Collective Narration and the Politicization of Climate Distress

Engineering notes

Key topics: autonomous driving. See the paper for implementation details and experimental results.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为端到端自动驾驶、BEV感知、3D目标检测、轨迹预测、路径规划、LiDAR感知等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

A few pages into Lydia Millet’s 2020 novel A Children’s Bible, the narrator Evie, a teenage girl spending the summer in a spacious rented house with her parents, her younger brother, and several other families, finds herself confronting, in deeply personal terms, the end of the world as she knows it—“[t]he familiar world, anyway” (27). Such experiences of ecological precarity and intergenerational political failure, experienced by young people confronting the climate crisis, have become a driving force behind the global youth climate movement, fueled by a profound sense of indignation and urgent anger. A particularly striking example comes from Greta Thunberg’s speech at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit, which reveals the “moral outrage” (Antadze) of an entire generation: This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! Her final exclamation—“How dare you?”—functions as a direct political accusation, transforming personal fear and grief into a collective ethical claim and holding those in power accountable for the futures they have jeopardized. Moral outrage, as Nino Antadze notes, is a justified emotional response to climate injustice that has the potential to foster “collective political action” (24). Unlike self-focused anger, it is directed toward identifiable targets: political agents, policies, or systemic structures responsible for inequality and harm. In this sense, the indignation expressed by young activists illustrates how climate anxiety can take on a collective, politically charged dimension. Against this affective and political backdrop, this article examines how contemporary climate fiction1 mobilizes narrative form to transform climate distress from a private psychological condition into a socially and politically legible experience tied to questions of justice, inequality, and collective responsibility. Focusing on Millet’s A Children’s Bible and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021), I argue that this shift is mediated through a set of formal strategies that foreground the relationship between individual affect and collective consciousness. Both novels function as climate Bildungsroman (Mahajan), tracing the moral and emotional development of young protagonists confronting intertwined ecological, social, and political crises. They also mobilize a set of narrative strategies that, drawing on econarratological insights—the critical intersection of narratology and the environmental humanities (James)—mediate the shift from individual experiences of climate distress to a collective understanding attentive to systemic injustice.2 Child focalization (Caracciolo) reorients climate affect away from nostalgic attachment to a stable past and toward forms of engagement attentive to present conditions and future survival, while collective narration—particularly the inconstant we-narrator theorized by Erin James—negotiates the boundaries between individual and collective subjectivity, rendering climate distress socially and politically intelligible. While A Children’s Bible foregrounds the emergence of a shared generational climate affect among privileged adolescents in the Global North, How Beautiful We Were mobilizes collective narration to expose the uneven distribution of environmental harm within a postcolonial context and to articulate forms of collective resistance. To further clarify how climate distress becomes available for political interpretation in these novels, the following section situates this argument within recent debates on the post-political dimensions of climate change (Swyngedouw) and on the collective and relational nature of climate affect. Drawing on the work of Louise Knops and Blanche Verlie, it examines how emotions such as grief, anxiety, and indignation can function not merely as individualized psychological responses but also as forms of collective political consciousness. Erik Swyngedouw’s notion of the post-political frames environmental crises as technocratic and ostensibly apolitical. The deeper political stakes—such as the unequal distribution of resources and responsibilities—are obscured, while individuals are tasked with managing their own contributions to the crisis. Systemic inequalities remain largely unchallenged, and apocalyptic narratives or fear-driven imaginaries further displace social conflict. In this way, climate change is often treated as a problem solvable through personal adjustment and technological fixes, rather than as a site for collective engagement with injustice. Yet, as Knops argues, emotions and affective experiences can serve as a counterforce to these depoliticizing tendencies. By attending to the temporal dimensions of climate activism, she claims that the grief, anticipatory nostalgia, and moral indignation expressed by young participants in movements such as Fridays for Future can “politicize time in a fundamental way” (208). Drawing on Swyngedouw’s more recent work, Knops suggests that the visible outbursts of political discontent and intense outrage in contemporary climate movements—what Swyngedouw describes as “boiling rancor” (Promises of the Political xvi)—signal emerging forms of politicization. These affective expressions, directed at futures “imagined as lost, stolen, or sold” (Knops 208), show how emotions can transform environmental concern into collective political action.3 From mourning for a future Earth that may never exist to attachments to the planet as a living collective and a determined resolve to defend the spaces we inhabit (often expressed through slogans such as “There is no planet B”), these affects open a critical political horizon in which the consequences of past decisions and ongoing systemic failures can be examined, while refusing to “lament Eden or demand to return to a past imagined as golden, stable, or pristine” (209). Recent scholarship in affect theories has begun to examine more explicitly how climate distress is shaped by questions of justice. In her recent “Feeling Climate Injustice,” Verlie outlines the political and structural dimensions of climate distress, explicitly seeking to “bring theories of climate justice