Lynn Hutchinson Lee reads from her novel at Little Ghosts Bookstore, overseen by a 12-foot skeleton (photo by Nina Munteanu)
.
A short time ago, my good friend Lynn Hutchinson Lee was launching her eco-fiction book “Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens” published by Stelliform Press at Little Ghosts Bookstore on Dundas St. W. in Toronto. Also reading from their current eco-fiction were Rebecca Campbell (“The Other Shore”) and Mahaila Smith (“Seed Beetle”).
.
Launch poster
.
I drove from Peterborough along country roads to Toronto that morning. When I got there, I parked my car at Lynn’s place and walked without my umbrella in the light drizzle through the urban treed neighbourhood toward Little Ghosts Bookstore—about a forty-minute walk. Of course, it started to seriously rain at some point, but I cheerfully continued, noting how vibrant the vegetation and flowers had become and how progressively more damp I was becoming.
.
Entrance to Little Ghosts Bookstore (photo by Nina Munteanu)
.
I entered the bookstore dripping but on time and negotiated the small crowd, greeting some people I knew, as I steered myself toward the small café in the bookstore to order a hot beverage. I found myself admiring the small two-tiered bookstore with lovely Casper ghost motifs. As Lynn began her reading, I noticed a large skeleton peering right back at me through the café window next to her (see top photo).
.
Author Lynn Hutchinson Lee holds her book at Little Ghosts Bookstore with publisher Selena Middleton (photo by Nina Munteanu)
.
The Book:
Here’s how the publisher described the book:
A dizzying and beautiful debut, Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens explores life as a Romany woman in Canada, and the flowers that refuse to die.
Orchid Lovell is a young Romany woman haunted by a fear of being found out. Her family has been chased out of town before. After settling in a seemingly idyllic northern mining town that she soon understands as rife with unseen cruelty, Orchid finds solace in a lush orchid fen where she doesn’t fear the town’s judgement. Amid the green beauty of the fen, Orchid meets her beloved Jack, and marries him in a secret blackfly-infested ceremony.
But the town’s waters don’t only harbor life. In the nearby creek, dead girls take revenge on the men who murdered them, luring them into murky waters. Despite the unyielding nature of the water spirits, one man evades their violence. After a devastating attack linked to the expansion of the mine, Orchid’s fate is entwined with the panni raklies’ ruthless justice.
Written in over 100 dreamy mini-chapters, this novella explores the tenuous reality of the Romany diaspora living in troubled times on troubled lands.
“The prose is sensuous and lyrical, saturated with earthy, evocative enchantment … In the powerful and intimate novel Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens, a bold, loving heroine confronts racism, sexism, and classism.”
Publisher Selena Middleton with Stelliform books on display at Little Ghosts Bookstore (photo by Nina Munteanu)
.
The Bookstore:
Despite the dark subject matter, the small bookstore was inviting and well lit inside from large front and back windows, with happy Casper-ghost décor and store keepers with sunny dispositions and friendly manners. This small indie bookstore with funky fun interior hosts a great selection of indie horror, a café with delicious drinks and a “chill place to hang out” and a 12-foot skeleton in the patio who oversees the café through the window. What more does a reader want?
Little Ghosts Bookstore t-shirt
.
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.
Here is my current list of 30 favourite eco-fiction novels and short story collections that have impacted me, and incited me to think, to feel and to act.
Flight Behavior is a multi-layered metaphoric study of “flight” in all its iterations: as movement, flow, change, transition, beauty and transcendence. Flight Behavior isn’t so much about climate change and its effects and its continued denial as it is about our perceptions and the actions that rise from them: the motives that drive denial and belief. When Dellarobia questions Cub, her farmer husband, “Why would we believe Johnny Midgeon about something scientific, and not the scientists?” he responds, “Johnny Midgeon gives the weather report.” Kingsolver writes: “and Dellarobia saw her life pass before her eyes, contained in the small enclosure of this logic.”
.
The Overstory follows the life-stories of nine characters and their journey with trees–and ultimately their shared conflict with corporate capitalist America. At the heart of The Overstory is the pivotal life of botanist Patricia Westerford, who will inspire movement. Westerford is a shy introvert who discovers that trees communicate, learn, trade goods and services—and have intelligence. When she shares her discovery, she is ridiculed by her peers and loses her position at the university. What follows is a fractal story of trees with spirit, soul, and timeless societies–and their human avatars.
