I have a confession to make. I’m a world class procrastinator. A heavyweight champion faffer-abouter. An Olympic standard timewaster. (This isn’t the confession. I’m just setting the scene.) It’s not great. It drives my friends and family nuts. It’s of practically no use in a climate and ecological emergency, which is all about acting […]
We don’t wake up at 5:14am and check the news to see if we’re at nuclear war. We don’t go back to sleep. We don’t read Putin-expert Fiona Hill’s article ‘Yes, He Would’. We don’t blame friends for dropping out of WhatsApp groups (we can’t, they’ve left). We don’t spend an hour leaving Google […]
[/su_column] ‘A terrific book, especially clarifying on the Anthropocene in context. I loved the especially eye-opening last chapter on the deep future, on the disposal of nuclear waste and the human failing to […]
Read More… from Notes from Deep Time: A Journey Through Our Past and Future Worlds | Helen Gordon
I was born in New York in 1960, an era when people—Americans, especially—still believed in the modern. My grandparents were wild about gadgets: at Sunday lunch, my father’s father—whose teasing always carried a whiff of terror—liked to chase his grandchildren with his electric carving knife; when we went to stay with my maternal grandmother, […]
Amitav Ghosh is an influential Indian writer and environmental thinker who has won many honours for his fiction. A former academic, he’s the author of several substantial works of non-fiction, including The Great Derangement, an exploration of literature’s failure to address the climate and ecological emergency. His new work, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in […]
Read More… from Listen: Parables of Nutmegs and GenocideAmitav Ghosh
7.9 inches of rain fell in Central Park last night dead cicadas on the crosswalk their bodies bunched in brittle knots sticky candy sky bright with grief branches submerged by the weight of our silence a letter unread a door closed firmly & […]
Read More… from The Month of Emergencies – poemRebecca Faulkner
Whether you can get there from here or wherever depends on whether you are there already, on whether you will find that you are already standing amidst the outspread hands of its stones, and their misty grey dawns, on whether indeed the arcs and folds of that sky really can make all location moot […]
The Great Barrier Reef diver/cameraman ‘cried in my mask’, to see the bleaching. Mankind is beginning to take creaky baby steps towards being able to live forever. Just when there’s no more forever to live in. There is a shock that sidles from the phrase ‘humans were rare,’ as applied to time in […]
Phil Kingston, 85, was one of three Christians on trial in January 2021 after they stopped a train at Shadwell Station in London in 2019. Two people stood on top of the train while Phil superglued himself to the side of the train. All three were acquitted. Here are some extracts from the defence […]
Read More… from Shadwell Three: Phil Kingston’s Defence StatementPhil Kingston
A vicar, a priest and an elderly former probation officer sat on a train. Not in a train, you understand: on it. It sounds like the beginning of a joke but it’s not. Far from it. These are the facts that were established at the beginning of a court case in which three people […]
Read More… from The Vicar, The Priest and The Former Probation OfficerJessica Townsend