Rivera Sun's Blog: From the Desk of Rivera Sun, page 5
January 21, 2023
Exxon Got Rich. We Got Played.
When I was a teenager, I knew global warming was caused by fossil fuels. So did Exxon.
For decades, Exxon has been hiding the truth about the climate crisis, burying their own scientific reports. From 1970 to 2003, the oil company ran studies that accurately predicted the disastrous consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels.
They modeled out the alarming reality of the disasters we are living in. They knew that continuing to burn oil would lead to the forest fires that burnt my friend’s house to the ground, the floods that destroyed the coastal California city I lived in, and the drought that threatens the water supply of the high-altitude desert where I worked for 10 years.
Exxon could have prevented the horrifying floods that put one third of Pakistan underwater and forced 33 million people out of their homes. Instead, they lied … and lied … and lied.
I know a number of people who bought Exxon’s lies, hook, line and sinker. I’m related to several of them. If I were in their shoes, my rage would know no bounds. They have children and grandchildren whose futures are at risk.
All this time has been wasted, 30 years when they could have been putting their skills and strengths to work solving the problem. These are people who built the Internet, saw the first man walk on the moon, engineered complex machines, ran companies, and have taken care of their families and communities to the best of their knowledge and ability.
It’s tragic that they believed the oil companies and wound up destroying their children’s safety. That’s the last thing they want to do.
Meanwhile, Exxon keeps raking in the profits as it imperils us all.
As if it weren’t infuriating enough to have been tricked this way, we now also have to pay to clean up the oil companies’ mess. Environmental disasters cost us billions of dollars this year alone. Hurricane Ian, whipped into a superstorm by climate instability, cost a whopping $100 billion. We’re paying for it, either directly as we help friends rebuild their homes or find shelter, or indirectly through taxes, high prices, economic upheavals, and insurance rate hikes.
Exxon got rich. We got played.
Because of their climate denialism propaganda, we are now threatened with the collapse of our civilizations, ecosystems, biodiversity, and the future of humanity.
As I write this, students are on school strike, walking out of classrooms. What is the point of studying algebra if the planet’s ecosystem is collapsing? Why prepare for a future that will likely never come to pass? It’s hard to be excited about graduating high school or college in 2030, the year we will pass the point of no return if we do not rapidly transition off of fossil fuels.
When I was their age, I was also worried about climate change. That was in the 1990s, when we still had decades to avoid the catastrophe we now face.
Back then, people often spoke about how fossil fuels were leading toward disaster.
Then climate denialism took hold. Once the oil companies started spreading lies, we descended into an Orwellian nightmare. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, George Orwell wrote in his novel, 1984.
The book was required reading for my high school class. Ironically, at the same time, Exxon was busy exemplifying the dystopian fiction’s Ministry of Truth, shredding facts, burying their own reports, and pumping out the propaganda that led to widespread climate denialism in the United States. Truth is lies, lies are truth.
My whole life, Exxon has been lying about the dangers of burning oil. Today, we know the truth. The climate crisis is real. Even Exxon proved it. The only question that remains is: will we act fast enough to save everything … and everyone?
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Rivera Sun , syndicated by PeaceVoice , has written numerous books, including The Dandelion Insurrection . She is the editor of Nonviolence News and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
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January 4, 2023
My New Rule For Climate Action
I have a new rule: any day that’s warmer than the historic average is a day to take climate action. In Northern Maine today, the temperature is a nippy 31 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s still cold, but the historic average is a frigid 14.4 degrees. I have keen memories of -10 temperatures from my teenage years over two decades ago. Back then, your breath smoked, dragon-like, as it froze on the air. Snow banks towered over my head. Underfoot, the snow squeaked. Everything from cars to trees to garages creaked in the cold, still and strangely fragile.
People crack jokes to cover their uneasiness about this year’s scant, soft snow. “I’m not complaining,” is the common catch-phrase. But it catches you out, that phrase … because we are complaining. Locals are grumbling about the impassable snowmobiling trails of ice, slush, and mud. Dismayed winter tourists are cancelling their vacation bookings. The environmentalists’ moaning over the plight of the moose calves (80% of Maine’s moose died this year from blood-sucking tick infestations) is a presage to the hunters’ bad luck next season. It takes frigid winter temperatures to stop those ticks. Foresters (both loggers and eco-friendly landowners) are anxious about emerald ash borer and other invasive insects that kill trees.
This is the reality of the climate crisis. The systems are strained to the breaking point.
Track the weather in your hometown. Try to remember what it was like growing up there. If you’re older than 30, chances are the contrast will be stark and worrisome. This isn’t big fish stories or your grandfather’s claim of walking to school uphill both ways. Scientific data confirms that year after year, the climate is heating up. The signs are everywhere, if only humans would look.
So what will you do … today?
Here are some suggestions:
Join a nonviolent campaign for climate action. (Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Fossil Free – there are many to choose from.)
Shift to a more vegetarian diet.
Pledge not to fly (air travel releases a lot of carbon emissions).
Move your money out of fossil fuel financing corporate banks.
Don’t like these ideas? Do something else. There’s no need to argue over action when there’s so much to do. Rather than splitting hairs over this tactic or that one, I recommend taking your need to gripe out on a politician or a fossil fuel executive. Tell them there’s an emergency. Ask them to act immediately. Invite them to keep taking action every single day that the temperature is above the historic average. (And maybe even on the days that aren’t.) Because the crisis is here.
The post My New Rule For Climate Action appeared first on Rivera Sun.
October 30, 2022
Ghosts & Gleaners
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
By Rivera Sun. Note: In this solutionary climate fiction story, I chose to re-envision my childhood home of Auburn, Maine in the year 2200. In exploring this transformed future, the writing offers a glimpse of how solutionary climate fiction could be an empowering form of worldbuilding for our changing world. You can find it as a pdf here.
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“Chickadee Evans, come back here and honor the ancestors!”
My mother’s holler startled the silence of the dark cemetery, sharp with exasperation.
“No!” I yelled back, smacking into a gravestone as I craned over my shoulder. “I’m not joining your stupid ritual. I’m not asking advice from the people who wrecked the world!”
She shouted something I couldn’t quite hear as I pounded away through the dry rustle of autumn leaves. Probably a tirade about how my witch-ancestors had been burned at the stake to give me the freedoms I was throwing away – blah, blah, blah. I’d heard that talk so many times I could recite it in my sleep. Mom and her coven never let up on that. Any time one of their daughters rolled our eyes at full moon ceremonies or menarche celebrations, we got The Talk. All my friends had some version of it: the witch hunts, the Holocaust, chattel slavery, residential schools; how we should count our blessings to have been born in the 2190s instead of the previous millennium. Even with the fluctuating climate. Even with the floundering ecosystems. Even with the chaos of our near-miss with the Sixth Great Extinction. After all, we could have been born in the Upheaval. Or the Lean Years. Or the Plagues.
It’s All Hallows Eve. The annual time of year when the past comes back to haunt us. Or help us, as Mom says. But she would say that – she’s a Gleaner. It’s her job to dig through the archives, old stories, and abandoned ruins to unearth cautionary tales to terrify us all with. You ignore the past at your own peril, she scolds me when I scoff at her hair-raising stories. Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Ugh. A lot of my friends are scared of the Gleaners. Who wouldn’t be? They’re freaky. Stalking the streets in black robes and somber faces, they look like the glossy crows pecking through the stubbled fields at harvest end, searching for stray wheat kernels to consume.
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
The graveyard is spooky enough without the Gleaners waking up unhappy souls. Last year, I had to spend All Hallows Eve listening to the howls from the mass burial site of one of the pandemics. Mom wanted to commune with the ghosts of the scientists who linked the virulent disease to feed lot farming and overuse of antibiotics. The Gleaners wanted to get some advice on a new plan to expand our town’s communal herd of cows. You’ve got to be careful what you ask for, though. You never know what the spirits will say. Mom was hoping to hear about better pasture rotation practices, but the dead scientists warned us about yet another horror: PFA “forever” chemicals had been sprayed on our fields as sewer sludge in the 1990s. We had to retire our herd and start again in a new area. Two hundred years later, we’re still being haunted by those undead chemical monsters. Unless we find a remediation method, they’ll still be here in another two hundred, even two thousand years into the future. People in 1990 shouldn’t have been messing around with stuff that could still hurt people in 4400. And don’t get me started on nuclear waste and weapons. We won’t be free of that until . . . I don’t think we can even count that high. Year 51,950?
