“Writing in the Anthropocene”

http://latitude46publishing.com/writing-in-the-anthropocene/

My imagination has been tuned into the ticking of the Doomsday clock for some time. The
crucible of extreme events, of catastrophe and Armageddon, have always been of interest. How
we behave in these worst moments says something about us as human beings. That interested
me. And so it was natural that my first work of fiction would be speculative fiction.
The Wintermen series started out as speculative fiction about climate change. I probably started
thinking about the storyline in 2010, intrigued more by the idea of perpetual winter than climate
change. As the first book went from draft to final version it evolved, more preoccupied by a
warming climate, by the consequences of our addiction to fossil fuels. I spent the next several
years imagining and writing about a possible future, exploring a cautionary scenario that helped
me think about what might be and how we could act to avoid that future.

Problem is, it is no longer speculative.

There is no more future tense when it comes to climate change, there is only the here and now.
As I write, Antarctica recorded its hottest day ever. Climate change rages through our daily
media coverage; maybe even now reaching a toxic tipping point of media saturation. Too many
animals reduced to ash, too much of the mass extinctions. Too many homes washed away or
burnt. It is not possible for me to write about climate change as a what if, and that changes the
project. So when I came to write the third, and final, book in the Wintermen series (At the End of
the World, fall 2020), it was with an understanding of it as a book of transition and uncertainty.

So how then to write about climate change now? It is time maybe to shift from the dystopian
project to the utopian one. If we could tear it all down, what would we want instead? Art can
help us imagine a different way of being, to resist an apocalyptic machismo that turns a select
few into successful preppers and the rest of us into victims. The imagination can be a sharp
weapon. We could use it like a crowbar, to pry open the narrow vision of how humans and non-
humans can be in the world together. To see more wholistic visions, and versions, of ourselves.

“Signals from the Edge #2: Wildfire and Fox”

Summer 2018. Woken up by the smell of smoke. Summer night and the windows are thrown open, the wind sending traces of Temagami forest’s burning drifting into my room. The forests behind Elk Lake are on fire too. I don’t know it yet, not then in the night, but so is the faraway Arctic Circle. Does taiga smell the same as birch and jack pine when it’s burning?

It’s disorienting, the darkness, the smoke, at first I thought it was the stoked ashes from a dream, but then there is a shrieking and I am fully awake. Then I hear it again, riding these night breezes thick with carbon, insistent and piercing. It is, I think, fox.

I am used to her screams now — but still they are uncanny. She is calling through the darkness, and we all listen, me, dog, cat. At the window now listening. Is she far away or close to the house? Impossible to tell, the spooky cries passed from tree to tree. Just like a banshee’s wails along the valley. No wonder folks believed in such beings. The sounds tonight, stirred and mixed with the smoke, maybe belong biologically to fox, but are otherworldly too, spiritually something else.

But what? At one time, people might have recognized all of this with more ease. Folks had their nature spirits, saw forests teeming with magic. It would be standing room only on a night like this, what with the burnings and the keening.

Could be time to try and find those things again — the beings and the creatures that we have forgotten. That we can’t see anymore. That we cannot hear anymore. Cannot hear that sublime singing of the trees, each one with their own song, cannot hear either their ultrasonic distress signals when they are parched.

We used to listen to trees, talk to them even (and not in a ‘let’s put on Pachelbel and be nice to the jade plant’ kind of way). When nature was magic we would turn to its wisdom, seek solace from oak trees, leave tokens at deadfall for the spirits. The forest was not something to be managed, not a site of resource extraction, not a source of consumables. They gave us things, of course, the forest and the fields. Timber, firewood, plants, medicine, game and berries, but also wisdom, guidance in surviving, companionship. Everyone needed parts of everyone else.

Living so close, paying such attention, it changes the relationship. Like being in love.

But we can’t be close if we are on the outside looking in. As it is now, we are only visitors, not companions, equals, comrades in arms. Removing ourselves from nature, setting humans apart from that teeming forest of magic, was probably a mistake. Probably has landed us in this global fever.

Torpid waters. Coral reefs swooning with anaemia. Bring me my smelling salts.

Little creeks dry up, creeks for frogs and sprites. The sprites, of course, went extinct long ago. Many frogs are likely to follow. The triggers for frog mating are temperature and rainfall. All this dry, all this heat? Frog romance taking a beating.

So maybe the separation of the human from the non-human is a boundary or barrier we should try to dismantle. To see what seeps through. Because all those binaries — they are helpful in sorting objects and events into categories, organizing things. But we aren’t sorting our closets, we’re trying to salvage our world. None of them, human/non-human, life/death, magic/science, irrational/rational, can help me understand what fox is trying to say.

I can only hazard a guess:

fox says it is ultrasonic in the woods tonight,
wonders why can’t I hear it.