Hey, this is Mendel, and you're listening to part two of an audio series we're featuring from the UBC Centre for Climate Justice called "The Right to Feel." I'll pass it over to producer Judee Burr to tell you more.
Hi, it's Judee. This is the second and final episode of a two part series of writings that grapple with the emotionality of climate change. These essays and stories were written in the graduate class Ecological Affect, taught in 2021 and 2022 at the University of British Columbia, on the unceded territory of the Musqueam people. It was taught by Naomi Klein and assisted by Kendra Jewell. I was a student
in that class. If you're joining us for the first time, I recommend going back and starting with Episode One, "Climate Feelings." The excerpts you'll hear in the second episode are works of fiction. In this class, we were assigned to write a eulogy for something that could be threatened by climate change, and then to imagine a different future, and to write a speculative fiction piece about how that loss might be avoided or mitigated. You'll hear excerpts of five of those pieces
in this episode, eulogies merged with speculative futures. We begin with Annika Ord, who stories threats to tiny pteropods in the North Pacific. Next, my story imagines a future in which a small organic farm is pressured to shut down. Third, Niki's eulogy for wolves is a story of how wolves avoided extinction when human communities relearned to center
ecological interdependence. Fourth, Sadie Rittman's story considers the loss of Icelandic understandings of enchantment, and how one researcher manages to carve out a space to see differently. Finally, the episode ends with Rhonda Thygesen considering the plight of bees through the eyes of an aging scientist. Now let's listen.
Hi, my name is Annika Ord. I'm from Southeast Alaska, and I study what place-based knowledges can teach us of climate change, glacier retreat, and climate resilience in Lingít Aaní, or Southeast Alaska. This is an excerpt from my fictional story Clione. Dissolution of fine bodies, soft and translucent. Slivers of light propelled by small wings like large ears, rowing in figure 8’s. A red center and soft ears like owls.
Pteropods are zooplankton, they belong to a group of free-floating mollusks which include sea angels and sea butterflies. Mostly, they live in the top 10m of the sea and are less than 1 cm long. They are found in all major oceans and at all latitudes and are an important food for species such as salmon, herring, and whales. For pink salmon and chum salmon, pteropods make up an essential food source. Pteropod swarming behavior allows salmon to efficiently feed on large
schools without having to work too hard for their food. In some years, these small, winged zooplankton make up 60% of juvenile pink salmon’s food and there seems to be a clear correlation between pteropod abundance and pink salmon populations. Both the sea angel and the sea butterfly rely on a calcium carbonate shells, however sea angels shed theirs
shortly after hatching. When pteropods and shelled zooplankton die, they sink to the ocean floor and their shells are slowly turned into sediment, storing the carbon, which came from the atmosphere, in the seafloor. Millions of tiny bodies cooling the planet, removing carbon from the sea that came from the air that we put there. As oceans absorb more and more carbon dioxide they acidify, and the shells of these
tiny and essential creatures are slowly eaten away. They’ve been around for 133 million years, evolving in the early Cretaceous, and have survived several bouts with ocean acidification since then. However, in the past 200 years, oceans have become 30% more acidic, increasing at a level not observed for over 50 million years. They are dissolving in the current onslaught.
It was the little ones who left first. Barely noticed by the relentless drone of memes and media, take out dinners and seductive silver devices mining attention, rains that never came and the drama of political stalemate. In fact, they gained more attention as ghosts than they did in life. After all, there’s not much glory in sea slugs. Of course, not everyone was lulled by the seductive static, the steady tread upwards and outwards, the promise of infinite convenience, luxury.
Dragon fruit in Alaska; migrants turned away at the border. But yes, on the whole, we slept. We began to notice when the salmon stopped coming back. Salmon after all, along the Pacific Coast of North America, are like the quarterback in football, sail to a dingy, berries to my pie. Without them, there’s not much action. We like to be focused; we pick our mascots. So much energy went into measuring the incremental changes,
confirming the confirmed and then confirming it again. We marked the losses and walked on. We thought, maybe next time this rigorous document of science will tip the scales. We believed that with the right science, the right argument, policy and politics would follow, corporations would fall in line. But money and power had broken that agreement a long time ago. We knew the truth. Governments knew the truth, but the Dream
held fast. A Dream that Ta-Nehisi Coates identifies as resting on the exploitation and violence against black and brown people.
"The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world.
