Disaster Stories

Fri, Sep 29

Floods would come and go and hurricanes might blow through, but the city would survive, if only because no one could imagine a force more powerful than human ingenuity. That defiance of nature – the sense that the rules don’t apply here – gave the city its great energy. But it is also what will cause its demise.

-Jeff Goodell, “Goodbye Miami”

For decades, those who experience environmental disasters have taken to the page to express their feelings of loss, sorrow, displacement, denial, or anger. Blood Dazzler and “Heaven or High Water” illustrate with alarming clarity the different forms of these emotions, with the grief following Katrina motivating the former and the denial of Miami’s impending fate the latter. Now, a new form of environmental disaster writing has emerged: future disaster stories. Using what they can already see and what climate scientists have predicted, writers like Jeff Goodell and David Wallace-Wells have begun to create worlds in which these changes are already upon us, and put readers into that world so that they may see and feel the consequences of inaction.

Goals

• Compare how the authors write about events that have already happened and events they are predicting. Are there differences in style, tone, sentence structure, etc. 
• Assess the success of communicating about climate change through poetry and prose. Which style did you find more effective or convincing?
• Reflect on how your own environment might change in the future as a result from a warming climate.