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Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

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if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Republicans in disarray!

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You are here: Home / Medium Cool / Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Climate Change, Human Impact

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Climate Change, Human Impact

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In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Climate Change, Human Impact

For this week’s Medium Cool, let’s talk about fiction/film, climate change, and refugees.

One of my MA students is writing a fascinating thesis, and his work makes me wonder what kinds of texts or films people might add to the conversation. Here’s his argument:

“Through an exploration of the important interventions marginalized speculative artists make in a culture obsessed with materialism and endless consumption, this thesis examines how climate refugees in fiction and film navigate dying ecologies and explores why their stories matter.”

Most of the works he’s considering are speculative fiction. What works come to mind when you think about stories in which climate/environment and refugees/immigrants intersect?

Reader Interactions

114Comments

  2. 2.

    dmsilev

    For SF, Dune comes immediately to mind, although some of that is is in the backstory rather than the actual main story.

  3. 3.

    dexwood

    Bowie’s character, Thomas Jerome, in The Man Who Fell to Earth was a climate refugee of sorts.

    eta: definitely an undocumented alien.  /s

  4. 4.

    Yutsano

    The Handmaid’s Tale is a story where the climate calamity is in the background, but the whole structure of the society is one choice that was made to deal with that.

  9. 9.

    The Thin Black Duke

    I wish Hollywood would do a remake of Soylent Green. I’d love to see a more nuanced and insightful approach to the premise.

  10. 10.

    BGinCHI

    Great suggestions so far. I was thinking about some of these too (Dune, Children of Men), and also trying to remember what ET was doing checking Earth out.

  12. 12.

    dexwood

    Logan’s Run might be a stretch. I don’t remember if climate change was part of the plot, but population control to balance use of natural resources was.

  13. 13.

    dmsilev

    The whole broad sweep of Tolkien’s universe, starting with The Silmarillion and as a background to LOTR, is the story of elves and other races getting kicked out of one home after another after another, as the environment gets steadily more hostile and the magic (for lack of a better term) steadily drains away from the world.
    Kind of depressing, really.

  15. 15.

    BGinCHI

    @dmsilev: Was thinking that might be more Colonialism, but then again, probably Colonialism and environment destruction and depredation go hand in hand.

    OK, no “probably” about it…..

  23. 23.

    NYCMT

    Ding Ling, “Shui”. Pearl Buck ” The First wife’ about the 1931 Yangtze floods.

  26. 26.

    oatler.

    @dexwood:

    Climate change was clear in the movie. “Greenhouse Effect all year long”, plus Edward G Robinson mourning how things “used to be”.

  27. 27.

    The Thin Black Duke

    Would Cordwainer Smith’s Scanners Live In Vain belong here? Think about living in an environment so hostile that the way humans can survive is to alter them surgically.

  30. 30.

    NYCMT

    There’s also Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun as one of the very few literarily worthwhile skiffy works. I see Bacigalupi and Harrison’s Make Room, Make Room!  mentioned, and I have to say as a recovering science fiction fan who abjured all the works of mediocrity more than two decades ago, I think actual modern literature has got a lot more to offer about real human responses to environmental collapse than science fiction, a genre largely edited by trimmers and nincompoops. (And I say that as a personal acquaintance of Charlie stross, Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and personal friend of Yoon Lee)

  31. 31.

    Buckeye

    @BGinCHI:  ET was a botanist, I don’t recall anything climate specific about it.

    I think Parable Of the Sower has climate change as a back drop.

  32. 32.

    Benw

    Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds is a great SF “multiverse” novel about climate change, immigration, and how capitalism divides the haves and have-nots. Highly recommended

  34. 34.

    NotMax

    Quick takes (mix of books and film).

    A Boy and His Dog
    Snowpiercer
    The Shape of Things to Come
    Earth Abides
    (less serious vein) The Bed Sitting Room
    (loose, tenuous fit to the topic) Aguirre, the Wrath of God
    .

    Switching gears, submitted for your approval for when the well of topics is running low, a Medium Cool dedicated to memorable commercials. Could be fun; can’t get much more pop culture than that.

