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Jenny Offill centers her writing, Weather, around her main character Lizzie. Lizzie is an entirely ulikable character, but possesses many qualities that you and me both share. Offill uses Lizzie to represent the the reader. She offers many relatable scenarios, “of course the world continues to end,” (Offill, 119) and follows the quotation by nonchalantly watering her garden as any woman-next-door would. As a generalized society, we have naively desensitized our catastrophic vernacular. We do not tend to take situations with the severity and intensity that they deserve sometimes. As a reader, I have seen many climate activist marches and noted every call for help, but seem to subconcsoiusly agree that the required amount of help necessary is out of my scope of ability. So, I do nothing. This example particularly illustrates the idea that even though individuals hear about a problem within our country, they will not call for physical action if they are not negatively affected first hand. Here, Offill utlizes her characters as a strand-in for the readers, symbolizing the human tendency to offer empathetic efforts and intentions (while still ultimately acknowledging the reality of our tribulations) but subsequently do nothing.

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Schulz, Thomas. No One Is a Virus: On American Ecofascism. 

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No One is a Virus offers a controversial post by Thomas Schulz that describes the idea that human beings are a virus to our land, and the presence of the Covid-19 virus was reversing the curse that we created through pollution efforts. This post gathered hundreds of thousands of opinions (some of which were very critical of the author’s character and intelligence), however, it did allow for a nationwide conversation about the adverse effects that we have seen within our land recently. Schulz required a large hook in order to garner so much attention, of that he gained through representing the readers of the post as the main character of his idea. “Coronavirus is Earth’s vaccine, We are the virus,” he writes, completely designating the readers as the primal problem (indicated by the inclusive character pronoun of ‘we’), (Anson, 2). With calling out the readers within the post, Schulz earned a conversation; people do not seem to get involved unless they are personally invited into the conversation through an offensive remark and thus, retaliate in defense. While the context of the post was insensitive given how many innocent lives were lost within this period of time, Anson’s characters played a role that called for action.

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Terry Tempest Williams uses her piece, The Clan of One Breasted Women, to describe the health impacts faced by several generations of females in her family as a result of living in close proximity to Utah’s nuclear fallout testing. In this scope, she concludes that nature and culture are interconnected – as the environment was proven to have direct affects on a specific demogrpahic of that area. She writes that the root of her fear is lodged within human-made machinery, and thus, ecological damage is capable of harming the human race. However, the instances that occurred on the land have cultivated unsafe conditions for her female family members. Tempest Williams uses her family members as characters in her anecdote, ultimately using these individuals to represent the environment. In the end, I witnessed their last peaceful breaths, becoming a midwife to the rebirth of their souls,” (Tempest Williams 286). The nuclear fallouts chemically polluted the air, and made the land unsafe. Williams allows the audience to empathize with her characters, as their declining health status entirely mimics the paralleled declining health status of the land and the environment as the fallotus destroy the land and the people who occupy it.

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Mark Maslin’s, Climate Change, paints the picture for what my specified tendency of climate writing strays away from. There is a natural tendency of activisits to strike a response within their audience by offering an overwhelming collection of data and facts. Informational writing establishes an increased sense of credibility and realism. Maslin writes alongside denotations, numerical statistics, historical contextualization, and graphed figures (depicting (1) greenhouse gases and temperature for the last eight glacial cycles recorded in ice cores, (2) Mauna Loa observatory atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements, (3) historic carbon dioxide emissions by region), (Maslin, 5, 6, 8). Many of our readings have developed alongside this format, relying on science and named events to write the narrative. Climate writing, however, can also find itself straying away from this tactic, and focusing on an allegorical basis, where representations of the environment and the people who inhabit it are depicted through characters, rather than data.

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Evelyn White, throughout her writing within The Stories that Shape Us: Black Women and the Wilderness, has explained that her fear of the outdoors is completely influenced by the discriminatory individuals who haunt the land. This fear has completely redefined her relationship with nature, in that, authentically experiencing the beauty of the land seems to be an impossible task. Their internal hatred has made the world so ugly. The audience is able to further understand this perspective when she writes, “I was certain that if I ventured outside to admire a meadow or to feel the cool ripples in a stream, I’d be taunted, attacked, raped, maybe even murdered because of my skin color,” (White 378). She writes with herself taking the role as the main character, ultimately representing readers in the audience who identify alongside her demographic. She represents the black community, and the historical struggle that this group has had with feeling comfortable enough in their own skin to ejoy their surroundings, rather than fear them. Her use of characters further drives home the copmplexities of this relationship, and illustrates the emotional importance of creating a land where every indivudal experiences equivalent amounts of justice, freedom and happiness.

