By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan – When people ask me what I do in retirement I like to say I’m a “Jewish climate activist of the literary kind.” Here’s why:
I’m Jewish. I’m 70. I’m not a novelist, and I’m not writing any books about climate change.
But since 2006, I’ve been working 24/7, no days off from my PR computer in 12 years, to promote climate activist ideas, novels and movies, free of charge. I don’t charge anyone any fees, and I’m not in this for personal fame or money. I’m a promoter. It’s my hobby, after retiring from a long and zigzagging career with newspapers in Washington D.C., Alaska, Japan and Taiwan.
My most engaging work so far was to coin a new literary term, ”cli-fi,” in 2011 and then to boost its popularity in the media as a headline term and an actual literary genre, different and separate from sci-fi. But of course, I borrowed the rhyming sounds from the sci-fi term.
To get where I am today, I used my informal PR skills to “plant” major media articles about cli-fi in The New York Times in 2014 and in The Guardian in London, the Associated Press, Reuters, and hundreds of media outlets worldwide. Based in a tiny kitchen office in my home in Taiwan, I reach the world with pixels. I don’t use the phone. I don’t have a phone. I don’t make any calls.
I’m a PR gadfly, on the fly. And I’ve never been so personally energized, although I need to underline that this is a very serious doomsaying business. It’s about tikkun olam, a Hebrew phrase, to repair the world.
This is all I do all day, every day. A happily retired journalist, editor, page designer, headline writer and proofreader, I run a global website called The Cli-Fi Report (www.cli-fi.net) and tweet around the clock to other climate activists and literary types worldwide seven days a week. I eat, breathe and go to sleep at night fulfilled and exhilarated. I wake up every morning full of energy and new ideas.
And I don’t make a dime from any of this. I’m paying it forward. Life’s been good to me. I don’t have much time left and in many ways I’m living on borrowed time. There was a near-fatal plane crash in Alaska in 1983, a heart attack in 2009 (with a tiny steel mesh stent keeping my ticker ticking).
Monthly social security checks from Uncle Sam are my only “income” now, and they’re just $600 per check. I live a simple life, far from the large cities of the world. And nobody’s ever heard of me. I like it this way.
From a PR standpoint, all this is an interesting media story about an independent overseas blogger with no media or literary connections creating an entirely new literary genre to wake people up around the world about global warming. I’m not surprised because in a way this is very much where my wandering peripatetic life was always taking me.
A friend of mine once said that with my climate work, I’m “a force of nature.” No, I’m a “servant” of nature. I’m doing this work for the world, not for me. I never put myself at the center of things.
I also never studied PR. But hanging around newspapers and newspaper people since my college days, I learned how PR works, what makes a good eye-catching press release, and how to gently pitch and approach editors and reporters.
My work as a climate activist of the literary kind is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.
And I owe this all to my parents, Bernie and Sylvia Bloom, z’l, who gave me wings to fly.
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Bloom is a freelance writer and inveterate web surfer based in Taiwan. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com