In this episode, I chat with Danielle Arostegui about her policy work for the Environmental Defense Fund, working at a Congressional thinktank to help pass the Inflation Reduction Act, and then deciding that writing climate fiction was where she wanted to take the fight next.
Text Transcript:
Susan Kaye Quinn
Hello Friends!
Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode Four, Scientist to Author, In Conversation with Danielle Arostegui. I'm your host, Susan K. Quinn, and we're here to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there. Today we're going to talk with Danielle about making the transition from scientist and activist to author, from writing climate policy to writing solarpunk.
I first became aware of Danielle's work through a story, a drabble, which is a story of precisely 100 words, which was published by Grist. And it perfectly encapsulates why so many of us are drawn to reading and writing these stories. I'm going to have her read it for us. Hi, Danielle!
Danielle Arostegui
Hello, thanks for having me.
Susan Kaye Quinn
It's so much a pleasure to have you here. I can't wait for our conversation. But first, why don't you read your story for us?
Danielle Arostegui
Absolutely.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I love hearing authors read their own work because you get that extra layer. I super love and appreciate professional narrators, right? That's a whole art. But when it's your own piece, you can kind of bring that original emphasis that you had. So that was a pleasure hearing that from you. And I wanted to just say that it immediately resonated with me. This was literally the first way that I encountered you. And I'm like, I need to know more about this person. Who is she? What is she doing? How can I get in contact with her? And I think it's a great encapsulation because it's very uplifting. It's very positive: oh, I discovered this thing, which I thought was one thing, but it was actually another thing, and a better thing, that really helps me in my life. And I feel like it opens the imagination of the possibilities, which is the tagline for our pod, imagine the possibilities. And that's desperately needed when we're fighting the climate crisis.
So let's talk about you. I'm going to do like a proper introduction now. You have a master's in environmental policy. You're a senior analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund. You worked on energy and climate policy as a research assistant for Congress. And you even worked on municipal carbon tax in Boulder, which I did not even know was a thing, which is very cool. Great stuff. Important work. Now you're writing stories for Grist, which is the drabble that you just read, Solarpunk magazine, and working on a novel to query. Let's talk about what's leading you to transition from this hands-on world of policy to writing fiction.
Danielle Arostegui
I think I've always been really drawn to the power of storytelling. And I knew actually from a very young age that someday I really wanted to write fiction. But I think for a long time I didn't feel like I had a good sense of what I wanted to write yet. But I was always a really big reader, and I always thought that the best way to be able to keep reading and call it work was to become a writer. So that was always kind of a twinkle in the back of my mind. But I also was always really captivated by the natural world and by environmental issues. I actually grew up in a family of fishermen and conservationists in South Florida. So I spent a lot of time in my childhood out on the water in the, you know, gorgeous Florida Everglades. And that experience impacted me really strongly.
I think in retrospect it makes a lot of sense that I ended up looking for a way to combine those two passions, but as you pointed out, I didn't start off that way. So I actually pursued both of those two paths separately before kind of realizing that I could combine them. I got my BA in creative writing. After that, I went straight to LA to work in the writer's room of a TV show. I started as a support in the writer's room with the plan to work my way up to become a staff writer. But around that same time was when I started seeing news about climate change really picking up.
It was just becoming more and more obvious to me that as a nation and as a planet, we weren't really doing enough to address that issue. So I got really fired up and I left TV and went back to school. I got my master's in climate policy, as you mentioned. I went to work for the Congressional Research Service, which you could think of as kind of like an in-house thinktank for Congress. So I was writing a lot of reports on climate policy and energy, trying to make sure that the members of Congress kind of had the information about those issues that they needed to make informed policy decisions, which was really cool. I loved that job. I got to a point where I felt like I just wanted a little bit more advocacy because working for Congress and CRS, that's a very non-advocacy role. You are just providing information. You are not telling anyone what you think they should do with it.
