‘Small Axe’ writer Courttia Newland shares an excerpt from his new novel, ‘A River Called Time‘ (Canongate, 2021), and speaks to Writers Rebel’s James Miller about Afro-Futurism, dystopia and the ecological movement. A River Called Time: An Excerpt He sank into the silence, grateful for the life that surrounded him on all sides, an unseen […]
The incredible story of Yaku Pérez, an indigenous water defender who, after being jailed and nearly assassinated for his activism, is among the top three candidates in Ecuador’s presidential election, taking place on February 7th. #YakuPresidente #ClaroQueSePuede, #YakuEs […]
Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for her pioneering writing on human rights, feminism and education. But one of her lesser-known works contains a startlingly prophetic insight into humankind’s impact on the environment. By @BeeRowlatt How did you first become aware of the natural world’s vulnerability to the impact of humans? Did it come as an […]
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Bee Rowlatt
Continuing our series of videos from our On the Brink event, here is model, actress & campaigner Lily Cole speaking passionately about the plight of the rusty patched bumble bee. […]
Read More… from Lily Cole telling the story of the rusty patched bumble bee
Lily Cole
Maryland, 1988. Junior high. Our task in Mr. M’s class: author a dispatch to a pal on Phobos, a moon of Mars, communicating highlights about our world. This task had a catch: ABC’s fifth and most common mark was off limits — for, as Mr. M told us, this symbol didn’t occur on Phobos. This […]
At our On the Brink event, artist, poet and environmental activist Judy Ling Wong related the story of a magical encounter with a snow leopard, speaking out against the threat of extinction to these wondrous creatures. Video edited by Ben Crabb. […]
As Christmas approaches, Clare Druce, founder of Chickens’ Lib, reminds us of the damage done by factory farming chickens and turkeys. Factory farming promised plentiful cheap food. Instead, it has given us giant corporations where the profit motive reigns supreme, while ‘food animals’ suffer on an unprecedented scale. Treating animals like machines goes hand in […]
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Clare Druce
From micro-plastics in the snows of Everest and Antarctica, to carrier bags at the bottom of the 11km-deep Marianas Trench, and the billions of particulates infesting the brains of our children, nowhere and no-one on our planet remains uncontaminated by the polluting by-blow of early 21st century human activities. The atmosphere too is tainted, it’s […]
Read More… from The Case for Rewilding the Climate
Bill McGuire
The marvellous Dame Emma Thompson gave a melancholy and mischievous call out to the Puffin for our On the Brink event when she found herself unable to “research puffins amidst the musty stacks” of the London Library “prevented by this latest lockdown.” She relies, instead on her “straggling and intermittent memory” to give us “everything […]
The real beauty of a coral reef is in the way it renews itself and creates the strongest of structures in the world with the most delicate of life forms. If the fragile polyps are damaged, the reef crumbles. You could say the same of us, and our world: that which is most fragile […]
What do we do when climate change threatens more than just a species and its habitat, but puts at risk thousands of years of relationships between land-based cultures and their most sacred plants? When Adla Massoud and her friends invited me to join them for a pilgrimage to the northernmost stands of Cedars of Lebanon […]
Read More… from Read: Sowing the Seeds of Hope
Gary Paul Nabhan
Tell us about what’s happening at Ardee bog, and why you are campaigning to stop it. Ardee Bog, in Ireland’s County Louth, is threatened by an absurd infrastructure project. If a proposed road, the N52 Ardee Bypass, is allowed to proceed in its current form it will cut through Ardee Bog and its […]
Read More… from Read: Trees breathe out. We breathe in.
Katie Holten
Changing destructive policies is one of the biggest ways to halt the loss of habitats and exploitative practices that affect the most at-risk species on the planet. Writers Rebel and Extinction Rebellion are committed to holding governments to account to reverse the devastating losses to biodiversity that the Anthropocene has caused. If you’ve not yet […]
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On the Brink: Support conservation missions
This year for Remembrance Day for Lost Species, November 30th, Writers Rebel are bringing together 20 writers from around the globe including Margaret Atwood, Amitav Ghosh, Elizabeth Kolbert, Ben Okri, Homero Aridjis and others to each tell the story of one animal. Please join us for this free landmark event. Below, Writers Rebel member Alex […]
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Join us for On the Brink: Mon 30th Nov, 7pm GMT
Who are the main people and organisations coming between the UK people and policy progress to address the climate and ecological emergency? Questions like this led Writers Rebel to organize an action in a quiet privileged street in the heart of the parliamentary district in London. The Writers Rebel action in Tufton Street: No More […]
Read More… from Listen: Where is the heart of climate denial in the UK?
M John Harrison is a much-celebrated multi-award winning veteran writer of science fiction and speculative fiction. He recently won the 2020 Goldsmiths/New Statesmen Award for The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. Here, he talks to Writers Rebel co-founder, and writer Monique Roffey, whose novel The Mermaid of Black Conch was also shortlisted for the […]
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Monique Roffey
‘The Romanticist’s Nightmare’ – An original poem accompanied by long lost historical archive footage of nature, contrasted with horrifying scenes of pollution, as a response to William Morris as a romanticist poet and proto-environmentalist during the time of the industrial revolution and the destruction of natural habitats and ecosystems. I have often thought about our responsibilities […]
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Brandon RA Pestano
Hau kea white snow, snow (Hawaiian) In this tropical archipelago, snow is most likely to be found on a simmering crater. In winter the temperature at the summits of Mauna Loa, Haleakala and Mauna Kea – the state’s three tallest volcanoes – drops to below freezing. Mauna Kea means ‘white mountain’ and it […]
Weather Gods I Tired of burnings, bulldozers, charred lungs, Chaac the Rain God decamps from Mayan rainforests, rides the bloated trade winds, comes to reign over the Old World. Days on end the swollen earth has swallowed till it’s soft as blotting-paper. The sun is an aspirin dissolving in a gauze of […]
There are a million species under threat of extinction throughout the world, with as many as two hundred disappearing every day. But amongst these there is one species whose passing we need not mourn: the Danish mink farmer. Even before Covid jumped the species barrier from humans to mink and back again, mutating into […]