“The truth isn’t about telling; no one just tells you the truth. It needs to be coaxed, even tricked, out. The truth is carefully hoarded—like water—and only flows among privileged acolytes who have proven themselves.”
Lynna Dresden
“Those of us who are captivated by fear, who despair in a dead zone—we need to consider new ways to tell familiar stories, to envision different endings. A book like this can change the way that you see the world at this moment, can allow formulae to take root in fiction and grow into a different kind of solution.”
Marcie McCauley, THE tEmz REVIEW
Jackson Creek in early fall, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
“Climate change is larger than all of us. It speaks in the language of finality. And mostly through water.”
Lynna Dresden
“An eye-opening story for those who are still on the fence about climate change. This is the perfect read for both sci-fi readers and eco-interested readers alike.”
Candidates have three minutes to make nine cubes out of a pile of blocks in the centre. Those who complete the puzzle in time will move on to the next test; those who don’t are eliminated and must return to the slums—their one chance at a better life dashed. Among the nine candidates in the room are Rafael (Rodolfo Valente), who steals a cube from another candidate to get his nine. Michele (Bianca Comparato), who initially out of kindness helps Fernando (Michel Gomes), who’s reach to the pile is limited, is in turn helped by him when she is shy one cube: at time-end, he cleverly piles her eight cubes into one large cube—the ninth—and she passes the test.
So begins Netflix’s 3%, a Brazilian dystopian thriller series created by Pedro Aguilera and directed by Cesar Charlone. In a kind of Hunger Games contest, candidates cheat in self-service; others violently impose Darwinian entitlement and survival of the fittest; yet others rely on reciprocal altruism.
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3% is set in the near future after the planet has fallen into a divided haves and have-nots through some calamity. Three percent of the population live well on an island in the Atlantic Ocean, called Offshore (Mar Alto). The remaining 97% struggle Inland with poverty and scarcity. A selection process lies between them.
Every year the 97% send their 20-year olds to undergo The Process, a grueling Hunger Games-style contest run by the Offshore elite to replenish their numbers. Only 3% of the candidates will be considered worthy. They must pass psychological, emotional and physical tests to earn a place in Mar Alto.
3% test
By the time Season 1 is over, candidates will have committed a full range of desperate and unsavory acts to make the cut—the stakes are high, after all: secure a position in the 3% elite or die in squalor and poverty. After being eliminated during the interview process, one youth throws himself off a balcony of the testing centre.
Major players in Season 1 of 3%
“It’s not so far from our own world, where the competition to get into a good school and land a good job drives many to self harm,” writes Matthew Gault on Motherboard. “In the 3%, as in our own world, society looks down on those who don’t achieve and there’s a certain kind of person who believes that life’s losers earned their place at the bottom.”
Ezekial, who runs “the Process” speaks to the new contestants
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Inland is valued by the elite only for its reserve of youth to recruit Offshore’s strictly controlled population (you only find out how in the last show of Season 1). As for what personality and fitness The Process tests for is also uncertain. “You each create your own merit,” says Ezequiel, who runs The Process, to the candidates. “No matter what happens … you deserve this.” The corollary is that if they don’t have merit—value, as determined by Ezequiel’s Process—they don’t deserve to move Offshore. There is, of course, a resistance to The Process, called The Cause. They cause stirrings of unrest and may even be responsible for the first murder in Offshore in over 100 years—which puts Ezequiel’s Process under question. Ezequiel dismisses The Cause by suggesting that it operates “in the name of a false or hypocritical equality.”
There is no inherent equality or fair entitlement in a land of scarcity; there is only proof of merit to a limited resource. This meritocratic notion—and the need to prove one’s worth to be accepted—is so ingrained in society that not even the poor question it. It was American writer John Steinbeck who argued that socialism would never take off in America because the poor see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed capitalists.”
Michele and Joana in the poor section of town
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We find out in the first show that the first murder in 100 years has occurred Offshore—which puts Ezequiel’s Process under question. And there are stirrings of unrest—some likely instigated by The Cause.
