by Joanne O’Connell

My debut novel, Beauty and the Bin was partly inspired by my food journalism, particularly by a column I wrote for the Guardian, about giving up supermarkets.   

For twelve months, I whizzed nettles into pesto, baked my own bread, grew vegetables, and stocked up on everything from chilli flakes to tomato ketchup at my local independents. At first, it was about saving money (it was for the consumer affairs section of the paper) but alongside the savings (£2,000 in a year, by the way!) it allowed me to explore how to live and eat in ways that protect the planet.  

It led to so many inspiring conversations, with people like eco chef Tom Hunt, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage, and expert forager Fiona Bird. I ate seaweed spaghetti on a Scottish Island, drank velvety smooth chocolate with a chocolatier in London, and learnt about everything from hydroponics to how much perfectly edible food gets wasted each year. And I didn’t just write about this stuff, the point of the column was to live it. So, my sourdough starter bubbled on the kitchen worktop, peas grew up the garden fence and the windowsills of my house became a blur of leafy salad greens (much of which ended up in Beauty and the Bin). 

Once the column was over, I carried on writing for the Guardian sustainable team, and begun to research my non-fiction food history book: The Homemade Vegan – which led me to connect with lots of climate pioneers all over the world.  

As a journalist and a non-fiction writer, you interview so many people. You’re looking for the real reasons behind what they say and do, and the privilege of the job is that it allows you an access to others from politicians to pop stars to the people eating surplus food from the supermarket bins.  But there are things you can’t say easily in journalism. You can report what people do or say but you can’t say for sure what they’re thinking. Plus, there’s a formula, which you must write to, there are fact checks and fast-paced deadlines.  

The more I thought about my writing, the more I realised there are things that novelists can say that journalists can’t. That sounds so basic! But this was my process. I knew I wanted to write a truthful, honest book about that awkward tug between family and friends when you’re just trying to find your place in the world. So, I wondered if writing a novel for children was also a great way to share what I’d learnt about food, and climate-friendly ways of eating – a new way of writing the story. And I knew I wanted the story to be a fun, light-hearted, magazine-style read, which could inspire a reader or two (fingers crossed) but which didn’t heap pressure on younger generations or worry them. 

But it wasn’t really until the final edit of the book that I realised how much the story had been influenced by my journalism work. The characters in Beauty and the Bin are nearly always either eating or putting food on their faces or feet; the family lives in a hydroponic growing farm, where Laurie, the main character, makes her plant-based beauty products from surplus food. And while I did of course know the idea for this book had sprung from my journalism and love of food, even I was surprised to discover that the word chocolate appears 91 times.  

‘You have two choices, Laurie. You can either get some food out of the bins to take to the party or you can get back into the car and sulk.’

Laurie got back into the car and sulked.

Unconcerned, her mum picked up the bags. ‘Come on, Fern,’ she said to Laurie’s little sister. ‘Last night’s rubbish should still be in the containers. We’re looking for bagels, salad, strawberries . . .’

‘Can I get into the actual bin?’ asked Fern, jumping up and down on the spot. Her bracelets, home-made from bottle tops, jangled loudly. ‘Like properly inside it? And throw things over to you?’

‘But you’re the lookout,’ said Mum. ‘What if the manager comes out and you don’t give me the signal in time?’

Laurie pulled her cardigan around her. Normal people, she thought, don’t slip around the back of supermarkets and take things out of the bins for free. She stared out of the window. It was nearly seven o’clock on a Saturday evening and the car park was busy. Shoppers were going through the shiny doors, into the brightly lit aisles to pay for groceries.

Her eyes rested on a girl and her mum – both dressed in this season’s statement jeans – who were trying to prise a trolley out of the rack. The mum kept tugging on the handles and then throwing her arms up, panto-style. Laurie couldn’t see the girl’s face but she was tossing her blonde ponytail.

She’s probably laughing, thought Laurie. Like I’d be, if I hadn’t been asked to climb into a bin and splatter myself with yogurt, custard and hummus. 

You can find out more about Beauty and the Bin here.

Joanne O’Connell is a journalist whose inspiration sprang from a year-long column she wrote for the Guardian called ‘Goodbye Supermarkets’, during which she met food waste campaigners, such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and eco-chef Tom Hunt, and presented a short video about taking her children foraging on a Scottish Island. She has written for The Observer, The Times, The Daily Express, The Independent and various glossy magazines, and is the author of The Homemade Vegan, published in 2016. She occasionally appears on television and radio, most recently on BBC Breakfast and Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.

This article originally ran in the newsletter in 2021.

Charlotte Mendel and Clyde Boyer talk about their time travel books.

Charlotte and Clyde were introduced through the Climate Fiction Writer’s League and have since engaged in a series of climate conversations and mutual admiration sessions. Both authors used time travel as a lens to look at our current climate crisis, providing a realistic look at our current mess, but also a path to better, possible futures. 

Clyde Boyer: Let’s start with Reversing Time. This isn’t your standard YA novel, and I think that’s a good thing. The concepts and emotions in this book are complex and there are no easy resolutions or answers. But, I think young people are much more sophisticated than many writers give them credit for, and I believe this climate story will resonate. It’s a great novel, so either read it first than read this interview or vice versa…but read this book. Let’s get started.

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Reversing Time paints a really compelling picture of a possible future. Egalitarian. A society not just better tuned to nature, but aligned with nature. Is reconnecting with nature a precondition for building a better future?

Charlotte Mendel: I hope there are no preconditions to an individual’s desire to contribute to the quality of their own lives. The desire to survive and thrive burns in all of us, and the realization that our future depends on transitioning away from fossil fuels—changing our main energy sources to renewables—is the only condition for building a better future. However, perhaps this realization is a little easier for people who love nature.

CB: In your experience, do you believe young people are more receptive to climate fiction? What unique qualities or mindsets do they bring to the conversation?

CM: The short answer is, no. I am still trying to figure out who is more receptive to climate fiction, what makes them more receptive, and what type of climate fiction best inspires people to make changes in their own lives—but at least I’ve figured out that age isn’t a factor. I think there is a huge, growing tsunami of people who are increasingly receptive to the idea that the choices we make in our lives really do matter, and soon a critical mass will be reached that will demand change at the governmental level. At that point the government will speed up the process of policy change, resulting in laws (like carbon taxes) that force the remaining—unreceptive individuals—to change as well.

I have had the privilege to meet passionate environmentalists ranging in age from 7 to 90. I have also had the lesser privilege of meeting the utterly indifferent, who occupy the same huge age range. I am not sure why this is so, because it is the younger folks who will suffer the brunt of the catastrophe if the world fails to meet this challenge. But as a middle-aged person, I am driven to change partly because I am conscious of having been part of the problem for much of my life. I spent my youth travelling and stuffing my face with meat. I didn’t know about climate change, and don’t waste time blaming myself, but I am very anxious to address the damage my generation did.

CB: When writing climate fiction, how do you strike a balance between delivering a compelling story and conveying an important message? Which aspect, the story or the message, do you prioritize?

CM: If you make the climate crisis as sexy an enemy as Voldemarte or Captain Hook, and the people fighting it as heroic and identifiable-with as Superman and James Bond, then the important message is the reason why the story is compelling.

CB: As an author, what challenges do you face when addressing complex scientific concepts in your writing? How do you ensure that young readers understand and engage with these ideas without feeling overwhelmed?

CM: Overwhelmed is a great choice of word, as it reflects what so many people feel about the issue. In fact, the whole thing boils down to one, simple goal: reduce/stop using fossil fuels. That’s it. That’s the problem. You don’t need to know anything else. If our energy comes from fossil fuels, then everything we consume—our food, clothes, the hot water in our showers—all contribute to the problem. So while we wait for our energy sources to switch to renewables, let’s reduce our consumption, thereby reducing fossil fuel use, and forcing the corporations to switch to renewables faster. It really isn’t rocket science.

CB: There is a great scene in Reversing Time, where the protagonist, Simon, is exposed to two destructive world views on the climate crisis; one of denial and one of resignation. These views are deeply personal and rooted in all sorts of behaviors and patterns and fears that make us human. Facts and charts don’t seem to address these negative behaviors. How can fiction help us address these behaviors in a positive way?

CM: I am not sure that I know how to address them in a positive way—I am working on that! I do know that the issue isn’t partisan. The ‘leftie’ assumption that they’ve got a better attitude towards the climate than the right is simply not true. It doesn’t take much digging into the lives of politicians on both sides to see that there’s little difference in their average footprints. We need everybody on board to fight this huge issue that will affect everybody, so when the left co-opts the climate crisis and links it with their beliefs about abortion, racism, sexism, or whatever—they are alienating the right and obstructing the possibility of change.

Any set of beliefs that obstructs change is equally problematic. As far as I’m concerned, if you think abortion should be illegal but you want to fight for the future of the human race—I love you much more than someone who believes in free choice and flies to Thailand for their holidays. Fiction can help address obstructive behaviours on both sides of the divide by the  simplistic, age-old method of honouring the heroes (those who fight climate change) and demonizing the obstructors.

CB: There is a threat of violence throughout Reversing Time, from the bullies who chase Simon after school, to the thugs from the oil companies, to even his parents and their domestic struggles. Is violence inevitable in the struggle for building a better world?

CM: Gosh, huge question! I feel very confused about this myself. Gandhi didn’t think violence was inevitable to build a better world, and he’s the hero Simon most identifies with.  In my current book, the heroine starts to assassinate billionaires who are trashing the planet. Her young, gentle lover is horrified by this terrorism, until he goes to a party one day and overhears two billionaires discussing the underground bunkers they are building to escape the disaster their lifestyles have helped to create. They discuss how they might control the guards who would be needed to, “shoot the desperate hordes” trying to get into their bunkers. This scene is based on a real conversation between real billionaires, published in The Guardian. When I read this article, I felt pretty violent. But I’m no Gandhi.

Your novel Girl Out of Time is chock-a-block full of action, fantasy, time travel, glimpses of futuristic worlds and alien ones—all wrapped up in a story of everyday human challenges, from bullying to teenage love to the nature of friendship.  When you set out to write Girl Out of Time, what was the source of your inspiration/vision? Did a specific concept or goal nurture the rich ideas and imagination coursing through your book?

CB: Chock-a-block full of action has to be my favorite new description. Thanks, Charlotte! You probably picked up on this in our conversations, but I’m pretty enthusiastic about a number of different topics from regenerative practices, biomimicry, positive youth development, reconnecting with nature, space travel, and science as a source of awe. Girl Out of Time was an opportunity to weave these concepts together in a story I really wanted to read. And, of course, there had to be aliens and time travel and lots of flying. That was some real wish fulfillment there.

If I had a specific goal at the beginning, it was to inspire my audience with positive visions of what a sustainable society might look like. If young readers can envision a radically better future, and even more importantly, their own role in that future, they are more likely to work for it. This is especially true for young readers, I believe.

CM: There are so many beautiful descriptions of nature in this story, and all the main characters observe, enjoy, and/or work with nature in various ways. Was this a conscious decision on your part—to describe nature in order to evoke a sense of its incredible beauty to the reader? What role has nature played in your own life?

CB: Absolutely. I wanted the reader to be immersed in Anna’s world and to tap into all their senses; not just sight, but sound, smell, and tactile sensations. There is a website that uses AI to score a book on different attributes, vividness, passive voice, etc. Girl Out of Time scored in the 96th percentile for vividness. I thought that was pretty cool…useless…but cool.

In biomimicry, we are trained to carry a nature journal wherever we go and to just sit and observe our surroundings — quietly and with no agenda. At first, you just see nature as one big thing, then slowly, as your field of perception begins to relax you start to see patterns, movement, varying shades of color, and life dancing all around you. It’s kind of magical. It’s also something I tried to capture in Girl Out of Time. Like the great Hall of Fame baseball player Yogi Berra once said, “you can observe a lot by just watching.”

My own relationship with nature has evolved over time, but it has always been a source of awe, even as a kid growing up on a ranch in Idaho. There is a passage in the book where the main character, Anna, looks up into a night sky so dense with stars she could almost sense their movement, “the heavens spinning slowly above her in an arc.” I had that same experience when I was young. A kind of disorientation like vertigo and a diminishing of self.

Like most kids on a farm, I ran away the first chance I could get. I became involved in technology and design and began building complex systems. It was fun and challenging, but I felt such a hole in my life. About seven years ago, I helped a friend of mine on a regenerative farming project in Africa, and it was if someone had opened the window and let the fresh air in. I went back to school for Biomimicry and have spent the last seven years reconnecting to nature.  I’ve learned nature is a model for doing things in a better way; a mentor. There is so much we can learn if we just listen.

