As a reader of this newsletter, you are probably familiar with this: sometimes you just don’t feel like hearing climate news anymore. All the escalating temperatures and measurements, this week the World Weather Organization reported records for all climate indicators. Or the German CO₂ balance, which is great on the outside and rather poor on the inside.
What always helps my mood when there is too much gloomy news is distraction. Not in the sense of no longer looking and preferring to completely push climate change out of consciousness as an issue. But sometimes it’s just good to change your level of perception. Culture is best suited for this; Books, films, theater, art. And because the Leipzig Book Fair has been taking place since yesterday, at which numerous new climate books are being presented, here for once there are cultural tips instead of climate news.
For example, my colleague Christoph von Eichhorn recommends the book “Moment of Decision. How we can survive the climate crisis with lessons from earth history” by Michael E. Mann in the current SZ literature supplement. I myself was allowed to interview the sociologist Jens Beckert about his book “Sold Future. Why the fight against climate change threatens to fail”, which is nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. And my colleague Christiane Lutz recently looked at the narrative force with which polycrises are currently being told in the theater.
Detached from the topicality, I always recommend to anyone who is interested three “cultural products” on the climate crisis that have particularly moved me in recent years. The book “The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson. A so-called Cli-Fi (Climate Fiction) novel from 2020, which uses a fictional UN agency to think through the future of the climate from start to finish and is really entertaining in a really good and exciting way. Then the 2021 film “Don’t Look Up” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence: a black comedy about the end of the earth and why people are just too stupid to avert it. And even blacker, the zombie film “The Dead Don’t Die” by Jim Jarmusch from 2019. The star cast ranges from Bill Murray to Adam Driver, Selena Gomez to Tilda Swinton in this masterpiece about the unrestrained destruction of the planet through racism, corruption and consumerism and, of course, scary and very funny undead.
What are your favorite cultural products that deal with climate change in a more direct or distant sense? Do you know any works of art that particularly suit your subject? I look forward to receiving recommendations at [email protected].
(This text comes from the weekly Newsletter Climate Fridaythat you here free of charge can order.)