When Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood tweets, the world listens.

And when the 76-year-old writer chanced upon a short video of a 6-year-old girl in Australia named “Ruby, the Climate Kid,” talking about how she admires environmental activists like David Suzuki, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Sir David Attenborough in a YouTube video she made with her mum Natalie, Atwood turned to one of her popular social media platforms – Twitter – and tweeted the link to her 1.3 million Twitter followers.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has also seen the video now and social media is spreading the word tweet by tweet and update by update.

Meet ”Ruby, the Climate Kid,” as she calls herself in the video. With several videos already uploaded to YouTube about protecting the planet and other ecological issues, Ruby plans to continue making short videos in the future and slowly build a fan base, her mum told IPS. These things take time, but with a Tweet from Margaret Atwood making waves across the seas – Atwood also ”Facebooked” theRuby video link– there’s a big future for this young girl with a mind for science.

Ruby is a six-year-old Gamilaraay girl, fiercely passionate about saving the planet and alerting everyone to how dire the situation is, even if they have grown complacent, Independent Australia reported last week, in an article Rubypenned — with a little help from her mother, Natalie Cromb, who serves as the Indigenous Affairs editor for the news publication. According to David Donovan, IA’s editor, the online journal bills itself as “the journal of democracy and independent thought.”

Ruby‘s mum says that, from a very young age, her daughter has been influenced by people like Attenborough, Tyson and Suzuki. And now she has a new friend in Dr Atwood.

Natalie told a reporter:

“She is an avid reader of environmental newsletters and non-fiction books about wildlife. She was appalled to find out that five animals have been declared extinct since she was born and has been determined to make a difference ever since.”

In between school – Ruby is currently in Grade One – saving the planet with YouTube videos and making her parents laugh, she enjoys spending time with her dad and mum, family and friends at their home on Tharawal country.

When Natalie told Ruby the news that a famous Canadian novelist named Margaret Atwood, who was once 6-year-old herself and did science projects with her brother and sister in those long ago days before YouTube existed, Ruby told her mum:

“But she’s so smart, how does she know about me?”

Explaining that Atwood had seen the video online and enjoyed watching it and listening to Ruby‘s words and Tweeted it to her one million followers, Ruby told her mum:

“I hope she likes it and thinks that I have good ideas to save our planet.”

Natalie explained why Ruby makes videos as ”the Climate Kid” and writes about the planet, noting:

”From a very young age, Ruby has shown a demonstrable interest in the world around her and she has observed and learnt a great deal.

”She watches Sir David Attenborough, David Suzuki and Neil deGrasse Tyson documentaries which inspire her and educate her greatly. She has a great affinity for planet life which I think is because of her culture and she genuinely believes she can help save this planet.”

Ruby is now planning to make a short video to speak directly to Margaret Atwood in Canada.

An early peak at the transcript looks something like this, according to sources:

”Dear Margaret Atwood,

I am so happy you saw my video about saving our sick planet. And you Tweeted the link to your one million followers and facebooked the link, too. 

You are so kind. I guess you were six years old once, so you understand me, just a little six year old girl in Australia. I can’t believe you watched my video on Youtube!

I know you care about the oceans, too. You are concerned about our warming oceans and ocean acidification.

I support you, Margaret Atwood. You are my new hero. Thank you. You are 76 and I am six. There is no difference! We are kindred spirits. 

I love you, Margaret Atwood.”

A scene in Guiuan, Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan, Nov. 21, 2013. Credit: Roberto De Vido/cc by 2.0

By Dan Bloom
TAIPEI, Jun 10 2015 (IPS)

I live on a crowded, subtropical island ​nation ​in the Western Pacific, on the opposite side of the “Pacific Pond” from North America. And just south of Taiwan is the ​many-splendored island nation of the ​Philippines. We are neighbours. You can fly there in one hour, it’s that close.

