Shaping the Future Through Climate Fiction With Tory Stephens
This episode features a conversation with Tory Stephens, who manages all things climate fiction at independent, non-profit media organization, Grist. It was recorded in March 2024.
Tory is a force for good. He creates opportunities and interventions that transform organizations and shift culture, building communities around social justice issues and using storytelling to champion green, clean, and just futures.
In his role at Grist, Tory oversees the annual Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest, engaging writers from across the globe in envisioning the next generations of climate progress. Whether built on abundance or adaptation, reform or a new understanding of survival, these stories serve as a springboard for exploring how fiction can help create a better reality.
Amongst other things, Tory and I discussed the ins and outs of the cli-fi genre, how this medium is key to reaching otherwise inaccessible audiences, and how speculative imaginings can inspire change in the here and now.
Additional links:
Visit Grist’s website
Learn more about the Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest
Discover the Imagine 2200 catalogue
Explore Humans of New York
Denzel Washington “It’s not color, it’s culture”
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
Dickon: Hi and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a podcast dedicated to helping you do exactly that. I'm Dickon and I'll be your host as we dig deep into the best practises and the worst offences, always looking for ways to help you and me improve our abilities to engage, empower, and ultimately activate audiences on climate related issues.
This episode features a conversation with Tory Stephens, who manages all things climate fiction over at independent non-profit media organisation, Grist. It was recorded in March 2024.
Tory is a force for good. He creates opportunities and interventions that transform organisations and shift culture, building communities around social justice issues and using storytelling to champion green, clean and justice futures.
In his role at Grist, Tory overseas the annual Imagine 2200 Climate Fiction Contest, engaging writers from across the globe in envisioning the next generations of climate progress, whether built on abundance or adaptation, reform or a new understanding of survival, these stories serve as a springboard for exploring how fiction can help create a better reality.
Amongst other things, Tory and I discussed the insurance and outs of climate fiction, how this medium is key to reaching otherwise inaccessible audiences, and how speculative imaginings can inspire change in the here and now. So, let's get on with it. This is Communicating Climate Change with Tory Stephens.
From your perspective, how can communication best contribute in humanity's response to the climate crisis?
Tory: For me, this is about reaching people where they're at. And one way that we can do that is through the different mediums that we have out there, and there's so many of them right now, and that's a little bit of the problem, but that's also a big part of the solution. There's tools that we've never had before, that individuals can take into their own hands. There's not like a gatekeeper, like in the past, you had a few media outlets, and now it's been fragmented into these thousands of pieces. So, for climate communication, I think we need a thousand flowers to bloom, maybe even a million of them. Right? And so there's a million, all the different people who want to bring a story, a fact, or some information to the medium that they work on or in, and talk about this crisis from a variety of angles and perspectives.
The project I manage, Imagine 2200, climate fiction for future ancestors, does that from a particular angle or particular type of story. And so we do climate fiction, we kind of narrow down this type of climate fiction we want, which is hopeful, culturally authentic, intersectional and layered characters, and all those things, plus the medium, is a way for us to get to a particular audience.
The organisation I work with, Grist, covers the news side of things. They're beholden to the new cycle and like big events, and they're doing investigative reports, which is great, and their climate communication assists in this whole dialogue that we all need to be having. Grist is like a hopeful news organisation, so we lead with hope, we lead with climate solutions, we lead with justice.
But sometimes there's folks who care about the climate and consume a lot of news, but then they also, like me, like a good fiction book or a good fictional story. But there's a lot of people that we connect with who get their orientation from climate fiction. And those folks often talk about how they don't really like the news. They call it negative. They say that it's divisive, that it's ideologically driven, you know, they just have a host of metaphors to describe why they don't like the news and why they love fiction.
And so this is what the project I manage provides. It provides a place for those people to tap into the discussion. But just from another angle. So, they can bring that story to their dinner table, or as they're moving through the world. For me, it's all about the dialogue and the discussion that we as humans need to have in this moment. In whatever avenue helps facilitate that, from a media standpoint, is something I'm interested in.
