The emerging Hollywood genre of ''cli fi'' continues to capture the world's imagination. This blog serves as media outreach. For more info write: danbloom@gmail.com and see ''THE CLI-FI REPORT'' at http://cli-fi.net
Researchers are thinking about social collapse and how to prepare for it, cli-fi novelists, too
After Europe and Australia and India and Canada and the U.S. stumbled through a terrible summer of 2018 with record hurricanes and fires and floods and heatwaves, more literary critics and literary academics are approaching questions once reserved for doomsday cults. Can modern society prepare for a world in which global warming threatens large-scale social, economic, and political upheaval? What are the policy and social implications of rapid, and mostly unpleasant, climate disruption?
Those literary critics and academics, who are generally more pessimistic about the pace of climate change than most academics, are advocating for a series of changes in how cli-fi novels and movies are seen and created and promoted in the culture at large.
In the language of climate change, “adaptation” refers to ways to blunt the immediate effects of extreme weather, such as building seawalls, conserving drinking water, updating building codes, and helping more people get disaster insurance. But cli-fi novels and movies can play a role by offering emotional insights into the issues we face. It's not all charts and stats. The arts can play a vital role, says Dan Bloom, curator of The Cli-Fi Report at www.cli-fi.net
But some acdemics and writers are going further, calling for what some call the “deep adaptation agenda.” For them , that means not only rapid decarbonization and storm-resistant infrastructure, but also writing and producing cli-fi novels and movies worldwide in a varity of languages.
Propelling the cli-fi movement are signs that the problem is worsening at an accelerating rate. In an article this summer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 666 climate scientists from around the world argued that the planet may be much closer than previously realized to locking in what they call a “hothouse” trajectory—warming of 4C or 5C (7F or 9F), “with serious challenges for the viability of human societies.”
Jem Bendell, a professor at the University of Cumbria who popularized the term ''deep adaptation'' and thinks cli-fi novels can help raise awareness worldwide, calls it a mix of physical changes—pulling back from the coast, closing climate-exposed industrial facilities, planning for food rationing, letting landscapes return to their natural state—with cultural shifts such as more Hollywood cli-fi movies , and including “giving up expectations for certain types of consumption” and learning to rely more on the people around us.
“The evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war,” he wrote in a paper he posted on his blog in July after an academic journal refused to publish it. “We need to appreciate what kind of adaptation is possible.” We also need more cli-fi novels and a publishing industry receptive to them and a movie industry receptive as well.
It might be tempting to dismiss Bendell and other cli-fi advocates as outliers. But they’re not alone in writing about the possibility of massive political and social shocks from climate change and the need to start preparing for those shocks. Since posting his paper, Bendell says he’s been contacted by more academics investigating the same questions. A LinkedIn group titled “Deep Adaptation” includes professors, government scientists, novelists, and film producers.
William Clark, a Harvard professor and former MacArthur Fellow who edited the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, is among those who worry about what might come next. “We are right on the bloody edge,” he says.
Clark argues that in addition to quickly and dramatically cutting emissions, society should pursue a new scale of adaptation work. Rather than simply asking people to water their lawns less often, for example, governments need to consider large-scale, decades-long infrastructure projects, such as transporting water to increasingly arid regions and moving cities away from the ocean.
“This is not your grandfather’s adaptation,” he says. And cli-fi is not your grandfather's sci-fi, either.
Diana Liverman, a professor at the University of Arizona School of Geography and Development and one of the authors of a 2018 academic paper, says adapting will mean “relocation or completely different infrastructure and crops.” She cites last year’s cli-fi novel New York 2140, in which the climate fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson imagines the city surviving under 50 feet of water, as “the extreme end of adaptation.”
Cameron Harrington, a professor of international relations at Durham University in England and co-author of the 2017 book Security in the Anthropocene, says adapting to widespread disruption will require governments to avoid viewing climate change primarily as a security threat. Instead, Harrington says, countries must find new ways to manage problems that cross borders—for example, by sharing increasingly scarce freshwater resources. “We can’t raise border walls high enough to prevent the effects of climate change,” he says. Cli-fi novels and movies might help raise awareness of what lies ahead.
There are even more pessimistic takes. Guy McPherson, a professor emeritus of natural resources at the University of Arizona, says climate change will cause human civilization to collapse not long after the summer Arctic ice cover disappears. He argues that could happen as early as 2019, sending global temperatures abruptly higher and causing widespread food and fuel shortages by 2020. Game over? Read a cli-fi novel to find out.
Many academics are considerably less dire in their predictions. Jesse Keenan, who teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and advises puboishers in New York and Longon on climate fiction novels and film scripts, says warnings about social collapse are overblown. “I think for much of the world, we will pick up the pieces,” Keenan says.
But he adds that the prospect of climate-induced human extinction has only recently become a widespread topic of academic discourse. Cli-fi novels and movies are here to stay.