to bear on the issue of climate distress” (1614). Verlie argues that climate distress4 has largely been treated within the psychological sciences as forms of individual mental vulnerability, rather than within the social sciences as political experiences of systemic injustice. As a result, approaches that frame climate distress primarily as an individual psychological condition risk “depoliticising, individualising and pathologizing people’s emotional experiences of climate change” (1602), thereby obscuring their structural causes. Verlie further contends that the subject of climate distress is not the individual human psyche but the “relational webs of climatic beings” (1605) within which humans, ecosystems, and more-than-human lives are entangled. Given that the impacts of climate change are themselves “unevenly and unfairly distributed” (1602), climate distress must likewise be as experienced and This for approaches that for uneven and with political and economic While of climate of the of climate political by it as an issue of intergenerational injustice young this is and to for the and inequalities experiences climate distress” the in climate anxiety is in that social people of and and This a is at they experience climate privileged in the Global North, Verlie suggests that it may grief for the of privileged of of by and In this sense, climate anxiety while how it with the more and structural and In response to these Verlie a on anxiety and grief to climate as a affective Climate distress not or mourning but also anger, and by she as climate through and the structural of to this is of which describes how and emotional responses to climate change by and distress as or To climate injustice such and the emotional by affective climate while forms of collective engagement through which these emotions can be expressed and into for political The following examine how contemporary climate this and legible through formal This article a site of in contemporary climate that foregrounds intergenerational and young protagonists environmental crises and the social and political from The novels intergenerational climate distress within the of the climate Bildungsroman while formal such as focalization and collective to the shift from individualized experiences of climate distress to collective and politically forms of climate within a of A Children’s Bible in 2020 and Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were in with as they in Millet’s novel is set in the Mbue’s in a the A Children’s Bible intergenerational the of an environmental crisis. The novel is by Evie, a young girl spending the summer in a rented house with her and several other the of the the their from by attending a on their and a that the house and the By the and her have and a of to the world How Beautiful We Were intergenerational as the social and environmental consequences of and The novel on the young of a the ecological by the the and and the survival, while power and the and As the by political and the structures that have their I novels within the emerging of the climate which the of the to the context of ecological crisis. As the climate Bildungsroman the and often political development of young protagonists confronting The Bildungsroman on the of the a profound following a of or In the of climate notes, must to a world and with the of and particularly for understanding how individuals and to ecological crisis. of climate in this to young the and mourning that or transforming affective into responses and to to a climate grief often the the an of the psychological and emotional of environmental crises while these experiences within social and political the the novels the of the Bildungsroman through their on collective and intergenerational Unlike the which in the into an social the climate Bildungsroman within a world as and politically no with structures but with environmental systemic failure, and the of As in to A Children’s Bible, the of the collective the novel to be as a form of “collective the not of an individual but of an entire to inhabit a world from In novels, through collective forms of political and to ecological and social crises. In climate grief the moral and emotional development of the younger the an individual of to the in A Children’s Bible and in How Beautiful We in this grief is with among and political Yet climate postcolonial grief to or As in of by to the distress by the and of familiar and one of climate all the by has been and be lost, within the of it us to and also to and anger, argues, function as that is structural harm and spaces for ethical and political A of postcolonial while grief not or it it to also from such and The of the between the in A Children’s Bible, and her are toward to a world, in How Beautiful We grief into political the with collective by climate in Mbue’s postcolonial grief, novels of to the emotional and political dimensions of ecological crisis. In they of climate shaped by the of and to the in the As work by the of the in the climate as and young protagonists not as future of the but also as political This of argues, is tied to the of through which are through the of the of this shift is the of nostalgic attachment to a as climate on often the for a world imagined as stable and that structures responses to ecological crisis. This is particularly in A Children’s Bible, remain on the of a privileged of while the themselves toward and in a In this sense, Millet’s novel with that, for privileged in the Global North, climate distress is often tied to grief for the of of By in How Beautiful We nostalgic for a past a are not in a world that never stable or to and the is not an these focalization reorients climate affect away from and toward forms of engagement attentive to present conditions and future and of an focalization up a further of more in A Children’s Bible than in How Beautiful We the of and through the of to such as human or As argues, can of the of the climate by at the of narrative with to those by and In such human is in to as narrative through While the and grief and further the relationship between individual experience and collective response by to forms of collective narration that foreground the emergence of a shared shaped by ecological crisis. 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Climate is as an to the of childhood emerging as a of within the the affective of this is not grief or anger. 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