Short Stories

She woke up whimpering on the blow-up mattress inside the dark tent. Her tears had trickled their way down her chin. She wiped her face with the back of her hand as he comforted her with gentle whispers. He listened to her recount the horrid nightmare of women and children being marched off a cliff by cruel men, a colonial massacre with smouldering fires and black smoke. The sounds of the waves and wind from the beach soothed her back to another time on a ridge in another town, with nothing but blue cheese and a starry night. During the days that passed, they would stare at the sea in silence. Her twenty-something-year-old palimpsest heart, filled with a white-hot rage, abated as they drove along the coast. Then it was time for them to leave. He came all that way to save her, but she didn’t want to be saved by anyone. She wanted to be alone. And she was for a while. Then everyone disappeared and became obscure memories in the vestibule of her mind. But when he came along and smiled her...

On Saturday, I attended a talk by Roger Hallam . He is one of the co-founders of the Extinction Rebellion movement that uses civil disobedience to protest against climate change. While Hallam might have come across as an alarmist, his depressing discussion points were on point. We should all be worried about climate change and the slow rate at which governments are taking effective action in the small window of time we have to reduce carbon emissions that contribute to the climate change abomination awaiting us all.  To calm down my existential anxiety, I took a deep dive into the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report . Supported by more than 100 scientists from 52 countries, the report assesses the latest scientific knowledge about climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. Three striking insights I came across in Chapter 7 involve Indigenous and local knowl...