A Climate Novelist on Hope and Dread

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, our Climate Story of the Week, a different guest in this week's episode, a novelist. We're going to talk with her about how to find hope amid the existential dread brought on by the climate crisis, which seems to be nonstop this year in terms of emergencies and natural disasters happening all over the world.

You've, of course, heard about the hurricanes, the fires, the floods, poor air quality, species on the brink of extinction in ways that weren't happening in decades before. Well, with me now is Lydia Millet, a climate novelist and author of several books, also, story collections. Perhaps you've read A Children's Bible, which was up for a national book award, or Love in Infant Monkeys. Her latest book is Dinosaurs: A Novel just out today. Lydia, thanks so much. Congratulations on the book release. Welcome to WNYC. Thanks for being here.

Lydia Millet: Well, thank you for inviting me.

Brian Lehrer: Can I just ask flat out, to start, do you try to approach dealing with a climate crisis through fiction as one of the things you feel like you're doing with your work?

Lydia Millet: Sure. Climate and extinction crisis, which are of course closely linked to each other, have been my fixation for a long time since before it was trendy. I work in my day job at an organization called The Center for Biological Diversity, which also works on these issues. I've been working there a long time. I write for the personal parts of my response to these emergencies that are ongoing. I also have a day job where I'm completely concerned with climate and saving endangered species.

Brian Lehrer: In the non-fiction world. What is it that you think you can accomplish towards saving the planet by writing a work of fiction that you can't in your day job with the center?

Lydia Millet: Well, I think for one thing that we live by stories. It's how we make meaning out of our lives. We need to be telling stories really in all forms of art now about what's happening to the world around us and what's happening to us as that world is transformed. I think story is a guiding light and we need really to tell new tales of how to live, stories that aren't just about epic individuals and victory and conquest, but really that are about communities and neighborhoods and the communal and our collective future. Stories can do that.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk a little bit about the story in the book without spoiling whatever you don't want to spoil. Funnily enough, after my discussion with you, we're going to be taking calls in our next segment from listeners who have left New York City for another city, like the protagonist in Dinosaurs, Gil, who in the beginning of the novel decides to sell his apartment at 24th and Madison in Manhattan and move to a house in Phoenix. To quote your book, "The Desert had an alien beauty that seemed as different as you could get within the Lower 48, the opposite of Manhattan." I understand you've lived in New York City and have now been residing in Tucson, Arizona for over 20 years. How much of this book's premise was inspired by your own experiences?

Lydia Millet: A little was inspired by my own, but more directly when I wrote it, I was actually inspired by my boyfriend, Aaron, who had just moved from Crown Heights. He'd lived in New York for a couple of decades, moved from Crown Heights to Tucson to be with me here in the desert. That part of Gil's journey was partly inspired by that and partly by the fact that Aaron had just-- In the book, Gil actually walks from New York to Arizona, which I never did, in which Aaron also never did. Aaron did walk the whole length of that Appalachian Trail right before he moved here as away to leave his old life and start his new one. It's about the same distance, about two and a half thousand miles. That was a journey of several months. I stole from his life a little more than I stole from my own for Gil.

Brian Lehrer: I think even in my own limited experience that you get a different appreciation for the earth, certainly, the beauty of the earth. I know it helped inspired me to think more about environmental issues once upon a time after growing up in New York City myself and doing some hiking and camping in the northeast, in the Adirondack, in the Green Mountains of Vermont, in the Berkshire going for the first time two Arizona and Utah, and seeing how beautiful the desert was without the kinds of vegetation that I was used to in the Northeast, the moor rush, the deciduous forest, and everything. I just felt it was so overwhelmingly beautiful in its difference that, I don't know, it just made me love our planet even more.

Lydia Millet: That exactly happened to me as well. When I first came to Arizona, went right out of college for a short time, I was just overwhelmed by the splendor and the large sky and the epicness of the Western landscape, as many have written about in the past. People like Teddy Roosevelt. I felt the presence of the sublime when I moved here in a way that I didn't back East, even though I feel I grew up in a city. I grew up in Toronto, I was born in Boston, and I lived for years in LA and years in New York. I love all those places in different ways, and I feel really at home there. There was something about the desert that was so spectacular and so large, but so comforting at the same time.

Brian Lehrer: Then there's a journey, at least there was for me, from just appreciating the beauty of the earth to then getting involved in public health issues around the environment to then global extinction kinds of issues as you are so involved with, and as we look at global threats such as climate change, which at least in my case started from just being inspired by the beauty of the planet. Then it gets into all these other much more tricky areas of policy and the disparate effects on human beings and all of that. New York Magazine calls your book Dinosaurs "a prime example of that rare and precious thing: a funny dystopia". Can there be a funny dystopia?