    ;)

  35. 35.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @BGinCHI: We wouldn’t have Samuel Delaney’s Aye and Gommorah if Smith didn’t get there first. And I would strongly recommend the MurderBot series by Martha Wells.

  37. 37.

    zhena gogolia

    @NYCMT:

    Yeah, I don’t know if it’s really climate change, but definitely people migrating because there are no resources.

  39. 39.

    Cermet

    As I posted just in the previous post to day – Soylent Green. The movie that encapsulates a lot of what we here in amerika will see.

  41. 41.

    zhena gogolia

    @NotMax:

    I got The Bed Sitting Room mixed up with The L Shaped Room and couldn’t figure out what the climate-change angle was.

  44. 44.

    BGinCHI

    @NotMax: Thanks for the suggestion!

    And yeah, “Snowpiercer” already a part of his thesis. Looking forward to seeing what he does with it.

  45. 45.

    NYCMT

    David Brin wrote _Earth_ consciously extrapolating the late ’80s consensus climate change scenario, and if one shaves off the Deus Ex Telluria ending, not tremendously badly if truly thoroughly mediocre.

  46. 46.

    NotMax

    One more loose fit, City by Clifford Simak.
    One more better fit, The Postman (book by David Brin only, not the mess of a film).
    Maybe also Edgar Pangborn’s Davy.
    .

  48. 48.

    RSA

    There’s some initial ambiguity about it, but in Forster’s “The Machine Stops” the characters believe that they need respirators to travel in the open air.

    The surface of the earth is only dust and mud, no advantage. The surface of the earth is only dust and mud, no life remains on it, and you would need a respirator, or the cold of the outer air would kill you. One dies immediately in the outer air.

    I was reminded of the story because the Homeless are outside, living independently of the Machine, and they’re the hope of humanity.

  49. 49.

    NotMax

    @zhena gogolia

    Whatever pharmacopeia of drugs Richard Lester was ingesting while making The Bed Sitting Room, he more than got his money’s worth.

    ;)

  50. 50.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @NotMax: Have you read Pangborn’s short story collection And Still I Persist In Wondering? Elegant and heartbreaking.

  52. 52.

    Tony Jay

    @dmsilev:

    I got the impression that the ‘draining of magic’ from Middle Earth was a natural result of the Valar gradually withdrawing from any kind of overt contact with Arda, plus the steady erosion of any Elven populations that had been to Valinor and had brought some of its reflected glory back with them. It wasn’t so much that their environments became unsuitable for magical races to survive in, as the magic they had been imbued with by their ‘divine’ creators/mentors had no permanence outside the Undying Lands.

    OTOH its canon that Melkor pretty much created the concept of climatic extremes as a side effect of his ego-driven hijacking of Arda’s formation, and Sauron carried on that tradition as part of his Order Through Fear dickery.

    #nerdmodeactive

  54. 54.

    Geoduck

    @oatler.:  And the original 50’s “John Christopher”/Sam Youd novel, The Death of Grass (a virus wipes out the world’s cereal crops). Youd wrote other novels that more or less fall into this category including A Wrinkle in the Skin (massive world-wide earthquakes), The World in Winter (a new Ice Age) and Empty World (pandemic). The World in Winter in particular deals with refugees, in this case Europeans trying to escape to still-survivable Africa.

  55. 55.

    Suzanne

    Slumdog Millionaire, which has a theme of urban poverty in a hot city.

    Snowpiercer.

  56. 56.

    marcopolo

    Kinda shocked nobody has mentioned “Interstellar” which I mostly like even with the arm wavy “love is the answer” ending. And then there are the truly bad “2012” and “Day After Tomorrow.”

    I know there are books I’ve read not mentioned but all my books are in boxes atm.

  58. 58.

    Buckeye

    @debbie:

    I think The Road is lack of resources after a meteor/comet strike, not climate change.

     

    I’d also throw in the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood.

  59. 59.

