Category: Nonfiction

Editorial

This issue of Reckoning is devoted to works about war and conflict viewed through the lens of environmental justice. What is seen through that lens is, by turns, grim and hopeful.

It is through writing that we remember freedom, as Le Guin puts it. Writers are capable of probing into the heart of the crises of our time: extinction, genocide, climate catastrophe. Diagnosing the rot at the source: violence, imperialism, and fascism. In a sense, these works may lean a little more into the mode of detailing the war that is ravaging our planet and communities, rather than than offering a restorative view of how the world could be healed. There is much value in this, especially in societies where we are kept so distracted and tired, over-worked and always busy, that we hardly have the resources to stop and say “this isn’t right.”

The title for this volume, ‘It Was Paradise,’ comes from a collection of poetry by Palestinian icon Mahmoud Darwish. The full quote is ‘Unfortunately, it was paradise.’ The reference is to Palestine and its decades-long colonization and occupation. Today, Zionist forces have left the land desolate, a truly bleak example of how genocide and ecocide are intertwined.

I believe that the power of the writer is in imagining what the world could be, that it doesn’t need to be this way. We can live in harmony with our communities and with nature, valuing all life on this world that we share in common. Without the role of imagination in remembering freedom, and prefiguring a future where there is truly justice, there can be no coherent and lasting change. I do not hope for a revolution to spring up spontaneously, but rather that we can all take actions, right now, toward a just future, together, cooperatively. I hope that this belief has informed my decisions as guest editor, and that you find this volume to be sincere and salutary.

I could not have done this without the unwavering support of the staff and editors at Reckoning. They have my thanks for their support, belief, and patience through this long process. I hope that the reader will find their experience of these dreadful times represented, but not in a pessimistic mirror. I hope you find courage and motivation to act in whatever way possible to create a better world for us all.

Review: Green to Grey: An Environmental Anthology

Cover art for Green to Grey: An Environmental Anthology edited by Ian Thomas Shaw and Tim Niedermann, featuring green wisteria leaves with gray wisteria leaves on top of them against a background of creased and crumpled paper.

We are living in a time of perpetual change. The kind of change that could see water being forcibly rationed and withheld from all but the most privileged or most criminal. The kind of change that shows us that tourism, whether well-meaning or not, has worn away at the natural and metaphysical consciousness of a country for the sake of money. The kind of change which would see alien planets eradicating mankind because our individualism is destroying us and the planet with it. Well . . .  perhaps that last change is a little far-fetched, but it is one of the what-ifs used to counter the what is-es of the short stories in Green to Grey: An Environmental Anthology (Guernica Editions) edited by Ian Thomas Shaw and Timothy Niedermann.

The anthology is divided into two halves. The first, Green, is a collection of what is-es: stories of our environment and our planet as it currently is, and more specifically the ways in which the past and our present have deteriorated due to both active and passive disregard for our world. The stories capture how the self-centeredness of individuals and the cruelties of capitalism have eroded our hopes for a positive climate future that we must, nevertheless, push back against. The second half, Grey, looks more towards the what-ifs: the possibilities of our environmental future if we stay the course and fail to protect our world.

Green is composed of eight stories that, although branching, all tie back to the anthology’s native Canada and the ways in which the Global North it represents has tainted those things it has touched or forgotten for the sake of greed, glory, or cruelty.  This may be my own sentiment, but the stories that have lingered with me the longest are those written by authors who have highlighted the struggles of immigrants and the Global South. These stories are told both from the side of those who have been taken from—as in “Endangered Species” or “Wild Geese”—and from those who do the taking, like in “Patagonia” and “Tio”.

Caroline Vu’s “Endangered Species” is a reflection on the ways in which war and the lust for power are affecting the ability of both native wildlife and the protagonist to survive, while Jerry Levy’s “The Anarchist” reflects on the big and little factors that can cause your average person to turn their back on the established patterns of the world.

In both stories, we see how the protagonist’s lives have been irreversibly changed by national or corporate greed. They are those who have been taken from, who have lost their families due to larger entities that do not see who is being affected at the individual level. There is resistance, but such resistance seems to have little meaning, particularly in “The Anarchist,” in which Gavin, the leader of our protagonist’s comrades in arms, is naught but “a two-bit hood disguised as a radical for causes . . . . But he doesn’t really care. He uses all the environmental rhetoric to serve his own needs,” and where Sal, one of these comrades, plainly states that, “Lots of people get shafted. The environment gets shafted. It’s just that, as I’ve gotten a bit older, my priorities have shifted” (p.37). The big causes matter less in the face of one’s personal agendas and concerns, fading into the background of one’s immediate life.

“Wild Geese,” as a piece reflecting the immigrant experiences of Koreans in the West who are even more than fish out of water, is slower and more melancholy than the rest of the anthology. It is less concerned with the direct environment than it is about the fragile lives of those who desperately flee their homes. Those seeking refuge in a place where they are not made to belong. While lacking in the immediacy and blunt metaphor of some of the other pieces in the collection, as an Asian who has lived a few years in a country that sometimes felt almost hostile to my identity, I felt resonant pangs of shared frustration with the protagonist’s father. He is a man who worked quietly frying chicken at KFC or repairing appliances for church congregants, turned a blind eye to his wife’s liaisons with her Vietnamese boss, and described memory as a narcotic. Some immigrants, like the father, will make themselves smaller or fade into the background, the better to blend in, making themselves helpful so they cannot be demonized even as they allow themselves to be demeaned in small ways for the sake of peace. Some, like the mother, integrate themselves through appeasement with their bodies or talents—objectified for the sake of personal gain. They are reflections of the titular geese flown too far away from home and unable to find their way back—drowned and dead because they have lost the wind beneath their wings, the motivation to continue onwards, living hollow lives full of reminiscence on the past.

“Patagonia” and “Trash Day,” on the other hand, are stories that  focus not on victims but on the perpetrators of petty violence against the earth and its inhabitants. The former looks at the ways in which tourism and appealing to tourists have warped the country’s environment, culture, and people through the story of a western visitor seeking closure and healing from tragedy in his own life through the lens of another nation. As he is told by his friend, Charley, “You need some beauty to distance yourself from grief. Patagonia is the perfect place” (p.58). “Trash Day” is a more immediate story that uses the individual act of picking up garbage to demonstrate the futility of trying to do small kindnesses in a capitalist society that has been built on convenience and harm.

Of the two, I found “Patagonia” lingered with me longer in that I was reminded of my own home: the sandy beaches of Boracay and Palawan that have been ravaged by tourists to the point that the former had to be closed for years for rehabilitation, the reefs that have been bleached bone white or ruined by the activities of careless tourists, and the friendly smiles that hide the corruption and poverty that run rampant in the Philippines as they do in Argentina and many other countries thousands of miles away from me. The story’s theme is best summarized when its protagonist states: “Twenty years ago, I first came to Patagonia for healing, when, all along, it’s Patagonia that needs to be healed” (p. 74). Tourists seek freedom from their reality, and in doing so have eroded a nation that already exists for its people. Their money is a disruptor, you see, bartered in exchange for room and board, cuisine, company, and sometimes dignity. They leave behind their garbage and are often irreverent with the emotions and environment left behind, taking more than what they have paid for.

My favorite story in the collection, Matthew Murphy’s “Tio,” became ever more harrowing from beginning to end as it contrasts the struggles of miners within the darkened tunnels of Bolivia and the tourists who come to gawk and twitter at their painful existences. It is a showcase of man’s inhumanity towards man and of the exploitation that has become the means by which the lines in the world have been drawn. I was reminded of the infamous “Afghan Girl” photo of Sharbat Ghula and the prestige gained from the utter disregard of real suffering even as it is fully on display.