.
The Maddaddam Trilogy is a work of speculative dystopian fiction that explores the premise of genetic experimentation and pharmaceutical engineering gone awry. On a larger scale the cautionary trilogy examines where the addiction to vanity, greed, and power may lead. Often sordid and disturbing, the trilogy explores a world where everything from sex to learning translates to power and ownership. The dark poetry of Atwood’s smart and edgy slice-of-life commentary is a poignant treatise on our dysfunctional society. Atwood accurately captures a growing zeitgeist that has lost the need for words like honor, integrity, compassion, humility, forgiveness, respect, and love in its vocabulary. And she has projected this trend into an alarmingly probable future. This is subversive eco-fiction at its best.
.
Annihilation is a science fiction eco-thriller that explores humanity’s impulse to self-destruct within a natural world of living ‘alien’ profusion. Annihilation is a bizarre exploration of how our own mutating mental states and self-destructive tendencies reflect a larger paradigm of creative-destruction—a hallmark of ecological succession, change, and overall resilience. VanderMeer masters the technique of weaving the bizarre intricacies of ecological relationship, into a meaningful tapestry of powerful interconnection. Bizarre but real biological mechanisms such as epigenetically-fluid DNA drive aspects of the story’s transcendent qualities of destruction and reconstruction. On one level Annihilation acts as parable to humanity’s cancerous destruction of what is ‘normal’ (through climate change and habitat destruction); on another, it explores how destruction and creation are two sides of a coin.
.
Barkskins chronicles two wood cutters who arrive from the slums of Paris to Canada in 1693 and their descendants over 300 years of deforestation in North America. Proulx weaves generational stories of two settler families into a crucible of terrible greed and tragic irony. The bleak impressions by immigrants of a harsh environment crawling with pests underlies the combative mindset of the settlers who wish only to conquer and seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource. From the arrival of the Europeans in pristine forest to their destruction under the veil of global warming, Proulx lays out a saga of human-environmental interaction and consequence that lingers with the aftertaste of a bitter wine.
.
Memory of Water is a work of speculative fiction about a post-climate change world of sea level rise. Symbols of water as shapeshifter archetype and its omnipotent life- and death-giving associations flow throughout the story, from the ‘fishfires’ in the northern skies to the painted blue circles on the doors of water criminals about to die. Water couples to main character Tea Master Noria, to explore consequences of commodification and exploitation. Teamaster Noria Kaitio guards its secrets; she alone knows the location of the hidden water source, coveted by the new government. Told in the literary fiction style of emotional nuances, Itäranta’s lyrical narrative follows a deceptively quiet yet tense pace that builds like a slow tide into compelling crisis and a poignant end.
.
The Broken Earth Trilogy is a fantasy trilogy set in a far-future Earth devastated by periodic cataclysmic storms known as ‘seasons.’ These apocalyptic events last over generations, remaking the world and its inhabitants each time. Giant floating crystals called Obelisks suggest an advanced prior civilization. The first book of the trilogy introduces Essun, an Orogene—a person gifted with the ability to draw magical power from the Earth such as quelling earthquakes. The trilogy focuses on the dangers of marginalization, oppression, and misuse of power. Jemison’s cautionary dystopia explores the consequence of the inhumane profiteering of those who are marginalized and commodified.
.
The Windup Girl is a work of mundane science fiction that occurs in 23rd century post-food crash Thailand after global warming has raised sea levels and carbon fuel sources are depleted. Thailand struggles under the tyrannical boot of predatory ag-biotech multinational giants that have fomented corruption and political strife through their plague-inducing genetic manipulations. The rivalry between Thailand’s Minister of Trade and Minister of the Environment represents the central conflict of the novel, reflecting the current global conflict of neoliberal promotion of globalization and unaccountable exploitation with the forces of sustainability and environmental protection. Given the setting, both are extreme and there appears no middle ground for a balanced existence using responsible and sustainable means. The Windup Girl, Emiko, who represents the future, is precariously poised.
.
