April WATWB: Out of Harm’s Way

The “We are the World” Blogfest (#WATWB) is in its thirteenth month! This blogfest is a blog hop that takes place on the last Friday of every month. This event seeks to promote positive news, stories that show compassion and the resilience of the human spirit. Your cohosts for this month are:  Shilpa Garg, Dan Antion, Simon Falk, Michelle Wallace, and Mary Giese. Please link to them in your WATWB posts and go say hi! Click HERE to check out the intention and rules of the blogfest and feel free to sign up.

I have chosen this story, Louisiana Islanders Find a New Home Beyond the Water, by Nicky Milne. Isle de Jean Charles is a small strip of land in Southern Louisiana. In the 1950s it measured 11×5 miles. Since then it has lost 98% of its land. Its inhabitants are mostly descended from the Biloxi, Chitimacha, and Choctaw tribes who took refuge from white settlers on the island in the early 19th century.

What I think makes this story good for We Are the World is the community effort the inhabitants are making to resettle all the families on the island.

Chantel Comardelle, the Executive Secretary of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, won funding from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to purchase land where the islanders can move. She says that the plan “blazes a trail for other groups who face the prospect of losing their land, both in the United States and other countries.”

“Right now, there’s very little positive in the form of relocation or resettlement of people,” she said. “We presented a different model of doing it – a community-designed, community-driven process.”

They are also working with a group called the Lowlander Center, a non-profit organization supporting lowland people and places through education, research and advocacy.

The inhabitants of Isle de Jean Charles are climate refugees right here in the United States. Climate change is no longer a “slow-moving disaster” happening somewhere else in the distant future. It is happening right here, right now.

Photo credit: Newlands Sugarcane farmland near Shriever, southeast Louisiana which has been purchased by Louisiana State for resettlement of the community of Isle De Jean Charles. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Chad Owen

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Book Review: 2047, Short Stories from Our Common Future, edited by Tanja Bisgaard

2047 Short stories from Our Common Future by Tanja Rohini Bisgaard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is only the second collection of short stories that I am reviewing on this blog (here’s the first), and again I am finding the process unexpectedly challenging. All the short stories I try to write myself turn into novels, and I prefer to read novels. So maybe short story collections just aren’t my thing.

With that warning, I’d still highly recommend this book. I found it in a Facebook group for Cli-Fi authors, where the book’s editor, author Tanja Rohini Bisgaard, posts. And I’m surprised there aren’t more story collections like this competing for reviewer eyes and space. The variety of stories is broad, and the opening story, Still Waters by Kimberly Christensen, about the beaching suicide of a pod of whales in Puget Sound, which mirrors the disintegration of the protagonists’ relationship and their very lives, packs a huge emotional punch. I was worn out after reading it and I wasn’t sure that any of the other stories in the collection could match it. I was right; none of them did.

Puget Sound, 2017

The rest are of more uneven quality, and all the choices are slanted towards North America and Europe (Bisgaard currently lives in Denmark), but the stories cover a wide range of protagonist ages, genders, professions, and voices, and an even wider range of consequences in the worlds imagined. Bisgaard’s own story, The Outcast Gem, is a moving tale of two sisters, one consigned to a shadow life as the consequence of a European one-child policy. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop in Oakridge Train by Alison Haldermaand, a story about a young woman meeting her boyfriend’s family for the first time, but it didn’t. The people in that story actually seemed happy, and their world on the mend.

Bottle Art by Allison McDonald at the Monterey Bay Aquarium

Other stories that I particularly enjoyed included Driftplastic by John A Frochio, about an artist who works with plastic trash as his medium, and Dear Henry by David Zetland, told entirely as a series of letters from one Henry H Sisson to the next, starting back in 1880. The last story, Willoy’s Launch by LX Nishimoto, about the CEO of a company that created intelligent, potentially world-saving, service robots, was kind of confusing to me. I didn’t always understand what was happening during the action sequences, or how Willoy was saving the world by holding down a button at the end. It’s good to end the book on a positive note, though, and I could totally see it as a movie.

That was perhaps my favorite aspect of this collection, and why it worked so well despite its flaws: it wasn’t all grim dystopia, there was little-to-no gratuitous violence, and a significant number of the protagonists were women. This collection is a creative mix that invites the reader to step into the minds and worlds of the characters, not merely watch and be entertained.

View all my reviews

Hop(p)ing

For the past 2 weeks I’ve been participating in a NaNoWriMo-related Blog and Social Media Hop, hosted by blogger and author Raimey Gallant. I did the Facebook, blog, Twitter, Google+, and Goodreads hops. I finished following everyone on the very last day of the follow period. I followed Facebook pages as my author page, and that seemed to protect me from being blocked the way some others were.

Otherwise, this year wasn’t a successful NaNoWriMo for me.

Book Review: Walden Warming by Richard B. Primack

Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods by Richard B. Primack

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The best part of this book is its founding idea. The author Richard Primack, a professor of Biology at Boston University, compared the information in Henry David Thoreau’s journals with his own modern day research to understand and measure how the climate and the plant and animal species of the area around Walden Pond in Concord MA have changed over the past 150 years.

Book Review: This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am a little late to this party, and I admit that I initially picked this book up simply as research for my SF novel set in the year 2074. I felt I needed a reality check. I wanted to know what experts thought the world would actually look like then, since we’re not there now and it’s unlikely I’ll be there to see it when we are.