Put this in your pipe and smoke it:
Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe have said that despite the fact that they are dead serious about fighting climate change and trying to come up with solutions they don't really read dystopian sci-fi novels or cli-fi novels about climate change. Strange, because in Bill's case he wrote an important essay in Grist in 2005 that called for more novels and movies and even operas about climate change.
See the link here:
''What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art''
https://grist.org/article/mckibben-imagine/
In Dr Hayhoe's case, she syas there is already too much stress in her life about trying to communicate solutions and hopeful optimism for global warming, so she really not into reading climate fiction novels by Barbara Kingsolver or Margaret Atwood or Kim Stanley Robinson.
An observer tells me: " I'm guessing that both Bill and Katharine feel that a separate --and playfu!l-- designation for fiction novels and movies about climate change makes it into a pastime, a cultural activity rather than an urgent social-political problem.
''And I think Hayhoe is worried on a personal level about wondering about the merit of constantly re-imagining climate change as an apocalypse. She wants religious answers as a conservative evangelical Protestant married to a weirded-out Christian pastor.''
''Dr Hayhoe feels, wrongly, but that's her POV, that readers don't learn anything about how to solve the problem by reading climate novels and seeing climate feature movies, even though both the writers and the readers may nevertheless feel they have somehow done something about it. In other words, the fictional engagement becomes a substitute for actually engaging the problem itself for both Bill and Katharine -- like slacktivism.''
1 comment:
Or....
Post a Comment