CM: There are two alien creatures in Girl Out of Time; the black shadowy aliens and the white spectres with the strange eyes. Although the white spectres are associated with fear for most of the story, by the end the reader realizes that both your creations are fundamentally ‘reasonable’. Do these creations represent or reflect any aspect of our own culture?

CB: I didn’t think about that when writing Girl Out of Time. When I created these alien characters, I looked at them from a biological lens primarily, not a cultural one. I asked myself how a creature would evolve on an alien landscape with hypergravity and eternal night. I looked to biological models here on earth for how these creatures could communicate, move, and sense the world around them. The shadow creature was really a thought experiment on envisioning a viable life form. But, the white spectres were something else… Spoiler alert: I wondered if it was possible to create a tense, action-oriented story, where there are no villains or bad guys, but a pervasive sense of mystery. I loved the idea of creatures who existed outside our sense of time who helped shape possible futures. They are gardeners trimming and pruning and managing complex ecosystems of time very much in the same way as Uncle Jack and Dr. Gloria manage ecosystem complexity on the Armstrong Regenerative Research Farm.

CM:  Girl Out of Time entertains, and it also provokes thought. If you were to choose one, single message that you would like your readers to take away from this story, what would it be?

CB: If there is a single message it would be this. We need to move beyond the current narrative on climate impacts and fear to climate engagement and agency. Kids need to be able to envision a better future, one so compelling that they’re willing to do what it takes to get there.

If there is a secondary message, it would be something along the lines of “get outside and get out of your head.” Reconnecting with nature not only helps us feel part of something bigger (awe), it helps lower stress, improve our immune systems and mood, and can even help us concentrate more effectively. It’s like a prescribed medication without the cost and nasty side effects.

Find out more about Reversing Time and Girl Out of Time.

Clyde Boyer is a social entrepreneur and former farm kid who has spent his life working with underserved youth and migrant populations and building learning hubs in Africa and Latin America. He is also a frequent public speaker and an advisory board member of SXSW EDU. A practicing Biomimic, he believes nature is the best teacher in solving many of our world’s issues.

Charlotte Mendel is a mother, author,  teacher, and a modest homestead farmer. Her first novel, Turn Us Again, won the Atlantic Book Award for First Novel, the H.R. Percy Novel Prize, and the Beacon Award for Social Justice. Her second novel, A Hero, was shortlisted for the 2016 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and was a finalist in the 2016 International book Awards, in the General Fiction Category.

by A Connors

Did you know that if you look at the Earth from directly over the Pacific, you hardly see any land. It’s pretty much all water.

We live on an ocean planet.

One of the marine biologists I spoke to while researching my book, The Girl Who Broke The Sea, had a nice way of putting it. He said:

If aliens ever visit Earth, they probably won’t even bother looking at the sticky up bits of rock on the back.

But, land-dwelling, fruit-eating mammals that we are, we tend not to think about it like that. We tend not to think about the deep-sea very much at all. 

I didn’t set out to write a novel about deep-sea mining. Like all good stories, I started with my main character: Lily Fawcett. I wanted to write a book about someone who feels like an outsider, someone for whom social interaction doesn’t come easily. I was a pretty socially awkward child at school, so it felt like something I could do a decent job of writing about, and it felt like something teen and YA readers would recognize and relate to.

I hit on the idea of sending Lily to a deep-sea mining rig somewhat at random. One of my friends drives ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles, think: radio-controlled mini-subs) and it just seemed like the perfect setting to force some change out of my character. Cramped, smelly, stuffy, noisy. Everything I knew she would hate.

But I wasn’t married to the setting at first. I have a scientific background, so the technical challenges of the deep-sea appealed to me. But apart from that, I’d never really thought about the deep-sea much at all. The only good movie set in the deep-sea I could think of was The Abyss from 1989, which is in stark contrast to the seventy plus movies alone set on space-stations over roughly the same period.

There’s something important here. Why is space so deeply woven into our culture in a way that the deep-sea is not? Both settings provide ample opportunities for dramatic tension. Unless you insert aliens into the mix, space is pretty sterile and uninteresting compared with the two-million-plus species that inhabit our oceans.

The marine biologists I spoke to as part of my research are actually kind of bitter about this. They have two theories. First, that the space-race of the 1950s (driven by the emerging threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles) still casts a long shadow over our collective consciousness. Second, simply that we are air-breathing mammals and our anthropocentric bias is baked so deeply into our psyche that we are hardly aware of it. The sight of a rolling field, a snow-capped mountain, or even the Earth from space, stirs something primal inside us. But when we try to imagine the vast depths of the deep ocean, our imagination – and our empathy – dries up (no pun intended).

It’s a problem with very real, practical consequences. NASA, for example, receives around four-times the research funding from the US government than NOAA receives. And almost more importantly: how many of us have heard of NASA but haven’t heard of NOAA?

It all changed for me when I started researching my book. I began with a few casual Google searches. I was mostly focused on the story, but I wanted the technology to be close enough to reality that it would feel plausible, and I wanted to get the language right, since I love the unique jargon that comes with each scientific field, and I think it’s an important part of making a story come to life.

Every time I learned something new about the deep-sea, however, it became more and more interesting. The richness of the ecosystem, the newness of the science, and the breadth of my own naivety revealed themselves ever more clearly.

From Google searches, I moved onto reading scientific papers. From scientific papers, I started to email the most frequently cited researchers and beg for some of their time.    

Marine biologists and oceanographers, I should say, are the coolest scientists I’ve ever met. Think: half-scientist, half-sailor. Think: lab coats and tattoos. I say this humbly as a former particle physicist: they are far cooler than us.

I learned, with their help, that the abyssal plains – vast undersea flatlands, hidden deserts, 5km under the ocean – account for about 50% of the earth’s surface, but that their systematic exploration has only become possible in the past ten or fifteen years, thanks mostly to the development of new battery and materials technology. I learned that we’ve mapped only about 20% of the ocean floor to modern standards. And that we’ve observed and catalogued only around 1% of the species we believe inhabit the world’s oceans.

As one marine biologist put it:

Our exploration of the deep ocean is so nascent that we discover something entirely new to science every time we look.

I also learned that there is around $200 trillion worth of metal lying loose on the ocean floor in the abyssal plains, and the mining companies really, really want to dig it up.

This was an interesting moment in the process of writing my book. I was about halfway through, the story was starting to come together, but suddenly I wasn’t just world-building anymore. I’d blundered into an incredibly important, controversial and much overlooked topic.

Not many people know, for example, that about a million square kilometres of the abyssal plains are already licenced for exploratory mining to around sixteen different companies. Or that the so-called “two year rule”, which obliges the International Seabed Authority to set out the regulations under which commercial deep-sea mining can begin, expires this July.

The arguments against deep-sea mining are pretty clear. Collecting polymetallic nodules (the type of deep-sea mining I cover in my book) involves driving a combine harvester-like vehicle across the ocean floor, ploughing 5m wide by 10cm deep tracks through the last untouched habitat on the planet. By some estimates, in order to recoup their investment, an average mining company would need to strip around 500 square kilometres of ocean floor every year. And the silt plumes generated by the process, and the noise of pumping the nodules to the surface, would extend hundreds of kilometres beyond that, affecting marine life in ways we are not even close to fully understanding.  

But the arguments in favour are not without merit. If we are serious about decarbonising our economy (and we have to be, because we can’t ignore climate change) then by some estimates, we’re going to need more metals in the next ten years (to build batteries and generators) than we’ve used in the entire history of humanity up to this point. The circular economy (recycling) will not meet demand. And surface-based mining is not without its own social and environmental impacts.

As a new writer, who had not yet even sold my first book, I had no idea how I could do justice to such a ferociously complex topic, in which science, industry, and international law were locked in a global three-way tussle.

I didn’t want to write in a way that felt like I was condoning a process that has the potential to wipe out entire ecosystems before we know they ever existed. But I also believe that fiction owes readers more than a dystopian cautionary tale and a saccharine “don’t do it” message. Addressing climate change is taking all the ingenuity, passion and energy we have, it is an active endeavour, and it requires difficult compromises. Fiction should help us navigate that reality.

The scientific community is pretty aligned on the subject of deep-sea mining. Whilst it might one day be a net positive, right now the consensus is that big-money and politics are trying to strong-arm science. Over 700 marine science and policy experts have signed an open statement calling for a moratorium on commercial mining. They suggest that ten years (aligning with the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science) is the right timescale.

My book is set after this moratorium, in a world where our scientific understanding and our technology has moved forward enough so that deep-sea mining can happen in a highly limited (and less destructive) way, under the watchful gaze of a resident science team. And even so, the on-going tension between industry and science is a major component of the story.

But what role does fiction really play? Fiction is not journalism. In telling a story about deep-sea mining, it’s easy to talk about raising awareness and alerting people to an overlooked environmental threat, but I think fiction needs to offer more than that.

The real power of fiction is its ability to trigger an emotional response in the reader. By creating sequences of events that play out internal conflicts, by constructing cycles of tension and release, novels engage readers at a much deeper psychological level than other forms. As Stephen King once wrote: Writing is telepathy.

The danger is that in trying to engage the reader and send them on an emotional journey, it’s easy to pick the wrong antagonist. I didn’t want to send Lily to the bottom of the ocean and have her do battle with a yellow-eyed leviathan, or defeat a creature with tentacles that were just begging to be lopped off. Doing so might have raised awareness, but it would have reinforced the stereotype of the deep-sea as a threatening, hostile, alien world, a reservoir of our deepest psychological fears, and a place completely separate and disconnected from human activity.

The deep-sea needs more of our empathy, not more of our fear.

I knew Lily would have to find something new to science at the bottom of the ocean. I didn’t want it to be a monster to be defeated, or even a completely benign entity in need of saving. By making Lily encounter something that is both a threat, and threatened, just as she is, and by making her journey primarily one of self-acceptance, I hoped to emphasise the similarities rather than the differences between us and the deep-sea.

This is my favourite line from the book:

It wasn’t human, but it had human traits. It could want, and need, and suffer. What did it understand of me? Probably no more than I understood of it. But it wanted to understand! That was the most human thing of all.

Books are important because they have a way of directing our attention (both as readers and writers) towards the things that really matter in the world, the things that are nourishing, and worthy of our attention. But more than that, by engaging readers at such a fundamental level, books have the ability to change how we think — maybe not all at once, but incrementally, in aggregate, over a period of many books, each one building on the last and influencing the next.

As fiction writers, we have an incredible opportunity to bring about change by dramatising new connections and parallels, by inciting empathy where it might not have naturally existed before.

In writing a book in which the deep-sea is a place of emotional discovery and connection, rather than a place filled with monsters to be defeated, I hope I’ve moved the needle in the right direction as far as the deep-sea is concerned at least.

—

Adam’s first novel, The Girl Who Broke The Sea, is published by Scholastic and available in all good bookshops.

If you’re interested in learning more about the deep-sea, the Deep-Sea Podcast is absolutely the very best place to start.

A Connors is a former physicist and former child who likes writing stories and building unlikely, poorly thought through gadgets with his sons. He started his career as a physicist, building part of the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. He has also sold encyclopaedias in Chicago, worked for an investment bank, taught physics in Sudan, fitted emergency Wi-Fi in the refugee camps in Greece, and now works as an engineering manager in the Google Research team. He lives in Hertfordshire with his partner, two sons, and a dog named Rosie.

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Solutions Spotlight

In this week’s extract from a novel including a climate solution, here is an extract from ‘No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet’. This is an anthology of 24 short stories, each with climate solutions at their heart. This has an associated website showing how to make each solution a reality.

This extract is from ‘Climate Gamers’ by D.A. Baden, Martin Hastie, and Steve Willis. This is about a gaming competition to develop scenarios that keep Earth under =1.5 degrees.

High-scoring team members, or rather their gaming identities, became celebrities. Devlin, or DevNoobCrusher69 as he was publicly known, was too canny to allow himself to get distracted as several others did by playing up to their personas. Still, he couldn’t resist a bit of trash talk with his arch nemesis, DrGetRekt, a gamer on another team he knew from his days playing Civilisation.

The game fuelled fierce debates between proponents of green growth who maintained economic growth was necessary to fund innovation into carbon capture solutions and those who were adamant that planned degrowth with reductions in consumption was the only way. However, the de-growthers failed to get political support and the green-growthers failed to achieve growth without stalling progress on greenhouse gas reduction. Dev’s team gained ground when they changed the metric of political success from the GDP to a Happy Planet Index, allowing degrowth policies to look good on the new metric.

