Dempster Highway, north of Fort McPherson, NWT (photo by NIna Munteanu)
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In my upcoming eco-fiction novel Thalweg, Gwich’in limnologist Bobby-Jo makes her way back home to Fort McPherson, NWT, after the sudden flood of the Peel River has all but destroyed her Arctic hometown. She starts in Dawson City and takes the challenging gravel Dempster Highway north.
The Dempster is renowned for its remote beauty and driving hazards. Drivers today are cautioned to take sufficient provisions, including a tire-fixing kit and spare tires. By the time Bobby-Jo is driving the Dempster in the 2050s, the permafrost is actively thawing. One of the characters describes it as: “a thin ribbon of shale and mud floating tenuously on an unstable sea of melting ice, slushy rock, and murky water.”
The Dempster is a temperamental gravel and shale road originally built in 1978 when explorers found oil and gas in the deep bedrock of Eagle Plains. The highway roughly follows Jack Dempster’s original trail that he learned from the Gwich’in and old dogsled routes. They used two-metre thick berms of gravel and shale to prevent the road from sinking into the ground; other materials would cause the permafrost to thaw and buckle the road, creating small lakes. When the uunjit discovered that the deposits weren’t large enough to exploit, the Dempster turned into a ghost road. The road to riches turned into the road to nowhere, abandoned to the rugged wilderness of mountains and tundra and the wildlife that inhabit it. The Dempster was left to itself and its people.
Bobby-Jo, Thalweg
Below is a short excerpt of Bobby-Jo’s experience driving the Dempster north from Dawson City:
On a cloudy morning in late August, I drove the North Klondike Highway and turned north on the Dempster as it started to rain. After a few kilometres, the cracked pavement gave way to loose gravel. The car slid along the slick mud like a sled on snow.
The first stretch of the Dempster followed a wide valley of moraines fed by glaciers in the high granite peaks of the southern Ogilvie Mountains. In Tombstone Territorial Park I stopped the car and stepped out into the cold breeze to rest my eyes on the bald sheer towering rock that rose out of a broad sloping alpine valley with peaks sharp enough to cut the sky like a knife.
Gold, russet, gray-green, stunning yellow and purple carpeted the valley floor with impressionistic swirls of lichen, alpine shrubs, cotton grass and blazing fireweed. Dark flecks of stunted spruce trees and dwarf birch and willow added contrast. A fine mist flowed and pooled in the depressions of the lower slopes.
I breathed in the freshness of sub-arctic air and moist earth. It had stopped raining, but the moisture that clung to the air brought out an incredible richness of fragrances, an aria of sweet floral scents mixed with earth and tree pitch. It smelled like home. I inhaled slowly and deeply, filling my lungs with ancestral energy. It resonated deep inside me where this place lay embedded in my soul.
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Tombstone Territorial Park (photo by Yukon Travel)
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My Experience on The Dempster and The North
My good friend and story consultant Anne accompanied me on my research trip North. We first flew to Inuvik, whose stilted buildings all have utilidors (above ground piping) running among them to prevent the permafrost beneath from heating up. Already, some buildings were sinking and the new hospital developed a small pingo (ice pimple) beneath it; the ice was heaving and cracking the floors. Anne and I got to Inuvik just in time to witness a canoe race from Aklavik along the Mackenzie River, the first in many years. We ate whitefish tacos at Alestine’s, a funky bistro.
Utilidors in Inuvik, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Drummers bring in the canoes during the race from Aklavik, Inuvik, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Alestine’s Patio, Inuvik, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
The Dakota truck on the Dempster Highway, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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We rented a Dakota truck and drove the Dempster south to Fort McPherson on the Peel River to meet with my new Gwich’in friends who helped keep Thalweg authentic and respectful: Sharon Snowshoe (head of the Gwich’in Council) and Arlyn Charlie (a gifted writer). The town—which was totally destroyed in my speculative novel—was a small dusty community with one main street, a school, a church, and a few shops.
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Left: Sharon Snowshoe and Arlyn Charlie with Nina Munteanu; Right: main street of Fort McPherson (photos by Anne Voute and Nina Munteanu)
Boats moored on the Peel River, Fort McPherson, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Black spruce forest and marsh in the morning mist off the Dempster Highway, north of Fort McPherson, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Driving the iconic Dempster through spruce forest and tundra / marsh, felt invigorating and humbling at the same time. This remote road to the Arctic North felt steeped in history and many stories. As I write this (three years after our trip) Anne, who was the driver, reminds me that the Dempster was surprisingly smooth; probably the result of a recent resurfacing.
