It's impossible to write a good novel about climate change

Once upon a time, a woman was hired to infiltrate a group of environmental activists who lived in a series of shared homes and apartments and trailers in the Pacific Northwest.

With people like this group, you often want to be reductive and say they're rich kids, who are out of touch with the ordinary man, but it's really not true. Most of them were white, and most of them had gone to college, but some were first-generation college students. Even when they'd come from middle-class upbringings, there was often something distinctly non-elite about them: Cynthia's parents were school-teachers in Fresno; Alex had been raised by a single mom who worked at the DMV.

And many of them were not young. There was a substantial cadre who were in their thirties and forties. You could call them professional activists, but really they were drifters, people who'd worked at marijuana grow-ops and bicycle co-ops for so long that any trace of class status had long been effaced. It was certainly believable that some of them could be trust-fund kids or could have parents who were doctors and lawyers, but...how could you tell? What would be the marker? They still lived in the same shared houses and communes as everyone else.

When other people in their circle went to graduate school and pursued professions, becoming social workers or teachers or nurses, these people didn't do it. They just stayed behind. Maybe that's because, ultimately, they didn't really have the education to be competitive in any kind of renumerative profession, but they had always aspired to white-collar work and didn't know how to reorient themselves to succeed as a blue-collar worker.

But that also might not be the reason! Maybe they just didn't want to do any of the things that they were supposed to do. And in these social circles, they did not have to. Nobody really cared where they'd come from. In this world, all that mattered was your charisma and the quality of your ideas.

That was the whole point! In this world, it was genuinely quite hard to tell who'd come from money and who hadn't. It's not that there weren't markers—if people had gone to college, but they didn't have student loans, that meant something. But what precisely did it mean? Usually it meant that if they didn't want to be here, they could find some way, often through further education, of escaping. But so what? Many people of the people in this world had no desire to escape. Even if they functionally had no alternatives, they'd convinced themselves they were here because they chose to be. Indeed this was a place that many people, including at least one highly paid agent provocateur, desperately wanted to enter.

Once upon a time, healthcare would've been the major aspiration—everyone in these circles had chronic health problems that they wanted addressed. But with the expansion of the Medicaid, everyone had healthcare now. Maybe dentistry would be the marker of secret wealth—but these people were so disorganized and idealistic that it was hard to imagine any of them, regardless of the amount of money in their bank account, would bother going to the dentist routinely even if they had the money to do so.

Actually, one of the activists, Terra, was fanatic about dental hygiene. She was most certainly not from a wealthy family—her dad was a retired prison guard to whom she didn't speak. But she heavily prioritized her dental health, and she always talked about the one job she'd had (at an alternative school) that'd allowed her to open up a Flexible Savings Account. This woman, Terra, who was in her late thirties, was constantly talking about her FSA, and how great it was.

Terra wanted a baby, and she scoffed at the anti-natalist viewpoints common amongst her friends ("So maybe in thirty years we'll be living in caves. So what? Cavemen had babies. That's why we exist!") But Terra also had love. She had a boyfriend who was the real deal. Someone who wasn't all talk, someone who was really going to do shit, make people take notice.

The key thing that distinguished Terra and her boyfriend, Gerard, from other groups of ecological activists was that they weren't ineffectual. It wasn't a game to them. They understood that they were here to commit crimes, in order to bring down global capitalism. They understood that capitalism relied on consensus. It wasn't a natural thing. It was a creature of laws. Private property required laws. If you bring down the law, you bring down capitalism. And yes that'll mean humanity retreats into the Stone Age and billions of people die, but so what? Climate change was rendering the Earth uninhabitable. This precious planet was perhaps the only source of life in the universe—certainly the only source of intelligent life in our immediate galactic environs—and Terra and Gerard felt a sacred trust to the universe itself. The Godhead had allowed life to come into existence and to learn of its own existence, and if climate change was to win out, that would be the ultimate annihilation, the ultimate rejection of God’s plan.

They believed that if people really understood the hopelessness of the future—that the Earth was about to be rendered uninhabitable, due to a runaway global warming effect that would ultimately turn the planet into Venus, then people would give up their earthly concerns, and they would pick up a stick or a stone or a rifle, and they would go out and they would, essentially, kill cops.

