Category: Essay

Maud Powell

“Finding meaning in grief does not mean we’re over the loss or okay with the loss; it means we can find a way to honor the love, even in our pain.”

—David Kessler

Streaks of wet dirt mark the floor beneath our circle of chairs—a sure sign of farmers gathering during the Oregon winter. A vegetable grower laments the missing crawdads she once hunted with her father in Lake Washington as a child. A farm intern chokes up about a news story on rainwater no longer safe to drink. An older cattle rancher talks about relationships lost to the politics of climate change. “My nephew doesn’t call anymore,” his voice strains, but he tries to make light. “At least he’s stopped asking for money.”

I sit with these farmers, asking them to share their most personal climate losses. There’s the beloved hydrangea that perished in the heat dome of 2021. The centuries-old Western hemlock, shading generations of family picnics, that finally succumbed to beetle damage. Fireflies in the Midwest are now uncommon, one woman says.

“The most magical part of childhood . . . nearly gone.”

The lake where one rancher brought his kids to fish is now too warm to sustain vertebrates. I talk about leaving our farm, Wolf Gulch. Like waves pounding the shore, the losses are relentless, one after another, lined up beyond the horizon. We sit in collective heartbreak and I wonder if this gathering is helpful, healing. Afterall, my own climate grief feels oppressive at times.

My husband Tom and I first learned to farm in India’s high desert in 1997. Our host family irrigated fields of barley and potatoes from ancient ditches fed by glaciers. We fell in love with agriculture and, soon after, settled in Southern Oregon to start a farm. Our vision: to create a profitable business on marginal land—land on the edge—knowing that property with reliable water and fertile soil was becoming scarce. Humans need to get scrappy, we reasoned, and in our heady idealism, we thought we’d lead the way. We also believed that environmental problems could be traced, at least in part, to the hyper-mobility of our culture. It’s easier to wreck your own backyard if moving is an always an option. We vowed to pick a piece of ground and root down for the long haul.

We bought property in the Siskiyou Mountains, rough with steep slopes, weeds and brush. Wolf Gulch, the land’s water source and namesake, was intermittent, running underground for long stretches of the creek bed. Though the property was not considered farmland, we forged ahead. We dug three large ponds to collect winter rains and designed a gravity-fed irrigation system that required no electricity. Our daughter, Grace, was six months old when we moved there. Four years later, I gave birth to our son, Sam, in the bedroom of our house.

We embraced permaculture and applied its principles to our new farm. Permaculture, a holistic, nature-centered approach to stewarding property, aligned with our practical, ecological worldview. We purchased a subsoil plough and ripped furrows in the fields so the soil could hold more water. We learned to plough along the slope’s contour to encourage moisture to fan along the furrows and keep the soil in place.

That first fall, Tom and I found the property’s largest incense cedar. I craned my neck to see its tippy-top. Elegant branches of lacy needles dappled sunlight hitting the ground. We potted up scores of saplings from under its generous canopy and replanted some on a landslide to restabilize the hillside. Others went in hedgerows between the farm fields, a few into the ground torn by the heavy equipment used to build our ponds. Before long, that single incense cedar’s offspring grew all over the property, providing shade, habitat for songbirds, refuge from the wind, and a toehold for the soil.

Each fall, we seeded cover crops to help the soil hold more water. Thick, viny mats of crimson clover, hairy vetch, milky oats, and annual ryegrass blanketed the ground all winter, then, by late spring, decomposed into mounds of rich humous. Within ten years of production, our fields, once a heavy red clay, boasted a foot of black topsoil. Tom began to refer to the soil as his third child.

“Your favorite?” I teased.

We planted trees between fields to shield crops from the drying north wind. Hedgerows of conifers, fruit trees, and nitrogen-fixing shrubs provided food for us and the birds, as well as glorious summer shade. Permaculturalists call this ‘stacking functions’—one design feature that offers multiple, interconnected functions and benefits, creating a sort of ecological poetry. It’s an approach that is efficient, true and, in the end, beautiful.

Before we bought the property, Tom noticed a red fir growing in a gully. Red fir typically grow at higher elevations, above 4,000 feet, so it seemed out of place—a break in the forest’s pattern. I loved imagining how the fir came to live near our valley floor. I told Sam and Grace this story:

 

Perhaps a hundred years ago, a young woodrat lived on neighboring Red Mountain. One summer, a forest fire burned through her home as she was eating the seeds of a red fir cone. She fled the mountain with the cone in her mouth and found refuge on the slopes of the Little Applegate River. Once she saw the abundance of madrone berries, she dropped the fir cone. A seed from that cone grew into our beautiful tree.

 

Then came our first brush with drought. In 2001, the valley received a third of the average winter rainfall. Our ponds dried and cracked, rendering them useless as sieves. We invested in plastic pond-liners, an expensive but foolproof solution to the cracks. We transitioned to irrigating with drip tape, which uses about 30% of overhead irrigation. The pond liners worked, and we were back in business.

In those early years, I spent hours walking the landscape. I longed for intimacy with place. In 2003, Grace and I discovered western columbine growing under the incense cedar. Sam was not talking yet, likely asleep in a backpack or stroller. It was the only native columbine I’d seen growing on the property, so I made a habit of walking there each spring when it was in bloom, usually a week after lupine appeared along the ditch trail.

For the twenty-five years we lived at Wolf Gulch, we grew organic food for thousands of people and trained dozens of new farmers. We raised our children and created vast networks of human, animal, soil, and plant communities. In the winters, I directed community theater and organized neighborhood musical events in our little valley. Some winters brought less than average rainfall, but we’d made our farm resilient. Or so we believed.

Then several winters of low rainfall and months of record-breaking temperatures ensued and the creek dried up completely. Tom kept the crops irrigated by shortening watering intervals and harvesting early. We transitioned from growing vegetables for a Community Supported Agriculture program to growing vegetable and flower seeds, both of which need less irrigation in late summer. We chose the seed varieties labeled drought-tolerant. We adapted. We made do.

The next few winters passed without much rain. April, notoriously damp and cool, teemed with brilliant, sun-drenched days above eighty degrees. While acquaintances marveled at the dreamy weather, a pit lodged in my stomach. One night that month, lying in bed, Tom told me that some of the trees in our forest were stressed. Drought and beetles.

“The incense cedar and red fir are both dead,” he said, voice flat.

I had stopped visiting those trees once the kids grew into teens, preferring instead to hike up on the ditch trails. But they held such fond memories and were fixtures in Sam and Grace’s early childhoods. It was like the news of losing close relatives.

We began to notice scores of Douglas firs dying in the woodlot. I prayed for a wetter May. One blustery Wednesday afternoon, we received a tenth of an inch of rain. June 2021 marched in with the ponds lower than ever and alarming forecasts. An unprecedented heatwave arrived. Medford hit 117°. Atmospheric conditions created huge areas of sweltering heat trapped under a high-pressure “dome”. For twenty-five days straight, the high temperature did not fall below 95.

Tom moved into triage mode, stretching the last of our water to keep plants alive. We took unheard-of measures—using a domestic well to irrigate commercial crops and buying water from town. Trucks rumbled up our half-mile driveway to deliver a few meager inches to the ponds. Farming is notoriously hard. We always knew that. Add drought and relentless heat, and the work becomes demoralizing and untenable.

In July, Tom leaned against the kitchen counter. It was after dark. He looked depleted.

“It’s too hard,” he said. “I think we need to move if we want to keep farming.”

I’d thought the hardest parts of our work were over—raising kids and building a business. We’d invested everything into our family, farm and land. Now what?

I wanted to persevere as we always had. In August, I lay awake wondering how we could store more water. Maybe we could collect rain from our roofs during the winter . . . but the tanks only hold 2,000 gallons each. What if we pumped rainwater from the tanks into our ponds all winter long, every time they fill? I shook Tom awake, eager to talk. He was confused and groggy until I explained my idea.

“It’s a good idea,” he said. “But I already do that.”

Our neighbors rallied around us, offering leases, leads on property, and boundless empathy. Still, I remained terrified. All the work we’d done to protect and steward Wolf Gulch, the lengths we’d gone to store water—none of it could shield us from climate collapse. We were left with the difficult question of where to call home.

Meanwhile, in India, the farmers who mentored us were no better off. They faced the disappearance of glaciers that fed their ditches. Our grief, shared with farmers around the world, means less food security everywhere, and the unraveling of once-vibrant agricultural communities.

The mental health impacts of climate change on the general population are well-documented, but with little attention on rural, agricultural populations1. Also, farmers are less inclined to seek out support and mental health services than the general population2. Yet we are perhaps the most vulnerable to climate anxiety and grief—our attention is fixated on the weather. We spend our days interacting with plants and animals and notice even subtle changes in the environment. We also suffer from excessive heat, more extreme weather events, and wildfire smoke.

Grief most commonly involves the loss of a loved one. In complicated deaths like murder, accidents, and suicide, grievers often experience anger, powerlessness, and regret. Why did this happen? What could I have done to prevent it? Ecological losses are similarly complicated. One moment we rage at politicians and oil companies, the next feel guilt for personal choices, and the next: abject horror in the face of scientists’ predictions. Parents and grandparents agonize over the losses to come.

Tom and I grappled with our future while the heat dome held fast. We had to face it: The forest was dying. The creek would not return. We needed to leave. I learned that British Petroleum knew and intentionally covered up the severity of climate change for thirty years. Rage. Then, guilt: Wolf Gulch was on hospice, and we were abandoning it to face its end alone. Only heartless cowards leave a person on their deathbed. I could barely keep track of my internal landscape—the cascade of emotional states shifted by the hour.

Some griefs are more acknowledged than others. All cultures have rituals for the death of a family member. Of course, this doesn’t make the loss of a loved one easy, but the social support provides a space and tools for the griever. Other losses are not as communally acknowledged, do not have avenues for expression or even a shared vocabulary. This is known as disenfranchised grief. Climate grief is considered a disenfranchised grief because in most cases, social and cultural supports for processing it does not exist. We are in new territory.

My dear friend Zoe, a mental health counselor and staffing manager for a climate foundation, offered to lead a ceremony at Wolf Gulch before we moved. Twenty close friends and neighbors gathered at our house and hiked to the dead incense cedar in silence. We took turns sharing memories about our time on the farm. Zoe led me through a ritual of shattering a ceramic bowl with four hammer blows, each blow a specific loss— the loss of my children’s home, the loss of land that fed us, the loss of trees, and the loss of the creek. I kept the shards, and next year, I will reassemble them using gold glue in the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi. Kintsugi represents non-attachment, acceptance of change, and taking the pieces of our grief and reassembling them with care and beauty.

Climate grief is overwhelming in part because it is ongoing. Losses are cumulative. We have already lost so much, we hardly dare fathom what’s to come. Climate therapists encourage grievers to break through the numbness by articulating one specific loss. Focusing on a single grief—giving space to acknowledge both the gratitude and grief for a place, plant or animal, is a way to catch the tail of the massive climate grief beast. From there, we can begin to feel more, connect with others, and act.

During the ceremony, we honored the red fir and the incense cedar. Those trees helped me find my bearings in a sea of Doug fir and ponderosa pine. They’d sparked my imagination and my children’s. The cedar has become a snag, home to millions of insects and dozens of birds. Grace, now a biologist managing piñon pine forests in northern New Mexico for climate adaption, cored the cedar and told us its life story in rings, precipitation, and heat units. The fir is now a nurse log. In the coming years, plants will sprout along the decomposing bark of its flank. My friends and neighbors thanked us for the chance to acknowledge climate loss in community. I was heartened by the honest expressions, deep sense of solidarity, and ritual.

The month before we moved, my childhood best friend Jess asked me to send her a Ziploc of Wolf Gulch soil. Jess teaches ceramics for a living in a small town in Vermont. A few weeks later, she mailed me back a vase made from the soil. The vase’s outside is rough, simple, and scored, the inside beautifully glazed with swirling green and blue. It sits in the windowsill of our new farmhouse.

Back in our circle, the farm intern wipes his face and looks around. His eyes say it all— “This is so much. Too much, maybe.”

A natural human response to unresolved loss is “numbing out” and paralysis. Let’s face it—climate change is terrifying. So the impulse is understandable. But researchers tell us that people who speak openly about their climate distress are more resilient, more likely to act, and benefit from connecting to others. We need to find ways to talk about it. Especially farmers.

I switch gears.

“We’re all resilient,” I say. “Or we wouldn’t be here in this room. We wouldn’t still be farming.”

The flower grower says she lobbies her county politicians. “Local is where we can make a difference.”