I shudder and scurry along faster. The trees have dropped their leaves, raking the black night with skeletal arms. I miss the autumn colors already. Restoring the fall foliage was the triumph of Mom’s generation. We lost it for a century or so. The Dawnland, as the Wabanaki call this region, requires cold nights and warm days and healthy microbes dancing on every leaf to unleash the season’s glorious colors. It’s pure magic – and we’re lucky to have it back. Mom’s grandmother helped brush microbes on maple seedlings. Her great-grandmother was one of the scientists who joined the Abenaki, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot visits to the Mi’kmaq and Welastekwewiyik Nations to “invite” the maples to return.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around the enormity of what it took to draw down excess carbon from the atmosphere and cool the runaway train of global warming – immense reforestation projects, severe regulations on emissions, degrowth policies, the anti-consumerism trends of the late 2020s, the economic collapses of the 2030s, the green reboots of the 2040s. For a century, the world was in utter chaos, wrestling the fossil fuel industry out of existence. Everything went through wild oscillations. Not just those scary polar vortexes and blistering heat domes, but political and social upheavals, too. Mom was the first generation to grow up seeing the restored blaze of scarlet and gold across the forests of what was once Maine. That’s why Mom’s so fanatical about her work with the Gleaners. We excavate the past, she says, to ensure a future for humanity. It’s crucial to think, not just across continents, but across generations. Two hundred years ago, people thought in sound bites and multitasked and lived without thought of the generations to come. They had no future. They had come to the brink of time. Unfathomable.
Still, there are limits to how many terrifying tales a teenager can take in. I’m not spending another All Hallows Eve in the cemetery, chanting around a circle of flickering candles as Mom searches for explanations. This year, she wants to know why the beavers abandoned their dams in the creek. The bio-healers are betting on a fungal infection, but Mom and the Gleaners think the nineteenth century French Canadians might have a different explanation. Given that they all worked in the local shoe factories, I doubt it, but Mom suspects they’ll remember the folklore of their fur trapping great-grandfathers. Personally, I’m betting on the Abenaki elders’ wisdom. They know more about this ecosystem than the colonists ever “discovered”.
Another shiver quakes down my spine as I stumble over a half-buried headstone. It’s too cold to hang out by tombstones tonight, anyway.
Be grateful for the cold, Mom’s chiding tone echoes in my frigid ears. I pull my wool hat down lower and shove my hands deeper into the pockets of my coat. We’re supposed to be grateful for everything these days – because it could be so much worse. We could all be extinct, for one thing. Or slowly starving our way toward doom on an overheating planet wracked by menopausal Octobers.
My bike is leaning up against the cemetery’s stone wall, alongside the coven’s herd of eclectic steeds. There’s a burro and a horse standing flank-to-flank next to the wagon for the older witches whose knees aren’t so good. I want Mom to let me get a horse. She says a bicycle is easier to feed. I told her I can’t ride it in the snow, but she gave me a look and reminded me that I already had a pair of x-country skis. The teenage yearning for better transport is eternal, apparently. No matter what century we live in, we’re all looking for a faster way to escape our parents.
One time, the Gleaners screened this old movie, Rebel Without A Cause. It’s about a bunch of teens skulking around in leather jackets and hurtling their disgusting gas-powered cars at a cliff like idiots. Afterwards, we had to write essays about the symbolic connections between suicidal car races and the use of fossil fuels. Depressing. I liked the blockbuster Titanic film better, though it’s hard to believe millions of viewers in 1997 missed the iceberg-sized allegory as they hurtled full-steam-ahead into the disaster of the climate crisis. When I asked Mom how they could be so stupid, she just snorted and told me I’d understand when I was older.
The night wind has teeth like a beaver, gnawing at my fingers on the handlebars. My light’s so feeble, it scarcely illuminates three feet in front of me. I forgot to plug it into the solar array yesterday. Last week’s storm left bone-like branches scattered across the road. It’s an old asphalt street, the edges nibbled away by time and erosion. I don’t dare take my eyes off the dizzying pool of light. The back of my neck prickles. The eighteenth-century story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman haunts me. The thought of flaming pumpkins hunches my shoulders as I pedal uneasily through the woods.
Image by jplenio on Pixaby.
The sight of the bluish, algae-powered streetlights in the neighborhoods floods me with relief. I hop off and walk my bike to avoid crashing into the hordes of shrieking, laughing children trick-or-treating from house to house. Most are wearing animal costumes checked out from the library. The town collection is immense, what with all the costumes needed for the theatrical plays, seasonal pageants, processions of species, and ritual dances. People come from other towns to borrow the most elaborate ones – our mirror-scaled trout or the twelve-person, barnacle-encrusted humpback whale, for example – or to hire our dancers for their festivals. We’re famous for our dancers. That’s how we got our solar generator repaired last year, trading a day of labor from a nearby town’s engineer in exchange for a bear dancer going to their May Day Celebration.
The kids are a riot of motion, wriggling, hopping, lumbering or loping up to the stoops and front doors of the neighborhood. They know the older dancers are watching, looking for their next apprentices, but it’s more than just ambition and showing off. On All Hallows Eve, we re-enact the Return From the Brink, the era when we came so close to losing all the creatures in the Sixth Great Extinction. It breaks my heart to imagine our world without them. Our bioregion would be so lonely without Snowshoe Hare, Black Bear, Pine Martin, Brown-Nose Bat, or Moose.
Tonight, the children take on their shapes and forms, and creep up to the doorsteps to renew our pledges to respect them. With honey oatmeal cookies and mint-and-apple wedges, dried pear slices and sticky-maple popcorn balls, each household gives a treat to this non-human ancestor, pledging to tend to the water, land, and air we all rely on. I used to love doing it. I’d dress up as Wren and flap down the street, or trudge along as Painted Turtle, or hop up the steps as Pickeral Frog. One year, I got lucky and drew the Lynx costume in the library’s lottery for the most popular outfits. My favorite year was Black Bear because everyone gave me honeycomb candies. My mouth waters just thinking about them. I haven’t dressed up for a couple years though, not since Mom started making me join the coven on All Hallows Eve.
It’s good to see the kids and costumes. It’s as if all our neighbors in the forests, meadows, bogs, lakes, and rivers have come out walking tonight. An antlered deer paws the ground and dips his crown of horns. A tiny fox trots across the sidewalk with a perfect, toe-first prance. A spotted loon tilts her head back and unleashes her eerie cry. A toddler bumblebee rolls in her father’s arms like pollen-laden flowers.
Later, in the Witching Hour, long after the youngest children have gone to bed with full bellies and animals dancing through their dreams, the Extinct Ones will come out, silent and spooky. They are not here for treats. Silvered, ghostly, blue under the algae-lights, they are here to haunt us all with what humanity has done. While the children dream, the rest of us must bear witness, grappling with the unfathomable loss of extinction. All night long, the ghostly dancers will embody them: the minke whale, the polar bear, the Atlantic cod. It is their right, their time of reckoning. If anyone has been felling trees carelessly, Great Owl will scratch long talon slashes across their front door. If someone had been careless with their garden house, Spotted Turtle will turn their rain barrel upside down on their doorstep. By morning, we will all know who among us hasn’t been keeping their pledges to the other species. They are not playing around, the Extinct Ones. Too much is at stake. An entire world. Human existence. Everything.
Image by Jakub Zeman from Pixabay
I shiver, more in anticipation of the Witching Hour than from the cold, and hurry past the fleetingly joyful cacophony in the neighborhood. Across the street, Malik’s house looms. The light in his room is blazing away, of course. I can see him tinkering on some invention through the bedroom window. His parents used to chew him out for wasting energy at night when daylight was just a few hours off. Then Malik joined the Engineers Collective and earned his extra energy allotment with efficiency upgrades at the community bathhouse. Brilliant, that kid. If I had half his brains, I’d invent … well, I’d come up with something ingenious enough to win me a continent-wide pass on the solar and wind-powered Solutionary Rail.
