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Cloud Mountain, Thunder Dragon: Stories of Gross National Happiness

Researcher and writer Jules Pretty‘s climb to Bhutan’s Taktstang mountain temple reveals a nation’s story of hope and regeneration through its common focus on Gross National Happiness. “Difficult to reach, but not impossible. Like solving a world crisis…”

2,050 words: estimated reading time = 8 minutes

It is said, each person of Bhutan wishes to make a pilgrimage to Taktstang. Founded in 1692, centuries of reverent feet. A great magnitude of devotion, the build and the maintenance, here on thunder mountain.

Showing: Tiger's Nest: Taktstang temple, Bhutan. Photograph byJules Pretty 2025. — Tiger’s Nest: Taktstang temple, Bhutan. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025.

Hello old friend, you say. I know you.

For this is who is waiting.

Taktstang temple calls quietly to the soul. Just welcoming, not demanding. Shall we take up where we left off? Up here hidden in mountains.

At this bird-perched temple and monastery built into the kilometre-high cliff. Half in cloud, spires golden, serenaded by forest birds in the thin air after rain. Hidden, not hidden, hidden again.

Difficult to reach, but not impossible.

Like solving a world crisis, say stopping the use of obsolete fossil fuels, preventing the scouring up of nature.

The climb to the Tiger’s Nest begins not long after dawn. Up there in the eastern hills above Paro, under the blue dome of sky. Up the trail, up steps and foot-worn paths. Through cool groves of seven-needled pine and oak, orchid and fern and old-man’s beard, rich epiphytes on every branch.

The climb’s stiff, at altitude. The sun leaps from the sheer granite cliff, lights the forest, swings around to shine on temple roofs and white walls of stone and clay. Beneath is the drop, the ascent. There’s a fluting bird, the yellow-billed magpie. There are bright prayer flags holding the land together.

Gross National Happiness — changing a country’s story

A pilgrimage of this kind is said to need right speech, body and mind. Speech is the story, body’s the hard work, mind’s the agency and effort. It’s a lesson for any kind of transformation.

The mind gradually empties as you climb. There’s the physical and mental test, then comes a muffled roar, a detachment from sky and land. The wind horses have stopped running. It’s the alchemy of change.

A single white cloud is fixed upon the azure sky.

The temple shimmers, across the ravine.

Far below is the valley, the contoured rice around the town.

Showing: Paro Valley and Himalayas. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Paro Valley and Himalayas. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025

Guides accompany each group of visitors. Jigme Chodup says, “One hundred and eighty-one.” The number of times he’s walked this upward pilgrimage. Here came Guru Rinpoche with his consort, she the flying tiger. Here they crushed the dark spirit, the mara of the mountain.

At some point it’s time to turn. To walk down the old trail that’s now a new trail, past herbs and orchids in the forest, past scars of landslips. Passing climbing pilgrims.

“Is there far to go?” A question about life itself.

“No, not far! Don’t stop. Transformation awaits.”

Such hope means taking risks. Precisely what the Fourth King does in the early 1970s. He takes a risk, and people give support.

At the age of 18, people say King Jigme Wingchuk seems mature for his years. He declares Bhutan’s primary aim should be Gross National Happiness. All else should serve this: economy, culture, society.

Some in other countries smirk at the idea of Gross National Happiness. Come on, what about growth? You can’t eat happiness.

What’s Bhutan now known for? Well, precisely this one big and beautiful story.

Gross National Happiness is described in Bhutanese as Gakid Palzon. Ga-happy, Kid-peaceful, Pel-prosperity, Zon-convergent. GNH means “happy-peaceful-prosperity-convergence for all.”

It’s completely changed the story of the country. The way that people talk, their identity, how they act.

A country with no litter, no plastic pollution, no person smoking in public. No pesticides or herbicides, so an abundant insect presence. Every tree filled by a noise-wall of crickets, every green space rich with flocks of butterfly. Nine hundred species of butterflies in the country, thousands more of moths. A country with no slaughterhouse, not one fast-food outlet. All the food organic, all agriculture regenerative.

Showing: Prayer flags and rice paddy. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Prayer flags and rice paddy. Photography: Jules Pretty © 2025

And this too: phone coverage everywhere, no dead signal zones. All electricity from hydropower, the surplus sold to India and now the primary source of national income. The next step: electrify transport.

Who’s the trickster now?

The king gives up his position, wants the next generation to bring new ideas. The Fifth King says, we’ll give away my power, create a voting democracy. As easy as that.

The country with a negative carbon footprint, it’s now one of a small group with the lowest internal social inequality in the world. And this: the 5th King’s vision for a new settlement in the south, Gelephu Mindfulness City. High tech, new jobs, integrated with wildlife, all the buildings made of wood.

What is it then? Are people elsewhere afraid of the idea of this sort of contentment? That they’ll have to give up things to find it?

What you’ve also not got. You’ll hear no one saying, we think selfishness is best, or friendliness is the enemy of economic growth. Or that growth is king.

The guide Jigme stops, says, “Just think of what we’d lose.”

That wider world of wonder. It’s still in a hole.

This small country never fell in. This hidden land, it’s not in the hole and it knows how to stay out.

The trickster’s wearing a mask. It’s rags to riches. Right enough, happiness riches.

People love that story. They never get enough of it.

The audience laughs. Too true.

The Masked Dance

One mountain day starts like this. Sunshine, hot for autumn. Clouds hide the hill-tops and snow-slopes of the great Himalayan peaks. It’s the first of three days of masked dance and celebration. The Tsechu festival, the best time of the year.

Gross National Happiness. Showing: Masked dance at Tsetchu. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Masked dance at Tsetchu. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025

The first day of dance. The dzong amphitheatre’s brim-full, eight thousand people, dancers down on the stone performance square. To one side, the citadel, white-walls and golden roofs. Clowns in masks wander, prodding the serious dancers, leaning into their faces, engaging with the audience in a side-show of jest and laughter.

The tricksters mimic moves, exaggerate, play at slap-stick entertainment.

No one’s allowed to take themselves too seriously. Laughter is good.

The audience loves it.

The national TV station broadcasts all the action across the three days. Homes and restaurants have their TVs running all day. There’s no commentary. Everyone knows the stories.

Here’s the Black Hat dance, monks spinning as they fight the devils of desire, beating hand-held drums.

Here are masked animals. The mythical faces of gold and green and blue: the tiger, the snow-lion, garuda, dragon. The audience eats and chats and points.

