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Mana Moana - Pacific Voices is a collection of emotive and artistic video works that have been created to amplify and support the Pacific to drive global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future

This anthology unites twenty of today's leading thinkers, writers, and visionaries-among them Cory Doctorow, Gregory Benford, Elizabeth Bear, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson-to contribute works of "techno-optimism" that challenge us to dream and do Big Stuff. Engaging, mind-bending, provocative, and imaginative, Hieroglyph offers a forward-thinking approach to the intersection of art and technology that has the power to change our world.
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Kathryn Cramer is a writer, critic, and anthologist, and coeditor of the Year's Best Fantasy and Year's Best Science Fiction series with David G. Hartwell. She is a winner of the World Fantasy Award and has received numerous nominations and awards for her work as editor. Her fiction has been published by Tor.com, Asimov's, and Nature. She lives in Westport, New York.

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering and the Department of English. He has worked as a journalist at Time, Slate, and Popular Science. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future | Project Hieroglyph

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This anthology unites twenty of today's leading thinkers, writers, and visionaries-among them Cory Doctorow, Gregory Benford, Elizabeth Bear, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson-to contribute works of "techno-optimism" that challenge us to dream and do Big Stuff. Engaging, mind-bending, provocative, and imaginative, Hieroglyph offers a forward-thinking approach to the intersection of art and technology that has the power to change our world.

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Widdam
A novelette for the "Year Without a Winter" project of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, to be published in their anthology in Spring 2018, also published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jan/Feb 2018 here.

Ambiguity Machines: An Examination
My short story is available online at tor.com (2015) . It was reviewed in: Bookslut; by A. C. Wise in SF Signal and by Tangent Online.

Entanglement
A long novella, in the anthology Hieroglyph (2014) reviewed in The Guardian at and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Reprinted in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction Volume 32.

Wake-Rider
Short story in Lightspeed (2014). Reviewed in Best SF.

Cry of the Kharchal
a short story in Clarkesworld (August 2013). There is a ghost (sort of), a poet, an ornithologist, a disturbed young man, a boy who might be descended from kings, and a very old story (that I made up) coming back to haunt present-day characters. ( Audiobook here.)

Sailing the Antarsa
a novella in The Other Half of the Sky (April 2013), an anthology of feminist space opera edited by Athena Andreadis . (More here.) The protagonist, a woman called Mayha, undertakes an unusual journey in a story involving physics, the environment, biology, communication, and myth. And there's an enormous tree-like being that is central to everything. Reviewed here.

A Handful of Rice
A novelette in Ann VanderMeer's anthology Steampunk Revolution (Fall 2012). It's alternate history, with steam and all that, plus a particular kind of magic. Not my usual kind of stuff so this was a bit of an adventure for me. Plus I got to be on the cover list of authors for the first time in English! (The first time ever was in a Russian magazine). There is a review at the tor.com site and a mention at Publisher's Weekly.

Ruminations in an Alien Tongue
a short story out in Lightspeed Magazine (April 2012). An old woman scientist reflects on her life and approaching death. This is also reprinted in an anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These.

Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra
a short story at Strange Horizons (March 2010). A long time ago I wrote a short story called Three Tales from Sky River (see below) also published at Strange Horizons. This story is about one of the tellers of those tales. Some of the stories within stories do double duty as myths and metaphors for actual scientific processes. The connection is left as an exercise for the reader. It is reprinted in Year's Best SF 16 edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. (Erratum: please note that the bio preceding the story incorrectly ascribes the editorship of the anthology "To Each Her Own" to me; it was actually edited by my namesake, editor and translator Vandana R. Singh).

Distances
a novella, published as a chapbook in the Conversation Pieces Series from Aqueduct Press (December 2008). The story is set on another planet and involves mathematical problems, cultural conflict, and the mythology of two cultures, all seen through the eyes of a very unusual young woman, Anasuya. There are deserts and oceans, gods and monsters, spaceships and relationships (both mathematical and otherwise). This is the longest piece I've ever written that can still be called a novella. Distances is a 2009 Tiptree Honor Book and won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award for 2008.

Conservation Laws
appeared in my short story collection The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet from Zubaan books in September 2008. A science fiction story about a loquacious tale-teller and his wanderings, it is my tribute to Premendra Mitra, the great Bengali SF writer. It won an Honorable Mention in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best SF Volume 27.

Oblivion: A Journey
a novelette, appeared in a new anthology series, Clockwork Phoenix, edited by Mike Allen, in summer, 2008. This story is a tribute to the Indian comic books I read as a child and the great Indian epic, the Ramayan; it is also my first space-operatic story. Locus called it an "opulent space opera... literate and compelling." See also the review at The Fix. "Oblivion" was also reprinted in Year's Best SF 14, edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and won an Honorable Mention in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Vol. 26.

Life-pod,
Foundation 100 cover

a short story, appears in the special issue 100 of the journal Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction in August 2007. This story earned an Honorable Mention in The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 25, ed. Gardner Dozois. It features a woman who finds herself on a living space-ship and must figure out, based on her fragmented memories and the "thought-clouds" of others in stasis, who she is and where she is going.

Thirst (2004) came out in the tenth anniversary (Winter 2004) issue of The 3rd Alternative . I am really thrilled to have a story appearing in one of the premier British speculative fiction magazines. Here is Tangent Online's review of that issue. Here is Matthew Cheney's review on SFSite. This story was also longlisted for the British Fantasy Award, and it won an honorable mention in both Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction: 22nd Annual Collection and the 18th volume of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin Grant. In 2006 it was included in a fine anthology called "The Inner Line: Stories by Indian Women," published by Zubaan in New Delhi. Features a housewife in small-town India confronting her loneliness and the mystery of her past. There are also various animals and the monsoons.

Three Tales from Sky River: Myths for a Starfaring Age came out in Strange Horizons in January 2004, marking my first professional sale as defined by the SFWA. It won an honorable mention in the Strange Horizons Readers' Choice awards for 2004, as you can see here. Also it got a favorable comment in this review. It won an honorable mention in both Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction: 22nd Annual Collection and the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: 18th annual collection (eds. Kelly Link, Gavin Grant and Ellen Datlow. The three tales are part of the mythology of a time when human beings have spread across the galaxy. There are more stories of this kind in the works.

A Portrait of the Artist, (2003) a science fiction poem, was published in Strange Horizons in 2003 and got second place in the 2004 Rhysling Prize for speculative poetry (long poem category).

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Widdam A novelette for the "Year Without a Winter" project of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, to be published in their anthology in Spring 2018, also published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jan/Feb 2018 here.

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The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection

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The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection - Kindle edition by Dozois, Gardner. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection.

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Description

In the new millennium, what secrets lay beyond the far reaches of the universe? What mysteries belie the truths we once held to be self evident? The world of science fiction has long been a porthole into the realities of tomorrow, blurring the line between life and art. Now, in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection the very best SF authors explore ideas of a new world. This venerable collection brings together award winning authors and masters of the field such as Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Damien Broderick, Elizabeth Bear, Paul McAuley and John Barnes. And with an extensive recommended reading guide and a summation of the year in science fiction, this annual compilation has become the definitive must-read anthology for all science fiction fans and readers interested in breaking into the genre.
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Product details

Format Paperback | 704 pages

Dimensions 155 x 234 x 46mm | 680g

Publication date 07 Jul 2015

Publisher St. Martin's Griffin

Publication City/Country New York

Language English

ISBN10 1250064422

ISBN13 9781250064424

Bestsellers rank 317,576

Review quote

"All stories gathered here, by such quality writers as Alastair Reynolds, Karl Schroeder, and Nancy Kress, keep the light of superiority shining brightly through all 700 pages.... A highly valuable addition to all public library collections." --Booklist starred review
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About Gardner Dozois

Gardner Dozois (1947-2018), one of the most acclaimed editors in science-fiction, has won the Hugo Award for Best Editor 15 times. He was the editor of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine for 20 years. He is the editor of The Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies and co-editor of the Warrior anthologies, Songs of the Dying Earth, and many others. As a writer, Dozois twice won the Nebula Award for best short story. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2011 and has received the Skylark Award for Lifetime Achievement. He lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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Rating details

395 ratings

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The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection

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We use cookies to give you the best possible experience. By using our website you agree to our use of cookies. Categories: Science Fiction Science Fiction Short Story Books In the new millennium, what secrets lay beyond the far reaches of the universe? What mysteries belie the truths we once held to be self evident?

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Toward an Effective Pedagogy of Climate Change: Lessons From a Physics Classroom

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A major roadblock to effective climate education is the lack of radical visions (Kwauk, 2020) for engaging with climate change and related social-environmental crises in the classroom.

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Journal Information

Science Fiction Studies is a refereed scholarly journal devoted to the study of the genre of science fiction, broadly defined. It publishes articles about science fiction and book reviews on science fiction criticism; it does not publish fiction. SFS is widely considered to be the premier academic journal in its field, with strong theoretical, historical, and international coverage. Roughly one-third of its issues to date have been special issues, with recent topics including Technoculture and Science Fiction, Afrofuturism, Latin American Science Fiction, and Animal Studies and Science Fiction. Founded in 1973, SFS is based at DePauw University and appears three times per year in March, July, and November.

Publisher Information

SF-TH Inc., the parent company of Science Fiction Studies, is a not-for-profit corporation established under the laws of the state of Indiana, USA. Its institutional home is located at EC 203, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN 46135.

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"Alternate Cuts": An Interview with Vandana Singh on JSTOR

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Journal Information Science Fiction Studies is a refereed scholarly journal devoted to the study of the genre of science fiction, broadly defined. It publishes articles about science fiction and book reviews on science fiction criticism; it does not publish fiction. SFS is widely considered to be the premier academic journal in its field, with strong theoretical, historical, and international coverage.

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Entanglement

People confronting the destructive effects of climate change in their own corners of the world - from biogeochemists to retirees and children in rural India - support one another through Million Eyes, an experimental network that connects people virtually at critical moments when they need inspiration and support.

Vandana Singh is a science fiction author and assistant professor of physics at Framingham State College. Her short stories, which most recently include "Peripateia" (2013), "Cry of the Kharchal" (2013), "With Fate Conspire" (2013), and "A Handful of Rice" (2012), frequently appear in Year's Best and other anthologies. She also writes poetry as well as novels and short stories for children.

Written by Christian Etter
Founder, Etter Studio (Zurich)
To understand these new complexities, we need a new human consciousness. To understand that our actions have consequences, even though they are disconnected in time and space. This is also what we try to address in our work whenever we have the opportunity.

The reason why I say biomimicry is a movement rather than solely a new technological trend is that it appears to be informed by an ethos that seems to me at least to have a basis in ethics - that we learn from nature, and refrain from exploiting nature.

Vandana Singh
SF Writer and Assistant Professor of Physics
Read the conversation >>

I've been following the rather ominous reports in the last few years of methane bubbling up from the Arctic ocean floor as the ocean warms.

Vandana Singh
SF Writer and Assistant Professor of Physics
Read the conversation >>

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People confronting the destructive effects of climate change in their own corners of the world - from biogeochemists to retirees and children in rural India - support one another through Million Eyes, an experimental network that connects people virtually at critical moments when they need inspiration and support.

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Part of the challenge of climate change is that the apocalyptic consequences of our carbon use are emerging slowly and globally, rather than in a single newsworthy disaster, making it difficult to muster the vision and motivation to fight it. Fiction exploring the possibilities of a changed and changing climate can be a powerful way to make these abstract futures more immediate for ourselves and our students. (Read about my experiences teaching climate fiction.)

Most climate fiction, or cli-fi, paints a bleak future. However, some authors also imagine ways that humanity might manage to respond positively to the crisis. Below, we offer two lists of literature and novels to consider reading and discussing with students.

The first list includes short stories, novels, and poems that take the more positive, visionary approach to the subject of climate change, focusing on fighting and adapting to climate change. Through envisioning cultural tools and social strategies for transitioning to a post-carbon world, these stories offer inspiration and guidance for how we might address our very real problems-- not just through magical new technology, but through cultural shifts that make use of the technology we already have. These texts could be used for whole-class reading, and could enrich a larger unit on climate change or even lead to students researching and creating their own artistic explorations of futures altered by climate change. Questions for discussion follow each listing.

The second list includes various other climate futures for students interested in reading further. It, too, covers YA and adult fiction that is focused on the social and practical issues around climate change. Many of these latter texts focus on vividly conveying the emotional weight of various disasters that come with climate change.

Climate Change Poetry and Fiction for Social Change

Climate poetry, much of it by teens themselves, can make an excellent model for students' own protest writing. A poem might feel less daunting for an exploratory venture into teaching climate fiction than an entire novel or short story, or you might like to pair poems with a longer text. Like the rest of this first list, these works focus on the social aspects of climate change. See more climate poetry from Climate Speaks at https://www.climatespeaks.org/performance.

"Let's Make More Minutes Count" by Solli, a 14-year-old Australian slam poet, appeared in 2019 as a video performance
Discuss: How does Solli use internal rhyme and rhythm? Does the poem give him power? Why or why not?

"On Climate Denial" by high school senior Jordan Sanchez appeared at the first Climate Speaks event in 2019, where NYC teenagers performed their own original climate poetry. Any of the poems from this event can serve as powerful examples for young writers, such as those by Elizabeth Shvarts and Andreas Psahos.
Discuss: Why do people deny climate change? What are some of the differences and similarities between NYC and San Juan in Sanchez's poem? Why does she juxtapose these images?

"Break Free" by Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, a teenage activist, was published as the title track of a rap album in 2018.
Discuss: How does Martinez connect his Indigenous identity with his climate justice fight?

"Earthrise" by Amanda Gorman. Gorman, the first Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, delivers her poem here.

"Dear Matafele Peinem" by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner was published in Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter (2017). The poem contrasts fear for her child's future with hope that change can happen. Jetnil-Kijiner reads the poem aloud in a video essay that makes its imagery and rhetoric extremely vivid and accessible to middle school and high school readers. Many other relevant poems by Jetnil-Kijiner include "Utilomar," "Tell Them," and "2 Degrees."
Discuss: How does this poem use figurative language to convey its emotional weight?

Dry, by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman (2018). What happens when the water suddenly runs dry? This powerful YA dystopia follows a group of California teenagers as their lives suddenly go from normal to a horrifying fight for survival. All it takes is a drought bad enough that a few states upstream seize the remaining water for themselves, and California starts quietly losing its mind. The most striking part of this book is how long it takes for everyone to ealize that everything has changed. It's so easy to deny and ignore what's happening in the quiet background of life, until suddenly you can't anymore.
Discuss: What are some of the most surprising ways that the lack of water changed life for the characters in this story? What are some of the most important reasons people survive or don't survive in this story? What advice do you think the characters at the end of the book would give their past selves at the beginning of the book? What advice would the characters give us today?

"Sunshine State," by Adam Flynn and Andrew Dana Hudson, in Everything Change Volume I, edited by Milkoreit, Martinez, and Eschrich (2016, free download at https://climateimagination.asu.edu/everything-change/). This short story imagines a secret solarpunk collective in the Everglades, working to adapt humans and ecosystems to climate change as the next big storm hits Florida.
Discuss: What legal, social, and economic barriers exist to transitioning away from our current fossil-fuel system? What tools and strategies help overcome those barriers in this story?

The Weight of Light, edited by Joey Eschrich and Clark A. Miller (2018, free download at https://csi.asu.edu/books/weight/). The short stories in this collection (from Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination) envision the social possibilities and challenges of different kinds of solar power. Stories include the following:

Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction, edited by John Joseph Adams (2015) includes two dozen stories. Several stand out for their explorations of the social causes of climate change and efforts to stop it.

"The Tamarisk Hunter" by Paolo Bacigalupi (2006) is also at https://www.hcn.org/issues/325/tamarisk-hunter-Bacigalupi. The story is about rural life in a water-starved American Southwest of the near future.
Discuss: How do Lolo's individual motivations and actions conflict with the collective goals of those paying him? Is that conflict inevitable? How are conflicts over water rights already shaping people's lives today?

"Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet" by Margaret Atwood (2009) is also at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/sep/26/margaret-atwood-mini-science-fiction. This 2-page letter from an extinct human race offers no explicit strategies for averting climate change, but its compactness makes it useful as a quick in-class read.
Discuss: Why is it important in the story that the gods had horns, beaks, or feathers? How did money become a god? Why did humans create deserts? What economic, cultural, or spiritual changes would need to occur for us to prevent the outcome in this story?

"Factory Air," by Omar El-Akkad, is one of four climate fiction stories in the 2019 Climate Fiction issue of Guernica. Of those stories, it is the one most concerned with the problem of how to fight the large-scale economic structures causing climate change.
Discuss: Why does Cassie make the decision she makes at the end of the story? Would you make the same decision or not, and why?

The Carbon Diaries 2015 and The Carbon Diaries 2017 by Saci Lloyd (2009-2011). This YA novel and its sequel humorously depict a teenage girl and her family dealing with electricity rationing and carbon taxes in London after extreme global weather events in the near future.
Discuss: How would similar laws change your life? What would you spend your carbon points on? How bad would climate change have to get before politicians would be willing to enact such laws? What would it take to convince the public to accept them? How do selfishness and fear worsen the energy crisis? A discussion guide from the publisher is here: http://www.holidayhouse.com//docs/CarbonDiariesComboGuide.pdf

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017). This long but engaging novel imagines New York after fifty feet of sea rise has put Lower Manhattan underwater, and creatively (and often optimistically) explores the ways that buildings, food, transportation, politics, and economics might change in a new world after carbon, through a cast of characters including homeless water-rat kids, an airship viral video star, a self-important financial trader, and more.
Discuss: How does our economic system encourage climate change, both now and in this novel? What would it take to enact the renewable energy changes in the novel sooner? In what ways is life in this novel surprisingly like life today? How is it different? How would your life change if the sea rose fifty feet?