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Tanker truck speeds past us on the newly graded Dempster Highway, north of Fort McPherson, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Anne stands by the Dakota, taking in the view from the Tuk Highway, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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The new highway to Tuk, by contrast, was uneven and blemished with pot holes. The drive took us to the Beaufort Sea of the Arctic Ocean, which was surprisingly warm and fresh. I found no lingering marine smell or salt water tackiness to the touch. I then remembered that the Mackenzie River emptied into the Beafort Sea right next to the community. The best place to eat was Grandma’s Kitchen, where we enjoyed muktuk (whale blubber) and dried whitefish. Grandma Joanne served us out of her trailer and we ate overlooking the Arctic Ocean, kept company by ground squirrels looking for a handout.
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Left: muktuk and dried whitefish served by Right: Grandma Joanne, Grandma’s Kitchen, Tuk, NWT (photos by Nina Munteanu)
View of tundra and pingo from Tuk Highway, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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I felt an abiding sense of home as I brushed through the tundra, among Labrador Tea, cloudberries and bearberries, boots sinking into sphagnum and crowberry, with a stunning view of Ibyuk and Split Pingos in the distance. Tuktoyaktuk sits on the edge of the Arctic Sea; boats of all kinds line the shores. Normally a quiet town, we’d landed there during some festivities, which brought in locals from all around. Anne and I strolled along the main street, talking with friendly Inuvialuit.
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Shoreline of Arctic Ocean at Tuk, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Kieth Felix stands next to his rack of drying whitefish, Tuk, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Fireweed and marsh near Inuvik, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Iconic cotton grass found throughout the north along the Dempster and Tuk Highways, NWT (photos by Nina Munteanu)
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The North is a celebration of contrasts. A wilderness of rugged beauty, often misunderstood. A place, both harsh and desolate yet incredibly rich and beautiful. A wild place that promises infinite possibilities.
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Tuk Highway winds through tundra by the Eskimo Lakes, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Climate change is changing all that; the permafrost is thawing. along with the melting pingos, land is sinking and exposing dangerous sinkholes, ground slumping and landslides are increasing, coastlines are eroding to the sea, waterways are acidifying, and wildlife habits are changing:
Climate change and habitat destruction were silently destroying the Gwich’in’s way of life. Though, you’d never think it, looking at the pristine-like wilderness along the Dempster. That was the problem: much of the destruction was invisible. It isn’t seen; it’s felt I could hear Johnny say.
That was the North. More a mindset than a place. For most Canadians the North encompassed this collective myth of vast inaccessibility, and hostile grandeur. Early settlers’ portrayal of the North as hostile and isolated came from their inability to read the land and its rhythms, to know where the animals were and why they were there. The uunjit didn’t feel the land, Johnny kept saying. And because of that they would not know how to adapt to change.
—Bobby-Jo, Thalweg
Thalweg releases with Inanna Publications in Spring 2027.
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The Dempster Highway
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the lates on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
A recent MIT study reports that reliance on AI is causing mass ‘cognitive surrender.’ The study revealed that pervasive artificial intelligence usage is fundamentally eroding active learning and overriding intellectual agency.
The report warns that students are falling into what they call “cognitive surrender;” gladly offloading their cognitive skills to AI. The researchers argue that students too easily reach for chatbots, bypassing the ‘productive struggle’ crucial for developing critical thinking.
The researchers argue that this over-reliance has led to an “illusion of learning” characterized by rising homework scores but plummeting memory retention and test performances. The researchers report: “there are early signals that over-reliance on chatbots can have a range of significant negative consequences—diminishing critical thinking, weakening memory, eroding confidence, and undermining mastery.”
The report discusses an isolating shift in campus culture: vanishing traditional study groups and office hours sitting empty as students choose automated chatbot replies over human collaboration. They note that the effects of AI reliance extend far beyond bad grades. Some students, they report, are losing the ability to participate in class discussions.
As a side note to this, I had a recent discussion with Dot, my friend who helps run a local health food store in the village I live in; she sadly related an all-too common experience she had the other day: of a young woman who, upon entering the store, had perfunctorily declined Dot’s offer to help, and instead relied on the chatbots of her smartphone for the information she needed to make a wise purchasing choice. Dot and her obvious expertise was ignored in favour of the girl’s infinitely ‘smart’ chatbot.
To combat students’ over reliance on AI assistance, schools like MIT, and my own University of Toronto, are avoiding unreliable AI detectors and instead rebuilding curricula around human-centric assessments: oral exams, semester portfolios, and mandatory group work, all designed to rescue education by reclaiming the struggle of thinking.
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‘Cognitive Surrender’ A Form of Laziness
Philippe Roi and Tristan Girard, authors of La Théorie Sensorielle
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Philippe Roi, cognitive science researcher and former Editing Director of Le Courier de l’Intelligence Artificielle recently argued that, “The greatest peril posed by artificial intelligence is not that it accomplishes our tasks, but that it spares us the inner transformation required to carry them out.”
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Roi, who co-authored with Tristan Girard La Théorie Sensorielle, noted that a form of laziness is currently spreading around the world. “It is neither idleness nor indolence,” he writes, “but a growing dissociation between the result obtained and the being who should have [trans]formed themselves to achieve it.”
