and
essayist, often brings her training as a biologist to bear on her stories. She can include passages of intricate detail,
such as this:
She walked closer so she could see this as
her son was seeing it. She hadn’t
examined the clumps at close range, and even now it was hard to understand how
they were constructed. The butterflies
didn’t seem smashed or stuck to the wings of other butterflies, not like a
hundred-car pileup, it was nothing as simple.
They seemed to be holding on by their needle-thin front legs to some
part of the tree itself, bark or branch or needle, out to the very tips. The tree’s basic shape was still visible
underneath, the column of trunk and broomlike sweep of the branches, but all
enlarged and exaggerated by the hangers-on.
Only at the ends of the dangling clusters did butterflies seem to be clinging to the
legs of other butterflies. The insecure
and the desperate, she thought. No world
can be without them.
This
unpretentious but intimate description lifts at the end into an almost existential
statement: the protagonist, Dellarobia, and perhaps a goodly segment of
humanity generally, is also insecure and desperate. It’s hard to write about climate change
without sounding didactic or hectoring, but Kingsolver’s scientific knowledge
is deftly embedded in Dellarobia’s story of disaffected marriage and love, and
within a portrayal of her richly imagined community of colourful and conflicted
humans.
This
is the purpose and power of fiction, of course: we learn about the butterfly
phenomenon along with the initially
uninformed Dellarobia. We are, like her,
sucked in to gradual understanding. In
an essay entitled “Jabberwocky”, from her volume High Tide in Tucson (1995), Kingsolver writes:
A novel works its magic by putting a
reader inside another person’s life. The
pace is as slow as life. It’s as
detailed as life. It requires you, the
reader, to fill in an outline of words with vivid pictures drawn subconsciously
from your own life ... Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge
of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another.
Writers,
I discover, have been writing about climate (not to mention the pervasive
presence of weather) for a century, at
least since Jules Verne wrote The
Purchase of the North Pole in 1889.
He helped pioneer science-fiction – the ‘sci-fi’ genre which is evolving into a
new buzz-genre, ‘cli-fi’, which works with the current definitions of ‘climate
change’. Prominent amongst these
fictions are so-called ‘speculative fictions’ – stories projecting current
trends and technologies realistically into the future. Such novels range from J G Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) to Margaret
Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009),
from Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010) to Kim
Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain
(2005).
Forty Signs is the first
in Robinson’s “Science in the Capital” trilogy.
The novels follow the trajectories of scientists and policy-wonks in
Washington DC as they try to cope with a massive shift in ocean currents,
unprecedented winters and deluges of stormwater (East Coast Americans are
already experiencing these). He can be a
tad ponderous, but he writes accessibly, and his science is solid. He packages the material in ways more persuasive
and affecting than scientists’ computer-model projections of where current
climate trends might lead us. Those
projections are, in their way, also fictional.
The
future, by definition, is a matter of the imagination.
Robinson
forms part of a study of climate change in fantasy fiction being pursued by one
of our Master’s students. He’s also exploring
Frank Herbert’s Dune (for its
depictions of dry-land ecology, certainly a present reality and threat for many
regions) and George R R Martin’s Game of
Thrones (for the ways in which that imagined society deals with the effects
of a threatened mega-winter). I can’t
say I’ve enjoyed the writing in either of these two works – I’ve not found a
single sentence in Game of Thrones
I’d relish reading twice – but my student has persuaded me there’s some
interesting and complex political thinking concerning climate going on. And Martin’s less well-known book, Tuf Voyaging, reveals his very clear
concern with ecological matters.
To
return to South Africa: butterflies also feature in a local speculative novel,
Jane Rosenthal’s Souvenir (2004). The protagonist Souvenir (Souvie) is a
clone-woman whose job is to float about the interior desert of the Karoo region
in a hot-air balloon, servicing windmills.
She falls in with a roaming Nigerian lepidopterist, whose subject of
study – non-cloned butterflies – are survivors of human intervention. The novel maybe tries too hard, incorporating
everything from cloning to a tsunami, but it’s an adventurous foray in a genre
still rather tentative in local writing.
But South
African and African sci-fi, if not cli-fi, is
starting to take off. Look out for the
butterfly effect.
Amazon butterflies |
Thanks for the blog, Dan! I enjoyed Flight Behavior as much as Kingsolver's other works: Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna. She is an exceptional writer. The imagination also has an ethical aspect: we need to imagine possible futures in order to change our current behaviours, so as to forestall possible disasters.
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