And I had opinions. So I went to the Environmental Defense Fund. I wanted to do this more advocacy focused work that they do. It was sort of towards the end of the Trump presidency that I moved there. So it was actually kind of a depressing moment for climate policy. You know, we had just pulled out of the Paris Agreement. There was all of this sort of devastation happening at the agencies that do climate policy in the federal government. But those of us in the nonprofit world were all kind of eyeing the next election cycle and saying, well, look, if we get Biden or a Democratic president in here, we could really have a shot at making something happen. So it was actually a really exciting moment. And of course, when Biden was elected, we kind of jumped into this flurry of activity. And it turned out that I was just very lucky to be in the right place at the right time, that I really got to work on Biden's climate agenda to kind of help shape what the goals that the US set for their climate policy goals.
And then also, some of the policies that went into Biden's big climate legislation, which of course is the Inflation Reduction Act. So that was really, I think, a massive highlight of my career. And I'm so, so happy that I went in that direction before I've kind of moved over to where I am now.
But after that bill came out and all of this big important work was done, I kind of was sitting there feeling like, what's next? And I kind of finally felt like I was ready to write and that I had something to write about. And it also felt like a moment when what we really needed was a strong, hopeful vision of what was gonna come next.
And so the Inflation Reduction Act, that was a huge win for climate policy, but it's still, we know it's not gonna be enough to get us to where we need to be to actually address the climate crisis. So I just had this question of, now what? In the back of my head. And I think that's really the question that animates me as a writer and that made me decide to move into writing.
I wanted to address these issues of where do we go from here? What does a positive, hopeful vision of a future under climate change even look like? And how can we as a species, as a society, evolve to meet that challenge? And those are really hard questions to answer because they're about more than just policy, right? Like this is about values and what we're willing to sacrifice and what hope looks like.
In other words, all things that I think fiction is really good at teasing out. And so for me, that just felt like the most natural place for me to move next.
Susan Kaye Quinn
That's all so amazing and fantastic. And I love how you've made this transition through all these different stages and landed right where I feel like our pod is very focused, which is these hopeful stories. Like this is what's next. This is what is needed. And we need not just one story, but a million stories and a million different visions of the future to start making it real.
I knew you were going to be like someone I needed to talk to because you have this amazing background. So trust your gut on that.
I remember when the Inflation Reduction Act passed, which was amazing and very exciting, that there was this shift in the conversation towards… okay, we've been advocating for so long—and it's not enough, none of it is still enough, we need to go so much faster—but it was a shift towards this more of an implementation phase. And shifting from, you know, activism and protest to the very unsexy installation of solar panels, which I actually think it's kind of sexy, but, you know, it doesn't excite the imagination in quite the same way or fire up the blood in quite the same way.
In a recent Sustainability Salon that I was fortunate to be able to attend, they were talking about movement building and how there are four different quadrants, and only one of those is marching in the streets and activism. Some are policy, some are ground implementation your policy, now you need to actually make it be successful. And sometimes that is where the movements can falter because they don't have quite the follow through. And sometimes that's really about people not being in the right places or in the right seats. You gotta have the right people in the right spot. Somebody who's really good at policy should be working on policy. Somebody who's really good at marching in the streets should be marching in the streets. Somebody who's really got a vision for storytelling should be doing storytelling. And so I think a lot of folks like myself—I also have an environmental background, but it didn't really get integrated into my writing. I'd been writing for many, many years before I started writing climate fiction. But it's like what you said where the moment changed, the ground shifted. And we were in this sort of new phase where, what next? How do we help implement this? And there really is a dearth of vision, I believe. And I fault fiction and storytellers, of which I count myself one, where we haven't been providing much beyond the apocalyptic warnings.
It's like if you have a kid and you're trying to teach them how to tie their shoes, you can't just tell them, how not to tie their shoes. You have to tell them how to tie their shoes. So it's kind of a how-to guide.
Everything you're saying is really resonating with me. And I feel like is really part of the larger zeitgeist, the larger conversation, because I hear a lot of writers say that same kind of journey where like I came from over here doing some things and I found myself here because, I needed to deal with my eco-anxiety, but also I wanted to do something because something needs to be done. And this is the thing that I'm good at.
