Cheap paper is all around us. It’s flushed down toilets, taken away in cups, wrapped around online orders, photocopied, printed and discarded. Paper may be a renewable resource, but it has to be grown somewhere. For the European market, this somewhere tends to be Portugal, which produces about 50% of Europe’s paper. Portugal’s paper […]
It’s 2020 and I am debating whether my lupin seedlings are ready for transplanting. Like Barnacle goslings leaving the nest, the transition is a bumpy cliff. They are the height of my thumb, two only have their seed leaves still and aren’t identifiable. I use a spoon to scoop them up and plop them […]
Read More… from Staying GroundedDr Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs
In 2022, a writer friend and I began talking about how we wanted to draw local poets and writers together, to build community around those who were addressing (or wanted to address) the climate and ecological emergency in their writing. We put some feelers out and on a warm evening in June, twelve of […]
Read More… from Now is the time to set up a local Writers RebelRebecca Stonehill
Following her appearance at The Big One on April 21st 2023, Zadie Smith has shared the definite text of her piercing speech with Writers Rebel. It is reproduced here exclusively. Hello. I want to speak to you today about a man called Craig Mackinlay, MP. Craig campaigns against flagship green policies, and is […]
For 2100, 77 years from now, the likely range in global temperature increase above the pre-industrial average is 2-4.9°C, with the median 3.2°C. Globally, that is to say, we are set on a course for a barely imaginable catastrophe. As Sir David Attenborough put it, four years ago this month, “It may sound frightening, […]
We gather here in love and rage to tell the story of our age, to ring the bell, to write the page, to raise the roof, rattle the cage, expose the lies, call out the cheats who foster, posture, pant and pitch deadly denial, rank and rich, and peddle death at Tufton Street and […]
On the 25th March 2023, as a side-event of the UN water conference held in New York, Women from XR Global linked live to three regions in Uganda to listen to voices rarely heard: the women who live on the frontline of climate change. The technical challenges were significant: the most impacted areas are […]
Read More… from Life on the EdgeSandy Winterbottom and friends in Uganda
Scribbly gum forest We inch westward on a sluggish commuter train. The trees look African – acacias? – but on closer inspection are not. Everything initially looks African or European (my two points of reference) but then isn’t. It is 35 degrees. Of my trip to the Blue Mountains, everyone in Sydney says, […]
It was April Fool’s day, and I thought it was a joke at first – my partner’s face plastered across the front page of the Mail on Sunday. We were out for dinner with his university friends. A mixed group – teachers, scientists, journalists. Those in the media would easily be able to mock […]
Read More… from I’m not radical, I just don’t want animals to diePhilly Stock
One of the most beautiful and affecting environmentally-related Twitter accounts is Lego Lost at Sea. Most often, it first presents many followers with a hauntingly eroded plastic figure – like an unfinished painting by Charles Munch – and asks them to identify it. Very quickly, it will be identified as, for example, something a […]
Read More… from Q&A with Tracey Williams, founder of Lego Lost at SeaToby Litt
Grunts and snorts and wails were bringing depth and texture to the pre-dawn dark. From my dune-top spot, my eyes gradually acclimatised to the lack of light and I managed to make out hordes of hulking forms persistently shunting themselves into new configurations on the beach. Soon, a bloom of peach on the skyline […]
A little while ago Caitlin Moran wrote about Greta Thunberg. The article, laced with Moran’s characteristic humour, was respectful and admiring, but a line towards the end snagged me. Moran, discussing predictions that humans will soon be able to communicate meaningfully with whales, asked Greta what she thought whales would have to say about […]
Picture this… a man walks into a gallery and throws black ink over a renowned artwork. Not, as you would be forgiven thinking, a Just Stop Oil intervention but a 1994 reaction by artist Mark Bridger to Damien Hirst’s pickled sheep creating a new work he called “Black Sheep” which was in turn absorbed […]
In a downmarket flat in a comfortable English town there lived a shy grandma. She lived with the guilt of breaking her children’s hearts and she didn’t suppose it would ever ease. But now that she had grandbabies she was determined to give them all the love, fun and care her slightly creaky body […]
When I was in high school, I babysat for my next-door neighbours, and one time – I was about fifteen – their seven-year-old daughter came downstairs after I’d put her to bed, unable to sleep. I picked out a story to read to her for comfort and – unthinkingly – chose The Lorax. At […]
Read More… from After Reading the Lorax as a Bedtime StoryJessie Tomlinson
WALRUS It began in Scarborough, on New Year’s Eve, beside the sea The discarded boot perhaps, of some vagrant giant Washed up on smaller shores; Prised us open with ivory prongs Finding things we carried with us from afar Quite unaware. The wonderfully-worn-loved leather jacket I lost in Manchester in 1992 When I […]
How did the collaboration between you and Ruth Padel on 24 Splashes of Denial come about? The Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was the beginning. Its release was shocking and psychically disturbing for many of us. Inaction felt like a betrayal of everything I loved, believed in, […]
Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to write Sarn Helen? In one way, it’s a conventional travel book, with the reader following the writer on a long journey by foot. But in another way, it’s a powerful factual piece of non-fiction that sketches out the science of the climate crisis […]
Australian author Sean Rabin’s novel The Good Captain is an environmental thriller that warns against complacency about the climate crisis. Set in the mid 21st century during a time of plummeting fish stocks, it presents a disturbing picture of what the world might soon become. The story follows a group of radical environmentalists committed […]
A week ago the world outside my window in Ottawa was covered in snow. But today—in the month when people make resolutions, seek to realize resolutions, or reject resolutions—it is raining. I can hear the rain as I write. It would be a soothing sound if it did not also sound like the chronicle […]
Until a couple of years ago, I would not have imagined I would ever go to prison. Then the moment came when I realised that the forms of climate protest I had participated in for 30 years – petitions, marches, letters to my MP, joining environmental organisations – were not working. So with time […]