Climate Change in Literature, Television and Film from Norway

Abstract

Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literature, television and film, and Norway has the worldwide first organization of writers committed to climate action (The Norwegian Writers’ Climate Campaign, founded in 2013). In this article, we argue that Norwegian climate change fiction and related works draw on elements that relate to specific national and/or Nordic cultural, societal and historical features, and that these elements give these works their distinct identity. We focus on four such features: (1) notions of “Nordicity”; (2) an (imagined) intimate connection between Norwegianness and nature, often seen as a typical element of Norwegian national identity; (3) references to Norwegian petroculture (since the Norwegian economy is largely based on the export of fossil fuels) , and (4) an atmosphere of gloom and melancholia in many of the works, which draws on a Nordic tradition of painting and literature, and which also often characterises the genre of Nordic noir.