Parsing the hot new lit genre: the climate change memoir
The emergence of the climate-change memoir reveals the increasingly personal consequences of a warming planet
The Right to Be Cold By Sheila Watt-Cloutier Allen Lane 352 pp; $33
The Big Swim
By Carie Saxifrage New Society Publishers 192 pp; $17
When Sheila WattCloutier was a child, her name was Sheila E8-352. The “E” meant she lived east of Gjoa Haven, a hamlet on King William Island in present-day Nunavut. Eight was the number the Canadian government had assigned to her community, a tiny gathering of families who lived mainly through subsistence hunting and travelled exclusively by dogsled. When she left her home in New Fort Chimo (now Kuujjuaq) in northern Quebec to attend residential school in Manitoba, she carried the number with her, stamped on a red dog tag.
Carrie Saxifrage also had a different name as a child, although she doesn’t say what it was. As an adult, Saxifrage chose to set it aside. She and her husband named themselves after a white flower that grows on mountaintops, and, as she recounts, “Our families didn’t know what to make of our earnest explanations of how we were claiming relationship to those pure, high places[.]”
Both writers have new books that can be characterized as examples of a new form: the climate change memoir. Watt-Cloutier’s The Right to Be Cold: One Woman’s Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet, and Saxifrage’s The Big Swim: Coming Ashore in a World Adrift both address the personal consequences of a warming planet. Both women want the same thing: a habitable world for their children and grandchildren.
The Right to Be Cold takes its title from an offhand comment by a British journalist — “You’re fighting for the right to be cold” — that Watt-Cloutier has taken up as her slogan and rallying cry. “I believe the campaign to link climate change to human rights protection — efforts that acknowledge our shared humanity and our shared future — are the most effective way to bring about lasting change,” Watt-Cloutier writes.
In various leadership capacities, Watt-Cloutier has travelled the world with two main messages: use of toxic substances and emission of greenhouse gases is endangering human life in the Arctic; and, what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. In 2012, Watt-Cloutier’s face appeared on the Canadian stamp, and in 2007 she was co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore.
But there’s an uncomfortable paradox in the human rights approach to climate change. According to international covenant, Inuit have inalienable economic, social, cultural and health rights. These rights are threatened by climate change and it is therefore necessary for the global community to act. Rather than stopping there, the argument tends to segue into a slippery second point: The Arctic is an early-warning system that signals what is swiftly coming for the rest of us. In response to her “right to be cold” being shrugged off by a woman at a conference, Watt-Cloutier writes, “The rights we’re fighting for are her rights too. Just as our environment is her environment, too. ... We all have the right to be protected from climate change.”
The Right to Be Cold is essentially a political memoir — there’s this committee and that committee, and the convention in Nairobi versus the convention in Stockholm. Saxifrage’s
The Big Swim, by contrast, is a more overtly literary book about the author’s relationship to nature. Describing herself in a wetsuit, Saxifrage writes, “I look like a dominatrix who dropped her boots and crop into the sea and now has to dive in after them.”
Saxifrage’s struggles inspire less sympathy than WattCloutier’s. One of her transitions to sustainable living is to swear off air travel, and while it’s certainly an inconvenience to do so, the entitled tone of Saxifrage’s discussion of her decision makes it almost embarrassing to read: “But of course, we had to fly ... every four years or so, we took a big trip to explore the world ... Travel stories swapped with friends illustrated our adventurous spirits and interesting tastes.” Instead, she takes the bus to Mexico for a Spanish-instruction holiday, and declines a seat in her friend’s private jet for the trip home from a rafting vacation in the Grand Canyon.
Although tempting, it would be both incorrect and unfair to perceive Watt-Cloutier’s work to prevent climate change as more meaningful than Saxifrage’s. (Saxifrage, it should be noted, also engages in political activism and reports on environmental issues for the
Vancouver Observer.) But reading the two books together reminded me of how easily and unfairly the science of climate change can be clouded by the social labels we apply to the people who give voice to what should be our collective worry. Because we live in a society that values some human lives over others, attempting to put “a human face” on climate change often highlights what keeps us apart rather than pointing the way to our common goal.
Even Watt-Cloutier’s work draws accusations of narcissism and privilege; in international meetings, other stakeholders complain that the Inuit are claiming too much attention for the Arctic and for themselves. Watt-Cloutier writes about her complex feelings about being perceived as white. Her father was a white RCMP officer who left before she was born, and as a child, her qallunaat looks bothered her. It’s a mixed blessing when she realizes that her looks, along with her southern education, might be subtly helping her to bring Inuit issues to the table in forums dominated by Canadians of European descent. “When white people first looked at me,” she writes, “they didn’t see ‘ other’ ... They saw someone who looked like them — and who sounded like them.”
The question of who we hear these messages from — who not only tells us the facts, but illustrates a way to live in response to the facts — depends on the same complicated and unfair mechanisms underpinning all of our social decisions. Part of our resistance to changing our behaviour in response to climate change is tied to negative social perceptions of what “kind of people” shop at health food stores or attend protests. “Real people” don’t have friends with private jets. But the good news is that
The Right to Be Cold and The Big Swim will appeal to somewhat different audiences. Should the climate change memoir become a widespread new genre, we may, in the next decade or so, see personal testimonials of how climate change has affected the lives of all kinds of different people across the globe. We’ll be exposed to a variety of aesthetics, skin colours, income levels, education levels and spiritual beliefs associated with sustainable living. The “kind of people” who change their lives in response to climate change will be everyone.