Can Literature Save the World?

This is a final paper for one of my 300 level classes. It's philosophy I stand by, and would like to share it here. Enjoy!

Introduction

In our current historical moment, the state of the climate remains the largest global crisis we face. Mass extinction, ecological degradation, and pollution continue to advance; despite scientific data reaching greater conclusions and providing methods of preventing further destruction, environmental inaction persists in the domains of human life that matter. As we face alarming increases in anti-intellectualism and the denial of basic science, many scholars in the humanities are asking if literature could be the discipline that sways the public in favor of progress, academia, and environmental preservation. While literature cannot save the world in a material sense— active change involves direct implementations in public policy — the ideology and potential for activism underlying these works certainly can aid in the process. With literature, we can light a fire under the collective underside of society by raising awareness, calling into question the pedagogy of human life, and reminding ourselves that we are the authors of our future. While environmental empathy can begin early using science-focused storybooks, writers such as Dickinson, Butler, and Simpson can offer profound ideological reminders of our past, present and future for high schoolers and beyond. Other worlds are possible; we simply must provide the public with these visions before any hope of intervention is passed.

An Intro to Ecocriticism

Before any discussions of efficacy begin, it is important to address the theoretical frameworks around ecocriticism. Prior to any widespread notion of ecological awareness, capitalism’s scope was infinite. Given the rampant use of fossil fuels, deforestation and pollution of aquatic and land environments, it is clear that capitalism is incompatible with respect for our Earth. As concisely stated by ecological philosopher Edward Abbey, “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” We cannot maintain infinite resource consumption in a finite system. Further, the argument that expansion into space may solve this issue is a non-starter on its face; if we cannot maintain this planet, what gives us the audacity to believe we won’t continue destroying alien ecosystems until our civilization ultimately caves in under its own weight? Space exploration remains a hand-waving dismissal of real ecological concerns on our current and only planet. It was only a matter of time until our abuse of natural resources caused noticeable consequences on the world around us. 

Once this shift was visible, our methods of counteracting the flaws of capitalism have been, largely, authoritarian. After all, interventions involving centralized planning government intervention can easily slide into rigid control under corrupt systems of power. With capitalism running under the presumption of infinite growth, cracking down on greedy corporations with regulations is akin to putting a child in time-out; while it restricts their abilities for a time, it does not change their motives. Worse, Mark Fisher argues in “Capitalist Realism” that our dependency on these measures has caused refusal of these measures to become unfathomable. Not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but that there are no fathomable alternatives. With this being the only allowed “solution”, capitalism’s only trajectory is into fascism. While neoliberalism sought to limit the intervention of the state, this has been made clear to not be true in practice; in light of the hard rule of authoritarian conservatism, liberalism seems meek and spineless in comparison. This is the true rot of capitalism. Deprived of its function and context, capitalism consumes culture and transforms once-valued objects or ideas into aesthetic ones. Efforts to revive culture and uphold earth-centric values are easily rewritten as oriental cosmopolitanism, figments of “quaint anachronism”(Nixon, 80) rather than tangible methods of change. In these moments, capitalism remains in a state of reflexive impotence. Any rational human can recognize climate change with sufficient common sense, yet will almost always choose to put off methods of truly identifying and solving the problem. Its defiance of the status quo causes us anxiety. This cannot continue.

One clear example is the failed conservation efforts in the Dead Sea; as the water of this unique ecosystem dries up, sinkholes threaten the surrounding environment as well as the near-landlocked country of Jordan. The expense of this problem is massively affecting the country’s treasury. This, combined with aging infrastructure and low farming subsidies, don’t give farmers the incentive to treat their land better. While the country has tried to build more aquifers (outputting 160% of the necessary water with twelve irrigation systems), the water crisis continues to worsen (Haditha, 3). This example illustrates how a simple mindset shift and gentle pressure isn’t enough to combat environmental decline, even when the consequences of it are so visible and destructive. While the goal for the people is to end global inequality and steer away from capitalism evils, at the end of the day, their consumerism to big companies only fed into a pre-existing sense of “capitalist realism”: the amount of realism we’re willing to acknowledge that falls just below any indication to alter the status quo. In the case of Jordan, the need for production hinders any efforts to shift the current agricultural system in favor of environmental stability. Climate change is regarded in the same way that war, poverty, and other evils of capitalism— they are seen as natural and inevitable. Therefore, any attempt to fix it is portrayed as being naive, and reliably destroys our innate sense of empathy. We cannot run activism for climate protection as a business, nor is it something that can be redirected onto the individual as a sense of underlying anxiety.