“Green Toe” begins with the mundanity of a man breaking his toe and ends with the wilderness reclaiming its own. Strangely, this makes “Green Toe” one of the more hopeful stories in an anthology largely defined by anger at injustices levied against Earth. In a world that is defined by man’s control over what they believe belongs to them, where one “had shaped my home environment to my own preferences for order and symmetry, without a thought what else might be possible,” that this small patch can return to the wild precipitates the hope that nature as a whole may someday, too, return to that wilderness, and that we can peacefully coexist with it (p. 47).

The Grey half of the anthology is a little more disparate, more scattered than Green’s beginnings. While every story is concerned with the future, the element of speculation is not always immediate, and that feels intentional. The future envisioned in the science fiction of yesteryear, of flying cars and identical robots, has eroded in the face of a humanity that must struggle to survive the adversity of climate change.

“Found Divination” and “A Green and Just Recovery” feel like sister pieces, each focused on showing visions of the future through the lens of fortune telling, using tarot cards and the I Ching, respectively.  In “Found Divination,” refusing to pay $50 for the full deck of cards, the protagonist finds two tarot cards and ruminates on what they might signify in a world where the stars have been hidden by haze. They conclude that “some say you should make up your own meanings, that the first meaning you make will be the right one, and this is mine” (p.120). Future as shaped by the intention one puts in.

In “A Green and Just Recovery,” our protagonist, Simon, thinks of making animal tile oracles or randomly searching I Ching books and websites as a means to anchor himself to his work and to his life. As Hiroko, someone precious who now exists in Simon’s past,  said: “If we’re going to invent an oracular method . . . for it to carry any energy, we have to create meanings, not just paste on someone else’s” (p. 171). The future not as certainty and fate, but something malleable to be shaped by human interpretation.

“Saving Morro” and “Hothouse Love,” on the other hand, are linked only by dint of being the most explicitly speculative fiction works in the anthology, though this is where the similarities between the two end. “Saving Morro” presents a vision of a world where water is a tightly controlled resource, evoking Mad Max and other barren dystopias while punching readers in the gut by introducing us to Arden, a hitchhiker on an important quest to secure water (which he carries in a hockey bag) for the titular baby Morro.  The story ends with him unceremoniously mugged, “a praying mantis face-down in the dirt, the hockey bag nowhere to be seen,” the water that was the purpose for his journey now long gone (p. 168). “Hothouse Love” is the longest, strangest, and somehow both the most hopeful and most scathing treatise against humanity contained in From Green to Grey. It is a story I enjoyed, but also one that lingered strangely within my consciousness, bringing me back again and again to ruminate on both its message and its prophet.

Notably, the collection is book-ended by two short stories by Ian Howard Shaw. “Green-ish,” the first story in the collection, follows the ramblings of a would-be member of the Green Party. In a similar vein, “Grey-ish” brings us to the not-too-far future consumed by AI. The protagonists of both are motor-mouthed and ornery, and I will caution readers that there is no subtlety in the satires that Shaw has presented in a future containing the “Federal Union of China, Korea, and Russia (FUCKR)” (p.184). It is no exaggeration to say that their viewpoint, older gentlemen are irritating and insufferable. But this insufferability, this blunt force satire that wallops you over the head, is the point. We live in a world occupied by talking heads like this who will keep talking nonsense over and around us, and to have their nonsensical attitudes laid bare is quite eye-opening.

What struck me most when I was reading through From Green to Grey is the undercurrent of despair and fury in the stories in the Green section, and how much it clashes with the uncertainty of what is to come. These are not hopeful stories that believe in our climate future. These are stories that display the deep ugliness of our climate present, a call to action, a memorial to the true struggles of those who live in areas forced into adversity. Those who dream of our climate future cannot conceive of having a perfect green world, with the most peaceful and greenest of these fantasies being the one that has been taken over entirely by entities who are not or are no longer human.

Cover art for The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, featuring a little orange cartoon guy with a bushy yellow mustache standing among colorful trees with long skinny trunks and very fluffy crownsIn my own studies of urban planning, I have discovered that creation of a space, of a place, is best defined by intentionality. A place is defined both by those who have planned for its purposes, whether these be its owners, its creators, its inhabitants, or its visitors. Here in From Green to Grey, through each and every lens, we have seen that the place we inhabit that we call Planet Earth is defined and shaped by disparate forces. Not all of mankind is wholly to blame—after all, from the mines of Bolivia to the mountains of Patagonia to the farthest reaches of Vietnam, man is a victim of man. Somehow I am reminded of my childhood and of the Lorax’s UNLESS, carved in stone atop an abandoned stone platform, meaning that unless we do something, unless we choose to redefine and shape our planet, the place we live in will continue to deteriorate.

There is a phrase that runs deeply through “Found Divination,” which is: “What do we do now? Where do we go? How do we get there?” (p. 119). I think it is one that exemplifies the intentions of Green to Grey best. We have come to this point in time when environmental, social, and personal injustices have run rampant, as exemplified in every story within this anthology. And now that you have come to the end of this collection, having been inundated with stories meant to inspire and provoke, as readers you and I must continue to ask AND answer these questions:

What do we do now?

Where do we go?

How do we get there?

Review: What a Fish Looks Like by Syr Hayati Beker

Cover art for WHAT A FISH LOOKS LIKE by Syr Hayati Beker, featuring a mermaid embracing a fish with human legs.

Fairytales are revealing: they tell us about the world in which they were formed, the landscapes and values that created them. They’re also ever-changing, morphing to meet the mindsets of the times. The brutality of the Brothers Grimm is transmogrified by Disney; the pagan folk stories of Wales morph into the Christianity-friendly fables of the Mabinogion.  As climate change rapidly shifts the realities of life on our planet, it only makes sense that the stories alter also. Which brings us to Syr Hayati Beker’s ambitious collection, What a Fish Looks Like (Stelliform).

Despite how often these stories change, it can be difficult to pull off an effective fairytale revision. Reimagining traditional stories isn’t exactly uncharted territory—I mean, I studied Margaret Atwood’s modern revisal of “Bluebeard” when I was doing my Master’s degree a whole two decades ago (good gods, am I really so old?). So Syr Hayati Beker has set themself quite a challenge. How do you tread such a well-worn path through the enchanted forest and still keep the trek even vaguely interesting?

From the outset, it’s clear that What a Fish Looks Like isn’t afraid to innovate. The evocative language and nonconventional format of its very first pages draw the reader into the book’s broken world, one where there are “no frogs left to kiss.” This is where climate futures and traditional tales mesh so well, as we’re immediately confronted with the natural core of fairytales that we’ve long taken for granted: forests and wolves; mice and pumpkins; fish and the sea. In this collection the names of old tales have been crossed out and replaced by a version that fits the eco-catastrophe. “The Little Mermaid” is changed to “Playlist 4Merx in Times of Sea Levels Rising”, “The Snow Queen” to “Server Farm Queen”, “Beauty and the Beast” to “What a Fish Looks Like”.

But this isn’t a set of disjointed retellings. The six stories all form part of an overarching narrative, with the spaces between filled with letters, notes, ticket stubs, and illustrations. This fits the standard “apocalyptic journal” trope, but it also goes far beyond it. The broken fragments, so poignant and heartfelt, present something very human. The world is dying, our thoughts scratched over the pages of a tattered book, and yet we live. We love. Thoroughly and painfully.

