Alexis Wright in The Swan Book (2013), a speculative novel set in the future, speaks of the ‘Mother catastrophe of flood, fire, drought and Blizzard’, thus replacing ‘Mother Nature’ with ‘Mother catastrophe’ (unpaginated). She thereby captures the urgency of climate crisis – well past the point of climate change – so that Nature now is catastrophic in nature.

In Homegoing (2016), Yaa Gyasi shows the transformation of an African community:

Diane Ackerman writes in her The Rarest of the Rare (1997):

Wright adopts an apocalyptic tone to speak of the climate-change-driven crisis. Yaa Gyasi describes the bioinvasion by an alien plant species of the African land, which will eventually alter its texture, social fabric and economy forever. Diane Ackerman's is an elegy for the disappeared species.

These excerpts represent three modes – the apocalyptic, the social realist and the elegiac, respectively – of speaking about climate crisis and its attendant losses, dangers and anxieties to address ‘the cultural challenge of climate change’.

The ‘cultural challenge of climate change’, write David Buckland et al., is ‘to craft a different language with which to understand the science of climate change, one that is more human and palatable for public consumption’ (Buckland et al. 2017: 97). Art, Buckland et al. propose, is ‘a possible means – it has the ability to reach into peoples’ psyches, where reasoned argument can often fail’ (98). Literature – as form, practice and institution – serves the same purpose, enabling a visualization of the human as a geological force that has irrevocably altered the planet, to adapt Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential characterization (2009).