← Rewilding Earth Podcast
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- [00:05]
A
You can create a future. It can be an aspirational future. It can be a utopian version of oh, we, we averted the tipping point, or oh, we came out the other side and we have eliminated all fossil fuels and we're regaining control, or we've adapted. There's so many ways you could go with an aspirational future, or you could write a dystopian post apocalyptic future that shows us the worst case scenario, which also has value because we don't want that. Right. If you see a story that's a future you don't want to live in, maybe that's like really great motivation to avert that specific future.
- [01:13]
B
You're listening to the Rewilding Earth Podcast. I'm your host, Jack Humphrey. We can talk a lot about data and policy on Rewilding Earth podcast, but let's face it, in today's world, the barrage of facts and headlines can sometimes paralyze people with inaction. Sometimes scientific reports aren't enough to make people care. That's where the power of fiction comes in. A great story builds the kind of deep empathy a dry report just can't replicate, acting as a laboratory for our climate future and moving people to action naturally. My guest today is novelist and former journalist Julie Carrick Dalton. She's the author of Waiting for the Night Song, the Last Beekeeper, and her upcoming book, the Forest Becomes Her. Julie joins me to discuss how we can use fiction to move the needle on real world conservation. Julie, welcome to the Rewilding Earth Podcast.
- [02:05]
A
I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
- [02:07]
B
I had to have you on because I read about you and your mission. Not just your books, but the mission behind what you're writing about.
- [02:15]
A
Yeah, well, this is my favorite thing to talk about, so I'm excited to be here. I think that fiction has an interesting place in this conversation. I'm a former journalist, so I spent a lot of years telling stories, you know, based on fact and reality. I think fiction has the gives me the opportunity to tell some bigger truths that can't always be captured by facts, if that makes any sense. You know, get to emotional truths. And I think when people read a story or watch a movie or a play or any kind of narrative storytelling, they have the opportunity to see the world through someone else's eyes, to step into a story that is not theirs. And that can change someone's heart. It can make them think differently about something. And I think that's unique to art. It can give people basically. I mean, if you think about A novel. Maybe it takes 10 or 12 hours to read a novel. The reader who picks up that book is voluntarily putting aside their own worldview, their own point of view, you know, for 10 or 12 hours to take on mine, to look through the eyes of my characters and see the world the way I and my character see it. And maybe that'll change them. Maybe they'll think, oh, I never thought about something that way. And when it comes to the environment and ecology, climate change, I think that the people who show up for fiction, maybe sometimes those people wouldn't watch a documentary or read a 10,000 word New York Times in depth article about climate crisis, but they'll read a good story. And I have the opportunity to kind of hook them in into kind of a Trojan horse, like sneak the vegetables in, you know, and, and engage them in the conversation too.
- [03:50]
B
I like that. Yeah, I've read that you have taught this. You can't be preachy about it. And I totally agree with that. Making it so that it's obviously not a work that was only solely designed to get people to move in a particular direction is really important to you.
- [04:06]
A
Yeah. I believe as a writer, as an artist, my primary mission is to tell a good story. It's too, because if the readers aren't engaged in the story, they're not gonna keep turning the pages. And if they don't turn the pages, they're never gonna get to that big truth. I wanted them to understand. So I want people to be entertained, I want them to enjoy the story, to love my characters. That is my primary mission. And the truth is I never set out to write books that people would categorize as environmental fiction or climate fiction. Those were just the stories I wanted to tell. I didn't even know climate fiction was a category when I started writing. I just wrote the books that were on my heart. The stories that are in me always come out very steeped in nature, rooted in ideas that are worries that keep me awake at night, which tend to hinge on some element of climate crisis. So I tell stories to entertain people, but because they're seeing these stories through my view, they're getting some of the science, they're getting some concerns that I have in it. But when it comes down to it, I really want you to like the story. I want you to be like, want to know what's going to happen and be excited to turn the page and stay up to read one more chapter. That is my primary goal as a storyteller.