So when Typhoon ​Yolanda hit Tacloban City in the Philippines in November 2013, we ​in south Taiwan ​could feel the rain and wind here in Taiwan, although the storm made its direct hit on Tacloban and ​sadly ​killed 7,000 people there."Movies like 'Taklub' present scenarios that make large events comprehensible and future possibilities concrete." -- Prof. Edward Rubin

​The Philippines has been a Catholic country for over 400 years now. People ​there ​know the Bible, people know Jesus, and people are devout and deeply religious.

So when the well-known Filipino film director Brillante ​Ma ​Mendoza decided to make a feature film about the aftermath of ​what the international community called ​Typhoon Haiyan — known as ”Typhoon Yolanda” in the Philippines — he used a quote from the ​Bible to bookend the story: “A time to tear ​one’s garments and mourn, and a time to ​mend and ​​build up.”

Mendoza’s ​powerful and emotional ​cli-fi movie “Trap” (called “Taklub” in Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines) was set up originally as an ”advocacy movie” financed by the government of the Philippines ​and produced by a senator from the national parliament ​to help raise awareness of typhoon readiness and the resilience of the Filipino people.

The carefully-crafted 90-minute feature has already been shown at the Cannes Film Festival and has a good chance of bagging an Oscar next year in Hollywood in the best foreign film category.

​It has also been recently been hailed by the Cli Fi Movie Awards (dubbed the ”Cliffies​”) — a film awards programme that recognises the best climate-themed movies worldwide — as the winner of the international 2015 cli fi awards for: best picture, best director, best actress, best actor, best child actor, best screenplay, best cinematography, best producer, best government sponsor and best trailer.

It’s that good, it’s that poignant, it’s that brilliant. Mendoza is a film director who is well-known in Asia, but while “Trap” is a powerful climate-themed movie with a great cast and helmed by a savvy director, whether the movie will catch on among arthouse fans in Europe and America ​it ​is hard to say.​

But for the Cli Fi Movie Awards, whose mission is to wake up the world via movie awards about climate change issues. of all the cli fi films nominated for 2015, “Taklub” took top honours in all categories this year! It is that important a movie.

“Trap” is a quiet, slow-moving, thoughtful piece of international cinema. It stars the famous Filipina actress Nora Aunor, and for her performance alone, the film is worth the price of admission.

​The quote from Ecclesiastes ​fits this movie to a T.

For me, that’s what “Trap” is about: a powerful piece of cli-fi storytelling that is about an almost unspeakable tragedy, following the lives of a group of typhoon survivors trying to pick up the pieces of their lives, but at at the same time Mendoza says after the tear​ing of garments ​ and mourning, it’s time to mend the country and get things right again. And prepare for the next big storm as well.

​I asked a professor from Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee, Edward Rubin, who is very concerned with climate change issues and the power of novels and movies to impact changes in public awareness, what he thought of Mendoza’s movie and its power to effect change.

“Written and audiovisual fiction (cli-fi novels and cli-fi movies like ‘Taklub’) can — and must — play a crucial role in educating people worldwide about climate change,” Rubin told me. “To begin with, people will watch the movie and be moved by it; they are not going to look at government charts and scientific research papers.”

Even more important, movies like ‘Taklub’ present scenarios that make large events comprehensible and future possibilities concrete,” he added, noting: “What is truly false, and belongs in the category of puerile fantasy, is to deny that climate change is occurring. The fact is that many of the grim possibilities portrayed in a cli-fi movie like ‘Taklub’ will become realities unless we take global concerted action.”​

“Trap” is not a documentary. It’s pure storytelling, pure cinema, pure magic. Can it help to raise awareness about global warming and climate change in the Philippines and worldwide?

Mendoza set out to make a touching local movie for audiences in the Philippines first, but he has succeeded in creating a piece of art that transcends borders now and has a global tale to tell.

