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ABSTRACT
Literary scholar Clare Bradford gives voice to a pervasive anxiety that arises when a child audience meets unsettling ecological narratives. She remarks: “to explain to young children that pygmy hippos are under serious threat or that elephants are still being killed for their tusks or that wilderness areas are disappearing is to construct a dangerous and unstable world in which environmentalist values have largely failed to halt ecological problems” (2003, 112). This paper takes a close look at the issue of introducing children to difficult climate knowledge, and pays particular attention to notions of childhood innocence and maturation that tend to get framed within a utopian/dystopian binary (of “protecting/preparing” children for the messy and monstrous world). I take the question of ‘what shall we tell the children?’ as a spur for exploring the limits of this binary and turn to the work of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and the philosophy of new materialism to illuminate other possible pathways. What happens when catastrophe meets whimsy in the work of Studio Ghibli? I don't profess to offer easy answers, but rather reflect upon some of the assumptions embedded in contemporary conversations about suitable knowledge while exploring the role fantasy might play in permitting access to truths that are harder to take in realist modes.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the editors and reviewers of this article for their careful reading and insightful comments.
Notes
1. On September 23, 2009, DECC issued a statement attesting to the “incontrovertible nature of the science that underpins the campaign material, which is founded on basic physics, a vast body of peer-reviewed scientific literature, and an overwhelming consensus of climate science experts.” (See: “DECC/ AMV response to ASA Complaints Re – ACT ON”)
2. As Alice Bell notes in her excellent commentary on the “Bedtime Stories” controversy, the spectre of frightened children can support a host of different arguments: “For example, a recent Unicef report on a poll of UK children, stressed youthful concern about climate change and was tied to pressure on the government to increase coverage of the issue in schools (Carrington, 2013). On the other hand, there is Bjørn Lomborg (2009) chastising campaigners for ‘frightening children with exaggerations’, and claims that young people need to learn abstracted scientific principles not ‘issues’ (Shepherd, 2011)” [Bell, Citation2014, 39–40].
3. (2013, February 15). Scary' UK climate ad faces probe. BBC. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8317998.stm
4. According to the BBC News, “A total of 939 people complained to the ASA about the “Act on CO2” campaign.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8571353.stm
6. Of course, as one reviewer of this article aptly noted, “turning on the lights does constitute an act of destruction and it can be extremely helpful to allow young people to attend to this.” But the point I wish to make here is one of larger context and the danger of staying within a neoliberal green consumerist logic focused on individual as opposed to collective actions.
7. For more on the dilution of agency, see: Greg Garrard's article “The unbearable lightness of green: air travel, climate change and literature.” He addresses a central paradox of ecological responsibility: “human population simultaneously magnifies the cumulative impact of our actions and dilutes my individual agency. The heavier we get, the lighter I become. As Timothy Clark has perceptively observed, nothing I do is insignificant: switching lights off, eating air-freighted green beans…At the same time, everything I do is insignificant, either because of the scale and unpredictability of the global climate system or because of—for shorthand—China” (2013, 185).
10. See: Alice Bell (Citation2014), Sandra Steingraber (Citation2008) and Clare Bradford (Citation2003).
11. The idea that knowledge is an existential necessity in preparing children for the difficult future circulated again in March 2016 when the West Virginia House of Delegates voted to block Next Generation Science Standards that would teach students about human-induced climate change. In response, Ann Reid, executive director of the National Centre for Science Education, responded: “West Virginia's children, like children everywhere, need to learn about the science of climate change since it is they who will have to live in a world that we have been warming.” See: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/02/29/3754731/west-virginia-house-halts-science-standards-over-climate/
12. David Sobel shares this view. In Ecophobia, he argues that as parents and educators we need to foster opportunities for children to connect with nature and care for the earth before we ask them to save it. As he has asked: “What really happens when we lay the weight of the world's environmental problems on eight and nine year-olds already haunted with too many concerns and not enough real contact with nature?” See: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-for-life/803
13. The contours of childhood are constantly being redrawn alongside notions of terrible and comforting literature. These are not stable terms. It is worth considering, for example, shifting attitudes to the fantastically ‘dark’ tales of the Brothers Grimm, which have been variously abridged, sanitized and Disneyfied in the name of protecting contemporary children.
14. While the triggering event may change, “coming of age” in (and through) children's fiction has commonly meant achieving maturity through an experience of mournfulness. Through lessons about the arduousness of life children are seen to make the necessary transition to moral awareness. (This cruel-ameliorative “hard knocks” approach plays out in the domestic sphere as well. Thus, for example, to compel a five-year-old to finish his/her dinner because there are “people starving in the world” is to instruct that child on becoming a grave and contrite global citizen; or to tell a nine-year-old child who has been keening over a minor disappointment about Anne Frank or Hitler is to scold that child into a sense of his/her proper emotional and ontological proportions.)
