creative writing on environmental justice
I’m Idi, and today’s my lucky day! The weather dome in Sector 99 isn’t leaking sludge for once, and the artificial sun isn’t stuck at max setting again—I mean, just last week, it was warm enough to melt the soles of my rubber slippers. The air filtration systems are still belching purple gas, but those never bother me anyway: I’ve breathed in DTE micro matter since . . .
What is up with the sky? What is up with it and the clouds and the grasses and how everyone talks? Do you know this? Why they don’t stop as it goes closer to the end of the table, Jess? They could just say, “Oh my geez do you see that glass thing is nearly to fall off the table, drop and shatter on the floor?” That would at least be a step, don’t you think? As the glass seesaws, . . .
Ko wai ka kite i te hua o te kuaka? / Who has ever held a godwit’s egg?2
Not I. And I never will, I expect.
This whakataukī about having faith in unseen forces has become a bitter pill for me to swallow. The godwits lay their eggs in Alaska, then summer in Aotearoa from September to March every year. And in the time of Te Rāhuinui, also known as the Global Ecological . . .
I meet Tara once and only once, on my last trip to Rose Isle, two days before Hurricane Zeta hits. The Category 4 storm is still spinning somewhere beyond the southern horizon, hundreds of miles offshore, as my crew and I reach the bridge from the mainland. Out the windshield, I can see the occasional cloud pushing past, and if I try hard enough, I can convince myself . . .
On the island, there is too much blood and not enough rain.
That’s because the wetleaf is gone. The soldiers told us to kill it: to slice and strangle the emerald vines as they flowed over our hills, those rivulets of paradise, seafoam soft. So we sliced and we strangled and we killed. And now we cradle the wetleaf in our palms, sitting with each plant as it dies.
The . . .
Your house isn’t flooded in the conventional sense. It’s an unconventional flood.
You knew about the rising seas and that, but this was faster, like the kind of disaster movie that pisses off your mates who work at MetService. One day it was the usual Wellington, can’t beat it, mushrooms in the cupboard, then the next day, with no tsunami and no warning, came the . . .
[An Exquisite Corpse]
Humans use words. Mushrooms use mycelia. Who’s to say which is better? This is why we have infused each copy with spores.
If you’re reading this, the psychedelics have already entered your bloodstream. Get ready.
First Jeff Martin bought the narrow strip of land between the river and Banks Road from the town, then he spider-webbed caution tape between the trees and nailed posted signs to their bark. The swimming hole where so many of us had spent our childhood summers was no longer ours. And this with each year hotter than the last.
Martin, who also owned The Weekly Gazette, . . .
The Submersible aQuatic Cetacean Communication Robot—professionally known as SQCCR, affectionately known as “Squawker”—splashes into the harbor from the starboard side of the Charlotte’s Web at dawn. A few brilliant, cool drops hit Julia’s skin.
The heat index is already 96 and aiming for the red by ten. What must the dolphins think of the extra three degrees . . .
Nothing at the bottom of the ocean bothers her. Nothing natural, that is. On a repair job in the Bering Sea last month, she encountered a lost Japanese spider crab hiking back to the Pacific, following a straight line of radiant heat from the subsea fiber-optic cable she had been dispatched to splice together at a break point. As she stripped the cut cables, the . . .