It’s well worth seeing if it comes your way.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

A satellite image of Typhoon Haiyan captures the scale of the storm. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/CC-BY-2.0

By Kanya D'Almeida
NEW YORK, Jun 5 2015 (IPS)

Imagine this, if you can: the world as we know it torn apart by ‘hypercanes’, storms with wind speeds of over 500 mph, capable of producing a system the size of North America. A tiny fraction of humanity driven to a civilisation underground, the remaining masses left to fend for themselves on the virtually uninhabitable Earth’s surface. Species extinction is complete and genetic engineering is at a new height, to ensure the continued survival of what’s left of the human race.

"I don't think I use the term "climate change" once in the book. That was deliberate. [The] last thing most people want is a preachy novel where the characters are obvious stand-ins for the author's opinion." -- Kat Ross
This is the setting for ‘Some Fine Day’, a novel for young adults by Kat Ross that falls into an emerging sub-genre of science fiction known as climate fiction, or ‘cli-fi’.

Readers follow the story of sixteen-year-old Jansin Nordqvist, who’s on the verge of graduating from a military academy when her parents surprise her with a trip to the surface.

Thrilled at the chance to see the ocean, breathe fresh air and experience real sunlight, Jansin cannot anticipate what her future holds: a period of captivity with the surface ‘savages’ she’s been warned about all her life, and discoveries about the underground regime that leave her questioning everything she’s ever been taught.

Over the past two years, cli-fi novels have gone from being a fringe sub-category to a widely referenced genre on sites like Amazon, as more and more writers turn their eye to the horrific realities of catastrophic climate change.

With global climate negotiations hamstrung and world leaders unable, or unwilling, to take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40-70 percent by 2030 to prevent the worst forms of global warming, there is no doubt that natural disasters will become more frequent and more extreme.

Given that youth will bear the brunt of an increasingly savage climate, it is impossible to underestimate the role that cli-fi could play in informing and inspiring the younger generation to take action now against the worst-case scenarios of the future.

IPS sat down with Kat Ross to discuss the ways in which fiction can contribute to the debate that is raging around the world on the ‘ifs, whens and whats’ of climate change.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: When did you first become interested in the ‘cli-fi’ genre, and what drew you to this particular form of storytelling?

Cover art for Some Fine Day.

A: I have to give props to Dan Bloom for coining the term cli-fi. It’s super catchy, and he’s really given the genre a major boost. But when I sat down to write the book, there was no question that climate change would be a big part of the plot. As a journalist, I’d been covering it for almost a decade, and every year, the predictions got scarier. Some stopped being predictions about the future and started actually happening.

I was struck by the massive disconnect between what scientists and the public were saying – like hey, can we do something about this? – and the total lack of government action. The elephant in the room is obviously the fossil fuel lobby, among others. They spend billions of dollars spreading “doubt” about the science, which is ludicrous. I think fiction can be a great way into a conversation about these issues, especially with young people.

Some Fine Day starts with a basic question: what if the worst-case scenarios actually come to pass?

Q: Is the book, though set in the future, actually a commentary on our own times? If so, what do you think are the most important takeaways for young people at this moment in history?

A: Oh, definitely! I think it’s pretty explicit that the ravaged world in the story – about 80 years or so from now – is a direct result of doing too little, too late on runaway CO2 emissions. But the cool thing is that while we may have one toe at the edge of the precipice, we haven’t taken that plunge yet. There’s still time to change the future. And young people have been stepping up for years now. Adopt a Negotiator is a great initiative that works a lot with youth. They bring accountability to these very opaque negotiations.

Ultimately, it’s the people in their teens and twenties who will be living with the consequences of the choices we make today – and they’re not happy. Governments better start listening.

Q: The book both celebrates and condemns the limits to which humanity has pushed technology and scientific experimentation — on the one hand, an entire civilisation living underground entirely as a result of scientific innovation; on the other, genetic engineering gone horribly awry. What were your thoughts as an author navigating these two extremes?

Kat Ross, author of Some Fine Day. Credit: Courtesy Kat Ross

A: Well, that’s the thing, right? Technology itself isn’t good or evil, it’s what we do with it. This is not a new question. Just look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818. We’re still fascinated by her tale of death and reanimation, and the awful consequences of scientific hubris. The basic idea is that everything comes with a price, although in the case of a switch to renewables, there doesn’t seem to be quite the same downside as bringing a giant dead guy back to life.