15. In 1945, Sontag came across photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau while browsing in a bookstore in Santa Monica. “For me,” she wrote in 1977, “it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after…” Coming from an exceptionally sheltered childhood in which she had never seen “any violence at all,” Sontag was left in a state of “tremendous shock” and unease. “What good was served by seeing them?” Sontag writes. “They were only photographs—of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect…When I looked at those photographs something broke” (Sontag, Citation1977).
16. In Centuries of Childhood Philippe Aries argues that a modern culture of childhood began to emerge in the seventeenth century and with it a theory of innocence. Children were to be protected from adult reality. See also: Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children by Viviana Zelizer, which traces the “sacralization” of ‘the child’ in popular literature and culture at the turn of the nineteenth century when children ceased to be common wage-earners in Western industrial society. For Zelizer, “sacralization” involved investing the child (formerly economically useful as a source of labor) “with sentimental or religious meaning” and value (11). But as others have observed, this dubious honor and burden was attributed almost exclusively to very privileged white children and not generally equated with children of color for whom issues of class and race served as a form of desacralization
17. In Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, RobinBernstein explores the racism and Eurocentric values implicit in nineteenth-century American understandings of childhood innocence. To be innocent, she argues, was “to be innocent of something, to achieve obliviousness…obliviousness was not merely an absence of knowledge, but an active state of repelling knowledge—the child's ‘holy ignorance’” (6). Significant for my project is her assertion that a “state of holy obliviousness” to worldly concerns has been central to the construction and preservation of white affluent childhood (7). Whereas knowing or bearing too much is intrinsic to the experience of social oppression borne by children from historically marginalized and impoverished communities. Most poignantly, Bernstein notes that a black child with too much experience can be “dechilded”.
18. Note: Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities (2017) is the first textbook to guide the teaching of climate change in university-level humanities classes. A People's Curriculum for the Earth Teaching about the Environmental Crisis (2014) is an educator's toolkit geared towards school-age children.
19. According a February 2016 report in The Guardian, the average American student spends “only an hour or two in the course of an academic year learning about climate change in middle and high school… Only 38% of American schoolchildren were taught lessons that adhere to the scientific consensus that climate change is largely the result of the burning of fossil fuels …. The lack of teaching and the mixed messages about climate change leave schoolchildren more susceptible to disinformation about climate change spread by political or corporate interests once they enter adulthood, the researchers said. The energy industry has spent millions funding climate denial and supporting Republicans in Congress who deny global warming is occurring.” http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/11/two-thirds-of-us-students-are-taught-climate-change-badly-study-finds Some might argue that the minimal time allotted to climate change in classes should be spent on the more urgent relaying of testable, evidentiary climate science. I reject this as a false choice. I propose throughout my research and writing that climate change requires thinking across the disciplines (from the sciences to the humanities) and that art offers an ethical and aesthetic supplement and a way of protecting a vision of humane science that draws its power from the subtle and sensitive pedagogy of storytelling.
20. See: Goldberg, S. (2016). Two-thirds of US students are taught climate change badly, study finds. The Guardian. 11 February. Retrieved from: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/11/two-thirds-of-us-students-are-taught-climate-change-badly-study-finds
21. Beryl Langer notes: “The fact remains, however, that capitalist childhood at the turn of the 21st century is embedded in an all-encompassing product universe through which children's identity is negotiated in terms of consumer choice. By 1999, global sales of toys alone (including video games) totaled $71 billion – a fraction of children's contribution to corporate profit through the purchase of food, drink, licensed clothing, sneakers, sports equipment, computers, movies and theme park attendance” (2002, 70).
22. Awarded an Honorary Oscar (Lifetime Achievement Award) in 2014, Hayao Miyazaki joined a list of cinematic luminaries including Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, and Satyajit Ray.
23. As Susan Napier writes: “The viewer finds in each film a topography that is exotic… but at the same time so richly realized down to minute details that it seems at least potentially contiguous to our own world” (2005, 122–23).
24. A more nuanced, posthuman new materialist version of this stance can be found in Stacy Alaimo's Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016). Alaimo argues that we need to embrace a roster of polymorphous posthuman pleasures if we wish to address anthropogenic climate change.
25. Storyteller Brenda Peterson reminds us that, “By telling their own animal stories, children are practicing ecology at its most profound and healing level. Story as ecology – it's so simple, something we've forgotten. In our environmental wars, the emphasis has been on saving species, not becoming them” (quoted in Sobel, Citation1998).