Here’s the dance of couples, a tall woman and man, calm-faced masks, tested to the limit. Yet the marriage survives it all. Children laugh, play on phones.

Rain starts to fall, gently as moths at evening dusk. Five thousand umbrellas ping open, and families cluster underneath.

Nature’s an important healer too. Especially when it’s abundant. When it’s not being beaten half to death on the ropes.

Overlooking the capital, all perched on steep slopes, the river dashing far below, high on the hill is the fifty-metre golden Buddha. Often hidden in clouds. But present, all the same, in people’s lives.

Sunlight briefly falls upon the Buddha. On his shoulders, on his lap, on his smiling face. The mountain dances, the arching rainbow a scarf wound around the mountain’s wrist.

And in each temple, in each Dzong fort, there’s golden light on the Buddha and disciples, on Guru Rinpoche who brought Buddhism to the country. Energy flows in from the universe, streams out again. Butter lamps flutter in the endless draughts, wind channelled down wooden corridors, high windows open to the world.

Showing: Butter lamps. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Butter lamps. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025

In the golden light of the sweet butter lamps, shadows dance on walls, murals are alive with tiger and snow-lion and elephant. The animals jump and blink, as it did for early humans when they stood right before the cliff face, the cave wall.

A monk pours saffron water on your hands.

For this is a place of story. How to care for places, keep them sacred.

By the banks of the river, two villages are engaged in archery competition. The men are mostly elders, burned by life in the fields. Like all team sports, there’s laughter, jesting, ribbing. They’re wearing sashes on their belts, one for each successful strike.

The target’s no more than a handspan wide. It’s 140 metres away.

Hitter and hit are not two opposing objects, they are the reality of the whole. The archer, the bamboo bow, the bamboo arrow. The arrow departs the eye of the archer, curves high in the sky. Time passes as it arches over the butts. There’s an acceleration at the end as the arrow at last is caught by the eye.

There’s an unzipping of the air, the arrow buries two feet deep, into the grassy mound, into the target.

The men simply sway aside. They call to the next archer, right a bit, up-up. Listen to the wind, to all the world around them. Another arrow pierces the sky.

A team breaks into dance and song when the arrow strikes the tiny target.

Jigme laughs, says, “Well, they are a bit drunk.”

All around, the contoured gold and green of paddy fields. Some drained and cut, hand threshing underway. The irrigation water travels from one field to the next below. Frogs are calling.

And so the monsoon rebounds, dashes in. A month after it should be over.

A growth story of the 21st century

Sixteen hours of torrential rain. Crashing thunder dragon, fire and lightning. Morning light comes late, dull and blue. The hills are hidden in mist. The river’s maddened, no longer blue and sweet, now a rushing, crashing venomous snake. Water strikes rocks, rises high in standing waves, whole trees spinning and leaping away.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. At this time of year,” says Jigme.

Never has such a storm come, so long after the old certainties of the monsoon.

On the drive over the Dorchu-la Pass, there are landslides every forty or fifty metres. Rocks ping off the road ahead, bounce away. The driver looks up, the guide looks ahead.

And what ugly devils stirred up this storm? Brought it to the people whose carbon footprint is less than zero?

All over the country, all across the north-east of the sub-continent, landslides and falling rock, bridges washed away. Snowstorms fall on the high mountains, strand climbers, a hydro dam is overtopping.

What else will come to the Himalaya with its forty thousand mountain glaciers? A billion people relying on a calm supply of meltwater for drink and irrigation.

Showing: Thimphu dzong. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Thimphu dzong. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025

Bhutan’s the growth story of the twenty-first century. Growth of happiness, growth of economy working within strict boundaries, growth of equality. An economy that does not impose externalities on others. A marvellous thing.

People here, they’re earth-cherishing people, as Joan Halifax has put it. They know how to look after the future.

How to be happy, peaceful, convergent.

Your age of oil? It’ll soon be over.

Eight hundred summers ago, Dōgen Zenji slides open rice-paper doors in Japan. He’s in the temple he founded, Eihei-Ji, the temple of eternal peace.

He sees, mountain, cloud, patches of blue sky. He writes this in the Mountains and Waters Sutra:

“There are mountains hidden in sky.
There are mountains hidden in mountains.
There are mountains hidden in hiddenness.”

Find more

UPDATE February 2026: You can now watch National Happiness and Social Equality: This is How Bhutan Did It, a special companion video to this post, recorded by Jules as part of his Story for Climate & Nature Recovery YouTube Channel.

Jules’s guide, Jigme Chodup, works for the Thimphu company, Keys to Bhutan.

“Anything that exists is possible,” is the message of this short YouTube excerpt of a feature on Bhutan’s journey with Gross National Happiness (with a link to the full documentary).

You can find out more about Gross National Happiness and other measures for wellbeing at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).

For more on the role of story, see Jules Pretty’s YouTube channel, Story for Climate and Nature Recovery — including this short video on the role of Tricksters in Story. We have featured Story for Climate and Nature Recovery in our Creative Showcase.

For more of his research and writing at Jules’s website.

Jules Pretty

A researcher and writer on environment and society, including ‘The Climate Chronicles’, and is author of several books on climate, nature and the stories we tell.

Spellcasters – a Dance with the Real and the Uncanny

Author Rajat Chaudhuri discusses the backstories and inspiration for his most recent book, Spellcasters, and how they connect to the plot of this novel, which is part psychological thriller, part climate adventure with a twist of the occult.

1,470 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes.

The most common question that authors get asked at literary events is the genesis question. Where did you begin a particular work, what was your inspiration or some variations of the same. I find coming up with a response difficult, because there is obviously no single starting point and beginnings are also part of a flow.

Spellcasters: Showing Rajat Chaudhuri at the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival (2024). Screenshot. — Rajat Chaudhuri at the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival (2024). Screenshot.

The writing of Spellcasters, which is my most recent climate novel, had been in a large part influenced by the opening up of the Indian economy to global economic forces and the rising tide of conspicuous consumption it unleashed, aggravating the climate crisis, driving resource exploitation, and affecting the environment. In this book, my attempt has been to weave together elements of fantasy and magic with a story of mental illness to portray the impact of this opening up on individuals and society.