That actually transitions into my next question. Once I started writing solarpunk, I started attending environmental conferences, sometimes as a speaker, sometimes as a participant. And at one in 2022, I connected with Melissa Aïnseba, which I'm probably not saying that name correctly, who is working on her thesis in cultural anthropology, interviewing solarpunk authors and asking why they do what they do. I ended up being one of the anonymous authors that she interviewed for her thesis, Rewriting the Future, where she says:
Individuals and communities negotiate their feelings of eco-anxiety by engaging with hopeful narratives of the future. Writers of hopeful climate fiction aim to rethink the world we live in.
I was personally very shocked to learn me and these 12 anonymous people from around the world were doing this work. When I started writing eco-fiction in the summer of 2020, I thought I was the only one writing this, which is, of course, ridiculous. But I couldn't find people. I immediately went looking for my people, and I could not find them because we were still very scarce on the ground. And here was a person who was studying people like me and there were other people, and we had all these similarities. Since you're a little sooner in starting this path, making this transition, I'm curious how much of your motivation for writing these stories is internal managing of that eco-anxiety versus external building a better world by imagining it first. And you kind of gave an answer, but I want to hear more about any interplay with those and how you negotiate that.
Danielle Arostegui
Yeah, that's a great question. And the answer is definitely both. But first of all, I just love that there's someone who's already studying solarpunk fiction. That's so cool. Great to hear. It makes me feel like this is really taking off and picking up steam, which is exactly what we want to see. But to answer your question, yes. I think the science is pretty clear that taking action is one of the best things that we can do to help manage eco-anxiety. So I definitely encourage people tuning in to find ways, even if they're small, even if they don't feel meaningful, to do something to take action because it really does help you feel like you're not entirely alone and that you are, even if it's just a little bit, moving that needle and it really does help. For me personally, when it comes to writing, I think that dealing with my eco -anxiety is probably the smaller part. I do have several other things I try to do to manage my ego anxiety and try to kind of give the most immediate impact that I can to help kind of scratch that itch. For instance, like installing solar panels and reducing my meat consumption.
The big motivator for me with writing about climate change is actually trying to do that hard work of figuring out what a better future could really look like. And I said it before, but it is really hard. There is this kind of famous saying that says, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. And that is so true.
Susan Kaye Quinn
So accurate.
Danielle Arostegui
I think what you were saying about all these dystopian stories that we've had, that we've seen really be very popular in the last kind of decade or two. They show us how we're going wrong and how terrible the future could be if we don't turn those things around. And that's an important message and it can really resonate with people. But overall, I think that hope is more of a driving force and more of a motivator for action than fear is. There's a lot of kind of science that shows that fear can be quite paralyzing for a lot of people. What I'm really hoping to do is, you know, try to figure out how we can tell those stories that show us what a better future could actually look like. And there's definitely a lot fewer of those than there are of the dystopian stories, although as you pointed out, that's starting to change. We're starting to see a lot more people come into the climate fiction space, and so that's really exciting. But then there's even fewer that actually show not only what a good future could look like, but how you could get there. And that's really, I think, the missing piece that we are struggling with right now. And one of the weaknesses that has been an issue in the environmental movement to date is that we've just been very focused on sort of the sacrifice side of things, the carbon taxes, the things we need to get rid of. Like I mentioned, I don't eat as much meat anymore and that's a sacrifice that I've made, but I also don't want people to feel like taking climate action is all about sacrifice because it really isn't. There's a lot of abundance that can be created in the transition to a more sustainable society. So what I really wanted to do was try to get in there and try to figure out how we could create a shared vision of a future that feels positive and abundant and like something that, you know, the average person would want to fight for so that we can get more people on board with this struggle. So I definitely see my work as being a very deliberate effort to try and help fill that gap. And like you said, this is something that's going to take a lot of voices and a lot of stories. And I am just one drop in the bucket. But we need to start putting drops in that bucket. So that's what I'm hoping to do.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I'm so excited that you are because even the first little drabble that you read had that immediate effect on me. And so I'm like, oh, yes, this is what it is. This is where you're changing your viewpoint.