The Ministry for the Future also by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020). This novel imagines life in the 21st century as the effects of climate change-- starting with a deadly heat wave in India-- slowly begin to change the social order on earth from the bottom up. The title refers to a new international organization working to enforce the Paris climate agreements, nicknamed "Ministry for the Future" because it is fighting for future generations. The book offers a terrifying but ultimately optimistic view of what that fight might look like and how it might turn out.
Discuss: What solutions or actions described in this book to fight climate change do you think are most plausible? Do you think violence in defense of the climate is justified or not?

The Disappearing Shore by Roberta Park (2019). This is a short, mystical little novel-in-parts about our present and our future, with each layer of the story responding to the one before. In short vignettes, fictional farmers, activists, lawyers, and rock stars meditate on the natural world and the human forces of emotional/cultural inertia as climate disaster approaches. The final portions of the book ask what kind of new life humanity/nature can make in the ashes of trauma. Purchase the ebook from the author here: https://robertapark.wordpress.com/the-disappearing-shore/.
Discuss: Which of the characters' stories in Part 1 do you most identify with? Which perspectives seem most odd or confusing to you? What changes have happened to humans between Part 1 and Part 2 of this story? In what ways might those changes be bad? In what ways might those changes be good? What has stayed the same?

Further Reading on Climate Change for Adults & High Schoolers
This listing includes especially challenging visions of climate futures for teachers or students interested in reading further.

Earthseed series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents) by Octavia Butler (1993-1998). These two novels, groundbreaking early YA dystopias, feature a young woman who journeys in a post-apocalyptic world to spread the message of a new religion in the face of relentless change.

Ship Breaker, The Drowned Cities and Tool of War by Paolo Bacigalupi (2011-2017). This YA series depicts a post-apocalyptic world of radical inequality after sea rise and warming. The novels explore similar themes as some of Bacigalupi's adult stories and novels, including The Water Knife (2016), which is about battles over water in the American Southwest post-global warming.

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (2012). This poetic novel looks at climate change through the perspective of a rural Appalachian woman who finds monarch butterflies in the forest, after climate change has pushed them out of their native Mexico. This book deals explicitly with the contemporary problem of climate change denial.

Orleans by Sherri Smith (2013). This YA dystopia depicts a post-hurricane Gulf Coast where a blood disease has restructured society into tribes based on blood type. It explores issues of rebuilding communities and the power of technology vs. the power of relational bonds.

Clade by James Bradley (2015). This interconnected series of brief snapshots tells the epic story of three generations of one family as they experience the slow burn of climate change over time. It examines the intergenerational relationships and emotions that emerge from long-term change of this magnitude.

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (2016). This short book is not really a novel: it uses a non-fiction style as if written from the perspective of a historian four hundred years from now, chronicling how climate change destroyed civilization. In this imagined future, democracies cannot muster the political will to act against climate change in time, and only dictatorships like China respond fast enough to save their citizens.

Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction, edited by John Joseph Adams (2015). Besides the stories listed above, this large volume explores human relationships and emotions in the context of climate change, including standout tales about a Midwestern family facing desertification ("A Hundred Hundred Daisies" by Nancy Kress), ecosystem destruction in the Pacific Northwest as humans move there to escape climate change ("The Myth of Rain" by Seanan McGuire), journalists covering drought refugees in Arizona ("Shooting the Apocalypse" by Paolo Bacigalupi), a family struck by a tropical pandemic ("Outer Rims" by Toiya Kristen Finley), an environmentalist fighting technological solutions to climate change ("Eagle" by Gregory Benford), a marriage crumbling along with dikes against the storms ("The Netherlands Lives With Water" by Jim Shepard), and a meditation on denial as water rises ("Quiet Town" by Jason Gurley).

Everything Change Volume II, edited by Angie Dell and Joey Eschrich (2018, free download at https://climateimagination.asu.edu/everything-change-vol-2/) includes "Monarch Blue" by Barbara Litkowski, in which the extinction of pollinating insects has left the job of pollinating to the poor, and "The Last Grand Tour of Albertine's Watch" by Sandra Barnidge, which illuminates the economic and social tensions of disaster tourism. Everything Change Volume I, which begins with "Sunshine State," listed above, also includes "On Darwin Tides" by Shauna O'Meara, in which a young girl struggles to survive without legal papers in a rapidly warming Malaysia, and "Victor and the Fish" by Matthew S. Henry, in which wildfires slowly destroy not only fish but also the communities built around them.

Fragment by Craig Russell (2016) starts out as an eco-thriller about a collapsing Antarctic ice shelf, but develops into a tender exploration of interspecies communication and solidarity. Of the dozen or so narrators Russell weaves together, the most interesting is a blue whale.

After the Flood by Kassandra Montag (2019) imagines a scenario in which water rapidly covers the world and dramatic social change ensues, as a mother searches the increasingly lawless ocean for her stolen daughter. While it's scientifically unlikely for the American Midwest to be flooded anytime soon, this novel's depiction of the rapid unmooring of our modern society and way of life is devastating.

The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) makes trees the unexpected protagonists through a dazzling use of symbolic connections, deep-dive science, and the epic interwoven timelines of multiple human and arboreal characters. This book turns the ordinary tree outside your window into an alien lifeform living on an entirely different timescale.

American War by Omar El Akkad (2017). When I first read this book several years ago, I thought its premise of a second American civil war, fought this time over the right to burn fossil fuels, was a little far-fetched. Who would be willing to fight and die for that? But as climate change continues to worsen, and as science denialism shows itself to be far stronger than even immediate threats to human life, it becomes increasingly clear that any realistic climate action America could take would be either too little/ too late, or violently opposed by much of the population. What comes after that? This book is less focused on climate change than on the refugee crisis and political turmoil that it would cause. Let's not flinch from considering it all.

The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin (2015-2018), including The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky. This series depicts a fantasy world in which society is shaped around enduring recurring geological disasters, an allegory of the social and physical devastation of climate change. It also explores how power shapes racial and social identities, tying into issues of environmental justice.

The Interdependency Series (2017-2020) (The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire, The Last Emperox). This ongoing series by John Scalzi explores a far-future space empire that has thoughtlessly developed around a natural phenomenon it exploits without fully understanding it. When scientists predict that cataclysmic change is coming, the profit motive makes it difficult for society to take the drastic action needed to stave off disaster. While it's not explicitly about climate change, the allegory is clear and could help students analyze the present moment. Be aware: mild sexual content and excess swearing.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004) is a difficult but rewarding read, told through six different stories, each embedded within the last and successively jumping forward in time. Collectively, they deal with how power inflicts violence on the powerless and how communities of empathy might develop against cultures of greed. Ecological devastation is a central theme, though war and nuclear weapons are more direct causes here than climate change.

If you're interested in post-apocalyptic visions, you may also like Earth Abides by George Stewart (1949). Though its initiating apocalypse is a pandemic, rather than climate change, its central focus is the reciprocal relationship between people and their world, and how each changes the other. After the majority of people are gone, how does the earth change? And how do those changes, in turn, change the people who are left? As technological knowledge fades, the story explores whether we might ultimately be happier and wiser to let much of civilization go.

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Climate Change Fiction for Students and Teachers

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Part of the challenge of climate change is that the apocalyptic consequences of our carbon use are emerging slowly and globally, rather than in a single newsworthy disaster, making it difficult to muster the vision and motivation to fight it.

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The United Nations argues that the world has less than 12 years to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half to avoid severe climate change consequences. All around the world, young activists are fighting to achieve this goal. You can join us in taking action on related issues here.
For the past 30 years, environmental activists have been calling on governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change.

The world has less than 12 years to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half - a daunting task that would require a total transformation of the global economy - according to the United Nations.

Yet even as the consequences of climate change become more stark with each passing year - floods and storms submerging coastlines more frequently, wildfires growing to new extremes, and droughts drying up critical sources of water - fossil fuel consumption continues to rise.

But for the emerging generation of activists whose future depends on the overhaul of a global economy still heavily dependent on fossil fuels, there is no other option than to fight for change- and they're making sure that governments, businesses, and powerful interests everywhere understand the stakes of inaction. Women and girls - often hit the hardest by climate disasters - have become leading figures in this movement.
Take Action: Protect Our Oceans! Prevent Ocean Plastic Pollution
Here are 12 female activists from around the world who are fighting to save the planet.

1. Greta Thunberg - Sweden

Greta Thunberg has become one of the world's foremost environmental activists over the past year through her weekly Friday for Future protests. The 16-year-old has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her work, has spoken at the World Economic Forum and in front of the European Parliament, and sparked a protest movement involving millions of young people worldwide.
Read More: Youth Leaders Tell Us Why They're Skipping School for Climate Action
Thunberg is best known for her bracing clarity. When she speaks about climate change, she doesn't mince words, downplay the situation, or take it easy on her audience. With a calm tenacity, she holds people and governments accountable and demands an end to fossil fuel use.

2. India Logan-Riley - Aotearoa / New Zealand

Though their efforts have often gone unnoticed, Indigenous people have always been at the forefront of environmental causes around the world.

The youth activist India Logan-Riley is working to center Indigenous rights in the movement for climate justice by ensuring that Indigenous people gain rights over their land. She's taken her message to the United Nations in talks that resulted in the Paris climate agreement, and she works as both an activist and conservationist in her native Aotearoa, which is the Māori name for New Zealand.

Globally, 2.5 billion people depend on land held by Indigenous people for food, water, air quality, and more. These critical ecosystems are often protected against extractive industries by indigenous groups, and deforestation rates on these lands are typically half the global average, according to the World Resources Institute.

3. Nakabuye Hilda F. - Uganda

You are killing our mother with your waste, our earth is dying, You can save it. Take action to protect the future, we are the future and we demand #ClimateActionNow#BeatPlasticPollution#PreserveOurLakes#KeepMamaAfricaGreen@GretaThunberg@lillyspickup pic.twitter.com/Gi5x2lfXZU
- Nakabuye Hilda F. (@NakabuyeHildaF) April 17, 2019

Around 77% of Uganda's population is under the age of 30, and a growing youth movement has emerged around the issue of climate change and environmental sustainability.

Activist Nakabuye Hilda F. has zealously campaigned to raise awareness of the hazards of climate change and plastic pollution. She's become a leading figure in Uganda's Friday for Future climate marches. She also organizes plastic clean-up efforts and urges her government to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Read More: These 9 Badass Youth Activists Are Changing the World
4. Luisa Neubauer - Germany

Heute wieder #fridaysforfuture: Jugendprotest für #Klima-Lösungen. Die Wissenschaft zeigt, dass die Forderungen berechtigt sind. Letzten Freitag waren @GretaThunberg & @Luisamneubauer bei @jrockstrom & #Edenhofer@PIK_Klima zu Gespräch über Forschungsstand https://t.co/JPsau16BXM pic.twitter.com/55AfOraKMm
- Potsdam Institute (@PIK_Climate) April 5, 2019

Often referred to as the "German Greta Thunberg," Luisa Neubauer is no less determined in her activism. The 22-year-old has helped organize the country's massive Fridays for Future climate marches, works with climate organizations such as 350.org, and regularly advocates for climate action at major global diplomatic events.

"It really feels like we're sitting in a car heading for an abyss," she wrote in a blog post for WWF. "But instead of braking, it accelerates. We were put in this car without being asked. There really is this abyss. The man-made climate change is real and we are experiencing these days the serious changes that it brings."

5. Ridhima Pandey - India

INSPIRING! Meet the nine-year-old, Ridhima Pandey who is suing the Indian Government over climate change->> https://t.co/tnAMPNDdzB pic.twitter.com/nQkP8u6tmL
- Greenpeace India (@greenpeaceindia) April 4, 2017

Most young children spend their time playing outside, but at 9 years old, Ridhima Pandey was busy suing the Indian government over its failure to address climate change in 2017.

Her ongoing lawsuit is part of a growing legal movement to hold governments that have failed to act on climate change accountable. The movement is driven by young people who see climate change as threatening their ability to access their basic human rights to things like food, water, and a safe place to live.

In her lawsuit, Pandey called on the government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, develop a carbon budget strategy, and create plans for recovering from the effects of climate change.

"My government has failed to take steps to regulate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are causing extreme climate conditions," she wrote in her petition. "This will impact both me and future generations."
Read More: 6 African Youth Activists You Need to Know
6. Shalvi Sakshi - Fiji

Few countries are more exposed to climate change than Fiji. The low-lying island nation could be submerged in the next few decades as sea levels continue to rise.

For 12-year-old Shalvi Sakshi, that's unacceptable. At the UN's COP23 climate talks in 2017, Sakshi was the youngest speaker present. Despite her young age, she delivered a sharp call to action, urging world leaders to stop the release of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

"This is the time to do something to slow down the rising of sea levels," she said.

7. Isra Hirsi - the US

Flint, MI has been without clean water for more than four years. @USClimateStrike is calling for a #ClimateDebate w/ all 2020 presidential candidates. ADD YOUR NAME: https://t.co/euOfO6Mw8g h/t @israhirsi pic.twitter.com/rhBjY1f5sP
- MoveOn (@MoveOn) April 17, 2019

While her mother Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is advocating for the passage of the Green New Deal - a broad proposal to transform the US energy system and enact redistributive polices -16-year-old Isra Hirsi is mobilizing her peers in support of bold climate action.

Hirsi was one of the lead organizers of the first-ever Youth Climate Strike in the US, which took place on March 15 as part of the global Fridays for Future protests.

The budding activist is pursuing climate justice by raising awareness about environmental racism. She wants to ensure that any climate action prioritizes communities of color and those likely to be marginalized, who are often disproportionately impacted by climate change.

"Climate change mostly affects communities of color and low-income communities, and these people live in these areas under these conditions, and we don't really do anything about it," she told the Cut.

"I think people of color are automatically ignored. It's also important to advocate to people who aren't fully aware of the problem to make sure they take a stand and come together because climate change affects all us," she added. "We all have to come together at some point."
Read More: Meet 7 Youth Activists Who Won the UN's 'Champions of the Earth' Award
8. Brianna Fruean - Samoa

Brianna Fruean, a 20-year-old Samoan activist, has been involved in communities fighting for climate justice for most of her life.

When Fruean was a child, a powerful cyclone struck Samoa, damaging its infrastructure and agriculture. The extreme weather event was her first introduction to the consequences of climate change and from that point on, she dedicated her life to advocating for environmental causes.

At 11, she became a founding member of the Samoan chapter of the climate organization 350.org, and at 16 she became the youngest winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Youth Award for her environmental activism.

9. Marinel Ubaldo - the Philippines

Marinel Ubaldo (@YnelUbaldo) talked about how the Philippines is dealing with #climatechange at #COP21 in Paris. pic.twitter.com/E6KJ6c2RrX
- Rappler (@rapplerdotcom) December 11, 2015

In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan hurtled toward the Philippines, ultimately killing more than 6,329 people and causing more than $4.5 billion in damages.

Some of Marinel Ubaldo's friends and family were killed and her home was destroyed by the powerful cyclone.

The tragic event prompted Ubaldo to dedicate her life to fighting for climate justice. The Philippines is extremely vulnerable to cyclones supercharged by warming oceans and rising sea levels. As a a fisherman, Ubaldo's father and his livelihood are endangered by climate change - so the issue is one that is very personal to her.

In 2018, she traveled to New York to speak in front of thousands of people gathered to protest environmental injustice.

"I'm here in front of you, not just as a climate statistic you see in the news, but I'm here as a human being  -  hoping to remind you that we need to value lives again," she said at the event. "My story is only one of many, and I'm here to speak on behalf of the vulnerable and the marginalized communities  -  may our voices be heard."
Read More: 'Extinction Rebellion' Protesters Block London Roads to Confront Climate 'Emergency'
10. Winnie Asiti - Kenya

In 2006, Winnie Asiti got her first taste of climate activism when she attended the UN's climate change negotiations in Nairobi, Kenya. Five years later, she helped form the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change and she now advises the Global Greengrants' Next Generation Climate Board, an organization that gives loans to environmental activists and causes around the world.

Nowadays, Asiti helps communities develop their own climate change strategies.

"It's not just about the COP because our vision is to go beyond [it]," she told Voice of America. "We want these groups to be able to make the linkages between the local, regional, international processes so that even when they come to the COP, they are able to take that knowledge back home and be able to link their own local activities, original activities, to what is happening at the international level."

11. Rayanne Cristine Maximo Franca - Brazil

From where I stand: "It is time that the world hears our voice" - Rayanne Cristine Maximo Franca via @UN_Women https://t.co/bjcvKPfMPf pic.twitter.com/HxCHXmE36k
- Women's CommunityCTX (@WomenCTX) August 9, 2017

Brazil is often the site of the biggest fights for climate justice - it's also the deadliest country in the world for environmental activists. Since President Jair Bolsonaro took office last year, the country has seen a sharp spike in deforestation throughout the Amazon rainforest, which helps to regulate the global atmosphere, and indigenous land rights have been trampled.

Rayanna Cristine Maximo Franca's activism centers primarily on women's indigenous rights, but empowering women is also critical to protecting the environment. Women are most likely to be negatively impacted by climate change, and educating women is one of the best ways to mitigate environmental consequences. In Brazil, indigenous activism is tightly entwined with environmental causes, where indigenous groups have long struggled for access to land and resources and advocate for the protection of the Amazon.