His team were now tantalisingly close to a predicted 1.5, but they were up against the elite and, despite their best efforts, were languishing in fourth. The problem was copycats. Copying didn’t always pay off as it depended what strategies were already in place, but DrGetRekt had amplified the impacts of switching to a Happy Planet Index by pouring money into artworks and culture so that each city had a giant construction showing performance on the index. Prizes were offered for the most engaging way of portraying the figures. Progress was reported in news programmes and school assemblies, harnessing the will of the people towards a common goal. The public had renamed DrGetRekt ‘the Culture Secretary’ as this simple policy had shot them into first place.

by Denise Baden

At a session at COP27 with speculative fiction writer Andrew Dana Hudson on how fiction can help save the climate, I may have accidentally coined a term ‘social-science fiction’. Just as science fiction helps us to imagine the pros and cons of new technologies, social-science fiction can help us imagine how transformative systemic solutions, such as personal carbon trading or switching from GDP to a well-being index, might look in practice. I was speaking to best-selling author Manda Scott last week from the Accidental Gods podcast, and she uses Rupert Read’s term ‘thrutopia’ which captures a similar idea – that is, how do we get from where we are now to where we’d like to be?

For example, an essential step is to upgrade our democracy to a form that allows us to think beyond short-term electoral cycles so we can make more sustainable decisions. Citizens’ Assemblies are a positive step here, and my most recent story ‘The Assassin’ is a fun whodunit, set in a citizens jury, where eight participants meet to deliberate upon climate solutions, one of which is an assassin. The biggest barrier to citizens’ assemblies being taken up more widely and given full legislative authority (a House of Citizens to replace the House of Lords perhaps?) is lack of public awareness. We’re adapting ‘The Assassin’ as an interactive play, which we hope will help to address this.  

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‘The Assassin’ is published as a standalone novella of 16,000 words but is also included in the anthology of 24 stories: No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet. If any stories inspire you, you can see how to help make them happen by following links to the accompanying website which shows what can be done to help progress each idea.

This anthology fills an important gap. There are numerous ‘cli-fi’ stories that present dystopian visions of what will happen if we don’t act. These can be unexpectedly problematic as such stories may lead to denial or fear-driven ‘prepping’ responses (buying up all the toilet rolls!) rather than to positive climate action. There are also numerous eco-fiction stories that persuade us to love nature and plant trees, but get us no nearer to understanding what the really effective solutions are and, even more importantly, how we might get there from where we are. This is a gap that I haven’t seen any fiction (other than Ministry for the Future) fulfil. No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet uses fiction as a safe space to explore the more radical transformative ideas necessary for a truly sustainable society – ideas that are hard for politicians to talk about for fear of misunderstanding as they can’t easily fit into a soundbite.

Stories in No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet range from technical solutions relating to carbon dioxide removal projects to more systemic aspects such as switching from GDP to a well-being index, sharing economy, personal carbon allowances, giving citizen assemblies legislative power – all which would allow a more sustainable long-term mindset conducive to directing investment towards sustainable technologies, practices and decisions. We have already made some headway. For example, our goal is that reality would mirror fiction and we’ve had interest from leaders at the World Ocean Summit who were inspired by some of the stories that proposed giving the nation status to the Ocean. They suggested scheduling a session to discuss at the next ocean summit.

So what do you think? Which term wins – ‘thrutopia’ or ‘social-science fiction?’ Either way, I’m excited to see that we are finally learning to tell climate stories that people want to listen to that can provide an engaging and entertaining blueprint for action. If you want to learn more, check out the Green Stories project. Also be aware of the latest competitions being run by Green Stories.

Email: greenstories@soton.ac.uk

D.A. Baden is Professor of Sustainability at the University of Southampton and has published numerous book chapters and articles in the academic realm. She wrote the script for a musical that was performed in Southampton and London in 2016, and has written three other screenplays. Habitat Man was inspired a real-life green garden consultant who helped make her garden more wildlife friendly. Denise set up the series of free Green Stories writing competitions in 2018 to inspire writers to integrate green solutions into their writing (www.greenstories.org.uk). Habitat Man began as an effort to showcase what a solution-based approach might look like, and then took on a life of its own. In between teaching and research, she is now working on the sequel.

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Solutions Spotlight

In this extract from a book featuring a climate solution, Clyde Boyer shares an extract from Girl out of Timeabout nature as a climate solution:

“We need solutions to an array of problems. But nature has already solved most of those problems through evolution. Energy production, resource distribution, water collection, waste management. The list goes on,” Mara said. “Nature is like the Library of Alexandria, but instead of scrolls there are natural models. We just need to learn its language. Unfortunately, your time doesn’t have the tools needed to unlock that language fast enough. And in my time, well, we learned that lesson after the library had already burned down.”

Marjorie Kellogg (author of Glimmer) and Mary Woodbury, pen name Clara Hume (author of Bird Song: A Novella) compare their individual approaches to writing about climate and ecological changes.

1.      Future vs. Near future: When does ‘near’ become ‘far?’  How do the world-building challenges differ? 

Marjorie: Far-future often extends into the infinite, as humanity is imagined to spread across the universe.  Exciting, mind-expanding, but not something you can expect to experience personally.  So, because I want the reader to walk in my characters’ shoes, Glimmer is insistently near-future, and the world building an honest try at realistic projection.  Therefore, a mix of the familiar with the new and strange offers the reader both a secure handhold and the thrill of discovery, be it horrifying or heartening.

Mary: Bird Song: A Novella starts as contemporary but then travels to the far-past and back again, at which time there’s an alt-history perspective. So, there is not a typical near- or far-future narrative. In Bird Song, the world-building is speculative and imaginary, and incorporates mythological stories from the past. I guess the challenges I faced were similar to any time-travel paradoxes that authors write about, not to mention how characters can move around in time.

2.       When you create a future world, what aspects of daily life do you most focus on to show the changes from the present? 

Marjorie: Changes in what’s most familiar to a reader can shape a future world without resorting to excess exposition: fashion, technology, home décor, transportation, information related directly to the story line.

When I’m writing, the external environment fills my mind’s eye cinematically: what my characters see and inhabit, what they walk past, the objects they interact with, the food they eat.  But this is an outward-looking point of view, so I often must remind myself to let my protagonist(s) glance in a mirror now and then, so the reader can visualize them as well.

Mary: In Bird Song, the world enters our far past, when gods and goddesses allegedly existed. The island was an Eden, and it had its guardians (the Greek Sirens). A young, college-age woman, Thelsie, falls into that world from modern-day Chicago, so she explores the island. It’s a strange place: mysterious, haunted, has a charnel ground, and so on. I wasn’t writing about a future world but an otherworld. During the evolution of the story, the young women realizes that the island would someday succumb to climate change, maybe even be flooded over. She also understands that after her arrival, those changes begin to take place at a rapid pace; it’s a conventional paradox of time travel. The time warps in the story do go from past to future, but future in this case is just our present day.

3.      Does writing about the future require a futuristic style or voice?
Marjorie: I hugely admire envisioned futures that feature an evolved version of the language, either partial as in a salting of invented slang (Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange) or whole-hog, as in Russell Hoban’s brilliant Riddley Walker. 

But…like reading Chaucer in the original, or even Shakespeare, too much unfamiliarity is a barrier to comprehension, to faith in the narrative, and even to enjoyment.  While many feel that deciphering Riddley Walker’s devolved English is part of the fun, it’s also exhausting until you ‘learn’ the language.  As language is never the point of my novels, I don’t want to make my readers work that hard.And it takes real expertise to predict where language will go.  Even current slang can seem random.  Like, fifty years ago (hardly far ahead for a future story line), who would have guessed that, apparently thanks to Alice Cooper, the word “sick” would come to mean cool, great, or awesome?

So, unless you’re a philologist (like Tolkien) or possess a rare perfect ear, sussing out the future of a language is essentially guesswork.  Even if lightly applied, it can become self-conscious, popping the reader out of the flow to struggle with the meaning of a word or usage, undermining her engagement with the story line.

Mary: I’ve done future writing but did not take on a futuristic style or voice. In my debut novel, Back to the Garden, however, I tried to write a few accents, but looking back, I think I went a little far with it and completely avoided it in the sequel of that book.

4.      Do you prefer writing about natural or built environments?

Marjorie: Writing in a natural setting is certainly more pleasurable.  It can bring out the poet in any writer.  But climate affects both, and cities, being the work of man, seem more reflective of human culture in all its ills and horrors, beauties and wonders.  Also, an urban landscape can quickly set the time, place, and tone of a story.  Nature tends to be timeless, and self-generated.  Nature renews itself (if allowed).  Cities require a functioning society to survive.

On the other hand, nothing is sadder than a sick or dying natural world, which is of course one of the major themes of climate fiction.  So, where I set a story depends entirely on its thematic and emotional needs.  But I’ve generally stayed away from ultra-futuristic, high-tech environments.  Just not my sensibility. 

Mary: I prefer writing about nature; some of my favorite writing comes from authors who name species and describe their habitats, traits, colors, sounds, and so on. In Bird Song, there’s a touch of the weird, so animals, plants, insects, and so on have strange attributes, like being bigger than usual or more vivid. The story takes place on an island, too, with no built environments around.

5.      Has apocalypse lost its narrative power and become too much of a cliché?

Marjorie: We live on the verge of apocalypse, but who wants to curl up with doom and gloom every night?  Yet I feel a duty to call attention to the situation, as a sort of summons to action.
Meanwhile, every book needs an ending, so if you set your reader up for Apocalypse, you’ll need a suitable, satisfying resolution: save the world up or blow it up?

After much of a lifetime reading SF and Fantasy, I’ve developed an aversion to only-the-hero/heroine-can-save-the-world scenarios.  I mean, c’mon, if this was possible, someone would’ve done it already.  Yet here we are, hurtling merrily toward catastrophic climate change.

I want to look at real solutions, not the only but the possible, and not just the scientific but the socio-cultural.  I believe it will take a village to save the world, because it will take a village (or more) to assemble the necessary batch of skills.  So, I tend to write about groups of normal but determined people working together to solve a given problem – focusing on one or more of them as POV characters, yes, but it’s never the lone sword against the multitude.

Mary: I think it is becoming that way, but fiction dealing with nature allows for narratives other than apocalypse, which is good. I think with the world being the way it is, apocalyptic writing is becoming too depressing for a lot of people to read in their spare time. The world is already scary.  People read for different reasons, but sometimes it’s just to escape or learn something. To go along with the above, how do we write apocalypse but without complete grimdark, and instead try to build empowering characters who inspire positive outcomes?

Some new storytelling genres have come around in the past few years, including solarpunk, lunarpunk, and hopepunk. These seem to be more positive. These genres fight the status quo and offer more refreshing narratives. They recognize the world as it is and provide a story that we can build a better world. But you also don’t really need to write in those genres to achieve empowerment, equality, renewable energies, and so on. You can write these stories in any genre.

6.      What goes into your decisions about narrative point of view, i.e., 1st, 3rd, omniscient?

Marjorie: Glimmer is in 1^st person, as I wanted to tell a very personal story that the reader would experience as the central character does, often misunderstanding or misinterpreting, then edging closer to the truth as information and understanding improve – in short, an unreliable narrator.  This does present problems: you can’t give the reader anything that the 1^st person doesn’t see or hear unless someone else tells the narrator about it in dialogue.  Excepting Harmony, my previous books were written in close 3^rd or with the advantage of an omniscient narrator, both of which offer greater flexibility for providing story and information.  In Harmony, I used interpolated media posts to supply extra information to a 1^st person narrative, but even that device can pull the reader away from close identification with the protagonist.

Mary: I wrote Bird Song in 1^st person, which seems more lenient in allowing a perspective where the reader won’t know everything that a 3^rd person narrative provides, so you can build more mystery that way.

7.      Was there some personal experience with weather or climate change that drew you to write such fiction?

Marjorie: I grew up on the Massachusetts coast with hurricanes blowing through every late summer and fall.  Boats and docks would be destroyed.  Fishermen would lose their livelihoods.  People would drown in rip tides.  Nothing like the superstorms we’re seeing due to climate change, but to a child, the power of wind and water was terrifying.  Where I live now, in upstate New York, we’ve had two catastrophic “hundred-year” floods in less than 20 years.  Makes a person think.

Mary: When I began writing climate change into my stories (Wild Mountain series and Bird Song), it was around 2008 or so, and at that time I had not had personal experience with the kind of short-term extreme weather brought on by long-term climate changes. However, since then I’ve experienced droughts, wildfires that were too close for comfort, and now a more active hurricane season on the East Coast of Canada.

8.     How can writers help readers face the realities of climate change?

Marjorie: By exploring possible solutions to living with climate change, as it seems unlikely the world will ever summon the will to stop or fix it, at least in the near term.  We can write stories about facing the worst and adapting, about finding courage and ingenuity, about lives in a climate changed world that still have meaning and hope. We can show that humans don’t have to share the fate of the dinosaurs.

