To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Imagining Climate Change

It's to the best of our knowledge from PRX. When we talk about climate change, it's all about science. Where are the novels and art? There has been a sort of cultural meme about climate change and climate stress. Things like zombie movies and other kinds of dystopias. That's been one way that we've worked out our climate panic. We already are the walking dead. Yeah. So many people turn away from the reality of what's happening around us. You know, does the water have to come up to your knees at your door on Manhattan Island? We need as many stories as possible to try and teach people how to hear. Scientists telling their story novelists, artists, activists, regular people. I'm Ann Strangehaps. This hour can stories and art help save the planet. First this. You

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I'm Ann Strangehaps. How do you imagine climate change? I mean, if you had to guess, how bad do you think it'll get? There was a devastating heat wave in Europe in 2003 that killed 40 ,000 people. By the end of the century, that will become an average summer. Huge parts of the globe, the entire equatorial band and the tropics and even part of the sub tropics will become literally uninhabitable. By that I mean that any time spent outside at all will result in death. A lot of South Florida, including Miami Beach, will be entirely wiped off the map then basically devastated by regular flooding. I think the estimates are that the flooding there will increase a hundredfold. And much of Bangladesh, which is a much scarier scenario because there are hundreds of millions of people who live there. 50 % more

war. Global GDP growth in half. Huge famines across the world. There's really no place on the planet that will be saved. There will be no people on the planet who will be entirely protected. This is not make believe. It's not a trailer for an apocalyptic thriller. It's a fact -based projection of our future. From a widely shared article by David Wallace Wells. And it's possibly the most terrifying thing I've ever read. It's also been pretty controversial. David, did you set out to scare people? I think the short answer is yes. Every day we walk out into the world and we're familiar with the world as it is. But in our minds we experience it as a kind of best case scenario. And we're relatively familiar with this sort of median

outcome scenario. But we almost never contemplate the scarier half of the spectrum of possibilities. And that means that we tend to sort of think of the median outcome as a worst case outcome. You know, the sort of base project that I was engaged in the basic endeavor was I took the UN's basically unimpeachable projections for how much warming would happen if we take no action. And I took their sort of high -end estimate. And I went to a number of scientists who specialized in subfields and said, what would it mean for your work on food? What would it mean for your work on conflict? What would it mean for your work on economic growth? It's, yeah, it's really scary. I mean, I think it's important for people to understand that something much more like our worst fears is actually possible because that is where we're headed if we do not take action. So you began that article no matter how well informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. So okay, go ahead alarm us. Well, what can I, what should I start with? Let's talk about heat death. Well, this is probably the scariest part of the article most of the readers responded to most

viscerally. And this has to do with what heat levels the human body can tolerate. If we get to about 10 or 11 degrees of warming, which basically nobody thinks is possible by the end of this century, but if we do absolutely nothing, we will certainly get to within 200 or 250 years. Then huge parts of the globe, the entire equatorial band and the tropics and even part of the subtropics will become literally uninhabitable by that I mean that anytime spent outside at all will result in death. Wow. And then there are a lot of other, a lot of other factors that we don't really know about yet. I wrote in the article about this kind of epidemic of kidney disease in the sugar cane region of El Salvador, where something like half of all the men working in the region. Have chronic kidney disease because they are dealing with very regular dehydration. And that is because the region has been warmed by climate. And it's, you know, it's not even necessarily a warming that these people would notice themselves if

it's just a one or two degree higher temperature across the board. You know, maybe you might think summers are a little hotter than they used to be, but it's not so dramatic that they can perceive it. But their bodies perceive it and the effects are really devastating that kidney disease is hardly expensive to treat El Salvador is not a wealthy country. And even if you are able to get your way to a dialysis machine, the life expectancy for chronic kidney disease on dialysis is only five to 10 years. And then if you, if you can't afford dialysis, it's, it's less than a year. So we're probably going to be seeing many more health crises like that across the world as warming gets worse. Wow. There's another section you write about the air becoming unreadable. I think you called it a rolling death smog, which is what? Well, there are a lot of different factors in how breathable the air is. One of the things that I found most interesting was that just simply having more carbon in the air that we breathe has really damaging effects on human