Parable of the Sower is a science fiction dystopian novel set in 21stcentury America where civilization has collapsed due to climate change, wealth inequality and greed. Parable of the Soweris both a coming-of-age story and cautionary allegorical tale of race, gender and power. Told through journal entries, the novel follows the life of young Lauren Oya Olamina—cursed with hyperempathy—and her perilous journey to find and create a new home. What starts as a fight to survive inspires in Lauren a new vision of the world and gives birth to a new faith based on science: Earthseed. Written in 1993, this prescient novel and its sequel Parable of the Talent speak too clearly about the consequences of “making America Great Again.”
.
The Water Knife is set in the near-future in the drought-stricken American southwest, where corrupt state-corporations have supplanted the foundering national government. Water is the new gold—to barter, steal, and murder for. Corporations have formed militias and shut down borders to climate refugees, fomenting an ecology of poverty and tragedy. Massive resorts—arcadias—constructed across the parched landscape, flaunt their water-wealth in the face of exploited workers and gross ecological disparity. Water is controlled by corrupt gangsters and “water knives” who cleverly navigate the mercurial nature of water rights in a world where “haves” hydrate and “have nots” die of thirst.
.
A Diary in the Age of Water explores the socio-political consequences of corruption in Canada, now owned by China and America as an indentured resource ‘reservoir’; it is a story told through four generations of women and their unique relationship with water during a time of great unheralded change. Centuries from now, in a dying boreal forest in what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, yearns for Earth’s past—the Age of Water—before the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity. Looking for answers and plagued by vivid dreams of this holocaust, Kyo discovers the diary of Lynna, a limnologist from that time of severe water scarcity just prior to the destruction. In her work for a global giant that controls Earth’s water, Lynna witnesses and records in her diary the disturbing events that will soon lead to humanity’s demise.
.
Waste Tide is an eco-techno thriller with compelling light-giving characters who navigate the dark bleak world of profiteers and greedy investors. Mimi is a migrant worker off the coast of China who scavenges through piles of hazardous technical garbage to make a living. She struggles, like the environment, in a larger power struggle for profit and power; but she finds a way to change the game, inspiring others. The story of Mimi and Kaizong—who she inspires—stayed with me long after I put the book down.
.
Fauna is at once beautiful and terrifying. Vadnais’s liquid prose immersed me instantly in her flowing story about change in this Darwinian eco-horror ode to climate change. I felt connected to the biologist Laura as she navigated through a torrent of rising mists and coiling snakes and her own transforming body with the changing world around her. It was an emotional rollercoaster ride that made me think.
.
The Word for World is Forest chronicles the struggles of the indigenous people under the conquering settlers through empathetic characters. The irony of what the indigenous peoples must do to save themselves runs subtle but tragic throughout the narrative. Given its relevance to our own colonial history and present situation, this simple tale rang through me like a tolling bell.
.
The Breathing Hole story begins in 1535, when the Inuk widow Hummiktuq risks her life to save a lost one-eared polar bear cub on an ice floe and adopts him. She names him Angu’ruaq. We soon learn that Angu’ruaq is timeless when we encounter him in scenes over the centuries from the Franklin Expedition in 1845 (who he helps by bringing them food) to 2031 when Angu’ruaq—old, hungry, his fur yellowing—returns to the breathing hole where long-dead Hummiktuq rescued him. By then the glaciers have receded and the ground is slush. Murphy’s spare and focused narrative achieves a timeless, dreamlike quality that plays strongly on the emotional connections of the reader; it elicits immense empathy for the Other in a deeply moving saga on the tragic dance of colonialism and climate change.
.
The Bearby Andrew Krivak is a fable of a post-anthropocene Earth told through the point of view of a young girl—possibly the only remaining human in the world—and the bear that guides her. Unlike the polar bear of The Breathing Hole, who remains silent and is clearly victimized by humanity’s actions, the black bear of The Bear lives with agency in a post-anthropocene world; he proselytizes and tells stories to instruct the girl on living harmoniously with Nature. His actions and elegant use of speech reflect his archetype as mentor in this story. This is foreshadowed in the fairytale the girl’s father recounts to her of a bear that saved a village from a cruel despot through cleverness and a sense of community.
.
Duneuses powerful world building and symbols of desert, water and spice coupled to the indigenous Fremen, to address exploitation and oppression by colonial greed.
The novel chronicles the journeys of new colonists and indigenous peoples of the desert planet Arrakis, enslaved by its previous colonists. The planet known as Dune lies at the heart of an epic story about taking, giving and sharing. The planet also serves as symbol to any new area colonized by settlers and already inhabited by Othered indigenous. It is the Mars of Martian Chronicles, the Bangkok of The Windup Girl, the North America of Barkskins.