I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world." That's an excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me." The change we needed would not come from measurements, at least not those of climate science. The measurement needed was of
the system. The system that funded the American military complex and the prison-industrial complex, sanctioned the stealing of Indigenous lands and children, policed black and brown bodies while privileging white, encouraged the indiscriminate extraction of fossil fuels, forests, fish, etc. by capitalist revered corporations the world round. What had remained peripheral to the nearsighted vision of colonial, capitalist gaze all this time is
that nothing, I mean nothing, exists by itself. I feel bad saying it, but it helped to lose some of our mascots. In the North Pacific, when the salmon left, the party began to grind to a desperate stop. Bears, boats, legislation, wolves, trees, trout, mines, fishing families, fishing nations. What we, predominately Western white majorities, had failed to see was the coordination and relationality of all life and
systems on earth . Brick by brick we were removing the foundation that held up the increasingly gaudy and top heavy house of the West. Enter Clione. The mist hangs low over the hazy blue islands. Over the overlapping blue mountains. Rain falls softly and constantly, except for the times when it pummels. I work in the kelp forests. We pull on our wetsuits and slip into the water. It’s time to check on the kelp forests and their inhabitants - sea stars, mollusks, kelp crabs and kelp
fishes, abalone along the cliffs. We tend to this forest, using old labs and classrooms as seaweed nurseries, helping to rear the young and offset the deaths. We visit each forest and farm along the coastline, caring for the kelp which cares for the fish. We harvest when its ready and reseed when we must. Today, I swim out to the reef. The bottom pulls away. The world is a soft deepening green. Cold spring water trickles between my suit and skin, it always enters through the neck. I pause,
looking at the space just beyond my nose. Particles of algae, diatoms, and a few ejected barnacle fronds float by. That’s when I see her. Rowing wings drawing slow figure-8s through her watery sky. Red heart and owl ears barely visible against the clear skin of her body. Clione. She is the 32nd I’ve seen since I started working in the kelp.
When everything began to collapse, when the sea angels and salmon, cedar trees and songbirds, and so many others started dropping, falling, disappearing, our human systems too began to stutter, surge, collapse. We didn’t fall softly. The neoliberal machine has never been one for downsizing with grace. But, while systems of extraction and power rumbled on with terrible momentum, people were waking up. I won’t gloss, it got a lot worse before the tide began to turn. We learned
from communities who had always been fighting the system. People rallied around Indigenous Nations and communities of color. Just transition and just housing, racial justice and gender equality, land back and clean water movements coalesced. We recognized that fighting climate change was fighting racism, was fighting dispossession of land, was fighting for clean water. The lines of separation that capitalism had worked so hard to draw, blurred.
Later, I peel off the cold black neoprene skin from my shivering body. I wrap myself in a thick wool blanket and sit down with a strip of smoked salmon and Labrador tea to write to Ellie. It will take about a month to get to her. Things take more time now; we are learning patience. It seems incredible, almost inconceivable, that our patchwork of responses has made
a difference. That restoration, local trade and production networks, carefully managed carbon drawdown and enhanced coastal weathering, sustainable harvests and green energy together have reduced acidification, slowed the warming. I’ve come to have more faith in humanity lately. And in the persistence of life. I draw the outlines of her small, determined body, red heart, owl ears, delicate transparent wings. I write, Ellie, they’re coming back.
Hi again, it's Judee. This is an excerpt from my fictional story “The Abundance Will Be Forever.” This title is a quote from Indigenous Fire Keeper, writer, and filmmaker Victor Steffensen from an interview he did about caring for country with fire on the Good Fire Podcast.
The Eulogy. From the Globe, February 20 2044. Page four headline — "Local Farm Closes After 60 Years; Farmer Confesses ‘It Just Stopped Making Sense To Grow Food." Solace Knoll Farm closed its doors last week after 60 years in business. The farm was started in 1984 and passed down in the Carden family. It has been run by Martina Carden for the past 23 years, despite the questionable economics of
producing food in our Northeast region. Food security experts attest that dry summers and heavy precipitation events in the region have encouraged shifts in the local food economy. Martina Carden acknowledged the impracticalities of running a local farm business. “You can’t compete against the corporations,” she told a small
crowd at the farm’s closing gathering. “With the latest rise in water prices and the refusal of state regulators to help local, sustainable businesses like ours pay, we needed to shut down.” Martina continued, “It just stopped making sense to grow food here.” The 30-acre Solace Knoll Farm began as an organic farm, but it lost its organic status in 2035 along with a number of other farms in the region due to issues with
pollution. Farmers continue to blame local water system management for exacerbating this pollution crisis, but water officials say that farms have been unrealistic in depending on a communal system already sapped by more essential uses. Many farms have closed in the last decade. Neighboring residents have some fond memories of the farm, but most see the closing as a natural evolution of the food system. Neighbors to the farm have complained that it is taking up valuable space that
could be used for housing development. “It was nice to walk by with the kids and see the animals and the vegetables,” said Marion, a 44 year-old dental assistant and mother of two children who lives down the street from the farm. “But it’s just seems more sanitary to get food from the grocery store after all those pollution problems we’ve been having.” “We used to talk about local food, back in my hippie days,” said Greg Kim, a 60 year-old town resident and local businessman.
