The “climate lens” is a concept in Canadian public policy which asks decision-makers not to ignore the coming tsunami (excuse the pun)of climate-driven effects that many communities will, or have already started to, experience. It asks our leaders to base their decisions not on what they’ve traditionally experienced as the risks and dangers of our civilized life, but rather on new risks and dangers that we can see coming, sometimes quickly, caused by our first unwitting and then deliberate alterations to the atmosphere.

But before our governments cottoned on to the need to be intentional about adapting to the changing climate, our writers and poets were already leading the way. “Cli-fi” is a term coined in the late 2000s to name a growing literary genre that gives readers space to imagine and rehearse how our human world may experience and respond to the very real and imminent consequences of global heating.

And this year, cli-fi has made a strong showing in Atlantic Canadian books.

We Were In It: Stories about Energy Transition (Memorial University Press) is perhaps the most intentional cli-fi of the latest Atlantic offerings.

Editors Lisa Moore and Sheena Wilson are the helm of a group of writers from a variety of fields and backgrounds, including “academics, scientists, creative writers, visual artists, Indigenous legal experts, Knowledge Keepers and policymakers,” who convened on computer screens during the pandemic, to write down stories and ideas through a “climate lens.” The result is a series of vignettes and short stories that range from comedic scenes of present-day power outages, to visions of a future where we sometimes willingly play a role in the lucrative destruction and then reconstruction of our world.

With the use of writing prompts (which the editors share at the end of the collection, and encourage readers to use themselves) the writers manage to hone in on the people at the centre of the crisis, their complexity, complicity and relationships. A woman walks out to witness a poisoned, dying calf, recalling a night spent with the man who came to sell fracking to her community. A surveyor recognizes his childhood paradise, even as he helps prepare it for harvest. The son of a beleaguered COVID nurse takes his lockdown-borne paranoia too far. Under the guidance of Moore and Wilson, We Were In It is a fascinating survey of the cli-fi imaginings of a diverse group of thinkers.

Sofia Alarcon’s version of cli-fi tackles the climate-aware state of mind. The writer and illustrator borrows the title of her debut graphic story collection, Endsickness (ConundrumPress), from non-fiction writer Elizabeth Rush, who defined it as “its own kind of vertigo—a physical response to living in a world that is moving in unusual ways.”

Alarcon’s stories run the gamut from the darkly absurd—skewering the false hope offered up by Patagonia sweaters and “positive thinking,” to the starkly honest—pondering the path of life on earth that brought us to this point in history. “This can’t be what our ancestors survived for,” say the friends in “Adaptation,” of their high-rent, low-pay lives. “This can’t be the pinnacle of human imagination.”

Finally, two poetry collections in this season’s crop of Atlantic books speak to cli-fi themes, not so much intentionally as unavoidably, as they give windows into lives rooted in the natural world.

Poet Chris Bailey writes from rural PEI, with one foot on a fishing boat with a “nor’east wind that don’t give a fuck about you,” and another boarding a plane westward, to where “lobster traps are décor here.” There’s not much effort needed to apply a climate lens when the cruel vagaries of Maritime weather are your everyday, and Bailey shows that in his second poetry collection, Forecast: Pretty Bleak (McClelland & Stewart).

Bailey documents the deeply personal, and also the voices and ideas of his particular corner of the world, where storms can turn a house into “a thrumming low-toned tuning fork” and work is “an act of love.”  In a series called “Only Replacement Will Do” Bailey walks readers through the destruction of Fiona and tunes in voices of determined resilience left in its wake: “Today is a day to count your blessings.”

Paul Moorehead is a pediatric oncologist, baseball fan and parent, all of which inform his debut collection, Green (Breakwater Books). Moorehead’s scientific outlook inspires and permeates his poems, as does his humour, the playfulness of which effortlessly gives way to darker observations and unforgettable images (see “hermit crabs residing in bottle caps” and “as though amber does any good for the fly.”)

In “Ways of Knowing,” Moorehead plays with the relationship between art and science, like Jacques Cousteau, whom he quotes with the assertion that “science and poetry are, in fact, inseparable.”

And while Moorehead’s collection includes more than cli-fi themes, it may also include the line that most sums up the genre, or at least the state of the world that inspires it:  “Everyone’s about to get a faceful of natural consequences,” writes Moorehead in “Lessons in Wild,”a poem about his daughter and his cat, and perhaps also about all of us and our world.

■ ERICA BUTLER is a radio reporter and journalist based in Sackville, New Brunswick, perched on one end of the Chignecto Isthmus, which like many places, is vulnerable to the effects of a new and changing climate.