Bias in the Anthropocene

Any hypothesis requires bias. You have to commit to saying, 'this is what I think will happen,' and that hunch then, must be rooted in your prior beliefs (to some degree at least). This has been a difficult reality for me to come to grips with. I began the research process believing that the representation of a near-future society that adapts to the challenges of climate change and reframes its cultural position towards the non-human world would instil action and hope in the reader. I wished to avoid the common trope of dystopian writing in climate fiction, such as The Windup Girl (Bacigalupi, 2009)and The Road (McCarthy, 2006), and instead focus on a more (what I believed) realistic future that successfully overcomes the challenges of climate change and move on to a better future. To achieve this, I planned to write a narrative following five everyday Australians as they move from the present into the future.

This 'hunch' however, reflected my position as a white Australian, and my (hopefully unconscious) bias that the status quo should remain. A lot of dystopian climate fiction depicts, what Hsu and Yazell (2019) call 'the third-worlding of the West as a result of apocalyptic social collapse,' (p350). The ‘dystopia’ in my planned novel, and the fear that I wished to instil in the reader as a motivator, was the threat of middle-class Australians being plunged into poverty; but who, in the end, still get by maintaining their middle-class status. This projects the western experience of climate change onto the entire world and silences the non-western experience which is already experiencing the devastating consequences of climate change. Maintaining the current status quo wouldn’t only oppress non-white people through their current environmental location, but also through gender, race and class (Plumwood, 1994). In many cases (such as Indigenous Australians) life has resembled a dystopia since colonialism.

Perhaps my idea for a novel reflects my inability, as Fisher (2009) would put it, to imagine a world beyond capitalism. Similar to what he argues, my idea for a cli-fi novel, while initially seeming like an alternative idea, would not exist outside mainstream culture or thinking at all. How about we continue as normal while voting for progressive parties and switching to renewable energies? I thought. Ah, such an easy solution to the world’s problems. But (as Fisher discusses about other texts, such as Wall-E), my narrative does not tackle any of the fundamental problems behind climate change, it would not explore replacements to capitalism but only mitigations of its worst excesses (Fisher, 2009).

The closest narrative to what I had imagined writing was James Bradley's Clade, where a small cast of middle-class Australians try to survive the climate catastrophe (Bradley, 2015). They experience floods, technological change, societal violence, but ultimately continue to live out their lives, ending the story with VR headsets; grown children with university educations and stable jobs; and aliens who, when they make contact, remind the reader that they are part of a collective 'humanity.' Humanity that, of course, is represented by characters who probably suffered little when compared to their colonised neighbours.

As Fisher explains, all attempts at anti-capitalist writing are absorbed into capitalism: sold, distributed, watched, consumed, and may even pacify the audience by performing anti-capitalism for them (Fisher, 2009). Much of what Fisher explains in Capitalist Realism reflects the current state of climate change, for example, he states that 'what needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation,' which could be said — and has been by thinkers such as Morton (2013) in Hyperobjects — about the state of climate change. Capitalism and anthropogenic climate change seem to mirror each other perfectly; one could be mistaken for talking about one or the other, because in some ways climate change is the result of the western capitalism machine: to consume as if the world's resources were infinite, and to fall pray in our fiction to the dream that 'western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products,' (Fisher, 2009).

Any writer who tackles climate change (or capitalism) runs into the reality that their book will be made from paper (from cutting down trees), distributed by trucks that run on oil, and sold as a part of capitalism. How can one make any meaningful critique? Well, this is the cavern that post-modernists so often find themselves in. Post-modernists have, as Plumwood said, ‘erected a sign pointing out the danger, but have not yet discovered another path,’ (Plumwood, 1994). Plumwood’s (1994) perspective is different to Fisher’s however, she argues that not all conflict should be reduced to class conflict; that this analysis ‘treats one form of domination as central and aims to reduce all other to subsidiary forms of it which will “wither away” once the “fundamental” form is overcome,’ (p5). This being problematic because it ignores the social-cultural underpinning capitalism, mainly that of hierarchical thinking, (i.e. humans are superior to nature, some humans are more deserving than others etc.), and that reducing all thinking to class critique suggests that all forms of human-to-human hierarchy must be eliminated before achieving any ecological justice (Plumwood, 1994, p15). On a more practical note, Cli-fi writer’s find an even deeper cavern to fall into: motivating readers into political action. A survey of cli-fi readers found that 73% were already concerned with climate change, that conservative readers responded poorly, and that the novels themselves were associated with intense negative emotions (Schneider-Mayerson, 2018).

