I can’t ignore them. You can’t write a whole book about the history of life on Earth and fail to mention that we’re heading into a major extinction event of our making. You can’t write about how Earth works as a planet and ignore the rapid climate change that will be catastrophic for many species, almost certainly including ourselves. To ignore this is dishonest and leaves the books incomplete. To acknowledge it and disarm the fear it raises is increasingly difficult, now near-impossible.
Ten years ago, I could write about all this with some hope that we might step back from the brink, do some sensible things that would at least limit the damage. Just before the pandemic I published a book which, by the time it came out, I thought already dishonest in its optimism. (Editorially imposed optimism, I would add.) Luckily, it being published the week of lockdown meant it disappeared without trace.
Hint: making bird feeders out of plastic bottles and putting on a jumper when you’re cold won’t save the planet. It might save some money, in the latest crisis to beset us. But the action we need is political and large scale, and it’s not going to come in time. If at all. The consensus is that you can’t say this to young children. But I’m beginning to wonder why not. I grew up in the Cold War, certain I’d be killed by nuclear war (still possible). My father grew up in the Second World War, certain he'd leave school to be conscripted and killed (it was over before he did). Only the people who grew up in the 90s and 00s have not done so in a climate of gloom. (That is, all the editors…) Young children know all about Greta Thunberg and climate change. She is held up to them as a hero. You can’t see someone as a hero if you don’t know what they’re being heroic about.
But it still leaves the problem. What to say in a book that is not specifically about the current situation, but to be complete must mention it. There is not space to go into it and its likely/possible outcomes in depth. Too much information isn’t appropriate either, as we don’t know whether the child reading the book will have someone supportive and knowledgeable to talk to.
I’m not particularly optimistic about our prospects any more, and no longer want to pretend to be optimistic. I’ve noticed editors are no longer doing the knee-jerk ‘can we put a hopeful spin on this?’ We now recognise the ‘hopeful spin’ is just lying. The furthest I’ll go is to say humankind must do a lot of hard and urgent work, make a lot of big changes, to avert the worst outcomes. I don’t think the prospects for the planet as a whole are all that bad, unless on our way down we have a nuclear war. We’ve seen how quickly species recover once we stop killing them. Even huge whales recover quite quickly, despite having long reproductive cycles. The humpback whale population had fallen to 1000 before the moratorium on whaling, and now it’s round 25,000. Quite a bounce-back for just 40 years. Life has flourished at much higher temperatures and higher levels of carbon dioxide than we are threatening to bring. The difference is that the change is happening too quickly for things to adapt. Eventually new species will emerge to populate the hotter world. But, as in previous mass extinctions, there will likely be a few million years of desolation in which only disaster taxa like cockroaches, rats, pigeons and maybe at first a few left-over humans scavenge the detritus of civilisation. That’s not encouraging if you’re eight and want to grow up and have a fulfilling life. There’s no way of putting a positive spin on it. Perhaps the ‘we need to act fast’ line will see me through another five years before even that becomes clearly a lie. Even five years feels optimistic. As I write, a third of Pakistan is under water and California is burning. More and more young readers can see what’s happening because it’s on their doorsteps. We can’t hide it; we need to know how to talk about it.
Anne Rooney
Out now from OUP (no mention of climate change!)