I love the idea of abundance. Rebecca Solnit has talked extensively about this, how we present, as you say, that it's all sticks and no carrots, but more even than carrots… I think this is starting to resonate more now with the general enshittification of the internet and other things that are happening. It's like, is this really as good as it gets? The pandemic gave us that pause to say, maybe what I really want is friends. Maybe what I really want is connection with human beings and not a bigger house or more whatever it is that the consumer economy is telling me that I should have, that these are the goals. This is how you know you've made it or you're successful or you're happy… except that we're not happy. We're dying of loneliness and drug abuse and just dying. And so I think solarpunk and other hopeful climate fiction narratives that can embrace the idea of going back to like, what do human beings really need to have? To be healthy and whole and happy in small, sustainable societies, portray that and make it delicious. Make it something you just absolutely want to have. And now go out and try to find a way to do that.
I find that's true with many writers that I talk to who are working in this space.
They're like, yeah, I write about it, but also I really want to live this life. So I'm trying to find ways to connect more to the community and build a better network and all those kinds of things. More than a lot of other genres, I think there's an integration of people's personal lives and their writing lives. We're trying to conjure visions of what the future could look like. What is something that's worth fighting for? People, especially when they're stressed—and I talk about this in the very first episode of the pod, about how our brains like literally shut down when we're stressed. And there's that imaginative part…it just gets cut off. And those of us who are like, you know, working in creative spaces, have that same struggle, but have more tools to overcome that. So we can do some of that lifting for other people, say, look, I conjured up this thing, what do you think? And then that sparks their imagination as well. And hopefully, you know, gets us moving in the right direction.
I have a sidebar question. Near-future fiction is absolutely the space I'm writing in, and I see a lot of hopeful people writing in, because we need to know how to get from A to B. And my brain is very suspicious of wishful thinking or like handwavium. I want to be convinced that this can actually work. When I go to write my stories, that's a lot of what's informing my sort of realistic approach to it. And I'm not saying that it has to be that way at all. A lot of times, super fantastical stories is a great approach as well, or any kind of speculative elements. What's your balance of that in your writing, since I haven't had a chance to read that novel you're going to query yet?
Danielle Arostegui
Yeah, oh, it's such a good question. I do agree. I think the near fiction stuff is really useful for the kind of nuts and bolts of how do you go from A to B? How do you get from where we are now, which in a lot of ways is very dystopian to something that feels good and looks good? And what are the steps in between those two rungs? With that said, I am definitely fantasy girly. And so I tend to lean a little bit more towards fantasy elements in my stories. But with that said, I'm not really writing Second World fantasies. I'm trying to write things that are grounded in the world that we have today and leaning very much on fantasy as kind of a strange mirror that allows us to look at a part of the society that we live in right now from maybe a slightly different perspective that makes it easier to see some of the things that are not working and maybe allows us to envision some of the things that could work better in its place.
So I still think it has a lot in common with what you were talking about, maybe the more non-fantastical near-future fiction where you're dealing with things very similar to the way they are now. I think that there's a place for both of those and the interplay between them also can be just exquisite.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Absolutely. And people are diverse, and they want to see stories that represent that diversity. Not just diversity in types of people, but in genre. So if you're a big Cozy Mystery fan, I want to see climate Cozy Mysteries because that will bring in those people. I want to see climate horror, because horror is a certain way of dealing with the world. There's a lot that's horrifying in the climate, but… if you're not a horror fan, and I'm not, so I have to speak second person on this… but horror often can be very hopeful in the end. So it can provide an access point for people who are like, no, I gotta come in the back door with the horrifying stuff before I can get to that more hopeful space. That’s why I say it was my brain that needed to have that gritty realism.
I think we're fighting a little bit against a lot of preconceived notions, both in the industry and in even readers' minds about being able to talk about the climate and have things be better, and not brushed away as Pollyanna-ish or utopian. I find the people who use those words tend to never have actually read any hopeful climate fiction because it's almost like a straw man argument that's used to dismiss the entire idea of it. Because hope is scary. And if we think that it's possible to have a better world, then well, gosh, we’ve got to work for it. And that's inconvenient for my life. So there's a lot of resistance.
