Referenced Texts

Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility edited by

Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023, p. 3.

“It is late. We are deep in an emergency. But it is not too late, because the emergency is not over. The outcome is not decided. We are deciding it now.” Rebecca Solnit: “Difficult Is Not the Same as Impossible.” 

Inspired by “Imagination is a Muscle: A Conversation with adrienne maree brown.”

“The climate crisis is a storytelling crisis.” 

"Remember" by Joy Harjo

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, 

Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. 

Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013, ix.

Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair. Golden green and glossy above, the stems are banded with purple and white where they meet the ground. Hold the bundle up to your nose. Find the fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth and you understand its scientific name: Hierochloe odorata, meaning the gragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. 

Adapted from Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

King begins each of the chapters in this book with a variation of an origin story, writing, “There is a story I know. It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle. I’ve heard this story many times, and each time someone tells the story, it changes.”

Stories are wondrous things (9). They help us understand our place in the world. There isn’t any center to the world but a story (32). 

But they are dangerous (9). For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world. So you have to be careful with the stories that you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told (10). 

Don’t be fooled. Stories are all that we have. A story told one way can cure, like medicine. It can fight off illness and death. That same story told another way can injure. 

But remember: you don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories (92).

Wendy Barker, Silk Roads

(The bolded selection was translated into different languages of the Silk Road: Chinese, Farsi, Turkish, Italian, and English)

Such a quiet act, the needle penetrating cloth. Loops of thread in coral, pink, fuchsia, teal, turquoise, forest green, lime green, mustard, lemon yellow, royal purple, brown, and black. The design dotted in crisp dark blue on the linen. A butterfly, a road.

The Great Silk Road. Overland. But by the time my great-grandfather set off mid-nineteenth century to find more silk for Macclesfield’s mills in Cheshire, he traveled by sea. The story goes he sailed up the Yangtze to ask the Chinese to trade. But how far upriver and on what sort of boat?

All from a worm, the caterpillar of a moth. Larvae of raspy crickets, silverfish, wasps, mayflies, leafhoppers, lacewings, and thrips produce silk, too, though not of good quality. Not used for textiles. And not for embroidery. Glossy three-ply filaments satin-stitching, chain-stitching leaves, wings, ridges in a winding path.

The prow of a ship cutting through water, the spray of droplets glistening in the light. A steel needle pricking the gaps between the woven linen threads, the needle emerging from underneath, poked back up again to the surface.

I don’t know what Great-Grandfather offered to trade for the silk, only that the Chinese told him to go back where he came from. But overnight a typhoon ripped the current, flattened the willows onshore. In the morning, tribal elders boarded the battered ship, said they’d trade with this blue-eyed foreigner, the spirits had willed it.

The pupas are dipped in boiling water or pierced with a needle and killed. Then the cocoon is unraveled as a continuous thread.

How a boat knifes its way through a current, lifting ripples, a wake. I want to slice through this story, unspool its lengths. Great-Grandfather didn’t speak Mandarin. Who translated? Who traveled with him? Did trackers drag the ship through shallows, narrows of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges, hauling that weight? And who paid whom for what?

Some embroideries are never finished. And even while careful to keep the underside tidy, to avoid messy knots and threads, it’s hard to see a pattern on the back of the cloth, where the colors, even while shimmering, tangle. 

Episode 8d: Expansion of the Suburbs

"Poem 133: The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Episode 11d: At Work

Text collaboratively created by Jared Sprowls, Rachel Bowditch and Karen Jean Martinson. 

Episode 11g: Scenes with Siri

Text collaboratively created by Ann Ethington, Kristina Friedgen, Ty Klassen, Clara Kundin, Becca Levy, Jared Sprowls, Rachel Bowditch, and Karen Jean Martinson.

Text collaboratively created by Jared Sprowls, Becca Levy, Kaitlyn Kief, Rachel Hutzenbiler, Kylie Wright, Jiarui Ding, Keenan Smith, Zoe Tyler, Philip Byrnes, Sophia Poliansky, Ian King, Rachel Bowditch, and Karen Jean Martinson.

Plastic: A Personal History by Elizabeth Bradfield

How can I find a way to praise

it? Do the early inventors & embracers

churn with regret? I don’t think my parents

—born in the swing toward ubiquity—chew

& chew & chew on plastic. But of course they

do. Bits in water, food-flesh, air.

And their parents? I remember Dad

mocking his mother’s drawer of saved

rubber bands and his father-in-law’s red,

corroded jerry can, patched and patched,

never replaced for new, for never-

rusting.

Cash or plastic? Plastic. Even

for gum. We hate the $5 minimum.

Bills paperless, automatic, almost

unreal.

 My toys were plastic, castle

and circus train and yo-yo. Did my lunches

ever get wrapped in waxed paper or

was it all Saran, Saran, Saran?

   Sarah’s mom

was given, in Girl Scouts, a blue sheet

of plastic to cut, sew, and trim with white piping

into pouches for camping. Sarah has it still,

brittle but useful. Merit badge for waterproofing.

For everlasting.

 You, too, must have heard stories,

now quaint as carriages, of first plastic, pre-plastic.

Eras of glass, waxed cloth, and tin.

Of shared syringes.

All our grocery bags, growing up,

were paper. Bottom hefted on forearm, top

crunched into grab. We used them

to line the kitchen garbage pail.

   Not that long

ago, maybe a decade, I made purses for my sisters

out of putty-colored, red-lettered plastic Safeway

bags. I’d snag a stack each time I went, then fold

and sew, quilt with bright thread, line with thrift store

blouses. They were sturdy and beautiful. Rainproof

and light. Clever. So clever.

 I regret them.

And the plastic toothpicks, folders, shoes that seemed

so cheap, so easy, so use-again and thus

less wasteful, then. What did we do before

to-go lids? Things must have just spilled

and spilled.

     Do you know

what I mean? I mean, what pearl forms

around a grain of plastic in an oyster?

Is it as beautiful? Would you wear it?

Would you buy it for your daughter

so she in turn could pass it down and

pass it down and pass it down?

From Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

So, with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began.

Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness [...].

Hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked. 

What people had shed and left – a pair of shoes,[...] some faded skirts and coats [...] those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated […].[3] (​​Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse)

From Cairo to Phoenix, desert cities rose where dammed rivers made arid soils livable. 

But after people are gone, the deserts will get drier and hotter while dams break and sea levels rise.  

In an abandoned city, there would be no one left to stop the flood.

In a post-people world, there’s no one left to patch the cracks.  

Adapted from Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

King ends each of the chapters in his book with a variation of the lines below:

Take this story. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. … But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. 

You’ve heard it now.