Thus, we need to expand the narratives we tell past any individual experience. In order to play into the overbearing ideals of capitalism, the first step of awareness is transporting people out of their current reality. Who doesn’t love a good escape mechanism, right? Scientists are already studying the impact of fiction reading on empathy, particularly in stories that involve emotional transportation (Bal, 2013). When we consume works of fiction, we subconsciously evaluate them based on verisimilitude (truth-likeness), not necessarily on facts. Essentially, a narrative feeling realistic is more important than it actually being aligned in realism, at least in reader immersion. Transportation, by definition, is the mental convergence where attention, emotion, and understanding are fully focused on the story. In this state, we lose perceptions of time and self-awareness; this is the escapism good books provide. This process makes books feel “real” and, fortunately for us, often elicit positive change in ourselves (Bal, 2013). This occurs in processes of empathic growth, where we identify with characters and emotionally invest in the stories we read. In one study, fiction reading leads to significantly increased empathy over time when readers are emotionally transported. However, when readers are not transported, fiction reading can lead to decreased empathy (Bal, 2013). What this tells us is that stories that invoke fear alone can’t fix our environmental empathy problem. This is why nonfiction may be less effective in sparking positive change; feeling obligations in the real world can reduce empathy if readers feel powerless to act.

One clear case study for the effects of environmental fiction is Emily Dickinson, particularly her works of poetry describing the natural world. Scott Knickerbocker explores Dickinson’s importance in early ecopoetics, and how she walks the balance between reality and imagination. Her use of metaphors and symbolism artfully approach ethical discussions of humanity’s relationship with nature at a time when naturalism was largely new and unexplored. Her method of writing portrays nature not as a wild, foreign body, but as a tangible and lived reality through tranquil personal accounts. She both lauds and critiques empiricism, approaching it with familiarity and fascination while simultaneously pointing out its hubris: this is clear in works such as “Going to Heaven!” and other early fascicle entries (Knickerbocker, 197). Ultimately, this creates a sense of accepted uncertainty as she allows herself to ask questions and leave them unanswered. Unlike many other writers of her time, she doesn’t give in to solipsism. Reality, as it exists within our wobbly conceptions, is sufficient— this produces a sense of awe that contradicts the cold tenets of capitalism. The environments she describes aren’t “wilderness” in the ignorant and sterilized sense; instead, her language embraces nature’s unpredictability and leans into wildness of its own. Her unconventional poetic style, especially the overuse of em dashes and lack of punctuation, embodies the uncertainty of nature in a very instinctive sense. These are the works we should embrace in public ecocriticism, not rattling statistics of how much we’ve failed.

History and Slow Violence

It would be an incomplete discussion of ecocriticism to leave out the role of history in the violence inflicted on the natural world. Indeed, we have inflicted  “slow violence” on ourselves and the world, one that is dispersed through time. This damage is incremental, rendering it invisible to our eyes. This term was coined by Robert Nixon in the introduction of the 2011 novel “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor”. The central argument is focused on the long history of people and their homes that were treated as disposable. The clear flaw with modern liberalism is that it fails to oppose the capitalism realism that perpetuates climate violence. Most visibly, profits are internalized to the upper classes, while the risks and byproducts of industry are offloaded onto poor communities (Nixon, 16). This behavior is what gives rise to environmental racism, examples of which are not limited to the water crisis of Flint, Michigan and the export of coal ash into Uniontown, Alabama. Poor communities are the populations that face the brunt of slow violence, the repercussions of which are less conspicuous than the visible changes we see in picturesque “victims of climate change” (ex. Coral reefs, oceanic trash islands, etc). While the repercussions of slow violence are less conspicuous than those of environmental problems like the Pacific Garbage Patch, they are no less real, and all the more challenging to target with effective policy making. Indeed, marginalized communities are often ignored because they lack representation or voice in the decision-making process (Nixon, 56). This causes less enforcement of environmental rules and sustains environmental unfairness. It’s because of this lack of voice that environmentalism is often excluded to privileged activists in rich countries, at least ideologically- in reality, ordinary people resist slow violence every day through protests and union strikes, outside the eye of inspirational infographics on social media  (Nixon, 23).  These acts of resistance, unworthy of media attention, are forgotten in the history of climate activism, and it’s exactly their stories and recreations of such that we should include in literature.

