I’m With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet

Content Warning: This book contains crude language and content pertaining to sexual assault and violence that may not be fit for certain audiences.

Published by Verso (2011).

  • Margaret Atwood’s I’m with the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet is a climate fiction (cli-fi) collection of short stories illustrating how climate change will be felt years in the future. This collection features nine other artists: Paolo Bacigalupi, T.C. Boyle, Toby Litt, Lydia Millet, David Mitchell, Nathaniel Rich, Kim Stanley Robinson, Helen Simpson, and Wu Mingi– each contributing their own stories. Genres range from dystopia to realistic fiction, but each story contains elements of climate fiction.
  • Canadian Author Margaret Atwood has written many environment-themed novels, including the popular book The Handmaid’s Tale. She has also popularized the term cli-fi in literature. Many of her futuristic and dystopian novels take place in settings altered by climate.

How is this related to climate?

  • I’m with the Bears takes an emotional and relatable approach to climate awareness and advocacy. The writers found that the urgency of climate change, mainly reported through warnings and numerical facts, is not always effectively communicated to the general public. I’m with the Bears makes an effort to bridge this gap. Through a collection of fictional and grounded short stories, the novel conveys how the effects of climate change will feel in a way that general audiences can connect to.
  • For example, “Diary of an Interesting Year” by Helen Simpson tells the story of a thirty-year-old woman living in an apocalyptic version of the year 2040, through her diary. In this world, disease runs rampant, civilization has fallen apart, and food is scarce. The author of the diary describes the loss of her family, migrating to less dangerous areas, and the sacrifices she makes to stay alive.
  • In her story, Simpson refers to the climate crisis as “the Big Melt.” Anthropogenic global warming is causing ice in the Arctic and Antarctica to melt at unprecedented rates. Since 2002, ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic have been shrinking. According to NASA, every year, Greenland loses 270 billion tons of ice (image below). Melting ice is also contributing to global sea level rise.

Side-by-side photographs of Greenland’s Sukkertoppen ice cap. The image to the left was taken in summer 1935 and the image to the right was taken in summer 2013. During this time, the ice retreated two miles (from Hilaire, 2020).

  • “The Tamarisk Hunter” by Paolo Bacigalupi tackles another major issue in the ongoing climate crisis: drought. Bacigalupi sheds light on the future of the megadrought in the Southwestern United States through the life of a man named Lolo. Lolo is a tamarisk hunter paid by the government to remove the invasive flowering shrubs from the Colorado River in an effort to save water. In this story, water has become scarce and heavily regulated. To the few people who remain in the West, water is a matter of life and death.
    • The Southwestern Megadrought is the southwestern United States’ worst drought in 1,200 years. Anthropogenic climate change has shifted moisture patterns and disrupted the water cycle, causing the region to experience long periods of minimal rainfall. It has put extreme stress on the Colorado River, which provides water to over 40 million people. Reservoir lakes including Lake Mead have also dropped to record low levels in 2022 (image below).

Satellite imagery of Lake Mead in the Southwestern United States in 2000 (left) and 2022 (right). Since 2000, the region has experienced its worst drought in over 1,200 years (from Jacobo, 2022).

  • Beyond raising awareness of the climate crisis, I’m With the Bears is part of the climate movement. The book’s earnings go to 350, a global grassroots organization dedicated to holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for their contributions to the climate crisis.

References and additional resources