Recently, I had a conversation with Seth Bernard, a Michigan musician and activist, about art’s role in changing culture. Seth mentioned a phrase he had heard, “Culture changes at the speed of narrative,” which seems like the perfect opener for my musing on fiction with a message.

Culture is, essentially, a story—a story that shapes and maintains our ways of living and knowing. Art’s role in changing culture is so powerful that when authoritarian regimes form, they often seek to quell the arts first.

Unfortunately, when writing about the environment and climate change, writers of nonfiction have had to deal with a lot of urgency and loss: melting ice, loss of biodiversity, humans running out of time to react. When I teach environmental literature, I tell my students we’ll resist the ten-chapter model, where the first nine chapters survey the “doom and gloom” and finally, the tenth offers a “lightbulb moment,” ending on individual practices: “Recycle. Conserve. Use LED lightbulbs!”

I introduce them to Indigenous authors like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Linda Hogan, who understand the need to heal our relationship with the more-than-human world, and Kathleen Dean Moore, an environmental ethicist, who describes our obligation to place as “the ecology of love.”

Writing eco-fiction is, for me, an act of love. It is an opportunity to acknowledge losses while celebrating all we are capable of. It is an opportunity to climb into the future.

In fiction, many of our most dramatic visions (especially on the big screen) warn us of the future we could have if we do not change. Think: Soylent Green, the Mad Max series, and The Road – stories in which humans behave on a scale from selfishness to monstrousness when it comes to surviving in a world of scant resources. Women, in particular, do not fare well in such futures. Neither does democracy.

My students and I have had fun with Wall-E, a children’s movie, as an indictment of a culture of consumerism and waste, with a spark of resistance.

Imagining the future is a generational experience.

For those who grew up in the ’60s or ’70s or ’80s, the growing-up message was some variation of: “You can do anything you set your mind to.”

But our youngest generations, the college students I meet in my classrooms, have grown up on a different message: “You’re screwed.” They’ve known since their middle school science classes that once we reach ten or twelve key tipping points (we’re pushing seven); once we surpass 350 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere (we’re at 424); once the permafrost reaches a certain percentage of thaw – well – we’re all screwed.

I applaud the writers and visionaries who have offered us a future based on denial, greed, and inaction. These warnings have helped to create an appropriate sense of urgency. However, what I’m sensing now is the need to offer readers and thinkers the opportunity to step into action. What my students want, as they struggle with eco-grief, is something to DO.

So, back to the speed of narrative.

I believe, with the help of story, we’re in the thick of building a more socially and ecologically conscious way of living and knowing—what the writer Aldo Leopold called our necessary social-ecological evolution.

Fifteen years or so ago, the field of sustainability brought talk of “culture as a story,” promoting the need for creativity, community, and compassion. Now, as climate reporting organizations notice an acceleration in tipping points, the narrative is speeding up. Writers of eco-fiction, climate fiction, and eco-resistance are welcomed as change accelerators.

I’m inspired by the idea of being a change accelerator.

In places all around the globe, people are working for a better future, working on community resilience, clean water, social and environmental justice, and stories of resistance are a part of our evolution. We need stories that invite us into the joy of solidarity, the raw people power that comes from standing together and saying, “No more!”

We don’t have to be perfect or superhuman. We only need to care and to avoid the tendency to rationalize away our caring.

In my new novel, Land Marks (She Writes Press, April 16), I set out to honor the individuals and groups across the state of Michigan who came together when fracking came to our state forests. People from all sorts of lived experiences brought whatever they had to offer to the “common ground” table. Storytellers, water well drillers, doctors, Indigenous community members, musicians, students, lawyers, and ban petitioners shared their research, their pictures, and their poetry.

And it was fun to work together.

Yes, the losses are many. And yes, eco-grief is potent and pervasive and must be acknowledged. But also yes, there is power in the three C’s: Creativity, Community, and Compassion. We can write power into being as an act of resistance against the forces that tell us we’re too small to make a difference.

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Maryann Lesert writes about people and place in equal measure. Her first novel, Base Ten (Feminist Press, 2009) followed an astrophysicist’s quest for self among Lake Michigan’s forested dunes and the stars. Her current novel, Land Marks, is based on two years of boots-on-well-sites research on fracking in the state forests. Her plays have been published by New Issues (2008) and in Smith & Kraus’s Best Ten-Minute Plays series. Her articles have appeared in EcoWatch and In These Times, and she is a regular presenter on art and activism. Maryann lives in west Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and writes by the big lake.