Law, Fiction and Activism in a Time of Climate Change

Nicole Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429878527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

The book examines the narratives of climate change which have developed and which are currently evolving in three areas: law, fiction and activism.

Narratives of climate change generated by litigants, judges, writers of fiction and activists are having, and will have, a profound effect on the way we respond to the climate change crisis. Acknowledging the prevalence of unreliable narrators, this book explores the reliability and significance of different forms of climate narrative. The author analyses overlapping themes and points of intersection, considering the recurrent motif of the trickster, the prominence of the child, the significance and ongoing viability of the rights discourse, and the increasingly prevalent emergency framing with its multiple implications for law's empire. She asks how law, fiction and activism measure up as textual and performative fora for telling the story of climate change and anticipating a climate-changed future. And, in addition, how can they help foster transformative narratives which empower us to confront the climate change crisis?

This highly topical, cross-disciplinary work will be of interest to anyone concerned about the growing climate emergency and makes a valuable contribution to climate law, environmental law, the environmental humanities and ecocriticism.

1 Narrating climate change

We, those of us alive in the helter-skelter early decades of the twenty-first century, are all children of the Anthropocene, whether we fall into the categories of the privileged, the suffering, the curious, the angry, the optimistic, the alarmed, the fatalistic, the ignorant and/or the complacent. Although there have been other suggested names for the period of climatic and ecological disruption that we are now increasingly experiencing,¹ the Anthropocene is the most commonplace, if not yet formally accepted by the global body with the responsibility for naming geological eras.² Our times are unprecedented, at least in known human history. There may well be parallels with events far back in deep time,³ but, despite the stories contained in paleoecological records⁴ or those frozen into rapidly vanishing polar ice,⁵ despite ongoing efforts to tell the grand story of the universe,⁶ overall we lack narratives with which to frame and make manageable such cataclysmic, pre-historical events.

1 These include, for example, the Capitalocene, Plantationocene and Chthulucene: see Donna Haraway’s explanation of these terms in ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’ (2015) 6(1) Environmental Humanities 159, 160.

2 This term was first coined by Paul J Crutzen and Eugene F Stoermer in 2000: Paul J Crutzen and Eugene F Stoermer, ‘The “Anthopocene”’ (2000) 41 (May) Global Change Newsletter 17. The International Commission on Stratigraphy established an Anthropocene Working Group in 2009, with the task of investigating whether the term should be formally adopted to designate the current epoch in the geological timescale.

3 Dale Dominey-Howes argues that ‘the contemporary crisis narrative of the Anthropocene that imagines the catastrophe of the Anthropocene as a unique event in the planet’s history is materially inaccurate and demeans the hazard and disaster experience of the past’: Dale Dominey-Howes, ‘Hazards and Disasters in the Anthropocene: Some Critical Reflections for the Future’ (2018) 5(1) Geoscience Letters 7:1–15, 6 <doi: 10.1186/s40562-018-0107-x>.

4 See Connor Nolan et al, ‘Past and Future Global Transformation of Terrestrial Ecosystems under Climate Change’ (2018) 361(6405) Science 920.

5 Nancy Campbell writes that: ‘The polar ice is the first archive, a compressed narrative of all time in a language humans have just begun to learn’; The Library of Ice. Readings from a Cold Climate (Scribner, 2018) 26.

6 For instance, Michel Serres has developed a ‘Great Story’ or narrative of the universe, which is told by the universe itself; see Christopher Watkin, ‘Michel Serres’ Great Story: From Biosemiotics to Econarratology’ (2015) 44(138) SubStance 171. See also Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story. From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era – A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (Harper Collins, 1992).

How do we make sense of climate chaos or chart a path through the Anthropocene? Writers from many disciplines are producing a profusion of texts in an attempt to answer this question. Novelists, playwrights and screenwriters are creating works in which their characters stumble or bravely stride through the all too plausible dystopias of a climate-changed future. Scientists are utilising every possible mode of communication, including theatre,⁷ letter writing,⁸ screen writing⁹ and activism,¹⁰ to convey a narrative of urgency and crisis. Lawyers are arguing for the extended, innovative application of legal principles in areas and scenarios that the original creators of these principles never envisaged. These are some of the emerging narratives of climate change, our well-intentioned efforts to comprehend, survive and somehow continue to thrive as a species in the age of climate disruption.