Through it all we follow a diverse set of mostly queer and trans people clustered in a dying city. With their fears, joys, and heartbreaks interweaving their way through the book, it becomes clear that it’s the characters themselves that form the real collection here, rather than the individual fairy stories. Each presents their own perspective on the climate catastrophe they’re living (and dying) through, and the first we’re introduced to are Seb and Jay.

This old collection of tales has been handed back and forth between the two former lovers, revealing their often-competing attitudes as well as their turbulent relationship. While Jay finds optimism in community and technology—even planning on leaving the poisoned Earth on an “Exodus” ship—Seb scans the empty oceans, desperately seeking life in the once-teeming seas. On first glance, Jay could be seen to embody hope, Seb something more like despair. Yet their roles aren’t binary (more on that later), but more of a confused tangle. Jay’s optimism can be cruel and wilfully shallow; Seb’s role involves listening to the long-dead depths on the off-chance that something will call to them. Neither is right. Neither wrong.

 

“After you left, I watched live video of that action that put you in the news: the last elephant funeral. Two thousand people crying in public, in paper elephant masks. What’s so hopeful about that?” (p. 25)

 

Life goes on. Life never stops going on, even as the air becomes hard to breath, the swelling oceans rise, and invasive “Sleeping Beauty”-style vines choke their way across the city. In the retelling of “The Little Mermaid” we meet a trans woman struggling through her own personal catastrophes, all while making plans to finally come out and live a life that’s authentic to her. Even in this mired world, her desires for the future ring clear. Meanwhile, “Antigone, But With Spiders” follows a theatre crew as they attempt to put on a live performance, one they hope will bring the neighbourhood together. They all command their own agency, not mere victims of our environmental mistakes, but people who want to live and thrive. As the narrative itself points out, this is an excavation of human lives: “The same way you can see in layers of rock and soil when there was an ice age or a drought, you can tell on the bathroom door where the world kept on ending and not ending in different ways” (p. 53).

Throughout it all, these characters are not alone. They seek solace in one another, forming collectives that continually shift and change. These collectives seem to have formed in the absence of authority, an anarchist solution to this slow apocalypse, and the overarching story explores all the strengths and weaknesses of community in the face of devastation. As someone who’s been involved in different queer communities across different countries, there’s so much that’s familiar here. With so many end-of-the-world stories featuring the same straight cis nuclear families, it’s heartening—and terrifying—for this Armageddon to hit so close to home.

As we saw with Seb and Jay, the characters are given a choice: to be part of #TeamEarth, or to join #TeamShip. That is, to stay and deal with the growing planetary catastrophe, or to take a chance on one of the Exodus ships heading for a new world (a choice complicated by the spreading vines and the fact that the first two Exodus ships may have met a grisly end). Individuals switch from one group to the other, and though there’s a great deal of ideological baggage attached to each choice, neither is presented as fundamentally right or wrong. Both are optimistic, both pessimistic.

All these elements combine to buck the binary of utopia and dystopia. I’ve written extensively on “ambitopia”, of going beyond these traditionally stale dualisms to discover something more relevant to our ever-changing world. To create something more than the rigid, complacent promises of utopia and the heedless despair of dystopia; fictions that help us deal with everything that prior generations have left for us. Here, collectives are established even as wider society fails; new stories are told when old worlds die. With its extremes of hope and despair, lethal environmental chaos occurring alongside attempts at artistic order—all in the face of queer love and community—What a Fish Looks Like presents a complex ambitopian future. It’s an ever-emerging genre that’s only growing more important as global temperatures continue to rise.

This non-binary approach is of course reflected in the book’s nonconventional format. Though mostly expressed via various textual fragments, What a Fish Looks Like also takes the time to showcase other forms of art. I briefly mentioned the illustrations before, and I have to take a moment to dwell on these, because the drawings scattered throughout the pages are absolutely spectacular. Aside from serving as another element that keeps the fairytale revisions feeling fresh, these images serve as visual reminders of the value of art itself, even—especially—at the end of the world. The beautiful creations formed in response to climate catastrophe can’t be separated from the very climate catastrophe that inspired them, and so they literally illustrate the book’s rejection of easy dualisms: utopia and dystopia, triumph and tragedy, gain and loss. Once I’d finished the stories, I found myself flicking back through the pages to revisit the trash-ravished ocean waves and posters referencing classical sculpture.

The text itself is equally haunting and rich. The bitter poetic elegance of the language carries the reader through devastation both public and personal, with formatting played with throughout; not only in the varied media used but via the playful placing of words upon the page, with scattered shards of sentences colliding with one another. This can be another aspect that’s difficult to pull off, yet they fit perfectly with the book’s wider themes alongside the queer, fractured hopes of its characters. There’s also a constant playful wit that dances its way throughout the novel, both highlighting and lightening the various small tragedies, further adding to the text’s depths.

 

“The air is aluminum and your throat is a microwave and everything crackles.” (p. 61)

 

By now it should be fairly obvious that I loved this book. But that’s not to suggest that all its elements came across perfectly. Though I enjoyed most of the stories, the retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood”—now “Root Systems”—managed to lose me. This tale was too abstract, beautifully evocative yet dropping the book’s narrative thread. It doesn’t help that it occurs in the middle of a crisis moment for one of the characters, shifting focus at what felt like the wrong moment. “Root Systems” also played into the fears I had before starting this collection, because we’ve been here before when it comes to fairytale retellings. The grandma is tough, the wolf misunderstood, and the lumberjack demolishes the forest. Among an otherwise unique set of stories, this rewrite of “Little Red Riding Hood” relies on too many old tropes.

Thankfully, it’s a small proportion of the overall text, and that’s the only real issue I had. Otherwise, the overall tone of What a Fish Looks Like never gets old, with tragedy morphing into dry humour, on into moments of persevering beauty, and back again. The emotional range is as varied as it is rich. It sweeps through different forms of collapse, not only in terms of governance and ecosystems, but even that of data infrastructure—which is compellingly explored in the final story, “Server Farm Queen”. Dealing with the swirling flurry of broken data, with information systems overwhelmed with meaningless garbage, the story reminds us that information pollution is also an unfurling disaster, one that impacts our psyches just as a changing climate impacts our bodies.

 

“Coke bottles. Polar Bears. Banksy. Warhol. Work of art. Do not be afraid of the—Meditation for a healthier—You could be at risk for—Symptoms include brain fog, losing sleep, sleeping too much, mood swings, Stop.” (p. 108)

 

So how can there be fairy tales without those deep dark forests, without the teeming wonder of the sea? How can there be handsome princes when there’s no functioning government, or even frogs left to kiss? Thanks to Syr Hayati Beker’s vivid imagination and gorgeous writing style, we’re given a fascinating glimpse into the recreated myths of an eco-wrecked world—as well as, more importantly, the actual people that lie behind them. All of which is revealed not only through conventional stories, but also via the scrawled notes, exquisite drawings, and fragmented poetry that they pass back and forth to one another. It’s all so gloriously messy. And so very human.

Here’s something any student of literature can tell you: when something is a literal “must-read,” it becomes a chore. Even a beloved book can be slow and burdensome when you have to get through it, and that’s no less true when it comes to writing reviews. But these stories and their annotations drew me in, they made me forget the compulsion even as I stopped to write my notes. Of all the books I’ve had the opportunity to review, What a Fish Looks Like is one of my absolute favourites. And this human excavation, with all of its complex characters, beautiful language, and keen ambitopian vision of a climate-ravaged future, could easily become one of your favourites, too.

Editorial: Circle of Life

“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.