- [05:22]
B
When did you figure out that you could go from journalism to writing novels. And what was that transformation like?
- [05:30]
A
Yeah, there was a transition point in the center that is important here. So I was a journalist for decades, and I have four children. And so at one point, I stepped away from journalism, was just freelancing a little bit and home with my kids. And I started farming, which is a big pivot from journalism. And while I was farming, being so in touch with the land, having the dirt under my fingernails, and in my mind, I started writing a fiction just for fun, you know, and the stories I started writing about had to do with, you know, the. The natural world and the dirt under my fingernails, literally. So I started writing just to play while I was, you know, working the land and at home with my kids. And that book started taking on, you know, some gravity to me. I started really thinking this was a real book and started taking some fiction writing classes. And I got hooked really quickly. And I started thinking that this story needed to get out there, and I'd never looked back. My third book is coming out this summer. It's called the Forest Becomes Her. And I have a fourth book due in November to my publisher at St. Martin's Press, which will be coming out most likely in 2028. So it was never a conscious decision. It was just this kind of thing that bubbled up. And I think it was emerging of my love of research as a journalist and wanting to uncover the facts and find out more about things I was curious about was partly the experience as a farmer being very close to nature and the land and invasive species and things that were, you know, changing in the growing region where my farm was. So it wasn't a hard pivot from journalism to fiction. It was from journalism to farming to fiction. And I don't think any of them could have happened if the other one hadn't happened before. Then. They all added up, you know, I
- [07:24]
B
mean, Thoreau and those were telling us quite a long time ago about this, that this may happen to a good journalist.
- [07:32]
A
And actually, the new. The new book that's coming out, the Forest Becomes her, is very much engages Thoreau and Emerson. It's Set and Concord, Massachusetts. And it. It kind of asks this, you know, big picture question of, are the transcendentalists still talking to us? And it engages a lot with their, you know, philosophies about the natural world and how we coexist with it. It's a. It's a contemporary book. It's not a historical f. But it really leans into that transcendental history and history of the land and Concord.
- [08:01]
B
I wanted to ask you about the inspiration for the Forest Becomes her, but I also want to say I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't pick up on the multi entendre of the title. I think I went a little deeper than you're supposed to to get that. I'm not giving anything away. I'm just going to say there's a moment where everything. I think everybody is going to realize that it's not just one title.
- [08:26]
A
Well, I also love the fact that you just got lost in the book. That's always what I want. I don't want you to be thinking, I wonder what that title's about. I want you to just pick up the book and not think about anything else. But as far as the inspiration that you asked about this book is of all the books I've written, including the fourth one that I'm working on right now. The Forest Becomes her is my most personal book. It's the most of me is in this book than any other book I've written or am writing right now. So, you know, going back in the wayback machine Back to 1983, I was 13 years old and I lived in, on this piece of land and there was a forest behind my house and I was that kid that lived, you know, in a tree and building forts, damming up cricks in the, you know, in the woods. And I was, you know, just kind of this half feral child that loved playing outdoors. And it was my safe place and it was a place I took a lot of comfort and refuge in. And I used to, I mean I literally named the trees, obviously not all of them. And I'm not talking about, I didn't name them like you know, maple and oak, they had like private names like the shipwreck tree and the elevator tree and the vine tree. They were, you know, my friend, my company. And when I was 13, a big chunk of that woods was clear cut and houses were built on it. And it destroyed my favorite tree. And which might sound silly, but I mean this tree was. They had a natural vine that hung down in this U shaped loop that formed this little swing. So if you can imagine a perfect and nature's perfect swing that I would sit on it and it was right on the bank of a creek and I would swing out over the water. And I didn't think anybody in the entire universe knew that this is perfect tree in this perfect swing existed. And I used to go back there just to think, to read, you know, to cry On a bad day. And one day When I was 13, I went back there and it had been destroyed. And I really felt the loss of that forest like a death. And I've carried that, that grief around with me my whole life because it was also. I was 13, which is probably the worst year of any human's life. And I really needed that forest then. And it was a place and I wanted, when I wanted to escape school or, you know, and I lost that and I just internalized that. And then as an adult, flash forward, I was in my 40s and we were living. We had a house in New Hampshire surrounded by forest. And there was a hundred acre track of woods near our house. And we had bear and moose and deer that would frequently literally walk into my yard. We would look out the window