Passion, Empathy, and Action

"Passion, Empathy, and Action: A Critical Introduction to The Climate Fiction Writers League" Presented at the International Society for Folk Narrative Research Interim Conference Titled "Nature(s) in Narrative" on June 13, 2026.

In a 2023 article for Esquire magazine, climate fiction author Jeff Vandermeer asks: "Should or can fiction be a manual for useful change?" As the author of the successful eco-horror novel Annihilation and subsequent novels in the Southern Reach Series, and more recently the dystopian climate change novel Hummingbird Salamander, Vandermeer is certainly qualified to discuss the usefulness of climate fiction to instruct and persuade readers. However, he also writes:

I often feel that talking about the issues expressed by my novels may make more material difference in the world than the novels themselves. This is the existential question about the success of a novel like Annihilation: does the story help create change or the dialogue around it? I can’t presume to tell you the answer.^[1]

Carrie Firestone, author of the novel The First Rule of Climate Club and Manda Scott, author of the novel Any Human Power appear to disagree with Vandermeer about the usefulness of climate fiction to instruct and persuade. Both of these novels are didactic and propose specific strategies for climate activism catered to middle school children and adults, respectively. Author Emmi Itäranta takes a different approach in the novel Memory of Water, more in line with Vandermeer's preference for climate fiction that "uses its knowledge of the subject as underpinning, not foreground,"^[2] by showing us a world where water shortages give rise to authoritarianism.

So whether or not climate fiction is useful as a tool of instruction and persuasion, authors are engaging with the climate crisis as storytellers. There are classes for writing climate fiction, notably the robust Thrutopia Masterclass, which asserts that rather than crafting utopian or dystopian visions of the Anthropocene, authors should endeavour to craft "grounded, plausible and inspiring route maps from a recognisable present towards a future we’d be proud to leave behind."^[3] Topics include the development of a mythic imagination, the creation of eco-civilizations in life and art, business in a regenerative world, and the future of work, among others. The Nordic Summer University took a different but equally robust approach with a study circle in January titled "Ecology of Transformative Learning Practices With/In A More-than-human World," which focused on nurturing "a diversity of practices for mutual learning and knowledge creation through conversation and play with the 'more than human'." Presentations included "Tuning into Birch Time: Relational Encounters with Land, Culture, and Story," "Dreaming an ecomythology for the Nordic and Baltic region," and a keynote about possible eco-mythology and transformative practices with/in the more than human Latvia.^[4]

Manda Scott teaches two modules for the Thrutopia Masterclass, and she is a member of the Climate Fiction Writers League. Carrie Firestone and Emmi Itäranta are also members, along with many other professional authors all over the world - including me - who "believe in the necessity of climate action, immediately and absolutely." The league's website asserts that "Fiction is one of the best ways to inspire passion, empathy and action in readers,"^[5] and a complementary Substack newsletter features author interviews and news about climate fiction in publishing. Founded by Carnegie-longlisted British author Wren James, the Climate Fiction Writers League includes among its members notable speculative fiction authors Charlie Jane Anders, Cory Doctorow, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Paolo Bacigalupi. Recently, James produced The Climate-Conscious Writers Handbook, an interactive journal for writers who want to weave climate themes into their fiction.^[6] I brought a copy of this handbook with me today for you to look at.

These are only a few among many climate fiction courses, workshops, and stories produced by people who believe - or at least hope - that storytelling can foster beneficial change in humanity's thinking about the climate crisis. As an author and reader, I hold the same hope. But as a folklorist, I understand that climate fiction texts are also examples of contemporary expressive culture that emerge from climate science, vernacular discourses about the Anthropocene, and the efforts of authors to imagine the climate crisis and its impacts. Let's explore this a bit further in two of the novels I just mentioned; The First Rule of Climate Club and Memory of Water. I'll offer a brief summary of each one, point to some of the climatological and social concerns it problematizes, and articulate any calls to action provided for addressing them. Along the way, I'll also comment upon Jeff Vandermeer's uncertainty about the usefulness of climate fiction texts as instruments of instruction and persuasion. Of note, Manda Scott's Any Human Power occupies a similar didactic position to Carrie Firestone's, so I will not be discussing it here except to observe that together they suggest a broader trend in climate fiction toward didacticism.