“3% is a brutal commentary on the world’s rising income inequality and the lengths we’re all willing to go to improve our lot,” writes Gault. “It’s a world of extreme income inequality where techno-fascists rule with an iron fist…Brazil has some of the highest income disparity on the planet,” writes Gault. “São Paulo is a megacity where the ultra-rich travel the skies in rented helicopters and cruise the streets in bulletproof cars. It’s a city where the poor live in makeshift favelas that resemble something from William Gibson’s nightmares. It’s a city where plastic surgeons do a brisk trade in reconstructive ear surgery because kidnapping is common and the easiest way to prove you’ve got a mark is to send their ear.”
Ezekial confronts Fernando in 3%
With each episode, 3% examines the motivations and paradoxes of heroism and villainy, sometimes turning them on their sides until they touch with such intimacy you can’t tell them apart. At its deepest, 3% explores the nature of humanity—from its most glorious to its most heinous—under the stress of scarcity and uncertainty. How we behave under these polarizing challenges ultimately determines who we are.
3% joins the ranks of several other films and shows about near-future scarcity-driven societies, with two examples below:
Snowpiercer—a stylish post-climate change apocalypse allegory. The train’s self-contained closed ecosystem of scarcity is maintained by an ordered social system, imposed by a stony militia. Those at the front enjoy privileges and luxurious living conditions, though most drown in a debauched drug stupor; those at the back live on next to nothing and must resort to savage means to survive. Minister Mason, an imperious yet simpering figure who serves the ruling class without quite being part of it, reminds the lower class that: “We must each of us occupy our preordained particular position. Would you wear a shoe on your head? Of course you wouldn’t wear a shoe on your head. A shoe doesn’t belong on your head. A shoe belongs on your foot. A hat belongs on your head. I am a hat. You are a shoe. I belong on the head. You belong on the foot. Yes? So it is. In the beginning, order was prescribed by your ticket: First Class, Economy, and freeloaders like you…Now, as in the beginning, I belong to the front. You belong to the tail. When the foot seeks the place of the head, the sacred line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.”
Advantageous—Jennifer Phang’s “pre-dystopia”, where jobs have become heavily automated and opportunities for education are cutthroat. Women have been generally forced out of the workplace and onto the streets: the logic being that they will be less violent while living on the street than men. Artificial intelligence has supplanted most people in middle management. “The people you do see are either impoverished and disenfranchised or are hidden in the upper floors, the protected places,” says director Jennifer Phang. Unemployment is close to 50% and there are no public schools. The only options for a young girl—if she is not to end up on the streets, either as a beggar or prostitute—is to attend a highly selective free magnet school or a very expensive private school.
In his book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, author Peter Frase considered effects of climate change and automation in possible outcomes of a post-Trump election America. Frase envisioned four scenarios based on abundance and scarcity and whether a society operated by equality (e.g., communism or socialism) or hierarchy (rentism, exterminism).
With scarce resources, socialism (aka Ecotopia) may arise within an egalitarian society if driven by altruistic notions of self-limitation. Ecologists describe such a self-limiting system as K-selected (see my discussion of K-selection and r-selection in “Water Is…”). A K-selected population is at or near the carrying capacity of the environment, which is usually stable and favors individuals that successfully compete for resources and produce few young. The K-selected strategy runs on a successive gradient of maturity, from initially competitive to ultimately cooperative. Competition is a natural adaptive remnant of uncertainty and insecurity and forms the basis of a capitalist economy that encourages monopolization and hostile takeovers. Competition results from an initial antagonistic reaction to a perception of limited resources. It is a natural reaction based on distrust—of both the environment and of the “other”—both aspects of “self ” separated from “self.” The greed for more than is sustainable reflects a fear of failure and a sense of being separate, which ultimately perpetuates actions dominated by self-interest in a phenomenon known as “the Tragedy of the Commons.” Competition naturally gives way to creative cooperation as trust in both “self ” and the “other” develops and is encouraged through continued interaction.