Dickon: We're all familiar with the sci-fi genre, but could you give a little introduction to cli-fi, or climate fiction, and clarify that for any listeners who might not be so familiar with this concept?
Tory: Yeah, for sure. So, climate fiction, you know, is an offshoot of, I would say, speculative fiction and science fiction. And so it's doing some of the similar things that those genres are doing, just the lens that it's looking at, and what it's focused on, is how we humans are gonna live in a world that is changed by the climate.
You know, I think for your listeners, they're on board and understand that we're in a climate crisis. There's people who want to talk about that. There's people who want to explore the future of that. There's people who want to explore the present. There's people who want to explore the feelings that are involved with what we're going through. There's a lot of climate anxiety. So all those things authors, writers bring together the elements of the global story that is impacting us because of the fossil fuels that we're burning, that is changing and adding carbon to our climate in causing it to get warmer, weirder and having these weather events plus, plus, plus.
And so there's eco-fiction that's out there. Eco-fiction might be about like a river or a forest, and it doesn't bring in that element of that. The climate is changing the situation there, but it's about things that we care about. The environment. Might even be about a fox and how she is moving through life. And you know, that sort of thing. It's a lovely story, but if it doesn't bring in that element that talks about how we're living in this Anthropocene, a changed world, because of our human activity, then it's an environmental fiction story, but it's not a climate fiction story. So there's that element that it has to have that total, you know, calamity that is happening because of our footprint, our global footprint and the things that we've done: cars and industry and everything that's causing us to live in this warming world.
And then the other piece is there's this element of, just like Star Trek and other stories provide a way to think about how we're going to live in those moments, or live through those moments, you know, there might be widgets or ways of being with each other as humans that aren't being depicted out there, so they want to dream about like, “Well, when this world changes, what are the buildings we're going to live in? What do they look like? Do they float on water? Do they have stilts? Do they move?”
We had this amazing visioning session that helped us figure out what kind of climate fiction we wanted to cover at Grist. And when we did that, we had these scribes that were kind of drawing some of the ideas that people were generating in our visioning, and one person was like, “Well, what if we have bubble homes that walked on land and you could be by the ocean, but then if you knew that there was going to be a swell, that bubble home kind of walks inland or something”, you know, so I I bring that up because that creativity, that imagination, that exploration that humans do so well, needs to be done in the pages of climate fiction and speculative fiction, that sci-fi part of it, where you can dream and add some futurism and some science. Sometimes hard science and sometimes the really silly kind of out of this world speculative sci-fi-ness shows up and I think that stuff is helpful and it's going to be necessary for us to figure out what are the possible ways out of this. You know? Or what are the possible things that we could develop and explore the stories that we're producing are helpful.
Dickon: What inspired Grist to launch the Imagine 2200 cli-fi contest, and what does it hope to achieve?
Tory: There's a gentleman who founded Grist, his name is Chip Geller. Chip had been noodling on the idea of bringing climate fiction to Grist. He understood the idea that I was talking about earlier, that, you know, you can't reach everyone through the news and facts and figures only go so far. They're super helpful. I'm not discounting those in any way. There’s just this emotional side of things and that dreaming side of things that exploring of the future side of things that he thought climate fiction would be the right tool to kind of bring to Grist.
We want to be at the beginning of the conversation at the end and in the middle around climate, and we feel like we're missing some pieces. And one of the pieces was, you know, literary folk talk a lot. There's a lot of these festivals for books and stories and what not. And there's a lot of conversations and really cool places like New York and LA and everywhere else in between, there's just conversations that we're not a part of and we knew we wanted to expand and that it made the most sense because there's people hungry for a climate conversation, but they just don't love getting their orientation from news because news is focused on facts and figures. Some folks just really want to, like, discuss a good book but keep it on the topic that they care about most, which is the climate.