Not just cops—teachers, judges, park rangers, any form of government official. Because without the government, there could be no capitalism or private property. You can't really destroy an oil tanker, but you can destroy the regime of law and order that makes oil tankers possible.

Terra's boyfriend was an anarchist. He believed a society without government was possible. Terra supposed that she didn't totally disbelieve in anarchism, but...she did think that the process of getting down to a manageable number of people on this Earth was going to be unbelievably horrific, to the point where it didn't make sense to talk about utopia afterwards. Maybe if the Earth only had six hundred million people, life would actually be much more pleasant than it was today. That was totally possible. But…no utopia was really worth that kind of human cost. The choice, to Terra, wasn't between utopia and dystopia, it was between some life and no life.

Anyway, Terra and Gerard assassinated judges all across the country. Each time they did a killing, they posted a manifesto online and issued a report about the specific ways that this judge had failed to take seriously the existing environmental framework in the United States.

It wasn't hard. Judges don't have permanent security details or protection. These two had gotten the idea from the Unabomber, who'd attacked professors because...it was easy. Nobody protects professors.

The moment they'd decided on their plan, they had started to distance themselves from the environmental movement. Because...they simply had no need of the movement anymore. Communication could only compromise them.

The agent who'd been hired to infiltrate their group—this agent suspected that Terra and Girard were behind the killings.

But the funny thing was—this agent had been hired by a corporation, and this corporation hadn't genuinely considered the environmentalists to be a threat. They'd just wanted a phony bomb plot they could gin up in the public eye to discredit the entire environmental movement. Fundamentally, our protagonist was a provocateur, not a spy—her bosses had no idea what to do when they were presented with evidence of any actual threat.

So although this agent kept reporting to her superiors that Terra and Girard’s prose style and general ethos really seemed to match the writings posted online by the killers, nobody seemed particularly concerned! Her bosses duly passed this information to the FBI, but when the agent in charge ran down Terra and Girard he found two random middle-aged kooks with no prior history of violence. Moreover these were two people who lived quietly in a trailer in Bellingham, were well-liked by their neighbors, and had no active connections to the environmental movement. So although the tip was flagged, it wasn’t seen as being believable or high-priority.

For her part, our agent wasn't really being paid to catch these killers. Her corporate overlords wanted her to create fake crimes, not solve real ones. The FBI had issued a million dollar reward for information leading to the capture of the person or persons behind these killings, but the agent had no way to claim that reward, because she couldn't get the FBI to actually take her information seriously.

So...she just moved on to the next thing. Stopped raising warnings about Terra and Gerard. After two years, the assassinations stopped—the woman surmised it was probably because Terra had finally persuaded Gerard to have a baby. But the woman figured that even to investigate that question would only put herself and this couple into further danger.

Afterword

This story that you've just read on Substack was inspired by Rachel Kushner’s Booker Prize-nominated novel Creation Lake. It has the same basic premise (a woman is hired to infiltrate an environmental group). It even has a similar character arc: the woman comes to feel some sympathy for this group and its aims.

But unlike Kushner’s novel, my story actually takes its own premise seriously and attempts to tell a story about climate fear, human cynicism, and the nature of the systems that both encourage and oppose left-wing environmental activism.

I think everyone understands that left-wing groups aren't really organized. They're not like Hamas. With a left-wing group, there's a bunch of people, and they believe in very disparate things and have disparate views about what types of action are worthwhile. There are important ways in which left-wing organizations really don't resemble criminal enterprises at all, and this makes it very hard to write a crime novel about them.

Remaining true to these realities while producing a readable story is difficult—however the literary novel does provide us a major tool for doing that, through its focus on manners. By writing about how people actually live, the literary novel can highlight the drama that exists even in situations where there aren't overt antagonists. Creation Lake, for instance, became much more readable when we're actually in the commune, and we start reading about petty dramas—the woman who got kicked out for being annoying, or the kid who impregnated their teacher.

But Creation Lake refuses to use any of these dramas to provide a resolution to its central questions: are these communards the good guys? Is what they are doing worthwhile? Or is the protagonist’s knowing cynicism superior to any form of belief?

