After a catastrophic storm destroys Melbourne, Isobel flees to higher ground with her husband and young daughter. Food and supplies run low, panic sets in and still no help arrives. To protect her daughter, Isobel must take drastic action.
The Glad Shout is an extraordinary cli-fi novel of rare depth and texture. Told in a starkly visual and compelling narrative, this is a deeply moving homage to motherhood and the struggles faced by women in difficult times.
Winner of the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction 2019
After a catastrophic storm destroys Melbourne, Isobel flees to higher ground with her husband and young daughter. Food and supplies run low, panic sets in and still no help arrives. To protect her daughter, Isobel must take drastic action.
The Glad Shout is an extraordinary novel of rare depth and texture. Told in a starkly visual and compelling narrative, this is a deeply moving homage to motherhood and the struggles faced by women in difficult times.
SEE COVER REVEAL HERE! The November 2019 issue of popular literary magazine #MCsweeneys will feature 10 cli-fi short stories with an introduction penned by NRDC director Susan Casey-Lefkowitz .@caseylefkowitz (but her Twitter feed has been inactive since May 2019
The November 2019 issue of popular literary magazine MCsweeney's will feature 10 cli-fi short stories with an introduction penned by NRDC director Susan Casey-Lefkowitz .
''For over 25 years, I have worked with partners from around the world as an environmental advocate. At NRDC, I have moved from working internationally to helping guide all of our work in the United States and around the world. I’m proud to fight beside our many partners around the world and here at home on behalf of people and the environment.'' Follow her on twitter @CaseyLefkowitz
2019 has been the year of over 10 special cli-fi magazine issues, from Guernica to High Country News, to Amazon, to many others! It's in the air! http://Cli-fi.net
Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University a Contributing Editor of HNN. For a list of his recent books and online publications click here. His most recent book is In the Face of Fear: Laughing All the Way to Wisdom (2019), which treats humor from a historical perspective.
In the 1960s, if you opposed racism or American killing in Vietnam, there was a counterculture to support you. Music, films, TV, clothing, hairstyles, social thinking, speech—a whole web of interrelated phenomena existed to help you oppose the dominant culture, “the system,” or the “establishment.”
Today we have just as much reason to protest as did the 1960’s dissidents. The Trump presidency, our climate crisis, and our senseless gun violence are alone enough to fuel a whole counterculture of outrage. But where are our balladeers like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, our concerts like Woodstock, our plays and films like Hair and The Graduate?
We are social creatures, and most of us are followers rather than leaders. Like fish in water, we need a sustaining element to surround us. We need a counterculture, or an opposing culture or way of life, to embolden our emotions and imaginations.
The counterculture of the 1960s was not perfect. It had its unthinking followers, its biases, its over-generalizations—like “Don’t Trust Anyone over 30”—yet it provided a strong alternative to the dominant consumer culture. Why did it disappear and where today is any new counterculture?
Mainly, that of the 1960s died because it lacked deep and sustaining roots. It was fueled by college students, civil rights activities, and opposition to the war in Vietnam. But students graduated and were absorbed into the “system,” into the tentacles of corporate America, where countercultural values and “hippie” styles were unwelcome. Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) was killed in 1968, depriving the civil rights cause of its most powerful leader. (That year also produced the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the election of Richard Nixon.) Finally, American troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and the military draft ended in the early 1970s.
What followed in the 1970s and 1980s was the disappearance of the 1960s counterculture and the absorption of many of its former adherents into the “system.” In his Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There(2000), conservative columnist David Brooks wrote: “We’re by now all familiar with modern-day executives who have moved from S.D.S. [a radical student organization that flourished in the 1960s] to C.E.O. . . . Indeed, sometimes you get the impression the Free Speech Movement [begun 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley] produced more corporate executives than Harvard Business School.”
In his The Culture of Narcissim(1978) historian Christopher Lasch identified a new type of culture that had arisen. It stressed self-awareness. But, unlike the counterculture of the 1960s, it did not oppose the capitalist consumer culture of its day, but rather meshed with it, goading “the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.”