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“AI enables us to diagnose without understanding, to translate a text without mastering the language, to publish a book without having written a single line, to create a work without having conceived it.”
Philippe Roi
Student studying in a library (image by Philippe Roi)
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Roi warns that the term ‘Ignorance’ is changing as a result. “It is no longer merely an absence of knowledge; it is becoming an inability to gauge what one no longer knows how to do. The ultimate danger is that, after entrusting our cognitive tasks to AIs, we will also abandon to them the desire to learn which has made us thinking beings.”
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References:
Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research. 2026. “AI and Education.” MIT, August 13, 2026.
Blinder, A. 2026. “Universities Sound Warnings About A.I. Even as They Embrace It.” The New York Times.
Kos’myna, Nataliya. 2025. “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Dept when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.” MIT Media, June 10, 2025.
Tangermann, Victor. 2026. “MIT Report Finds That AI Is Leading to “Cognitive Surrender” Among Students. Futurism, September 19, 2026.
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Field in late fall, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the latest on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
My guest today is author Simon Rose, who has published twenty-one novels for children and young adults, eight guides for writers, more than a hundred nonfiction books, and many articles on a wide variety of topics. Today he’s here to tell us more about his two latest novels, The Memory Bank – All in the Mind and The Memory Bank – Prisoners of the Prism.
Nina:Welcome, Simon!
Simon: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.
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Nina:Where did you get the idea from to create The Memory Bank novels?
Simon: For these books, I was first inspired by how people often have casts made of a beloved pet’s paw made when their faithful friend passes away. It’s certainly something I’ve done over the years. I then remembered how death masks have been created of notable people throughout history, well before the invention of photography, so that we know what some of these people actually looked like and in some cases the mask closely resembles the person’s face as portrayed in a painting. The ideas began to converge.
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Nina:There are some quite well known people of which death masks were made, aren’t there?
Simon: Yes, there are masks that were made of the faces of Martin Luther, Oliver Cromwell, Mary Queen of Scots, Marie Antoinette, Isaac Newton, Horatio Nelson, John Keats, Ludwig van Beethoven, and a number of others. Perhaps the most notable one for me is Napoleon Bonaparte. Some people dispute whether it’s really him, but the mask does bear an uncanny resemblance to his many portraits. There are links included in both books and here on my website in the Sources of Inspiration page if you’re interested in learning more about this topic.
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Nina:I know that you’ve always been fascinated with different historical eras. We can see that from many of your previous novels. Were the masks something that you’ve always been interested in?
Simon: Yes, I’ve always wondered about them, but I wasn’t sure how I’d ever be able to include them in a story. I was also aware of masks worn at carnivals in Venice, which seemed to be a natural fit as I was putting the story idea together for The Memory Bank.
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Nina:How did the pet souvenirs serve as inspiration for the story?
Simon: Without giving away too much of the story, for the two novels I speculated how in the modern era masks could be made of a person’s face. This would then preserve their memories, as seen through their eyes, for their family members to see on a screen after the person’s death. This would be just like viewing photographs or watching home movies.
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Nina:Sounds incredible. You certainly have a wonderful imagination.Tell me a little bit about your next project.
Simon: I currently have a couple of fantasy projects that I’m working on, so they’ll probably be taking up most of my creative time for the next little while. I’ll also be out there promoting The Memory Bank novels whenever I can. For regular updates, people can subscribe to my newsletter, which goes out on the first day of the month. They can do that on my website at www.simon-rose.com where they can also learn all about my other books.
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the lates on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
The sleepy village of Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean, NWT (photos by Nina Munteanu)
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A few years ago, I travelled to the village Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories on the Arctic Ocean. I was researching my upcoming eco-fiction book Thalweg with Inanna Publications (scheduled for release in early 2027). I drove with my friend Anne Voute; we rented a Dodge Dakota truck and drove the Dempster Highway north from Inuvik and the recently completed NWT Highway 10 (completed in 2017), which provides the remaining 140 km stretch to the Arctic Ocean.
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Black spruce forest along the Dempster Highway north of Fort McPherson, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Highway 10 to Tuk winds through the tundra and Husky Lakes, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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In Thalweg, main character Bobby-Jo is a Gwich’in limnologist who grew up in Fort McPherson in the Arctic Circle, land of permafrost.
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Poster Child of Permafrost
Ibyuk Pingo, near Tuk, NWT (photo shot from Cessna 172 by Adam Jones, 2013; Wikipedia Commons)
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The poster child of permafrost is the conical ice-cored pingo, common in the Pleistocene Coastal Plain. Pingo is an Inuit word that means conical hill.
