Geoff R. Martin reviews Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming

Martin, Geoff R

English

Scholars Commons

The Goose
Volume 14 | No. 1 Article 4
7-15-2015
Facing The Change: Personal Encounters With
Global Warming edited by Steven Pavlos Holmes
Geoff R. Martin
Harry S Truman College (City Colleges of Chicago)
Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America
Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment Commons
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This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an
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Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée
Martin, Geoff R.. "Facing The Change: Personal Encounters With Global Warming edited by Steven Pavlos Holmes." The Goose, vol. 14
, no. 1 , article 4, 2015,
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss1/4.
Facing the Change: Personal Encounters 
with Global Warming edited by STEVEN 
PAVLOS HOLMES 
Torrey House, 2013 $16.95 
 
Reviewed by GEOFF MARTIN 
 
My review copy of Facing The 
Change arrived the same week that the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 
(IPCC) published their Fifth Assessment 
Report (AR5). Though entirely different in 
tone and authority and mode of analysis, 
the two collections make for timely 
companion reads. AR5’s “Summary for 
Policy Makers” filters an extensive meta-
analysis of climate science research into 
statements of confidence about this planet 
and our future, using, repeatedly, adjectives 
like “unequivocal,” “extremely likely,” and 
“unprecedented.” The voices gathered in 
Facing the Change, however, are not nearly 
so confident, but they are no less convincing 
for their hesitance, their fear, their 
confusion. These are not climate scientists 
reporting a litany of facts and cautious-
prophecy; these are simply people (writers, 
teachers, poets, students) looking out their 
back windows and noticing small changes, 
harbingers of more to come, and recording 
their own perspectives and attendant 
feelings. In his introduction, Steven Pavlos 
Holmes calls these writers “our emotional 
and cultural first responders to climate 
change” (2). 
Holmes structures this collection of 
writings from 42 authors into three 
sections: “Observations,” “Generations,” 
“Revolutions”—each with two or more sub-
chapters composed of poetry, short stories, 
and personal essays. Befitting a collection 
that aims to capture not a particular theory 
or exact prediction but “something more 
amorphous, individual, and emotional, even 
spiritual” (1) from the emerging experience 
of a changing climate, the works range over 
an array of objects and phenomena that 
mark these changes, that seem to make an 
aggregate climate visible and material in the 
present moment. In this respect, Facing the 
Change proceeds as an exploration of 
things, and our feelings about those things, 
that seem to evidence a changing climate. 
Part One, “Observations,” starts out 
in unease, hoping that “another spell of 
normalcy sets in. / Even five inches of ice on 
the lakes / would let us pretend that 
everything is right” (Smith 7). But the 
proceeding pieces push against that hope, 
with climate change lingering in the 
background of the invasion of Iraq (Davis 
11), Superstorm Sandy (Sohar 21), and 
Hurricane Katrina (Davis 23). Chapter Two, 
“Species Out of Joint,” charts human-animal 
interactions: a snowshoe hare in a Maine 
without snow; the rusted pines of a beetle-
chewed Oregon; spinster turtles and 
insomniac bears. The chapter also includes 
one of the collection’s strongest pieces—
“To Wit, to Woo,” wherein Kathryn Miles 
tracks North American owls through their 
Linnean taxonomy, their literary and 
mythological history, and their 
contemporary status as a species out of 
place, irrupting in daylight, haunting the 
limits of knowability, and signaling “the very 
real boundaries of modern scientific 
knowledge, the limitations of our standard 
ways of talking about avian behavior” (33). 
Chapter Three takes up, explicitly, the plight 
of the polar bears, those now-viral symbols 
of climate change. 
Part Two, “Generations,” explores 
the weight and unease of intergenerational 
responsibility associated with parenting in 
the Anthropocene. Children’s books become 
laced with irony as the poet watches the 
“toothy simplicity” of Walrus “becoming 
1
Martin: Facing the Change
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015
less than paper and ink” (Berger 75). Dane 
Cervine’s evocative poem, “The Last Days,” 
plumbs a father’s “secret misgivings” 
concerning his own longevity, his childhood 