The vegetable grower uses breathing techniques to regulate her nervous system. One man plants native trees to feel better.

“I go to the gym,” a beekeeper quips.

An urban farmer engages in guerilla wildflower planting—throwing handfuls of seed into empty lots and waiting to see what emerges in spring.

“It gives me hope for unexpected outcomes,” they say.

Another woman tells us a story—she had been farming with a group of friends in California in 2016 when a catastrophic wildfire scattered them to different places. Whenever she smells smoke and her lungs ache, she texts her friends from the California days. It’s her cue to stay in touch. The rancher admits that he sometimes hugs his cows for solace.

We are in this together, and we’re more resilient when we speak openly about how climate change is affecting us.

In 2020, David Kessler, a colleague and collaborator of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, added a sixth stage to the lexicon of grief: meaning-making. Kessler argues that finding meaning beyond the stages of grief most of us are familiar with—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—can transform grief into a more peaceful and hopeful experience.

Holding climate grief conversations with other farmers has given me a chance to transform my loss into something vital. The response has been overwhelmingly positive—any reluctance to talk quickly melts into connection and empathy. After the gatherings, farmers exchange numbers and ask when we can meet again. By sharing the specificity of our love—for fireflies, crawdads, hydrangea, an ancient incense cedar—and by witnessing each other’s loss and resilience, we find greater meaning in our grief and harvest the energy we’ll need to keep farming.

Tom reminds me that Wolf Gulch was never ours, that we took on the exquisite burden of stewarding it for twenty-five years, but of course it will carry on without us. The land will be here long after we are gone. We leased farm property from friends down the road, moved closer to town, and plan to sell Wolf Gulch next spring. We are still farming.

Now it’s Grace who tells me a story, a new narrative about how the forest is not dying but changing. The red fir and incense cedar may have died, but others will come to replace them in time. Animals, like the woodrat from Red Mountain, and the wind, will carry the seeds and acorns of piñon pine, manzanita and black oak—trees that are better suited to heat and drought. They will take root and build lives at Wolf Gulch. The forest is adapting. There is a new generation leading the way.

 

Sources

1. Howard, M., Ahmed, S., Lachapelle, P., & Schure, M. B. (2020). Farmer and rancher perceptions of climate change and their relationships with mental health. Journal of Rural Mental Health, 44(2), 87—95. https://doi.org/10.1037/rmh0000131.

2. Hagen, B. N. M. et al. “Farmers Aren’t into the Emotions and Things, Right?”: A Qualitative Exploration of Motivations and Barriers for Mental Health Help-Seeking among Canadian Farmers. JOURNAL OF AGROMEDICINE, [s. l.], 2021. DOI 10.1080/1059924X.2021.1893884. 

Purbasha Roy

It is my good fortune to have seen elephants from childhood. Many would imagine I had grown up near a sanctuary, but that wasn’t the case. We lived by an iron-ore mine, and forests surrounded every colony we lived in. The townships we lived in were made by cutting through forests and hills. The roads consisted of ups and downs. Walking with our heavy school bags always felt cumbersome. Life was difficult but enjoyable before internet culture swiped the whole earth inside itself.

The truth is, I lived among elephants since my early days, from when a child begins to pile moments as memory alive, still breathing. We lived in a lowland house. It took about fifteen cement stairs to reach the front garden of our house. In the autumn, when the festivities began, the mahouts came riding, asking for money, rice, potatoes in exchange for the elephants to raise their trunks. And to give rides, especially to the little children. What everyone knew was that the mahouts came from some far state of India. One sweet thing was that each elephant had a name. The mahouts called them by it like humans. Usually they came in numbers of three or four. Every mahout had his own elephant.

I was maybe seven or eight years old. My mother had everything prepared, along with vermilion to smear on the elephant’s trunk, for doing so was considered to bring good luck to the family. Maa asked me to accompany her, though I was very scared of its large, large size. Maybe Maa was trying to remove the fear from me. I went along with her till the lowest stair and stood there unable to go closer. I watched her apply vermilion to its trunk. Then she descended and handed me the bowl containing the jute bag she brought to give the mahout, and returned, forwarding the bag towards the elephant. The elephant understood this and raised the bag to the mahout. After the mahout emptied the bag, the elephant brought it down, placed it in Maa’s hands. The mahout kept exhorting me to have a short ride, saying it won’t harm you. It loves children. I kept nodding my head, no. After the elephant left, I felt relieved, the way a climber feels hugging a tree that still stands stoic after a storm has passed by. One thing that attracted me was the elephant’s small eyes and what I felt were dried tears. This made me ask my mother, does it cry, because its body is tied? Maa must’ve answered something to pacify me. I don’t remember her words. That incident then, now a memory, is as precious to me as light is to a pane of glass.

I was probably ten when, one evening during summer vacation, we heard chaos. We lived in double-lined, single-family detached quarters. The quarters were on either side of the roads, and faced each other. The houses were in a seesaw pattern, ours on the lower end, the road running through the middle. Each quarter had enough space to grow tropical trees and plants. Ours was filled with guava, blackberry and mango trees, many plants like hibiscus of different varieties, and marigolds and common day flowers. In the rainy seasons, the rose balsams filled up whatever space was left vacant.

Between our quarter and another ran a pitch road through which the elephants passed. Following my brother, we both sisters mounted on the iron gate to get a clear view of the road ascending to another colony as they walked through it. In the middle of the elephants’ course was a home that had a huge jackfruit tree with ripening harvest. The elephants broke its tall branches so easily, one wouldn’t believe it if not witnessed. This was very new to us. Our whole colony was stunned by this adventurous happening. No one dared to close in on the elephants until two motorcyclists, being oversmart, passed them at a close distance. Something thrilling always has a risk factor. This angered the female elephant, for the way she turned to face them was quicker than two blinks. Slowly, after eating whatever they could find from the quarter gardens, they moved onwards, on their way to their home: the forest surrounding our place.

As the elephants discovered our colony could provide food to satisfy their hunger, their visits became frequent. They went where they chose with a large number of human eyes on them. Something strange happened: the dogs began barking at the elephants whenever they came. It was believed that this was an instinctual anxious response for the perceived threat from those tall and heavy animals. Another belief was that dogs bark out of excitement. Whatever the reason, the commotion heightened and took time to quieten down.

Often we planned outings to the local bazaar to buy things or to visit the small eateries present here. This place in its smallness contained everything at a walkable distance, one small market and every shop confined at a single place. The news of the elephants’ arrival at any corner of the town spread very fast. We had to cancel our plans for the elephants’ presence here and there.

After several visits with his mate, the male elephant began coming alone. Who was there to tell us what fate had the female elephant met? Or had it gone to some other forest? The male elephant would eat what it found and then leave; this occurred so often that everyone’s interest dwindled, only remaining cautious of its presence for safety.

After the long vacation of almost two months, our school reopened. We saw a house wall broken down on our way to school. The hole on it seemed like a big, unrefined O. Our friends told us the family that lived there made rice beer in large quantities. The elephant had broken into the stock room and drunk all of it. We had the knowledge that rice beer made people drunk. This was a common phenomenon here. Sadly, many families suffered ill health, poverty and anxiety because of it. Our young minds contemplated how the elephant must’ve walked drunk. We laughed beyond our bodies. Now after years, I feel the horror of what could’ve happened that didn’t. The elephant’s large trunk encroaching on the room—what if someone was sitting inside and the elephant got hold of the person? These kinds of incidents made us learn to adjust to their arrivals, though the elephants were not mentioned in the newspapers, only in pamphlets circulated by the company’s head among the employees, requesting them and their families to be wary of the elephant’s presence.

Eventually, the people began cutting down trees that bore fruits the elephants loved. How this process of cutting down trees began I don’t know. Maybe the way the elephants disheveled the tree branches inspired someone to cut down the entire tree. And then this became a common reaction to the elephants’ intrusions. With no food supply to settle its hunger, the male elephant lessened its visits. This continued for a span of four or five years, and then its arrivals ceased. We sometimes talked about it, and then we forgot in life’s busyness.

With time, my siblings and I had to relocate to nearby towns for our higher education. Once, returning, we happened to hire a car. It was noon in the hot month of May. Suddenly, we saw a large male elephant reaching into the back of a truck. We saw it was pulling out gunny bags filled with potatoes. This had created a traffic jam. Baba told the driver and us to close the car windows. Power windows were not very common in those days. The driver had little experience regarding this, as he was coming down from a city. We did, and began sweating, but there was no other way. Baba told us, it’s the same elephant that roamed in our colony. We saw the truck’s driver and the helper standing on the sidewalk cutting sad faces. We felt bad for them, and simultaneously for the elephant? How hungry he was. His hunger had forced him out of the receding forestline. We humans have a composite architecture. We desire almost everything, and at the same time we want nature to achieve compatibility with our actions. How is a balance possible when one is stretched beyond the margins?

My brother asked, “How do you know, Baba, it’s the same elephant?”

Baba answered, “Here, these days, a forest officer has been appointed.” He had told someone my Dad knew. This male elephant leads a solitary life. It roams, eats whatever it finds and then returns back to the forest. It is not harmful, but it’s better to take precautions, the forest officer had added to his advice for common people.

The next day, the newspaper headlines read, “New traffic police in town. What dedication!” The photograph was of the elephant eating potatoes. Accompanying it was another photograph of the gunny bags scattered around the vehicle. This kind of news became frequent, so we began to make our journeys by train.

In my sophomore year at senior college, one day the newspaper headline read, “The traffic police has been electrocuted”. There was no nearby utility pole, just a tall bamboo stalk dug into the earth. This narrated the whole story. The headline broke our hearts. Many days of our lives which the elephant had filled now felt emptied in a moment. The elephant’s tusks had been removed. Overnight, the poachers had taken them. Maybe it was they who had frightened it, to fulfill their malicious plans.

I don’t know where the tusks are now, what artifacts have been made out of them. If it was a cold-blooded murder, are the people who committed it behind bars? Or are they still roaming in search of another innocent animal to die in their trap just so that they can make a few more bucks. Bugs? Yes, actually bugs, not the hard-earned money people earn legitimately. Criminals such as them have minds filled with poisonous bugs.

Of course, we have stayed in close proximity to nature. We have seen wild boars, various kinds of snakes, velvet spiders, to name a few. Now too, a wide ground lies before the quarters of the flat we stay in, though there’s no wilderness. Grasses grow in their own way, then fawn, and then again in monsoons they turn green; a cycle to which the eyes, the body have got habituated. Some days, we go for walks along it. It’s nice and soothing, but not what it used to be in childhood, the forestline and the magic of living around it. The varieties of black-colored bird, carnivorous, feed themselves termites from the holes present at one end of our garden. The others were the large-sized cranes that stayed in the high-altitude trees: what did they eat? From where had they arrived in our township? No one had any idea. They just arrived and settled at my place. We didn’t have a camera, so after several Google searches, we couldn’t find out. Now, they are nowhere to be seen.

But more than anything we have seen or encountered, the elephants were the most memorable part of our lives since childhood. Seeing any elephant on the screen or in sanctuaries conjures up the ones we saw.

Catherine Rockwood

Reckoning 9 comes to you from a year of reading and discussion—from intervals of not quite thinking we knew what this unthemed issue should look like to flurries of activity, enthusiasm and advocacy. Then, in a slow pull-back at the end of the submission window, everyone on the editorial team started to say okay, yes. Together with the writers, thanks to them and to each other, we are starting to have done the work to make this issue happen.

It’s a remarkable one. I’m tempted to say the individual pieces of writing started talking to each other early and knew what they were collectively about well before the editors did. As C.G. has said, there’s a tremendous amount of grief here. There’s also a repeated witness of tenacity and urgent acts of preservation and restoration. We remember or learn of “six dolphins/safe in a hotel swimming pool” via Allison Whittenberg’s brief, luminous “Katrina.” If the young daughter in Ellen K. Fee’s “baby’s breath” is born into a world that’s losing its flowers, she may yet make something new with the stalks left behind, “begin anything with a bundle of sticks.” Leah Bobet’s “Klamath River Hymn” reminds us, in the leaping of wild salmon, that while our desire for environmental restoration is powerful and can work in tandem with natural forces, repair itself is not a quick process. That we must have patience for the process of mending, wherever it begins.

We’re glad you’re joining with us to read, to mourn, to consider, to plan, to create. May these stories, poems, and essays accompany you well in the coming year.

Priya Chand

How does Twitter’s collapse relate to the climate crisis?