cognition. I think the stat that I cite in the story is that if we get to about a thousand parts, carbon parts per million in the air, which we're on track for by about 2100 that human cognitive ability declines by about 21%. So we have a choice of being cooked to death or becoming stupid. They're not sure which I'd prefer. Yeah, it's, it's not a, it's a Sophie's choice. You know, there are, again, there's, there's the possibility that there will be technological solutions for a lot of these effects, but it's also the case that they, they really add up many of the scientists I spoke to said to me explicitly, it's not the heat stress, it's not the food shortages. It's not, we haven't talked about the effects on conflict or economic growth, which I find super interesting. It's not even those taken individually. It's the fact that when you see civilization stressed on all of these points at once, it's just going to be very, very hard for governments and public organizations to stay stable. Do you think that's already happening? I mean, if you look around the, the planet today,

we've got this massive refugee problem threatening Europe, which is then destabilizing European politics and also to a certain extent American politics. How much of that do you think is actually because of global warming? Well, a lot of climate scientists are very careful in talking about those connections. They, you know, they want us to understand that the correlations that they found between warming and conflict are correlations and not necessarily causal, but they have found that for every half degree of warming, you see between 10 and 20 % increased likelihood in conflict. And it's not hard to understand how those effects could take hold if there are agricultural shortages due to crop failures and droughts. If there are public health crises that come from direct heat effects, you can see how a government that may be not entirely stable and not have widespread support among its population would sort of crater under some of these stresses. And personally, I'm not, you know, I've never really thought of myself as an environmentalist. I've lived

in New York City, basically, my whole life. And I think like a lot of people thought that climate change was affecting people in far off places, in ways that my life wouldn't really be changed by. But the Syrian refugee crisis really changed my thinking about all that. When I saw, you know, just a couple of million refugees, as you say, totally scrambling are geopolitics. And then you think about what could happen in Bangladesh, where there may be, you know, conceivably as many at a hundred times as many climate refugees coming out of a drowned Bangladesh. That's really, really terrifying. You said that you did want to scare people, kind of scare people awake. You did get some blowback from environmentalists and climate scientists. You know, I don't want to go through a lot of different points, but one of them, you know, the point that it's possibly counterproductive to terrify people, you know, and also possibly dangerous. And people with no hope don't have much motivation to change. You know, there have been a few psychology studies that suggest that fear, especially on

climate, is not the best motivator. But I have to say that personally, I think it's clear to me, I don't even understand the perspective from the other side, frankly, that it's very clear to me that complacency about climate change is a bigger issue than fatalism. I just think there are many, many more people on the planet in the US, in the White House, that are not scared enough about climate change than there are people who are too scared. Thank you. Thank you. David Wallace Wells, his article, which came out in New York magazine, is called the Uninhabitable Earth. Now, you can debate the likelihood of any of those projected scenarios, but the point isn't how or when or if will reach five degrees Celsius warming, the point is that climate change is really hard to imagine. The scale is literally

beyond us, and so we're going to need more than science to come to terms with it. We're going to need imagination, as in the arts. All of this literally took about a minute, though in my memory, it's lasted forever. Novelist Amitav Gosh. So I was, I think, 21, and I decided to visit a friend, and while I was visiting this friend, the weather suddenly got worse. The sky was full of clouds, it was strange sort of rain everywhere. And I was walking back to my room in the university when I looked over my shoulder, and suddenly I saw this sort of strange, sort of finger extruding from a cloud. It was coming whipping down directly at me. You know, other

people were sort of huddling against door under an awning. It was a glass door, I remember. There wouldn't be much shelter for me there. So I ran around the corner and managed to find a little balcony to shelter under. It was a tornado. People had been sucked through the door. Many had been terribly hurt. But I think dozens were killed. And it was a disaster scene like I've never ever seen. It was extraordinary. The only tornado in the recorded history of Delhi. And I happened to be there on that road that day, you know, just at that time. And that is a true story about the storm that nearly killed Amitabh Ghosh. Just think of all the great