Many of the former youth protesters of the 1960s participated in this “mass consumption,” as the growing consumer culture sold mass entertainment in new formats (including for music, films, and books) to young adults.
The last quarter century have brought little relief from our culture of consumption and narcissism. One of the period’s most notable changes has been the expansion of the Internet and social media. In her highly acclaimed These Truths: A History of the United States, historian Jill Lepore stated that “blogging, posting, and tweeting, artifacts of a new culture of narcissism,” became commonplace.
Although some have argued that the Internet has promoted a greater sense of community, Lepore is far from alone in emphasizing its encouragement of narcissism. In 2017, for example Newsweek stressed it in a piece entitled “Is Rampant Narcissism Undermining American Democracy?” Moreover, the previous year Americans chose for their president perhaps the most narcissistic and materialistic man to ever hold the office—Donald Trump.
Many Americans, however, oppose Trump. What prevents the emergence among them of a new counterculture to oppose him and the crass materialism he represents?
For one thing, the college students of today are vastly different than those of the 1960s, and so too is higher education. It is much more expensive; more students incur large debts to pay for it; and a much lower percentage of students major in the humanities. Meanwhile, our consumer culture continues to prompt aspirations to earn a “good salary,” and there are scant ways of doing so outside of our dominant corporate culture. We need money not only for food, cars, and houses, but also for things many younger people want like computers, Internet services, cell phones, and an increasing variety of leisure activities.
Moreover, stimulants like the 1960s civil rights struggles and opposition to the Vietnam War (and the draft) are gone. They can no longer galvanize young people. Yet, there remains one great hope, one phenomenon that could help a new counterculture burst forth—our present environmental crisis. Regardless of 2020 political results, this new birth could occur.
Such a counterculture could develop out of seeds planted by individuals like the German/English economist and environmentalist E. F. Schumacher and Kentucky writer Wendell Berry, plus two more recent seed-planters, 350.org founder Bill McKibben and Pope Francis. Moreover, now in 2019 there are signs that such seeds are beginning to sprout.
Schumacher was a hero to many of those influenced by the original protest movement of the 1960s. Indeed one of them, Theodore Roszak, who wrote The Making of a Counter Culture(1969), also authored the Introduction to Schumacher’s popular 1973 work Small Is Beautiful.
In it and other works of the 1970s, Schumacher criticized modern industrial societies for “incessantly stimulating greed, envy, and avarice,” for preparing people to become “efficient servants, machines, ‘systems,’ and bureaucracies,” and for driving the world toward an environmental crisis. Instead of focusing education on career preparation in such societies, he believed it should help us answer questions like “What is our purpose in life?” and “What are our ethical obligations?”
Four years after Schumacher’s death in 1977, Wendell Berry gave the first Annual E. F. Schumacher lecture. In it he praised Schumacher’s adherence to spiritual values. In 1983, in his essay “Two Economies,” Berry quoted Schumacher’s belief expressed in “Buddhist Economics” that the aim of such an economics should be “to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.” In his 2012 Jefferson Lecture, Berry suggested that our corporate capitalist consumer culture remained dominant and heavily implicated in our present climate crisis.
The 2009 Schumacher lecture was delivered by Bill McKibben, one of the USA’s “most important environmental activists.” That same year, along with Berry, he protested at a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. The previous December, the two men had sent out a letter noting the global-warming danger of continuing reliance on coal—the “only hope of getting our atmosphere back to a safe levels . . . lies in stopping the use of coal to generate electricity.” In September 2019, McKibben’s 350.org co-organized a massive global climate strike involving 4 million people in 163 countries.
In 2015, McKibben lavishly praised Pope Francis’s environmental encyclical and ended his essay writing, “This marks the first time that a person of great authority in our global culture has fully recognized the scale and depth of our crisis, and the consequent necessary rethinking of what it means to be human.”