A flavour of these changes brought on by globalisation and the human costs of unfettered growth can be found in this description near the beginning of the book, when the scientist Vincent Dutta drives to his lab outside the city of Aukatabad, where he is conducting secret experiments with psychedelics under orders of a shadowy corporate entity:

‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ pulsated through the car speakers, as the first of the flyovers zipped by. Glassy shopping malls, the steel and chrome geometries of mega corporations flashed past, shimmering in the heat. The burning air echoed the howls of farm labourers whose bones were turning into buttery dust under the newly-sprung city of glass. In hoc signio vinces!

Showing the cover of Rajat Chaudhuri's novel, 'Spellcasters' (2024) — Cover of Rajat Chaudhuri’s novel, ‘Spellcasters’ (2024)

Psychedelics in certain ways are quaint and old-world, but think of our social media addiction, which is mediated through a dopamine rush, and how this can affect mental-well being. So the story can be considered to be an allegory of such modern addictions (consumerism being another) that is driving people crazy.

Later on, as we are introduced to the main character, business reporter Chanchal Mitra, who gradually gets affected unpredictably by these changes, his transformation, much of which drives the narrative, is echoed in the ways the cities of Anantanagar and Aukatabad, partly modelled on Calcutta and Delhi, are transforming because of the onslaught of globalisation:

It is around this time of the attack on the Chief Minister that it begins. We grow feet, more and more feet, like centipedes. Jet engines thunder above us in droves, desire kisses the stratosphere, dirt’s swept away, miasma vacuumed. They even demolish the hovel where Akbar lived near the river bank, but I manage to get him a place in an abandoned warehouse belonging to the rail company.

Frenzy, feverish frenzy overtakes us all. We move at a dizzying pace. Steel, concrete, cement, stock market pulse beats, exotic vacations, infotech gurus and aerodrome-sized establishments to lose freedom, win it back again.

Within the storyworld, this unbridled growth impacts the planet as the burden of aspirations also begins to have an effect on minds. In Chanchal’s city, Anantanagar:

The immense heat of the afternoon is an attack on civilisation. This year, it is worse than the last. The avenues of Anantanagar shimmer in the fiery blaze, tar melts like liquid nightmares, the art-deco mansions hiss and crack while hulking SUVs climb mirror-clad avenues swooping up into jannats of petroleum dreams. Unnoticed in the mountains, the glaciers melt away, drop by drop—like the terminally ill shuffling along till the end, glioblastomas growing, the teardrops of a future waiting in the wings. Sorcerers crouch at every corner, casting spells, selling hope and tricks.

Here onwards it is a story of how globalisation and limitless growth not only changes the familiar and impacts the environment, but also affects the mind of Chanchal.

Spellcasters – a shadowy realm

While researching mental illness, I was lucky to be granted extended interviews with the well-known psychiatrist Anurag Mishra who also happens to be a student of the great psychoanalyst-author Sudhir Kakar, who recently passed away. And the fact of my character’s mental afflictions is also nuanced by my readings of Kakar, especially where he compares Indian and Western healing traditions in Shamans, Mystics and Doctors. Which is perhaps how the element of occult and secret societies enter the story, invoking a shadowy realm where the uncanny and the improbable dance in step with the real.

Just as growth picks up, so do emissions and other environmental impacts, many borrowed from reality, and we have unnatural rains in a desert, blinding smog blanketing Aukatabad, landslides in the Himalayas, all of which in turn advance the plot of the novel. In this process, the settings and the environment of Spellcasters almost become characters, or actants, shaping the story in particular ways.

Showing the Inside cover of ‘Spellcasters’ (2024) — Inside cover of ‘Spellcasters’ (2024)

All along, climate change and an altered environment play important roles in driving the narrative as the fortunes of the simple man Chanchal and a powerful business tycoon are affected by the planetary forces. The city of Aukatabad, much like the real city of Delhi, remains blanketed in smog:

Morning tastes like a scrapyard. Morning smells like a farm fire. The yellow-grey walls of smog had grown darker. For days and weeks the dust of the desert, swept by freak and untimely storms, had thickened the haze and now the city was suddenly engulfed in coarse dust. It holds the streets in a stranglehold, blurring the borderland between night and day.

We know very well that the pursuit of limitless growth, in the absence of environmental justice and social safeguards, can have devastating effects. The weak and the vulnerable without proper state intervention get left out of the growth story while also suffering the most from climate impacts. When Chanchal loses all his money and has to skip meals he thinks:

I imagine heaps of rice on banana leaf plates and the aroma of fish frying in the wok. Mustard oil, that’s what we prefer. But now I could even do with a dal fry, but it is not for me. Food is not for me tonight. I am not for food tonight. I slide the menu below the carpet. There will be thousands all over this unhappy land who will go without food tonight, and many more nights. I will join their ranks, this last night in the city of kings.

Elsewhere, in Chanchal’s hometown:

The poor of Anantanagar, who had set up small shops everywhere—and those from the villages whose lands had been snatched by the smart cities and tech academies—creep and crawl all over, overflowing into the shopping malls, fighting with the uniforms, snatching careless cappuccino cups of dreamy-eyed duos sitting in sidewalk cafés on the boulevard that heads towards the river.

Limitless growth, planetary illness

Spellcasters is really about the spells cast by powerful ideas like limitless growth, our material aspirations and the indulgence in conspicuous consumption which together are not only ‘infecting’ the living planet, one of its symptoms being climate change, but also affecting our minds. The mirroring and interactions between this planetary illness and individual illness, portrayed through mental affliction, forms the conceptual background of the novel.

In between there is the business tycoon, who goes by the name JRK, with a world domination plan fuelled by the power of psychedelics. As the story progresses, conflicts arise between Chanchal and this tycoon, which put both their lives in great danger. Besides, there is also the ever present possibility of a secret society of occultists who may or may not be working to save humanity from the wicked designs of the businessman. If we look around us, we will find how the plot of Spellcasters often seem to mirror realities of our times.

Having been a climate activist for many years it was natural for me to create the character of JRK presiding over a global business empire, as a personification of the ambitions that drive resource exploitation and endless growth. But JRK has many shades, and a very dark past, all of which propel this story of planetary crisis towards its denouement.

Will it be magic and the occult that is decisive in the story or is it the planet itself that will strike back at human ambition, and restore some balance, symbolic or otherwise? Read the book to find out!

Find more

Spellcasters is published Olive Turtle an imprint of Niyogi Books and is available from bookstores and online.

A review by Kousik Guhathakurta for Scroll (January 2024) described Spellcasters as “a modern saga blending climate fiction with a sardonic take on city-bred consumerism.” And author Amitav Ghosh calls the novel “a phantasmagoric journey through an alternative reality of collapsed time, hallucinatory visions and spectral visitations: an unexpected and unsettling rollercoaster ride.”