fear of biblical apocalypse, and his 
daughter’s emergent future along “this thin, 
ephemeral line between Eden and 
Armageddon” (86). Cervine’s poem 
notwithstanding, this second section suffers 
from a loose sentimentality. The thought of 
iceless ponds in rural Pennsylvania, for 
example, renders a wintery nostalgia for a 
place “where championships were won, 
where time stood still, and where love 
existed solely” (Brandstadter 78). The 
second chapter, “Future Imperfect,” 
projects forward this nostalgic mourning 
through several pieces that work to conjure 
the atmosphere, both fictional and gaseous, 
of a hot and dying planet; these pieces are 
hard to pull off, with the moving force they 
seek, without falling into earnest 
exaggeration or too-easy despair. 
The final section, “Revolutions,” 
offers a wider scope of writings that engage 
with the challenges of thinking through to 
action on climate change. Holmes aims for 
the first chapter, “Twistings,” to explore the 
“dark night” of “negative emotional 
responses” (105) that need expression en 
route to healing. From Chicago, Jill Riddell 
admits that she’d “like to be in a position to 
write an essay about climate change filled 
with rage and despair” but must do, instead, 
with a contentedness in making “unheroic, 
everyday changes” (116). Helen Sanchez 
marshals her cynical wit as a coping 
mechanism (“In all seriousness, I’m seriously 
depressed,” she writes,) for her endlessly 
compromised attempts at mitigating climate 
change: “even my vegan diet contributes to 
global warming with all the methane gas it 
produces from my body” (116).  
The second chapter, “Turnings,” 
contains works that mark certain writers’ 
emotional and spiritual shifts in the face of 
climate change (105). Willow Fagan, for 
example, links his early life experience of 
queer denial and his current struggle to 
come to grips with climate change by 
finding himself, as he says, “drawing on the 
skills and courage and wisdom I drew on 
then, as I rebuilt my understanding of the 
world in relative isolation, as I now face 
unpredictable changes that once again 
threaten the order of the world” (134). In 
“Glooscap Makes America Known to the 
Europeans,” Sydney Landon Plum recounts 
several stories of the Abenaki hero-creator 
figure, Glooscap, that describe the struggle 
between the lifeways of the giant North 
American beaver, Castoroides ohioensis, 
and the lifeways of human culture—a fight 
over the shape of the environment that 
played out in an earlier era of non-
anthropogenic climate change. This long 
historical view allows Plum to take up the 
question of human meddling and of 
storytelling in a way that moves beyond a 
cynical apocalypticism (which he calls a 
“slacker mentality”) and into diverse, 
eclectic, and compelling storytelling of 
human life and engagement with the 
natural world (143). The collection’s call to 
action comes, perhaps a little too obviously, 
in the final essay, “How to Be a Climate 
Hero,” where Audrey Schulman explores the 
social phenomenon of the bystander effect 
and the challenges and pleasures of 
breaking group cohesion. 
Two short poems bring the Coda 
together. “The Lucky Ones” begins with the 
asteroid impact on the Yucutan Penninusla 
and ends with waves of annihilation. The 
second poem, “The Angels are Rebelling,” 
sees Gaia sounding the alarm, “hammering 
on her golden bells” (161). 
2
The Goose, Vol. 14, No. 1 [2015], Art. 4
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss1/4
Despite the urgent and impending 
tone of the Coda or the sincerity of its final 
call to action, Facing the Change comes off 
as quietly melancholic; it suggests a kind of 
American Romanticism subdued by the age 
of the Anthropocene. The collection finds, I 
think, its greatest strength and resonance 
where its writers are uncertain and 
reflective, where they navigate the 
extended spaces between sense and 
understanding. To my mind, the book 
should simply declare itself a collection of 
writings from the continental United States; 
its concerns and domains are largely 
American (each writer’s state is listed in the 
table of contents), and the single non-US 
inclusion, “A Jungle for My Backyard,” is also 
a clear outlier, a didactic short story about 
the impact of palm oil extraction on 
indigenous lands in Borneo, Malaysia. This 
global extension is welcome but feels 
tokenary in its singularity. Despite this 
quibble, Facing the Change is an earnest 
and straightforward attempt to capture the 
range of nervousness, concern, and fury 
that is shaping American nature writing in 
our present moment. 
 