I’m far from alone in retreating from global social media to more private spaces—shared interests, affinities, locality. The most pertinent one here is my forest stewardship community. Even the solitary act of cutting up an invasive tree—mitigating centuries of damage caused by settlers to a formerly well-managed landscape—becomes communal quickly. Nature can never be fully reduced to a guidebook, and there will always be a behavior to surprise us, as with the elephants of Purbasha Roy’s childhood.

Sharing space, whether virtual or physical, inevitably results in shared experiences. Many of these are found in Reckoning 9: both the comfort of finding shared purpose, as in Siobhon Rumurang’s “Cloud, Cloud”, an act of anticolonial resistance, and the darker side—shared beliefs that contradict one’s lived experience, as for the narrator of E.L. Mellor’s debut story, “Blue Speck”. No space can fully escape a dialogue with its own history or marginalized present.

Ultimately we are reminded that community is essential, inevitable, and coalesced around some shared quality. We can shout into the void, but it’s the people next to us who will hear, understand, and, hopefully, spread the word.

C. G. Aubrey

When we decided to leave Reckoning 9 without a theme, I wasn’t certain what to expect. Speculative fiction brings to environmental justice writing endless possibilities. Within speculative fiction, we explore difficult topics like climate change, pollution, and human displacement from the comfortable frames of comic sci-fi, cozy fantasy, and solarpunk. “No theme” could have well meant chaos, but even as the submissions for this issue spanned genres and galaxies and uncertain futures, I found an oft repeating thread: we are all grieving.

Some of us are grieving for the lives of loved ones lost. Some of us are grieving the loss of our homes and livelihoods to climate change. Some of us are grieving the countless ecosystems lost or nearly lost to environmental destruction and degradation. Many of us are grieving the loss of community, of connection, with each other and with our planet. For some, this grief is new. For far too many, it is generational, an historic truth with consequences immediate and future-reaching, as the essays of Marianna Ariel ColesCurtis and Jacqueline St. Pierre so rightly remind us.

It is an immense privilege to grieve with you, to not only hold space for such profound losses, but to lift the voices and hearts of those whose grief has gone too long ignored or silenced. In the way of comfort, there is little that I can say that others, many collected here, have not said better. I can only offer, through their works, the power of resistance, the strength of community, and the persistence of nature, of which we humans are still very much a part.

I hope you’ll take what you need and share what you can.

 

21 December 2024

From the traditional border of Tuscarora and Siouan territory.

Knar Gavin

The question, as a form, courts: wide-spanning and invitational, it provides the grounds for voicing provisional answers and desires, variously. The works that comprise this issue of Reckoning provoke essential questions for our current historical conjuncture, questions which defy the treacherous narrows of business-as-usual and open instead toward livable futures at once wily and strange—futures filled with the surprises that come of persistence, of life-thrum, prevailing in spite of everything.

How are we to “link fingers in the dark” (following Kelsey Day); what do we do at the checkpoints, when everything goes wrong (querying after Joanna Streetly)? How do we carry the ravages of the past into urgent articulation with our planetary present? What does that carriage—of word and idea; of nightmare-begotten dreams—look like and hold? Where do its lines break, and what wastelands can it be machined into navigating? How do we multiply the tongues of refutation and ignite material practices that collectivize, that make places built against destruction and for flourishing?

Alongside my fellow readers and editors, I have sought, in this issue, to bring together writing that provokes such lines of questioning. In turn, the writers included here have helped me to ask and re-ask the question of militancy, and what it might—or ought—look like on the page.

I tend to agree with the great documentarian, Muriel Rukeyser: we must “walk in the river of crisis toward the real.” Yet a profound recalibration of pace is in order. Amidst the ongoing genocide of Palestinian peoples, we must run, together, gathering the truth up in our hands and hurling it against the barricades to thought itself, which the state of Israel—backed by the death-fund of US empire—has thrown up to obscure the reality of this gruesome moment of flagrant, unblushing human sacrifice.

From Palestine to the abysmal failure of climate talks at COP28, the planet is ablaze with injustice. Even so, in the face of the anti-life operations of empire, menacing extractivism, and the killing racial logics of global capitalism, other stories are bursting forth; sites of resistance are erupting and lines of solidarity are being forged. I am grateful that Reckoning 8 houses some of these stories—counter-behemoths to the fire-spiting behemoths of the now, which would render land, lives, and languages alike moribund (per Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe’s conjurings).

This issue insists that we can, indeed, must, be fierce and uncompromising, on and off the page. That we must retain and seize the right to dissent from planetary collapse, enacting, instead, the inevitability of resistance, that dear and dearly fruiting tree, its luminous stones sweetly enfleshed with fuel for the hurling.

 

December 27, 2023

Occupied Lenape Territory of so-called Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Filomena Acosta

“This is my home,” my mother says to me one overcast day.

Picture this: mother and daughter are sitting on the couch together, our ponchos pooling and swallowing us whole. We are looking at a picture on the internet, a snapshot of the valley in Petorca. My mother was born in that Chilean city, a tiny bird nestled in the bosom of the Andes, gasping through thin air and an ever-evolving awe of the world. I expect, watching her then, a cloud of nostalgia to fog her eyes, for her to fly away from me and the couch here in Canada.

She does not fly away. I notice her speech warbles with hesitation, her throat holding that last word down, home, dragging it out long and narrow like the country. How I remember her staring, the rubbing of her eyes, the drugstore eyedrops, and the small circle of her mouth.

When she finally says it again—“This is my home”—no longer is it a statement, rather a climb, peaking in a question. She leaves me behind then to dash to the safe upstairs, rummaging through our family’s birth certificates and citizen papers and passports and who knows what, until she brings back to me an old picture.

My fingers retain still the feeling of that smooth, glossy paper; of how I turn it, checking the back to see ink splotches faded with time:

Lxxx, Petorca, 1975.

Wistfulness, I understand then, means there is some semblance of a home to yearn for. There is still something there to return to—yes, there could be little differences here and there—but you can walk the land and observe, with tinted sunglasses, a kaleidoscope of memories and endless futures gleaming in the sunset.

Nothing of that nature is found in the photograph in her hands—it is a reality which does not exist anymore. It was, as I consider the image, something beautiful, with swathes of green and yellow and blue. It was, she tells me, the place she was happiest in, even if she did not have hot water or had to use an outhouse or went hungry. It is, as I discover, somehow, the same place as the cracked, parched desert on the internet labelled Petorca. The jarring combination of speaking, of thinking, all at once present, past, and unknown, makes for an ominous blanket heavier than the warmest poncho.

This is my home? This cannot be my home. Did I ever have one? I had one, I know I did, once, but it is not this. How long can the world go on for? How long can I?

“What happened to the river?” I say, taking the role of the fool who asks obvious questions before a disaster foretold.

I remember the soft curve of her jaw as she cranes her head to our popcorn ceiling, going past it to enter something holy and safe.

“God help us all,” she responds.

What can one say about the environment that has not already been said? How could we reconcile with the fact that the place we were born will not be the same place we will die, even if the maps, even if our hearts, say otherwise?

My old university here in Canada floats on top of a marsh. I can feel the chill of the mornings I’ve spent walking along watery pathways, frogs croaking and salamanders whirling near my feet; occasionally, on these walks, my eyes wandered to the trail of smoke that wafts up from the clanging industrial parts of the city. Group projects in my academic career consisted of developing apps that would help the user report turtles crushed and splattered by cars, to hopefully have someone help take them to wildlife rescues. My lectures had many students yawning through the degradation of our Great Lakes, a source of life, with algae blooms and gifts of spewing sewage and oil spills.

At these institutions, one looks at the data; one maps and calculates and writes obligatory reflections that are more opinion pieces on the reality of things, and then one moves on. Moving on commonly means a hiring event where major oil and mining companies, among others in little cliques of giggling imperialistic friends, gather us ready and bright-eyed, one by one.

A funny thing: my tía abuela, Juana, a stout woman in her nineties, still works to run a family goat farm in Chile. My tía sends my mother a video of the old woman on the news, appearing on the screen with hands curling like tendrils in a garden.

“No way,” I say, looking at the old woman in amazement, seeing a continent of toughness etched on her pixelated face. “She’s still alive?”

My mother slaps me before she starts the clip again, leaning in, trying to listen to her tía’s words carefully.

Petorca province is a major provider of that emerald jewel of a fruit, the avocado—la palta—which can only grow in certain regions. A just right environment is mandatory for the fussy fruit. Raising them requires 320 litres of water per avocado. Agricultural companies and politicians and the like illegally divert the coursing river to these fields. Once grown, they are exported to a European or North American country, a destiny coded on stickers and red-flag sale signs, all to end up part of people’s self care smoothie or a sandwich in a bougie restaurant.

There, on television, my tía abuela Juana speaks of the town’s water crisis: people cannot wash their clothes, they cannot take showers, crops are wilting, livestock dying from dehydration. She could not afford to buy the avocados that her neighbours grow. She is still alive, yes, todo bien gracias a Dios, but who knows about the well-being of her children, many who work at the farm, if all her goats die from no water? What about her grandchildren; her great great-great-grandchildren; her great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren?

In the climate crisis, it is those at risk—ones statistically contributing the least to global pollution and energy consumption—who will encounter the worst effects of it. Though I believe that designating those at risk is to make the sacrificial lamb a matter of inheritance, instead of the truth of chronic disenfranchisement, of intentional displacement. Everything has a price to it, and some people are willing to be paid. Even the world burning has a price.

In Chile, Patagonian fluvial systems, running like veins to the end of the world, suffer as their ecosystems are upset by deforestation and pollution. Lithium exploitation in the name of green electromobility in turn consumes water in the north, with mining sites near primarily Indigenous communities. In my home here in Canada, water still has material needs we must provide, a necessary relationship that the media calls disruptive and violent and holding this country back. The water does not need oil spills and fertilizer pollution and waste; it does not need to water golf courses or suburban lawns or mall fountains; it does not need people to face police brutality for protesting these violations.

There are things to say about Indigenous sovereignty. There are things to say on how the fight against colonisation is the fight for water justice. There are things to say about our power as a group of people, that through each home we love, those which are fracturing like cracks in clay, we make our attempts at resilience. We survive. Fight.

I do not write about this for the love of writing about this. I do not write believing I have a voice that is good or matters above the rest. Those things to say on environmental justice perhaps are said better by others instead of me: an overwrought, disabled, neurotic Latina, with a persistent fear of misstepping hovering over me like a fly. However, now is the time where we must drive our purpose towards the collective needs of our people, and to the land.

I laugh when someone asks me if I consider myself an academic or a writer. It is unnatural for me in those ecosystems. What is there for people in that hierarchy of beings, with those intellectuals that love to create and fondle and debate among each other? However, I do consider myself an eternal student, and read anything that could explain the seedlings of questions that sprout from my chest: what is justice, what is the environment, who are we all in between?

Taking an Indigenous Knowledge class, I loved my time there, my professor almost lulling me with stories and exciting me in challenging the normative way of thinking, even when it was difficult at times. There I read and analysed, as part of our curriculum, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass.

“Wow,” I wrote to my professor late in the evening, happy to see the poetry in the world around us translated to words I could finally comprehend. “She’s just like me. For real!”

I believe the part of the book I just must write about goes like this, after introducing the reader to the Onondaga Thanksgiving Address: “Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.”

A great achievement of colonialism is that it convinces people that hyper-individualism is good. That there is not a right to anything unless you buy it. This is seen in Chile, with waters regulated by private property laws, which are a symptom of the infection of neoliberalism, implemented after the coup of 1973. For how could one own water? Why do government officials hand water out on a first-come first-served basis? The delusion of hyper-individualism creates the mantra this is just the way things are, that it is natural for an old woman to go on television and plead for water in the community and to stop desecrating the land she was born on.

It cannot be an individual’s responsibility to save watery ecosystems and the turtles by banning straws; we cannot turn up our nose at disabled people’s need for plastic straws and not do a thing to, say, fast fashion companies overflowing landfills and causing water pollution with last micro-season’s trends. It is abhorrent that the average person’s carbon footprint is always scrutinized, yet a celebrity can use private jets to fly mere minutes on a whim. There is a need for community. There is a duty we must fulfill to each other and the land.

Because for what, for whom, do we declare environmental justice?

There may not be a complete reversal of the climate crisis. That opportunity may very likely wave us by. Unprecedented times are precedent-setting times. Yet it is still within our power to continue forward. I do not mean that we all hold hands together and sing la-la-de-da, because there are those that oppose what needs to be done. There are those who will say that this injustice, these crises, are not real, even when we look at them in our own backyards. I also do not mean that progress, even technological progress, is bad, for there are things like ecological socialism to take into consideration as we move forward, ever forward. There is no one solution that may tie up neatly in a bow; we must think of the tangible, we must think of each other, and not fall into traps of ecofascism or relentless nihilism.

