What explains the lack of decisive progress on human-driven climate change? Having invested half of my 62 years in reporting and writing climate-related stories, blog posts, and books, I’ve lately found it useful—if sometimes uncomfortable—to look back for misperceptions or missed opportunities that let the problem worsen.
Can we name the main culprits? There are almost as many theories and targets as there are advocates of one stripe or another. Among them: lack of basic research funding (I was often in that camp), industry influence on politics, poor media coverage, and doubt-sowing by those invested in fossil fuels or opposed to government intervention. There’s also our “inconvenient mind”—my description for a host of human behavioral traits and social norms that cut against getting climate change right.
Suddenly this kind of “autofiction” – fictionalised autobiography that does away with traditional elements of the novel such as plot and character development – is everywhere. Thumping on to your desk in the form of the last volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s epic account of his life, My Struggle; touching more lightly down in the case of Kudos, as Rachel Cusk completes her elegant trilogy in which a novelist, “Faye”, journeys around Europe absorbing the stories strangers and acquaintances tell her; in Motherhood, in which Canadian writer Sheila Heti dramatises her own interrogation of what it might mean to choose – or choose not – to have children. Édouard Louis’s History of Violence, Delphine de Vigan’s Based on a True Story, Joanna Walsh’s Break.up, Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series – these books don’t simply use the biographical details of their authors’ lives as inspiration, but also to disrupt and complicate our experience of story and subjectivity, to find a new way to describe reality at a time when, as Kathy says in Crudo, it is “hard to talk about truth” and perhaps even harder to write it.
Paleontologist Steve Brusatte loves Jurassic Park. Without it, he jokes, he wouldn’t even have a job. So he’s not going to criticize all the inaccuracies in the Hollywood franchise. But he’s also studied dinosaurs his whole life (real ones, with feathers), so he loves talking about giant creatures that ruled over the Earth millions of years ago.
In his new book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, Brusatte, a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, charts the origins of dinosaurs from the beginning of the Triassic period all the way to their abrupt disappearance about 66 million years ago. He also takes a close look at the evolution of the field of paleontology, and how it has diversified and grown by leaps and bounds in recent years — thanks in part to Steven Spielberg’s iconic 1993 movie.
Writers fetishize all sorts of things. Writers who refuse to work with any but one brand of pen, or at any but one time of day, or without lighting candles, or playing music, fetishize their process. Others fetishize their fears. Some embed these fetishes into the work itself. Take Stephen King’s Misery, for example, or Delphine de Vigan’s Based on a True Story.
Based on a True Story, published in French about three years ago, sold half a million copies, inspired a film by Roman Polanski, won several prizes, and purportedly became an “international sensation.” The novel appeared in English, translation by George Miller, last year. The story is simple: a writer named Delphine, like her creator, is drawn into a strange, invasive friendship with a woman referred to as “L.”