Exterminism (aka Mad Max) may arise under a hierarchical model, driven by greed and exacerbated by uncertainty in the environment—not unlike what we are currently experiencing with the planet’s system and cyclical changes. In this scenario, in which resources are both limited and uncertain, those with access to them would guard or hide them away with desperate fervor. Frase writes:
“When mass labor has been rendered superfluous [through automation], a final solution* lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor.”
Gault says it best: “3% hits so hard because it seems bizarre and distant, but as the show unwinds and reveals its mysteries, audiences will come to realize that we’re already part of The Process.”
*the Final Solution was originally used by Nazi Germany as “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question”; the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews during World War II, formulated in 1942 by Nazi leadership at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin, culminated in the Holocaust, which murdered 90 percent of Polish Jews.
References:
Fisher, Mark. 2009. “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?” Zero Books. 92pp.
Frase, Peter. 2016. Four Futures: Life After Capitalism.” Verso. 160pp.
Munteanu, Nina. 2016. “Water Is…The Meaning of Water.” Pixl Press. 584pp.
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. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. 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.
“Nothing in nature stays the same. Or if it does, it’s because change has brought it back to what it once was.”
Lynna Dresden
“Munteanu excels at extrapolating today’s science into a stark vision of what we face in the next decades. Environmentalists, science fact enthusiasts, and science fiction fans will be shaken by this cautionary tale of climate change. Great for fans of James Lawrence Powell’s The 2084 Report, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thompson Creek, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
“We hold ourselves apart from our profligate nature. But we aren’t unique. We are more part of Nature than we admit. Using the thread of epigenetics and horizontal gene transfer, Nature stitches in us a moving tapestry of terrible irony. The irony lies in our conviction that we were made in the inimitable divine image of God. That we are special. Water flows endlessly through us, whether we are devout Catholics or empty vessels with no purpose. Water makes no distinction. It flows through us even after we bury ourselves.”
Lynna Dresden
A Diary in the Age of Water is “Unsettling and yet deliciously readable … Brilliant.”
THE PRAIRIE BOOK REVIEW
Swamp forest by country road, Kawarthas, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
The Otonabee River under rosy haze from northeastern wildfires, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
It was pleasantly cool yesterday evening during my walk along the Otonabee River. Over the day, the smell of ‘campfire’ smoke from the raging northern wildfires intensified and the sun became an eerie copper disk in the peach-coloured sky. The river had gone still, as if hushed and waiting beneath the cloud of haze. Houses along the shore had become fluid watercolour paintings, colours and textures blending in a soft fabric of grey and green. As I set my gaze on a favourite cottage by the river, its reflection caught in the still waters, I thought the scene beautiful…
My heart then reminded me that this wasn’t a mist rising off the river but the yellow-brown dust descending from the corpses of millions of burnt trees, sent here by a cruel northeast wind.
Map of Ontario wildfires June 5, 2023
Today, the Ontario government reported heavy smoke conditions in the Northeast Region due to a large number of fires in eastern Ontario and Quebec—with fires worse than usual this year in Quebec. More than 160 fires are burning, most out of control, in Quebec. Smoke drift is travelling as far as just north of Timmins, down through Sudbury and past Parry Sound. Environment Canada issued Air quality warnings today for Peterborough, where I currently live.
Global News reported today that “relentless wildfires have devoured 3.3 million hectares of land across Canada so far this year—roughly 10 times the normal average for the season.” In the last 24 hours, 21 new fires were discovered across Ontario, amounting to 159 active fires provincially. According to Global News, “Searing hot, tinder-dry conditions, similar to what was seen in western Canada, has only worsened the situation in Ontario.” And Quebec.