We live in a perfect green and blue spaceship. This is our home. We are born here, of course we will take care of it, one way or another.

After we watch the news and say our goodbyes to my tía, my mother and I prepare food together. She speaks of childhood memories while baking fresh bread; I simmer with the squash soup in all the ways I feel helpless—and all the ways I feel hopeful—about my power in this world.

When I sit with my family at the dinner table, that precious glass of water stays by my hand, waiting to give me a gift, and I accept it in each swallow. Tomorrow, I think to myself, tomorrow I’ll return the gift, in full.

While forks scrape plates and conversations lull, my mind drifts away: to snowy peaks and pine trees and endless sky. I remember the smell of the sea, the sun on my back, the green of the valley. I dream of mountain goats following at the heels of an old woman. I see the happiness that land gave my mother in her smile.

But what about the river? Its silence now is louder than the rush of water ever was. I hope our children hear its song again, one day. I hope our children have a glass of you, dear river.

Pero todos bien gracias a Dios, y mi gente.

References

Wall Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Milkweed Editions.

Ejiro Elizabeth Edward

Magic! That is the word I could use to describe where I came from, my island. It was not owned by any individual but a collective of small dwellers surrounded by bodies of water, a small place where I knew our neighbors’ names, where I woke up to the serenity of the waves greeting me. I almost took this view for granted and lost my wonder of her.

I once lived close to the ocean, knew the smell of the ocean, I took care of the ocean in the ways of my people, and in turn she gave me life. Some days she would come bearing fruits of thanksgiving to my doorstep, foreign items I didn’t know I needed until she brought them to me. The children of Tarkwa Island benefited the most from these gifts. When I was a new baby, my mother got from her a dream catcher she placed over my crib. My hands would stretch out to touch it, and as an adult I could remember the dream catcher hanging over my head, slipping into my dreams and drawing me into the water.

As a child, items from the ocean were used as toys, or sometimes our parents graced our bodies with them, like that one time I got a rainbow shell.

I still wear it on my neck.

 

But there were other days too, days she kissed the toes of the threshold of my house that barely stood together. She threatened to swallow us, but she did not. On days like this she gifted the community with even stranger things. Like the one time she vomited in front of our neighbor’s house a lifeless human body. They said the body was round and swollen. I only heard about it; I was forbidden as a child to see those kinds of giftings from the ocean. But I grew up too and saw many gifts. I even saw the ocean give us the body of my childhood friend who had been missing for three days. I knew this loss, and it laced my tongue to remember that even when we were one with the water, the proverb remained: “Being a swimmer and spending time in the water does not make you a fish”. We were surrounded by the ocean, and to survive the ocean we had to become like rocks.

 

You would think that I should be afraid of water. That it would come one day and swallow me into its mouth and just like that I would stop existing. But a land that inhabits you shouldn’t be the one to kill you. I told this to outsiders who queried my bravery and rolled it on their tongue. Who came here to enjoy the water my island offered but ran back to the comfort of their homes when they grew tired of her beauty. Who would blame them? They had no idea how to pacify the water.

Children of the water returned back into the water. We were not like the outside world whose spirits roamed after death. When one of our own died, we would ship them into the middle of the sea and let them go back home. This was where they belonged, for the ocean held on to us, and if we didn’t do that, that person’s spirit would cry from beneath the grave, calling us to join them. We couldn’t afford to let our community die, we knew the city world frowned on us when we did such things, but they had no say over our domain.

This was home. Home was ours.

 

The ocean was on an island, separated from the outside world. I watched the city people come and go. They came to our island to have a swell time, but for us this place was home, and home was threatened. Home was threatened by the city people, people who parked their cars at the edge of the city and took boats to our island to have some fun. They would come dressed in their fancy city clothes, wearing bourgeois sunglasses, for the sun our bodies adored. They came with food items, too tired to clean up after they left, making the environment uninhabitable for us. But we were gracious enough to pick up after them. There was already a system in place that allowed the men of our island to tax them so we could clean up the place. It was giving back what belongs to us, and they did.

 

During summer the children of the island, now men and ladies, showed off their talents. I, for one, blended into the ocean to show off my skills with my skateboard, synched with the wind, and in turn I got the admiration of the city people. I got job offers to teach these people, and I made respectable money for it. I didn’t desire much—I was a wanderer, I needed only bread and fish for the soul.

Other times I saved people from our ocean. She was sometimes eager to eat those who didn’t know how to flow into her rhythm, but she knew me well enough to be merciful.

 

I defended my island until I could no longer defend it. It was the year before covid-19 that the government came for us. The year 2018, when I woke up to ships and guns surrounding our small houses, with a loudspeaker waking me up from my dream saying: “The government will be taking over this island, this island will now be used for military purposes”.

I imagined my ears to be filled with the sand from our island, that the seashells had covered them and that I was in a dream. The one where the sirens and the mermaids played tricks with my mind. Disbelief filled me til I thought I would drown in it.

Where would I go? Where was home if not here? I watched as the elders held countless meetings with government officials, days leading to months, til I began to shrug off the evacuation as nothing.

The island youths were angry. I was angry! Who would dare take our island from us? But I was powerless, and my tongue did the talking. Some of us, the youths who had access to social media, tweeted and trended for a week. I prayed that the city people would intervene. That they would save us. They did not.

 

It was decided that we would evacuate the premises, but we would be compensated. But how much could compensate for home, for her? For the smell of water? To wake up to the ocean and dive into her. To have your body know the waves. To become one with her. To have access to her. Our evacuation was due next year, but I was already swollen with sadness.

My eyes filled, and the tears dropped into the ocean.

In those days, the ocean was quiet. It was peaceful, it followed us in mourning, it could sense our loss, collective loss.

The island was slowly being cleared by the government with the installation of small camps. I watched as the elders of our island sold off our homes for five shillings, like Judas selling off Jesus to his cross. The betrayal burnt the bones of the youth in Tarkwa Bay. Where would we go and call home? Some heard this news with great joy, receiving a call to swap their consciences for a desire to leave.

Eventually, people started leaving, but my foot was rooted here. The bodies of my mother and siblings were buried deep in the ocean. How would I carry their presence into the busy city? Into a land where vehicles smothered the skin of humans in exhaust. Where their water rushed through pipes into their homes, while all I had to do was drink from the ocean.

I wasn’t ready. A few of us stayed back to defend our home, until the men with machine guns came at night and bullets dropped like rain onto our houses and we fled. Four years later, the world has moved forward and the city people have more access to our island, but this time the government is in control.

 

The city isn’t for people like me. I have watched my body shed skin to adapt to this new environment. It still doesn’t fit my webbed feet which are used to carrying the weight of sand. Not this concrete ground and cemented rooftops that threaten to take the air out of my lungs. This city where the clouds swallow the stars and hide them. It’s been years, and my body still can’t adapt to this environment. They say that man evolves, but all I wanted to evolve into was the sea.

As a child, I played mermaid with my island friends. Now my people are scattered all over this city, trying to blend in and become a part of it. But an ocean child is forever an ocean child, and when this city finally sleeps, I will return to her.

The Reverend Emilie Teresa Smith

Marcia Mejia and her Indigenous community, the Eperara Nation, live along the banks of the Naya River in Colombia. Her settlement of Joaquincito sits right at the delta where the Naya reaches the Pacific Ocean. The Naya was a major site of conflict during the 50-year-long Colombian civil war. The Eperara, together with 64 Afro-descendant communities along the river, have defended their holy waterway and suffered terribly as narco-empires continue to fight for control of this strategic waterway.

1.

Marcia stamps her flip-flop on the dirty floor.

“I can’t leave you, not with a whole two hours to go until the bus,” she says in a low voice.

“Go, go,” I say. “Go. I’ll be fine. Be careful on the street.”

We drop my bags on the sagging, tipping plastic seats in the terminal. We hug again. I brush back her straight black hair.

“You haven’t had supper,” she says.

“Nah.”

I try not to cry. I’m old enough to be her mother, but I feel like her sister. She matters to me. I feel helpless, unable to do anything more to keep us close. She is so small, invisible to the rest of the world, so vulnerable. Steady, persistent, unstoppable, like a sturdy—but threatened—tree holding out her branches wide to protect her community: Joaquincito, of the Eperara Nation, on the mouth of the Naya River, on the Pacific Coast of Colombia.

The Eperara have lived on this river for time out of mind. But the enemies they face are monstrous, more dangerous perhaps than ever before: internal and foreign beasts crouching at the door. Waiting. Who will move in? Who has more power? Bigger guns? Who can twist things around, play the game—cocaine, mining companies, massive hydro-electric dams—make a pile, shit on the people and the earth, piss in the river, and move on?

“Go,” I urge gently. “I’ve got food. Plantain chips and lemonade made with panela. Besides, you guys have been feeding me too much for days. I already didn’t fit into the canoa!” We both laugh.

“Okay, Emi,” she says. She turns and walks away. Her orange wrap-skirt glows in the gloom. Somehow the bus station manages to be both fluorescent bright and deeply dingy at the same time. She’s gone.

I take a deep breath. Alone at last. Time to think about where my heart has been and gone these past five days. I look around for my salt-crusted chips. Eat a few. I’m not that hungry. These have been days of fish, glorious starchy vegetables of different hues and sizes, and fruit I never knew existed.

Then, wait! The flash of orange is coming back! Marcia. Her face is crumpled.

“I can’t leave you here alone. So long ‘til the bus.”

“It’s good, really. Go. Go,” I say.

“Okay, I’m leaving, Emi,” says Marcia again, resigned. The orange in her beaded necklace, her orange skirt, her determined eyes set in her round face are all so dear to me. One final, final hug, and she’s gone, becoming a carrot-colored dot, disappearing into the darkness. Just as she leaves, the evening rains call to the earth; the world outside is erased. Walls of water form, seeming to run both up and down.

I squeeze my eyes tight in prayer. Surround her with an impenetrable circle of protection. Make her invisible to the killers. Keep her safe. It’s August, 2018. These are hard days for Colombian community leaders, especially for women and men from the Indigenous and Afro-descendant—Black—communities. More than 342 people have been killed in the past year-and-a-half, since the 2016 signing of the peace accords between the government and the guerrillas of the Rebel Armed Forces.

I had met Marcia three years earlier, at an international gathering in Brazil, Fe y Territorios, Faith and Territories. It was a busy, frantic conference, with hundreds of participants, but somehow Marcia connected with me. She sought me out time and again. We sat and chatted.

“You have to come see me someday, in my community,” she said. I agreed, casually. I am the co-president of SICSAL, an international Christian human rights organization. Although we work in 28 countries, we are small and don’t have a lot of funds. I had no idea when I would ever make it to Colombia.

Marcia and I weren’t in touch regularly, but every once and a while, she would have access to the internet, and a note would pop up on my screen. Usually the same thing: How are you? When are you coming to see me?

Hi, I would answer. Nice to hear from you. Not sure.

But then, three years later, I did end up in Colombia, at another international conference, this time in Medellin. Marcia was supposed to come to the meeting but problems on the river took over: the boat couldn’t get out. The level of violence on the river was very high. I had to admit, I didn’t actually know where Marcia lived. Somewhere on a river delta, somewhere in Colombia. I didn’t know how, exactly, to get to her.

Fortunately, I have friends.

La Comisión (the Interchurch Commission for Justice and Peace) makes the connections for me and sends me off on the night bus to Buenaventura. My companions are Nidiria, a poet, and her friend Yamali, young leaders from the Women’s Committee of the Naya River Delta. They were both at the conference with me, showing up every day with one fabulous colorful outfit after another, purchased down in the city center during our breaks. At the conference they were clear: they had the right, as women, as young people, as the descendants of enslaved Africans, to live full lives, safely, in their homes, in their communities. Travelling with them, I feel like a young adventurer, invulnerable yet with a shake of danger.

The women shepherd me from the conference grounds, in the green sanctuary of the Mother Laura Convent on the outskirts of Medellin, through the long thin windy road down to the coast, through the sketchy, rough streets of Buenaventura to the safe house of the local Comisión leaders: Enrique and Maru—María Eugenia. The Comisión—on the frontline of energetic insistence on human rights for all—is a particular target for violence. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ordered the Colombian government to provide for the safety of Comisión leaders. We arrive at an anonymous-looking house. An armoured car is parked in front. An unsmiling guard stands stiffly; presumably he has a legal gun to protect us.

