By Mary Woodbury

In this spotlight on climate change authors I talk with Brian Adams, who has become a prolific fiction writer covering various environmental themes for teens and young adults. I first talked with Brian in November 2014 after the publication of his novel Love in the Time of Climate Change. 

Meet Casey, a community college professor with OCD (Obsessive Climate Disorder). While navigating the zaniness of teaching, he leads a rag-tag bunch of climate activists, lusts after one of his students, and smokes a little too much pot. Quirky, socially awkward and adolescent-acting, our climate change-obsessed hero muddles his way through saving the world while desperately searching for true love. Teaching isn’t easy with an incredibly hot woman in class, students either texting or comatose, condoms strewn everywhere, attack geese on field trips, and a dean who shows up at exactly the wrong moments. What’s a guy to do? Kidnap the neighbor’s inflatable Halloween ghost?  Channel Santa Claus’s rage at the melting polar ice caps? Shoplift at Walmart? How about all of the above!

Who would have thought climate change could be so funny!  Actually, it really isn’t, but Love in the Time of Climate Change, a romantic comedy about global warming, is guaranteed to keep you laughing. Laughing and thinking.

After our previous chat – a portion of which follows – Love in the Time of Climate Change won the 2014 Gold Medal INDIEFAB Book of the Year in the Humor category.

You are a professor of Environmental Science at Greenfield Community College in western Massachusetts, you are active in the climate change movement, and now you have written a romantic comedy about something similar involving a climate change activist teacher. How did your real life experiences inspire your novel? Any funny anecdotes to share?

As a professor I have struggled for years with how to present the issue of climate change to students without them resorting to substance abuse, slipping into profound depression, sending me poisoned chocolates, or, worse case scenario, doing absolutely nothing. The teacher in my novel undergoes the same sorts of struggles, many of which are based on my real life teaching experiences. The process of guiding students to the abyss and then gently pulling them back, giving them hope, and motivating them to get off their asses and do something, is incredibly challenging. If anyone has figured out how to do this please contact me!

Funny anecdotes…being the awkward fool that I am, I have so many I could share! One of the scenes in the novel takes place during a field trip to a solar home, and the love interest (Samantha) is attacked by geese and falls into a farm pond. Her teacher (Casey, our hero) lends her dry clothes, which makes for an awkward moment when the dean shows up. This is based on an incident I had when teaching and I had my students in the Green River doing aquatic insect sampling. One of my students fell in, I loaned her dry clothes, which led to, wait for it, awkward moments. I have a great deal of awkward embarrassing teaching experiences that I embellished (or not!) and used in my novel.

Can you tell us more about your background in climate change action and environmental science teaching?

I have been an activist all of my life around energy-related issues, and a teacher most of my professional life. This is my 20^th year at the community college where I teach. I’ve found activism to be an effective and productive way to deal with climate change angst. There is great joy to be found in the struggle, and to be surrounded by active young folk who want to change the world is incredibly inspirational. On campus, I am active with our Green Campus Committee as we work to reduce our carbon footprint. Off campus, I am increasing my activism with Climate Action Now, a local western Massachusetts node of 350.org.

Love in the Time of Climate Change is about a serious subject – climate change – yet you use humor to address it. I think comedy is a great way to tackle dire subjects because laughing is good for the soul and helps us put this overwhelming crisis into an identifiable and human perspective, which might be more motivating than the scary facts. Yet it takes a special skill to treat subjects like this with humor – without making light of the facts – and you seem to have succeeded. How did you accomplish this?

I’ve attempted something that I think is rather unique in that I’ve tackled potential world catastrophe in a fictionalized form through humor, drugs, social awkwardness and sex while being uncompromising about the science of climate change. I have found that many people avoid climate change nonfiction given how depressing and absolutely paralyzing it can be. I mean, seriously, how many people read climate change nonfiction? It can be an incredible downer! Extreme weather, food insecurity, drought, famine, melting glaciers, drowning polar bears, out of control wildfires, rising sea levels… My thought is that humor, silliness and love present an ideal opening not just to climate activists but to a larger audience as well. I love awkward romance and relationship angst, so it was a lot of fun to write.

Quite a few novels are being written today about climate change. How do you think fiction can address this subject in ways that other literature cannot?