12. Oladosu Adenike - Nigeria

20 weeks #FridaysForFuture#ClimateStrike in Nigeria.
Not signing the climate change bill by our leaders is equivalent to them seeing thousands of us hitting the street because we are now in an era when we stand for things that matters to our future.@GretaThunberg pic.twitter.com/PmM6asElnk
- Oladosu Adenike (@the_ecofeminist) April 12, 2019

Oldaosu Adenike tirelessly campaigns for the planet. Going by the title " ecofeminist," Adenike is an organizer for Nigeria's Friday for Future climate marches and is active on Twitter where she educates her followers on the complexities of climate change and calls on young people to push for climate action.

"One of the reasons why the 'climate' is becoming changed and subsequently leading to crisis (sub-crisis) is because of a lack of youth planning in their tomorrow," she wrote in a blog post. "Their voices [need] to be heard on critical or burning issues of the moments such as climate change."

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12 Female Climate Activists Who Are Saving the Planet

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The United Nations argues that the world has less than 12 years to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half to avoid severe climate change consequences. All around the world, young activists are fighting to achieve this goal. You can join us in taking action on related issues here.

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She is only eight, but Licypriya Kangujam has already been campaigning for action to tackle climate change in her native India for two years.

The young activist has pushed for new laws to curb India's high pollution levels and wants climate change lessons to be mandatory in schools.

"I cry when I see children lose their parents or become homeless due to the dangers of disasters", she told the BBC.

But, she adds: "If you call me Greta of India, you are not covering my story."

Referring to Greta Thunberg, whose Fridays for Future school strike has grown into a global movement, Licypriya says that while she has much in common with the Swedish teenager, "I have my own identity, story".

"I already began a movement to fight climate change before Greta started," she said, adding that the two are "good friends" who "respect each other".

Listen: BBC OS talks to Licypriya Kangujam

Climate change: A really simple guide

The pair both attended the UN climate change conference, also known as COP25, in the Spanish capital Madrid in December.

Residing in India's north-eastern state of Manipur, Licypriya says she was a small child when she accompanied her father on fundraising events for victims of a powerful and deadly earthquake in Nepal in 2015.

But it was after attending a UN disaster conference in Mongolia with him in 2018 that she felt the need to get involved in activism.

"I got lots of inspiration and new knowledge from the people giving speeches. It was a life-changing event," she says.

"My heart feels sore for people who cannot help themselves when disaster strikes."

In response, Licypriya set up Child Movement, a body that aims to raise awareness "to protect the planet by tackling climate change and natural disasters".

Licypriya has also campaigned, often alone, for new laws to help address the issue of poor air quality across India.

She has even designed what she calls her Sukifu device - a symbolic survival kit for the future she created to emphasise the need to curb air pollution in the country.

In November, schools in India's capital, Delhi, were ordered to close by authorities who said air pollution in the city had reached "unbearable levels".

India's Supreme Court says world is 'laughing' at smog issues

Making climate change a compulsory subject to be taught from an early age in schools nationwide is one of Licypriya's main aims.

"Rajasthan has now become the first state in India" to add climate change to the school curriculum, she says.

She adds that the Indian state of Gujarat will be the second in the country to agree to educate children on the crisis.

Licypriya says she also feels inspired to continue fighting for government action to tackle climate change after witnessing others provide help to victims.

"I get very happy when I see rescuers saving children and their parents from danger."

But, she says, leaders need to stop dispelling the messages of activists.

"They are not taking any action, I want all leaders to do more - otherwise our future will die soon. They must act now, to save our planet and our future."

Read more on climate change:

Greta Thunberg trademarks 'Fridays for Future'

World's biggest iceberg makes a run for it

A visual guide to Australia's bushfire crisis

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'I cry when children lose parents to climate change'

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She is only eight, but Licypriya Kangujam has already been campaigning for action to tackle climate change in her native India for two years. The young activist has pushed for new laws to curb India's high pollution levels and wants climate change lessons to be mandatory in schools.

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Xiuhtezcatl, Indigenous Climate Activist at the High-level event on Climate Change

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Procrastination and denial taken to absurd lengths hammer home a point about global warming in this technically ambitious black comedy. A family living in a gully are too wrapped up in their own worlds to heed impending doom. Daughter Mary (seven-year-old Paige Shand-Haami) is the only one who sees the future. Water was shot over 14 days - with cast and crew spending 10 of them waist deep in water - on a set in a Wellington swimming pool. It was directed by Chris Graham, and partly funded from a SPADA Young Filmmaker Award won by producer Karl Zohrab.

Acknowledgements

Financed by the NZ Film Commission Short Film Fund & Post Production Fund

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Water - Procrastination and denial taken to absurd lengths hammer home a point about global warming in this technically ambitious black comedy. A family living in a gully are too wrapped up in their own worlds to heed impending doom. Daughter Mary (seven-year-old Paige Shand-Haami) is the only one who sees the future.

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hen Naomi Klein toured North America with her 2019 book about the Green New Deal, she and her assistant liaised with local campaigners from the Sunrise Movement. This youthful climate action group was organised to set up a table at each event, with petitions and actions, so audiences could become activists, right there. When they reached Palo Alto, they discovered that the Sunrise Movement contact they'd been "bossing about" was a 13-year-old, who was organising the whole thing between her classes.

This shock inspired Klein, who began her activism in her 20s with the anti-corporate bible No Logo, to write her first book specifically for young people. How to Change Everything joins a burgeoning library of new books seeking to mobilise a new generation: alongside the iconoclastic Jay Griffiths' Why Rebel, and youthful activist Hendrikus van Hensbergen's How You Can Save the Planet, an excellent down-to-earth handbook for teens and pre-teens.

Klein describes her books as "ammo for activists" and she tells her increasingly precocious readers that there are three fires in the world today: climate change, rising anger, fear and anti-immigrant sentiment, and young people. This third fire might save us all. "The more sparks the fire has, the brighter it will burn," she writes. "I invite you to add your spark."

For all that, How to Change Everything is not incendiary in tone but a calm, detailed exposition of the climate crisis and what we can do about it. Adults will find it a useful primer when our understanding of the importance of climate justice or the shortcomings of carbon capture and storage fails us.

Given her accumulated wisdom over 25 years of activism, it is tempting to view Klein, 50, as a mother figure for the latest wave. But that might wrongly imply that she is didactic or unwilling to learn from the young. Speaking from her home in British Columbia, Canada, Klein believes that social media makes it "infinitely harder" for young activists today than when she experienced the "incredibly overwhelming" success of No Logo in 1999.

"When I look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar and this new generation of political leaders, I don't know how they cope with that amount of input, both positive and negative, and still keep their centre. And they do." Partly, she thinks, it is because youth leaders "have each other's backs". She gives the example of Disha Ravi, the 22-year-old Fridays for Future activist in India, who was arrested and charged with sedition and criminal conspiracy. "One of the most amazing things is the way the Fridays for Future movement globally rallied around her," says Klein. "They've woven this incredible truly international web of children and young adults. Frankly, its internationalism puts the adult climate movement to shame."

'It's about the right to a future' ... Tokata Iron Eyes with Greta Thunberg at a youth panel at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, North Dakota in 2019. Photograph: Jim Urquhart/Reuters

Klein's vision of activism was changed by the words of another young activist, Tokata Iron Eyes, who was only 13 when they first met at Standing Rock in Dakota. "I feel like I have my future back," Tokata said when her Sioux community won its first battle against an oil pipeline threatening their water supply.

"This is what people are fighting for - their right to a future," says Klein. "And it's such a deep right. That's realigned a lot of the writing that I do. It's about the right to a future."

Klein and everyone else with a 1960s, 70s or 80s childhood, was raised with a terror of nuclear war. Many people - including Klein's family - protested against future-ending nuclear weapons. Are today's youthful fears any different? US college students who were drafted for the Vietnam war felt their immediate future was in jeopardy too, says Klein, but she thinks that today's young feel profoundly "unprotected" - not because of accidents or mistakes, but by the normal functioning of the political and economic system: "I grew up with nuclear fear where something could go wrong, somebody could push a button, and we would be in peril. Whereas with the climate crisis, it's the system literally just continuing to do business as usual that brings us to collapse. The system itself is a failure. The system itself needs to change. And that is what is radicalising."

Another young person who is radicalising Klein is her eight-year-old son, Toma. "He's changed me in lots of ways," she says. "He challenges our consumption. We call him the garbage police, because he hovers over to make sure that nothing is being wasted. And he got us composting at home."

Four years ago, Klein took Toma on a work trip to Australia and a diversion to experience the wonder of the Great Barrier Reef. Their visit coincided with a bleaching event, a mass coral die-off caused by global heating. "I felt a mixture of joy and heartbreak," wrote Klein, "because I knew that just as he was discovering the beauty of our world, it was draining away."

Klein kept this brutal reality from her son but couldn't shield him from the climate crisis more recently. Last autumn, Toma's school reopened in the midst of the Covid pandemic when the area was smogged with wildfires. "And so the teachers faced this impossible dilemma: do we keep the windows open to keep air circulating because of Covid? Or do we close the windows to protect the kids with asthma from the wildfires? For kids on their first day of school, that's what the adults around them were talking about. We shouldn't be surprised that they're radicalised."

Some parents worry about how to explain global environmental crises to young children; one guide suggests that planetary ills should not be taught to under-10s. My seven and nine-year-olds are moved to desperate tears by today's more hard-hitting David Attenborough documentaries, and Klein admits she withholds these from her son.

"In an ideal world, we would wait till 10," says Klein. "The reality is, sometimes we just can't protect them, because climate change is real and it's affecting our communities." With Toma, she's tried to talk about pollution on a scale that he can understand: "We lay down principles - that our actions have consequences. And I mostly see my role as giving him opportunities to connect to the natural world, so that he knows what he's fighting to protect, and whatever he is able to do comes from a place of love, and not only fear." She's also taken him on a (successful) local action, to stop a gas-fired power station. "I try to protect him from hopelessness. We have to give them a sense that they can affect this world, or we will lose them to nihilism and despair," she says. But she also recognises it is "privileged" to be protective. "Many people on this planet don't have that option because they're so directly impacted. Think about how many little kids have been forced to migrate because of hurricanes battering their homelands in Central America."

The fact that they are sacrificing so much of their childhood doing what they shouldn't have to do is all the more reason for older generations to do more

Activism may be uniquely young today but older people have seen multiple generations of youthful uprisings fail to dent global capitalism. How can the youth change it all? "I'm not arguing that they should do it on their own," says Klein. "We need a mass, intergenerational movement. Young activists really bridle against this idea that their job is to give hope to older people. The fact that they are sacrificing so much of their childhood doing what they shouldn't have to do is all the more reason for older generations to do more and take leadership from them."

The global leader Greta Thunberg inevitably features in How to Change Everything. "I look to her as the North Star in so many ways, because she is just so unimpressed with talk," says Klein. "Now that Trump is out of office, there's lots of politicians saying the right thing. I just think of Greta and 'enough with the blah blah blah ', as she said in Davos. OK, show me the carbon. Or the lack of it."

There's a lot of blah blah blah about how the coronavirus pandemic will change everything, too. I pessimistically fear it has swamped the youth climate movement, just as 9/11 drowned out anti-corporate globalisation protests, but Klein is confident the movement will return, "with a lot of force and probably with some surprising new tactics that we haven't thought of".

What the pandemic has changed, says Klein, is our understanding of how to respond to an emergency. When youth movements called for climate change to be treated as an emergency, governments responded with fine words but little urgency. "The big difference post-Covid is we now know what it means to treat an emergency like an emergency. We've all seen our governments do it. They can change things dramatically overnight. And that's not something those of us born after the second world war had experienced. Our expectations and our ability to differentiate between just talk and actual change is heightened. And the pressure is going to be even greater on political leaders."

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Naomi Klein: 'We shouldn't be surprised that kids are radicalised'

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hen Naomi Klein toured North America with her 2019 book about the Green New Deal, she and her assistant liaised with local campaigners from the Sunrise Movement. This youthful climate action group was organised to set up a table at each event, with petitions and actions, so audiences could become activists, right there.

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Haere mai! Welcome to Aotearoa Reads, your A-Z of lively written, audio and video content on Aotearoa books and writers. Alongside original NZBC content, enjoy the latest reviews, commentary, interviews and book recommendations on the web, handpicked by the Book Council team. Subscribe by email to get the latest Aotearoa Reads articles straight to your inbox.

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Haere mai! Welcome to Aotearoa Reads, your A-Z of lively written, audio and video content on Aotearoa books and writers. Alongside original NZBC content, enjoy the latest reviews, commentary, interviews and book recommendations on the web, handpicked by the Book Council team. Subscribe by email to get the latest Aotearoa Reads articles straight to your inbox.

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Climate change is infamously hard to wrap our heads around, and perhaps even harder to attach our hearts to. The remodeling of the entire planet is downright scary, and the demands that climate change places on us-the demands of individual attention and collective action-can be disorienting. While climate change discussions are often driven by political activists and scientists, the scale and scope of the changes we are making to Earth may make it a topic perhaps best suited for the philosophers and the poets.

To best prepare for the times to come, some argue, we will need to visualize a world of climate chaos and to walk through different imagined futures-narratives of action and inaction, of hope and despair. What better way, then, to introduce youths to the possibilities that stretch before us than YA climate fiction?

Climate fiction, or cli-fi, first made a splash with Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy. It began to be recognized as its own genre around the time of Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital trilogy, and established itself firmly in mainstream literature with Barbara Kingsolver's 2012 novel Flight Behavior. Since then, young-adult cli-fi titles have exploded onto the literary scene. They are a great way to reach the readers whose lives will likely be dominated by the impacts of climate change-and, perhaps, spur them to action.

Here are some of my favorite YA cli-fi books, organized by age, since some titles are not appropriate for younger imaginations.
Ages 11 to 14
Blood Red Road by Moira Young (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2012)

Part one of the Dust Lands trilogy, Blood Red Road, is the gritty story of Saba, a fierce young fighter who has set out on an epic journey to find her kidnapped brother, Lugh. Saba has to navigate through a wasted world swirling with dust storms, full of landfills, and baked by heat-but she has the help of a few friends. There's the roguelike Jack; her sister Emmi, whom Saba dislikes; and the Free Hawks, a group of female warriors who love to hate on the governing authorities.

What happens to the travelers and how the journey ends (or does it?) is best left for readers to unravel. But the setting of the Dust Lands trilogy won't wait for a spoiler-alert: The dystopia Saba has inherited is a world left by people called "The Wreckers" who are now extinct, their civilization long gone. The Wreckers could very well be us.

by Carl Hiaasen (Yearling, 2005)

Hoot is an oldie but a goldie. In his first book for kids (followed by the likes of Chomp and Flush), Hiaasen turns his humor to three middle-school children who are trying to save an endangered species of owl from an all-American pancake house called Mother Paula's.

While not explicitly climate fiction, Hoot still makes this list because climate change and mass extinction lurk in the background, making clear that our fates are inextricably linked to the flora and fauna around us.

How will Roy, Mullet, and Beatrice take on the cops, corporate thugs, and construction crews that are threatening the owls? Hiaasen's indignation at our stupidity is as relevant as ever-only now it's not just Florida wildlife versus a pancake restaurant but the entire planet versus fossil fuels.

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008)

The cover of Life As We Knew It apocalyptically reads, "the weather finally broke . . . for good." And so it has. An asteroid has hit the moon, bringing it closer to Earth and unleashing a wave of natural disasters.

The point is not whether this could happen but that freak events are possible, and this book is a glimpse into what could happen when they do. "Here's the funny thing about the world coming to an end," Miranda, the book's rural Pennsylvania heroine says. "Once it gets going, it doesn't seem to stop."

Told in diary entries, the book begins as the complaints of a self-absorbed and precocious teenager and mellows to a woman realizing the harshness of a world in climate winter. Will Miranda find a way out?

The Fog Diver by Joel Ross (Harper Collins, 2015)

The world is covered by a fog in which humans can't survive, making them move to the highest elevation possible. A group of ragtag orphans operate an air-raft that lets the hero, Chess, dive down into the mists to scavenge for treasures they can trade for supplies. Born in the fog, Chess is the only one immune to the sickness it, and he has special sight that allows him to see in the fog. But his special abilities make him a wanted man in the eyes of Lord Kodoc, ruler of slums and all-around evil guy, who is hunting him.

The Fog Diver is fast-paced and exciting. Through the fog shine a few important parables: that we are the problem that caused the abysmal fog; that nature can thrive if left alone; and that this is the time to let tenacious young kids lead the way.

Also recommended: Survival Colony Nine by Joshua Bellin, The Lost Compass by Joel Ross, by Melanie Crowder, and parts two and three of the Dust Lands trilogy by Moira Young.
Ages 15 to 18
The Emissary by Yoko Tawada (New Directions, 2018)

Born in a country that is isolated and off-kilter, the children living in The Emissary are condemned to short, miserable lives. Japan has suffered some kind of trauma that has left it closed off from the rest of the world; its children are born frail and don't make it to adulthood, while the adults keep on living.

In this awry world, both sinister and funny, we are introduced to the infant Mumei and his great-grandfather, Yoshiro. Author Yoko Tawada is a master at illustrating their lives; the tenderness and love between great-grandfather and grandson seeps through the pages.

But what will happen when Mumei is chosen as an emissary to tell the outside world what is happening? Will he make the journey? How will the world react to him?

The allegory is clear: Our children will inherit a far more hostile planet. Countries are closing off their borders already, and the number of refugees will only rise as more people are displaced by a changing climate. But we have our own young emissaries like Greta Thunberg. Hopefully, her fate will be different from Mumei's.