Even mainstream researchers concede there’s room for cli-fi novels and movies. Dr Solomon Hsiang, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies the interplay between the environment and society, says it’s too soon to predict the pace of global warming. But he warns that society could struggle to cope with rapid shifts in the climate. Cli-fi novels could raise awareness in the culture at large.
For Bendell, the question of when climate change might shake the Western social order is less important than beginning to talk about how to prepare for it. Therefore cli-fi novels are vital in the big picture.
He acknowledges that his premise shares something with the survivalist movement, which is likewise built on the belief that some sort of social collapse is coming.
But he says ''deep adaptation'' is different: It looks for ways to mitigate the damage of that collapse.
“The discussion I’m inviting from cli-fi novelists and filk directors is about collective responses to reduce harm,” he says, “rather than how a few people could tough it out to survive longer than others.”
Odia-language cli-fi movie "Kokoli" from India explores climate change issues in coastal regions
Set for November release in India and set to screen at film festivals world-wide. See korgw101.blogspot.com
Odia-language cli-fi movie "Kokoli" from India explores climate change issues in coastal regions
Love in a time of climate change? A new cli-fi Indian film puts cli-fi on India's map, following in the footsteps of Amitav Ghosh's novel ''The Hungry Tide''.
Doing away with typical Bollywood movie storylines of young lovers facing family opposition, an upcoming Indian cli-fi film set for release in November 2018 instead features a couple battling climate change in order to be together. The movie uses the Odia language in the film. Subtitles will be available in English as well.
"Kokoli" -- the name of the female character in the movie and also a type of fish -- tells a story of a fishing community along tbe coast of India facing the loss of livelihoods and land as sea levels rise in due to climate change and global warming the eastern Indian state of Odisha. The Odia-language movie will be released in November.
The Odia-language film centers on Miss Kokoli and her boyfriend, who sets out to build a wall to keep towering waves from destroying and uprooting his village - a task he must succeed at in order to win her mother's approval. Romance? Yes.
"Fishing is the only livelihood for them and the only skill they know. They are victims of climate change," filmmaker Snehasis Das told reporter Annie Banerji for the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Simultaneously, I focus on how love - a relationship - can be disturbed due to calamities," said the 43-year-old director. "It is a lot about how they adapt to love and climate change. Their future hinges on adaptation."
With a nearly 500 km (300 mile) coastline, Odisha state is home to many coastal communities that depend on the sea.
The state is also one of India's most vulnerable to the effects of global warming, hit by rising sea levels, cyclones and floods, with vast stretches of the shoreline being lost to erosion. In June, the state government warned in a report that fishermen's catches could plummet with rising temperatures.
India faces the most severe threat from climate change, followed by Pakistan, the Philippines and Bangladesh, a survey showed in a March 2018 survey of 67 countries.
UPDATE:
Award-winning Indin documentary filmmaker Mr Snehasis Das and actress Miss Gargi Mohanty have joined hands for the upcoming film ‘Kokoli – fish out of water’.
Produced under the banner of The Naked Eye in association with Ckinetics, the film reflects the displacement of the fishermen community due to soil erosion in coastal Odisha.
“The impact of climate change has distressed people in the coastal areas. Though a love story, the film has a strong social message. To give a realistic feel, the film has been completely shot near the beach and Penthakata slums in Puri,” said Snehasis, who has earlier worked with Gargi in ‘Spandan’, based on organ donation.
The title ‘Kokoli’ derives from a sea fish of the same name, played by Gargi. “Her happiness has been ruined by calamities and her struggle is the story of the film,” added Snehasis, who is planning to send it for festivals apart from releasing it in theatres. The film’s cinematography has been done by Srikant Pattnaik while editing will be done by National Award winning Prashant Naik. The only song in the film has been taken from an earlier album of Odisha’s melody queen, Trupti Das.
“Climate change has affected many families. My love gets victimised when families shift back due to soil erosion. The struggle to get united with my lover against all hurdles makes the character stronger, which is the essence of the character,” said Gargi, whose claim to fame is ‘Krantidhara.’ Gargi has always chosen strong scripts over commercial stories.
“Good scripts have always attracted me as there is much to learn on the set. As an artiste, I want to grow with every single project,” added the actress, who discontinued the television mega serial which propelled her career, to give complete focus on the character of Kokoli.
When asked about the “literary” world ignoring science fiction and cli-fi as not being REAL literature, and given that, how to reach beyond sci-fi readers, Dan Bloom replied to sf literary critic Gautham Shenoy in India:
''As Amitav Ghosh brilliantly noted in his essay about literary matters in The Great Derangement in 2016, the gatekeepers of the literary world in London, New York and Mumbai have persisted over the years in trying to push sci-fi and cli-fi genre novels into the gutters and outhouses of book circles. But what they do when they do that is wrong and counterproductive. The borders between all genres now are less rigid than in the past and this allows readers outside normal sci-fi boundaries to ignore the literary gatekeepers and plunge in to climate related novels in whatever genre they choose without fear of the establishment.''