Mary: I think the best way is by reaching the reader’s heart and writing a story that will touch people and make them think. Though I think polemics can help change narratives in society, I prefer fiction to be an art form; preaching and fear-mongering are not good ways to go about storytelling, unless it’s just part of the genre (like horror, possibly).

9.      What would you consider is unique about your novel’s approach to climate change?

Marjorie: It’s a meme in the study of dramatic literature that, according to Aristotle, there are only five stories in all of drama.  So, uniqueness is a hard quality to claim.  But the writer’s voice – or the voice(s) given to her characters – is what will make those familiar stories individual and fresh each time.  Glimmer is an up-close and personal tale, like taking a walk with a new friend whispering in your ear, experiencing with her the psychic and emotional burdens of climate change as well as its external perils, and swept along as she discovers selfhood and strength.

Mary: Bird Song is experimental and genre-blurring. It includes a modern reimagining of the Greek Sirens, Circe, and other mythological characters. It’s also weird, in that the island’s plants and animals are different, larger, more vivid—and the island itself takes on strange properties. Time travel is also present, with the main character, Thelsie, moving from our present day to the past to our present day again, all while considering how climate change will affect the island in the future.

Find out more about Bird Song and Glimmer

Marjorie B. Kellogg leads a double life as theatrical set designer and writer, especially of climate fiction.  Her books include Glimmer (2021), Lear’s Daughters, The Dragon Quartet, Harmony, and A Rumor of Angels.  Locally, she is Editor of The New Franklin Register and has written many articles for theatrical publications. 

Mary Woodbury writes fiction under the pen name Clara Hume and lives with her husband and cats in Nova Scotia. She’s the author of the Wild Mountain series and Bird Song. She works as a technical writer and localization specialist. Mary co-founded the Rewilding Our Stories Discord, runs Dragonfly.eco—an exploration of world eco-fiction—and has written guest articles at Impakter, Chicago Review of Books, Artists & Climate Change, Ecology Action Centre, and more. Some of her other hobbies are hiking, gardening, bird-watching, and amateur photography.

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Solutions Spotlight

In this week’s extract from a novel including a climate solution, here is an extract from ‘No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet’. This is an anthology of 24 short stories, each with climate solutions at their heart. This has an associated website showing how to make each solution a reality.

This extract is from ‘Frackers’ by Martin Hastie – a story set in Australia about out of work frackers.

‘So, Donna, here’s a thought. Could we get carbon credits if we were able to shut down a long-term source of CO2?’ Mick asked.

‘Maybe. Things like that depend on protocols being in place. But there are loads of new ones being written all the time.’

‘So could we put out coal seam fires? Like the one that’s been burning for thousands of years down the road at Wingen there, at Burning Mountain?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe, I guess.’

‘So,’ said Mick, ‘spinning off the top of my head…how’s this for a plan? We’re going drilling. Drilling for carbon credits.’

Clive raised his head from its position side-down on the bar.

‘What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. ‘Maybe it’s time to call your old mother to pick us up. You’ve drunk too much already.’

‘Hear me out,’ said Mick, warming to his theme. ‘I’ve been thinking about this for a while. We drill, right? We’re born to drill. So we’re going to do some drilling that helps stop unnecessary emissions and helps slow down the climate crisis. It’s a crazy job and it seems no one is doing it. But we can.’

by Charlotte Mendel

Amitav Ghosh said that climate change was “a crisis of culture, and thus of imagination” and called for writers to play a greater role six years ago. So if you’re a writer who understands that we must transition away from fossil fuels this decade if we want to avoid catastrophe—then you start writing cli-fi, right? After all, writers have historically played a role in great societal change.

It’s true that Cli-Fi is a growing genre, but most stories are set in a post-apocalyptic world, which is a bit like Zelensky rousing his troops by describing the devastation a Russian victory would cause. I don’t think we need to focus on what will happen if we don’t act; our stories need to empower people to see what will happen if we do act. We need to use our art to inspire people to imagine a different future. A future which the experts tell us is attainable. So why can’t we imagine it, since it’s so attainable? Because we hear gloom-and-doom predictions every time we plug into media. People feel despair about the future, because they understand the urgency of the situation, but they don’t feel a sense of agency.

People probably didn’t feel much agency in WWII either, when Britain was under threat of a German invasion after a huge military disaster. But Churchill didn’t predict disaster, did he? He said, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the fields and in the streets. We will never surrender.” That’s what a growing tsunami of people are doing, across the globe. This is actually an exciting time to be alive, precisely because we do have agency—there has never been a time when our choices made such a difference. Where we consume, what we consume—humans are causing the problem, and therefore humans can solve it. Art can help imagine a different future.

But for some reason, our industry is not only failing to lead—we’re lagging behind the friggin’ oil companies.

Oil companies are getting so much pressure that they spend billions to show they are prioritising the energy transition. It’s a central issue for most politicians as well—a lot is happening globally at the political level. Yet even if you write a book that makes the crisis as sexy an enemy as Voldemort and fires people’s imagination with a Churchillian call to action—it is hard to find literary agents or publishers who are interested in climate fiction. They simply don’t exist—I invite you to google if you have any doubts.

And this is why I think that the publishing industry is lagging behind most businesses and most politicians—but even worse, it is lagging behind its own readers. And it’s not just our industry; the BBC wrote,

“Despite our societies being at crisis point, just 2.8% of scripted TV and films released 2016-2020 mentioned anything related to climate change, and just 0.56% mentioned it directly”.

So, epiphany! No more dystopian cli-fi, people have hard lives and they don’t want to read gloom and doom. Create gripping stories with climate heroes and villains that rouse people to think about their own behaviour. Excite readers by plugging them into the real-life tsunami of change happening globally so they get excited about being part of it. And keep publishing this new brand of rousing, utopian cli-fi! Fellow writers—we can make a difference, and we do that by writing books that make our readers feel that they can make a difference too.

Find out more about Charlotte’s books.

Charlotte Mendel is a mother, author, teacher, and a modest homestead farmer. Her first novel, Turn Us Again, won the Atlantic Book Award for First Novel, the H.R. Percy Novel Prize, and the Beacon Award for Social Justice. Her second novel, A Hero, was shortlisted for the 2016 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and was a finalist in the 2016 International book Awards, in the General Fiction Category. Her first YA book, Reversing Time, was published by Guernica Editions in the fall of 2021. Another literary fiction book, A Hostage, will be published by Inanna in 2023.

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Solutions Spotlight

In this extract from a book featuring a climate solution, Charlotte R. Mendel shares an extract from Reversing Timeabout protesting as a form of activism:

“Come on, kid. It’s time to get down now.” A gigantic police officer was standing below him.

“Sorry,” Simon said. “We have to stop cutting down trees. We have to stop consuming so much. We have to do it now.”

The policeman got a ladder and climbed up to the platform. A second policeman followed him. “Come on kid, party’s over.”

“Does this look like a party to you?” Simon said, wrapping his arms more securely around the tree even as one officer took a pair of wire cutters and began to crack through the links of his chain. The other one read out his rights and told him why he was being detained, and that he could get legal advice from a lawyer.

Simon interrupted him. “Don’t you believe what the global community of scientists are telling us? We are causing the climate emergency. We need to stop. Don’t you want your kids to breathe?”

One of the policemen unwrapped the chain while the other unwrapped Simon’s arms. Simon clasped Gandhi hard with his legs.

“I’m fighting for the right to breathe for the rest of my life. I am fighting for your children.”

“You’re starting to get on my nerves, kid,” the first police officer said, and jerked Simon’s leg roughly. He gave a cry, more in surprise than anything else.

“Police brutality,” someone yelled from below. Simon peered down and saw a little crowd surrounding Gandhi’s base. Several were filming with their cameras.

The officers tried to pry him loose again, one holding Simon by his arms while the other tried to unwrap his legs. It was difficult to unwrap two legs from different directions at the same time. Simon was squirming like an eel and kicking. The officer lost patience and shoved one of Simon’s legs out so far to the side that he cried out again.

“Why don’t you taser him?” a sarcastic voice from below suggested.

“Yeah,” another voice called out. “A kid clinging to a tree should be tortured.”

climaA chorus of “He’s just a kid” and “Shame” rippled around the base of the tree. Simon wished his mother was there.

Learn more about non-violent civil disobedience through Extinction Rebellion.

Michael J. DeLuca talks to Catherine Rockwood

Michael: Hi, I’m Michael J. DeLuca, publisher of Reckoning, the journal of creative writing on environmental justice. To celebrate the release of Our Beautiful Reward – Reckoning’s special issue on bodily autonomy – editor Catherine Rockwood agreed to talk to me about the issue.

Catherine Rockwood (she/they) lives in Massachusetts with her family. Their poetry appears in or is forthcoming from Moist Poetry Journal, Strange Horizons, Scoundrel Time, Contrary Magazine, Rogue Agent Journal, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Endeavors To Obtain Perpetual Motion, is available from The Ethel Zine press. Another mini-chapbook, And We Are Far From Shore, is forthcoming from Ethel in 2023.

I should add that Catherine and I recently met in person for the first time after having worked together on Reckoning staff for several years, and it was lovely, relaxed and intellectually stimulating in ways I had honestly almost forgotten face-to-face human interaction could be in these isolating times. So I hope to share with you all a little bit of that today. Welcome Catherine!

Catherine: Thank you!

Michael: First of all, Catherine: what did you learn editing this special issue?

Catherine: I learned a lot. One of the things that I learned is purely personal and that’s just that I enjoy editing, which I didn’t know before. I learned to be really super grateful for Reckoning’s readers. They saved me from making a lot of mistakes, I think, they helped me read better. Everyone I forwarded things to got back to me with great advice and insights. That’s not to say I didn’t make mistakes, I did, but other people can’t fully save you from that. However, a generous advising team like the one at Reckoning helps improve outcomes.

We’re proud of the issue. Part of the reason I feel proud of it is because of the people who helped me put it together. It wouldn’t be as good as it is without everybody. I think the other thing that is really exciting is, I learned that editing expands the imagination kind of like reading does, and there’s a very different feel to it. So you’re not really asking yourself what does this individual poem or story do, but instead you’re thinking—and this was totally new to me, and so interesting—what does this poem or story do together with this other poem or story? And you kind of do that, and you do that, and you find new things, and you find new combinations, until you hit your page limit.

It should be said, we had a little difficulty putting a page cap on this issue. We kind of went over our initial limit because there was so much great stuff that was coming in and so many pieces that we wanted. But speaking in terms of what it’s like to edit: it’s super intense to be bringing that togetherness of this set of works into its final shape. And I loved it, but also: I was tired once we were done.

Michael: [Laughing] Me too! It is kind of magic how a group of people who don’t know each other can be all thinking about the same topic, and be brought together after they’ve written something on that topic into a physical/conceptual object—an issue of a magazine—and actually begin to feel like a community, mutually inspiring, mutually supporting. I’ve experienced this a lot with Reckoning. I totally want to echo everything you say about Reckoning staff, they are wonderful, they are a community that feels pretty resilient to me at this point.

Catherine: Yep.

Michael: I’m doing a lot behind the scenes, but the work culture, the creative culture of Reckoning staff is a solid entity of its own, and that’s wonderful.

Perhaps a fun thing to interject here is, as you said, we went over our intended page limit, and I’m glad we did, the work that’s in the issue coheres really well, but it made us have to change our intentions for the physical object, which is what’s coming out here in March. We got all excited about the idea of it having a zine format, sort of like an old style punk zine. We were going to have a piece of vellum—

Catherine: [Laughing] Yes!

Michael: —that would flip back and reveal the art….

Catherine: We got very excited about materials and binding, but yes, that had to change.

Michael: We got to a fair point of talking it through with your chapbook publisher, who is awesome, and was willing to do all this hand-binding, and then alas, too many great words. So now it’s a perfect-bound paperback like all the other Reckoning issues. Oh well—it’s still great.

Catherine: That’s right. Sara Lefsyk at the Ethel zine press was willing to work with us on it, but yes, our page count went over. But people should still check out the Ethel zine press, another great indie publisher.

Michael: Okay, so: what’s the connection between environmental justice and bodily autonomy?

Catherine: Right! This is a big question. And having thought about it—and I’ll just say these are really just my thoughts, which I’ve tried to inform as much as possible through reading and discussion—so one answer for me is that it’s harder to gear yourself up to take action on and for environmental causes if you don’t feel empowered to make basic decisions about what’s right for your own body. We have an essay by Amber Fox, it’s called “Ghost of a Chance: A Trans Girl Tries to Live” that really opened my eyes to that, as what I would call a fact.

