The point of asking “what if?”
There are at least two ways in which we might imagine the future. One path takes us through unchecked climate change and its consequences on human and planetary life, including the exacerbation of conflicts around the world. The other path has us finding and implementing solutions to environmental collapse, with young people leading the way to a brighter, more sustainable future. The reality is perhaps going to be somewhere in between, but even to reach that halfway mark we need to believe in the possibility of a positive outcome.
One of the genres of writing that has always had a niche following but has gained popularity in recent times is speculative fiction – fiction that plays on the “what if?” question and departs from reality to imagine different worlds, some fantastical but others within the realm of possibility. Stories in this genre range from the dystopic and dark to those that are imbued with hope, seeking solutions to the many problems that beset the human race. The dark stories serve as a warning, cautionary tales that shake us out of our complacency and push us to act if we are to avoid such a future. The hopeful stories present us with alternative imaginations of what could be, showing us how we might get there. One of the sub-genres of speculative fiction (or ‘spec-fic”) is climate fiction, which lays out for us, in imaginative detail, what life could be like as climate change progresses. For many of us, the climate “catastrophe” (as it has been dubbed by scientists) is something in the future, or it is something beyond our capacity to deal with as individuals. It’s hard to think about whether and how we can actually do anything to change the direction we are moving in. Climate fiction portrays the consequences of catastrophe while also pointing us to possible responses, both as a society and as individuals. Storytelling, after all, is one of the most powerful ways of influencing how people think and getting them to imagine something different.
As teachers, it’s easy for us to become cynical and jaded, sometimes defeated by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. These may be immediate circumstances to do with one’s personal or professional life – from care responsibilities at home to poor infrastructure and institutional politics at work, from tedious commutes to challenging classrooms, and a host of other things. So how do we move past that to bring energy and purpose to our days? Possibly because the act of teaching demands hopeful speculation – we begin each year with the firm belief that we can change the futures of the children in our classroom, and we then proceed to showing them how they can move from a place of not knowing, to a place of understanding. And then we do it all over again, year after year.
That’s why we need hope. Even the darkest, most dystopian fiction is written in the hope that it can lead us to a different place, that nothing is inevitable, that maybe this will dislodge us from the conviction that nothing can change. It is after all, the season of lights, maybe the time of year when we are at our most hopeful!
We’d love to hear where your mind goes when allowed to speculate, to ask “what if…?”
