Imagination 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.

A Strange Country

Psychotherapist Susan Holliday discovers an intricate world of imaginal possibility (a strange country) in an overlooked detail of a familiar landscape. Turning away from global events for a moment reminds us that change often starts with something small.

2,060 words: estimated reading time = 8 minutes

It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time, or the traveller who enters a strange country.¹

– Bill Brandt, photographer (Camera in London)

I wake before dawn to the sound of a robin’s song piercing the morning chill. It takes me less than an hour to dress and make my way to the wrought iron gates which mark the entrance to Richmond Park. A heavy dew rests on the still shadowed grass, seeming almost to hover above it like an overnight spell. All around, the bracken is rusting into its autumn glory. I make my way up a gentle slope through a stand of birch, beech and oak trees to reach the crest of the park. Here the sun has just tipped over the horizon and cast every leaf, blade and branch into fine gold. A huddle of deer nuzzle the grass, making the most of the quiet before the weekend cyclists arrive. I must have walked in this park a thousand times and still it takes my breath away.

The park is always a ‘strange country’ to me, a correlation of ever-changing elements, light, season and subjectivity. At first I just see what I have seen before, but with every step my preconceptions fall to the floor. Unclad, my eyes begin to see beyond recognition. What I’ve come to realise, over many encounters with the park, is that as my perception deepens, it moves from the general and the big, to the particular and the small. On this occasion it shifts from the broadbrush palette of grass, tree and sky, to the particular curve of a branch; the tritone beech leaves rustling their blessings over the waking park; and the oceanic wave structure of ageing bark.

Walking for days at a time, nature writer Nan Shepherd notices how her perception deepens gradually, so:

The eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it has already seen.
So the ear, the other senses.²

This strikes me as a beautiful description of how we come to see more keenly. The word ‘gradual’ refers to something coming into fullness over time (from Latin gradus, meaning ‘step’). Gradually, we see what we ‘didn’t see before’. We begin to see ‘in a new way’.

So it is only on my way back down the slope, as I re-enter the shadows, that I notice the dazzling spiders’ webs which jewel the bracken. They were there all along. I passed them on my way up. I just didn’t have eyes keen enough to see them. Crouching down now, to take a closer look, I see a lattice of tiny pearls, strung together with impossible intricacy. To me, their beauty stems in part from their near perfection (the essential word here being ‘near’). Each little rectangle of negative space is uneven, each one an incomparable structure, building through repetition into something greater than the sum of its parts. These lines have not been measured or calculated. They have been drawn through countless micro movements of the spider’s body.

A strange country. Showing: Jewelled spider's web. Photograph by Susan Holliday 2025 — Jewelled spider’s web. Photograph: Susan Holliday © 2025

A strange country: the gift of intricate hinterlands

Each web is a ‘strange country’ all by itself. The longer I look, the more I feel drawn into this other world. I imagine any one of these webs would be fine enough to grace a noblewoman’s robes in a Tudor court. I find myself wondering what it might be like to shrink down in size, to place my feet on its little ladders, or to hold one of the pearls in my hand. Children quite naturally see this way. The most unremarkable detail becomes an opening onto an intricate hinterland. Through their imagination and the suspension of preconception, these details become enormous. We have only to think of the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, or the wardrobe in C.S Lewis’ Narnia adventures to remember the power of this portal vision.

And this brings me to the heart of the matter. For as adults we tend to regard the ‘small’ as lesser, as marginal and of little consequence. This has never been more so than at a time when everything is valued according to quantity and scale. The small can so easily be dismissed as a mere trifle, rather than valued as a coherent whole with its own integrity and particularity.

Indigenous peoples, artists, philosophers and mystics have long held a different view, in which every speck of the whole reveals universal patterns and principles. Fourteenth-century mystic, Julian of Norwich, encapsulated the essential paradox of the ‘great little thing’ in one of her revelations:

He showed me a little thing the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and I thought, ‘What can this be?’

And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made’.³

Four hundred years later, William Blake encouraged us to “see a world in a grain of sand”.⁴ Romantic fancy, some might say. In defence of the small, I could stray into the ways in which quantum mechanics and fractal geometry are opening up our contemporary understanding of the complexity and correspondence of micro and macro dimensions of our world; the profound influence of the minute. But I want to stay with my own experience, to say something about why I believe we need to turn our attention away from the titanic battles, the larger-than-life characters, the numbers, trends and averages, and lean towards the small, the slight and the fleeting.

