Join the climate scavenger hunt
by Lauren James, plus Cynthia Zhang and Saul Tanpepper talk optimistic dystopias
My new book, Green Rising, is a climate thriller inspired by movements like Extinction Rebellion. I wanted to write about teenage activists who have the power to make real, decisive change in the climate crisis. It’s something which makes us all feel incredibly helpless, and climate fiction is often a depressing, dystopian look at our doomed future. I wanted to write a more optimistic, hopeful path forward to a better world, with clear instructions about what we should be doing next to fix the planet.
When I was writing Green Rising, I became really passionate about doing something about climate change – but I didn’t know how to actually help make a difference! So much of the climate crisis is beyond our control as individuals. Change relies on large corporations making changes to the status quo. But there are some things we can all do to help – most importantly, to start conversations about climate change and raise awareness of how urgent the situation is.
People tend to bury their head in the sand about climate change, because it often feels so hopeless. But it’s important that we’re all aware of the politics and ethics of climate solutions, because they’re going to determine the course of the next hundred years on Earth.
I challenge you to do something from my list below, and use it to talk to someone – whether it’s with your family, employer or educational institution – about how they can make a difference.
I can’t wait to see how many points you can get and all the actions you might take!
Pledge not to mow your lawn (10 POINTS)
Make space for insects by letting plants like daisies and white clover grow. These will produce nectar and habitats for pollinators, frogs and small mammals. If you feel self-conscious about leaving your lawn ‘messy’, then try to mow a border around the outside or a path through the middle. Avoid using pesticides too. Find out more here.
Go on a charity shop clothes hunt (10 POINTS)
Disposable, cheap fashion pieces are a major contributor towards wasted energy. If you buy new clothing, it’s best to invest in long-term, quality pieces that can be worn for many years. Even better, try to buy second hand! Visit your local charity shops to hunt down some new clothes, and post your haul online.
Air dry clothing instead of tumble drying (10 POINTS)
Save energy where you can by letting your new clothes haul air dry instead of tumble-drying them.
Register to Vote (10 POINTS)
It’s important to vote in all political elections you are able to, and make sure your representatives are aware that your vote is based on their climate policy views. If you haven’t yet registered to vote, you can do so here.
Switch to LED lightbulbs (10 POINTS)
Energy efficient LED bulbs can save energy compared to halogen/incandescent bulbs. Get 10 points for every bulb you replace!
Go foraging (20 POINTS)
From mushrooms to blackberries, there are lots of edible foods available in hedgerows and woodlands. Use this calendar to see what’s in season in your area. You can pick up some litter along the way, while collecting wild elderberries or sloes to make homemade cordials and liqueurs.
You can even collect some wildflowers to dry or press. Use flowers to decorate recyclable brown paper, and wrap up a bottle of homemade sloe gin as a personalised, sustainable Christmas or birthday present.
Make a bird bath or wildlife pond (20 POINTS)
Use a shallow, watertight bowl, bin lid or plant tray to make a water source for local wildlife – and wait to see what comes for a dip. Birds, hedgehogs, bees and frogs will be grateful!
Donate old books to a school or charity shop (10 POINTS)
I don’t know about you, but my shelves are filled with books I know I’m not going to read again. Why not make someone’s day by donating them to a local primary school or charity shop? Show off your contribution with a #unhaul post. If you’re a book blogger, showcase the eARCs you’re reading via Netgalley – which all saves on postage and printing of paper proofs!
Build a bird box or insect hotel (20 POINTS)
Use a wooden pallet, broken bricks/plant pots, twigs and leaves to create a structure for insects in a cool place in your garden. If you’re more crafty, you can make a bird box out of recycled materials like plastic drain pipes, paint cans and even old boots.
Decorate your wheelie bin (30 POINTS)
Use your wheelie bin, front window or garden fence to raise awareness of the climate battle by using one of Extinction Rebellion’s downloadable assets. You can make a stencil to use with spray-chalk or emulsion paint, or print out stickers and posters (I’m a big fan of the Declaration of Rebellion). Of course, these are council property so make sure you have permission first. You can even create a mural – paint beautiful art with a climate-based message on a wall!
Distribute outreach materials (30 POINTS)
Go the extra mile by giving your stickers or posters to friends, shops and community centres, encouraging them to showcase their views too. Extinction Rebellion are hosting lots of events this summer to encourage climate activism (check out their calendar here).
Volunteer for Extinction Rebellion (40 POINTS) –
As well as organising marches and protests, Extinction Rebellion are always looking for creative people to help with outreach, from musicians to graphic designers, photographers and social media content creators. Artists can help by making murals, stickering, flyposting, stencilling, chalking, banners and subvertising bus stops or billboards. Find other roles: https://volunteer.extinctionrebellion.uk/roles
Make a change to your diet (30 POINTS)
Whether that means cooking with non-dairy butter, drinking tea with oat milk once a day, or only eating beef once a month, you can incorporate small changes into your routine that will make a difference over the course of a lifetime. Use this guide to see which foods are in-season locally, so you can avoid hot-house produce grown out of season.