and find a moose or a bear with cubs in our yard. And they came from this tract of land that was being on the market for clear cut and development. And that 13 year old girl and me just roared with panic. It was about to happen again. This time I was a little older, had a little more agency and I partnered with a local business and bought the land and we preserved the land. That forest, you know, 15 years later is still vibrant and those moose and bear are still hanging out in the woods. And that was where I built my farm. They had already cleared about 6 acres of the land by the time I got to it. So we built a farm on those six acres and I farmed it for up until a couple years ago. I sold it just because the book touring and writing started taking over my life. But the farm and all that land is in really good hands. And about 92 acres of land are preserved of forests. So when I was writing this book, there's. One of the main characters is a 13 year old girl who was mourning the loss of the forest that was destroyed in her backyard. That might sound a little bit autobiographical because it is. But you were talking about fiction giving you artistic opportunities that sticking to the truth doesn't. When I wrote this book, I didn't have to end the story the way my story ended. When I was 13, I could imagine whatever future I wanted. I could imagine this to end. So there's another forest in the book that is potentially going to be clear cut too. And I empowered this 13 year old girl in a way that I hadn't been as a child. I didn't have the boldness and the resources and the just relentlessness that my character does. And so it gave me this kind of an opportunity. To relive my own, that moment of trauma in my own life and play it out differently and imagine how I would like it to have worked out, which was a really empowering thing. Was really cathartic, too, for me to revisit both of the forests in my life, the one from my childhood and the one that I was able to protect. And this book really is kind of an homage to both of those forests, the one that disappeared and the one that still exists.
- [13:11]
B
Well, it's nice to meet you, Polly.
- [13:15]
A
Thank you. And I'll give you another little insight. All three of the main characters or a version of me at different points in my life. I've never done that before. That's why this book feels very exposing to me to write because, you know, we're all different people at different times in our life. You know, I'm a very different person than I was at 13. There's a character, another point of view character, named Hazel, who's in her 30s and Stella's in her 50s. And I was a different person in my 30s, and I'm now in my mid-50s, and I'm, you know, I'm still changing. And so I took these different versions of who I was, the different women I've been, different women I will probably become. And I wrote them into the same contemporary time space and allowed them to interact. They're not exactly carbon copies of me, but there's elements of each of these characters that are me at different moments in my life. And, you know, getting to watch them play together is kind of an exciting and empowering thing to do.
- [14:11]
B
I imagine that when somebody reads a book that has a character in it that's doing and feeling similar things to them, even though it's a work of fiction, but they're designing a different outcome or they're winning the day. Where in your real life you can't see how we're going to win the day. That's got to help. That really does have to move the needle in real world conservation terms.
- [14:36]
A
I think so, too. And I think it's important. I think it's so easy and very understandable how people get paralyzed by grief with eco anxiety and eco grief, because we're losing so much every day, we're losing species every day at an escalating rate. So it would be super easy to slip into this paralysis of grief. And sometimes when we talk about hope, when it comes to climate, I think some people can brand it as a Pollyanna attitude. If I say, well, I have hope for the future, I think defining hope is important because hope doesn't mean. Because I guess I should back up is I do have hope. And although I write about dark material, I think I write from a perspective of hope in all of my books. Not in a Pollyanna way, but I think my characters have hope in them. Even in their. Even in the dark moments, there is hope. But in defining hope, I don't mean that I think everything's gonna be fine. I don't think we're going to turn back to where we were 200 years ago in terms of climate. I don't think we're going to avert tipping points. I think we're going to lose more species. I think there's going to be more climate, migration and disasters. But hope can also. It doesn't have to mean everything's going to be fine. Hope can mean saving one species. Hope can mean saving one tree. It can mean a community coming together. It means not letting go of hope that things can be okay, that things can be better, or that we can do good in this world. Still. It doesn't have to mean that we fix everything. I think if we put that big burden on ourselves that hope only means we avert climate change, we're all going to be disappointed, so why bother, right? But if we define it as small goals and we have different things that inspire us, whether it's protecting a certain species of frog in the Amazon or in the case of Polly, in my book, protecting a single oak tree mattered so much and it had big consequences for this 13 year old girl. So I do 100% believe in hope, but I think we need to frame it in the perspective that there are a lot of different. Hope comes in different sizes.