We arrive to a household waking up. Maru is making eggs, tossing her mop of curls as she stirs vigorously. She looks around to laugh hello and—snap—turns back to flip the arepas, fried cornmeal triangles. Enrique pours coffee. And, surprise! There are three human rights leaders here from the Washington Office on Latin America: Adam, Gimena and Alex. They are going upriver this very morning, all the way to Las Conchas. We can all go together, they say. I have no idea where Las Conchas is, but it’s somewhere on Marcia’s river, so—let’s go!

The dock reeks. Things have died here and just been left to rot. An old wooden boat sits submerged up to its deck in water. Alongside it, men load two fiberglass hulls, which look sturdy enough. A group awaits, and then we’re on board. The two boats sag full, about 10 or 12 people per vessel: four of us gringos, and the Comisión folks, my friends Nidiria and Yamali, going home. Most travellers are community members returning up the river, including baby Kaila and her mom, from Las Conchas. Kaila had been sick, and they brought her out to see a doctor. Now she sleeps right snug beside me, in her mother’s arms, covered in a pink fuzzy sweater for the wind and the spray that will come. We slip on life jackets. Soon we putt-putt into the harbour. We slide past small shacks built up perilously over the river. Girls scrub clothes in the oily water, glancing up to see us just with the corner of an eye. We glide through the green and brown water and then into a mangrove swamp.

Now the boats move fast. They flit across the narrow waterways, choosing first the left branch, then the right from an impossible puzzle of choices. The boatsmen slip their caps over backwards and shout to each other with joy. It’s like they’re playing tag. The engine drones. The hum is so steady that I am almost asleep, head nodding down. Then—slap—we’re in open ocean. Blue, white and grey. The silver curve of an ancient coin, across which are days and days of sea, until there are at last some distant, wistful islands. The sunlight is deceptively thin, but strong enough to burn Alex to a crisp in half an hour. I had remembered before we left and slipped on a light, long-sleeved shirt underneath my life jacket, despite the coastal heat.

Nudging, roaring, surging and soothing, the boatsmen know how to ride through the swells. Then at last we turn into the mangroves again. Nidiria calls loud and happy from the front, “Emi, THIS is the Naya!”

The Naya is a short river, only 120 kilometres long. It begins its life in the foothills of the soaring Andes and snake-winds its way down and across the jungle lowlands, becoming a fat and brown river at its mouth, thick with spindly mangroves, where it finally meets the Pacific Ocean. Indigenous peoples have lived along the rich banks of the Naya since before memory can tell. But life changed drastically when, in 1526, Spaniards arrived in the area.

That year, Sebastián de Belalcázar, a Castilian donkey thief, set out to pillage the hot lowlands of the Pacific littoral, founding the city of Cali, all the while slaughtering Indigenous people and fighting internecine battles with his fellow invaders. In the mountains beyond, rumours ran wild about rivers of gold and fabled cities paved with the shiny stuff. The Pizarro brothers had actually found stacks of treasure and went promptly to work destroying the great Inca Empire. Belalcázar, though, would find no such treasure.

Reported to be a particularly vicious man, Belalcázar was even called to account by the Spanish authorities for slaughtering all the women and children of a particular village while the men were absent. He died in 1555, while awaiting extradition to Spain, where he was to be tried for the murder of a fellow Spaniard. (The statue of Belalcázar in Cali was torn down in 2021 by Indigenous community members, as was one in Popayan a year earlier.)

There were no pots of gold to be had in the lowlands among the fishers and the gatherers, so Europeans set about creating sugar plantations. As the Indigenous communities were all but extinguished, the Spaniards began trafficking boatloads of Africans to slave in the fields. The slave trade began in 1518. Over the next three hundred-plus years an estimated 1.1 million Africans were forced through its hideous capital: Cartagena de Indias, on the Colombian Caribbean coast. Slavery was abolished in Colombia in 1852.

Today, along the Naya river, there are sixty-four Afro-Columbian communities, while the upriver and downriver Eperara peoples each have a reserve.

We buzz along the lower reaches of the river and, after about half an hour, pull up to a collection of wooden houses built on stilts. We land at a shaky ladder leading up to the Casa Grande, bigger by far than the small, personal homes. The Casa Grande is the sacred gathering space of Joaquincito, the home of the downriver Eperara people.

There she is! Marcia is waving madly and coming down the ladder. Everyone from the village is in the Casa Grande, waiting to meet me. Enrique and Maru are talking with Marcia, explaining that we’re not staying, that I’m not staying, but that they’ll drop me off the next day. “Do you want to come?” they ask her. “We’re going to Las Conchas. You should come, but hurry, get your stuff.”

Marcia disappears, then returns with a little pink backpack and a girl, maybe about nine years old. They jump in the back. We beam with joy at one another. We did it! We’re together at last. There is no time to say anything, and we’re off. Up the river, buzz, buzz.

The green walls of the jungle close in around us, hiding who knows what. The trees seem endless, eternal. Looks like the jungle won here. But then we zip around a corner and there’s a big town: Puerto Merizalde, named after its founding bishop, who dreamed of building a bustling metropolis in the jungle. We move along the wooden houses stacked right over the river until—there He is! Standing high on top of a massive cathedral in the river town that had failed to become a city, right on the dome reaching out to his people: a grandiose white Jesus, hands extended in blessing. We float along under his outstretched arms.

On the other side of town, we dock and climb out onto a soggy wooden platform. We’re stopping for lunch. At last Marcia and I hug each other. I meet Yasmin, her daughter. We head up arm in arm to a table to my first fish of the Rio Naya. We eat with satisfaction, and we catch up. Things are not well at all on the river. Peace accords have meant nothing. I listen, shake my head. Four community leaders dead in the last few months. Everything a great unknown. Solemnly we board the boats again to travel to the next stop upstream. Yamali stays here, but Nadiria will travel with us up to Las Conchas.

2.

We’re heading further inland. After about an hour, we arrive at the Humanitarian Zone of San Francisco, where we will exchange our ocean-going boat for a river boat that will make it easier to journey farther up the shallow river through the ever-thickening, verdant jungle.

The region around the Naya River has a particularly troubled history, explains Enrique from the Comisión, with input from the WOLA experts, Adam and Gimena. In the past thirty years or so the Naya’s relatively short length, from the thick coca leaf sites up in the highlands, along the back and forth of the main branches of the river, to the lonely and unguarded Pacific coast, has become a key route for the moving of drugs and arms. There are big bucks to be made by the Colombian military (the largest in Latin America) and the shady paramilitary bands (which have direct links to the official military, but operate with impunity). These latter are responsible for the greatest number of human rights abuses. Last of all, but thick in the game, are Colombia’s two guerrilla organizations: the Rebel Armed Forces (FARC) and the much smaller yet still fierce National Liberation Army (ELN). Everyone wants a piece of this rich pie.

During Holy Week, 2001, one of the worst massacres of Colombia’s more than 50-year-long civil war occurred along the Naya River. Between April 11th and 12th, paramilitaries from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia brutally murdered and mutilated an estimated 70 people up and down the Naya. Thousands more fled into hiding along tributary rivers, to Puerto Merizalde, and all the way down the river and along the ocean into the city of Buenaventura.

After a number of years of displacement, communities started to return and rebuild. An important tool for peacemaking was granted to them when the Inter-American Court on Human Rights ordered precautionary measures for the communities, and a number of “humanitarian zones” were declared. These were to be areas exclusively for civilians, entirely free from all weapons. No armed players from any side of the war would be allowed into the Zones. The communities would patrol themselves, and the Naya Community Council would oversee the civilian network.

By the time we arrive at the San Francisco Humanitarian Zone, I’m feeling a bit queasy. Maybe it’s the food, the sun, or the sway of the boat. I breathe deeply. We all pile out. Good thing Maru told us to wear our flip-flops. We disembark straight into the shallow water, and the riverbed is muddy and rocky. We are met by community leaders at the river’s edge. The village reaches right down to the water. Old cement block buildings, once painted but now crumbly and worn, stand close together. Neighbors look out and shout out to us. We stop at one place and another. Everyone knows Enrique and Maru, and there’s laughing and teasing. At one place we are given a shot glass to share. I take a wee sip. Holy Beasts! There is a coal of fire in my mouth, in my throat, in my esophagus, in my gut. Oh, I remember this. Isabelino, an Afro-Colombian leader who I met in Brazil, had some. It is a sacred drink, made with herbs, but also with a high alcohol content. My stomachache eases. That’s good news!

Then, out of nowhere, a helicopter thunders overhead. It lands on the other side of the village. The army. We go closer to observe. Soldier after soldier, each shouldering a bundle, marches down from behind a hill, turns left and disappears. We watch them warily from a distance, then go down to the next street. The leaders tell us what is going on. The soldiers have set up camp, smack at the edge of the village, on a jutting bit of land sticking into the curve of the river.

Adam, who carries himself with calm and confidence, consults with the villagers. Leaving them behind, we gringos move forward to check in with the military camp. An infantry specialist comes out to see us, a little surprised. Adam and Gimena converse with him, and Alex and I fall back. Soldiers should not be here, while we have every right. We are invited guests and, of course, we are unarmed. Quietly I take out my phone and snap a few shots. The soldiers have brought in heaps of provisions, what look like sacks of sugar or rice. Everyone is polite if tense.

I get the story in pieces. Officially, it seems, the military came to search for evidence concerning the four community leaders—three brothers and a cousin—who were kidnapped, disappeared and in the end murdered in April and May. Adam raises his eyebrows.

Later, I get a few more pieces of the puzzle. Valle de Cauca, a distant, forgotten corner of Colombia, became a central battleground and hiding place for the fighters in the civil war. It was mostly controlled by FARC guerrillas. After the 2016 peace accords went into effect, the FARC disbanded, moving into controlled de-escalation communities. But along the Naya, this left a vacuum of power, and of course the movement of drugs continues. There is a lot of money involved. Adam says that he has heard that ordinary soldiers request to be sent to this region. This is the place to make money. That may be the real reason the army is here. And behind the army, the paramilitary waits.

Finally, we are back at the boat, a new one able to go further up the river. I climb in beside Marcia’s daughter, Yasmin, in the front row, the bumpiest place. The green jungle walls climb higher and higher on either side of us, as the river gets both shallower and narrower. A couple of lime-green iguanas scuttle into the brush. There’s no more sun to burn us—it’s rumbling and cloudy up in the darkening heavens. Occasional single wooden houses jut up on stilts, and every once in a while, another Humanitarian Zone, with its big vinyl sign declaring it to be a weapons-free area, exclusively for civilian use. There are children running along the shore, people in impossibly skinny dugout canoes, standing or sitting, and others leaning on the window frames of the houses. Everyone waves, on the water and on the land.

The boat sways and swoops. On one riverbend intersection we come across, incredibly, my friend Isabelino, who had given me a sip of the sacred drink when we were in Brazil. We wave and laugh, and then our boats charge off like horses to gallop in opposite directions. The boat drones. I’m not sure we’ll ever get there. We haven’t seen houses for a while, when on one swoop we hear a sickening scrape and thud. Then the engine dies. Our boat turns lazily in the current and starts floating aimlessly downstream. Where will we stop? Sometimes it’s better not to ask anything and just encomendarse (hand yourself over) to God.

Our able boatman manages to get us into one quiet lull on the river’s edge and then another. Going backwards, we come to a house high on the riverbank. He calls up. A gruff answer comes down. Then a man appears with a rifle of some sort. Shouting, suspicion back and forth. It looks like he won’t help. Are we going to have to float down further? But then, it seems, peace has been made. The man on the shore disappears, comes back and down to our boat. He has a thin white wire. The motor is raised out of the water. I hold my breath and look around. Everyone seems relaxed. Then we all cheer as the engine putt putts. We’re off again.

The going is tenuous, with the driver occasionally killing the motor. We are too heavy, and the river too shallow. Once or twice, we get out of the boat and walk along a sandbar. At one point, Alex, who’s a big man, falls into the river while exiting the boat. But there’s not one complaint, just a smiling resignation at riding the rest of the way in his wet jeans.

Rain rushes down. Tarps appear from the boat’s storage, and we wrap them around ourselves. I tuck the end in around Yasmin. She’s shivering. I take off my sunscreen shirt and wrap it around her, and then the tarp, and then my arm holding it all in place. Then it happens: I love her. This little girl, who has the bravest mother: Marcia, who has traveled to Spain and to the States, who has seen and touched and laughed at snow, who has macheted her way through every rock planted on her path, a rural Colombian Indigenous woman with no recognized rights. Her sheer will is making things happen.

