Writing Romantic Climate Change


Book Description

In the Romantic period, women writers developed specific aesthetics and writing strategies in their engagements with climate change and climate catastrophe. Anya Heise-von der Lippe draws on intersectional feminist and ecocritical approaches to highlight gender as a complicating category in Romantic engagements with these topics. She addresses the ways in which gendered critical framings continue to resonate in current Anthropocene discourses that use Romantic conceptualizations of »Nature«, impacting contemporary approaches to the relationship between humans and non-humans in the ongoing climate catastrophe.




British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene


Book Description

This book is the first major ecocritical study of the relationship between British Romanticism and climate change. It analyses a wide range of texts – by authors including Lord Byron, William Cobbett, Sir Stamford Raffles, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley – in relation to the global crisis produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. By connecting these texts to current debates in the environmental humanities, it reveals the value of a historicized approach to the Anthropocene. British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene examines how Romantic texts affirm the human capacity to shape and make sense of a world with which we are profoundly entangled and at the same time represent our humiliation by powerful elemental forces that we do not fully comprehend. It will appeal not only to scholars of British Romanticism, but to anyone interested in the relationship between culture and climate change.




Love in the Time of Climate Change


Book Description

Meet Casey, a community college professor with OCD (Obsessive Climate Disorder). While navigating the zaniness of teaching he leads a rag-tag bunch of climate activists, lusts after one of his students, and smokes a little too much pot. Quirky, socially awkward and adolescent- acting, our climate change obsessed hero muddles his way through saving the world while desperately searching for true love. Teaching isn't easy with an incredibly hot woman in class, students either texting or comatose, condoms strewn everywhere, attack geese on field trips, and a dean who shows up at exactly the wrong moments. What's a guy to do? Kidnap the neighbor's inflatable Halloween ghost? Confront evangelicals and lesbian activists? Channel Santa Claus's rage at the melting polar ice caps? Shoplift at Walmart? How about all of the above! Who would have thought climate change could be so funny! Actually, it really isn't, but Love in the Time of Climate Change, a romantic comedy about global warming, is guaranteed to keep you laughing. Laughing and thinking.




Romantic Climates


Book Description

This book seeks to uncover how today’s ideas about climate and catastrophe have been formed by the thinking of Romantic poets, novelists and scientists, and how these same ideas might once more be harnessed to assist us in the new climate challenges facing us in the present. The global climate disaster following Mt Tambora’s eruption in 1815 – the ‘Year without a Summer’ – is a starting point from which to reconsider both how the Romantics responded to the changing climates of their day, and to think about how these climatic events shaped the development of Romanticism itself. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, climate is an inescapable aspect of Romantic writing and thinking. Ideologies and experiences of climate inform everything from scientific writing to lyric poetry and novels. The ‘Diodati circle’ that assembled in Geneva in 1816 – Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Polidori and John Cam Hobhouse and the gothic novelist MG ‘Monk’ Lewis – is synonymous with the literature of that dreary, uncanny season. Essays in this collection also consider the work of Jane Austen, John Keats and William Wordsworth, along with less well-known figures such as the scientist Luke Howard, and later responses to Romantic climates by John Ruskin and Virginia Woolf.




Odds Against Tomorrow


Book Description

While working for a financial consulting firm that offers insurance against catastrophic events, a young mathematician becomes increasingly obsessed with doomsday scenarios until one of his worst-case scenarios unfolds in Manhattan.




How to Avoid a Climate Disaster


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NATIONAL BESTSELLER In this urgent, singularly authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical--and accessible--plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid an irreversible climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help and guidance of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science and finance, he has focused on exactly what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide toward certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only gathers together all the information we need to fully grasp how important it is that we work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases but also details exactly what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. He describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions; where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively; where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions--suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but by following the guidelines he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.




The Loneliest Girl in the Universe


Book Description

A surprising and gripping sci-fi thriller with a killer twist The daughter of two astronauts, Romy Silvers is no stranger to life in space. But she never knew how isolating the universe could be until her parents’ tragic deaths left her alone on the Infinity, a spaceship speeding away from Earth. Romy tries to make the best of her lonely situation, but with only brief messages from her therapist on Earth to keep her company, she can’t help but feel like something is missing. It seems like a dream come true when NASA alerts her that another ship, the Eternity, will be joining the Infinity. Romy begins exchanging messages with J, the captain of the Eternity, and their friendship breathes new life into her world. But as the Eternity gets closer, Romy learns there’s more to J’s mission than she could have imagined. And suddenly, there are worse things than being alone…. Now nominated as a YALSA Quick Pick!




Love in the Time of Global Warming


Book Description

Seventeen-year-old Penelope (Pen) has lost everything—her home, her parents, and her ten-year-old brother. Like a female Odysseus in search of home, she navigates a dark world full of strange creatures, gathers companions and loses them, finds love and loses it, and faces her mortal enemy. In her signature style, Francesca Lia Block has created a world that is beautiful in its destruction and as frightening as it is lovely. At the helm of Love in the Time of Global Warming is Pen, a strong heroine who holds hope and love in her hands and refuses to be defeated.




We're Doomed. Now What?


Book Description

An American Orwell for the age of Trump, Roy Scranton faces the unpleasant facts of our day with fierce insight and honesty. We’re Doomed. Now What? penetrates to the very heart of our time. Our moment is one of alarming and bewildering change—the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe. Now what? We’re Doomed. Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss, from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation. Whether writing about sailing through the melting Arctic, preparing for Houston’s next big storm, watching Star Wars, or going back to the streets of Baghdad he once patrolled as a soldier, Roy Scranton handles his subjects with the same electric, philosophical, demotic touch that he brought to his groundbreaking New York Times essay, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.”




The Great Derangement


Book Description

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements. Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.