Sustaining Attention to Climate Change

Abstract

n The Ants and the Grasshopper, a 2021 documentary film, Malawian farmer Anita Chitaya travels through the American heartland, discussing the climate crisis with her fellow agriculturalists.1 In Iowa, she sits down for lunch with the Jacksons, who listen―over steaming dishes of homegrown vegetables―to her account of increasing drought in southeastern Africa. Politely but resolutely, the Jackson family insists that climate change is a political agenda rather than an environmental reality. Yes, they also have noticed erratic weather on their farm, but they attribute it to natural variation. To my mind, this scene is among the most quietly devastating in recent cinema: after traveling thousands of miles to advocate for her community’s livelihood, Chitaya is met with staunch climate denialism. She looks down at her empty plate, at the remnants of what I imagine was potato salad. The Jacksons are expert practitioners of what Min Hyoung Song calls everyday denial, “an arduously willed state of refusal to acknowledge something that otherwise exists in plain sight” (28). Each recordbreaking temperature is excused as anomaly, each crop failure is understood as misfortune. As Song notes, “[b]ecause of its repetition, everyday denial can be remarkably durable. It can be