Editorial: Everything’s Environmental Justice

As Michael says, “Everything is environmental justice”, and well “everything” is a lot, but it’s also true. Take fair elections. They may not seem at first glance to be connected to environmental justice, but in places without fair and equal representation, those who stand to suffer the most have the least power to protect themselves from environmental injustices like climate change vulnerabilities, pollution, and displacement.

In red-lined and gerrymandered states across the US, privileged political and economic elites vote against clean energy and line their pockets with money from oil and coal lobbyists, but coal ash doesn’t wind up in their water supplies. They invite and encourage pollution hotspots like data centers, power plants, and refineries to build or dump in poor, rural, disproportionately racialized communities with willful disregard for the health and welfare of the people, the surrounding land, and the water supply. Because dumping—both literal and metaphorical—always occurs downstream.

We’ve seen this kind of inequality before in places like Flint, Michigan, where it’s been twenty years and the primarily Black community is still only beginning to see justice. We see it continuing in climate-vulnerable communities, especially along the coasts where rising sea levels threaten those who can’t afford to leave. We see it across Appalachia, where mountain top removal mining contaminates water, air, and creates ever-worsening health crises. Now, maybe more than ever, we need free elections. To move the scales towards justice everyone must have a voice, and those voices must be represented equally.

In this way, environmental justice is connected to gender equality, to disability rights, to fair lending practices, to immigration and labor laws, to education, and communication. The list is endless because, ultimately, environmental justice challenges unequal and failing systems; it demands new ways of thinking, of communicating, of being.

Environmental justice reminds us, more than anything, that we are all (and always) connected. I hope the works collected here in our beautiful tenth issue show how much those connections matter.

Thanks to all of you for an amazing decade.

How to Get Away with Chaining Myself to my Friends in Front of Heavy Duty Machinery

“If we ever wanted to, our friend group could transition nicely into a BDSM circle,” I announce to my friend George as we stare at nearly $1,000 worth of locks and chains in a pile on the living room floor.

“Is that a thing? A BDSM circle?” he asks, looking up from his project of color-coding keys to locks with iridescent nail polish.

“I don’t know.” I shrug. “You can ask the cops about it.”

“Probably not the best strategy . . . .” he says as he sets up a stopwatch.

“Ok! Let’s try Pancakes with Blueberries.” The code name for the position we’ve chosen doesn’t sound like the sexiest of moves, but we haven’t chosen it to be sexy. After all, we are not (as of now) a BDSM circle. We are just friends, with a lot of locks, a lot of chains, and a plan to shut down a natural gas pipeline.

I got involved in activism my senior year of high school. For my first act of civil disobedience, I skipped school to attend a rally in Washington, DC against the Keystone XL pipeline. High school tyrant Mr. Maxfield told me that if I went, he’d give me detention. As an anxious teen whose identity hinged on straight As and approving nods from adults, I cried about the decision beforehand to no less than three teachers and two administrators. But the next Saturday, wearing my homemade No Tar Sands shirt in the no phone zone cafeteria with all the other adolescent miscreants, I felt like a complete badass. Four years and many protests later, here I am searching under the couch for missing adult diapers as I prepare for my second arrest for direct action.

Today, there are six of us planning to block construction of the West Roxbury pipeline with our bodies. Ian, Amy, and I will jump in a pit where the pipeline will go and lock ourselves in a triangle with our backs together. This arrangement is ‘Pancakes with Blueberries’. In a pit across town Max, Sam, and Angus will fold themselves into a complicated tangle of arms and legs, with people lying down and sitting on top of each other. This we call, somewhat less whimsically, Shit Pit Yoga.

George is driving the getaway car. We have planned to do one loop around the block to scope. The second drive-by is the real deal.

“Oh my G-d I can’t do it!” Amy panics.

“No no! We’re doing it!” I cheer and lunge for the door, “Oh shit. Can we do another loop?”

“Come on,” says Ian, hopping out. Nothing fazes Ian.

Once we’re out of the car, we must act fast. The workers and security on site are used to activists. If we don’t get into formation, they’ll get us out much more quickly, meaning the whole thing will have been a big waste of time and money.

The July sun is already hot at eight in the morning. I look over the edge of the pit, then close my eyes and jump, like it’s a swimming pool, like it’s a normal summer day and I have nothing to worry about. Like I am young and fearless.

I lock my feet together first so that even if we don’t get our waists locked together I will not be able to walk away if the police try to make me. More specifically, if the police try to make me, my ankles will break. This fact that previously seemed merely strategic is suddenly anxiety-inducing. The chains have been custom tailored for my ankles by an engineering major friend. They are tight, requiring the lock to be just so to close. I close it.

For our waists, each person is in charge of the lock to their left. (Always go left.) I reach around and my clammy fingers fumble with the bolt between Ian and me. Shit. How much time has passed? 20 seconds? A month? I scoot backward to get a better angle and the lock slams shut.

“I’ve got pancakes!” I call out.

I wipe my hands on my pants, which are long despite the 90 degree weather because I’ve been told that jail is cold. I’m fighting global warming, but I still hate the cold. I wipe my hands so I’ll be ready for what’s next: super glue.

“It never really works,” George told us weeks before in a prep meeting. “Your hands will be too sweaty from heat and nerves, but it confuses the cops and looks good in a headline.”

I spread it across my palm and up my arm then pass the bottle off to Ian before we grasp hands. He passes it to Amy, and Amy throws it aside hoping we don’t accrue an additional littering charge for this detritus. All hands together and no one has even noticed the commotion. We’ve got blueberries.

Climate change is bad. Really bad. Most of the time, even I am a climate denier. I will lay my body down in the sand, but I don’t know how to grapple with the voice in my head, with the numbers in the news, with the knowledge that my country has condemned hundreds of thousands to death. People will lose their homes. People will lose their livelihoods. People will die. It’s started already. And the people who will bear this burden first and hardest are communities of color, low-income, and indigenous communities. I don’t know how to feel this, I mean really feel this, and still wake up in the morning. I get the urge to ignore. I get the desire to look away. Of course I deny.

In the pit, we clutch each other’s hands as if they aren’t already glued together.

“I’m nervous,” Amy tells me. We do the only reasonable thing there is to do; we sing.

“The tide is rising, and so are we.” The song comes from Rabbi Shoshana Freedman and singing it I have never felt more powerful. Shouting and sirens begin to drown our voices. We sing louder. The construction workers, police, and firemen circle us, looking down over the sandy drop off. They grumble about how to cleanse what is, for this morning, a money-losing pit of filthy activists.

Over the radio, we hear: “Wait, they’re in your pit too!?”

Oh yeah we are! We are everywhere.

The fireman throws his jacket over my head to protect my eyes from flying sparks. It’s heavy and I have a vague memory of elementary school field trips from back when I had a simpler understanding of what it meant to be a civil servant. Without warning, I am sprayed with a hose. This is also, in theory, to protect me, but sitting in a puddle of mud in darkness beneath a fireman’s jacket, warm metal against my bruised ankles, all I can think is, How did I get here? Why do my friends, my beautiful friends who are in their early twenties, who navigate depression, and grad school, and dinner, and dating, why must they put themselves in situations like this? What a totally absurd thing to do with a Monday morning.

The moment I am free from my ankle chains, I am bound at the wrists.

“You’re under arrest for trespassing and disturbing the peace.”

Personally, I thought our music was perfectly peaceful, but the National Lawyers Guild, who provides legal aid to activists, says arguments based on the quality of the singing will not hold up in a court of law.

As I am led past two fire trucks and an ambulance to the police wagon, I call out to my jail support an important message, “Please bring pizza!”

In the first holding cell, we cheer as Max, Angus, and Sam are led in.

“We love you!” Max, whose baby will be born within the week, has a towel wrapped around his waist.

