Thanks to the success of Hollywood disaster films, from Waterworld to The Day After Tomorrow, it’s not hard to imagine an apocalyptic future as climate change takes hold.
Picturing a warmer but more habitable earth, however – one with plentiful clean energy, and less pollution and waste – is more challenging because so few futuristic tales tell of such a world.
“People are naturally drawn towards disasters as stories. If you don’t have any jeopardy, you don’t really have a plot,” said James McKay, an engineer who runs a centre for low-carbon technologies and bioenergy at the University of Leeds, in northern England. “If everything’s going well, there’s not much dramatic tension.”
But McKay, who for 20 years has moonlighted as a creator of comics, thinks he has found a way to overcome that: through publishing “graphic novels” that paint a picture, in drawings and stories, of a better future.
“It’s really important to take people away from the dystopia idea, which switches everyone off when they hear all this terrible doom and gloom,” he said. “We need to ask people to think about the positive view. Then they engage, and see this as a problem that needs a solution rather than...