Pingos form when a mass of water is trapped beneath permafrost under pressure. Also called hydrolaccoliths, these huge mounds of earth with ice cores can reach up to 70 meters in height and 600 meters in diameter. Pingos usually grow a few centimeters a year, with the largest having taken decades or even centuries to form. Pingos eventually break down and collapse. They collapse when the ice core melts. This may happen when cracks form on the sides of the pingo that may reach down as far as the ice core, exposing the ice to warm air and sunlight. Once the core completely thaws, what remains is a doughnut-shaped ring of raised tundra enclosing a small round lake. Evidence of collapsed pingos in an area suggests that there was once permafrost there.
Hydrostatic (closed-system) Pingo (illustration by E. Ginn, 2021)
Development of closed-system pingo (illustration by Encyclopedia Brittanica)
Map of major pingos in the Tuk area, NWT (pingos marked with black semi-circle)
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One quarter of the world’s pingos, more than fourteen hundred of them, are in the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula, part of the Mackenzie Delta of the Northwest Territories of Canada. The Inuvialuit and their Thule ancestors used these cone-like hills as navigational landmarks or lookouts when looking for caribou or whales. Hunters also used hollow pingos to freeze meat.
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Ibyuk and Split Pingos (photos by National Air Photo Library, Ottawa)
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Pingo National Landmark protects eight pingos with the most famous being Ibyuk and Split. Ibyuk is about 50 meters high; it is the tallest pingo in Canada and the second tallest in the world and estimated to be more than 1,000 years old. It is also the world’s largest growing pingo, up to recently growing at a rate of about half a centimeter per year. With ongoing climate change, this is also changing. A local information sign in Tuk mentioned that Ibyuk Pingo has stopped growing and is beginning to slump, which is changing its shape. Kilutqusiaq—Peninsula Point—is a pingo on the coast that is almost completely eaten away by erosion: having eroded about 35 metres since 2004.
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Pingos viewed across tundra near Tuk, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Climate change in the Arctic has caused some permafrost thaw slumps on lake shores, rivers and coastlines; shoreline erosion and sea level rise has swallowed buildings and cultural sites in the Tuk area. Kilutqusiaq—Peninsula Point—is a pingo on the coast that is almost completely eaten away by erosion: having eroded about 35 metres since 2004.
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Tuk sign on warming climate impact on pingos
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In the time of my novel Thalweg—2050s—hundreds of pingos near Tuktoyaktuk are caving in and forming circular ponds due to climate change. Giant ice-pimples are exploding as methane-rich gas hydrates decompose and form pressure bombs of combustible methane. The subsidence creates huge sink holes as wide as a house and deeper than hell.
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Thalweg
Ibyuk Pingo seen from nearby sandspit, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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During her travels, Bobby-Jo thinks of her Inuvialuit friend Mary Steen in Tuk where giant pingos are thawing and exploding—thanks to climate change and permafrost thaw.
When we were kids, Mary took me up the Ibyuk Pingo, the giant cone mountain over a thousand years old. It’s the second highest in the world at forty-nine metres high and three hundred metres across and was still growing a few centimeters a year at its centre—despite the warming climate. Ibyuk is a hydrostatic pingo, which means it formed in an area of continuous permafrost and grew up from a large thermokarst lake. Expelled pore water from permafrost aggradation pushed up the old lake silts and sands from below, and the ice-mountain rose up like a giant frozen pimple above the ancient drained lake flats.
Ibyuk Pingo from a nearby spit of cottongrass and marsh grass, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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We shouldn’t have been there; regrowth from trampling is extremely slow, often taking over half a century. The tundra moss, lichen, shrubs and krummholtz help insulate the pingo against ice core melting. When the ice core of the ice-cone is exposed, particularly if the vegetation blanket has broken open by dilation cracks or through erosion, the ice thaws and the mountain eventually collapses. During our climb, Mary and I noticed deep furrows in the vegetated soil layer. They cut down the slope as if a giant bear had clawed it and revealed the pingo’s icy sores.
When Mary and I returned to Tuk from our adventure, she got into trouble with her parents; someone had spotted us climbing the ice mountain and told them. I got a lecture and Mary was grounded for a week.
Because I was visiting, I was grounded alongside her. Pingos are living things, her parents told us sternly. They breathe, they grow, they shrink, they ebb and flow like water; they pulsate vertically. And we’d been in great danger. The Ibyuk Pingo was unstable—not just from a warming climate but from yahoos sliding down its steep sandy slopes and kids climbing where they shouldn’t. Did we know that the depth to its ice crust under the crater pond was shallow and fragile? When we were at the summit, the crater could have collapsed with sudden drainage of the pond and we would have disappeared in a roiling black sink hole!
When I last spoke with Mary five months ago, she told me that the area was starting to look like a moonscape, with craters everywhere. I thought of our little adventure on Ibyuk and decided that my analogy of a pimple or boil was appropriate given that pingos ruptured and flung their icy guts outward with explosive force. Mary admitted in a voice trembling with emotion that Ibyuk, the giant pingo we’d hiked up, had finally collapsed from massive coastal erosion and sea level rise. But not before it exploded.