- [16:59]
B
Yeah, I'm going to get some personal counseling from you.
- [17:03]
A
I'll give my best.
- [17:04]
B
This is one of the perks of this show. So I vacillate between everything, the headlines and everything that's going on that I can possibly keep track of which our bodies have not evolved to even be able to do any of the things that modern society is asking us to do or demanding that we do every day. But we do our best. And I am the kind of person that is a, that can work on a single tree thing and, and be very worried about and do whatever I can on a bigger scale. And sometimes people like me feel like we can't get anything done because we're going between things and we're not really being able to focus. So can you help me?
- [17:43]
A
I would say do both. You know, why because we can't give up on the big things. I mean, I believe in that small things matter, but I believe the big things matter more. I think reentering climate agreements that we have agreed to in the past would be a really big step. I think putting more pressure on corporations, putting pressure on politicians, all of those things are going to move the needle the most, more than saving a tree. So I think we need to be doing both. And I think personally, it's good for us to do both. For me, when that forest went down when I was a child, it was just devastating. And I was helpless. I was completely helpless. And that was what hurt the most, is I just sat there and watched it like I had. I had nothing to offer as an adult when this other forest was on the, you know, on the market and I was in a position to, you know, work with this local business to protect this piece of land. It felt really empowering. Did I save the world? Nope. Maybe I let, you know, kept a couple of moose and bear from being evicted and, you know, kept some great trees and protected some erosion and a little, tiny, little pinpoint, small piece of land in rural New Hampshire. I didn't change anything. I didn't change the world. But in that space of the world, I changed a lot. And I think if you're doing the small things, it gives you this boost of that change can happen or even prevent backsliding, if nothing else. But I think we absolutely can't let go of the big things. We need to be out there for the rallies, we need to be on the statehouse steps, we need to be calling our legislators, we need to be boycotting the companies that are doing all the bad things. You know, it's a combination of things. It's not. It's a yes and kind of situation, not an either or, but I think the grief is sort of inevitable. You know, we all are going to swing into. You know, I was with another author on a panel talking about climate one time, and she said something about how sometimes we need to be devastated and broken by climate news in order to be motivated to come back from it. You know, sometimes we need to feel the worst and feel the depths of our grief in order to climb back up and try to make things better. So I wouldn't fight your grief. And I'll also tell you, there's a. I don't know if you know the author, Heather White, who writes about eco anxiety. She has a great, you know, Instagram. Her name is Heather White and she's an environmental scientist who's a great communicator about climate science and climate activism. And she will give you hope because she gives you ways to make a difference and ways to not disengage. Because I think that's the worst thing we can do. If we let our grief paralyze us, then we disengage and that's the worst thing. So I would definitely check out her, her books if you haven't done so
- [20:37]
B
already, and maybe a cautionary tale of, you know, if you find someone who looks like all they're doing is giving up, they could just be in the throes of, of that devastation point. You don't know that they're not going to turn around at some point in the near future and, and begin the fight because they look like someone who's giving up. I found myself early on feeling a little preachy to people and now I'm like, well, how many people did I, did I get preachy with about that, about not giving up that were just in the throes of the devastation phase and they overall had no intent of giving up.
