Poetry in the Age of Climate Change

We often talk about climate change as an apocalyptic scenario made real, the beginning of the end of the world. And that’s because it is. 2030 is the year that’s on all of our minds, the year in which it will be too late to save ourselves from ourselves if nothing substantial is done to prevent it. We, and I say this without a single hint of hyperbole, are an endangered species. But not extinct, not yet.

 

Given the gravity of our situation, is it inappropriate, or even offensive, to bring romance into the conversation, creatively or otherwise? Romance and catastrophe certainly have never been mutually exclusive. In fact, some of the canon’s most memorable love stories are dependent on the “end of the world” trope, or a sense of looming tragedy, in order to exist. Take for instance Romeo and Juliet, or Cathy and Heathcliff, both couples whose bonds are made more profound, even more romantic, by the existence of an outer force that threatens their being together. Though these outside forces, whether they be social disapproval or economic divisions, aren’t actually matters of life and death in the way climate change is, more often than not they tend to feel that way. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, the social forces keeping them apart led to their actual deaths, and not just emotionally. To be without the other, for both of them, would mean the end of the world. They would rather be dead than be apart. 

 

But is it inappropriate, even offensive to write about the climate catastrophe as being that outside force? Is love a frivolous and unimportant thing in the face of climate change? Eunsong Kim, in “Romance #1,” seems to think so. In the poem, she compares hoping for the end of capitalism, arguably the lead agent facilitating climate change, to the silly crush of a 14-year-old. Love isn’t powerful, it is naive, just as hoping for significant economic upheaval for the sake of the planet is. Love isn’t going to get anything done. Love is a waste of time, a foolish, whimsical distraction from real issues. 

 

While Craig Santos Perez in “Sonnets XII” and “XVII” isn’t quite as dismissive of love as Kim, he still doesn’t seem convinced that love can actually save us. “Sonnet XVII” compares the body of his beloved to the dying planet, writing, “I love you as one loves most vulnerable things, / urgently, between the habitat and its loss.” His beloved is a “vulnerable thing,” a thing that is unsafe from the consequences of climate change. And though his love is not going to save the world, and could even be called hopeless, it is a refuge from despair, a chance at temporary human happiness in an increasingly temporary world. Though he has given up on his future, he is determined to make the most of his present.

 

Tracy K. Smith's "Watershed" turns the association between love and climate change on its head, writing about the planet not as a threat to human love but as a thing that in and of itself is deserving of love. She writes, "I could feel Earth's desperate situation. Her aura appeared to be / very strange, made me wonder if it was radioactivity. It was bleak, / faded in color, and its sound was heart wrenching." And though the poem overall is generally ambiguous about how much hope it believes we ought to have, this idea of seeing the earth in a wholly different light, of treating it with the kind of love we normally only afford to other people, of giving it a gendered pronoun -- it feels different, almost inspiring in spite of the sadness of the poem. 
 

I can’t help but think of a monologue from Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” a monologue which may just be my favorite piece of writing, ever. In it, a character recounts a dream of hers, in which she envisions “the souls of the dead, of people who had perished,” floating up into the sky like “skydivers in reverse”. These souls join hands, clasp ankles, creating a “great net of souls,” made of the “stuff of ozone”. As the great net rises, it is absorbed by the outer rim, repairing the patches in the ozone. Kushner writes, “In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.” 

 

I don’t think Kushner was trying to make any grand statement about climate change; it was written in 1991, and the play is more focused on other social issues. But I do think the image he creates, that of human bodies joining together to repair the earth, is one that poets and non-poets alike, all citizens of Earth, can take inspiration from. Maybe love is part of the solution. Not just romantic love, but love as a broad and universal experience of compassion, as a recognition and appreciation of other people’s value, their right to exist, and perhaps most importantly, their right to continue to exist. 

 

So what does love got to do with it? I’d argue everything. As Smith writes in "Watershed," "All that was important in life was the love we felt." Though climate change is the worst of humanity, love is the best. Maybe this idea is too fluffy, too sentimental, too abstract to solve a problem as deeply political and intricate as climate change. But maybe this idea of loving people, not even romantically but humanistically, along with loving the planet as though it were a person, can be the inspiration for more pragmatic solutions, solutions which will likely be painful but, with any luck, progressive too. And even if it can’t, the idea gives me a sliver of hope, and that has got to count for something.