You can find more of Rajat’s work at his website, and his new middle-grade work of climate fiction will be published in June 2025: Wonder Tales for a Warming Planet.

Rajat featured as part of the ClimateCultures Quarantine Connection series in 2020. We shared his piece, Heat or the Iceberg Chill – a translation of a poem by Novera Hossain, and part of Rajat’s project to translate 100 Bengali poems by non-mainstream poets – on Day 23 of our 40-day series.

Rajat Chaudhuri

A writer of climate novels and co-editor of solarpunk collections, closely involved with the climate movement, who writes and speaks about climate, literature and possible futures.

Stories We Tell About Food & Regenerative Farming

Animist farmer & writer Paul Feather reviews the book Six Inches of Soil and finds that progressive stories about regenerative farming could better integrate their roots in Indigenous practices of reciprocity and respect and tap the deeper implications of radical perspectives.

2,900 words: approx reading time = 11.5 minutes

“Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.” – Paul Harvey (1978) U.S. radio broadcaster

The stories that we tell each other, the stories that we were told perhaps by teachers or parents when we were young, those that we tell not simply in words—though words are very much a part of it, and I return to words in a moment—but that we enact with our choices and continue telling as they were told to us: these stories are the meat and potatoes of culture.

As I write this, my impatient daughter leans over to me and whispers that she is hungry. She speaks softly so as not to interrupt her mother’s conversation with two neighbors about these stories we tell and how we might gather over food one day soon to retell them together. Out of respect for this conversation, or simply because she judges me more likely to stop what I am doing—to stop typing these words—my daughter interrupts me instead of these others to tell me that she is hungry.

Eat another cantaloupe, I tell her. There are leftover potatoes in the skillet on the stove. You made bread at school today, and there is some left. Go eat it.

And we each will have our stories about this. I think to myself that she is bored more than hungry, but I don’t know what her stories are. Maybe that I am boring, or that someone should have made dinner, or that eggs are easy to make but she is tired of eggs.

Every meal has a story.

The stories we all tell about food are bound up with other stories: sometimes with stories about how we gather in community to cook it or eat it or grow it, or about the meaning of the soil and the Earth. They’re existential. They influence how we all act.

Regenerative farming: Showing an image of soil from 'Six Inches of Soil' — From Six Inches of Soil (2024)

Our food is globalized, so now our stories about food are further bound up with other stories about geopolitics and climate and war and just about everything else. It’s gotten rather complicated.

Social movements, scholars, and corporate or government bodies have been trying to unravel this complication and to converge on a viable global story about food, and the collective story has grown to encompass billions of words worth of books, academic papers and all the rest; but anyone with a lick of sense can tell that we haven’t really got it figured out just yet.

So writing about food is a tricky business.

Six Inches of Soil

Over the last few days, I’ve been reviewing Six Inches of Soil, a book accompanied by a documentary of the same name (which I did not watch) that describes the English movement for regenerative agriculture (RA).

The book starts off by introducing itself as a continuation of the documentary project and then the first three chapters establish the background for a conversation about regenerative farming.

Regenerative farming: Showing the cover of the book, 'Six Inches of Soil' (2024) — Six Inches of Soil

The first chapter summarizes the Green Revolution with a more-or-less mainstream analysis presenting it as “a miracle that created a disaster.” Some readers might object to this analysis and argue that the Green Revolution wasn’t as miraculous as it’s sometimes made out to be, since small family farms have always been more productive than industrial corporate operations. In her 2016 book Who Really Feeds the World, Vandana Shiva points out that small family farms—most less than 2 ha in size—produce 70% of the world’s food while being relegated to less than 25% of the farmland [1]. But Six Inches of Soil sticks to the mainstream narrative here about the miraculous productivity of industrial agriculture, and so that’s uncontroversial in a sense. In any case, every legitimate analysis agrees that whatever the initial value of industrial agriculture, it has made a very big mess.

The second and third chapters attempt to define regenerative agriculture and lay out the soil science behind it. Defining RA is a bit tricky: the billions of words of story about food is sometimes vague on distinctions between regenerative and other frameworks like organic, permaculture, agroecological, conventional, etc. Six Inches of Soil presents RA as a methodology that conforms to certain principles and practices intended primarily to increase soil health—which mostly means incorporating organic material, sequestering carbon, and increasing biodiversity—all good things.

It is a problem that Six Inches of Soil presents ecological farming as an outgrowth of the Green Revolution. The book’s claim that regenerative farming paradigms are a response to the destruction caused by chemical industrial agriculture is completely false. [2] & [3]

Regenerative farming has been practiced for thousands of years by Indigenous people all over the world, and while the book mentions that European scientists began to think about organic farming after studying Indigenous growing methods, its failure to meaningfully and consistently acknowledge the origin of regenerative agriculture in Indigenous thought and practice as well as Indigenous people’s continued contributions to the movement will have implications for later chapters.

Case studies in regenerative farming

The middle portion of the book describes three different regenerative farms. The first is an 800-acre commodity grain operation that has brought sheep into their fields to build fertility and transitioned away from plowing in favor of less impactful cultivation methods. The second is a small start-up market garden that also integrates sheep for fertility and tills only minimally with hand tools. The final case study is a rotationally grazed cattle operation that experiments with silvopasture.

The case studies give the book a more grounded center and—along with the dialogical style arising from the book’s origin as a documentary film—make this a relatively easy read in spite of the complex topic.

Showing 'Principles of Regenerative Agriculture', from Six Inches of Soil (2024) — The principles of regenerative agriculture presented here in ‘Six Inches of Soil’ are strictly material and omit socio-cultural aspects of RA such as reciprocity, the sacred, or human rights.

All of the case studies present regenerative farming as bit of a struggle—though a rewarding one—and none of the operations are exceptionally profitable. Indeed, none of the featured farms pay their operators a living wage. These growers seem to be motivated mainly by a passion for their work and a sense that they are contributing to a positive social and environmental movement.

What does regenerative farming regenerate?

The final two chapters of the book present first a more spiritual dimension of regenerative agriculture and then a view of the future. These chapters taken together—along with several interludes sprinkled between the chapters—illustrate a fundamental tension within the RA movement. I perceive this as a tension between a mainstream, progressive, modern paradigm and a smaller more radical current that finds in agroecology far deeper implications about cosmology, epistemology, or spirituality. (In full transparency I am firmly committed to the more radical interpretation.) Somewhere in between, we might discern a dialogue that promotes relatively radical restructuring of our economic and social value systems, but does not find modernity to be completely bankrupt and would attempt to evade an epistemological crisis.