- [21:15]
A
And if you think about the people who are devastated and broken by climate grief are the people who care the most, right? It's the people who are the oil company executives and they're not the ones, the people building data centers, they're not the ones who are experiencing the grief. They're not the ones that are going to make the difference. The people who feel the grief most acutely are the warriors that we need most because they care. They've got something in this fight. And so I think it is a cycle sometimes and we can't, you know, we can't rest in the despair very long. But it's hard not to feel it. I mean, I think that's what makes people effective, is that they feel things deeply.
- [22:03]
B
Wilderness is self willed land. A wild animal is a self willed animal. They are earthlings that are as yet not thralls to man. Those words from Dave Foreman define why we do what we do. The Rewilding Earth podcast is a long running project of the Rewilding Institute. Because of listeners, donations and people and organizations sharing this podcast with others. You've helped us spread the blueprint for a wilder, more self worth willed world. But we can't let up. Most of the world still needs to absorb what it means to restore nature for its own sake. Please consider making a donation today to support the show. Your gift helps us reach the next generation of rewilders who will rebalance the natural world. Go to rewilding.org donate to help us spread the word. And thanks for standing with the wild. So I'm thinking about Edward Abbey and maybe Richard Powers. Authors who didn't write books just to write books. They also changed how we look at the land. And in your book forest become sir, you treat the forest as a sentient character, much like Powers did in the overstory. So I imagine that this is true, that you might see your work, your fiction work as a way to re enchant the world for readers who've been desensitized by scientific data, especially around climate change.
- [23:29]
A
Yeah, I mean, I hope so. I would love that. This one of the the first reviews I got for my first book for Waiting for the Night Song. This reviewer started out the review saying something I'm not quoting directly, something to the effect of I don't like politics in my fiction and I don't really pay much attention to climate science and I don't, you know, I don't really watch the news that much. So I'm like, oh wow, this is going to be a great review because it's person is not going to, you know, want to hear what I'm saying in my story. But she went on in the review to say, but I really love this story. I love the characters and I really cared about them. By the time I got to the end of the book, I cared so much about the characters that I cared about what happened to them. And I think differently about climate change now.
- [24:12]
B
Wow. That you must have had to sit down after that and think a minute.
- [24:16]
A
Yeah. That is the hidden vegetables. That's the, you know, that is the best, you know, case scenario. Because I imagine if you read my book and if you enjoyed my book, I would be so happy and grateful. Grateful and proud that you liked my book. But I bet I didn't change what you think because we are like minded, I believe when it comes to climate and the environment. But people who don't agree with me are the ones that I want to reach the most. I want them to come to it naturally. I don't want to come to it because I stood in a soapbox and said, you should believe this. I want to give them a reason to care. And if you have a reason to care about something, you want to protect it. I hope in the forest becomes her, particularly through this young girl, Polly's eyes. I want you to see her grief over the loss of the forest and see how acutely she feels pain because of the loss of this natural environment. And how she's fighting for it and to understand why she feels that grief and to empathize with her. And, you know, empathy can crack people open and change people. And I think that fiction and art in general has, you know, the capacity to do that where a documentary might not have the same, you know, And I don't mean I'm not putting down documentaries. There's a huge market for people who need to watch them and want to watch them and learning from them and stories that need to get out. It's just a different type of storytelling. So I feel very, like, honored and lucky that I get to do this.
- [25:43]
B
So if you were flying at 100,000ft above the earth and you were from another planet and you were just looking at that view, you would. You would not be wrong to think that humanity, this species that seems to be on top, on this planet, has no idea how connected it's supposed to be to nature. And the way that you really powerfully connect that in the book, in a way that is unmistakable, how connected we are, how connected your characters are to nature. I have a feeling there's a little bit of storytelling science behind that as well, in that I. I came away with the fact this is a very strong. We are so deeply connected to nature, and we are just floating around in a sense of otherness. That's not who we really are, who we're really supposed to be, and certainly with a weakest relationship with nature and where we came from that we've ever had in history. That's what I got out of it. Again, I'm the choir, so of course I did. But do you want that to translate to the readers who probably haven't thought as much about that topic?
