Tag Archive for: climate emergency

Rebel Talk | Extinction Rebellion

Responding to a call from poet Rip Bulkeley’s call, sixty-three poets contributed to the anthology Rebel Talk. As Philip Gross’s Foreword explains, the poems “…seek to show what, uniquely, these times are, and why it is once again so urgent that creative artists respond to the challenges they pose, in particular to the climate emergency.

Each poem is an individual response to this challenge: as a collection, they possess a wealth of language and imagery, by turns hard, laconic, diamond sharp, down-to-earth, tender, urgently lyrical. What are these times? Almost – not quite – too late.”

Rebel Talk is divided into six chapters, exploring themes and emotions which draw together responses to the climate emergency. The opening chapter, ‘Earth’, rejoices and grounds itself in nature’s diversity and cosmic unity. Here is a vision of a natural world which we can recognise and respect, in which we can flourish and thrive because we know what we must do to make sure we don’t damage it.

The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here | Hope Jahren

Degrowth 101 for young adults, The Story of More takes readers through the science explains how key inventions, like electric power and large-scale farming, have helped and harmed this world.  Readers learn about these processes that release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the current and projected consequences of greenhouse gasses -and discover what action we can all take to avoid climate devastation.

Read our Librarian’s top climate choices for Young Adults here

Not the End of the World | Geraldine McCaughrean

The story of Noah’s Ark gets a cli-fi reworking in this work of historical fiction. Geraldine McCaughrean imagines the story as told by the voices of Noah’s family, including his inquisitive daughter. It’s a gripping story about coming face-to-face with disastrous, extreme weather events.

Read our Librarian’s top climate choices for Young Adults here

The Uninhabitable Earth | David Wallace-Wells

From its first line – “It is, worse, much worse, than you think” – Wallace-Wells’ urgent, unapologetic wake-up pulls no punches. Published in 2019, it maps out how humankind’s current trajectory will lead to a seismic shift in politics, culture, and history itself unless we dismantle our delusion of invincibility and begin to embrace our own agency and harness the transformative power of collective action. Because as Wallace-Wells reminds us, the stakes could not be higher: “If we emit carbon dioxide at anything like current rates for the next two decades, the game is over.”

Read more of our Climate Classics: timeless works exploring themes of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Clade | James Bradley

Clade is the story of one family in a radically changing world, a place of loss and wonder where the extraordinary mingles with the everyday. Haunting, lyrical and unexpectedly hopeful, it is the work of a writer in command of the major themes of our time. The distinguished nature writer Robert Macfarlane calls it “a brilliant, unsettling and timely novel: a true text of the Anthropocene in its subtle shuttlings between lives, epochs and eras, and its knitting together of the planet’s places. Like Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, its great subjects are deep time, swift change, and the eeriness of everyday life. Reading Clade leaves us, in Timothy Morton’s phrase, “strange strangers” to ourselves; and makes the Earth seem an odder, older, more vulnerable home.”

“Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section”

 

The Healer | Antti Tuomainen

It’s two days before Christmas and Helsinki is battling a ruthless climate catastrophe: subway tunnels are flooded; abandoned vehicles are left burning in the streets; the authorities have issued warnings about malaria, tuberculosis, Ebola, and the plague. People are fleeing to the far north of Finland and Norway where conditions are still tolerable. Social order is crumbling and private security firms have undermined the police force.

Tapani Lehtinen, a struggling poet, is among the few still able and willing to live in the city. When Tapani’s beloved wife, Johanna, a newspaper journalist, goes missing, he embarks on a frantic hunt for her. Johanna’s disappearance seems to be connected to a story she was researching about a politically motivated serial killer known as “The Healer.” Desperate to find Johanna, Tapani’s search leads him to uncover secrets from her past. Secrets that connect her to the very murders she was investigating.

The Healer is set in desperate times, forcing Tapani to take desperate measures in order to find his true love. Written in an engrossingly dense but minimal language, Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer is a story of survival, loyalty, and determination. Even when the world is coming to an end, love and hope endure.

“The surefooted rendition of rain-washed urban decay that will stay in the mind of most readers.”—The Independent

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section.

