The Importance of Art to Climate Change

Climate change can seem too vast, too distant for people to care about it in relation to their day-to-day, more immediate struggles. Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, calls on poets, dramatists, and novelists to open our eyes:

"...Oddly, though we know about [climate change], we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas? Compare it to, say, the horror of HIV/Aids in the last two decades, which has produced a staggering outpouring of art that, in turn, has had real political effect. I mean, when people someday look back on our moment, the single most significant item will doubtless be the sudden spiking temperature. But they’ll have a hell of a time figuring out what it meant to us...

"...Art, like religion, is one of the ways we digest what is happening to us, make the sense out of it that proceeds to action...

"...[If we choose not to create art] the only role left to us – noble, but also enraging in its impotence – is simply to pay witness. The world is never going to be, in human time, more intact than it is at this moment. Therefore it falls to those of us alive now to watch and record its flora, its fauna, its rains, its snow, its ice, its peoples. To document the buzzing, glorious, cruel, mysterious planet we were born on to, before in our carelessness we leave it far less sweet."