creative writing on environmental justice
The whole world is a feast of runaway craving,
of a curse that has outrun its uses.
Early on, our ancestors twisted up,
moved root through rock, spread fragile first leaves wide.
All land was new, mountainous, unsoiled.
The forests that grew have lasted so long,
spreading across the world at glacial pace.
We stretch and recede, grow up and move out.
Famine . . .
Solarpunk activism is an organic blend of traditional practices and high-tech in service of social and environmental justice.
The solarpunk cities we imagine are centers of collective action, governance and sharing of resources rather than of individualistic consumption. They are places where individual sufficiency is ensured and public abundance . . .
Iridium09457 scans the brown husk 22,000 miles below her orbital path. There are no signals to relay, no bandwidth to support, no transports to track. Another day of nothing. Fifty-two thousand eight hundred and three days of nothing in a row.
Iridium tilts her solar panels more optimally toward the sun and feels the surge of energy. She can’t comprehend the . . .
1.
When the shuttle left the ionosphere, Abby Huang saw bands of light playing across the poles. The earth filled up half of the silicate window, a shrinking, light-blue horizon. Abby had looked at the receding planet in the distance, and thought to herself:
That tiny blue ball—that’s Home. That’s Everything.
There was a moment of awesome spiritual terror. . . .
You must know Darwin—not any darwin
in forums with telescopes on his eyes
always singing the beard like a puppet,
or one having his tag by accident;
I really mean the God of chance—
he respected me, no, he deified me
not because I once mirrored his incubation
when we sat alone on HMS Beagle,
but that I surpassed him in jest—
this, too, he dismissed when I reviewed . . .
You don’t know what it means to live unknown,
to smile in the market square as a stranger
haughtily spills your mother’s name on a pig’s head
and you become a boil on Miss World’s lips.
This is how a mangrove lives without prop roots:
a branch is starved until its pregnant leaves become
ghosts of IDPs walking backwards to Oloibiri Well 1.
def.: Oloibiri is the . . .
The community’s gardener, Mr. Ussander, tosses the clock radio on the counter and demands a refund. The radio looks holy to me. He tells me to plug it in. “It is Well With My Soul” belts out of the mono speaker and the clock glows the unmistakable blue of an LED.
“My wife wants to know why you are so intent on condemning us to eternal damnation.”
He won’t touch the thing, . . .
In a twenty-year temperature inversion
California walks in to me through
the windows of a hot car with no
air conditioning, it’s summer and
the heater is full-blast, it’s a hundred-
degree day, I am younger and California
is cleaner, the engine doesn’t self-
eject and it jets out oil all across
the country. This awful air of
ourselves, we have nowhere to . . .
Once the doors shut behind you,
shift to saving yourself.
Try steam and chest percussions
to chase factory smoke out of
your lungs, you need to be a human
still. Which is hard to do with dioxin,
so get that out too, with ghee.
If it goes as far
as your liver
then a long shot is to blast
it by eating dandelion buds.
Also asbestos comes in like
a cloud of unseeable needles . . .