HISTORICAL CLI-FI Ripping Out Earth's Resources with Historical Climate Fiction
but also their sense of identity. These early European settlers and the people who followed them over the next couple of centuries viewed the forest as endless, there for them to use and tame. Some believed in a Biblical directive to cut trees down and cultivate the land. Others just wanted to make money from the timber. Their view was that Indigenous people were lazy because they seemed uninterested in subjugating the forest, failing to understand that there were benefits to living in harmony with it, that it was a source of food, shelter and medicine. Barkskins’ narrative follows lumber barons, lumberjacks and displaced MiꞋkmaq men and women through several generations until the present day. By the 19th century, it had become clear to a few of the characters that the exploitation of the continent’s forests had serious consequences. By the 20th century, some were starting to acknowledge what their Indigenous neighbours had known all along: “The entire atmosphere – the surrounding air, the intertwined roots, the humble ferns and lichens, insects and diseases, the soil and water, weather. All these parts seem to play together in a kind of grand wild orchestra. A forest living for itself rather than the benefit of humankind.” Proulx employs an incredible wealth of historical detail; she also describes the forests in moving prose. For these reasons, Barkskins has been described by reviewers as “grand”, “sweeping”, and “magnificent”. However, a number of reviewers have complained that it’s impossible to feel anything for the characters; by the time a reader starts to care about them, the story has moved on. It is true that there’s a constant parade of characters, but I suspect that this is the point. The author is showing us that humankind is insignificant within the context of an old-growth forest.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic altered our lives, climate change was the issue dominating global conversation. Of course this was not a new area of focus, but there appeared to be heightened public discourse around rising seas, melting glaciers and the extinction of iconic species. Novelists have apparently responded. A CBC News article from 2019 1 pointed out that “a profound concern over the state of the planet . . . is infiltrating fiction today”, and the New Yorker goes as far as to call “cli-fi” a genre.2 Although its moniker might be a 21st-century one, cli-fi is not a new phenomenon, as readers of Jules Verne and J.G. Ballard can attest. As one would expect, most cli-fi is set in the future. However, there have also been novels published that are either partially or wholly set in the past and are underpinned by climate or environmental themes, with several notable ones released in recent years. One that has received significant hype is Barkskins by Annie Proulx (Scribner, 2016). This novel – recently turned into a TV series – opens in the 17th century, when men from France are clearing land for farms in eastern North America. As they do so, they demonstrate an almost universal disregard for the Indigenous inhabitants of these lands, and use violent means to push whole communities out of their traditional territories. Many starve, succumb to diseases such as smallpox or are killed by the land-hungry newcomers. Most lose not only their homes
8
FEATURES | Issue 96, May 2021
Another cli-fi novel where the environment is almost a character in its own right is The Overstory by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton, 2018). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it has received much critical acclaim. This article will mention it just briefly because it is debatably not a historical novel. Only a very small part of the story is set in the 19th and early 20th centuries; the bulk of the action takes place in the 1990s, when environmentalists were camping in redwood trees in the western United States to prevent logging companies from cutting them down. Like Barkskins, there are multiple characters and storylines to follow, meaning readers may have difficulty caring much about these fictional people, though The Guardian points out that, “Powers is . . . skilled at capturing a character, a family, a culture with a few swift brushstrokes.”3 The message of The Overstory is powerful: that we are using the planet – and trees – at a rate that is unsustainable. The underlying theme of The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Press, 2021) is what can happen when people attempt to use every last acre of land. In her author’s note, Hannah calls the drought of the 1930s: “the worst environmental disaster in [US] history”. Set in the “Dust Bowl” years, this novel has a clear protagonist in Elsa, who marries into a Texas farming family and embraces a life of milking cows and growing wheat, only to find herself on the road to California in search of the land of milk and honey, as so many did during the Great Depression. Before Elsa heads west, government representatives arrive to offer
