Finding Hope: Beyond Grief and Alarmism in the Climate Crisis
This piece was written as part of the Veritas Institute, a program of the Veritas Forum at which college students spend a week learning from top scholars in the fields of science and technology and write an essay about a topic at the intersection of science and the big questions. Fare Forward is pleased to support the Veritas Institute by publishing some of the best submitted pieces.
Interweaving human loss and environmental destruction, Migrations makes the case for hope in the small steps we can take to save our planet.
Review by Sarah Gantt
In Charlotte McConaghy’s novel Migrations, protagonist Franny Lynch lives in a futuristic world where “eighty percent of all wild animal life has died, [and] most of the rest will go in the next decade or two.” In Franny’s world, undomesticated animals we consider common today, such as deer and seagulls, are either extinct or confined to remote nature preserves. Judging the book by its premise, Migrations might look like just another piece of alarmist eco-literature, but McConaghy ends up charting a more hopeful course, one that suggests a transformation in our attitude toward the climate crisis.
The widow of an ornithologist, Franny is determined to follow Arctic terns on their last migration from Greenland to Antarctica. Fish are scarce, so she catches a ride on the Saghani, a commercial fishing vessel, by convincing its captain that the terns will lead him to fish. Throughout Franny’s perilous journey, we witness flashbacks of her romance with her late husband, Niall. We know Franny and Niall are separated physically—she is on the Saghani, and he is not—but only gradually do we realize that their separation is permanent. During her first storm onboard ship, Franny narrates, “It comes in a wave, as it does, the rupturing force of missing my husband. He too loves storms.” From everything we know, their marriage was a happy one, but Franny tells the Saghani’s crew that Niall left her.
Only in understanding Franny’s history do we gain clarity about her separation from Niall. We learn she has faced incredible loss in her life. Franny grew up with her father in prison, she came home one day to find her mother dead, and her child was stillborn. These experiences contribute to Franny’s restless nights full of sleepwalking and nightmares.
Franny says she has a habit of leaving people, of traveling to faraway places and rarely returning, but she never left Niall, she only wandered from him and then came home. In her marriage, Franny stayed, and Niall left. Her narrative makes readers suspicious that we are not being given the full story. Franny lives in denial about Niall’s death. They used to write letters while he was alive, so Franny continues to write to him on the Saghani; her “pile of letters to send him grows fat” because she has no one to send them to.
For Franny, Niall’s death and mass extinction are intricately interconnected. As an ornithologist, Niall was passionate about climate science, and throughout their marriage, Franny became invested in his work. She even lived with him on a wild animal reserve in Scotland. In his work and personal life, Niall emphasized humanity’s devastating role in the climate crisis; he often said, “We [humans] are a plague on the world.” Because of her family history and connection to Niall, Franny felt the weight of humanity’s destructive tendencies personally.
McConaghy leads readers to care about climate loss because we become invested in Franny and Niall and their life’s work.
Throughout Migrations, McConaghy invites us to think about the responsibility connected to loss. During Franny’s time on the Saghani, she feels culpable for mass extinction and Niall’s death. The two losses inform each other as Franny revisits intimate experiences with her husband and animals. For instance, she remembers crows that followed her and brought her trinkets when she fed them, and she remembers Niall announcing the crow’s extinction to her years later.
Franny’s guilt-centered narrative surrounding death is much like the narrative contemporary scientists tell us about mass extinction. For example, one CNN headline from about a year ago reads, “The sixth mass extinction is happening faster than expected. Scientists say it’s our fault.” According to a recent study cited in the article, 173 species went extinct between 2001 and 2014, “25 times more than you would expect under the normal extinction rate.”
As we have seen in the past fifty years of inaction, presenting an alarmist message about climate change to the public is a failed strategy. But there are alternative approaches to the climate crisis. In Migrations, Niall chooses a dejected, jaded cynicism, and many of the fisherman aboard the Saghani choose denial. The novel hinges on this question: What approach will Franny choose?
At the end of her journey, we learn Franny followed the migration pattern of the Arctic terns because Niall requested in his will that his ashes be released where the terns fly. Migrations is an imaginative effort to feel our way into a world of grand loss; McConaghy leads readers to care about climate loss because we become invested in Franny and Niall and their life’s work.
When Franny reaches Antarctica, she witnesses the flight of hundreds of terns scientists thought did not exist. She submerges herself in the frigid water, and we expect her to end her life, her final journey complete. But Franny’s eyes snap open when she hears Niall’s voice saying, “You showed me. We can nurture it, if we are brave enough.” Franny concludes, “We are not here alone, not yet. They haven’t all gone and so there isn’t time for me to drown. There are things yet to be done.”
In this scene, Franny experiences a baptismal rebirth, and her despair transforms into hope. She chooses life instead of death; she chooses hope, a positive outlook rooted in meaningful work that will help produce the kind of future she envisions. And Franny’s hope is distinct from blind optimism centered around technological solutions, suggesting a mass movement of nurturers united against mass extinction.
Through Franny’s shift from alarmism to hope at the end of the novel, McConaghy provides a critical perspective on mass extinction that can transform our response to the climate crisis as a whole. Although average people cannot pull any big political levers, they are capable of fruitful action. For instance, most species of bumblebees are endangered, but adding a simple bee house to your yard can help bees survive. Such an act might seem insignificant, but compared to inaction in the face of an overwhelming problem, even such a small act of radical hope can be transformative.
Sarah Gantt is an Art History and English major and French minor at Williams College. She enjoys reading poetry, rowing on the Williams Women’s Crew team, and studying Gothic cathedrals.
Migrations was released by Macmillan Publishers on August 4, 2020. You can purchase a copy on their website here.
Sarah’s review of Migration was both interesting and informative. She made me want to read the book too. We’ll done. A message of hope in a bleak landscape.
Sarah ‘s review of Migration is a clarification for the alarm the world need to hear . You raised in me the desire to read this book.
I read Sarah Gantt’ s review and thought the book, “Migrations”, would be a really great read. So Sarah did a really good job on peaking my interest by giving a lot of detail with just enough intrigue to entice you to want to know more about Franny’s story by Charlotte McConaghy.
Well done Sarah. Your review about a book I have never heard about has made me want to go buy it and read it. You did a fabulous job. Thank you.