They say ‘the devil is in the detail’, but maybe the sacred is there too. I don’t mean this in any religious sense, but in the context of everyday experience. We live in an age of distraction and consumption fuelled by fear of boredom and emptiness. As a psychotherapist, this word ‘boredom’ has intrigued me for years. It comes up a lot, either in the sense that life has become ‘boring’, or that a person fears they will be perceived as ‘boring’. It seems to me that ‘boring’ is the state we arrive at when we believe there is ‘nothing much to see here’, or perhaps ‘nothing new’. Boring is the ‘same-old-same-old’. It feasts on abstractions and averages, on preconceptions and generalisations.

‘Boring’ signals I have lost faith that within me, or in front of me, there could be more than meets the eye. More to be discovered. More strangeness. Perhaps I believe that I’ve seen all there is to be seen, or I’ve seen it all before. So I stop looking, or I start looking elsewhere. This is a bit like looking down from an airplane window on an outstretched continent, and believing it to be boring, simply because at this height (and at this speed) I can’t see the incomparable particularity, the infinitely varied and ever-changing detail of its topography. At close quarters, what I thought was entirely self-evident reveals itself to be a ‘strange country’, full of surprises and unplumbed depths.

Showing: Bark detail. Photograph by Susan Holliday, 2025 — Bark detail. Photograph: Susan Holliday © 2025

Each of us contains an inner landscape. A place, like the park, we may have visited many times. Perhaps we think we have seen it all. Until one day, if we are really paying attention, we notice a slight shift, a little anomaly, an overlooked detail ‘for the first time’. Virginia Woolf suggests these glimpses are “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”.⁵ How often we overlook or dismiss these curious intimations. Un-midwifed by our beholding, the inkling moment is stillborn. Yet the moment we start to notice the details of our experience, life no longer seems so boring, so barren.

Just imagine how this simple practice of attending to little daily miracles could change our relationship to each other and to the whole. When every detail (like the jewelled spider’s web) opens a door onto a world of imagination and possibility, life feels rich and vital. Perhaps then we would no longer need to consume our way out of emptiness.

Finding my niche

We differentiate ourselves through our particularity. It is through paying attention to the subtle qualities and slight nuances of character that we start to appreciate we are not just a number, a statistic or a type. Each of us is one of a kind. There is only one of us in all time.

In his 2021 book, The Journey of Soul Initiation, Bill Plotkin articulates the principle that each of us occupies a distinct ‘ecological niche’:

Soul, for me, is an ecological concept, not a psychological one nor a spiritual or religious one. Specifically, by Soul I mean a person or thing’s unique ecological niche in the Earth community.⁶

Hauled into the trawler nets of socio-economic grouping, diagnostic typologies, or target markets, it can feel increasingly challenging to distinguish our authentic singularity, the significance of our particular ecological niche.

Could it be that the current polarisation of society into crude groupings of ideology and identity originates in a deep wound, which is the experience of not mattering in our smallness. If everything around me reinforces the narrative that what I imagine, feel, think and long for is of little importance ‘in the grand scheme of things’; if what I choose to do with my life doesn’t really matter ‘in the end’, then I will find my sense of mattering through identifying with something larger. Through this amalgamation, I lose sight of the details which define my singular significance.

The tragedy is that this obscuring of the little things which make me uniquely ‘me’ robs the wider whole of my particular contribution. Collectively, this self-effacement quickens the degeneration of the planet.

If I am to find my unique ecological niche in the Earth community, I will need to give some time to wandering about the inner ‘park’ of my life, until my eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it has already seen. Sensing my responsibility to my own particularity, I no longer look to ‘kill time’ (with distraction and consumption), but to realise my life ‘through time’ in all its richness and distinction.

Perhaps the Earth can teach us

Absorbed in the intricacy of the little spider’s web, my eye flickers between the lines and the spaces between them, the negative shapes. I start thinking how the whole structure of the web depends on these little spaces. I begin to breathe more deeply, as though taking in this airy structure as a blueprint for my own existence. Like most of us, my life is pretty crammed, packed with activity, crowded with ideas, obligations and intentions. Loaded with stuff. Drawn into the ‘strange country’ of the little web, I begin to sense what it might be like to live a more spacious life.