Map of Quebec wildfires June 5, 2023
Sun setting over smoky Otonabee River, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)
There is an old willow tree on the river bank by the path I walk daily. Its massive arms stretch out over the water and one arm leans low over the path so you must bend down to walk under it. The derecho last May had cracked the tree open. But the sturdy willow continues on, undaunted, as all Nature does, thrusting up suckers from its large limbs toward a future of many more willows. It’s a favourite tree of many a walker who like to sit on its generous arms and look out over the river. Each day I touch its bark and say hello.
Old willow on the path by the Otonabee River, the glow of smoke-sun on its generous arms (photo by Nina Munteanu)
New suckers burst out of the leaning willow limb (photo by Nina Munteanu)
I think of my old friend. How a fire would take it.
First its leaves would sizzle and take flight in a requiem dance. The trunk, a funnel of fire and smoke, would sway and groan then crack with a final death shout to the roaring hissing fire. Like flying kites, leaf corpses would join embers of curling bark and soar in a vortex of billowing coal black fury. The river would flow through a killing field, black stumps and burned debris flying with the vagaries of a mischievous wind. Covered in a film of thick and oily debris, the lonely river would grow dark and surly, smothering its own aquatic forest—the algae, benthic invertebrates and fish.
And I would weep…
Sun setting over hazy forest at mouth of Thompson Creek, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s recent book is the bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” (Mincione Edizioni, Rome). Her latest “Water Is…” is currently an Amazon Bestseller and NY Times ‘year in reading’ choice of Margaret Atwood.
Poplar trees in fall, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
I just finished reading Ben Rawlence’s 2022 book The Treeline. It is a book that made me think. It made me cry. It made me despair. It also gave me hope.
Cattails line a snow-covered marsh with spruce and fir behind, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
I was gripped by this honest and unflinching exploration on the moving treeline with climate change and what it will mean for humanity. Beautifully written and rigorously reported, Rawlence invited me on a journey of all major treelines over the globe from Scotland, Norway and Russia, to Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Throughout his description of a warming world and a vanishing way of life, Rawlence meditates on the many repercussions on how humans live.
Pine-cedar forest in Ontario (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
He aptly describes the forests of the world as the ‘heartbeat of the planet,’ the cycles of breathing and the pulses of life from the spike of oxygen in the spring when trees put out their leaves to the peaks and troughs over day and night that regulate plant photosynthesis and respiration. The peaks and troughs are getting shallower, he writes. With more carbon dioxide in the air the trees work less; they inhale less and exhale less oxygen.
“The planet is a finely tuned system. A few degrees of change in its orbit can usher in an ice age; a few degrees of temperature change can transform the distribution of species, can melt glaciers and create oceans. In the future, when the ice is gone, there may be no such thing as a treeline at all. As the stable currents of air and water associated with the Gulf Stream, the polar front, polar vortex and Beaufort Gyre dissipate or fluctuate, the Arctic Ocean melts completely, and the Rossby waves in the upper atmosphere go haywire, the fine gradations of temperature, altitude and latitude first observed by Alexander von Humboldt will become decoupled and ecological transition zones scrambled. Instead of a majestic sweeping zone of forest around the planet, we might find discontinuous pockets of trees in odd places, refugees from soil and temperatures long gone, and crocodiles once again at the North Pole.”
Ben Rawlence, The Treeline
Snow-covered river shoreline with mixed forest, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
Rawlence brings this all into perspective to our present situation and the role science has played in our hubristic illusion of control:
“An unfortunate side effect of science is the illusion of human mastery: the idea that if we know what is happening then we can control. The irony is that we might have been able to. The tragedy is that it is too late. The chain reaction is under way. The curve only gets steeper from here…five metres of sea level rise is locked in; it’s just a question of how fast the ice melts. Once again, the models seem to underestimate the speed…”
Ben Rawlence, The Treeline
Willow by a river at first snow, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
What is most unfortunate for us, for humanity, is that we have known all this for some time. But we’ve done little. “Industrialist capitalism and its export colonialism” with its exploitive gaze that drives our needs and wants and actions has chosen to ignore the signs. That exploitive gaze ignored that we are not only embedded in but dependent upon the natural world and all the forests to live and flourish.