I understand not wanting to write a traditional detective story, because ultimately such stories glorify action, and maybe the author simply doesn't believe in action. Maybe the author believes in cynicism and inertia. But that doesn't free you from the need to actually make the case that cynicism is necessary and inevitable! In my tale, the detective plot is stymied by the incompetence and inertia of the system, but the thread about Terra wanting a baby provides a thematically appropriate resolution to the action: ultimately having a child forces you to care about the future in a direct and immediate way that clashes with high-minded idealism.

I know literary writers often (pretend to) disdain fiction with a message, but if you're writing about politics, if you’re writing about economics, about science, about the future—then the story itself needs to conclude with some kind of statement.¹ The very form of such a story demands the answer to certain questions: how does this turn out? Are these people kooks or not? Who is the bad guy here?

You can pick whatever answer you want, and you can even undercut and subvert and complicate your chosen answer, but if you simply refuse to pick an answer, then you are betraying a promise you made to the reader—a promise that you would attempt to make sense of this ethical morass that you yourself chose to construct and that you somehow persuaded the reader to invest in. And to betray that trust is not brave; it is a shameful act.

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Lots of writers nowadays seem to be taking the climate and ecology as their primary concerns—I'm sure many of those books are much better than Kushner's and they do not have the problems I've identified. However, I often don't read books that're related to climate and the environment, because, personally, I find it very depressing to dwell upon the worst-case scenarios for climate change.

Climate change is not something I can affect. It seems pretty clear that the will for a political solution to climate change is lacking. I hope various technological mitigations and solutions can be found. I am just as affected as anyone—there's never been a wildfire in San Francisco, but it's not something that's per-se impossible. The hills just to the south of us often strike me as seeming no different from hills in Santa Cruz or Contra Costa counties that definitely have caught fire.

I certainly hope that climate change doesn't cause the collapse of modern civilization or end all life on earth—I do not believe it will, but this belief of mine is a very vulnerable belief, and I like to avoid exposing it to countervailing information.

Seen in that light, maybe Creation Lake is the best possible climate novel, because...I actually did read it.² If the book had been any less detached or had treated its subject with any more seriousness, I likely would've avoided it.

For instance, last year I was in a book club that picked Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. It's a much better book than Creation Lake, but...I just stopped reading the book. Too dark. Made me too afraid for my own future and that of my child. I didn't want to read it anymore, so I didn't.

Creation Lake never made me afraid in quite that way, which is probably the reason I actually finished reading it. Still...that doesn't make it a good novel. Maybe climate change simply can't be done well! I don't think any novel about climate change can definitively rule out the possibility that climate change will cause the extinction of mankind, and this possibility is so threatening that it becomes really hard to write a climate novel that doesn't come off as either unbearably dark or fundamentally dishonest.

There is a reason that in the aftermath of the Black Death so much great literature arose...that barely mentions the Black Death! I know many contemporary people wrote about the Black Death, but those aren't the works we actually read! In The Decameron they hardly talk about it. Same thing with The Canterbury Tales. In the end, what's there to say? There was a great disease, and one third of everyone in existence—they died. It was horrible. We certainly hope it does not keep happening, but in the meantime we will focus on things that are timeless (which in both collections seems mainly to be cuckoldry).³

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Further Reading

Whenever I make a really reductionist claim like, “The Decameron is mainly about cuckolding”, somebody will come in and post a bunch of links to me purporting to explain how great The Decameron is. I know it's great! It's fantastic. It is a huge influence on my own writing. My tales show an immense influence from The Decameron, which I listened to in audiobook only last year.⁴

Many of the most interesting tales are indeed about cuckolding. In the following incident, a woman has tricked her husband into climbing into a tub to clean it out, so she can sell it to a man who (she claims) has come to buy it, but who is really her lover.⁵

Giannello [the lover] said: ‘The tub seems to be in pretty good shape, but you appear to have left the lees of the wine in it, for it’s coated all over with some hard substance or other that I can’t even scrape off with my nails. I’m not going to take it unless it’s cleaned out first.’

So Peronella said: ‘We made a bargain, and we’ll stick to it. My husband will clean it out.’

