Books Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

Cockroach Cabaret — Learning to Make Friends With Arthropods

Composer and performer Camilla Cancantata considers the nonhuman voice in Cockroach Cabaret. Scrutinising human actions, her alter ego questions the role of humanity on planet Earth, asking if we can pull ourselves back from the brink of apocalypse.

1,570 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes

The Cockroach is an alter ego that I developed years ago, after writing a song called the Complaint of the Cockroach as part of my Songs for Interesting Times collection.

Cockroach Cabaret. Showing a photograph of Camilla Cancantata © 2006 — Cockroach Cabaret. Photograph: Camilla Cancantata © 2006

The Cockroach is uncertain about the role of humanity on planet Earth, and frankly astonished by our behaviour. Why are we so hell-bent on our own and other species’ destruction? Why do we despise, torture and eat some animals and keep others as pets, the eating of whom is generally considered shocking? Why do we seemingly consider ourselves superior, despite our very recent arrival on Earth?

It seemed to me that a creature that emerged in the Carboniferous era, survived several ice ages and outlived the dinosaurs, that is still thriving and diversifying, should be treated with respect. The Cockroach points out the relatively recent arrival of vertebrates, and even more recent arrival of primates, and how modern humans have essentially been here for the blink of an eye.

Alas, our jumped-up species totally fails to view creatures from a more ancient lineage than ours with any kind of evolutionary perspective. 90% of animals on Earth are arthropods — animals (including all insects) that manage perfectly well without an internal skeleton. They also form half of the biomass of all animals on Earth — whereas humans have the smallest biomass — 0.01% — even less than viruses! And a tragic statistic that the Cockroach thinks all humans should know: only 4% of mammals now on Earth are truly wild, and less than 6,000 tigers live in the wild.

Cockroach cabaret — solidarity with the more-than-human

Most cockroaches live in woods and forests in warm climates. Only a few can live around humans — and be hated for it. They are deemed pests — they upset our routine, eat our left-over food, some of them carry diseases. But they got on quite happily with life before we turned up. Cockroaches, like certain flies — also often hated by humans — compost and recycle, keeping the planet free of waste.

Showing BatCave Cockroach, photograph by Ltshears — BatCave Cockroach. Photograph: Ltshears (2005), shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BatCave_Cockroach_0123.jpg

So did humans, for a while — and most indigenous tribal peoples still do, living gracefully, taking only what they need to survive, and co-operating with the non-human world. The Baka people of Africa, for example, build beautiful housing out of leaves and branches, which will merge back into the landscape when they move on.

In the ‘developed’ world — whatever that means — colonialism and industrialisation have created vast amounts of increasingly toxic waste that, in the 21st century, has now become virtually impossible to break down. We gaze in confusion at coloured plastic boxes and wonder if that old toothbrush can be recycled?

To restore some balance and perspective, I founded the Arthropod Friendship Association, only partly in jest. You are invited to join, the requirements being that you agree with and try to adhere to, or at least respect, the constitution:

The Arthropod Friendship Association

Constitution

Aims and objectives

To break down the barriers to understanding between arthropods and vertebrates and create new relationships. This includes examining and reducing both irrational and justifiable vertebrate fears of e.g. being poisoned, infected with life-threatening diseases or losing food supplies.

Explore differences between approaching the world with an exoskeleton or internal bone skeletal structure.

Educate in order to reduce current inequalities, where a few powerful vertebrates control the lives of millions of arthropods.

Acknowledge that most arthropods have been on the earth for many millions of years longer than vertebrates. They deserve respect.

But respect is in short supply for cockroaches. Google ‘cockroaches’ and you will be taken to endless sites of extermination. And that terrible question — “What are cockroaches/wasps/spiders etc for??”

To which the only sensible retort is “What are humans for??”

Once I started on the path of cockroach solidarity, I discovered others had been there before me — Don Marquis, the author of archy and mehitabel, and Marion Copeland, who wrote Cockroach, a poetic and thoughtful book that made me decide I too am an eco-feminist. There are many others, some of whom feature in Copeland’s book.

Archy and Mehitabel — cross-species comrades

In archy and mehitabel, Archy lives in a newspaper office, back in the early 20^th century, and comes out at night to use the typewriter, calling himself a ‘vers libre poet’ trapped in a cockroach body. The human daytime workers make sure there is always a fresh sheet of paper for him to write his stream of consciousness poetry: he needs all his weight to put down a key, and so cannot use capitals or punctuation. Mehitabel is a disreputable and wonderful female alley cat who is a reincarnation of Cleopatra, or believes she is. The two creatures of the night have a slightly uneasy relationship but are comrades in adversity.

“Damned be this transmigration,” writes Archy — “I with the brain of a milton fell into the mincemeat at christmas and was damned near baked in a pie”…

Mehitabel, after hanging out with suburban middle-class cats — “fat slick tabbies” — says — “none of that for me give me the alley archy me for the mews and the roofs of the city and the occasional fish head and liberty is all I ask freedom and the garbage can”…

Cockroach (Animal) by Marion Copeland (2003) – cover.

Marion Copeland’s book explores both entomology and history, and also takes a look at the culture surrounding cockroaches, including a plethora of poetry, stories and children’s stories, all sticking up for the humble and despised creatures of the world. She notes how small children are generally fans of cockroaches and other so-called bugs, and only later learn — presumably from adults — to hate them. She quotes Janelle Cannon, author of a children’s book, Crickwing, about a golden rainforest cockroach, who says: “considering how long these well-designed bugs have survived…it is easy to see that we humans invaded the cockroaches’ pantry long before the cockroach entered ours!”

Absolutely. We humans invaded everyone’s pantry, not only invaded, but laid waste to it. Our endless wars devastate lands and landscapes and their non-human inhabitants, animal and plant. We even destroy the means of our own sustenance: irreplaceable seed banks in Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine and Afghanistan have been destroyed by war and wanton looting. Corporations and industrialised agriculture kill off entire ecosystems, poisoning land and water. The heating of the Earth caused by our reckless use of fossil fuels is having impacts that will reach far into the future.

