With Donald Trump pledging allegiance to climate change, many people fear the repercussions for the environment of this tiny blue spot we call home. In her new book The Burning Years, author Felicity Harley imagines a scenario in which a scorched Earth plays home to international conflicts known as the weather wars. Doomed attempts to control the weather instead of looking after the environment, lead to a world that becomes more fragmented than ever before.
I became familiar with Harley’s work after reviewing The Burning Years' for The Humanist. Harley has done an awful lot of personal research on climate change so I thought it would be interesting to gain Harley’s insight on where we go from here and how we might avoid the dystopian future that springs forth in The Burning Years.
Jamie Flook: You have just written a climate change novel entitled The Burning Years. Did your experience as an executive director of the World Affairs Council of Connecticut inform your ability to write about a novel such as this or were there other influences?
Felicity Harley: Not really. And yes there were other influences.
I’d started off my career as a writer well before I entered the arena of non profit management. By the time I was in my teens I had written poetry and short stories and then in my early twenties I wrote my first novel – Love and Persia. It was about serving in Tehran in the information section of the British Embassy, and falling in love with the old Persia, and at the same time painfully falling in love with a complicated man whom I’d met there. I intertwined these two themes, as well as using the book to reflect on my secretive Caribbean mother.
This first novel was followed up by a second as yet unpublished one which described my experiences in California, where I went after I quit the Foreign Office and fled a potential marriage to the Queen’s Private Secretary - now Baron Janvrin, to become a Marxist and start the Santa Barbara News and Review. One of the principal players in my novel A Photograph of Us, and who also features in My Quantum Life, went on to start Mother Jones and is now heavily involved in the Resistance School at Harvard (https://www.resistanceschool.com/#resist). He was if you like my political mentor and always a great friend.
I focus on it (climate change) because philosophically and with every bone in my body I believe it is an extinction event. Sometimes in my darkest moments I want to be there when it happens and that’s why I imagine it in my books. I also sometimes think of human beings as being a stupid and painful experiment put into action by some higher power, and quite honestly I have never understood our desire to perpetuate ourselves at all cost. So writing these books allows me to explore characters like the plutocrat Walton Jame who want to live forever.
JF: President Trump appears to be rolling back policies designed to deal with climate change. Should we be that worried?
FH: The people that are now in charge of our government and who heedlessly and cynically promote a high consumption, carbon-hungry system are treating our atmosphere like a waste dump. By doing this they are making sure that your and my children and grandchildren will most likely die from starvation, cancer, and massive, overwhelming weather events.
JF: In The Burning Years, the leading characters are predominantly female. Do you think more women in leadership roles (in both science and politics) could make a positive influence on how me fight climate change or is gender irrelevant?
FH: I believe in gender equality so yes we need many more women in leadership roles. However because men and women have different brain structures, both are needed in our probable, particular universe to solve and fight climate change.
JF: I personally wonder whether we have done enough to try to talk to climate-change deniers using language they understand. I.e. Trump says that he is putting the economy before climate change which sounds to me like an outright failure to understand that the economy will be destroyed by climate change if it is not dealt with now. Shouldn't we make more of the financial consequences of climate change?
FH: Yes of course. I think the people who are involved in the fossil fuel industry know that the use of fossil fuels are coming to an end, and before they do they want to make as much profit as they can before this happens, thus their cynical attitude towards climate change. Just look at the leaders of Exxon Mobile including our current so called Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who wrote emails that show they fully understood the terrible effects of fossil fuels on our climate.
JF: The world does not have much of a history of electing politicians that care about climate change, can we do anything to take the fight out of their hands or do we really need them to come on board?
FH: In my book I talk about the weather wars. We need to find global, collective solutions to climate change. America First just doesn’t cut it because we’re all in this together, and the only tool we humans have to work with is collective political action and sensible policies. Since our government has decided to take a back seat perhaps China will step forward and take on a leadership role. Unfortunately as humans we’re in the Maslovian pyramid of survival – that means eating, working and staying healthy. Once we’ve attended to basics such as these, we as individuals can take on this fight. Because it’s so hard for most of us to just keep alive in the world I don’t have much hope that we’ll have the collective ability or will to stop climate change. Here’s an excerpt from the book and it’s a little bleak:
“While we had international environmental agreements, as the impending cataclysm approached, countries panicked. That’s how the “Weather Wars” started. In 2045, because we were all trying to save ourselves from the effects of climate change, treaties and agreements between countries became obsolete as conventional weapons were now useless. Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases had risen to such an extent into the atmosphere around the globe that they had formed a thick blanket holding in heat. As these heat-trapping gas concentrations increased, the blanket’s thickness also increased and trapped even more heat in our lower atmosphere. Heat that had been designed by nature to escape through the stratosphere was now no longer able to do so, and resulted in it being much cooler than it should have been. This abnormal coolness then contributed to ozone loss, which effectively cancelled out any progress we had made in the past, by reducing CFCs.
Like us, most developed countries around the globe didn’t care what happened in other parts of the world, and were using any number of untested methods to reduce the effects of regional climate change. These methods included blocking a portion of the sun’s rays; fertilizing nearby oceans with iron to pull carbon out of the atmosphere; covering their land with vast sheets of white plastic, making them look like snowfields, in order to reflect sunlight back into space; and building machines that could suck carbon out of the air.
On the positive and let’s say idealistic side I rather like this pledge from The Climate Mobilization movement we could all take individually: http://www.theclimatemobilization.org/international_pledge
JF: In your view what are the best climate change solutions available to us? Solar radiation management, reductions of greenhouse gases or other possibilities?
FH: The best solutions are global policies to stop emissions, and at the same time investing heavily in green energy making it cheap and accessible to everyone. Also I really do think, ergo my second book in the series The Sound of Gaia, that there is a source of energy we haven’t discovered yet, just like Tesla told us and that’s why my third book yet to be written will be called Tesla’s Dream. In my second book I take a well-researched scientific guess at what I think that is and how we can activate it, so stay tuned. And I should add it nearly killed me reading through all the scientific research to come to this conclusion!
JF: In The Burning Years, a group of scientists led by the character of Rachel leave the Earth in a worldship to explore interstellar opportunities for human habitation. Do you think it might be time to consider investing more resources in space exploration with a view to saving our species?
FH: Not really. It’s too far out, sorry Elon Musk – perhaps in two or three hundred years. I love the series The Expanse – but that’s at least five hundred years away, again if we make it!