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Climate writers often use characters to symbolize different components of their writing. Some utilize their characters to become a stand-in for the environment, while others assign their characters to represent the audience and the readers themselves.

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Anson, April. “No One Is a Virus: On American Ecofascism.” Environmental History Now., 21 Oct. 2020, envhistnow.com/2020/10/21/no-one-is-the-virus-on-american-ecofascism/.

International Energy Analysis, Berkeley Lab 2019.

Maslin, Mark. “Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction.” Amazon, Oxford University Press, 2021, www.amazon.com/Climate-Change-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0198867867.

Menrisky, Alexander. ENGL 2635E Lecture, [2023]

Offill, Jenny. Weather. Knopf Doubleday, 2020.

Schulz, Thomas. No One Is a Virus: On American Ecofascism.

Tempest Williams, Terry. The Clan of One Breasted Women. Northern Lights, January 1990, Volume VI, No. 1

The Lorax, Illumination Entertainment. Universal Studios, 2012.

Water Scarcity, Adobe Stock Images.

White, Evelyn. The Stories that Shape Us: Black Women and the Wilderness. Norton, 1996.

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Within the climate fiction (cli-fi) section of our Scrapbook assignments, the film The Lorax was analyzed. The setting takes place in a completely dystopian society of ‘Thneedville’ in which clean air must be purchased in bottles, and all aspects of green nature are represented as plastic blow-up balloons. In the story, Ted recounts the story of the Lorax himself, who ‘speaks for the trees’ and fought all of his youth fighting to keep nature alive – much to the contrary of the Once-ler who cut down all of the trees in order to manufacture one of his products. The audience follows the stubborn drive of the Once-ler as he continues with his destruction, until we are met with a caricature of a disaster-infused world. The movie drives home the importance of nature conservation, and offers a catastrophic perspective on what could happen to our world if we refuse to take action. Ultimately, the Lorax dies at the climax of the film. The director of the story strategically used the Lorax as a character as a stand-in for the environment, as his death symbolized the death of our natural world due to pollution efforts and deforestation.

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The movie Wall-E was additionally noted through the Scrapbook posts, designated through the lecture topic of ‘climate in film.’ Wall-E discusses and displays a caricature of the Earth if waste consumption continues at rapid rates. It falls synonymous with  a “plot that is premised on disaster, its aftermath, or its prolonged unfolding” (Menrisky, 2023). Wall-E paints a potential picture of what the Earth could look like if we do not take action while we can to change our bad habits. Here, we meet Wall-E, a beloved robot with humanistic capabilities. Wall-E represents the reader. The robot grasps to stay safe and live a healthy life in this new world, and he quietly mourns the loss of what once was. The readers can understand that we too, could be Wall-E, and have to watch our planet slip away due to inconsiderate human efforts. We could live in filth, plotting the mundane, and live in the result of our lack of respect for our environment. Wall-E, our protagonist, is a lovable character that the audience wishes to see succeed and find love with his crush, EVA. We gain a love and protection for this character, only to note that we ultimately yearn to protect ourselves from the inevitable dystopia depicted.

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Similarly, within the scope of climate fiction, I noticed a Scrapbook post that further illuminates the mechansics behind the power of using characters as a stand-in for the reader in climate writing. When we notice that a character reflects similar qualities to ourselves, we innately gather a sense of security, protection and love for the character (just as we seek these amenities in real life for ourselves). Humans are most likely to become involved with a topic that concern them directly. I read the attached article that describes Climate Anxiety, explained by Yale experts. Anxiety is an uncomfortable feeling that people sometimes struggle to shake. The article suggests that climate anxiety has spiked exponentially within the past few years, perhaps due to increasing media reports throughout the pandemic. Now that humans (and our future generations) may be at risk, their feelings of anxiety will catapult them into action in order to save themselves and their generational line. Anxiety sparks movement. To shake these dark feelings, we actively work to eliminate our stressors; in the case of climate anxiety, this proactive cure has the potential to change the Earth's fate). Emotion is a powerful force, and the simplest way to intertwine this tact in climate writing, is to offer a situation in which the reader might not be okay in the end.