The cross-disciplinary nature of narrative is now widely recognised and has been termed the ‘narrative turn’. Looking at narrative in disciplines outside the humanities allows for an exploration of the ‘storied forms of knowledge’ in these areas.¹¹ Although there are, arguably, many different narratives of climate change, including most prominently the narratives of climate change science and those which unfold at the level of international climate politics, my focus here is on the growing collection of narratives in climate litigation, climate fiction¹² – encompassing literary texts and theatrical and screen productions – and climate activism. Of this cross section, only courtroom narratives have political gravitas and what Jacques Derrida famously called the ‘force of law’;¹³ unlike other narrative forms, these will (sometimes¹⁴) be enforced by the State. Nevertheless, other climate narratives have an important role to play: in influencing public opinion, in generating discussion at various levels and in political and apolitical spaces, and in enabling us to apprehend the uncanny, all-encompassing and immersive dimensions of the ‘hyperobject’¹⁵ of climate change.

7 See, eg, Stephanie Merritt, ‘Climate Change Play 2071 Aims to Make Data Dramatic’, The Guardian (online, 5 November 2014) <https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/nov/05/climate-change-theatre-2071-katie-mitchell-duncan-macmillan>.

8 In 2015, science communicator Joe Duggan organised an Australian exhibition called ‘Is This How You Feel?’, consisting of handwritten letters by climate scientists on how they felt about climate change.

9 See Garry Maddox, ‘Climate Fiction Forum Sees TV Drama as One Solution to Global Warming’, The Sydney Morning Herald (online, 15 August 2017) <https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/climate-fiction-forum-sees-tv-drama-as-one-solution-to-global-warming-20170815-gxwew4.html>.

10 See Justin Gillis, ‘Climate Maverick to Retire from NASA’, The New York Times (online, 1 April 2013) <https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/science/james-e-hansen-retiring-from-nasa-to-fight-global-warming.html>.

11 Martin Kreiswirth, ‘Narrative Turn in the Humanities’ in David Herman, Manfred John and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (Routledge, 2005) 377, 380.

12 Climate fiction is more popularly known as ‘cli-fi’, a term invented and popularised by American journalist Dan Bloom. A survey of climate fiction can be found in Adeline Johns-Putra, ‘Climate Change in Literature and Literary Studies: From Cli-fi, Climate Change Theater and Ecopoetry to Ecocriticism and Climate Change Criticism’ (2016) 7(2) WIREs Climate Change 266. As well as discussing novels and plays, the author also covers climate change poetry, which is beyond the scope of this book. A detailed study of climate fiction can be found in Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions. The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (University of Virginia Press, 2015).

13 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: the “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, tr Mary Quaintance (1990) 11(5–6) Cardozo Law Review 920.

14 This statement requires qualification in light of the capacity and propensity of governments to legislate so as to overrule judicial decisions that generate politically unpopular outcomes, as discussed in Chapter 2.

15 This term is Timothy Morton’s: Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

A comprehensive examination of all legal, fictional and activist climate narratives is beyond the scope of this book or any book, given the ongoing proliferation of such narratives across all fields. I have endeavoured to draw upon a diverse and broad cross section of texts and performances at this point in time for what is, essentially, a thematic discussion. In investigating the narratives that have emerged and are emerging across the three fields, I consider their effectiveness in enhancing our understanding of climate change and in shaping political and societal responses to what is increasingly seen as an existential crisis for humanity: thus, climate narratives as catalyst. Here the porous quality in such narratives, their points of intersection and areas of cross-fertilisation become important. I am interested in identifying the themes and central concerns which emerge in the context of the climate change story, and in looking at the commonalities in narratives from these diverse areas; this discussion turns on climate narratives as mirror. Finally, I address the question of whether narratives can provide useful insights into humanity’s fate and the fate of the nonhuma...