Change to a renewable energy utility supplier (30 POINTS)
Many utility suppliers offer a tariff which uses renewable energy sources such as wind or solar energy. Check your supplier’s website to see how to switch – more information can be found here.
Speak out! (10 POINTS)
If you’re nervous of getting caught seed-bombing, you can still help by signing petitions like this one to rewild Britain’s national parks, or write to your local MP to encourage your council to rewild vacant land (check what your council is doing here). You can find government climate petitions here. Extinction Rebellion’s big goal for 2021 is to demand that the UK Government stop all new fossil fuel project investments – every voice will help make that happen!
Speak to your employer/educator (50 POINTS)
If you work in local government or in the private sector, then part of your pension is almost certainly invested in coal, oil and gas companies. Write to the trustee or convenor of the pension scheme to ask them to divest from their harmful default options using a template.
You can also ask for more sustainable practises within companies or institutions, such as only offering beef once a week in canteens, asking for more reusable materials to be used in shipping, or reducing the amount of business trips taken by employees. It’s likely they’ve not considered the harm being done through their actions while working in a business-as-usual fashion.
If you work in publishing, join Writers Rebel’s campaign for recycled paper to be used in book printing. They’re looking for people to help with editorial support, administrative tasks, investigative research, campaign planning, event organisation and project management.
While writing Green Rising, I founded the Climate Fiction Writers League, an organisation of over a hundred climate writers. I run this newsletter in order to encourage readers to take action. Talking about climate change to your social media followers, or founding a climate activism group in your workplace, can help make people reconsider their actions.
Good luck on your climate missions, fellow activists! Green Rising is about politics, standing up for what you believe in and taking direct action. But remember: no amount of careful consumption can fix an industry-wide problem. The carbon emissions responsible for climate change are largely caused by industry, and can only be reduced through government action. This fight has to start with policy changes, immediately. So the most important thing you can do is vote, and make sure you know where your money is going – at every level. While magic is fantastical, the ability of humans to fix the climate emergency is not. I believe we can make a difference: and I’m excited to see how you go about it.
-lauren
You can find out more about Green Rising here.
Lauren James is the twice Carnegie-nominated British author of many Young Adult novels, including Green Rising, The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker and The Loneliest Girl in the Universe. She is also a Creative Writing lecturer, freelance editor, screenwriter. Lauren is the founder of the Climate Fiction Writers League, and on the board of the Authors & Illustrators Sustainability Working Group through the Society of Authors.
Her books have sold over a hundred thousand copies worldwide, been translated into six languages. The Quiet at the End of the World was shortlisted for the YA Book Prize and STEAM Children’s Book Award. She was born in 1992, and has a Masters degree from the University of Nottingham, where she studied Chemistry and Physics.
Optimistic Dystopias - a naïve contradiction?
Today, two authors discuss their writing: Cynthia Zhang, author of the adult contemporary fantasy novel After the Dragons, and Saul Tanpepper, whose story The Cloud Weaver’s Song won second place in Grist’s climate fiction competition Imagine 2200. Read or listen to a 30-min audio recording of the story online here.
You can read Sim Kern’s previous interview with the competition winner Lindsey Brodeck here.
ST: Hi, Cynthia! It’s so good to be able to meet and talk with you! I just finished After the Dragons and I just love so much about it, particularly that you chose to set it in Beijing. I’ve done a lot of traveling, but I’ve never been to the Far East, so I’m always excited to read stories set there. Given that you grew up in the United States, I’m curious why you decided to set your post-climate change story in China.
CZ: Hi Saul! Thanks so much for kicking off this conversation, and I’m so glad you enjoyed the novel!
I grew up in the US, but I was born in Beijing, so it’s always felt like a central part of my experience of China even though my parents aren’t actually from there. As a kid, our flights from the US always landed in Beijing, so my summer memories of visits home always began with Beijing, this old, busy city where I could read maybe half the billboards. So part of it is nostalgia, the desire to connect with a place that I am technically from but which (because my parents left for China when I was four) I have very few real concrete memories of.
Beyond personal history, Beijing felt like the natural setting for After the Dragons because it’s such a contradictory city. Which fits, since the People’s Republic of China is itself a deeply contradictory country itself—a communist state with one of the largest capitalist economies in the world, an old country eager to modernize, a rising superpower that still has a major chip on its shoulder because of nineteenth century colonialism. There’s a lot of wealth and innovation in Beijing, but there’s also a lot of poverty and suffering, much of which has been caused by development itself—I remember reading about the 2008 Beijing Olympics and how thousands of residents were displaced to make way for new buildings. Those were some of the tensions on my mind when trying to write about my relationship to a country I left when I was four.
