‘Climate literature takes us beyond science to feelings’

Sarah Dimick teaches English at Harvard University. She tells Times Evoke about climate writing taking us to the heart of global warming:

As we think about anthropogenic climate change and the future, we often ask questions of scientists. My research explores what writing, literature and art offer us in a world so altered. There are questions about climate change outside the bounds of science. This phenomenon is about a change in the composition of our atmosphere — but it is also about shifts in how we live our lives, relate to others, build our hopes, fears and understandings. These are profound transitions which can be accessed through literature.

SUMMER’S TASTE FOREGONE: Climate change impacted mango productivity in 2022, reducing yields of the loved summer fruit. Photo courtesy: iStock
Climate literature encompasses fiction, poetry, essays, drama, etc. It took off around the turn of the 20th century and engages with multiple themes. We are seeing it deal now with a strong sense of displacement — there is tremendous human, animal and plant movement in the Anthropocene. Stories are growing around climate migration, having to leave home or seeing new entrants arrive. This is literature thinking through what our ties are to each other in an uprooted world.



Another major theme is understanding climate change as emerging from histories of colonial resource exploitation and racial capitalism. Often, in news reporting, we hear of climate change being ‘unprecedented’ and disconnected from known history. Many writers are pushing back against this and narrating how climate change is similar to living under colonialism or oppressive systems of power, arguing that the same systems have caused this crisis.



Environmental justice is also an extremely powerful genre which I teach a course on. We see writers here drawing attention to ecological injustices of diverse kinds. Ken Saro-Wiva was an Ogoni writer in Nigeria who highlighted how exploitative big oil was. He was executed for his work in 1995 but his words remain deeply inspirational. Kathy JetnilKijiner from the Marshall Islands writes extraordinary poetry on climate justice while Cherie Dimaline from Canada, a First Nations writer, thinks about global warming within a longer history of the dispossession of indigenous people. Indian writing is often structured by the monsoon — it has a close relationship with precipitation and dryness. As climate change intensifies, many of us will be thinking about water, what life with and without it is like. Many stories will emerge around floods and drought and people coming together or confronting social divides. Indian writing will be an amazing reservoir.

WAITING TO BLOSSOM: Global warming is now impacting phenological time or when flowers like dahlias, seen in winter in India, could bloom. Photo courtesy: iStock


I am currently working on a book called ‘Unseasonable’, due out in 2024. I am writing about the intersection of contemporary literature on the global scale with ‘phenology’, the science of environmental time or when buds open, lakes melt and fruit blooms.

Many of these times are now changing with an altering climate. I am curious about such environmental timing and how changes in it can shape our stories and feelings. As environmental rhythms, from monsoon to snowfall, become destabilised, I am exploring how writers can respond to these disruptions, how literature can help us gauge these shifts and possibly navigate for readers and writers alike what it means to live with emotions, justice and dignity within such unpredictable times.

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