The Influence of Climate Fiction: An Empirical Survey of Readers

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2020

Does environmental literature lead readers to be more aware of environmental injustice? To empathize with climate migrants? Who reads a book of climate fiction, and why? This article, part of a thematic cluster of Empirical Ecocriticism, offers empirical answers to these questions through a survey of 86 American readers of The Water Knife (a 2015 novel by Paolo Bacigalupi) and a parallel survey of 183 Americans who regularly read fiction. Its methodology includes a novel measure for evaluating an individual's awareness of environmental or climate injustice. It finds that The Water Knife was effective at reaching a diverse group of readers, raising awareness about climate injustice, and leading readers to empathize with climate migrants. However, its violent, dystopic future led some readers to fear climate migrants, which might lead to support for reactionary responses to climate change. These results are situated within relevant scholarship from ecocriticism, environmental communication, the empirical study of literature, and environmental psychology.

Environmental Communication, 2020

Literary works of fiction about climate change are becoming more common and more popular among critics and readers. While much research has indicated the persuasive effectiveness of narrative storytelling in general, empirical research has not yet tested the effects of reading climate fiction. This paper reports results from the first experimental study to test the immediate and delayed impacts of climate fiction on readers' beliefs and attitudes about climate change. We found that reading climate fiction had small but significant positive effects on several important beliefs and attitudes about global warming-observed immediately after participants read the stories. However, these effects diminished to statistical nonsignificance after a one-month interval. In this paper, we review the relevant literature, present the design and results of this experiment, and discuss implications for future research and practice.

Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change, 2023

“Does Climate Fiction Work? An Experimental Test of the Immediate and Delayed Effects of Reading Cli-Fi” is the result of a collaboration between an ecocritic, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, and five environmental social scientists: Abel Gustafson, Anthony Leiserowitz, Matthew H. Goldberg, Seth A. Rosenthal, and Matthew Ballew. They conducted an experimental study to measure the immediate and delayed effects of climate fiction on readers via short stories by Paolo Bacigalupi and Helen Simpson. They found that whether the stimulus was a speculative dystopian story or a realist story exploring the psychological dynamics of climate change awareness and denial, reading climate fiction had small but significant positive effects on several important beliefs and attitudes about global warming, observed immediately after participants read the stories. Although these effects diminished to statistical nonsignificance after a one-month interval, the authors note that longer texts, such as novels, can be expected to have more significant and longer-lasting effects. Finally, they discuss the need for environmental media to not focus exclusively on threats but also promote self-efficacy and response efficacy—the sense that one can take action, and that such an action will be effective. This book chapter is derived from the article “Environmental Literature as Persuasion: An Experimental Test of the Effects of Reading Climate Fiction,” published in Environmental Communication in 2020, https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2020.1814377.

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2019

This article views environmental literature through commonly-used narrative frames, and argues that widely-read and influential American climate fiction novels in the early twenty-first century tended to focus primarily if not exclusively on characters who are American, white, wealthy, and educated instead of highlighting the perspectives of poor people and people of color. They thereby minimized the critical framing of climate change as a matter of justice and equity -- climate justice -- missing an opportunity to cultivate transnational empathy and raise awareness of the tragically unequal human consequences of climate change. I explore the way that the Americanness, whiteness, and financial resources of cli-fi’s typical protagonists structure, in deeply problematic ways, the recommended responses to climate change in two widely read novels. For this reason, among many others, I argue that climate injustice ought to be a central element of every climate narrative, in fiction and other media.

American Literature in Transition, 2000-2010, 2017

With a focus on the novel, this chapter appraises three major themes that emerged in the embryonic corpus of climate change fiction. The first concerns the denial, avoidance, and acceptance of the magnitude of climate change in the present and recent past. The second presents cautionary fables of the Anthropocene (the current epoch in which humans act as a geologic force), extrapolating current trends into devastated, depopulated and denatured futures. The third advances this implicit rebuke to the present by exploring the eco-politics of resistance, reform and revolution. I conclude by identifying two rising themes for the next decade of climate change fiction: aiding the ongoing transition to life after oil and depicting the amplified global inequalities of climate injustice.

