Climate Crisis As Intergenerational Struggle

Using language to re-embrace our relationship with the natural world

Krista Foss Interviews Catherine Bush

Catherine Bush is the author of Blaze Island (2020), described as “sublime” by writer Lisa Moore. Bush’s four previous novels include the Canada Reads long-listed Accusation (2013), the Trillium Award short-listed Claire’s Head (2004), and the national bestselling The Rules of Engagement (2000), also a New York Times Notable Book and a Globe & Mail Best Book of the Year. She was recently a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Germany and has spoken internationally about addressing the climate crisis in fiction. She is Coordinator of the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA, located in Toronto, and can be found online at www.catherinebush.com.

Catherine Bush. Blaze Island. Goose Lane. $24.95, 365 pp., ISBN: 978-1-773101-05-7

In your March 2020 essay in Canadian Notes and Queries, you wrote, “As writer, I no longer feel capable of making art that fails to acknowledge the climate crisis and the existential condition in which we all live.” You also wrote, “… paradoxically, the more we talk about our actual predicament, the harder it becomes to represent it imaginatively.” Yet the suspense in Blaze Island builds the realities of climate change into the narrative versus burdening the story with message. Can you elaborate on how you navigated this paradox in the writing of your book?

There’s an American glaciologist named Jason Box who gained a lot of notoriety for saying in a 2014 tweet: “If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd.” That’s a dramatic statement – but “we’re f’d”  is not a story. Well, the story is the flack he got for speaking so bluntly. The story is: how does a climate scientist hold grief and rage and existential terror in his heart while trying to parent, while watching ecological devastation unfold, while navigating a world in which most people can’t bear to face the implications of these existential threats? How does he make oatmeal for his daughter’s breakfast after staring online at melting polar ice? What does his despair make him do then? This is the specific dilemma of my fictional scientist, Milan Wells, who seeks refuge on a remote island in the North Atlantic, after having his career sabotaged by climate-change deniers. 

I’ve always felt deeply connected to the natural world and aware of ongoing ecological loss. My first novel, Minus Time, published back in 1993 and just reprinted, features a young woman, the daughter of a female astronaut, who gets involved with a group of animal-rights turned eco-activists. My sister is a climate-science advisor for the federal government. I’ve never been able to put the climate crisis out of my mind. And I really felt the power of Amitav Ghosh’s call in his 2016 nonfiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, asking why more writers of literary fiction aren’t grappling with the climate crisis, the greatest existential peril of our time. I’d already begun work on the novel, but I was certainly writing into this gap.

I’ve always been drawn, as most writers are, to the contradictions of human behaviour – the climate crisis only amplifies these contradictions. That’s one door in as a storyteller, and my desire to use language to re-embrace our relationship with the natural world despite ongoing loss, to decentre the human while telling a compelling story with humans in it.

I wanted to write a novel that merged realism with the quality of a tale that lures you into its heightened world and makes you want to believe it: a story about parents and children, a love story opening up even as the known world might be ending, a story in which wind may be dangerous but is also a sensual presence. From early in my conception of the novel, I knew I wanted to use Shakespeare’s play The Tempest as a template; it offered a way to introduce scientific realities that can feel fantastical and also the beautiful, mysterious microcosm of an island.

Alan (Milan) Wells, a Prospero for the Anthropocene, is a climate change fugitive, a prisoner of conscience on a self-imposed exile to Blaze Island with his daughter Miranda. There’s a gorgeous tension between them. His decisions impact her like weather, imposed and out of her control. This is mirrored in another character – Frank – and his relationship with a charismatic, powerful father. Could you tease this out further, how this intergenerational “weather” underscores your other themes?

Father-child relationships are at the heart of the novel: Miranda must find her own agency in relation to her moody, widowed, climate-scientist father, who in his desire to protect her from the worsening state of the world creates a bubble that becomes, finally, a kind of prison. Frank, the rebellious activist son of a billionaire venture capitalist, must move beyond merely reacting against his father’s aggressively aggrandizing power. Then there’s Caleb Borders, who grows up alongside Miranda with a father-sized hole where his missing, never-spoken-of father ought to be, and who has his own reckoning with the past, present, and future. I was compelled by the way that our response to the climate crisis manifests as an intergenerational struggle. I hadn’t really encountered this in literary fiction. We see it acted out now in real life: the Fridays for Future movement; Greta Thunberg castigating world leaders at Davos; a current court case here in Canada in which a group of young people are suing the federal government for failing to take meaningful action to prevent the climate crisis.

Metaphorically we’re all living under the bad Dads of western industrialized capitalism, its largely white patriarchy, its mantra of plunder and endless growth and extractivism, all of which have created the terrible atmospherics of this current moment: toxic and unbreathable air, rising winds and storms. In the novel, Roy Hansen, the airline magnate (this part now seems like fiction) directly affects the planetary air as his ever-expanding fleet of airplanes spews more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Milan Wells, the climate scientist contemplating climate engineering possibilities, has the potential power to alter the atmosphere and must decide what to do with that desire for technological control. Their children must find a way not simply to react to their fathers’ dominant weather but potentially alter it by altering their own microclimates.

