Tag Archive for: biodiversity crisis

THE FUTURE | NAOMI ALDERMAN

The future that Alderman conjures in her ambitious, exuberant follow-up to The Power is all too close to our own. Unchecked corporate greed dominates the political and cultural landscape; the Sixth Mass Extinction is in full swing; and AI, social media and new gadgets are transforming the way we live, communicate and think.

Against this backdrop, a collection of billionaires, paranoiacs, and idealists including a former cult member and a survivalist influencer co-operate and compete to shape the future of their dreams. With the continuation of much of life on Earth at stake, Alderman’s timely, intelligent thriller is tempered with anthropological, philosophical and religious commentaries which deftly frame the action in the context of entrenched cultural history, the biodiversity crisis, and Deep Time. – Liz Jensen

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Why Rebel | Jay Griffiths

Why rebel? Because our footprint on the Earth has never mattered more than now. How we treat it, in the spirit of gift or of theft, has never been more important.

Because we need a politics of kindness, but the very opposite is on the rise. Libertarian fascism, with its triumphal brutalism, its racism and misogyny – a politics that loathes the living world.

Because nature is not a hobby. It is the life on which we depend, as Indigenous societies have never forgotten.

Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars, and they are lining up now to write rebellion across the skies.

‘This, bluntly, should be our generation’s Gettysburg Address’ ~ Rishi Dastidar, selected Why Rebel for guest contribution to May 2023’s What We’re Reading Now.

Jay Griffiths has been a long time collaborator with Extinction Rebellion and Writers Rebel. Last year, in collaboration with actor Mark Rylance, composers Sam Lee & Anna Phoebe and Paint the Land, she co-produced Almost Invisible Angels, a haunting short film which speaks out in praise of insects. Her accompanying written piece for Writers Rebel gives us a chilling insight into a world without insects – a world that creeps uncomfortably closer with every month of global inaction to protect our remaining biodiversity.

Country Music | Will Burns

The poems in Country Music are observant, curious, finding everywhere they look detail worthy of notice, determined in that ‘The falsehood is that there is little / left for us to know’. This same faith in the minutiae of the world acknowledges the cost of our decisions, however small that ‘To feel the evening coming up / and to stream one way or another’; can be the difference between this life and that, ‘at once to feel / all these things change’.

From the intimately personal the choices that lead us towards, or away from, old friends, lovers, family members and their lost and vanishing stories, to the collective humanity’s ‘bad choices piling up like debts’; Burns is everywhere concerned with consequence and responsibility. ‘The bloody mess of individuals / plastic stuff outside an abandoned tent’, tobacco packaging, dogshit, old newspapers, styrofoam, white goods, both blend into and stand out from the landscape. This is evidence of the human cost, the tent’s inhabitant existing at the margins. There are ‘rubber boats in the news / and no borders to heavy weather’, the patterns of migratory birds are disrupted, and a sequence of poems explores the poet’s grandmother, displaced after the war, like a castaway, to ‘some welcome or unwelcome or indifferent port’. Here is an exhortation to remake, restore, ‘begging for you to build again / this time something cool and that will last’.

Plastiglomerate | Tim Cresswell

Plastiglomerate finds our world in the midst of environmental disaster: from plastic pollution and wrecked shipping to fires in the Amazon rainforest. Geographer-poet Tim Cresswell writes with the forensic eye of a professional, bending the hard vocabulary of science into a jagged but compelling lyric that telescopes from the vast to the cellular in the space of a line. Plastiglomerate completes a trilogy of poetry books that examines mankind’s impact on the earth; its central poem recycles the British folk ballad The Twa Magicians to make an ecological protest song fit for the Anthropocene age.

But among powerful depictions of the natural world under threat – from beached whales to lost birds – it is the humanity of Cresswell’s imagery that wins through: leaf-blowers in surgical masks, blue nail polish, the biro “leaking in the heat of my pocket”.

“Engaging and unsettling poems that tell it like it is, looking unflinchingly at environmental beauty and disaster. There is redemption here too, in the warmth of human relationships – while this is indeed a world of “ruin and plunder”, it is also a
place “full of love and sap”. A powerful and memorable collection.’ ~ Jean Sprackland