Climate change is a topic very much in the news as people around the world experience the worsening effects of the phenomenon. Just recently, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) released the 2022 Global Assessment Report (GAR) on Disaster Risk Reduction, which emphasized the interconnection of global systems and how this makes many societies highly vulnerable to risk.
A contributing paper to the GAR analyzed several scenarios related to ecological factors and concluded that global societal collapse is possible.
Another study says that almost all nine planetary boundaries—among them ocean acidification and freshwater use, land system change, and climate change —will be breached by 2030. This is sobering information, but how many will actually read the reports or understand how these scenarios will affect us as individuals, as families, as communities?
This is where art steps in. Art provides a human connection and brings numbers, statistics, and scientific jargon to a level that anyone can understand. This is the value of the book Harvest Moon: Poems and Stories from the Edge of the Climate Crisis.
Through the work of writers, photographers, and artists from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and Latin America, who created 30 images and wrote over 30 poems, stories, and essays about the climate crisis, spanning 24 countries and 11 languages, this book brings into focus the horror and desolation that is now destroying habitats and communities around the world.
South Africa’s Malebo Sephodi writes about devastating floods that wash away property, lives, minds: “The rain came. But it did not bring joy. It brought misery…The storm swept her brother away. Her mother has gone mad. There is nothing we can do for them because everyone has lost something.”
Drought, for Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu of Zimbabwe, breaks hearts and stifles the future: “That was before the sun had suddenly become unbearable and cracked the earth. Lines were drawn, deep and intersecting, creating a puzzle of the land that I had always known and loved.” The main character in her piece can no longer plant the crops she used to and that sustained her family; instead, food from far away has to be purchased at a price.
Islam Juma Kapera from Tanzania bemoans human ignorance and unconcern about the environment: “They do not fear bad consequences – just look at their behavior / What they do is harmful, risking our lives. / They are relentless, causing suffering for us / What they do is useless, depleting their strength.”
There is so much power, honesty, and courage in these verses and sentences and the others that fill this beautiful book, while the images, in stark black-and-white, reveal the ravages dealt by the climate crisis.
The publisher lyrically describes Harvest Moon as an “anthology of loves and lives, of stories that thrive where borders and edges meet and where fates merge and collide like bodies of water seeking oceans and tides encountering clouds and landfall, habitats, and hives.”
Its Filipino contributors are Marjorie Evasco, Luisa A. Igloria, Dr. Joey A. Tabula, and Gawani Domogo Gaongen, who contributed a piece in Kankanaey.
The afterword was provided by noted essayist Rebecca Solnit, who has written on topics such as feminism, politics, art, and the environment. The importance of this book may be summed up in a couple of lines she wrote: “We are guided by stories, the old ones passed on, the new ones we made like rafts in a flood, the ones we told like water to pour on fire.
“Stories arose from this time, of those who did what was needed and those who stood in the way, and those who changed minds with their stories, of those new stories in which we saw a new heaven, a new earth, and a new humanity.”
In sharing the narratives of the climate crisis, we are also sharing hope and optimism that we can still turn the tide toward a better future.
Harvest Moon: Poems and Stories from the Edge of the Climate Crisis
Edited by Padmapani L. Perez, Rehana Rossouw, Alexandra Walter, and Renato Redentor Constantino
2021 / 308 pages, pb, large format / P599.60 (discounted from P1,499.00)
Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities and Milflores Publishing, Inc.
To buy, visit: milflorespublishing.com
For comments and feedback, you may reach the author on Facebook and Twitter: @DrJennyO.