The book as a whole maintains a very progressive—and I would argue mainstream—synthesis of regenerative agriculture as a strategy to mitigate climate change. The book promotes a theory of change in which consumer choices and movement-building put pressure on governments and corporations to enact better policy. Most of the interludes and much of the final chapter offer policy suggestions or regulatory strategies that would support a healthier food economy. Progressive readers will be very much at home with all of this, while readers less enamored with progressive politics may be underwhelmed by these portions of the book.

I judge that the mainstream progressivity of the book as a whole arises from viewing RA as a response to the Green Revolution and from failure to acknowledge that Indigenous people have been doing regenerative agriculture for thousands of years and continue to do it in many places.

A 2023 article exploring anti-colonial definitions for regenerative agriculture finds that neglecting the paradigm’s Indigenous origins results in over-emphasis of its biophysical dimensions and tends to omit socio-cultural aspects that are critical to the movement’s success in mitigating global catastrophe. The authors suggest an anti-colonial definition for RA that foregrounds these socio-cultural aspects by making them a container for the biophysical farming practices:

A way of farming comprised of entangled values and practices, and founded in Indigenous principles of loving-caring for the Earth. This approach to farming values 1) reciprocity, 2) respect, 3) collective (human and non-human) wellbeing, 4) knowledge co-creation, 5) (re)localization, and it is often practiced through some combination of 1) minimizing soil disturbance, 2) maintaining vegetative soil cover, 3) maximizing diversity, 4) integrating livestock, and 5) minimizing synthetic agrichemicals. [3]

When we abstract regenerative agriculture away from its origins and away from this broader cultural container of reciprocity and respect, when we pay attention only to its biophysical dimensions, what we end up with will not address the roots of the global environmental crisis. Choices enacted from this narrower interpretation of RA will likely perpetuate environmental crisis.

On spirit

Chapter seven is about the more spiritual side of agroecology.

Chapter seven brings a deeper ecological perspective to the book by gesturing toward the unfathomable microbiological complexity in the soil popularized by scientists like Anne Biklé or Martin Sheldrake; more radical perspectives such as Vandana Shiva’s statement that our sense of self could or should arise from having our hands in the soil; and by including several poignant observations from contributors like Satish Kumar, who observes,

In our modern mechanistic world view we only recognise things which can be measured. What cannot be measured does not exist. I think this worldview needs to change.

Satish Kumar. From Six Inches of Soil (2024).

This chapter seems intended to address the deeper cultural implications of agroecology—and it more or less does—but there is a difference between including a chapter about something and making that something a container for the entire book.

The book has 22 contributors, and for some of them it seems that the movement is mostly about moving carbon from the atmosphere into the soil so that it better delivers ecosystem services and mitigates global warming. This is entirely consistent with a modern mechanical worldview, does not require a deep cultural shift toward values of reciprocity and respect, and according to this interpretation a farm growing sugar for Coca-Cola on land stolen from Cambodian peasant communities could be regenerative if percent carbon in the soil is going up. [4]

Some contributors like Satish Kumar and Dee Woods do consistently foreground deeper epistemological and cultural issues, but the book as a whole does not.

Something missing

Sitting here now and returning to wrap up this review after letting it simmer overnight, I am again writing between interruptions from my daughter about the food we will eat. She is neither bored nor hungry today. She is chatting with me while cutting up pears and apples and roasting them as an after-dinner treat for company visiting this evening—a service she proposed as an exchange if I would boil potatoes for dinner, and to which I readily agreed.

And so today as every day we enact our stories about our food, and inside of this story where my daughter is cutting up pears I will try to cut to the center of my thoughts with these awkward words and to have time left over to boil the potatoes before the guests come.

Regenerative farming: Showing an image from 'Six Inches of Soil' — From Six Inches of Soil (2024).

There is a sense that however many billions of words we have written, there remains something missing from our stories about regenerative agriculture. A 2022 literature review comparing agroecology and RA frameworks explores whether politics are the thing that is missing:

One aspect of agroecology that does not always fit comfortably in the realm of regenerative agriculture is political activism, or the place and emphasis that the “social” dimension takes in the definition of the social-ecological system. This is perhaps one of the reasons why agroecology is more closely associated with peasant movements, for whom claims on rights and access to natural resources are urgent, while regenerative agriculture is an approach increasingly—but not exclusively—also adopted by commercial, often large-scale farmers or external investors less concerned with natural resource access or food sovereignty issues. [5]

The mainstream trend in the RA movement does actually promote political activism, but I think it somehow remains apolitical in the sense that it’s progressive rather than radical.

To the extent that an ecological worldview finds our disconnection from the land rooted in deep cultural dysfunctions, and to the extent that progressive politics fail to address those dysfunctions, I wonder if the mainstream current within RA might be agroecology without the ecology?

Whatever framework we use, if it isn’t held within a cultural container of reciprocity and respect, it is without a soul.

Six Inches of Soil could more naturally address these deeper dysfunctions if it better acknowledged agroecology’s roots in Indigenous farming practices and the cooption of those practices by Western academics and scientists who adopted “regenerative” methods without acknowledging the central values of the cultures who invented them and who, in coopting these methods, failed to perceive that regenerative values are integral to the methods themselves.

But these are fraught and thorny issues, and perhaps it isn’t reasonable to expect this book to adequately address the deep dysfunctions of our culture. If portions of Six Inches of Soil fall short here, it does also clearly advocate that consumers get their hands in the dirt and visit a farm—that we all build better relationships with growers and make some connection to the soil, and that we make opportunities for children to do the same. If the book is effective in that advocacy—if people read it and then tear up their front yards to plant a garden with their children, or even if they grow a bit of kale in a pot on the patio—then I think it is a successful project and I am grateful for it.

References

[1] For data to support this claim, see Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland (2014), published by GRAIN, a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.

[2] Six Inches of Soil p25: “There have been a series of ecologically or biologically based farming systems that have responded to the roll out of industrial farming. The first response was biodynamic farming, and then came organic farming in the late 1930s. Permaculture, agroforestry and agroecology arrived during the 1970s, and then finally, we have regenerative agriculture.” See also the chart on p26.