GEOFF MARTIN teaches English at Truman 
College (City Colleges of Chicago) where his 
courses take up climate literacy, urban 
environmentalism, and food politics in the 
city. His essay, “From the Banks of the 
Grand,” was shortlisted for the 2011 Edna 
Staebler personal essay contest and is 
available from The New Quarterly. He holds 
an MA from McMaster University. 
 
3
Martin: Facing the Change
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015


Facing The Change: Personal Encounters With Global Warming edited by Steven Pavlos Holmes

Wilfrid Laurier University

The GooseVolume 14 | No. 1 Article 47-15-2015Facing The Change: Personal Encounters WithGlobal Warming edited by Steven Pavlos HolmesGeoff R. MartinHarry S Truman College (City Colleges of Chicago)Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North AmericaCommons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment CommonsFollow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegooseThis article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrantede la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactezscholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended Citation / Citation recommandéeMartin, Geoff R.. "Facing The Change: Personal Encounters With Global Warming edited by Steven Pavlos Holmes." The Goose, vol. 14, no. 1 , article 4, 2015,https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss1/4.Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming edited by STEVEN PAVLOS HOLMES Torrey House, 2013 $16.95  Reviewed by GEOFF MARTIN  My review copy of Facing The Change arrived the same week that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published their Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). Though entirely different in tone and authority and mode of analysis, the two collections make for timely companion reads. AR5’s “Summary for Policy Makers” filters an extensive meta-analysis of climate science research into statements of confidence about this planet and our future, using, repeatedly, adjectives like “unequivocal,” “extremely likely,” and “unprecedented.” The voices gathered in Facing the Change, however, are not nearly so confident, but they are no less convincing for their hesitance, their fear, their confusion. These are not climate scientists reporting a litany of facts and cautious-prophecy; these are simply people (writers, teachers, poets, students) looking out their back windows and noticing small changes, harbingers of more to come, and recording their own perspectives and attendant feelings. In his introduction, Steven Pavlos Holmes calls these writers “our emotional and cultural first responders to climate change” (2). Holmes structures this collection of writings from 42 authors into three sections: “Observations,” “Generations,” “Revolutions”—each with two or more sub-chapters composed of poetry, short stories, and personal essays. Befitting a collection that aims to capture not a particular theory or exact prediction but “something more amorphous, individual, and emotional, even spiritual” (1) from the emerging experience of a changing climate, the works range over an array of objects and phenomena that mark these changes, that seem to make an aggregate climate visible and material in the present moment. In this respect, Facing the Change proceeds as an exploration of things, and our feelings about those things, that seem to evidence a changing climate. Part One, “Observations,” starts out in unease, hoping that “another spell of normalcy sets in. / Even five inches of ice on the lakes / would let us pretend that everything is right” (Smith 7). But the proceeding pieces push against that hope, with climate change lingering in the background of the invasion of Iraq (Davis 11), Superstorm Sandy (Sohar 21), and Hurricane Katrina (Davis 23). Chapter Two, “Species Out of Joint,” charts human-animal interactions: a snowshoe hare in a Maine without snow; the rusted pines of a beetle-chewed Oregon; spinster turtles and insomniac bears. The chapter also includes one of the collection’s strongest pieces—“To Wit, to Woo,” wherein Kathryn Miles tracks North American owls through their Linnean taxonomy, their literary and mythological history, and their contemporary status as a species out of place, irrupting in daylight, haunting the limits of knowability, and signaling “the very real boundaries of modern scientific knowledge, the limitations of our standard ways of talking about avian behavior” (33). Chapter Three takes up, explicitly, the plight of the polar bears, those now-viral symbols of climate change. Part Two, “Generations,” explores the weight and unease of intergenerational responsibility associated with parenting in the Anthropocene. Children’s books become laced with irony as the poet watches the “toothy simplicity” of Walrus “becoming 1Martin: Facing the ChangePublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015less than paper and ink” (Berger 75). Dane Cervine’s evocative poem, “The Last Days,” plumbs a father’s “secret misgivings” concerning his own longevity, his childhood fear of biblical apocalypse, and