The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch (Bloomsbury, 2010)

A Pacific Northwest bildungsroman, The Highest Tide traces a summer in the life of Miles, a Rachel Carson-worshipping, too-short-for-his-age boy who is deeply fascinated by the ocean and the multitudes of life in it.

When Miles finds strange sea creatures (a giant squid, a ragfish) washing up at a Puget Sound beach, he is mistaken for a prophet and made into a sensation by the local media. During an interview, Miles portentously tells a reporter, "Maybe the earth is trying to tell us something."

The Highest Tide will make young readers enamored with the oceans at a time they need it the most. Climate change is causing warming and acidification. Emaciated whales are washing up on the shores. Coral reefs are dying and algae are blooming. As the waters of Puget Sound continue to rise an inch a year, Miles and his town will experience the highest tide by the end of the fateful summer.

Author Jim Lynch populates his story with a sweet and sour ensemble of characters and manages to keep the spotlight squarely on the water while exploring quintessential coming-of-age themes of puberty and sexuality.

Midnight at the Electric by Jodi Lynn Anderson (Harper Collins, 2017)

Sometimes it takes a simple, quiet voice to show us not only what we've lost but what we can hope to gain.

Midnight at the Electric begins in 2065, in Miami, where 16-year-old Adri has spent her whole life watching as the waters rise higher and higher through the city. This is the lost world being left behind, and Adri has been chosen as one of the few colonists to eke out a new future for humanity on Mars.

But before she goes to outer space, her life will be linked to two people who lived generations before her: Catherine and Leonore. Through the letters that Catherine and Leonore wrote to each other, Adri will find a past she never knew she had and an unexpected family among two long-dead women.

Evocative and lyrical, Midnight at the Electric is as much history as it is future. When things go awry in the future-climate chaos, war, dust everywhere-we will have to rely on each other to make it through.

When Adri eventually leaves Earth, she hopes to get to Mars safely and once there, "We make something new, and we do it right. We pay attention."

by Sherri Smith (Penguin Random House, 2014)

There is only so much devastation a place can take before it succumbs. The Gulf Coast in Orleans is that place. Hurricane after hurricane has blasted away the land and its people. After the storms comes the Delta Fever, an epidemic not unlike the Spanish Influenza: deadly, with no known cure. After the fever comes the quarantine, and the United States separates from the Delta States.

What the residents of the Outer States don't realize is that people still survive, in primitive colonies, in the Delta. They just have to not mix blood types (A-positive and O-negative are segregated) to keep the fever at bay. Orleans is harrowing and dystopic but not so hard to imagine.

"You know, there used to be music here all the time . . . jazz and blues, zydeco. The kind of songs that made your heart sing," an illegal mover of good between the two places says wistfully.

"Not anymore," replies 15-year-old Fen, an O-positive blood tribe member who is living in the quarantined region. Soon, she will be on the run from blood farmers with her friend's newborn, trying to give the baby a new life on the outside. This is a book as heartbreaking as it is uplifting. As a species, we are often terrible to one another, but author Sherri Smith insists that we can, and must, be kind.

Also rcommended: Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis, by Sarah Crossan, After the Snow by S.D. Crockett, The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline, Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi, and The Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd.
Ages 19 to 22
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Hachette, 2017)

Kim Stanley Robinson is a science fiction master, and New York 2140 is among his masterpieces. Sometimes climate fiction can be dishearteningly dystopian, but not this title. The sea might have risen 10 feet in the 2050s and another 40 feet as 2100 approached, but the denizens of New York soldier on. The voices of eight of these-all residents of the iconic Met Life tower-tell an urgent story of a not-so-far-fetched New York.

How Robinson created a utopian vision of humanity amid the debris of all our bad choices is hard to say. Suffice it to say that this mosaic takes on much more than climate change, because resilience in 2140 is about people changing the system-political, financial, and social-to survive.

"In the eternal battle of men against the sea," Robinson writes, "which antagonist was winning?" Read and find out.

South Pole Station by Ashley Shelby (Macmillan, 2018)

Cooper Gosling, our aggrieved and somewhat lost protagonist has earned the dubious honor of winning a National Science Foundation grant for the Antarctic Artists & Writers Program and is now living with the oddball personnel that populate a place where it is -54°F and the sun doesn't shine for half the year.

South Pole Station is rife with workplace drama, as only this kind of atmosphere can be, and author Ashley Shelby has managed to write a novel that is both dark and hilarious. It is also filled with scientific detail that gives the reader a sense of what is happening without being, well, boring.

At times, it is eerily like real life, with the federal government of South Pole Station biased against scientific findings and the arrival of a scientist who claims climate change is a hoax. Heartwarming in the chilling cold, South Pole Station is an irreverent take on the misfits living at the end of the world, and how art and science can share world views.

American War by Omar El Akkad (Penguin Random House, 2018)

America has been waging oil wars for a long time now, but it's now 2075, and in a country reeling from the impacts of climate change, the North has outlawed the use of oil. But the South refuses to abide by federal laws, and so it secedes from the Union to spark a second Civil War, which drives Omar El Akkad's fast-paced and alarming debut novel.

In flooded Louisiana, Sarat is born and lives. The story follows her into the war, where she will visit some dark, unhappy places. The only joyous parts of the novel are Sarat's memories: "My favorite postcards are from the 2030s and 2040s, the last decades before the planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself," the prologue begins.

Akkad imagines what it would be like if all the horrors of war that America has unleashed across the world-drones, refugee camps, suicide bombers-were to come home, and in the process turn Americans against each other.

Blackfish City by Sam J Miller (Harper Collins, 2018)

While the premise of Blackfish City sounds like science fiction, the context is very much of the present reality. Humans have fled the flooded and burned-up world of climate chaos and used their technological prowess to build a floating city called Qaanaaq in the Arctic Ocean. The energy is renewable, the heating is geothermal, and everywhere you look there is a feat of engineering. Yet society remains unchanged.

Told through the perspectives of four struggling characters-Kaev, Fill, Ankit, and Soq- Blackfish City is a richly imagined story of technology and a reminder that technology can only take us so far when we remain the kind that refuses to play well with others. If the people who left the world behind continue to make the same choices in Qaanaaq, how long before it crumbles too?

Crime is on the rise, corruption is unabated, the rich stay rich and the poor remain poor. In the midst of this arrives a mysterious woman, Masaaraq, regarded as a messiah by some and an enemy by others.

Like Robinson in New York 2140, Miller subverts the hero trope here to show that Masaaraq alone as an individual is nothing and that the collective has no easy ways to form a just society is a post-apocalyptic world.

Also recommended: Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, The Migration by Helen Marshall, Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich, by James Bradley, The Floating World by C. Morgan Babst.

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Hope in the Midst of Ecological Dystopia

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Climate change is infamously hard to wrap our heads around, and perhaps even harder to attach our hearts to. The remodeling of the entire planet is downright scary, and the demands that climate change places on us-the demands of individual attention and collective action-can be disorienting.

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14 books based on 5 votes: The Stone Wētā by Octavia Cade, Sodden Downstream by Brannavan Gnanalingam, How to Bee by Bren MacDibble, The Dog Runner by Br...

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We've heard of sci-fi and YA fiction genres but what about cli-fi? Climate fiction, or cli-fi, is a new category of speculative fiction, born out of climate change concern.

Where We Land is a new cli-fi novella that envisions a world dealing with climate refugees and rising sea levels.

Tim Jones is the author and he explained to Jesse Mulligan the novella is set in the future - how far in the future depends on how pessimistic you are.

He says cli-fi has always been around in some form.

"There's been some quite well known authors who've written what wasn't called climate change fiction or cli-fi in their day. It probably would be now, people like Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, the American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, and there's New Zealand writers who have been writing climate change fiction. I reviewed James McNaughton's novel Star Sailors a few years ago, for example."

He says climate change is an existential problem writers can no longer ignore - it's been informing his work since 2001, he says.

"My first short story collection, which was published in 2001, was actually called Extreme Weather Events. So, as you can see, I've had an interest in this area for a while, but things have gone far enough now that we're in a climate change emergency.

"Are we going to act or are we not going to act? And if we act, what form is that action going to take? Now, this novella is, I guess, based on the gloomy possibility that as there get to be more and more climate change refugees, or climate induced migrants is another term, nations are going to put up more and more barriers."

His first influence was Australia's response to boat arrivals.

"It was very much influenced by what was going on with Australia and their response to people trying to reach Australia by boat. The basic premise of this story is that New Zealand is doing the same thing a few years in the future.

"The Navy is sinking ships that are arriving. There's a shore patrol whose job it is to stop people who make it past the Navy. So that's the fundamental story I think if you read the book, you'll see where my sympathies lie in that situation."

His book centres on two protagonists with opposite motivations, he says.

"Two characters who've got opposing goals and it's quite simple in a way. One of them has come all the way from Bangladesh on a ship that's falling apart. The ship doesn't make it to shore, he wants to make it to shore and he wants to make it into Auckland.

"The other's a junior member of the shore patrol who more than anything else, she wants work and she wants pay. Her patrol's job is to catch the people who made it off that ship and past the Navy."

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You've probably heard of Sci-fi and YA genres of books but what about Cli-fi? Climate fiction is a new category of speculative fiction, born out of climate change concern.

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Becoming a member of the LoveReading4Kids community is free.

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Written by Tony Bradman

LoveReading View on Under the Weather: Stories About Climate Change

Perfectly pitched for younger readers, this is a timely collection of stories about an urgent matter that will affect everyone's future. The stories have a global perspective with different authors tackling the different consequences of the world warming up. Crucially, although there are terrible things that happen as a result of climate change - as in Candy Gourlay's story How to Build the Perfect Sandcastle which shows how an island in the Philippines is threatened by the temperature rise - this collection also shows that there is hope as children take action to make changes.

From the effects of rising sea levels to changes in animal behaviour and human lifestyles, these powerful stories portray the issues surrounding climate change in personal terms and so bring them vividly to life. Timely and hugely relevant these stories are as full of warmth and humour as they are providing warnings and inspiration and whether read from cover to cover or dipped into for one or two stories, will enlighten and inspire everyone to consider how climate change will affect us all unless we do something about it, and now.
LoveReading4Kids

Under the Weather: Stories About Climate Change Synopsis

Offering warnings and inspiration in equal measure, the stories cover a wide range of localities from Siberia and Canada to Australia, UK, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean. Writers include award-winning Linda Newbery as well as exciting newcomers like Australia's George Ivanoff.

Under the Weather: Stories About Climate Change Press Reviews

'This collection of powerfully written stories explores the issues surrounding climate change in personal terms and brings them vividly to life for children.' - The Bookseller

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All versions of this book

ISBN: 9781845079444
Publication date: 01/03/2012
Publisher: Frances Lincoln Childrens Books an imprint of Frances Lincoln Publishers Ltd
Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9781845079307
Publication date: 05/11/2009
Publisher: Frances Lincoln Childrens Books an imprint of Frances Lincoln Publishers Ltd
Format: Hardback

Book Information

ISBN:
9781845079307

Publication date:
5th November 2009

Author: Tony Bradman

Publisher:
Frances Lincoln Childrens Books an imprint of Frances Lincoln Publishers Ltd

Format:
Hardback

Pagination:
224 pages

Suitable for:
11+ readers, 9+ readers

About Tony Bradman

Tony Bradman was born in 1954 (not during the Jurassic era, as his children have been known to claim). He went to school in London, and then Cambridge University. After university he worked in the music press, then became Deputy Editor of Parents magazine, and began reviewing children's books. He had his first book for children published in 1985 and became a full-time author in 1987. He is a hugely prolific author with a particular passion for bringing history to life for young people. He is a regular at all the major literary festivals, reviews for The Guardian and is the ...

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Under the Weather: Stories About Climate Change by Tony Bradman

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No catches, no fine print just unconditional book loving for your children with their favourites saved to their own digital bookshelf. New members get entered into our monthly draw to win £100 to spend in your local bookshop plus lots lots more...

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This week we're celebrating the positive power of stories, all kinds of stories, to bring home what we risk losing on our beautiful planet - and what we can do about it. Here authors and children's books site members share the books that made them think. We'll be feeding this blog with more recommendations all week, so please share yours - and keep checking back.
Frank Cottrell Boyce (whose latest book is the remarkably green The Astounding Broccoli Boy)
The book that made me realise that I was part of the environment was The Ladybird Book of Saints. On the cover was this brilliant image of St Francis releasing the caged birds he had he had bought in the market. For ages afterwards I would go into pet shops and zoos and itch to unlock the doors. In fact there are "freeing the animals" scenes in at least two of my books. There are so many environmental messages about how horrible humans are wrecking the planet - that's obviously true in a way but this image made me feel that I belonged in the World too and that I could cherish and love it.
David Almond, author of Skellig
The Promise by Nicola Davies and Laura Carlin. It's beautifully written, beautifully illustrated picture book. It shows a troubled darkened world being recreated by the human need for greenery, life and colour.
Louise O'Neill, author of Only Ever Yours
Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction novel that is very much concerned with the damage humans are inflicting upon the environment and the possible catastrophic results that could have. Written in 2003, many plot points now seem eerily prescient and it makes for a disturbing, powerful read. Highly recommended for older teenagers.

Carl Hiaasen's Hoot is true to its name in that it's a supremely funny YA novel, and one that tends to be overlooked. There's a real environmental streak running through all of Hiaasen's works and Hoot is no exception, it deals with a Florida teen who bands together with a couple of new friends to stop the destruction of a burrowing owl colony. It's a lot of fun with a solid conservationist message at its core and an abundance of charm to boot."
Candy Gourlay, author of Shine
Long ago I wrote a short story called How to Build the Perfect Sandcastle for Under the Weather, the climate change anthology edited by Tony Bradman. About a white sand beach losing its sand because the sea is heating up ... the same hot oceans that later whipped up the murderous monster that was Typhoon Haiyan in 2013.

Perhaps the all too real climate change disaster in the Philippines has made me partial to flood stories. My favorite is Not the End of the World, the lyrical resetting of Noah's Ark as a Tsunami survival story by Geraldine McCaughrean.
Lottie Longshanks, site member
The wild series by Piers Torday. So far I have read The Last Wild and The Dark Wild. Kester has the unusual gift of communicating with animals and it is his mission to save the animals from red eye the disease that is slowly killing them. It is a really exciting story and you soon guess who the villains are Selwyn Stone and his lackeys who want to dictate the way that everyone lives. The amazing rubbish dump in the second book in the series really makes you think about the damage that we are doing to our planet. I can't wait to read the third book in the series, The Wild Beyond.

White Dolphin by Gill Lewis Set in the south West of England the exciting story tells of children who take on the might of a powerful fishing business to stop dredging in the harbour because of the damage it does to marine life. I also love Moon Bear by Gill Lewis. This incredibly moving story shows how deforestation leads to misery for the animals whose habitat was the forest. And finally here is a recommendation for small children I read it to my cousin who lives in Oman when he comes to visit us. Dear Greenpeace by Simon James. Emily writes to Greenpeace to find out how to care for the whale that she thinks she has seen in her pond. Emily's letters and the lovely replies she receives from Greenpeace will give little children a lot of information about whales. (Also see Lottie Longshank's poem Our Precious world)
SF Said, author of Varjak Paw
I recommend Exodus by Julie Bertagna: a brilliantly prescient YA novel about climate change, set in a drowned future world. It's full of unforgettable visions and characters, and it will stay with you forever!

ItWasLovelyReadingYou, site member
My book would be Breathe by Sarah Crossan. It made me think about how we take so many things for granted, such as oxygen. You can't see it, we use it every day, without it we would not survive; yet many people do not really sit down and feel a sense of gratitude for these types of things, becuase we assume we deserve them, we see them as something that will never go away, we just accept it without question. Breathe really made me feel a sense of 'imagine if we didn't have oxygen, or we had limited supplies of it-", it made me question my unconscious detachment from what keeps us alive, and really feel privelidged to have all of these necessities.
Katherine Rundell, author of Rooftoppers
Cosmic, by Frank Cottrell Boyce. Cosmic is a book that makes the world look like something worth protecting. It's hilariously funny, and also wise - it makes its readers want desperately to go into space, but also to take care of the world while we're on it. The Earth is, as one of the astronauts says, "some kind of lovely." The Last Wild series by Piers Torday - these three spectacular books are about a world decimated by humans, and the possibility of that loss feels very real and urgent and frightening - and they're also fantastic adventure stories, about bravery and animals and human capacity to do huge good as well as harm. And there's a bossy talking cockroach.