Riley Tao’s flash fiction piece “Hangs Heavy on Their Head” connects developing concern for the environment with an increasing sense of possibility about presenting in public and to oneself as non-binary. When you feel that you can choose what’s right for yourself in terms of gender identity, I think that then extends to feeling you can make actual choices about the world and in the service of the world. Which is of course one of the reasons gender identity is so heavily policed. So—really big stuff there.

Michael: Yeah, for sure.

Catherine: Yeah! It’s huge.

Here’s another more rambling answer, and that is that the definition of autonomy is self-government. But when it comes to the environment, we’re all dependents. We’re all at the mercy of what the environment’s condition is. And that’s not a great position to be in at all right now, overall. Which is why more than ever people who can get pregnant should be able to self-govern about the pregnancy itself. Of course—and this is where the justice part comes in—some of us are more at the mercy of our local environments than others. Due to the historically unequal conditions that have determined where marginalized populations live, in the US and elsewhere. And that’s not fair. Environmental justice work increases bodily autonomy in the sphere of childbearing, where it helps equalize or balance local material conditions including the condition of essential natural resources like air and water that pertain to making a decision about a pregnancy—to continue it or not to continue it, to raise a child or not raise a child, now, as things are.

My thought on this is influenced by—or I would say sourced in—Sister Song, an Atlanta-based organization with national reach, founded and led by Black and Brown women. And you can find the organization at www.sistersong.net. In the 1990s, Sister Song coined the term “reproductive justice” and articulated a careful set of principles around it. I’m quoting here from their website:

“Reproductive justice is comprised by the human right to control our bodies and our future, the human right to have children, the human right to not have children, and the human right to parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”

Where environmental justice comes into it explicitly of course is in that fourth principle, “the right to raise children in safe and sustainable communities”. There are many things that go into creating a safe and sustainable community, but a functional environment is a sine qua non, it’s an absolute necessity. For historically marginalized communities to experience reproductive justice, they must have clean water, clean air, a livable climate. Which as things now are would take some deep work. We should all be putting time, money, work in to make that a possibility.

So those are some of the connections that I see.

Michael: Yeah. And the concept of reproductive justice here perfectly illustrates how that works.

Catherine: Yeah.

Michael: We got the idea for this issue as a result of the Supreme Court ruling about Roe v. Wade, and then very quickly were forced to expand—”forced”, I mean, we realized that the question of reproduction is only a small part of bodily autonomy and the more I sit and think it through, you know, as you’re saying, where you live determines what you can and can’t do with your body including have healthy children?

Catherine: That’s right.

Michael: I’m thinking about the people who live near me in Downriver Detroit who grow up with terribly contaminated air, and as a result, if you’re born in that area you’re incredibly likely to have all these allergies, and your kids are as likely, and all that’s about systemic economic factors that result in Black people ending up living in Downriver Detroit as opposed to white people, etc etc and on and on.

Catherine: Yeah, and again, I feel like I’m coming to this very belatedly and there are many people who’ve thought about it much more deeply, much more profoundly for much longer. But editing this issue, thinking about this issue really brought home to me that essentially, destroying the environment is removing fundamental choices from people, the ability to make fundamental choices. So in terms of the issue, one of the works that we published that really illustrates this for me, where the author is explicitly talking about that, like, you know, what choices remain to me, based on what other people have done to the environment, is Laurel Nakanishi’s “Ghazal for Freshwater”, where the speaker talks about having a new baby and living in an area where you are no longer in control of whether or not you can offer your child fresh water. And it should get to you, you know, thinking that way.

Michael: Should I say the hippie thing about star stuff?

Catherine: I think you should totally say the hippie thing about star stuff, yes.

Michael: [Laughs] Okay! Something this issue and working with you on it has taught me about is the progressive theoretical conception of “bodies”. This is something I heard about long ago when my partner was in a Women’s Studies program and couldn’t wrap my head around until this moment, really. We are made of profound stuff, star-stuff, as it’s a bit cliché to say in science fiction, but we’re these incredible, thinking, feeling creatures, extending far beyond our physical forms, but bounded by them. We’re in them, and in that sense, in a very real way, environment is a part of them, part of us. Industrialist, individualized society has made it too easy to sever that connection, to think of ourselves as independent of our bodies—and here when I say “our” I am probably unable to help meaning, more than I should at this point, dominant white male bodies—and that makes things conceived of as outside us—again, me—seem exploitable, disposable. And that includes bodies, other bodies. But we are what we eat, what we breathe, what we absorb through our skin, and that’s true of animals and of plants and of people. It’s easy to begin to sound here like I’ve eaten too many of the special brownies, but the lens of environmental justice has shown me that body-mind-spirit is all one thing in ways the hippies that surrounded me in my youth never managed. And I will stop myself there.

Let’s try to talk more about some amazing moments in this issue, without spoilers if we can.

Catherine: So I’m mainly a poet in terms of practice—well, in terms of my own writing practice—and so I’d like to start with the poetry and then move on to the amazing fiction. And I would say, true for both of those…. Let’s see, we have one nonfiction piece in Our Beautiful Reward, we have Amber Fox’s essay, but in terms of the poetry the thing that I like the most about what we assembled is that it really varies in terms of style and form. So we have free verse, we have Laurel Nakanishi’s “Ghazal for Freshwater”, we have Marissa Lingen’s litany, which ends the issue. There isn’t a sameness to the poetry stylistically. And every poem is on topic, but also highly individualized, and that was just—and I’m going to swear here—it was a fucking joy. I mean it was so great to read and think about this very different but again very focused work. Plus the pieces, the poems, you know, really ring the changes on and against each other.

For example, we start the issue with Linda Cooper’s poem “After the Ban”, and I don’t think it’s a spoiler—I’m going to do a little, like, on-the-go criticism. So in this poem—and you have to read it to see how this is done—a young woman is kind of disassembled by “the ban”. And implicitly this is the ban on abortions at all stages of pregnancy, I mean moving into very early weeks where it is in fact impossible to know that you might even be pregnant. The young woman in the poem is sort of disassembled by the ban into a set of abstractions that suddenly reform in just a wild, powerful way at the end of the poem.

And in Annabelle Cormack’s “Charcuterie”, a young woman is disassembled in a very different, non-abstracted way. So we also had—and I was delighted by this, we had some very necessary, very visceral body horror included in this issue.

To conclude, we have Marissa Lingen’s “Exception”, where instead of the material world turning against known rules, the speaker’s own voice turns against her. So in the framing poems of the issue, “After the Ban” and “Exception”, in both cases—these are very different poems—there’s a moment where what’s settled or decided in the poem drops away, and a whole new set of possibilities hovers or explodes into view. And I love that. It’s a bit of a response; there’s this sense that, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, you know, something that we understood—that was of settled benefit to a large percentage of—to the American population—dropped away.

And, you know, it’s trying to remember that this is a true loss, and it’s costly, and it’s hurting people now, and that we can also try to think of it as a moment of unsettlement, a moment where new possibilities are going to come into view in terms of what might happen in the future. So the poems do that, I hope the issue does that, and I just love what the writers have done.

Michael: Yeah. This again is reminding me of how beautifully it all came together. The sense that—you called it “falling away”—that this is an issue about a shock.

Catherine: A shock of loss.

Michael: Right. And it shares something with the other special issue we did, which was about COVID, in that it’s a bunch of reactions. And that’s—it’s both wonderful and sad, I mean if we had given people more time, if we had waited, perhaps the issue would have had more activism, more resistance? But it still has a lot of resistance, and it is important to me to give that sense of loss a platform.

Catherine: Yes.

Michael: It also always astonishes me how poetic meanings can evolve—and in prose too, I mean, we read these pieces over and over as we’re developing the issue, and every time I read them in that process they mean a little something different to me. I read Juliana Roth’s poem, “Roses in Washington Square Park”, so many times before I was able to just engage with it as a narrative of something that was happening to a narrator and her mother in a park, and when it actually did I couldn’t understand how I had engaged with it the previous times I’d read it. The other thing that occurs to me here is that Mari Ness’s poem “Green Leaves Against the Wind” articulates exactly what I was talking about a minute ago about interdependent bodily forms.

There’s the line “I could feed this garden with my blood.” And I’m thinking about every time I clip my nails. This may be gross, but I put it in the compost, and then those proteins feed my plants, which feed me again, and I am interconnected with all that. My garden is me. And that is something it has taken me until this long to realize about that poem. And this is about how the pieces interact with each other, as you were saying at the beginning of this discussion.

Part of the wonderful thing about editing is looking at these pieces individually and then learning new things about them when they’re placed side by side. And the most striking example to me in this issue of that is what happened when we looked at Julian Jarboe’s and Dyani Sabin’s poems next to each other. They’re both about the risks of physical and emotional love when bodies are under threat, and they really play off each other beautifully, and they’re both very subtle, and I was unable to grasp some of the subtleties until I looked at them next to each other.

Catherine: Yeah.

Michael: Which makes me feel obtuse, frankly, but in a good way because I’m learning.

Catherine: [Laughs.]

Michael: But we should talk about the fiction too. Which direction are we walking—as an issue, as a field, as a society—with respect to Omelas? I really like how comparatively undystopian this issue is in the traditional sense, the science fictional sense, considering the subject and where we are in the world right now. Nobody’s trapped in a distant orbital maze to make a point. Instead, for example in Anna Orridge’s story, they’re trapped in a walled subdivision taking care of somebody’s kids. The dystopia here is close, in time and in scale, it has nuance. Does that feel like a relief to you as much as it does to me?

Catherine: Yes, and I think also particularly in relation to this topic, that it’s important to understand—I think it is like genuinely capital-I Important to understand that to some extent the dystopia is us. [Laughing.] And yet that sources of hope and familiarity and community are also us as it relates to this topic, environmental justice and its relationship with bodily autonomy. Leah Bobet, who has a wonderful poem, “fertile week”, in the issue, recently talked about the interest of setting work what she called “five minutes into the future”. So that’s a Leah Bobet quotation there, “fiction set five minutes into the future”. A lot of what we accepted for Our Beautiful Reward is set there. I think that is because, as you say, one of the factors is that our call was quite immediate, it was quite reactive in relation to the overturn of Roe v. Wade at the end of June 2022, and so people’s responses were immediate, you know, this applies to my life, this applies to your life, fictional renderings of that. But this is, I think, important—it was certainly important to me as an editor. I think generally, though not universally, this is important to Reckoning as a publication. You could speak more precisely to that. But none of the stories end on what you’d really call a note of despair.

So Rimi B. Chatterjee’s “A Question of Choice”—fantastic story—leaves us with a view of evolving resistance to patriarchal reproductive tech in northern India. That story is just so fun, I mean it shows and discusses a lot of super difficult things, but it’s also just fundamentally unbowed at its very core, and I hope lots of people read it. Dana Vickerson’s beautifully structured short story “On This Day, and All Days, I Think About What I Have Lost”, does end in a state of profound grief, but it’s also about endurance, stubbornness, recovery.

I do love the fact that if you’ve read around in the field, you know, in speculative fiction and in what you would call more—not space opera necessarily, but more distant worlds, you can kind of get the outlines of galactically huge things under the surface of the apparent everyday in the fiction in this issue. So for instance, Anna’s story “Wild Winter Rose” is partly I think about the way dislocation to another country can be as terrifying as emergency space travel unless you have the help of some kind of community.

Michael: Yes! So much of this is in conversation with a shared body of work. And I never want Reckoning to be exclusively genre and I personally have no idea how to distinguish between genre poetry and non-genre poetry, which you and I have talked about in the past.

Catherine: Yep.

Michael: But I feel like genre thinking and metaphors are much more in the public consciousness than they ever have been, and a moment like this… I felt like this in 2001, actually. When 9/11 happened I thought, I have entered a science-fictional side timeline, and I didn’t like that feeling, and I didn’t think that reaction was appropriate to what had happened. But, you know, an emotional response is an emotional response and I can’t be too critical of myself about it at this point from something so long ago. But I feel, with everything that’s happened, not to name that orange-headed guy, but it all repeatedly feels that way these days, and we have these huge metaphors underlying everywhere. So when I was reading the Dana Vickerson story, I thought about the world of Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, in which some similar things happen, dystopian, dark things that look a lot like the United States of today, in frightening ways that lots of people have pointed out. But Vickerson’s ending is hopeful to me in an interior sense where Butler’s ending… the hope it provides is in the stars.

It’s saying “this world sure is messed up and dystopian, and this country’s origin is in slavery, and maybe that’s inescapable, but maybe we can get away from it into the unknown. And that never quite worked as well on me as the ending of that Dana Vickerson story, even though it is incredibly sad, tragic, and the character is left isolated and without much more than her memories and her grief. And yet there’s this internal hope, which feels much more real to me than the idea of colonizing space ever did.