For Some Fine Day, I had a lot of fun asking questions like, exactly how do you build an underground city? Where does the air come from, the food and water? Are hypercanes possible? (According to a scientist at MIT, the answer is yes) If all the icecaps melted, how much would the seas rise? What would that look like for the Eastern Seaboard?

In short, I have a fondness for creepy mutants and couldn’t help throwing a few into the mix.

Q: Themes of the surveillance state, fascist governance and the so-called ‘one percent’ run consistently through the book, with the protagonist first a product of, then an enemy of, all of the above. How did you imagine or hope your target audience would understand these ideas in the context of the story?

A: It’s become something of a fixture of the dystopian genre to have jack-booted thugs running things. But I think it actually made sense in the context of the story. These are people who have lost everything. They’ve been driven from the surface by massive storms, ocean acidification, species extinction, the whole enchilada. The transition to underground prefectures was spearheaded by the military, and now they’re facing very limited resources. Every drop of water, every bite of food is rationed. There’s a tendency to hoard, and to fight with your neighbours. So it’s not a very democratic society.

As you say, what’s interesting about the main character, Jansin, is that she starts off as one of the true believers – a special ops cadet who’s been trained all her life to never question orders. But she evolves over the course of the story to understand that she doesn’t have to live like that. It doesn’t have to be “us versus them.” Which is the most powerful propaganda tool ever invented.

It’s one of the reasons I like to write about young protagonists. I think in general, their minds are more open. Their core beliefs haven’t yet fossilized.

Q: There is a sense of urgency to the book that makes it an absolute page-turner. While this is a work of fiction, it does in many ways mirror the current emergency humanity finds itself in. Was this intentional? Or was the point more to create a thriller, and leave the readers to draw their own conclusions about the ‘climate politics’ of the world you create?

A: I don’t think I use the term “climate change” once in the book. That was deliberate. It’s pretty clear what’s happened, and frankly, the last thing most people want is a preachy novel where the characters are obvious stand-ins for the author’s opinion. Or maybe you do, but it’s easy to go out and find that kind of book if it’s your bag.

Some Fine Day is targeted at the young adult audience (though I think it’s for anyone), so I needed to be extra-careful there. Stealth indoctrination! Just kidding. No, I mainly wanted to tell a ripping good story, with characters you care about, and build a world that felt real in every sense.

Margaret Atwood pretty much summed it up. She says: “It’s rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots. They’re still really about people because that’s who we are and that’s what we write stories about.”

But if anyone reads my book and it inspires them to say to themselves, “Holy sh*t, this really sounds bad. Could any of this actually happen? Hey, I heard there’s a rally going on in the town square on Sunday. Maybe I should go see what they have to say…”

Well, I’d be just fine with that.

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

Excerpt:

Paolo Bacigalupi. Credit: JT Thomas Photography

By Dan Bloom
TAIPEI, May 22 2015 (IPS)

Item: In a recent blog post at the New Yorker magazine, staff writer Dana Goodyear surveys the current drought impacting California and writes: “It’s hard to escape the feeling we are living a cli-fi novel’s Chapter One.”

Item: Edward L. Rubin, a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville, surveys the ongoing California drought in an oped at Salon magazine, writing: “As the California drought enters its fourth year, it is threatening to strangle the splendid irrigation system that transformed the previously desolate Central Valley into some of the world’s most productive farmland and the scruffy Los Angeles Basin into one of the world’s great cities.”

Item: Indian film director Shekhar Kapur is currently in pre-production for a climate-themed movie about future ”water wars” in New Delhi and titled “Paani,” a Hindi word for ”water.”