“You can’t do it anymore. We need that water for residents and the industries that keep money flowing into town.” A footnote to this article reads "Some quotes have been edited for clarity. This paper is supported in part by Amber Corporation and Devon Corporation.”
From Mirage Magazine, front page headline February 20 2044 — “Beloved Solace Knoll Farm Closes: Activist and Farmer Martina Carden Speaks Out Against Water Diversions for Toxic Corporate Extractivism and Local Inaction on Ecological Crises”. The article reads — Martina Cardin took over Solace Knoll Farm from her grandmother more than two decades ago. Now the community has to say goodbye to this precious source of locally
grown food. Martina's family has collaborated with leaders from the Pokanoket, Wampanoag, and Narragansett Tribes, and with the local community to sustain this place as a beacon in the local, organic food movement these last 60 years. But government officials continue to see regional fracking as a more important water use than local farming, and PFAS pollution rates have skyrocketed. National and international food
conglomerates have tightened their hold on food markets. The cost of land has been at a premium in the Northeastern United States for the past few decades, and it has become unaffordable to most farmers who want to grow food at a communal scale. The most significant tipping point for the farm, Martina says, was the water shortages and PFAS pollution crisis in 2034. She blames the rise of industry in the area, and the lack of any precautionary action to regulate
what businesses were dumping into the water. Martina shared a short eulogy for the farm which we have printed in full below. “I remember the abundance that made me fall in love with this place. Grandma kept the edges of the fields wild, which kept the bees coming and gave local animals a refuge from the pavement, cars, and commercial noise just a few streets away. Wild animal diversity isn’t in the standard farmer playbook, but, I admit, I loved seeing the deer and the fawns eating grass
in the first dewy light of morning. Grandma talked about the farm like that – like a more-than-human community. We had so many birds – scarlet tanagers, black-and-white warblers, and pileated woodpeckers. These are only the English names. We are on Indigenous land where traditions of care so much older than these processes of destruction continue to exist and be practiced. Our grandchildren deserve an inheritance of abundance. It has been a gift to
try and offer that to the land and people I love. I don’t know whether this spot will be a farm or an apartment complex in the years to come. But our work does not end. Our community does not end. The existence of this place has been a form of resistance against the extractive world too many see as the only possible future. Writer and lawyer Julian Aguon said, “I cannot think of anything more terrifying than children who do not believe this
world can be changed.” Children, friends – the world can be changed. We must continue to fight, and continue to foster liberatory spaces elsewhere. Let this place remind us of what is possible, and what is at risk of being lost.”
The Farm — Alternative Timeline, 10 years earlier, 2034. Carson. “Get in the truck – hey! Grab three more crates!” Carson was already sweating. The farm was supposed to be a reprieve from the stifling monotony of desk work, but this crashing into tables, dropping the parsley into the compost pile, almost getting trampled by a cow – this was something else. She
clumsily pushed three crates into the truck bed. Her arms, thin and pale from desk work, were sporting lines of red scratches and bruises blossoming from the lifting and setting down, the act of trying to keep up, like careening through a video game she hadn’t grasped the mechanics of. Except Solace Knoll Farm was very real. It was unusual to see a clearing of land between the residential lots. A large apartment complex had gone in on one edge, and the fields seemed to shape
themselves around its shadow. It was green in squares of beet greens and lettuces, and there were shrubs and trees around the edges. The chickens clucked rhythmically by the barn. It was already getting warm in the hazy pale dew of the early October morning. “Gotta hustle out here my friend,” Linda said, once Carson had jumped up and was crouched tensely in the truck bed with eight other people. “Not like that sweet office job you’ve got.” She grinned cheekily, revealing two cracked
teeth. Carson nodded tersely and looked away. I don’t have to come back next week, she reminded herself, feeling a flash of anger at the indignity of it. She glanced over at another worker with two nose rings and a neck tattoo who was bobbing his head to some music; Carson could just make out a few sounds from the near invisible ear pieces. “15 bunches each!” Linda called out, as they filed out of the truck at the field of kale and cabbage. “We have a bulk order.” They filed through
the field. Carson followed nose ring guy, copying his movements, trying not to pick too many of the bug eaten leaves. Was it worth it, not using pesticides, she wondered. She should calculate the efficiency savings. She might be able to really help these people. After 15 minutes, most everyone was done picking, but Carson was swatting at the plants, feeling a bit panicked, still 7 short. Nose Ring grabbed her arm. “I picked some extra for you, Amber Corp.” Carson was too grateful
to protest. They filed back after the group, heading toward the carrots. “What are you listening to?” Carson asked Nose Ring, whose name was actually Blythe. “You wouldn’t know them,” he said, looking bored. “Cli-pop stuff. The Weather Station.” He gave Carson an earpiece though, and she continued to follow him as they picked kale together.