[3] Origins of regenerative paradigms in Indigenous agriculture are well documented, e.g. Sands, B., Machado, M.R., White, A. et al. Moving towards an anti-colonial definition for regenerative agriculture. Agric Hum Values (2023).

[4] This is just one example where this sort of claim gets made, e.g. ‘Nature-based solutions’: Land grabs in nature’s name (2022), published by PAN Asia Pacific (PANAP), one of five regional centres of Pesticide Action Network, a global network dedicated to the elimination of harm upon humans and the environment by pesticide use, and to the promotion of biodiversity-based ecological agriculture. Six Inches of Soil does not make explicit claims that projects associated with clear human rights violations are regenerative, but neither does it consistently and unambiguously clarify that they are not.

[5] Tittonell, P et al. Regenerative agriculture—agroecology without politics? (2022). For another review on the contestation of these terms, see Giraldo, F and Rosset P, Agroecology as a territory in dispute: between institutionality and social movements (2017).

Find more

Six Inches of Soil: How to heal our soils, ourselves and our communities through regenerative farming ed. Molly Foster, Priya Kalia & Jeremy Toynbee (2024) is published by 5m books. Contributors: Mike Berners-Lee, Matt Chatfield, Henry Dimbleby, Adrienne Gordon, Vicki Hird, Anna Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Hannah Jones, Satish Kumar, Tim Lang, Claire Mackenzie, Nicole Masters, Josiah Meldrum, Lucy Michaels, Emma Mills, James Murray-White, Marina O’Connell , John Pawsey, Tom Pearson, Colin Ramsay, Nic Renison, Lizzie Sagoo, Ben Thomas, Ian Wilkinson & Dee Woods. The book consists of seven chapters and six ‘interludes’:

Chapter 1: It’s a miracle, but that miracle has created a disaster
Chapter 2: Regenerative farming, what is it?
Interlude I: Are we using our farmed land wisely?
Chapter 3: The science of soil
Interlude II: Regulation, greenwashing and co-option
Chapter 4: Regenerative mixed farm: Pig Pink Farm, Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire
Interlude III: Subsidies, Brexit and trade
Chapter 5: Organic market garden: Sweetpea, Caxton, Cambridgeshire
Interlude IV: Food security and UK self-sufficiency
Chapter 6: Pasture-fed beef: Treveddoe, Bodmin, Cornwall
Interlude V: Applying agroforestry in mixed regenerative farming
Chapter 7: Soil as soul
Interlude VI: Enterprise stacking
Chapter CHAPTER 8: How do we build a sustainable future for food and farming?
Epilogue – Act now

In parallel to the book, the documentary film Six Inches of Soil, directed by Colin Ramsay, tells the story of British farmers standing up against the industrial food system and transforming the way they produce food. The film website includes additional reading and resources, including an impact campaign.

In his previous ClimateCultures post, Dystopian Farming: an Inquiry, Paul introduces ‘dystopian farming’ as resistance as well as sustenance and a search for joy and meaning that makes our dire times tolerable: the potential for liberation. And in Super Wicked Problem – or, the Crisis Formerly Known as Climate, he seeks the meaning of our planetary crisis in local spaces of resistance that serve as the wombs from which deeper understanding will be born.

Paul Feather

An animist farmer and author whose artistic interests include the courtship of landscapes for food and seed and translating animist thought into the language of physics.

Un-tending the World — A Geopoetics of the Wild

Writer and filmmaker James Murray-White finds in James Roberts’s ‘Two Lights’ a profound, close observation of the living world: a wise blending between writer and subject that encapsulates the essence of geopoetics as the sensitive expression of reality.

1,780 words: estimated reading time = 7 minutes

“There is a skill in un-tending to our spaces, in patiently leaving them to their own remaking. It’s a skill that is vital now, when the damage we’ve done to earth has become so urgently in need of reversal. Some of the best examples we have are found in old churchyards. We can enter and quietly watch the slow unfurling of the space. Perhaps we can rediscover our sense of the sacred.”

James Roberts’s work has been on my radar since I received and reviewed a copy of his astounding Winged four years ago, as the UK and much of the world remained in lockdown during the Covid pandemic. My gut feeling then was that this book
marked the emergence of an artist whose observation and awareness of the creatures of this earth are precise, startling, and vital. And needed, urgently.
I wrote then that he is ultimately a realist interlocutor, and now I’m convinced.

“In this twilight space that echoes with the sound of the falls there is an elsewhere that is almost touchable. Children, every one a little animist, are born with a sense of mystery in nature, though we educate it out of them. It returns at times, in places like this. “

Here, in his new work, it is James’s words and narrative that lead, with a carefully curated collection of images that stand alongside — supporting, not dominating. And his words track difficult and often unimaginable terrain: his wife’s illness, his depression, and the various ecological crises we are foisting upon our world that are accumulating into a bigger disaster of ecosystem collapses that we cannot understand.

Geopoetics in ink: Showing a Swift from the book 'Two Lights' by James Roberts — Swift from the book ‘Two Lights’ by James Roberts

Geopoetics — seeking a renewed sense of world

All of this has sent James out to walk, wander, explore and observe: bigger journeys in earlier days, across Africa and the Algerian desert, and then more recently closer to home, along rivers and streams meandering through Wales and the Welsh/Herefordshire Marches, woods, fields and edgeland strips and crevices.

“I’m doing my best to imagine a species of bird on a planet like ours, but utterly different, thousands of light years away. I imagine this planet spins on a more oblique axis to its sun so that twilight in its northerly and southerly regions lasts for days. Here evolution has favoured creatures which can create their own light. Its oceans glow, lit by clouds of algae. In its strange forests trees have evolved needles which shine like Christmas decorations. And in its skies are great birds blocking out the pointillist patterns of the surrounding galaxies. The birds have long necks and wide wings. They are covered with phosphorescent feathers, standing out against the sky, like luminous swans or comets.”

This is from the opening chapter, ‘Chasing the Dawn’, tracking the start and spread of each dawn across the world, and demonstrates a deftness, an acuteness, and a sense of an observer-participant in this universe, that really fizzles. It sets this book up beautifully.

He leads us across different terrains and habitats, describing how different species of birds interact with and are moved or motivated by the sun’s rising, and then brings us back to ‘home’ with him, with a placing and drawing of his own terrain, and then an overview of how he came to be there.