“What happened to your pants??” we ask.

“Well . . . .” Max monotones, “Sam was screaming because of the superglue and they poured acetone on my dick.”

“What??”

But Max is led to the back to be fingerprinted.

“I guess it’s good he’s already having his baby.” Ian shrugs. Nothing fazes Ian.

Here is the truth. The sacrifices we will have to make are going to be bigger than $40 and a day in jail. Change is happening, but not fast enough. At this point we are not fighting to stop climate change. Our fight is for degrees. Degrees of warming. Degrees of deaths.

To those who would call young activists idealistic I would say, yeah. The criminal justice system is racist, and cruel, and life-ruining. But because I am white, young, college-educated, and protesting climate change in a liberal-leaning region, I am free to pass through its tendrils relatively unscathed. And I would be lying to say it’s not partially for selfish reasons that I engage in civil disobedience. I am terrified by the thought that the fires, storms, droughts, and hostility to immigrants and refugees we see now may not in fact be “the new normal”. The new normal will, in all likelihood, be a lot worse.

There’s kind of a relief in jail that at this moment, there’s nothing more I can do. In my cell, with nothing but my tired mind, receding adrenaline, and wet clothes, I can finally accept that this is out of my control. It is unacceptable to live resigned to the reality that we will not be able to do enough. It’s self-sustaining to acknowledge this truth. People will lose their homes, communities, and livelihoods. People will die. Hopefully fewer because of us, but there’s really no way to know. We will keep fighting anyway. We will sing louder. We sing to be heard, but also to say, “We hear you. We have not, and we will not, forget you.”

The marches and rallies, the meetings and pits have all taught me how to love. This is the way I have to say “I have your back” to Amy and Ian and George and Sam and Max, to our unborn (or soon to be born) children, to my sisters, to the fighters everywhere. There is no winning in a world where people will die needlessly, but there is still loving. There is still believing in a world worth fighting for. When we are singing, when we are laughing, this is when I find the strength, trust, and commitment to lay my body down.

Outside the jail, my hands oily with pizza grease, I hug my friends as they’re released. On Sunday, we’ll debrief the action in our normal meeting and eat home-cooked chili from a comically large pot. We will think about how we can confuse the police for longer, how we can maintain pressure, how we can engage more people in West Roxbury. We’ll break out the ukulele and play John Prine crooners. For now, I run and jump on Angus as he walks from the precinct.

“Angus!!!!! We did it!” I cheer.

“Oh my G-d did you actually get us pizza? I’m so happy!” he says to George, who is without a doubt the best jail support a grimy activist could ask for.

“Of course!” George smiles. He yells to the precinct as we walk to the car, “See you next week!”

Next week, there will be a new pit to fill with new songs. Next week, we will be everywhere.

The X That Means Both Death and Hope

This story begins and ends with the X that means both death and hope.

Three Xs, two strikes, one message: Solidarity.

 

26 November, 2017.

 

The Australian government would prefer that we forget this crime against humanity, this X in flesh in the air.

It’s a humid, sweaty, overcast day at a protest at Federation Square in the centre of Melbourne. Shen Narayanasamy of the progressive activist group GetUp! tells us that the police are beating with batons the refugee men who have spent 21 days in peaceful protest against their detention on Manus Island, Australia’s refugee detention centre in Papua New Guinea. SHAME read the signs in the square. FOUR YEARS TOO LONG. We’re doing this today at the request of the men, to rise to the dignity of their example. Natasha Blucher of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre tells us whistleblowers’ accounts of the Nauru camp, another offshore Australian refugee detention centre. Amazing locals put themselves at risk to get us, journalists, food, and water into the camp. The smell: There was two weeks’ worth of garbage that the men had tried to collect and contain. Pulling water from a well with an oily film on top. Ingenious fresh-water catchment, bed sheets tied up with bottles at the bottom. Every cubicle in the toilets was full to the brim with diarrhoea. The men were so sick and had serious illnesses from three or four years locked up. Even in that toxic place, the refugees’ culture of hospitality prevailed. We ate biscuits that somebody had baked in the middle of a siege. They brought tea for us and added sugar. They’d saved it for guests. HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE A CRIME spake the signs. STOP VILIFYING REFUGEES. In the crowd I see Hijabi Muslim women of colour, young white guys in shorts, and many seniors holding photos of the refugees who have died in Australian camps. There have been 14 known refugee deaths in offshore detention since 2014, including 7 by suicide. Senior women with purple shirts saying Grandmothers against children in detention.

The crowd is asked to kneel, or sit if we can’t kneel, for four minutes, with our hands crossed above our heads, which is the way that the men of Manus had been protesting for 21 days. We squat or sit with difficulty for four minutes, hearing the words of Kurdish-Iranian asylum seeker Behrouz Boochani’s statement, his dignity, his gratitude for our support. There is the hideous dissonance of a Wallace & Gromit exhibition ad in huge letters behind the crowd squatting with their hands crossed. The ad silently blares It’s hard to wipe the smile off your face! Behrooz’s statement is haunting: despite having not enough food themselves, the refugees had been feeding their dogs, and the police had killed one out of spite.

The sun breaks through the clouds and is thanked for it by a grateful speaker. Activists who used to teach at Victoria University speak with admiration of their migrant and refugee students’ resourcefulness. The small moments of humour are some of the most striking. Leading us in the squat, a speaker says It’s okay to sit if you can’t squat, if your knees aren’t, you know, pilates. The crowd chuckles, and I think about those small moments of levity, not because we’re having fun, but because we recognise our shared humanity, our vulnerability.

This X is in flesh in the air, arms crossed in solidarity, the X of the refugee men’s arms iconic of their captivity. The X that represents the deaths from which they flee and to which our policies have driven them. But their X is the hope of protest too, of shackles to be broken, and ours a tribute to their dignity and their deep humanity, unassailable.

Australia’s federal government would prefer that we forget this crime against humanity, this X in flesh in the air. Will you let them?

 

13 November, 2019.

 

This X is the target that Aboriginal people have had on them in this colonised country for over 230 years. It is the X in the scope of a gun, too often turned on Black men, women, and gender-diverse people by police in this colony.

It is a grey day at the snap rally Justice for Kumanjayi Walker, a 19-year-old Warlpiri Aboriginal man who was shot by police in his home in Yuendumu, 300 km north-west of Alice Springs, in central Australia, on Saturday 9 November, 2019. A crowd begins to gather at the intersection of Bourke and Elizabeth Streets. A man with a sad expression, lines on his forehead, and a streak of rich red hair licking up from the right of his forehead addresses a circle of orange-and-yellow high-vis supporters. No microphone, but I see him mouth They say it’ll be a rally in the rain, well it’ll rain. Those of you who’ve done this before… A fat Black man with a clipped beard and red Indigenous-design dots across a red sports-style vest leans his face into the chest and over the left shoulder of a thin man in front of him, taking comfort from him. Two little Black girls huddle together under their Aboriginal flag to protect them from the beginning rain. A sign rises over the crowd. THE FUTURE IS BLACK. A chill wind blows down Elizabeth St and through the pillars I stand between at the top of the Bourke St post office steps.

