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: […]
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 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 […]
Read More… from A human city burning in the distance
Chiara Ambrosio interviews Oliver R. Cheetham
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 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 […]
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 […]
Read More… from Recycle Archaeology’s Labels for Landfill
Helen Wickstead
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 […]
“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 […]
If you think you can live the way you have always lived, you are wrong. If you think your kids will have a life like yours, you are wrong. If you think politicians have a bigger horizon than the next election, you are wrong. If you think that the problems you don’t solve […]
Read More… from The last speech I gave before I became a criminal
Carsten Jensen
Jeremy Lent, described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,” is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. Here he talks to Writers Rebel’s Liz Jensen about his latest book, The Web of […]
Read More… from FOLLOW YOUR HEARTBREAK: Q&A with Jeremy Lent
Liz Jensen
What does emergency feel like? If you’re in Henan, China, perhaps you felt a goldfish nibbling your foot as you waded along the pavement during the summer floods. If you’re in Madrid or Chennai or Sydney, maybe it was stifling heat, the smell of rotting trash, dead insects crisping on the windowsill. If you’re […]
Behind the missiles, bombs and bullets raining down on Ukraine lie fossil fuels. The rich world’s addiction to perpetual energy is financing a dictator’s war. The Ukrainians fleeing home and those who’ve stayed to fight are at the mercy of a twisted economic system. As the oil pumps, the blood spills. Oil and gas […]
Read More… from As the Oil Pumps, the Blood Spills
Stephen Young
Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist, known as @ClimateHuman on Twitter, founder of ClimateAd and a number of other organisations responding to the climate crisis. Last week he was arrested with Scientist Rebellion. Yesterday (Tuesday 12th April 2022) he spoke at the a launch event of the new A22 global climate change civil resistance […]
Read More… from Satisfying, empowering, life-affirming: civil disobedience
Peter Kalmus
Professor Maggie Gee speaks to Writers Rebel’s Sharon Eckman about her new book The Red Children, released today, and how it might inspire wider understanding and action around climate change. Read on for some extracts from the book. SE: You said that you wanted to write an ‘upbeat, funny novel’ about climate change, which […]
This interview took place on Thursday 24th March 2022. The wonderful Margaret Atwood was in London for an event at the Royal Festival Hall, promoting Burning Questions, her new book of essays and occasional pieces. She spoke with Toby Litt, editor of the Writers Rebel website. TL: Thank you for talking to us. […]
There is a place where the river meets the land; a kink in the direction of the water, so that the usually tranquil current froths to a restless swirl, and things wash up onto the grass like bad food spat out. For the past two weeks we have been pulling bodies from that place […]
Read More… from What We Find in the Guts of the Bodies that the River Gives Us
Philip Webb Gregg
Bombs are falling on Kiev in a war whose outcome could bring unimaginable consequences. As if the environmental crisis were not dangerous enough for life on Earth, we must wonder: is humanity incapable of mastering its own demons? We have been blessed with an amazing planet born 4.5 billion years ago; a small fireball […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 – poem
Rebecca Faulkner