In the encyclical itself, the pope stated, “the problem is that we still lack the culture needed to confront this crisis,” and there is an “urgent need for us to move forward in a bold cultural revolution.” And like other critics of modern narcissism, he bemoaned “today’s self-centred culture of instant gratification,” and of “extreme consumerism.”
Thus, Schumacher, Berry, McKibben, and Pope Francis all share the essential view that today’s consumer culture needs to be replaced by one featuring, in the pope’s words, a “spirituality [that] can motivate us to a more passionate concern for the protection of our world.”
The cultural critic Raymond Williams once wrote that “a culture, while it is being lived, is always in part unknown, in part unrealized.” Hence, we may not yet realize that the four individuals mentioned above have been seed-sowers for an emerging new countercultural movement. But there are some promising signs.
Regarding music, one recent article notes: “2019 has been a year of youth climate strikes and record-setting heatwaves, and—probably not coincidentally—it’s also the year that pop music stars started speaking about climate change en masse. . . . Now we’re seeing actual, quality pop music talking about the climate crisis from artists like Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey, and (he claims) Lil Nas X.”
In film, Paul Schrader’s First Reformed(2017) was a first rate exploration of the effects of climate change on an environmental activist and his minister (Ethan Hawke).
Literature has produced more numerous examples of climate concern. Berry, author of novels, poems, and essays, has long written about the health of the earth and planet, and in recent decades about climate change (see, e.g., here and here). It is difficult to think of any other major American cultural figure who for so long has championed the type of values needed for a countercultural challenge to today’s consumer culture.
In 2000, prolific fiction writer T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth depicts the world in 2025-26: “Global warming. I remember the time when people debated not only the fact of it but the consequence. . . . [Now] it’s like leaving your car in the parking lot in the sun all day with the windows rolled up and then climbing in and discovering they’ve been sealed shut—and the doors too. . . . That’s how it is.”
In September 2019 another well-known novelist, Jonathan Franzen, wrote about the coming of a “climate apocalypse.”
Among poets, already in 1985 Carl Dennis wrote the amazingly perceptive “The Greenhouse Effect.” More recently, the influential Poetry Foundation has gathered together “environmental poetry [that] explores the complicated connections between people and nature, often written by poets who . . . are serving as witnesses to climate change while bringing attention to important environmental issues and advocating for preservation and conservation.” The Foundation collection also includes essays on ecopoetry, an important new trend dealing with climate change and other environmental topics.
Come gather 'round, people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown . . . .
In light of the rising sea levels produced by global warming, the lines remain relevant today. So too do his words
Come Senators, Congressmen Please heed the call Don't stand in the doorway Don't block up the hall.
A new counterculture could help lessen such blockage. As Schumacher, Berry, McKibben, and Pope Francis have all indicated it can embrace many traditional values while still being progressive and forward looking. But, as Francis, indicates it must reject our unsustainable “throwaway” consumer culture.
Any Opinion on Climate Strikes Should Not Matter… Unless Given by A Person Participating in It
by Aditi Kale
Oct 20, 2019
AUTHOR ID:Ms. Aditi Kale is an independent researcher and a writer in popular science. She has an academic background in biodiversity and is interested in ecology, evolution and climate change.
As a researcher and a writer interested in observing things and exploring them, I am caught between Climate Strikers and their Critics and feel a bit dizzy not knowing where to look or where to stop.
My verdict?
The Climate Strikers win this time round, because their narrative centres around science and climate justice and not on interpreting or counter-arguing someone else’s perspective.
The question that haunts me now is – is the resistance to Climate Action shifting from Climate Scepticism to leaning on Climate Strike Scepticism?
What can be done to ensure that this does not happen?
At an individual level, the answer for me is writing about it. So here it goes…
The Global Climate Strike has already created a momentum in Climate Change Awareness like no other human endeavour has. The likely reason for this is that it is supported by youth and people who have less of hidden agendas and vested interests than others. Although their logic considers money and politics, it does not centre everything else around it. The first thing everyone must understand and respect is that the strikes are not happening because of compulsion from some outside authority. They are voluntary and self-motivated in nature. Hence, they are personal too, and have lots of stories behind them.
