creative writing on environmental justice
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 . . .
We are so used to statistics that many of us rarely bother about the numbers and what they really mean until alarms trigger us to act. We rarely drink the right amounts of water even when we dread heat injuries, cerebral edema, urinary and kidney problems, seizures, and hypovolemic shocks. The poems in this issue are like a sensor for diagnosing water levels and . . .
I grew up on the coast. That’s not unusual, coming from an island country as I do. Water is part of the daily life of islands, beyond the ways of drinking and planting that are common to all of us. Nearly every week my parents would take my sister and me down to the beach to play in the rock pools. The intertidal zone is something I never grew out of, and the sense memory . . .
Water: what is it good for? Absolutely everything.
(I’m sorry. But also not. I hope that’s stuck in your head now.)
In privileged areas worldwide, access to clean water is never far away. Water is so ubiquitous—and, depending where you live, so seemingly renewable—that, if you are in this population, it’s easy to forget how easily disrupted these systems are, . . .
I am a ghost. I don’t know if I was born this way, if I died when I was small, or if it happened later . . . . For a long time, those questions were important to me. But ghosts like me have existed in every culture and in every age. We existed when acknowledging our existence was punishable by death, we existed even when language . . .
These are the Supreme Court Justices of the United States of America who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022.
John Roberts
Samuel Alito
Clarence Thomas
Neil Gorsuch
Amy Coney Barrett
Brett Kavanaugh
Five Justices had stated publicly in the past—sometimes the very recent past—that they regarded Roe v. Wade as settled law. (The sixth never acknowledged . . .
Last September, they told us not to drink the water.
Our water, from our river, the same water that’s cooled every summer thirst, washed every dish at every birthday party, rinsed the sap off every Christmas since the day I was born.
The advisory was only a precaution, the news broadcast reassured us, but the Food Lion and Harris Teeter shelves were empty in hours . . .
By the hand of your great-uncle Zé and great-aunt Fernanda, you and your sister Amari enter the enormous bird enclosure. The cackle begins. The geese do what they do best, warn those inside and those one hundred metres around the farm that intruders have arrived. The sound is deafening. The peacocks join the chorus. You inspect the clay roost lined with straw, . . .
I.
My home was on fire.
Wildfires came with vengeance in late July, engulfed the forest and turned it to cinders.
It is a place with a long memory: centenarian pines reached to the skies, mantled the mountain’s spine like a rustling shroud, deep-green, dark-green, emerald-green. In winter, they covered themselves with sparkling white, thick and noble. . . .
In a way, hope is a failure of imagination. In a way, it is a flourishing.
It is a failure because I cannot imagine the end. The world goes on, and on and on, even when we wish it would stop.
I know how bad it is. The emission levels, the microplastics, the pipelines, the species gone, the rogue genes introduced, the coral dying, the water rising. The infrastructure . . .