Because I am a literary writer, writing about climate justice, people often ask me, What is the importance of the arts in the climate struggle? I turn to Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth century German philosopher. “We have art in order not to die of the truth,” he wrote. So then. What are these lethal truths, the truths that break our hearts, sap our spirits, and turn us to stone? How can art save us in the face of those truths?...
Essentially we have all these really big stories that we try to engage people with, but they’re distant from us perhaps in space and time. We’ve got more pressing things in our lives. It’s very hard to make that sort of stuff stick unless you can connect it to people’s lives and to where people are. So, start from the individual, start from the personal, and look at what are our connections, as individuals and communities, to those bigger picture?...