Michael J. DeLuca
“Everything’s environmental justice” is something I used to say around the shop back during Reckoning 2 or thereabouts, a way of indicating what kinds of environmental writing should go in the magazine: all kinds, from everywhere and everyone.
Ten years in, I stand by that statement, even as I acknowledge that “everywhere” for our purposes refers, with far too few exceptions, to the English-speaking world, and “everyone” means specifically those in earnest about enacting environmental justice, large-scale or small.
Let me put the lens of environmental justice over this book or device you’re gazing into, Reckoning X, our collectively edited communication issue. This lens is many-leaved. Perhaps a very, very thin leaf is made from cobalt mined by children. Accessibility, access to information, access to services, education, cost, economic situation, race, nationality, sexuality, and ethnicity: these are all leaves of the environmental justice lens, as are the physical ones inside our heads made for us by some billions of years of evolution and, depending who you are and how you look, God.
Everything’s communication, too. All behavior is communication. Mycelial networks, spores, the chemical interactions of root systems, birds dancing, orcas wearing salmon hats, cephalopod color displays, cat hackles, pheromones, ant chemical highways, ultraviolet floral pigmentation, and pretty much everything humans do, for better or worse. Communication is at the heart of environmental justice, and it’s the heart of Reckoning. Who gets justice, who is even allowed to work for it, is a matter of who’s allowed to communicate their need and who is able to receive and understand that communication. Everything’s a circle, everything’s interconnected.
Here in Reckoning X, Jaime McGhee’s “The Over-Sea”—a story about emigrating to the land of the colonizer—denotes speech by indentation, but renders speech within a colonized mindset using quotation marks. It’s a deliberate, deeply meaningful choice by the author, calling attention to the textual and linguistic violence inherent in a literary medium like this one. Luis Rafael Moya’s textual art piece “Agujero Negro” speaks to the same point.
Ten years into making Reckoning, I’ve become we, and we’ve learned so much. We can see so much more of that interconnectedness than ever before, even as the intersecting crises grow more acute with every year that’s passed. And though at times I dread what another ten years might teach me about humanity, where I’d have failed, we keep going.
Reckoning started with a staff of one. After ten years, our editorial staff has included upwards of thirty people from ten countries, speaking eight languages, each of whose lives and minds are completely their own, unlike any other, and each of whom has contributed something indelible to what Reckoning has become and is becoming.
We start out not knowing, then we learn from each other. I think that’s as good an encapsulation as any of what these past ten years have taught me, about environmental justice, about what it is to be alive, struggling to survive, perceive, communicate, and understand. This issue is packed full of all kinds of different ways of communicating about environmental justice—some soothing, some shocking—from all kinds of different people. Some of it, I very much hope, will blow your mind right open.
