Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors w/ Tory Stephens

For episode 151, Elia Ayoub and Daniel Voskoboynik host Tory Stephens, Climate Fiction Creative Manager at ⁠Grist.org⁠, to talk about ⁠Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors⁠ and why narrative work is an integral part of any climate solution. Why does Imagine 2200 choose hope over dystopia? What are effective narrative shifting tactics and strategies? Stephens is also on the Hollywood Climate Summit Board so Elia talked to him about moving beyond post/apocalyptic films. We also asked him how listeners can take part in Imagine 2200.

Relevant Links:

The Fire These Times is a proud member of ⁠From The Periphery (FTP) Media Collective⁠. Check out other projects in our media ecosystem: the (newly aired!) Mutual Aid Podcast, Politically Depressed, Obscuristan, and Antidote Zine.

Episode Credits

Host(s): Elia Ayoub and Daniel Voskoboynik
Producer(s): Elia Ayoub
Guest(s): Tory Stephens
Music: ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge
Sound editor(s): Elia Ayoub
Episode designer(s): Elia Ayoub
Portrait Arts (Elia and Daniel’s): Molly Crabapple
Artist of the original image: Taj Francis – Imagine 2200 Collection Cover

Transcript prepared by Shirley Yin and Antidote Zine:

To me, the work of narrative is about getting your idea into the marketplace in a thousand different places and a lot of different mediums. That’s why we’re losing the narrative war: there’s all these other narratives out there, and we’re not countering it or creating a space for people to dream about the world we actually want.

Elia J. Ayoub: Today we’ll be talking to Tory Stephens, who is the climate fiction creative manager at Grist.org, which is behind the Imagine 2200 Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors project. Let’s start with some basic intros. Would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners and tell us about what Imagine 2200 is about?

Tory Stephens: My name is Tory Stephens and I’m calling in from a small railroad town in Massachusetts, which is on the east coast of the United States. I’m a creative manager for climate fiction at Grist. Grist is an independent nonprofit media organization in its twenty-fifth year. We’ve been reporting on the climate crisis since it was called “global warming” and we were one of the only outlets in the news space doing this work. In the last few years, the Washington Post and the New York Times have beefed up their climate reporting, but if you remember like ten years ago, there weren’t many people at their climate desk. So Grist has been doing this for a long time. 

We reach a lot of people who are climate scientists, activists, people who care about the planet. But we recognize that we can’t talk to everyone; facts and figures and statistics and research and investigative reports are really good for some people, but other people get their orientation from fiction: through stories, climate storytelling, and narratives that take place on different worlds and have alternate timelines. We wanted to play in that space and talk to people in that space, so we created Imagine 2200, an initiative that right now is primarily focused around a climate fiction contest, where people submit a story they think is great and we review it. 

We’ll get into how we do that. But essentially, it’s a contest. We have an idea that we would like to do: publish climate fiction beyond the contest. Because we receive a lot of stories that don’t get published. We’re trying to figure out how to get really good stories outside the contest out there. But essentially, I’m the creative guy behind the curtain that is helping bring climate fiction stories to the world.

I used to be a fundraiser. I work in movement spaces too. I have been a resource generator for movement-building organizations, primarily in the Deep South. A lot of the ideas that I’ve gleaned, and the communities that I’ve interacted with on the movement side of things that I wouldn’t get in the news or journalistic space, I’ve brought over to this project. Things like care work and healing justice and liberation practices for Black and Brown people in the South, and fighting against racism and all the other -isms that are very present in the Deep South because of the history of slavery and things of that nature. 

I don’t live in that area, so I had to go down there and do a strong listening tour. But I came away and was able to work with a group of people to bring a couple million dollars over the last eight years. We’ve moved seven million dollars to the Deep South. Through those connections and community that I’ve built there and engaging folks, I’ve definitely learned, because every day of my life was not movement building. And those folks have taught me a lot around justice that we’ve been able to seed into the project.

Daniel Voskoboynik: I want to ask you more on this. What does it mean to bring justice into the space of climate storytelling? And also how? In what way? It seems like we’re looking at the project from afar. Hearing you as well, partly it’s about reaching people that aren’t reached by highly data-based or empirical storytelling. But there’s also a real narrative shift as well that this kind of work tries to do. 