It occurs to me then, perhaps the Earth can teach us. Perhaps the small, the slight and the fleeting, in all their intimate beauty and particular significance, can show us other ways of living. To heed this minute and infinite intelligence, we may need to create little gaps in our lives, tiny spaces. Change starts with something very small. A deep breath, perhaps.

Walking on down the slope, I feel a little lighter.

Susan’s references

Bill Brandt, Camera in London (Focal, 1948)
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (Canongate Books, 2011)
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin Classics, 1998)
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, A Choice of Blake’s Verse (Faber and Faber, 1970)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (The Hogarth Press, 1927)
Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation (New World Library, 2021)

Find more

Susan Holliday is a psychotherapist and photographer and you can find more of her writing at her website.

Susan’s book Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart was published by Matador in 2021. You can read James Murray-White‘s review for ClimateCultures, Seeing Nature’s Wonders in the Human Heart.

Susan Holliday

A psychotherapist and writer committed to the rewilding of human nature, exploring the correlation between despoiling our natural world and the desolation of the human spirit ...

Between ‘The Valley’ and Dublin: ‘Narrative’ Deep Mappings?

Artist and researcher Iain Biggs introduces two fictional-poetic works that offer ‘narrative deep mappings’ as explorations of places that are never static, always in process. This post accompanies Iain’s new essay for our Longer feature, ‘Wild’ Deep Mappings.

1,330 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes

You can also read Iain’s new essay for Longer, ‘Wild’ Deep Mapping (after Gary Snyder). Longer is our feature sharing members’ works that offer a deeper exploration of a topic than is usually possible with our blog: essays, fiction or other forms that haven’t appeared online elsewhere and explore in more detail creative responses to our ecological and climate crisis. With each new Longer piece, the author introduces or complements it here with an original, related post.

***

Where we live in the world
is never one place…

– Naomi Shihab Nye, My Grandmother in the Stars

Until quite recently I always referred to Ursula K Le Guin’s Always Coming Home as the best fictional narrative flowing from the same mentalité as the deep mappings that most interest me. That changed when I came across Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin, edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph, an unusual combination of poetry, photographs and a conversation. I see the two books as trans-Atlantic cousins, surprisingly alike in some respects and quite unlike in others. Both celebrate a particular place in depth, and both were largely created by women whose work presupposes a poetic imagination. ‘Largely’, because both books are the product of active collaborations.

The title page of my beautiful 1986 copy of Always Coming Home — withdrawn from Shetland Library and bought second-hand — names Le Guin as author (she also drew the maps), but adds artist Margaret Chodos, composer Todd Barton and geomancer George Hersh as contributors. I get the impression that the poems in A Poet’s Dublin were selected by the editors, possibly with Boland’s assistance. It was certainly the editors who sent Boland out with a camera to gather images to accompany the chosen poems. The connections between the poems and the resulting photographs are not always obvious. They may even appear “like disjunctions”, as Randolph puts it in her Introduction, adding that this serves to remind us of something important: “that an imagined place is never static but always in process, always slipping away from its last definition into its next adventure of being imagined”.

Much the same could be said of the disparate, even disjunctive, elements in Le Guin’s book about “the Valley”. An imagined future region certainly, but one in no small part grounded in the various adult realities that surrounded Le Guin as a child. The reality of her mother’s work as author, anthropologist, and friend to and biographer of Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people of North California. Also, of her father’s work as a highly respected cultural anthropologist and archaeologist, who later in life also served as a lay psychologist. Her father’s belief that genius arises out of culture at particular times, rather than being the isolated quality of a ‘great man’, would seem to have informed Le Guin’s detailed and diverse accounts of different aspects of ‘Valley’ culture and ritual, and to have informed the contrast between that culture, aligned to nature along the lines of the First Nations peoples in California, and that of the military and technologically-preoccupied Condor people.

