Margaret Atwood: We are entering a new era of book banning

NEWS

The multi-award winning novelist, essayist, poet and activist wrote in the 50th anniversary issue of Index on Censorship magazine

By Margaret Atwood

23 Mar 22

Americas | News and features | United States

Filming of The Handmaid's Tale at the Lincoln Memorial. Photo by Victoria Pickering

Our summer 1989 issue bore an image of two indigenous Kayapo people captioned “Our Right To Know About Our Environment”. Decades before Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth we have been talking about how the climate crisis and censorship feed off each other.

We are enternig a new era of book banning and censorship – not in totalitarian and authoritarian dictatorships alone, as was once the case, but in the United States, erstwhile champion of Freedom of Expression and home of the First Amendment. One focus is the realm of public education: books concerning race, gender fluidity, the Holocaust, and the history of the United States, as well as those long-term targets, evolutionary science and feminism, are in the crosshairs. But if climate science is not prominent on this list, it soon will be. One-time Florida Governor Rick Scott – now a Republican Senator – forbade state employees to use the terms “global warming” and “sustainability,” presumably because it might be bad for business. It’s hard to sell a piece of real estate that is predicted to be underwater soon.

The climate crisis will spur natural disasters – as it is already doing. Floods, fires, high winds, sea-level rises, crop failures, and the spread of destructive species will cause famines, homelessness, an increase in wealth inequality, and mass migrations, or an attempt at them.

These in turn will generate social unrest. Autocracies will have no trouble shutting down the bad news and exterminating or interning those causing them headaches. But how will democracies respond? Like Rick Scott – close your eyes, wipe out words, pretend it isn’t happening, thus preparing the ground for future death and destruction? Regulate the news, in ways that are considered good – as in wartimes? Create ecotatorships, in an attempt to stem or reverse the catastrophic effects of climate change by severely regulating material spaces? Open the Free Expression doors and fall victim to foreign “content farms” and bot operations, run by those who wish to weaken or obliterate democracies? Hard choices! I’ll pop back in via seances in a hundred years or so to see how it all worked out. X

By Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the Maddaddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry in a decade, followed in 2022 with Burning Questions, a selection of essays from 2004 - 2021. Her next collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood was published in March 2023. Atwood has won numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright, and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.