So I’m curious to ask you: why is that narrative work so important? In what ways does the dominant economic system that has led to the climate crisis also try to transmit certain kinds of stories? Why are stories such important tools to counter those narratives, but also to open space for other ones? Why is narrative work so important?

TS: I have been focused on narrative work for a few years now, and I saw the power of narrative work in advocacy work that I used to do. I used to work in the health advocacy world. What that looks like is: in America, there are these programs, Medicaid and Medicare. Medicare is insurance for older folks, and Medicaid is insurance for poorer folks who can’t afford the market insurance. These programs are always under attack by the rightwing here in the United States. There’s advocacy organizations that have popped up to help defend and broadcast and tell stories about why we need to have these programs, who they help. And I was in that work. I was raising money in that field of health advocacy.

There was a lot of narrative work and strategy work that was being done. The long-held belief in the United States is that Medicare has a constituency. It has a story: it’s easier to take away, sadly, some poor person’s health care than to take away grandma’s health care. That narrative has taken shape, and there’s a constituency, and politicians will work to protect the older folks because for one, they show up and vote a lot more than folks who are working a nine to five or even longer and they can’t make it to the polls. Beyond the realistic everyday life things that folks have that make them for a program or not for a program, there were stories being churned out to bash these programs and bring them down. But then there were also positive stories to lift them up.

What I noticed is that there wasn’t one for Medicaid, and that was because there wasn’t all this money. The older folks who are in their retirement have a lot more money to help with funding an advocacy program. So what we did in the advocacy work was to start to push that, because Medicaid was under attack. There was a lot of story work done around “Why Brenda?” I was the one who was focused on: let’s move away from statistics and figures and research, and focus on one person’s story, how not having this program, whether it be Medicaid or Medicare, would impact their life. 

That was helpful, but you have to get the word out. For narrative work to work, it has to bloom in a thousand different places on a thousand different platforms, so that somebody who gets their media from talk radio gets it, somebody who gets it from social media gets it; someone gets it who wants to read a human interest story on a news site but is a little bit more about a person and what they’re going through in their life. And maybe that takes a thousand words as opposed to a social post that’s a meme or something. But that’s the way narratives work and take shape. You need these thousand flowers to bloom.

To your question, is the economy set up to tell the stories? What I read into what you were saying is: is there someone out there telling the fossil fuel story and why it’s so incredible? Hell yeah! The fossil fuel companies themselves, but also the general story—I’m not a person who thinks there was no benefit to fossil fuels. There definitely has been a benefit for society. It’s just that we overused and doubled down, tripled down, quadrupled down, and we’re too tied to this fuel. There’s plenty of stories about someone who pulled themselves up from their bootstraps, dug in their yard, got a pump or a well going, and they were industrious. 

There’s that aspect, the entrepreneurial spirit. There’s the aspect that this has brought us out of poverty. You look at the United States a hundred and fifty years ago, it’s all been run on fossil fuels that has built up these gleaming towers and all this other stuff. So there’s narratives out there at work around why fossil fuels are great for society. And then there are all the other people whose interest is involved in it, pushing narratives themselves—when they go on MSNBC, when they go on Bloomberg. There are titans of industry like the Rockefellers; their stories are well-known, and they’re considered icons and titans. But on the other side of things, trying to reverse all that narrative that has worked its way into our society is hard.

So what I think we need is a thousand flowers to bloom on the climate side of things. One of the most underutilized, efficient, and effective climate solutions is story work. Climate storytelling. I’m more focused on the fiction side of things because I think [climate] is in the news. It’s not as much as before, but like I said earlier, the New York Times ramped up their climate reporting because you can’t ignore it. The Washington Post, you name it—even Fox News is getting in on it. They’re not doing it from a climate perspective, but they have a whole weather channel that’s like, Weather events! Disaster! and they try to make it exciting and flashy. That’s because the climate has changed so much that there are all these things happening. So they’re getting in on the story work; they’re just not following the conclusions. I think we need a lot more fiction.