The chapter delves into a description of his connection to bird life, birding, or bird knowledges — this is such a wise blending between writer and subject. It is as though we are being gently told or forewarned that from here on in, the writer becomes bird, and will be shamanicly moving between these worlds throughout the book.

Showing 'Watching for Swans' from Two Lights by James Roberts (2023) — ‘Watching for Swans’ from Two Lights. Image by James Roberts © 2023

The words flow as black marks making narratives on the page, and then as we turn ~~some~~ pages we find a resonant wash of a bird flying across the whiteness. A swan champions upwards, neck and wings extended (I searched for the right descriptive word there, and championing feels like the very best at my disposal right now), within or against a black/grey gloom or miasma, passing across and over.

I’m influenced by the Scottish poet/philosopher Kenneth White, who advocated an approach to life known as geopoetics, defined by The Scottish Centre for Geopoetics as “seeking a renewed sense of world, a sensitive and intelligent contact with the world by means of a poetics, expressing reality in different ways, through de-conditioning and using all our senses”. This work — I’m unable to call it simply ‘a book’ — encapsulates all of that, glued together with feathers held and dropped by all the avian community flying past James’s close-observing eye.

Swans abound minutes from my house close to a bend in the River Cam, and I too stop and watch and wonder as they glide and move, inhabiting and dominating watery space. There’s a bird interplay, along this hallowed river space, between swans, ducks, and a heron (I assume it’s a single solitary heron, with a defined hunting ground, though there is a ‘heron tree’ a mile or so further down, which is known to house a dozen or so at various times). And of course there’s at times a very active human layer, University and town teams rowing along at speed, their coaches on cycles bellowing from the towpath. Then there’s the below-the-water-line interplay, although with three sewage inputs within a couple of hundred metres any aquatic life is seriously threatened. And yet, the swans live here! They arch, and breed, and feed. Life.

“It’s our fate on this ocean-facing island, if our direction of travel as a culture continues, to face the rising waters, the ever-more-frequently-boiling rivers. We may continue to poison them, to carve, block, and silt them up for a time yet, believing as we do that they are simply our resources to be harnessed. But they will outlast us and their waters will run clean, eventually. There will come a time when this stretch of river will flow wilder than it does now.”

Creation in the ruins

In another striking sequence, within the chapter titled ‘The Church and the Island’, James writes about visits to ancient churches, creates pictures, discusses religious practices, especially asceticism — fascinating histories of hermits Evagrius and Cynog — and even hearing an ethereal voice testing the acoustics in one building. He then returns us to the ruins, to the wild, and the becoming that transcends facilitated worship towards an other-worldly deity.

Other snapshots he brings us include tragic moments of hatred invested upon the natural world by some of us. Shooting at swans, tearing apart foxes, throwing an owl’s already dead body onto a road to be crushed by vehicles, and the ugly reality of compulsive photography — of everything! — rather than seeing, observing, sensing, listening, and being with.

Two Lights is writings and images in the ruins. The desolation of despoliation, and not knowing the catastrophe that humans are catapulting ourselves towards. And yet, through close witness, and perhaps the collapse of our ego clutching to all we think we know, the avian world is just there — here, right alongside us. Whether or not they might save us is immaterial. Their equal existence is what’s important, and how we may come to notice that through the witnessing experiences, reflections, and decline of our own mortal lives. He really is writing and creating work about passageways through time and air, led by avian species that live their lives in focussed flights of movement, within landscapes of loss and life.

“Across the continent many species are on fire, crops withering in the prolonged drought and vulnerable people dying. Every single community on Earth, human or wild, has now encountered losses caused by the depletion of nature and by global warming. Unless we find a way to heal the damage we’ve done the losses will accelerate. It will take a huge shift in our psyches to achieve this. Every country, city and village, every community and family needs to ask the question: who speaks for wolf, for bear, for fox, for gull, for heron, for kingfisher – for all species, not just our own?”

'Wolf' from Two Lights by James Roberts (2023) — ‘Wolf’ from ‘Two Lights’. Image by James Roberts © 2023

Find more

Two Lights – walking through landscapes of loss and life by writer and artist James Roberts is published by September Publishing (2023).

You can read a sample chapter at the link above — and explore much more at Night River Wood, James Roberts’s website and his Instagram.

In our Quarantine Connections series, you can read A River of Sound, a piece that James Roberts contributed during Week 8 of our communal sharing of creative content and reflections during the UK’s first Covid lockdowns of 2020. James said of this piece: “I wrote this piece a year ago as a response to an increasing awareness of my own gradual loss and also the almost unnoticeable fading of natural sounds from the landscape. A year later there is a noticeable increase of birds in the landscape, and particularly in the surrounding uplands where the curlews are calling more than I’ve ever heard before. I’m not sure if this equates to me being hopeful for the future of declining species, but it shows how very easy it would be for us to give the wild the space it needs to thrive.”

James Murray-White mentions The Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, a network developing an understanding of geopoetics as the creative expression of the Earth. “It looks for signs of those who have attempted to leave ‘the motorway of Western civilisation’ in the past in order to find a new approach to thinking and living … It seeks a new or renewed sense of world, a sense of space, light and energy which is experienced both intellectually, by developing our knowledge, and sensitively, using all our senses to become attuned to the world, and requires both serious study and a certain amount of de-conditioning of ourselves by working on the body-mind.” You canalos explore the International Institute of Geopoetics.

All the Little Gods Surrounding Us, his review of James Roberts’s earlier Winged is one of 14 posts that James Murray-White has written for us. ClimateCultures was seven years old this March! James was one of our first authors back in 2017. Throughout this year we’re delighted to celebrate our anniversary with new posts from some of those inaugural contributors, alongside other returning — and new — ClimateCultures authors.

James Murray-White

A writer and filmmaker linking art forms to dialogue around climate issues, whose practice stretches back to theatre-making.

School Strike For Baby Hope

Writer David Thorpe introduces his forthcoming climate fiction collection, School Strike For Baby Hope, and explores how our imagined futures must include the costs and dilemmas of better pathways, even where we avoid the worst of climate change.

1,440 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes

In November, just in time for Christmas, my new collection of climate fiction short stories will be published by Android Press. The ten stories have been published elsewhere, often in obscure places. For example, the title story, School Strike For Baby Hope, was published by Extinction Rebellion on one of their websites.

