Wild Type

Living in Australia had gotten me and my Laddie off the hook for Thanksgiving travel since 2019, and we expected our recent relocation to Alaska would extend the streak. Then he wound up on a November business trip back to our native mid-Atlantic. With people we hadn’t seen in three years conveniently congregating for the holiday, we couldn’t pass up an opportunity to see them in one time-and-carbon-efficient visit. So I bought my own ticket on the same route, and the prodigal children donned their N95s to return home.

My concept of “home” liquefied during the pandemic. We sold our house right before the first big lockdown in March 2020 and spent months in AirBnBs, awaiting approval to enter Fortress Australia. Home was wherever I plugged in my laptop. When we finally made it to Oz, my employer provided furnished housing, a terrarium of someone else’s design. Years of that made “home” any place I curled up at night with my Laddie. While my domestic space shrank, my backyard stretched to the horizon. Trails and trees welcomed me wherever I went. Birds introduced themselves as chatty neighbors. The sky spread a glorious roof overhead. Adrift amid an apocalypse, I embraced Earth as my universal home.

I-95’s swollen river of pavement washed away many of those nature comforts. The community where my Laddie and I had owned a home, bucolic by local standards, had yielded more ground to new development. My childhood street hosted fewer bird species than I recalled. Running a solo “turkey trot 10k” around the hotel on Thanksgiving morning, I greeted Canada geese hunched over puddles in the parking lot. An occasional scarlet or yellow tree drew me like a moth to bask in its botanical flame. Had these landscapes become more ecologically barren in my absence, or were my eyes just jaded after Australia’s incredible biodiversity? Resigned to diminished suburban biomes, I didn’t expect to join an ecology expedition.

“Can we go play outside?” begged our niblings, aged three to ten. Thanksgiving brought the first dry weather in days, so the kids—including those in their thirties, ahem—scampered outside to play by the lake in my mother-in-law’s backyard. Crammed onto a drainage pipe like turtles on a log, the children scooped up water with empty yogurt containers, seeking small aquatic creatures. The night before they’d sat dull in front of the television. Sunlight animated them, with water splashing around their feet and mud streaking their sleeves.

“I found a shrimp!” My eldest niece cupped the crustacean in her small palm, where it paddled along a shoreline of chipped sapphire nail polish. Later she caught a small fish and kept him as a pet for the afternoon. “I’m making him a habitat,” she told me, carefully selecting weeds and stones. I smiled, recalling how many times I’d done the same at her age. Her stewardship of the makeshift aquarium made me wonder what kind of habitat we were creating for her.

October 2023 capped the hottest 12-month period in at least 125,000 years. The average global temperature for the year flirted with the critical 1.5C limit that experts assess would mitigate the impact of climate change. Earth’s underestimated sensitivity may accelerate global warming and breach that threshold far sooner than projected, according to a November paper. The world is quite literally on fire…and people are still stressing over holiday dinner menus and mobbing department stores for discount televisions. A recent post on the blog OK Doomer elegantly described this phenomenon as “cultural necrophilia”:

We’re living through the same abrupt climate shifts that ended previous civilizations… This world always had to end. It was never going to last more than a generation. It couldn’t. All the facts made that very clear from the start. The rich and the corrupt simply chose to ignore that. They lied. That’s not the worst part. It’s not the collapse. It’s not the death of our hopes and dreams. It’s the fact that we’re not allowed to grieve it and move on.

– from OK Doomer, “The World Has Already Ended”

This cornucopia of dystopia left me struggling with the old Thanksgiving rituals. Instead of agonizing over whether to serve pumpkin or pecan pie, we should worry about how climate change will make both crops more difficult to grow. (Hot, dry conditions already threaten pumpkin production across the United States, while drought and hurricanes have devastated pecan farms.) It seems perverse to sing songs about frost and snow when Antarctica’s melting ice shelves have lost 7.5 trillion tons of water in the last 25 years, driving sea level rise. My football team’s loss stirred no emotion against the prospective loss of my planet. Although I enjoyed spending time with my niblings, the Ghost of Thanksgiving Future haunted every moment with glimpses of what their holiday celebrations might look like when they reach my age:

