Climate change deniers can’t face grim future
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — The upcoming climate talks in Paris are less than 50 days away, and COP21, as the United Nations conference is being called, might very well decide the future of humankind. It’s that serious and that foreboding. I’m optimistic.
Rubin writes op-eds for the online magazine Salon.com, including “Our end-of-the-world obsession is killing us: Climate denial and the apocalypse, GOP-style.”
“Why are so many people prepared to jump on the denial bandwagon?” Rubin asks his Salon readers in one of his recent op-eds. “One answer might be that both officials and citizens cannot face the possibility of nationwide or worldwide disaster. Proponents of global warming, it could be argued, have predicted a future that is just too grim to contemplate.”
I read his novel, and whether critics call it sci-fi or cli-fi, one thing is certain: It’s part of a new genre that is changing the way we see things in this, the “Anthropocene Age,” a term describing the current epoch when earth’s physical history is determined by humans.
And next year, for the spring semester at Vanderbilt, Rubin plans on teaching a combined literature and political science course at Vanderbilt titled “Visions of the Future in Cli-Fi.”
When I asked him why he wrote a climate fiction novel and then decided to teach a climate literature class in 2016, he told me: “It is important to communicate with a broader audience, and in an immediate and vivid way. I’m hoping to bring home to people the reality of climate change; its main effects may be in the future, but they will actually happen unless we take decisive action now.”
Rubin grew up Jewish in Brooklyn, New York, and has always been interested, passionately, in issues such as social justice and human rights, as well as the environment and law. I asked him what in his Jewish background tipped him to want to stand up so strongly for human rights and for climate justice.
“The prophetic tradition, I think,” he said. “I remember being impressed with the enormous courage that Nathan shows when he accuses King David of murder, and that Jeremiah shows when he tells the people that disaster is coming and that it is their own fault.”
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Bloom is a freelance writer with a specialty in climate change issues. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewihworld.com