Lydia Millet: Well, when I wrote my previous book, A Children's Bible, I was really trying to combine humor and great solemnity of matters in a book I had never-- I'd always written books that were either towards satirical and parodic and comic or really more grounded in ideas and seriousness. I wanted to make a hybrid where you had this reality and the relief valve of humor as I think people do even in the direst of situations, but still had important things being discussed.

That was really a project of A Children's Bible. I wouldn't say that Dinosaurs is dystopic. It's more almost just domestic realism or something. It's about a man who moves into a house with a glass wall on the side of it and is able to observe the family next door as though they're dolls and a doll house or players on a stage and becomes more and more invested in their lives and in his affection for them.

Brian Lehrer: [crosstalk] No, go ahead.

Lydia Millet: Yes. It's small story. It's a smaller scale story, but also reaching for the larger scale that we're all in. We have our personal lives and then we have this vast panoramic information landscape. This book wanted to navigate between the two of those. How do we deal with this surfeit of information that we seem to have now all the time? This like oppressive, deluge of information about the vast world. How do we balance that with our own personal lives and their problems and satisfactions and relationships?

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, are you a fan of Lydia Millet? Perhaps you've read one of her 11 other books or story collections, maybe A Children's Bible, or another one of her books if you'd like to say something or ask her a question. Her latest novel, that she's here for now, is Dinosaurs, and we're doing this in the context of our Climate Story of the Week, a fiction edition of Climate Story of the Week. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or Tweet

@BrianLehrer.

The human relationship with animals is a major theme of your work and a major theme in Dinosaurs. You told the New York Times magazine that, "We live in an exploitation paradigm in terms of our relationship with the natural world, but that beneath that always stretches a deep love that only needs to be called fourth." Can you explain a little bit more about what you mean by that and how those ideas come alive in your new novel, especially with relationship to other kinds of creatures?

Lydia Millet: Yes. I think as children we grow up amidst animals with the lore of animals. The images of animals and the sounds, they define our alphabet for us. They're just all around us. We really understand ourselves in the world through animals as children. The older we get, and I think somewhere in our teen years, it starts to be bred out of us. We start being trained to compete with other human beings and to forget the animals as though they are childish things that should be left behind.

I think that most of us retain that original love and are always present to it in different forms, even those of us who live in cities and might disparage the pigeons we see around us as flying rats or something. We still really need the trees on our streets. We really need the doves and the crows and the sparrows. We need all of that. The world would be dead without them. I really think that it's deeply intrinsically human thing to love the other beast that we evolved with. I think they make us who we are.

Brian Lehrer: In your day job at the Center for Biological Diversity, have you focused on any species that our listeners may not be aware of are threatened because of climate change per se that you might want to mention?

Lydia Millet: Oh, there are so many. At the center, we do work on so-called charismatic megafauna, like polar bears and gray wolves and sea turtles and whales, but we also work on-- [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Wait, can you stop it for a second and describe that term: charismatic megafauna?

Lydia Millet: Oh, sure. I'm not necessarily condoning the phrase, but for a long time in conservation, the big animals that people relate to easily and that you see so many pictures of in nature calendars and postcards and so forth have been called charismatic megafauna. Big animals that have charm, basically, and panda bears for world wildlife, for example. At the center, we equally focus on the tiny creatures in vertebrates.

For example, an animal called the American burying beetle, which is a glamorous beetle insofar as beetles can be glamorous, which I think they can with that black and orangey-red was threatened by the Keystone XL pipeline. Really, there's so many species we work on that are tiny, even fairy shrimps that live in little ephemeral vernal pools in California. Our philosophy is very much that every kind of life is intrinsically good and necessary to the web of life that we depend on to survive.

Brian Lehrer: We actually hear so little about other kinds of species, animal species, or insect species in terms of the climate stories that usually make the news when we're talking about hurricanes and the horrible wildfires and the flooding in Pakistan now, or whatever it is. Sometimes, there's a story that breaks through about somebody's dog, for example, that's really heartbreaking or heartwarming depending on how it ends, but so many others that get affected that we just never think about. We hear about the property damage, we hear about certainly human lives lost, and things like that, but these animal stories don't break through.

Lydia Millet: Wildlife is often devastated by these massive events. The one exception to that I can think of in recent memory is the Australian wildfires where we did hear about just the stunning death toll of wildlife in Australia after those fires and of koala bears and such. I guess they're not really bears, koalas. Generally, we focus on human impacts and that's, of course, natural. It's devastating for us when these events occur, but it's also devastating for wildlife. For example, work on monarch butterflies are one of our focuses right now because monarchs used to be these just common backyard butterflies.

