From plague to planetary crisis: climate fiction before cli-fi

Our oldest stories begin in the soil or by the sea, myth being the original ecological narrative.The Mand and Sumerians tell of people growing from seeds or moulded from earth; Rigveda, the ancient Hindu sacred text, and the Kojiki, the earliest written Japanese chronicle, speak of births from primordial oceans; and Abrahamic traditions place us in Eden's lushness.With industrialisation came a new imperative: writers began exploring not just our connection to nature but also our power to destroy it.Climate fiction is a recent literary genre confronting environmental and societal breakdown.But literature has grappled with the interplay of people and environment long before "cli-fi" exploded in the 2010s.These works offer more than historical perspective.They reveal how story and imagination might help us grasp what climate data alone cannot-the full scope of our crisis-while helping us to envision paths beyond catastrophe.