The Cockroach is clear: too many humans are taking up too much space with too much stuff. Yet we do not even look after our own kind. We tolerate inequality with ease and cannot control the violence and wanton destructiveness of our own species: we need to respect and learn from the ancient heroes of evolution who have survived so much. With the help of their wisdom, we may still be able to pull ourselves back from the brink of apocalypse.

You despise us, criticise us, try to paralyse us
Call us vermin, want to wipe us out
You say there’s too many of us but we’d like to know
Which one of us will be the first to go?

Camilla adds that, “although health issues meant that the Cockroach Cabaret couldn’t go on tour this year, next year looks hopeful. Expect music, songs and spoken word, in a thought-provoking performance with plenty of humour and some salient facts. No live cockroaches are exploited for this show. Contact me on camilla@littleweed-music.org if you’re interested in the Cockroach Cabaret — and find out more at The Cockroach 2026, looking for friendly spaces.

You can listen to Camilla’s song ‘Complaint of the Cockroach’ and her Songs for Interesting Times album on Bandcamp.

archy and mehitabel, by Don Marquis, was first published in 1927 and is published by Penguin (1987).

Cockroach (Animal), by Marion Copeland, is published by Reaktion Books (2003).

***

From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say something about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.

Camilla – “In my favourite line of work/play — which is live performance — I find no use for AI. I got taken to Gifford’s circus this year — a family outing on a very hot day. It’s commercial theatre that relies on ticket sales, and not cheap, but it was great to see circus again and experience the high energy of it all (I have run away to the circus a few times). Acrobatics and balancing acts, live music, cues — all rely on trust. As does theatre, even without acrobatics. I don’t think I could ever trust AI. I have used it occasionally as an editing tool but am not interested in its creative possibilities. I’m not in the film industry or a commercial field of music threatened by AI — that I leave to others. The military aspects of AI are of course terrifying, but until we humans have taken the Cockroach’s advice, it looks as if we’re going to carry on with war and violence. All we as artists can do is use our creativity to try to move things in a different direction with whatever tools we feel comfortable using.”

Camilla Cancantata

A composer, improviser and performer, currently working on Dancing Dark Matter and Food! a family-friendly musical on the growing resistance to the corporate takeover of food.

One Poem a Week: Plague Poems Six Years On

Artist, writer and practical activist Nicky Saunter remembers weekly act of creative solidarity during the Covid-19 lockdowns: plague poems for plague times, reminding us that writing may be a solitary pleasure but sharing is an act of magic.

1,850 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes

Writing poetry sometimes feels like a dirty secret — something many people do, but they don’t like to shout about it too much. Sometimes for fear of ridicule, sometimes because what they are writing may be more revealing than they are comfortable with. This may seem a strange sensation to those who have grown up in a world where social media expects you to bare all, to open your heart to strangers and to confess your deepest fears and emotions. But perhaps poets are a strange mix of being both shy of revealing themselves and yet needing to be truly heard and understood.

Those of us who write poems perhaps have moments of wistfulness about a time when poets could make a good living, were part of the glitterati, invited to the most happening soirees and making headlines in daily newspapers. These days it is only dead poets and the occasional poet laureate whose name is widely known, and few people are able to quote poetry at any length.

Yet poetry persists and pops up so often in times of stress and trauma, when understanding is needed and when reflection on a complex issue fails to deliver a simple answer. Occasionally someone young and cool on YouTube performs their own poem in response to an event in the never-ending newscycle. Like rap and song lyrics, these words cut through the image storm that is social media, and burn brightly. We recognise this ancient flame for what it is — someone speaking from the heart out into the world without knowing if anyone is listening or if people are listening, whether anyone will understand. Will they “get it”? Will they “get me?”

Plague poems

During the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, a small group of people who didn’t all know each other came together on a WhatsApp group (before we were all deluged in such groups…) to write One Poem a Week. The idea was to follow a theme that had arisen naturally in the world, from our experiences that week. As time went on, we sometimes took as a theme words or phrases from a poem written the previous week. These poems became a live chain of intersecting thoughts and ideas weaving through the airwaves. In the breaks between lockdowns, we published two slim volumes and got together to read live in front of an audience. None of us had done this before.

In 2026 the group still lives on, our weekly poems still punctuated by terrifying headlines, family matters, news of births and deaths, ideas for art, shared grumbles, photos of nature, music choices and more. The weekly arrival of poems straight from other people’s minds on a shared theme drop like ripe cherries saved from the birds — rare and delicious.

I would like to share here a handful of poems from across these years with a little about where they came from. Reading them again triggers incredibly strong memories and sensations from the time of writing, although many are also written themselves about times past. I have learned that writing them is a solitary pleasure but sharing them is magic and well worth the risk.

Plague poems: Showing a drawing, 'Circle of dance' by Nicky Saunter, 2026 — ‘Circle of dance’. Art: Nicky Saunter © 2026

The Poems

It is interesting how poetry kaleidoscopes time and brings to the surface long-forgotten moments in great clarity. In the Essex market town where our family went shopping in the 1970s was an old fashioned grocer’s shop called Bowtell’s, where men behind counters performed magic to my young eye, wrapping cheese without string or tape.

Wrap

Saturday morning at the grocers, men in white coats stand ready
Pungent coffee aroma drifts from the roaster in the window
And so the show begins - curtains up
At the great glass altar of cheese.

The squat cheddar king sits heavy on his throne
Releasing reluctantly an infant slice to the wire,
The stagehands respectfully separate the two
Placing the small block just once in the spotlight
Square in the centre of the greaseproof paper stage.

A magician has appeared, pencil behind his ear
A drum roll, the first fold; a gasp, the second fold,
The semi-nude block is turned blushing from our gaze
The cymbals clash - the final tuck, a secret learned
And it’s over with a bow
It’s a wrap.

Sometimes a news item fills you with such a powerful response that it becomes a real sensation in your own body. It can literally make you feel sick. Writing and empathy are strong partners.

Fried

I heard they fried a woman in Arizona
in a prison cage beneath the blistering sun
and I say blistering because that's what the metal cage did to her skin

can you begin to imagine that?

On my wrist I have a tiny burn mark
shiny, pebble smooth and beautiful now
it hurt like hell fresh from the oven shelf
where I left a tiny piece of myself.