.
Camp Zero, set in the remote Canadian north, is a feminist climate fiction that explores a warming climate through the perilous journeys of several female characters, each relating to her environment in different ways. Each woman exerts agency in surprising ways that include love, bravery and shared community. The strength of female power carried me through the pages like a braided river heading to a singular ocean. These very different women journey through the dark ruins of violent capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy—flowing past and through hubristic men pushing north with agendas and jingoistic visions—to triumph in an ocean of solidarity. I empathized with each woman as she found her strength and learned to wield true heroism—one based on collaboration and humble honesty.
.
We, written in 1920, is a hopeful dystopic work of courageous and unprecedented feminism. While the story centres on logical D-503, a man vacuously content as a number in the One State, it is I-330—Zamyatin’s unruly heroine—who stole my attention. Confident, powerful and heroic, the liberated I-330 embraces the Green Wind of change to influence D-503. A force of hope and resilience, she braves torture to successfully orchestrate a revolution that breaches the Green Wall—feats typically relegated to a male protagonist in novels of that era. When pregnant O-90 refuses to surrender her child to the State, I-330 helps her escape to the outside, where the Green Wind of freedom blows. I resonated with Zamyatin’s cautionary tale on the folly of logic without love and Nature.
.
In Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia, award-winning authors of speculative fiction Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Nina Munteanu present a collection that explores strange new terrains and startling social constructs, quiet morphing landscapes, dark and terrifying warnings, lush newly-told folk and fairy tales.
.
I list other significant and impactful eco-fiction books below:
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Canadian Tales of Climate Change (edited) by Bruce Meyer
Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Borne by Jeff Vandermeer
Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad
Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
Lost Arc Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Greenwood by Micheal Christie
Where the Crawdads Sing by Della Owens
Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy
.
.
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.
I teachscholarly writing at the University of Toronto through several writing centres; I’m helping students with their assignments in engineering, the health sciences and humanities. All are generating scholarly papers on various topics with various purposes; anything from a critical assessment, literature review, position paper, or reflection essay to a lessons learned document, research proposal, or thesis chapter. Everyone is using some kind of AI when generating, writing and editing their works. And there are plenty of AI tools to choose from. Some of the most common AI tools used by my students include: Grammarly for grammar; Perplexity as a research tool, text summarizer and conversational AI search engine; Paperpal for editing, Google Scholar as a search engine, ChatGPT to summarize works, brainstorm ideas, provide quiz questions, or even generate human-like text in a first draft.
All these assignments are purpose-built and students must successfully address their assignment requirements to succeed. In some ways, the idea, topic and handling of the topic are assigned; the student need only carefully and clearly address it.
But, when creating something new, like a piece of fiction or even a non-fiction article, professional writers are essentially walking into a new world, not restricted by “assignment guidelines or requirements”; they truly must face the blank page.
.
The blank pages of a notebook (photo by Nina Munteanu)
.
There’s no precedence for creating a piece of fiction. Yes, certainly inspiration is involved, but the work of something unique must start with a blank page. Professional writers often dread facing the blank page. It even has a name: blank page syndrome, or writer’s block, the feeling of being overwhelmed or even paralyzed by the prospect of starting. Alex Elkjær Vasegaard tells us that “it may come from the fear of not being good enough, of not knowing enough, or of the vastness of the potential ahead.”
I recently read a post on LinkedIn by writing colleague Erik Buchanan, which resonated with me. I asked his permission to quote it here and he gladly gave it:
Just got a recommended post from a marketing person claiming that using AI allows you to get past the hardest part of writing: “the blank page.”
I blocked them, and I’m putting what I was going to reply to them here instead, because they are not a person who will be open to this rant:
If you cannot get past the blank page, you are not a writer.
If you use AI to get past the blank page, you’re still not a writer, and now you’re a thief.
You’re using other writers’ words, fed into an information aggregator and splatted out like a drunk’s meal vomited onto the sidewalk. And you’re scooping it up and claiming it’s fresh food.
You want to write? Write something.
Speaking as one who has written 18 novels (more than half ghostwritten for money), 150 articles, short stories, instruction manuals, sales copy, website copy, commercial scripts, short films and now a feature film (currently being re-written) it’s not that hard.
