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.