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Thalweg releases with Inanna Publications in Spring 2027.
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Road through tundra to Tuk with pingo in background, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Glossary:
Pingo: A dome-shaped mound consisting of a layer of soil over a large core of ice in a permafrost area. Pingos form when a mass of water is trapped beneath permafrost (ground that is frozen for at least two years) under cryostatic or hydraulic pressure. One quarter of the world’s pingos are in the Tuktoyaktuk peninsula, more than fourteen hundred. Most are closed-system hydrostatic pingos, pingos formed in an area of continuous permafrost from pore water expulsion caused by permafrost aggradation at the bottom of a drained lake.
Permafrost Degradation: A naturally or artificially caused decrease in the thickness and areal extent of permafrost (Jorgenson, 2013). Widespread degradation of near-surface permafrost (40-80%) is projected by 2100 (Abbott & Jones, 2015). Release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost is likely the largest terrestrial feedback to climate change and one of the most likely to occur (Abbott & Jones, 2015). Degradation of permafrost soils can lead to the collapse, drainage and disappearance of water bodies (Vincent et. al., 2011). Jorgenson categorized twenty-three types of permafrost degradation based on dominant ice type, hydrologic regime, heat source and mass transfer.
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Cottongrass field with black spruce behind, off the Tuk highway, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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References:
Abbot, Benjamin W. and Jeremy B. Jones. 2015. “Permafrost collapse alters soil carbon stocks, respiration, CH4, and N2O in upland tundra.” Global Change Biology 21: 4570-4587.
Jorgenson, M.T. and T.F. Osterkamp. 2005. “Response of boreal ecosystems to varying modes of permafrost degradation.” Can. J. For. Res. 35: 2100-2111.
Jorgenson, M.T. 2013. “Thermokarst Terrains.” In: John F. Shroder (Editor-in-chief), Giardino, R., and Harbor, J. (Volume Editors). Treatise on Geomorphology, Vol 8, Glacial and Periglacial Geomorphology, San Diego. Academic Press. pp. 313-324.
Harris, S.A.., French, H.M., Heginbottom, J.A.., Johnston, G.H., Ladanyi, B., Sego, D.C., van Everdingen, R.O., (eds.). 1988. “Glossary of permafrost and related ground-ice terms.” Technical Memorandum 142, Permafrost Subcommittee, National Research Council of Canada.
Mackay, J.R. 1998. “Pingo growth and collapse, Tuktoyaktuk peninsula area, western Arctic coast, Canada: a long-term field study.” Geographie Physique Quaternaire 52(3): 1-53.
Munteanu, Nina. 2027 (upcoming release; in press). “Thalweg.” Inanna Publications, Toronto, ON.
Vincent, Warwick F., et.al. 2011. “Ecological Implications of Changes in the Arctic Cryosphere.” Ambio 30: 87-99.
Ibyuk Pingo seen from nearby grass-covered sandspit, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu
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Scenes from in and near Tuk: top left, cottongrass; top right, ground squirrel; bottom, tundra scattered with spruce trees along Highway 10, NWT (photos by Nina Munteanu)
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the lates on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
Our current world—under the final shadow of climate calamity and environmental destruction—is steadily polarizing: politically, socially, and environmentally. Wealthy vs. poor. Privileged vs. indentured. Right vs. Left. Educated vs. illiterate. And so on.
This is the opposite of what we need—particularly to deal with the hyperobjects of climate change and environmental destruction; these require a united global intelligence and effort to address and overcome. Oddly enough, the hyper-destructive forces that we’ve unleashed are only intensifying our polarization as our capitalist paradigm encourages separation, segregation, and ‘othering.’ As more things go wrong, some look to lay blame. There is always the ‘Other.’
As there appears less to share, some greedily disparage ‘the other’ and take what they consider theirs in a version of Sonderweg—an elitist’s special and privileged path.
Polarization leads to lack of consensus, greater misunderstanding, violence and eventually to outrage. Polarization breeds fanaticism. Borne of deep frustration and fueled by relentless passion, fanaticism sparks violent change. We are seeing some of this today throughout the world: unhinged fanaticism, fed by growing polarization and exclusion. In Germany, the far-right fascist Reichsbürgers movement violently rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state. In the USA, far-right white supremacists and Christian fundamentalists incite domestic terrorist violence fueled by nativism, populism, anti-communism, and ultra-nationalism.
Eco-terrorism—from mild civil disobedience to destructive violence—is increasing in tandem. Eco-terrorism has increased by over 22% since 2017 as acts of radical environmental activism have steadily escalated into environmental warfare.
Amid all this violent foreplay between fanatics, the rest of us slide into a solipsistic brain coma as we stare mesmerized at our phones expecting godlike answers delivered uniquely to us by chatbots.