At every bend in the river Enrique drapes himself off the bow of the boat, holding tight to an oar, and measures for depth. For a long time, it is announced that Las Conchas is 15 minutes away, just around the next corner, until, at last, half of us are dumped onto a sandbar while the boat makes its final push to the community. Then comes back for the others. It is dark, and the rain is torrential. We were supposed to arrive at noon, and now it’s seven in the evening. In all the boat trip took almost nine hours.

We shake our feathers out in a dry little house on stilts. Baby Kaila, who didn’t cry once during the trip, and her mother are welcomed joyously, and Kaila disappears into the arms of one auntie and then another, and then through a series of cousins, or sisters and brothers. Her mother rests after the long ride. Nidiria sits and laughs with her old friends. The WOLA people talk softly with our hosts.

At last we make our way in the dark, in the rain, up a walkway that has become a stream, to a school. We sit at the small desks, and the room fills up. Someone jerry-rigs a lightbulb and a microphone to a cord which goes out the window to a generator somewhere. More neighbours come. The room is packed. People stand thick along the outside of the barred windows.

Before we talk, a smaller group of men and women gather in front of the classroom, to drum, to sing. How could I ever describe this sound, not even music, exactly? How could I, with my thin-white-Nordic blood, ever say anything at all about what this drumming and singing means? Something so ancient, so holy, so filled with sorrow and resistance, struggle and survival of 15-20 generations from the capture of their ancestors in Africa. If this isn’t Resurrection, I don’t know what is. The shaking, the lament, the song of determination fills the room, fills the hearts and souls of everyone present, pressing us all into a bonded commitment, a kind of vow that can never be broken. When they finish at long last, I don’t know what else needs to be said. The woman leading the singing says one thing: “This is a song of gratitude, and welcome. Thank you.” I lower my head. My eyes burn.

But of course, there is more to be said. One person after another speaks a part of the story. Adam types away on his computer, which came upriver sealed in a freezer-size Ziploc bag.

On April 17th, three men, brothers Hermes Angulo Zamora and Obdulio Angulo Zamora and their cousin, Simeón Olave Angulo, disappeared from somewhere along the river. After they failed to return, community members searched up and down the waterways. They reported the disappearance to government officials in Buenaventura. Tensions continued to climb. A third brother, Iber Angulo Zamora, was increasingly threatened. Support was again demanded from the departmental capital.

At last, on May 5th, a commission from the Human Rights Ombudsman office came to escort Iber out of the region. On the water they were confronted by armed men in a boat, who pulled Iber into their possession and sped away. Later, the four disappeared men were found executed.

Fears are high that the army is using these murders as an excuse to move in and take over the region. And right behind them, the paramilitaries. The river is, some community leaders say, already surrounded by the army, who have no regard for the communities’ ways of practicing vigilance. Nidiria points out that for more than 300 years Afro-descendant communities have defended and conserved the river and the earth. There is hope for increased unity between Afro and Indigenous people of the Naya.

There is some debate around small-time coca farmers, up and down the river. These farmers have never become wealthy but have served as a source for the raw coca leaves. Coca farmers are trapped. They have few other options. The government promised to help with new crops, and thousands of farmers signed contracts stating that they will no longer plant coca. But as usual, those getting shafted are the already poor. There has been no meaningful support for the transition, and in the meantime, the power struggle to control the coca trade ratchets up, with farmers trapped in the middle.

The discussion carries on for hours. Lollipops and chocolate cookies are distributed at some point. Finally the gathering comes to an end. I sit up quickly when Enrique asks if I might pray with the community.

“Of course,” I say. How to pray here in this place, with these people, what can I possibly say? Thank God for the Holy Spirit who always gives the words to speak. I think, well, why not start the prayer like I start every prayer. Not sure if it will work here.

“El Señor sea con ustedes,” I say.

“Y con tu espíritu,” comes thundering back, more people than I can count.

And so, in the dim flickering light, in the pouring rain, in a schoolhouse in Las Conchas I close my eyes and we pray.

3.

It rains all night in Las Conchas. There’s not a sound in the little dry house, except for a dog—there’s always a dog. Bark. Bark. Bark. But I sleep completely senseless, wiped out from so much travelling, listening, until the first roosters crack the morning chorus.

We are up with the first light. We eat soda crackers and drink hot, sweet coffee. Then we go back down the river, so much faster than the day before. The shallow areas from yesterday have filled in with last night’s rain. It’s still blustery and even cold, especially in the fast boat. Marcia and I make a Yasmin sandwich, and we wrap ourselves all up in tarps. There are children in school uniforms in the thin canoas, standing up and pushing along the river’s edge. Today’s the first day of school, after holidays, and they are heading to the nearest classroom. Yasmin whispers to me, “We have school today too.” I have no idea how far we still have to go downriver. Go, boat, go!

We arrive in San Francisco. No sign of the soldiers. We change boats and float down past the giant Jesus frozen in eternal blessing.

Before long we spy Joaquincito. It’s still morning, about 9 o’clock. Marcia, Yasmin and I disembark, climb the wooden stairs. The WOLA folks and the Comisión people wave and push off. About a month, Adam yells over the motor, until they’ll have their official WOLA report on the Naya River. We duck under the low roof and step in—suddenly we’re in the Casa Grande. It is dark, cool. I imagine it full of people for ceremonies and meetings.

So, here I am. Now what? Surrender, open, trust, love. Plutarco comes out to greet us. He’s the head of the community. Later I find out he’s Marcia’s older brother and the community health promoter.

Joaquincito is the Resguardo, the reserve of the Eperara community of the lower Naya River. There are about a hundred Indigenous nations all over Colombia, settled from the lowland rivers that head west to the Pacific, or north to the Caribbean, or east to join the great Amazon, to the highlands that meet the mountains and the edge of the Andes. In Joaquincito there are 42 households, mostly Indigenous, with just a few Afro or Mestizo families blended in. Along the river there are far more Afro-descendant settlements, 30 times as many as Indigenous communities.

Marcia leads me to the other side of the Casa Grande, through a wooden kitchen with a fire pit rigged up on cement blocks with a sand base. There’s the biggest cooking pot I’ve ever seen—upside down now. That must feed everybody.

“We just had a big feast,” says Marcia. “Five days ago.”

We shimmy down a treacherously (for me) damp wooden ladder, across some soft planks, then up onto a long, cement platform, about three feet above the wet ground.

“That’s the bridge,” says Marcia. “We fought years for that. Blood was spilt for it.” The bridge stretches out along the front of the houses. Each house reaches the bridge with a simple plank. Drainage canals carve into the land, which is often underwater depending on the level of the river, which floods with heavy rain and the sway of the ocean’s tide.

We go down two, three, four houses to Plutarco’s place.

“We’ll stay next door, with my mother,” says Marcia. “But it’s more comfortable here.” We slip inside. “I’ll get breakfast.”

I meet Plutarco’s wife, Paula. There are piles of kids, Plutarco and Paula’s children, Paula Andrea, Paulo Andres, Junior and little Ingrid. And Marcia’s son, Alejandro. Then comes Marcia’s mother up the plank, carrying two full, sloshing pails of water from the river. She nods a greeting to me and snaps a few words in Siapidara.

I sit in a chair at a small table. Marcia has disappeared through a door and left me with the kids. They are taking turns swinging in a hammock. Ingrid, who is one and a bit, stares at me with a look of suspicion as she moves from sister’s hip to cousin’s arms, then back again. Who’s this woman, say her fierce undisguised eyes.

Marcia comes back in a bit with a plate piled with food—just for me. Yikes. Four boiled green bananas, a hill of rice and a piece of rich pink pork. “That’s from the feast,” she says. “My brother smoked it. It takes a long time, but it lasts then for a good while, about a week.” Of course. There’s no refrigeration here, only electricity once in a while with an expensive generator.

Dear Lord, I’m in Rio Naya bacon heaven! Who knew that pork could be this delicious? Greasy and meaty and smoky. The green bananas are starchy and bland, perfect with a piece of bacon embedded.

While I’m finishing up a great fuss is going on in the house across from me—later I find out it’s the general store, which enjoys the only constant electricity, provided by a large solar panel. We head out to see. José de la Cruz has hunted an animal in the night, and now it’s coming to be weighed, and sold, I presume. I ask what it is, and get “rabbit” and “wild pig” as answers. The beast is now headless, so I can’t really tell. Not by looking at its little trotters. A sharp thin knife carves it into pieces.

After this, Marcia calls me to go back to the Casa Grande. There’s going to be a community meeting—a chance for me to get to know more people. We gather in the cool dark space. We sit on wide platform benches, men, many women, and many more children. Plutarco greets me officially. I say thank you, and then I listen.

Arturo, the school teacher, speaks first: “We are one of 102 different nations in what is now called Colombia. After the Spanish invasion we were called savages, then we were called, pejoratively, “minors” or infants. In 1991 there were reforms to the national law and we were recognized as nations, and the Afro-descendant communities were as well. We lived in peace. Then in 2001 we suffered the terrible internal displacement. We fled to Buenaventura, to other rivers, and no one helped us. We returned, and we know our rights, but so far that is just on paper. In 1989 the limits of our Reserve were defined, then in 2005 they were extended. There has been some disagreement with the Afro-community, but there has been a lot of work on building unity. The government owes us a lot, and we have received barely anything. Now, for example, they are saying something ridiculous: We own the land, as Indigenous people, but the government owns what’s under the land. That makes no sense to us.”

Oh dear, I think. The mining companies are already hovering here. Possibly Canadian. Beware.

Then Inez speaks: “I am the head of the Women’s Association. We have had a lot of troubles. The government promised us support, but nothing at all has arrived. Then there were the fumigations. We lost everything: even our seeds. We had yams and yucca, sugarcane and plantains. We lost most of it. The earth no longer yields much. We’ve had to go further and further into the forest, away from the village.”

Norberta speaks: “We don’t want mining or any such thing. We haven’t asked for much, but we haven’t received anything at all. We need a health centre, a school, decent housing. We’ve had no support since the displacement in 2001. We have insisted that there be dialogue. We are tired after 52 years of war. Our young people don’t want war. We live in paradise here. We have taken care of this place, we have looked after our own. They don’t want to admit that the military are here, and the paramilitaries, but we know that they are around. This is a Reserve, not a Humanitarian Zone like they have up the river. But this is a weapons-free zone too. Twice the army has arrived in the community, and twice the community has chased them off. All the Naya River has been in resistance. We have been fighting for 527 years, with our own culture, language and art. The last straw was the fumigations in 2012 and 2013.”

Cecilia agrees: “Everything was lost. The earth herself got sick. Our food supplies have diminished. Our pineapple, for example. And we live in fear. We built our Sacred Big House in 1991, and we have been saying forever: Mother Earth is not to be destroyed, not our forests. This is the very heart, soul, strength of the Earth. We are the only Indigenous community on the lower Naya, and we have been fighting militarization and big companies. And now they are threatening to fumigate again.”

The meeting goes on until many have spoken. I feel like I’m starting to get a sense of the story. Just a taste.

Marcia invites me to go back to the house. They are going to carry on in meeting. I am exhausted. I need a nap. I think fondly of the hammock as I negotiate my way up the slippery plank to Plutarco’s house. But what do I find? Ingrid is sleeping in the hammock, across its soft width, a perfect little bundle. I am embarrassed at how grouchy I feel: here I am uncomfortable and tired—and jealous of a baby!

Marcia is away in the Casa Grande for a long time. I’m glad she doesn’t feel like she has to entertain me constantly. I sit and read my book by the Andean theologian Victor Bascopé, the man who showed me how to make coca leaf tea and how to chew coca leaves when I was in Ecuador. He had told me about how hard it was to research the detailed story of the invasion of the Spaniards. The murder of so many leaders, both named and those now forgotten, and so many others. The treasures that were stolen, and much, much worse, the theft, destruction, attempted annihilation of Andean cosmology.

“When I look at the rocks making up the walls and churches and colonial buildings I just cry,” says Victor. “Each stone is an ancestor.”

I am reading about the nosebleed-high Andes, and I am here in the warm always-wet lowlands. The people and stories are linked, though not the same, of course. The invasion narratives of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the English and the French have common threads. For King, for Queen, for Church.

At last, Marcia’s back from the meeting. They aren’t going to Buenaventura tomorrow after all. Not until Wednesday. I can go with them. Marcia’s worried that I haven’t had lunch. I’m stuffed, I reassure her. She’s trying so hard to help me, to guess what I need. I am still figuring out how to be here. Mostly I try not to be a nuisance. Whatever may be uncomfortable or different or not the way I would do it. Forget it! Receive everything. I am filled with gratitude.