novels the world would have missed. See of poppies and the glass palace. Ghosh has been thinking about that storm lately, and about all the other weird, freakish weather we're seeing, because he's trying to figure out how to write about climate change as a novelist. He makes the case for climate as a crisis of imagination in his new book The Great Derangement, Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Steve Paulson talked with him. So when you look back at that experience all those years ago, what do you make of it? Well, it's a very strange thing. After that for many years, I did try to write about that experience. And, you know, I'm a novelist. A novelist like to put stuff like this in their books. And I've often tried, but yet I was never able to do it. Simply because the very unlikeliness, the bizarreness of the experience, the very improbability of it was such that it was really impossible to put it in a book. I mean, you know, how do you write a novel

which has its own conventions of probability, its own conventions of believability? How do you put it into a novel, you know, that someone is walking down a road and at just that moment, this completely unprecedented thing happens? I mean, that is so fascinating. I mean, you really are saying that truth is stranger than fiction here. That is exactly the case. Truth is much, much stranger than fiction. In fact, fiction is a very watered -down version of the world most of the time. And you say in your book that it's not just novelists who don't really want to deal with these kinds of extreme events, it's our larger intellectual culture. I mean, sure, there's the occasional major storm or earthquake, but those are usually sort of written off as one -off events. And for the most part, we assume that what happens in nature is gradual. It's not sudden and huge. It's something even stranger than that, I think. You see any number of books and films

which visualize, as it were, the projected drowning of New York City at some point in the future. Well, I mean, there's this, we're flooded with apocalyptic stories. We are. And yet, if you ask even your friends, has anyone responded to the actual drowning of New York City in 2012 with a novel, a story, a film, or a painting? There's nothing. Absolutely zero. So how do you explain that? You know, I struggle to explain it. I mean, it's just not what the modern creative imagination is about. If you ask any artist or writer what their work is about, or what the sphere of art or literature is, the first thing they'll say is that it's a sphere of absolute freedom. And what does freedom mean in the Western tradition? Freedom as the idea of freedom as it's developed? But is, in some very important respect, freedom from nature. You know, only people who were free of nature were thought to be capable of

creating their own history, creating their own art. People who had to live, as it were, responding to nature constantly, were people who were thought to be without consciousness, without history, without art. And that's sort of the traditional definition of culture. Culture is what is not nature. Traditional since the late 18th century. I mean, that's when these divisions were put in place. Before that, really, these distinctions never, never applied. So you're talking about the Enlightenment here. I mean, these are Enlightenment values that put human beings at the center of everything. That's really it. Yes, it's absolutely the case that it was within the Enlightenment that, you know, you have this dayification of humanity, the centrality of the human, and the exclusion of the non -human from everything, really. So when it comes back to your profession, writing novels, and this whole question of why novelists don't write about these cataclysmic storms, first of all, I wonder if that's actually true. I mean, there's this recent surge in what's been called Clifi

climate fiction. Where do you put those novels? It's certainly true that there is a lot being written, you know, about events like these, or what might happen. But again, let me just come back to the example that I started with. There's any number of novels and films and so on about the possible drowning of New York, and yet there's nothing about the actual drowning of New York, you know. You're talking about those novels that are set in the future, and I suppose that we might sort of classify a science fiction. But yeah, as various sort of genres of science fiction, and that's actually something that really troubles me, because I think when our only way of dealing with these issues is by projecting them into a landscape of fantasy, really what we're doing is the same thing as a sort of denial, you know, of the reality of our lives. Because, you know, climate change is not in the future. Climate change is now, it's happening, it's all around us. When we project these things so much into the future, we actually give people a way of not dealing with these issues. So you're saying that I guess what we would call serious fiction, literary