What does it feel like to know that
whatever you touch is going to sear you, char your flesh like a tuna steak
(we are all from fish after all)
and will it smell like food or like me
how long will the metal hook pain last
as it grids my face, back, thigh or arm with the live pattern of cruelty

she didn't live - Marcia Powell
banged up for banging for money
but I remember her and so will you.

We took in an old staff rescue dog called Buster who enjoyed the next few years moving like an ageing mafia boss between the sofa, rug, bed and garden in a slow stroll and with a big smile on his face. There is nothing like a dog for teaching a restless soul how to see the moment.

Sleeping Dogs

how can it be that the snore
of a loved one fast asleep raises
deep in the night’s bestial dark
such ire, such stabbing murderous thoughts
and yet what soothing honey is gifted
by the rhythmic rasp
of a sleeping dog before the fire

Some images will never be forgotten even if we wish they could be. We sat watching footage of desperate people crossing the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas in the hope of something better, only to be trapped in a no-man’s land of makeshift shelters and endless paperwork.

Shell 

Someone’s home, such a tiny thing
Curled in marble coils of calcium
On the sun-warm palm of a child
Staring in awe at this seaside wizardry
How did they get here?
And where have they all gone?
Unique on a beach of millions
Like so many life jackets on Lesbos
Abandoned by seasick migrants
Sea, salt and air will out and
Shells become sandcastles
But life jackets are here to stay

Unbelievably, war has returned to Europe and Ukraine was fighting for its life. Elsewhere in the Sudan or Syria, people continued to hide from soldiers and fear their weapons and their lack of humanity. I think often about women and children, the elderly in these times of physical extremis.

War

Finger to her lips, shushing for life the curious toddler
Rocking the mewling infant to the safety of sleep
The last biscuit in exchange for stillness
Distraction from boots on the stairs
Metal and muscle crashing past
Please, please let them just pass
Not notice this door, paint peeling gently
Smell of cabbage poverty lingering
No men to see here, no threat at all
Just one sweating mother, shepherding
Her babies down the hall
Her Kalashnikov heavy but ready

Heat and fire were frequent themes as they came in waves across the world, increasing in their strength and threat to life. Sometimes a good story emerges from such fear and panic — as when local people came to the rescue when a community field went up in flames.

Fields on fire

One cigarette butt from a hairless lip
Is all it took to torch the hay
Strewn with care round tender trees
Searching still for sap root safety
(Aren’t we all?)
But even as the cinders sparked skyward
Supporters poured in a soothing flood
To extinguish the pain, splash laughter on flames
Buckets and barrows, old-fashioned really
But prompt and willing, that’s the key
The rest is nature’s job, rejuvenation
The total miracle of life from death

These two need no explanation, but simply arrived as people became both richer and poorer, warmer and colder. Short poems can be just as impactful as long ones.

The rich

I had a dream
In which
The rich
Became smaller
The richer they got
The Sunday times
Rich list
Was tragically
Eaten by
Their own
Overbred
Pet lapdogs

Cold

Should the half of the world too cold
Cuddle up to the half too hot
We might all be warm

Although strong emotions tend to start poetry into life for me, these can be positive: love, nature, hope, joy. It seems right in these trying times to finish with a couple of these.

Drenched

You know the first time you feel tropical rain
It makes you laugh, just hoot with laughter
The joke is on you, with your hopes of reaching shelter
Before the mighty heavens crack and broil
Time and wind stops, temperature dips
And we are drenched both to our slick skins
Between the car and the porch overhang
Metres that might as well be miles

Out in the yard with fat drops bouncing up red mud
The earth is alive with jumping water in slo mo
I leap and then you, splashing like tots
Mouths open to the pummelling sky
The rains have come, bringing life and food
Joy runs untrammelled down gutters and pipes
Bubbling hope, spurting fountains alive
And us too, dancing in disbelief.

Flow

There is a point of particular caramel calm
Before the shutter finally falls

And light commits indelibly to film
Every line and furrow of your beloved face

When focus is all, line and pattern
Form effortlessly into seamless composition

The quadrille of rustling silk falls quiet
A pause as distant music holds its breath

Freezing forever the tilt of a head, a raised arm
And in that decisive moment, I am in flow.

All poems © Nicky Saunter 2026.

Showing 'Crow power', art by Nicky Saunter, 2026 — ‘Crow power’. Art: Nicky Saunter © 2026

Find more

The One Poem a Week project resulted in Plague Poems: March April May 2020, by Andrew Simms, Nicky Saunter and Nick Robins. You can read more at Nicky’s website, Through The Round Window.

During that first lockdown, ClimateCultures invited members to send in something for our Quarantine Connection series, and you can read the 40 contributions we curated over eight weeks: images, poems, audio or video pieces, short stories, research snippets, event or exhibition programme, extracts from a longer piece — all helping us to fight feelings of isolation when our physical cultural spaces were closed or restricted for the usual sharing of art, knowledge and experience.

***

Nicky – “Although I have used AI to create images in Canva, I found it too limiting and same-looking to use again and haven’t used it since. I used it to bring together some sources for research, but it didn’t come up with anything I hadn’t found myself.

“There are probably a million ways I might use it, but I haven’t yet found anything to take my dogs for a walk or recruit volunteers for local charities. No doubt it will come, but as yet it has simply taken my writing and research work and hasn’t added much for me to use.”

Nicky Saunter

A practical activist, campaigner, social entrepreneur and artist with a particular focus on communication, between people and between humans and the rest of the natural world.

The Steep Climes Quartet: My Take on Climate Fiction

Writer David Guenette shares creative insights into his Steep Climes Quartet, a longitudinal study into climate futures unfolding across an American county. This post accompanies David’s essay for our Longer feature, where he asks “What is Climate Fiction?”

2,620 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes

I’ve been at work on the Steep Climes Quartet, a literary climate fiction series. The series is a sort of longitudinal study over time across the consistent location of Berkshire County, in Massachusetts. The first book, Kill Well, takes place in 2026. The second book, Dear Josephine, takes place in 2029. The third book, Over Brooklyn Hills, occurs in 2035. The first three books are published. The final book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Farm to Me, takes place in 2047, and I’m aiming for a Spring 2027 publishing date.