Catherine: This is so interesting. And I think, again, the way that the field needs to, must, and will continue to have conversations about…. [Laughs.] You know, this world or other worlds? Right? Do we place our hope in this world or other worlds? And that conversation has been going on for a long time. It’s achieving nuance, achieving new information sets, new factors all the time. I do wonder—you know, I think you could argue that some of this is still about race, and whether the color of your skin has anything to do with how much you feel is left to recuperate, environmentally, psychologically, on earth. So I’m thinking here about Sofia Samatar’s fiction, and in particular I’m thinking about her short story “Request for an Extension on the Clarity“ which is in her collection Tender, and I think it first appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet—

Michael: Yes, that was my guest issue, I bought that story, so proud!

Catherine: Oh, did you? It’s such an incredible story. And that, to me, that’s a story I read and I was like, “oh, shit!” [Laughs.] You know?

Michael: Yeah.

Catherine: Here’s something I, comparatively affluent cisgender white woman, had never thought about before. So this is where a nonwhite protagonist can’t bring herself to return to earth, but also isn’t fully ready to throw away her relationship to the planet, and so for the time being—and this is sort of the always time of the rest of the sequel of the story, I mean as far as you know she’s just going to stay where she is which is on a space station, an in-between space of contemplation between these really difficult, different options. I can’t remember all the fine particulars of that incredible story, but I remember that essential and deliberate positioning that Samatar really wanted us to think about. So—the conversation will continue. And it was so incredibly exciting to have an editorial seat at this particular iteration. And a tremendous amount of affection, I would say, for the experience and the undertaking is what I’ve been left with.

Michael: That is a reasonable stopping point?

Catherine: Yes.

Michael: I sure would love to talk—you know, each of these pieces—there are things for us to squee about. But we need not squee about every single one of them.

Catherine: Yep, yep. [Laughing.]

Michael: So I’ll say, thank you very much, Catherine. This was a lot of fun, and I hope what we have talked about excites people to read the rest and get excited about that too.

Catherine: Yes, exactly. Please read these wonderful works.

You can now purchase the Our Beautiful Reward issue of Reckoning journal.

Michael J. DeLuca lives in the rapidly suburbifying post-industrial woodlands north of Detroit with partner, kid, cats and microbes. He is the publisher of Reckoning, a journal of creative writing on environmental justice. His short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Mythic Delirium, and lots of other places. His novella, Night Roll, released by Stelliform Press in October 2020, was a finalist for the Crawford Award.

Catherine Rockwood is a staff member of Reckoning Magazine and a reviewer for Strange Horizons. She has a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies, and many remaining questions about everything.

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Tree to Me campaign by Society of Authors

How can authors affect change when the books their words are printed on are not sustainable?

By asking your publisher Tree to Me’s ten questions, you can begin a dialogue about the environmental impact of each stage of your book’s production. It might seem like a small step, but with many authors asking, we hope that the demand for sustainable practices will be heard across the industry.

Tree to Me will help you identify with your publisher, confidentially, the current environmental impacts of your book’s production, while signposting measurable sustainable changes.

As readers become increasingly environmentally conscious, authors and publishers talking publicly about sustainability in publishing will help them make more sustainable book purchases. The more this happens, the greater the demand for good environmental publishing practices.

Climate change affects us all. Together, we can achieve the sustainable production of an indispensable weapon against it – literature.

Find out more about the questions for publishers

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Solutions Spotlight

In this extract from a book featuring a climate solution, Sarah E. Lewis shares an extract from The Change Agents about animals seeking an extraordinary partnership with humans and racing together against the climate crisis to save their shared world:

The wolf looked calmly and authoritatively at the Alliance members and then scanned the attendees in the gallery, making all feel included. She said, “We called this special meeting of the Alliance to discuss a new development in our Climate Change Initiative. Mission Command has been working on a project for years now with the goal of partnering with humans to fight climate change.”

The crowd released a collective exclamation while the members of the Alliance looked over the audience reassuringly.

The wolf continued, “The world is on a perilous path because of the warming climate. The more time that passes, the less time we have to avert disaster where our habitats are destroyed and our species dwindle into extinction. We in the animal kingdom can only do so much in the climate fight. The sole way to have any chance of success is to enlist the assistance of humans to slow down and ideally reverse global warming. We are pursuing any involvement with humans cautiously, but after decades of working on our own, it’s clear the beings who caused the conditions resulting in climate change must address it.” The Alliance members shook their heads in agreement.

“We have information and capabilities that humans don’t and working together is the only hope for saving ourselves and this planet as we know it.”

The gallery members chattered among themselves, surprised to hear of the Alliance’s decision to work with beings many viewed as enemies.

“Mission Command made contact with a human we believe can help us,” informed the wolf. The eyes of the Alliance and those in the audience all turned to Eliza. She immediately blushed and a ‘who, me?’ look came over her face. Bebop leaned into her for moral support.

The wolf went on, “The human who Mission Command has identified knew nothing of this mission, and we brought her here to fill her in on it now.”

Discord erupted in the audience and a badger moved toward the front of the gallery.

“May I ask a question?” he asked a number of times, each louder than the last in an effort to be heard over the attendees. Eventually the uproar settled and the wolf invited the badger to speak. He cleared his throat and said, “We’re concerned about a partnership with humans. They only care about their best interests and not ours. That’s how we ended up in this mess in the first place. Why should we waste any effort working with them now?”

The wolf replied, “The Alliance had the same concerns and we’ve discussed it every which way for quite some time. We kept coming back to the reality that the actions needed to slow the warming can only be done effectively and most impactfully by humans.”

A crow piped up from a rock above the gallery. “But what can we do to convince them to take action? They don’t even listen to other humans, much less to us.”

The elephant answered, “You’re absolutely right, humans are a challenge, and we don’t understand them. That’s why we believe the only way to get our message to them is through another human. We’ve tried everything we can think of on our end and have nothing to lose by giving this a shot.”

Consider supporting the World Wildlife Fund’s work to protect natural species.

I write novels centered in the natural world in which the joint catastrophes of climate change and the nature crisis loom large – perfect, terrifying ingredients for post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction. Which have always been my favourite type of stories.

But because these things are not in the realm of fantasy, sometimes even I have to admit, you need a break from the world’s unfolding disaster. You want to imagine better outcomes. Ones where we do actually ‘look up’ – to borrow the allegory from the 2021 blockbuster movie – and see the comet coming in time.

Writers for young people have a special responsibility perhaps. It’s a broken world we’re passing on, and whatever steps we take now, their lives are going to be different to ours, because of what we and previous generations have done. And because of what we failed to do.

I was thinking up ideas for my next book as the world was coming out of COVID restrictions. It didn’t feel the time for a bleak dystopic vision of planet Earth. I wanted to be hopeful. I took inspiration from David Attenborough’s speech at Glasgow’s COP26.

If working apart, we are force powerful enough to destabilize our planet, surely, working together, we are powerful enough to save it. In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed a terrible decline. In yours, you could and should witness a wonderful recovery.

What if the world did work together and take action on the massive and unprecedented scale the twin crises demand? What if there was a wonderful recovery?

In Beyond the Frozen Horizon, I do it on the very first page, wrapping up succinctly some of the things I wish most for our world. It’s easy on paper. In my book, for thirty years or so now, fossil fuels have been kept in the ground, meat and dairy consumption have drastically reduced, there’s been a ban on single use plastics and fast fashion, and, crucially, vast areas have been set aside as wilderness zones. In other words, much of the world has been left to rewild itself.

The end result isn’t that dissimilar from my previous books. In Where the World Turns Wild, a rewilded world is achieved through disease – much of humanity is wiped out, and survivors are confined to sealed off cities. In Between Sea and Sky, much of humanity has again been wiped out, this time by a series of environmental disasters – floods, storms, fire, famine. The landscape around Blackwater Bay, where that book is set, has been abandoned, and lost species are returning.

It was nice, in Beyond the Frozen Horizon, to do it without the death count.

My main character is a 13-year-old girl called Rory, who travels with her geologist mum to Svalbard. Her mum’s got a job with a green energy company, who are mining for rare earth metals. The company insist their presence in the remote archipelago won’t negatively impact wildlife or the land itself. And anyway, they’re part of the recovery, providing essential materials for green technology. I’m sure you’ll already be suspicious. I needed a threat – this might not be a dystopia but it’s far from utopic – and corporate greed and greenwashing become the enemy. Human appetite for progress and things and experiences and more things, hasn’t gone away.

It was poignant, writing about thriving wildlife in the Arctic as, in real life, the ice melts, and there were times I wondered if it’s a copout – imagining that humankind might actually have taken big enough steps to save the world. I do think it has a value though. I’ve always believed in stories as refuge – places to go, when the world is hard. The climate and nature crises are petrifying, relentless things to live with. They can overwhelm us. This framework for the story enabled me to allow readers to experience the Arctic without being bludgeoned with sadness. We know so much now, about how and why the natural world is good for us. Reading about a place isn’t the same as being there, but it goes some way. The same parts of the brain can be activated. And most of us won’t ever get to visit the Arctic in real life (and it would be disastrous if we all did).

Rory falls in love with the stark icy wilderness. It stuns her, frightens her, but it brings her clarity too, on her own life. She’s so small there, in the vastness of everything. She makes friends as well, which has been something that’s been lacking lately, in her life back home. Rory doesn’t become a different person, but she becomes more herself, I think. I wanted readers to have this chance too, just for a little while, in the pages of my story.

I’m not done with dystopia and post-apocalyptic fiction. It’s easy to dismiss these genres as bleak and depressing, but I believe there’s a creative power to imagining human life brought so close to the brink. How would we start again? How would things be different? Surely the natural world would have to be given more prominence. It’s what will save us in the end, just as, in Beyond the Frozen Horizon, it’s what saves Rory.

Here are six children’s and young adult book recommendations, where we see the balance tipped in favour of the natural world. Where plants and animals can heal us.

• Bloom by Nicola Skinner – the story of how a packet of surprising seeds changes and greens a grey, grim town. Effortlessly funny and brilliant!
• Savi and the Memory Keeper by Bijal Vachharajani. The Overstory for children. Actually, I haven’t read The Overstory, but this book brings plants and trees and their inter-connectedness to life so wonderfully, I’m making that claim anyway. It’s got humour and sadness in equal measure. Published by Hachette India. I’d love to see it become more widely available.
• Green Rising by Lauren James – Around the world, teenagers sprout plants from their skin. Corrupt corporations try and exploit the phenomenon, but can the Green Rising triumph and save planet Earth?
• Dogs of the Deadlandsby Anthony McGowan. Not ostensibly climate-fiction, but this shows rewilding in action. Life in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
• When Shadows Fall by Sita Brahmachari – a small urban wilderness comes into centre stage in this unflinching, much acclaimed novel, about trauma and loss, and how we heal.
• The Last Bear (and The Lost Whale – I’m sneaking in a seventh!) by Hannah Gold. Hannah is wonderful at making us feel a real connection to specific animals, and opening up our hearts and minds to what it takes to save them.

All my covers are illustrated by Kate Forrester!

Nicola Penfold was born in Billinge and grew up in Doncaster. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University. Nicola has worked in a reference library and for a health charity, but being a writer was always the job she wanted most. Nicola writes ecological adventure stories for Little Tiger, with a focus on natural solutions to climate change. Her debut novel Where the World Turns Wild was chosen as a Future Classic for the BookTrust School Library Pack, and shortlisted for several regional awards. This has been followed by Between Sea and Sky and Beyond the Frozen Horizon. Her books are perfect for upper KS2 and KS3.

Solutions Spotlight

In this extract from a book featuring a climate solution, Sarah E. Lewis shares an extract from The Change Agentsabout animals seeking an extraordinary partnership with humans and racing together against the climate crisis to save their shared world:

The wolf looked calmly and authoritatively at the Alliance members and then scanned the attendees in the gallery, making all feel included. She said, “We called this special meeting of the Alliance to discuss a new development in our Climate Change Initiative. Mission Command has been working on a project for years now with the goal of partnering with humans to fight climate change.”

The crowd released a collective exclamation while the members of the Alliance looked over the audience reassuringly.

The wolf continued, “The world is on a perilous path because of the warming climate. The more time that passes, the less time we have to avert disaster where our habitats are destroyed and our species dwindle into extinction. We in the animal kingdom can only do so much in the climate fight. The sole way to have any chance of success is to enlist the assistance of humans to slow down and ideally reverse global warming. We are pursuing any involvement with humans cautiously, but after decades of working on our own, it’s clear the beings who caused the conditions resulting in climate change must address it.” The Alliance members shook their heads in agreement.