Using AI means you’re too lazy to learn the craft.
Don’t do it.
.
A blank page is more than a simple page that is empty. It offers something new, without precedence to write, draw or create. Whether it’s a physical sheet of paper in a notebook or a white space in a digital document, the blank page represents a fresh beginning and wonderful potential for unique creation.
.
Erik’s point is so Germaine to the creative writing process. The blank page is an open door to possibility; it is a writer’s first step in creating something uniquely their own. Plot, character, setting and language—such as technique, style, words and phrases—certainly make a novel wonderful to read; but it is the unique idea, the spark, the premise and theme that carry that novel into greatness and keep it memorable.
Coming up with first words on a blank page (photo by Nina Munteanu)
.
Poet Alberto Blanco challenges our notion of the blank page being blank: From the tree it was made from, the rain and sun that allowed the tree to grow, and the people that created it, it soon becomes clear that a blank page contains the whole cosmos.
In “The Blank Page: A Meditation on the Creative Process and Life’s Journey” Alex ElkjærVasegaard describes the blank page as “an expanse of white, unsullied by ink or pixels. It’s the void that calls for creation. It’s the challenge that every artist, writer, and thinker faces. But isn’t that just a beautiful metaphor for life itself?”
Erik, I too would have blocked that marketer. I doubt they are a writer…
.
“Who then … tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. And where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page. When a royal and gallant pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration, has written down its tale with the rarest ink of all — where, then, may one read a still deeper, sweeter, merrier and more cruel tale than that? Upon the blank page.”—Karen Blixen, Last Tales
.
Maple beech forest in early spring, ON (photo and rendition 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.
I recently ran across a list posted on social media of the 20 most popular AI tools for productivity in writing. I only knew two of them. This heightened my anxiety about what I know and am prepared for in the use of genAI, particularly in academic settings, where I teach writing at university. And it got me thinking why I was so anxious…
.
I shared the list with my colleagues at the university writing centre and one instructor who was actively following AI tools admitted that they knew only a few of the listed tools as well. They further shared that they were feeling increasingly apprehensive about genAI’s impact on higher education. “It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed,” they ended.
(Photo: Nina writing her novel at a cafe)
.
This was my exact sentiment: a kind of apprehensive excitement. An understanding that all communicators stand at the precipice of a major paradigm shift in tool use. The ramifications this will have on all aspects of effective and efficient communication will span from redefining plagiarism to reinventing creativity. As with all powerful tools—aside from the obvious threat of misuse—there is always something lost with the gain and I wonder what we are losing with all this. I have some ideas, and they do bother me from time to time.
.
Applications of Generative AI (image by Neebel Technologies)
I do think it important for me as a communicator and writing instructor to understand the trade offs and to work with them.
When the world adopted the portable calculator, rote knowledge of basic math suffered. I know; I tested it during a lab exam when I was teaching college biology many years back. I forbid the use of calculators in the test and many students, who had lost the ability to do long division or multiplication by hand, lost marks. For some reason, I’m still not sure of, it was important for me to insist on students doing math longhand (a basic skill fast becoming obsolete like cursive writing) and punish those who had lost the art. Perhaps I was drawing on Isaac Asimov’s possibly prescient 1957 short story satire The Feeling of Power, which explored the limitations of a future world that lost its basic skills to machines. The corollary, I suppose, is that more complex and conceptual math gained some ground through this handy and efficient tool. Machines have their advantages, certainly. And generative AI is just one sophisticated aspect of machine use.
.
.
Consequences to Creative Writing
In my world of professional fiction authors, there is a palpable fear of being replaced by AI as story creators: a version of the ultimate science fiction horror plot of being taken over by the machine world (I’ve even exploited that in my SF thrillers Angel of Chaos and Darwin’s Paradox).
Given our unique powers of imagination, I don’t think that will happen (very soon, if ever successfully). Though, as we dummy-down and simplify complex stories for fast-paced multiplex audiences addicted to fast-paced bite-sized and easy to digest entertainment, AI-generated narratives could get by. How is all this affecting the publishing industry now? I recently learned that one of the top five online science fiction magazines, Metastellar, accepts AI-assisted stories with the proviso that “they better be good.” And Metastellar provides some convincing reasons. This has become a hot topic among my fellow professional writers at SF Canada. One colleague informed me that a “new publisher Spines plans todisrupt industry by publishing 8000 AI books in 2025 alone.” On checking the news release, I discovered that Spines is, in fact, a tech firm trying to make its mark on publishing, primarily through the use of AI. The company offers the use of AI to proofread, produce, publish, and distribute books. They are, in fact, a vanity publishing platform (essentially a service for self-publishing), charging up to $5000 a book and often taking just three weeks to go from manuscript to a published title. The quality of what they will produce is unclear—and questionable.
