Barbara Kingsolver has woven her concern for the environment into her books since she began writing novels in 1988. Her 2012 novel Flight behavior examines how climate change may affect the monarch butterfly, and the 2007 nonfiction work Animal, vegetable, miracle recounts her family’s experiment eating only food grown near their home in Virginia.
She recently applied this skill to a new, much shorter genre: promise writing. The coordinators of the American Climate Corps – President Joe Biden’s signature green jobs program – invited Kingsolver to deliver the pledge that new members recite when they are sworn in. “I told them, ‘This will be the first vow or promise I’ve written since my wedding vows,'” Kingsolver said. Last month, the first 9,000 members of the Climate Corps pledge to Kingsolver’s oath:
I pledge to bring my skills, respect and compassion to work every day and support environmental justice in all of our communities.
I will honor nature’s beauty and abundance, which we all depend on, and commit to protecting it from the climate crisis.
I will build a more resilient future, where every person can thrive.
I will take my place in history, with a shared purpose in the American Climate Corps working on behalf of our nation and planet, its people and all its species, for the better future we hold within our sights.
The inductees spread across the country to install clean energy, restore habitats and build trails. The Biden White House expects to employ 20,000 young people over the first year of the program, inspired by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched in the 1930s to help the country recover from the Great Depression.
Kingsolver believes the reimagined version will also make history, calling it “one of the most exciting things happening in the country right now.” In a call with Grist, she discussed her vision for the American Climate Corps and how it connects to the themes in her novels: nature, empathy and class. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q. What was the thinking behind the language you used in the pledge?
A. In less than 100 words, I tried to bring in the most important parts of this initiative — that it’s about respect and justice for communities, it’s about respect and reverence for the environment and our connection to it, and it’s about participate in history. I read it out loud to myself while I worked because a promise is more like poetry than anything else. It should sound right, spoken out loud, and it should sound like you mean it. Like a wedding vow!
Q. You have said that you believe that writing can promote social change. Is that part of why you wrote it?
A. Words are what I have to offer. It’s my way of giving blood. I think that advocacy and literature are two very different things, and this was a chance to really jump into advocacy, which I’m thrilled to do. I feel this growing sense of worry and paralysis among younger generations as they look at the world they are inheriting. And I’ve always thought that worry can be a paralyzer or an engine that puts you to work, and that you’ll go further and feel better if you put your worry to work.
Q. I know you’ve been writing about climate change in your novels for a long time. What did you learn about how to communicate about it in an accessible way?
A. I think the most important thing to remember, no matter who you are, whether you’re a policy maker, or a novelist, or just a friend or a family member having a conversation, is that none of don’t like feeling judged. People take information from sources they trust, and trust involves respect. So if you open a conversation with the words “You idiot”, that conversation is already over.
I write with the assumption that my readers are all at least as smart as I am. I never talk down because there is no reason why I should. I might have a fact that other people don’t have, or some skills that other people don’t have, and likewise they have facts and skills that I don’t have. So I’m going into this as an equal exchange. I think that if more people remembered this on social media, the world would be a happier place.
Q. In Demon Copperhead, your most recent novel, a through line that emerges is how coal companies exploited Appalachian communities. Can you talk about what inspired you to write about climate change, and whether the history of the region had anything to do with it?
A. Well, I’m a country person. I grew up playing in the woods as a largely unsupervised child. So, the forests, the fields, the water, the river – it will always be part of my world. I do not think of the world as a place of only human interest and occupation. I think of myself as a species among species. I studied biology, so I have this awareness that every breath I take, the oxygen I breathe, was produced by trees. So, it’s always going to be part of my writing. It is always part of my thinking.
Q. Poverty and class are often central themes in your books. When we think of the Climate Corps, part of its purpose is to revitalize areas of the country that have long been neglected. What role do you hope it will play?
A. I think it’s a really class-conscious effort, encouraging kids from everywhere, from every class, in every geographic part of the U.S., rural or urban, to have opportunities to get involved in conservation, in this way to engage the future. , and to be really clear that enjoying the environment is not a privilege of the elite.
