Climate change experts and environmental humanists alike agree that the climate crisis is, at its core, a crisis of the imagination and much of the popular imagination is shaped by fiction. In his 2016 book The Great Derangement, anthropologist and novelist Amitav Ghosh takes on this relationship between imagination and environmental management, arguing that humans have failed to respond to climate change at least in part because fiction (a) fails to believably represent it. Ghosh explains that climate change is largely absent from contemporary fiction because the cyclones, floods, and other catastrophes it brings to mind simply seem too “improbable” to belong in stories about everyday life. But climate change does not only reveal itself as a series of (b) extraordinary events. In fact, as environmentalists and ecocritics from Rachel Carson to Rob Nixon have pointed out, environmental change can be “imperceptible”; it proceeds (c) rapidly only occasionally producing “explosive and spectacular” events. Most climate change impacts cannot be observed day-to-day, but they become (d) visible when we are confronted with their accumulated impacts.
Climate change evades our imagination because it poses significant representational challenges. It cannot be observed in “human time,” which is why documentary filmmaker Jeff Orlowski, who tracks climate change effects on glaciers and coral reefs, uses “before and after” photographs taken several months apart in the same place to (e) highlight changes that occurred gradually.
*anthropologist: 인류학자 **catastrophe: 큰 재해 ***evade: 피하다