We go to the sacred river. Yasmin comes, and little Paula joins us. Everyone jumps into the river. Even though we’re in the warm equatorial waters, I have to ease myself in, down the worn ladder. The water is brown and slow and cool. Once I’m in, the river seems wide and endless. We splash and play. Marcia washes herself, and then a tub of clothes, while sitting on a low wooden step. The girls pretend to be sharks, and they do cartwheels from the soft bank into the water. They are like baby otters, twisting and splashing and smiling. They find a canoa, and they paddle around and around. They convince me to get in, and around we go, laughing without walls of any kind.

This river is holy. It is the artery of the whole body, the means by which people here live. It is where they bathe and wash and pull water for everyday things. It is their means of travel and their source of fish. The river changes, with the tides and the cycles of the moon and the rains.

“Naya Tooja.” Sacred River Naya, Marcia whispers. “Cho nara weda tooja beda.” No human hand could have ever made this river. No human hands dug the channels or made the turns. We float, and more than that: we are carried.

4.

It rains all night again, and I sleep in Marcia’s bed—without Marcia—with the mosquito netting all tucked in around in the absolute dark, in the absolute silence, but for the roosters that set one another off, then call down the row at three, four, five in the morning. By five or six o’clock, I know, everyone will be getting up. There was one single shattering of thunder last night—I didn’t see the schism of lightning. It was after we were in bed around nine and it seemed to crack the wooden houses with the power of its sound. Yasmin began to cry. Her mother’s soft words pulled her back into sleep, to comfort, to shelter.

Again, I wonder what I can do, what I can say? It takes so much energy to host me, to welcome me, to worry about me, to make space for me. Would it be better if I did something in a different way? Why am I here? Of course, I am not the Great White Saviour. But is there some part of me that wants to be? I have nothing to offer but my self. Marcia is clear, and she has shared with others: Emilie doesn’t come to bring projects or money.

Yet there is something about me being here—for me, and for the community. What does it mean that someone sees, someone notices, someone listens? For them and for me. I lie and think and toss a little. The rain comes down in steady soft waves along the roof. In a while, it is not quite as dark as it used to be.

At last it is five or so, and we get up. The day starts. Children are sleepy, still staying close to home, and to mothers. The women go into the wet side of the house. I am starting to figure it out. The front of the house is the ‘dry’ part. Here people sleep, sometimes in a separate room walled off, and in the back is where the cooking and washing happens, in a room still up on stilts. The back food-area is divided too, the preparing side and the washing part—where dishes and fish, root vegetables and even babies are rinsed and scrubbed—and then out on the very edge a fire on a bed of sand and stone. The back area opens to the sides and the bright green everywhere of growing things. This room is where the action is, at least in the daytime. Grandmas and mothers and aunties and kids gather here. Another hammock and a few small stools are occupied, so I sit on the floor. I like it better here than on my own on the other side of the wooden wall, where I spent the afternoon reading yesterday. Plutarco comes in with a mess of fish, and Marcia’s peeling green bananas. For now, we drink sweet hot coffee and eat soda crackers while the fish get cleaned.

I’m starting to understand food here now too. All meals seem to be a starch and a protein. Starches so far have been yucca, taro, purple yams, and green banana. The first three, and the last too sometimes, are prepared boiled. Twice we have the bananas fried, once whole, and once squashed into disks, patacones. The proteins we eat are best bacon ever, eggs, lots of fish, boiled or fried, beans, and once, chicken—but we’ll get to that part later. Everything is so good. Then there’s the fruit: sugarcane (peeled, sucked and chewed, spitting the hard, twiggy part out), green coconuts (drinking the fresh water first, then eating the thin, slippery bits inside after cracking open with a machete), guanabana, grenadilla, cherimoya, pitaya (weird yellow blobby thing with black spots, mushy white and melting inside), lulo (only for juice), papaya, maracuya (passion fruit? eat together with crunchy seeds), bacao which I thought was cacao, and is indeed a relative (very strong smell and taste, bitter crossed with sour, inedible for me—I give it to happy, receiving children), bananas and plantains, which I only see cooked and green, and my favourite: zapote—pumpkin orange, sweet and slimy, with two fat, long, slippery brown seeds. The zapote is given to me as I walk along the raised cement platform by a young man rushing by with two of them. He stops and turns when he sees me, and hands me one of his treasures.

The fruit is all gift. People come by the house to deliver or call me into their house across the wooden plank. I receive everything, try everything, like everything (except the bacao).

Doña Cecilia particularly likes to come by. She talks to me, and she asks me questions. She invites me to her house. “My house is really clean,” she says, and she shows me around the yard, back a bit from the cement platform and along another platform, this one made of wood. Her yard is a little bit drier—at least for now—as it is farther from the slow, mud-brown river that rises up every twenty days or so and floods under the closer houses. She shows me where she has a raised compost pile. She shows me her flowers, her fruit trees and her medicinal herbs—she and her husband, Bejerano, are healers. “This one is for stomach upset, this for headache, this for (mal de) ojo, this for sadness.” She takes me—and a whole handful of children—up a narrow path that leads even farther away from the river. We should have gumboots, she says, eyeing my flip-flops skeptically. We wander up the squashy path until it is apparent that it just won’t work. The earth is too soft. I am ankle deep in mud. Further up, she points, we have our plantings, the yams, and papas chinas (taro). She tells me more about how terrible it has been since the fumigations.

The Colombian government, with the full support of the USA and its ‘war on drugs,’ has engaged in extensive spraying for years. The chemical defoliant, glyphosate—the main toxic component in Monsanto’s Roundup—was repeatedly sprayed in aerial raids on coca plants and—according to residents of the Naya River basin—everything else: food crops, houses, animals and even people. In 2015 the government promised to stop fumigations by airplane after the World Health Organization declared that glyphosate was a proven carcinogen. However, the threat of resumed spraying remains, the latest possibility being drones to deliver the poison.

“So many things have just dried up,” says Doña Cecilia, sadly. “No pineapple at all. Nothing is growing in some areas.” People have told me of strange diseases not known in these regions before. Marcia’s mother had to endure the choppy boat ride to Buenaventura and have a large tumour removed from her neck.

Don Bejerano shows me his carvings: a sweet little turtle, a bird, and a gorgeous walking stick carved with a couple of birds, and just below the handle, a man, holding a staff of his own and a mochila, a woven bag.

Doña Cecilia worries at the fire and brings me my first fried fish of the day—crispy with salt sizzled right through. I pick at it and eat it delicately, saving on the side bones thinner than a needle. Her grandson comes by, and Doña Cecilia sends him up a palm tree to get us a couple of fresh coconuts. He sheds his shoes and shimmies up fast, but stops about two-thirds of the way up. He yells something down to his grandma, then scoots down quickly.

“There’s a new wasp’s nest up there!” they explain to me, laughing. We’ll have to wait for our drinks.

As we share stories—I tell them about my red-headed grandson and my black shaggy dog—I can feel the threads begin to connect us. Doña Cecilia tells me about her son, who died, about how heartbreaking and constant is her desolation. Once, she says, a long time ago, she tried to live somewhere else; her husband is from the Chocó region, but she could never get used to not being on the Naya. She tells me her story of the displacement in 2001.

It was further up the river, in the Afro communities where the worst violence took place. By various estimates, between 40 and 130 civilians were killed over a few days, many brutally. Bodies were dissected with a chainsaw. Quickly, the information flew down the river: leave, now, get out. Most everyone did. It was a massive exodus of boats, big and small. Some went into the town of Puerto Merizalde to stay with family, many went into hiding along quieter branches of the river. And others went all the way to Buenaventura. The whole river was drained of people. Doña Cecilia says that at first they refused to go. But at last Doña Cecilia, Don Bejerano, and their children climbed onto a boat. They made it downriver, to a branch along the mangroves where they hid for five days.

Then they decided to go back, no matter what. Five families returned to Joaquincito together. They stayed in one house, afraid of the paramilitaries, who were hunting up and down the river. They stayed and ate what they could.

“The worst thing was listening to the dogs and the chickens die. We had nothing to feed them, and almost everyone had gone. They didn’t have time to take their animals. The animals cried and cried from the pangs of hunger, and finally they died. The Sisters (from the order of Mother Laura) heard we were starving and brought us a little bit of food, dried rice and beans. We held out for a few weeks, but in the end, we had to travel down to the city, to Buenaventura, where for two years we lived as refugees.”

We sit quietly together. I am thinking about the recent murders on the river, the ongoing deaths, the attacks on leaders of all social organizations. Back at the conference in Medellin, we named and prayed for the over three hundred Colombian community leaders murdered since the signing of the Peace Accords, two years ago.

We sit and then I go back with the flock of children to Plutarco’s house. We eat more fried fish, soft and salty, which never seems to be too filling. Marcia’s sister-in-law drops by, with a young woman—her daughter-in-law—and her brand-new baby grandson. We chat, and I hold the baby, and then, when it seems polite, hand him back to his mother. The women consult for a while in Siapidara. I smile nicely. Marcia comes up to me and asks me quietly, “They want you to baptize the baby.”

My heart thuds. What to do? How can I be both pastoral and stay within the bounds of acceptable church practice? I know I can do the former and don’t always trust myself with the latter.

The only important question in this instant is: What would be of assistance to this family? What do they need? I don’t worry about correctness within the church, but do I care about being honest with this family. Baptism is a mark of belonging. Of course, all creation, and every creature, especially this perfect little one with dark hair and black eyes, lying in my arms, is loved, adored, treasured by his family—and by the One who made us all. Baptism is a way we humans turn and shout yes back to God.

There is no priest or pastor who ever visits this community. And me? I am, now, a friend. I say yes, let’s bless the baby! Let’s get some water. They bring me clean water, from the big jugs of filtered water left for me by the prepared WOLA people. We pour a bowlful. We gather around, the children and the women. I hold little Liam Mejia. We pray together. May the Creator of Heaven and Earth ever hold you close, little one. May you flourish in love, in this place. May you grow to the fullness of your life. May you play in this river for many, many years. May the fruit be abundant. May the pineapples return.

In my heart I pray that the wolves of greed and violence that surround this community may be held at bay. I pray that the Naya won’t be invisible to the world. That the Afro communities standing for their right to live, to flourish, may be allowed to exist as signs of the bursting through of justice. And that the Indigenous communities may be left to practice their knowledge, their time-out-of-mind knowing of things that matter. So many things that we have forgotten. And I pray that we—the rich, the north—can turn our hearts away from greed and towards love for all creation.

Liam is asleep. He moves and stretches a little as the water pours off of his head, onto the wooden floor, through the cracks, and back to the water below.

Earlier in the day, as I peered out of the wooden morning window and out along the cement walkway, I saw a woman carrying two unfortunate upside-down chickens. They seemed to have given up, no squawking was happening as their tails pointed to the sky. Uh no, I thought. Too much. Has Marcia asked for them to be brought to me here? I am being a nuisance. I nodded as the woman approached, then sighed in relief as she walked by our plank, down one, two, three doors, and up to another house.

But now, after our blessing, I’m told that there is a chicken soup coming back to Plutarco’s house. The chickens were killed to celebrate this impromptu baptism. I am served a big bowl. Liam sleeps and we eat.

Later I spy his mother with a whole group of young women and men out on a raised platform playing soccer with a squashed, wet ball. Every few minutes the ball flies off into the mud and the water on the ground. Then it starts raining. No one stops playing, laughing, shouting, and the game goes on until the sun hovers over the western bank of the river.

Just before it sinks into the jungle trees, Marcia and I go along the cement platform, then along the wooden walkway to the holy river, to her most holy river, her cho nara weda tooja beda, her ancestral river, made by no human hands. Here we sit and dangle our feet into the warm water. Tomorrow, before dawn, we will be going out to the open sea, through waves rolling bigger than our boat, to Buenaventura—one of the most dangerous cities in Colombia—she with Plutarco to settle things, to fight with the state, me to catch a bus back to the Convent of Mother Laura in Medellin, and a plane back to Canada. We feel sad already. I will go with my heart made bigger, my life somehow different. Marcia—who knows why she reached out to me, what she saw, what she sees?

It doesn’t matter. This is how two women become friends.

Afterword

This essay was written in 2019-2021. Since my visit I have had steady, if laconic, exchanges with Marcia. Sea changes have happened in her life, and in Colombia. In January 2020 Marcia welcomed a new baby, with her husband, Colombian Indigenous activist, Wilson Poirama. In June 2022, Marcia began advanced studies at the Pontifical University in Medellin.