The signs are heartbreaking. I see women looking desolate under hand-written and printed signs KILLED IN CUSTODY, the red and yellow letters stark against the black background. A fierce, articulate Black man gestures with his right hand as a bank of cameras point at him, Terra Nullius is a legal fiction! (Terra Nullius, Latin for “nobody’s land,” was the legal principle used by British settler-colonists to justify stealing the territory of Australia from its Aboriginal Traditional Owners during British colonisation in the late eighteenth century.) A woman with short white hair nods during the speeches, an Aboriginal flag rises above the lowered zip of her open black hoodie. Her mouth wobbles, she bends her head down to her left hand to wipe a tear, never putting down her sign End the brutality! Stop the killings! Justice for Wayne! Her stricken face resonates between the placards and I can’t look away from her grief. The sacred smoke of burning eucalyptus leaves rises over the crowd in a wind that blows down Bourke St. An Aboriginal Elder raises his voice and a smooth dark brown staff and projects to us his name and his Country, and that he is from the Stolen Generations. He raises his hands to the sky and describes the spirits he is connected with—I have been blessed. A ripped cardboard sign rises before me, BLACK LIVES MATTER with strong strokes in yellow and red. The crowd has swelled and fills the tram tracks. I see the kind eyes of Aunty Tanya Day smiling from a poster.

Jaeden Williams, a Yalukit Willam man of the Boon Wurrung people, speaks. My family have been here for 4,000 generations, for 100,000 years. This land has a story that is a lot longer than 150 years. According to the Boon Wurrung, this land was created by Bunjil, who travels as an eagle. He taught us to welcome all friends and guests. Bunjil’s Laws are two promises, and these promises have been the essence of the land since time began. He asks the crowd to speak after him, and we join our voices to say,

 

We promise

to look after the land

and the water

and we promise

to look after the children

 

That’s been the spirit of this land, of Melbourne, of my culture, since time began.

 

A sign, white text on a black background:

 

16 . 03 . 2019

Veronica Baxter 34

IDENTIFIED AS A WOMAN

THROWN IN A MALE PRISON

FOUND HANGING IN CELL

 

Does anyone have clapsticks? asks a speaker. The powerful Elder raises his staff and says, I’ve got a weapon of mass destruction! and the crowd laughs along with him. A woman speaker asks us to put a hand over our hearts—Breath in from our ancestors. The crowd is silent, stricken faces, the pulse-pulse of our hands tapping a heartbeat on the cloth over our hearts. After finishing, I think our ancestors heard us. A tram leaves the intersection toward Queen St.

A speaker reads statements from Elders in the area, later published in The Saturday Paper.

From Marly Wells Naparngardi, a Warlpiri woman: We came on Sunday morning to stand together in our grief and were presented with smirking police officers and no answers. Two mounted police attempted to bring their horses closer, an intimidation tactic. Someone requested them to leave and I heard one of the officers say, “If you had any respect for the horse’s life you would stop waving the cardboard in its face. He doesn’t like it. You’re intimidating him.” If you had any respect for human beings, if you had any respect for the Traditional Owners of this land, if you had any respect at all, you would be questioning the systems in place—the systems you benefit from, the systems that keep Aboriginal people down. “SHAME!” breaks out and spreads across the crowd.

A person of colour in a white knit jumper and navy headscarf holds a sign spray-painted on the back, beneath three inverted triangles in the queer anarchist movement’s pink and black,

 

QUEERS

AGAINST

COLONIAL

-ISM!

 

A man sings a Warlpiri song, a sad melody, and translates after every line—He’s missing his kids. Signs are held over heads as the rain begins. Police must not investigate police! A woman with a rainbow beanie asks to take a little boy with pale short hair past me down the steps to see the speakers. The crowd cheers a speaker and the boy turns around in his bright giraffe-print coat to give her the thumbs-up. The boy explains to her that he’s giving the thumbs-up to the speakers when the crowd claps to show his support. Use of bush medicine, cultural practices, and Law. Between speakers, a quiet descends over the crowd. A baby cries to my left and a motor idles on Elizabeth St.

The wind changes direction and blows up the steps towards me and I smell the sacred smoke of the eucalyptus. The women behind me are trying to find their friends in the crowd. “He’s running.” “Is he a super fitness nut?” The march begins and I join the back of the crowd and remember the enthusiasm and solidarity. A man and woman’s voices begin the chant behind me, Too many coppers: Not enough justice! A person with short hair and intricate spiderweb and flower tattoos emerging from their sleeves holds a sign lettered in black, yellow, and red,

 

TELL

THE

TRUTH

 

The red of TRUTH drips in the rain down their left wrist off the bottom of the sign, ominous. Too many coppers! begins the chant and breaks off into giggles as Too many coppers! rolls back from the front of the crowd and confuses the rhythm. We cross Swanston St and bank up, the roar of the crowd swells. A Black woman with short black curls holding her takeaway dinner with a tiny sauce tub on top rests on a short plinth and smiles, and I recognise her expression—gratitude and pride.

 

19 . 11 . 2004

MULRUNJI 36

DIED IN CELL WITHOUT TREATMENT

 

Too many cop-pers! Not enough—the crowd breaks off and a woman in yellow next to me adds hesitantly, Justice?

The crowd banks and turns to the left and a woman behind me asks, Are we stopping here? and it’s because there is a line of police in yellow high-vis in front of the Melbourne East Police Station, the letters of the sign booming towards us in 3D. I realise that the high-vis people I saw at the beginning are there to physically stand between us and the police, to protect us from their potential violence. Our guardians. They wear paper gas masks loose at the side of their necks, just in case, water bottles in their backpacks. The police watch uncomfortably.

We cross Russell St and a woman walking a shopping trolley and carrying a silver walking stick pipes up No justice, no peace! as she walks through the intersection. A woman with braids in a short, fluffy, red-lined jumper wheels her wheelchair with the march in front of us. I see two Eureka flags and the Torres Strait Islands flag flicking in the wind of the intersection ahead. A woman with a cane has an Aldi shopping bag and thongs—her feet look cold! She turns and laughs at her friend, a generous smile that rises from her cheeks under ginger bangs and hair trailing her shoulders and spilling out of a knitted beanie. A man with a sign, “Do ya want some water, Schazz?” “Yes please.” A silver-haired man in a red beanie and a worn leather jacket with a small gum branch tucked over his ear grins and embraces a friend. I see the two rows of guardians bringing up the rear of our march. Water trickles down the tram tracks. I see the boy with the giraffe-print jacket in fluoro pink gumboots at the edge of the crowd.

The crowd banks up at the Parliament steps.

In 2017, Aunty Tanya Day fell asleep on a train after drinking and was woken up and arrested by police under an archaic law for public drunkenness that has been historically disproportionately used to incarcerate Aboriginal people. During her four hours in a cell, she fell and injured her head, unsupervised. When she was discovered, it took an ambulance one hour to arrive. She never awoke and died in hospital.

At the protest, Tanya’s daughter Apryl Watson speaks, her voice struggling from the emotion: We’ve seen again and again deaths in custody, straight-up murder. Her voice is exhausted. Can you tell me how many people went to the Melbourne Cup, got blind drunk—How many whitefellas died in a cell? How many white women had ambulances? They didn’t give a shit about mum. Her voice breaks down at the end of her line. I’ve got my daughter at home, I can’t even have her sitting next to me when I get breathalysed, she’s crying because she doesn’t know what’s gonna happen to me, because she knows what happened to mum.

The sinking sun illuminates the stone-faced pillars and the tiny gold sphere is a dot in the inscrutable sunglassed eyes of every cop on the steps of Parliament.

We hear the righteous anger of a speaker. 12 years ago my nephew was found handcuffed in an alley and do you think anything happened to them police? The look of ’em, looking at us like we’re dickheads. They’re racists, they’re murderers! Every year this is happening! This Victorian government here was the first Constitution—Terra Nullius began here. If we had sovereignty recognised in this country, would we be in their jails? Would they be stealing our children? His voice rises to a sharp growl. They don’t give a fuck about us!