As an entrepreneur, writer, and climate change activist, I’ve studied climate change science and policies for over two decades and believe that the most effective basis for the discussion of the climate crisis in climate fiction is realism. No apocalypse, no fantasy, no deus ex machina. I believe climate fiction can be an effective way for individuals and communities to identify climate change challenges and that climate fiction can offer alternative perspectives for understanding the climate crisis and approaches for dealing with climate change. I believe that climate fiction that focuses on the reader’s familiar circumstances and provides a recognizable world will better explain the nature of the crisis and foster a more powerful identification with the problems we face and the solutions before us.

Of course, the novels better be enjoyable reading.

The changing world — a near-future climate timeline

The main theme of The Steep Climes Quartet is our fractured society and the solidarity climate progress requires of us and our communities. Over the course of writing the series — I started in 2015 — other themes evolve and the series includes some source of hope in the form of an economically competitive clean energy transition. But don’t think I’ve grown pollyannish — ongoing and important plotlines involve various misdeeds by Big Oil. I’m also not pollyannish about the rate of progress and take into consideration that political bodies and society at large typically move at snail’s pace. Still, by Book Three, Over Brooklyn Hills, 2035 sees that core court cases against Big Oil are finally starting to break for the climate, but then again, these same corporations and their political allies have managed to get too many gas-fired generator plants in place, with the net result of slowed progress on carbon emission reductions.

Showing the cover of 'Kill Well' - book one of The Steep Climes Quartet (2023) by David Guenette — ‘Kill Well’ – book one of The Steep Climes Quartet (2023)

In the first three books, the residents of the Berkshires — a pleasant bucolic place, by the way — don’t have a lot of direct experience with the terrible consequences of climate change and, like most of us, hear about such negative consequences mostly through the news. Kill Well, in 2026, has a big heatwave in the upper Midwest, and the West is experiencing another plague of wildfires, but Davin, the Berkshire-based main character, is an economically pressed recent divorcee and mostly caught up in worrying about rising costs and the income he’s struggling for. The worst thing that happens to him in the first book, climate-wise, is that a heavy rain damages his vegetable garden and a part of the Airbnb apartment on the first floor of his Housatonic house. There’s a plot line of a young woman on the run after witnessing her fossil fuel divestiture boss killed on a business trip, which brings her to Chicago, where Davin’s son is living his first year out of college, but who is now heading home to escape the heat and the slowing economy. The two meet on the train heading toward Boston, and she ends up at Davin’s house, and there’s a contract killer in play, too, but the prevailing theme in Kill Well is the widespread economic stress of rising costs and the recession-like state of the nation’s economy that retards, along with Trump, clean energy progress.

Sholwing the cover of 'Dear Josephine', book two of The Steep Climes Quartet (2025) by David Guenette — ‘Dear Josephine’, book two of The Steep Climes Quartet (2025)

In Dear Josephine, set in 2029, the nation is post-Trump and politics is working better, but there remains evil intent of those who run fossil fuel empires. There’s Miami’s destruction by the combination of a powerful hurricane hitting in sync with high ocean surges, but the residents of the Berkshires are unaffected directly, mostly. And then there’s a guy running around the country trying to kill billionaires and there’s a guy using Kill the Rich as cover for assassinations in service to fossil fuel think tanks to ease some newly inconvenient political ex-allies off the playing board. And yeah, in Dear Josephine there’s a fair amount of conversation and thinking about externalities by a regular series character, Jeannie Louise Smith, who’s a climate tech and policy wonk living on Cottage Street, but I did follow a beta reader’s advice to cut a lot of character talk about externalities. This book also marks the appearance of a climate action terrorist group.

Showing the cover of 'Over Brooklyn Hills', book three of The Steep Climes Quartet (2026) by David Guenette — ‘Over Brooklyn Hills’, book three of The Steep Climes Quartet (2026)

Over Brooklyn Hills is six years after the second book and nine years after the first. MAGA, repudiated in the 2026 mid-term and 2028 elections, has given way to economic reforms and climate policies and America has rejoined much of the rest of the world in making climate progress, mainly by pushing the clean energy transition. There’s also a look at the consequences of choosing violence, as the climate terrorist group introduced in Dear Josephine now finds itself involved with Mexican cartels who are battling the U.S.’s militarization of the southern border as climate drought blankets large parts of Mexico, Central America, and South America, driving illegal migration. Climate migration is writ small, too, as seen in a long heatwave hovering over the New York metropolitan area and the Berkshires finds itself with very many more young people (i.e., typically less economically advantaged) escaping the heat and the energy bills demanded for safety, and the towns of South County and the second-homers aren’t enjoying the change in the character of their summer.

Showing the mockup cover to 'Farm to Me’, which will be the final book of The Steep Climes Quartet. The cover may be different by publication, in Spring 2027. — ‘Farm to Me’ will be the final book of The Steep Climes Quartet. This cover is a simple mockup and may be different by publication, in Spring 2027.

Farm to Me, which is in draft and with a mess of notes, sees 2047 with reducing yields of some of the once highly productive agricultural areas in the U.S. due to chronic drought and aquifer collapse. New England has been experiencing a resurgence of its once dominant industry, agriculture. There’s been some real progress with carbon emission reduction, but climate change is locked in place, albeit at levels that would be worse without modest progress. Resiliency and adaptation programs are all the rage, but climate change continues to exert a downward pressure on the economy. Farm to Me sees human nature remaining a good news/bad news puzzle, with a murder mystery tied to one ambitious New England food distribution company. There is the issue of aging in the time of climate change and the angst and agony of the young about the future, where the cumulative effects of climate change pile on and tipping points are just the latest dread, and Davin’s granddaughter, not yet 18 years old, is of interest to a federal investigation into a climate activist group she’s part of.

One goal of the series is to present climate change as accurately as possible and with solid scientific grounding. In this way, readers who may not be similarly inclined to keep up with science and policies may consider their own understanding advanced, and, yes, this is something of an illusion for those future timelines, but then novels derive from the creative act of controlled illusion.