The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators, 2024

This chapter explains how to produce and run climate justice reading groups, which can help students and educators learn from each other's climate experiences, and support each other to imagine what a better, sustainable world could look like. The essay is co-authored by two academic researchers and two young people who worked together to produce and run their own climate justice reading group. In this chapter, we introduce our project of climate fiction reading groups, which we shared with young people in the UK in 2021. Reading together helped participants in the groups to explore, share, and craft transformative climate imaginaries, while learning about and developing concepts of climate justice. For us, a climate imaginary is a way of imagining a future world significantly transformed by climate change. That future world will be "sculpted by anthropogenic changes to the environment, and perhaps restructured by social, political, economic and cultural reform" and we agree with others that our new world, "already characterised by interdependence, must be characterised by togetherness." 1 The reading groups were partnerships, based on togetherness, between academics and young people. Young people were more than just readers and research participants. They also led the groups, facilitated discussions, and conducted research. Two of the young people from the groups are also authors of this chapter. This chapter is co-authored by two academics, Dr. Benjamin Bowman and Dr. Chloé Germaine, and two young co-researchers. Pooja Kishinani is a student at the University of Manchester and a member of Climate Emergency Manchester, and Charlie Balchin is a student at the University of Birmingham, both in the UK. By writing together, we share our reflections on the impact of these reading groups.

There is a growing consensus that climate fiction might be an effective communication strategy to move the public on climate. However, empirical evidence documenting such an effect is limited, especially when it comes to climate fiction's potential to induce emotions of hope and fear, which are of key importance to the ongoing debate about the social effects of climate messages. To address this gap, we conducted an experimental cross-cultural study (N = 2268) with participants from India and the USA. In line with the Extended Parallel Process Model, we hypothesized that climate fiction combining fear and hope appeals ("ambitopian climate fiction") would be more effective at stimulating climate action intentions than either fear-appealing ("dystopian") climate fiction or hope-appealing ("utopian") climate fiction. The hypothesis was not supported. We found that, in the US sample, dystopian climate fiction was more effective at stimulating climate action intentions than ambitopian climate fiction. However, ambitopian climate fiction was found to be efficient at inducing both hope and fear in both samples and at stimulating climate action intentions indirectly, in the Indian sample, through these emotions. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

WIREs Climate Change, 2017

In the last 5 years, climate change has emerged as a dominant theme in literature and, correspondingly, in literary studies. Its popularity in fiction has given rise to the term cli-fi, or climate change fiction, and speculation that this constitutes a distinctive literary genre. In theater, the appearance of several big-name productions from 2009 to 2011 has inspired an increase in climate change plays. There has been a growing trend, too, of climate change poetry, thanks to the rise of eco-poetry (poetry that exhibits ecological awareness and engages with the world's current state of environmental degradation) and the launch of some key climate change poetry initiatives in the media. This prevalence of climate change literature has brought about a greater engagement with climate change in literary studies, notably the environmentally oriented branch of literary studies called ecocriticism. The increasing number of ecocritical analyses of climate change literature , particularly novels, is helping to shape a canon of climate change fiction. In a separate development, there has been greater interest in the phenomenon of climate change in literary or critical theory (the branch of literary studies concerned with literary concepts and philosophies rather than with literary texts). This development—centered on the study of climate change as a philosophical or existentialist problem—is sometimes termed climate change criticism or critical climate change.

The call for papers for this collection on “The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction” arose from concerns about pessimistic assessments, in recent literary criticism, of the novel’s ability to meet the representational challenges posed by the pressing planetary problem of climate change. The contributions to this volume take issue with that pessimism and take stock of the novel’s capabilities.

2016

As a global population, inclusive of humans, fauna, and flora, we are each subject, though disproportionality, to the risks associated with our planet's changing climate. These changes are largely caused by our unabated expulsion of CO 2 emissions into the atmosphere. Our globalized world and economic activities have largely engendered the burning of fossil fuels. The 2014 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, which means keeping warming below 2°C, we need to achieve emissions scenarios relative to pre-industrial levels. Without such reductions we can expect substantial species extinction, increased food insecurity, frequent extreme precipitation events, continued warming and acidification of the ocean, global mean sea level rise, and more frequent and longer lasting heatwaves. Responding to this means collective action at a global level. In my thesis I ask how the novel can respond to and help us to cognise these demands, as well as to cognise the scale and complexities of climate change, its philosophical and physical implications, and to attend to the particularities of local place whist remaining global in its scope and vision. I argue that climate change gives rise to a new form of novel. My work is primarily concerned with ecofiction and how it can raise consciousness about climate change. I consider that the novel, as a counterfactual narrative, can personalise the issue, create stories so that we have ways to speak about it and enchant us towards an ecological imagining. My thesis begins by discussing the existing genre of popular climate change fiction. This mostly consists of clichéd, post-apocalyptic and hero-orientated disaster narratives. These novels are often predictable and limited in how they can engage the reader with climate change. In my second chapter I look at how climate change affects and alters our language. Certain processes belonging to it lead to a loss of words but also to the production of new words. I examine these themes in