“We have information and capabilities that humans don’t and working together is the only hope for saving ourselves and this planet as we know it.”

The gallery members chattered among themselves, surprised to hear of the Alliance’s decision to work with beings many viewed as enemies.

“Mission Command made contact with a human we believe can help us,” informed the wolf. The eyes of the Alliance and those in the audience all turned to Eliza. She immediately blushed and a ‘who, me?’ look came over her face. Bebop leaned into her for moral support.

The wolf went on, “The human who Mission Command has identified knew nothing of this mission, and we brought her here to fill her in on it now.”

Discord erupted in the audience and a badger moved toward the front of the gallery.

“May I ask a question?” he asked a number of times, each louder than the last in an effort to be heard over the attendees. Eventually the uproar settled and the wolf invited the badger to speak. He cleared his throat and said, “We’re concerned about a partnership with humans. They only care about their best interests and not ours. That’s how we ended up in this mess in the first place. Why should we waste any effort working with them now?”

The wolf replied, “The Alliance had the same concerns and we’ve discussed it every which way for quite some time. We kept coming back to the reality that the actions needed to slow the warming can only be done effectively and most impactfully by humans.”

A crow piped up from a rock above the gallery. “But what can we do to convince them to take action? They don’t even listen to other humans, much less to us.”

The elephant answered, “You’re absolutely right, humans are a challenge, and we don’t understand them. That’s why we believe the only way to get our message to them is through another human. We’ve tried everything we can think of on our end and have nothing to lose by giving this a shot.”

Consider supporting the World Wildlife Fund’s work to protect natural species.

Manda Scott talks to Michelle Cook

Michelle Cook: Manda, I’m excited to meet you. I was wondering if Thrutopiawas something that you made up, because it isn’t a thing that I’d heard of before, even though I suspect I was writing around it.

Manda Scott:Really good to meet, you, too. I loved Tipping Point—really impressed with the way you handled such a complicated subject and kept the action moving in ways that gave us such a clear insight into the politics of your world. I’ve just downloaded Counterpoint, and read your outline and you’re definitely writing around it.

Michelle: Thank you!

Manda: So the short answer is Professor Rupert Read came up with the idea of Thrutopia and he let us use it when we were looking for a name for the new genre we’re trying to create, and the Masterclass we ran last year.

The slightly longer answer is that I genuinely thought I’d stopped writing novels. It just takes too long, particularly in standard traditional publishing—to go from the idea to people actually reading it. Podcasts are so much faster: I can interview someone yesterday and put it out tomorrow and the ideas are out there in the world.

But my spiritual path is shamanic, it’s the core of the Boudica books and so now I also teach the dreaming that’s in the books. I was teaching online in summer 2021 and had a particularly clear instruction to create a space on the hill above the farm and sit there every evening as the sun went down in a particular frame of mind until further notice.

Michelle: Whoa, that sounds really precise.

Manda:Really. And twenty years into teaching this stuff, I have worked out that if you get something this clear, you absolutely do not mess about with dumb questions like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ You just do it. So I did—and I was happy to sit on the hill watching the sun go down and crows go to bed in the trees along the river. Though I was thinking by February this is probably not going to be so much fun.

Michelle: Yes! I was thinking that too!

Manda: So, we never got there, because by the end of the first week, I had the idea for the unpublished manuscript that you’ve started reading (working title: ‘West of the Sunset, North of Tomorrow’). This is my first Thrutopian novel. I’m working on the sequel now.

It starts with a 15-year-old lad sitting by his grandmother’s bedside, saying, ‘When you come home, can we go up the hill, watch the crows go to bed?’  And she says, ‘No, this is it. I am dying, you know this. I’m not coming home.’ And in the course of the conversation, he says that he doesn’t want to live in a world with her not in it. She realises he’s serious and she promises that if he really needs her and he calls, if it’s at all possible, she’ll answer. Then she dies and all the rest is told from her perspective as she has to honour this promise—and can also have a sense of potential futures, some of which are ones we’d want to get to, and some of which completely aren’t.

Michelle: What a great concept. I’m eight chapters into the advanced copy you kindly gave me. I love it—such beautiful language and ideas. I adore the character of Alanna, she’s a badass grandma! And her relationship with her grandson, Finn, is incredibly moving. I’m wondering how much of herself the author put into Alanna…

Manda: There are bits of me in all my characters—I don’t think we can bring people to life if there isn’t something of us in them. I don’t know you well, but I’d say there’s a lot of you in Essie. If I had to gauge, I think I’m more Finn than I am Alanna but yes, she has aspects of me.

Michelle: Do you still go up the hill now?

Manda: I learned to love it, so yes, occasionally, but I don’t have to do it every single night as the sun goes down because the instruction by the end of that first week was to write the book. And the not-arguing thing still applies, but this is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done—far harder than any of the historical novels.  Because working out how we could actually get through to a future we’d be proud to leave to our children is really hard.

I realised very quickly that if I hadn’t spent the previous two years doing the podcast Accidental Gods, I wouldn’t even begin to know the building blocks.

However this book turns out, we need more of this, it can’t just be me: we need every TV show, every movie, every book, every play, every Tik-Tok video…to be exploring how we get out of this mess in ways that work. From dismantling our dysfunctional political system to changing the way the economy works so that it’s in service to people and planet instead of the mess we have now where people and planet are destroyed to feed a growing economy. We need to know the tech that works and the tech that just makes people richer and isn’t part of the solution.

Michelle: Exactly! One of the central themes of my books is the enormous drawback in our attachment of profit to human progress. If something could save us, should it be required to make someone rich as well?

Manda: Yes! And we need so many more people asking this. And so my partner, Faith, and I set up the Thrutopia Masterclass which was designed not to teach people to write—you can get that all over the web—but to give them the ideas of what to write – and to create a cohesive, supportive community that could act as a think tank and an ideas generator and spark a whole new genre.

Michelle: What an inspired idea.

Manda:Well, it all came from the crows on the hill!The course ran from May to October ’22 and one of the first people I contacted was Prof. Rupert Read, asking him to be one of our speakers. He pointed out that we were trying to create Thrutopias, and he sent me the paper that he had published in Huffington Post in 2017 where he defined what a Thrutopia is and why we need it. I asked if we could use the name for our new genre and he was kind enough to say yes, and so here we are.

Michelle: So you’re heading for plausible futures where we heal the damage we’ve already done and work out a new way to live that we can sustain longer than ten minutes?

Manda: Right. The kinds of futures where everyone will imagine it and want to get there because it’s so obviously better than where we are now. We all know how bad it could be: The Handmaid’s Tale meets The Road and life is hell forever.

But where you put your energy is where you get to. And our pathetic political leaders just implement what’s in the zeitgeist. If we don’t create a zeitgeist that has multiple visions of futures that everyone really wants, we’re sunk. We need not just ideas that are going to stop us crashing over the edge of the cliff into four degrees C of warming, but actually things that are better than we have now. And I still think that’s possible.

Michelle: Interesting what you say about leaders. I’ve been plagued recently by the idea that our democratic systems only create followers of the crowd, not leaders. And I’m remembering the internet meme where someone is saying, ‘So what happens if we implement all these things and it wasn’t going to be as bad as we thought, and we accidentally create a better world?’!

Manda:Yes! But the problem is that the people with the money and the power are afraid to let go. Which means we’re headed to the total extinction of all life on Earth because a handful of mostly old, mostly white, mostly blokes don’t want to give up power. This is what you wrote about in Tipping Point.

Michelle: And they are doing this knowingly. When I was writing Tipping Point, I thought, ‘No one’s going to buy this. This is too evil.’ And actually, some of the things that have happened in real life have been way worse than that. I realised I was going to have to dial it up a bit. Obviously, there have been terrible acts in history, but creating a character prepared to see the end of human life for the sake of profit I found quite difficult.

Manda: It’s hard, particularly if we do incorporate a bit of ourselves in everyone we write. We have to find the monster inside. I have a theory that we can do all the factual research we like, and that’s fine, but we can never write beyond our own emotional intelligence. And what’s going to get us through this, is everyone growing in emotional literacy. So paving the way means a lot of internal work.

Michelle: I feel as if I need to understand the destructive mindset to get my head around it. But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe we just need all the people who don’t understand to get on the same page. Because the ones who are creating the evil are a tiny minority.

Manda: Right. They are the 1% of the 1%. It’s just that they have the power to make their voices heard.

Michelle: And we’ll never reach the people who are wholly invested in business as usual, because that’s where their power lies. I was doing some change engagement training the other day and they quoted from The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli: ‘…the innovator has for enemies all those who do well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.’ Maybe it’s the lukewarm people in the middle who can make the difference.

Manda: I hope so. Everyone can make a difference – and everyone has to. We don’t really know where the tipping point is, but I think we need at least 25% of people talking to all of their friends with ideas of a better world. That’s everyone who reads this and orders of magnitude more.

Michelle: I’m thinking of the campaign group 38 Degrees. Apparently, 38 degrees is the angle at which an avalanche occurs—a metaphor for the tipping point of change. It just needs a critical mass. We need to craft stories with a positive message and get it onto the right platform. Climate Spring have the same vibe. They’re not interested in purely dystopian narratives where everything’s going over a cliff and we end up almost fetishising disaster. On the other hand, where’s the story in utopia? Where’s the conflict? We have to find the stories in how we get there.

Manda:You managed to find one in Tipping Point and Counterpoint, though. The sense of threat is palpable, and the ingenuity of the characters is really striking. I read the outline for Counterpoint and it feels as if it’s heading somewhere generative—a Thrutopian future?

Michelle: Thank you, I tried to hit an optimistic note among the grit. I think I had to create this terrible world to find the story, but I couldn’t leave it there. I had to find a way for us to survive. And then in the second book I confess cheated a little bit, went years further into the future to look back and say, ‘Yeah, it wasn’t easy, but we got there and now we do it like this.’ Now I really want to get underneath the building blocks of how you get there. Sounds like that’s Thrutopia. And it sounds like I’ve got some work to do…

I find it weird that amongst everything in mainstream entertainment—books, TV, film— the majority of it doesn’t mention climate change at all. Like it’s a minority issue, not something most people worry about. And somebody who’s actively trying to make positive change is portrayed as out of step or fanatical. It feels deliberate.

Manda: Because it is.I have a friend who used to write for one of the big UK TV soaps and they used to write in little things like characters taking out recycling and it would be cut out by the subeditors because—and I quote directly—‘Our income depends on people needing to buy a new granite worktop for their kitchen every year, and you cannot undermine that.’

Michelle: That’s so frustrating!

Manda: Isn’t it, just?! Needless to say, my friend doesn’t write for that team anymore. But this is where I got to with writing my book. We live in a culture that is defined by consumption, extraction, destruction, and by a lack of meaning. We don’t know what we’re here for at the moment. I get a lot of people coming on courses with the Shamanic dreaming or the Accidental Gods membership who are essentially searching for meaning.  Which is really heartening – we need to find what we’re here for individually so that we can shape what we’re here for culturally.  Just now, our culture is programmed to consume and thereby destroy, but we have so much potential. When we exert our creativity, grow up and bring the best of ourselves in all our resilience and emotional intelligence to the world, then we’re awe-inspiring in its truest sense.

And we all know we truly weren’t born to pay bills and then die. If we put our minds to it, we can create a regenerative culture we’d be proud to leave to the future generations. It will just require a complete dismantling of the way that our current system works.

Michelle: Sometimes it feels too difficult. Like, how am I going to do this without utterly changing my life? I mean, I recycle; I’ve got an electric car…

Manda: That’s great.

Michelle: But it’s not enough.

Manda: It’s not going to undo the effects of our overshoot, for sure, but it’s a start and it sends the right signals, which at this point matters a lot.

Michelle: What else can we do?

Manda: That’s a whole other conversation, but if we look at it overall, clearly there are things we can do individually, and things we can only do collectively and we each need to be working on both so that we don’t just barrel over the edge of the cliff by default.

And you have to be kind to yourself. I recently heard a Spanish philosopher who said that when you look at your life, if you have less than four internal contradictions, you’re a fanatic. If you have more than ten, you’re a hypocrite. But somewhere in the middle is fine—you’re doing your best. Sounds like you’re well into doing your best!

Michelle: I like his thinking… You’re talking about a huge shift.

Manda: Totally. We have to think big. But we’re not alone. People are already planning for this. Sane governments are already looking at what’s necessary and making it happen.

I think the answers to all of these lie in a simple set of principles. When we get this writing out into the world, everyone will have a slightly different take on exactly how we get from where we are to where we need to be. But the value system underpinning it will be broadly similar. We’ll need a sense of integrity, and giving each other the benefit of the doubt, of assuming good intent unless there’s evidence to the contrary. We’ll need community and ways of making decisions that are more sophisticated than a single vote on complex issues. We’ll need to rediscover our sense of connection to the land and the web of life.

