Category: Climate Change
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were you a fisherman, before?
No surprise, really, but in case you had any doubts: Kate Beaton’s Ducks is a masterwork. Funny and sad and profound and tragic, an exposure of the world and of the self, the weight of the story perfectly balanced by the lightness of the style. Stayed up to the early hours to finish it in…
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palpably anxious authors
Interesting and accidental juxtaposition in these two bits from very different scenes and sources, which nonetheless rhyme strongly: In my most cynical moments, I wonder if the return to literary moralism isn’t an evolutionary tactic of publishing’s extant power structures, substituting real-world issues of employment and portfolio identity representation—which do matter—with equitable representation within individual…
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give ’em enough hope
At the end of this bleak but oddly comforting long-read from Marlowe Hood—whose name suggests he missed out on a potential career as a noir gumshoe character—is this quote from one of the many climate scientists and activists Hood has interviewed over the years: “Hope is an active verb,” said [Clover] Hogan. “We continue to…
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Nightmare on Planet Thanet: Rosa Rankin-Gee’s Dreamland
Anyone of the “climate dystopias are surplus to purpose” school of thought might as well click away now; Dreamland is very much not the droid you’re looking for. A staggeringly bleak extrapolation of post-Brexit Britain, taking as its focus the recently (and probably temporarily) reinvigorated seaside town of Margate as its setting, I’m not sure…
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a position of negligible influence
Given my line of work, I should probably be among the many people who scour the latest missives from the IPCC as soon as they drop. My reasons for not doing so are two-fold. Firstly, I’m very short of time, and scanning 800+ pages of written-by-committee material in order to confirm the details of what…