The First Rule of Climate Club, written by American author Carrie Firestone, is a Middle Grade novel that follows Mary Kate Murphy, a student at Fisher Middle School invited to participate in a climate science pilot program that comes to be called "Climate Club." The story is told primarily from Mary Kate's point-of-view but also contains journal entries, letters, student essays, and other narrative elements, many contributed by fellow Climate Club members. Throughout the novel, Mary Kate and the Climate Club research topical problems of personal concern to them; automobile idling, fast fashion, meat consumption, and school food waste, among others, and propose actionable solutions like buying electric cars and second-hand clothing, adopting a plant-based diet, and setting up a school composting program. The town mayor's casual racism toward Climate Club member Shawn adds another thematic layer to the novel, opening the way for discussions amongst the students about anti-racism and political action. Meanwhile, Mary Kate is also navigating her best friend Lucy's mysterious illness. Medical tests confirm that Lucy has not one, but four tick-borne diseases likely contracted in the woods where she spends time with Mary Kate, all of them on the rise because of climate change.^[7]

Carrie Firestone is a former high school teacher in New York City who says in a 2023 Climate Fiction Writers League interview that her novel is based on an environmental club she organized while teaching. Her stated goals in writing it were to demonstrate how powerful activism can be when people work together, encourage the publication of climate justice fiction, write children who hold adults accountable for their roles in the climate crisis, and model what it means to show up for a mentally and/or physically ill friend.^[8] Firestone's novel is correspondingly didactic, and her characters are often mouthpieces for the lessons she hopes to teach young readers. Climate Club student Rebecca Phelps writes in an essay:

I stopped eating meat because I love animals and didn’t want to eat them, but then I learned from my neighbor that one of the biggest causes of climate change is all the forests being chopped down to support people’s beef obsession. The more trees chopped down for grazing, the fewer trees we have to absorb carbon dioxide. Killing, processing, transporting, and selling animal meat all uses energy. Even cow burps release a lot of methane into the atmosphere. There are many more ways the meat industry contributes to climate change, but these are the big ones. And I personally don’t think we should kill innocent animals just for a quick burger.^[9]

Later, in a letter to Mayor Grimley about his aforementioned racism, Mary Kate writes:

I have learned that sometimes accusing people of being racist isn’t the best way to deal with racism. That’s because you can have wonderful Black friends, or give money to Black charities, or say nice things about how Black Lives Matter on social media and still be part of the problem. My sister, Sarah, explained that to me, but it took a while for me to really understand it. I guess what I realized is that if we are not always trying to be anti-racist, then we might be contributing to a racist system without even realizing it.^[10]

It isn't always possible to separate the concerns and discourses that prompt the writing of a novel from the story itself. Novel research and world-building are background processes that contribute geographical, political, scientific, and other necessary supports to stories about something else. But in this case, there is a clear throughline from Carrie Firestone's experience as an activist and teacher to the expression of her ethical beliefs in The First Rule of Climate Club. Rebecca Phelps' essay in support of vegetarianism includes common scientific and vernacular statements about the meat industry, Mary Kate's letter includes common political and vernacular statements about racism and antiracism, and there are many other passages like them in the novel. Because of this, The First Rule of Climate Club is both an example of contemporary expressive culture about the Anthropocene and a chronicle of contemporary discourses about climate justice whether or not it succeeds in Firestone's mission to inform and persuade young readers.

In the Young Adult novel Memory of Water, Finnish author Emmi Itäranta both integrates and centres the climate crisis in a way that suggests she does not intend to be didactic but rather to offer us a window into a frightening but plausible future. The novel is set in a dystopian Finnish Lapland called New Qian where fresh water is scarce. An authoritarian regime has risen up to control the fresh water that remains, but tea master Mikoa Kaitio knows the location of a hidden spring where fresh water flows in abundance. His daughter, Noria Kaitio, is training to become a tea master but also becomes the sole caretaker of the spring when Mikoa dies unexpectedly. After his death, Noria is left alone to decide whether to keep his secret or share the water with her struggling neighbours, among them a sick child. Meanwhile, Noria and her best friend Sanja discover old cassette tapes and CDs that point to a clandestine expedition to the Lost Lands, where there may be plenty of fresh water. Noria and Sanja plan an expedition of their own to the Lost Lands with the help of Mikoa's friend Major Bolin, but the New Qian regime closes in before they can execute the plan. Sanja flees with the CDs and the knowledge they hold, but Noria is left behind to weather the wrath of the regime, which has discovered her father's secret.^[11]