I toss a pebble at the windowpane to get his attention. He shoves his glasses on top his black kinks and blinks owlishly. Two centuries ago, Malik’s ancestors on his father’s side fled famine and war in Somalia. This was in the 1990s, even before the climate crisis scorched the desert straight down to dust. Every year, in solidarity, our town contributes to the reverse desertification projects in Malik’s ancestors’ region. It’s not charity. It’s reparations, mutual aid, and repayment of a debt we owe. The Somali Bantu community taught the French Canadian and Irish American community members how to dry farm. They shared the seeds for their hardy squashes, drought-rugged corn varieties, and heat-loving dry beans. Malik’s forebearers showed mine how to irrigate – we’d never done it before. We never had to. A two-week stretch without rain was unimaginable back then. The erratic weather patterns and extreme oscillations between downpours and dry spells nearly wiped out this region. We learned to build back-up systems for our back-up systems. Diversity gave us the knowledge needed to survive. The Somalis dry farming. The Abenaki’s wild herb foraging. A bit of Yankee ingenuity. A dash of French-Canadian thriftiness. The luck of the Irish-Americans. We needed it all, and then some.
Malik pushed up the window and leaned out.
“Thought you were at the séance?”
“It’s not a séance,” I answer automatically, irritably. Technically, my mother and her coven of Gleaners are communing, which is less of a parlor room game, and more of a meditation practice. “Come on, I’ve had enough ghosts and gleaners for one night. What I need is some fun.”
He can see my wicked grin from there. He knows that fun actually means mischief. Even if I can’t read his features – backlit by the desk lamp, his dark skin is inscrutable – it’s not hard to imagine them. The classic eyebrow lift. The question on his full lips. It’s like a personal ritual between us, those expressions. We’ve even got a kind of call-and-response greeting before mischief ensues.
Me: I’ve got an idea.
Him: How much trouble can we get in?
Me: Not that much.
I was always wrong. He always joined in, anyway. Some trouble is worth it.
Malik grabbed his coat and we took off. We didn’t bother trekking to the western part of town to fetch our friend Morningstar Rose. Her family was upriver at the Abenaki ceremonies. Her parents were ambassadors from their nation to our town, keeping us accountable. The fact that the Abenaki are here at all is a miracle. They almost got wiped out by colonial genocide, fleeing northward to survive. About two centuries ago, the remaining descendants started to return to their ancestral lands. It was a big deal, apparently. Kind of like the Maple Nation coming back. It helped that the other Wabanaki Nations pushed the local towns to give land back. And that the United States was weakening.
During the Upheaval, the old United States cracked under the strain of global sanctions against fossil fuel exports. Like the Romans and British, the empire crumbled. Nominally, there is still a United States in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, but most of the nation’s borderlines had been erased, or at least ignored as irrelevant. Now, we’re part of a mycelium-like network of town solidarity groups, watershed alliances, mountain range coalitions, forest commons, bioregion councils, and so forth. Hundreds of Indigenous nations exist in direct relationships with these groups. It’s not perfect. In some places, it’s still really messy – don’t get me started on the Republic of Texas’ neo-colonialism or the Ploughshares Movement’s struggle to get North Dakota to dismantle the world’s last nuclear weapon – but on a living planet, it’s folly to think in terms of nation-state borders. It makes a lot more sense to organize around rivers and woodlands, coastal zones and wildlife migration patterns.
“So,” Malik prompted, wrapping his scarf tighter as his breath frosted on the air, “what kind of trouble do you have in mind?”
“Mr. Malone,” I smirked.
My friend gasped, eyes widening. I hardly needed to say more. Mr. Herbert Malone was the grumpiest person we’d ever met. I didn’t know it was possible to be born without a sense of humor. Then we enrolled in Mr. Malone’s Advanced Composting course. Malik was researching bio-heat converters, and I needed bioscience credits, so we signed up together. That was a mistake. The last time we studied composting, we were twelve. Back then, Ms. Jones taught us with hands-on lessons turning the elders’ compost piles. She was an earth goddess with an infectious laugh and a love of worms. Mr. Malone was a sour-faced stickler with a nasal drone and a dislike of anyone under fifty. Mr. Malone even refused to comply with the rules of open science and tell Malik how to deal with noxious off-gasses. He repeatedly tossed us out of class for “impertinence”. I mean, how could my joke about shit creek and paddles be out of line, given that we were talking about the perils of miscalculating proper heat temperatures for composting human effluence?
“What do you think?” I asked Malik. “Should we scatter his compost around the yard?”
“Salt his garden.”
I blinked. Malik hated him with a vengeance, but this? Even awful Mr. Malone didn’t warrant something so extreme. No one messed with gardens. They were sacrosanct. We depended on our little backyard patches of kale and side yard potato rows. Our ancestors had survived the Lean Years of the Upheaval because of them.
“Okay, okay, not that,” Malik backed down.
“We could toss stinky river weeds over his apple trees,” I countered.
“That’ll show him about noxious gasses,” he muttered.
We grabbed our bikes. Malik hooked his family’s cart to his bike hitch. I tossed a couple rakes in the back. We coasted down the steep hill past the Restorative Practices Center and through the middle of town. Down by the river, a thin fog breathed off the surface. Frost snarled through the reeds, cattails, and tangled brambles. The old waterwheels churning below the falls rumbled and creaked, masking the sleeker – and quieter – new turbines inside the rebuilt millhouses. The torrential rains and flashfloods of the 2040s had gutted everything along the river’s course. The old car bridge had collapsed; a suspension-wire footbridge stood in its place now. The nineteenth-century brick mills had crumbled, too, but had been rebuilt. Water power was too precious to ignore forever. Sluices ran from above the rocky falls through the gearworks and over the wheels of the generating station, the flour-grinding house, the laundry center, and the community hook-up where you could attach a number of devices like sewing machines, juicers, lathes – basically anything that needed a turning gear. It was cacophonous and wonderful, everyone met up there. It wasn’t called the Hook-Up for nothing.
Image by Paul Schneider from Pixabay
The path upstream from the falls was bumpy with tree roots. I dropped my bike at the trailhead and helped Malik haul the cart up the steep embankment. We could smell the rotting river weeds long before we arrived. Gagging, we skidded down the slick mud. Our bike lights bobbed in our hands like drunken fireflies. I grabbed a stick and poked at the shoreline. The river swelled and shrank with the runoff of each upstream rainstorm, drowning and uncovering the grasses. I could feel the slimy stems under my feet. The best stuff would be half in the water where the current eddied backwards, stalled by the huge boulders of the falls.
Snap!
I shrieked and stumbled backward as something hard and jagged-toothed crunched the end of the stick. Malik whipped his light around, searching for a snapping turtle, even though we both knew it was the wrong time of year for a cold-blooded reptile. A glint of metal reflected on the water’s edge. Malik reached for it, hooking its curved bands with the end of his rake.
A steel trap. We shuddered, viscerally recoiling. I rubbed my ankle where the sinister teeth could have crushed it.
“Who would – why – what are they after?” The questions choked in my throat.
“Otter,” Malik suggested.
Just a few weeks ago, the neighborhood grapevine had buzzed with gossip about a recent sighting of a river otter pair. We hadn’t had any of those laughing, playful creatures here for centuries, though we’d heard tales from other parts of the Androscoggin River. Their return was a sign that our pledges were being kept, that fish were abundant and the waters were running clean. Thrilled, the local bakers marked their sourdough loaves with a pattern reminiscent of the otters’ distinctive five-toed footprints. One of our dancers slipped on the sleek costume and danced a rolling and leaping welcome in the streets.
Who would do such a nasty thing as set a steel trap for them?
Malik was already scouring the mud, his headlamp sweeping left and right. He called to me, pointing to the boot prints. I knew them. Everybody did. Billie Martin had been bragging about them for two weeks straight, showing everyone the diamond rattlesnake pattern in the rubber soles. Hardly anyone had rubber these days – and who’d waste it in shoes? Gaskets, bike tires, and laboratory tools were all higher priorities. Malik had muttered something about stealing Billie’s shoes to make hospital equipment, but I had talked him out of it. Now, I regretted it. It was clear how that blockhead had paid for them, not to mention the extra energy allotment for his mother’s home washing machine, and the solar motor on his father’s bicycle. He’d been trapping animals for their pelts. City folk would pay a fortune for furs, horns, antler racks, even mounted fish. The rich liked to put stuffed creatures on their faux fireplace mantles. Something as cute and furry as a river otter would fetch a high price. They claimed their taxidermy displays were “legacy” items from centuries ago, but how long could a dead animal last? I wish multi-millionaires had gone extinct instead of sea minks.
We found seven more traps along the riverbank. It took us hours to scour the shore, cautiously tapping our sticks like canes for the blind, flinching each time the metal teeth snapped shut, sharp and unforgiving. We abandoned our prank on Mr. Malone. It seemed small and petty now. There were real monsters about, people who’d kill a whole ecosystem for the chance to gloat over a pair of shoes.
