Climate Action
How Dystopian Books Set The Climate Story Straight
November 4, 2025
Review
Climate change, like many sources of cultural tension, has earned its place in popular media. Numerous hit movies and television shows have spoken for the trees (and the wider planet) by showing the beauty of nature, the ever-changing relationship between people and our environment, and the terror of futures in environmentally hazardous worlds.
Written works — especially those in the dystopian genre — have also responded to the climate crisis in educational and profoundly moving ways. Here are just some of the lessons we can learn, as environmental activists, from dystopian fiction.
Models of Understanding
The most obvious — but important — way that dystopian fiction helps climate activists is by giving us ideas of what a near-future world might look like. The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is a comprehensive example, detailing numerous real-world technological proposals to mitigate climate change. It also describes the human impacts through an American aid worker named Frank, traumatized and crippled as a result of a heatwave in India that killed hundreds of people. He laments to a bureaucrat that he still hears them each night, and wants her to do more to make a change.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler constructs a different world, where the story’s characters can do nothing to change the environment. The reader experiences this world through the eyes of Lauren Olamina, an African-American girl with “hyperempathy,” which causes her to feel the suffering, and small joys, of the decaying world around her, inside her body. She, like many, is constantly on the road, because jobs are scarce, and often have slave-like conditions. Natural disasters, sexual violence, and drug gangs are just a few of the threats she faces.
These stories are very different, but they both turn abstract scientific predictions into one haunting, harshly clear picture of a future world. While understanding the science of climate change is, of course, important, these stories give the reader a chance to inhabit a different Earth. Doing so can teach us different lessons, closer to the heart, and can inspire people to take action when data and predictions may not.
Lauren and Frank, in differing ways, bear the weight of their worlds in their bodies. Neither story tells us how to cope with such a burden — they go in widely different directions, with Lauren founding a compassionate religion, and Frank turning to violence to save the world, which most of the other story’s characters condemn. Neither go out of their model worlds to tell us what we should do, in ours, to save our futures. But they help us visualize, and feel for, the people of tomorrow the way their protagonists do.
Not Everyone is Affected Equally
Of course, not all humans experience climate change the same way — and dystopian novels reflect that, too. The dystopian future of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which has become a recurring symbol in contemporary women’s rights protests, actually came to fruition because of environmental problems. In Atwood’s universe, the United States has been replaced by a Christian fundamentalist nation called Gilead. The narrator is a “handmaid” who is forced to bear children for a male Commander. The Commander is named Fred; she is named “Offred,” signifying that she is his legal property.
In the novel, Gilead is created due to misogyny, extreme Christian fundamentalism, and environmental problems that have caused most of the population to become infertile. In real life, rising global temperatures can cause sperm production to decrease, while plastics have been linked to decreases in fertility in both sexes. In a world where sexual violence is a known war tactic and women are underrepresented at every level of government globally, one can see how climate change may especially harm women.
PULLQUOTE: “It’s not climate change — it’s everything change.” -Margaret Atwood
What stories like The Handmaid’s Tale can do is bring awareness about current inequalities, and how they might potentially show up in the future. The Unworthy by Augustina Bazterrica, which focuses on an all-female cult in an environmentally ravaged world, serving a male leader who calls himself “God,” has similar feminist themes, but goes further. The women in this imaginary world come from different nations and cultures, but are only allowed to speak in His language. The narrator also forms a relationship with another woman, which they have to keep secret.
Again, while fictional, it reflects certain real-world truths about how climate change harms cultures, especially minority ones, and LGBTQ+ people unequally. And being able to see that play out in a novel reminds us why we don’t want the climate to get this bad in real life!
Survival is Insufficient
Finally, dystopian fiction fights climate change by asserting the dignity of a full human life, instead of a life defined by survival, competition, and consumerism.
While Stephen King is most famous for his horror fiction, he has also written dystopian stories, including The Running Man and The Long Walk. In his 2020 novella “The Life of Chuck,” the story opens in a near-future setting wrecked by climate change: the Internet is down, earthquakes and sinkholes are tearing the land apart, and people are committing suicide in droves. In the middle of this chaos, the glitching television screens are playing a strange ad, with a businessman whom no one recognizes. It reads, “Thanks, Chuck, for thirty-nine great years!”
As we learn more about him, we discover “small” details that deeply humanize him and us all, like his love of dancing, which he uses to keep his spirit alive; we learn to celebrate him as a multifaceted human being. The story references a quote by Walt Whitman, “I contain multitudes,” to talk about the worlds inside human beings, inextricably linked to the natural world we live in.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel looks at humanity through a holistic lens, depicting art and passion, rather than consumerism, as what holds humanity together. The story focuses on a traveling theater troupe in a climate-ravaged wasteland, preserving Shakespearean plays, because, to them, “survival is insufficient.” The story’s unique structure, which goes back and forth between the troupe and the story of an actor who inspired them years before, shows how one life, and one story, can keep people going in dark times.
As the world faces very real threats from consumerism, rising authoritarianism globally, and wealth inequality, the message that all people are unique, and deserve more than just what they need to survive, is a powerful one. To save our planet, these stories assert, we have to believe that we, as artistic, passionate human beings, have value outside of the destructive, unsustainable systems we have built.
If these stories of the future are motivating you to take action, check out our petitions or find an EARTHDAY.org event near you, to help us write a better story for our planet’s future. Also, if these stories made you rethink what a climate future might look like, and you want to learn more, support our CLIMATE EDUCATION initiative, and help us spread the word about why and how we should fight the real-life dystopias on the horizon.
This article is available for republishing on your website, newsletter, magazine, newspaper, or blog. The accompanying imagery is cleared for use with attribution. Please ensure that the author’s name and their affiliation with EARTHDAY.ORG are credited. Kindly inform us if you republish so we can acknowledge, tag, or repost your content. You may notify us via email at [email protected] or [email protected]. Want more articles? Follow us on substack.