fiction, that's pretty much stayed away from climate change. I mean, it's sort of, it's been left to fantasy. It's been left to science fiction. Oh, you know, these catastrophes that might happen in the future, but those people who are writing novels about our lives today, they pretty much stay away from that issue. Yes, it's not entirely the case. I mean, Ian McEwan has written, you know, about climate change in his book, Solar, Barbara King solver has written a wonderful novel about in which climate change plays a part. It's called Flight Behavior. But it is largely absent. I mean, if you look at the mainstream of literary fiction today, it's carrying on much as it was 20 or 30 years ago. And there seems to be absolutely no recognition of the profound rupture that divides the world of today from the world of, you know, 1990. So I have to ask about you. Has climate change figured in your own fiction? It has, but in oblique ways. And let me just say here that, you know, this book that I've written, The Great derangement, is in a way,

it's an introspection. It's really me trying to cope with my own inability to grapple with climate change, you know. So I'm not pointing the finger at anyone, nor is it in any way my intention to remove other writers for what they choose to write about. I mean, that's not on my business, really. So I'm trying to explore my own limitations, if you like. I mean, I really believe, you know, that I like people of my generation, we used to ask our parents, what did you do in the war, you know, in the Second World War? Our children are going to say to us, how did you respond to this? And really, I think the world of the arts and culture will not have a very convincing response. And you said that your goal is not to point fingers, but you do point a finger at least one person, John Updike, who in a book review years ago once defined the purpose of the novel as an individual moral adventure, which is a fascinating idea. I mean, there's a whole philosophy there of what he thinks a novel is supposed to be.

You take issue with that idea, right? Yes, but what is so interesting to me is that Updike's statement of this really comes about at exactly the same time that we have this sort of invention of a neoliberal economics where everything is really about individual choices. This has had a profound effect on all our thinking in so many ways, and it certainly has profoundly affected the ways that artists and novelists think about their work. How so? Well, you look at earlier kinds of novels. I mean, I take an iconic, really great American novel like Grapes of Wrath. How could you possibly call that an individual moral adventure? And this novel, Grapes of Wrath, is perhaps the single most influential novel written by an American in the 20th century. It's in every way a novel about a collective predicament. If we take a novel like Grapes of Wrath or you take another great iconic novel,

American novel, a Moby Dick, which to me is perhaps the greatest novel of the 19th century, if not of all time, in what way would you describe this as an individual moral adventure? It's not. It's something else. It's about a collective predicament. Okay, so if the novel, if we're living in a different age now, and we need a new mindset, a different sort of imaginative space, what would it mean to write about a universe that is animated by non -human voices? That's really the problem, isn't it? I mean, because the non -human has no place within novels as such, because novels are, they grow out of this whole process of separating the human and the non -human. Again, let me return though to Moby Dick. One of the reasons why Moby Dick is really such an extraordinary novel is because it doesn't make this separation between the human and the non -human. To Melville, the whale is very much a creature with intention. Melville never makes a distinction in that sense between the world of the

human and the non -human. I mean, in his book, he returns time and time again to telling us what whales do or what whales are. I mean, you know, that's something so hard to imagine in the world of today's literature. And yet, it's exactly that that makes Moby Dick such a transcendent piece of writing. Amitav Gosha is an award -winning novelist, author of Sea of Poppies and Flood of Fire. And he and Steve were talking about his new nonfiction book, The Great DeRangement, Climate Change and the Unthinkable. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. The Great DeRangement and the Unthinkable.

