Can Fiction Ignore Climate Change?
In a recent paper, Colby faculty and students explore how often environmental crisis finds its way into the world’s most prestigious literary fiction
Short stories in The New Yorker are celebrated for the range of human experiences they portray. A marriage haunted by an old betrayal, stirred up as a couple puts their child to bed. Siblings struggling to find the right words to remember their parent as they prepare for the funeral. A son’s understanding of his dead father is uprooted by the surprise arrival of a man who explains they were once lovers.
Widely regarded as the preeminent venue for literary fiction in the English-speaking world, the weekly magazine featured these three plots in recent short stories. A tastemaker in the literary scene, The New Yorker’s stories help create the norms of contemporary literary realism—fiction that seeks to render a world recognizably like our own.
Several years ago, Christopher Walker, an assistant professor of English who studies literature and the environment, began to ask how fiction in The New Yorker represented climate change.
“It’s something that’s redefining our lives, our communities, our ecologies, and the planet. So is it appearing in the worlds described in fiction? And if so, in what ways?” Walker wondered.
It’s a question that goes well beyond literary studies. Stories do more than entertain; they help establish what is worth noticing in the world. “There’s a broad understanding and recognition that storytelling in various forms is an important way of engaging the public,” said Gail Carlson, associate professor of environmental studies and director of the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment. “Stories help people understand the ways we are threatened, and the ways that risks have increased.”
Supported by the Buck Lab, Walker set out to determine exactly how climate change was entering fiction in The New Yorker. The study continued the Buck Lab’s active interest in how contemporary narratives represent the environmental crisis. In 2024, the Climate Reality Check, a project led by former associate professor of English Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, explored the presence of climate change in popular films.
‘Can we actually have realist fiction when so little of our attention, as we read imaginative literature, is given to something literally remapping the planet?’
Assistant Professor of English Chris Walker
For the new study, Walker, working with Assistant Professor of Psychology Veronica Romero ’09 and Schneider-Mayerson, recruited five students—Kiara McCellon ’26, Claire Campbell ’26, Moya Stringer ’25, Charlotte Snow ’25, and Samantha Chilton ’25—to read each of the 474 short stories published by The New Yorker over the previous decade. The team also tracked six other environmental issues, including air and water pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity loss.
To ensure their analysis would be as systematic as possible, the team developed the Strategic Environmental NarrativeS, or SENS, codebook. A guide for assessing environmental perspectives in fiction, the group trained on other kinds of literature, compared their answers, discussed disagreements, and refined the codebook through 20 practice rounds. Then, they spent more than a year tackling the 474 stories in The New Yorker.
Their findings, which were published in July in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Environmental Communication, surprised them. Climate change appeared in 10.1 percent of the stories. Four out of five stories failed to mention any of the environmental problems the researchers were tracking. In light of The New Yorker’s extensive and award-winning climate journalism, Walker said, “the mismatch was actually quite shocking.”
At the same time, the team found a small number of stories in which environmental change entered the narrative in powerful ways. Rather than a dystopian centerpiece, in some stories environmental disruption appeared as it often does in our lives, quietly woven into a character’s emotional experience of the world.
Walker pointed to 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s “The Middle Voice,” published in the magazine’s Feb. 6, 2023, issue. Toward the end of that story, a woman who has lost her ability to speak steps into a hot, polluted street and notices an insect.
“The repulsive fog of exhaust fumes mingles with the scene of grass in the humid night air,” writes Kang. “This close to the road, the roar of car engines slices into her eardrums the way sharp skates cut into ice. In the grass at her feet, a grasshopper cries slowly.”
For Walker, Kang is a writer who threads our anxiety-filled experiences of environmental change with broader human themes, in this case human agency and communication.
Fiction need not lecture us, or abandon the intimate stories The New Yorker is celebrated for, Walker said. But if fiction aims to depict how we live today, our changing physical world must surely be in the picture. “Can we actually have realist fiction when so little of our attention, as we read imaginative literature, is given to something literally remapping the planet?”