I grew up with them, perhaps you grew up with them, but now they really are threatened in their historic migrations. We've worked on them and various other butterflies we've worked on, some in Nevada, some in California. Creatures that only live in very small areas, but also wide creatures like wolves, say, red wolves in the east or Mexican gray wolves in Arizona, or jaguars. We work on the big guys, too, because of course predators are really, really important to ecosystems, too, and we have a tremendous problem with the loss of predators in the United States.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, we're in our Climate Story of the Week with author Lydia Millett, who in her day job, as she describes it, works about 30 hours a week at the Center for Biological Diversity, but is also a very celebrated author of fiction, and her new book is Dinosaurs: A Novel, which definitely has a climate connection. 212-433-WNYC. Elizabeth in Hoboken, you're on WNYC with Lydia Millett. Hi.

Elizabeth: Hi. I'm actually really looking forward to reading Lydia's stuff. I haven't read any yet, and I wanted to give a shout-out to Center for Biological Diversity. I'm from New Orleans and I'm taking the Crescent Train back there tomorrow. CBD has been a part of fighting the Formosa Plastics plant that just had a big judgment against it in Louisiana. We deeply appreciate your involvement. Thank you so much. Climate crisis there for us is something that is really front and center all the time because I love-- I used to live in New York. I moved to New Orleans five years ago and I'd love to live there for the rest of my life. I'm doing a lot of volunteer work, so hopefully, that will happen.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Elizabeth: Thank you for everything you're doing.

Lydia Millet: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much. When she refers to CBD, that's the Center for Biological Diversity, not the kind of CBD we talked about earlier in the show with New York becoming a legal state. Joel in Union, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joel.

Joel: Hey. Hi, Brian. Hi, Lydia. It's Joel, Heidi's friend. I've read two of Lydia's books the one about the woman who had a [unintelligible 00:18:01] for George H W Bush, which is hilarious, and the one about the real-life mermaids. I welcome this new book, especially since it's inspired by the desert, which also is an inspiration for my photography. Lydia, I'll send you my book. All right? Playground [unintelligible 00:18:18] Anyway.

Lydia Millet: Thank you, Joel. Thank you.

Joel: Congratulations for getting on Brian's show, you so deserve it, and I don't know if you traveled all the way to New York, but I wanted to celebrate you and highly recommend your inventiveness and your subtle ironic humor, which is such a joy.

Lydia Millet: I appreciate that. Thank you for calling.

Brian Lehrer: That's so sweet, Joel. Thank you very much. I'm going to read everybody a passage from Dinosaurs that's pretty self-contained and it gets into the theme of evolution. "Paleontology was progressing by leaps and bounds, they said. It was no longer held to be true that all the dinosaurs had gone extinct 66 million years ago, after the Chicxulub impactor made its crater in Mexico, blocked out the sun, and killed off the plants.

The dinosaurs needed to survive. Only the ones that wouldn't turn into birds." That's a little passage, tiny passage from your book. I guess the question that comes out of that is when it comes to everything going on in the world, but especially the climate crisis, does one of the hopes we have lie in our capacity to evolve like some dinosaurs did, as implied there all those millions of years ago?

Lydia Millet: I haven't really thought of it that way because evolution is such a glacial process.

Brian Lehrer: Slow?

Lydia Millet: Yes, such a slow, glacial process for which you need deep time and we have such short horizons in human time. I think where our hope lies  is really an action and doing things and resisting and pushing for the government and for corporations to do their duty and save our children and our grandchildren and the children and grandchildren of others from what fossil fuels have wrought. I think boarding and action and getting out there and doing things, I think that's where the real hope is.

Brian Lehrer: Melanie, in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Lydia Millet. Hi, Melanie.

Melanie: Brian, I love you so much. I'm so happy to be on. I've actually called regarding this before about animals specifically. I'm so, so happy that you're talking about this right now. I think about this all the time, human exceptionalism; precisely how people aren't thinking about animals in times of crisis and disaster. One thing that comes into mind, in particular, is the crisis in Ukraine right now. Thinking about how many animals, domestic and wild, that have been harmed and abused by war. Also, what's been happening in Pakistan as well.

I know that there are some places that you can donate to, like IFAW, et cetera, more specific places. I just want to know if there's things that we can do. I also have one other critique about WNYC regarding the animal thing as well. When it comes to heat, very hot, hot heat, or very, very cold temperatures, climates outside, I would love if the newscasters could also make an announcement for people that have animals and as well to care for them with these extreme climates.

Brian Lehrer: I hear you. I know we did at least one reference on the show to taking care of your dogs when it was really hot this summer, but I hear you about how it could be weaved in more regularly to the precautions that people need to take. Lydia, you want to react to some of Melanie's thoughts?

