Scaling Climate Change: The Transformation of Place in Climate Change Fiction
This chapter analyzes how Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior communicate the global transformations that climate change involves and how place attachments and locally based forms of belonging are challe
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limate change is the epitome of a deterritorialized environmental crisis. With its diffuse relation between cause and effect, its latency and long timescale, as well as its global dimension, climate change eludes our perception even while it is omnipresent in media accounts and scientific reports. Whereas the effects of other environmental problems are often visible locally in the form of mine tailings, land erosion, or loss of biodiversity, the impact of climate change is cumulative and cannot be immediately felt. Moreover, so far it has been in the uninhabited areas of the world (the North and South Poles, high elevations, and coral reefs) where early signs of climate change have been detected. These geographically distant impacts “have to compete for attention with immediately felt physical needs, professional demands, economic necessities, or social obligations” (Moser 34)—often unsuccessfully. Contesting our focus on the local and going beyond national frames of meaning, an understanding of “global climate change” requires a new way of thinking—one that may involve the development of a global consciousness. This chapter focuses on two climate fiction novels and the narrative challenge of grasping the spatial dimension of global climate change. By examining Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, it explores how a planetary transformation such as climate change impacts our understanding of locality and place and illustrates how these climate fictions ultimately present novel ways of
© The Author(s) 2016 A. Mehnert, Climate Change Fictions, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40337-3_3
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envisioning climate change as the deterritorialized crisis it is. These novels acknowledge that climate change is a crisis caused by forces that transcend the local and thus can only be adequately understood from a global perspective. The literary works discussed here are innovative because they refrain from an advocacy of place and instead foster an awareness—not unlike Ursula Heise’s call for an “environmental world citizenship” (Sense of Planet 10)—of the interconnectedness and mutual conditioning of human and non-human, natural and cultural places worldwide. So far, our vision of climate change mainly derives from climatologists’ abstract simulations. Moreover, in her analysis and critique of experts’ abstract images in climate change discourses, Birgit Schneider explains that the problem of conveying the reality of climate change has mainly been one of scale: People observe daily weather changes, but they do not perceive climate— something which is, according to its modern definition, a statistically created abstract object of investigation with a long-term assessment period. Furthermore, people can only experience local weather, but not the global effects of climate change, which would require no less of them than to perceive the world as a whole.1 (82)
Schneider points to the extreme difficulty of representing something as elusive as climate change and exposes the epi
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