‘But of course,’ said the husband. And having put down his tools and rolled up his sleeves, he called for a lamp and a scraping tool, lowered himself into the tub, and began to scrape away. Peronella, as though curious to see what he was doing, leaned over the mouth of the tub, which was not very wide, and resting her head on her arm and shoulder, she issued a stream of instructions, such as: ‘Rub it up there, that’s it, and there again!’ and ‘See if you can reach that teeny-weeny bit left at the top.’

While she was busy instructing and directing her husband in this fashion, Giannello, who had not fully gratified his desires that morning before the husband arrived, seeing that he couldn’t do it in the way he wished, contrived to bring it off as best he could. So he went up to Peronella, who was completely blocking up the mouth of the tub, and in the manner of a wild and hot-blooded stallion mounting a Parthian mare in the open fields, he satisfied his young man’s passion, which no sooner reached fulfilment than the scraping of the tub was completed, whereupon he stood back, Peronella withdrew her head from the tub, and the husband clambered out.

Then Peronella said to Giannello: ‘Here, take this lamp, my good man, and see whether the job’s been done to your satisfaction.’

Having taken a look inside the tub, Giannello told her everything was fine, and he was satisfied. He then handed seven silver ducats to the husband, and got him to carry it round to his house.⁶

Now this is what people write when they think the world might actually be ending!

If you want to read The Decameron, I listened to it in audio—the narration and production values on this Naxos audiobook are superb. They are head and shoulders above everyone else when it comes to doing very long classic works of literature in audio. I genuinely wonder sometimes if they are a CIA cult-op because otherwise I have no idea how the economics could work—how many people can possibly be listening to an audiobook of the Decameron? Nonetheless I am grateful for them.

1. Most people I encounter tend to believe there is too much politics in contemporary fiction, and this is bad, because fiction should be about language and form. I only partially agree. I think the politics in contemporary fiction is usually extremely thoughtless and shallow, but the solution isn't less politics, it's more thoughtful and morally-complex politics. Eschewing politics to focus on form and aesthetics is also fine, but it’s not the only fine choice.

2. I should also note that Kushner’s novel is, at least on the surface, not concerned with climate change. The group in the book is opposed to a government water project. But many of the gloomy musings on human nature did strongly evoke the kind of anti-human rhetoric that's typically associated with climate doomers. For example, here’s one of the characters in the novel, denigrating Homo sapiens, which he calls H. tardissimus.

And how bitterly ironic, Bruno said, that H. tardissimus strolls in at the end of a gaping stretch—unfathomable to the mind, so much time, lived by an enormous variety of people. At the end of an endless saga, H. tardissimus, aka “Tardie,” arrives on the scene, only to destroy everything.

3. The plague would recur in Europe for another three hundred years. The last outbreak of the plague in England was in 1666. Approximately fifty years later, Daniel Defoe wrote Journal of the Plague Year, which is the earliest description of the plague that I've actually read (The Decameron really does not describe it in detail). A hundred years after that, Manzoni wrote The Betrothed, which also deals heavily with the plague. The plague was so horrific that it needed to be definitively over before it could give rise directly to great literature.

4. I wrote more about The Decameron and another collection of early prose tales, The Golden Ass, in this post:

One of my favorite stories in The Golden Ass for instance, features a husband who comes home, and he tells his wife about the disgraceful scene next door, where the neighbor discovered his wife cheating on him, and he murdered her and her lover. The husband then discovers his own wife is cheating on him—her lover is hiding right in the room! And he’s like, “I’m not going to be an idiot like the guy next door. I won’t seek your death as is my right under the law”. Instead he just goes to bed with the wife’s lover—a handsome youth—and divorces the wife

Millennials are unprepared to wield power

5. Incidentally an extremely similar story is also found in Lucius Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, which is where Boccaccio must’ve found it. This means the tale is at least 2,000 years old. Naxos’s version of The Golden Ass is also superb.

6. This quote is from the Penguin Classics version of The Decameron, translated by G.H. McWilliam, which I own, but didn’t actually read, since I listened to it in audio. The Naxos version was translated by Guido Waldman, and I actually found that translation to be significantly better. Here’s Waldman’s version if you want it in text form.