Music And now it's time for a dangerous idea. My name's Ian McCalman and I'm an Australian environmental humanist or historian. My dangerous idea is not one I thought of, it's the idea of the Anthropocene. The term was coined by Paul Krutzen who is a physicist and he said that we have become a force

of nature. That's the simple idea that once we were tossed around by forces of nature, now humans have become a force of nature. We can overwhelm nature, we can change it. This is one of the most extraordinary and awesome and fearful ideas that you can possibly imagine. But it has some good implications for me as a historian and a humanist because what has done really is it is so large an idea and trying to solve it is so difficult that there is no single discipline that can do it. We really need to put the whole lot together from art, from history, to science, to engineering, to architecture. You name it. Those disciplines have to be welded together, work together in order to solve the problem of us as a force of nature. Those are coming together. We're starting for the first time

in my lifetime and in many other people's lifetimes to work together in a cross -disciplinary way to solve what I believe is the most terrifying problem the earth now faces. When we have become forces of nature, we can create new climates that we can no longer control. We can create new changes in the sea level that we can't control. We can melt the ice flows that we can't control. We generate these problems but we don't have the capacity to solve them. And that's what I'm talking about. The anthropocene means we've got to get together to solve them. Ian McCalman is a historian and explorer. He's the author of Darwin's Armada and the Reef. So this hour we're talking about climate change

and the imagination. And one of the biggest challenges in talking about climate change is how to convey the scale of it. I mean, weather happens on a human scale, week to week, month to month, but climate. Climate moves in centuries and millennia. It's a whole different time scale. Charles Monroe Cain recently walked through a new exhibition of work by Cambui Olujimi. He's a New York -based artist whose work is all about getting us to think differently about time. If we're going to talk about time, deep time is a whole other beast. If we think of geologic time, that's a whole other beast. When you have your first kiss, time doesn't move at the time that your clock tells you it should move. When you are in solitary, time does not move at the same time that your clock tells you it should. Time is not actually something that is innate in our

existence, but it's something that is fluid, is created, is malleable, is interrupting it. One more, one more, one more, one more. One more try, one more. We have come too far, too far now. I'm looking at a wall, my left feet tall. It's a bunch of different digital clocks with photos from your family or past to found photos, and behind it is stars. And it's all blinking different times. It almost made me, it relaxes me. It's almost like I see this, and I'm like, oh yeah, it doesn't matter, let go. You know, if the sun is an orange, the earth is many blocks away, and it's like the size of a pinhead. And then, if that's the case, then we have Jupiter, then we have Pluto, then how big is our galaxy? Then how big is our universe?

And I think, you know, when a galaxy that has, let's say conservatively, a billion stars. And then, each of those billion stars have four planets. And then, you know, then there are billions of galaxies. So, as you start to just move out, it decentralized is your, your toil. What oppression in general does is it takes away time. Capitalist oppression liquidates other people's times. Your whole life is spent, making, literally, making someone else rich, as you struggle. Inslavement is that to the eighth

degree where your entire life is solely for the benefit of someone who torment you. There were no bonds you would invest in the enslavement of another human being to ensure your own economic prosperity. And that is a theft of time at its base. You can define exactly what this experience is. It's not necessarily four o 'clock. I live in New York and my, in New York has a way, and I'm from New York, so I'm going to talk about it. And it's a lot. But like, New York is like, oh, yeah, I never have time. I'm too busy, I'm too busy, and that's what it trains you to believe. But I started taking a column like micro vacations, or, you know, I'm on my way to a meeting, and I'm stressed out. Sit somewhere for two minutes. Don't talk to anybody, turn your phone off, just sit there for two minutes. And

so, these are just rarely, like, kind of, pragmatic and concrete ways that we reset that four o 'clock. Growing up, none of the cloths, we only had one cloth that was set to the right time. And every clock was set somewhat individually. So, somebody might set it 40 minutes fast. It was always fast, so you would get somewhere on time. Yeah. And so, some people in the house would set it 45 minutes, some people would set it 20 minutes. And so, depending on what room you were in, there would be different cloths. Like, that's your cloth. So, you know, and you knew it was 20 minutes. You knew it was 20 minutes earlier, right? And somebody else, and sometimes we would even change. And so, the idea of time growing up, now that I'm thinking about it, it was always changed. And you would even change your cloth. That's a 35

minutes, you might start, like, when you wake up and you see it, you, you know, do the transcription in your brain. So, it doesn't trick you into getting there early. So, then you change it. This is like, all of these kind of time plays growing up, yeah. I used to think about this with my siblings when they, I would get mad with them. So mad, they'd be giving me such, such, such, such. And then I think, well, you know, like, no one cares who you are on Jupiter. Right. Like, they don't know you. They don't know you. You can go there. I'm confident they're not going to believe it. I know you. And so, it makes you think about your life. And it's hard to say, I matter. A lot, I matter a lot to me. And maybe like my pets or maybe to my children or I don't have kids. But, you know, to my nephews and my family, I'm added to them. And I might even matter to my art. Let's even take it that far. But the sheer skill of mass, of matter.