    SiubhanDuinne

    I know I’m kind of a stuck record on Dorothy L. Sayers, but the last section of The Nine Tailors, depicting a flood and its aftermath in the fen country, remains one of the great pieces of descriptive writing.

    ETA: Not climate change, but a pointed lesson in what can happen when man puts himself in charge of nature.

  62. 62.

    Leto

    So two right off the bat (mainly because Avalune and I have been in a dystopian obsession for the past few years):

    1. Margaret Atwood’s MADDADDAM Trilogy. It’s a combination climate dystopia, genetic mutation, and rampant capitalism all rolled into one. To a large degree it’s a non-satisfactory ending which makes it all the more appealing.
    2. One that we just picked up and I immediately read: A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher. It’s a Scottish author, so there’s a good bit of UK English flavoring, but the story takes place after the end of the world. Not to spoil too much, but the population of the Earth goes from roughly 7 billion to around 10k in around 10 years time. It’s a quick read at around 400 pages.

    I should get Avalune to chime in here because I know she’s read a ton more and would also probably job my memory on a few.

  64. 64.

    TheOtherHank

    12 Monkeys

    There was a pretty bad scifi book I read back in the 80s/90s where the premise was that the only thing preventing the next ice age is all the greenhouse gasses we’d been pumping into the atmosphere. When the tree hugging enviros succeed in stopping all the pollution, the earth is plunged into a new ice age (as I recall, it is a fact that places not all that far north went from ice-free to covered by glaciers in less than 100 years during the last ice age). The brave libertarians help a plucky refugee from one of the orbiting habitats that has crashed to earth and needs rocket fuel to get back home. As I said, it was pretty bad. Oooh, Mr Google comes to the rescue. It’s Fallen Angels by Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn, so you can anticipate the point of view of the heroes based on that list of authors.

  65. 65.

    marcopolo

    Okay, adding two Kim Stanley Robinson Trilogies.  First:  Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below Zero, and Sixty Days & Counting.  Second, his Mars books (cause Mars is short of like atmosphere): Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars.  

    And, honestly, quite a few of this other books have these themes in them.  Pretty sure you could do an entire thesis just looking at his work.

  68. 68.

    Craig

    @Tony Jay: Morgoth and his minions are pretty good stand-ins for modern extraction corporations and ‘own the libs’ Republicans. Almost everything he and they do conforms to a rule, or ruin mentality.

  70. 70.

    PJ

    J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World is not about refugees, but rather the people who decide to stay, or return to, the overheated environment.  For some, it’s because the desire for wealth overrides the dangers, for others, it’s the desire to embrace the destruction of the world even as it destroys the ones embracing it.  We can see both of these behaviors today, and I think they will persist as the world grows warmer.

  71. 71.

    James E Powell

    @debbie:

    Love The Road, both book and movie.

    Love Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome despite all the reasons why I should not.

    Really liked the Dust Lands Trilogy. Thought it was much better than Hunger Games. I’m still surprised it wasn’t made into a movie. At one time, Ridley Scott was attached.

    Liked more than loved Interstellar. Can’t put my finger on why I didn’t love it. Maybe too much build up from friends before I saw it.

  74. 74.

    dm

    Good, people are mentioning Paolo Bacigalupi — his novels of a post-climate-change/biotech-run-mad world are magnificent.

    Kim Stanley Robinson has been on the climate-change beat for a while.  His latest, The Ministry of the Future begins with an environmental disaster that kills 20 million people, yet manages to end on an optimistic note that maybe we’ll get it together (I’m not sure he’d write the same novel after experiencing our encounter with pandemic).  His New York 2140 is another curiously optimistic novel about a New York converted to “super-Venice” by rising ocean levels (“they’re underwater, but gosh, I think they’re going to leave the world a better place than they found it’ll”, is how I felt when I finished the novel, which is also a love letter to New York).  And of course his trilogy of Mars novels pretty much looks at the argument for “climate change (on Mars) in a good cause”.

    His NSF trilogy (Forty signs of rain, Fifty degrees below, Sixty days and counting), are a lot weaker.

    Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are two shockingly contemporary topical novels, about life as a refugee in climate-ravaged California, despite having been written three decades ago.