And so that's a big reason as to why we got into this, is so that we can talk to others about the climate. It opens other doors that Grist wasn't in. I like being in those spaces and talking about the climate. But talking about it from a non-news perspective.
Dickon: Some listeners might be wondering, why 2200?
Tory: It’s actually wrapped up in my own personal story of how I got to Grist. So, I before, have been a storyteller in the healthcare advocacy space for many years. And so many of the things that I was doing was writing these appeals, the things that you get in the mail that say, like “Brenda is having a hard time feeding her family. Could you please support her with a $25.00 gift,” or whatever.
One of the blogs that changed my life is Humans of New York. It’s this guy that interviews a new person every day from New York, and it just exploded and went viral, and now he has like a book. And this is, I'm talking 15 years ago, so things were different then. But the argument I was trying to make then is the same one I'm trying to make now with climate fiction. The argument I was trying to make with my bosses and people who were wanting a particular type of appeal, that's the letters that you get in the mail, that's what they're called, appeals. They wanted ones that led with statistics and facts and figures like, “We were able to give out 25,000 condoms,” I worked at a organisation that worked with HIV and AIDS, “we were able to test this many people for HIV and AIDS.” Or, “We were able to help people with distributing Narcan,” so that when there’s drug overdoses, that people don’t die. And so things of that nature, an update for the person that got the appeal.
I saw the value of Humans of New York and how much it was exploding. I loved reading the stories about some, like the people are just random. I think Freud said this, “When you get someone on a couch and you really start to ask them questions, they are interesting and dynamic and layered,” you know? And so why don't we do that for fundraising?
My case was to shift from statistics to a more human-centric story that is emotional and lo and behold when we put out those kind of stories, we actually started to get an uptick in the donation amount. That’s different than new donors. But if you can get old donors to give 40 bucks instead of 25 bucks because they really care about Brenda doing better. Great!
So, that sort of lesson I took to climate fiction. All the numbers you talk about, like migrants, or if you talk about the fires and how many people's homes were lost, if you don't humanise that story, it's just a number. 100,000 people are under a heat dome… I just want to know, like, what one persons experience is like?
You know, “I'm sweating in my living room at the A/C broke because the electric load of the utility was too high. They had to shut it down. And so now I'm living in my home with my small child.” And on and on and on. The people who write climate fiction can do that.
The reason we focused on the far future is because that's what indigenous folks do. Basically, they look out and you have to be a good steward. Not for just now, but for 8 generations from now. That's how you are a good human right now, is that you care and you pass on a planet, a space, a ecosystem to your ancestors and you're thinking about them in what you do now. If we all operated in that way, whoa! We'd be doing completely different things. We'd be living in a completely different way. So what we do is we flip it on its head. We think about that. And that important role, you know, and what it can do and we present a goal. Our call for submissions presents the goal. We want a clean, green and just future by 2200. Right? We do that because we want the writers to figure out what's that space in between look like? And use that imagination to play in that space. And here's the beautiful thing about doing that, is by playing in the futurism, you don't have to wait for 2200 to happen for you to apply these lessons.
Some of the technological advancements that might come up in the story, yeah, we don't have those. So you may have to wait some time, but not all the things that come up in these stories are technological. Some of them are just like, how do we live and work and play with each other in the future, in a way that is better than now? In a way that is focused on care work and less harm happening between each other. And those are a few reasons why we're focused on 2200.
If we did 2030, it wouldn't be long enough for this to kind of happen. Imagine 2200 is interested in publishing fiction, but the big driver of our programme is that we have a contest that is annual, global - so we get stories from 90+ countries - We focus on marginalised folks that are not often seen in climate fiction. So, I often get people telling me or saying, “I have never seen a character that was trans in a climate fiction story”, or “I hadn't seen a Caribbean character in so long”, you know, so we do that kind of thing, and we're getting about 1000 stories a year. Which is quite significant.
So, over the course of three years, we have about 3000 stories and we we only published the 12 that we feel fit the prompt that we put out into the world around that we want that clean green just world that has culturally authentic stories, intersectional characters, and is blooming with like climate solutions and hope.
