How Can Words Change the World?

by Liz Jensen

We believe literature and stories can create radical change. Fiction can empower people, encourage new ways of thinking, and change the path of history. For our first Norwich Book Festival, we asked two renowned authors to write on the climate crisis, and create a positive call to action that was inspiring, honest and hopeful.

This original piece of writing was commissioned for the inaugural Norwich Book Festival, and performed as part of our Books Can Change the World event with Wren James and Liz Jensen. We would recommend following this by reading Wren James's piece, 'Writing to Change the World'.

Here’s what the writer who believes that words can change the world doesn’t want their readers to say after reading their campaigning article, the poem they poured their heart into, the eloquent letter of protest they wrote to their MP or Shell or the King, or the carefully-crafted words on their protest banner: “I’m feeling even more scared and powerless than I was before. But fortunately other people are taking on the climate and ecological emergency in a way I can’t, so I’ll just sit back and watch while they sort it out.” Or if it’s your cli-fi novel they’re talking about: “The story really engaged me. Good thing it’s just fiction.”

By the way, nothing is just fiction. That’s why we read fiction.

So what do we want them to say?

How about: “I’d never thought about that before. Not in that way. It woke me up. I didn’t think there was anything I could do, but I’m going to start new conversations with my friends, donate to an environmental pressure group, campaign for citizens assemblies, join a beach-clean, learn permaculture, get myself arrested at a protest and stop buying giant prawns harvested by slave labour on the other side of the world.”

Annoyingly for the writer of climate and ecological fiction, there’s a fine line between words that spawn anxiety and fear and words that spark emotions that lead to effective action. Like other mammals, the part of our brain that makes us alert to danger – the amygdala – is easily triggered. But as writers, we don’t want the flight or freeze reaction. We want the fight. It was one of the many issues we discussed when I and a handful of other novelists formed the campaigning group Writers Rebel, with the aim of putting literature in the service of the ecosystems – including our own – that are being threatened, damaged, and obliterated by climate breakdown, pollution and rampant extractivism. We all had our reasons but if you want living proof that books can galvanize action, look at me. The book that woke me up was Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, in which he explored the imaginative failure that prevented contemporary literature from rising to the biggest challenge of our times.

The good news is that since the publication of The Great Derangement in 2016 the literary landscape has changed radically. Dystopias continue to shake us out of our cognitive dissonance, and nature writing continues to remind us of the beauty of the living world and keep threatened words, concepts and ways of seeing alive. The term cli-fi is now firmly in the lexicon, and helpfully for us lit-nerds, the cultural researcher Gregers Andersen has pinpointed its principal themes: Social Breakdown, which focuses on societal conflict arising from scarcity of resources; Judgement, in which nature strikes back; Conspiracy, which imagines climate change as a tool of manipulation, and Loss of Wilderness, which charts the annihilation of the natural world. But useful as these categories are, they don’t fully reflect the new genres that are emerging. While Thrutopian fiction describes the turbulent journey towards the possible, the burgeoning sub-genre of Solarpunk takes the embodiment of that possibility as its starting-point. And in novels like Laline Paull’s The Bees and POD, Polly Clark’s Tiger, and Richard Powers’ The Overstory, I believe we’re seeing the emergence of yet another genre - let’s call it More Than Human fiction – that sees the world from the point of view of other species.

All this is exciting, in so far as it applies to fiction, and as far as it goes. But at a time of mass chronic distraction, why not think beyond the page and make the process open to everyone, whether they write fiction or not? Enter the process of “futuring,” the harnessing of the imagination to picture positive futures. Now since I don’t believe we can reach any kind of  positive future without going through a lot of hell first, try this by way of a thought experiment.   

Imagine a piece of land or a stretch of water that you love.
Now imagine how it will change over the next 20 years if nothing is done to protect it and the worst predictions come true. Perhaps the climate is much warmer – or if the Gulf Stream has failed, much colder. Either way, much of what flourished here 20 years ago won’t flourish here now.

Now step into this new landscape, take a good look around, and imagine it’s your task to help it flourish anew.

What shape would that flourishing take? What plants and creatures might thrive here, and what might you do to encourage further life? And then? And what next?

There. You’re already thinking.
Imagination is a muscle. If you don’t use it - out of fear, out of apathy, or out of a preoccupation with the moment you’re in - it atrophies. But when you flex it, the world opens up in new ways. You don’t need to be a writer to do this. Homo sapiens is not just a storytelling, pattern-seeking, meaning-making species, but a species – perhaps the only one - that can conjure scenarios from thin air and make them feel real. Futuring is part of our collective DNA. Which is why it’s our most powerful tool when it comes to shaping how we might survive and who we might become. Imagination is the cognitive mycelium that holds us together in the dreams from which we wake wanting to protect and nurture the home we share with our fellow-creatures.

Not tomorrow, but now.

Right now.

Liz Jensen 

Liz Jensen is the author of eight acclaimed novels including The Ninth Life of Louis Drax and the climate thrillers The Rapture and The Uninvited. She is a founder of the ecological campaign group Writers Rebel and the creator of the Rebel Library. She lives in Copenhagen.