After last month’s hefty non-fiction book, I thought I’d go with something lighter. It’s an expansion of an award-winning short story about climate change to novella form. Some have complained that it doesn’t add that much to the already great original story but since I’ve never read it, this works well for me. I actually think that it could stand to be expanded even more as it is set entirely in one particular part of Vancouver Island and characters appear in media res with no introduction. Since the geography and ecology of the area are so important, it was tough for someone like me who has never even been to Canada to get into. I had to read up information on the setting but it absolutely is a beautiful and moving story about the slow-moving climate catastrophe.

This is a collection of short vignettes about many different characters spanning perhaps a hundred years. Many of the stories are very short and a character may appear once and never be mentioned again. A central theme here however is that their actions reverberate across time even if no one remembers them. The very first story, one of my favorites, is a case in point. After a long period of teaching online classes, a university professor finally returns to the physical university to pick up some reference materials. He is shocked to find the university nearly abandoned and in poor repair. The only other academic he meets has given up any pretense of teaching classes to devote herself fully to rescuing the collection of books at the library, finding homes for them before the buildings are flooded and destroyed. In this quiet way, they acknowledge the inevitable oncoming fall of human civilization while realizing how critical it is to preserve all this gathered knowledge as best they can for whoever comes next. The other stories further trace the decline as sea levels rise, extreme weather leads to both heatwaves and massive floods, waves of epidemics and uncontrolled wildfire devastate the forests. Yet no matter how many die and how bad things get, there are always survivors and the collection focuses on them and their works.

We’ve all seen many apocalyptic stories and the one thing they all have in common, no matter if it’s zombies, nuclear war or disease, is that the end of the world arrives very quickly. Climate change however is very slow. In this collection, they describe how the polar ice is melting and will continue to do so for hundreds of years without anyone being able to do anything about it. Yet that doesn’t mean it’s any less deadly or the consequences less devastating. Coasts are swept away, entire islands are gone, cities destroyed, wildfires blanket the land, epidemics kill untold numbers of people. As trade, communications and civilization itself break down, the world becomes smaller and smaller as communities are left to fend for themselves. Pockets of the old world remain, the largest cities, the enclaves of the billionaires, and so on. But the people in the tiny part of Vancouver Island this collection of stories focuses on know little about them and so neither do we the readers. It’s frustrating that my curiosity about what is happening elsewhere in the world is left unsated but this book is so powerful and feels so authentic precisely because of its narrow focus.

Another striking choice author Rebecca Campbell has made is that the scenes never show death and suffering on screen so to speak. We know that death happens as the friends and family members of the dead miss them. There is longing for so much of the little pleasures in life of the old world, ice cream in drug stores, fast food, bright city lights, music and much more. A father worries about his daughter’s asthma, a condition so easily relieved by medicine that is no longer available. Yet this is no treatise on human suffering. The survivors find ways to adapt to the new world and reasons to live. Indeed as civilization stabilizes, the human population starts growing again. Species of trees and plants figure large in the stories. Not being someone familiar with trees, this left me a little lost, but I get the gist of what Campbell is going for. We’re going to lose the picturesque gardens and flowers. Replacing them will be genetically modified versions of plants, more resilient to the hotter temperatures and resistant to forest fires. One particular species that appears again and again is the golden arbutus. The survivors learn to shape it to craft living furniture and structures, hinting towards a post-industrial human civilization that is friendlier towards the environment.

Coming on the heels of City, the breakdown of human civilization and the sense of loss over many generations feel very familiar. It feels almost like cheating to stir powerful emotions as you follow characters across many decades as they age. Nevertheless it is effective and pairs well with the sense that the people in it have lost so much. It also takes tremendous chutzpah to open a story with a scene of a man illegally felling what might be the last ancient Sitka spruce tree still alive and end by making readers sympathize with what he needs the wood for. It would have been so easy and tempting to turn this into a blanket condemnation of technology and capitalism but that never happens here. The characters miss their phones and the connection they create to the wider world. They prize their solar power cells and whatever bits of electronics they can still keep working through the darkest days. It’s very pro-genetic engineering to adapt plantlife to the changed world it’s all about the preservation and expansion of knowledge. What it does bemoan is the refusal of people to accept that the Old World is gone and that we must adapt to survive.

This sense of balance and an ultimately hopeful outlook is what really won me over even as it doesn’t shy away from showing the catastrophic damage caused by climate change. I suspect that the author’s stance will be controversial among environmentalists, many whom are against adaptation as that amounts to accepting that global temperatures will rise. I think there’s almost no chance that the world will be able to keep to the 2°C limit and that while I hope that things won’t get quite as bad as what we see here, the world should be looking into adaptation strategies. I highly recommend this collection as a short preview of what the Earth of the future might look like and I’d love to see more stories covering other places on the planet.