Wheeling our bikes over the suspension wire footbridge, we crossed the river to Billie Martin’s place. No lights shone in the windows. No candles burned. No one sat up, waiting for the ghostly dancers to pass by at midnight. No one in this household cared that they had unearthed the demons of history. No one was losing sleep over how the sicknesses of previous centuries were rotting them from the inside out. No one worried about how their actions in the present were imperiling the future.
I peered over the fence into Billie’s yard. Wrath boiled in my blood. While my mother and her coven sat vigil in cemetery, wondering what had befallen the beavers, I saw the answer hanging on his shed, gruesome and bloody. The scar-eared matriarch hung upside down, nailed by her flat tail, her water-slapping warnings silenced. Malik boosted me over the fence and I took her down, cradling that beautiful creature in my arms, promising that I would return her to her dam, give her a proper release, and apologize for the cruelty of our species.
I opened the back gate and put her stiffened body into the cart. We lifted the steel traps, carefully muffling their clanking noises and made our way to Billie’s front walkway. We’d leave the traps there, showing the whole neighborhood what he’d done. When the Restorative Council caught wind of this, Billie would spend the next two years in the mosquito-plagued western forests, restoring beaver habitat with nothing but hand tools and sweat. And he’d have to give those rubber soles to the healers’ collective. They’d reclaim the washer, the solar motor, anything that had been bought with illegal poaching. The steel traps would be melted down and turned into something else. Nothing would remain of this fiasco except regret.
My plan was to leave the traps, closed, on the walkway. Malik thought we should open them the way they’d been on the riverbank, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of flesh and bone getting mangled in them, not otter’s, not beaver’s, not Billie’s mother when she stepped out the door on her way to the Hookup. A sudden idea struck me – nothing genius, certainly nothing that would win me that coveted rail pass – and I hissed at Malik to wait.
I darted into the night with a sense of my ancestors whispering in my ears. Not the smart ones. Not the heroic ones. The mischievous ones. The ones who crept into their cousins’ houses on All Hallows Eve to turn every last stitch of clothing inside out. The ones that stalked the spirit-thin veils of the season and brought a touch of reckoning to their communities. The ones who dumped cow dung on mean neighbors’ doorsteps. The ones who hung the gossip’s dirty laundry on her front fence. The ones who played “faery” and spirited away an abused wife to safety in another town. Mom had told me their stories. I’d rolled my eyes at the time, but I was glad to know these tales tonight.
Image by Vlad Vasnetsov from Pixabay
One by one, I snatched up the flickering heads of jack-o-lanterns, blowing out the candles to mask the light, carrying them back to Billie’s front walkway. Malik and I pried the traps open. The jagged teeth yawned wide for an instant before we released them. The metal chomped onto the pumpkin heads, leaving bits of pulp and pith scattered everywhere. As the last trap clanged shut, the lights burst on in the house. We hurtled for our bikes and pedaled away furiously. Billie’s mother screamed at the sight of the ghastly pumpkins smashed between steel trap jaws. Billie burst out in his pajamas, snatched up a jack-o-lantern, and flung it after us. It missed by a mile. He had a terrified look on his face as the neighbors ran out at the commotion.
By the time we’d huffed and puffed up the steep hill homeward, the town clock tolled out midnight. The neighborhoods had fallen under a spell of stillness. Unearthly creatures stalked the streets. The Extinct Ones prowled the Witching Hour. Ghostly and pale, Caribou lifted his antlered head and snorted at us. Eastern Cougar yowled and bunched into a crouch. Slow and silent, Albatross wheeled in a dance of lonely madness. Grey Wolf turned her yellow eyes on me, mournful, baleful. Some silent exchange passed between us, as if she guessed the tricks I’d just played. My heart leapt into my throat with knowing, with thrill.
I might never be a Gleaner like Mom, but the Extinct Ones called to me in a silent howl, urging me to join them. I had the temperament for it – the wrath and love in equal measures, the wicked delight in darkness and trickery, the hot rage at the mistakes of history, the fierce protectiveness of the future. I was born for Witching Hour forays. The whispers of my mischievous ancestors sang in my ears. I could serve in this role, holding my community accountable for their actions in the present, delivering warnings from the past, ensuring a future for us all. A dark smile spread across my lips. I would love to learn their secret ways, practice their rituals, learn the skills of these eerie beings . . . so that, in the centuries to come, when the Extinct Ones crept into the night, no one would ever dance as Otter . . . or Beaver . . . or Human.
September 17, 2022
We Have a Violence Problem – Campaign Nonviolence Strives To Solve It
By Rivera Sun for PeaceVoice
We have a violence problem. It runs through our nation like an invisible road system, touching every front door, cutting through each town and city. Mass shootings kill our children in their schools. Forty-five thousand people will take their own lives this year. An additional 14,000 are likely to be killed by gun violence. Twelve million of our fellow citizens will experience intimate partner violence this year. More than ten million children face violence in the forms of maltreatment, verbal abuse, sexual assault, extreme neglect, and physical abuse.
And all this will continue, year after year … unless we take our violence problem seriously.
In 2014, an effort named Campaign Nonviolence launched to ‘build a culture of peace and active nonviolence, free from war, poverty, racism, and environmental destruction’. Each year, they hold an annual week of actions, bringing together the many efforts to address violence. In all 50 states and dozens of countries, more than 4,000 actions and events will take place between September 21st, the International Day of Peace, and Oct 2nd, the International Day of Nonviolence.
Tens of thousands of people will be organizing teach-ins, rallies, marches, protests, mural painting events, sermons on peace, trainings in nonviolence, violence prevention teams, overpass bannering, leafleting, vigils, street theater, and so much more. With hundreds of participating groups, the Campaign Nonviolence Action Days has become an annual reminder that the systems and structures that are currently churning out violence and injustice can be replaced with viable and realistic alternatives anchored in nonviolence.
Campaign Nonviolence defines violence as more than just physical. It can take the forms of cultural violence, systemic and structural violence, emotional and psychological violence, institutional violence and more. Conversely, the campaign also recognizes that a culture of nonviolence is constructed of structural/systemic nonviolent solutions – things like living wages, affordable housing, restorative justice, trauma healing, renewable energy, racial justice, and so on.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dr. Bernard Lafayette put forward the idea of institutionalizing nonviolence in our schools, businesses, public offices, cultural beliefs and attitudes, and more. It’s a compelling notion to imagine that the output of our society could be healing, respectful, affirming, generous, fair, and compassionate. Social change has always come from those courageous enough to imagine it. Suffrage, worker rights, schooling for every child, social support for our elders, access for people with disabilities – all of these came about because of the vision, courage, and perseverance of people who longed for a different world.
Violence may be everywhere, but so are we. Tens of thousands of people will move into action between Sept 21-Oct 2 to bring a nonviolent world one step closer to reality. Will you?
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Rivera Sun , syndicated by PeaceVoice , has written numerous books, including The Dandelion Insurrection . She is the editor of Nonviolence News and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.
June 15, 2022
Sleepwalking Toward Climate Nightmares
How can anyone sleep at night? My first nightmare about environmental crisis occurred in 1990. I was eight years old. In it, acid rain poured from the sky, scalding the skin of humans and stripping holes in the leaves of trees. On either side of a long, ashen-gray street, billowing plumes of smog chugged out of smokestacks. I was running, searching for sanctuary from the toxic waste. Nowhere was safe.
It’s 2022. I’m turning forty this summer. The climate crisis is crashing down in cascades of disasters – forest fires, torrential floods, crop failures, ferocious hurricanes, heat domes … the stuff of nightmares. And while I wrestle with existential dread and horrified insomnia, our political leaders are asleep at the wheel. They’re dreaming of midterm elections, business-as-usual, yet another war, and hoping to pass the buck on dealing with the non-negotiable need for a swift transition away from fossil fuels.
We’re running out of time.
When I was a teenager, the epic movie Titanic rolled through the movie theaters. Leonardo DiCaprio starred as a doomed, but handsome lower-class artist named Jack who fell in love with an upper class woman played by Kate Winslet. The ship hit the iceberg. The band played on. The poor drowned in droves. The rich tossed children out of lifeboats to secure their safety. It was the epic symbol of our times, a powerful metaphorical augury. It would take DiCaprio twenty-two years to find a more apropos image. In Don’t Look Up, he stars as a freaked out scientist warning of an inevitable collision with a massive, extinction-causing asteroid. In this film, he doesn’t survive either.
In 2003, Drew Dellinger wrote these haunting lines:
It’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
The poem goes on to ask: what did you do, once you knew?