Failure to acknowledge these stories allows industry and government to fill in the gaps of rhetoric. Their common claims that the environment can “heal itself”, of individual carbon footprint, ignore the longer environmental impacts of development and are symptomatic of a willfully ignorant appreciation of the work of scientists. This argument also allows operators, regulators, and other actors to forgo any obligation to spend money or develop better regulations to clean up polluted sites- it’ll just get better on its own, right? There would be no reason for them to waste their precious blood money to remedy the destruction they caused (putting aside the idea of “undo-ing” harm, too, as we can’t return the Earth to a previous untainted state). Trying to imagine a future where the climate is recovered often devolves into reminiscing about the past, according to Chakrabarty in “The Climate of History”, this “illustrates the historicist paradox that inhabits contemporary moods of anxiety and concern about the finitude of humanity”(Chakrabarty, 197). Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” expands on this, concluding that the reverence of the past is based on the idea that everything about history has been ultimately unsuccessful; we made irreversible mistakes, and therefore everything is terrible and we should just give up. He challenges this idea of history as a linear continuum driven by tangible actions, arguing instead that what is often seen as tangible turning points is actually an uninterrupted status quo of suffering and failure. Historical materialism, originally meant to transform philosophy into a grounded, worldly praxis, has lost touch with reality by internalizing the logic of progress and conformism. Benjamin insists that true historical awareness must recognize history as a series of interruptions and contradictions. Often, there is no overarching and logical narrative to our decisions across billions of people: “The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” (Benjamin, 5). By acknowledging the events of the past in this discontinuous way, the historian can "blast open the continuum of history"(Benjamin, 8) to find new perspectives and opportunities missed. Traditional Western philosophy has clearly not worked thus far; therefore, we should prioritize theological sensitivity that resists finality, affirming that the past is not lost. As said in our class, other worlds and alternative praxis are possible. We need to spend more time with literary efforts that stretch our understanding of temporal and spatial violence while evoking empathy without complacency, works that show how communities and individuals have lived with the ongoing legacies of this violence.

Possibilities in Literary Activism: Pedagogy and Radical Empathy

Literature renders visible the unseen through character, narrative, and metaphor within these societal issues. A 2010 Frontiers In Ecology paper by Diane Knight approaches the surmounting of “ecophobia” in early education, particularly in children’s literature. This article clearly addresses the delicate balance of narrative we must strike in order to reach people effectively. Children remain one of the most curious and open-minded groups to influence; their emotional pliability is exactly why our approach must be careful. If we raise alarms about large-scale environmental destruction too early in education, the message may devolve into “fear appeals” that scare readers into ignoring or minimizing environmental problems:

“The use of fear appeals may backfire with elementary-age children, creating barriers to development of environmental empathy. Sobel likens “ecophobia” to ‘math phobia’, which can result from ‘too much abstraction, too early’”(Knight, 2010)

In the same way that presenting the concept of death to young children can cause an overexpression of fear, the same occurs with remote and nebulous claims of an environmental doomsday. This is true especially in conjunction with tangible and beloved figures, such as the possible extinction of Galapagos tortoises and polar bears. Instead, an effective way to engage children in ecology while avoiding ecophobia is to build upon their interest in the natural world in their own community. Instead of saying “the tortoises are dying!”, we can say “look how amazing these creatures are. We should protect them!” The focus can easily be shifted from despair to fascination if we emphasize the dynamic, unique nature of the world around them. Building an early appreciation for graspable places in their communities, such as local parks and forests, can foster a lifelong appreciation for the diversity of life (Knight, 2010).

One great example this article cites is Scholastic’s Magic School Bus. Through the kind and knowledgeable teacher Mrs. Frizzle, her students learn all about science and nature intermixed with a reasonable amount of magic and fictional technology. Each book is short, structured, and bases a defined storyline on real environmental science. It contextualizes complicated scientific truths into a neat package for kids to consume, all while championing cooperation and ecological empathy. Further, the use of magical realism is helpful to foster empathy for farther-reaching places:

“Although books with narrative may be effective in encouraging children to appreciate a nearby natural environment, they may also provide a gateway to appreciating remote environments. By stirring the imagination, narrative may encourage children to learn about animals and habitats that they may not have the opportunity to see or visit.” (Knight, 2010)