The office plants had pushed Carson over the edge. Most of the plants in the office were fake – the fancy kind that were designed to clean the air – “They’re just like plants!” the ads said – but were really just bots. Something about the inability to tell what was a real plant from what was a fake plant left Carson cold. Her grandma had a big fig tree down by the river in the 2000s. She’d planted it in the 80s in her yard. The tree died more than a decade ago, a couple years after
Grandma did. But the rich figs still shimmered in Carson’s memory – plump and fat. So that’s how the farm happened. Carson felt that she had to jump into something boldly. She had no experience of easy transitions. She knew about Solace Knoll farm from Amber Corp Grocery’s audits of the regional food industry; it was an object of ridicule. The organic farm movements a few decades ago turned out to be
just a bunch of privileged kids acting out. They only stayed in it a few years before giving up on a needlessly difficult life in the dirt when it turned out to be all cows and no vacation. At Amber Corporation Grocery, they were feeding the masses. Who could argue with that math? Yet, here she was on a truck for some reason, heading toward a patch of dirt in the back the farmers called “Fern Gully”
where the salad mixes were grown. She noticed Linda was eyeing her over along with the other newcomers as the truck bounded over the rutted road. Blythe started having a loud conversation with Linda about Amber Corporation workers and the psychology of “exceptionalists deregulating their mind from care.” Was this hazing? She felt another flash of annoyance. They still drive a truck, Carson thought. The hypocrites.
Hi, my name is Niki. I research wolf-caribou dynamics using mathematical models and spatial analyses. This is an excerpt from my story, "A Eulogy for Wolves," that begins with a eulogy and then turns to another possible future. They did not pass away gently, rather they ripped a page from Mr. Thomas’s book until they were overcome with our
relentlessness. Wolves were the first major predator species to be driven to extinction, and given the current rate of extraction and hubris towards the ability to control natural systems, most large predator species are expected to follow. Wolves and their ancestors have been dancing with caribou and their ancestors on this landscape since time immemorial, and only recently have our institutions of power attempted to change the tune, and what clumsy dancers they are.
Wolves were found in many diverse ecosystems across the globe harboring close relationships with their ungulate neighbors. Though the specific step or name of the dance partners shifted over time and space, wolves were always incredibly attentive to the mood swings of their partners, often
mirroring the leaps and dips they witnessed. In their early days, wolves were able to listen and quickly adapt to changes in the rhythm of the dance; they were intricately connected to the delicate strides of their prey and understood the fragility of the partnership. As time went on, however, our institutions of power requested that more and more of our own music be played and the unfamiliar cadence reverberated over the natural rhythms of the original song.