Some of us can’t sleep. We know it’s the eleventh hour. We know we’re 100 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock. We know the ecological debts wracked up by our parents and grandparents are coming due. We know the future is increasingly uncertain with every minute, every second spent spewing out more fossil fuels into the atmosphere.
We can’t sleep … and we need to use our insomnia to wake up those who are asleep at the wheel. In the halls of power and corporate boardrooms, on Wall St. and on governing boards, we need them to gasp awake and jerk us out of this devastating collision course with proverbial icebergs that are melting and collapsing in skyscraper-sized chunks.
All my life, I’ve had nightmares about the realities we’re living now. The poets and storytellers are hard at work, screaming for sanity and a swift transition. The activists are mobilizing and turning up the street heat as the climate crisis intensifies. The schoolchildren are walking out of school, demanding that we act. It’s time for the rich and powerful to do their part. We don’t have another decade.
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Rivera Sun , syndicated by PeaceVoice , has written numerous books, including The Dandelion Insurrection . She is the editor of Nonviolence News and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.
February 19, 2022
Nuru and the Little Park
A worthless patch of wasteland. That’s what the developers called it. They promised to transform the empty lot near Nuru’s apartment into the “Jewel of Nairobi”. Nuru’s blood boiled at the thought of the twenty-story skyrise, full of expensive apartments and shops and offices. In Nuru’s view, the empty lot was already a jewel, a diamond in the rough set in the heart of their neighborhood. True, it was a little scraggly around the edges. The ‘pond’ was a hole in the ground that sometimes filled with rainwater. But, everyone loved their Little Park. The big city parks were too far away. It took a half hour on two different matatus –minibuses packed tight with twenty other people – to get there when traffic was light. And it never was.
Nuru was angry. Those developers had never played tag all day in the Little Park like she had. They had never hidden in the bushes to weep over a broken heart. They hadn’t sat on the turned-over boxes by the flowering aloe, laughing until they got hiccups. The skyrise would make a lot of money for some people. It would steal a lot of joy from others.
If you do not live in this neighborhood, Nuru thought, you would not know how precious this empty space is.
It was not worthless! It was not a wasteland! It was special, like the rest of the city. Nairobi, Kenya was a beautiful place. Zebras and giraffes grazed right at the edge of the city limits. A huge, green park sprawled in the center of the shining downtown buildings. There was even a rippling lake. It was the home of Wangari Maathai, who saved the forests of Kenya, stopped the bulldozers from tearing up the city park, and launched the Green Belt Movement to protect the trees and stop the desert from spreading. All throughout Nairobi, teens like Nuru were part of environmental clubs founded by Maathai’s daughter. Last week, Nuru and her friends had put placards on the trees along the Nairobi Expressway, begging the workers not to cut down the trees as they expanded the highway.
The empty lot near Nuru’s family’s apartment was not a wildlife preserve, like the famous Nairobi National Park right next to the city. Zebras did not graze in the empty lot. Tourists would never pay big money to see the mice that burrowed in the dirt or the common bubul bird that ate the crumbs from Mr. Otieno’s sandwiches on his lunchbreak. It was not like the big city park where thousands of people came to relax or picnic or hold birthday parties.
But hundreds of people loved this empty lot. Everyone in the neighborhood used it. Nuru’s window overlooked the area. From here, the comings and goings had a rhythm like a dance in slow motion. One afternoon, tired of working on math homework, Nuru took out her phone and snapped a picture.
This is our Little Park, Nuru typed, uploading the photo onto social media. You may not think it is much, but to us it is a treasure we cannot live without.
Nuru tagged the environmental clubs. A steady stream of likes and comments came in. Encouraged, Nuru took another photo at sunset when Mrs. Mwangi and her children ate rice and banana in the cool shade of the palm tree. They lived in a stifling apartment over a corner store.
A little green space goes a long way, Nuru typed. It is a spare dining room with a fresh breeze.
In the morning, Nuru posted about Mrs. Kamau who took a stroll each morning. It helped her poor circulation. Mrs. Odhiambo often joined her; the doctor had ordered her to get exercise to help her diabetes.
A patch of green is like a hospital, Nuru wrote in the next post. The Little Park keeps us healthy and saves us money on the doctor’s bills.
Someone posted a comment about the litter in one part of the park. Nuru’s fingers flew, ready to make a defensive reply. She paused. The person had a point. The next day, she asked some friends to help clean the park.
“Why bother?” they asked. “They’re just going to bulldoze it and pour concrete over it all.”
But Nuru’s best friend Gasira helped her. They posted pictures as they worked. Mr. Njeri from across the street sent his sons over to help.
“He saw your post,” the older one said. “He follows your #LittlePark pictures.”
Nuru smiled and waved. Mr. Njeri waved back.
On Saturday, Nuru borrowed a bucket and hauled water to Mrs. Wanjiku’s tomato plants. She grew them against the south-facing wall of Nuru’s building, where the sun warmed them in the mornings.
How will Mrs. Wanjiku’s tomatoes grow if they build a skyrise here? Nuru typed.
How would her bedroom get any light, for that matter? Nuru took a series of photos out the window. The sun rose over the rooftops and shot straight into the room. If they built a skyrise, all Nuru would see was a wall.
On Monday, Nuru received a surprising call. An official from the Office of Urban Parks had seen her posts. If Nuru could document all the ways the empty lot was used by the neighborhood, there was a program that could designate it an urban green space and protect it. But, there was only one week before the authorities voted on the permit for the skyrise. Nuru needed to act fast. She needed help.
#SaveUrbanGreenSpaces, Nuru typed, calling upon the environmental clubs.
The next day, a dozen youth showed up, phones in hand, ready to help. They went door-to-door, asking the neighbors how they used the empty lot. Some people refused to talk to them. A few thought the new building would bring more money into their shops. One said the old lot was an eyesore and a nuisance. But most people had a story to tell about how much they loved – and used – the Little Park. The environmental club members took photos and wrote down the stories they heard.
Because we have an urban green space, Nuru wrote in the letter going to the commission, we have so much. We have better health. We have quiet space to think and dream. We have a place to laugh and cry. We work there and rest there. We eat our lunches and hold celebrations in the park. Students do their homework in the shade of the tree. Elders tell stories on the turned-over crates that serve as benches. Babies have taken their first steps in the grass. Friendships are born there. True loves are found. The Little Park is not worthless.
If they calculated all the ways the space gave to the local neighborhood, it was priceless. It saved people money on medicine and office space, bus fares and work rooms. It served as playground and community center, market and living room.
On the day of the vote, Nuru could hardly eat a bite. Though it was a school day, the teacher made an exception and took the whole class to the meeting. They sat nervously on metal folding chairs, waiting.
The vote came in. Nuru’s Little Park won! The urban green space was here to stay.
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Behind the Story
In 2004, Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Prize for her efforts to protect Kenya’s forests, establishing the Green Belt Movement. Her lifework inspired countless others. Now, Maathai’s daughter and a new generation of organizers are protecting and expanding urban green spaces in Nairobi and other Kenyan cities. Nairobi is a remarkable place. It contains immense urban parks, including City Park, which Wangari Maathai protected from urban development, and Nairobi National Park where lions, zebras, and giraffes live.
The urban green spaces movement works to protect those parks and expand the smaller parks, greenery, and wildlife within the city. The youth have been putting placards on the trees threatened by the expansion of the Nairobi Expressway. They have also been raising awareness of how urban green spaces provide benefits for public health, social spaces, and increased mental wellbeing for residents. In addition, urban green spaces provide shelter and food for numerous wild creatures that have learned to cohabitate urban spaces with humans.
This story emphasizes the importance of the Internet and social media in Kenyan social and political life. Debate and dialog on social justice issues frequently occurs on social media platforms. For over a decade, the Internet has been used as a tool for social change, political discourse, community conversations, and more. In Nuru’s story, digital tools help her show how important the park is to her neighbors and brings their concerns to the attention of public officials. Urban green spaces are important around the world. Nuru’s story can help us organize to preserve these spaces near us. Learn more here.
Other Stories:
Rosalinda and the Cloud Catchers (Peru)
The Boy Who Hated Fishing (Italy)
Dev and the Elephant War (India)
Faridah and the Tangled Knot (Yemen)
Faridah and the Tangled Knot
Faridah woke before daybreak. The sky above the city rooftops and distant hills gleamed gray as she left the house, water buckets in each hand. If she hurried, she’d beat the long line and return in time for school. She was lucky. Her family apartment was close. Other students, Halimah and Laela, had stopped coming to class entirely. The well was a long way from their homes. By the time they reached it, waited among hundreds of others filling buckets, and then lugged them back, half the day had vanished.
