After reading the works of Nixon, Lemenager, and Ghosh, a clear dissonance between our culture’s focus on consumption, as well as individualism, causes the inevitable consumption of our planet. Ghosh writes about historical instances in which climate change has moved on a scale beyond Nixon’s “slow violence”. Nixon defines “slow violence” as “forms of environmental violence that are easily ignored because they occur over long periods of time and are spatially dispersed,” ( Nixon 1). Nixon speaks to how activist writers can bring awareness to the issues of slow violence. He closes his argument with a comment about who bears witness. Nixon says, “ Contests over what counts as violence are intimately entangled with conflicts over who bears the social authority of witness, which entails more than seeing or not seeing,”(Nixon, 16). This clear boundary between bearing witness to slow violence or even violence for that matter and finding it imperative to call attention to injustice or harm being done to other communities or community members is one of the main reasons authors are calling for a collectivist approach. 

In” Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre”, by Stephanie LeMenager, a discussion of every day and “regularity” is brought up. She begins her piece by sharing the climate change news and then discussing the news that are “ anecdotes of catastrophe digestible with coffee,”(LeMenager, 2). While this regular news feed shows us many forms of violence and highlights the problems in the world, it can make us forget that our planet is changing and that our “‘everyday’ relies on human habit and its complement of forgetting,” (Lemenager, 2). Lemenager takes Nixon’s concept of slow violence and argues a similar point of view to Ghosh when she speaks on “learning to die” as a society and civilization. Ghosh and Lemenager both argue to abandon our individualistic mindset that the Western world praises for a collectivist approach to the climate crisis.

Ghosh’s The Great Derangement speaks to the barrier of bourgeois culture or “regularity” and the clear indicators that are telling us as humans that our planet is suffering. This connects directly to Nixon’s observation about witnessing slow violence, as well as Lemenager’s ideas surrounding breaking the barrier between the every day of most people and the every day of those suffering from our world’s demise. With this barrier we notice that people are inclined to look at things on an individual scale rather than the collectivist mindset argued for by both Ghosh and Lemenager that is turned towards protecting our home for generations to come. Towards the end of The Great Derangement, Ghosh begins to describe what the typical cli-fi novel depicts; it is often a dystopian rendition of a world that is almost uninhabitable due to climate change. This is a semi-flawed way in which to write about climate change because climate change is present and part of our world even before the planet declines into almost nothing. Ghosh talks about the genre of cli-fi saying, “it could be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or short story to the genre of science fiction,” (Ghosh, 11).

While Nixon argues that slow violence is hard to depict on a large scale when so many novels contain violence that is not slow, Ghosh reminds us that if we were to write a novel that is present in our climate crisis, we would have to move towards collectivist thinking to think towards our future so that the dystopian classic cli-fi novel does not come to pass. With discussions occurring over who is bearing witness and who is actively ignoring the signs of our planet’s decline in favor of everyday life, all three authors are adamant that the cli-fi genre could be successful in raising awareness and calling attention to the things missed in Lemenager’s idea of “dystopian news”. Cli-fi is up against serious challenges based in greed and colonialism and perhaps fiction is the best way to raise empathetic sentiments towards those struggling to adjust to climate change conditions, while promoting a collectivist approach to the problem.