Item: Adam Trexler in the introduction to “Anthropocene Fictions,” his newly-released academic study of 150 climate change novels, by authors in Germany, Finland and Canada over the past 50 years, writes: “Perhaps prompted by [the] coinage of “cli-fi,” [media] reported that the global warming has spurred the creation of a whole new genre of fiction.”

Welcome to the 21st century, where water issues combined with climate change and global warming threaten to turn the future into something that is difficult for most of us to imagine.

But that is where novelists and film directors come in, for they can toy with ideas and scenarios and try to make sense of where we stand now and where are headed.

Meet Paolo Bacigalupi, a fifth-generation Italian American and a prose writer with a sterling literary pedigree.

While he once wrote novels that were marketed as science fiction, his new novel, titled “The Water Knife,” is pure cli-fi. The story he tells seems almost ripped from daily newspaper headlines about heat waves, droughts, water shortages and, well, “water wars.”

A Colorado native married to a woman from India, Bacigalupi has in the past written environmentally-themed sci-fi novels. ”The Water Knife,” released this month, leaves science fiction behind and ventures deep into the mushrooming cli-fi genre.

Now in his forties, Bacigalupi writes like few people can today, prose that sings, ideas that flow, musings that ponder who we are and what we are doing on – and to – this planet Earth.

He is famous for saying that one of the classic questions that resonates with him as an author is: “If this goes on, what will the world look like?”

”The Water Knife” is set in America’s near future, and it’s about “water wars” between two major western cities: Las Vegas and Phoenix. The title comes from the starring role that so-called “water
knives” – a term the author coined for his story – play in the climate-themed story.

As master storyteller Bacigalupi frames it, “water knives” are eco-terrorists, hired thugs who become major players in a near future water war in the American Southwest that he imagines and delves into.

At a recent appearance at the annual American Library Association convention in Chicago, Bacigalupi introduced his new novel this way:

“You want a drought? I’ll give you a drought!”

And that’s what ”The Water Knife” is all about: a major drought that impacts the West.

Sound familiar? This book has legs, and it is likely to make a major impact of its own upon publication.
Translations are sure to appear in at least 12 editions outside the U.S., from Brazil to Spain.

Bacigalupi has a good track record as a novelist and short story writer, and he has fans worldwide now.

An earlier novel, ”The Windup Girl,” was a major genre hit, and ”The Water Knife” appears poised to go mainstream with an even bigger impact.

“Mad Max,” “The Hunger Games,” “Waterworld,” “The Walking Dead” and innumerable other books, movies and television series portray futures where the world has been devastated by disasters.

Do we really want to assign blame to global warming?

In the famous words of the American cartoonist Walt Kelly who created the Pogo character, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Bacigalupi knows this better than most people.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Devastating floods in the northeastern Indian state of Assam in 2014 prompted the government to erect bamboo bridges. This man and child travel from one village to another on a boat, and travel by foot over the bridges. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

By Dan Bloom
TAIPEI, Apr 8 2015 (IPS)

University lecture halls in North America are no strangers to the ”cli-fi” genre of climate-themed novels and movies, but now India is getting into the act as well, thanks to the pioneering work of Professor T. Ravichandran of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) in Uttar Pradesh.

Dr. Ravichandran’s course, titled “Cli-fi and Cli-flicks,” is set to begin in late July and consists of 15 modules covering such topics as eco-fiction, eco-fabulism, and representations of climate change issues in feature films and documentaries."How long will I continue to teach Shakespeare and Shelley and make them aesthetically love the beauty of daffodils or skylarks when in reality they would soon become endangered if climate change goes unchecked?" -- Professor T. Ravichandran

Aimed at undergraduate students at IITK, the course will be the first of its kind in all of India, Dr. Ravichandran told me in a recent email.

“In India, climate change awareness is not as acutely felt as in the U.S. or the U.K,” he said. ”My recent research on ‘Literature, Technology and Environment: Global and Pedagogical Perspectives,’ sponsored by the Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic fellowship from USIEF, India, and hosted at Duke University in North Carolina, was a turning point in my career.”