Faridah hurried through the paved streets. At the corner, her friend Noura joined her. Behind the veil of her niqab, Noura’s eyes were still sleepy. The two girls took their usual short cut behind the grocer’s shop. Here, the street narrowed into an alley and they hopped over the rubble of a crumbled building. Like many places in Yemen, the streets of their city bore the scars of war. Bullet holes riddled the concrete walls on the next block. Faridah avoided looking too closely at them. When she was little, she’d tried to count the holes. She had run out of numbers.
The walk took twenty minutes with empty containers. It would take a full half hour when they returned with the heavy jugs full of water. Faridah and Noura were strong, but they still had to rest.
“Look,” Noura said when they arrived. Their plastic jugs clunked together as she nudged her friend’s elbow. “There’s no one in line.”
They ran the last steps. As the jugs filled, Faridah took their money to the office and paid the fee. The man looked grumpy. When she returned outside, she saw why: Raziya was here again. She was one of those university women who had returned after graduating. To stir up trouble, some people said. Faridah disagreed. She liked the young woman. Raziya had courage.
Raziya and her fellow university graduates were trying to fix the water problem. It hadn’t always been like this. When Faridah was a small child, she remembered green gardens on the rooftop of her family’s apartment and big trees outside the door. It had been cool and shady. Back then, the faucets still worked. Girls went to school instead of walking all day to get to the well. The water didn’t cost as much, either.
That was before the fight over the water. In the conflict, men came to blows, people were shot, and the pipes were broken. Now, no one could agree on anything. Faridah’s mother grumbled that the men cared more about fighting than fixing.
It’s easy for them to do nothing, Faridah thought, they don’t have to get up early to lug water around.
“There will be a meeting with the water officials,” Raziya was telling Noura by the water pump. “We want everyone to come. Will you tell your mother and sister?”
“The officials won’t do anything. They never do,” Noura complained. She switched the container under the spigot.
“That’s why we must all go, all of us women, and even the younger girls like you.”
Faridah let out a gasp. Women and girls didn’t go to those meetings. Raziya went on, speaking fiercely, and making an even more daring suggestion: if the men wouldn’t agree to fix the pipeline, the women would interrupt the meeting. They would raise their complaints and propose the solutions. They would sit down in the middle of the meeting and not leave until the situation was resolved. All of the young women from the university would be there. They had spent the last year speaking to thousands of people in the city about the problems. They had even found someone to pay to fix the broken pipe. They just needed the men to agree to the plan.
“Faridah, you should come,” Raziya urged.
She startled. Why her?
“You should tell them how hard the water situation has made it for you and your family.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think too long,” Raziya urged. “The meeting is tonight.”
The young woman tried to persuade them further, but they had to go. Raziya shouted the time and place at them as they hefted their water jugs and started up the road. The sun was already hitting the tops of the flat roofs. They had to get home.
The water seemed twice as heavy today. Every step made Faridah’s shoulders ache. She got a stitch in her side from the heavy jugs. Her hands cramped. She stopped to catch her breath.
“Noura, maybe we should go to that meeting,” Faridah said to her friend. “If only so that we never have to haul water ever again.”
Noura giggled.
“Can you imagine? Just turning on the faucet and having water come out?”
Faridah smiled. She dabbed her niqab against her sweaty brow. It was already hot. The summers burned hotter and hotter each year. Raziya said the whole planet had a fever. Humans had been polluting the air too long. The university graduate had big plans to turn the whole city green and shady, but that would never happen so long as girls like Faridah and Noura had to haul every drop of water halfway across the city.
It was all tied together in one big knot, Faridah thought with a sigh.
Water. Peace. School. Money. Gardens. Food. Heat. Shade. Climate. Hope. Everything depended on sorting out the problem with the well.
She hefted the buckets again and started up the road. All she could do was untangle her piece of the big knot.
“Noura,” she said, determined. “I’m going to that meeting. And I’m not leaving until we get the water fixed.”
And that’s exactly what she did.
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Behind the Story
In Taiz, Yemen, three villages have been in conflict over water distribution since the 1980s. In 2011, tensions over the al-Siwari well boiled over. Violence erupted and people destroyed a 4.5 mile-long water pipe network that connected houses to the well. The communities were without easy access to water for more than eight years. Then, a group of ten young women who had graduated from university (like Raziya in the story) worked with the entire community to find an acceptable resolution to the conflict. Over the course of a year, they spoke to thousands of people, worked with technical experts, and also found a donor who would repair the pipes. They organized under difficult tensions. At one point, gunfire broke out over the water issues. Even when they had a working solution, they faced an additional hurdle: they had to convince the water authorities – all men – to agree. The women broke with tradition and attended the meeting, interrupting when the men failed to approve the solution, and insisting that it be implemented. In the end, they succeeded. Learn more here.
Like Faridah and Noura, many young girls in Taiz, Yemen, had been forced to drop out of school because of the effort to carry water from the distant well. With the pipes fixed, they could return to their lessons. In the fictional story, Faridah realizes the many benefits of repairing the water situation – her mother can save money instead of paying for water, they can grow a garden again, and it is possible to cultivate plants and trees that can help cool the city as the climate crisis heats up. Our solutions – and our problems – are all entwined. In order to work on one, we need to address the others. Like Faridah, Noura, and Raziya, we may need to find the courage to do something unexpected, disrupt the system, and speak out for solutions. If the women in Yemen can do it, so can we.
Other Stories:
Rosalinda and the Cloud Catchers (Peru)
The Boy Who Hated Fishing (Italy)
Dev and the Elephant War (India)
Nuru and the Little Park (Kenya)
Rosalinda and the Cloud Catchers
Rosalinda did not want to leave the mountains of Peru. She loved her home with the tin walls that chattered in the wind. She was born in this valley shaped like a bowl. She did not want to move to the city and leave behind her Abuela Jacinta and her aunts, uncles, and cousins. It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t her fault the thin mists that swept across the ridges never quite gathered into rain anymore.
Once, the trees and plants that carpeted the slopes had caught the mists, but those were gone. Every year, it grew drier and rockier and lonelier and hungrier. Mama did not have enough water for her garden. Without that, what would they eat? No tomatoes. No squash. No corn.
Her father had decided that the family would go to the city to find work. If her father, mother, and brother found jobs, they could earn enough to send some money back to help the rest of the family. Rosalinda’s mother promised that she would like her new school in the city – the classrooms even had microscopes and chemistry sets. She knew Rosalinda loved science.
“I like Abuela’s science lessons,” Rosalinda stated.
“Bah,” her grandmother answered, “you’re getting too smart for me. If you go to the city schools, maybe one day, you’ll be an inventor and make new things.”
But Rosalinda could see sorrow in Abuela Jacinta’s old face. Her grandmother hugged her close. Rosalinda felt a tear hit her dark brown hair.
If only the rain would fall instead of tears, she thought.
She ran outside. The misty clouds slid past in a whispering hush, tickling her skin, and refusing to fall in drops.
If only we could catch them, Rosalinda wished.
If only they could round up the clouds like sheep. Or cast a net like the fishermen do in the sea. Rosalinda spread her fingers wide and tried to imagine fishing for moisture. It would have to be a net as fine as a cloth and as big as a hillside. Maybe they could wring the water out of it like the laundry they washed in the metal bucket.
Unless, Rosalinda mused, her imagination racing, the nets were made of metal or something slippery. Then it would drip down like water off the roof.
Every morning, before the sun burned the mists away, the tin roof of the house collected a sheen of moisture. It pooled on the edges of the rippled metal then dripped down. Her mother grew herbs underneath the overhang. The smelly goats always tried to eat them. Rosalinda had to chase them away twenty times a day. One time, she’d tried to put up a tarp to fence them out, but her favorite goat had licked the moisture, nibbled the plastic, choked and nearly died.
Rosalinda’s eyes widened. Plastic would work! It would catch the mist, then the water would drip down from its sleek surface. She couldn’t use a tarp – the wind would blow it away. She needed a net of plastic. What could she use?
Aha! Rosalinda had an idea. Tio Roberto had a whole heap of old bags bundled behind his house. She dashed between the houses to ask if she could use them. He gave them to her, gladly. What else was he going to do with them?
Rosalinda had seen her grandmother, mother, and aunts weaving. She had learned the basics. She cut the bags apart, then started to weave the little strips into a stronger net.