Tamarack and birch trees in the fall, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
What Rawlence does acknowledge is a way out of our self-created doom and accompanying solastalgia:
“Our present emergency is forcing us to remember what, until recently, we have always known: that there is a web of communication, meaning and significance beyond us, a world of life forms constantly chattering, shouting and flirting and hunting each other, indifferent to human affairs. And there is solace in such a vision. The way out of the depression and grief and guilt of the carbon cul-de-sac we have driven down is to contemplate the world without us. To know the earth, that life, will continue its evolutionary journey in all its mystery and wonder. To widen our idea of time, and of ourselves. If we see ourselves as part of a larger whole, then it is the complete picture that is beautiful, worthy of meaning and respect, worth perhaps dying for, safe in the knowledge that life is not the opposite of death but a circle, as the forest teaches us, a continuum.”
Ben Rawlence, The Treeline
Poplar trees line a road in the Ontario country (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
The planet will be alright. Species will go and others will come. Earth has experienced five extinction events (we are currently experiencing the sixth extinction event now) and after each, life flourished again, albeit different life.
Is there still hope for humanity? Perhaps—if we set our hubris aside and embrace humility and kindness. And, if in that humility, we can adapt our way through the succession we’ve triggered. There might be hope for us still…
Rawlence devotes his epilogue called “Thinking Like a Forest” to the wisdom of the indigenous people who have for millennia co-existed sustainably with the natural ecosystems of the Earth. “The Koyukon, the Sámi, the Nganasan, the Anishinaabe are just a few of the countless indigenous peoples whose world view attests to our foundational reliance on the forest.”
Time to learn from them.
Trees at sunset in winter, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s recent book is the bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” (Mincione Edizioni, Rome). Her latest “Water Is…” is currently an Amazon Bestseller and NY Times ‘year in reading’ choice of Margaret Atwood.
“As Nature tames a lake over time, one thing replaces another. As it undergoes a natural succession from oligotrophic to highly productive eutrophic, a lake’s beauty mellows and it surrenders to the complexities of destiny. Minimalism yields to a baroque richness that, in turn, heralds extinction. The lake shrinks to a swamp then buries itself under a meadow.”
Lynna Dresden
’A Diary’ is a brilliant story…Munteanu writes with fresh, stimulating style.”
CRAIG H. BOWLSBY, author of The Knights of Winter
Outlet of Thompson Creek at sunset, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
Ice and snow cover the Otonabee River in winter, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
In my upcoming novel “Gaia’s Revolution,” one of the protagonists, Damien Vogel, contemplates in 2022 a key event from 2020 that only a few seem to take seriously:
In Siberia in June 2020, record heat of thirty degrees Centigrade, over the average of 11 degrees, collapsed permafrost and caused oil tanks in Norilsk to rupture. Over twenty thousand tonnes of diesel spilled into the Pyasina lake and river system. Damien remembers looking at the veins of red on satellite images from space. That disaster is just the beginning of what the ‘sleeping bear’ of methane hydrates promise to unleash when the permafrost reaches a critical thaw and those hydrates awaken. Melting permafrost is a quiet sleeper in the climate change procession, he considers. At a microscopic level, in the chemistry of the water and in the change in the atmosphere, a time bomb is ticking.
A decade later, Damien’s twin brother, Eric, notes that:
“Back in the ‘20s scientists started noticing major permafrost melt on the Siberian Shelf,” Eric goes on. “The melting released hydrates, which set the oil and gas companies frothing at the mouth with joy and the climate scientists spinning in a panic because of what they knew it meant for the planet. It was the harbinger of the largest methane ‘burp’ ever.”
Eric then adds:
“Permafrost thaw kicked us into this devastating global warming, Dame, and everyone—even the climate modellers—ignored it, because they didn’t have enough data. Gottverdammt! They’re all still asleep, Dame!”
