Class and Climate Fiction

What’s at stake when a work of climate change literature articulates its concerns in terms of wealth inequality? What questions arise if we position literary works at the crossroads of poverty studies and climate change... [ view full abstract ]

What’s at stake when a work of climate change literature articulates its concerns in terms of wealth inequality? What questions arise if we position literary works at the crossroads of poverty studies and climate change fiction? American literature has a long history of writing about the poor, but cli-fi literature is a more recent genre without as extensive a critical bibliography as poverty studies. While the literature of poverty studies emphasizes the struggles of humans, cli-fi fiction tends to highlight nonanthropomorphic concerns. The rhetoric and representation of poverty and anthropogenic planetary warming can overlap as interlocked vocabularies; thus, concerns about vulnerability, deprivation, limited resources, exploitation, oppression, development, distributive justice, mitigation, and education can equally apply to the financial struggles an environmental conscience. Since both wealth inequality and climate change are socially constructed forces of economics and politics, reading fiction through an interdisciplinary ecopoverty lens reveals and connects the dual exploitation of the poor and the earth.

 An ecopoverty perspective shifts readers’ attention from one focused exclusively on the environment to one on the intersection of class status and the environment. The term “ecopoverty” is distinct from “environmental justice.” In general, the EJ movement tends to avoid an emphasis on nature, wilderness, preservation, and conservation, and instead focuses on government policy, community health, toxic industrial waste, urban and workplace poisoning, and local economic sustainability, To many in the field of advocacy, environmentalism and the social justice movement are “frenemies” – they politely grin at each other in recognition, but they mistrust each other since environmentalists tend to discount civil rights, and EJ advocates think the environmentalists’ emphasis on wilderness and the human/nature divide is misplaced. Further, the foundational gender, race, and class concerns of the EJ movement distinguish it from the mainstream environmental movement that historically has tended to be white and middle class.

While cli-fi literature is a 20^th- and 21^st-century genre, the dual concerns of a changing climate (loosely defined) and socioeconomic disparity are relevant to nineteenth-century studies as well. As Richard Primack’s book Walden Warming shows, Thoreau’s careful notes on flowers, birds, and plants makes Thoreau a co-author on studies of climate change in Concord today. Walden also stands as an early example of the overlap of class status and environmentalism: Thoreau deliberately lowered his standard of living in order to live deliberately and closer to nature, and he is quite critical of the Irish poor. His writings show his resistance to Edenic thinking, which tries to separate human culture from nature in order to have dominion over it. Thoreau shows us the importance of thinking ecosystemically, which we need to carry over into 21^st-century studies of climate change.

On the one hand, an interdisciplinary environmental and poverty studies approach to literature might seem at odds: biocentric equality mandates a nonanthropocentric focus, while concerns of poverty studies center on lived experiences and identities. Similarly, while much of cli-fi literature relies on scientific predictions or estimates of what life might be like due to extensive planetary warming, we do not have such a need for hypothesized future estimates about quality of life in poverty studies because literature that thematizes socioeconomic struggle powerfully portrays the actual lived reality today of people facing conditions of impoverishment. Yet reading such works as Thoreau’s Walden, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Junot Diaz’s “Monstro,” and Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Tamarisk Hunter” through an ecopoverty perspective makes evident to readers the twinned concerns of the environmental and the economic. These writers hitch socioeconomic vulnerability to environmental vulnerability, with the latter three demonstrating that anthropogenic climate change particularly impacts communities facing conditions of impoverishment.       

  Ecocriticism’s presumed deep connection to a sense of a local place occludes the effect of globalism and planetary warming. Ecocritics often rely too heavily on an “ethics of proximity” -- “localism” prevents us from seeing larger global processes. In other words, devotion to regionalism may naively miss the larger forces affecting the region. If we apply this idea to poverty studies, we may realize that defining “our” poor by nearby neighborhoods, or the catchment area of a university’s social outreach, might occlude the inbound approach of normally faraway economic migrants. For example, Kingsolver’s Dellarobia Turnbow in Tennessee slowly becomes aware of the plight of the Delgado family, who can be seen as both economic and climate migrants from Mexico. Reading climate fiction through the lens of poverty studies permits readers to see previously unacknowledged links between Dellarobia and the Delgado family. Junot Diaz’s unnamed narrator’s wealth allows him to escape the impoverished Dominican Republic for Rhode Island and to escape the heating climate disaster unfolding in Haiti. Bacigalupi’s Lolo likely will end up an economic climate-change migrant when his water source and income get cut off.           

It is important to consider whether and how the literary imagination, especially in cli-fi works, can intervene in political discourse and possibly change public opinion and motivation to move towards reversing dangerous planetary damage and its devastating socioeconomic effects on the world’s poor. As readers and critics, we must remain hopeful that a historical perspective of C19 EH can help confront the urgent climate concerns of C21.  An interdisciplinary ecopoverty critical lens can offer compelling perspectives on anthropogenic climate change that scientific reports cannot. Indeed, an ecopoverty perspective that understands the overlapping concerns between poverty studies and the environment can serve as an essential resource not only for reflecting on our relationship to the earth, but as a way to change our imaginations so we can come to our own rescue before it is too late.