Wolves weren’t originally our opponents, but rather competitors in a friendly game of survival. Dreams developed in manifest destinies brought us into increasing contact with our cheeky rivals, and they certainly kept their competitive edge. Like all storybook rivals, the competition was rooted in a healthy respect for the opponent, that is until technology allowed us to shift from the values that encouraged
coexistence. Wolves held fast to their instinct for reciprocity within their communities, while institutions praised individuality. No man should be tied down by unseen forces of nature, apparently just the invisible hand of the market. Wolves laughed at our antics, and tried to continue the dance. Wolves are survived by their family, their neighbors and communities. They will be particularly missed by their close friend, caribou, who is left to fend for themselves in
the front line of the confusing rhythms we step to. We lead the dance in a rigid and forceful fashion; our vice grip on their upper arm is the only way caribou can follow our misguided steps. They are now forced into a fraction of the original dancefloor while we slice across and unearth the floorboards, creating wounds that won’t heal for hundreds of years, yet are impatient when caribou can’t leap across the chasms we’ve
created. Caribou had a complicated relationship with wolves that was based more on structural necessity rather than warm, fuzzy feelings, but they felt stable and secure in their future, which is more than they can say with us in the lead. As the people that are left to remember, we ask how many martyrs must die for our sins, how many extinguishes of a flame in the name of suppressing freak wildfires before we admit we are
the ones holding the matches. In lieu of thought and prayers, we are asked by close relatives of wolves to reflect on what we are connected to, what depends on us and what we depend on, and whether we are honestly honoring that call-and-response or just turning a deaf ear to the entire song. Niki, 2060, looking back. The world was sending distress signals long before the 2020s but only then did the institutions of wealthy nations that catapulted us into this mess, feel the cracks in their
technologically advanced armor. Dreams of rich geniuses lifting our helpless bodies out of the toxic quagmire, with geoengineering silverlined clouds, quickly dissipated as the seasons became waves of pandemics interspersed with heat domes, floods, and freak cold snaps. No Messiah arrived. As a biologist in the 2030s, it was a terrifying and intriguing
time to study the natural world. Nothing was constant,so the traditional methods like “before-after-control-impact” became impossible to enact as a study design because every living being was either leaving or arriving in attempts to track their natural climate. The idea of “invasive species” became useless as every year ushered in a new world record in temperature, storm or earthquake intensity, and with it brought a continuous upheaval of species dispersal and birth of novel
ecosystems. It was like a gambler down on their luck shaking the dice of biodiversity every year, desperately hoping for a winning combination. I graduated with my PhD and worked as a wildlife consultant in northern Canada, focusing on a rapidly declining barren ground caribou herd. I felt a bit sheepish being so involved with caribou; so much money was poured into the conservation of this species while others fluttered and extinguished silently without so much as a coin flipped towards their
salvation. It’s not that I didn’t think caribou weren’t important or didn’t understand the cultural and ecological significance they held, but I saw the circus act of federal and provincial governments talking out both sides of their mouths. Hundreds of thousands of federal and provincial dollars were funneled towards caribou decline while several orders of magnitude more dollars were spent in subsidies towards the
very industries that were the direct cause of their demise. I grew weary of the narrative presented - proximate causes of decline like wolf and moose populations - had to be enacted in the short-term in order for all of us to organize and painstakingly monitor the gruelingly slow long-term solutions of habitat restoration. We all had to accept the necessary evils of wildlife management if we wanted
to save caribou from certain extinction. I, meanwhile, seriously considered removing myself from the narrative and dreamed about teaching music instead, and reconnecting with nature in a mindset completely apart from p-values and assessment impacts. Southern Mountain Caribou, a subspecies of Woodland Caribou, went extinct at the beginning of the 2030s, despite intense culling programs across British Columbia. Small cries of exasperation and indignation grew in volume across the
country. Then, British Columbia's resident Orca whales went extinct soon after a particularly hot year warmed the hatching tributaries of Chinook salmon enough to essentially cook the eggs. Suddenly, all the individual voices sounding alarm bells about dwindling local species, impacts to community health, food security, and more, united in a resounding and
demanding cry for immediate change. A wave of biologists, Indigenous rights activists, medical professionals, and many more, emerged from individual marches to question the structure of Canadian Wildlife Management Systems and beyond. In public debates, biologists cited numerous studies that showed the highest levels of biodiversity were consistently
found in areas under Indigenous sovereignty. Academic and government biologists, myself included, started leaving our positions to join movements organized around Land Back, which fundamentally fought for legally and holistically reuniting Indigenous peoples with the land they were forced off centuries ago. As more species and systems faced a very public demise, the validity of federal and provincial systems
of wildlife management crumbled. Networks of local and regional wildlife management committees were founded on the fundamental understanding of connectedness. Hindsight might be 20-20, but this was a novel concept, not in theory, but definitely in practice. An abnormal observation in a community would be investigated as a symptom of a larger issue without the dreams of historical baselines clouding our judgment, or acting as an impetus for entirely suppressing a partner in that
broken link. The consequences of climate change were still raining down on the world. But with the start of restructuring systems, communities could weather the storms together. Many people were still forced to flee their homes in response to climate change, but they were no longer described as immigrants with the same connotation that the word was used in the early 2000s. The idea of illegal aliens was not only considered
horribly cruel, but asinine. Because who could be illegal on land that was stolen to begin with?