I sit on the Hollywood Climate Advisory Board, and on that board, one of the other organizations we work with is Good Energy. And they’ve talked about how in Hollywood, they did a study with a university, and they scanned TV shows across streaming sites and movies, and they put in keywords like climate change, global warming, heat index, things related to a changing climate, and what they found was a measly three percent of the stories that we consume through streaming, TV, film, all that stuff. We had the awards show here the other day, and people are talking about these shows—this is the land of TV, and I think the world is becoming that way, too. We talk TV. But we’re not talking about the thing that’s the most important existential crisis. 

So when I said that this can be an efficient thing, I don’t know if that efficiency extends to Hollywood. But it doesn’t matter. In Hollywood, I know there are incredible storytellers that could tell really cool stories about the climate that we would consume. These are some of the most brilliant storytellers out there, who have had hit shows. There’s a show or a movie with Jim Carrey from way back that was called The Cable Guy. What if that was The Solar Installer, or The Wind Farm? I think some stories would be quite boring if the whole thing was just about the existential crisis that we’re in, but we need small and big ways to show that the economy needs to shift. Light touches, like having Jim Carrey be a solar installer instead of a cable guy—you could have had millions of people, young and old, that were like, You know what, that’s a job that I want. I want to be a solar installer. I didn’t know about that. 

Shifting it back to fiction, I think it’s an effective way because it’s low cost. It does take a lot of energy and imagination and time, but the cost is cheap to put out a book, or to put an idea out on a blog, or write a short story and submit it, or put it into a magazine that collects or creates those. It’s not super expensive. I just think we need more of that. To me, the work of narrative is about getting your idea into the marketplace in a thousand different places and a lot of different mediums. I’m an advocate for that. It’s an underutilized climate solution. I think that’s why we’re losing the narrative war, because there’s all these other narratives out there and we’re not countering it or creating a space for people to dream about the world we actually want.

EA: Up until a few months ago I had done this consultancy working for a local NGO here in Switzerland. What I did was look at the ways in which the tobacco industry, which is pretty big here, it has one of the seats here in Switzerland, learned from the fossil fuel industry and vice versa. It’s actually the other way around: the fossil fuel industry learned a lot from the tobacco industry because it was a bit older, at least in its scale. And one thing that’s interesting and very noteworthy immediately, especially with the tobacco industry although since then the fossil fuel industry has caught up learning those lessons, is that the tobacco industry for the most part has stopped saying tobacco is bad for you or smoking is bad for you. They lost that battle in the nineties with the big court case in the US and stuff like that. So what they’re doing now is positioning themselves as part of the “solution” that they are creating. There’s a website by Philip Morris International (PMI), which is based in Switzerland. And basically the tagline is something along the lines of: if you don’t smoke, don’t start. If you smoke, quit. And if you can’t quit, change. And it’s the change that where they get you, because the “change” is actually: You can buy those other products that we also produce, vaping and all of that stuff. But there are no smoke products.

I found that quite interesting because for the most part, the fossil fuel industries, especially if they have an international audience in mind, will stop saying things like It should only be fossil fuel. They have reduced their attacks on renewable energy, but they are basically saying, Well, you have to have both. They’re pushing the narrative that this is a transition phase. Of course, a transition is open-ended. It can last five years, it can last fifty years. It depends on the conferences that they’re having and the audience that they have in front of them, and they know how to cater to their audiences.

The other thing that PMI is especially very good at (and this is one of those things that goes under the radar), is playing the corporate game of saying, We are a healthy work environment! We’re very diverse! We have a psychologist on site! That sort of thing. To make it look like it’s just a job like any other job, basically. By doing that, they anticipate certain criticisms that may come at them. If they were openly cartoonish, like that movie with Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood—it doesn’t sell that well anymore to be this openly stereotypically toxic. The product is the same; in many ways, it’s actually worse, and it’s much more numerous in the sense that they sell more cigarettes than they did a century ago. But the way the message or the product is now quoted, the narrative has shifted. So they have always understood that story and storytelling is part of the process of selling something. They’ve always understood that.

There are very good reports that John Oliver did on the tobacco industry. One of them is on Philip Morris USA (because there’s Philip Morris USA and Philip Morris International) talking about women smoking during pregnancy. The CEO at the time said something that today seems very ludicrous and outrageous and insulting, but at the time wasn’t seen that way, which is that many women like having smaller babies (a side effect of smoking), because it makes it easier to go through labor. That was an actual PR campaign that clearly worked for some time, until it didn’t.