All to serve as metaphor for what I and my colleagues at university are striving to achieve with students in their academic writing: excellence in communication, particularly in conveying complex scenarios that require creative solutions where clear, concise, and convincing writing is requisite.
.
I still find myself reluctant to use AI in my writing and communication, though I’ve at times slid into using AI for research and initial summaries to save time. I do this rarely because I absolutely enjoy doing research. I enjoy challenging my brain to summarize key points and write a good line. I enjoy the thrill of unanticipated discoveries, which always happen on these forays. I also recognize that many people do not share my enthusiasm for these brain exercises.
(Photo: Nina writing in another cafe)
.
I think that AI alone will not replace human mind for unique creativity. I didn’t say “can not.” It could; but it won’t. This is because even as genAI becomes infused in many aspects of life pursuit, there will remain those like that rare mathematician capable of doing math by hand in The Feeling of Power, valued not just because they are rare, but because in that rarity, they fulfill a critical role. When the machines stalled in their ability to move society forward in The Feeling of Power and all seemed lost, this archaic mathematician presented new innovation with basic math. I’m not suggesting that the technology will all break down, plunging the world into darkness (though this remains a possibility and is still a great plot for science fiction); but I submit that diversity rules over monopoly when it comes to survival.
.
Five Mass Extinctions
.
This may seem a rather dark projection of the future, but consider that over the millennia, after five mass extinctions and with the sixth mass extinction underway, diversity has always saved the world. Within that necessary diversity, it is the nurtured rarities, the outliers, the misfits and nonconformists that survived the destruction of the previous world. Each time, diversity made that possible. As though engrained in Nature’s world building.
.
Mass Extinctions (image by National Geographic)
.
Ecologists call it ecological succession, others use the term “creative-destruction” to describe the recursive pattern of living and non-living things of the planet. Both describe how the oligarchs of an established climax ecosystem fail due to change or disturbance and are replaced by a previous rare misfit or immigrant better suited to the new environment.
.
Primary and secondary succession in two different ecosystems
.
I think AI is part of our succession. Our use of AI in all its forms will represent a diversity of reaction and action that represent our own diversity and potential to survive in a changing world. All to say: relax and embrace the outliers.
.
Writing in nature (photo by Nina Munteanu)
As William Gibson so famously said in 1993: The Future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed. And maybe that’s a good thing…
.
So…
…To AI, or not to AI, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of terrible writing, Or to take arms against a sea of scribbles And by opposing end them. To think—to write, No more; and by writing to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That tech is heir to: ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To think, to write; To write, perchance to create—ay, there’s the rub: For in that creation of unique thoughts what others may come, When we have shuffled off this genAI…
.
Writing in Nature (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.
Free Times Cafe venue at night (photo by Ashish Pillai)
.
Appropriately, on the eve of Earthday, Exile Editions and Stelliform Press launched two eco-fiction books at one of Toronto’s oldest and established cultural/dining venues, Free Times Café, by Kensington Market. Both books were works of eco-fiction and climate fiction that focused on issues of environmental treatment and destruction. Both works focused on hope.
.
Top left: Free Times Cafe venue at night (photo by Nick Wons). Top right: Michael Callaghan of Exile Editions, Lynn Hutchinson Lee, Selena Middleton of Stelliform Press, Nina Munteanu. Bottom: Lynne Sargent reads from Portal.
.
Exile launched their anthology Through the Portal: Tales of a Hopeful Dystopia, edited by Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Nina Munteanu. It was their twentieth in a series; this one focused on hope in a climate-changing world that is progressively becoming more dystopic. Short stories and poems were read by authors.
.
Top left: Ursula Pflug reads from Portal. Top right: Michael Callaghan introduces the anthology. Bottom: Lynn Hutchinson Lee reads from her novel Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens.
.
Stelliform launched Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens a novel written by Lynn Hutchinson Lee, who read several excerpts of her novel.
