By Monica Nathan (@monicapnathan)
With the health of our planet at a tipping point, it can be easy to feel disillusioned about the future of our environment. Stories, however, have always helped us make sense of the world around us, and the climate crisis is no different. For this month’s FOLD Reading Challenge, we invite you to explore climate through the voices of marginalized authors.
These stories and poems highlight the ways climate change impacts different people in different circumstances. Indigenous communities, low-income individuals, and those living in the Global South often bear the brunt of environmental catastrophe while having the least influence over the factors that create it.
Whether speculative fiction, memoir, theatre, or poetry, each of these works reminds us of our intrinsic connection to the environment and our collective responsibility to care for it. They challenge us to confront difficult realities while inspiring hope and action through a deeper appreciation for the natural world.
1) What You Won’t Do For Love: A Conversation by by David Suzuki, Tara Cullis, Miriam Fernandes, and Ravi Jain (Coach House Books)
What You Won’t Do for Love is an inspiring conversation about love and the environment. When artist Miriam Fernandes approaches the legendary eco-pioneer David Suzuki to create a theatre piece about climate change, she expects to write about David’s perspective as a scientist. Instead, she discovers the boundless vision and efforts of Tara Cullis, a literature scholar, climate organizer, and David’s life partner. Miriam realizes that David and Tara’s decades-long love for each other, and for family and friends, has only clarified and strengthened their resolve to fight for the planet.
What You Won’t Do for Love transforms real-life conversations between David, Tara, Miriam, and her husband Sturla into a charmingly novel and poetic work. Over one idyllic day in British Columbia, Miriam and Sturla take in a lifetime of David and Tara’s adventures, inspiration, and love, and in turn reflect on their own relationships to each other and the planet. Revealing David Suzuki and Tara Cullis in an affable, conversational, and often comedic light, What You Won’t Do For Love asks if we can love our planet the same way we love one another.
2) Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Alchemy by Knopf Canada)
For many years, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has found refuge in skiing—in all kinds of weather across different forms of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, as she skimmed along this path and meditated on our world’s uncertainty—including environmental devastation, the rise of authoritarianism, and the effects of ongoing social injustice—her mind turned to the ice beside her, and the snow beneath her feet. And she asked herself: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To know not only the land on which we live, but the water that surrounds and inhabits us? To coexist with and alongside water?
So begins this renowned writer’s quest to discover, understand, and trace the historical and cultural interactions of Indigenous peoples with water in all its forms. On her journey, she reflects on the teachings, traditions, stories, and creative work of others in her community—particularly those of her longtime friend Doug Williams, an Elder whose presence suffuses these pages; reads deeply the words of thinkers from other communities whose writing expands her own; and begins to shape a “Theory of Water” that reimagines relationships among all beings and life-forces.
In this essential and inventive work, Simpson artfully weaves Nishnaabeg stories with her own thought and lived experience—and offers a vision of water as a catalyst for transformation, today and into our shared future.
3) The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed (ECW Press)
The world is nothing like it once was: climate disasters have wracked the continent, causing food shortages, ending industry, and leaving little behind. Then came Cad, mysterious mind-altering fungi that invade the bodies of the now scattered citizenry. Reid, a young woman who carries this parasite, has been given a chance to get away — to move to one of the last remnants of pre-disaster society — but she can’t bring herself to abandon her mother and the community that relies on her. When she’s offered a coveted place on a dangerous and profitable mission, she jumps at the opportunity to set her family up for life, but how can Reid ask people to put their trust in her when she can’t even trust her own mind?
With keen insight and biting prose, Premee Mohamed delivers a deeply personal tale in this post-apocalyptic hopepunk novella that reflects on the meaning of community and asks what we owe to those who have lifted us up.
4) I’ll Get Right On It, Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis by The Land and Labour Poetry Collective (Fernwood Publishing)
The deepening climate crisis is making all kinds of work harder, more dangerous and more unpredictable, or if it hasn’t yet, it will soon enough. And all kinds of workers have something to say about it. I’ll Get Right On It is a poetry anthology about making a living and carrying on despite smoky air, fires, climate grief, species loss and increased precarity. Contributors include Indigenous, migrant, racialized, low-income, queer, disabled and unpaid labourers who do all kinds of work, including climate-related work, extractive work, migrant work, gig work, care and service work and traditional work.
This anthology builds on the rich traditions of working-class literature, work poetry and social poetics. These poems are both a way to pay attention to the politics of everyday life and a workshop for building solidarity among working people already surviving and adapting to a climate emergency. They surface the commonplace, powerful feelings of cynicism, helplessness, empathy, responsibility, resilience and hope that are needed in the struggle for a liveable future. Connecting the dots between labour and environment, this anthology invites us to think and feel through the many ways climate change transforms our working lives.
The FOLD Admin