Marcia writes, “Agradecer primero a mi dios por darme una oportunidad de vivir y también a mis amigo internacinale que me ayudaron para mí salud y esa es la razón de vivir en este planeta tierra, agradecer a mi esposo wilson poirama por apoyar mis metas, mis carrera profesional, en todas mis proyecion, tambien familiares como hermano, hermanas, mi madre querida, mis hijos gracias a todos asi puedo avanzar nueva mente encontrar en la universidad”

Translation: “First of all, I would like to thank my god for giving me an opportunity to live and also my international friends who helped me with my health (crisis), and that is the reason for living on this planet Earth; I would like to thank my husband Wilson Poirama for supporting my goals, my professional career, in all my plans, also relatives like my brother, sisters, my dear mother, my children; thanks to all so I can advance again in the university.”

There are hopeful changes at the national level as well. In August 2022, Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla and the ex-mayor of Bogotá and, thrillingly, Francia Márquez were inaugurated as President and Vice-President of Colombia. Márquez, an Afro-descendant woman from Cauca, a renowned and beloved community leader and anti-mining activist, has invited her countrypeople to join her in living a “vida sabrosa”, a life with flavor, a life with dignity, joy and power. Popular movements are gathering strength.

Adam and Gimena from the Washington Office on Latin America have kept their eyes on the Colombian story, especially watching and reporting on the risks and triumphs of local community leaders. Here is their fine article summarizing the current context.

I plan to visit Marcia in March 2023, as part of the gathering of the Óscar Romero International Christian Network in Solidarity with the Peoples of Latin America (SICSAL).

Dheepa R. Maturi

In my childhood, I remember whispering the names under my breath, determined to ward off my family’s amusement by pronouncing them precisely: Tiruchirappalli and Thanjavur, Dindigul and Erode, Coimbatore and Chidambaram. These were the cities of my summer vacations, where I visited relatives, temples, and sights throughout the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Occasionally in view as we traveled by car and train was Cauvery, South India’s third-largest river, bisecting Tamil Nadu roughly west to east. My father would point out her drying riverbeds and then explain water cycles and drought and the timing of monsoons. After sweltering hours on the road, I wasn’t particularly receptive to his facts and figures. Nevertheless, I listened groggily as he reminisced about the Cauvery of his own childhood, her waters ample and clear, and as he worried for her future.

Now, decades later, Cauvery’s crisis conditions have accelerated from pressing to dire. With so many Indian cities losing groundwater at an alarming rate—and indeed, predicted to lose it entirely at any moment—their governments increasingly turn to Cauvery’s river water, extracting it with pumps, collecting it in tanks, and then transporting it to clamoring crowds.

As groundwater drains, the water table falls below river levels—which means Cauvery now feeds the groundwater, too, like a mother pouring her attention wherever she’s called. But as climate change alters monsoon patterns, Cauvery herself is barely fed and never replenished.

As I hear of the worsening droughts, of the increasing desperation and displacement, it’s particularly harrowing to learn which cities in the Cauvery basin are approaching Day Zero, when all the taps run dry. Some are those I visited throughout my childhood, the cities where family members live at the front lines.

A wide rectangular room anchored my grandparents’ home in the city of Karur and accommodated most household activities, even eating and sleeping. As a child, a major source of my amusement was cartwheeling from one end of this room to the other, where the narrow passage to the kitchen and bathroom commenced.

At that entryway stood a tiny sink with an equally miniscule faucet—everyone’s first stop for morning ablutions, specifically, toothbrushing. I still remember my mother’s scolding when I accidentally let the water run while brushing, as well my relatives’ look of shock at my wanton disregard. I learned that two or three quick fistfuls of water from the tap were considered sufficient for a rinse and eventually mastered those motions. But my irritation—and shame—lingered.

At the time, I didn’t consider the possible reasons for the tight management and careful husbanding of household water—I only felt the inconvenience. I struggled to get my long hair fully washed with the allotted two buckets of bath water. Sitting on a short stool, I used a small chombu to pour the water over my head; it took me a week or so to get the knack of maximizing its coverage.

During summers of drought, I sometimes had to draw my bathwater from a storage well at the side of the bathroom. During those droughts, the thick wall of this storage well was lined with larger chombus, used to catch extra water whenever the taps were running. That captured water would be used later for washing clothes or cleaning the household.

Even in a clean and well-maintained home like my grandparents’, the stored water containers attracted the dengue-spreading Aedes mosquito species, which hospitalized me at age seven. The stored water itself also presented challenges, often tasting a bit strange and even altering the flavor of the food cooked in it.

My grandparents’ home was comfortably outfitted by community standards, with an attached groundwater well, some pipes, and a few sinks. Unlike other families, we did not have to fetch water from elsewhere. With attentive management, there was enough with which to cook, wash, and to transport in stainless steel thermoses when we traveled—after, of course, it had been thoroughly boiled, filtered, and cooled.

At a certain point during my summer vacations, one vision sustained me: returning home to America, filling a tall glass with ice, then adding water straight from the tap. I dreamed of that brimming liquid and my first frosty gulp and the sweet taste.

Just a few more weeks, I’d tell myself.

As a child learning Bharath Natyam, a classical dance form native to South India, I was discouraged at times by the notoriously rigorous physical training. I knew, though, if I bided my time, I’d eventually cross the bridge from nritta (physical steps) to nrithya (facial expressions), and finally, to what I longed for: natya (drama). At its heart, Bharath Natyam is a storytelling tradition, and I longed to be the one dancing those stories.

The stories were those I’d learned from my parents and grandparents, from books and Sunday School lessons—compelling tales of sages, warriors, kings. Later, in high school and college, I enjoyed researching these stories further, digging into their philosophical and spiritual dimensions, and then watching as expert dancers communicated those more esoteric aspects.

For example, a physically skilled dancer might accurately execute Shiva’s signature tandava dance—but could she demonstrate how it symbolized the ever-pulsing circle of creation and destruction? An expressive dancer might easily portray a woman’s assiduous search for her beloved—but could she evoke the soul’s longing to merge with Oneness?

When I could see and understand what a dancer truly meant to convey, it felt exciting and revelatory, like a flash of light.

At a 2019 Isha Foundation fundraiser for Cauvery Calling, a massive river revitalization effort, I watched a set of dances relating well-known tales of the woman named Cauvery, the wife of a renowned sage, who accepted the task of irrigating South India. At one point during the evening, the featured dancer told the story of another river, the Ganga, whose connection to India’s history and mythology is as deeply rooted as Cauvery’s. Though I’d heard many versions of Ganga’s story, my skin prickled at this particular interpretation of the old tale:

Humanity needed Ganga’s sacred waters on the Earth, and she was ordered to descend there from heaven. Angered by the order, Ganga planned to sweep the Earth away in a furious torrent. Appealed to for assistance, Shiva, the divine ascetic and yogi, caught Ganga as she descended in the thickly matted locks of his hair, where she remains now, eternally entangled. She is released only gradually, reliably, and sustainably for humanity’s survival.

Locks. Entanglement. Sustainable release. In the context of the event and the information being shared there, I understood what the dancer wanted to tell me.

I saw that flash of light.

In the last few generations, forests flanking Indian rivers have been cleared for a variety of reasons, for example to follow non-traditional agricultural methods. For millennia, those forests produced thick, interlocking networks of roots and topsoil, which trapped water in the earth. That water was released gradually, feeding the river continuously and sustainably. The dense tree cover resulted in transpiration, drawing rainfall, and acting as another source of water for the river. The river never dried, and, due to the tightly-woven root networks, the monsoons couldn’t wash away all of the nutrient-rich topsoil.

Encoded in the dance was this age-old wisdom. Shiva’s locks represent the underground root-soil networks. Ganga’s capture represents the sustainable release of water and preservation of topsoil. This is a story of the structures and cycles holding the water in our rivers. It’s a story of the natural world in balance.

It is estimated that Indian land has supported agriculture for at least 10,000 years. However, over only the last few generations, the availability and nutritional value of its soil has plummeted due to climate change factors and the recent “Green Revolution” that encouraged farmers to abandon traditional crops, deploy chemical fertilizers, and plant high-yield seeds.

Lacking adequate water and nutrient-rich soil to produce crops, and now trapped in debt and despair, Indian farmers are committing suicide at a shocking rate—some sources estimate 60,000 suicides over the last three decades. This desperation has prompted responsive measures such as the Cauvery Calling campaign, an alliance of scientists, universities, associations, and government bodies.

Soil health is deeply connected to river health, and as such, soil depletion results in river depletion. Cauvery Calling is implementing a large-scale intervention, planting a kilometer-width of trees on both sides of the Cauvery, over her full length, in order to build up organic material in the soil, increase water percolation into the river, and promote water retention within the river. Farmers enrolled in the program are gradually diversifying to fruit tree-based agriculture and are receiving educational and moral support during the entire period of transition.

There is an old saying in the Tamil language: even if the rains fail, Cauvery will never fail. Sayings like these are now subject to question. Within a few generations, 10,000 years of traditional agriculture have come undone. Within a few generations, rivers that flowed for millennia have drained, and the forests that sustained nutrient-rich topsoil have been depleted.

It is now predicted that 25 percent of India will turn to desert. I find it unimaginable that this land I visited regularly, bursting with plants and insects, exploding with color and fragrance, overflowing with fruits and flowers, could lose its ability to support life—unimaginable that its teeming soil could turn to sand.

As this desertification advances, I wonder whether the erstwhile profession of water divination—the detection of drinkable water by examining local vegetation—might revive. The ancient sage Sarasvata composed a geo-botanical guide to prospect for groundwater based upon micro-environmental ecology, noting how, for example, the presence of a date palm near jujube and piu trees pointed to water, as did certain ficus varietals in proximity to one another. Later, in the 6th century C.E., Varahamihira built upon this work, listing 120 plants serving as groundwater indicators. Though such guides may possess less relevance due to irreparably damaged and altered landscapes, I suspect that the people drawn to this profession, being instinctively tuned to the natural world, will adapt.

I met such a figure recently, not in India, but in Santa Cruz, California. She was not a water diviner, but rather a forager who searched for edible foods among the grasses, weeds, and trees in the area.

When my husband and I began our hike with her, I found it difficult to concentrate, thinking of the wildfires that had raged in the area during the previous week, imagining another spark reigniting the landscape. But I slowly tuned in as the forager shared how to identify edible plants and explained which leaves and nuts and berries we could touch and eat. Each time, before placing an item in her mouth, she closed her eyes for a moment in gratitude to the land around her, the source of the food she consumed.

Though we hiked in a parched and dusty area, at one point we crossed into a clearing, its air fresh and cool. A pond rippled at our feet, inviting us to bend and touch the ground, to place our hands in the water.

I wished I could send myself backward in time to stop the car in India that held my child-self. I wished I could place her hands in the water, too. I’d ask her to feel Cauvery nourish the land, to look deeply into her waters.

I’d beg that child to ignore her various inconveniences. I’d ask her to stop worrying about pronunciations, to stop reciting city names, and instead to list all that the flowing water fed: Soil and Clouds, Leaves and Roots, Bodies and Cells.

Though I wouldn’t want to spoil her moment of communion, I’d feel obligated to warn her of the times to come, and to urge her to fight for the water, for her life, for the earth.

Sources

1. Das, Krishna N. and Shyamantha Asoken. “A Quarter of India’s Land Is Turning into Desert”. ScientificAmerican.org. Nature Publishing Group. 18 June 2014. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-quarter-of-india-s-land-is-turning-into-desert/

2. Isha Foundation. “Cauvery Calling”. https://www.ishaoutreach.org/en/cauvery-calling

3. Kumar-Rao, Arati. “India’s water crisis could be helped by better building, planning”. NationalGeographic.com. National Geographic Society. 15 July 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/07/india-water-crisis-drought-could-be-helped-better-building-planning/#close

4. Safi, Michael. “Suicides of nearly 60,000 Indian farmers linked to climate change, study claims”. TheGuardian.com. Guardian Media Group. 31 July 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/31/suicides-of-nearly-60000-indian-farmers-linked-to-climate-change-study-claims

5. Salopek, Paul. “India is in a historic water crisis. Will diverting 30 rivers solve it?” NationalGeographic.com. National Geographic Society. 6 March 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/india-diverting-30-rivers-to-solve-historic-water-crisis/

6. Zwerdling, Daniel. “‘Green Revolution’ trapping its farmers in debt.” Npr.org. Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 14 April 2009. https://www.npr.org/2009/04/14/102944731/green-revolution-trapping-indias-farmers-in-debt