Missy Higgins: how an obsession with apocalyptic climate fiction changed my life

Extract from The Guardian

The singer reveals what Emily St John Mandel, James Bradley and Naomi Klein taught her about facing the future

Missy Higgins: ‘To learn that the very thing that drives our culture – profit and growth – is the very thing that is going to kill us was more terrifying than any flu pandemic story I’d read thus far.’ Photograph: Cybele Malinowski / Blue Murder Studios

Missy Higgins

Missy Higgins is an Australian singer-songwriter.

Tuesday 22 November 2016 10.46 AEDT 

I looked down at my son, playing with an old plastic aeroplane we’d found on the side of the road. Its propellers rusty and brown, its wings cracked and bent.

“Why did I bring you into this world?” I thought. “How could I possibly have thought that was a good idea?” A surge of tears pushed against my throat. I swallowed and turned away.

In my hand was my iPad, the device I read all my books on. My husband insists he can’t sleep with any lights on so I’ve reverted to reading in the dark on night vision. My obsession with post-apocalyptic literature, however, seems fitting for the dark.
The obsession began with a friend’s recommendation for Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, a book about a travelling theatre group who journey from scattered camp to camp, performing Shakespeare to anyone who survived the flu pandemic. I fell in love with this disease-ravaged, post-electricity world where artists were the saviours, the rememberers of culture and romance and imagination. I was hooked.
The next book recommendation I received was Clade by Australian author James Bradley. Clade begins with a scientist working in Antarctica while his wife is trying to conceive via IVF in Sydney. He becomes increasing frustrated with society’s refusal to heed the warnings of climate change, which leads him to feeling more and more anxious about the idea of bringing a child into this world. The book goes on to span multiple generations, showing the slow but devastating results of climate change on future generations. It is epic.

The Canadian author Naomi Klein, who wrote This Changes Everything. Photograph: Anya Chibis for the Guardian

Right there is where the seed was planted for me. Something to do with the adventure-fantasy of a new world where none of the rules apply anymore, combined with the very real possibility of environmental collapse, made the stakes so much higher and the book all the more riveting. As I continued on this cli-fi (climate fiction) bender, a creature grew inside of me. It started off small and restless in my belly, and over the months it grew teeth and claws.
One day, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything entered my periphery and something twigged. I realised all the post-apocalyptic cli-fi books had led me to this moment. Enough of the fiction. Enough of the hinting. If the world was going to end, I wanted to read the facts. Hit me in the face with them, fuck it, let’s do this.
Well, This Changes Everything did just that. If you do nothing else, just read the introduction to this most terrifying of apocalyptic non-fiction books. To learn that the very thing that drives our culture – profit and growth – is the very thing that is going to kill us was more terrifying than any flu pandemic story I’d read thus far.
That at the root of our problem is possibly who we are as a species seemed more hopeless and paralysing than any zombie apocalypse. Then, when Klein spoke about the very real prospect of our children having to battle serious environmental collapse in their lifetime, I just fell apart.

The creature inside me was thrashing about. “What have I done?” There my son was, glowing in all his angelic innocence, playing with the product of this sick, disposable dream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to collapse down to my knees, hold him and tell him I was sorry. That I didn’t know what the future held and I was scared. So scared. But instead, I watched him in all his wonder, in his blissful little bubble and I stayed there. If only for a sweet, sweet moment, I stayed there and I forgot.
• Missy Higgins is currently on an orchestral tour around Australia