Dr. Ravichandran said he experienced a paradigm shift in his thinking about the way in which he connects to the natural environment during his fellowship in North Carolina.

When I asked him what he meant, he replied: “It made me to think seriously of my role as a teacher of literature to engineering students. How long will I continue to teach Shakespeare and Shelley and make them aesthetically love the beauty of daffodils or skylarks when in reality they would soon become endangered if climate change goes unchecked?”

To answer his own question, Professor Ravichandran added: “In order to make myself relevant to my existence on this Earth, I thought at least I should cause awareness on climate change in the minds of my students. So that’s how I started working on the course. In India, I hope to make this course a successful and effective one.”

Since the predominating global concern today is climate change, which obliterates geopolitical boundaries and connects humans in search of common solutions, Dr. Ravichandran is appropriating an inter-disciplinary approach for his course, he told me.

“Climate fiction (‘cli-fi’) and climate films (‘cli-flicks’) offer an inter-disciplinary study of a looming phenomenon that the humans in the Anthropocene age witness helplessly as if trapped on a sinking ship,” he said.

“The real question to be addressed is not, as posed by climate change sceptics, whether this catastrophe is so alarming that humans need to act on it immediately, but how long can humankind afford to remain impervious to something that is so glaring?” he added.

Dr. Ravichandran said that he hopes that having his students focus on novels and films in the ‘cli-fi’ genre will foster a change in mind-set that can open them up to thinking about the sustainable use of scarce resources and ensuring the symbiotic sustenance of the human and the nonhuman on Earth.

Students in the pioneering IITK course will be reading such novels as “Year of the Flood,” “A Friend of the Earth,” and “Flight Behavior.”

In additon, movies such as “Interstellar,” “Snowpiercer” and “The Day after Tomorrow” will be screened and discussed, Dr. Ravichandran said.

As a reporter from North America who has been closely following the rise of the cli-fi genre in the West, I am glad to see IITK in India offering a course like this to its engineering students. Call it a meme, a motif, a cultural prism, a buzzword, a PR tool, or a marketing term, ”cli-fi” is here to stay and India has just joined the club.

In fact, with this course, the first of its kind in India, the professor and his students will be making history, and I hope the media in Uttar Pradesh and beyond will pick up this story as a news story in English and Hindi.

Professor Ravichandran’s novel course could very well become a role model for other academics in India to follow.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

2015 is shaping up to be ''The Year of Cli-Fi'' in academia, and not just in North America, but in Britain and Australia as well. Credit: Tulane Public Relations/cc by 2.0

By Dan Bloom
TAIPEI, Mar 10 2015 (IPS)

From Columbia University in New York to the University of Cambridge in Britain, college classrooms are picking up on the “cli-fi” genre of fiction, and cinema and academia is right behind them.

While authors are penning cli-fi novels — with movie scriptwriters creating cli-fi screenplays to try to sell to Hollywood — classrooms worldwide are now focusing attention of the rising genre of literature and cinema."Literary fiction has dreamed up many versions of the end of the world, but how is contemporary fiction dealing with the threat of climate change?" -- Prof. Jenny Bavidge

Jenny Bavidge at the University of Cambridge taught a class on cli-fi last summer at the Institute of Continuing Education there, and Darragh Martin is teaching a cli-fi class at Columbia University in Manhattan this summer, too.

Cli-fi is a catchy abbreviation for the genre of “climate fiction,” much in the same way that “sci-fi” is a nickname for “science fiction.” With news articles about the rise of cli-fi appearing in the New York Times and Time magazine last year, literature professors saw an opportune time to introduce cli-fi classes into the curriculum.

“Literary fiction has dreamed up many versions of the end of the world, but how is contemporary fiction dealing with the threat of climate change?” Bavidge asked students in her introduction to the class last summer. “This course will focus on works by contemporary authors, including Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan, and ask whether ‘cli-fi’ imagines solutions as well as ends.