Creative challenges for The Steep Climes Quartet

I’d be happy enough to relax my long-running autodidact efforts on climate change, but alas, climate models keep getting tweaked and plentiful research continues. For instance, there are new findings and expanded concepts about faster rising temperatures than conventional understanding has posited, and I’ve had to make my best guess that 2035 will see a rise of 1.7-1.8 Celsius in the global annual average. By the time I have the fourth book’s manuscript well in hand, I’ll have had to best guess about the global annual average temperature rise in 2047. Yet more speculative are the political winds and social expectations governing these timelines, made all the more challenging because political and societal developments march on up and down and sideways.

CO2 emissions, global temperature rises and climate impact risks for SSP-based scenarios over the present century (IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) “Climate Change 2023” Synthesis report (adopted longer report: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2023/03/Doc5_Adopted_AR6_SYR_Longer_Report.pdf)

Of course, presenting the changing world across the series can’t be simply info-dumped, but rather seen, experienced, and understood (or not) through the characters’ own perceptions. The series uses a third person-semi-omniscient point of view, with characters alternating among chapters and some know more, some far less. Like the rest of us, the most stunning stories of climate consequences are more often heard of, not experienced directly, although over the course of the series, more and more direct experience of climate change comes to all.

There are other challenges in attempting to portray the future. These include representations of technology development and most of the characters in this series are regular people and not pioneering tech heads. Human economies and technologies roll out more slowly than the sci-fi-inclined often hope and not just more slowly but also quite unevenly (tip o’ the cap to William Gibson!). By Over Brooklyn Hills and 2035, AI and the spread of some other technologies advance, with smart glasses and haptic feedback and some modest virtual reality interfaces showing up. An AI bubble in 2030 causes a significant recession, especially in the U.S., but that industry evolves. By the last book, in 2047, AI has settled into a controlled progression, and in Farm to Me, I’m exploring the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, which happens to be based in Great Barrington, to explore what the shift toward a more local economy might look like, especially in response to climate change, although this will be more in the background, too.

This challenge of moderating readers’ expectations with tech grows harder the further one goes into the future, but faulting on the side of less-is-more is the right bet. For the Farm to Me story, there’s a part that involves regenerative agriculture, and there are advances in sensor technologies that can accurately analyze carbon sequestration in soil. This sort of development is not a big stretch but rather an incremental improvement in monitoring systems, no doubt to be aided by AI-based computations.

Still no flying cars.

The makings and markets for cultured meat and fermentation-based protein, set up in Over Brooklyn Hills, are a well-established market by 2047. The failure of property insurance and the climate threat to housing markets in some areas will be leaking into the general economy. There will be some new nuclear reactors, although fewer than one might expect, since such energy production is hampered by high costs and bankruptcies.

Did I mention no flying cars?

Of course, I’ve got to finish the damn manuscript first.

The foundation of climate fiction

Projecting out two-dozen-plus years, prognostication becomes more fluid, but keeping up with the best climate science remains an important requirement in writing this series. No magic solutions need apply, but rather only informed extrapolation. For example, it may be that regenerative agriculture is among the best of carbon sequestration strategies, but carbon capture remains an unlikely silver bullet. There’s also opportunity to explore the issue of real costs, where externalities (there I go!) of all sorts of things, from hamburgers to fast fashion, will get a nod, because sustainability will only grow as an issue in the years ahead. The world won’t be ending in 2047, but the higher and persistent loading of greenhouse gases take their toll, with some tipping points threatening. But the main story — the foundation of climate fiction — remains the progress our society makes based on our understanding of climate change and the economic, political, and moral choices we face.

Will our society make sufficient progress?

Talk about a cliffhanger!

Find more

You can read David’s new essay for our Longer feature, Telling Stories about Climate Change.

David explores these ideas, and examples of climate fiction, at The Steep Clime on Substack. And you can find more of his writing — including the first three novels in the Steep Climes Quartet and other books — at his website, davidguenette.com.

Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher, was published in 1973 and is available from Vintage (Penguin Books).

The Schumacher Center for a New Economics, in Great Barrington, MA, USA, was founded in 1980 to envision the elements of a just and regenerative global economy, “undertakes to apply these elements in its home region of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts; and then develops the educational programs to share the results more broadly, thus encouraging replication.” They produced a new study guide to Small is Beautiful to mark its 50th anniversary in 2023.

In the UK, the work and example of E. F. Schumaker’s work inspired the creation of the Schumacher Society, the Schumacher Institute, and Schumacher College.

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David – “AI and writing: a tool, not a partner:

“Serving as a research agent, AI can be an excellent tool for writers who need facts and figures and overviews on a topic. This applies to non-fiction, such as the climate change articles I write, but also as convenient quick research or confirmation (or pointer to errors) for fiction writing. This is how I’ll use AI. I don’t typically worry about hallucinations because I know the knowledge domain well enough to spot AI’s missteps or the results of a poorly put query.

“AI can be helpful, too, as a high-level copy-editor and proofreader, mainly to bring in fresh eyes to discover obvious issues that the writer—having written the work—often has trouble spotting. Having a good human copy-editor remains, in my opinion, an essential element of book production. The way I’ll use AI for copy-editing and proofreading makes for less drudgery and lets the real copy-editor and the proofreader better concentrate on improving the manuscript.

“I suppose AI can be helpful with emails and letters—the sort of business correspondence best delivered as clearly and briefly as possible—although I often don’t bother because emails and letters default to a common tone and style, which isn’t anything a writer should want. I often find that AI—I typically use Gemini—offers “improvements” that are lowest denominator style choices and I often enough conclude with a “Yeah, I don’t think so” response when checking out what AI thinks an email or letter should be. Although, apparently, AI likes em dashes nearly as much as I do.

“AI in the actual work of creative writing seems to me an uninteresting cheat aimed at writing as “content” for easy, quick, and undemanding consumption and thus misses the fun part of the whole process of creating a poem, short story, or novel. My conclusion about AI as a co-author (or, I suppose, even principal author): Why bother?

“Of course, I had to use AI to assess this short essay, didn’t I? It found one typo and offered a slight improvement in another sentence. It also suggested a stronger transition in the last paragraph to better distinguish creative writing from mere content.”

David Guenette

A writer and author of literary climate fiction series, The Steep Climes Quartet, who also writes about climate fiction and climate change science, technology and policies.

Beyond Ecosystem Collapse: New Stories to Live By

Ecopoet Helen Moore discusses the importance of econarratives and ethical leadership for how we interact with each other and the more-than-human, and how a new free online programme can help us find the new stories to live by.

