Laleh Ahmad shows how the solarpunk genre imagines realistic green futures based on renewable energy & communal self-reliance rooted in care
Climate despair is pervasive, and I understand why. The options seem increasingly narrow: despair or escapism. In the face of once-in-a-lifetime disasters occurring every few years, it feels impossible to consider climate change with anything but a sense of overwhelming doom.
But isn’t this, in itself, absurd? Climate change is symptomatic of human beings’ absurd desire to look away from existential threats and pray at the altar of growth, and in response to its constant reminders that it will not go away, many people have chosen to continue on the same path.
Illustration by Astral-Requin, 2019
Writer Amitav Ghosh argues that we need a “heightened imaginary response to climate change.” He explains this idea via the notion of “probability.” If literature inspires reality as much as reality inspires literature, then literature, to a large extent, can shape what our minds might be able to digest as “probable.” Ghosh argues that by not including the specter of climate change in literature, authors are feeding their readers a comforting illusion that convinces them that their experience of climate change is something outside the norm, something bizarre.
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