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“Let’s have the conversation” : climate change, religion, and belief formation in Barbara Kingsolver’s flight behavior

University of British Columbia

Eco Critic Greg Garrard hits the nail on the head when he comments in “Conciliation and Consilience: Climate Change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior” that “[i]t is not facts that people primarily believe… but other people [and] Dellarobia is swayed [to the anthropogenic climate change position] as much by Byron’s charisma as by anything he tells her” (306). With Garrard’s comment in mind, I argue that Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is a key example of how a work of climate fiction is better equipped at portraying relationships between people and nonhuman animals than depicting environmental disasters or making scientific facts accessible to readers. Moreover, in terms of cultural work, the psychological elements in Kingsolver’s writing and her melodramatic style bring a type of realism to the text not common to climate fiction since the genre’s origins are founded in science fiction. Kingsolver shows the role of conversation and influence in understanding climate change and acting in response to it. Her attention to human relationships, how arguments evolve, and their consequences is more convincing and more useful in promoting climate change than simply depicting catastrophes.

Text

2020-12-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/76887

English

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/