It all depends on a story

By Steve Willis and Jan Lee, authors of Fairhaven - A Novel of Climate Optimism

Two co-authors, Steve Willis and Jan Lee, discuss their novel Fairhaven - A Novel of Climate Optimism.

Steve Willis: According to May data from Copernicus, over the previous 12 months the average temperature worldwide was more than 1.6°C (2.7°F) higher than it was at the dawn of the industrial age. It’s getting hard to stay optimistic!

Jan Lee: Yes, the dominant narrative in the media would have us believe that there’s little we can do to stop the apocalypse, and popular books and movies are furthering this narrative. It started with The Drowned World and continued with The Water Knife. And the first chapter of The Ministry for the Future gave me nightmares!

Steve Willis: But why should we care about these depressing fictional stories, when the facts are depressing enough?

Jan Lee: These stories matter, because popular fiction and film have a unique power to impact public opinion. And they can even change history. We know this is true because it’s happened before. In the 19th century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe changed opinions about slavery; it is sometimes called “the book that started the [Civil] War”. In the early 20th century, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, with its depiction of unsanitary meat packing, was named “... the final precipitating force behind both a meat inspection law and a comprehensive food and drug law” according to the Food and Drug Administration. More recently, the sitcom Will and Grace transformed Americans’ opinions on same sex relationships. According to a study at UCLA, “increased viewing frequency and parasocial interaction were found to correlate with lower levels of sexual prejudice — a relationship that was most pronounced for those with the least amount of social contact with lesbians and gay men.”

Steve Willis: “Will and Grace” stands out among these examples because it portrays a positive, optimistic situation rather than a negative warning. You and I both have children, and as parents we know that positive reinforcement gets better results than threats do! It’s the same with climate change: dystopian cli-fi stories frighten and depress readers and viewers. It can even contribute to the increasing phenomenon of climate anxiety, especially in children. On the other hand, positive portrayal of climate-friendly action can encourage readers to do the same. A favorite quote of mine is from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, “One should be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

Jan Lee: That’s the attitude taken by our main character, Grace Chan. She has experienced the consequences of climate change herself, in the (very real) 2017 floods in Penang, Malaysia, where she lives, and she suffers from climate anxiety. But she finds like-minded people who are also “determined to make things otherwise”, and she gets to work: first on a coastal adaptation project, and later on an ocean restoration project.

Steve Willis: Grace Chan is an everywoman; the idea is to show that there is a role for anyone, whether you’re a student, an engineer, an accountant, or a fisherman.

Jan Lee: As someone who worked for many years in corporate affairs and sustainability, I have yet to see my job portrayed in a book or movie! But seeing people like you represented in fiction can change behavior. We were both impressed by the University of Southampton study from 2023, where 50 readers were asked to read a book ("Habitat Man") showcasing everyday people engaging in green behaviors, and all but one of the readers changed their behavior on at least one activity. I’ll also share one of my favorite quotes, from science fiction great Ursula K. Leguin, about this enormous potential: “The exercise of imagination … has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.”

Steve Willis: It’s one of the reasons I first started writing climate fiction – as an exercise to envision a scenario where we actually solve this global problem. I’ve spent my career as an engineer working on huge projects, but no one has ever tackled something this big; we are in uncharted territory. Writing out ideas for major projects that address climate change helps tease out important project details that would be otherwise hidden, and allows you to think outside the box for solutions.

Jan Lee: We’ve incorporated several of these solutions into the plot of the book. Why don’t you describe them?

Steve Willis: The name of the book, Fairhaven, is taken from the name of a fictional coastal adaptation project in Penang, Malaysia. It’s inspired by the land reclamation projects in the Netherlands, and one of our characters is a Dutch engineer at the Fairhaven project.

Jan Lee: Grace’s boyfriend, Hans.

Steve Willis: Yes! Although you’ll have to read the book to find out what happens with that romance. The Fairhaven project they’re working on would build two high dikes at the north and south ends of the mud flats that currently separate Penang island from the Malaysian mainland. Then the mud flats would be drained and a new city built on top of it.