Cautionary tales and possible futures

If a citizen living in pre-20th century Britain were to be told that in the future they would be able to travel anywhere in the world in a few hours, to buy any food from anywhere in the world at a local shop throughout the year, have free healthcare, most likely live until their 90s, and hold a device in their hands which could give them any kind of knowledge they asked and permitted them to talk to anyone in the world, and to see their faces, they would think the future was some kind of paradise. Well, we live in that age and we know different. We have threatened ourselves with the end of life on Earth — including our own end — in order to have these unnatural luxuries. We know the cost.

It seems to me that in imagining a future free from climate change we must be careful to imagine what kind of costs that might have. Every decision presents a dilemma. The purpose of governance is damage limitation; minimising the negative consequences of any decision. Unintentional consequences must be thought through. Climate fiction consciously does this.

Some of these stories are about the unintended consequences of action on climate change, so they serve as cautionary tales. These stories – At the Crux and For the Greater Good – reflect my interest in ‘one planet’ thinking – the ecological footprint as a measure of sustainability. I asked myself: if the country set itself the same task as one planet development in Wales – of satisfying the needs of inhabitants within the confines of a global fair and equal distribution of environmental impact – what could be the implications for the population? Living like this would demand monitoring of the entire ecological impact of the country and dividing it by the population each year.

School Strike for Baby Hope and Beacon arose from my experience of being in my local Extinction Rebellion group. We had many successful actions in Swansea and joined the national demonstrations in London. School Strike For Baby Hope appeared in Teens Of Tomorrow: Stories of Near and Far-Flung Futures, which explored possible futures through the stories of twelve courageous teens.

Showing the cover of 'Teens of Tomorrow' - published by Odd Voice Out Press © 2021 - featuring David's story 'School Strike for Baby Hope' — Teens of Tomorrow – published by Odd Voice Out Press © 2021 – featuring David’s story ‘School Strike for Baby Hope’

What else is cli-fi? If you read the Wikipedia entry it cites Jules Verne’s 1889 novel The Purchase of the North Pole as an early harbinger, which imagines a climate change due to tilting of Earth’s axis. His Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1883 and set during the 1960s, has Paris have a sudden drop in temperature, which lasts for three years. Wikipiedia lists J. G. Ballard’s climate extremism novels from the early ’60s and then, as knowledge of climate change increased, says fiction about it really started coming out, one of the earliest being Susan M. Gaines’s Carbon Dreams.

Should we always go with our imagination?

Imaginative works can be used to reinforce people’s prejudices, too, such as Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004), which was pounced upon by climate sceptics for reinforcing their view that climate change was some kind of conspiracy.

Then we encounter lots of dystopic films. From Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times, through George Orwell’s 1948 book Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Lucas’ 1971 film THX 1138, Mega-City One from Judge Dredd, conceived in 1977, to Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, and The Day After Tomorrow (2004). They have all set the template for many other stories and films, such that in the popular imagination the sprawling mega-cities of the future will largely be over-populated, polluted, broken places, featuring dark towers, high levels of surveillance and crime, their citizens treated little better than battery-reared animals, and no room for nature.

But is the dystopic metropolis a self-fulfilling prophecy, subconsciously, if not consciously, reinforcing the mindsets of planners and architects? Does it soften up the public, preparing them to acquiesce in the face of grim and unimaginative design, polluted air, poor policing and service levels, corrupt or inefficient governance, long commute times, constant noise, high levels of personal danger?

Is this the reason why people do nothing despite being bombarded by the truth about the future and climate?

I think we need comedies about climate change and the future. For this reason, I have included The Chernobyl Effect and The Last Laugh in the collection. These are stories from my body of work about the character Doc Chaos, a darkly satirical character in the tradition of William Burrough’s Doctor Benway and Alfred Jarry’s Doctor Faustroll. This is dark comedy, exaggeration for comedic effect. Making people laugh is a way of slipping things under their radar.

Showing the cover for The Chernobyl Effect & The Last Laugh - stories of David's Doc Chaos character — The Chernobyl Effect & The Last Laugh – stories of David’s Doc Chaos character

The End

These days I spend all day in a wheelchair because of cervical myelopathy. I have become unable to feed myself or use both my phone and computer. The only way I can write this article is to dictate it, as a friend is kindly typing it for me. I have written elsewhere that my stroke in August 2021 was caused by high blood pressure and a result of climate change stress.

I now think that my present condition, and the fact that I see no hope in my future again, is a mirror of the present and the future of the planet as a whole. I wish it were not so, but I can’t believe anything else. For example, as the average temperature of the planet has risen, so has the myelopathy of my spine, and just as we find tipping points such as the melting of the ice caps in climate change, there are tipping points in my body when the nerves in my spine become trapped and suddenly I find I can no longer do something, like feed myself, that I could do yesterday. Then I think to myself “What will happen before it ends?”. And I’m glad I won’t be around to see the world shrivelling up as it gets too hot. Unfortunately, my sons will.

Look after yourselves and find something you love and stick with it.

Find more

School Strike For Baby Hope will be published by Android Press in November 2024. As well as other fiction — including novels Stormteller and Hybrids — David has written several books on sustainability, including One Planet Cities: Sustaining Humanity within Planetary Limits and The One Planet Life: A Blueprint for Low Impact Development. Find out more at his website. And you can read David’s blog on Substack.

The Fifth Estate published A personal story about climate anxiety and illness from our UK writer David Thorpe in August 2021: a “personal account of his illness and its connection to his absolute commitment to avoiding the worst of climate change. It’s a sobering and very worthwhile read”, where David talks about the link between climate stress and the stroke he had recently suffered. That article also links to his story Don’t Follow Leaders, which David wrote for the publication.

In previous posts for ClimateCultures, The Rise of Climate Fiction Part 1 and Part 2, David explores how the term ‘Cli-fi’ reveals the tension between our twin fascinations with utopian and dystopian visions, how fiction engages readers with human stories within the climate change one, and writers’ responsibilities — given that “stories are fundamentally how humans understand and spread wisdom as well as entertain themselves.” David also contributed a piece for our Environmental Keywords theme on Environmental Justice.

In 2017, David was one of our inaugural authors at ClimateCultures. He was one of the short story writers, poets and non-fiction writers commissioned to produce new writing at Weatherfronts climate change conferences for writers — two TippingPoint events that also inspired the creation of ClimateCultures. In Utopia and Its Discontents, he explores the thinking that went into his winning story, For the Greater Good, which was included in the free Weatherfonts ebook anthology published by Cambria Books.

David Thorpe

A novelist, scriptwriter and writer of comics and graphic novels, as well as a non-fiction writer on carbon-free energy and sustainable development.