{"id":1273,"date":"2024-02-21T22:33:43","date_gmt":"2024-02-22T03:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/?p=1273"},"modified":"2024-05-28T08:14:37","modified_gmt":"2024-05-28T12:14:37","slug":"post-2-in-the-series-from-the-preface-to-upcycling-ecopoetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/?p=1273","title":{"rendered":"Post #2 in the series, from the preface to Upcycling Ecopoetry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cChange the story\u201d doesn\u2019t guarantee success.  There\u2019s plenty of contemporary skepticism about what Parul Sehgal, Amit Chaudhuri, Christian Salmon, and others have called the contemporary \u201cnarrative turn\u201d in many fields, including medicine, religion, and law, not to mention cultural studies like literary and art criticism, or ecopoetics.  Stories seeming to bring climate apocalypse into focus can easily paralyze us with despair or numb us into indifference.  And\u2014just as dangerous\u2014stories promoting \u201cgood\u201d outcomes can tempt us to buy their cheap therapy, feel-good exercises to make us feel better and avoid facing the problems.  Doubts about stories and the ethical value of the imagination go back a long way\u2014to Plato at least.[i]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, it\u2019s clear we humans need to be able to carry on a conversation about how, as a species, we are living in a way that is poisoning the Earth and other species on it, not just causing a lot of misery to our fellow humans.  Those of us who live in \u201cdeveloped\u201d countries are the ones chiefly at fault\u2014though many, perhaps the majority, refuse to accept that inconvenient truth.  Rishika Pardikar reminds us that the nations of the Global North (Europe, North America, Asia, and the Gulf states) are currently responsible for 92 percent<\/em> of all carbon emissions.[ii]<\/sup><\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why can\u2019t we also talk about how some people have worked out ways to live that aren\u2019t<\/em> so damaging to the planet?  Those who have done so seem to have a pretty good understanding about why inequality in past and present human societies is linked to peoples\u2019 views about \u201cnature\u201d and how they treat it.  Extraction economies that view nature as simply full of dangers to control and resources to plunder also\u2014no surprise\u2014tend to treat \u201cforeign\u201d other people in the same way.  Story-worlds like Dune<\/em>, Avatar,<\/em> or The Last of Us<\/em>; the many iterations of the Star Wars<\/em> universe, including The Mandalorian<\/em>; or the fictions of Octavia Butler and N. K. Jemisin\u2014they all explore on cosmic scales the connections between empire, resource exploitation, climate disasters, slavery, genocide, and hybridized new species.  They also imagine how small bands of rebels or exiles might survive, and what factors would make rebellions successful against top-down imperial systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We like to think there\u2019s a tech fix for the climate problem, even though tech innovations in the past generated unintended consequences\u2014including some of the causes for why we\u2019re in a new fix now.  Some like to believe in engineering climate miracles so we can go on living the way we are; we\u2019ll just need to scale up \u201ccleaner\u201d sources of energy and invent clever ways to decrease pollution and \u201ccapture\u201d carbon.  But tech climate-change solutions are easily gamed; corporations, including banks, have an incentive to profit off the new even as they continue to support fossil-fuel production.  We need to engineer changes, no question\u2014but we need also to be sure real improvements in global climate futures are being accomplished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The planet needs fixes like carbon capture and other pollution abatements, plus expanding forests, marshes, and grasslands\u2014which, by the way, are more efficient carbon sinks than anything humans can invent.  But what is really<\/em> needed is a human lifestyle and consciousness fix, especially for the richest 25% of humanity world-wide most responsible for Anthropocene climate instability.  But how do you incentivize a change in consciousness and, with it, behavior?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[i]<\/sup><\/a> Solnit\u2019s essay\u2014as well as Chaudhury\u2019s and others\u2019 arguments from Plato to the present for and against imaginative narrative\u2019s powers\u2014are expertly summarized by Parul Sehgal, \u201cThe Tyranny of the Tale,\u201d The New Yorker<\/em>, July 3, 2023, https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2023\/07\/10\/seduced-by-story-peter-brooks-bewitching-the-modern-mind-christian-salmon-the-story-paradox-jonathan-gottschall-book-review<\/a>, accessed July 9, 2023.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ii]<\/sup><\/a> Rishika Pardikar, \u201cGlobal North Is Responsible for 92% of Excess Carbon Emissions,\u201d Eos<\/em>, October 28, 2020, https:\/\/eos.org\/articles\/global-north-is-responsible-for-92-of-excess-emissions<\/a>. Accessed February 8, 2024. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cChange the story\u201d doesn\u2019t guarantee success.  There\u2019s plenty of contemporary skepticism about what Parul Sehgal, Amit Chaudhuri, Christian Salmon, and others have called the contemporary \u201cnarrative turn\u201d in many fields, including medicine, religion, and law, not to mention cultural studies like … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1273"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1274,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273\/revisions\/1274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}