Indigenous campaigner Nemonte Nenquimo wants people to “wake up”, she told Alex Clark in this week’s Saturday magazine. “If we continue on this path of little by little destroying forests, destroying rivers, destroying air, the consequences are going to be awful for humans and cultures around the world, for all forms of life.”
The leader of the Waorani people of the Amazon rainforest won her case against the Ecuadorian government to prevent it from auctioning half a million acres of land to the oil industry in 2019, and last year she successfully campaigned to protect the country’s Yasuní national park from drilling. Now she has written a powerful memoir, which she has urged oil company executives and those with power to read.
“I want investors and financial institutions and the ones that are making decisions about where money flows, I want them to read the book and this story,” she said. “Because one of the things that our elders say is that the less you know about something, the more easy it is to destroy it.”
Nenquimo is just one of many authors who have been writing about the climate crisis in recent years. In 2022 Greta Thunberg published her landmark title The Climate Book, bringing together more than 100 writers, activists and scientists in an anthology of essays about the crisis and what we should be doing about it. And climate fiction (or cli-fi, if you must) has been rapidly on the rise since Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh questioned why so few fiction writers were taking on the subject in his 2016 polemic The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Writers including Jessie Greengrass have made the climate emergency a central theme: Greengrass’s 2021 novel The High House imagines a future world about to be destroyed by floods, a poignant warning about what could happen if we fail to act. But even novelists that we may not class immediately as “cli-fi” authors have been compelled to bring climate issues into their work: in Paul Murray’s Booker-shortlisted The Bee Sting, for example, one character becomes obsessed with building a bunker in preparation for the climate apocalypse.
Next week, a new prize for fiction that engages with the climate crisis will be launched, which Ghosh said “marks the advent of a new awareness of the environment within the literary community”.
Activist and author Tori Tsui, who will be on the judging panel for the the Climate Fiction prize’s inaugural year, said: “Climate fiction is a Trojan horse, accessing readers from all walks of life who may feel more equipped, and inspired, to be part of the change to tackle this crisis head on.” The £10,000 prize, which will open for submissions next month, will be launched at a Hay festival event on 2 June.
The Hay festival itself has been coming under fire from climate activists lately: on Friday the literary festival dropped its principal sponsor after boycotts over Israel and fossil fuel links. A number of those scheduled to speak at the literary festival, including Dawn Butler, Shami Chakrabarti, Nish Kumar and Tsui herself had pulled out at the last minute over investment management firm Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship, following a recent statement by campaign group Fossil Free Books (FFB) which demanded that Baillie Gifford “divest from the fossil fuel industry and from companies that profit from Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide”.
Not everyone is sure that boycotting the company - which remains the sponsor of a number of literary festivals, including the Edinburgh international book festival and Cheltenham literature festival, as well as the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction - is the right thing to do. Baillie Gifford has reiterated that it is “not a significant fossil fuel investor”, and some in the books industry, such as Anna Frame, communications director at Canongate Books, have noted that finding festival funding can be very difficult. The money “has to come from somewhere” Frame posted on X. Baillie Gifford “are one of the relatively few companies with cash that are also at least trying to do better”.
What we can all agree on is that the climate crisis is something the literary community cares deeply about – and as authors continue to campaign and write about this issue, we can only hope that they help to effect lasting change.
Nemonte Nenquimo alongside other Waorani women protesting against oil drilling in their ancestral territory. Photograph: Amazon Frontlines