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The Most Important Comic Book on Earth | Rewriting Extinction

 

 


“Storytelling is our most ancient and powerful technology. Stories have shaped our world, have changed the course of history and transformed lives. It’s the life blood of our species, pumping through our collective cultural veins, informing our actions motivating us, spinning our webs of beliefs, ideologies and realities. No part of our lives remains untouched by the stories we are told or those we tell ourselves.

In many ways the ‘story’ of Extinction Rebellion has always been its most powerful asset, that by coming together in creative, collective civil disobedience we can harness our power and change a world hurtling towards a global catastrophe created by our insane systems and reckless appetites.

Paul Goodenough’s Rewriting Extinction project is a herculean attempt to reimagine our collective fate through story, to literally rewrite the mass extinction event currently under way. A dazzlingly ambitious collaboration of creative talent from across planet Earth, it contains wisdom from luminaries in the comic industry like John Wagner, Tula Lotay, Alan Moore and Amy Chu to the talent of people like Moses Brings Plenty, Lucy Lawless and Andy Serkis to name but a scant few.

It’s a love song, a war drum, a desperate plea and an inspirational call to arms to take action now on behalf of all life, to fight for every species, every inch of ground, every child growing up in these uncertain times. The project not only tells stories but weaves them into projects that are directly making a difference. The proceeds raised go towards a variety of projects and organizations that are contributing to our struggle for survival. These stories are dedicated to preserving life itself and this in itself is a testament to the power of change.

So read it, let it seep into your bones, then ponder what you can do to change the story of a planet heading for extinction, every action we take here on in is absolutely vital to every life living now. Rewriting Extinction is the only story worth telling our children, is the only story worth living and breathing. Because if we can craft a vision of change, can become that change, future generations may just look back on this era as the greatest story ever told.” ~ Simon Bramwell

 

Neptune’s Projects | Rishi Dastidar

What do you do when you are a god – but powerless and unable to prevent one of your favourite species from their insatiable, accelerating death wish? Do you try to shout louder and more insistently, or instead reinvent yourself as a troubadour of romantic ruin? Such are the dilemmas posed by Rishi Dastidar in his third poetry collection Neptune’s Projects, a reshaping of mythology for the climate crisis era which gives bold consideration to the stark choices we face. A post-apocalyptic jig and reel, these poems are compelling, deadpan yarns of the sea, full of both fury and fun. In Neptune’s Projects the end of humanity is made wry, thrilling – and alive.

‘Rishi Dastidar is a ludic myth-maker, a satirist of keen eye and big heart. These poems of the sea and shores of this ‘tight little island’ bite back with verve and gallows wit.’ ~ Karen McCarthy Woolf

‘There has always been an intersection between poetry and the natural world. Now here comes Rishi Dastidar’s Neptune to add wit, postmodern panache and mythic irony to the tradition of the open sea. A richly rewarding read.’ ~ Roger Robinson 

Rishi Dastidar was guest contributor to May 2023’s What We’re Reading Now. Discover some of his recommended eco-writing here.

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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.

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Being Ecological | Timothy Morton

Don’t care about ecology? This book is for you.

Why is everything we think we know about ecology wrong?
Is there really any difference between ‘humans’ and ‘nature’?
Does this mean we even have a future?

Timothy Morton, who has been called ‘Our most popular guide to the new epoch’ (Guardian), sets out to show us that whether we know it or not, we already have the capacity and the will to change the way we understand the place of humans in the world, and our very understanding of the term ‘ecology’. A cross-disciplinarian who has collaborated with everyone from Björk to Hans Ulrich Obrist, Morton is also a member of the object-oriented philosophy movement, a group of forward-looking thinkers who are grappling with modern-day notions of subjectivity and objectivity, while also offering fascinating new understandings of Heidegger and Kant. Calling the volume a book containing ‘no ecological facts’, Morton confronts the ‘information dump’ fatigue of the digital age, and offers an invigorated approach to creating a liveable future.

‘[A book] from which I took that maybe we can engage with this subject in different tones and a lightness of heart and spirit’  ~ Rishi Dastidar, in his guest contribution to May 2023’s What We’re Reading Now.