Imaginary

Visual Arts

Film and Stage

• Mountain Patrol: Kekexili: a group of Tibetans isolate themselveson a mountain four miles above sea level to protect the endangered Tibetan antelope from poachers, who have no qualms about killing the animals or the men
• Avatar: a soldier loses function in his legs and undertakes a missionin an alien world, only to discover that he belongs in spirit with the nature-worshiping “aliens”; the film’s celebration of violence mars and blurs the message, though.
• Walkabout: on the “contrast between civilization and man’s more natural states”; “a statement on the exploitation of the natural world and native cultures by European civilization”
• First Reformed: the film’s inner meaning is enigmatic, even to the filmmaker but the message on climate change cannot be ignored.

Music: songs and other short pieces

• Nawang Khechog, “Caring for Our Mother Nature”

Poetry

Grey and furtive in the final twilight, he lopes by, leaving his spoor along the bank of this nameless river that has quenched the thirst of his throat, these waters that repeats no stars. Tonight, the wolf is a shade who runs alone and searches for his mate and feels cold. He is the last wolf in all of Angle-land. Odin and Thor know him. In a commanding house of stone a king has made up his mind to put an end to wolves. The powerful blade of your death has already been forged. Saxon wolf, your seed has come to nothing. To be cruel isn't enough. You are the last. A thousand years will pass and an old man will dream of you in America. What use can that future dream possibly be to you? Tonight the men who followed through the woods the spoor you left are closing in on you, grey and furtive in the final twilight.

[Jorge Luis Borges, “A Wolf”]

Poems:

• Robert Frost, “A Brook In the City”
• Robert Frost, “The Exposed Nest”
• William Wordsworth, “Proud were ye, Mountains”
• William Wordsworth, “On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway”

Books of poems:

• Brenda Shaughnessy, The Octupus Museum: Poems (Knopf, 2019): “posits an apocalyptic future that looks a lot like now, an extension of our current dystopia in which food, water, housing and medical care are scarce or too expensive to access.”

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

• Rolnick, “Oceans Eat Cities”, about global warming

Fictional Narratives

Novels:

• Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander: A Novel (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021): “This is climate fiction at its most urgent and gripping.”
• Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun: A Novel (Hogarth, 2021): “imagines a highly imaginable California so ravaged by drought and wildfires that only the rich can afford to survive.”
• Matt Bell, Appleseed: A Novel (Custom House, 2021) “employs myth, magic and science to give a damning account of the narrative of American exceptionalism and the relentless post-conquest exploitation of this country’s vast natural resources.”
• Richard Powers, Bewilderment: A Novel (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021): “It’s a book about ecological salvation that somehow makes you want to flick an otter on the back of the head, for no good reason at all.”