- [26:55]
A
Yeah, 100%. I think that you're absolutely right that humans, especially in the modern world, tend to think of ourselves as separate from nature. There's, you know. You know, we go outside to experience nature, but we are nature. We are part of nature. We are connected to this world. It. It sustains us. You know, we think of ourselves as stewards of the natural world or having dominion over the natural world. And that's just an illusion because we are the natural world and we coexist with it. And the forest becomes her. There's, you know, we're dancing around, talking about the end of the book. So we're not going to go there, because I don't want to give that away to readers. But I do lean into the science of how substructures under the soil are so connected to each other. You know, if you've read this overstory or, you know, many other pieces of literature in the past 15 years about how microrsial networks of, you know, like fungal structures under the soil are connected to plant roots and microorganisms and bacteria and nematodes that live in the soil and how they. They feed each other, they communicate with each other, that there are chemicals like hormones in trees that will. If an invasive beetle is attacking tree on one part of the forest, they emit chemicals in the air that trees will pick up in another part of the forest. To know that this invasive species has entered the forest and that tree, who's been warned, can now start producing chemicals to fight off that invasive beetle that's in the forest and under the ground. They're sharing sugars, they're sharing chemicals. They're diverting resources to each other. They're talking to each other. The forest isn't a bunch of things just planted in the ground. It's a. You know, it's sentient in a way because it does communicate with each other. And we don't recognize ourselves as part of that. When we don't see, you know, when we walk by a tree and see that it looks diseased, we're like, okay, let's cut it down. It's a disease tree. Well, why is it diseased? What's going on that caused the disease? And how is that affecting other, you know, species in the forest or, you know, in my neighborhood? And we need to remember that one of them. Another inspiration for this book was an essay by Emerson called the Oversoul, which kind of hinges on this idea of, you know, God doesn't live up in a cloud, you know, ruling over, you know, humanity. It's like God lives in nature, in the trees and the rocks. And not in a pagan sense that I'm saying, like God is a tree. I'm saying that God exists in all of nature. And that was a really interesting essay to me. Cause it was this way of connecting, like, nature, humanity and divinity and spirituality all in one thing. And that. That really kind of blew. Blew my mind up a lot when I was writing this book.
- [29:48]
B
You know, if you're going to really touch on everything, you got to touch on secretly things like a secret trustee. And I believe there's a little bit of corporate accountability hidden in here. There's the vegetables. There's a big bad in this. And I think it's going to be fairly easy for people to go, oh, I know what she's talking About. I get it. I see what she was doing there. How powerful do you believe that is for other authors, young authors? How much would you want to put this in their veins so that they use these storytelling tools to move the needle in the real world?
- [30:23]
A
Well, the first thing I would say is I would never impose on any writer or any artist the requirement for their art to have political purpose. I think that if they feel moved, if, you know, there is also an argument that all art is political because it's founded in some sort of emotional feeling that comes from the world we live in.
- [30:48]
B
But you want them to get there in their own way, in their own time.