Dickon: How does climate fiction serve as a tool for communicating the complexity of climate change? And how can it inspire us to create a better reality starting from today? You kind of hinted at how it can give us some ideas that we can already start today. But how can it inspire in that way?
Tory: This complexity piece is a little bit tough in the venue that I'm in, short stories is tough. For our project you get 3000 to 5000 words. So, you really have to narrow your goals.
Let's talk about climate fiction in general, though. So you have Kim Stanley Robinson's book that I think is doing a lot of things, right? Ministry for the Future is the one that I'm referencing. He's dealing with the complexity that is the global issue that we're dealing with. The world is still there. There is a changed world, but it's not an apocalypse. What I like, and I'm sticking with him because he really does a complexity piece well, is he brings in finance, like that, even our financial system is going to have to change in a significant way. And he shows that and gives time to that. That is one of our superpowers, is the ability to communicate by using story and for others to kind of be like, “oh, I get what you're talking about really quickly” and “oh, I see how that could be useful.” I think that storytellers are great with complexity and climate fiction is just another way for us to be great storytellers.
I don't want to sell short what we're doing. The example I use with Kim Simly Robinson, he's putting in like 500 pages. With us, we only have 3000 to 5000 words, so people have to be really efficient with their language and what their scope is. And yet we've seen it, you know, folks delivering really beautiful stories that connect on an emotional level, deliver climate solutions, offer that vision of hope, and are culturally authentic.
The stories in themselves and the solutions, and I keep going to Star Trek, it's on my mind today, there's technology sometimes - I'm not a Trekkie, so I don't know all the terms - the phone that they had or whatever they called it, it predated any kind of like idea of a cell phone or maybe others were working on it, but to help popularise the idea that maybe in the future we'll be talking with these handsets that don't need a landline.
So, I often wonder, what are the things that are being generated in climate fiction that are going to show up in real life that are going to actually help us with the climate crisis? My advocacy work that I do in this role is a lot about getting more people to generate ideas and to get those into popular culture so that a scientist or someone like an engineer sees that and goes “oh, I didn't think of that, but I think I know how to do that.” We need to be discussing, "How we get out of this climate crisis?” We definitely need to talk about the problems, in the current catastrophe, but we need so much more brain power focused on the solutions.
I think that we are capable of almost anything when we put our mind to it, especially when it's like collective and it's generative and like we're doing it for the right reasons. Let's do that. Let's have that experiment. What's the worst that happens? We don't make it? We have to do this.
So, we really want more discussions around climate solutions, hope, getting to a clean green, beautiful and just world. And those those ideas live in the minds of people right now. I think all those things that are playing in the future can inspire a person now to work towards that future.
Dickon: What do you see as the unique role of storytelling in engaging people emotionally and intellectually with climate issues compared to, say, traditional journalism, the news, or scientific communication?
Tory: Right, so I went to Aspen Ideas and there were panel discussions of all sorts. And one of them was around climate fiction. And the piece around emotion, you know, there's a lot of people who have a lot of feelings around climate right now. Imagine if there was no medium to be seen, you know, and feel like there's no me out there that is experiencing these kind of human emotions. But there are. There's tonnes of you and you and you out there that are experiencing these emotions and actually almost everyone on stage said it was about them having these feelings and not having a place to put them.
They write books and put themselves into the character, then they have had feedback that people see themselves and they feel seen and feeling seen helps them ease some of that climate anxiety that they might be having. That's a necessary part of the climate fiction piece. That's that's a part of what climate fiction is doing that news will never do. Or rarely do. There's times where you get these human interest stories in the news that are, like, really about again, I'll use Brenda 'cause that's my fictitious person, but it'll hone in on a particular person's experience, or community’s experience, and tell that story not from a facts and figures place. And I think that's when the news does this well,
I mean, I think the facts and figure stuff is super important and they need it. But just as this kind of storytelling piece around climate, we had a story at Grist around sugarcane production in Florida and how they had to shut down a high school because of burning the cane. There's high asthma in the community already like so they just shut school down, right? And so seeing the depiction in a humanised way in the emotions of those children and the impact on them, not just like, “Oh, 500 children a year…” You know, as a statistic and a figure. It builds it out in your mind as a story that you can communicate and tell to someone. It's easy to pass on. It's easy to understand, the impact the people involved, what they look like, what they're feeling. That emotional piece is huge.