I recently read on Locus Magazine a commentary by Canadian author Cory Doctorow called “Hell is Other People” in which he characterized our AI-infatuated oligarchy:
A subset of humanity is committed to a world where everyone else takes orders from them. We have different names for these people. We call the majority of them “toddlers,” but we call the others “bosses” or “tyrants.” These latter two groups – who, unlike toddlers, are unlikely to outgrow their belief that everyone else should shut up and do as they’re told – are also among the people most excited about AI. What’s more, the more powerful these people are, the more credulous and enthusiastic they are about AI.
Among bosses, the most enthusiastic boosters are tech overlords. These billionaires will not shut up about AI, and, tellingly, the thing they’re most excited about is the fact that AI might let them fire programmers and replace them with chatbots.
While tech bosses look forward to AI replacing workers, social media bosses (like Mark Zuckerberg) look forward to AI replacing friends. How many of us are already relying on AI (which uses the first person narrative) to answer almost every question?
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According to Doctorow, “Zuckerberg hopes that bots will produce a social media service without socializing. If he can imprison you in a mirror-palace of chatbots, he can order them to say the things they calculate will make you keep scrolling, and he will owe them nothing.”
This, of course, aligns with the oligarch’s puppet regime, whose first directive is to remove opposition provided by independent-thinking people. Doctorow pithily describes it:
The broccoli-haired brownshirts from DOGE laid waste to the civil service, indiscriminately firing skilled workers who do things that America needs done. When asked to justify this vandalism, they said that those fired workers were superfluous to requirements, because “General AI” was just around the corner. The idea of creating and enslaving an artificial god is so attractive to them because it allows them to realize the fascist dream, in which every whim of their cult leader is instantaneously translated into action – without having to pass through the filter of skilled people who understand how things work.
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Ink cap mushrooms curling and deliquescing (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the latest on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
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Acorns line up beneath a red oak, Jackson Creek Park, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Reviews of my climate thriller Gaia’s Revolution continue to trickle in. The latest is by Canadian speculative author Noah Chinn:
“When choosing what to read, it’s important to sometimes go out of your comfort zone. This is one of those times…This is not a story I would read for fun. But it is an important story that should be read.”
Noah Chinn, author of Lost Cargo
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CANREADS Review of “Gaia’s Revolution”
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the latest on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.Her latest eco-fiction novel Gaia’sRevolution was released by Dragon Moon Press in March 2026.
David Eggers—famous author of many best selling books (e.g., Contraposto, The Circle, The Eyes and the Impossible)—recently spoke at the OpenAI Headquarters. It seemed an excellent opportunity for him to give them some advice on AI use by writers.
He told the staff that the “effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic,” adding that “whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago.”
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Eggers called out OpenAI staffers for enabling the rapid cognitive deterioration of an entire generation, tech that has turned educators into involuntary AI detectives, and budding writers into prompt engineers.
His advice to an employee who mentioned that they used ChatGPT to write a poem: “So, why don’t you leave your house, leave the screen, meet some people, get yourself in a writing group. Another human might be very encouraging and help you express yourself authentically.”
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References:
Tangermann, Victor. 2026. “Author Invited to Give Speech at OpenAI Headquarters, Uses Opportunity to Trash AI to Their Faces”. Futurism, July 21, 2026.
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the latest on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
Nina Munteanu with Simon Rose and Suzanne Lieurance on Writers To Writers Podcast
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I was recently interviewed by Simon Rose and Suzanne Lieurance on Episode 4 of Writers To Writers June 2026.
We covered why I write about ‘green issues’ in my fiction, how I came to write eco-fiction and my aversion to littering—an aversion which Suzanne shared she also felt—which I ascribed to a disrespect for others and ‘the silent other’, represented by the natural world. We discussed my influences as a kid growing up and then later as an adult.
I shared how I have incorporated ‘green issues’ in both my fiction and non-fiction writing and short and long fiction. We shared how we started as young kids creating stories for our families and neighbourhood friends, developing our skills as storytellers.
We also discussed the strange world of writing and publishing and how a prequel to a prequel can come about. This then morphed into a discussion of morally gray characters and their evolution and why I find the character Loki far more interesting than Thor. If you want clarification on these, go have a listen!
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the latest on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
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Nina Munteanu interviewed by Simon Rose and Suzanne Lieurance on Writers To Writers Podcast
In my latest eco-fiction novel (Re)Genesis (upcoming), four teenagers in ‘small town’ Ontario discover and unravel a conspiracy by a chemical factory that uses shapeshifting substances for weapon use, causing a shift in the genetics of humanity itself. The discovery eventually leads them to communist Poland where it all started with the cyanobacteria Nostoc commune.
(Re)Genesis follows the premise of dark karma as Nature learns to reflect back what we send out. Making use of real examples of learning, pattern recognition, anticipation and adaptation in non-human life, the novel explores the concept of biosemiosis* in this eco-thriller.