*

So, again, I’m left with the question: what to write? To begin with, shaming the reader should not be the goal. Most of all because shame is a poor tool for inciting action, as illustrated in Schneider-Mayerson (2018) survey of climate fiction readers. Shame, when boiled down, reinforces a dualist mentality that Plumwood warns against, an in vs out group; these are the values of the group, and you are inferior if you don’t follow them. There must be a safe space, where there isn’t an expected knowledge and it’s okay to make mistakes. Many ecocritics assert that the realist novel is inadequate for achieving this task and that alternative forms must be created to respond to the challenge (Ghosh, 2017; Nahrung, 2019; Trexler, 2015).

Under the critics who influenced this reflection (Hsu & Hazel, Fisher, Plumwood, Trexler, and Ghosh), the novels I can learn most from are post-colonial. Xausa (2021) argues that post-colonial literature, particularly the work of Alexis Wright (Carpentaria and The Swan Book), embody the form the new environmental novel must take. Both novels, she argues, ‘address the alignment of ecological imperialism, environmental racism, denial of rights to Indigenous People, and give voice to the slow violence that led to the catastrophe,’ (Xausa, 2021, p115). While Wrights work are overtly environmental, other post-colonial works also explore the slow violence of the environment by colonialism (Things Fall Apart by Achebe, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez, Mullimbimby by Lucashenko etc.). The form of these novels is often circular, with past actions blending into the present; focus on more collective narratives (rather than individualist ones); and include representation of indigenous cultural and religious beliefs as literal (often termed magical realism, or Indigenous realism).

Fiction is going to be an essential tool in overcoming climate change because it is both a scientific and cultural problem (Andersen, 2019). And the act of writing itself, especially when done by a person of privilege, must undergo cycles of writing, researching, editing, re-writing, researching… etc. Such reflection is always challenging, and sometimes frustrating, but always valuable. In almost all cases it will only strengthen the work.

References

Andersen, G. (Ed.). (2019). Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis: A New Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene. Routledge. https://doi.org/https://doi-org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/10.4324/9780429342493.

Bacigalupi, P. (2009). The Windup Girl. Night Shade Books.

Bradley, J. (2015). Clade. Penguin.

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism : Is there no alternative? John Hunt Publishing.http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=954706

Ghosh, A. (2017). The great derangement : climate change and the unthinkable (Paperback edition. ed.). The University of Chicago Press.

Hsu, H. L., & Yazell, B. (2019). Post-Apocalyptic Geographies and Structural Appropriation. The Journal of Transnational American Studies, 10(2). https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/post-apocalyptic-geographies-structural/docview/2335629436/se-2

https://libkey.io/libraries/772/openurl?genre=article&au=Hsu%2C+Hsuan+L%3BYazell%2C+Bryan&aulast=Hsu&issn=&isbn=&title=Post-Apocalyptic+Geographies+and+Structural+Appropriation&jtitle=The+Journal+of+Transnational+American+Studies&pubname=The+Journal+of+Transnational+American+Studies&btitle=&atitle=Post-Apocalyptic+Geographies+and+Structural+Appropriation&volume=10&issue=2&spage=&date=2019&doi=&sid=ProQuest

McCarthy, C. (2006). The Road. Alfred A. Knopf.

Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects

Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt4cggm7

Nahrung, J. P. (2019). Watermarks: Science Fiction, Mitigation and the Mosaic Novel Structure in Australian Climate Fiction University of Queensland].

Plumwood, V. (1994). Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Taylor & Francis Group. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=168813

Schneider-Mayerson, M. (2018). The Influence of Climate Fiction: An Empirical Survey of Readers. Environmental Humanities, 10(2), 473-500. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-7156848

Trexler, A. (2015). Anthropocene Fictions

The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. University of Virginia Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x1r99

Xausa, C. (2021). Climate Fiction and the Crisisof Imagination:Alexis Wright’s Carpentariaand The Swan Book. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 8(2), 99-119.