Fiction can clearly go where non-fiction can’t, and draw readers deeply into stories and drama and relationships where they get hooked while getting educated. My novel is very didactic and quite preachy, and I make no apologies about it. But if it wasn’t for the awkward romance and silly adolescent antics, I’m not sure people would stick it out. I love stories where you’re laughing while saving the world!

Are there any inspirational authors you grew up with who inspired you to tackle environmental issues through fiction? And, I have to ask, are you a big fan of Gabriel García Márquez?

I love Edward Abbey (all of his writing) but particularly his The Monkey Wrench Gang. That was a great revelation to me. Activism can be fun! And that’s the take away here: How do we bring humor into the most serious of topics without trivializing the gravity of the situation? How do we make climate change an issue people want to take on and have a good time doing it? How do we foster the sentiment of the great anarchist activist Emma Goldman who supposedly said “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”  How can we dance while saving the world?

And yes – Gabriel Garcia Marquez rocks!

Back to your book, the teacher in your novel suffers from OCD, or Obsessive Climate Disorder. Can you describe this?

There is a scene in the novel where the hero is in the midst of “fooling around” with a very attractive woman who is clearly interested in him, and he is simply unable to free his tortured self from the energy no-nos in her apartment: inefficient light bulbs that are all turned on; the open windows and the cranked heat; recyclables in the trash can, etc. I can’t tell you what happens (read the book!) but, when climate change rears its ugly head in the midst of foreplay, that is clearly and unmistakably obsessive climate disorder!

Well, I just got your book in the mail, and can’t wait for this scene! Your book audience is probably all ages to an extent, but your main characters consist of a youngish teacher and his young, college-aged adult students. Young adult fiction is growing by leaps and bounds, even in climate novels. Why is this audience so important?

Youth will save the world! My goal was to promote activism among younger folks and get them psyched and motivated to get out there and make change. For anything good to happen, the younger generation must be active! I’m working on a novel now that features a 15 year-old protagonist battling mountain top removal in West Virginia, sort of a coming-of-age to activism novel.

Bill McKibben, of 350.org, said that you are “funnier than most of us environmental types” and that it was a pleasure to meet you. How did that feel to be acknowledged by such a well-known activist and author?

I was SO flattered to be blurbed by him! I believe, however, that he meant it was a pleasure to meet the main character in my novel, not me. If I met Bill McKibben, I’d probably do something really awkward and make a complete fool of myself! Bill is a hero to so many of us in the climate change movement, but his dig at those “environmental types” is quite revealing. While there is absolutely nothing funny about climate change, we do need activists to take joy in the struggle and have fun in their activism. My goal was to bring humor and hope into a genre that is noted for dystopian despair.

Since then, Brian has come out with KABOOM!, and his third novel, Offline, came out April 22, 2019. Brian recently told me about his second novel:

KABOOM!, my second novel, is the story of Cyndie and Ashley, two spirited and spunky teenage girls living in the heart of coal country, West Virginia, who discover that their beloved mountain is to be blown sky high by the coal company. It’s a young adult romantic comedy that focuses on first love and finding your voice through environmental activism. While KABOOM! (Kids Against Blowing Off Our Mountaintops) is fictional, mountaintop removal is definitely not. It’s a horrendously destructive and extreme method of coal extraction and it’s heartening to know that there are many true-to-life committed activists in Appalachia intent on fighting it. The times we live in are tough, so rather than dwell in dystopian nightmares, I try to use humor and romance as tools to promote environmental issues and move my story along. KABOOM! won gold medals at the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards and the Literary Classics Book Awards.

It’s great to see youth activists taking on fossil fuels, one of the leading contributors to global warming. Brian’s stories are an example of how humor can be used to shed light on serious issues, without demeaning those issues, and how youth can be empowered to take on Big Things.

He also was excited to discuss Offline, coming soon:

Offline is a young adult romantic comedy about two spirited and spunky teenage girls. The novel’s focus this time is on cell phone and online addiction. Meagan, the heroine, is banished by her parents to her gay grandfather’s farm to deal with her “netaholism,” and a lot of the novel’s humor is Meagan and her bestie’s bumbling forays into the offline natural world. The inability for so many people to disconnect from their laptops and phones and get outside is driving me crazy, so I wrote a novel about it. It’s timely, it’s funny, and I hope it gets people (not just kids!) thinking about going offline.

Brian and I also talked about what’s been going on in the five years since Love in the Time of Climate Change.

