World Literature Today – July 01, 2019

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EDITOR’S

NOTE

PHOTO: ALBA SIMON



If one were to drive a nail through this decade, planetary history would

swing in the balance. – Kathleen Dean Moore, ISLE, Winter 2014

FIVE YEARS AGO, in the headnote to

a special section on international eco-lit

(“Words from a Dying Planet?”), I wrote:

“When the Intergovernmental Panel on Cli-

mate Change released its ‘Climate Change

2014’ report last month, with its dire warn-

ings about the ‘vulnerability and exposure

of human and natural systems,’ it reminded

us of a question posed on our blog last year:

‘Now we must write as if the planet were

dying. What would you say to a planet in

a spasm of extinction?’” (May 2014). That

question—asked by Kathleen Dean Moore

and Scott Slovic and partially answered in

their brilliant Winter 2014 issue of ISLE:

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and

Environment—remains as urgent as ever.

The issue of ISLE included the creative work

of more than thirty writers in response to

the editors’ “Call to Writers,” which we

had posted on the W LT blog in September

2013. Moore and Slovic urged writers to use
      their gifts to compose narratives of “moral
      imagination”: “Some kinds of writing are
      morally impossible in a state of emergency,”
      they wrote. “Writers may not be able to save
      the old world, but they can help create the
      new one.”
      Five years on, what has changed? For
      one thing, the trickle of media coverage
      about climate change in 2014 has become a
      flood in spring 2019. As I write this in mid-
      May, we’re still reeling from a report by the
      Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform
      on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services that
      more than a million species are threatened
      with extinction. Just this week, the Mauna

Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded CO 2

levels exceeding 415ppm, the highest in

more than 800,000 years. Microplastics and

radioactive carbon-14 from atomic weapons

testing have been found both in glaciers and

the ocean depths. Such words as Anthro-

pocene and anthropogenic, pointing to the

human causes of the colossal changes we’re

witnessing in our lifetime, have become part

of the common policy vocabulary around

the topic. In response, a wave of teenage

#climatestrike activists led by Greta Thun-

berg has swept the globe.

The sense of urgency on the part of writ-

ers has likewise accelerated, especially from

those areas around the world most suscep-

tible to the worst effects of climate change.

The May 2014 issue of W LT included work

from Bolivia, India, Nigeria, and Taiwan—

all on the front lines, from sea level to

the heights of the Andes and Himalayas.

The current issue gathers words of wit-

ness from Australia, Brazil, South Africa,

and beyond. In “The Grand Experiment,”

the lead story by Mexican writer Alberto

Chimal (page 53), those responsible for run-

ning the “experiment” set out to colonize

the polar regions in order to retain their

power and control over “the best of all pos-

sible worlds” even as the rest of the globe

becomes uninhabitable. In one hundred

numbered entries that mimic the language

of a scientific report, Chimal’s narrator sati-

rizes the magical thinkers who deny the

validity of climate science. Elsewhere in the

section, a five-line poem by Jane Hirshfield

ranges from the Svalbard ice cap, to last

year’s fires in California, to a snail impos-

sibly climbing Mount Fuji. And translator

Tiffany Higgins, in a note accompanying

Márcia Wayna Kambeba’s poem “The Time

of Climate,” cautions readers that “Brazil-

ian indigenous writings don’t fit neatly into

US/European formulations of climate and

environment. I believe for this reason,” she

writes, “that they’re essential for broadening

conceptions of possible solutions.”

Undoubtedly, policymakers will con-

tinue to posit increasingly urgent, perhaps

desperate, “possible solutions” in the years

ahead. To be sure, the climate debate is

now front and center on the global stage.

Kathleen Dean Moore writes that “the

great ship is turning into the wind and

changing course” (ISLE). With great moral

imagination, writers, scientists, and artists

have shown us the catastrophic conse-

quences that loom if we don’t turn the ship

in time. If not, the nail in this decade may

turn out to be a stake in the century’s heart.

If we do turn in time, posterity might still

forgive us.

Daniel Simon