What I find very useful about what Grist does, and Imagine 2200, is assume that they are going to die out at some point, because they will. Nothing is permanent. As a general rule, in the human species, we never do the same thing forever. At some point, we do something else. We need to build from that. Let’s say that in ten years or in twenty years, and maybe more optimistically in five years, the fossil fuel industry collapses. It’s dying out, it’s being phased out, whatever it might be. What does the day after look like?

I’m very into Star Trek. When you watch Star Trek, it’s like, well, obviously we’ve moved beyond it. This is three hundred years in the future—we’re not talking about fossil fuels. It’s ridiculous. We’ve moved beyond it, we’re in this different thing now, this is not part of the debate. The wallpaper is different. Everything is different. This is the world, and that’s it. And you take it for granted, almost. I like that kind of mental exercise.

With that in mind, let me ask you this: Why does Imagine 2200 choose hope over dystopia? You’ve mentioned a bit of that, so let’s get into it a bit more. And also, why do you stress the importance of cultural authenticity? I find that very interesting as well in climate fiction.

TS: There’s a lot of reasons why we focus on hope. It was a natural thing for us because of who Grist is. I don’t know if you know this, but our new tagline is: Climate. Justice. Solutions. But for the longest time, our tagline was something about not being for doom-and-gloom. We were the happy place where we focused on climate solutions, hope, opportunities to get us out of this crisis, and the people who are doing that. We would report on people that are focusing on the justice side of things. And essentially, we’re still doing the same thing; we’ve just changed our tagline to one that is a little bit more grown-up, because we’ve grown up—we’re twenty-five now, not sixteen.

We knew if we’re going to produce a climate fiction initiative at Grist, it’s going to focus on climate solutions; it’s going to have a healthy dose of justice intertwined throughout the whole project and it’s going to be hopeful. So that was one reason. But the other reason was, when I started to do the research on climate fiction and what the genre looked like and what the short stories out there are about, I wasn’t finding a lot of hopeful stories. I was finding a lot of doom-and-gloom, disasters, What do you do the day after the apocalypse? kinds of stories, instead of What do we do when we’ve moved away from fossil fuels?

So we explored this with a whole bunch of people at a retreat. Before we launched Imagine 2200, or even had the name, we had a retreat session where we had some facilitators that were really good at visioning work. I had never done collective visioning. We were going to go to this retreat space, but a pandemic happened, so the whole thing took place on Zoom instead of underneath the beautiful stars of the spring sky with these amazing people in the United States that are focused on climate injustice. What I found was that through the visioning work, a lot of the folks had not read climate fiction widely. Some of them who came to this are activists, others are scientists. Most of these people were not in the fiction or literary world; they may have heard of climate fiction, but were kind of like me: when I first started Grist and they were like, We’re exploring climate fiction! I was like, Climate what? I could guess what that was, because it says it in the name, but I hadn’t read any climate fiction books. I’ve only been at Grist for four years now. Four years ago, I didn’t even know the term “climate fiction.” Maybe I heard of it in a news article or something like that, but I didn’t really know what it was.

The group of people that we brought to do this retreat were essentially like me: they had heard the term, but they hadn’t really read much about it. And when we started, the facilitators did a smart thing. They created a—it wasn’t Dungeons and Dragons, but a role playing-type game. I was involved in the co-creation process, but it was their idea that we should have a band of four people go on a quest together. The goal was to create a timeline from the present day, which at that time was 2020, all the way to 2200. And the goal for that team of four people that didn’t know each other and were from different backgrounds, disparate backgrounds, was to get to a clean, green, and just world at the end.

Built into that idea that we’re going to get to a clean, green, and just world is a hope, a mantra and a feeling, and the whole goal is around getting to a healthy, hopeful planet. There were twenty-some people, so there were five different groups. And they went on their quests and created these timelines, and when you read their timelines of the things that they needed to do, not all of them were hopeful—there were wars over the direction of the country on certain timelines. But in the end, they started to shift towards hope. And for some of them, there was a shift towards hope after fifty years on their timeline. 

