Stories to Save Our Planet
Climate Fiction Anthology
Date Published: 11-02-2022
Publisher: Habitat Press
A collection of inspiring, funny, dark, mysterious, tragic, romantic,
dramatic, upbeat and fantastical short stories
These 24 stories are written by a variety of authors, with the aim to
inspire readers with positive visions of what a sustainable society might
look like and how we might get there.
The stories are diverse in style, ranging from whodunnits to sci-fi,
romance to family drama, comedy to tragedy, and cover a range of solution
types from high-tech to nature-based solutions, to more systemic aspects
relating to our culture and political economy.
EXCERPT
Opening paragraphs from four stories
MANGROVE MAJ
These things creep up on you without you noticing. One minute, there you are minding your own oil-trading business, racking up the millions (and the rest!) in your numbered bank accounts, feted by fawning industry admirers and sycophantic media hangers-on. Then, before you know it, all of a sudden you are Mr. Unpopular, a leper bell around your neck, featuring at number seven in The Guardian’s much-trumpeted list of the Top Ten Existential Threats to the Global Environment.
It would be fanciful to suggest that my origins were humble – a first-rate if rather troubled education at Lancing College, a knight-of-the-realm father rubbing shoulders with ministers and minor royals. (Papa was, rather unfortunately, disgraced in later life, but the point still stands.) When you exist only in these rarefied environs, the advantages that you have over others are neither apparent nor of any particular concern. Indeed, the first time I read an opinion piece accusing me of being posh and overprivileged, I almost spat out my 1969 Louis Roeder Cristal Millesime Brut. Later in life, though, even I had to appreciate that such a charge is difficult to counter when you happen to be in possession of your very own island.
COME HELP ME
On May 1, aboard the Morning Star, Yulia is learning the various meanings of May Day. In Russia she knew it as a major holiday. In the Soviet days it had meant speeches and parades in Red Square and, later, in her time, it was a pleasant day for celebrating spring and workers. In America, Peter is teaching her, it involves putting flowers in a basket and dancing around a pole with ribbons and maybe, too, depending on who you are, Communist sympathizer or not, saying kind things about workers. But, more importantly for them now, mayday is all one word and is what she must shout into the radio in the occasion of the boat being on fire or sinking. She should shout it three times in a row, and give the location.
This is how you work the radio, Peter has shown her. This is the emergency locater beacon, and this is how you turn it on, although it should turn on automatically if it goes underwater. This is the emergency life raft, and this is where you release it. These are our survival suits. Now we put soap on the zippers. Now we practice getting into our Gumby suits. Gumby is a rubber man, yes, from a cartoon. No, hood now. Zip all the way. Now we do it again, faster. He uses the timer on his big, complicated, good-under-water watch. Now you are dead of hypothermia, he says, if she is too slow to zip or can’t get her hair tucked into the hood.
But why is she going to shout mayday? Peter says the French: venez m’aider, come help me.
Yulia can barely imagine her other life, the one that is disappearing, as behind fog, with every minute on the water and every mile from land. Only two days ago—just when finals week started—she’d sold off her textbooks, tossed piles of papers into the trash, kissed her favorite microscope good-bye, and flown to Kodiak to meet Peter. Her master’s degree in marine biology and the award she’d received for her thesis were happy achievements, but she hadn’t needed the long robe and flat hat and for so much hugging.
She has a new job: sticking hooks into stinky herring, clipping the short lines onto the long line. Watch the lines go down and then six hours later watch them come up, big white-belly fish taking shape as they swing towards the surface. Maggie’s clothesline, Peter says. Like big white panties coming up, and it’s for her to unpin them. Bigger than big panties—maybe pillow cases and sheets. Who is Maggie? Peter doesn’t know this, just an expression.
Her happiness comes not just from big halibut that will make money for Peter and her. There is the rest to love: sky, waves, gulls with lonesome voices, some fish frying in a pan, a deck to scrub, a movie to watch and forget, mountains far away with snow. And Peter, of course: she wants to be with this man, her Petya, engine oil on his hands and fish oil in the brain.
Yulia is learning about the American enterprise system, quota shares that mean Peter can catch certain pounds of halibut in the part of the ocean called Area 3A. Enterprising is when you figure things out, like in science, but for more practical and personal reasons. Peter is always figuring things out, how to make something work, how to use mayonnaise instead of the eggs she somehow forgot at the store. She wants to be enterprising too, and now she has already learned how to run the hydraulics so that Peter can gaff the monster fish. When he was not mad about the eggs he called her “a natural” at baiting hooks and snapping gangions. She felt proud when he praised her “good hands.” She is not so confident about knives. It’s Peter’s job to gut the fish, hers to pack the insides with ice. They will fill the hold this way.
