Creating hope through culture

Tim Kindberg is a writer and digital innovator who lives between Bristol and Western Kenya. His most recent novel, Future Song, is set in near-future Bristol against a backdrop of adaptation to climate change. In this blog he explores how art and culture can offer us a way to both understand the changing climate and imagine a route to a better future.

Arts and cultural organisations, including UNESCO and the British Council, have found that culture plays a significant and positive role in our response to climate change. According to the latter, ‘culture is now understood as a driver and enabler of climate solutions – influencing awareness, behaviour, resilience, and policy.’ As well as the arts, the term culture also encompasses social beliefs, behaviours and norms, where cultural impact can be more mixed. For example, some use the phrase ‘culture war’ to refer to the dispute between those who accept and those who deny the reality and significance of climate change. What kinds of culture affect how we respond to climate change, whose culture are we talking about, and what is the positive role it can play?

I’ll start with the literature of climate change, also known as ‘cli-fi’, which has embraced the subject perhaps for the longest of all art forms; Jules Verne did so in 1889 with The Purchase of the North Pole. More recently, the genre has greatly expanded and includes for example J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower (1993) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020). Given that we are living in a time when climate change affects us more directly – and parts of the world have been living with it for much longer – what do books such as these offer us? Can dystopian visions of the future such as the first two of those latter novels compel us to try to avoid the suffering they portray? Can the technocratic solutionism of Stanley-Robinson’s novel inspire us to act on a large scale, as we surely can if we set our minds to it? Or is literature somewhat irrelevant, and we should just get down to the practicalities of meeting and discussing and acting communally, riding our bikes and voting for climate action?

But that begs the questions of who ‘we’ are, and what actions are, or feel to be, in reach for many. There are small-scale academic studies on the effects of climate literature. One empirical survey of readers found that climate fiction raises consciousness and encourages thinking about our future. However, it tends to do so only for those who already accept the reality of climate change – and who may be more inclined to read it, anyway. And it doesn’t necessarily have an impact on either our need for hope or the related question of our empowerment to act. But doesn’t that depend on the type of visioning in the work?

The environmentalist and philosopher Rupert Read coined the term ‘thrutopia’ as an alternative to dystopias, which shock us, and utopias, which can be hard to believe in. By contrast, a thrutopia concentrates not so much on where we will end up, but on the process of how we go about changing our world for the better, despite challenges. Although it doesn’t address climate change, he offers as an example Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a seminal work which imagines the creation of an anarchist world from one rather like our own. But a problem with galvanising action on climate change has been that it occurs ‘over there’ – to polar bears and people living in flood-risk areas. I believe that we need more art that is grounded to some degree in our shared present-day realities, rather than being set on distant worlds or in a future too far for us to imagine ourselves in.

Art offers meaning, and reflection upon the times we live in, even when it extrapolates into the future. There are exceptions like 1984 and Guernica, but in general it is too much to expect an individual book or painting or work in any form to have a profound impact. We should look to art more widely to bring consciousness about climate change into everyone’s lives, including the lives of climate deniers; to do so along with a thrutopian message of methods we have for mitigating and adapting to it. The more a can-do attitude to a changing climate is the backdrop to the stories and images we encounter, the greater the possibility that consciousness will be raised and action will follow. Literature is still important in this respect, and music, TV and videos have a far wider reach.

What if culture wars could be displaced by a popular culture of consciousness about climate change, and of common cause to do something about it? Culture lies upstream from politics: cultural change is often a precursor, if not prerequisite, to political change. Culture is also not only about works by individuals alone. It is something we enact as part of a community. As Ursula Le Guin said, “I see art as a community enterprise both in place and time, and believe that art that leads to more art is more valuable than sterile excellence.” Art begets art, in other words.

We act both when we make art, and when we pay attention to it: each entails imaginative engagement. Art that gives cause for hope but which is also realistic and grounded can instil not only acknowledgment of the challenges we all share, but also a sense that things can be different. US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “Hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you create, with your actions […] once one person has hope, it can be contagious.” And those actions can be cultural, and accessible to all of us.