And just logistically, Beijing works as a setting because for years the air pollution there was notoriously bad. I hear it’s been getting better in recent years though, which is very heartening to hear—obviously there are still plenty of problems to tackle, but it’s good to know that change is still possible, no matter how dire the circumstances seem.
I have a few questions about your work as well. First of all, congratulations so much on placing in the Imagine 2200 contest - that’s such a huge feat, and I’m glad it means that The Cloud Weaver’s Song can reach new readers, including me!
ST: Thanks, it really is an honor to be one of the twelve diverse storytellers featured in Fix’s inaugural climate fiction collection. At a time when doom and gloom pervades so much of the climate discussion, a project looking to inject hope and a sense of endless possibility is a refreshing change. So, what would you like to know?
CZ: Something I was struck by throughout the story was the constant tension between tradition and change. There’s something deeply ironic in the fact that tradition prevents the Sky People from listening to Semhar and adapting to new conditions when the Sky People’s way of life developed out of adaptation. At the same time, I can imagine that living in precarious circumstances would give tradition even more power—experimentation is difficult because the risks are so high, so it feels far safer to stick to what has already worked. I think this is a very relevant message for the current global response to climate change, but I’m wondering if you have anything to add on this topic. How do you think we can balance the need to change with the responsibility of listening to the past?
ST: When I set out to write the story, I didn’t consciously plan to pit the need to change against the Elders’ reluctance to embrace it. In retrospect, I suppose the theme arose organically out of the zeitgeist as it relates to our current climate challenges. There’s an intuitive sense that technology, the driving force behind change, enabled us to have such a large and rapid impact on the climate. Perhaps this explains why there’s such a strong resistance to employing new technologies as solutions. Realizing that we can’t roll the clock back, either, has paralyzed us into not doing anything at all. Of course, that’s not an option. We have to make changes, and we have to be both brave enough to accept this fact and creative enough to conceive of new technologies.
I don’t know if the organizers of the contest intended for us to avoid this dilemma by asking us to place our stories 200 years in the future. However, in doing so, they freed us to consider how a society might have already overcome the broader challenges of climate change without tasking us to explain how our characters overcame their reluctance to doing it. But it’s such a perennial conflict that I guess I simply couldn’t avoid making it a central theme in The Cloud Weaver’s Song.
It’s interesting that your own story employs some of these same tropes, albeit in a completely different and unique way, by incorporating a mythological element into a real world setting struggling with modern-day problems. And I just love how you juxtapose your vivid, colorful descriptions of the dragons against Beijing’s often drab and desolate backdrop. China’s cultural history with dragons is steeped in reverence. But you go further in your story: Dragons have become commodified. They’re kept as pets, they’re disposable, and they’re even used as tools for turning a profit. So, once more we have this same tension between honoring tradition and moving past it. But you take it even one more step by envisioning a way for dragons to become crucial to your characters’ story arcs. It’s… inspired.
CZ: Ah, thank you! I’m so glad you enjoyed the depiction of the dragons in this story—I’ve always had a soft spot for animal characters, and I’m glad these little scaly terrors could slither their way into your heart. Speaking of inspiration, I was really taken with the central technology of the webs in The Cloud Weaver’s Song. They’re so striking and unique—I don’t know that I’ve seen anything similar in sci-fi, though perhaps maybe in myth. Was there any particular inspiration for gathering water via webs? Something in nature, perhaps, or maybe new developments in tech?
ST: The ideas are based on existing technology. For example, meshed dew-catchers are currently employed to harvest water from the air in deserts around the world; and mech — or exo — suits, such as the one Sigourney Weaver’s character dons in Aliens, are an emerging technology.
As you know, I set my story in the Dannakil Depression of the Horn of Africa, one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. One of the themes the organizers had encouraged in our submissions was Afrofuturism, which is an expression of the sociopolitical, cultural, and technological experiences of the African people, particularly of its diaspora. Again, in hindsight, I think this was very clever of them, since, as a genre of fiction, Afrofuturism blends the modern with folklore and myth. Think of the Kingdom of Wakanda in Black Panther as a reference. So, yet again, there’s that dynamic between the old and the new. By calling Semhar’s and Alimira’s mech suits spider and termite skins, respectively, I wanted to invoke in the reader’s mind the unique cultural and mythological experiences of the people of the region.
You took a different approach in After the Dragons by highlighting the culture clash between your two main protagonists, Kai and Eli. But the friction between them extends to their personalities, as well. Kai is an artist with a strong sense of morality, while Eli is the scientist driven by his emotions. It’s a fascinating juxtaposition, since it switches the stereotypes of what motivates them. Was this intentional? And how does the interplay between the two of them – the conflict, tension, and ultimately their feelings for each other — help them finally come to agreement? And in your opinion, how does their reconciliation speak to whether or not our world can agree on much larger issues, such as climate change?