Feedback from my first novel, Love in theTime of Climate Change, has been very positive. Published in 2014, the novel chronicles one semester in the life of my community college professor hero (mot me!) as he muddles his way through saving the world while desperately searching for true love. I tried to tackle potential world catastrophe in a fictionalized form through humor, social awkwardness and sex while driving home the essential science of climate change. Once again, silliness and a love story can hopefully entice readers into picking up my novel who might otherwise shy away from reading anything to do with such a paralyzing, mind-numbing issue.

In my non-literary life, my wife and I have inherited quite a bit of money, which we are using to install photovoltaics on non-profits whose mission we agree with. It’s an exciting project that allows us to put our money where our mouth is and help tackle climate change on the local level while allowing wonderful organizations to use more of their resources to do good work in the world. Climate action now!

I appreciate Brian doing the good work he does and taking the time to chat with me again about his novels. He tells me he is also working on another…stay tuned!

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

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Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change (Routledge). Mary lives in the lower mainland of British Columbia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Karen Malpede

“There’s a wilding inside that connects with a wilding up there,” Uncle, the elderly environmentalist, says in my 2014 play Extreme Whether. That is what it feels like when creation takes hold of one. Necessity flaps madly in the gut like a free-flying bird that will dash itself to death or find release. This is why poetry is wild nature produced by human nature, a song between a living cosmos and an ever-emergent self. This is why preservation of life in all its sentient forms is the work of the dramatic poet and why the poet must be fiercely engaged in the exploration, creation and manifestation of justice on this earth and for earth’s creatures.

I had written ecofeminist theatre all through the 1980s and mid-90s. In Better People, 1987, a rare beast wanders into a geneticist’s lab, and rather than be cloned, she swallows him; he emerges an animal-rights ecologist. But, I was sidetracked by the Iraq war and the US torture program so it wasn’t until 2012 that I turned my attention to the warming climate. As I did the research necessary to begin to understand, I came, of course, upon the resistance to scientific truth from the fossil fuel industry, a Republican Congress and successive administrations. Extreme Whether is about this conflict within a family (à la Ibsen). One twin is a renowned NASA climate scientist being censored by the government, the other, a publicist for the fossil fuel industry, married to a Republican lobbyist. I came to view climate scientists as visionaries and altruists, ill-suited to the public battle forced upon them but fighting for truth in the face of falsehood. The relationship between a deformed frog, Sniffley, who exists in the minds of the characters and the audience, and an Asperger child, who is also a fierce environmentalist (prefiguring Greta Thunberg), and Uncle provides the play’s subplot.

Extreme Whether is the last of my mid-life ecotheatre works. Now, I have found my way into cli-fi futurism and at the same time, the dictates Edward Said outlines in his last book On Late Style seem particularly apt. I am calling my new play Other Than We, a Late Style work. Writing now, at the “end of the world,” (at very least at the end of the stable climate we’ve known since writing began), and closer to the end of my life than I’ve ever been, I think about Edward Said’s concept of Late Style in both ways, personal wisdom on the edge of singular mortality, and the madness of unthinking ecocide.

Said writes: “Lateness is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present.” Lateness, according to Said, includes the facility to rip through one’s own style, arriving at dissonance and resonance, surprise, entangled themes and variations, a strange sort of buoyancy, ending in irresolution, and mystery.

Said died in 2004, the year of the invasion of Iraq. (His daughter, Najla Said, would play three roles in my play Prophecy, about the costs of the war.) If Said had lived, he, too, could not help but become increasingly obsessed with the climate crises. In her Said memorial lecture in London in 2016, Naomi Klein focused on the environmental themes already present in his work. I have never before set a play in the future and doubt that I could have done so were my own future not becoming short. While I had thought about and researched the play for several years, I wrote most of Other Than We in the months following Trump’s election. In part, a debate about the origins of consciousness, “from a glob of flesh thought, think of that,” in main, a thriller about the creation of a post-Homo sapiens species, Other Than We is preternatural, outside the known order of things. Its final transformative moment represents, simultaneously, the death of Homo sapiens and dawn of a new species’ consciousness.

In the middle of the night, working from 3:00 am to 6:00 am, literally shocked out of sleep by an image or thought, I wrote. This futurist cli-fi play takes place after “the deluge,” when the survivors live in a surveilled and increasingly unsustainable Dome. The two women scientist-lovers, joined by a physician refugee from Africa and an elderly linguist, knowingly sacrifice themselves in order to birth a new and finer species that will run on four legs or two, tolerate temperature extremes, be able to go for long periods without water, be androgynous, and, most of all, be capable of language and rational thought BUT no longer have a head separate from a heart. Every thought henceforth will be felt through.