26. Challenging boundary categories of the real and unreal, Bernheimer notes that, “In the late 1950's, Italo Calvino named folklore the ‘true’. Ursula Le Guin, whose books have been marginalized as genre fiction, has long named science fiction and fantasy our most ‘plausible’ literature.” See: “A Terrible Twist” http://www.katebernheimer.com/images/A%20Terrible%20Twist.pdf
27. For discussions on the radical uses of negativity in signifying worlds-to-come see: Willful Subjects by Sara Ahmed (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Ordinary Affects by Kathleen Stewart (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Depression: A Public Feeling by Ann Cvetkovich (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); and The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
28. The true genre of the fantastic, according to the literary critic Tzvetan Todorov, “contains works in which the moment of hesitation remains unresolved, leaving the viewer/reader in a state of uncertainty. This is essentially what happens in Totoro, where the fantastic world that the children discover could be either supernatural or an expression of their own imaginations” (Napier, Citation2005, 157).
29. See: Maclear, K. (2016). Pedagogy of an Empty Hand: What are the goods of education? What is teaching good for?” Curriculum Inquiry, 46 (1), 98–109.
30. “Miyazaki's films,” as Dani Cavallaro observes, “bear witness to a keen understanding of animation as the most unfettered and potentially the most creative cinematic form thanks to its knack of transcending the laws of physics and biology, as well as flouting the expectations of logic and mimesis with carnivalesque gusto” (2006, 3).
31. “Miyazaki has stated consistently that while he is drawn to the animation of Walt Disney, he is uncomfortable with Disney's cloyingly artificial, sanitized portrayal of nature” (Shunsuke, Citation2015).
32 “By ‘vitality’”, Jane Bennett explains, “I mean the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans, but also to act as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due” (2010, viiii).
33. See: Miyazaki, H. (Citation2002). “Hayao Miyazaki Interview.” Interview with Roger Ebert.http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/hayao-miyazaki-interview
35. The English version features the voices of Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Cloris Leachman, Liam Neeson, Lily Tomlin, and Betty White among others.
36. One of the most frightening aspects of the film is the grown-up characters' apparent indifference to the disaster going on around them.
37. Paula T. Connolly offers a similar perspective in an article titled “Surviving the Storm: Trauma and Recovery in Children's Books about Natural Disasters.” Discussing literature for children and young adults that depict the devastation of natural disasters, particularly Hurricane Katrina (2005), Connolly addresses the challenge of honoring the scope of an environmental tragedy without overwhelming young readers. She examines three strains of narrative: the animal story (which avoids direct discussion of human trauma, providing an emotional buffer), the eyewitness account (usually verbal/visual testimony from children) and YA fiction. She notes that the “assurance of recovery” is central to many of the stories she discusses and posits that stories play a role in “arming” children with the skills and means to survive catastrophic disaster and possible loss.
38. The ongoing nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan raises significant questions about Japanese forgetting and cultural amnesia, how a society is “readied” and made indifferent to its nuclear past and present through its youth culture, how a younger generation confronts the spectre of ongoing nuclear disaster and the continual fear of future climate-related disaster, and how dominant perceptions of childhood and their subversion have respectively immobilized and mobilized children and youth in Japan. As noted by Geoff Read in The Kyoto Journal (2013): “The twin pillars of childhood in Japan are cuteness—kawaii!—and the spirit to struggle on—gambare! Innocence and determination are protective in many ways, but they can also be limiting, making it difficult for children to express their uncertainty.”
39. “I gave up making a happy ending in the true sense a long time ago. I can go no further than the ending in which the lead character gets over one issue for the time being. Many things will happen after this… I think that's as far as I can go. From the standpoint of a movie maker, it would be easier if I could make a movie in which ‘everybody became happy because they defeated the evil villain.” (Miyazaki quoted in Cavallaro, Citation2006, 6).
40. Miyazaki's ‘media diet’ comment points to a paradox remarked upon by one of the reviewers of this article who notes: “the very act of watching Ponyo requires participating in ecological destruction.” For further reading on the “invisible” violence inscribed by media culture, please see: Jussi Parikka's The Anthrobscene. Parikka refuses to disavow or ignore the material impacts of seemingly ‘immaterial’ digital life, including the mining impacts linked to the computer age. Explaining the neologism “anthrobscene,” he writes: “the addition of the obscene self-explanatory when one starts to consider the unsustainable, politically dubious, and ethically suspicious practices that maintain technological culture and its corporate networks” (2014, Introduction section, para. 13).
41. Japan is an allegory of the limits of preparation. “For centuries, this country has lived with the feeling of constantly having to be prepared for the worst. Everything the Japanese have created over the centuries can be destroyed within seconds. No other country is as highly developed and simultaneously as directly at the mercy of the forces of nature. Miyazaki uses this contradiction repeatedly as a theme in his films” (Beier, Rapp, & Reinhardt, Citation2011).
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Kyo Maclear
Kyo Maclear is novelist, essayist, children's author and a PhD candidate at York University where she holds a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Her current research examines the figure of the child in narratives of environmental collapse. Her most recent book is the hybrid memoir Birds Art Life (Scribner 2017). To learn more about Kyo, visit: kyomaclear.com & kyomaclearkids.com.