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Lecture - Narcissism (Characters Symbolize the Reader)

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Lecture - Narcissism (Characters Symbolize the Reader)

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Characters are used as a symbolic function. The placement and characteristics of individuals within a story supplement the bigger picture. Specifically, characters can be used as a stand-in for the readers, and the audience themselves. People are more inclined to listen is a crisis is specifically affecting them firsthand. People are more inclined to respond if they are able to see themselves within a character. Throughout our annotation content, I witnessed frequent discussions of the tendency of human beings to be naturally selfish. There is a trend that when adverse affects of environmental conditions are placed within the context of an individual, they will feel a greater urge to fight. People are concerned with their health and their safety. People are concenred with the health and safety of their loved ones. Until one of the aforementioned individuals within a person’s social circle is affected directly, people will continue being an audience member: reading, learning, gossipping, empathizing; but sitting on the couch with an absence of proactivity at the end of the day. By using a character to represent the audience members, we can encourage this sense of personal responsibility to take action.

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The Lorax, Illumination Entertainment. Universal Studios, 2012. 

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Lecture - Personification (Characters Symbolize Environment)

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Lecture - Personification (Characters Symbolize Environment)

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Characters are used as a symbolic function. In some cases, a character can symbolize the environment itself. This trope is usually portrayed through the death of a character, alluding to the foreshadowing death of our land if our societal pollution efforts continue at the driven rate we have displayed. In order to create a character that symbolizes the audience as a whole, the author focuses on literary elements such as personification (disccused within our lecture content). Personification is described as the attribution of human characteristics to the nonhuman (Menrisky, 2023). There is power, and a new sense of understanding that comes with attributing familiar character qualities with inanimate objects. Society tends to develop a greater urge to nurturing and protect the environment, when a stand-in character finds their way into their heart. If the Earth is dying like one of the human characters, or the grass is crying like one of the human characters, the audience is able to grasp the affects of our destruction on a personal level.

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International Energy Analysis, Berkeley Lab 2019.

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As described within our lecture content, writers tend to “experiment with form, language and image to render vast ecological networks more comprehensible to human senses,” (Menrisky, 2023). This prinicple is precisely why the complexity of characters drives human activism so powerfully. This phenomenon also encompasses the issue that is derangements of scale, which highlights the idea that the intensity of climate change is impossible to relay on a literary level because the magnitude of the issue could never be accurately displayed. Climate change is a giant worldwide issue that may not be reversible; numerical data points can be confusing in attempting to understand the issue. In climate writing, authors sometimes choose to introduce a character into the narrative. The character serves as a representation of a bigger entity (often whether the environment or the audience), in an attempt to make the complexities of the situation more familiar and digestible to the reader themself. The writers attempt to start small, by introducing a new friend, in order to begin their journey in depicting the power of the issue at hand. Humans know humans best. Delivering information through a familiar platform can be effective.

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In using characters to resperesnt either the reader or the environment, there is a great presecne of elegy within the writing. Choosing to tackle a story, describing the journey of a character, is an emotive tactic in an attempt to hook the audience and allow them to feel. Both of these instances of symbolism are driven by a raw emotion that carries a great weight as the audience grows to love the characters they meet in their stories. These climate writers, in utilizing the literary tactic of symbolism, are not overwhelming their readers with numerical statistics or action items. They create a person – with a life just as complex as any other, and use the relationship between the character and the audience to drive their activism efforts directly into their hearts. Emotion drives people to act. Passion creates change. Connection empowers action. There is no greater connection than two individuals, whether they are fictitious or not.

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The Epistemological Standpoint challenges the concept of universalism, or the idea that everyone experiences that world in more or less the same way (Menrisky, 2023). This idea specifically encapsulates why storytelling through characters as a representation for other entities continues to grow and evolve over time. As life continues, and humans gain more experience as they inevitably mature into new beginning, they have the potential to morph into different versions of themselves. Everyone has their own story, and lives their own life. Every person that you pass by on the street lives a life with thoughts and feelings as complex as yours. Everyone fights their own battles. I think that storytelling is unique, and continues to serve as a timeless representation of environment, because we see ourselves in new characters as we grow. I could identify with a specific character when I was young, however, I may not be able to see myself within them anymore. As we grow, we need new symbols and representations of ourselves to align with our ever-so-changing stories of our own.

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Characters are a large component of allegory. Throguhout our course, I have noticed that allegorical wiriting is a consistent literary strategy. Specifcally, our leture notes that allegory is “a literary work or mode in which plot, character, and/or setting largely function as symbolic figures to concretely represent and convey a message about complex events, processes, or ideas,” (Menrisky, 2023). It is becoming increasingly common to convey information through storytelling. Storytelling is capable of encompassing layers upon layers of meaning. These stories can be viewed at the surface level for what they are, but also hold a deep complexity and purspoe for every word, every character, every setting, and every idea. Allegory contextualizes modern day environmental representation; as we know that environment is not merely setting, scenery, or backdrop, but itself a subject and even a character (Menrisky, 2023).