Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Novels and stories:

• 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.”
• Stephen Markley, The Deluge: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2023): “Confronts the Scale and Gravity of Climate Change”.
• Alexa Hyde, The Last Catastrophe: Stories (Vintage, 2023): “Each story confronts the climate crisis by way of characters who are attempting to either accept or flee from the consequences of human destruction. Neither path, of course, will save them.”
• C. Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2023): “A couple of summers ago, as I drove through Oregon amid a record heat wave across the Pacific Northwest, I pulled over at a trailhead to eat a plum. Wildfires were burning, temperatures hovered around 100 degrees and the pine forest in front of me had been rendered ghostly, the edges of everything lost and faintly browned by smoke. It was a shock, then, to bite into the fruit and taste its disruptive sweetness, how fresh and pure it was in spite of the surroundings. It was the sort of thing that tears the mind and body in opposite directions — and as we face down a moment increasingly dominated by environmental crisis, this may be the ambivalent flavor of our future: sweet and bitter and full of contradiction.”

Poetry

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Small Island, Big Song is a group of musicians from sixteen island nations of the Pacific and Indian oceans. They focus on preserving nature for everyone.

• “Senasenai a Mupaljat” (small island mix) (2018) (74’)
• “Our Island” (2022) (68’) 

Compositions:

• Neil Rolnick, “Oceans Eat Cities” (2015) (approx. 16-17’), about global warming
• Gregory Spears, “The Tower and the Garden” (2018) (approx. 35’), a “four-movement setting of poems by Keith Garebian, Denise Levertov and Thomas Merton exploring religion, technology and conservation”
• Martin Bresnick, String Quartet No. 4, “The Planet on the Table” (2019) (approx. 32’) is “inspired—instigated is perhaps a better word—by the poetry of Wallace Stevens”; along the same lines is Bresnick’s “Bird As Prophet” (1999) (approx. 13’).
• Steven Stucky, “Silent Spring” (2011) (approx. 17’) is inspired by Rachel Carson’s book.
• John Luther Adams, Inuksuit (2009) (approx. 60’) “is inspired by the stone sentinels constructed over the centuries by the Inuit in the windswept expanses of the Arctic. The word ‘Inuksuit’ translates literally: ‘to act in the capacity of the human’. This work is haunted by the vision of the melting of the polar ice, the rising of the seas, and what may remain of humanity's presence after the waters recede.” [Adams]
• Ross Edwards, Symphony No. 3, “Mater Magna” (2001) (approx. 24’): Edwards describes the work as “a meditation on the need for ecological re-balancing, using as a symbol, the Earth Mother, ‘Mater Magna’, the vital female force in nature. It is about healing and ultimately achieving wholeness.”
• Brian Field, Three Passions for our Tortured Planet (2021) (approx. 12-13’): the three passions, all related to climate change, are fire (wildfires destroying forests), glaciers (melting), and winds (of increasing intensity, such as hurricanes and typhoons).
• Christopher Cerrone, Beaufort Scales (2022) (approx. 35’) was inspired by the composer’s experience with a wildfire, who explains: “Although wildfires are a natural occurrence, they have unfortunately become a frequent, annual occurrence . . . because of climate change. I knew after that experience that I had to find a way to artistically document this experience.”
• Stacy Garrop, Terra Nostra (2015) (approx. 66’) “. . . explores the relationship between humanity and Earth, and how humankind can re-establish a harmonious balance.” Here are the composer’s program notes.
• Jake Runestad, Earth Symphony (2021) (approx. 32-35’)  (text & score): “The work imagines Earth’s hope for humanity, her discovery of its power, her ruination at its hands, her lament at its loss, and her recovery. By anthropomorphizing Earth herself, ‘Earth Symphony’ enables entry into our own ecological shame, guilt, responsibility, potential, and redemption, all from a wide-angled, time-telescoped lens, thereby asking our most immediately pressing environmental questions in an entirely new way.”

Albums:

• Bruce Wolosoff has composed works for cello and piano, which he presents on the album “Paradise Found” (2022) (56’), with cellist Sara Sant’Ambrogio. The main works are Cello Sonata No. 1, “Paradise Found” (approx. 23’), evoking the experience of witnessing nature in its splendid beauty; the second is Cello Sonata No. 2, “Requiem for the Planet” (approx. 21’).
• Yolanda Kondonassis describes her solo harp album, “Five Minutes for Earth” (2022) (80’), as “a project that both celebrates our planet and illuminates the challenge to preserve it. In 2020, I asked each of the composers featured in this collection if they would consider contributing a work for solo harp of approximately five minutes in length that expresses a powerful experience inspired by Earth in one of its many conditions or atmospheres.”
• Renée Fleming, “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene” (2021) (63’): “ . . . Fleming reflects on the climate crisis, and the urgent threat to the natural world, and, implicitly, to our existence.” [Neil Fisher, Gramophone magazine, November 2021 issue, p. 77.]
• Ros Bandt, “Medusa Dreaming” (2021) (57’), “a site-specific water symphony”, presents “a sonic archaeology of the site and a desperate plea for international water care in the time of global collapse”.
• Iro Haarla Electric Ensemble, “What We Will Leave Behind” (2021) (54’)
• Kaleiido, “Elements” (2022) (46’): in four parts – sky, land, ocean and ember – like a prayer for Earth
• Sushma Soma, “Home” (2022) (35’), with tracks about consumerism and elephant hunting
• Yarn/Wire, “Little Jimmy” (2022) (47’): the album contains three compositions by Andrew McIntosh. “Little Jimmy incorporates field recordings of a wilderness that has since been decimated by wildfire, creating a unique autobiographical and climatological context for the piece while unintentionally archiving a natural setting that no longer exists. The sonic landscapes of the forest, mountains, wind, and birds are echoed by Yarn/Wire’s soundscape of piano and percussion, inviting meditative reflections about humans and nature that both connect and contrast the two worlds.”
• Christopher Tin, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra & Voces8, “The Lost Birds: An Extinction Elegy” (2022) (46’) is a mournful tribute to species made extinct. In the liner notes to the album, Tin writes: “It’s a celebration of their beauty—as symbols of hope, peace, and renewal. But it also mourns their absence—through the lonely branches of a tree, or the fading echoes of distant bird cries.”
• Allison Miller, “Rivers in Our Veins” (2023) (67’): “. . . the album is a 12-song cycle inspired by the many rivers and watersheds of the United States, as well as the organizations devoted to protecting those vital resources.”
• Sam Lee, “songdreaming” (2024) (48’) “is in essence a record about country walks and the mystical power of landscape suffused with a deep belief that music might begin the process of healing the planet at a time of ecological apocalypse.”
• Jake Blount & Mali Obomsawin, “symbiont” (2024) (37’) confronts “the threat posed by climate change and social injustice by combining source material ranging from shape-note hymns, traditional spirituals, slave songs and First Nations’ anthems to sequenced beats, synthesized drones, fuzzy electric guitars and gourd banjos.”

Music: songs and other short pieces

• Nawang Khechog, “Caring for Our Mother Nature”
• Michael Jackson, “Earth Song” (lyrics)
• Sting, “Fragile” (lyrics)

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.