These characters exhaust their own bodies in a daring escape, creating, birthing, nursing, nurturing the new beings, without knowing if their experiment will be a success. It’s a metaphor, of course, a fable, for what we do anyhow when we give birth, if we dare, in this harsh new world. There’s an unforeseen transformation at the end. No answer, but a glimmer. The play inhabits the liminal space between knowing and not knowing. Late Style supposes clashing feelings, tonalities, and resolutions that devolve into rising crescendos again. The climate crisis moment we inhabit imposes, like Late Style, the impulse to rework, rip up or revivify old structures, transform social systems, to dare in face of the imminent end of species and habitats.

To rewild our intellects.

Other Than We will have its world premiere at LaMama, NYC, Nov. 21-Dec. 1, 2019 and be published by Laertes Books.

(Top image: Uncle (George Bartenieff) and Annie (Emma Rose Kraus) construct a frog pond for Sniffley and others, Extreme Whether, 2018, LaMama production. Photo by Beatriz Schiller.)

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Karen Malpede’s earlier ecotheatre works include A Monster Has Stolen the Sun (1984), Better People(1989), the adaptation of Christa Wolf’s ecofeminist novella Kassandra (1992), The Beekeeper’s Daughter (1995) and the short Hermes in the Anthropocene: A Dogologue (2015). Blue Valiant, scheduled for production in 2021, continues her fascination with animal-human communication. She is author of 19 plays produced in the U.S. and Europe and of the anthologies: A Monster Has Stolen the Sun and Other Plays and Plays in Time: The Beekeeper’s Daughter, Prophecy, Another Life, Extreme Whether;  her plays and essays on the environment have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Dark Matter, Transformations and elsewhere. She is co-founder of Theater Three Collaborative and Adjunct Associate Professor of theater and environmental justice at John Jay College for Criminal Justice, CUNY. National McKnight Playwrights Fellow, NYFA Fellow.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Peterson Toscano

In this episode of the Art House, we use the power of our imagination to experience the future we desire. Right now, we need to reduce localized pollution and global heat-trapping greenhouse gases. How do we build the political will so that the public clamors for legislation and policy that will change how we get and use energy? We need to communicate to the public what success looks like.

But envisioning success in our climate work requires imagination.

To help us with this task, Sean Dague, the group leader for the Mid-Hudson South chapter of Citizens Climate Lobby, leads us through a powerful exercise. He asks us, What does a decarbonized world look like? What does it smell like? What does it sound like?

Once you hear Sean’s vision of a successful future, we invite you to continue the exercise. Try some creative writing. Write a short story or a letter from the future about what you see, smell, and hear. Maybe create visual art, a drawing or painting. If you can’t draw or paint, get images from magazines or online then create a collage. Write a song, create a map, choreograph a dance. Use art to capture a vision of a decarbonized economy.

Even if you don’t see yourself as an artsy person, just try it.

Towards
the end of his life, writer Kurt Vonnegut would say, “Everyone should
practice art because art enlarges the soul.”

Please feel free to share your art with me at radio @ citizensclimate.org and let me know if I can share it with listeners, on the podcast, Facebook, and Twitter.

Coming up next month, poet Catherine Pierce crafted the extraordinarily moving poem, Anthropocene Pastoral. It was published in the American Poetry Review. She reveals the creative process from the original inspiration, through the many choices and changes she made, to publication. Then she reads her poem for us.

If you like what you hear, you can listen to full episodes of Citizens’ Climate Radio on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, SoundCloud, Podbean, Northern Spirit Radio, Google Play, PlayerFM, and TuneIn Radio. Also, feel free to connect with other listeners, suggest program ideas, and respond to programs in the Citizens’ Climate Radio Facebook group or on Twitter at @CitizensCRadio.

(Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash.)

This article is part of The Art House series.

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As host of Citizens’ Climate Radio, Peterson Toscano regularly features artists who address climate change in their work. The Art House section of his program includes singer/songwriters, visual artists, comics, creative writers, and playwrights. Through a collaboration with Artists and Climate Change and Citizens’ Climate Education, each month Peterson reissues The Art House for this blog. If you have an idea for The Art House, contact Peterson: radio @ citizensclimatelobby.org

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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