Literature can be a powerful companion to other disciplines, strengthening the moral and emotional imperatives of environment-focused policy. Toni Lahtien’s 2024 paper “On the Limits of Empirical Ecocriticism” explores the strength of ecocriticism in the emphasises of culture and imagination, and reflects on the significance of cultural representations in discussions about the environment. While ecocriticism is vital for the cultural imagination and ideals of representation, it lacks impact without appealing to the science underlying those ideals. This questioning has given rise to empirical ecocriticism, a subsection that integrates social science statistics into reader narratives. Previously-mentioned papers such as “How does fiction reading influence empathy?” fall snugly into this category. This approach allows academics to build on reader-response dynamics while including provable backing in cognitive science. Truly, the intersection of humanities and neuroscience may be the key to understanding the best methods of storytelling to elicit positive change. While literature may inspire ecological awareness or compassion toward non-human life, its effects are mediated by genre, reader background, and interpretive context—romantic literature may foster empathy more effectively than dystopian fiction, which plays more into escapism instead of education (Lahten, 2024). Though empirical ecocriticism aspires to a more grounded perspective, its findings are still approximate and contingent, limited by literature’s inherent ambiguity and the variability of reader response. Because literature in itself carries multiple meanings and its interpretation is contextual, analyses of the effectiveness of reading are always inevitably incomplete, case-specific, and situational, and their results are, at most, approximate (Lahten, 2024). We must produce a variety of literature to reach enough individuals effectively. There is no “perfect literature” to spark emotional responses, yet some remain ubiquitous in culture even decades after their release.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower remains one of the most powerful works of climate fiction. It is a call to reflection and mobilization through, frankly, terrifyingly prophetic visions of dystopia. The ways in which Butler’s fiction has played out in 2020s America is startling. Pre-existing ideas of utopia have been bastardized into a collapse of bureaucracy in the face of overwhelming violence, alongside the creation of highly rigid and exclusionary communities based on identity, particularly race and class. Our predisposed ideas for “solutions” are shoved right back in our faces as a catastrophe—methodical state intervention and rationalist exclusion can’t solve the deeply irrational issue of climate change. Despite this terrifying imagery of the future, Butler remains able to present alternatives to this life, a sort of “utopia after failed utopia” in the story of Lauren’s religion. With the disturbing levels of plausibility present in Butler’s future, the alternatives she presents feel more tangible. Amidst walled-off communities driven by fear and hatred lies a glimmer of action and hope. Despite its bleakness, Butler reminds us that “We haven’t hit bottom yet” (Butler, 294); it is never too late to avert catastrophe if we choose differently. Instead of predicting an inevitability, Butler instead focuses on our necessity of choice that is centralized on a concept of radical change. Change cannot be a passive occurrence, as capitalism wants us to think, but instead must be an active force shaping our existence. There is no greater champion of this perspective than Lauren, who truly believes that “everything changes” (Butler, 195); thus, her Earthseed focuses on change as an inevitability instead of static order. Lauren’s conception of Earthseed and that “God is Change” aligns smoothly with Benjamin’s idea of history being a series of contradictions and chaos. Allowing oneself to flow with the momentum of the world while promoting peace and cooperation is a radical idea within our current political schematic; yet, Acorn has a bright and hopeful future ahead of it. So, if Lauren can create an intentional community based on pre-existing religions of today, why can’t we? Even if the establishment of Earthseed doesn’t last forever, the importance of this novel is the idea of “planting the seed” of change, so to speak. Butler’s work remains ubiquitous for this reason; despite her frightening accuracy of our current world, there is always room to shift our trajectory, and we must.

Conclusion

All hope is not lost in the quest to foster environmental empathy. In the face of imminent climate disaster, literature still remains a force for good, not only in education but in reshaping our collective consciousness and providing alternative ideology to the tenets of capitalism. We can illuminate once-invisible acts of violence against marginalized groups, foster an increased awareness of climate change without the use of fear tactics, and tell compelling stories of growth and change in the process. Many authors have been leading the charge in early and modern ecocriticism alike; Emily Dickinson’s poetry invites a profound reverence for the natural world, revealing its fragility through lyrical intimacy, while Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower imagines the radical possibilities of resilience and community in the wake of environmental collapse. Alongside these works of fiction, writers like Walter Benjamin challenge us to reckon with our defeatist perceptions of history, instead positing that the Earth is a vehicle for change and progress. With science and literature combined, we can awaken a political and emotional consciousness, one capable of envisioning alternative futures, sustaining hope, and will ultimately “save the world”.

Works Cited

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zer0 Books, 2022. 

Bal PM, Veltkamp M. How does fiction reading influence empathy? An experimental investigation on the role of emotional transportation. PLoS One. 2013;8(1):e55341. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0055341. Epub 2013 Jan 30. PMID: 23383160; PMCID: PMC3559433.

Knickerbocker, Scott. Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language. University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. 

“The Dead Sea Is Dying. Drinking Water Is Scarce. Jordan Faces a Climate Crisis.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 15 Apr. 2021, www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-04-15/the-dead-sea-is-dying-drinking-water-is-scarce-jordan-faces-a-climate-crisis. 

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt2jbsgw. Accessed 2 May 2025.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History: In a Planetary Age. University of Chicago Press, 2021. 

Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin on the Concept of History /Theses on the Philosophy of History, www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html. Accessed 9 May 2025. 

Overcoming “Ecophobia”: Fostering Environmental Empathy ..., Frontiers, lternet.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Frontiers.pdf. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025. https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/100041

Lahtinen, T., & Löytty, O. (2024). On the Limits of Empirical Ecocriticism: Empathy on Non-Human Species and the Slow Violence of Climate Crisis. Green Letters, 28(1–2), 77–90.  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14688417.2024.2403416

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. New York :Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.