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

patiently put it: “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.