Site Brahmachari, author of Kite Spirit and Artichoke Hearts
For me it has to be The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy by Gavin Maxwell. I fell in love with these books as a child because they are set on the West coast of Scotland - a place I love - where wildlife and nature are the biggest characters. It;s a humbling landscape. If you have a love of the outdoors and really want to study the nature of beautiful, playful otters... and can stand to have your heart broken .... you should read these stories. Although they were written 50 years ago they are as timeless as the shingle beaches they are set on. The author lived and breathed the paradise he went to live in... and so will you when you read these books... and afterwards you can watch the film (tissues at the ready!)
OrliTheBookWorm, site member
Breathe by Sarah Crossan is probably the book that's impacted me the most in terms of the environment - it's a dystopian novel, with people living in domes due to a lack of oxygen - the raw descriptions and harsh realities were wonderfully done and uttery thought provoking, and made me take a step away from my laptop and have a look outside my window.... It's a brilliant book, which I guarantee will change your perspective on the environment around us.
Piers Torday, author of The Dark Wild trilogy
The Animals of Farthing Wood by Colin Dann - the original classic tale of a group of British animals seeking refuge when their precious Farthing Wood is threatened by human development. They overcome incredible obstacles and danger to make it to a wildlife sanctuary. But reading it today there is an extra poignancy - some of the animals in the story, like the red-backed shrike, are now extinct, and others - like the adder, hare and voles - are all under threat.
BritishBiblioholic, site member
Watership Down by Richard Adams - When the rabbits in Watership Down are forced to leave their home, it is due to its impending destruction by humans. This potentially can be seen as an allegory for the ongoing destruction for the environment in general - and unlike the rabbits, if we don't save our environment, we won't be able to find somewhere else to live.
Tony Bradman, author of Anzac Boys
One of my favourite books about the environment is Oi! Get Off Our Train, a brilliant picture book by John Burningham. It's about a boy who dreams he's travelling around the world on his toy train, and each time he stops he picks up animals from species that are endangered because their habitat is being threatened or has been destroyed. Great pictures and the message is delivered with a lot of fun.
Sarah Crossan, author of Breathe
The Last Wild by Piers Torday - it's rare for a cli-fi novel to be magical, engaging and affecting, but Torday achieves all of these things. Not only that, but each book in the trilogy gets better. He's not a writer to watch but one we are already keenly watching.
Please share the book that made YOU think about the environment and climate change and we'll add it to this blog. You can either email on childrens.books@theguardian.com with the heading "eco books" or tweet @GdnChildrensBks.
Your recommendations
Beatrice, on email
The Word for World is Forest by Ursula Le Guin for fairly sophisticated young readers from about age 13. The indigenous social organization of the very green planet experiencing colonization therein was fascinating, and opens young minds up to understanding the profound disruptions experienced by, as well as the important teachings of native peoples everywhere. Also, The Owl Service byAlan Garner gave rise to surprising conversations with my 10 year-old about landscape, and the connections between culture, history and the environment, as well as the importance to humans of preserving those connections. For much younger children The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein can seem a little odd viewed from a conservationist perspective, but it inspired lovely conversations about nature and environmental stewardship ("us taking care of nature because nature takes care of us") with my 4 year-old. Anything by Jean Craighead George.
Sandra, on email
I would strongly recommend the power of Scottish writer Rachel Meehan's two books, Power's Out and Water's Edge. Through her strong characterisation, and the fiesty nature of her principal character Nairne, her hard-hitting story lines play out with force. The unvarnished truth of the implications of relentless climate change is delivered through fast paced adventures, which are compelling reading for young people. Her message is unmissable.

Teresa, on email
Have a look at Rachel Meehan's books - the Waters Edge trilogy.
Mary, curator, eco-fiction.com
Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta: The novel takes place in the future after climate change has ravished economies and ecologies, and made fresh water scarce. The main character, Noria, is a young woman learning the traditional, sacred tea master art from her father. Yet, water is rationed and scarce in her future world. Her family has a secret spring of water, and, as tea masters, she and her father act as the water's guards, even though what they are doing is a crime according to their future world's government, a crime strongly disciplined by the military.

Nature's Confession by JL Morin: The eco-novel is wonderful and reminds me of classic science fiction I watched or read as a kid. It was a genre that fascinated me then, and this book has joined that memory. The novel is epic in that it doesn't just tell a story (which it does do too), but it puts our very survival into question while romping through the universe or discovering new quantum physics that are both scientific and spiritual in nature. In the meantime, universal symbols are unearthed, codes are investigated, fat corporations are dominating, a romance is blossoming, computers come alive, and native tribes and Nature on another planet bring our own treasured past into the future.

Tito intiro Chavaropana by Jessica Groenendijk: Tito intiro Chavaropana means 'Tito and the Giant Otter' in Matsigenka. The author, a biologist who has studied giant otters, is now working on a sequel, in which Tito sets off into the forest to hunt a spider monkey and meets a harpy eagle on the way. They become friends but not without a misunderstanding or two!

Spirit Bear by Jennifer Harrington: Spirit Bear celebrates a rare and iconic black bear that is born with a recessive gene that makes its coat creamy or white. Also called the Kermode bear, the spirit bear lives in the delicate, rich, and threatened ecosystem of the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, Canada. Jennifer's story is about the journey of a spirit bear cub that gets lost from his mother and has to find his way back.
Rachel, on email
I would like to recommend Rachel Meehan's Water's Edge and Power's Out, from the Troubled Times series, published by Cherry House publishing. I bought these books for my son who was around 13 at the time and he gobbled them up, so I took a peek and was hooked from the beginning. I'm a bit of a scaredy cat when it comes to apocalyptic, end-of-world type stuff, so I was nervous about the subject matter, but the stories are so strong, and the lead character is so gutsy, that I was quickly able to put my fears aside and just get lost in the books, the sign of a very good read. I think that these books make the threat of climate change seem very real; they are based on the implications of slow, incremental change rather than something sudden and momentous, which makes them feel that they could be set in a very near future, and that in fact some of the issues touched on in the book are already with us. All the more frightening. I am writing this recommendation as an adult reader, but I think I can say on behalf of my teenage son, with whom I have discussed the books (and he loves them), that the author has a very direct style, generates pace and tension brilliantly and raises very important issues of our time, in a way that is highly readable and has a powerful impact, not just for a teenage audience but for adults too.

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What are the best eco books for children and teens?

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This week we're celebrating the positive power of stories, all kinds of stories, to bring home what we risk losing on our beautiful planet - and what we can do about it. Here authors and children's books site members share the books that made them think.

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Sustainability is a critical issue for New Zealand - environmentally, economically, culturally, politically, and socially. We need to learn how to live smarter to reduce our impact on the environment for future generations.

About

"Mō tātou te taiao ko te atawhai, mō tātou te taiao ko te oranga"

"It is for us to care for and look after the environment to ensure its wellbeing, in doing so we ensure our own wellbeing and that of our future generations"

What is education for sustainability?

New Zealand's national curriculum focuses on 21st century learning, ensuring learners are equipped to participate in and contribute to their own society and the wider world. An important aspect of this is encouraging students to consider significant future-focused issues such as sustainability.

Education for sustainability (EfS) is about learning to think and act in ways that will safeguard the future wellbeing of people and our planet.

Education for sustainability includes learning about:

the environment - water, land, ecosystems, energy, waste, urban living, transportation

the interactions between the natural environment and human activities, and the consequences of these

the choices and actions we can take to prevent, reduce, or change harmful activities to the environment.

Central to this learning is the exploration of attitudes, values, and behaviours with respect to the environment - both our own and those of others.

A focus on education for sustainability:

can develop learners who are informed decision makers, and connected to the land and the environment

provides a context that enables meaningful connections between learning areas, key competencies, and values

offers ways for students and schools to contribute to the social, cultural, economic, and environmental well-being of New Zealand. A sustainable school prepares young people for a lifetime of sustainable living, through its teaching, its culture, and its day-to-day practices

provides opportunities for students to engage in genuine learning in their communities and take action

uses authentic learning to develop creative and critical thinking for a sustainable future.

How does education for sustainability link to the New Zealand Curriculum?

Sustainability is a significant theme throughout the national curriculum:

It is evident in The New Zealand Curriculum's vision for young people in New Zealand to be "confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners".

It is an important element for a graduate of Māori-medium education to enable them to effectively participate in the Māori world, advocating a Māori world view and understanding their role within whānau, hapū, iwi, community, and wider society.

Education for sustainability and Te Marautanga O Aotearoa

Te Marautanga o Aotearoa endorses a curriculum to support Māori students in their own world and to connect students purposefully towards contributing to a sustainable environment through holistic learning pathways.

Education for sustainability and The New Zealand Curriculum

Vision

Principles

Values

Key competencies

Learning areas

Growing a sustainable school

A framework for understanding and developing a whole school approach to sustainability has been produced by a New Zealand research team including teachers through a Teaching and Learning Research Initiative project. This framework shows the areas of school life to consider when developing a whole school approach to sustainability.

Four areas of school life work together to create a sustainable school.

In a sustainable school:

People work collaboratively, are reflective of our bicultural heritage and the diversity of their community. They ensure that students are all involved in sharing decisions in order to become confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners.

Programmes focus on learning about the interaction between people and the environment and developing attitudes and behaviours for a more sustainable future. Through taking action students discover why sustainability matters and how to make sustainability a reality in their school and wider community.

Sustainable Practices are part of school culture instigated by students and staff to make a more resilient community for the future.

A Place is created where students and their community work together willingly to reduce their impact on the planet for future generations to enjoy the diverse and beautiful world we live in.

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Sustainability is a critical issue for New Zealand - environmentally, economically, culturally, politically, and socially. We need to learn how to live smarter to reduce our impact on the environment for future generations.

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1. For example, Barratt Hacking and Barratt () note that at an international conference held in 2005 called 'Childhood', devoted to examining their role in transforming societies, only a 'limited number' of the 700 papers explored environmental perspectives. In extracting some lessons from the articles published in that special issue of Environmental Education Research, namely children as environmental stakeholders, researching their environmental learning, including agency and restrictions on learning, and further directions for childhood environment research, there are numerous positive and important suggestions that pertain to questions of marginalization and restorative justice, participatory approaches that give voice to children, intergenerationality of interest and power, and the existential (and phenomenological) significance of everyday, local environments. Methodological adjustments and new directions are also recommended. Children's literature is not mentioned though, and ecoliteracy, in the sense anticipated by literature, is implied only.

2. According to Buell ( 2005. 2005 The future of environmental criticism: Environmental crisis and literary imagination, Malden, MA: Blackwell. , 113) the challenge for environmental justice revisionism will be to fill the ecocriticism gap of explaining '... how nature matters for those readers, critics, teachers, and students for whom environmental concern does not mean nature preservation first and foremost and for whom nature writing, nature poetry, and wilderness narrative do not seem the most compelling forms of environmental imagination, then the movement may fission and wane'.

3. Somewhat akin to the surrealist movement in Art, and exemplified by Salvador Dali's The persistence of memory, commonly referred to as the 'melting clocks', we bear witness to the time of the landscape being partially deconstructed via Dali's paranoia‐critical method. Ants and flies feed on the disintegration of the rotting carcass of 'modern time', measured by and symbolized through numerically quantified clocks.

4. Indeed, while it may surprise some readers that advocates of poststructural analysis in environmental education haven't (quite? yet?) taken the increasingly familiar route to this troika in such work - to explications of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory perhaps via Slavoj Zizek's post‐Marxist commentaries or Julia Kristeva's inquiries about language, the subject and semiotics, is perhaps putting it (too) crudely - it does appear to have been on the horizon for some time (cf. early work by Conley ).

5. This is rather than to privilege a direct focus on what it might hide in the classroom, as in an ideologically driven critique. Interestingly perhaps, Alain Badiou (, 4) has defined a fable as 'that part of a narrative that, so far as we are concerned, fails to touch on any Real, unless it be by virtue of that invisible and indirectly accessible residue sticking to every obvious imaginary'.

6. There is a considerable hill to climb here. What counts and is experienced as restrictive forms of thought and action imposed on people by the social conditions, of say, capitalist globalized societies, can be easily contested and thus derailed in disputes about notions of false consciousness, the credibility of Marxist and Marxian analysis, etc.; while an identity (colonized or not to different degrees and hybridities), being a fundamental attachment for the subject, cannot simply be thrown off at will. Indeed, identifying it is not reducible to claims of an identity, as if the claim were identical and identifiable with what is labelled or assumed as the identity, or if simply speaking otherwise in the face of irreducibility can erase difference. As noted in the Editorial, MacIntyre, Ricoeur and Gare, each lay claim to identity requiring narrative competence - accounts of ourselves are intersubjective and interlocutory, and thus never fully or solely subject to the control of an individual alone.

7. Cf. Aleksandra Mir's 'Switzerland and Other Islands', exhibited at Kunsthaus Zurich, August-September 2006. This series of political, geographical and mythological drawings on the subject of islands includes Insula Svizzera, which reimagines Switzerland's landlocked borders as a coastline, while the Unexplored Islands series uses a range of frames and objects to resituate family political boundaries as those yet to be explored or integrated with existing atlases. http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/switzerland/switzerland.html.

8. The Harlequin, lest we forget, stands in the place of the chaos of life and has been a commonplace in historic European children's literature. According to Lechte (, 347), this 'hybrid, hermaphrodite, mongrel figure, a mixture of diverse elements' and 'a challenge to homogeneity', with the Harlequin, when one costume is removed, another is underneath to take the former's place. Equally, the Harlequin's presence and story‐telling can be used to bear witness to the tragedy and absurdities of our stories and times, revealing, challenging and redistributing knowledges that might otherwise escape attention or reflection.

9. This is a markedly different conclusion to that of Theodor Adorno. Given this, and following Sloane's lead, an 'eco'‐informed engagement with John Boyne's 2006 children's novel, The boy in the striped pajamas, presents a potentially rich and compelling scenario to explore the intersections of its aesthetic, ethical and political dimensions, responsibilities and limitations, given the im/possible and forbidden childhood friendship Boyne portrays on either side of a camp fence.

10. If it is said, 'every tool is a weapon - if you hold it right' (Ani DiFranco), is a stone or stick a weapon if you throw it (right)? More pointedly and abstractly, it is said, representations remain objectifications because they articulate an external position. So, in one view, children's storybooks, mythic tales, etc., as objects, are, by their very nature, quite literally a 'frozen' relation that immobilizes and condenses meanings, concepts and possibilities. Equally, in themselves they do not avail the interiority to a meaning or self in time engaging with 'the ways things are' or one's or another's life as lived. But in throwing a stone, or in 'teaching a stone to talk', as Annie Dillard would have it, they can present openings to many things: they may afford transformative interdictions, even when - perhaps, better when - their genre isn't intentionally transgressive but rather 'conservative'. To understand how this may be so, autoethnographic approaches are arguably well suited to the exploration and examination of these claims, in that these approaches foreground inquiries as to whether the reader is awake to possibility, regards a text as provisional and not closed or incontestable, or, as Burke and Mackenzie ( and Cutter‐Mackenzie, A. 2010. What's there, what if, what then, and what can we do? An immersive and embodied experience of environment and place through children's literature. 2010 Environmental Education Research, 16(3-4): 311-30. ) have suggested, can demonstrate they are ecoliterally competent to make good use of all that in, as and through an environmental education worthy of the name.

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Openings for researching environment and place in children's literature: ecologies, potentials, realities and challenges

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1. For example, Barratt Hacking and Barratt () note that at an international conference held in 2005 called 'Childhood', devoted to examining their role in transforming societies, only a 'limited number' of the 700 papers explored environmental perspectives.

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Australian & New Zealand Environmental History Network

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Teresa Shewry

How do literary texts orient their readers towards conflicts over the meanings and uses of water or of butterflies and their rainforests? What might these texts say about how the planet looks from different perspectives around the world? How does literature try to make readers see struggles over scientific abilities to alter and re-alter life?

In this issue of ENNZ, we focus on literature and the environment, a combination that may seem unusual, given that environmental studies is more often associated with scientists, policy makers, and political movements than it is with literary critics and their texts. Yet, as environmentalism engages increasingly with various places and subjects world-wide, interest in environmental issues has grown and been institutionalized in the humanities, including in Comparative Literature and English departments. The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) was established in the early 1990s, and there are now many publications, conferences, and even entire university programmes in the field.

The worlds of the socio-cultural texts that have tried to take their readers beneath the seas, over the ice sheets, across islands and continents and beyond into space, and the aesthetic, political, and cultural contexts in which they are engaged, generate perplexing questions and problems for researchers. I will suggest just a few of the possibilities of the field by outlining some of these questions here.

Why study literature and the environment? Why not just become a scientist in order to undertake research about the environment? The answers to this question vary according to how concepts such as "literature" and "environment" are used and defined, and the contexts in which they are engaged. Recently, it has been increasingly common for environmental literary critics to justify their research as contributing to the alleviation of environmental crisis and therefore to the survival of life on earth. For example, Lawrence Buell argues that scholars in this field foreground cultural texts such as literature and film in approaching the environment because:

The success of all environmentalist efforts finally hinges not on 'some highly developed technology, or some arcane new science' but on 'a state of mind': on attitudes, feelings, images, narratives. That the advertising budget of U.S. corporations exceeds the combined budgets of all of the nation's institutions of higher learning is crude but telling evidence that trust in the power of imagination is not a literary scholar's idiosyncrasy.

A potential (although not inevitable) problem with this approach to environmental literature is that it can lead to assumptions that novels or poetry should speak about the environment as if they are scientists, politicians, or environmentalists. This expectation of literature can be seen in New Zealand at present, where socio-cultural texts are often instrumentalized in varied ways in environmental struggles. For example, poetry, novels, and films are used in education about conservation or to draw eco-tourists to socially and environmentally contested locations.

Does literature simply repeat back to us truths that are already known to science, political movements, or politicians? If literature does act as a prism for scientific or political voices, in what ways does it rework those voices in the process? I think that by analyzing the varied and often experimental struggles undertaken by socio-cultural texts in building narratives about the environment, scholars can investigate alternative perspectives on nature, culture, and landscapes, and the aesthetic, political, and socio-historical contexts in which they are engaged. As the Italian writer Italo Calvino has written, of literature in a different context:

Literature is necessary to politics above all when it gives a voice to whatever is without a voice, when it gives a name to what as yet has no name, especially to what the language of politics excludes or attempts to exclude. I mean aspects, situations, and languages both of the outer and of the inner world, the tendencies repressed both in individuals and in society. Literature is like an ear that can hear things beyond the understanding of the language of politics; it is like an eye that can see beyond the colour spectrum perceived by politics.