That's why I think it's funny about sci-fi is sometimes, like, there's these very core elements of who we are as humans that don't show up. Some of the climate fiction that I was reading to kind of get up to speed on this, you know, there were some depictions where the world building was amazing, but the characters felt flat. They were definitely not intersectional. Where my queer folks that I care about? Where are, you know, my indigenous and black and brown folks? It was kind of flat. And so the emotion piece is huge. The depictions of people that are similar to what is in your community is huge.
That's another reason we want to advocate for more of these stories to come up. Kiese Laymon, who is a really brilliant writer out of Mississippi, was one of the judges for the first year of Imagine. I followed him before he was a judge and was just following him as a voice, you know, on Twitter, and who talked about literary things and black identity and living in the Deep South of America.
There was a movement some black folks on Black Twitter created “Publishing Paid Me”, and it was powerful. The idea of the movement was to show your receipts. Black and white. You got a book deal, show your receipts. And when people were showing the receipts, what white folks got versus what black folks got or brown folks or indigenous folks, it was like 10 times less. Sold units, sometimes were not even close. Kiese has books that were, you know, 150,000 or 200,000 units, yet you know, he sold it for like $9000 because there was no way the industry was gonna pay him more.
And so I bring this all up because that disparity that you see, how many white authors are getting published versus black authors means that there has been a lack of depictions of black and brown and indigenous and developing world folks as climate heroes or having climate anxiety and being depicted in these stories, yet at the same time, we know that frontline communities, like where Kiese is from, you know, Mississippi and down in Louisiana, our frontline communities, where the people who are going to be feeling that impact, are black and brown and indigenous and they are on the front lines.
Their stories, those stories of hardship and harrowing nights and hurricanes where you can't leave them because you just don't have the dollars to get a car, Katrina, basically in a snapshot, they're not getting to market.
I want climate fiction that is diverse and has diverse perspectives. Because I think, for one, the emotional piece, the other piece which is like that, folks can see themselves, and then third piece that a lot of people don't talk about is that, I think they have different solutions than John who lives in his nice home living on the Hudson two hours from New York.
And I'm not discounting that John doesn't have something to offer. What I'm saying is that there's a whole host of stories and voices and ideas that we need to bring into the fold, publish, inspect, have literary discussions. There's like an ecosystem that all this comes with when you publish a book. It's not just a story that comes out, it's the discussion and the aftermarket effects.
Folks get to know that there's like black climate heroes or black folks that care about the climate that went through these things and the stories that they're telling are quite different and very culturally authentic.
I saw Denzel Washington, an actor here in the United States and has done a tonne of movies and really brilliant actors. And someone was like, “Is it colour that matters?” and he was like, “Sure people's colour matters, because their culture matters.” And he was talking about like a hot comb. Black folk used to perm their hair. And if you put too much lye or if you get the comb too hot, you might burn your head. That was an experience that a lot of black folk from a particular era. And even if you didn't grow up in that area, you've heard stories of someone trying to straighten their hair. And, you know, we need authenticity or that cultural realness that it would be quite hard for someone from Thailand or, you know, a white person who hasn't had that experience could kind of bring into the story.
And to me, that's what makes the world interesting, is that we're all different. I don't want a homogenised similar communities just like me that talks like me and sounds just like me.
Dickon: For listeners who are hearing about this body of work for the first time and are excited, like I am, to get stuck into it, where would you direct them to start their journey, both online or in physical book form? You know, both from the Imagine 2200 collection and elsewhere in your readings.
