Having worked with hundreds of climate writers over the last five years, the climate fiction I see is mainly dystopian, focusing on the negative effects of climate change without offering proactive solutions. Rather than encouraging action, stories like these make readers shut down and feel anxious. I would love to see more books that […]
Stories both reflect and influence our values and behaviours. How characters behave, what they think and do and feel, and importantly, what they don’t think about or don’t bother doing, sets the cultural landscape against which we judge our own actions and those of others. This makes fictional role models the ultimate influencers – […]
Pens of the Earth was formed in 2019, its mission to inspire writers to engage with green initiatives and to spread the word by writing positive environmental fiction, poetry and articles. Perhaps one day we would have enough to publish a book (spoiler alert: we did). When we started out, we were driven by […]
Read More… from Collective Voices
Rachel Birchley and Helen Salsbury
We’re delighted to share a new climate-themed collaboration between the composer Vik Sharma and our own Toby Litt. Vik has previously worked with poet and Writers Rebel ally Ruth Padel on 24 Splashes of Denial. Sea Creatures is an immersive sequence of three poems, words by Toby, music by Vik. You can listen to […]
There’s this small coastal town you visited when you were seven years old. Ice cream dripping down your chin and onto the pavement, that glassy stone staring up at you in bubblegum pink. The barely lucid memory of the sun beaming over you. Hands pressed into the mounded rocks. Everyone scooped molluscs into their […]
I sit in a small cubicle in the back of a police van and brace myself so I don’t slide off the plastic seat as we are driven through west London. After about half an hour a grand portcullis-like doorway between two brick towers is framed in the small window. As we enter, a […]
‘The dragon’s coming!’ said the woman beside me. ‘It better be,’ her partner added, ‘we’ve been waiting long enough!’ Down the high street came Tradinno the Dragon, making its way through the Bavarian town of Furth im Wald. Fifteen metres long, with wings vibrating over its scaly body, it breathed out fire behind teeth […]
We are very glad to be able to share some extracts from the wonderful Scientists on Survival anthology. You can buy it here. I cannot accurately recall a time when I wasn’t aware of the threat of climate change. Throughout this constant awareness, my response emotionally and materially has followed a winding path starting […]
Read More… from Community, agency and hope
Shana Sullivan, MSc
The October sky blazed blue and the sun shone on a sea of canvas pagodas in a factory car park. Over 700 people sat between banners that read: stop speculation, stop the genocide and stop arming Israel. An exhibition of Palestinian art hung from the fences. A stall offering Working Class Beer stood opposite […]
Read More… from If They Bury Us, We Will Be Seeds
Anne Enith Cooper
How would you spend your time if you were locked in a cell for twenty-two hours a day? Beat the walls? Learn to juggle? Yoga? Learn a language, go mad, write a memoir, cry? I have been writing to activist prisoners, most of whom are astonishingly sane and stoic. I would like to share […]
11. The young god recalls what happened to her people I was not affected yet I was scared. And it was new to me yet I’d been there before. It triggered memories. Empires rise. Empires fall. As it is on earth, so it was with the gods: even in the heavens, wisdom […]
This blog is an excerpt from Everything That Rises: A Climate Change Memoir, following the first election of President Trump in 2016. I envied those with the ability to speak freely, effortlessly filling journalist’s answers to questions about the Paris Agreement with noise. How were they not scared? It didn’t matter how much […]
The walk had started cheerfully enough. We gathered in the village square, formed a polite circle and introduced ourselves. Many of those who turned up already knew one another, veterans of the Right to Roam campaign. Many had been involved in organizing the protests that had taken place earlier in the year against […]
The shrieking of the young woman covered in fake blood had a visceral effect on me. She’s the same age as my daughter I thought, as the TV presenter thrust her microphone into my face. Like spectators in a Roman amphitheatre watching cowering Christians, the crowd of protesters pushed forward expectantly as if sensing […]
On 21 July, the whale activist Paul Watson docked to refuel his ship, the John Paul DeJoira, in Nuuk, Greenland. And in response, Denmark – of which Greenland is a part – did something morally incomprehensible. It ordered police to arrest and detain him. What was his crime? Watson, the former Greenpeace activist […]
“You have to be very lucky to see a snake,” Sam said to me. “They are shy.” I was pulling on long gum boots to wear for a hike in the forest. Sam is the resident guide at a small guesthouse, set deep inside a forest in Wayanad, in the northern hills of Kerala. […]
She knew that there were other parents in the streets nearby silently planning their terror runs, just like her, just then. This was reassuring, like a superstition, or a community. Hot magic-blue night. She said, ‘Whisper.’ ‘What if I’m scared?’ whispered Vito, who was eight. ‘Of the insects, maybe?’ ‘There is nothing to be […]
Briefly Very Beautiful, set in the near future in a country that is never named as Britain, involves some bold world-building choices. Which of these were the easiest to make, and which the hardest? Those choices were quite straightforward. I was drawing logical conclusions from existing conditions. If this, then this. If fire, then […]
Read More… from Q&A with Roz Dineen
Liz Jensen and Natasha Walter
It’s not unethical to buy one, despite what some people say. Sure, there’s too much plastic in the world, too much material, too many petrochemicals, but no one has told us definitively that it’s not OK. They would have banned them, anyway. It’s completely fine if you want to walk to the hypermarket to […]
All these images, I cannot shelter from, as one might shelter from the rain. They fall and fall, and fall and fall, in perfect, perfect liquid lines. Things go, they burn out brightly, they reach the surface of my mind. The weather, the people, at the edges, bordering what goes on between and behind. […]
We marched, that day, towards the Houses of Parliament, leaving the square outside the Tate Britain and forming a procession along the Thames. Someone had brought branches to the protest, green and freshly coppiced from a managed wood, and we held them aloft like we were extras from Macbeth, converging on Dunsinane. As a line of […]
Read More… from You Can’t Kill the Message
Amber Massie-Blomfield