Toby Litt
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Posts by Toby Litt
Loss Soup & Other Stories | Nick Hunt
After Ithaca | Charlotte Du Cann
Frequencies at DuskJane Smith
Twenty of us stood masked and slightly nervous in the brightly-lit prefab hut, ready to be initiated into a whole new world of nocturnal life. Phil from the local bat group showed us photos of brown long-eared bats, talked about bat altruism and touched on the wonder of the nursery roosts he’d seen. He […]
In Case of Medical Climate Emergency, Break GlassAnouchka Grose
COLLECTIVE ACTION OR COLLECTIVE SUICIDE One of the many alarming aspects of this latest heatwave is that you can link it to the climate emergency without anyone trying to make you feel crazy. For the long-time eco-anxious amongst us, this is more than a little disconcerting. Having been treated like lunatics for decades, suddenly […]
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Un-fashioning the FutureTansy Hoskins
The fashion industry has a disjointed relationship with the future. It is an industry that is simultaneously obsessed with constructing what comes next, but at the same time refuses to look ahead and realise that business as usual offers nothing but a full scale rush into disaster. Research by the McKinsey consultancy firm found […]
Charlotte Du Cann Q&ASally OReilly
Charlotte Du Cann speaks to Writer’s Rebel’s Sally OReilly about her new book, After Ithaca – Journeys in Deep Time. Described by head Rebel Librarian Matt Rose as “part memoir, part essay, part travelogue – that follows a real life journey of descent in a world on the tip of crisis”, Charlotte’s work pulls from […]
Ghost MooseHilary Menos
The moose haunts my dreams, his palmate rack begging me for alms, or succour, or release. Now he stands at the end of my bed in the dark, chewing cud. I must scare him to save him as the men here kill rogue moose, their rifles cocked, their wool caps low on their heads. […]
ColourlessRebecca Stonehill
only that it’s becoming unmanageable; that much, only, do I know. And more than knowing – I feel it, in the corals bleaching and leaching of colour, in the thud of trunks as they hit the floor of ancient forests, in the vapour trails that crisscross the skies like angry scars, in the face […]
Dandelions on the CommonCraig Smith
There are new dandelions on the Common. The spindly stalks of these coin-sized supernova can barely lift their heads from the ground, today being November and the season for dandelions long being over. One weekend, three years back, the boy and I questioned how the solar rays of dandelion petals switched modes to become […]
Rebugging the Planet Vicki Hird
As my older son emerged dripping from the lake with a leech on his foot my excitement was infectious enough to send his brother wading back into the icy waters to get one of his own. I’m not suggesting blood-sucking leeches should be loved by everyone. That’s probably taking it too far. But if […]
Persons Unknown: Q&A with Simon CrumpSally O'Reilly
In 2012 Sheffield City Council and the Department of Transport signed a 25-year contract with Amey plc to renew the city’s highways in a programme called ‘Streets Ahead’, at a cost to the taxpayer of £2.2 billion. As part of this contract, some 17,500 trees were due to be felled, most of them healthy. […]
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One Foot in Front of the Other: Walking for Climate and Ecological Justice Helena Smith
In July 2021, I read about an Extinction Rebellion group which was planning to walk from London to Glasgow for the COP summit. Much like the historic Camino to Santiago in Spain, the walk was intended to symbolise a path for meditation and growth, and also to connect, not just with nature but […]
InsectsJay Griffiths
Sometimes it is dreams that do it. Sometimes it is facts. So it was with this film. Sometimes, half-waking, an image is given to us, just like a dream-vision. I was on the tricksy sweet edge of sleep, when I saw Tintern Abbey in its woodland home, filled with insect-angels, and the Red Rebels: […]
Q&A with Kim Stanley RobinsonLiz Jensen
Kim Stanley Robinson is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost science fiction writers. He has received both the Robert A. Heinlein Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society for his body of work, which includes the Mars trilogy, the Science in the City trilogy, and […]
A human city burning in the distanceChiara Ambrosio interviews Oliver R. Cheetham
A conversation between Chiara Ambrosio, co-founder of independent childrens’ book publishing house Child Be Strange, and Oliver R. Cheetham, author of Roger The Elephant. Roger the elephant was a buffalo: Or at least that’s what his parents told him, and he’d never known them to be wrong… Chiara: Your book is about […]
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Liquid IniquityMichelle Lovric
What happens when our civic waters are run as profit centres? I call it ‘Liquid Iniquity’. All too often, big business is privileged over nature, over life. And all too often, the results are filthy air, ruined vistas, tormented and dispossessed citizens. Take London. The River Thames is run on a charter from 1909. […]
My Mother’s HandbagMaja Lucas
My mother’s handbag is 30 years old. It’s black leather, and covered in scratches and bumps. On one side the strap has come loose, but she has cobbled it together with green twine. Some of the seams are coming apart where the leather has worn off. But my mother hasn’t thrown it out, because […]
Recycle Archaeology’s Labels for LandfillHelen Wickstead
Most people don’t know that thousands of finds from archaeological digs end up in landfill. Some of these “de-selected” artefacts turned up on the spoil-heap or outside the trench. They can’t be used to date deposits because they are not stratified within excavated layers. Many fragments of ancient bone, pot and stone are not […]
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Hungry for a FutureCharlie Gardner
Soon after laying down our fork at the end of a meal, our body starts to protest. At first it’s a subtle, uneasy feeling in the belly; a sense of absence, a hole that needs to be filled, but ignore it for long and the reminders become less subtle as the stomach contracts in […]
A Citizen’s ArrestCarsten Jensen
“What if I got to jail?” I thought, when Extinction Rebellion Denmark asked me to speak at the opening of its week of protest. Because this is the point we’ve reached: the point where states come down more heavily on climate protest than on tax evasion. When he was jailed for his role in […]