CZ: So, fun fact: both my parents are scientists and my brother is currently in med school, making me the familial black sheep who chose a very different (and far less stable) career path. When developing Eli and Kai as characters, I don’t think I was consciously thinking in terms of an art/science divide, but it’s possible that this is because that divide has always seemed a little artificial to me. Though I work in the humanities, I have a great deal of respect for what colleagues in STEM are doing, and in contrast to the STEM/humanities antagonism that many media stories emphasize, I try to focus on the ways both fields can learn from each other. Which I suppose is something that bleeds through in After the Dragons insofar as Eli and Kai are characters with very different backgrounds who learn from each other.
Overall, I see both Eli and Kai as characters who want to help the world around them, but they feel differently about their ability to enact meaningful change. While I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s naive per se, Eli is fundamentally more optimistic and better at managing despair. Tiny elementary schooler Eli rescues a box of abandoned kittens, and while that experience inspires disbelief about the kind of people who would do such a thing, he’s struck by the wonder of tiny creatures brought back to health by care and kindness. Kai does his best to mitigate injustice where he can, but he’s more prone to despairing over how much work there is to be done. And to be fair, there’s a lot of reason to despair! We need large-scale, structural change if we want to survive, and the vast majority of the people in power are simply not interested in that.
But even as we grieve and mourn what’s lost, I think it’s important to find ways of sustaining ourselves nonetheless. Of understanding the importance of protecting what is left and the ways in which our actions, even if they seem so small against the vastness of one hundred companies producing 71% of carbon emissions—God, just saying that makes me depressed. Still. Social movements have never been led by the rich and powerful, and that just means it’s all the more important for us to do what we can now.
Returning to The Cloud Weaver’s Song, I really love about your story is how hopeful it is. It’s not a naive hope—the People of the Sky have suffered significantly, and there’s suffering in their future if their leaders refuse to change—but just the idea of the Earth becoming green and inhabitable again. In wrestling with my own climate anxieties, I’ve tried to balance awareness of the planet’s fragility with an acknowledgement of nature’s resilience. Things are bad and they’re going to get even worse, but maybe at some point in the future we can figure things out. On the spectrum of doom to cautious hope, where would you place yourself and this story? And asking as someone who has a lot of anxiety about climate change, how do you manage climate anxiety/grief?
ST: I’m actually really optimistic about our chances. This may seem self-contradictory, since a lot of my fiction is dystopian and post-apocalyptic and incorporates elements of global warming and its dire consequences. It’s a reflection and exaggeration of the real world as it is today and of people’s fears. But there’s always an element of hope as well, an ability to overcome, which reflects my own personal sense of possibility. As a former scientist, I’m keenly aware of the power of technology and the human mind to conceive of ways to do things better… once we set our minds to the task. Right now, the world is in a bit of a slump due to Covid-19 and a string of natural disasters that have the media beating the gloom and doom drum. People are eager for more reasons to hope, and they’ll look to stories to deliver it to them.
Your characters’ challenges mirror this. They have a certain fragility, whether it’s physical or emotional, and a resignation to a fate that feels immutable. But it’s all overcome by the arrival of the right person at the right time, someone who is brave enough, and optimistic enough, to take chances and find solutions. Importantly, he doesn’t do it alone. That’s an important message for us all, because neither can we.
CZ: Yes, definitely! There’s the idea in a lot of dystopian fiction that under dire circumstances, humans will revert to a natural state of violence and selfishness. History will give you plenty of examples for that argument, but there are also just as many examples of how people have managed to band together despite dire circumstances. Working together is hard and complicated and frustrating, but it’s also our best bet for making it through this.
You can read The Cloud Weaver’s Song here, and find out more about After the Dragons here.
Saul Tanpepper is the author of the popular post-apocalyptic book series BUNKER 12 and ZPOCALYPTO, as well as the climate fiction stories “Leviathan” and “They Dreamed of Poppies.” A former combat medic and retired PhD scientist from Northern California, he is the co-author (as Kenneth James Howe) of the African diaspora memoirs “Relentless” and “I Will Not Grow Downward.”
Cynthia Zhang is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kaleidotrope, On Spec, Phantom Drift, and other venues. After the Dragons, her debut novel, was released in August 2021 with Stelliform Press. She is tragically online and can be found at cz_writes on Twitter.
News Round-up
Ten ways to confront the climate crisis without losing hope [Guardian]
Climate migration on five levels: a response to Undullah Street [Storythings]
Liverpool’s Theatre in the Rough has announced an open callout for short works exploring the Climate Crisis - open to female writers living in Liverpool