  75. 75.

    BlueGuitarist

    Brilliant African American sci fi writer Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.

  76. 76.

    Benw

    Also, I liked Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days & Counting, which is about people in the US in the present day dealing with climate change in very real political and scientific ways.

  78. 78.

    Falling Diphthong

    What leapt to mind for me was, oddly, Z-Nation. The zombie plague dwarfs any rising sea level details, but it’s a story about displaced people, over and over again, trying to find somewhere safe to settle.

    A cheesy cult show, but they dealt with some very resonant themes. It was like “Okay, now that we’ve put the goofy zombie stuff at the forefront, we can do something interesting one level down.” Or put another way: Roberta and Addie, the female main characters, always wear sensible shoes that they can run in.

  79. 79.

    ShadeTail

    Splatoon. The team-shooter video game by Nintendo. It’s entire backstory is that global climate change killed off the human race and caused various sea creatures to evolve into sapient bipedal races.

  80. 80.

    AWOL

    There Goes the Sun:

    Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series of novels.

    “Sunshine,” directed by Danny Boyle.

  81. 81.

    CaseyL

    Mary Robinson Kowal’s “Lady Astronaut” books are set in an alternative Earth where a meteor wipes out the Eastern Seaboard of the US in 1952 and sets off an environmental chain reaction that will render the planet uninhabitable within 50 years. That makes everyone on Earth a future refugee, as the world’s governments scramble to accelerate a space program aimed at getting colonies established on Mars.
    The societal changes that in our universe were percolating in the 1950s and boiled over in the 1960s are also accelerated.​
     

    ETA: The environmental destruction in these books aren’t directly human-made, but there are definitely refugees in the series’ “present,” as survivors attempt to relocate after the Strike, as well as the predicted future.

  82. 82.

    Narya

    Nearly everything by Sheri Tepper is premised on apocalyptic climate change and the need to deal with it. Not all solutions she proposes are…good ones, let’s say, but I think it’s worthwhile to explore that. She folds in patriarchy while she’s at it.

  85. 85.

    Acallidryas

    There has been some really great cli-fi lately.  Blackfish City is a really interesting take on climate change, bioengineering, and late stage capitalism,  on a floating refugee city.

    I don’t know if Children’s Bible from last year is what you might be looking for, but it was a truly fantastic book that hit on the topics of climate change, refugees, and how older generations have their head in the sand.

  86. 86.

    dm

    @NotMax: Yes, I found out about that when verifying that her Parable novels were published in the early 90s, despite featuring a vapid president with the motto, “Make America Great Again”.

    There’s another interesting thing going on with the Perseverance mission: the presence of a Navajo engineer on the mission staff  (“Hey, it looks a lot like where I grew up!”, he jokes) means that a lot of features are receiving names in Navajo.

  89. 89.

    Craig

    Phillip K Dick’s novel The Penultimate Truth is, like most of it’s contemporaries concerned more with nuclear war and it’s aftermath than climate change. There are though a lot of motivations involved that reflect our current crisis. Large populations with no voice to understand, or change the impact of actions by their elites, lots of dangerous, hi risk/hi reward, short term gambles by elites to enrich themselves. This is from memory, so I really should read it again.

  91. 91.

    marcopolo

    One last one from me: Seveneves.  Neal Stephenson imagines a situation where the moon cracks apart, but slowly, so that there is enough time for humanity to try to figure out how to live through a moon debris shower that will wind up superheating the Earth’s atmosphere.  The book is in two parts, when the moon is falling apart & raining down; then it jumps like 6000 years in the future to take a look at how folks wound up surviving.  It’s an interesting read.

    I’ll also mention that the science fiction of my youth (in my 50s) always threw out the idea that we’ll probably be able to run away (to Mars or another planet in another solar system) if we fuck up the Earth badly enough.  Over the last decade, or five years, I feel like that optimism has pretty much died out.  We know a lot more about what living in space does to us, we are a lot more aware of just how big (and distant) space is, and a book like Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson, which is about a generation ship going to Tau Ceti to set up a new human colony does a pretty good example of exploring the very difficult reality of human space exploration.