Hi, my name is Sadie Rittman. I research re-enchantment and spiritual and ontological implications of climate crisis. This is an excerpt from my story "Return of the Hidden Worlds." Eulogy. The world was once an enchanted place. Humans coexisted with various “hidden beings” - elves, trolls, fairies and more - inhabiting dimensions alongside ours. Every culture
had its stories. There were the Huldufólk of Icelandic lava fields; the Aos Sí of ancient Ireland; Patupaiarehe of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s misty forests; Hawaiian Menehune in hidden valleys; Cree Mannegishi between rapids and rocks; shape-shifting Arabic Jinn. All were liminal, mystical mediators of our relations in the more-than-human world. In our interactions with the land and its creatures, we had to consider and respect these beings of the hidden world, or
else suffer their punishment, or loss. Icelanders considered Huldufólk inhabitants before detonating large stones to build roads; Hawaiians thought of the Menehune that might seek revenge should they kill birds too fast to harvest feathers; and Irish farmers appeased the Aos Sí who in turn ensured the health of their crops. In the world shared with those hidden, there could be no “natural resource.” But in an age where “seeing is believing,” “the unseen” by
definition can’t be believed, much less known. Now we have only what science proves. Charles Eisenstein writes that “so deeply embedded it is in our understanding of what is real and how the world works,” that “science in our culture is more than a system of knowledge production or a method of inquiry.” Moreover, “when someone demands we be realistic, often they are referring either to money, or to scientifically verifiable fact.” This connection between money, science, and the bounds of
reality is not accidental. The world as we’ve “known” it rests on a configuration for reality, and corresponding science, that serves the interest of capital. Anthropologist Frédérique Apffel-Marglin explores how with “the first conceptualization of the market economy in the seventeenth century,” “the disentanglement of the individual from a web of community and spiritual obligations gave rise to the individual subject acting on the basis of his perceived
self-interest.” This produced concomitantly “the individual subject” and land as “economic resource.” In turn, this separation could only be enabled by the Cartesian split between, as anthropologist Susan Greenwood wrote, “the thinking mind, which had a soul, from mechanistic soulless matter.” On my first research trip to Iceland as a 20 year old student from New York, I was mystified by how a “modern,” “developed”
European country could purportedly believe in elves. I came away with a few linked factors towards an answer: the “aliveness” of nature, the nearness of “the past,” the landscape cultured by stories rather than capitalism, and a cosmopolitical attitude in which stories did not necessarily have to be “believed” to be real. As so many of my informants so
“In Iceland we live so close to nature. And here, nature is alive. Because of this, the elves live here, and we can see and feel their energy.” Far, far away from the “objective world,” in Iceland with its howling wind, bubbling hot springs, flowing lava and northern lights, Icelandic writers May and Hallberg Hallmundsson wrote: “the land was never an accumulation of inanimate matter… but a living
entity by itself. Each feature of the landscape had a character of its own, revered or feared as the case might be, and such an attitude was not a far cry from the belief that it was actually alive, or, at the very least, full of life.” Icelanders were overpowered by more-than-human life, and they expressed to me themselves that this “aliveness” was the condition in which elves could live, or be believed in. I regret to report that the juxtaposition between landing in
JFK and Keflavik is no longer so stark. Increasingly, Iceland is also cluttering with the architecture of capitalism. I've been told that what’s pivotal is the rapidly melting Snaefellsjokull glacier, once an “energy center” for the elves. It might be fully melted by 2050, and is already the build site of another luxury resort. Grandparents no longer grew up in turf houses; they are urbanites who’ve had their TVs, internet and smartphones to mediate their lands with stories
of elsewhere. The popular TV show Game of Thrones shot scenes “north of the wall” in the Icelandic highlands, layering the landscape with new meanings, which tourists would flock to for photographs. Also layered are more highways, shopping malls, fast food chains, and the infrastructure for the new Dreki pipeline. Grandparents no longer point out the “hidden worlds” alongside the highways, now smothered with Wendy’s and
Burger King. Even if they did, their grandchildren’s attention is algorithmically stripped by surveillance capitalism, sucked down into smartphones which also mediate the landscape. What interest may be left for the old stories in the passing landscape does not extend to consider anything capitalism doesn’t deem “real.” I’m afraid my obituary only repeats a long-told story. As one elderly Icelander summarized back on my first
research trip, “the elves leave with electricity.” Yes. The same knowledge paradigm that drills for energy to light up the earth - “Enlightenment” - is also that which has driven out the hidden worlds. Amidst environmental pollution, industry, rationalism and capitalism, we find ourselves alone in a human world. Capitalism must cover everything, and so the fairies retreat."