A line of Black women at the front hold up red-painted palms to the police line as we in the crowd chant Blood on your hands! Apryl Watson, her palms reddened, wipes her face with the back of her hand and, looking exhausted, walks down the steps.

Since her death, Aunty Tanya Day’s family fought for the Victorian state public drunkenness law to be abolished, and the law is set to be abolished on Melbourne Cup Day in November 2023.

Constable Zachary Rolfe faced a murder trial for the shooting of Kumanjayi Walker. He was acquitted of all criminal charges by an entirely non-Indigenous jury. It was the first time a Northern Territory police officer was charged with an Aboriginal death in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991. There have been at least 517 Aboriginal deaths in custody since the release of the Commission’s report. No Australian police officer has ever been convicted of an Aboriginal death in custody.

 

9 May, 2018.

 

This X is the axis along which wages crawl in economic graphs, with productivity and profits soaring upwards together into the corner like a banker’s hollow smile. This X means an early death for those who can no longer afford to live in Australia.

Lots of morning coffee is being clutched at the Australian Council of Trade Union’s first Change the Rules strike. The sun is bright on Lygon St and the crowd smells of aftershave, perfume, and cigarettes. People hand out socialist newspapers reading “Corporate Greed is Bleeding Australia Dry!” I overhear conversation between guys in hoodies and boots, They’re saying $85 billion in tax cuts. The union initialisms on every side—NIW AEU NIMF MUA CFMEU—teachers, nurses, midwives, maritime and construction workers and more. The Greens triangle marches around above the crowd on invisible arms. A woman laughs on the way past, I’ve got the wrong shoes, the wrong shoes. I see fierce veteran Boomer activists with grey-streaked hair. The union’s Eureka flag in Indigenous colours flicks in the wind among the Australian Services Union (clerical workers). Big white blokes welcome each other with big handshakes. How are ya, mate? Where you bin workin’? I hear the growing boom of a helicopter, the first of the day. The socialist red flag flying high atop Trades Hall. An Indigenous man in a knitted beanie wears his nation’s flag proudly as a cape. Luke Hilakari, Trades Hall Secretary, tells us that we are 60,000 people strong on the streets of Melbourne. We do not wanna be a country of the working poor. For so long, big business have been feeding us crumbs, like we’re pigeons. We’re not pigeons. When the 1% have as much as 70%, the system is broken. Inequality is at a 70-year high. It hasn’t been this high since the Great Depression. Luke booms, Do you want equal pay for women? The crowd roars YES!

A speaker introduces Mahani, who is here representing 100,000 farm workers with the National Union of Workers. Overwhelmingly casual. No penalty rates. Paid cash-in-hand well below the legal minimum wage. Mahani introduces herself as a migrant farm worker from Malaysia. She has a high woman’s voice and a Malaysian accent. She sounds a little shrill through the speakers—who doesn’t when they have to project?—but her message is clear. We need work rights! We need better future! Speaking of undocumented migrant workers’ harsh black-market labour conditions, she says, We need amnesty now! White blokes who’d roared their support for Luke now stand around scoffing and laughing, wincing at her voice through the speakers. These moments don’t make it into the press coverage, but they’re some of the most important to remember. I am reminded that solidarity is not a status we achieve, but a horizon we work towards, and that our movements regularly fail people of colour. Mahani, migrant woman of colour, activist and union leader, braves our crowd’s bullshit and our country’s hostility to stand up to speak for 100,000 farm workers being exploited all over Australia.

A speaker booms, What does the government think when they think that they can turn around and tell youse who you can elect as union leaders? I say to all of you, people from all unions, when they came after them, they come for all of us! Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the peak trade union body, tells the crowd that 40% of Australian workers are in insecure work. 732 corporations paid not one cent of tax. 62 people who earned more than $1 million in a year paid not one cent of tax, not even the Medicare levy. Guys giggle about the difficulty of holding signs in the wind. Nah I’m good holding the flag here, might swap when I need a cigarette. Won’t have one yet though, might burn the flag! A tune starts up from a brassy marching band behind us. I first heard the tune as a kid in country Queensland, knowing it by the earlier folk song lyrics, John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave overlaid with the union movement’s 1915 lyrics to become their rallying song, “Solidarity Forever.” But I still hear John Brown’s body in the melody, and it only makes the union’s version more urgent—the failure of the union is a body in the grave.

The National Tertiary Education Union, my crew, in purple shirts and whistles. Education Not Exploitation! Casuals Against Casualisation! There are lots of young women among us. Postgrads and casuals on strike! No more unpaid work! Pink-scarfed, purple-haired, chatty, checking phones. Someone starts up a snare drum. A woman unionist tells us that the stereotype of a unionist is a man with a hard hat, but in Australia but the average unionist is a woman with a degree. Among the union’s contingent at a later rally, I hear Nic Kimberly, a casual academic, address the crowd. The Australian Catholic University threatened Nic with revoking his PhD scholarship for criticising casualisation in progressive national newspaper The Age. His voice gets stronger and more defiant as he says, So what did I do to respond? I became the union branch President! In the crowd, the conversation continues around me. It’s not about someone coming to uni to have that transformative experience anymore. It’s about getting bums on seats, and not long while we’re making money. Elsewhere, I hear, we’ve got a problem with homeless students. A silver-haired union woman waves to kids in the windows on Lygon St. The chilly winds of late Autumn blow down Victoria St as we walk through the intersection. Bystanders bop to the brass band as we slowly march. A first degree shouldn’t cost a mortgage! Onlookers grin, take phone videos. Flyers, flags and protesters have filled the street as far as the eye can see from Swanston to Queen St. A woman of colour wears leopard-print, sunnies and huge heart earrings with Militant in curvy script inside. The other side, I later see, reads Feminist. A flag flicks across the back of my neck, a surprising intimacy. A red-and-black jester-clothed trumpet player is cheered by the crowd. A sign says I’m young and insecure and so is my work! There is a crisp wind from behind and welcome pockets of sunshine and the slow spin of autumn leaves lifted on winds between skyscrapers. Smiling women in office windows wave invisible flags with us in solidarity. Photographers perch on every tram stop and plinth along our way to capture our march’s glorious sprawl.

Flyers paper the fancy cars parked in the middle of Bourke St. A kid in blue gumboots and a Superman shirt is wheeled through the march—despite chants, clappers, trumpets, and drums—completely asleep.

We pick up marchers, chants and energy as we make our way down Swanston St. A guy faceplants on the tram island and is helped by everyone. You right, brother? A voice reads out a news update behind me, City streets shut down as 50,000 march. A grumpy skinny corporate guy in a tight blue suit cuts through the crowd at an intersection. A speaker says, It’s about the young people we work with every day. They are ripped off in their jobs. They’re forced to jump through hoops to access inadequate Newstart (the unemployment welfare payment). We don’t want them to become the working poor of the future. Troy Carter tells the crowd about the Esso (ExxonMobil) workers: Sacked, then offered their jobs back at up to 40% less. It would be 742 days before the strike ended in a deal. Troy speaks about the effect on his family, on his children being bullied at school. My children have forced themselves into a shell to avoid being rejected. When I stood outside UGL (the contractor for Esso), their Payroll Officer yelled, “How’s your kids, Troy?” and laughed. Colin Long speaks, Secretary of the Victorian National Tertiary Education Union: 50% of undergraduate teaching is performed by casuals, many working casually for 5, 10, 15 years. Low super, no leave. It should be a scandal that one of our members found herself unable to leave an abusive relationship because of being totally financially dependent. Our researchers find cures for cancer, we develop renewable energy. We write to chart the course of the history we are living. Are you ready to change the rules? The farm workers’ signs, stark and true: NO PICKERS NO FOOD NO FUTURE.