his daughter’s emergent future along “this thin, ephemeral line between Eden and Armageddon” (86). Cervine’s poem notwithstanding, this second section suffers from a loose sentimentality. The thought of iceless ponds in rural Pennsylvania, for example, renders a wintery nostalgia for a place “where championships were won, where time stood still, and where love existed solely” (Brandstadter 78). The second chapter, “Future Imperfect,” projects forward this nostalgic mourning through several pieces that work to conjure the atmosphere, both fictional and gaseous, of a hot and dying planet; these pieces are hard to pull off, with the moving force they seek, without falling into earnest exaggeration or too-easy despair. The final section, “Revolutions,” offers a wider scope of writings that engage with the challenges of thinking through to action on climate change. Holmes aims for the first chapter, “Twistings,” to explore the “dark night” of “negative emotional responses” (105) that need expression en route to healing. From Chicago, Jill Riddell admits that she’d “like to be in a position to write an essay about climate change filled with rage and despair” but must do, instead, with a contentedness in making “unheroic, everyday changes” (116). Helen Sanchez marshals her cynical wit as a coping mechanism (“In all seriousness, I’m seriously depressed,” she writes,) for her endlessly compromised attempts at mitigating climate change: “even my vegan diet contributes to global warming with all the methane gas it produces from my body” (116).  The second chapter, “Turnings,” contains works that mark certain writers’ emotional and spiritual shifts in the face of climate change (105). Willow Fagan, for example, links his early life experience of queer denial and his current struggle to come to grips with climate change by finding himself, as he says, “drawing on the skills and courage and wisdom I drew on then, as I rebuilt my understanding of the world in relative isolation, as I now face unpredictable changes that once again threaten the order of the world” (134). In “Glooscap Makes America Known to the Europeans,” Sydney Landon Plum recounts several stories of the Abenaki hero-creator figure, Glooscap, that describe the struggle between the lifeways of the giant North American beaver, Castoroides ohioensis, and the lifeways of human culture—a fight over the shape of the environment that played out in an earlier era of non-anthropogenic climate change. This long historical view allows Plum to take up the question of human meddling and of storytelling in a way that moves beyond a cynical apocalypticism (which he calls a “slacker mentality”) and into diverse, eclectic, and compelling storytelling of human life and engagement with the natural world (143). The collection’s call to action comes, perhaps a little too obviously, in the final essay, “How to Be a Climate Hero,” where Audrey Schulman explores the social phenomenon of the bystander effect and the challenges and pleasures of breaking group cohesion. Two short poems bring the Coda together. “The Lucky Ones” begins with the asteroid impact on the Yucutan Penninusla and ends with waves of annihilation. The second poem, “The Angels are Rebelling,” sees Gaia sounding the alarm, “hammering on her golden bells” (161). 2The Goose, Vol. 14, No. 1 [2015], Art. 4https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss1/4Despite the urgent and impending tone of the Coda or the sincerity of its final call to action, Facing the Change comes off as quietly melancholic; it suggests a kind of American Romanticism subdued by the age of the Anthropocene. The collection finds, I think, its greatest strength and resonance where its writers are uncertain and reflective, where they navigate the extended spaces between sense and understanding. To my mind, the book should simply declare itself a collection of writings from the continental United States; its concerns and domains are largely American (each writer’s state is listed in the table of contents), and the single non-US inclusion, “A Jungle for My Backyard,” is also a clear outlier, a didactic short story about the impact of palm oil extraction on indigenous lands in Borneo, Malaysia. This global extension is welcome but feels tokenary in its singularity. Despite this quibble, Facing the Change is an earnest and straightforward attempt to capture the range of nervousness, concern, and fury that is shaping American nature writing in our present moment.  GEOFF MARTIN teaches English at Truman College (City Colleges of Chicago) where his courses take up climate literacy, urban environmentalism, and food politics in the city. His essay, “From the Banks of the Grand,” was shortlisted for the 2011 Edna Staebler personal essay contest and is available from The New Quarterly. He holds an MA from McMaster University.  3Martin: Facing the ChangePublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015

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Facing The Change: Personal Encounters With Global Warming edited by Steven Pavlos Holmes

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