Published in Anastasia Cardonem, Paola Loreto, Adele Tiengo, eds., The U.S. and the World We Inhabit. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019. 102-118. 1 CLIMATE CHANGE AFFECTS AND NARRATIVES: TOWARD TRANSSPECIES HAPPINESS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE Greta Gaard In summer 2017, the New York Times Magazine published an article on climate change that presented the terrifying possible futures of mass extinctions, food scarcity, perpetual wars, poisoned oceans, economic collapse. Climate scientists responded angrily, arguing that the public needs optimism and hope in order to take actions that mitigate climate crises. Ecopsychologists disagreed, distinguishing “affect tolerance” from “affect phobia” – the latter functioning as a real barrier for climate action – and argued for a nexus of fear and hope as sufficiently motivating affects. This essay uses Narrative and Affective ecocritical approaches to explore the scientific and popular narratives of climate change, as well as the dominant narrative of North American culture, its inhibition of empathy, its articulation of the heroic self, and the subsequent paradox of its happiness narratives as the pursuit of happiness through acquisition, consumption, travel – all activities that fuel climate change. The essay unmasks the (un)happiness/separate-self-identity narrative of dominant North American culture, and describes relational identities that can emerge from Indigenous perspectives as well as from findings in physics, biology, and philosophy – notably material feminist and ecofeminist perspectives. To demonstrate an ecoliterary approach to narrating ecological interidentity, affect tolerance and happiness, the essay discusses Freya Mathews’ novella, Ardea. On July 9, 2017, the New York Times Magazine published an article by David Wallis- Wells, titled “The Uninhabitable Earth” (2017a), and within days, it became the most - read article in the magazine’s history, stirring up debate, controver sy, and quite honestly, terror. The article confronts the “present tense” realities of climate change: the immediate and impending realities of mass extinction, the scarcity of food, climate plagues (i.e. Zika virus), unbreathable air, perpetual war, economic collapse, poisoned oceans. It concludes on a note of tepid optimism, arguing that “climate scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall radical warming, they say, because we must” (2017a). A week later on July 14, the magazine published an annotated version of the article with four minor factual corrections, and more importantly, ample quotations from the scientists cited in the essay, the scientific papers, books, additional research and contexts for the argument. But the larger debate about the article was not about the facts of climate change: it was about the journalistic ethics of exploring the “worst-case scenarios of climate change” (Wallis- Wells 2017b). As Michael Mann and his colleagues charged, “fear does not motivate, and appealing to it is often counter-productive as it tends to distance people from the problem, leading them to disengage, doubt and even dismiss it” (2017). They