Narrative deep mappings: Showing 'Stammersong', a poem by Ursula le Guin from 'Always Coming Home' (1985); with illustration by Margaret Chodo-Irvine. — ‘Stammersong’, a poem by Ursula Le Guin from ‘Always Coming Home’ (1985), with illustration by Margaret Chodo-Irvine.

Narrative deep mappings: always more than one place at a time

Any literalist familiar with both books could instantly come up with reasons why my linking them is at best idiosyncratic. But then literalists believe that we live in the world one place at a time and are almost certainly immune to the pleasures and challenges of deep mappings. They’re also likely to be suspicious of an orientation described as “towards an archaeology of the future”, as Le Guin names the act of imagination that initiates Always Coming Home. While literalists might acknowledge some similarities between the polyvocal approach of Always Coming Home and certain deep mappings, I doubt they’d see an equivalent polyvocality in A Poet’s Dublin. A view that, to me, would suggest that they had either skipped or missed the point of Two Poets and a City: a Conversation, its final section.

Showing 'The Pale Ditch' a photograph by Eavan Boland © 2014. Printed alongside Boland's poem, 'The Mother Tongue' in 'A Poet's Dublin' — ‘The Pale Ditch’. Photograph: Eavan Boland © 2014. printed alongside Boland’s poem, ‘The Mother Tongue’ in ‘A Poet’s Dublin’.

Narrative deep mappings: Showing 'The Mother Tongue', a poem by Eavan Boland, in 'A Poet's Dublin' (2014). — ‘The Mother Tongue’, a poem by Eavan Boland, in ‘A Poet’s Dublin’ (2014).

Reading that conversation between Meehan and Boland turned me back to all that had gone before, alerting me both to the many generational and class tensions that haunt Dublin, and to the implications of their mutual sympathies as Irishwomen and poets. The relevance of all this to deep mappings is suggested by Paula Meehan’s observation that: “To all intents and purposes, our maps [of Dublin] shouldn’t overlap. What I love about poetry is that it makes sectarian or sectional stances redundant”. She adds that what she had initially mistaken as Boland’s use of the city as “a scenic backdrop for the working out of the drama of the self” was in fact an exploration of Boland’s relationship: “with the polis, with the power structures of the state as manifest in architecture, in statuary, in the suffering histories of the excluded as much as in the commemorated and sanctified official histories”. So, not polyvocal in the sense of the multiple intersecting narratives, images and scores of Always Coming Home, but a listening, conversational concern for the numerous worlds that make up Dublin at the intersection of the physical city with various popular and official imaginaries. A Dublin in which it is necessary to acknowledge that:

Small things
Make the past.
Make the present seem out of place.

– Eavan Boland, Once in Dublin.

Alongside the need to

… look again.
Into the patient face of the unhealed.

– Eavan Boland, Unheroic.

To miss the underlying tenor of that concern would be to miss all that makes Anna Liffey, here quite properly located between photographs of two Dublin bridges and perhaps the most moving and compelling of all Boland’s poems.

When I earned a living working as an artist/educator/researcher in a university, reading art criticism and theory was a necessity that stretched my thinking. Since retiring I’ve had less and less appetite for writing predicated on the presuppositions of the analytical mind. Like an animal sick from a diet lacking certain vital minerals, I’ve hunted out material to enable me to address that long-standing lack. Material that nurtures a more inclusive, holistic and relational understanding of the world. Poetry, Le Guin’s speculative fiction and her essays in Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Space Crone, along with various poets’ reflective work — Boland’s A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, John Burnside’s The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century and Meehan’s wonderful (and wonderfully-titled) Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them have provided rich and varied nourishment that reaches parts that criticism and theory cannot.

Why share this?

Because, like deep mapping, these two works (and others that flow from the same mentalité) help us to resist the toxic culture of possessive individualism and the culture industry that serves it.

Find more

Always Coming Home by Ursula K Le Guin (1985) is published by Gollancz (2016 edition).

Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin (2014, edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph) is published by Carcanet.

Iain’s new essay for our Longer feature explores ‘Wild’ Deep Mapping (after Gary Snyder) as an approach that offers many possible modes of address, where practitioners follow their particular, informed and sensitive intuitions about the complexity and relationality of place in time. Mapping that is diverse, ancient, and full of information.