Speaking of Italian writers and their influence, a second issue that researchers currently confront is the difficulty of stabilising environmental literary texts in particular contexts. Literary critics follow their texts as they move in both space and time, and these movements can be unbearably slow (with resemblances in genres unfolding over hundreds, or thousands, of years) and can radiate across vast spaces. Researchers in the field of literature and the environment have carried out experiments with appropriate temporal and spatial scales at which to imagine environmental literatures, and an ideal of "internationalization" has emerged, in a context of criticism (which is not entirely accurate) that up until now the field has been primarily based in and focused on North America. In some cases, scholars assume that because the environment is a world scale phenomenon, the approaches and methodologies of environmental literary criticism also apply world-wide, to all literatures. For instance, Greg Garrard recently wrote that "I will be dealing principally with British and North American literature and culture, although the principles of ecocriticism [environmental criticism] would of course admit of more general application." . At the opposite pole, some critics have seen non-American environmental literatures as culturally "particular", or assumed that non-American literature is unable to speak about environmental issues beyond local or national contexts.

In New Zealand, environmental writers and critics often manoeuvre in a context where the nation has been (and often continues to be) imagined not only as a political entity but also as an ecological or environmental entity. Nigel Clark has described the ways in which ideas of a primordial, unique, and national nature were important for settlers in imagining New Zealand as a national community, and were promoted in literary studies among other disciplines. One challenge for researchers may be to consider how socio-cultural texts experiment with ways of imagining environmental problems at scales that sometimes engage intensely with the national context but also that at least partly go beyond it, addressing issues such as various migrations to and from New Zealand, regional or planetary environmentalisms, or the movement of people, ideas, and nonhumans in ways that do not compute with established conceptual frameworks.

Finally, a point of convergence but also contention between many scholars who work on literature and the environment is their investigation of the relationships between nonhuman nature and culture. What characterises the environmental dimension of literature? Lawrence Buell argues that in environmental literature "the nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history." Many scholars have tried to balance the ways in which nonhuman nature is always caught up in history, culture, politics and power, without simply squashing resistant, unaccountable nonhuman worlds beneath rhetorics of "culture" or "history." An as yet unexamined issue that the field may need to confront in defining the term "environmental" has been posed recently in a different context by anthropologist Christine J. Walley:

While obviously all people have relationships with, and ideas about, the environment, since it is the medium in which we live and which sustains us as human beings, must we all possess a common view of nature that bounds our perceptions of the environment in similar ways and sees it as distinct from other phenomena? Although much academic thought particularly in its French variants has rested upon a symbolic distinction between nature and culture, is such a distinction, [...] truly universal?

The archives of literature and criticism about environmental issues in New Zealand are rich but diffuse: much criticism exists as book reviews, or in journal articles. Some recent, longer studies and articles that touch on literature and the environment in New Zealand or the Pacific have been published or are forthcoming. Further, interesting work is being done across disciplinary boundaries. Recent works include:

Charles Dawson has a paper forthcoming on rivers and bicultural issues in the journal PAN.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey's Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures has been published with University of Hawai'i Press (April 2007) and includes discussions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and nuclear testing.

Diane Hebley's The Power of Place: Landscape in New Zealand Children's Fiction 1970-1989 (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998) is a detailed study of the representation of places such as beaches or islands in children's literature.

Julian Kuzma's Landscape, Literature, and Identity: New Zealand Late Colonial Literature as Environmental Text, 1890-1921 is an intricate study of landscape in New Zealand literature and an analysis of the uses of literature in environmental history (Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Dunedin: University of Otago Schools of English and History, 2003).

Notes

Teresa Shewry is undertaking doctoral research on ways that Pacific literature and film narrates and influences hope for changed ecologies in a context of urgent ecological problems and intensifying efforts to reshape people's approaches to ecology in the Pacific in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

Jocelyn Tresize is undertaking doctoral research on John Muir's writing from an ecocritical perspective.

Briar Wood has a paper forthcoming in ISLE (April or May 2007) called "Mana Wahine and Ecocriticism in Some Post-80s Writing by Maori Women."

David Young published Whio: Saving New Zealand's endangered blue duck with Craig Potton Publishing (Nelson, 2006) and Keeper of the Long View: the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and Sustainability with PCE (Wellington, 2007). His previous book was a history of conservation in New Zealand (2004).

Further interesting starting points for materials and references are the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment web pages:

European Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/esml/easlce/index.htm

David Young recommends, for those who want to stretch out towards the edge of sustainable thinking, a couple of websites and an article:

Alan AtKisson, "Sustainability is Dead, Long Live Sustainability", 2001, http://www.AtKisson.com

Adams, W.M., "The Future of Sustainability: rethinking environment and development in the 21st century", 2006 http://home.flash.net/~jteague/Sue/orglearn.html

Kofman, Fred, and Peter M. Senge. "Communities of Commitment: the Heart of Learning Organizations". Organizational Dynamics 22.2 (Autumn 1993), p.5 (19).

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Literature and the Environment: Fictions of Nature, Culture, and Landscapes

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Teresa Shewry How do literary texts orient their readers towards conflicts over the meanings and uses of water or of butterflies and their rainforests? What might these texts say about how the planet looks from different perspectives around the world? How does literature try to make readers see struggles over scientific abilities to alter and...

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Enter an immersive digital art experience, bringing together more than 20 leading creatives from across Aotearoa. These multimedia works explore our relationships with the ocean and climate breakdown, highlighting indigenous voices and knowledge. This is art as activism.

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Art: Michel Tuffery

Animation and Editing: Michel Tuffery & Mike Bridgman

Poetry & Performance: Karlo Mila

Soundscape Design: Laughton Kora

Fangufangu and Vocals: Manase Lua

Soundscape Mixing: Tiki Taane

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Art: Michel Tuffery Animation and Editing: Michel Tuffery & Mike Bridgman Poetry & Performance: Karlo Mila Soundscape Design: Laughton Kora Fangufangu and Vocals: Manase Lua Soundscape Mixing: Tiki Taane

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Green Party Co-leader Marama Davidson's State of the Planet speech

Mā te oranga o te taiao, ka ora ai te iwi, mō te takitini kāore mō te torutoru anake.

Nei ra taku mihi tuatahi ki a koe e te koka o te ao, korua ko te matua ki runga ra - me o tamariki katoa huri noa I te ao turoa. Ko Papa, Ko Rangi, ko ngā Atua katoa tēnā koutou.

Ki ngā tūpuna hei takoto te ara tika mō tātou te iwi o nāianei, tēnei te mihi ki a koutou.

E rere haere ana ngā mihi ki te mana whenua o te rohe nei. Ki ngā hapū me ngā iwi o Tāmaki Makaurau, tēnā koutou mō tō koutou manaakitanga i tēnei wā.

Huri noa ki a koutou kua whakarauika mai nei i tēnei rā, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

Kia ora!

Well, what a time to be a part of this world!

Today, I want to share some of the big dreams and visions that my Green colleagues and I are working for.

Over the summer I was grateful to return to my Hokianga homeland with my family including my dad, who is also here today.

During our holiday dad showed me the kauri tree he had planted over 20 years ago on our whenua.

That kauri is pretty big now, about as tall as the house.

And my brother said the best time to plant this tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.

Well, we can't go back in time, so we need do all we can now to protect our climate, solve inequality and care for nature.

Addressing these issues is the priority for the Green Party and I want to thank you all for being here today to hear what I have to say about this mahi.

And let me take this opportunity to thank our current and former Green Party MPs, our local government representatives and our Green Party leadership and our party members and volunteers who are the backbone of everything we do.

Introduction

Here in Auckland our communities want more from Government. They want long lasting change.

They want action on the climate.

They want strong communities which means good housing, liveable incomes, accessible transport, meaningful jobs, quality healthcare and thriving natural parks.

That's what the Green Party is here to do.

We measure our success through the wellbeing of our mokopuna, through the growth in our precious native wildlife, through the harmony in our communities and through the safety of our environment.

Protecting our climate, solving inequality and caring for nature - I want to see Aotearoa flourish.

We've been in Government for two years, and in that time we've done so much - including banning new offshore oil and gas permits, delivering a blueprint for a kinder and stronger social safety net, and passing the Zero Carbon Act.

We've acted to protect our people and our planet.

It is only with the Greens in government that we've turned the ship around, but we know we need to go further and faster on the issues that matter.

Over the summer I've spent time with whānau on my whenua, my awa and my moana, I've talked with our home people and local communities and I've walked along the coastline and in our native bush.

This has renewed my determination and resolve for the work we need to do.

Today, I want to talk about the future our people and our planet deserve.

Our vision for nature is that she is thriving, living and constantly breathing around us.

Before even our human needs come into play, Papatūānuku must be treasured and protected for her innate beauty.

Everything in the cycle of life is important - from the most minute of the 150 different types of organisms that live on Tāne Mahuta right through to the ancient giant kauri tree ancestor itself.

So first, we must protect nature for nature's sake, and second because we rely on Papatūānuku for our kai, for the air we breathe, for the water we drink and for our humanity.

Our water should be clean and refreshing, free from pollution and protected as a taonga to be cared for and nurtured.

We can have healthy forests of kauri, oceans teaming with life, and valleys filled with native birdsong.

We can once again understand that animals are our relations.

I look forward to the day when humans stop thinking we can be the boss of our big Mama, and just love her the way we are supposed to.

Strong political leadership must recognise that tangata whenua and grassroots community movements are dedicated to protecting our future and the environment, and we need to support them.

I also want to talk about our vision for indigenous peoples.

Affirming indigenous knowledge, and leadership is essential to solving the most pressing issues of our time around climate, inequality and nature.

Around the globe indigenous peoples have been looking after the land and caring collectively for each other, for millennia.

As peoples we acknowledged early on that when we exploit something that our earth mother has provided us with, this has an impact on the rest of the cycle of life and on future generations.

We had to make mistakes, learn from them and work out how to keep life's circle in balance so that nature was able to replenish herself.

And we have held on to these understandings long after our lands, waters and languages were taken from us.

We knew what a circular economy was centuries before the term was invented.

So around the world prioritising indigenous led solutions is our way forward.

Here in Aotearoa, Te Tiriti is our country's founding document, forged at the creation of Māori and non-Māori living together in an equal and respectful relationship.

Upholding Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the sovereignty of tangata whenua is simply the right thing to do.

When Aotearoa arrives at this understanding, we will be a nation where ALL our people and our environment flourish.

Indigenous thinking shows us how to be good ancestors to our descendants seven generations ahead.

Indigenous peoples expertise, knowledge AND most importantly leadership is critical in protecting our climate, solving inequality and caring for our planet.

Part of solving inequality is acknowledging that our communities have always been diverse.

We need a world free of discrimination which celebrates our colourful and different lives.

The only reason our schools and hospitals, sports teams and work places, performance and art organisations, marae and community gardens - the only reason our communities - thrive is because of the love and time put in by so many different people from different walks of life.

Welcoming that diversity all around us is how we build cohesion and connection among groups so we can resolve the worlds issues together.

Our vision of cohesive and connected communities is founded on our shared notion of fairness.

When people have long-term warm homes, healthy kai on the table, enough money left to pay the bills and deal with life's surprise events, meaningful jobs with living wages, when schools and training places and healthcare providers and justice systems honour who people are and provide what people need when they need it - then communities and families are healthier, safer and stronger for everyone.

It matters to me that all people should have the same opportunities to live good lives.

That people are able to live the lives that they choose to live rather than the lives they are forced to tolerate.

I look forward to a shared understanding for example where sitting in an important meeting or at a bedside with a sick person are both recognised as high stake roles.

And we cannot address inequality without also addressing climate change.

Because we need to safeguard the living systems on which all of life and humanity depends.

This requires us to transform our system to one that reduces harmful emissions so that we leave our grandchildren a stable planet to live on.

I want to give an example about what happens when I speak publicly about climate change.

I put up a social media post recently about taking action on climate change.

Someone commented: "You know Marama I can't even think about this climate stuff while I'm losing the house I live in because I can't afford the rent increase."

They raise a valid point.

In creating a zero carbon world, we have to make sure people are able to put food on the table and have a roof over their head, otherwise our solutions will seem irrelevant to their lives.

My vision for protecting our climate, solving inequality and caring for nature understands that all these issues are connected and dependant on each other and we must address them all holistically.

However, we need to be real about the challenges we face.

That the situation we are in, and the problems we are trying to solve, have been created and perpetuated deliberately to benefit a few at the expense of the many, and at the cost of our planet.

We have enough to ensure every single person lives a good, full life.

We have a beautiful and prosperous country that everyone could share in.

But for too long we have focused on short-term profit at the cost of our people and planet.

We have measured success based on abstract ideas of growth and worth instead of asking whether our children have full puku or our kaumatua have warm houses or our communities have strong bonds.

The problems we face now are the consequence of decisions our governments made, not just for the past thirty years but for generations.

By driving the theft of Māori land, encouraging the exploitation of our Pasifika neighbours, entrenching the inequality of women and the exclusion of people with disabilities, we, politicians, have supported the wealthiest few to get wealthier at everyone else's expense, to build walls of poverty and disenfranchisement and call them opportunities.

As a country, we have sat on our hands as our natural taonga have been driven to the brink of extinction and climate change has accelerated due to an unfounded belief that the very market which benefits from this will fix it.

And in the process we have been divided against each other and told to think of ourselves as free-floating individuals, cut loose and competing against one another instead of working together.

We can choose something different. And we must.

Because if we don't, we will see more unprecedented catastrophic weather events and fires like those in the Amazon and Australia, wrecking our landscapes, communities, homes, animals and families, world-wide.

More stressed rivers, which threatens not only the health of our communities but the health of all living systems which underpin our way of life and the extinction of more and more species

More of the misery, imprisonment, anger and despair plaguing many of our whanau.

In my turangawaewae of Northland the impact can be seen in the deteriorating Hokianga Harbour and the stressed Whirinaki Awa.

In New Plymouth we're hearing about people not able to leave violent relationships because there's nowhere for them to go.

People in Dunedin are experiencing more and more flooding every year, with no sign of improvement.

In Whanganui prisoners are returning into our justice system because there's not enough support to help them reconnect to their communities.

In Christchurch it looks like the bonds of our communities challenged by white supremacists committing acts of unspeakable violence.

And in my home community of Manurewa, South Auckland, it looks like queues at the local Work and Income Office starting as early 4:00am.

I know that people are living this and I will not lecture them on their lives from this place of privilege.

But I want you to understand my priority has always been and will always be advocating for those who are struggling.

My priority is people living with these consequences - that's why I'm here.

Earlier I touched on the interconnected nature of the big crises we're facing of climate change, environmental degradation, and inequality.

Focusing on only each problem in isolation cannot and will not work.

These crises will impact on women, on working people, on lower income communities, on people with disabilities and on indigenous communities in a way that is unjust.

We need to work together to understand the connections between progressive grassroots campaigns from Pacific leadership calling for a halt to the seas rising over their nations, to students striking for climate change action.

From anti-poverty and homelessness advocates to indigenous peoples protecting their lands and waters.

Not to mention people agitating for fair pay and equity agreements, and so many more!

I want to pay particular attention to tauiwi and allies around the world showing up alongside indigenous peoples on the frontline protecting their lands.

The solidarity that is shown to first peoples movements is a power that has unlimited potential and I am excited to see more and more of it happening around the world.

We are all fighting the same oppressive forces.

These causes are all connected, they are all resisting the ongoing perpetuation of inequality and climate destruction.

But we have made start.

As the Co-Leader of the Green Party I know we have the responsibility to present the bold and big ideas that will serve as a catalyst for change.

Our 20 years in Parliament, and now 2 years in Government, have seen a massive shift in the public consciousness.

We have delivered more action on the climate emergency in the last 2 years than the previous 30 years of government combined.

James has passed the Zero Carbon Act with the strongest possible political consensus - and I know just how hard that was!

Julie Anne introduced a massive reprioritisation of transport spending to focus on modes like public transport, walking and cycling, which reduce emissions.

Gareth worked tirelessly to end new off shore oil and gas permits, to protect our planet and our climate.

Chloe has worked to expand free mental health services for our young people, making sure they get the help they need when they need it.

Golriz is a champion for improving our electoral law, so that we have a democratic system that people can trust.

Jan Logie is leading a system wide reform, bringing together government, community, business and Māori in our approach to ending sexual and domestic violence.

Working for nature, Eugenie has delivered the largest boost to conservation funding in sixteen years, started tackling the plastics crisis, and worked with Labour on major water reforms.

And I've worked on making renting safer, warmer, and more secure.

We've turned the ship around, but we know we need to go further and faster to protect our climate, solve inequality and care for nature.

Just imagine what we could do with an increased presence in Government after the next election.

We've taken some big steps on our journey.

We've done critical work in this term of Parliament, at the heart of this Government.

I had the privilege - as I have had for several years now - of being at Ratana last Friday to celebrate the birthday and the inspiring legacy of Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana.

And I've been reflecting over this long holiday weekend about this Government's legacy.

Legacy is planting a Kauri tree - it will be many years, generations even, before it's fully grown.

But we can protect and nurture our legacy as we would protect and nurture the Kauri tree.

We've done so much, but it's still not enough.

We can spend another three years building structural support around the Zero Carbon Act to help it succeed.

We can put a proper limit on climate pollution and fix the carbon price so polluters pay a fair share.

We need to keep working in our communities, our transport network and on our farms to make the Zero Carbon vision a reality.

We can continue to prioritize the most vulnerable in our society, and make sure every child in Aotearoa grows up happy and healthy and loved.