That's one of the things that I think our genre that we're working in is so great about because it breaks down some of that resistance. It says, hey, you could just read this story and get a glimpse and maybe start to think about things in a different way. That's easy. That's not a hard thing to do. The next steps might be a little more harder, but it's warming you up for that. Hopefully there are actions that people can take even if they're not going to go live in the world of my story. It might inspire them to say, hey, maybe I can do something now.
Danielle Arostegui
I really like what you said a minute ago about making these stories feel delicious because I feel like that's not something that people associate with climate change. No one's like, ooh, yummy, climate change, but they can go together. And when you read a story that manages to take issues like climate change and then show you a world where you do kind of want to crawl inside of it, then that does make you feel like there is something here to fight for. And maybe that barrier to action comes down a little bit.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I hope so. I think we're going to need, just like a million stories, we need a million different ways to lower those barriers to action. And it's going to only get worse in terms of the climate crisis itself. People are going to be more and more needing to have coping mechanisms, to have ways to take action, to calm that eco-anxiety. And I feel like this is a great portal for it.
I've got a quote here from Maya Angelou. I'm murdering the names today. I apologize to the world. But she said:
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Pretty famous quote. When you think of a hopeful story and people leaving it feeling hopeful, to me, that is a very multifaceted thing. I can read T.K. Rex's story, Holdout, and come away just feeling buoyant and uplifted because it's just so darn cute. But also having to grapple with some more serious issues. I think people who read my stories, at least part of what I hope they walk away from is, gosh, this nerdy stuff is really important. I'm glad somebody's doing it. And also they're kind of funny and silly and a little bit queer. One of my favorite reviews is that it's like a gay Scooby -Doo power grid mystery. I'm like, yes, I love it. So what is the feeling or feelings that you would like your readers to walk away with?
Danielle Arostegui
Let me just say I love this question so much because I think it's so true that the main thing we take away from books are kind of the feels that they leave us with. So maybe to just give you kind of the quick pitch of what the book I'm writing is about, and then we can talk about how I'm hoping it will make people feel.
So the book I'm writing right now is a YA solar punk fantasy about a teenage girl named Charlie who discovers that she is a witch when she gets hit in the eye with pepper spray at a pipeline protest. This is not just any pipeline that she's protesting. This is a pipeline that exploded a couple of years ago and it killed several environmental activists who were there protesting it, including her mother. So this is quite, yeah, this is quite a personal fight for Charlie in addition to being something that she feels is important from a broader societal perspective. So she's not really, she's not just trying to register her frustration with business as usual or assuage her eco-anxiety, but she really wants this pipeline shut down for good and she's willing to do quite a lot to make it happen. But she is facing a very familiar problem to, I think, many of us who have ever tried to take a stand against climate change and fossil fuel interests, which is that she's realizing that it's really quite difficult to make change as an individual person. So when her magic awakens, she thinks she might be on a path to having finally the power that she needs to stop this pipeline company in its tracks. But of course, Charlie's journey is just beginning, a journey that will take her deep into the hidden realms of the fey who rule the seasons and who might just hold the fate of humanity in their immortal hands.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Wow.
Danielle Arostegui
So that's the premise. And with that kind of as context, the main feeling I really want people to come away with after reading this book is hope and the feeling that they can make a difference even as one solitary person. And I know that sounds like a little twee and maybe some people will be like, oh, you know, hope, I don't know, but I really think it's important for young people, especially who are looking at this sort of massive, seemingly intractable problem that we're facing to not lose sight of the fact that they really do have power to make a difference. So we're definitely aiming for some empowerment vibes, which I think is a big part of what makes this a solar punk story but it is also a fantasy, so I'm hoping there's gonna be a lot of also kind of feelings of wonder and magic and of course some sort of delicious darkness for all my little edgy fantasy fans out there.
