"Goose Bumps"

I have just returned from Under the Volcano (UTV), a three-week writing program for poets, fiction and non-fiction writers, and journalists, in Tepotzlan, Mexico. This hardly captures the range of participants or the kinds of writing they’re producing, but I will be sharing more about the experience over the next several weeks. For now, let me just say it was intense. I learned a lot and wrote a lot. I came back invigorated, inspired and with new friends.  

One of the speakers at our first “Community of the Imagination” gathering, “Sensing the Story: Vision, Intuition and Speculation,” was Valeria Souza, a Mexican scientist specializing in evolutionary and microbial ecology. I have rarely heard a more eloquent speaker on climate change and yet, when asked about the role of the arts, she claimed that scientists don’t know how to speak. “We need awareness,” she said, “And artists create stomach rumblings and goosebumps.” That image has stayed with me. If we are to save ourselves (among other presenters, Souza made it clear that the planet will survive, at least in some form, but we won’t), the call to collective action needs to be visceral. It needs to be a gut punch. It needs to make our hearts pound with fear.

And yet, we must still have hope. When UTV founder and director Magda Bogin asked Valeria what we can do in the face of “climate despair,” she said that we have seen that microbes are capable of changing everything, so we should ask them, humbly, to work for us.

I wish I had more confidence that we were capable of humility. It is our arrogance that created this “climate catastrophe.” (At another gathering, journalist Oscar Lopez said that we have moved from “global warming” to “climate change” to ‘climate crisis” to “climate catastrophe.”)  Arrogance fuels climate change deniers and the politicians who pander to them. In fiction, hubris ends tragically. I’d like to think there is still time to avert that fate.