“Add this to the list of decisions”: Maggie Astor, “No Children Because of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It,” The New York Times, February 5, 2018.
a half of all those exposed: Janna Trombley et al., “Climate Change and Mental Health,” American Journal of Nursing 117, no. 4 (April 2017): pp. 44–52, https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NAJ.0000515232.51795.fa.
In England, flooding: M. Reacher et al., “Health Impacts of Flooding in Lewes,” Communicable Disease and Public Health 7, no. 1 (March 2004): pp. 39–46.
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: Mary Alice Mills et al., “Trauma and Stress Response Among Hurricane Katrina Evacuees,” American Journal of Public Health 97 (April 2007): pp. S116-23, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2006.086678.
Wildfires, curiously: Grant N. Marshall et al., “Psychiatric Disorders Among Adults Seeking Emergency Disaster Assistance After a Wildland-Urban Interface Fire,” Psychiatric Services 58, no. 4 (April 2007): pp. 509–14, https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2007.58.4.509.
“I don’t know of a single scientist”: Kevin J. Doyle and Lise Van Susteren, The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States: And Why the U.S. Mental Health Care System Is Not Adequately Prepared (Merrifield, VA: National Wildlife Federation, 2012), p. 19, www.nwf.org/~/media/PDFs/Global-Warming/Reports/Psych_Effects_Climate_Change_Full_3_23.ashx.
“climate depression”: Madeleine Thomas, “Climate Depression Is Real, Just Ask a Scientist,” Grist, October 28, 2014, https://grist.org/climate-energy/climate-depression-is-for-real-just-ask-a-scientist.
“environmental grief”: Jordan Rosenfeld, “Facing Down ‘Environmental Grief,’ ” Scientific American, July 21, 2016.
Hurricane Andrew hit Florida: Ernesto Caffo and Carlotta Belaise, “Violence and Trauma: Evidence-Based Assessment and Intervention in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review,” in The Mental Health of Children and Adolescents: An Area of Global Neglect, ed. Helmut Rehmschmidt et al. (West Sussex, Eng.: Wiley, 2007), p. 141.
soldiers returning from war: “PTSD: A Growing Epidemic,” NIH MedlinePlus 4, no. 1 (2009): pp. 10–14, https://medlineplus.gov/magazine/issues/winter09/articles/winter09pg10-14.html.
One especially detailed study: Armen K. Goenjian et al., “Posttraumatic Stress and Depressive Reactions Among Nicaraguan Adolescents After Hurricane Mitch,” American Journal of Psychiatry 158, no. 5 (May 2001): pp. 788–94, https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.158.5.788.
both the onset and the severity: Haris Majeed and Jonathan Lee, “The Impact of Climate Change on Youth Depression and Mental Health,” The Lancet 1, no. 3 (June 2017): pp.E94–95, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(17)30045-1.
Rising temperature and humidity: S. Vida, “Relationship Between Ambient Temperature and Humidity and Visits to Mental Health Emergency Departments in Quebec,” Psychiatric Services 63, no. 11 (November 2012): pp. 1150–53, https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201100485.
spikes in proper inpatient admissions: Alana Hansen et al., “The Effect of Heat Waves on Mental Health in a Temperate Australian City,” Environmental Health Perspectives 116, no. 10 (October 2008): pp. 1369–75, https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.11339.
Schizophrenics, especially: Roni Shiloh et al., “A Significant Correlation Between Ward Temperature and the Severity of Symptoms in Schizophrenia Inpatients: A Longitudinal Study,” European Neuropsychopharmacology 17, no. 6–7 (May–June 2007): pp. 478–82, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroneuro.2006.12.001.
mood disorders, anxiety disorders: Hansen, “The Effect of Heat Waves on Mental Health,” https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.11339.
Each increase of a single degree: Marshall Burke et al., “Higher Temperatures Increase Suicide Rates in the United States and Mexico,” Nature Climate Change 8 (July 2018): pp. 723–29, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0222-x.
59,000 suicides: Tamma Carleton, “Crop-Damaging Temperatures Increase Suicide Rates in India,” Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences 114, no. 33 (August 2017): pp. 8746–51, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1701354114.
III. The Climate Kaleidoscope
Storytelling
On-screen, climate devastation: One good academic survey of this phenomenon is E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
“Dying Earth”: The genre really picks up steam with H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, eventually finding a natural home in postapocalyptic cinema, e.g., The World, the Flesh, and the Devil and The Day After.
“climate existentialism”: “Nihilism and defeatism in response to the climate crisis isn’t either brave or insightful and it’s deeply weird to see it treated as some beautiful, poetic intervention,” Kate Aronoff has written, on Twitter, referring probably to the writing of Roy Scranton. “Climate change is many things. One thing it’s not is a vehicle for literary men to opine on their existential dread and then dress it up as science.” See https://twitter.com/KateAronoff/status/1035022145565470725.
literary theorists call metanarrative: See, especially, Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
as surely as screwball comedies: A great account of this is Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).
The Great Derangement: Ghosh’s book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) was published with the vivid subtitle Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
“cli-fi”: The term has gained currency only over the last decade or so, but examples of the genre—typically speculative fiction driven by climate conditions—date back at least as far as J. G. Ballard (The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World) and possibly to H. G. Wells (The Time Machine) and Jules Verne (The Purchase of the North Pole). In other words, it’s more or less as old as the science fiction genre, from which it draws its name. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (which also includes The Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake) surely qualifies, as does even Ian McEwan’s Solar. All of these test Ghosh’s thesis, since they are climate-powered novels with the narrative architecture of the classic bourgeois novel, more or less. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a bit of a different beast—a climate epic. But those who these days talk up cli-fi as a genre seem to mean something more…well, genre—for instance, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy and, later, New York 2140. Going back further, J. G. Ballard’s Drowned World trilogy is an exquisite example.
especially in conventional novels: Ghosh is dealing here with a very narrow definition of the archetypal novel, emphasizing stories of protagonist journeys through emerging bourgeois systems. And while he raises the Cold War and 9/11 as examples of real-world stories that have inspired novels in that tradition, it’s not really the case that the best novels, and films, about the end of the Cold War are the ones that place their characters very precisely on a map of the 1989 world, like butterflies pinned to a screen. And the ones that have approached 9/11 have been mostly duds, as well, though an entire generation, especially the male half, sometimes seemed to feel called to literary action by it. “If September 11 had to happen,” Martin Amis wrote in The Second Plane, his meditation on the fate of the imagination in the age of terror, “then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime.” Global warming has not made Martin Amis feel like George Orwell, as far as I know, though it has spawned a whole small genre of mourning essay: the fatalistic, quasi-poetic, first-person ecological lamentation—exemplified by Roy Scranton, with his Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and We’re Doomed. Now What?—which may be the closest that climate change stories can get to the self-mythologizing moral clarity of Orwell.