You can read Iain’s previous posts, Open Deep Mapping: Conversations-in-process, Places-in-time and Disciplinary Agnosticism and Engaging with Ecologies of Place, and his essay Open Deep Mappings Today – a Personal Introduction.

Artist James Aldridge reviewed Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place, the book Iain co-authored with Mary Modeen, in Queer River and Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place.

Iain Biggs

An independent artist, teacher and researcher interested in place seen through the lens of Felix Guattari's ecosophy, working extensively on ‘deep mapping’, other projects and publications.

Thrutopian Fictions: Ways to a Better Future?

Writer Rod Raglin asks if Thrutopian fiction’s solutions-focused approaches to our climate predicaments address the real challenges. How to overcome our reluctance to make the sacrifices needed to get through the hardest times and towards a better future?

1,180 words: Estimated reading time = 4.5 minutes

Thrutopian is described as literature that avoids the pitfalls of both dystopian – paralyzing by depicting bleak futures – and utopian narratives – disconnected from the realities of current challenges. Instead, thrutopian stories are rooted in plausible solutions for getting through difficulties and towards a better future.

But do these thrutopian stories take into consideration economic realities, political expedience and an electorate that only considers their immediate needs? Do they address the reality of climate change that is already having a devastating effect on many parts of the planet?

Facing up to power …

For years, Canada has been struggling to meet the commitments it made in the 2016 Paris Agreement, involving reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The major policy initiative of federal government was to implement a carbon tax, a mechanism that puts a price on carbon emissions, aiming to encourage individuals and businesses to reduce their carbon footprint. A charge is levied on fuels like gasoline, diesel, and natural gas, increasing their cost to consumers to incentivize fuel efficiency and the use of lower-carbon alternatives.

In addition, it responded to public pressure about the environmental hazards of pipelines and introduced a strict environmental review process that discouraged further expansions.

That was until Donald Trump got elected and declared economic war on his neighbour.

In response to Trump’s tariffs and the impact on the Canadian economy, the first piece of legislation passed by newly elected Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, was to eliminate the carbon tax. His rationale for axing the tax was to “make sure our companies are competitive, and the country moves forward … it’s focused on building this economy.”

Also being reviewed (and likely modified), is the government’s policy to have all Canadian car sales powered by a battery, fuel cell or plug-in hybrid system by 2035.

In addition, old plans to build other energy projects are being revived by giving provincial governments “the environmental authority to approve pipelines”.

Before you could say “what the frack!”, the BC provincial government had passed The Infrastructure Projects Act, giving itself broad powers to override existing environmental regulations and authorities and expedite approval of major projects, public and private. “We’re not in the business of turning away investment in British Columbia,” said the premier of the province, David Eby.

Just to make sure no investment is being turned away, The Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions is undergoing a review of the policies and programs of CleanBC, the province’s climate strategy.

How do environmental principles stack up against economic realities? They don’t.

Nearly three-quarters of Canadians supported getting rid of the carbon tax and the renewal of pipeline projects. Apparently, the threat of becoming the ’51^st state’ far exceeds that of a climate catastrophe.

… and climate realities

Though wildfires are a natural part of the Canadian boreal forest life cycle, higher temperatures and drier conditions, caused by climate change have resulted in more frequent and severe fires and a longer fire season.

Showing Haze sun, a photograph by Rod Raglin — Haze sun. Photograph: Rod Raglin © 2025

This year’s fire season — the second worst since 2023 — has seen 3,092 wildfires that have consumed 5.17 million hectares (as of July 12, 2025). Officials with Public Safety Canada say the greatest fire danger is still to come and expected to be in the Northwest Territories, the Yukon and southern British Columbia.

I live on the west coast, and regularly wildfire smoke drifts in from the interior, making the sun appear as an orange ball and creating a haze that burns the eyes and throat. On some days, the air quality in Vancouver is the worst on the planet, and we’re advised to close windows and stay indoors. For inland communities, it’s far worse.

While Canadians worry about how tariffs will impact our economy generally, and their livelihood specifically, it’s not an existential threat, like having breathable air.

Like alcoholics, who must hit bottom before they’re motivated to sober up, Canada appears to not be there yet – environmentally speaking. As the results of our last federal election proved, we are still a society that prefers to pay less to fill up the family SUV than contribute to the mitigation of global warming.