- [30:51]
A
And like I had said earlier, I never set out to write environmental fiction. I wrote a story that was on my heart because that is the story that I needed to tell. There are writers out there who, you know, are writing about other causes, about, you know, like, I don't know if Lisa Genova writes literature that deals with mental health. She's a neuroscientist, and she writes, you know, you know, wrote Still Alice and a whole vast number of books that deal with mental health crisis from the perspective of a scientist or novels. Um, that's her area specialty. These are things that keep her up at night that she wants the world to know. And I think we all have things that keep us up at night. And if you listen to it, like, what is it that keeps us up at night? Is it about, like, we need more bike lanes in our city? You know, is it that we want to stop the Taco Bell from moving into our town center? Historic town center? There are things that. That motivate us and move us. And if you're a writer that's going to, I think, bubble up into what you write. So I wouldn't be prescriptive, but I would say to be open to those ideas and when they start to surface, embrace them. And like, how can I make. How can I fully write that story that matters to me? Because if it matters to me, it's probably going to matter to somebody else. You know, like these stories. I'm hoping that it resonated with you. And it was because I wrote a story that really mattered to me, and I want it to matter to other people. I want them to see my humanity. I want them to see this forest and this girl that cares so much about this forest. And I think that's the only thing I would say to writers, is to listen to the thing that keeps you up at night, not the thing that keeps somebody else up at night. Are you really upset about this species of butterfly that used to exist in your neighborhood when you were a child? For me, I miss the fireflies. I grew up and had fireflies running all over my yard at night. And where are they now? What is that thing that's on your heart that you know? And then write about that, like dig into that and also think about why it matters to you and what you could do about it, or, you know, hand it to your characters. That's what I do. I take something, some sort of element of climate crisis that really bothers me, and I hand it over to my characters. And they don't all think about it the same way. You know, you mentioned the big bad in the forest becomes her. There's a, you know, a company that is doing some unethical things. There are many of those. You can, you can in your own mind make that company, be any company you want. But, you know, just to think about in the world that we live in, you know, how you can tell a story that will bring people in and see the world a different way.
- [33:40]
B
So on the prescriptive versus non prescriptive, you've mentioned that your novels or novels in general can be laboratories for climate futures. And I would expand that out to, yeah, that's true. That could be just for conservation, for rewilding, but laboratories in a way that become maybe like blueprints, not prescriptive, but give people other ideas through your characters of what a future could be if they tackled a problem this way or this way. And my opinion is that most people think that that's kind, that kind of writing is for real world stuff. Like we should write dry, you know, IUCN reports. Not to bully the IUCN or anything, but, you know, we should do that because it needs to be exact and people need to do this the right way. They need to rewild this way, they need to do this this way. And I'm not saying that those things shouldn't exist. I'm just saying, in addition to that, I really love what you're saying about our imaginations can be laboratories for different possible futures. And passing that along in your book to as many readers as possible is an imperative, I think.
- [34:50]
A
Yeah, and I have to admit that I got that idea, that first little nugget of an idea about the laboratory is from an interview I read with Jeff Vandermeer, the author who wrote many books take on climate issues, speculative fiction. He wrote Annihilation, which was made into a big movie, and a lot of other books that your Readers have probably heard of or read. But he said that he thinks of his books as laboratories for possible climate futures. And that really just got in my head. I made a whole class about that, that idea that I've taught. And I think what it is, is, you know, you can create a future. It can be a future that, an aspirational future. It can be into this utopian version of like, oh, we, you know, we averted the tipping point or, oh, we, you know, came out the other side and we are, you know, have eliminated all fossil fuels and we're, you know, kind of regaining control or we've adapted, we've, you know, there's so many ways you could go with an aspirational future, or you could do it, write a dystopian post apocalyptic future that shows us the worst case scenario, which also has value because we don't want that. Right? If you see a story that's a future you don't want to live in, maybe that's like really great motivation to not get there, you know, to avert that specific future. So I think that these laboratories for the future are so, they're, they're limitless. We can write any, I can write any future that I want to. Now, when I, when I write speculative elements in my stories, I want them to be plausible. You know, I want science, you know, I don't want to just invent a solution that makes no sense. I want it to be something plausible or I'll lose my readers. In my most recent book that came out in 2023, the last beekeeper, it's set in the. It's kind of a dystopian novel set in the near future where our pollinators have died off. And so we're in an agricultural crisis because when we lose our pollinators, we'll lose a third of the food on earth. That book is also infused with hope, but I wanted the science to be right. I worked with a beekeeping specialist to talk about pollinators, things that affect them, with agricultural experts, so that when readers read it, even though I introduced some speculative elements into this book, including some science that doesn't exist, but that could exist in the future, I needed to do the work to make it plausible. So I think a lot of these laboratories, they can be speculative, they can be futuristic and creative, but there needs to be an element of believability. Even if you introduce magic, there has to be something that readers can like emotionally hook onto and just go with the story and not be put off by that. Doesn't, you know, that doesn't add up because, you know, if you've write a story where there's no gravity, well, gravity exists. So that just destroyed the whole, you know, people aren't going to be engaged. So, yeah, these laboratories, these futures are limitless. And we get to show readers what it would look like to live in that future, but also we can show people what it looks like to live right now. There's a book by Jesmyn Ward which won the National Book Award several years back called Salvage the Bones, which takes place during, I think it's the 12 days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. It's about a black family in Mississippi that's got a bullseye on their back, but they don't know it. But we, the reader, do know what's. And we live in their world. As the storm is bearing down and as they're, you know, imagining evacuation opportunities and realizing they don't have any, they can't leave. They don't have the capacity to leave. While other communities that have resources are evacuating and they're left behind. We can put readers into climate realities that already exist, but they might not be experiencing them, which I think is also really powerful.