Both works have received much praise.
.
.
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.
Art is the oar that guides us through dystopian rivers
Mary Woodbury, dragonfly.eco
.
Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopiathe ecofiction anthology edited by Lynn Hutchinson Lee and me and published December 2024 by Exile Editions, recently received another wonderful review from Mary Woodbury at dragonfly.eco. Here is an excerpt:
As the world teeters on disaster, what saves us ranges from graceful failure to full-fledged resistance and opposition. Through the Portal, an anthology of eco-fiction, offers 35 artful, provoking stories to propel us forward. The book serves to reconnect us with Nature in diverse storytelling, from cautionary tales to fiction that brims with hope while also helping us grieve what we’ve lost—described as solastalgia.
The anthology is a stunning collection of short stories and poetry that address our most existential concerns through metaphysical, epic, solarpunk, mythological, and contemporary perspectives. From landscape and weather transformations to stars, fairy tales, parking lots, mermaids, whales, storms, bees, and much more, the reader is treated to a journey of colorful narratives woven into a chronology: imagination, after the fall, and Earth hour.
Hopeful dystopias are so much more than an apparent oxymoron: they are in some fundamental way the spearhead of the future—and ironically often a celebration of human spirit by shining a light through the darkness of disaster. In Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia, award-winning authors of speculative fiction Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Nina Munteanu present a collection that explores strange new terrains and startling social constructs, quiet morphing landscapes, dark and terrifying warnings, lush newly told folk and fairy tales.—Exile Editions
.
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.
Lynda Williams, author of science fiction series The Okal Rel Saga and publisher of Reality Skimming Press has just pulled together a writers group in Prince George, B.C., for writers to connect with other writers and share feedback on fiction and nonfiction.
Meetings will start March 20 and continue every other Thursday following from 7-9 pm at the Live Well Prince George Society.
All levels of experience are welcome. There is a $2 donation per drop in or $10 annual membership.
“It is a novel to learn from, and it is a novel to take forward into life as inspirational guide. Each of us is called upon to examine, not only our relationship with water, but with all Earth gifts.”
Jane Buchan, author & educator
Vermont author Jane Buchan recently wrote a review of my 2020 eco-fiction novel A Diary in the Age of Water. Here is an excerpt:
As climate, social, and political crises escalate, one source of guidance becomes essential to our continued optimism and activism: a Numinous Story… A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu, is, for many of us alive in these terrifying times, a numinous story. It meanders through our consciousness with the enlightening science of fresh-water lakes and rivers and streams, sometimes heavy with sediment and toxicity, sometimes fast flowing and cleansing, sometimes terrifying with truths smacking us down with the force of a tidal bore. Its characters are story tellers and story receivers, and despite their diverse natures, all the stories they tell reveal the many threats to our source of life on Earth – our water.
Nina Munteanu’s novel structure is perfect for the weaving of human scientific and mystical relationships with water. It’s initial and final sections create a frame for the inner story of bitterness, despair, self-serving behaviours, and corporate rapaciousness described by a professional scientist, a limnologist named Lynna. In the outer story we meet Kyo and Nam, Kyo’s mentor, as well as Ho, a librarian and keeper of a remnant of rare books. These characters exist on the other side of a mysterious cataclysm, the causes of which are the novel’s key themes.
Kyo, a small, four-armed blue being whose story begins and ends the novel, introduces us to the characters who form the larger diary section framed by the opening Library section and final Seed Ship section. Kyo makes glancing references to Una, mother of Lynna, and Lynna, mother of Hilde. Only Lynna is fully realized through her own perceptions and thoughts, these expressed in diary entries beginning in the spring of 2045 and ending in the late fall of 2066. Her diary, taking up 250 pages of this 303-page novel, provides the chronological spine connecting our past and present to a possible future that is not the one most humans want to think about, let alone welcome.
A Diary in the Age of Water is best sipped and savoured rather than gulped. Gulping will lead to choking for most non-scientist readers, and this book deserves to be experienced as it is written, in slow, undulating, revelatory waves… Like all complex stories, A Diary in the Age of Water requires patience, something our video-oriented age does not foster. The richest stories ask that we learn to hold many apparently divergent story threads at once. One of my fears as I read the diary was that the darkness of greed and short-sighted thinking and feeling would win out over that wondrous mystical relationship with the world that Una carried. While Una does her best to pass the experience of the sacred on to Lynna, Una’s spiritual influence is eclipsed by Lynna’s oppressive dependence on scientific knowledge to the exclusion of all else.