20 years later. For my retirement address at the Centre for Cosmopolitical Collaboration and Research, I’ve been asked to dig up this old obituary from back when nobody read my work, and explain how we brought back the “hidden.” Regrettably, we learned the hard way that one worldview, one sociocultural context, one “reality,” was never meant to overtake and
strangle the whole planet. Just as a monocrop perishes while biodiversity flourishes, a system and corresponding “reality” so totalizing and invasive as capitalism could not allow human survival. In our delusions of separation, superiority and corresponding objectivity, spread so
aggressively across the planet, we very nearly went extinct. In looking at how the “hidden” returned from the banishment of “unreality,” I’ll start with instructions from an elf himself, Fróði, in his book How to See an Elf, co-written with seer Ragga Jonsdottir. They wrote: “Find a rock you feel drawn to. Sit down and be comfortable. Maybe you find it amusing to sit down and talk to an elf. But that is alright, because it is through joy that we can make a positive
connection between worlds. Examine the rock, the texture of the stone, colors of the flowers and the moss, and watch the straws dance softly in the breeze. Maybe you notice something special, something especially beautiful, or amusing, something that catches your attention. Now we practice and find the joy in trying to regain this long awaited friendship.” “Listen beyond and through these beautiful sounds
of nature. There is silence… Perhaps you hear something else, maybe a soft song, or the light sound of voices, that seem to come from afar, even from inside the rock. With your eyes half closed, or completely closed, you might even see a pointy hat behind a rock, hear a soft sound of bells or see small twinkling eyes looking at you.” “Did it work? Did you see me? If not, it’s also fine, it was a
beautiful moment, wasn’t it? I am sure that the colors around you seem brighter now, the sounds of nature stronger and you even feel more joy within. A peaceful moment in nature can strengthen the bond between us, elves and humans.” As we find in Fróði’s instructions, elves and other “hidden worlds” always belonged to the realm of connection. At my retirement, we now live in a world resembling Ragga’s old image of “the many worlds of the stone”. One world, many
realities — a pluriverse. As the Zapatista's had it in their “Pluriverse Principle,” we “walk” worlds into being “in a world in which many worlds fit”. With decolonizing processes of Land Back, there is space for this. With our release from capitalism’s stronghold, there is also time. Time no longer money, economic contributions no longer identity markers, partaking in financial exchange no longer a matter of partaking in “life”, our bounds for reality have widened beyond just
“money” and “science.” No longer fully extrapolated within a totalizing capitalist logic, we’ve been released into a wider world.
Hi, my name is Rhonda Thygesen. I research the proteome of honeybees, and I'm a student in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. This is an excerpt from my story "Eulogy for the Bees." Eulogy. My love story with pollinators started when I was young and living in rural Alberta. I grew up on a farm with fields decorated in canola seed, known as Brassica napus, which bees tended to regularly. I watched them come in June and leave in July. This timing of pollination for the blooming
crop was decently regular since the 1980’s. In my naivety I thought that the bees and canola plant were just friends and wanted to say hello to each other. When I was doing my undergrad in biology, I applied to work with Alberta’s apiculture team for research experience. Through that job I learned that the hello I thought bees were giving to canola flowers was a serious work visit. I got hooked on studying
pollinators after that. I was surprised that there was a developed field of researchers trying to help pollinators live better against the stressors in their environment. I didn’t make the link as a young researcher that these stressors were correlated with climate change. Nor did I feel brave enough to share my realization that those trying to research the effects of agrochemicals and disease on bee populations were trying to
also please the industry instead of changing it. It would have been brave of me to show up to research meetings as the youth who called out each of us for being a part of the problem and not the solution. I felt a lot of anger in those days, and I swore to never be naïve to their important work and silent suffering in health and population. This could be why I am writing this eulogy to the bees today.