It plays a small role in the universe. And I think that small role is important. But I am not getting it twisted to think that like, I don't, I don't move mountains. You know, the best I can do is hope to affect the minds of humans on a small planet. Come, Bui Olujini, talking with Charles Monroe Kane about his new solo museum show Zulu Time at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. I got an image

of an arm with writing on it from a dream. The arm was really big and it was really white. And I could see raised letters like you would see Braille on a page. What are our oldest forms of storytelling in there like cave drawings? But also tribal markings. And the second that image, you know, captured my imagination, I was stuck with it because I'll get haunted by those images. I won't be able to let them go. And so I had to just chase it and make it into a story. Novelis Lydia Yuknovich writes a gorgeous new book about climate change and other things. It's called The Book of Joan and we'll talk with her next. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One of the most stunning new pieces of climate fiction is from Lydia Yuknovich. It's a speculative novel called The Book of Joan set in a disturbingly near future. Earth is decimated. Radiation exposure has

altered the bodies of the few survivors who orbit our husk of a planet on a hacked together spaceship. Steve Paulson recently got together with Lydia Yuknovich to talk about some of the ideas on the book and also to see if she still has any faith in humanity's future. Through the wall -sized window, I can see a distant nebula. Its gases and hypnotic cues make me hold my breath. I can also see the dying ball of dirt, earth, circa 2049. Our former home, it looks smudged in sepia. A fern person in the window catches my eye. Well, what used to be a fern? I never had a green thumb, even those long years ago when I lived on earth. This fern is mostly a sad little curve of stick. Its photosynthesis is entirely artificial.

If it were allowed the sun we've got now with the absence of adequate ozone layers, it would instantly die. Rats and amazes we are, far enough from the sun to exist in inhabitable zones, and yet so close one wrong move and we're incinerated. We're the aftermath of earth life. So Lydia, you have conjured up a rather grim picture of our planet in the near future. Around the year 2049, the earth's ecosystems have collapsed. What does this world look like? The world looks like something easy to picture cinematically on one level. There's no blue sky and vegetation is gone and everything is sort of bleak and dry and dirt colored. So

that's one way to talk about it. But another way to talk about this conjuring you mentioned is it's a future that I could throw a rock at. It's so close. It's interesting. This is not your vision of some far off distant, horribly dystopian version of the future. You're saying we have one foot in this world already? Absolutely. I'd even go as far as to argue that we need to reimagine what we mean by the word dystopia because I think we've already made it. But we've been tricking ourselves with fictions that it rests in some distance away from us. So there is a new kind of fiction that people are talking about now what's been called Clifai, climate fiction. Yes, I love this phrase. Is this your version? It is my version and I first kind of caught wind of it probably about 12 years ago. But I love the phrase because science fiction as a category and dystopian fiction and speculative fiction, they kind of lock the understanding of the story into this set of genres.

You know, that are very traditional and follow certain plot points. But Clifai kind of opened up the idea that the environment would no longer just be like the setting or the difficulty that the characters were going to confront, but that it might itself be more central as central as the main character. I just find that fascinating because I think we do need to redefine our relationship to the planet. And so this is a way to reimagine our relationship to the actual dirt. Well, let's get back to this world that you have envisioned. There are a few human survivors who have left the planet. I mean, there are no people left on the planet and they now hover out in space in some sort of giant spaceship, what's called Cl. Thing. Thing. What is this? Well, it's an attempt at survival. You know, it's a space station that was not constructed in the best of times, but in the worst of times. And so it's kind of patchwork. And so things don't quite work