1,550 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes

In January 2026, the UK government published a report entitled Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, which linked the deleterious state of local and global ecosystems and biodiversity loss with the increasing risk of ecosystem collapse and threats to national security.¹ Despite its huge significance, the report received very limited media attention, and this goes for much of the scientific research that sounds the alarm about the climate and wider ecological emergency. Research led by Stockholm Resilience Centre has stated the importance of remaining within planetary boundaries and describes how “transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be […] catastrophic […] to human well-being”, and that of countless other species.²

Showing the cover of the Planetary Healthcheck 2025 report.

At current consumption levels, seven of the nine boundaries have been exceeded: Climate Change, Biosphere Integrity, Land System Change, Freshwater Use, Biogeochemical Flows, Novel Entities, and Ocean Acidification.³ Given the perilous situation we collectively face, effective forms of environmental communication are urgently needed to support community resilience, ecosystems regeneration and deep adaptation.

Econarratives for planetary life

Fundamental to human communication are the stories that influence how we interact with each other within the ecosystems that sustain us and that we influence. Pioneering work by my colleague (and fellow ClimateCultures member) Arran Stibbe, Professor of Narrative Ecology at the University of Gloucestershire, has shown how stories play an important role within the global ecosystems that life depends on, by shaping how humans conceptualise and act in the world — some stories encouraging people to destroy the ecosystems that life depends on, other stories encouraging attention, care and protection of the natural world.

Showing the home page banner or The Search for New Stories to Live By — Home page for The Search for New Stories to Live By

Building on his 2024 book, Econarrative: ethics, ecology and the search for new stories to live by,⁴ Arran led a team of colleagues at the University of Gloucestershire and a wider international team as part of the CLADES project (Critical Language Awareness, Democratic Engagement and Sustainability, funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ programme), to develop a free online 8-part course The Search for New Stories to Live By. In this course, which included my own contribution on ecopoetic activism in part 4, guiding themes are econarrative and ethical leadership.

Econarrative is defined as stories which see humans, more-than-human species and the physical environment in interaction with each other, while ethical leadership is defined as shaping how others perceive themselves and the society around them based on an ecological vision. As Arran Stibbe encourages, “We can all be ethical leaders, in our lives, our families, our communities, our companies, or our countries. All we need is a clear ethical vision, critical awareness of the stories that underpin our unsustainable society, the ability to seek out new stories to live by, and to communicate those stories in inspiring ways.”

The Search for New Stories to Live By examines the use of narratives by ethical leaders who are doing just that work. They include community elders, writers, poets, activists, campaigners, scientists and politicians, all of us storytellers in one way or another. The course also examines the stories we tell and how we tell them, seeking out ways of imagining a radically different society and bringing that society into being. My own contribution, which focuses on Ecopoetic Activism, looks at how ecopoets challenge the stories we live by and create new stories to transform social reality. There is a prevailing cultural narrative, maintained by literary gatekeepers, that ‘good’ poetry should not convey an apparent message. However, this is often a privileged position, arising from people who have high levels of material security and who occupy a part of the world (I’m writing here in the UK) which has yet to be severely impacted by the intersecting climate, ecological and social crises.

Acknowledging that all art is essentially political (being ‘apolitical’ is in itself a political position) and recognising the urgency of the challenges we collectively face, ecopoetry charts another course, a consciously activist stance, seeking to raise awareness, witness, mourn, commune, speak truth to power and vision new ways of living and being, among other approaches. Frequently, the work of ecopoets critiques extractivist Western attitudes and behaviours towards the ecosystems on which humans depend, along with the neocolonial exploitation of people in the Global South. Understanding that we humans are part of ‘nature’, ecopoetry may also seek to re-enchant our relationship with the more-than-human world. Or an ecopoem may narrate the restoration of a polluted river, such as the Merse in Tuscany, which the Italian ecopoet, Massimo D’Arcangelo describes, and which I explore on the course.

The search for new stories

Designed for anyone who is aware of the trajectory of society towards collapse under ever-growing inequality and environmental destruction, and who wants change at the only level that can make a difference, The Search for New Stories to Live By is a self-study course, where participants work their way through the eight parts — the introduction, Creation Stories, Identity, Ecopoetic Activism, Enchantment, Ethics, Emotions, Apocalypse – watching video talks, reading notes, completing exercises and looking through the detailed PowerPoint slides. Educators are also welcome to use the materials for their courses, and there is advice on teaching in the extra materials section, with stated course goals being for learners to develop critical awareness of the stories that underpin our current unsustainable civilisation, to develop skills in using language in inspiring ways to convey new stories to live by, and to contribute to bringing a new sustainable civilisation into being.

Finally, it is worth noting that this course builds on a previous course, The Stories We Live By, which explores the dominant stories that drive industrial civilisation and which have contributed to creating the destruction and far-reaching interconnected issues we currently face. Given sufficient time and interest, that first course could be explored before The Search for New Stories to Live By.

Helen’s references

DEFRA, 2026, Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, UK Government
Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin III, F.S., Lambin, E., Lenton, T.M., Scheffer, M., Folke, C., Schellnhuber, H.J. and Nykvist, B., 2009. Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and society, 14(2).
Kitzmann, N., Caesar, L., Sakschewski, B., Rockström, J., Andersen, L., Bechthold, M., Bergfeld, L., Beusen, A., Billing, M., Bodirsky, B.L. and Botsyun, S., 2025. Planetary Health Check 2025: A scientific assessment of the state of the planet.
Stibbe, Arran, 2024. Econarrative, Ethics, Ecology, and the Search for New Narratives. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Find more

You can access the new, free course at The Search for New Stories to Live By.

Helen mentions an earlier course, The Stories We Live By, which builds on an awareness that the issues the world faces are so severe they call into question the stories that our societies are based on. Through topics such as Ideologies and Discourses, Framing, Metaphor, Evaluations, Identities, Convictions, Erasure and Salience, it provides tools for revealing the stories we live by, questioning them from an ecological perspective. You can access that here — and read a ClimateCultures review of the early version of that course.