Jan Lee: Fairhaven is an adaptation project, which will help communities protect themselves against the sea level rises that are already happening. But in the book we also portray a project that will buy some time for us, as our global, large-scale energy transition takes hold.

Steve Willis: Another character, Kenji Fujimoto, is a friend of Hans. Kenji is working on a project to create more sea ice in the Arctic by spraying water into the air on top of the existing ice. This will in turn generate albedo that can reflect solar radiation and slow down warming. In reality, there are four teams working on projects like this right now, but not yet at scale.

Jan Lee: Even at scale, stopgap measures will only get us so far. We also need to leverage the resources we have, like ocean biomass, to actively absorb CO₂.

Steve Willis: That’s where the Sea Orchards project comes in. During my many years working on oil platforms and other remote sites, I frequently observed the phenomenon that the legs of oil platforms end up with a huge amount of marine life beneath, even as the over-trawled areas around them are nearly empty. The Sea Orchards project takes that concept and runs with it: by building large vertical “legs” with buoys and logs, and adding nutrient, we can create a habitat for marine life that starts from the bottom up. Rice straw feeds the microscopic organisms, which feed the next level of life, and so on, right up to the larger fish and other sea life.

Jan Lee: You and I are both based in Asia, and one thing people always claim to have in common here is being very “practical”. The practical question a lot of people ask is: will it work?

Steve Willis: Yes. What we portray in the book are real, workable solutions in their scaled-up, implementation phase.

Jan Lee: They are also financially viable. One of the great things about writing this book together is that you and I were able to draw a lot of detail from our respective careers. In your case, you specified things like the types of equipment used, the sounds and smells of an oil platform, and the project planning needed for an initiative of this size. And from my side, I was able to work out who the important characters would be, and how such projects would be structured and approved, because I’ve been in corporate boardrooms where such decisions are being made.

Steve Willis: We started writing the book in 2023, and things change fast in this world. When I first contacted you on LinkedIn, we hadn’t yet blown past the 1.5 degree threshold yet. Do you think we’ll make it?

Jan Lee: The characters in our book Fairhaven do not have an easy time of it, and neither will we. As in the book, things will get worse before they get better. But our characters persevere and succeed, because they can envision a future where it all works out in the end. There’s a happy ending to look forward to.

Steve Willis: I agree. We have seen too many “Mad Max” futures in fiction. With our book, we hope that readers will come for the story, but leave with a message: a Fairhaven future is not only preferable, but possible.

Buy Fairhaven now.

Jan Lee (pen name) has worked in corporate affairs and sustainability in the Asia Pacific region since 1994. She previously led ESG and communications in Asia Pacific for a major technology company, as well as Corporate Citizenship and External Communications Asia Pacific for the world’s leading chemical company. Since taking a step back from the corporate world in 2022, she has become a full-time sustainability activist and writer.

She is also an award-winning science fiction writer. She is the co-author, with Steve Willis, of “Fairhaven – A Novel of Climate Optimism” (Habitat Press UK), a winner in the Green Stories contest. Her work has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized several times in the “Writers of the Future” contest. She is Editor-in-Chief of The Apostrophe, the quarterly magazine of the Hong Kong Writers Circle.

She currently acts as a senior advisor for a number of environmental and social activist organizations, as well as co-chairing the Energy & ESG Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce of Hong Kong.

Steve Willis is an engineer and innovator who works on large-scale climate solutions and environmental projects. During the covid lockdowns wrote short, climate fiction stories which explored potential positive outcomes to the climate crisis.
Steve’s heavy industrial background is combined with sharp observation, a vivid imagination, relentless persistence and a talent for lucid dreaming. He uses these unusual skills to continuously seek massive scale climate solutions, to identify climate start-up opportunities and to write stories which capture some of the essence of working on the climate crisis challenge.