“As people living through this particular historical moment, we may want to ask how far [cli-fi] novels contribute to efforts to better understand our relationship with the planet and its ecosystems,” she wrote

One of my mentors in the world of sci-fi literature is the novelist David Brin.

I once asked him about how climate change themes have been influencing sci-fi novels and movies, and he told me by email: “Global warming and flooding were important in my 1989 novel ‘Earth,’ but they were earlier featured in the film ‘Soylent Green’ based on Harry Harrison’s novel ‘Make Room, Make Room!’”

Six U.S. colleges have set up cli-fi classes this year, with both undergrad and graduate level courses involved. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This year, 2015, is shaping up to be ”The Year of Cli-Fi” in academia, and not just in North America, but in Britain and Australia as well.

Several non-English speaking countries are also looking at cli-fi and how it impacts their own literary circles, including Brazil, Spain, Germany and France.

While six universities and colleges in the United States have taken up the call and are part of the new trend in higher education in 2015, the genre is reaching out worldwide to writers (and readers) across the globe. Cli-fi is not an American or British genre; it has become a global genre.

The Chronicle of Higher Education newspaper in Washington, D.C., which covers academic issues in a variety of subject areas, has assigned a staff reporter to look into the rise of cli fi in the academy as well, according to sources.

In addition to Martin’s summer class at Columbia, which starts on May 27, professors at Temple University in Philadelphia, the University of Oregon, Holyoke Community College, the State University of New York in Geneseo (SUNY Geneseo) and The University of Delaware are currently teaching cli-fi classes this semester, with a total of about 200 students nationwide enrolled.

It’s a beginning. And there’s more to come.

Academics writing in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, among other world languages are putting out papers about cli-fi and planning classes in the genre at the universities where they teach.

There is, of course, a long and storied history of teaching sci-fi at colleges in North America and Britain, with several universities even setting up literature departments that specialise in sci-fi research. Now cli-fi is joining the global academic world and finding a room of its own there as well.

Elizabeth Trobaugh and Steve Winters at Holyoke Community College are team-teaching a climate-themed literature class this semester titled “Cli Fi: Stories and Science from the Coming Climate Apocalypse.”

When I told Trobaugh that I planned to write an oped about her course, she replied: “Thank you for your interest in what we are doing this semester. Professor Winters and I thought we were onto something, and your email confirms our conviction that cli-fi is indeed on the rise, and this is the moment (as Macklemore says in the song) to catch the wave.”

Stephen Siperstein, a doctoral student at the University of Oregon, is also teaching a cli-fi literature class this semester, with his undergrad students posting weekly class blogs about what they are reading and how they are reacting to the new genre of fiction.

At Temple University, Ted Howell is teaching an undergraduate class titled “Cli-fi: Science Fiction, Climate Change, and Apocalypse” with about 30 students enrolled. They are also keeping weekly blogs about the course, using them to interact online outside of class with their professor and fellow students.

At SUNY Geneseo in upstate New York, Professor Ken Cooper is teaching a class this semester titled “Reader and Text: Cli-Fi.”

”Representative works will include Paolo Bacigalupi’s ‘The Windup Girl,’ Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Flight Behavior,’ and other novels,” Cooper told his students by way of introduction, adding mischievously: “There will be at least one zombie apocalypse, too.”

Siohban Carroll at the University of Delaware is a specialist in 19th century British literature, and told me in a recent Tweet: “I’m teaching a 19th Century ‘cli-fi’ class right now at the graduate level. One segment is on Mary Shelley and the Anthropocene.”

So there you have it. Cli-fi has reached into academia and found partners on college campuses. It’s a worldwide trend because global warming impacts us all, and literature and cinema always respond to the things that matter.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Literature has a role to play in our discussions about global warming impacts worldwide. Credit: Karoly Czifra/cc by 2.0

By Dan Bloom
TAIWAN, Apr 4 2014 (IPS)

When we read novels or short fiction in any language, we read to understand the story. We read to learn something new, and hopefully to get some kind of emotional uplift through the words on the page and the skills of the storyteller.

