Nearly a quarter of a century ago when I published my first novel, Haweswater, about the impact of dam-building in north-west England, nature writing felt quite different, at least for me. Several landmark novels about climate apocalypse and survivalism had been published, including Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien and The Death of Grass by John Christopher, but there was no imperative to write about such things. These stories involved anomalistic catastrophes – a mutated virus, nuclear war – and they were very bleak. They resonated but also seemed unusual. At the other end of the scale, Ben Elton’s Stark had comedically outlined the nature of oligarchic greed, resource consumption, and the ruination we were hurtling towards, while the Bezos and Musk equivalents could head off-world – not quite so funny now.
The public knew about climate issues, though terminology often stressed them individually – ozone depletion, greenhouse warming, desertification, coral bleaching – rather than total Earth systems breakdown. Disparate, visionary science fictions didn’t indicate a genre movement yet. There was a luxury of choice regarding stories related to nature – no elephant in the room (or polar bear), if you didn’t tackle climate-change concerns.
In the 2000s, while the scientific data was righting itself from hacks and attacks, a whole spate of alarming nonfiction books arrived, forecasting the devastating effect of global temperature rises, mass extinctions, and the chaotic world that would occur if our trajectory of fossil fuel consumption, industrial farming, deforestation and the like wasn’t altered. Books like Six Degrees (Mark Lynas), A World Without Bees (Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum), and Half Gone (Jeremy Leggett) sounded the doom gong, loudly.
As a news-hungry novelist, I responded, wringing jeopardy from these predictions to create a dire, possible future. Full-throttle dystopian speculation seemed to be appropriate. I wrote The Carhullan Army, which imagines female paramilitary resistance in a Britain destabilised by flooding and politically fascistic, where rationing and population control are the new norms. Looking back, I can see this story arrived out of pure, exhilarated fear about impending ecological disaster, the repressive systems which could arise out of it and their effect, especially, on women. It was an attempt to ring the same warning bell, to create a virtual, experiential realm for the reader out of their propositions.
Fiction writers were turning towards the situation. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, perhaps the most horrific, cataclysmic fable of this era, while never explicitly naming its disaster, depicts, as George Monbiot noted, the extreme consequences of “a world without a biosphere”. A decade later, The End We Start From by Megan Hunter, imagines a saturated, desolated England, with migration south to north as characters struggle to control their lives. Water shortages, drought and expanding sands feature in Claire Vaye Watkins’ novel, Gold Fame Citrus, where countercultural Californians try to get to grips with a brutal new wilderness almost too big for human comprehension. Too big for comprehension, regarding the world’s threatened environmental state, would become our existential sufferance.
These issues were not, in fact, speculative, but live around the globe. The ensuing havoc and damages do not affect humans equally. The racial extrapolation of history and culture in relation to climate future is depicted in Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath. In it, the abandoned black population of an uninhabitable, cloud-shrouded America search for meaning, home, and connection. Who will suffer and how when the apocalypse descends as a result of society’s legacy, is one of the fundamental concerns. If there are positive human adaptations or consolations to be found in these stories, they are transitory, vestigial or futile – distantly circling birds, an orphan fostered in hell, precarious love, sorority. Hope is dwarfed or excoriated by the monstrous new reality of planetary vastation. Tracking forward from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, anxiety around the loss of our habitat and safe, humane civilisation has been the operating key for dystopia.
Cli-fi is now its own genre, and booming, its themes curated on bookshops tables. But is pessimism still the prevailing mood? Utopia, it’s said, is difficult to write and perhaps less interesting to read. “Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness,” George Orwell asserted. Darkness is attractive in so far as it’s inherently dramatic to depict, provocative and recognisable. In the face of failure to politically cooperate, legislate and mitigate against Earth systems breakdown, nature-horror and environmental comeuppance might truly represent our feelings of fatalism. Perhaps dystopia serves a purpose, as a repellent. It’s difficult to know whether it acts as a cautionary tale, deterring people from its pathways, or whether it simply provides disturbing entertainment while endorsing the worst-case scenario.
But is Orwell’s philosophy correct? Or might the premise be learned incapacity, a defeatist ideology that commits us to mess and devilry, rather than nurturing anything better? Might it hinder solution stories and contribute to a negative cultural paralysis?
One man’s utopia is very different from the next woman’s. There have always been positive proposals in science fiction, too, such as the formidable work of Octavia Butler, which opposes the notion of destructive tendencies in our species and dares to dream up models of evolution. The narratives of Afrofuturism rise from experiences unlike Orwell’s, exploring themes of black identity and agency and offering alternative, empowered versions of the future. Who is to say what literature can’t be or do?
