Race for Tomorrow (William Collins) by Simon Mundy
We Have a Dream (Magic Cat Publishing) by Mya-Rose Craig
Climate change primers are not an easy task. How can our civilisation’s greatest challenge be rendered in a digestible form that doesn’t utterly depress its readers but rather compels them past the first chapter? Enter two new works by Simon Mundy and Mya-Rose Craig. Both refuse to get bogged down in either dystopian futures or endless statistics, choosing instead to focus on the stories of people across the world whose daily experiences of environmental change, along with their efforts to tackle it, can help us to make sense of this mind-boggling situation.
Over the last 15 years as an environmental campaigner, I’ve seen the different ways we’ve tried, and often failed, to convey the magnitude of the problem. We’ve taken turns focusing on economic cost, lives lost, or worsening manifestations like the recent floods and droughts. We tried sneaking climate more indirectly into communications around issues like fuel poverty and air pollution. Now, thankfully, it feels as though we are finally putting the emergency back where it needs to be: front and centre.
Race for Tomorrow and We Have a Dream are part of this trend, which recognises that there is no one single answer to the catastrophe. To write a book about what Mundy describes as “by far the biggest story of the century”, to “avoid getting lost in the sprawling mass of information, with a subject that touches every part of the planet”, both authors have opted to highlight multiple narratives from across the world. Craig’s We Have a Dream, written primarily for young people to inspire them into action, focuses on raising up the voices of young Indigenous people and people of colour. Mundy, who writes for those taking their first foray into the complexity of the issue, journeys across the world interviewing fascinating people playing very different roles in the fight against climate change.
Adapting to our new reality is a feature of any book now being written about climate change. But as Mundy says when visiting Venice to report on its new ocean barrier developed to protect the city from rising seas, “the barrier is less a promise of a new future than a gigantic symbol of all that has gone wrong in the past”. He recalls the climate scientists arriving on Maldivian atolls to chart when a village will disappear, not if.
In We Have a Dream, young activist Litokne Kabua tells us how nearly two thirds of the homes in his Marshall Islands community have washed away after extreme weather events and the degradation of coral reefs that protect the islands from storm waves. Adaptation alone will never be enough to safeguard the most vulnerable, who have had no hand in creating this mess – and both books thankfully still choose mitigation of climate change’s worst impacts as their focus.
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I am always pleasantly surprised when reading books about the environment to come across a statistic that grabs my attention, and Mundy doesn’t disappoint. I had to put the book down and take a deep breath after learning that mountain glaciers are retreating by 10,000 tonnes per second. Woven into his journey are a number of such facts, before he moves on to another story from an entirely different perspective. It is a pace that occasionally risks sacrificing complexity. Yet on the whole he captures many of the trade-offs, conflicts and double standards at play in the fight for climate action.
The chapter on Bangladesh manages this especially well. It explores the conflict between Sheikh Hasina’s much lauded climate rhetoric on the world stage and her despotism at home. The culprits of this crisis, however, enter a little late. Fossil fuel companies make their first appearance about halfway through the book, via the incredible story of the Filipino lawyers and activists challenging Shell. Yet their role is intrinsic to every single story Mundy tells. Similarly, we have to wait until the final section for the entry of the US and China, despite their fundamental role in destroying the environment and in developing the climate adaptation infrastructure he visits across the globe. But if the villains take a while to appear, the rallying call of those fighting them features throughout – and there is no equivocation about the need for climate justice.
The increasingly popular call for rich countries to take responsibility forces us to confront the reality that, just as climate change is linked to other planetary tipping points, such as biodiversity loss, it also cannot be isolated from systemic injustices and global inequalities. The very premise of Craig’s book highlights this fact, choosing only activists who, like the author, are people of colour and/or who represent Indigenous communities. Unsurprisingly for a book with intersectionality at its heart, its focus is rarely exclusively on climate: addressing rights for Indigenous communities living through frighteningly rapid change in the Arctic, efforts to conserve wildlife in Bangladesh, and the challenges of air pollution in Singapore.
The stories in We Have a Dream implicitly remind us that climate change is a threat multiplier: it makes other problems worse, and by what magnitude is very hard to predict. What we know is that inequality, conflict and resulting mass migration can be worsened by climate change, while some environmental threats, like interference with the nitrogen cycle, can also compound it. As an inspiring activist herself (I worked with Craig when one of Greenpeace’s ships took her to the Arctic for the most northerly ever climate strike), she streamlines the information most likely to spur action in her readers. The stories she promotes – each accompanied by vibrant, beautiful illustrations by Sabrena Khadija – follow the same format. We are introduced to 30 inspiring individuals: their backstories, dreams for the future, and the moment they first realised environmental activism was for them. For a younger reader, the book might well prove transformative.
As primers for quite different audiences, neither work attempts to be exhaustive in its scope. With climate change, such a task is virtually impossible. Instead, I was left at the end of each book wanting more, and therein lies their success. In fact, it would be hard to finish either as a newcomer to the subject, or to climate activism, and not immediately go out to try and learn more. And that is exactly what these authors want to happen.
This piece is from the New Humanist spring 2022 edition. Subscribe here.