Lydia Millet: Yes, absolutely. I think very, very often about human exceptionalism. In fact, my daughter is writing a paper on speciesism in college right now as we speak. I think about it a lot. I think that in our response to the climate crisis, it's crucial that we remember the rest of the natural world because really all those creatures, quite aside from their own extraordinary worth, are what sustain us. They are our life support. It's really important that we don't overlook the imperative of preserving biodiversity as we go forward with our work to curb climate change.

Brian Lehrer: Melanie, thank you so much. Call us again. Birds, to continue her point, are very important in Dinosaurs. In your book, each chapter, it seems, mentions a different kind of bird. What's the significance of birds in this story, and maybe for you personally, other than the evolutionary connection between them and dinosaurs that we mentioned?

Lydia Millet: Gil the character, he's an urban person. He's always been an urban person, and he was never particularly interested in birds. I remember being quite bored by birds since when I was young. I liked them as I liked most of the animals I saw, but I wasn't-- I always like, "I'll take them or leave them." The older I get and the more I live among them in th desert, the more I love them and the more I'm fascinated by their perfection of design and their beauty.

Anyway. Gil's is kind of following that same trajectory of that, I think a lot of us as well during lockdown, where what you have to look at what is near you, what is outside your window are birds and other creatures that succeed in living among human beings. He comes to not be bored by birds, but instead, be fascinated by birds over time. My kids used to have this ongoing argument with my mother's partner who is a geneticist. He would just claim in no uncertain terms that birds were dinosaurs.

They would fight with him over this and say, "They're not dinosaurs from a genetic perspective, of course, they are dinosaurs." That argument was part of what inspired me in this too because we are fascinated by dinosaurs, which are so other to us, these long-extinct creatures. We're fascinated by them as children and as adults. We put them in museums and go stare at their bones. At the same time, we have their descendants all around us in our yards on our city streets, perching on balconies. We live with these extinct creatures and how they exist in the present, both at the same time.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask you briefly about the protagonist in the book? You've said his name several times, Gil. If you care to reveal why it evokes a fish's gills or perhaps even something from a bird. I see from my producer that Gil in Polish means bullfinch but perhaps--

Lydia Millet: No, I'm not up to speed on my polish. That's great.

Brian Lehrer: Perhaps that's reading a little too much into it. How about Gil? For that matter, what was behind the decision to make the main character a man in particular, if anything went into that?

Lydia Millet: The Gil thing, I have to admit was, I think I was just thinking of that name because one of my favorite writers had that name Gilbert Sorrentino and Brooklyn writer. It wasn't particularly significant in terms of any etymology outside that. I wish I could say it was. I've written so many different demographics of protagonist and narrator. He was male mostly because I see so much male loneliness in the world, especially middle-aged male loneliness.

It seems like a lot of men live these kind of solitary lives where their whole social situation depends on their partner, often a wife or girlfriend who designs things socially for them. Then without that, if that tie is broken or whatever, they often are bereft. Because I was writing about loneliness and finding company, it seemed natural that the main character be a man because I've just seen so much of that in the man I know.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting. We just have two minutes left. Here's a tweet from a listener after we were amusing about the desert and you living in Tucson after living in New York City for a while. It says, "Although the desert is indeed beautiful, humans, were not intended to live there, it is not sustainable water, climate change, et cetera. It's a desert and living there puts a stress on the whole planet." For you who have chosen to live in Tucson, a Desert City that's growing in population all the time, and with your central interest in climate change and preserving the planet, how do you deal with it? How do they deal with it generally in Tucson for all our listeners, everywhere else?

Lydia Millet: Well, I would have to take issue with that.

Brian Lehrer: With the premise?

Lydia Millet: With the assertion that now under climate change, nothing is sustainable. There's no place and no way that Americans are living right now. That's sustainable under climate change. Specifically, this desert where I live, which is the Sonoran Desert, in particular, an area called the Altar and the Avra Valley, that is the longest, continually inhabited place in the United States. We have petroglyphs all around this valley. There may be something like 10,000 petroglyph sites. That attest to the presence of Native Americans here going thousands of years back.

I take issue with the fact that it was not meant to sustain human life. I don't think that's accurate at all. As to how I deal with living unsustainably, we pretty much all are now as individuals. If we drive a car, if we have a child, if we eat meat, if we drink coffee, all these things have a really heavy carbon footprint. I truly believe we need to change systemically and structurally. That's all we can do. It's not going to really help for each of us to focus on our recycling. Now, we need laws to change, we need policy to change, we need economic models to change and we need them to do that fast.

Brian Lehrer: That's our Climate Story of the Week as we leave it there with Lydia Millet, whose new book is Dinosaurs: A Novel. This was wonderful. Thank you so much.

Lydia Millet: Thank you so much for having me on the show.

 

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