I have been reading the finalists of the short story competition Imagine 2200. It is a project of the Fix “Solutions Lab” within the “science” website Grist, which purports to cover the science of “climate.” (Like Facebook after its rebrand, for some reason, it’s just “climate” now, not “the climate.”) Grist describes itself as “the only newsroom focused on exploring solutions at the intersection of climate and justice.” This should be promising! Solutions are good. I like solutions.
Things fall apart quickly. “When a queer witch writes climate fiction, utopia isn’t the goal,” we learn in an interview with Ailbhe Pascal, the writer of one winning story, “Canvas — Wax — Moon.” “Not expecting to see abortion in a cli-fi story? To Pascal, it makes perfect sense,” we’re told. OK, then! Good to know, I guess. Per the author’s profile, Pascal “is a queer, disabled, mixed-SWANA, storytelling witch who lives in occupied Coaquannock, Lenapehoking. Find Al writing poetry for their prayer tree, laughing at their own mistakes, or sharing moon meals with their chosen family.”
If those two sentences were incomprehensible to you, good; that’s because they are. While “cli-fi” is basically self-explanatory (shorthand for “climate fiction”), there are too many other odd phrases here to explain them all. But let’s start with “SWANA.” According to the SWANA Alliance website, “SWANA is a decolonial word for the South West Asian/ North African (S.W.A.N.A.) region in place of Middle Eastern, Near Eastern, Arab World or Islamic World that have colonial, Eurocentric, and Orientalist origins and are created to conflate, contain and dehumanize our people. We use SWANA to speak to the diversity of our communities and to forward the most vulnerable in our liberation.” Its “Demands” tab explains that “WE WANT THE END OF ZIONISM AND A FREE PALESTINE,” and “WE WANT THE END OF THE WHITE THEFT OF OUR SENSE OF SELF AND SELF IMAGE.”
A few points of objection. First, it’s not a sense of self or a self-image if the lack of affirmation from other people can rob you of it. Second, in case the translation from woke to English isn’t clear here, “SWANA” is just a new activist-chic word for “from the Middle East.” Never mind that “southwest Asia” better describes Gujarat than Yemen or that virtually all Arabic speakers comfortably use a direct translation of the “Middle East” for the region. For some reason, probably because consultant types have infested the world of nongovernmental organizations and brought their buzzword-salad along, activists have really taken a shine to acronyms. I see no signs of this going away. Expect to see SWANA doing what AAPI did last year and BIPOC the year before it.
More specifically, a site purportedly focused on advancing “science” should really avoid obviously and somewhat dangerously unscientific talk. That witchcraft is fake is a scientific consensus. “As an herbalist who has supported loved ones with their abortions,” Pascal says at one point in the interview. Another scientific consensus: People should go to doctors, not herbalists. And I haven’t looked up the latest double-blind studies on “prayer tree” efficacy, but I have my suspicions.
Celebrating weird, unpalatable talk of indigenous superstitions, magic, unpopular conceptions of “justice” and such just strikes me as off-mission for a publication dedicated to the advancement of public understanding of scientific matters. It really is possible to believe in climate change without believing in the necessity of the “Green New Deal,” nor in witchcraft conducted over whatever “moon meals” are. If Grist were as focused on 2200 being a time of climate “solutions” as it claims, it would talk to some more economists and nuclear engineers instead of herbal-abortionist, cli-fi writing “witches.”