It was Albert Einstein that said “if the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” Einstein maybe wasn’t factually correct in his timeline, but he is honest in the important bond between bees and humans. There was indeed no other species on planet earth that was such a force of nature nor one that
gave us so many gifts. The worker bee is a very literal term, working hard to upkeep the ecosystems it participates in to keep the animals of this planet healthy. Our mouths were the receivers of their labour. Almonds, apples, blueberries, coffee, dairy, cereals, and cotton will not see the future without them, and we will cherish those things while we still have them. We will never be able to taste warm honey comb
fresh from a hive on a July afternoon. Our plates will look less vibrant without you here, in fact, they will look almost bare. Our tastebuds will miss the diversity. Our clothing will surely not be as extensive. You were the true gods of the farmland. Future. My grandson Ethan and I had taken up a new Saturday ritual of sitting nearby different garden beds, crops, and greenhouses to watch for bees. We’d set up our seats now in a canola field in southern Alberta and it was April.
Patches of the yellow plant were hard to come by and my childhood intuition told me inside that we were sure to see a fuzzy honey bee on of the flowers we sat in front of. We waited patiently to hear a buzz. “But we might never find them?” “Exactly right,” I said. “We might never find them.” I always tried to tell him the truth, if I knew the answer. He could tell if I lied. Maybe they’re too far away. Too much empty space or something. What if they can’t smell the canola
flowers any more? What if they don’t recognize it’s bright yellow colour? It had become a lot more difficult to spot pollinators as the world has seen massive insect decline amongst the impacts of climate change. Floods and droughts or water disasters and wildfires were of immediate danger to people, but other species were suffering too. Only certain parts of my home province were able to still grow canola seed as the plant couldn’t survive in areas with too much drought or
intense heat. I’m 66 years old now and have witnessed canola seed barely survive in the country that laboured it. The yellow fields used to signify summertime and now time and climate have become so unfamiliar that canola basically grows in what should be our early spring. An Indigenous friend of mine tells me horror stories of how her people know that Earth’s signs have changed. They used to use snow drifts and star patterns to guide themselves in the Canadian
winter to and from hunting. It’s been a long time since you could take the signs of mother nature as truthful, she says. We saw the effects of climate change on our in our daily life which we called the “long goodbye”. Droughts often impacted our resources for cooking and dishes and baths. We grew food that was able to survive on our land between Edmonton and Calgary. Some heat waves ruined our small harvests.
Some days we didn’t go outside because of the air quality. On many occasions we lost friends to natural disasters and didn’t travel much to see family. Aspyn’s friends told her stories from their old homes. I became friends with parents, and we silently suffered with the costs of living. Despite climate doom being perpetuated by corporations and the government there was no assistance. The public was restless, and it was common for angry mobs to form protesting the little action
that was happening. Those working with pollinators and fighting for them were also getting agitated. Much reform has occurred since then. We always understood that change was never going to be an overnight process. We weren’t going to be able to quit everything we’ve been doing to harm the environment for decades all at once. We were too deep in our ways to ever have that be a reality. But big moments of
change did happen. The public never gave up. Each artist, scientist, and activist continued to work hard to lobby global leaders to do better. As disaster struck closer to people’s homes they could no longer be ignorant to the issues at hand. We were losing the planet we knew and we were going to be next. It has been decades of this since I was young in the 2000’s and climate activism started way before that. We have been at war with the climate for too long.
"She’s here! She’s here! She’s here!" Ethan said. A small foraging honey bee was trying to descend on one of the canola flowers. I took a breath and tried to calm my own happiness. This always reminds me of when I was a little girl growing up in seas of canola bees. Hives were never far away. “She’s here,” I said as I opened my eyes. Ethan and I are watching the bees in their hive. We see them leave and return home. There are nurse bees poking their heads
into cells to clean larvae and feed them. We see the notorious figure-eight bee dance to communicate to others where the good flowers are for food. Resin is being built onto the frames by worker bees as an antimicrobial product to protect the hive from disease. The queen is in the hive laying eggs in empty cells with her long and skinny abdomen. My favourite lesson from bees is that each of them has a unique role. And that role is important. Without a worker, nurse, forager, drone,
or queen, the whole hive would be unable to function. That’s a lot of power for one individual. It’s crucial that they work together for survival. They never give up on each other and they haven’t proven to give up on Earth yet either.
We’d like to thank all of the students who contributed their work to this episode, and everyone in the Ecological Affect class whose thoughtful ideas fostered such generative discussion and meaningful writing. Thanks to Kendra Jewell, Audrey Irvine-Broque, Lorah Steichen, and Maggie O’Donnell for reviewing drafts of this audio story. Finally, we’d like to thank the University of British Columbia’s Hampton Grant program for funding work on this
project. For my part, it was a gift to be part of this class and to curate this gathering of our writing. Thanks to all of you for listening to this series.