Emmi Itäranta writes for the Climate Fiction Writers League newsletter that when she began working on Memory of Water in 2008, she wondered if readers would find it too difficult to believe in Arctic winters without snow and ice, water shortages in Finland, or sea level rises in excess of 50 meters. Then she comments upon her concerns, writing:

Turns out I need not have worried...Thirteen years on, it is now long established that the Arctic region is warming two to three times faster on average than the rest of the world. The impacts of this are far-reaching. According to current estimates, (the) Arctic Ocean may be entirely free of ice during (the) summer by 2050.^[12]

These concerns are reflected throughout the novel, notably in a memory Noria shares of a conversation with her mother:

My mother had told me that in the midst of the Northern Ocean, where the day lasted six months and the night governed the other half of the year, where the bloodiest battles of the oil wars had taken place, there might still be small islets of ice, floating across the deserted sea, quiet and lifeless, carrying the memories of the past-world locked within, slowly giving in to water and melting into its embrace. They were the last remnants of the enormous ice cap that had once rested on the topmost peak of the world, like a large, unmoving animal guarding the continents.^[13]

Of particular interest in this passage are the small islets of ice that carry memories of the past-world locked within. My husband worked for the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine as an undergraduate student, and one of his responsibilities was to carry a beeper that sounded if the freezer containing the ice core samples malfunctioned. These priceless Arctic and Antarctic samples contained climatological information that could only be read if the ice remained frozen in its original state. They were a geological memory of the world, making the melting polar ice caps a kind of inexorable forgetting.

But rather than making Noria a mouthpiece for solutions to water shortages, polar ice melt, and rising seas, Itäranta explores important themes by way of her characters' interactions with the world she has created. Mikoa preserves a rare fresh water spring by keeping the location of it secret, but his daughter must weigh this preservation against the well-being of her suffering community. The tea ceremony is a performance of culture that notably requires fresh water to enact, but it takes place in an environment of water scarcity, which allows the reader to witness the pressure of ecological collapse upon intangible cultural heritage. Mikoa preserves a human memory of local fresh water, but Noria and Sanja find tapes and CDs that preserve a digital memory of fresh water beyond the control of New Qian. Ultimately, Itäranta's lack of didacticism makes room for moral and ethical dilemmas her characters imperfectly resolve, which is a reflection of the climate crisis we face now and our imperfect responses to it. Because of this, Memory of Water is certainly an example of contemporary expressive culture about the Anthropocene even though it does not explicitly serve as a manual for useful change.

This tension between didacticism and storytelling is precisely what Kevan Manwaring identifies as the core problem of climate fiction when he argues in his book Writing Ecofiction that:

At the very core of ecofiction there is a fundamental problem—how to reconcile agenda with art. An agenda in fiction could be anything, but in this context if we consider it to be a desire to raise awareness about environmental issues (in early ecofiction) and the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crisis (in more recent work) then we have what risks becoming didacticism, which may be instructional and educational, but may backfire in its very wish to communicate, persuade, and even motivate, by its school-teacherly manner.^[14]

However, I am delivering this paper to a room full of narrative scholars, so many of you have likely already thought of narrative traditions in which didacticism plays an important role. One that came to mind for me while writing this paper was the tradition of historical tales discussed in Keith Basso's foundational work "Stalking with Stories: Names, Places, and Moral Narratives Among the Western Apache," where he writes that:

In addition to everything else - places, events, moral standards, conceptions of cultural identity - every historical tale is also 'about' the person at whom it is directed. This is because the telling of a historical tale is always prompted by an individual having committed one or more social offenses to which the act of narration, together with the tale itself, is intended as a critical and remedial response.^[15]

Another was the collection of Greek fables attributed to Aesop, which often places animals in the roles of humans so the lesson of a didactic narrative lands more gently and its contemporary successor Star Trek, which often places aliens in the roles of humans to do similar narrative work. A good example of this is the Deep Space Nine episode "Duet," which explores the emotional toll of genocide and reckons with guilt and forgiveness via the interaction between a former Cardassian labor camp secretary and a former Bajoran resistance fighter. So Manwaring is correct that didactic stories can be off-putting to listeners and readers, but traditional and contemporary storytellers have developed strategies for working around our prickly disaffection for preachy stories.

