A new book shows how stories help readers comprehend climate crises and prepare for the unimaginable

It begins with shoes. Rain shoes to be precise. The icy showers of northern latitudes call for high-quality gear which is not something we from the tropics usually prepare for while travelling. Such as a Rs 15,000 pair of waterproof shoes, with the label of a multinational, stitched in a South Asian sweatshop – beyond my means then, beyond my means now.

So I had to bear the frigid rains in my sodden Khadim sneakers while imagining the radiator warmth of my cosy little cabin which made strange creepy noises all through the night, like those in that old house from Poe’s memorable tale. After all, how much does a young activist from a developing nation like ours make? Not enough. Not enough at all to beat the frigid northern weather which, like a ruthless torturer, seemed to be getting worse over the days.

Those days at the turn of the century, climate change was still new, confined mainly to research labs and conference rooms of international organisations and NGOs like ours. The aam admi had not heard about it. Global warming was still niche, largely a matter of academic curiosity or denialist manoeuvres in the form of novels like Michael Crichton’s famous potboiler. The oil industry, of course, knew that the planet was slowly catching fire but, in keeping with the exacting standards of corporate social responsibility, had chosen to keep quiet.

I had arrived in Stockholm in the early part of that year to research consumption habits of that rich Nordic country and compare them with what we have been doing back home. The Swedes had kindly put me up in this cosy little houseboat which was moored on the shore of Lake Malaren, which is like the placid soul of Sweden’s bustling capital. Not far from there was the old town of Gamla Stan, with its medieval buildings and roaring nightlife, the sounds of its beats often floating up to me over the waters of the lake. It was an ideal setting for work or for getting completely wasted.

My days were filled with interviews and meetings supplemented by reading reports about sustainability, climate and the environment. I looked for clues, searched for patterns and gathered as much information as I could about consumption habits and spent the evenings sipping Finnish vodkas in a lonely barge restaurant while lamenting about not finishing my novel as another year slowly slipped by.

So on this particular evening, I was still out working, trying to track down the office of a global refrigeration company, when it had begun to rain. This multinational, like many others, was using harmful coolant gases in their products which were puncturing the ozone layer, besides causing global warming. The ultraviolet rays that were reaching the earth through this ozone hole were causing skin cancer, and the impact of some of these coolants on global warming and the greenhouse effect was just beginning to get noticed.

I had had a very late lunch that day with a weirdly flavoured tandoori chicken (the other option was reindeer meat) at a small restaurant near my office and had taken a train to my destination. But I had gotten off at the wrong station and didn’t realise it. By the time I walked out of the station, the sky was overcast, and soon ice-cold drops had begun to fall, chilling me to the bone.

There was not a soul out on the street in this part of the town. It was abnormally quiet with shrouds of rain blocking my view in the bleak dusk light, and the feeling was quite akin to what Snowman would have felt as he woke up in the opening scenes of Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood’s end-of-the-world dystopia. Walking up and down deserted roads for almost an hour, my sneakers soaking wet, my paper map soggy and falling apart, I had finally arrived at the office shivering in my dripping raincoat.

All through that meeting, I tried to impress upon this official from the multinational that companies like theirs were purveying environment-damaging products in my country while supplying environment-friendly versions of the same in their domestic market. Condescending and slightly supercilious, he kept brushing off the issue, drowning me in figures and technology-conversion statistics, till I mentioned that we are planning to work closely with a large activist network which has a strong presence in their country.

A coin seemed to drop, and immediately there was a perceptible shift in mood and tone. The gentleman was suddenly all attention, almost empathetic. The meeting extended a little beyond schedule. We spoke about leapfrogging to new technologies, climate change, ozone depletion and the Montreal protocol for phasing out ozone-depleting substances.

I took my notes, thanked him and left. The rain had let up by then, but the temperature had dropped further still. On the train back to my boat, while bothering about catching a cold, I couldn’t decide whether I was satisfied with this particular encounter. However, buttressed by this and many other similar experiences, I slowly began to arrive at the conclusion that there is a real need to expose double standards, the lurking injustices, the glaring inequalities that underpin, perpetuate and aggravate planetary crises like ozone depletion or climate change. And to do this, I kept telling myself, activism could be just one of the instruments in a toolbox which has to include other sorts of engagement, other mantras and other ways of seeing and communicating environmental emergencies. And being a fledgling writer, I had almost immediately caught on to the importance of stories and their possible role in influencing the imagination.

The worldwide activism around ozone depletion did have a happy ending. Over the years, facilitated by the Montreal Protocol, many industries switched from ozone-depleting substances, which were also climate-damaging gases, to better alternatives with the resultant repair of the ozone layer. So much so that we can now expect the Antarctic ozone hole to close by the 2060s, while other regions will fare even better.

But a bigger battle had already been joined. In the first two decades of this century, the world would be swamped by an unprecedented crisis, manifested through forest fires, dangerous heat waves, cyclones, floods, crop failures, disease, forced migration and much more. Anthropogenic climate change was upon us, the biggest existential threat to life on the planet for a long time.

As I pushed ahead with my climate activism and awareness efforts, interacting with people from different walks of life, I was increasingly realising the importance of new kinds of stories to connect with the public imagination about the looming crisis. With climate change impinging on our day-to-day living, literature had also arrived at a crossroads where it needed to seek new directions. But what are the stories we should read, write and tell to engage with the climate crisis? Should these be dystopian accounts of a climate-ravaged planet or solution-focused tales of hope? How can one write engaging fiction about a phenomenon and a crisis that has its roots in science and meteorology but deals with our exploitative relation with the planet and its less privileged inhabitants? Do poetic language and aesthetic qualities of the text have a role to play in communicating the messages of climate change? Who will be the heroes of such stories, or should we have no heroes at all? As an activist and a writer, how could one bring these two practices together to communicate these urgent messages?

In the course of examining such questions, I had, quite by accident, arrived at this genre of writing that we call climate fiction or cli-fi. I discovered that already in the industrialised West and then gradually in developing countries too, writers had begun to imagine and represent climate change in their fiction. This was hopeful news, no doubt.

Excerpted with permission from The Climate Crossroads: Literature’s Encounter with a Planet on Fire, Rajat Chaudhuri, Bloomsbury.