Hello Friends!
Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode Seventeen: Diversity in Climate Storytelling
I created Bright Green Futures to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there.
This episode, we’re going to talk about how to write diversely and why it's so important for climate stories. Let's start with the why and then we'll discuss how to do it well.
Why Write Diversely
The obvious reason for diverse storytelling is simply that all kinds of people exist and deserve to have representation in our culture, of which stories are an important part. The slightly less obvious reason is that climate storytelling, in particular, needs to be about everyone because everyone is impacted by the climate crisis—and everyone needs to be involved in climate solutions.
The more subtle reasons have to do with climate justice — how the most marginalized people within a rich country like America are the most adversely impacted by pollution and the most vulnerable to climate change. Globally, the countries most likely to suffer from climate-driven droughts and floods and wildfires are often the ones who contributed the least to the problem. And that’s not a coincidence. Centuries of imperialism and colonization have built a world economy based on cheap oil and gas and the exploitation of people all over the world. The solution to that crisis will involve recognizing that fact and decolonizing our way of life in order to live sustainably on the planet. It will mean lifting up those on the bottom of the economic hierarchy and having those at the top—especially the billionaires and super wealthy—consume less and pay more to fix the problem.
We have a long history of telling stories only about some folks—the wealthy, the privileged, the able-bodied. For most of my life, there were very few science fiction novels with female main characters. I spent more time in alien POVs than female ones, but mainly it was always men. The hero was a guy, that was just axiomatic. That the men were white wasn’t even discussed. There’s a joke that goes, As we all know, women didn’t exist before 1990. But that’s exactly what it was like—women simply didn’t do cool things, so why would you write stories about them?
The same can be said for people of color, queer people, disabled people. And—spoiler alert!—all those folks not only exist and have always existed, but they are going to exist throughout the climate crisis in the future as well.
But whose story gets told isn’t just about visibility, although erasing people is a very effective way of permitting terrible things to happen to them. It isn’t just about telling stories from the perspective of the marginalized, although that’s tremendously important as well. It’s about accessing the kinds of solutions that will actually work. If we’re going to tell stories about a future that’s sustainable, it has to be sustainable for everyone. It has to be a world that’s not just decarbonized but also just and fair.
And again: it’s not a coincidence that a world build on imperialism is also choking the planet with CO2 and killing us with pollution. We got to where we are building upon a history of exploitation that continues today and is constantly evolving, with capitalism’s engine still driving extraction and exploitation and externalizing the costs while hoovering up the profits to fewer and fewer hands at the top.
Endless growth and exploitation are simply, by definition, not sustainable.
The system as a whole needs reform. And the stories we need to tell about that will need perspectives not normally heard, characters not normally centered, and justice and representation for all.
But it’s impossible to tell a story about the entire world, and sometimes people think that’s what’s required. A book like Ministry for the Future tries to do just that, with a world-spanning plot and something like fifty POVs, and while that book is brilliant and necessary and it opened up the conversation for optimistic climate fiction to simply exist, climate storytelling doesn’t have to fit inside that blueprint.
In fact, that’s exactly the point: we have the wrong blueprint. We’ve been working off faulty stories—about people, about sexuality and gender, about systems of power and governance and economic systems—for so long that if we’re going to imagine a better world, we will naturally have to dismantle those stories.
And the people doing the dismantling are going to be all of us.
I could talk all day about why we need diverse storytelling—it’s also simply better storytelling, with fresh perspectives and new takes, more likely to center community than the individual, and so much more—but suffice to say that climate stories aren’t about how the climate will change, but how we will change. And part of that change is building a just world for everyone.
How to Write Diversely
So let’s talk about how to write outside your race or gender or sexuality or any other “identity” marker. And I’ll throw in immediately the caveat that even within your own identity, you definitely don’t represent everyone. I do not represent all women. But I am a woman who has some insights into what being a woman in the world can mean. I have commonality with lots of women on lots of things, but we are not a monolith. Likewise, every gay man does not think or act or look the same. That idea is itself a stereotype, an othering of people based on their identity, which is very much the opposite of what we want.
Which brings me to a resource that everyone should be aware of: Writing the Other. It’s a book but also a website with a ton of resources, classes, and all kinds of information. Don’t go ask your friends to do the emotional labor of explaining how to create a character with their identity—chances are they’re not fully aware of all the stereotypes anyway. Use online resources like Writing the Other to do your research. That’s why it’s there.
I’ve been on a couple panels, talking about writing outside of your race, gender, sexuality, etc, and I write diversely myself, especially in my climate fiction, so I’ve been thinking about this aspect of writing for a minute. Which does not make me an expert of any kind. I’m still constantly learning, as every writer should, but I have some approaches I’ve found useful, so I’ll share them with you.