We've started to level the playing field between renters and homeowners - and now we need to massively increase the number of public homes we're building, to ensure people can afford a good home as well as all the other basics required for a good life.

We've increased minimum wage and put more money into the pockets of single parents by removing unfair sanctions - next is fully implementing the recommendations from the expert welfare report and immediately increasing core benefits.

We can keep working to protect our native flora and fauna, those taonga which speak to who we are as people of this nation.

We have focused on tackling waste including banning single use plastic bags - but now we need companies to take responsibility for where their products end up.

We established Te Kahui Wai Māori, who have delivered te mana o te wai, a blueprint for restoring and protecting our waterways - now it's our job to implement it.

With your help the Green Party can push further and faster. It's possible.

Our work is not done and we cannot stand idle. We've planted a seedling - now we need to help it grow.

I mentioned earlier how excited I am to have this platform.

I will always be amazed that it is my job to share my dreams and visions for a better world based on the work of our flaxroots leadership all around us.

And I know that The People will be the first to tell me when it is time for me to sit down.

Until then I want to keep supporting your collective movements for transformative change.

I want to keep taking your voices into the halls of power.

Our communities' voices, our city's voices, and our country's voices. Especially those voices that often get ignored.

This year, I will proudly be seeking the Green Party's nomination for the Tamaki Makaurau electorate, as I did last election.

Tāmaki Makaurau is where my family and I have chosen to make our home. It is where I return to after taking the region's messages, hopes, and frustrations down to the Beehive.

I am proudly an Auckland MP.

And I am proud to stand with other Auckland Green MPs: Chloe, and Golriz.

When our communities in this city do well, it is good for communities throughout Aotearoa.

When our Tamaki Makaurau rivers, harbours, and forests are healthy, it is a sign that ecosystems around the motu are healthy.

When our buses and our parks and our community space are filled with the sound of our people speaking our reo, we know the language is getting stronger.

This city is so vitally important, it deserves political competition - and political cooperation - that brings out the best in everyone.

This term in Parliament - I have known how important it is to hold the line for our peoples' biggest concerns.

When whānau have had their tamariki unjustly removed by the State, I have called for support not separation.

When Auckland housing is seen as a way to make the rich, richer, I have dedicated my focus to ensuring that housing is a public good.

When others have stood by and refused to address Māori water rights, I have stood strong on our Green Party position which agrees with tangata whenua having proprietary, kaitiaki and rangatiratanga rights over water.

When Tāmaki mana whenua do the work to clean up our rivers, protect kauri from die-back, restore our Waitemataa harbour, and replenish native trees on their maunga, I am eager to support their leadership as custodians benefitting all of us.

Everyday, I work for the communities and the people of Tāmaki Makaurau in Wellington.

I work to support to the call from Māori to have a tangata whenua response to ending homelessness.

To ensure water is treated as a taonga with intrinsic value, rather than a commodity to be sold off to the highest bidder.

To make sure everyone has enough to live a dignified life!

I'm proud of the role the Green Party has played in ensuring te reo in our schools is a priority for this Government.

I'm proud - and, to be honest, a little bit sad - to be the only politician pointing out that our South Auckland families don't need roving armed police, they need homes, decent jobs, healthcare and education.

I am so privileged to be trusted with the successes and hardships which colour life in Tāmaki Makaurau.

One of the greatest privileges of working in Tāmaki Makaurau is being able to know and support the kaitiaki protectors of Ihumātao.

To the frontline founding cousins Pania Newton, Qiane Matata-Sipu, Bobi-Jo Pihema, Moana Wa, Waimaire McFarland, Haki Wilson and ALL the protectors who spanned numerous regions and backgrounds: thank you.

Thank you for your focus on the more enduring path for justice, and returning the land to mana whenua.

When others belittle you, your power grows stronger due to the tens of thousands around the country who support you.

The community you grew almost overnight on the whenua has given us a glimpse of what the best of our nation could be.

I and the Green Party have supported you for six years and we will continue to do so.

As well as being an inspiring movement, the kaitiaki/protectors at Ihumātao have created a huge opportunity for this country to have a hopeful conversation about true Tiriti justice.

Te Tiriti is about an enduring relationship, respecting the rangatiratanga of tangata whenua.

The Green Party knows that Te Tiriti is supposed to be honoured, not settled, and that deferring to large natural groupings does not uphold the mana of hapū.

I know what the issues are and I am committed to consistently fronting on them.

I have been involved in the work to enhance the lives of our whānau in Tāmaki Makaurau since long before I became an MP and I will keep going.

I am humbled to have shared this region as my home for the past 25 years and in 2020 I look forward focusing on the issues that are important to Tāmaki Makaurau.

Conclusion

We have before us a massive opportunity for change.

It is only with the Greens in Government that we've managed to turn the ship around - the next step is going further and faster.

It is, give or take, about nine months until the 2020 election.

As a mumma and nana I know just how long and how short nine months can be.

We will have an election date soon, and the Greens are letting people know what we stand for.

Our call to action is for community movements to keep holding politicians to account.

To get the fundamental system changes required we need people in power who are beholden to our collective wellbeing - for the many not just for the few.

I have hope because people are good.

The only choice we have is to remain hopeful and organised for the long haul.

Protecting our climate, solving inequality and caring for nature will require intergenerational work, pulling all our wisdoms together.

I have faith in our humanity because it always come through.

In struggle our puku rumbles with a desire to help each other, to save our animals, to nurture our trees.

Collective caring has survived the worst that life has thrown at us.

We can choose to overcome and rebuild a better world.

No reira tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

Ngā mihi nui,

ends

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Marama Davidson's State of the Planet speech

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Green Party Co-leader Marama Davidson's State of the Planet speech Mā te oranga o te taiao, ka ora ai te iwi, mō te takitini kāore mō te torutoru anake. Nei ra taku mihi tuatahi ki a koe e te koka o te ao, korua ko te matua ki runga ra - me o tamariki katoa huri noa I te ao turoa.

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few years ago, Björk began corresponding with a philosopher whose books she admired. "hi timothy," her first message to him began. "i wanted to write this letter for a long time." She was trying to give a name to her own singular genre, to label her work for posterity before the critics did. She asked him to help define the nature of her art - "not only to define it for me, but also for all my friends, and a generation actually."

It turned out the philosopher, Timothy Morton, was a fan of Björk. Her music, he told her, had been "a very deep influence on my way of thinking and life in general". The sense of eerie intimacy with other species, the fusion of moods in her songs and videos - tenderness and horror, weirdness and joy - "is the feeling of ecological awareness", he said. Morton's own work is about the implications of this strange awareness - the knowledge of our interdependence with other beings - which he believes undermines long-held assumptions about the separation between humanity and nature. For him, this is the defining characteristic of our times, and it is compelling us to change our "core ideas of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is".

Over the past decade, Morton's ideas have been spilling into the mainstream. Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of London's Serpentine gallery, and perhaps the most powerful figure in the contemporary art world, is one of his loudest cheerleaders. Obrist told readers of Vogue that Morton's books are among the pre-eminent cultural works of our time, and recommends them to many of his own collaborators. The acclaimed artist Olafur Eliasson has been flying Morton around the world to speak at his major exhibition openings. Excerpts from Morton's correspondence with Björk were published as part of her 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Morton's terminology is "slowly infecting all the humanities", says his friend and fellow thinker Graham Harman. Though many academics have a reputation for writing exclusively for their colleagues down the hall, Morton's peculiar conceptual vocabulary - " dark ecology", "the strange stranger", "the mesh" - has been picked up by writers in a cornucopia of fields, from literature and epistemology to legal theory and religion. Last year, he was included in a much-discussed list of the 50 most influential living philosophers. His ideas have also percolated into traditional media outlets such as Newsweek, the New Yorker and the New York Times.

Part of what makes Morton popular are his attacks on settled ways of thinking. His most frequently cited book, Ecology Without Nature, says we need to scrap the whole concept of "nature". He argues that a distinctive feature of our world is the presence of ginormous things he calls "hyperobjects" - such as global warming or the internet - that we tend to think of as abstract ideas because we can't get our heads around them, but that are nevertheless as real as hammers. He believes all beings are interdependent, and speculates that everything in the universe has a kind of consciousness, from algae and boulders to knives and forks. He asserts that human beings are cyborgs of a kind, since we are made up of all sorts of non-human components; he likes to point out that the very stuff that supposedly makes us us - our DNA - contains a significant amount of genetic material from viruses. He says that we're already ruled by a primitive artificial intelligence: industrial capitalism. At the same time, he believes that there are some "weird experiential chemicals" in consumerism that will help humanity prevent a full-blown ecological crisis.

Morton's theories might sound bizarre, but they are in tune with the most earth-shaking idea to emerge in the 21st century: that we are entering a new phase in the history of the planet - a phase that Morton and many others now call the "Anthropocene".

For the past 12,000 years, human beings lived in a geological epoch called the Holocene, known for its relatively stable, temperate climes. It was, you might say, the California of planetary history. But it is coming to an end. Recently, we have begun to alter the Earth so drastically that, according to many scientists, a new epoch is dawning. After the briefest of geological vacations, we seem to be entering a more volatile period.

The term Anthropocene, from the Ancient Greek word anthropos, meaning "human", acknowledges that humans are the major cause of the earth's current transformation. Extreme weather, submerged cities, acute resource shortages, vanished species, lakes turned to deserts, nuclear fallout: if there is still human life on earth tens of thousands of years from now, societies that we can't imagine will have to grapple with the changes we are wreaking today. Morton has noted that 75% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at this very moment will still be there in half a millennium. That's 15 generations away. It will take another 750 generations, or 25,000 years, for most of the those gases to be absorbed into the oceans.

The Anthropocene is not only a period of manmade disruption. It is also a moment of blinking self-awareness, in which the human species is becoming conscious of itself as a planetary force. We're not only driving global warming and ecological destruction; we know that we are.

One of Morton's most powerful insights is that we are condemned to live with this awareness at all times. It's there not only when politicians gather to discuss international environmental agreements, but when we do something as mundane as chat about the weather, pick up a plastic bag at the supermarket or water the lawn. We live in a world with a moral calculus that didn't exist before. Now, doing just about anything is an environmental question. That wasn't true 60 years ago - or at least people weren't aware that it was true. Tragically, it is only by despoiling the planet that we have realised just how much a part of it we are.

Morton believes that this constitutes a revolution in our understanding of our place in the universe on a par with those fomented by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. He is just one of thousands of geologists, climate scientists, historians, novelists and journalists writing about this upheaval, but, perhaps better than anyone else, he captures in words the uncanny feeling of being present at the birth of this extreme age.

"There you are, turning the ignition of your car," he writes. "And it creeps up on you." Every time you fire up your engine you don't mean to harm the Earth, "let alone cause the Sixth Mass Extinction Event in the four-and-a-half billion-year history of life on this planet". But "harm to Earth is precisely what is happening". Part of what's so uncomfortable about this is that our individual acts may be statistically and morally insignificant, but when you multiply them millions and billions of times - as they are performed by an entire species - they are a collective act of ecological destruction. Coral bleaching isn't just occurring over yonder, on the Great Barrier Reef; it's happening wherever you switch on the air conditioning. In short, Morton says, "everything is interconnected".

As Morton's work spreads beyond cultural hierophants such as Björk to the pages of major news outlets, he is arguably becoming our most popular guide to the new epoch. Yes, he has some seemingly crazy ideas about what it's like to be alive right now - but what it's like to be alive right now, in the Anthropocene, is pretty crazy.

n the course of its young life, the Anthropocene has grown into a concept as grand in its scope as any other world-historical paradigm worth its salt (which, if it's sea salt, now includes a good dose of synthetic waste in tiny particles called microplastics). What began as a technical debate within the earth sciences has led, in Morton's view, to a confrontation with some of our most basic ways of understanding the world. In the Anthropocene, he writes, we are undergoing "a traumatic loss of coordinates".

The Anthropocene idea is generally attributed to the Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the biologist Eugene Stoermer, who started popularising the term in 2000. From the outset, many took Crutzen and Stoermer's concept seriously, even if they disagreed with it. Since the late 20th century, scientists have viewed geological time as a drama punctuated by great cataclysms, not merely a gradual accretion of incremental changes, and it made sense to see humanity itself as the latest cataclysm.

Imagine geologists from a future civilisation examining the layers of rock that are in the slow process of forming today, the way we examine the rock strata that formed as the dinosaurs died off. That civilisation will see evidence of our sudden (in geological terms) impact on the planet - including fossilised plastics and layers both of carbon, from burning carbon fuels, and of radioactive particles, from nuclear testing and explosions - just as clearly as we see evidence of the dinosaurs' rapid demise. We can already observe these layers forming today.

For a couple of years, a lively debate over the usefulness of the concept unfolded. Detractors argued that humanity's "geological signal" was not yet loud enough to justify the coronation of a new epoch, or that the term had no scientific use. Supporters wondered when they should date the Anthropocene's start. To the advent of agriculture, many millennia ago? To the invention of the steam engine in the 18th century and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? To 5.29am on 16 July 1945, the moment when the first-ever nuclear test exploded over the New Mexico desert? (Morton, in his all-embracing way, treats each of these moments as pivotal.) Then, in 2002, Crutzen set out his arguments in the scientific journal Nature. The idea of a moment in planetary history in which human influence was predominant seemed to tie together so many disparate developments - from retreating glaciers to fresh thinking about the limits of capitalism - that the term quickly spread to other earth sciences, and then beyond.

Since then, at least three academic journals devoted to the Anthropocene have been founded, several universities have established formal research groups to ponder its implications, Stanford students have started a popular podcast titled Generation Anthropocene, and thousands of articles and books have been written on the subject, in fields ranging from economics to poetry.

Some thinkers object to the term, arguing that it reinforces the human-centric view of the world that has led us to the verge of ecological catastrophe. Others say the blame for the despoliation of the Earth should be laid at the feet not of humanity in general, but of (predominantly white, western and male) capitalism. Several alternative designations have been minted, including "Capitalocene", but none has caught on. They don't have the disquieting existential ring of Anthropocene, which stresses both our culpability and our fragility as humans.

Around 2011, the Anthropocene "began to crop up regularly in newspapers for the first time", according to the scholar Jeremy Davies's recent history of the concept. The BBC, the Economist, National Geographic, Science and others covered the idea. Planetary changes had increasingly led journalists to set their environmental reporting in the context of geohistory - atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of 400 parts per million? Not seen since the Pliocene, three million years ago - and the Anthropocene became a useful shorthand for placing human activity in the perspective of geological deep time. For Morton, who had recently begun writing about it, it captured his concern with the way beings of different kinds, including humans, depend on each other for their existence - a fact the various calamities of the Anthropocene drove home.

In 2014, the Anthropocene was inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary, and last year, the epoch was formally endorsed by a working group within the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the official keeper of geological time. As a tentative start date, they chose the year 1950, when one of the clearest markers of human activity shows up globally in the earth's crust: plutonium isotopes from widespread nuclear testing. The working group's announcement was considered so significant that it made the front page of the Guardian. (Across the media, the Anthropocene is now used to frame everything from fiction reviews to discussions of the Donald Trump presidency.) As Jan Zalasiewicz, the chair of the group and one of the leading scientists studying the Anthropocene, said at the time, the new epoch "sets a different trajectory for the Earth system" and we are only now "realising the scale and permanence of the change".

There have been periods of intense climate fluctuation coupled with mass extinction before. The most recent was 66m years ago, when a meteorite six miles in diameter struck what is now the Yucatán Peninsula. The impact released an estimated 2m times the energy of the most powerful atomic bomb ever detonated, altering the planet's atmosphere and wiping out three-quarters of its species. But that was a comparatively simple event, which the physical sciences are well-equipped to understand.

To make sense of an epochal change that is being driven by human activity, we need more than geology, meteorology and chemistry. If this is a reckoning for our species, we need an intellectual guide - someone to tell us just how panicked we should be, and how our recognition that we are transforming the planet will change us in turn.

he awareness we've gained in the Anthropocene is not generally a happy one. Many environmentalists now warn of impending global catastrophe and urge industrial societies to change course. Morton stakes out a more iconoclastic position. Instead of raising the ecological alarm like some Paul Revere of the apocalypse, he advocates what he calls "dark ecology," which holds that the much-feared catastrophe has, in fact, already occurred.

Morton means not only that irreversible global warming is under way, but also something more wide-reaching. "We Mesopotamians" - as he calls the past 400 or so generations of humans living in agricultural and industrial societies - thought that we were simply manipulating other entities (by farming and engineering, and so on) in a vacuum, as if we were lab technicians and they were in some kind of giant petri dish called "nature" or "the environment". In the Anthropocene, Morton says, we must wake up to the fact that we never stood apart from or controlled the non-human things on the planet, but have always been thoroughly bound up with them. We can't even burn, throw or flush things away without them coming back to us in some form, such as harmful pollution. Our most cherished ideas about nature and the environment - that they are separate from us, and relatively stable - have been destroyed.

Morton likens this realisation to detective stories in which the hunter realises he is hunting himself (his favourite examples are Blade Runner and Oedipus Rex). "Not all of us are prepared to feel sufficiently creeped out" by this epiphany, he says. But there's another twist: even though humans have caused the Anthropocene, we cannot control it. "Oh, my God!" Morton exclaimed to me in mock horror at one point. "My attempt to escape the web of fate was the web of fate."