So how to tell the “story” of climate change and global warming?The more we embrace the science behind climate change at a cultural level, the more effectively we can join together to avert the worst.

A new literary genre dubbed “cli-fi” has been evolving over the past few years, and while its name is a takeoff on sci-fi, this new genre is focused on stories that relate to climate change and how it impacts human life now and in the future.

Some insist that cli-fi is a just subgenre of sci-fi, and that makes sense on one level. But in other ways, cli-fi is a genre of its own, and it’s gaining momentum around the world not merely as escapism or entertainment – although it often has those elements – but also as a serious way of addressing the myriad complex, universal issues surrounding climate change.

I know a little about cli-fi because I have been working for the past few years to popularise it, not only in the English-speaking world but also among the billions of people who read in Spanish, Chinese, German or French, to name but a few. Cli-fi, as I see it, is a genre that should be tackled by writers in any nation in any language. It’s an international genre with an international readership.

A growing number of cli-fi novels are targeting a youthful audience – what’s called the YA (young adult) category – such as Mindy McGinnis’ “Not a Drop to Drink,” “The Carbon Diaries 2015” by Saci Lloyd, and “Floodland” by Marcus Sedgewick. For indeed, it is children and teenagers who will suffer the consequences of previous generations’ lifestyle choices.

In a world facing potentially catastrophic impacts from climate change, this new literary genre is now becoming part of our communal storytelling culture, imparting new ideas and insights about the future humanity might face, not only in 10 years, but in 100 or 500 years as well.

This is where cli-fi comes in. It can play an important role in bringing the emotions and feelings of characters in a well-written story or novel to the awareness of readers worldwide. Imagine a cli-fi novel that not only reached thousands of readers, but also touched them, and perhaps motivated them to become a louder voice in the raging international policy debate over carbon emissions.

That’s the potential of cli-fi.

One U.S. university is now offering a literature course on cli-fi novels and movies for graduate students working on degrees in environmental studies and literature. For Stephanie LeMenager, who is leading the class at the University of Oregon this year, the course gives her and her students a chance to explore the power of literature and film as writers and directors grapple with some of the difficult issues facing humankind as the 21st century unfolds.

LeMenager’s class is called “The Cultures of Climate Change.” It’s the first in North America, even the world, to focus on the arts and climate change this way. And I am sure that other universities around the world will follow this pioneering effort by adding new courses on climate fiction for their students as well.

Nathaniel Rich is a 34-year-old author who wrote the widely acclaimed novel “Odds Against Tomorrow,” a story set in near-future Manhattan which delves into the “mathematics of catastrophe”. A resident of New Orleans, he believes that more books like his will be published – not just in English, and not just from the perspective of Western writers in wealthy nations.

Writers from around the world also need to be encouraged to dip their toes into the cli-fi genre and use the literature of their own cultures to try to wake people up about the future that might await us all on a slowly-warming planet with no end in sight.

The plots can be scary, but cli-fi novels offer a chance to explore these issues with emotion and prose. Books matter. Literature has a role to play in our discussions about global warming impacts worldwide.

You might say that the climate-change canon dates back as far as a novel titled ”The Drowned World’. written in 1962 by British writer JG Ballard. Another early book about climate change was written in 1987 by Australian George Turner, titled “The Sea and Summer.”

Barbara Kingsolver, a U.S. novelist, published a very powerful cli-fi novel a few years ago titled “Flight Behavior.” It made a big impression on me when I read it last summer, and I recommend to readers here, too.

Canadian Mary Woodbury has created the webzine Cli-Fi Books that lists cli-fi novels past and present.

How do I see the future? I envision a world where humans cling to hope and optimism. I am an optimist. And I believe that the more we embrace the science behind climate change at a cultural level, the more effectively we can join together to avert the worst.

Dan Bloom is a freelance writer from Boston based in Taiwan. A 1971 graduate of Tufts University where he majored in French literature, he has been working as a climate activist and a literary activist since 2006. He can be found on Twitter @polarcityman