properly and they're not as high -tech as they should be. And then the humans, as you say, who've ascended to this junk keep up in the sky are themselves not what they used to be. And I was playing with the idea that everything has been orphaned and damaged and rearranged to the extent that we don't even really know who we are or why we are or what we're doing. And in the story, the people who are up there, they look different, they act different, they feel differently than we do. You set this not that far into the future. I mean, 2049 and things have radically changed. I mean, why not set this two or three hundred years into the future rather than, you know, a few decades? Well, it's a great question. And I think in the tradition of sci -fi novels, that would be the normal plot trajectory. But I'm writing in a time where things like Trump happened in the blink of an eye and

regardless of anyone's attitude about this thing that's happened in America. It happened so quickly and with such speed, I think we failed to understand that speed is the primary factor of changing our lives right now. When I thought about the speed with which the things we're scared of could literally happen because they are happening, I decided to shorten and cut that time span to remind ourselves that the future is alive and are present all the time. The hero of your story is a young rebel named Joan. Some people would call her an eco -terrorist. And basically, you have reimagined the old story of Joan of Arc, that warrior woman from the 15th century who fought against the English, reported having visions of angels, was then captured and burned at the stake at the age of 19. Why does that story resonate for you? Well, more than one reason, I was raised Catholic for the first part of my life, my early life, and it didn't work.

I didn't make it even to 15 years old as a devout person or a Catholic person. But that's where I first encountered the storyline of this girl. And I was a kid when I first heard about it for my sister. And my first reaction was, what? There are girl warriors and no one's telling us. Where are they hiding them? I mean, I had kid shock that I'd never heard this person, and so I became obsessed immediately with her. And then when I was in my adolescence, she visited me in a dream. Are you serious? Completely serious. I'm also smiling, because this is where I tend to lose people. Tell me about that dream. Well, I've had three epic dreams in my life where a historical figure has shown up. And I mean, like, showed up in your bedroom, standing next to your bed, talking to you. Wow. Like that

real. She took me outside to stand in front of my house, and my house was on fire symbolically. She said no one's going to save you. And at the time, it just kind of creeped me out and, you know, interested me and scared me. But later in life, as I was, you know, a woman who went through enough misfortunes and her own coming of age that the idea that one might have to save oneself became kind of like a life mantra for me. So I had an obsession and fascination with her for those reasons. But then as I was wanting to write a story about climate change and war and love, just how important it is that we begin to redefine our relationships to the planet, and to belief and to each other, she occurred to me

as the perfect historical figure to dig back up and bring voice to. Just as a tangent, I'm curious about who are the other two historical characters who figured in your dreams. I'll tell you one of the other ones. Mary Shelley. Okay. My favorite novel of all time is Frankenstein. And so she's showed up once and also at your bedside too. At the bedside, she was wearing a dark green velvet dress. I can tell you what she smelled like. And she also said an important sense to me. She said, motherhood is not monsterhood, which I've written about because eventually in my life, I had a daughter who died the day she was born. And so then that sentence took on a life that probably, it would not be an exaggeration to say that sentence helped save my life. These dreams that you're talking about, I mean, they sound more real than, you know, waking life.

Yeah, I have regular dreams too, but these these felt as if the person was there. So I don't really know what to call them. But I do know that when fiction writers or novelists are inside, or probably painters or any kind of artist, when they're inside the process of making there are, it's that kind of place. It feels that real. And as if you're in another world that's been created and you could step out of your regular life. I mean, if I could stay inside these novel worlds or creating art, I would. Now, I know Joan of Arc is this revered figure today still in France. And there are various statues and monuments dedicated to her honor. Have you gone to see them? Oh, obsessively are you kidding? I have actually licked the statue that's in Notre Dame. Nobody saw me. So yeah, it's way beyond did I visit them? Okay, so you have reinvisioned Joan of Arc and you've set her into this near future world.