Susan Kaye Quinn
It sounds amazing. I can totally see people who are in that genre, reading fantasy on the regular, not expecting to see a climate fiction story in their fantasy fruit loops. Fantastic. I love that because I think it really is part of breaking open the mindset a little bit to say, hey, you know what? Everybody's going to have to deal with this. This is not just an out there kind of thing, it's a right here kind of thing.
I feel very strongly that it is really super okay to just do things because they're good things to do and to have themes that say are about individual empowerment, because that is a good message. I think we get too sophisticated sometimes in our need to feel like everyone is a gray moral person. It is really okay to state things strongly.
At the same time, I feel like that connection between the individual, what can I do as an individual about this huge problem is an absolutely vital question. It's going to have a ton of different answers to it, but it's a very, very important question. So one of the answers is definitely: Hey, every person can make a difference individually, either within your circles or with your unique powers, whatever that is. That's definitely a super solid answer. But I think we're going to be interrogating that question for many years to come.
Coming from your policy background, you know, like that is you are operating at a pretty high level, right? You had access to people who were powerful people making powerful decisions. And certainly your efforts fed into a really big structural change. And that's fantastic. So there's, there's that option too, right? That is an option that can be reflected in our fiction as well. And a lot of things in between.
A lot of times I feel like our society is trying to tell us that we're powerless. I don't think you have to be Superman or some Marvel hero in order to be powerful. But that's what our storytelling has told us, that you have to be super-powered in order to be able to make a change or a difference. And I think that disempowers people.
Any kind of like empowering story I am here for because that's 100% going in the right direction.
Danielle Arostegui
I wanna say I so agree with that. And one of the things I really wanted to be careful with in this story was that I didn't want it to be Charlie's magic that saved the day. The magic feels for her like it's going to be this opening into power, but that's not what makes her powerful. At the end of the day, she's gonna have to find that power on her own. And I think that that's the type of message that hopefully will be resonant with young people who are looking up at this issue today and trying to figure out like, well, what do I do? How do I use my particular skills and interests to make a difference? And the answer is, it really depends on who you are and what you care about and what you want to work on, but there's a way for everybody.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Right. I feel like that's a meta message. Once again, there's a way for everybody. If your talent is writing, then write. If your talent is doing art, do art. Going back to the Sustainability Salon and the person who was presenting about movement making, she was so adamant that anyone in the arts of any kind—music, drawing, books, whatever—please get involved because the arts draw people in. It's an access point and it's super powerful to use in movement building. And that really super resonated with me because sometimes I feel like, you know, here I am doing my little stories or whatever. It's like that meme where you've got everything burning in the background and somebody's sitting there gardening their little garden. I'm like, working on my little hopepunk stories while the world is on fire. And you know, it's easy to get sucked into that idea that you're inconsequential and what you're doing doesn't matter, but every one of us has talents and skills. And if we're working with those, then that's our part.
That leads me actually to wht I wanted to talk to you about, about using your skills, your talents. So obviously you have this long background of wanting to be a writer or writing even since you were a little kid, which I think is true for almost every writer I've ever talked to. But you also have this great background of climate policy and interacting with the issues at a very technical level. How much of that gets into your storytelling, and not necessarily just this story, because I hope that you will write more.
Danielle Arostegui
That's the goal.
Susan Kaye Quinn
So where do you think that's heading for you?
Danielle Arostegui
That's such a good question. I think that everything that I've done in the climate space ends up in my work in one way or another. And that's not to say that I explain how a carbon tax works. I will probably never ever do that to my poor readers. But all those things that I've learned, the kind of experiences that I've had, my understanding of how power works in the United States government, of how you can influence that from a policy lens. All of those things are really important to me when I'm thinking about how am I gonna build a world that I’m going to put my characters into because I do really want to make sure, like you were saying earlier, that I'm not hand waving away how we get from here to this post climate change utopia because there's no hand waving about it. It's going to be really hard work and it's going to take a lot of people doing a lot of things.
