Four Storytellers Tackle Climate Change

On Thursday, September 19, Guernica co-sponsored an official Brooklyn Book Festival event with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Called “Now or Never: Storytellers Tackling Climate Change,” the event featured an interdisciplinary panel that included New Yorker journalist Carolyn Kormann, novelist Pitchaya Sudbanthad, artist Eve Mosher, and NRDC policy expert Robert Moore. It was moderated by Guernica’s deputy publisher, Amy Brady.

The event carried a potent sense of urgency. For one thing, it fell on the eve of a global climate strike that would draw, by some estimates, almost 4 million people to over 2,500 scheduled marches and rallies on all seven continents. And for another, Tropical Depression Imelda had descended in the hours just before the panelists took the stage. It flooded parts of southeast Texas—the same region devastated by Hurricane Harvey in 2017—and forced immediate evacuations.

Amid a room buzzing with excitement and worry, the panelists discussed how storytelling factors into their climate-focused work; how narratives about humans impacted by climate change can induce empathy in policy makers; and how some narratives are problematic not for the lives they describe, but for those they leave out. What follows is an edited transcript of the evening. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Amy Brady: What drew each of you to the subject of climate change, and why do you pursue it in your work?

Eve Mosher: I started working on climate change about 12 years ago as a collaborative practice. Prior to that, I had been doing studio-based art that was related to the environment. What changed is that I got angry. I had read a magazine that included essays about [Hurricane] Katrina, shrinking glaciers, and other things. It also included documents and photo images from the Bush administration that showed how the administration’s science advisors had rewritten documents on climate change to soften the language and make it sound like climate change would have an economic benefit. That made me really mad. And anger seems to stir me to action.

I put myself through college by joining the Illinois National Guard. In 1993, there was a 500-year flood on the Mississippi