Who is the Joan in your story? Well, you may have noticed I took God out. It's a minor character in the historical drama. When I did that, it wasn't for any kind of irreverent reason or anti -religion reason. I just re -rooted these, the idea that she heard voices or that she heard the voice of God as a kind of more, the voice of the planet and the voice of the cosmos, you know, and a Carl saying in a way. And in that way, the wonder and the, you know, bigger than you and the creator kind of themes, I could retain them, but just kind of re -root them through what we know about science and the natural world. So in your story, there is a big battle kind of the last war on Earth between Joan and her nemesis, this cult leader named Rijon de Men. And it happens as life on the planet

is crumbling. And you have a passage that describes some of this. Could you read that? Sure. I remember what and where her first action was. Thousands of improvised explosive devices covering the tar sands in Alberta like malignant cancer cells invading a body. And I remember the last battle of the wars. Her epic face off with Joan de Men. In the face of a final battle set the Alberta tar sands she dropped to the dirt and rested their face down arms and legs spread. An army of resistant soldiers creating a sea of human protection around her for days. First, a series of violent solar storms occurred one atop the other, and for a while everyone thought, my

God, a natural disaster beyond imagination. And the skies wore clouds and colors we'd never seen before. And then the world's super volcanoes, the enormous caldera's yellow stone and long valley and hals in North Sumatra's Lake Toba, Taubo, Era in Japan erupted in chorus, almost as if by cosmic design. Tsunamis and hurricanes and typhoons followed as if in accompaniment ice caps speed melted. The waters rose not gradually as they had been swallowing up coasts and islands worldwide, but in a matter of weeks. In America, New York and the upper and lower east coast, Florida, gone San Francisco and most of California drowned in sank Atlantis -like. Geocatastrophe. The sun's eye, smoke, organic

processes like photosynthesis and ecosystems dead. The relation between earth and its inhabitants dead. War, dead. Earth reduced to a dirt -cloth floating in space. The atrocity of speed and destruction. The magnitude of those days still makes me hold my breath. Who is it like for you to imagine this level of destruction and death? Well, it was not Jolly. I don't find those images and those narrative lines to be unimaginable. We're halfway if not more there. And so what a novelist can do if we're of any use to anybody. It's that we can enter the facts of our present tense and

wade the waters of imagination to see what else is in there. I mean, we can go places that are too scary to go in regular life. And we can ask, well, okay, we see that the ice caps are melting. It is true. It is scientifically fact. But where do we take our imaginations from there? And so a novel can hold the horrible, you know, in this space where the reader can enter, but you can still eat dinner and love your family afterward. And I think that's one of the powerful things about novels is that it can suspend, you know, the unimaginable and play it out without killing anyone. You know, I get the sense that art means everything to you. I mean, if there's one sort of redeeming quality of our species, it's our capacity to make art. It is for me personally in that like so many of us I came from an abusive home and a set of circumstances that could have killed me. So as sappy as it sounds for

me, finding self -expression gave me the path away from self -destruction, although I tried self -destruction many times as a, you know, young adult person. So I mean, I got a tear in my eye when you said that. Art is everything to me. And I would say I believe in art the way I understand other people believe in God. That's Lydia Yugnavic talking with Steve Paulson about her new novel, The Book of John. And before we go, I just want to say one thing. Something that's hard about any serious conversation about climate change is that it can leave you feeling just wrong out. And personally, I always feel a little resentful. Like someone's just sucked all the joy out of being here. So if we've left you feeling that way, I have a suggestion.

Sometime today, go outside. Look at all the things we usually complain about. Weeds, ants, ticks, mosquitoes, and practice feeling grateful. Because we do at least have the power to choose, to spare or love. To the best of our knowledge comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio. Steve Paulson put this hour together with help from Charles Monroe Kane, Doug Gordon, Mark Rickers, and Karen McKecney. Joe Hartke, as our sound designer and technical director, I'm Ann Strange -Hamps. And if you like our show, do us one favor. Tell someone else about it. Thanks for listening. Thank you.