“What are you doing?” her abuela asked.
Rosalinda explained, her head tilted to the side in concentration as she worked.
“I am going to fish for mist.”
Her brother overheard and told her she was crazy, but her grandmother was smart and inventive. She sat down on an overturned bucket and listened carefully to Rosalinda’s idea.
“Where will the water go when it drips off the net?” Abuela Jacinta asked her.
“Into a gutter then into a barrel then into a hose that we can move around the garden,” Rosalinda answered.
Her grandmother sent Rosalinda’s brother to go find a section of gutter. She sent her sister to get a length of hose. Shemade Rosalinda’s father roll over a big barrel. She asked all of Rosalinda’s aunties to help weave the net of strong plastic.
“Rosalinda,” her abuela explained, “has an idea. We must build a net big enough to catch a whale, but fine enough to sift water from the air like a sieve.”
After days of work – and a fair amount of grumbling from the family – they had done it. The massive net stood upright at the top of the dry hill, billowing in the wind. No one thought it would work, but as the thick mists slipped through, the woven strands beaded with moisture. Gravity pulled the droplets downward. They dripped into the gutter, ran down its length, and trickled into the barrel like a tiny stream. Everybody cheered.
With water, they could plant their corn and squash and potatoes and tomatoes. With the garden, they could feed their families. With food, they did not have to move to the city.
“It’s un milagro, a miracle!” her mother cried.
“No, Mama,” Rosalinda corrected. “It is science, an invention.”
“A miracle and science,” her abuela said. “It’s both.”
Rosalinda’s cloud catchers fed her family. They turned dry, dusty slopes green again, not just with gardens, but with wild plants, too. When the bushes and trees grew taller, they caught the moisture from the air in their broad leaves. When Rosalinda grew older, the story of her cloud catchers won her a scholarship to university. She studied engineering, but her abuela told everyone she was getting her degree in two subjects:
Miracles and science.
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Behind the Story
This story is fiction. Rosalinda did not invent the fog nets … but someone did and they really work. In the high mountains of Peru, there are cloud catchers just like the one Rosalinda builds with her family. Huge, plastic netting is hung on the ridges to siphon the moisture from the air. It is channeled into buckets and a hose is used to water the garden. As the plants return to the dry slopes, their fronds and leaves begin to do the same thing as the nets. The process is called “reverse desertification” and it helps to restore an ecosystem. You can watch a video about this here.
In Rosalinda’s story, it is important to collect the water so the family can grow their own food. If they don’t, they have to move to the city to earn money and support their family. Rosalinda and her parents would become climate migrants – people who leave their homes because the environment can no longer support human habitation. In 2017, there were 18 million climate migrants – and that number is growing each year. From droughts to forest fires to unbearable heat to floods and rising sea levels, the rapid changes in the climate due to human impacts are forcing people to flee their homes.
Rosalinda’s story has many parallels throughout the world. One movie, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, tells the true story of a Malawian youth named William Kamkwamba who invented a way to pump water up from the ground with a windmill. In other places, youth inventors are coming up with low-cost solar energy designs, fuel-efficient stoves, machines that clean-up plastic from the oceans, and much more. Local people have smart ideas for solving our pressing concerns about the environment. Young people, especially, have a good reason to think of bright ideas for the future – it’s their future!
Other Stories:
The Boy Who Hated Fishing (Italy)
Faridah and the Tangled Knot (Yemen)
Dev and the Elephant War (India)
Nuru and the Little Park (Kenya)
February 16, 2022
Dev and the Elephant War
Each night was war. The elephants invaded in the dark. They came from the forest, crashing and cracking through the underbrush at the edges of the fields. Dev’s father and the other farmers stood guard in the rice paddies, firing guns at the sky, blazing bright headlights from the trucks, hurling explosives and fire crackers at the massive creatures, trying to scare them off.
Without this, the herd of elephants would eat their crop. Dev’s family would starve. Each year, the beasts devoured more than half the rice. The farmers had to clear more forest land for fields. The elephants had less space, so they ate more crops. It was a nightmare.
“Go back to the forest!” Dev shouted from the window of their home. “You can eat all of the trees! Leave our fields alone!”
When the farmers and elephants fought, everyone in the village woke up. They hollered and shouted, banged pans and clanged sticks against the metal walls of sheds. The elephants trumpeted back. The dogs barked ferociously. The babies wailed. The cow that wandered freely through the village bellowed in alarm and swung her curved horns.
It was horrible. Like all wars.
Two nights ago, a baby elephant had been hit by a homemade bomb and died. Dev and his best friend, Samesh, had run out of the house. They saw the baby thrashing. She fell still.
Then, the baby’s mother charged.
Samesh was nearly killed. Now, he lay pale and weak with crushed ribs and a mangled leg on a pallet in their house. His mother prayed all day long that her son would live and walk again. Dev could hear her prayers through the open window of his room. Their two houses stood side-by-side like best friends. He always knew what Samesh would have for dinner. His friend always heard what Dev and his family were talking about. When they were in too much of a hurry to use the front door, Dev and Samesh could climb through the windows, over the gap between the house walls, and into each other’s rooms.
Dev couldn’t sleep. He could hear Samesh moaning. His fever had risen. His leg was infected. The doctor warned Samesh’s parents that he might have to amputate the boy’s leg . . . if he didn’t die of fever first. Dev could hear sobbing.
Samesh’s mother lit the incense on the altar and renewed her prayers. Dev murmured the words along with her, his eyes squeezed tight. He would do anything to save his friend. He would walk a hundred miles or climb the Himalayas if it would help. He did not know what he could do, though. He was sad and worried . . . and so very, very tired.
Drifting into an uneasy sleep, he dreamed that he walked to the edge of the forest and waited. He felt the heavy thud of footsteps. He heard the cracks and crashes of a huge animal coming closer. His heart hammered in his chest. His mouth went dry.
An immense, old elephant stood in front of him. He bore the scars of age and curling tusks.
Do you want to save your friend? he asked Dev in a thundering voice.
More than anything, Dev answered.
Then you must end the war between the humans and the elephants. You must make peace.
How? Dev pleaded. He was just a boy. What could he do?
The old elephant flapped his ears and explained.
When Dev woke, the roosters had not even crowed. The sky was not yet light. He had scarcely slept. He longed to shut his eyes, but there was no time! He had to save Samesh.
“Hang on,” he whispered over the windowsill to his friend. “I know how to set things right.”
Dev told his father what the old elephant had said in the dream. He told Samesh’s mother. He told the neighbors who had built the explosive that killed the baby elephant. He told each person, young and old, because he would need everyone’s help to succeed. He talked to the farmers with the land closest to the forest.
“We need to leave rice fields along the forest’s edge just for the elephants,” he explained. “They will eat there, where they feel safer, and leave the rest of the fields alone.”
Some laughed in his face. Others scoffed. A few argued and called him crazy. But Samesh’s father supported the idea – he had heard of this working in another place. He made a deal with the farmers closest to the forest: if they would give their rice to the elephants, he would give them the same amount of grain from his own fields to make up for their losses. Dev’s father turned to Samesh’s father in alarm.
“You cannot do that! It’s nearly all of your crop. You will have nothing.”
“I believe in Dev’s dream. And, I will do anything to save my son. His life is worth it.”
“Your son will live only to starve,” Dev’s father argued. He glanced at Dev’s anxious face. “But, I will contribute some of our rice to help you.”
One by one, the other farmers agreed to give a percentage of their rice to those who gave their crops to the elephants.
As soon as it was decided, Samesh’s fever broke. That night, the villagers stood, not by the forest’s edge, but on the road between the closest fields to the forest and the rest of the farmland. They lit incense instead of explosives, and sang to the elephants instead of shouting.
The herd came, first one big bull – the one who had come to Dev in his dream – and then the baby’s mother. They curled their trunks and flapped their ears. They took a bite of rice. Then another. All was safe. All was calm. The war between the elephants and humans had ended.
Samesh recovered slowly. Each day, Dev climbed through the window to tell him how the elephants came to eat, but stayed close to the forest. The rice grew heavy and abundant in the other fields. Without the elephants eating so much of it, the farmers could afford to give up the strips of land by the forest.
Soon, Dev assured Samesh, you will see this with your very own eyes.
Samesh smiled. He did not need to see it. He could hear it. The dogs had stopped barking. The babies slept quietly. The people rested through the night. The wandering cow swished her tail contentedly.