Tory: Grist is a media organisation, an independent nonprofit media organisation, that's been around for 25 years. This is our 25th year. We were the first folks to be like a single site news organisation that was focused on the climate. You can go to our site right now, consume as much content as you want. There's no pop up thing that's going to say, “You've hit five articles,” like no, you can read them all, and they're there and they're free and it's great. And we put out new stuff every day. So, you know, if you care about the climate. Check out Grist.org and then also Imagine 2200.
We get 1000 stories. So we're sitting on a lot of actually good stories, but we just don't have the money to publish them. The first 12 end up in the collection and anything above 12/13/14 and so on, they don't end up in the collection, but we think they're cool stories. We know they're cool stories, we have reviewers review them. We've had judges who, you know, thought they were great, but just not the best ones. And so we've been publishing those. So you'll find those on the about Imagine 2200 page and, you know, I'll turn over to the books and I say books because we have another one coming in the fall.
So the first book we published is called “Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors.” It's basically the first collection that we have online that you can read it online for free at Imagine 2200. But the book is quite nice because you can dog ear it and everything that makes a book great. The first book is the first collection of stories from the first year, the second book that's coming out, Metamorphosis, that book's coming out this coming fall 2024 in October, late October. And that will be a curated collection of stories from years two and three.
All these stories, if you want, you can go to imagine 2200 about and you can find them all. There's about 40 something stories there that we've published over three years. Some of the stories that we’ve produced in the past, we've hired voice actors. So, if you want to just pop in your headphones and take the stories with you. You could just listen to them. And we try to be really culturally sensitive. So, if it's like a story from Africa we hired, you know, someone who kind of can get that vernacular and accent right.
Dickon: What's the single most important aspect of communication that we should be paying attention to in our communications endeavours?
Tory: I would say make it exciting. Say you're a scientist that has to present data, make it exciting. Figure out how to make that happen. Figure out how to make it work for people who are not in your field too. I think that's super important. How do you make it exciting for people that don't find that sort of thing exciting? One of your biggest questions shouldn't just be about how you find this data and present it, but make it exciting. Make it fun. It's not just about the data, it's about the exciting story that you're telling.
Dickon: What's the biggest mistake that you see communicators make when attempting to engage the public on climate change? Issues.
Tory: Again, it’s just the mantra, leading with statistics and not leading with the human emotions in mind, right? I really do think that people care about humans more than they care about statistics. You know, they care about that top line number, but then humanise that top line number, right? They care about that wildfire, now humanise it. Make me smell it. Feel it, taste it. Pull me there and then bring in some people that are experiencing that and really show the human side of that data. It will go further, faster. It will be a more durable piece of media.
Dickon: It was a trip talking to Tory for this episode, but what in particular stuck with you from our conversation? What will you take from it and apply to your own work?
For me, it really boils down to the visioning that climate fiction can offer when it comes to not only the technological solutions associated with current and future needs, but in portraying future societies that exhibit values, equity and levels of representation that are all too rare in the present day. If I've learned anything from talking to previous guests like Marcus Appel, Josephine Latu Sanft, and others, it's that these types of stories can inform our world views and shape reality today. The words, the scenarios, the characters - they matter - and they have an effect on us, whether we like it or not.
So that's what I'll be taking with me. But how about you? What did you hear? What will you be incorporating into your communications endeavours?
Thanks to Tory Stephens for sharing his time and energy with the show, it was great. You can find some links to relevant resources in the show notes. Thanks also to you for listening to Communicating Climate Change. If you enjoyed this episode, why not leave it a rating or a review? You can find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts or by subscribing so you never miss out. You can find Communicating Climate Change on LinkedIn too, and if you think the series would be of interest to friends or colleagues, why not point them in the right direction. Remember each and every episode attempts to add to our toolkits to help us develop the creativity and the imagination that we'll need for this epic task. So be sure to stay tuned for more for anything else, just head over to communicatingclimatechange.com. Until next time, take care.