It is important to me that there is a realistic underpinning of how the main components of our world work, things like how power works and how you make change and what it looks like when that change happens. So I do think that all of those things do really impact me. And then they also create these really fun opportunities for little side bits of flavor where, because I happen to know a lot about permaculture or a lot about a type of policy that creates resilience centers. Like those are little things that I can pepper into my story and they're not a big plot point. It's not an important part of the plot, but it just shows you what things could look like if we did them a certain way. If we followed these things that we're learning would be really good for fighting climate change so that the world that my characters inhabit feels both lush and inviting, but is predicated on science and our understanding of what would actually make some of these issues better.
Susan Kaye Quinn
My screenwriting professor would call those drops. You drop in just that little thing that is like, oh, wait a minute, this is a super cool thing I've never seen before. And it's of course world building and all that. But I think it's important to highlight that if you're a scientist, if you're a policy expert, if you're somebody who is working in this space in the climate world, I would encourage you to think about trying fiction because I do believe there's an intersection happening where there's a lot of people who love listening to podcasts, love reading nonfiction. And then there's other people that are only into fiction, but there is an intersection there. And I think people really are gravitating, like in the last, I would say decade, there's been a shift towards liking a lot more nonfiction in our fiction. And maybe a little fiction in or nonfiction, there's sort of like a blurring of the lines going there. And in climate-type stories that can work really, really well. And you get things like Braiding Sweetgrass, which is philosophy and science and biology, but it's also kind of storytelling. Or something like Ministry for the Future, which is absolutely fiction, except for all the mini essays in it that are absolutely 100% nonfiction. And so that blurring, I feel like is right in the wheelhouse of folks like yourself or myself that have a technical background and want to move into this fiction storytelling space.
Since you're in the early days of making that transition, what words of advice do you have for people who are respectable, serious scientist people or policy people who are thinking about doing this leap into fiction?
Danielle Arostegui
Yeah, that's a great question. I want to make sure that we're clear that there's nothing non-serious about writing fiction because as someone who's worked in policy for years and is now working on my very first book, I can tell you that writing a book is by far the hardest thing I have ever, ever done, including all of the long, densely footnoted reports that I used to write in my old jobs. So don't be fooled that just because fiction is made up, that is somehow less serious than the other types of climate work that exist. But more to the point, I'd say that if you're working in the climate space and you have kind of even a little bit of curiosity about reading or writing climate fiction that you should absolutely go for it. I think it can be really easy in the course of working in climate policy or even climate science to kind of get bogged down in your little slice of the puzzle that you're working on. And one thing that I think climate fiction can do really well is help people break out of the silos that they're in and look at all the aspects of an issue that otherwise might not really come across their work that they might not be considering. Because climate really is a multidisciplinary issue and it requires people thinking all across the spectrum of issues to really tackle it effectively. So I do think that anything that helps break folks out of their silos is always gonna be a win, in my mind. And you might just be surprised to find that you found a new favorite genre.
Also, to what you were saying before about the ability to bring your expertise to a story and bring in that knowledge and the blurring of nonfiction and fiction, actually being in your silos can be really helpful for fiction because other people working on climate fiction might not have the particular expertise that you have. And so if you can bring that into a story, maybe your research, you knowledge, is going to get out to people that otherwise are not gonna read the scientific paper or the policy report that you've written, but they might read the story and come away with a lot of the same information that otherwise they wouldn't come across. And so in terms of being able to widen the reach of this type of information that is really helpful for addressing the climate crisis, coming into fiction might be a good way to kind of get it out there. So I would say that that is something also to consider.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I agree 100%. It's so about accessibility. We need to engage people. We need to move them from being passive to active in this fight because we need everybody involved. And that, again, the arts are engaging. And that's one way to bring the depth of your knowledge, which, I mean, if you have an extreme depth of knowledge, you have stories to tell. You have cool stuff down in the weeds there, literally in the mycelium network or wherever you are operating. There is cool stuff in there.
And I do like what you said though, I hadn't thought about this breaking out of your silos and getting the larger perspective because you can get so deep in the weeds that you don't, it's not even that you don't understand the larger picture, it's more that you just don't benefit from that breadth of like, oh, okay, now I know where I, my piece is in the larger picture and maybe can gain some more motivation and reinvigoration from that.