It is an appeal and demand from people who are going to spend the rest of their lives dealing with the crisis. It involves people of any age group who sleep with anxiety and wake up with the apprehension of what they may have to face next. That should be considered in any narrative addressing the movement, regardless of the narrative’s leanings.
It is unfair to target specific individuals in a people’s movement. The movement should be judged for the purpose it is trying to achieve and not for other things which it does not address. The movement is one way to draw attention to solutions and changes required to face the bigger global issue we are all experiencing. It does not even claim to be the only one solution. And yet, it has already proven its mettle.
The terms ‘Climate Justice’ and ‘Uniting behind Science’ and recognising the current circumstances as a ‘Climate and Ecological Crisis’; all appear to be fair claims given the facts and current climate impacts. The movement has helped bring these universal issues to the forefront. People from different regions have united for a common cause and are expressing their concerns and solidarity. It may be noted that, most of them are also involved in individual and community actions when they are not striking. However, they also have a realisation that the momentum required for urgent action is much larger than what an individual or some scattered efforts can achieve.
If one looks at majority of narratives against the Climate Strikes, they are not coming from co-sufferers or co-strikers, but from people who depend upon media or secondary information to know about the strikes. Unfortunately, they are missing on the most authentic source: the people involved, as well as social media, where the Strikers express their thoughts.
Nevertheless, the mere fact that people are noticing the demands made by the Climate Activists, irrespective of whether they are supporting or opposing them, marks the success of the movement.
I sincerely recommend just 3 considerations for anyone writing or reporting about Climate Strikes or Climate Strikers –
Empathise with the agony of the individuals who are going to spend the rest of their lives (sometimes, 75% or more) worrying about and facing unprecedented climatic events.
Participate in the strikes near you to understand the points raised by the strikers and converse with them to learn and share the knowledge that exists.
Give, at least, some benefit of doubt to the Climate Strikers, that they may know more or have a better realisation than what they are given credit for.
Any comment, criticism or compliment which is given after these 3 considerations will ensure a more robust analysis of all the aspects of the movement.
This Climate Movement is big enough to survive on its own, even in the face of criticism. However, it will be a loss to anyone who cares for people or environment to not use its momentum or make it stronger with personal wisdom.
As an individual who has attended three Climate Strikes, the only recommendation I would like to give the Climate Strikers is –
You are going to face steeper hurdles as the movement grows bigger, so sharpen your knowledge of the global and local context to strengthen your cause. Once the movement accelerates Climate Action, this will also help you distinguish between the bad, the good and the best climate-friendly activities.
Ultimately, more than on which Climate Action one chooses, our survival as a species and as a society will depend on whether or not we are able to recognise a crisis and act on it.
