Climate Realism: The Aesthetics of Weather, Climate, and Atmosphere in the Anthropocene

This special issue of Resilience offers a new concept—climate realism—through which to read for the cultural and aesthetic forms of knowledge solicited by climate change. This issue gathers sustained engagements with cultural objects both formally and thematically invested in the realities of climate change, and it can be productively read in conjunction with the edited volume of the same title,¹ which collects new essays from a range of scholars in the humanities on the critical frameworks and genealogies needed to ground climate change theory. By considering the conjunction of climate and realism, the contributors assembled here put forward varied archives of thought necessary to both register and move through the pressure posed by a planet fully animated by anthropogenic climate change. This pressure is ecological, of course, insofar as the lifeworlds that create our planet are variously impacted by increasing temperatures; altered chemical profiles; and rapid shifts in the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere. However, this pressure is also cultural—our understanding of the changing dynamics of the planet is bound up with the narrative, visual, poetic, discursive, and ethical dynamics through which climate comes to matter.

As a proposition, then, climate realism names the cultural challenge of representing and conceptualizing climate in the era of climate crisis. Climate has traditionally referenced the weather it gathers, the mood it creates, and the settings it casts. In the era of the Anthropocene—the contemporary epoch in which geologic conditions and processes are indelibly shaped by human activity—climate indexes not only atmospheric forces but the whole of human history: the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and the possible futures we may encounter. In other words, with every weather event, we have become acutely aware that the forces indexed by climate are as much social, cultural, and economic as they are environmental, natural, and physical. While climate change itself remains independent of any structure of thought enlisted to know it (e.g., ocean acidification intensifies whether we notice it or not), at the same time, the multiple causes folded into the last two hundred years of industrial production, five hundred years of colonialism, and millennia of agricultural terraforming are intimately bound up with the reality of climate. This double bind of climate realism—climate as expressive of nonhuman systems as well as the materiality of human history—is the challenge to representation that the editors of this special issue aim to pursue.

Climate realism hones in on the emerging forms of representation and the limits of those forms that take up the epistemological, aesthetic, and ontological questions posed by a warming world. Contributors to this issue consider a range of representational modes such as climate fiction (cli- fi), landscape photography, weird cinema, contemporary art, science fiction, and the realist novel. While each of these forms comes with its own genealogies of thought, specificities of medium, and speculative procedures, they all manage to hold the past, present, and future tenses of climate in their instantiations, thus making available multiple scales of climate to an aesthetic experience. This unique capacity of aesthetic form to render multiple temporal scales as well as reorder knowledge derives from what Ian Baucom and Matthew Omelsky call the threshold of epistemology made available by, for instance, polyphonic voice in the novel, more-than-human perspectives in film, or immersive duration in installation art.² Yet we do not counterpose aesthetic representation as a corrective to other forms of meaning-making in the age of climate change—in other words, we do not suggest that the visual and discursive genres through which environmental science and policy represent climate change is flawed. Instead, we disclose that a different ordering of knowledge and perception underwrites aesthetic forms contending with the realities of climate change.

There are many informational genres tasked with carrying climate to various interpretive communities—newspapers, documentaries, mitigation strategies, scenarios plans, economic forecasts, and so on—and each brings a particular narrative structure, tone, relation to scale, and implied...