I think, I think these stories are great for readers. I think they're also great for writers. I think writers benefit a lot from writing the stories, even if you never published it. Just the act of trying to go through that exercise I think is super beneficial. So hopefully this pod will encourage some folks to do that.
Danielle Arostegui
Even if you don't publish a story that you've written, if you're learning anything about the art of storytelling, then you're going to be more convincing when you talk about your information, about your research, about your policies. You can just bring some of those little tricks and tips to bear and just be better at the thing that you're already doing.
Susan Kaye Quinn
You just made me think of… I don't know if you saw this recently, the Dance Your PhD contest that Australia has? So this guy won with a video that's like three minutes long, and he's studying the behavior of marsupials in Australia. And then he has his friends dress up, not as marsupials, but as humans in different cultures. And how they interact with each other and they dance for three minutes to explain his thesis. I'm like, there's the biggest intersection of nerd and like arts. I'm like so into it. So yes, get creative and people will dig it. I will put the link for that in the show notes too.
This is a great thing to close on. I’ve got the rapid round of three questions for you. What hopeful climate fiction have you read recently that you would recommend?
Danielle Arostegui
I'm a huge fan of Becky Chambers. I really loved Psalm for the Wild Built and Prayer for the Crown Shy, both of which imagine a more sustainable society that nevertheless feels really full and abundant and like it's got all the things you want, the community and the connection. But then I've also been geeking out over Sim Kern's collection of short stories, which is called Real Sugar is Hard to Find. And I highly recommend that just a nice, accessible entry point to people who are looking to get into the world of climate fiction but maybe aren't ready to bite off the whole book. There's just these short, beautiful little stories in there that just make you think about different aspects of the issue.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yeah, that's fantastic. I do think a lot of what's happening in solarpunk is in the short story realm. So there's a lot more of that material out there for people who are looking for it. We will definitely, and we have once again on the pod, we have a Featured Reads list, which is everybody who's been on the pod and their stories, but also a Recommended Reading list for just everything else and across media like film and TV and stuff like that. So look for your next read there.
All right, next question. What do you do to stay grounded and hopeful in our precarious and fast-changing world?
Danielle Arostegui
I am actually converting my backyard into a permaculture food forest right now. And it has been so much fun to watch this project taking off and, you know, feeling like I'm just kind of helping bring a little slice of abundance to my neighborhood and see the trees growing. So that's been really grounding for me lately.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I love that. And you do sound like you're very grounded in general. So I love that. We need to be examples for each other with that stuff. And so last question, since I know that you're getting ready to query your young adult fantasy, what's next after that?
Danielle Arostegui
I do need to finish it totally first, so that's my big hurdle. But then I am hoping that I'll get to turn back to doing some more short stores. And hopefully, fingers crossed, if all goes well with the query process I would really love to write a second and a third book in that same YA fantasy series that starts to look at a little bit more of the after we've decided to become an activist what does the creating of this new world look like.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Fantastic. I wish you all the luck with that. I'm excited to see the announcement that it's going to be out there. Thank you so much for coming today on the pod and talking with us about this. It's been such a pleasure.
Danielle Arostegui
Thank you for having me.
Bright Green Futures is a weekly newsletter/podcast. Check out the Featured Stories and Hopeful Climate Fiction lists for further reading. The best way to support the show is to subscribe and share the stories with your friends.
LINKS Ep. 4: From Scientist to Author, In Conversation with Danielle Arostegui
Grist’s Climate Fiction Drabbles (100 word stories)
Rewriting the Future: Thesis on Writing Climate Fiction, Melissa Aïnseba, Utrecht University, 2022)
Rebecca Solnit, What if Climate Change Meant Not Doom— But Abundance? (Washington Post, 2023)
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions)
Dance your Ph.D. 2024 winner Weliton Menário Costa
Monk and Robot series, Becky Chambers (2022 Hugo Award)
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