In his book The Treeline, Ben Rawlence writes about the ongoing extinction of indigenous peoples in the north as the treeline migrates northward into tundra and the permafrost and sea ice change and go extinct themselves.
Ice fragments on the Otonabee River, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Because methane is present in much smaller concentrations many scientists have mistakenly deemed it as important as carbon dioxide in the climate change equation; however, it is becoming obvious that methane poses a real and largely unacknowledged danger. Methane is twenty times more efficient in trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Permafrost—which is currently melting rapidly in the north—contains almost twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere. In the rapidly warming Arctic (warming twice as fast as the globe as a whole), the upper layers of this frozen soil are thawing, allowing deposited organic material to decompose and release methane.
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The clathrate gun hypothesis is the notion that sea temperature rises (and/or drops in sea levels) may trigger a catastrophic positive feedback on climate: warming would cause a sudden release of methane from methane clathrate (hydrate) compounds buried in seabeds, in the permafrost, and under ice sheets.
Something of this nature has already occurred in Siberia in 2020. In his book The Treeline Ben Rawlence reports the following warning by Dutch scientist Dr. Ko van Huissteden, a leading authority on permafrost:
“It is hard to measure methane release … [but] some studies have suggested that an unstable seabed could release a methane ‘burp’ of 500-5000 gigatonnes, equivalent to decades of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to an abrupt jump in temperature that humans will be powerless to arrest.” (Wadhams, 2015)
Creation of gas hydrates requires high pressure; water; gas—mainly methane—and low temperatures. Three environments considered suitable for this process to occur include: sub-seabed along the world’s continental margins; permafrost areas on land and off shore; and a process for storing methane hydrates: ice sheets. As long as the climate is cold and the ice sheet stable, the gas hydrate zone remains stable. As the ice sheets melt, the pressure on the ground decreases; hydrates destabilize and release methane into rising seawater and finally into the atmosphere.
A recent study in Science revealed that hundreds of massive, kilometer-wide craters on the ocean floor in the Arctic were formed by substantial methane expulsions. Because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, temperatures would rise exponentially. Once started, this runaway process could be as irreversible as the firing of a gun—and on a time scale less than a human lifetime.
The sudden release of large amounts of natural warming gas from methane clathrate deposits in runaway climate change could be a cause of past, future, and present climate changes.
Latest research on the Greenland ice sheet and elsewhere throughout the Arctic has revealed major methane discharges in Arctic lakes in areas of permafrost thaw. Scientists are exploring areas where methane is bubbling to the surface and releasing to the atmosphere.
If human emissions continue at their current rate, rapidly changing ocean currents and retreating ice sheets may uncork methane from under ice caps, ocean sediments and Arctic permafrost, causing a jump in radiative forcing. Even if rapid ice sheet disintegration were to scatter large amounts of ice into the oceans, the net cooling effect would be strongly countered and likely overwhelmed. The areas that did cool would likely trigger severe weather outbreaks.
As I write, we are pumping out CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate 10 times faster than at any point in the past 66 m years, with the resulting sea level rises, extreme weather events, heat waves, droughts, unseasonal storms, and stress on biodiversity around the globe. Research published in the journal Nature Geoscience demonstrates that “the world has entered ‘uncharted territory’ and that the consequences for life on land and in the oceans may be more severe than at any time since the extinction of the dinosaurs,” writes Damian Carrington of The Guardian.
In an interview with Guardian reporter John Abraham, Woods Hole expert Robert Max Holmes, exhorted:
It’s essential that policymakers begin to seriously consider the possibility of a substantial permafrost carbon feedback to global warming. If they don’t, I suspect that down the road we’ll all be looking at the 2°C threshold in our rear-view mirror.
Ice break up on the Otonabee River in early spring, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Wadhams, Peter. 2015. “A Farewell to Ice.” Penguin.
Flowing water in a river, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. 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.
Nina Munteanu Writing Coach 