With this in mind, I return to Jeff Vandermeer's question: "Should or can fiction be a manual for useful change?" Ultimately, climate fiction texts are works of intangible cultural heritage that imagine the climate crisis whether or not they motivate readers to passion, empathy, and action. So in addition to asking Vandermeer's question, perhaps we can ask where they invite the attention of readers to settle in the complexity of issues that comprise the Anthropocene, and why. If we are writers of climate fiction, it might also be helpful to situate our individual projects on a continuum from "using subject knowledge as a narrative underpinning" to "drafting a manual for change" at the outset and write with that place on the continuum in mind. This can help us interrogate our aptitudes and motivations for pursuing a given project, and it can also help us account for audience sensitivities to didacticism. But whatever our level of interest, the back cover of the Climate-Conscious Writers Handbook makes a worthy point. All fiction is climate fiction, because all but the most alien others among the characters we read and write have to breathe, drink clean water, and eat, just as we do. And even those alien others come from fictional places that sustain their lives, just as the Earth sustains ours.

MacCath-Moran, Ceallaigh. 2026. "Passion, Empathy, and Action: A Critical Introduction to The Climate Fiction Writers League." Presented at Nature(s) in Narrative, June 13.

Footnotes

1. Vandermeer, Jeff. “Climate Fiction Won’t Save Us.” Books. Esquire, April 19, 2023. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43541988/climate-fiction-wont-save-us.
2. Ibid.
3. “Thrutopia.” Accessed April 13, 2026. https://thrutopia.life.
4. “Circle 5: Ecology of Transformative Learning Practices With/In A More-than-Human World – NORDIC SUMMER UNIVERSITY.” Accessed April 13, 2026. https://www.nsuweb.org/circle-5-ecology-of-transformative-learning-practices-with-in-a-more-than-human-world.
5. “Climate Fiction Writers League.” September 7, 2021. https://climate-fiction.org.
6. Climate Fiction Writers League. “The Climate-Conscious Writers Handbook Is out Now!” Substack newsletter. Climate Fiction Writers League, June 14, 2025. https://climatefictionwritersleague.substack.com/p/the-climate-conscious-writers-handbook.
7. Firestone, Carrie. The First Rule of Climate Club. Kindle. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2022.
8. Kecojevic, Angela. “The First Rules of Climate Club.” Substack Newsletter. Climate Fiction Writers League, September 12, 2023. https://climatefictionwritersleague.substack.com/p/the-first-rules-of-climate-club.
9. Firestone, Carrie. The First Rule of Climate Club. Kindle. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2022: "Climate Class Application Essay, Rebecca Phelps."
10. Firestone, Carrie. The First Rule of Climate Club. Kindle. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2022: "All Souls' Day."
11. Itäranta, Emmi. Memory of Water. Harper Voyager, 2014.
12. Itäranta, Emmi. “The Arctic on Fire: A Nordic Perspective on Climate Fiction.” Substack Newsletter. Climate Fiction Writers League, September 17, 2024. https://climatefictionwritersleague.substack.com/p/the-arctic-on-fire-a-nordic-perspective-a20.
13. Itäranta, Emmi. Memory of Water. Harper Voyager, 2014: chap. 4.
14. Manwaring, Kevan. Writing Ecofiction: Navigating the Challenges of Environmental Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024: chap. 5.
15. Basso, Keith. “Stalking with Stories: Names, Places, and Moral Narratives Among the Western Apache.” In Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society, edited by Stuart Plattner and Edward M. Bruner, 19–55. Waveland Press, 1984: 39.