  92. 92.

    SFBayAreaGal

    Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep and the movie Blade Runner

    Martian Chronicles

    The Time Machine

    War of the Worlds

    Earth Abides

    The Day of the Triffids

    Lucifer’s Hammer

    The Stand

    On the Beach

    Just to name a few

  95. 95.

    martha

    @Fester Addams: Yes! I was going to recommend this series.  Jemison builds such a  vivid world of climate disasters and their impacts on the societies and communities she created. Also, her characters really resonate.

  96. 96.

    tonyinsandiego

    what about that one the alt-righters love? the Camp of the Saints or something like that?

  98. 98.

    raven

    I’m reading this right now

     

    “Wade Davis is a powerful, penetrating and immensely knowledgeable writer… Magdalena is a geography book about a river that is also a political history of Colombia, an admonition of ecological disaster, an impassioned defence of indigenous wisdom, and a memoir of the author’s various travels and friendships over the years… Evanescent… Magdalena is steeped in a physical sense of Colombia: the landscapes, the disreputable backstreets, the irrepressibly resilient people.”

  99. 99.

    pluky

    Paul Park: The Starbridge Chronicles trilogy.

    How a society structures itself to survive periodic ecological collapse.

  100. 100.

    RSA

    @Phylllis: Was there climate change in Children of Men?  I don’t remember.

    If the scope includes non-ecologic disasters, I’ll mention Herbert’s White Plague and Sheldon’s “Screwfly Solution,” which have similar themes.

  102. 102.

    Bill Arnold

    @Fester Addams:

    How about N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy.

    Somebody who I trust (and who’s recommendations always resonate with me) strongly recommended that series recently. Not far into it but it feels quite well drawn and written so far.

  103. 103.

    AWOL

    @Bill Arnold: Book was dullish. I put it down. Awful human. Made the publisher destroy a few thousand bound galleys because the orange on the cover didn’t match the shade he desired. Workers lose $$$ as bonuses dwindle because of egotists like this. Humans lose more trees. Over nothing. Hope he never pretends to be an environmentalist.

  107. 107.

    namekarB

    Am surprised no one has mention “The Good Earth” by Pearl S Buck but perhaps a 1931 book and 1937 movie gives away my age

  108. 108.

    KBS

    @Fester Addams: I’m so glad someone mentioned this!  Fabulous series about an apocalypse, and the rage of oppressed people.  N. K. Jemisin is a fantastic writer.  Her short story, Emergency Skin, was a more direct commentary on climate change.  I highly recommend all her writing!

  110. 110.

    Spanish Moss

    “Far North” by Marcel Theroux. A post apocalyptic novel set in a time after global warming has made settled areas dangerously lawless. Encounters with refugees spur protagonist Makepeace to leave her relatively safe isolation in the frozen north to embark on a quest to reengage with civilization. Obviously depressing, but hopeful too. National book award finalist in 2009.

    This is one of my favorite post apocalyptic novels, which I seem to love in spite of the fact that they are pretty universally depressing. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but after experiencing a much smaller degree of isolation during Covid I realize that this book is exploring two themes that are relevant today: impact of global warming and impact of isolation for safety. I might have to read it again.

  111. 111.

    frosty

    YA trilogy starting with Ashfall. Climate change from the Yellowstone volcano erupting and the story of survivors and refugees. Really well written.

    Thumbs up for New York 2140 too.

  112. 112.

    IbnBob

    I will recommend very highly 2018 A.D., or the King kong Blues, by Sam J Lundwall. Lundwall was (and I believe still is) a Swedish SF writer. He put together this novel using material from the news media of the day (1968). It’s absolutely astonishing how many things he called. He wasnt trying to be a prophet, just identify what might be trends.

  114. 114.

    Wakeshift

    Days late to a dead thread, full of excellent suggestions and discussion.

    However, notably absent from the list is Nausicaa (Miyazaki film), which I think is relevant and deserves mention.

    Now back to catching up on the last few days’ with of posts and comments…

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