Frank Hansen is literally thrown ashore on Blaze Island in the path of a Category 5 hurricane. And he introduces himself as a birder looking for accidentals – those coveted sightings of out of place species blown off course. The idea of the accidental – and how it ultimately manifests for Frank, points to a kind of hopefulness. Was that the intended effect?

The novel opens in the midst of a hurricane whose outer reaches have swerved north to batter Blaze Island. Having crashed his car in the gale, Frank manages to crawl as far as the isolated house where Miranda lives with her father and, after being rescued, presents himself as a birder. As Miranda’s father immediately points out, the middle of the night, in the midst of a hurricane, is a peculiar time to be looking for birds – even those flung far off-course. It turns out that the accidentals whom Frank seeks are human – his father and uncle, whom he suspects of flying secretly to the island, lured by a possible investment in a climate-engineering technology. But Frank’s sense of the accidental is upended again when he encounters Miranda, both islander and outsider, blown there by her own swerves of circumstance years before. Obviously, a love story is central to The Tempest. In Blaze Island, Frank and Miranda each have their world rearranged by the other: each allows the other to see newly. In the midst of peril, this is a hopeful gesture, the beginning of love and possibility. In Frank’s company, Miranda discovers how to look forward in the face of enormous change and the unknown, in which the past cannot be a guide to what is to come. Also – she’s never met a young man, a stranger, with a tattoo! The unpredictability of the new weather can be terrifying; but our capacity to change – to re-encounter the world and respond to profoundly altered circumstance – will be what saves us, if anything can.

Climate engineering is not an intuitively lyrical subject for a literary novel. And yet Blaze Island’s prose is gorgeous – jam-packed with beautiful gems, and a striking contrast of the sensuous prose detailing maritime island geography and botany with this other sometimes de-natured and yet also poetic, scientific language. What were the challenges of these two languages in the novel?

I love the challenges of attempting to inhabit scientific languages in a novel because I am not a scientist. I love the metaphoric possibilities of the haze in which proponents of solar radiation management wish to wrap the Earth by shooting huge quantities of particulate matter into the upper atmosphere – for decades, for generations. I love all the different possible ways to describe clouds, both their scientific names – stratus, cirrus, cumulonimbus – and the folkloric ways in which atmospheric wisdom has been passed along traditionally: that mackerel clouds bring wind; being able to see the dark side of the new moon means rain. The intense volatility of clouds at the micro-level makes it virtually impossible to capture them in a computational model even on today’s supercomputers. This is just one expression of our world’s utterly intense unpredictability. Fiction is another way of giving expression to the world’s unpredictability by attempting to make patterns out of it. I love a world on the page interpenetrated by all these different languages, which are different modes of perception, all necessary, none absolute. I love writing about scientists because I’m fascinated by how they combine data-driven research, which leaches out the subjective, with the subjectivity of our experience of being human in the world, a world that we experience, ultimately, through our bodies. It was crucial to me to give expression to the live-ness of the world beyond the human: give presence to animal and bird, plant, the land, the air.

The post-storm isolation of the Blaze Island characters, the fragility of their survival, their subjugation to the whims of technology and capital, and the importance of interdependence after the storm, are similar to feelings, collective and personal, emerging from the pandemic – do you see the book being instructive for this crisis too?

I’m glad that you call attention to that. Of necessity the pandemic has forced many of us into more self-sufficient modes of existence, living more locally, thrown back on our own resources, unable to look to the past as a model for what is to come. In the novel, Miranda has been compelled by her father to a life of sheltering in place. He won’t allow either of them to fly or leave the island. They have an off-grid house, they produce most of their own food. They even make their own bread, though, given my own pandemic experience, I realize I should have done more with sourdough. For a while, Miranda’s father keeps her out of school, teaching her about the land, arguing that these lessons in resilience are the best way to prepare her for the life to come. When the storm batters Blaze Island, it cuts the island off from the rest of the world, isolating even the strangers, including Frank and his father, who’ve recently arrived. Frank’s father Roy wants nothing more than to escape, just as the climate crisis makes him long to grab a jetpack and flee to Mars. The islanders, meanwhile, take refuge in their own resourcefulness. Even as her world expands through Frank, Miranda realizes that she’s simply trading one island frame of reference for a larger one. We’re all islanders on this planet, which doesn’t necessarily mean we’re all isolated from each other. Island living – like pandemic living – acknowledges deep networks of interconnection and mutual care in order to ensure survival.

Krista Foss’ short fiction has appeared in Granta and has twice been a finalist for the Journey Prize. Her essay writing won the PRISM International creative non-fiction contest in 2016, has been featured in Best Canadian Essays. Her first novel, Smoke River, published by McClelland & Stewart (2014), won the Hamilton Literary Award. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Follow Krista on Twitter @kristafoss.