That’s one of the big reasons that Grist has this in its ethos. When we brought these justice- and climate-focused or solution-focused individuals together, it just had a whole vibe of hope. The thing that I recognized that we don’t do as humans, when I was doing this visioning work, is that we don’t dream about hope collectively or talk about hope collectively.

It’s weird to talk about hope with my family or my neighbor, or people you don’t know well. How often do you talk about it? We’re talking about it now as an intentional thing that we’re doing on a podcast. But outside of my work, it’s hard to talk about hope with people that are closer to me than some of my colleagues are. A part of what I learned in that exercise is that we all need to be actively talking about hope, going through the layers of what that means for individuals, different perspectives of hope, because I don’t believe there’s one sort of hope. If you ask someone from different cultures or different situations, they’re going to say, This is what I think a hopeful future looks like. So with Imagine 2200, the idea is to explore those many hopes, those many futures that we could come to.

I hope I answered your question, but it was mainly around the things that I came away with going into a project that is full of hope. I walked out of the thing and was like, Oh, so all the stories I’m going to find out there around climate fiction are going to be super hopeful? And then I remembered, No, they’re not. I did know there are these dystopian stories, and mostly the ones that I knew were like, the Hollywood ones that had all these disasters; The Day After Tomorrow and things like that. For me, it was an eye-opening experience to go through this retreat with all these people and have them dream about hope.

Something that also happened there is that a lot of the time people weren’t talking about the climate solely. They were like, We’re not going to tackle the climate if we still have systemic racism. Let’s use America, for example. In Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, there’s a place called Cancer Alley, because of the fossil fuel industry in plastics that is there. And the people that live there—business doesn’t care, business moves on, got to keep on grinding to get that money, at the expense of these people’s health. 

So I walked away with a lot, because people were sharing openly their feelings and visions around what they want out of the future. And that’s not something that we do often as people.

DV: I want to ask two slightly different questions. The first is just picking up where you were finishing with this. In Imagine 2200, there seems to be this important intersectional approach that’s prioritized. I especially love the reference to intersectional characters. What does it mean to try and seek out and build intersectional stories and intersectional characters? 

And also, knowing that so many different cultures around the world understand the climate in different vocabularies and languages, and also understand storytelling in different ways, with a frame like climate fiction, where even a word like “fiction” might not make as much sense in a storytelling tradition, what does it mean to be intersectional in the way that you gather stories and look out for stories? 

And just a final reflection, hearing you speak, what I appreciate about what you’re saying is there’s a lot of learning going on. I’m curious how your own practice of hope has changed in the last years as a result of the work you do.

TS: I’ll start with intersectionality and why we call for intersectional characters: what I’ve come to learn is that people are intersectional. The tough part about this world that we live in, and this word that we’re using to describe people and their particular positionality or situation is that it gets so academic. The word itself is a turnoff to certain people, and especially people who I want to reach. I’ll try to break it down in more simple terms. The simplest way to say it is, people are complex and have lots of layers, and those layers make up who they are in the decisions they’re going to make in life, in what they care about, and how other people react to them. 

A Black gay man who is living in Georgia is going to have a very different experience than a Black gay man who is living in New York. However, there may be certain power, or privilege, or lack of privilege that they have. Privilege: being a man; lack of privilege: being a gay man. And your positionality in life—me being a Black man, versus someone being a white man in Boston, it’s just different. Even after the civil rights movement and all the things that have been done to correct what’s going on in America, we know that there is still discrimination and racism. We care about all those things: how their gender, their race, their sex, their class plays out and affects their life, and we want that to be shown within the characters in our stories.

Another thing I found when I was trying to read up on what climate fiction is, is that oftentimes, because climate fiction is an offshoot of science fiction, the world-building was incredible, but some of the characters were what I call Lego people. Because you could just pop their heads off and it didn’t matter. If a character is Brazilian, or say, French, you shouldn’t be able to pop their heads off and swap them and the story will still make sense. Because the food they eat, the type of language they’re going to use, the way they describe something, or the people in charge in their country—are they rightwing? Left? In between?—the history that lives in the people is missing. The layers of a person are missing. And I was like, Damn, this story was really good, but. I love good world-building, but I’m character-driven. If I don’t have a good character that I care about, I’m going to say, Well, they built the world well, but the story wasn’t that great.