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Nostoc commune found colonizing a gravel path, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Ahmed Bennu, a mind-challenged boy, who is arcanely transformed by a tragic incident into a genius publishing papers at Harvard, pursues the concept of biosemiosis in Nostoc commune, a ubiquitous cyanobacteria (blue-green algae)—and an organism his own body has begun to mimic—that has colonized the world. In a scientific paper published by Nature, he describes the ever-increasing fluidity in Nature and argues that Nostoc can anticipate and exert goal-oriented behaviour to change itself and its environment. He joins Harriet—who lost her best friend in that arcane incident—and their investigation leads them to a nefarious past, to the 1950s, deep in the Kurpioska Forest of Poland, where chemical company Zima Elastomers used Nostoc to concoct a freakish substance for the communist military. Not only did the substance infect the workers there; it escaped with dire consequences for the world’s future.
Of course, it’s just science fiction. But is that all it is?…
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Biosemiosis & Umwelt
In the 1930s, Jakob von Uexküll coined the term Umwelt* (species-specific reality or subjective environment) to define a life process that involved semiotic* interactions. He argued that an organism’s behaviour results from activity that attributes meaning to the world around it, rather than merely mechanically reacting to stimuli. Building on this notion, Friedrich S. Rothschild coined the term “biosemiosis” in 1962 to postulate that life has its subjective interpretation of the world around it—its Umwelt—a segment of the world that has significance and meaning based on that life’s biology and needs. Developing the concept of biosemiosis further, Thomas Sebeok later contended that all organisms are enveloped in a cloud of messages about themselves and their situation, which they constantly transmit, receive, and interpret. Life itself is a process of signification and meaning-making, from bacteria and plants to mammals and birds. Biosemiosis involves pattern recognition, anticipation, flexibility, goal-directed movement, memory, and learning.
All organisms participate in complex interactions that involve sophisticated signaling and exchange. In Planta Sapiens, Paco Calvo argues that, “this happens at the level of single-celled organisms, which can collect information and make decisions.” The slime mold Physarum polycephalum,for example, is an amoeba-like cell that can navigate its environment through learning, memory, and decisions. In the 1980s, evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis argued for intelligence of bacteria based on similar observations.
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Nostoc filament showing various adaptive cells (illustration by Nina Munteanu)
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My novel (Re)Genesis features the cyanobacteria Nostoc commune, known to be highly adaptable to changing environments and known to participate in complex interactions by entering into symbiotic relationships (e.g. plants, fungi and lichen) that involve complex communication and exchange of resources; biosemiosis in action. In my novel, Nostoc commune is used by Polish biochemical company Zima Performance Elastomers as the driving core of a synthetic protein substance with chameleon properties called Syprene and meant for covert stealth operations by the military. Not unlike Margaret Atwood’s calamitous dystopia Oryx & Crake, things go wrong at Zima: terrible unintended consequences occur as non-human biological intelligence asserts its self-determination and humans find their sovereignty eroded into a more fluid existence.
In a scene close to the middle of the book, two sisters wish each other goodbye at the train station in the village of Mala Dolina, built for Zima Elastomers; a veil of dark portent overshadows them both:
Ewa and Zofia stand in awkward silence at the little train station in town, waiting for the train. A thick snowfall covers the tracks and the ground. The snow comes down like thick confetti, covering everything with a soft blanket of white.
It’s time for her to return to Warsaw to teach the winter semester at the university. She hates to leave Zofia with the twins so young, especially with Piotr not totally recovered. But, given how their work shifts now overlap less, surely Piotr can look after the twins when he’s home. It is not perfect, but it must work, she decides. Things must go on.
Ewa glances covertly at Zofia, standing next to her on the platform, and worries nonetheless. Piotr is definitely not fully recovered from his accident last fall. She finds him often morose and strange, staring off into the distance for a protracted time or saying odd things that have nothing to do with anything. Pieces of nonsense. He seems to have lost his joy for life and it is impacting her sister. He now walks with a stoop. Shortly after Christmas, Zofia had anxiously confided to her something distressing: Piotr had told Zofia that there was something in the brine pit. Something moving and alive. This is, of course, impossible. Nothing can live in that cesspool of poisonous waste. Zofia reminded her that Agata had made that same claim shortly before she was found dead and floating face down in the brine pit. Ewa recognized real terror in Zofia’s eyes. Neither said aloud the terrible thought that went through their minds: was Piotr going mad?
Ewa hears the train approach and soon it comes around the corner, emerging out of the thick pine forest, pushing through the snow on the tracks. Both women glance at one another with fake smiles.
What follows validates their fearful foreboding.
Process philosopher Alec Borislow writes, “There are invisible meanings, signs, and messages constantly being transmitted that shape the reality of all life forms. Biosemiotics aims to make the unseen seen.”