CLIMATE GAMERS
Welcome to the Climate Games. The premise is simple but the task urgent. Your goal is to control the climate crisis by deploying actual or speculative solutions to keep predicted temperatures below + 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Over a thousand different climate actions are available to you, covering all areas: ocean, forest, soil, cities, culture, governmental, policy, taxation, finance, carbon credits etc. How you proceed is up to you but choose your path wisely. You must find a way of funding and managing the processes – preferably without civil or economic collapse. The world stands on the precipice. Can you be the one to bring us back? You will work in teams initially but in the final phase the winning team is disbanded and you’re on your own – winner takes all!
We wish you the very best of luck.
Since childhood, Devlin had been a bit of a dick – or asshole, as his fellow gamers over the pond would say. Arrogant as only a teenager can be, prone to gloating and grandiose statements. Still, there was no malice in him and something engaging about his positive can-do attitude. Devlin also had what psychologists would call ‘Just World Syndrome’, meaning that he couldn’t countenance that bad things might happen to good people. Faced with the injustices of the climate crisis, some similarly afflicted people became either climate deniers or victim blamers, so it’s to his credit that Dev’s response was simply to declare that it was a no-brainer to solve. Other character traits – refusal to admit he could ever be wrong and obsessiveness, combined to ensure that having made this assertion at the tender age of ten, he had to set himself to proving it.
In his spare time he played games. A lot. Some people, his parents for example, who didn’t appreciate how in control he was, might even say he’d become a gaming addict, throwing away friends, his studies and normal life to live in a virtual world. He was still not much more than a child, recently turned 19, but already a veteran of the gaming world, a regular fixture in the top 100 leader boards in Minecraft, World of Warcraft, GTA and its many offshoots. His research into climate solutions petered out when he discovered Civilization and devoted himself to winning the game using every possible method. Devlin countered parental nagging that he was throwing his life away by listing all the ways he could monetise his gaming. Admittedly, when boiled down to an hourly rate, it added up to peanuts, certainly not enough to leave home, but with the Climate Gamers challenge, here finally was the chance to prove everybody wrong, win big and save the planet. He no longer thought it would be easy – it wasn’t like ten years ago when a rapid switch away from fossil fuels to renewables might have been enough. Now tipping points had been passed, it would be way more tricky. He knew he was the man to do it.
THE ENVELOPE
Sepphira swims five metres below the ocean surface, waiting for her moment. She’s not usually superstitious, but this morning she’d strapped her grandmother’s fifty-year-old titanium diving knife to her ankle, so that something of Allegra was with them today. There are fading photos on the walls of the science facilities of Allegra using the knife to cut ropes and fishing gear from entangled whales, dolphins and turtles: unthinkable today. Ocean protection had been a worldwide priority for the last fifteen years, and in 2040 the need to cut fishing gear from cetaceans is thankfully a thing of the past. Apart from the knife, the rest of Sepphira’s gear is new and hi-tech. She’s wearing one of the latest full-face masks so she can talk into the small microphone when she needs to, and in her earpiece she can hear Leonard speaking to the delegation. She’s aware of each gentle flick of her fins, and the need to conserve her air supply. Today there are important people watching, who will decide the future of the facility. Three generations of Sepphira’s family have poured blood, sweat and tears into the seagrass and marine restoration project; it’s unthinkable that this could all collapse now. She’s desperate for the officials to leave impressed, but nevertheless she’d been thankful when her father had asked her to be the diver today. She knows her nerves won’t be as visible through the tempered glass.
About ten metres away, there is an underwater observation room – built to encourage the tourists to ride their bikes across from the apartments and campsites to spend some precious dollars on a short boat trip and a unique glimpse beneath the ocean. Inside, you feel like you’re standing in a bubble, glass panels on three sides providing a panoramic vista, the lighting dimmed so that divers can only see silhouettes of those inside. Voltage is kept as low as possible, because no one on site wants to squander the solar power – efficient green batteries have come a long way in the last decade but so has the challenge of managing consumption in an award-winning science facility and tourist destination. Besides, when you stand in the dark at this time of the early morning, when the sun is strong and the sky clear, you get the underwater landscape in all its glory: the light playing like tiny sea nymphs along each blade of seagrass, the gentle undulations of each long stem as the current whispers a softer choreography beneath the surface of the restless ocean. The seagrass extends farther than the eye can see – kilometres further – and Sepphira’s family and the team of scientists and volunteers are responsible for all of it. Marine life and seagrass restoration on this small tourist island has been her family’s home and passion for nearly fifty years. So much has changed, and yet here they are again, desperate for money to sustain and expand the business, and needing to prove themselves.
About the Author
EDITOR/AUTHOR: D.A. Baden is Professor of Sustainability at the University
of Southampton and has published numerous book chapters and articles in the
academic realm, and a eco-themed rom-com Habitat Man. She wrote the script
for a musical, performed in Southampton and London in 2016, and has written
three other screenplays. Denise set up the series of free Green Stories
writing competitions in 2018 to inspire writers to integrate green solutions
into their writing (www.greenstories.org.uk). Denise has written three
stories for this anthology, and co-written two others. The Pitch is adapted
from her novel Habitat Man. Follow on https://www.dabaden.com/ and
@DABadenauthor
Contact Links
@GreenstoriesUk
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