We wanted to honor people who have all those layers to themselves, because we didn’t see that in the storytelling. We didn’t see disabled characters, Black and queer characters. I didn’t see them when I was looking through this scan of climate fiction. And we wanted to make sure that we were reaching those people. The thing around the narratives that I was talking about earlier: you need these thousand flowers to bloom, and they have to bloom in different communities. You can’t just have a conversation in the white world around the climate crisis. It has to happen in different countries, in different communities, different affinity groups, folks that feel comfortable talking about something as big as the climate crisis.

That’s why we focus on intersectional characters. We feel like it’s important to getting the story out there and honoring the people who honestly are also on the front lines of this stuff. Some of the folks who have been missing from climate fiction are the people who are living it right now! It’s not something that’s coming in thirty years (well, I guess now the timeline’s faster).

My wife and I live in New England, and ten years ago we used to be like, The place that we will move to is Vermont. Vermont will be warmer, but because it’s already so cold, it will even out. What’s happened recently is all the snow is melting and flooding Vermont, because they have all that snow and lots of hills and mountains. So like, nowhere is safe these days. There’s all these different disasters popping up. But ten years ago, and even now, it’s more acute with folks that are on the front lines. 

By having intersectional stories, we’re honoring and allowing folks to talk about the experience that they’re in, and then think through what would a hopeful future look like for them, after they’ve gone through all that they’ve gone through and who they are. So that’s the piece on intersectionality. I wish there was an easier word for that, so that we could meet folks who just don’t use these types of academic words to describe the world.

DV: The second part of my question was around hope, around your own practice of hope, how in these four years receiving and reading and sifting through all these stories, how has it also transformed maybe your own relationship and practice of hope?

EA: If I can add to that, maybe you can share some examples of the stories that you’re working on.

TS: The way that I think of hope now is, there’s a dial, like a dial to your stove. This is the same with climate solutions or intersectionality or decolonized futures. Sometimes it’s dialed up all the way and the story is super utopian, and we’ve solved so much, and everything is working out really great. And then other times there’s just little glimmers of hope. And that’s something we’re okay with. Imagine 2200 is not a utopian project. It is a project that focuses on five core elements: cultural authenticity, hope and hopeful futures, decolonized futures, climate solutions, and intersectional characters. Sometimes people really dial it up with the cultural authenticity, but the hope is dialed down a little bit. You may have another story where it’s the reverse.

That’s one thing I’ve noticed. You have to be comfortable with different levels of hope that people put in their story, and I’m fine with that. Not every story needs to be utopian. And I still think sometimes those stories are a little bit more realistic. But at the same time, we’re totally comfortable with utopian stories. Usually in a utopian story, there are still some interpersonal dynamics between the community of people that are like living this utopian dream, and that’s what they’re trying to figure out, which is quite interesting. 

I’m not trying to trash Obama, but I have a disagreement with him around the way he talks about hope, possibility, and optimism. It’s like this natural progression. I know over the course of human history, yes, this is not the Middle Ages; things are better now. But I don’t believe that we’re just on a trajectory of hope. There are many instances of humans intervening to help push along and make the world better, and I think that’s the story that he’s not telling. I used to be more on the Obama thing, like we’re moving towards a more progressive future, a hopeful future. But it’s not a straight line. Often whenever something super hopeful happens, at least in the United States, in the favor usually of people of color, there’s a backlash. I think I had a more superficial idea of hope.

By engaging people, especially people that are on the front lines, I think it’s a little bit weird to talk about hope. You can’t talk about it with your neighbor. If I went to my brother like, What’s giving you hope, man? I could do that, because my brother’s pretty chill, but he’d be like, What? It’s just not a regular conversation. I’ve been able to have these irregular conversations, and through that, what I’ve learned is that you have to be okay with different people’s goal of what hope is. And it’s made it so I have a less superficial idea of hope, and it’s more durable, and it’s flexible. I’m willing to explore it a little bit more. That doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable. And that alone has helped me be like, Wow, this is somewhere I want to put my energy. Because I think it will pay off for me personally. And if I’m doing it in community, collectively, we can do something about this world. And that gives me hope.

EA: Before we started talking with you, Daniel and I were chatting a bit and we did mention that movie that you brought up, The Day After Tomorrow. You mentioned Lego characters—what’s interesting about these movies and TV series is that there’s almost no difference if you change the general plot from a climate apocalypse to a zombie apocalypse—it’s post-apocalyptic, i.e. things are bad, and what those things are almost doesn’t matter. For example, I am Legend and other films of that genre are centered around a hero. Someone, often male but not always, is fighting against the odds and will come out of this alive, and maybe even happy.

What’s always interesting is when you watch a movie like I am Legend you identify with the main character. You don’t identify with most of the humans that are dead within five minutes into the movie. You’re not that random person who was killed in the background, you’re the main character, and that is how a lot of those films usually work. But in the statistics of it, you’re more likely to be that person who’s dead within five minutes in the background than you are to be Will Smith.

And that’s a testament to the power of storytelling: it can make you believe something that is unlikely. But what’s interesting is that usually what we are led to believe is not that we can face adversity as a community in the face of difficult odds. There are movies like that, but they tend not to be climate related. And I want more of those. I like Grist and I like other projects of that similar vein. On this podcast, we try to bridge the gap between the fictional world and the real world. What would solar punk look like in Gaza in one hundred years? It almost feels obscene to ask it today, given what’s happening. But that’s part of the mental exercise that a podcast has the privilege to be able to do, because we’re just talking.

I like that you mentioned also the difficulties of talking about hope. I get that. I also struggle with it. One thing I found that helps a bit is reframing hope as a verb rather than just a thing that is there, something you have or you don’t. One thing I found very helpful, or hopeful, you might say, is that when you don’t have hope, you can still participate in creating it. Even if I personally don’t feel it right now, others do, and I can latch on to what they are feeling and what they’re currently doing about it, and that helps me to eventually get it back, if that makes sense. I like that. And there is obviously an argument to be made that this is what storytelling is for.

I was listening to this podcast by two Indigenous women in what I believe is currently the northern US or southern Canada talking about apocalypse, and talking about what that even means. At one point, someone in that conversation said, To me, the apocalypse started in 1492 with the arrival of white colonizers in what we now call the Americas. I listened to this during the early days of the pandemic, and when they mentioned this, it clicked in my head that up until then, I used to think of the apocalypse as something that is inherently a future thing. Between the pandemic, and listening to that podcast, I was talking about the apocalypse as something that already happened, and we’re living in the post-apocalypse already.

And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have hope, and it doesn’t even mean that there can’t be a second apocalypse. None of that is taken for granted, but just reframing things. And of course, I’m from Lebanon, from Beirut, and in August of that year we had the big explosion, which looked very much like an apocalypse as well. All of these things got jumbled in my mind, and that allowed me, despite me resisting that in the beginning, to see these things as being more than a linear thing. Like, the past was bad, the present is okay, and the future might be good if you are in the Star Trek universe, or the future is inherently bad if you’re in a post-apocalyptic universe. Actually, the future is: We have no idea. That’s the point. It has not happened yet, by definition.

TS: There’s a Nigerian writer who talks about dystopia in the same way that you just talked about the apocalypse. He talks about how in the West we consume so much dystopian material, and he questions Why is that? People who are living an actual dystopia right now, like in the Delta of Nigeria where he’s from, maybe don’t want to go home and cozy up to a movie that’s about something that’s crappy and how the world has gone bad.

I often think about this article that I read about truck driving in the United States, where there are these facial cameras on you all the time to see if you’re sleeping, and you have to check in. So many people are fleeing that industry, and it doesn’t pay as much as it used to in the past. They’re living a sort of dystopia, the folks that would love to get out of that job but don’t have another skill, and are having to check in, sleep on the side of the road, be away from their family, have facial recognition tell them that they need to pull over now because they are tired, even though maybe they don’t feel tired but the AI told them that they are tired. To me, the whole thing felt really dystopian, and I was like, Yeah, this stuff is nonlinear. And there are definitely millions, if not billions, of people, that need to be liberated from the dystopia that they’re living in right now. I don’t mean liberated like we go save them, but liberation where they have their full freedom and opportunity to have a better world.

DV: Thank you so much, Tory. We want to ask you on behalf of all the listeners, for folks hearing this and inspired to bring their own stories or visions of liberation, what is the best way that they can participate or get involved in Imagine 2200?

TS: The great thing about Imagine—in the first year, it was not something that was guaranteed to be an annual initiative. Now we know that next year, we’re going to have the contest. In fact, we’re publishing twelve new stories. On Grist.org, you will see that Imagine 2200 has launched a new collection. And you can find the collection of all the old stories we published.

We’ve also been publishing stories outside of the contest. In the first year, we received 1,100 stories from across the world. Second year 600, third year 1,050. We have judges and reviewers that read and score the stories for how dystopian they are or not, how hopeful they are, how much they have climate solutions. When we have the right mix that feels like an Imagine 2200 story, we pass it along to the judges. But what we found is that, if we’re having a thousand stories submitted, there’s close to a hundred and seventy-five that I would say are really decent stories—we just don’t have the capacity to publish that many. But we found the capacity to publish six over the course of the last year. So if you go to Imagine 2200, you’ll find all the different collections, the editors picks, and we even have some audio stories that we’ve done. We have paid voice actors reading the stories in there.

If you want to stay in touch with Imagine 2200 and get an update on the latest and greatest climate fiction stories that we produce, folks can sign up for the email list. It’s not a newsletter, so you’re not going to get an email once a week, but whenever we have a good story, or the collection is launching, or when we have our call for submissions. Because we now know that this contest is annual, we are accepting submissions during the submission window that will open sometime in March. And it’s open for three months. I always tell people it’s hard to come up with a really great story in three months. So if your passion is writing, or if you want to try your hand at writing, start now. Because we’re definitely going to have the initiative open, and you don’t have to wait until we say Go. You could even work on a story now and workshop it for a whole year and submit it in 2025.

We didn’t really talk about the writers involved in this initiative, which is a really cool aspect of this. I was so focused on what we get out into the world: Is it going to be good? Are people going to like it? Is it going to be cool? Is it going to be exciting? Is it going to help people see that clean, green and just world that we want? Again, I come from the fundraising world. The first year I was running this, I wanted us to talk about policy and publish these “bright spots” reports, all the bright things that are happening across the world related to climate solutions and justice. We want climate fiction—after the visioning session, I came around to being like, Wait, this is brilliant, I love it.

So we’ll be open for three months and you can submit your story. For writers, I often tell people: workshop the story, have a friend read it, have other writers read it, sit on it. If you really want to submit it in the first year, go for it, but take your time and work on it, because ultimately it’s not really about winning the contest, it’s about motivating people to articulate the vision they want for the future that is clean, green, and just. That exercise in itself, to write three to five thousand words on what a beautiful world we could have, where we’re living in harmony with nature and collectively trying to figure out how we do this in a way that repairs relationships between people and nature—that’s such a beautiful goal that should extend beyond Imagine 2200. 

And it does, people are working on that. But I encourage writers to seek out others. Sit at a coffee shop and talk about your story with someone else. What do you like about it? Is my character a Lego person? If they are, how do I make them not a Lego person and more layered and intersectional and more dynamic? The writing part is interesting, because when I first started this, I just thought about: is it going to be cool and are people going to read it? Which is important, but we’ve had 2,800 writers envision what they dream of a beautiful world to be, and I think that in itself has been a really cool endeavor that I just wasn’t focused on when we first started this.

We are now focused on helping writers. We have a partnership with Clarion West, which is a writing workshop for speculative and science fiction that now does climate fiction. When we open up the project this year, we’ll offer that. I think it’s a hundred bucks, maybe a little bit more, but if you want, you can bring your story in there and they’ll help you workshop it, to talk about the strengths and weaknesses and things of that nature.

EA: Tory, is there anything else we didn’t get into that you’d like to add? I have a feeling we can do this semi-regularly, given that it’s a yearly thing. Maybe we’ll have you again next year. We’ll see how we can organize something. We’re a small collective, we do our best, but it’s always fun to collaborate with others. So yeah, if there’s anything you want to add, please feel free. Otherwise, thank you for joining us. This was really fun.

TS: Yeah, this was a lot of fun. I’d love to do it again. You all are great.

DV: Massive gratitude to you, Tory, and gratitude for your work over these years and uplifting all these visions. It’s much, much needed work as well. Thank you.

TS: Thank you.

Elia J. Ayoub

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