This X means early death for the workers whose wages have flatlined along the X axes of economics graphs. But while the union movement lives there is always hope for a better future.

 

15 March, 2019.

 

It’s a clear day, sunshine, with a cool breeze outside the Old Treasury Building on Spring St as the crowd gathers for the global School Strike 4 Climate. An old woman with a walker, moving slowly, sunnies and a straw hat, makes her way through the intersection, a sign on her walker saying 1.5 to stay alive, stop climate change! Indigenous men in white paint clack clapsticks from atop a plinth, gum branches held to their comrades. A teenage girl’s voice rises above the crowd. My name’s Gaia, I’m a 17-year-old school striker and I’m here because I want a future on this planet. We acknowledge that we meet on the stolen lands of the Boon Wurrung people and there is no climate justice without First Nations justice. The men raise their arms from the plinth and roar their strength. Two choppers hover over the intersection. Striking for our future, says a sign covered in sparkly writing and kids’ drawings. Stop giving us an excuse to skip school! The speaker continues, Make some noise if this is your first protest! I hear a roar reaching down the hill past Treasury Gardens that warms my heart. Grey-haired activists look on and smile. The sign pun/meme game at this protest is exquisite. My friends see me writing down slogans and make sure that I’ve noted the choicest quotes: There was one earlier, a picture of Tony Abbott (the ultra-conservative former Prime Minister filmed eating a raw onion like an apple), said “No onions on a dead planet.” Kids wouldn’t have to act like politicians if politicians didn’t act like kids! Prime Minister has a pet rock—He’s so coal. A handful of girls and a woman appear on the balcony of the Old Treasury building before being shooed off. A young woman’s voice across the crowd: 20,000 people are here, 20,000! and we roar. An Indigenous speaker says: We need to listen to my Country, to the Law of my ancestors. A sign says, I came here because I hate Melbourne weather. Climate change is not an elective! I hear, There’s a drone! and I see it, tiny creature hovering smoothly with its black legs. Grumpy old man who supports students. Don’t frack the future alongside the Midwives’ Union. Teachers for Climate Justice. A speaker says that 100 companies cause 71% of climate change. An Aboriginal woman is walking with her kids, something written in the elegant rhythms of an Indigenous language over an illustration of the Aboriginal flag and the earth. A translation on the back of the sign says Little faces, powerful hearts, we stand together. I ask her, What language is that? She replies Gunnai! with pride. It’s beautiful. My queer community are here: Gay for Renewables!

We listen to the urgent speeches of teenage girls in the microphone, Everyone who’s an activist and also a student, get everyone at your school, the crowd cheers, whistles and kazoos trumpet from all around. Keep the Earth clean, it’s not Uranus. I see the rainbow sheen of fresh-blown bubbles rising from the corner near the Treasury Gardens and floating away. We cluster in the shade of the buildings at the edge of the crowd. A baby in a sling on her mum’s front is holding a cardboard sign saying Nap strike for climate. Kids are front and centre on the steps of Old Treasury. The crowd is happy, energetic, diverse, loud, and dynamic. Climate change is union business on the black shirt of a charismatic fat lady with red lipstick who’s walking a little girl by the hand. Coal: Drop it coz it’s HOT. Marchers have brought a massive rainbow flag, silky and tall as two people. I notice later that it says WE ARE UNION. Proud teacher! Scared human. Kids’ fresh chalk drawings fade between the tram lines on the street, trees and earth in pinks and greens. Kids in school uniforms sit on the curb, grinning into their milkshakes. I’d rather be at school than telling you to do your job. A sign says My kids are revolting—proud dad. Tourists and businesspeople and shoppers look on happily from the street. I love the way the kids’ use of pop culture fuels their activism. Every disaster movie starts with scientists being ignored.

The crowd has poured into Treasury Gardens, and there are dogs barking, picnics, kids cheering, a speaker announcing solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux water protectors. White women in yellow high-vis security vests, Where’s the baaand, Jenny, I thought you said there was gonna be a band?! A speaker passionately exclaims, We are not your enemy! Farming communities are not your enemy! We are the ones being hit worst by climate change. A woman’s voice in the mic: I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who goes home every night who thinks, what is going to happen to my kids when I’m dead and gone? A speaker says My dad is a farmer. His dad is a farmer. I wanted to be a farmer but there won’t be anything left to FARM. The police estimate 50,000 people in Melbourne alone.

Attending the Melbourne protest of Donald Trump’s inauguration on 21 January 2017, a friend asks me, What’s the point? I say, We have to do something, we have to let them know that this is not okay. Critiquing the dismissal of activist events as “preaching to the choir,” Rebecca Solnit writes:

 

[Researcher Erica Chenoweth] concluded that only around 3.5 percent of a population was needed to successfully resist or even topple a regime non-violently. In other words, to create change, you don’t need everyone to agree with you; you just need some people to agree so passionately that they will donate, campaign, march, risk arrest or injury, possibly prison or death. Their passionate conviction may influence others. Ideas originate at the margins and migrate inwards to succeed; insisting that your idea must have arrived rather than be traveling is to miss how change works.

 

This X is the death of all life, what awaits us if we do nothing, if we don’t do enough, the X for extinction in the centre of Extinction Rebellion’s hourglass logo. But this X also means hope. Our hope lies in the fight not yet over, in the leadership of young people and Elders who show us the way. The hourglass is not finished, but time is running out.

This story begins and ends with the X that means both death and hope.

Three Xs, two strikes, one message: Solidarity forever.

 

 

“The X That Means Both Death and Life” originally appeared in Unlikely Stories in July 2023.

Bonus Content

Neurodivergent, adjective [English] (neu·ro·di·ver·gent)

: having or relating to a disorder or condition (such as autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, or obsessive-compulsive disorder) that impacts the way the brain processes information : exhibiting or characteristic of variations in typical neurological development.1

 

Neurodiversity, noun [English] (neu·ro·di·ver·si·ty)

1: individual differences in brain functioning regarded as normal variations within the human population

2: the concept that differences in brain functioning within the human population are normal, that brain functioning that is not neurotypical should not be stigmatized, and that people with neurodivergent brain functioning should not be excluded from groups, organizations, etc.2

 

“[The neurodiversity paradigm] challenges us to reexamine all categories and concepts that currently fall under the pathology paradigm, lest it turn out we have wrongly medicalized suffering in any strand of human life that might better be accounted for in terms of social marginalization and oppression.”3

 

Important Notes

The words “neurodivergent” and “neurodiversity” are rooted in the English language and English speaking and cultural contexts.

Definitions of neurodivergence and disabilities (as with other marginalizations) are culturally and societally ascribed. What is labeled as such in one culture may not be in another.

While we will often find “neurodivergent” and “neurodiversity” used together, it is important to understand that “neurodiversity” and the Neurodiversity Movement represent a paradigm shift from pathology to diversity. This shift, however, does not (and should not) include the very real and disabling experiences of neurodivergent individuals.

 

Further Reading on Neurodiversity

 

A Sampling of Organizations Related to Specific Neurodivergences4

 

More Cool Stuff

1. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “neurodivergent,” accessed September 12, 2025, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/neurodivergent.

2. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “neurodiversity,” accessed September 12, 2025, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/neurodiversity.

3. Robert Chapman. “Neurodiversity Theory and Its Discontents: Autism, Schizophrenia, and the Social Model of Disability,” The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019 (pp. 371-390).

4. This sampling should in no way read as an endorsement from us, simply a starting place for personal education.