As Yale goes, so goes the nation: Cli-fi matters!

Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut in the USA is known for its progressive views on social issues and climate change. And a very good climate awareness website published via Yale University’s “Yale Climate Connections” area has recently been taking up and discussing with links the rise of the cli-fi literary genre in North America, Europe and Australia.

Recently articles and brief podcasts featured cli-fi columns and books by Amy Brady at the Chicago Review of Books, Michael Svoboda at George Washington University, Craig Russell in Manitoba, Canada and others. Professor Svoboda writes about cli-fi cinema and cli-fi novels for the YCC website, and some of his previous links can be seen here and here and here.

It’s heartening to see a major American university like Yale reporting on the cli-fi meme, and hopefully other universities around the world will find Yale’s approach useful and inspiring. I envision similar websites about cli-fi cinema and novels appearing from literature departments at Tufts, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Middlebury, UPenn and UCLA.

As the title of this short summer blog post says: ”As Yale goes, so goes the nation.”

In this Age of Trump where the U.S. government belittles the reality of climate change and global warming, even going so far as to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords, it’s heartening to see Yale, among other prestigious universities in Europe and Australia, leading the way with its must-read Yale Climate Connections website and reports on the inexorable rise of cli-fi in the 21st Century. Long may it thrive!