In a previous ClimateCultures post, Ecopoetikon: Global Ecopoetries for a Cultural Tipping Point, Helen celebrates global ecopoetries through a new project gathering poets from Global South and North. Ecopoetikon offers a powerful indicator of intersecting crises and inspiration for a tipping point in our relationship with the living world.

Helen’s latest ecopoetry collection, The Last Lighthouse in Rising Seas (Palewell Press, May 2026), explores ‘petronarcosis’ (fossil fuel addiction) and the links between forced migration and the climate crisis and has been celebrated as confirming her “as the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time.” In this piece for our Creative Showcase — which includes one of the poems in full — Helen reflects on the book and the genesis of the poem, which conveys hope in how we can resist the forces of destruction and seek Thrutopian paths forward.

You can read a review of her 2024 collection, river / run, by fellow ClimateCultures member and poet Fiona Moore, here.

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From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.

Helen — “I am deeply suspicious of AI for multiple reasons, including the ecological and social impacts of data centres; the disproportionate power and influence wielded by the techbro oligarchs; growing evidence of biases within AI, which one study reveals only reinforce Islamophobia, sexism, racism etc; research also evidencing it as a form of technocolonialism; the impact it has on our critical thinking and writing skills; and, last but not least, because of its theft of creative work by often poorly remunerated artists and writers.

“I have not used AI in compiling this article, although some of the text is recycled from the online course blurb. The occasional use that I do make of AI is when researching a topic, and then only where it pops up freely as part of a Google search.”

Helen Moore

A pioneering British ecopoet, socially engaged artist, writer, translator and academic based in Bristol.

Standing in Relationship with Land

Artist Jennifer Leach offers a ‘case study with no answers’; how (and whether) to engage with issues of right land relationship with resistance but not aggression: pausing, listening, acting with integrity, and being at peace with our choices.

2,270 words: estimated reading time = 9 minutes

How to be in this world right now, how to act, how best to use our creative gifts, and what voice to speak out with – a case study with no answers.

There is a strong argument growing right now, that engaging oppositionally with systemic injustice only serves to fuel polarities and division within a system that is heading for collapse. The advocates of this argument, many of them community leaders engaged in stunning endeavours of nurture and growth, are encouraging us to transfer our energies into laying fresh foundations for a more loving, more equitable world. I, like many activists, artists, and people with heart, find myself caught deep in this place of ‘no longer and not yet’. And I personally have been deeply impacted by the Walk for Peace monks in the USA, who have so visibly demonstrated radical change through embodied non-engagement with any political landscape. I find myself arriving in an internal place of peace beyond conflict, whose rules of reflection in the outer world I do not yet understand. I am unsure whether there remains any useful place, for me, for protest and challenge. Others of you may feel the same, and I share here a case study that illustrates this dilemma.

Standing tall with the more-than-human

In 2023, our community fought hard to prevent a local golf course, a major green lung of Reading, from being swallowed up by naked greed in the form of a large deluxe housing estate. In the history of planning in the UK, there had never been any application with a greater number of objections, over 4,000. Planning was denied twice, but on the third time of asking (like a bad fairytale), the Council voted in favour of the scheme. We, the community, gasped, we shouted, we cried, we were reprimanded for bad behaviour in the Council chamber. The scheme rolled inexorably ahead.

It felt important to bear witness to this swallowing of the land, in particular to the 112 trees that were to be felled. With Andrea Carr, friend and fellow ClimateCultures member, we came together with the community to do just this. We bound each doomed tree with a white band of muslin, photographed and honoured it. I had already spent months with the trees, photographing and recording each one of them, and I believe they reciprocated by revealing to me their unique energies in the photographs I took. Our project, Standing Tall, can be seen on the Outrider Anthems website.

Land relationship: Showing trees destined to be felled bound with white muslin to honour them. Photograph by Jennifer Leach. — Honouring the trees to be felled. Photograph: Jennifer Leach © 2022

The trees were felled, the deluxe detached houses are being built, with a token number of ‘affordable’ terraced houses (costing £500,000+) available through shared ownership with housing associations. And with the cement mixers still churning, the developers moved on to Phase II.

How then to participate in this second phase of landgrab within my community? By the time it raised its head, I was shifting further away from resistance, to focus more on the resolution of inner conflict and division, learning to be more humble in my judgement of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Concentrating on becoming the peace I wish to see in the world. And yet, the land, the beautiful land! How could I not help defend it?

I felt that using my creativity to reflect a changed dialogue might be the most helpful course of action, and so I made two small physical books, one called Standing Tall, the other The Land in Relationship. These small books are things of beauty, and in their own quiet way, radical. Standing Tall is a portrait of the land and the trees, a record of the art intervention led by Andrea and myself, and a pictorial record of the land during and after building. The loss of habitat is quietly evidenced. When the huge ‘protected’ oak sheds a limb through stress, it reads like a climactic moment in a story of loss. The book concludes with the words: “Fairfax Ltd is now submitting applications to build on the remaining golf course land. We dream that they may not succeed. We dream of a world where housing is no longer built for excessive profit and gain. Where housing is not seen as an investment. Where people own only the one home they live in. We dream of a time when, in the making of all decisions, the land, the community, and the more-than-human will, at last, be honoured again.”

Land relationship: Showing trees where only houses now stand. Photograph: Jennifer Leach © 2022 — Houses now, where these trees stood. Photograph: Jennifer Leach © 2022

The second book, The Land in Relationship, maps out the reality of inappropriate, insensitive planning actions, by placing the proposed site (always so prettily coloured in the application paperwork) within its landscape, naming all that is bound in relationship to it – the land surrounding it, the fauna and flora, the community, the ecosystem, the planet. It ends with the text: “It is time – long past time – to move back into right relationship with the land. There is no greater priority.”

Showing a Trapped tree, isolated in the new development. Photograph byJennifer Leach 2026 — Trapped tree: isolated in the new development. Photograph: Jennifer Leach © 2026

These books are intended to re-establish contact with a truth nearly always crushed by the language and aggression of planning.