First, do no harm. By that I mean, educate yourself on the most horrible stereotypes that are out there. Stereotypes about Black men or trans women or any other identity have been constructed on purpose to oppress—they exist to reinforce the power structure where those folks are definitely not the ones in power. Educate yourself and stay away from them, not just because they’re toxic and reinforce the power structure you’re trying to dismantle, but because those stereotypes do active harm to people in the world today—they are the kind of thing that’s used to justify violence. Steer a wide berth around them.
Secondly, be aware of negative and positive tropes and caricatures. You might think that quippy gay best friend is a safe character type, but it’s been used to death, and that makes it another kind of box to stuff people (and characters) into. And often those tropes grew out of stereotypes that were too obviously toxic, or evolved over time, or might be so embedded in the popular culture that you might not even recognize them as such. Again, do your research. Know that the Bury Your Gays trope came out of a particularly odious time when the Hays Code in Hollywood meant gay-coded characters had to be villainized (and killed) or banished from the screen. Understand why the Model Minority trope/stereotype is harmful even though it’s “positive” depiction — not just because it’s reinforcing racial superiority myths, but because of its history of being used as a racial wedge between Black and Asian communities in America.
Even if you’re familiar with these kinds of tropes, you might stumble into writing something that’s a milder caricature, maybe not actively harmful but something that still gets an eye-roll within the community. I ran into one of those when writing a lesbian couple that, for story reasons, immediately had one character practically moving in with the other. I hadn’t heard of the U-Haul Lesbian trope before that, but I learned something that day.
As a writer, you should be creating fully fleshed out, three-dimensional characters, and that’s a good approach for avoiding a lot of problems (assuming you’ve spent a reasonable amount of effort assessing your own biases and finding your own blind spots), but even then, you can stumble into things inadvertently. Be alert and do your research.
This goes for every writer, no matter your identity, because you’ll still need to write outside that identity to have any diversity at all in your stories. Which, ostensibly, we all want. I know that’s what I want to read in my stories.
So how do you avoid all these potholes and landmines? Again, Writing the Other is a great resource, as is a general education about the history and oppression of various marginalized folks. Also: diversify your life. Not that you want to insert yourself into communities, but if you look around and your friendscape is a monoculture, you might want to work on changing that. Start by being the kind of person people will feel safe with, which I hope is a goal of yours anyway. Or simply go be in the world, in different public spaces that have some cultural diversity.
Another place to start: diversify your reading. Especially Own Voices stories, where the writer is inside the community and can speak more deeply to what it’s like to be part of that identity. Lifting up Own Voices stories is also a very worthwhile activity because we need more diversity in the author pool. And if you’re outside the community, think very carefully about what kinds of stories you want to tackle: it’s one thing to write, for example, a deep-sea mining mystery with a gay Latino main character who has a crush on the hot navigator when you, the writer, are a very straight white woman; it’s another thing entirely to write a deeply personal coming-out story where a gay teen has to deal with their homophobic parents in a deeply religious community. The first one is my story Slimy Things Did Crawl. The second is nothing I will ever write because it’s not my story to tell.
There’s a difference between representation and presenting yourself as an expert in an identity outside your own (or worse, straight-up appropriation). Know that difference. Educate yourself. Assume you have blind spots—because you do—and actively go hunt them down. Rinse and repeat. Because culture is not static and the world’s favorite identity to use as a punching bag keeps shifting.
Take the Risk
I sometimes hear authors, especially cis-het white authors, express fear about writing diversely because they don’t want to “get it wrong.” The implication is that you’ll be hounded on social media or it will trash your career or some other terrible thing will happen to the author. And while I get where that fear is coming from, the concern is mostly misplaced — your first concern should be doing no harm to marginalized folks. The second should be avoiding the softer and more hidden bigotries that have been embedded in the culture, the ones that sit in your blind spots and you’ll have to work hard to see. These are less likely to cause active harm but they still need to be uprooted and tossed in the trash.
But once you’ve done the work to make sure you’re doing right by your characters—and by extension the communities they are representing—by making sure your characters are fully fleshed out, the kind that could live and breathe in the real world, then be brave. Writing isn’t for the timid. You need to do the work, but you also need to be willing to take a risk—or many risks. Really, all of writing is risk of some sort, if you’re going to write something worth putting out into the world.
We’re not going to dismantle the patriarchy or imperialism or bigotry without taking a risk or two. When we’re trying to imagine a better future, we can’t ignore the past—especially when its ghostly, poisonous fingers are still wrapped around the throat of the present.
Get uncomfortable. Look all that human ugliness in the face. And then dream better, my friends.
I want to read your richly diverse stories of the world we all want and deserve.
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LINKS Ep. 17: Diversity in Climate Storytelling
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Ep 17: Diversity in Climate Storytelling