April 25, 2024: Climate Culture: “The Ghost Birds”

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On what’s specific and what’s universal in Karen Russell’s amazing story.

I first encountered “The Ghost Birds” in the Best American Short Stories 2022 anthology (well worth getting your hands on as those collections always are), but it originally appeared in The New Yorker in October 2021. Whether you’re a subscriber or not you should be able to read it as one of your free articles for the month, so in lieu of a full first paragraph here I’ll recommend that you read this phenomenal short story and then come on back for a couple of my thoughts.

Welcome back! At the heart of Russell’s story is a depiction of a very real natural phenomenon: the annual flight of Vaux’s Swifts, migratory birds who settle in spaces like (most famously) the chimney of a Portland (Oregon) elementary school. Most of the cultural works about climate change that I’ve encountered focus on its effects for human characters and communities, which is of course understandable (these are texts created by human artists, after all) but also both limited and ironic given the role that humans have played in creating this crisis. Russell’s text certainly still features central human characters as I’ll discuss in a moment, but from its title on it is also deeply concerned with what a climate crisis future might look like for the natural world, including the dystopian yet frustratingly realistic concept of a world from which birds have almost entirely disappeared. I really don’t like to think about that possibility, which is precisely what makes Russell’s story so important, both as a unique work of climate culture and as an intervention in our own moment.

But that’s not what made Russell’s story hit me so hard the first time I read it. Her narrator and protagonist Jasper is a single father, one who is trying desperately to reconnect with his teenage daughter Starling (he’s a birder through and through) through a shared trip to try to find those titular ghost birds. It’s not just that I’m a divorced single father too, but also and especially that I think all the time about the climate crisis as it connects to my sons and their futures (not least because they have become very dedicated activists for that cause on a variety of fronts). Concerns about what the future will hold for our kids are of course one of the most universal human perspectives and experiences, and yet one that needs to be depicted through specific moments and emotions if a cultural work centered on that perspective is going to ring true. And for this reader, Russell’s story, despite its setting in a dystopian future, rings as story as any I’ve read in a while.

Last climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?