So what is the fiction that needs to be written now? This is the question I grappled with over the decades of writing my novel Helm. Is it about signposting progress when it comes to environmental adaptation and damage limitation? Should writers try to offer a restorative or rousing spirit for the times we live in, an opposition to eschatology? Can literature actually be a tool to encourage something better – creating eco-topia on the page, so it might be imagined off it? Midway through the writing of the book, I took part in a British Council Nature Writing panel in Germany and this last question was asked by the audience. Robert Macfarlane, the chair, barely paused before saying: yes. I remained silent.
Since the dystopian days, I had tried a hopeful version of environmental fiction, The Wolf Border, which is about nature recovery and the rewilding of Britain. A good kind of What If scenario, I’d thought. But its premise and its political conditions – Scottish independence and radical land reform – seem more fantastical and remote now than when it was written. The truth is, as I sat quietly on that panel, I felt corseted by old ideas about fiction: that gloom is our territory, that fabricators have a different role to factualists, that novelists aren’t obliged to help steer society out of a negative mindset. My luxury to choose an environmental mode felt hollow.
For nonfiction writers, the presentation of issues and ideas is central. They encourage literal engagement with a subject. They can brilliantly advocate, use literature to protest and campaign for conservation. They might move the dial politically, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring did, prompting the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. They can reconstruct biased, racialised environments as the cultural geographer Carolyn Finney does. In her book Black Faces, White Spaces, she examines the relationships between African Americans and the natural world, white privilege, historical access to and ownership of the great outdoors, broadening perspectives on the environmental justice movement.
With fiction, it is harder to present issues without it being on-the-nose; there are so many moving parts in a virtual world: characters, plots,landscapes, themes. A story might foreground the environment, it might even be about the environment, but it isn’t a manifesto. It is galvanising to see writers such as Monbiot tackling the issues behind industrialism that drive pollution and depletion – neoliberalism, capitalism, the internalised narratives that make us believe consumer economic systems are set and unchangeable – then suggest alternatives. I’ve been struck too reading Wild Fell by Lee Schofield, which imagines the future blossoming of ecological work he’s undertaken in the same location where Haweswater and The Carhullan Army are set. I was struck, because I’d never imagined an optimistic vision for my home turf; it seemed like a literary gear I didn’t possess.
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How wonderful, this kind of righteous sightedness; how mindful a contribution towards systems change. And there’s a wild, inspiring proliferation of books written by women regarding human synergy with nature: hawks, hares, mountains, common land, rivers. These works begin to overcome the immense scale of fatalism.
So can fiction. The Overstory by Richard Powers demonstrates the genuine power of collectives in the fight to protect nature. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour finds, alongside the shocking planetary transformation affecting all species, a beauty in transition. These novels invite scientists to shout louder and readers to participate more.
This became the imperative for Helm. It is a book about a unique aerial phenomenon, Britain’s only named wind, far older than humans and perhaps imperilled because of us. After more than a decade of stalls, rewrites and re-examinations of the topic, I had begun wondering if I should imagine ways up and out of doom scenarios instead of just describing the conflict within them. The answer was yes.
The novel tackles issues of climate change, but its tenor is different. Perhaps the very nature of its subject helped: air, levity, mercurial otherness. Nature narrating itself is not new in literature, but remembering that our human story is not separate from nature’s story is timely. The wind, whose biography the book attempts to capture, is a mischievous puckish storyteller, entertained by humans and impervious to its own destruction, so the tone is a bit “tea-party at end-times”. A beautiful indifference is one option for dealing with environmental ruin, if you’ve no agency to alter it. But the character of Selima, a contemporary meteorological researcher studying microplastics in clouds, is more serious and culpable. Selima has the weight of awful facts on her shoulders, along with interference from climate deniers. Her existential crisis is, I think, a version of what we all may feel as isolated individuals, given the overwhelming issues we face. Yet she remains defiant and collegiate; she keeps on going with her work. The end of her story is still speculative, but it leaves room for activism to triumph.
There are lots of stories in the novel about how mankind has tried to control the elements over millennia, via industry and religion; how we’ve consumed and damaged nature as our “manifest destiny”. But there are also stories about ways of existing holistically, recognising our place in nature and its place in us. These are mostly the female characters’ stories; they prevail against bad operators, and they are companionable with Helm.
The Helm’s-eye overview gives a whimsical perspective of human endeavour, our significant anthropogenic moment on the planet, our solipsism and minimalism in the scheme of things, and a sense of: what next? This allowed for a fundamental shift in spirit towards buoyancy and a rescaling. In the end, it felt as meaningful and right to try to imagine positive countervailing ideas around our ecological impact as the dystopias had previously felt.
Helm is far from eco-topia. But I hope the book is a constructive offering for our current moment. I’ve always believed fiction can be vital in allowing readers to apprehend and experience other versions of the world. I’m starting to believe it can play a part in encouraging healthier visions of the environment, by depicting our benign proclivities, and imagining that marvellous natural phenomena like the Helm wind can be saved.