There’s a brilliant book called The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow that outlines how so many other highly complex cultures avoided the obvious pitfalls of ours—namely giving power to corrupt psychopaths and letting them set the agenda. David Graeber also wrote, ‘Debt, the First 5,000 Years’ and ‘Bullshit Jobs’ so he was really on top of the insanities in our culture.

Michelle: Rings true. I’m buying The Dawn of Everything immediately. I do worry about our collective disengagement from politics, small p. We enable abuse of power when we stop paying attention to those who wield it. Whether we like it or not, politics will engage with us and determine fundamental aspects of our lives: our health, what we learn (or don’t), how safe we are, the quality of the air we breathe, whether the work we do is considered valuable (or not). It makes no sense to ignore this stuff.

Manda: I love that you get this. So many people are disengaged with politics and don’t realise that genuine engagement could change everything. I just interviewed someone for the podcast who’s created an app that enables quadratic voting on the blockchain and the potential for that to change how things are done is huge. Way too geeky for now, though.

But if we take a step back and look at the system as a whole, in essence, we have created a hell where most people don’t spend their days doing vocational work that feels truly purposeful, they just do whatever they can to stave off starvation or homelessness and even that sometimes isn’t enough. If I were to offer you the chance to find that sweet spot where your heart’s greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need, would you not jump at it?

Michelle: Oh, I wish. I remember feeling intensely sad towards the end of the last lockdown period because, awful as the pandemic was, that was also an opportunity to change course, wasn’t it? People didn’t want to go back to the grind. And then suddenly you’ve got Jacob Rees-Mogg telling people they had to be at their desks and it’s all about control. I knew it was going to happen. I could see us all trickling back. And the air smelt sour again. For that time where all we were doing was walking around our neighbourhood, the air was sweet.

Manda: The birds were singing…

Michelle: Yes! You could hear it. We are so indoctrinated. Even those of us who want to think outside the box are influenced. This idea that what is happening now is inevitable; that eternal economic growth is a natural law, and there’s inevitably going to be inequality. Because it’s all about getting ahead of your peers. It’s ingrained. All that nonsense rhetoric about ‘world-beating’ this and that. Why are you doing that? Who’s winning the race?

Manda: And who’s losing if you’re winning it? Why is this set up as a zero sum? We don’t have to have this whole society of zero sums that’s being imposed on us.

Michelle: Yeah, exactly. The ‘race’ is just considered human nature. How would we ever know if it wasn’t? It’s heart-breaking, isn’t it?

Manda: But even thinking this means you’re a Thrutopian at heart! It’s great. So now we just need to find the route to get to there. We need to do the creative thinking and have the alternatives ready, because otherwise people default to what they know. And what they know is violence and retreat into tribalism. Because it’s easier to imagine the total extinction of life on Earth than it is to imagine an end to predatory capitalism.

Michelle: Where do we find the details, though? That’s the bit I’m missing underneath all my big ideas.

Manda: It’s everywhere, honestly, you just need a nudge to get you looking in the right places. Podcasts are amazing. In the last four years since I started the Accidental Gods podcast, there’s a whole rash of others in a similar field. Just off the top of my head I’d recommend Nate Hagens, ‘The Great Simplification’ and Nathalie Nahai’s ‘The Hive’ and The Upstream Podcast with Della Duncan, and Rob Hopkins ‘From What if to What Next?’ There are literally hundreds more—I’ll create a list if anyone’s interested—all by super bright people who are really engaging with this.

The thing is, most people are really focussed on their own field: the economy, politics, material flows, regenerative agriculture, urban design…whatever. What we can do as creatives to stitch them together into the stories that bring everything alive, that show how everything works in one holistic way. We have to think systemically and that’s what writing does: it creates whole systems and shows them working. I genuinely believe it’s up to us, the writers, to create the visions and show how we got there. Because other people are too busy surviving. And that’s not their fault.

Michelle: There is something about the power of stories. It clicked with me a few years ago when I started writing Tipping Point, that you can bash your head against a brick wall trying to convince people. I rant at people all the time, anyone who’ll listen, but building a story, creating somebody who doesn’t really exist that they care about is so much more powerful. Engaging with these big ideas emotionally is the best way I can think of to do it.

Manda: And you do it brilliantly. So keep doing it. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again.

Michelle: And right back at you, Manda. I can’t wait to sink back into West of the Sunset’s delicious language…

Manda: Thank you. We should do this again sometime.

Michelle: I would love that! Thanks Manda—I’m feeling super inspired right now.

Find out more about Tipping Point and Accidental Gods.

Michelle Cook lives in Worcestershire, UK, with her husband, their two young children, and a cat called Lyra Belacqua. Her first joyful steps into creative writing were at the age of ten, when the teacher read out her short story in class. A slapstick tale of two talking kangaroos breaking out of a zoo, the work was sadly lost to history. Still, Michelle never forgot the buzz of others enjoying her words. More recently, she has had several flash pieces published, was long-listed for the Cambridge 2020 prize for flash fiction, and placed first in the February 2020 Writers’ Forum competition with her short story The Truth About Cherry House.

Novelist, columnist, blogger, podcaster, broadcaster and red-green activist, Manda Scott‘s novels have been shortlisted for an Orange Prize, nominated for an Edgar and dived into the endless iterations of TV adaptations. She’s currently host of the THRUTOPIA MASTERCLASS which is helping a whole generation of writers to craft plausible, generative, thriving, near-term futures we’d be proud to leave to our children – and map the routes to get there. Her latest novel, A Treachery of Spies weaves a contemporary crime thriller with the courage and heroism of the Special Operations Executive in WW2. She’s written a Thrutopian TV series and is working on a Thrutopian novel. Because we have the answers to a flourishing future, we just haven’t created the visions that will draw people towards them. When not writing, she is host of the Accidental Gods podcast, and runs a horticultural smallholding, which one day will feed the local community.

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Solutions Spotlight

In this extract from a book featuring a climate solution, Ruth Hartley shares an extract from Dust and Rainabout the re-wilding of agriculture:

I remember what Makemba said to me at the Source of the Great River in the Evergreen Forest.

“Chipo! Can you cry enough tears to end the drought? Think of your brother! Perhaps he needs your help? A river that forgets its source will dry up. A people that forget their roots will not be able to survive.”

I’m looking down on the Great River below me. I can hear the sounds it makes as it flows past. It is talking to me. It tells me that it doesn’t stop doing what a river does. It carries on flowing down to the sea. No river can run backwards. No life can be lived backwards.

When I travelled with the Rain Spirits, they took me all over the world, so I’ve seen the sea. I’ve seen that water is Life. I’ve seen that the river is always the same and always changing. The river that Chibwe, Mokoro and I travelled on has left us and gone on ahead of us to the sea. The river that runs past me now is a different river that knows different people. I’m only one tiny part of the River that is Life. All I can do is be that tiny living part of the River of Life. No matter how much I cry, that is all that I am.

The Great River has spoken to me. I know what I must do. I slip and slide down the bank and walk back to the camp.

Learn more about the World Food Crisis Appeal, helping people in Zambia cope with drought conditions.

Or, the risks and rewards of writing eco-fiction while working on environmental issues

by A.E. Copenhaver

In an essay published in Liberties journal, critic and philosopher Becca Rothfeld brilliantly topples a few monoliths of contemporary writing by declaring them ‘sanctimony literature.’ After first commenting on some of the “riskless and conciliatory” novels (and novelists!) of the 21st century in an essay for The Point, Rothfeld then more deeply mines this trend of simplistic and performative wokeness in modern literature. She notes that often these novels are full of characters who are “stupefyingly smug,” who never display any “genuine curiosity about what it really means to be good, [… and who are] blind to the distinction between morality and moralism.” 

This fantastically satisfying examination of performative wokeness in literature is just too good—and reading Rothfeld’s essay in full is totally worth the $50 annual subscription to Liberties journal. 

And I say this as someone who not only has written a novel that could, at certain angles, slot into the sanctimony literature bookshelf (according to some readers, anyway), but also as someone who has spent most of her professional career—at various times and with varying intensities—standing very closely to and even bumping elbows with some of the more performative versions of “the many aspects of goodness” explored in Rothfeld’s essay.

So, it’s no coincidence, then, that upon recognizing the fruitful landscape of working in the environmental sector, I heard, with ever increasing insistence, the loud and excoriating voice of Cara Foster, the protagonist of my first novel, My Days of Dark Green Euphoria. 

Cara Foster can speak for herself, so I won’t attempt to explain her perspective here. But crack open my book without noticing the ‘vegan literature—satire’ designation in the front matter and you, too, can be offended and outraged by Cara’s unrelenting judgments of everyone who eats animals, drives to Target for casual shopping sprees, who likes donuts, smokes cigarettes, takes long, hot showers, who flies in airplanes, who maybe doesn’t recycle, and who enjoys having pedicures. 

My dear aunties once told me—to my great delight—something to the effect of: You might make some people very upset with how ruthless Cara is.

To me, the possibility of this upset over Cara’s perspective serves as evidence of two possibilities: one, that I failed as a writer to make Cara a satirical character, and two, that readers are really and truly listening to what Cara has to say—and they might not like it one bit.

And this could be precisely what is so intriguing about Rothfeld’s criticism: just as characters from so-called sanctimony literature seem eager to demonstrate their own politics and then condemn everyone else for theirs, modern day readers, too, appear primed and even enthusiastic to judge, condemn, call out, and to feel offended and outraged by these same characters. 

It is in this sense that the ethics of reading come into play. At what point and with what consequences do readers feel justified in slamming a book shut and refusing to read further? Perhaps when the protagonist is a pedophile or murderer (or both)? Perhaps if she’s a vegan with climate anxiety suffering from compassion fatigue and zero anger management? Or maybe it’s more to do with the author’s failure to execute the character to achieve the desired reading experience. Either way, both insufficient portions and heaping measures of ethics in fictional protagonists can be wonderfully and richly engaging if well executed.

And in the professional realm of environmental protection or social justice advocacy or climate action, or defense of human, land, and animal rights, we workers offer ourselves up daily to criticism from our own kind. Are we aware of our privilege enough, and do we acknowledge it too much or too little? Are we unknowingly or purposefully perpetuating systems of oppressions in the way we speak or write or host meetings? Are we exemplifying the savior complex? Are we making everything worse simply by showing up or attempting to contribute to this work at all? 

Clearly, I don’t have the answers. And while I intend to keep up my work both on and off the page, I believe reading and conversing with literature—in its myriad forms, whether sanctimonious or not—is one of the best ways to wrestle with these very difficult and important questions.

Because for as sanctimonious as so many contemporary narrators and characters are accused of being, readers (and critics) sure do seem to enjoy engaging with them—especially if those same readers either cannot tolerate the politics, ethics, tone, or messaging contained therein enough to read the entire novel, or if instead those critics choose to write thousands of words about how problematic and derivative and simplistic and self-righteous all this sanctimony is.

Alternatively, we might consider: What is the greater significance of so-called sanctimonious narrators in modern literature? What is their relationship to the climate crisis or the sixth mass extinction we are all experiencing? What are they really saying and how are they saying it? The more readers and critics (such as Rothfeld) contemplate these and similar questions, the better our collective understanding and imagining of the human and beyond-human experience in the 21st century will be. Otherwise, our own imaginations could turn out to be the last safe space. 

A.E. Copenhaver is a writer, editor,  science communicator, and climate interpreter. In her current position with the International Arctic Research Center, she helps run the Study of Environmental Arctic Change, a research collaboration funded by the National Science Foundation. Her debut novel My Days of Dark Green Euphoria won the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature and was published by Ashland Creek Press in early 2022.

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Solutions Spotlight

In this extract from a book featuring a climate solution, Donna Glee Williams shares an extract from The Night Field about the re-wilding of agriculture:

As we got close to my field – our field, now – I heard a frail high cheeping in the night. Peepers. Tears sprang to my eyes. Could it be? Frogs already? It had been so long since I’d heard their voices. Was that all it took to bring them back – just a few months without the poison? Could things truly heal so fast? My heart sang and I cheeped back to them, one more voice in the night.

Lakka looked at me. ‘Now? Out here? You’ve picked this night to finally go crazy?’ She was trudging heavily, weighed down by the full sprayer on her back. It was a long way to the fields by the river.

I cheeped again. ‘Don’t you hear them, Lakka? The frogs? They eat bugs – any bugs. All bugs. Cutter-bugs, Lakka, cutter—’

And that’s when the hound hit her.

Learn more about natural pesticides from the charity Pesticide Action Network.