“Climate Change is the most important issue we face,” according to the Secretary General of the U.N., Antonio Guterres. Richmond Times reported on, Oct. 18, 2019, that Climate Change will not be on the agenda at the 2020 G-7 Summit, according to the Trump White House. If Trump gets his way, the World’s most important leaders will meet in 2020, and not deliberate on the most perilous problem in the World, today. Mr. President, we respectfully tweet: ‘you are an idiot.’ In this article, the Times reported that ‘France, Italy, Japan, Canada, Great Britain and Germany are raising concerns that Climate Change will be left out of the meeting.’ These leaders have apparently read the tea leaves from their alarmed and protesting citizenry. The Times article quoted the French Finance Minister, Brun Le Maire, as stating: “the first matter of concern for our populations in Europe and the U.S. is Climate Change; I really think that the responsibility of the most powerful states around the world is to address the issue of concern to our populations.” Le Maire asks additionally, “What would the relevance of the G-7 summit be, if these leaders did not address the most important topic of the day?” Can we vote this Minister in as our new, prescient President? If Webster was fishing for a new illustration of absurd, it couldn’t do better than Trump’s indifferent idiocy about Climate Change. His improvident vision for America borders on derelict madness, or maybe worse, dereliction of duty(by the Commander and Chief no less). He kept the discussion of Climate Change out of this year’s G- 7 Summit, too. Incredulously, he also pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord before that; and intends to increase production of fossil fuels, which any fool knows, drives Climate Change. The severity of the Climate Change crisis could not be greater. A consortium has been organized, just recently, called Covering Climate Now, consisting of 250 newsrooms in 32 countries, with a combined reach of 1 billion people, to attempt to ameliorate this monstrous problem. Apparently, from what Trump has not done about Climate Change, it will take the sound speakers used by Metallica, placed in the oval office, to get his seemingly blinded attention. What sign from above is Trump waiting for? Nine out of the ten hottest days have occurred during the last 15 years, with records going back to 1880. One might suppose that Trump’s plan is for all of us to go to the beach on the really hot days. What about the dire concerns of our globally radicalized youth; radicalized because, as Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old
Swedish Climate Activist said, to the leaders of the world, “you have
failed us.’ With those words we can understand why the terrified
youth of the world are marching, everywhere, as fervently as they
are tossing and turning in their tremulous dreams. Once again,
Thunberg, the vociferous tribe’s spokesperson, said caustically and
ever so sadly, “you have stolen my dreams.”
She bluntly railed, from the U.N. pedestal, against the leaders of
the world, with a pugnacious grimace, repeatedly saying, “How dare
you,” fail to act on our behalf. Her plaintive howl was for a judicious
resolution to Climate Change. She was implicitly saying, we are your
children: ‘remember you do not inherit the Earth from your
ancestors; you borrow it from your children.’ Let us in the U.S. make
a chorus of Thunberg’s chant: ‘How dare you, Trump, ignore the
sinking ship of state, and the children on it, as the sky fills with
carbon dioxide.’
As I have already said, Thunberg is from Sweden, and after
listening to her speak, a cross between Alice in Wonderland and
Margret Thatcher of Great Britain, pint-size with a petite
comportment, her visceral anger is all the stature she needs; she
may have been from the land of neutrality but she is not neutral; she
is a fierce opponent of mankind’s complacency. Trump, you may
have impulsively withdrawn from Syria, but you are not going to be
able to retreat so recklessly from addressing Climate Change. If
nothing else, Thunberg will expose your poisonous lassitude like
Rachel Carson did pesticides.
That’s a weapon against Climate Change we don’t have yet, an
expose like Silent Spring. The lack of legislative action is the cry of
the youth in the streets. Silent Spring was published in September
of 1962, and by the end of the year, 40 bills had been introduced in
State Legislatures for the regulation of pesticides. Shakespeare
wrote that some of the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune(youth’s treacherous birthright) were the law’s delay and the
insolence of office. Silent Spring made swift inroads against both of
those resistances to progress. Trump, your obstructions to fighting
Climate Spring now, when it is achievable, and your
contemptuousness of the youth who are not waiting any longer for
action, is not less than a crime against humanity, which will
cripplingly haunt your legacy, if nothing else does, first.
Winston Churchill said at the start of WWII, a war not unlike our
engagement with Climate Change: “We shall fight in the seas and
oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength
in the air, and defend our (land), whatever the cost may be; we shall
fight on the beaches, fight in the fields and streets, fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender.” Trump, the children of this world are not
waiting for you to act. They have their marching orders. They will
march on your White House like the conquering soldiers they intend
to be, and fulfill the words prophetic words of Churchill: “I have…full
confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the
best arrangements are made…we shall prove ourselves…able to
defend our(homes) and to ride out the storm(we face)…and outlive
the menace of (climate change).”
AUTHOR ID:Daniel Zeigler is working on a cli-fi novel-in-progress about climate change risks and issues and he hopes his book will be received by readers and critics as a new kind of ''SILENT SPRING'' [by Rachel Carson] about climate change. He lives is Virginia.
Novel SUICIDE CLUB 
& 
+ translations / Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers
