Climate fiction

Step 1 – Carbon Diaries

  • Summarize the first 3 months of Carbon Diaries, both at individual levels (Laura, her family, her friends and neighbours) and institutional levels (country, regulation, city, etc.)
  • Sources: Lloyd (2008) Carbon Diaries

Step 2 – The Ministry for the Future

  • Read the first 20 chapters of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.
  • What triggered the creation of the Ministry for the Future? Emphasize the climate crisis and political turmoil that preceded its creation.
  • What is its status and legal foundation? How does it operate?
  • What are the first challenges it faces?

Final integration

  • What are the potential futures imagined in science fiction in terms of climate change and humanity’s strategies to adapt? Gather all the quotes in the chapters related to practices of counting, accounting and accountability:
    • Counting: What is counted exactly in these novels? What counts (in the sense of being important and relevant)? What are the units of measurement and the tools/techniques used to count?
    • Accounting: Which systems that are using these counting and measurements? Which authorities and stakeholders are involved in them? Who controls and audits if the counting and measures are accurate?
    • Accountability: How are stakeholders judged based on these practices of counting and accounting? How is one considered responsible or guilty? What are the consequences?
  • Sources:
    • Lloyd (2008) Carbon Diaries, Chapters “January”, “February”, and “March”
    • Robinson (2020) The Ministry for the Future, Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 15, 16, 20
    • Callenbach (1975) Ecotopia, Introduction and Chapters “William Weston on his journey to Ecotopia”,  “Crossing the ecotopian border”, “The streets of ecotopia’s capital”, “Food, sewage and stable states”, “In Ecotopia’s big woods”, and “Workers’ control, taxes and jobs in Ecotopia”

Step 3 – Unpacking accounting