- [38:47]
B
You've given me so many things just to write down and check out later, and some of that I've been checking out. Like, I'm already Heather White's friend. Best friend. We go back five minutes.
- [38:59]
A
Excellent. You're going to love her. I think she'd be a great guest on your podcast in the future.
- [39:04]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. Because you might see her here and also the books, and I love that. I mean, someone like you. And fortunately, there are a lot of people who are lightning rods that when you talk to them, they know about a lot of things. They're walking little black books. You're certainly one of those. I mean, you've only exposed a tiny little tip of your iceberg here today, but I get the sense that we could talk for hours and I could get exposed. Our whole listener base could be exposed to just tons of things that we immediately need to go check out. So we do have an extra credit section at the bottom of the official page for this podcast. I know you're listen, listening in tons of different ways all over the place, but if you go to rewilding.org pod and find this episode, you will find extra credit. And for everything that I was able to capture here today and other things Julie might ply me with and anything else that will support what we've talked about here today. You will find that there@rewilding.org pod and this is neat because this, someone might be listening to this in 2027. In that case, the book has been out for a year. You can go get it now. But for the people who are listening to this, you know when it's released, the book's not going to be released until What, July?
- [40:24]
A
Yep, July 2026.
- [40:26]
B
So let's tell them how we get a hold of this book. Can we do pre orders? What's the deal?
- [40:32]
A
Yeah, it's available for pre order now. Wherever you order your books, I would suggest always going to your local indie store to order. You can pre order a book there and it'll arrive in your mailbox on July 14th. Think of if you pre order one, it's like a gift to your future self. You might forget you ordered it. And then July 14, it shows up in your mailbox. Yeah. So I can't wait to hear what folks think about it.
- [40:57]
B
That's a good point about the local bookstores. You can't just be nostalgic for the things you missed about the past. There are things you can do today to make sure that those things stick around longer. If they're still here and indie bookstores are still here. For those of you lucky enough to still have one in your town, please do support it. Julie, thank you for taking the time to be here today and, and letting everybody know about your latest book and about your thoughts about the power of fiction to move the needle in the real world. I just love that phrase. I don't know if I made that up or stole it from my research around you, but I love that because I love living in a, in, in those worlds when I'm reading a book and, and not just as an escape, but it is an escape from the real world. But to bring my what I've learned from those books into the real world and go, you know what? That wasn't so fantastical. I mean, I can see elements of that happening here. And then I start applying that filter to the world I see around me and I think that's just so powerful. You. You wield a mighty pen and I thank you for it.
- [42:04]
A
Well, thank you for having me. Thank you for what you're doing. You are, you are moving the needle with this podcast. So thank you for your work.
- [42:12]
B
On behalf of everyone at the Rewilding Institute, thank you for listening, sharing, and supporting the Rewilding Earth podcast. Over the last nine years, this show has grown into a significant global community because of people like you. If you'd like to keep that momentum going and rewild the world with us, please head over to rewilding.org donate your support ensures we keep telling the stories that the wild needs us to hear. Thanks for listening.