Dear Terence Mordaunt, all your working life, you’ve been a man of the sea. As co-founder of the Bristol Port Company, it’s the key element of your immensely successful business. But even before that, you were – as I understand it – a navigating apprentice in the Merchant Navy. I’m sure you must have […]
Read More… from Toby Litt’s Letter to Terence Mordaunt of the GWPFToby Litt
12th September, 2022 Dear Kathy Gyngell, I’m a well-known novelist and co-founder of Writers Rebel and I’m writing to you because Steve Baker announced last week that he’d been given a role in Liz Truss’s new government as junior minister in the Northern Ireland office. A day later, he stepped down from his role as […]
Read More… from Monique Roffey’s Letter to Kathy Gyngell of the GWPF
Sunday 2nd October Dear Jerome Booth, Forgive me contacting you out of the blue – but I was just reading about your association with the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) in today’s Observer! That came as something of a surprise, I have to say, given the acumen you have brought to bear on […]
Read More… from Sir Jonathon Porritt’s Letter to Jerome Booth of the GWPF
Just up the road from where I live in West London there’s a tree with a wild colony of honeybees living inside a cavity in its trunk. You can see them in action here. Above the gravestones of Kensal Green cemetery, which include those of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Freddie Mercury, a Queen bee […]
This week, intersectional environmentalist and writer Leah Thomas shares an excerpt from her forthcoming book, The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet, published by Profile Books. I had a rude awakening during the summer of 2014. While on break from college in my hometown of Florissant, Missouri, […]
Ned Beauman is a journalist, screenwriter, and the author of five novels. In 2013 he was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta magazine. Here he discusses some of the themes of his new novel, Venomous Lumpsucker, with Writers Rebel’s Liz Jensen. Liz Jensen: Venomous Lumpsucker is a fierce, funny, angry book that […]
Political thinker and philosopher Roman Krznaric is interviewed by Writers Rebel’s Liz Jensen. Roman shares an excerpt from his latest book, The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short Term World, here. Liz Jensen: The title of your book is taken from a quotation by the medical researcher Jonas Salk, […]
This week we share an extract from Roman Krznaric’s new book The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World. Read his interview with Writer’s Rebel’s Liz Jensen here. While the time rebellion in politics and economics has only developed since the 1970s, novelists and film makers have been extending our […]
Read More… from Science Fiction and the Power of StorytellingRoman Krznaric
A short while ago I cared for a patient who was admitted to the hospital with breathlessness. He’d developed heart failure, a condition with a cruel name which describes a state where the heart muscle ceases to pump efficiently enough to deliver blood and oxygen to the cells that need them, often leading to […]
Read More… from Why the Climate Crisis is a Health CrisisKatie Percival
First, have the dream. Then make it happen. In conversation with Liz Jensen, Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transitions Movement and author of What If to What Next: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want discusses the power of the imagination and how stories can frame the future we want, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Read More… from In Case of Medical Climate Emergency, Break GlassAnouchka Grose
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 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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
Read More… from Persons Unknown: Q&A with Simon CrumpSally O'Reilly
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 […]
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: […]