Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy Volume 4, No. 1 (2008)
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be wise to take out insurance against such contingencies. The recommendations of Richard Lindzen and other greenhouse contrarians … to follow a “what, meworry?” strategy are grounded in disagreement with what the bulk of the scientific community believes. Such a posture strikes us as a very dangerous gamble and thus a poor basis for public policy (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1996, pp. 140-41). In response to Gore’s question about Americans’ apparent tolerance of the risk of global warming, the Ehrlichs – and many others – would respond, “We are not tolerant of this risk!” The problem, in a democratic and pluralistic society, and a society in which scientific literacy is mediocre at best, is how to inform the public about current issues in accessible and appropriate ways, neither overplaying nor understating the risks and uncertainties of the issues. For better or worse, the role of communicating important social and environmental issues to general audiences, ranging from extinction to gun-running, has been tacitly delegated to entertainment media, such as movies and popular literature. Environmental Fiction and the Science of Climate Change I would like to conclude by focusing on two specific climate change novels – Susan Gaines’s 2001 Carbon Dreams and Michael Crichton’s 2004 State of Fear – that demonstrate the pros and cons of having literary artists weigh in on important environmental issues. In his 1985 book Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Ecologists, Economists, and the Merely Eloquent, Garrett Hardin castigated environmental writers who masked scientific ignorance beneath what he called a “patina of poetic language” – in particular, Hardin was critiquing John Muir’s famous (and oft-quoted line) about everything in the universe being “hitched to everything else.” What I’d like to suggest about the literature of climate change is that sometimes this literature can help readers formulate their own understanding of the science and politics of this issue, and other times a vivid fictional narrative (coupled with pseudo-scientific apparatus) can diminish the public’s capacity to process information about this subtle and complex phenomenon. Michael Crichton’s best-selling5 novel State of Fear presents a startling caricature of environmentalists as fear-mongers who will go to almost any lengths in order to frighten the public and secure funding to support their activist agendas. Crichton’s activists use paramilitary tactics in their attempts to fracture the continental ice in Antarctica, seed vicious storms in the American Southwest, and instigate tsumani-causing undersea rockslides in southeast Asia – all in the name of public relations and in defiance of scientific findings that discount the theory of global warming. One of the central characters in the novel, Nicholas Drake, the villainous leader of NERF (the National Environmental Resource Fund), declares out of frustration, I hate global warming…. It’s a goddamn disaster…. [I]t doesn’t work…. That’s my point. You can’t raise a dime with it, especially in winter. Every time it snows people forget all about global warming. Or else they decide some warming might be a good thing after all. They’re trudging through the snow, hoping for a little global warming (Crichton, 2004, p. 295). To which Drake’s PR advisor, John Henley, responds,
ISSN 1941-0948
doi: 10.3903/gtp.2008.1.6