“Can we go play outside?”
“No, it’s still warm enough for mosquitos. Do you want malaria for Christmas again?”
The children shudder, an echo of fever chills, and their mother lays protective hands atop their heads. “We can play Hiking Hero after dinner, if you promise to take turns with the VR helmet. Right now it’s almost time to eat.”
“Dad said that an hour ago.”
“Because I can’t tell when this stupid lab-grown turkey loin is cooked,” grumbles their father, his head halfway into the oven.
“Then it’s no different from the birds grandma used to make.” Reaching into the fridge, the woman pulls a bowl from among the vacuum-sealed protein slabs and SmarTaters. “It’ll taste fine drenched in this new sauce I found. Look–‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Cranberry.’”
“I can.” Her husband pokes the tapioca pearls bobbing in flavored red gel and wrinkles his nose.
“I like it!” The little boy swoops in with a spoon. “The pearls pop!”
“So will you, if you eat it all before dinner,” says the woman. Laughing, she carries the bowl to the table. Hazy grey light glitters on the silverware, and the video screen attached to the head chair. The rest of the family will dial in soon, transcending space, time, and travel restrictions to celebrate together. She opens her violin case on the sideboard, ready for digital duets with her musician parents. With her aunt improvising silly carols that leave the kids in stitches, the tradition generates enough loud joy to blow off the ceiling.

Maybe this year we actually will, the woman thinks. Then we’d have stars for our centerpiece.

She cracks the window and leans out. As if stars could penetrate that smog! The backyard oak, lone survivor of last month’s Category 6 hurricane, stretches stubbornly skyward as if its leaves could sweep the atmosphere clean.
“If you can open the window, how come we can’t go outside?” Her daughter demands, arriving with a fistful of freshly washed napkins.
The air filtration system beeps an alert, and the woman closes the window with a sigh. “Sorry. I’m just remembering Thanksgiving when I was your age. Your uncle and aunts and I played in the pond behind great-grandma’s house.”
“Eew, why would you touch that toxic waste?”
“It was clean back then—at least compared to now. Things could still live in it.” A faint sensation tickles her palm; glancing down, she imagines a minnow swimming along the fate line. “Fish. Ducks. Us.”

On Black Friday, while others swarmed the outlets for fast fashion and e-waste, we took the kids to a local park. It had once been a landfill, but despite a lingering sterility, it offered a pleasant community space. I walked around the pond, photographing coots that reminded me of Australia. My tall Laddie hoisted the kids in turn to dangle from the fitness trail’s pull-up bar. All of us charged down a grassy hill, dodging the gas vents to reach the playground.

“They might be the last generation that gets to do this,” I murmured to my sister-in-law as we watched her children romp on the slides and swings.
She nodded, a faint line between her eyebrows. “We try to spend a lot of time outside.”
The notion tore at my ribs. How can we bequeath our offspring a degraded world? How will they judge us for that inheritance? How could so many of playground’s parents, watching their children play in the shadow of a former trash pile, clutch disposable coffee cups? I spent 500 pages exploring these ideas in Syzygy, and concluded that I wasn’t hopeful enough to reproduce.

That doesn’t mean I abdicate responsibility for the planet. Quite the opposite: I’ll dedicate the energy I would have invested in raising kids toward salvaging their homeworld. Writing is the only substantial skill I can offer, but climate fiction alone isn’t enough. So I’m pivoting toward science communication. I just completed the first course in an academic program, and volunteered to do some media work for a local wildlife non-profit. In the coming year, I aim to publish more freelance articles. Wild Type will shift focus as well, incorporating more environmental journalism and perhaps fictionalized forecasts like the Thanksgiving dinner scene above (let me know what you think in the comments). I still intend to complete my Heavy Metal cyberpunk series—although adding schoolwork to my full-time job will slow progress—but as my creativity evolves, fiction will take a supporting role to fact. Because the fact is that if we don’t change our civilization right now, we condemn future generations to a bitter harvest.