The elephants and humans had made peace.
Behind the Story
This story was inspired by a segment in David Attenborough’s documentary film, The Year Earth Changed. The film explores how the pandemic lockdowns impacted wild life and natural systems. It shows deer ranging through Japanese cities, the Himalayas becoming visible as smog decreased, sea turtles laying record numbers of eggs on empty Florida beaches, and more. One segment tells the story of how a rural Indian farming community took advantage of the economic shutdowns to employ laid-off factory workers to address a longstanding problem with elephants. Farmers and villagers had been in crisis for years. As expanding farmlands encroached on the elephants’ forest habitat, the wild elephants began to devour half the crops. To stop them, the villagers engaged in nightly confrontations. They flashed bright lights, fired guns in the air, and set off homemade explosives. Several people had been trampled by the elephants.
During the lockdown, many of the villagers lost their jobs in factories and returned home to the villages. A conservation group organized five hundred people to plant a several-mile-long swath of rice along the edge of the forest. They hoped this would entice the elephants to stay closer to the shelter of the trees, and not enter the main fields. It worked. The elephants did not enter the farmers’ fields once that year.
This story shows that we can find creative solutions that help both humans and animals. In this fictional adaptation, a young boy has a dream that he must make peace with the elephants in order to save his friend. His friend’s father has heard of this idea working in another area and agrees to try it. We need to share the stories of what’s working. We never know who might need them and whose lives we might save – including both animals and human friends.
February 6, 2022
The Boy Who Hated Fishing
Leonardo sulked in the bow of his father’s boat. The sky blazed blue. The water sparkled. The wind ruffled the golden grasses along the Italian coast’s pale cliffs. Many boys would be happy to be fishing with their father on such a beautiful day. But those boys were not Leo.
“If I miss school again,” he complained loudly over the rumble of the motor, “the teacher will fail me. If I fail, I won’t be ready for university when I turn eighteen.”
Leo was counting the days when he could leave this tiny fishing village and go to a big city like Rome or Milan.
“Don’t worry about that,” his father, Gino, roared back, his dark curls tossing in the wind. “You will be a fisherman like me, like your grandfather and great-grandfather and his great-grandfather.”
Leonardo doubted this very much. Each year, the catches dwindled. By the time he grew up, there wouldn’t be any fish left in the sea.
“Tell me if you see the fish!” Gino boomed, hand on the tiller.
Leo turned his face into the spray and squinted. In October, shoals of silver fish called mullet came to mate along the Italian coastline. Once, they swam in groups so thick they made the water look black in patches. Leo’s father said had seen sharks carving roads through the dark schools as they hunted. When the sharks lunged, the mullet fish leapt high into the air and fell like rain. Leo’s grandfather claimed that he never used to bother with nets on days like that. He just let the sharks fill his boat with raining fish.
Those were the good old days. Now, they would cast a mile-wide net and hope to catch something, anything. Fishermen were an endangered species along with the fish. Last year, his father almost had to sell his beloved boat to pay his debts. The best fish were gone from these waters. The fish that were left were hardly worth the time to catch them. They’d be out here all day. Leo would miss school again. His teacher would fail him. He’d never go to university. He’d be stuck here in an old boat on an empty ocean.
“Don’t be so grumpy!” his father called to him, reading Leo’s thoughts in his tight shoulders. “We can bomb the best fish up. That will be fun.”
Leo didn’t think so. Other boys loved to drop the homemade explosives into the water to kill the fish and collect them as they floated to the surface. But those boys were not Leo. He thought it was revolting . . . and not fair to the fish.
It was a long day. The next day was even harder. His teacher was mad at him. His father was mad at his small catch. His mother was mad at his father for planning to go out again after dark. If he was poaching fish beyond his licensed territory, he could be arrested and fined a huge sum. Or worse, he might be shot by an irate fisherman defending his area!
She refused to let Gino take Leo with him. Leo was relieved. If he stayed up all night, he’d fall asleep in class. Although, he could probably doze off tomorrow afternoon, anyway. Some guy from down the coast was coming to talk about fish. Boring!
But, Leo discovered that this man, Benicio, was not boring. Not at all. He was a small man with bright blue eyes. He was brown from the sun and beamed cheerfully.
“I began fishing when I was younger than you,” he told the class, “but only in the last ten years have I truly learned how to fish.”
Benicio came from a town many miles away. Leo had been there once on a class field trip to see the famous stone fort that had defended Puglia against the Turks. The white-washed houses of the town were built right to the edge of the peninsula’s high cliffs. You could jump off the roof and land in the water – though he doubted you’d survive.
Benicio had come to ask for their help.
“In Puglia, the other fishermen and I have created a marine reserve,” he explained. “Instead of using big nets with small holes, we use small nets with big holes. Your fathers fish every day. We only fish once a week. We make more money this way – and it’s better for the whole ocean.”
Leo sat up from his slouch and paid attention. If his father could pay his bills by fishing once a week, he could go to school more often!
Benicio spoke about how the marine reserve worked, how the fish schools were growing, how the white seabeam fish were getting as large as dinner plates, and how all the other creatures – dolphins, turtles, sharks, seals, whales – were doing better, too.
“And, because the mama fish have a safe place to raise their young, the great big schools of fish are spilling over the boundary of our little marine reserve into the nearby fishing grounds, helping other fishermen, too.”
Leo raised his hand.
“What do you need our help with?” he asked curiously.
Benicio grinned.
“Making a marine reserve here.”
If there was a marine reserve every thirty miles along the coast, he told the students, the whole ecosystem would explode with life. The fishing would be abundant not just for their fathers and them, but for their children and grandchildren.
Leo went home excited. His father scoffed at the idea. He had heard of Benicio, but he dismissed the man as a dreamer full of impossible ideas.
“It’s not impossible,” Leo argued. “They’re doing it.”
“Don’t try to teach me how to fish!” Gino harrumphed. “When you’ve been fishing as long as I have, then you can give me advice.”
“By that time,” Leo retorted, “there won’t be any fish left in the ocean.”
The next day, in the schoolyard, he sought out the sons and daughters of other fishermen. They needed a plan.
“If we want a marine reserve,” Leo said, “we have to make it happen. We have to tell everyone Benicio’s story. We have to make the grown-ups believe it is possible.”
“We should have a demonstration,” said one of the girls, “like they do for the political rallies.”
Lucia made banners with mullet and white seabeam fish on them.
Emilio came up with a chant: Our futures! Our fish!
Bianca suggested they walk out of class, like the climate strike youth were doing.
Salvatore added that they should march down to the docks.
When they did all of these, the other students joined them – and some of their parents, too! After all, Dante’s mother bought fish for her restaurant. Guiseppe’s father sold fish in his shop. Nicolas’ parents took tourists snorkeling. Daniella’s whole family had been trying to protect the ocean for years.
They marched to the docks the first time. The next time, they marched to the shops. After that, they went to the mayor’s house. By the time they went to the Fishing Authority’s office, half the town, young and old, was marching with them. Even Leo’s father.
It had taken a while. Gino demanded proof. His mother wanted to see the reports about the marine reserve. They went around and around about the idea. In the end, Leo won them over. His father and mother marched with them.
On the day the marine reserve was decreed, the whole town gave a special award to Leo. He had organized his classmates. He had listened closely to Benicio’s story. He had gotten the parents involved. He had dared to turn an impossible dream into a reality.
Leo hid his smile as he shook the mayor’s hand.
To think, he’d done it all because he didn’t want to fish!
____________________
Behind the Story
This story draws inspiration from a real-life example of a marine reserve called Torre Guaceto along the Italian coast. (You can learn more here.) The fishermen were struggling, overfishing the sea in order to make money. In their huge nets, they would catch everything from anchovies to dolphins. It was emptying the ocean. But then, a group of them came together and created a marine reserve. They fished only once a week, but they made huge revenues of up to $10,000 in a day. Not only was it good for the fishermen, it was good for the fish, too. The schools of fish rebounded in the marine reserve. There were so many fish, they spilled over the boundaries and increased the catches of nearby fishermen. Just like in the fictional story, the next step in restoring the sea ecosystems is to establish marine reserves up and down the whole coast.
This short story imagines what it might be like to try to start a marine reserve. As in the story, knowing the real-life examples can help us discover what will work. After learning from Benicio, Leo organizes his classmates and they organize their parents. Together, the intergenerational group pressures the authorities to support the idea. Change happens when people work together, speak up, and push for creative solutions to pressing problems.
From the Desk of Rivera Sun
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