The chief reason that we are waking up to our entanglement with the world we have been destroying, Morton says, is our encounter with the reality of hyperobjects - the term he coined to describe things such as ecosystems and black holes, which are "massively distributed in time and space" compared to individual humans. Hyperobjects might not seem to be objects in the way that, say, billiard balls are, but they are equally real, and we are now bumping up against them consciously for the first time. Global warming might have first appeared to us as a bit of funny local weather, then as a series of independent manifestations (an unusually torrential flood here, a deadly heatwave there), but now we see it as a unified phenomenon, of which extreme weather events and the disruption of the old seasons are only elements.

It is through hyperobjects that we initially confront the Anthropocene, Morton argues. One of his most influential books, itself titled Hyperobjects, examines the experience of being caught up in - indeed, being an intimate part of - these entities, which are too big to wrap our heads around, and far too big to control. We can experience hyperobjects such as climate in their local manifestations, or through data produced by scientific measurements, but their scale and the fact that we are trapped inside them means that we can never fully know them. Because of such phenomena, we are living in a time of quite literally unthinkable change.

This leads Morton to one of his most sweeping claims: that the Anthropocene is forcing a revolution in human thought. Advances in science are now underscoring how "enmeshed" we are with other beings - from the microbes that account for roughly half the cells in our bodies, to our reliance for survival on the Earth's electromagnetic heat shield. At the same time, hyperobjects, in their unwieldy enormity, alert us to the absolute boundaries of science, and therefore the limits of human mastery. Science can only take us so far. This means changing our relationship with the other entities in the universe - whether animal, vegetable or mineral - from one of exploitation through science to one of solidarity in ignorance. If we fail to do this, we will continue to wreak havoc on the planet, threatening the ways of life we hold dear, and even our very existence. In contrast to utopian fantasies that we will be saved by the rise of artificial intelligence or some other new technology, the Anthropocene teaches us that we can't transcend our limitations or our reliance on other beings. We can only live with them.

That might sound gloomy, but Morton glimpses in it a liberation. If we give up the delusion of controlling everything around us, we might refocus ourselves on the pleasure we take in other beings and life itself. Enjoyment, Morton believes, might be the thing that turns us on to a new kind of politics. "You think ecologically tuned life means being all efficient and pure," the tweet pinned to the top of his Twitter timeline reads. "Wrong. It means you can have a disco in every room of your house."

Those words are typical of his thought, which often sets out from the dismal familiar, but then veers wildly off the beaten track. "There's something truly hopeful in his work," Hans Ulrich Obrist says of Morton. "Hope and maybe even optimism are somehow in there." Morton has a story about converting his home outside Houston, where he holds a chair at Rice University, to wind-generated electricity. After a day or two of "feeling very righteous and holy," he realised he could now have "full-on strobes and decks and people partaying for hours and hours, all day, every day," while causing far less damage to the planet. "And that's the ecological future, actually."

ne Saturday morning last autumn,I went looking for Morton at the Serpentine Galleries' annual festival of ideas, where he was to speak later that day. Over the previous few weeks, he had been in Seoul to help Olafur Eliasson open a solo exhibition; in Singapore, to speak at the Future Cities conference; in Brussels, to give a talk titled " Nature Isn't Real " in a public park at night (he said 250 people showed up); at the University of Exeter, where he outlined "rocking", his new theory of action, which he described as "a queering of the theistic categories of active versus passive"; in Rome, where he spent his time, among other things, drinking martinis; and in Paris, where he went raving with his friend Ingrid and was so overcome with emotion and exhaustion that he spent some of the night lying in the middle of the dancefloor.

If you had to select an avatar for the Anthropocene, Morton might be an appropriate choice. He has arctic-blue eyes that at once shock and appear shocked. Combined with a slight pudginess that suggests physical vulnerability, an eczematic redness to his face, and a thistle of thin blond hair, he looks as if he has survived some kind of fallout. Indeed, he is something of a man afflicted. Among other things, he suffers from severe sleep apnoea, severe depression, severe migraines, and, it seemed to me over the course of our conversations, the occasional bout of mild paranoia. Obrist, who has recorded more than 2,500 hours of interviews with artists and philosophers, told me that Morton is the only one who became "so emotional that actually he starts to cry".(They had been discussing mass extinction.)

Earlier in the year, when I had spoken to Morton on video calls, he had been ebullient. Now, sitting at the back of the gallery's restaurant, which had been converted into a performance hall, he seemed to be running on fumes. He had already published 14 essays that year, while continuing work on his two upcoming books. In the next few weeks, he was speaking in Chicago, at Yale, in Seoul (again), Munich and, finally, convening with members of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to contemplate the kinds of messages we should be sending into space on a potential reboot of the Voyager mission. (The original, launched in 1977, sent two spacecraft hurtling beyond our solar system; each contained a 12-inch gold-plated record engraved with sounds and images representing humanity and other earthly beings.) By the end of 2016, as he later wrote on his blog, Morton had racked up 350,000 air miles.

Morton's itinerary was an index of how popular the notion of the Anthropocene has become, and how deeply his approach to it resonates with our increasingly disquieting experience of the world. Poring over his books, or speaking to him in person, one starts to suspect that what is outlandish in his thinking and personality actually reflects something truly strange about the world. Over lunch, Morton ordered a chicken salad sandwich - an earlier experiment with veganism had lapsed - and we discussed the development of his thought. As he ate, I was reminded of a recent report that almost 60bn chickens are slaughtered globally every year, which, in the words of Jan Zalasiewicz, means that their carcasses have now been "fossilised in thousands of landfill sites and on street corners around the world". That thought leads immediately to another one: about the bacterial "superbugs" we have created through widespread use of antibiotics, especially in industrial livestock production. From there, it's only a short jump to thinking about other strange phenomena in our new epoch, like rocks formed from plastic and seashells, and changes in the earth's rotation caused by melting ice sheets. Once you start listing these unsettling Anthropocene facts, there's no end to it.

It's possible, when one encounters Morton for the first or second time, to wonder if there's something concocted about his hippie disposition, his emotionality, his intellectual flair. But his childhood friends and relatives say that his visceral engagement with ecology, and his academic prowess, go back to his childhood. Morton was born in north-west London, in 1968, in the midst of a period when a growing awareness of ecological threat still went hand in hand with the sense that people could change the world for the better, possibly under the influence of LSD. After his parents, who were both concert violinists, divorced in the late 1970s, his father sailed off on a Greenpeace protest trawler; his mother was a committed feminist who was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

From early on, Morton was an academic standout. He received the top scholarship at the elite St Paul's School in London five years in a row, and then went to Oxford to read English. He got the highest marks in his subject across the university in his first-year exams, and a first in his finals. Doing well academically was important to Morton, but eventually he came to the realisation that it's "actually secondary to this other thing, called being alive". His life took on something of the shape his work would later adopt. It was about more than accumulating knowledge; it was also about pursuing pleasure and intimacy. In his second year as an undergraduate, he and his roommate, Mark Payne, who is now a classicist at the University of Chicago, would "do acid and listen to Butthole Surfers and talk about Blake". (Payne says they did acid and talked about Milton.) He also fell in love for the first time. As a graduate student, Morton wore his hair long, with a suede jacket, and decked himself out in beads. His PhD thesis, which is recognised as an important contribution to the study of Romanticism, showed that the vegetarianism of Percy and Mary Shelley was intimately entwined with their politics and art. Paul Hamilton, who supervised some of Morton's graduate work, told me that, when it came to the Shelleys, Morton "changed the lights for everyone".

Despite the success of his dissertation, Morton struggled to land an academic position, and even contemplated killing himself. Eventually, he found a job at the University of Colorado, Boulder, before moving on, in 2003, to the University of California in Davis, north-east of San Francisco. Being in northern California seemed to season his thought, and he began focusing on explicitly ecological questions, such as what we write about when we write about nature. In a canny bit of self-branding, he also took to calling himself Professor of Literature and Environment.

Over the next few years, Morton published his book challenging the idea of "nature", as well as a follow-up asking what it means for us to rely in unfathomably complex ways on a countless number of other beings. He also joined a small, contentious philosophical movement called object-oriented ontology, or OOO, which holds that every being, including humans, can only ever grasp the world in its own limited ways. (In other words, we will never know what flies know, and vice versa.) Then, in 2012, Morton left California for his current chair at Rice, one of the most well-regarded universities in America.

With the security of tenure and the successive infusions of Buddhism and OOO into his thinking, Morton started to write in a more riffing, personal style. His talk of discos in his wind-powered home and the cringey way he elongates "partaying" aren't incidental to his project. "Inevitably, ecological awareness has this kind of 70s flavour to it," he says. It's an aesthetic he embraces, "in all of its flared weirdness". There's a bell-bottomed capaciousness to his intellectual style, too. He may well be the only person ever to grace a list of the most influential living philosophers and have a songwriting credit on an album that reached No 4 in the UK charts ( Stacked Up by Senser, from 1994).

He has followed in the footsteps of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Edward Said in giving the prestigious Wellek Lecture, at the University of California in Irvine - but he has also performed at Glastonbury, playing music for fire-juggling performance artists, and served as a consultant on the Steve Coogan series The Trip to Italy. Although he's about to publish a book attempting to fuse dark ecology with Marxism ("The tweak is pretty intense, and not everyone's going to like it," he says), he also has one forthcoming for Pelican books, Being Ecological, which is meant to enchant the general public. The first sentence is: "This book contains no ecological facts whatsoever." Though several of his books are dedicated to the customary people (spouse, children, siblings), he has also dedicated one to his cat, the late Allan Whiskersworth. One of the most engrossing posts on his blog, which he updates regularly, is a critical inquiry into giant penises drawn on rooftops so they can be discovered via Google Earth. He's deep into Shambhala Buddhism and has circumambulated Mount Kailash in Tibet. Not long ago, he received a very moving Tarot reading.

If people find most of this ridiculous, all the better. "I like to think of myself as the corniest, most awful thing you could possibly imagine," he told me. He has achieved the usual trappings of academic success; now that he's through the metaphorical metal detectors of polite society, he has a different aim. "I can get quite well known, and then I can unleash this kind of anarchist-hippie thing that I've been holding like a very precious liquid, carefully, without spilling any, for years and years and years," he said. "And now I'm going to pour it everywhere."

When it was time for his talk at the Serpentine, Morton appeared in a tight-fitting, silver Versace shirt of the sort a camp Bond villain might wear. His lecture was titled " Stuff Can Happen ".

"You wouldn't believe how many philosophers are afraid of movement," he began. He went on to discuss two strands of thought in the work of the philosopher Hegel. One problem with Hegel, Morton said, "the problem I call macro-Hegel, is that macro-Hegel makes the slinky move up the stairs, improbably. And at the top of the stairs, like the killer in Psycho, is waiting, drum roll, you guessed it, white western patriarchy in the guise of the Prussian state." (I had not guessed this; should I have?) "So macro-Hegel blows it."

It seemed an odd way to approach a lecture to a motley crew of artists, activists, students and musicians. Even as someone with an interest in Morton's work, I soon felt bored and distracted. The man standing next to me, an American scholar with an acerbic sense of humour, rolled his eyes and whispered a comment to the effect of "What is this bullshit?"

Despite Morton's popularity, this isn't an uncommon response to his work. The Morton detractors with whom I spoke accused him of misunderstanding contemporary science, like quantum mechanics and set theory, and then claiming his distortions as support for his wild ideas. They shared a broad critique that reminded me of the sceptical adage, "If you open your mind too far, your brains will fall out." The slurry of interesting ideas in Morton's work doesn't hold together under scrutiny, they say. The philosopher Ray Brassier, who was once associated with OOO, has charged Morton and his blogging confrères with generating "an online orgy of stupidity".

Tim Morton giving a speech at the Serpentine Galleries in London in October 2016.

Other critics, especially on the left, complain that Morton's conception of the Anthropocene glosses over issues of race, class, gender and colonialism by blaming the entire species for the damage inflicted by a privileged minority. The focus on the human enshrined in the term Anthropocene is a particular target for critics. By referring to humans as a unified whole, they argue that Morton effaces distinctions between the affluent west and the other members of humanity, many of whom were living in a state of ecological catastrophe long before the notion of the Anthropocene became trendy on campuses in Europe and North America. Others say that Morton's notion of politics is too woolly, or that the last thing we need when facing ecological challenges are abstract musings about the nature of objects.

Morton's defenders, however, see him as something of a Ralph Waldo Emerson for the Anthropocene: his writing has value, even if it doesn't always stand up to philosophical scrutiny. "No one in a philosophy department is going to be taking Tim Morton seriously," Claire Colebrook, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University who has worked extensively on the Anthropocene, told me. But she teaches Morton's work to undergraduates and they love it. "Why? Because they're like, 'Shut up and give me an idea!'"

Not everything that Morton said to me in the course of our conversations struck me as philosophically or ecologically plausible. ("You and me, and our computers and that painting behind you and maybe one of the pigeons in the street - we're going to get together and make a little anarchist collective, and the focus of this anarchist collective will be reading, um, the letters of Beethoven.") But what attracts many to his ideas are not their cogency so much as their profusion and playfulness. Hans Ulrich Obrist and the artists Philippe Parreno and Olafur Eliasson all used the same word to describe his oeuvre: it's a "toolbox", they said, from which they can pluck useful ideas.

That toolbox may be useful to the rest of us, too. As global warming and other features of the Anthropocene intensify, our experience of this grave new age is bound to become ever weirder and more fraught. When that happens, more and more people are likely to seek out writings - such as Morton's - that echo their experiences of alienation, as well as their yearning for hope. Some other thinkers seem to believe we can tidy up the world if we just have better, more logical, more rigorous ideas. Morton says we can tidy up our ideas all we want, but the world is going to remain a fundamentally messy place that will always resist our philosophical decluttering. What we need to do instead is get comfortable with this weirdness. During one of our earliest conversations, I told Morton I appreciated his work, to the extent I thought I understood it. "I think I understand it too, sometimes," he replied.

here's nothing like the prospectof an authoritarian strongman to make intellectuals, hippies, and, above all, hippie intellectuals appear hopelessly ineffectual. Compared to organising protests or setting up a recurring donation to the American Civil Liberties Union, talk of deep time or of effacing the false ontological divide between humanity and nature risks seeming rather fatuous.

In November, the week after the election of Donald Trump, Morton flew to New York to confab with the Nasa group about what a new Golden Record might contain. He was devastated by Trump's victory, but not necessarily surprised that America had opted for what he called the political equivalent of a diet of vicodin and cinnamon buns. In his hotel room, he had a "private weeping session" while reading the David Malouf novel Fly Away Peter. Later, he went for a bite of sushi - in which mercury from coal-fired power plants, smelting metals and burning trash tends to accumulate, occasionally leading to poisoning - and got swept up in a large crowd. "I was in that first protest, man," he told me. "I was in that first fucking anti-Trump protest at Trump Tower." He quipped to his Twitter followers, and to the Nasa meeting, that he wanted to put the president-elect on the next Voyager probe.

I wondered how potent Morton's animistic politics would seem under the new dispensation. The day after his talk at the Serpentine in the autumn, I had eaten lunch with him, the performance artist Kathelin Gray and John Polk Allen, AKA Johnny Dolphin, the prime mover behind Biosphere 2, a planetary microcosm built inside what is essentially a gigantic test tube in the Arizona desert. The conversation, in the course of meandering from places on the globe with special energy (the Himalayas, Chaco Canyon) to the "lunatic asylum for clever people" that is Oxford, turned toward solidarity with other species.

"I've always called other things 'people'," Gray said. "My Native American friends are very happy about that."

"How could you not call them people?" Morton responded.

Gray told a story of snakes she had known. Morton, evidently moved, put his hand on his chest. "You had two friends called Snakey?" he said. "That's wonderful."

This had all sounded a bit ludicrous, even before Trump got elected. But somewhere in these schmaltzy attempts to express their affinity with other creatures was a genuine desire to move towards the sort of radically pluralist politics that Morton advocates. "Don't hide under a rock, for heaven's sake," Morton had said to me at one point. "Go out in the street and start making any and as many kinds of political affiliations with as many kinds of beings, human or otherwise, that you possibly can, with a view to creating a more non-violent and just, for everybody, ecological world." It was hard to argue with those aims. We can't debate with other species, but the Anthropocene makes it clear that we need to include their wellbeing among our goals.

Morton's own political emphasis seemed to change after the election. Wind-powered house parties and interspecies reading groups were out. Now, the whole point, he said, was "to freakin' crush these fascists over and over and over again".

Still, the Anthropocene isn't going away just because a venal troll in a baggy suit is sitting in the White House. The build-up of carbon in the air and nitrogen in the soil; the acidification of the oceans and the desertification of once-fertile lands; the counterpane of radioactive isotopes (from nuclear testing) and plastic (from consumer packaging) that blankets the globe; the species after species extinguished - the list of dramatic changes to the planet goes on. The politics of today may be more urgent than ever, but the need for a politics of tomorrow hasn't gone away.

A few days after the election, Morton regained his sense of humour and began to laugh about the president-elect, "this little orange guy with a huge, yellow pile of Cheetos on his head". Yes, Morton was going to spend the next months, or however long it took, fighting fascists on campus and wherever else he could be heard, but he was also continuing to proclaim his unusual view of ecology.

"Let's put some house music on," Morton said at the end of one of our longest conversations. "Even if it's true that we really are screwed, let's not spend the rest of our lives on this planet telling ourselves how screwed we are."

What should we do instead?

"Shake hands with a hedgehog and disco."
Main photograph by Max Burkhalter for the Guardian
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'A reckoning for our species': the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene

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The long read: Timothy Morton wants humanity to give up some of its core beliefs, from the fantasy that we can control the planet to the notion that we are 'above' other beings. His ideas might sound weird, but they're catching on