Writing towards a better future

In the midst of this ‘reset’ of environmental priorities has emerged thrutopian literature with its “plausible solutions for getting through difficulties and towards a better future.”

A quick look at a few of the titles suggests that other than the name there’s little difference between this genre and eco-fi or cli-fi – other designations that have emerged for environmental fiction since I began writing it in 2010.

The difference between my books and these newer ones appears to be issues of subtlety and practicality. In my novels, environmental issues are not in the forefront but presented only as a subplot that must eventually be addressed in practical ways for the protagonist to achieve their goal. The few thrutopian titles I’ve reviewed flip this around, presenting the environmental problem foremost and the characterisation secondary. In my opinion, this approach makes the narrative more didactic than entertaining – usually a turnoff for the reader, though time will tell.

And though this new fictional category attempts to present possible solutions to mitigate the environmental crisis, I saw no evidence it addresses how to overcome our reluctance to make the sacrifices necessary to implement them.

This was the issue I set out to answer when researching my novel, The Triumvirate – Love for Power, Love of Power, the Power of Love. What I discovered was it’s a lot harder to create a better future than envision one – human beings notwithstanding. Political and economic issues take precedence over the environment, and it is only when “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”*, do we realize we’ve made the wrong choice.

I’m sure this new sub-genre will thrive. Who doesn’t want to choose hope over despair, the positive over the negative, delusion over reality? It’s easier to suggest that we still have time to prevent the worst-case scenario even while that scenario is playing out in front of us.

This is the reality of thousands of wildfire evacuees every Canadian summer (actually, fire season is now April through October, depending on where you live) as they idle away the hours in evacuation centres worrying if they’ll have a home, or for that matter, a community to return to.

* ‘The Second Coming’ by W. B. Yeats

Find more

Rod writes about his novel The Triumvirate in his previous ClimateCultures post, Power, Love, Religion & Climate Fiction: Life Imitating Art, discussing how a story about power, love and religion finds echoes in our unfolding climate crisis and how we try to come to grips with a hostile and uncertain future.

You can read a Writers Rebel interview with novelist Manda Scott about her thrutopian novel, Any Human Power. And ClimateCultures member Denise Baden writes about her own approach to writing to a better future in Social-science fiction or Thrutopia?

Rod Raglin

A journalist, publisher of an online community newspaper, photographer and writer of novels, plays and short stories that address the human condition and serious environmental issues ...

Worlds in Progress: a Retreat to Feed the Seeds of Imagination

Poet and artist-book maker Sarah Hymas looks ahead to the Imaginarium ‘Worlds in Progress’ retreat she is running for a second year, an open, fluid, multi-layered spacetime for writers to sow and care for the seeds of imagination.

1,225 words: estimate reading time = 5 minutes

For fourteen years I ran a residential writing course, Write Like Nobody’s Watching, in South West France. After the pandemic, my enjoyment of it had changed. Even though I had, for the previous few years, been travelling down and back by train — a two day journey from Lancashire I loved — I found being part of a process that invited people to fly (no one else came overland) for five days of writing that had very little to do with the region where often people didn’t even leave the villa increasingly problematic.

The heat in the last couple of years compounded my unease. Some years it was too hot even at 10.00 am to cross the patio to reach our outdoor workshop. We had to set up under trees and I remember even having some of the one-to-ones in the swimming pool, it was hot. I needed more and more time to retreat from the retreat everyone else was taking. So I found someone else to run the week and stepped back.

Worlds in progress: creative building & building creativity

I didn’t want to stop facilitating the space for people (and often myself) to write and dream. I loved the process of building that spacetime. I just wanted to do it closer to home, in a place that was more accessible, less expensive. I wanted the place we were in to have more of an impact on those of us visiting it. I wanted more community, less alcohol (yes, my 40-year-old self, I’m looking at you), more stillness. So when I was on a residency with Settle Stories in January 2024 in an old mansion in Giggleswick, working on their Storyful Way, I knew I’d found the place I wanted to trial a new Imaginarium retreat. One that would be more collaborative in its approach, inviting a creative investment from those coming to help build the space more explicitly than simply participating in a week of writing workshops.