Creativity and witnessing for land relationship

Having completed the books, and not sure how best to share them, I was invited to speak at the government inquiry that was set up to decide on the Phase II planning application once South Oxfordshire District Council had turned it down and the planners had put in their inevitable appeal. And in this forum came the greatest ethical and spiritual rub for me. I did not know what I should say, nor what voice to use. I did not know how to use my creativity in the best interests of the land and the community, in a system that is inherently undemocratic and whose language is strident and disassociated. Should I be poetic, sharp, gentle, visionary, forceful?

After much thought, I wrote a story, The Oligopoly, using the language of my profession as artist and storyteller. I took three small oak trees up to the stand with me, and I shared my story. It was a tale that took no prisoners, and which, according to my own truth, laid bare the underlying narrative of bullying, greed and systematic aggression that underpins the highway to societal and environmental collapse. It ended with a provocation: “Change must start here, now, in rooms such as these. With acts of principled wisdom and clear thinking, based on necessity. If not for [the people] themselves, then for their children, and the children of all species.”

Showing: Stencil graffiti by Edward von Lõngus, Tallinn (removed by the authorities) — Stencil graffiti by Edward von Lõngus, Tallinn (removed by the authorities)

You can listen to my recording of The Oligopoly here:

Throughout my delivery, I could see the developers squirming. What was worse, I could feel the whole room squirming. At the end of my tale, I gave the inspector, and the developers, a copy each of the government’s 2026 Joint Committee of Intelligence National Security Report, and a copy of my two small books; they were filed under evidence.

I returned to my seat, feeling the intense discomfort not only of the developers, but of ‘my side’ too. I felt deeply uncomfortable. Exposed. I felt confrontational. Had I overstepped the mark? Had I alienated the inspector? Had I imposed my own act of hostility, and furthered rigidity and conflict, with a horrible sense of moral superiority, through the telling of my story? Could I have told a different story or used a different voice? Reader, I do not know.

What I do know is that local naturalists spoke knowledgably and movingly about the bats and the wildlife and the ancient wonder of the local Cucumber Wood, and conscientious volunteers and low-paid councillors from local neighbourhood groups and parish councils, who had spent months preparing a case to save the land, committed to five full days of the excruciating minutiae and scrutiny of planning-speak. And what I also know is that the inspector, when visiting the site itself, spent longer there, and walked further, than in any other site visit the lawyers could recall.

A few days ago, against all the odds, against all the predictions, the planning application was turned down. The inspector’s report was attentive and balanced; he had recognised the beyond-monetary value of the land, he had recognised the land in relationship, and he had honoured it.

I wonder still about my role, and inner conflict remains. Did I ‘grab the burning rope’ of resistance, and fight against a development that may indeed need to happen, before something better is born? Am I guilty of delaying the inevitable death of a system, I who believe so strongly in allowing the natural arrival of endings? Are acerbic acts of truthtelling helpful, or are they simply aggressive? Do they belong to the old adversarial system, or can they be supportive because they are ultimately rooted in acceptance rather than in conflict and anger? Perhaps in this instance the creative shake up was necessary, so that the inspector could see and listen differently. Perhaps it allowed the pleas of the community to be heard, and the quieter voice of the books to seed better. Perhaps it had no impact whatever. Who knows?

As a codicil to the story, Fairfax Housing and Reading Golf Club have just put in an appeal to the High Court, citing injustice and unfairness in the inspector’s report. Should the High Court accept their appeal, a different inspector will be appointed and the inquiry will begin all over again. The unremitting process continues. In light of this, I feel happier that I named and framed the developers’ merciless persistence within the context of a process that masquerades as democratic.

And so, for now, the case study ends. What is my conclusion? All I can really say, after much consideration, is this: in an extremely difficult time of shift, flux and changing systems, as we are compelled to face with renewed honesty our own individual approaches, pausing long, listening deeply and acting authentically are the best yardsticks, perhaps the only yardsticks, we have. And if we act so, we should then accept that we have then done our best, made the best decisions we could, and have acted with integrity. And that we should be at peace with our choices.

Find more

You can find more on Outrider Anthems’ Standing Tall project — along with digital flipbooks of the two books Jennifer presented to the council meeting — here on the OA website, and in Jennifer’s piece for our Creative Showcase: Standing Tall, 2022.

Jennifer has shared the text of her story, The Oligopoly, on her new Substack: “This substack space is going to be a mixture of myself and the organisation I founded in 2011 – Outrider Anthems. I am an artist, writer, advocate for the Earth, and a fan of life cycles and endings rather than exponential growth curves. I believe we as a global society have entered the ragged space between ‘the no longer and the not yet’, and we will need to work hard and listen well to find a new way forward in community. This is what I will be exploring here, hopefully in conversation with others.”

As reported by the CIEEM (Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management) and The Guardian, the UK’s Joint Committee of Intelligence report, National security assessment on global ecosystems, was published in January 2026 “with no press briefing, headlines or apparent ministerial comment, the report has landed amid a news cycle dominated by the World Economic Forum in Davos. Yet its conclusions are stark and far-reaching, with profound implications for environmental policy, planning and public investment in nature.” The CIIEM continues: “Of particular concern is the report’s conclusion that, if current trends continue, every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse, and that ecosystem collapse is highly likely to drive national security risk.”

The Walk for Peace, led by Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara, is a journey dedicated to raising awareness of peace, loving-kindness, compassion, and unity. This historic journey began at the Hương Đạo Vipassana Bhavana Center in Fort Worth, Texas, and travelled over 2,300 miles to reach its destination in Washington, D.C.

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Jennifer – “The question of AI? Intrinsically I do not like it. I do not like who has inputted the data, how the data has been sourced, its internal biases, and who is seeking to make money, and gain power, from its use. I do not like how it has become our path, without debate and without consensus. I do not like how it replaces human effort and makes it easy to relieve ourselves of critical thinking. I do not like the cheesy, saccharine images that are its representation of spirituality, nor the ‘wonders of nature’ that it seeks to fabricate and enhance, as if they are not naturally wonderful enough. To the new parameters of ‘perfection’ it sets, I find myself responding with more mess, more spontaneity, more deliberate ‘imperfection’. This I like. I do confess to using it to cheat at Wordle, and my Spanish and elementary Zulu have been made possible through the AI owl service that is Duolingo.”

Jennifer Leach

A poet, writer, performer and storyteller whose wild work, forged in the fantastical reaches of deep imagination, brings to life new stories for our strange times.