Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. – J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World

Earlier this year, (I am late in finally moving this post from draft to final form), University of Florida held a fascinating plenary session called “Imagining Climate Change: Science and Fiction in Dialogue” as part of their February 2016 Water Institute Symposium. I was lucky enough to attend this along with several other events meant to foster dialogue about water and water resources.Many of these events embraced the intersection between art and science, with an understanding that the former may have a lot to add to the communication of the latter.

The plenary focused on a panel consisting of scientists and science fiction writers, several who dabbled in the blurred lines between those professions. Terry Harpold, Associate Professor of English at UF, moderated the discussion. Scientists included Ellen E. Martin, a paleoclimatology fellow for the Florida Climate Institute and professor of paleoceanography at UF, and Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an earth system sciences professor at UC Irvine. Rounding out the authors were Yann Quero, Jeff VanderMeer, and Tobias Buckell.

The session reminded me of variations of scenario-based planning exercises we practiced in our conflict management course. The participants can embark on a sort of imaginative course of suggesting possible futures or outcomes. As Kahane (2012) describes the method: “The scenario method asks people to talk not about what they predict will happen or what they believe should happen, but only about what they think could happen.” Different versions of the process have wavered on the importance of plausibility versus probability. But regardless, it lets those involved imagine the future and possibly envision solutions to keep negative possibilities from occurring, or identify steps to support positive scenarios.

Harpold directed the panel first to consider water and its influence on them – “the great solvent of our collective imagination” – and the members described often poignant moments where resource coincided with personal memory. One panel participant, Tobias Buckell, described his youth growing up in the Caribbean and living on boats, a unique perspective that colored his responses to later questions. Dr. Famiglietti was also able to re-iterate a point he has made in the documentary Last Call at the Oasis, concerning his findings of extreme water scarcity in the western coast of the US among other regions, and how his interests have continually moved towards how to relay this topic effectively to the public and outside of the constraints of technical writing.

The conversation turned to examining the role of writers in contrast to those of scientists, as it was noted that sometimes science writing is not enough, the effectiveness of the translation piece is becoming the defining thing. When asked why writers feel compelled to bring in the science, the French author Yann Quero noted that it used to be the job of the writer to make people dream. It appears however, for some writers, that the looming threat of climate change has made some of them feel a personal onus to translate the sometimes labored language of the science into humanized narratives, crafting stories with probable elements. “Let me grab you by the face and show you how tragic this will be on a human scale” added Tobias Buckell.

It was also suggested that this kind of science-driven fiction can make the lives of scientists more relatable by conveying their lives and the constraints they work under. Ideally, this would make the efforts of researchers like Dr. Famglietti and Dr. Martin easier. But it is also clear that scientists are operating under a different set of constraints with regards to communicating the science of climate change, as became very evident when the topic of uncertainty was posed to the panel.

Dr. Martin referred to the perception of there being gatekeepers of scientists and publishing, certain thresholds that needed to be met before scientists were let loose to communicate. Further discussion established that fiction had the luxury of being able to exist within a different convention of reliability. However, when the question was posed about how much uncertainty needed to be minimized before action was taken,  Dr. Famiglietti recounted (I saw him in multiple contexts, so this comment may have been made at an earlier event) attending a meeting where Al Gore was speaking and proceeded to lay out a directive for the scientific community to embrace the responsibility of sharing their science, as no one else knew their data with the same intimacy, or perhaps understood with the same gravity, the messages their research was revealing. If there was a preponderance of supportive data, more harm than good could be done waiting to to reach a 98% confidence threshold.

Additionally, scientific jargon and word usage can be misconstrued. The public may hear the word “error” and understand it to mean “wrong”, when in a scientific context, it may in fact refer to the process of getting closer and closer to the correct answer.  So there is the challenge of choosing how to effectively relay the larger messages. Alternatively, authors were asked how or if they maintain scientific rigor within their text, while still subscribing to the creative process of writing fiction. One of the more interesting responses came from weird fiction (an actual subgenre of speculative fiction, not my classification) author Jeff Vandermeer who suggested fiction doesn’t need to solve the questions  it poses, as we often can’t in real life. He also referenced the writer J.G. Ballard, author of “The Drowned World”, who engages his reader in thought experiments. How is the human mind altered by climate change? Perhaps you don’t need to even characterize the change correctly, the power is more in the act of considering it.

The panel ended by gauging the level of hope panel participants had for the future, as  moderator Harpold suggested “hope is a deeply irreducible human thing…” The tone of responses was one of adaptation rather than complete mitigation. There are no absolute solutions, but we would be remiss to do nothing. Dr. Famiglietti recognized the irreversible trend associated with some aspects of climate change but voiced his hope in future communities to develop sustainable ways to manage resources. Vandermeer suggested we not engage in magical thinking and shy away from the complexities of climate change, but may need to instead redefine our vision of utopia. Also acceptance that our current way of life is dead leaves us room to engage in new ways of living, that we we need to become less to become more. From his own experiences, Buckell has been led to believe we are far more likely to come together to rebuild and recover, in contrast to the “rugged individualism” Hollywood has led us to believe characterizes natural disaster.

All in all, the session an intriguing look into the minds of a group of men and women who have devoted a significant part of their lives to considering the implications of climate change. It is certainly a heavy task to engage it, but one they are clearly doing so with thoughtfulness and conviction.