Tag Archive for: politics

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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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The Deluge | Stephen Markley

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while an ecological crisis looms. America is battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington DC, their stories unfold against a backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon up courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find hope in the face of staggering odds. Each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance of a future?

 

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

Brimstone: a Book of Villanelles | John Kinsella

Using this poetic form (of five 3-line stanzas and a final quatrain) throughout to great effect, John Kinsella’s latest collection is a work of ecological and political passion. The birds and animals of Western Australia, its landscape of vibrant colours and panoply of sounds are described in vivid detail, so much so that the reader almost feels part of this antipodean environment.

And it is the ecological destruction of the environment and the politics behind it that are the target of the poet’s rage and frustration. This is indeed a powerful and necessary work from a powerful and necessary poet who believes that poetry is one the most effective activist modes of expression and resistance we have.

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The Windup Girl | Paolo Bacigalupi

The Windup Girl is the ground-breaking and visionary modern classic that swept the board for every major science fiction award it its year of publication.

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen’s calorie representative in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, he combs Bangkok’s street markets in search of foodstuffs long thought to be extinct.

There he meets the windup girl – the beautiful and enigmatic Emiko – now abandoned to the slums. She is one of the New People, bred to suit the whims of the rich.

Engineered as slaves, soldiers and toys, they are the new underclass in a chilling near future where oil has run out, calorie companies dominate nations and bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe. And as Lake becomes increasingly obsessed with Emiko, conspiracies breed in the heat and political tensions threaten to spiral out of control.

Businessmen and ministry officials, wealthy foreigners and landless refugees all have their own agendas. But no one anticipates the devastating influence of the Windup Girl.

‘The pace of the book is fast and relentless. It is a dark vision . . . As a portrait of a world far from our own but not unrecognisably so, it is finely done’ Times Literary Supplement

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