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Heterogenous Being*
In his 2025 PhD thesis, Steven L. Ogden explored the dichotomous narrative that separated human with non-human. Evoking the term “heterogenous being,” Odgen acknowledged the influences and potentialities of nonhuman subjects in narrative, both in fiction and nonfiction.
Ogden writes that “like René Descartes, many today still consider the mind or “rational soul” of humanity to be entirely exceptional to and independent of animality, and believe no part of Man (as master and possessor of nature) could derive from the “potentiality of [nonhuman] matter.” Ogden quotes Donna Haraway (author of When Species Meet) who said that “to exist as an individual is always to become with many.” She is talking about the thousands of species living symbiotically inside us and around us that keep us alive. This is what philosopher Levi Bryant refers to as a democracy of objects in which “humans are no longer monarchs of being, but are instead among beings … and implicated in other beings.” We are entangled in beings. We are implicated in other beings.
In his exploration of Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory, Ogden points out that one of Powers’s main characters, botanist Patricia Westerford, understands that her peers believe plants live an inanimate existence, whose rooted immobility points to a kind of “unfreedom” that represents an “archetype of inert matter.” According to poet David Hinton, this devaluation of plant life relates to the human-nonhuman duality, “a Western dichotomy that relegates the vegetal world to a space of ‘linguistic silence.’” And yet plants are biosemiotics, exhibiting cognitive behaviour through adaptation, anticipation, flexibility, and goal-direction. Plants demonstrate phenotypic plasticity through their complex engagement with their environment, shaping what emerges.
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Various slime molds, ON (photos by Nina Munteanu)
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There is a growingzeitgeist of not just planetary awareness but of sensibility, a sense that we are interlinked with all other life and nonlife, that we are all more than the sum of our parts. And that intelligence—no matter how it is interpreted and measured—is far more prevalent than we thought, and found everywhere: from bacteria to insects to plants to animals, fungi and slime molds. Indeed, works devoted to incredible and intelligent nature of the non-human world have increased dramatically. Notable examples include Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds; Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, Suzanne Simard’s TheBreathing Trees, Paco Calvo’s Planta Sapiens and Zoe Schlanger’s TheLight Eaters.
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Several books on nature’s intelligence
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Is it possible that we have finally escaped the oppressive shackles of 17th Century Cartesian dogma contesting that dogs have no feelings?
God, I surely hope so.
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Glossary:
Umwelt: a segment of the world that has significance and meaning based on an organism’s biology and needs: sounds it hears, scents it smells, foods it tastes.
Semiosis: the process of interpreting something as signifying something else using the process of signs, symbols or sound to produce meaning.
Biosemiosis: a biological term for ways organisms communicate, interpret meaning, and interact with their environments through signs and codes.
Heterogenous Being: a way of being that recognizes and incorporates humanity’s pluralized configurations with the nonhuman world by uniting the studies of science and humanities into an interdisciplinary hybrid creative-scientific aesthetic.
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References:
Barbieri, Marcelo. 2008 (ed). “Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis” Springer, Netherlands. 525pp.
Borislow, Alec. 2023. “Send Me a Sign: Biosemiosis, Umwelt, And Signifiers.” Medium, November 30, 2023.
Calvo, Paco, M. Gagliano, G. Souza, and A. Trewavas. 2020. “Plants are intelligent, here’s how.” Annals of Botany 125: 11-28.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2008. “When Species Meet.” University of Minnesota Press.
Hata, Shingo et al. 2022. “Dried Nostoc commune exhibits nitrogen-fixing activity using glucose under dark conditions after rehydration.” Plant Signal Behav. 17(1): 2059251.
Kecsey, et. al. 2018. “Adaptations of cyanobacterium Nostoc commune to environmental stress: Comparison of morphological and physiological markers between European and Antaarctic populations after rehydration.” Czech Polar Reports 8(1): 84-93.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2003. “Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.” Oregon State University Press. 176pp.
Marder, Micheal. 2013. “Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life.” Columbia University Press.
Ogden, Steven L. 2025. “Heterogenous Being: The Inhumanities and the Creative-Scientific Aesthetic.” A Dissertation submitted to the University at Albany, State University of New York in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 207pp.
Reber, A.S. 2019. “The First Minds: Caterpillars, ‘Karyotes and Consciousness.” Oxford University Press, New York. 296pp.
Schlanger, Zoe. 2025. “The Light Eaters.” Harper Perennial. 304pp.
Simard, Suzanne. 2026. “When the Forest Breathes.” Allen Lane. 336pp.
Trewavas, Anthony. 2003. “Aspects of Plant Intelligence.” Annals of Botany 92(1): 1-20.
Uexküll, Jakob von. 1921. “Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere” 2nd ed. Julius Springer, Berlin.
Uexküll, Jakob von. 1931. “Die Rolle des Subjekts in der Biologie.” Die Naturwissenschaften 19: 385-391.
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the latest on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