I also knew I didn’t want to run it solo. Increasingly, I want to work with others, to share the stresses and joys of any project. Someone to plan with. Someone to talk candidly to. I had already run an Ancestral Imaginarium with Katherine Zeserson and knew she had experience of running residential retreats so she was the obvious choice. As well as experienced, Katherine is joyful, intuitive, creatively curious and energetic. We came up with the name — Worlds in Progress — to capture our ambition for the week to be an open fluid space of multi-layered worlds: the worlds of our transient community; the worlds we were all writing; and the worlds we would return to after sharing the week — the worlds that were often so tricky for so many of us — the worlds we’d like to nudge into different directions.

Our first Worlds in Progress Retreat ran in January 2025 with ten other people who work, create and play with text somehow. We offered sitting, singing and flexing every morning, for those who wanted. We suggested loose mealtimes to suit however everyone liked to eat — sorting ourselves out for breakfast and lunch — and to fit around whatever was the occupation for people’s days. We invited people to share their creative practice during playshops later in some of the afternoons. These were attended by maybe two thirds of the group, those who wanted a break from their own head, or wanted to explore what they were writing in a different way, or who fancied some playtime. We offered one-to-ones to anyone who wanted to chat about anything they wanted. We had cooking teams for the evening veggie meal and lingered long over them with chat and laughter that often took someone (or two or three) out into the January nights for further exploration of our wider world in progess. We were blessed with an astonishing week of snow and ice (far, far from the temperatures of the last year I was working in France when it reached 55° in the sun).

We wrote and researched. Even I wrote for a couple of hours every afternoon, beginning a new long-form piece that had been cooking in the recesses of my imagination for a while. We made new friends. We found commonalities. We were given space, we gave space. We learnt new words, new ideas, and felt safe enough to share ignorances, unknowns, uncertainties and silly things. In short, we did — for those five days — construct a world we wanted to inhabit and nourish and sustain.

Nurturing the seeds of imagination

Some people came with a sense of fraudulence. The original call out was for ‘text-based artists’ — for anyone whose creative practice worked with text in any form — and the word ‘artist’ triggered people’s doubt they were one — who were they to call themselves such? But the artistry that was seeded and flowered and continues to be shared from that week is clear to me. The careful crafting of love and generosity, the sharing, the giving and receiving of intention, and the relishing of beauty and preciousness in life. That confidence was felt across the board, it seemed. It was such a delight that everything came together to make this new form of Imaginarium such a blissful retreat experience.

It takes time for seeds to germinate. The seeds of our imagination don’t come in packets that explain when or where to sow and how long they’ll take to flower. The seeds of our imagination need various soils and weather conditions to nourish them. Our intuition knows these conditions. And perhaps these seeds aren’t too particular or tender. Perhaps they are. Nothing can tell us how long until harvest. We need to water these seeds with faith (by which I mean the fertile mix of trust and confidence), and a selective choice of positive actions (with a sprinkle of learnings).

And perhaps most importantly we need not to over-tend, not insist on a timeframe. Nor over focus, but to encourage with a light touch, accepting other shoots may grow in the soil we’re feeding, that rogue seeds are already in there. All life begins in the dark. The unexpected is inevitable. As a creative spirit it’s easiest to welcome whatever appears and ask: Who are you? How can I help you grow? How can you help my growth? In what world can we thrive?

Seeds of imagination: showing a germinating seed. Photo by Sarah Hymas. — Germination. Photo: Sarah Haymas © 2025

If you’d like to know about the next Worlds In Progress Retreat that’s happening in January 2026, then head over to this page. We ask for ‘Expressions of Interest’ (by the end of July) to be sure that what you’re wanting is what we’re offering.

Find more

The January 2026 Worlds in Progress retreat will take place at Woodlands, near Giggleswick, North Yorkshire. You can read about The Storyful Way, the project with Settle Stories that Sarah worked on in residency at Woodlands.

In her previous ClimateCultures post, On a Writer’s Imaginarium, Sarah reflects on the various forms of imaginarium she has created over the years as online or offline cross-genre shared spaces to support creative writing.

Sarah Hymas

A poet, performer and artistbook maker focusing on the sea, its ecosystems and its interdependence with people, and the impacts of climate change and pollution.