Sustaining Attention to Climate Change

In The Ants and the Grasshopper, a 2021 documentary film, Malawian farmer Anita Chitaya travels through the American heartland, discussing the climate crisis with her fellow agriculturalists.1 In Iowa, she sits down for lunch with the Jacksons, who listen—over steaming dishes of homegrown vegetables—to her account of increasing drought in southeastern Africa. Politely but resolutely, the Jackson family insists that climate change is a political agenda rather than an environmental reality. Yes, they also have noticed erratic weather on their farm, but they attribute it to natural variation. To my mind, this scene is among the most quietly devastating in recent cinema: after traveling thousands of miles to advocate for her community’s livelihood, Chitaya is met with staunch climate denialism. She looks down at her empty plate, at the remnants of what I imagine was potato salad.

The Jacksons are expert practitioners of what Min Hyoung Song calls everyday denial, “an arduously willed state of refusal to acknowledge something that otherwise exists in plain sight” (28). Each record-breaking temperature is excused as anomaly, each crop failure is understood as misfortune. As Song notes, “[b]ecause of its repetition, everyday denial can be remarkably durable. It can be maintained despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, so that my home can be washed away by a storm the likes of which have never been recorded for my region and I still insist that nothing but a familiar variability in the weather is at work” (28). Indeed, just before the credits roll in The Ants and the Grasshopper, the audience learns that the Jacksons were forced to relocate after severe flooding decimated their farm.

But the brilliance of Min Hyoung Song’s most recent monograph, Climate Lyricism, is that it confronts both denial and the insidiousness of inattention. Rather than denying the reality of climate change outright, I find my own mind can routinely slip past the climate crisis, refocusing on a work deadline or a grocery list or a celebrity scandal. “I don’t want to dwell on the topic of climate change,” Song explains,

I want to focus on the tasks right before me and the easily graspable texture of my immediate surroundings. These seem so much more manageable. It’s not that I don’t care. I do very much. I just don’t know what good thinking about it all the time will do.

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The key challenge that Climate Lyricism takes up is how to sustain attention to climate change—how to think consistently and directly about the climate crisis—despite the unease and downright terror produced by this undertaking.

For Song, lyricism generates both the archive and the method for this task. Like other scholars working to theorize the lyric’s role amid environmental disruption and racial capitalism—Margaret Ronda and Sonya Posmentier are critical forerunners here—Song defines the lyric capaciously, moving from poetry to prose to nonfiction writing.2 Focusing on what he calls the revived lyric, often concerned with race and identity, Song suggests that lyricism “is a mode of literary attentiveness with special properties—such as compression of expression, a heavy investment in apostrophe, the careful observation of what is observable in language, [and] a probing of what comprises the human” (4). This mode of lyricism—practiced by writers and by readers alike—draws attention to how climate change and related injustices permeate everyday life.

In selecting texts to think with, Song deviates from the legions of scholars, journalists, and bloggers on the hunt for literature that dramatizes—or even briefly references—climate change. Instead, he argues that “readers should seek to make their interest in climate change explicit, asking about everything they read what it has to offer to an understanding of this topic” (67). Breaking free from the books that appear again and again on climate reading listicles, Song’s sharpest analyses engage texts that initially seem irrelevant to the climate crisis, including Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. In Song’s hands, these works illuminate structures of denial and detail the “psychic costs” of attentiveness (52). They transform into vital repositories, texts from which he constructs fresh patterns of environmental thought. “[W]hile Kaminsky’s poems might not have anything explicit to say about climate change,” Song explains, these poems can make readers “more aware of how the avoidance of bad feelings prevents a necessary openness to the many sources of collective heartache” (74). In this way, Climate Lyricism escapes hackneyed content-driven definitions of climate literature, revitalizing reading as an environmental act regardless of the text at hand.

As a literary critic focused on climate writing, I am particularly grateful for Song’s commitment to traversing racial, ethnic, and national borders in his analyses. Literary criticism engaging climate change all too often foregrounds white writers from Britain and the United States, and a sustained study of climate writing that interweaves the words of Grace Lee Boggs, Tommy Pico, and Han Kang is both crucial and severely overdue. Throughout these pages, Song’s expertise in Asian American literature and ethnic studies strengthens and advances his environmental claims, demonstrating yet again that environmental scholarship is at its most dynamic when it intersects with fields long committed to theories of justice. For instance, from a discussion of racial microaggressions, Song details what he terms microdenials, everyday incidents in which the climate crisis is downplayed or omitted. These incidents matter, Song maintains, “because they are part of something larger and systemic” (49). Similarly, building on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist killjoy, Song constructs the figure of the climate killjoy, a person who consistently discusses the climate crisis, “insisting on talking about what others don’t want to talk about” (79).

Because Song conceives of Climate Lyricism as a conversation, imagining that a reader is “here before me, across a table, preferably in a pleasant room or even in an outside café on a sunny cool day, possibly drinking some coffee,” I want to ask a few questions (14). What influence might the lyric have on people who pay excruciating attention to climate change for the sake of individual or corporate profit? In McKenzie Funk’s prescient Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, for-profit firefighting companies track increasing wildfire risk in wealthy Californian neighborhoods while Dutch engineers patent floating beaches and seaworthy Affordable H₂Ousing.3 Funk argues that sustained attention to climate change may not lead in the direction we would like to assume—commitments to public transportation, increasing vegetarianism, roofs lined with solar panels. Some people may pay attention in order to capitalize. And I wonder about my colleagues at Harvard and the scientists at other schools who attend—on a serious, daily basis—to climate change, their sustained focus producing plans to inject aerosols into the atmosphere. What force does the lyric wield in an age of geo-engineering? I pose these questions not as a critique of Song’s work, which is discerning and timely, but rather as a testament to the consequential environmental conversations it initiates. How can attention to climate change be channeled into actions that prioritize the common good and promote an equal distribution of power?

Scholars of contemporary literature will be particularly intrigued by Song’s innovative periodizations. Near the close of Climate Lyricism, Song rethinks the dating of literary works, drawing on the Keeling Curve to position Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day at 340 ppm and Solmaz Sharif’s Look at 402 ppm. But even more arrestingly, he distinguishes between a poetic era “when carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas concentrations were significantly lower in the atmosphere and environmental concerns less obviously pressing” and an era when poems “seek to express how harsh the present has become and is becoming” (162). Subtly, Song implies that climate change is shifting the periodization of contemporary literature, creating new partitions in Post45 writing. But literary scholarship is marked by its own periods—New Criticism gives way to deconstruction, ecocriticism focused on nature writing gives way to ecocriticism concerned with environmental justice. Following Song’s lead, we might begin to track how climate change demarcates chapters of literary criticism, moving from an era of scholarly curiosity to an era of bell-clanging alarm. However future critics choose to distinguish these early periods of climate scholarship, I am convinced that Song’s book will be a key marker, one that signals a new era in climate thought. This is a book that deserves our sustained attention, both in scholarship to come and in everyday conversations or musings.