Through these characters, Nina Munteanu offers a warning for our times. Science is vitally important to our understanding of natural systems but science best serves us when it is balanced with an experience of the responsiveness of the natural world, a responsiveness that evokes our reverence and respect. Every culture honours the spiritual nature of the greater-than-human world, encoding its reverence in mythology, folktales, and wisdom traditions. – all keepers of numinous stories that transform our relationships with one another and the world. When we live honouring the sacred nature of all life, we become partners and co-creators. When we do not, we are highly dangerous parasites…
Lynna is called to hold the science of water firmly in her mind as her heart slowly opens to water’s responsiveness, water’s intelligence, water’s generosity, water’s love. It is a huge transformation for her, because science has been her safe place, her refuge. But knowing how something works is only the first part of the journey for those of us alive on this watery planet; we must all experience the why – the joy of unbreakable interconnections that make our lives meaningful… It is not Una’s daughter, Lynna, who carries this numinosity forward. It is Hilde, Una’s granddaughter, whose name means, significantly, Warrior Woman. How Kyo fits in to this lineage is one of the novel’s most unique speculations, one best discovered by reading the entire novel.
This novel is rich with information about water’s evolutionary journeys; it also describes the horrors of human greed that directly impact our relationships with water. It is not an easy book, but it is an important one, especially for people ready to engage, to advocate, to stand against the corporate insanity currently destroying Earth’s delicate balances. It is a novel to learn from, and it is a novel to take forward into life as inspirational guide. Each of us is called upon to examine, not only our relationship with water, but with all Earth gifts.
Go to Jane’s site Winterblooms to read the full review, worth reading in its entirety for its rich and poetic narrative.
.
Jane Buchan is a writer currently living in Vermont and originally from southwest Ontario. Her books include Under the Moon, Kinder Sadist and her latest, The Buttes. She is also an emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) coach, Master Trainer and educator.
.
Jackson Creek flowing through ice formations (photo and rendition 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.
I recently participated in author readings from the eco-fiction anthology “Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia.” Co-editor Lynn Hutchinson Lee and I opened the session with some introductory remarks, followed by readings by four of the anthology writers: Annaliese Schultz, Jade Wallace, Isabella Mori, and Matt Freeman.
Co-editors Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Nina Munteanu introduce the anthology at the reading; authors and moderator pictured above
.
The readings generated a lot of discussion about the nature and role of eco-fiction and stories in general on how we view the world and how that, in turn, influences the choices we make in life. Below, I include a short story excerpt and audience reaction for each author who read.
Annaliese Schultz read from her story Water & Oil. “Bursting from months, maybe years, of inertia born of dismay (engendered by the unending disasters of the world), Zip is instantly galvanized and greater than himself and gone.” One audience member shared that her story “sounded horrifyingly too possible.”
Jade Wallace read from her story Pluck. “It was only after I started working at the florist a few months ago that I began to think of plants as things that move. I learned that algae may swim towards the light; sundew can catch insects in their stalks; the leaves of touch-me-nots will slouch when they feel rain.” A member of the audience shared that “with what we now know about the way trees/plants communicate with each other, it was a neat story of crossing over to try to tell humans something.”
.
Jade Wallace reads from her story “Pluck”
.
Isabella Mori read from her story Shift. “Red Nelly, that’s what they called my grandmother; always looked a little dishevelled. So did her living room. Four book shelves were squeezed into the small room, sagging with dark tomes, oversized coffee-table books, Greenpeace brochures, and video cassettes that even her questionable looking TV couldn’t play anymore.” Someone in the audience mentioned that the author had woven a very human story. “Stories are sometimes better teachers than all other forms available to us. I felt moments of warmness and reflection.” Another audience member added, “The wisdom of animals and plants—there’s hope for the planet. I’m ordering this book from my local independent as soon as I close his meeting!”
Matt Freeman read from his story Birdseed: “Near the end I began to devote the bulk of my time to what I believed to be a gregarious individual of the species Corvus brachyrhynchos—the American Crow. By then a chemical scythe had begun to carve up the clouds hanging over the lands of ‘Vancouver’ in a psychedelic frenzy, and the shocked blue skyline often bled in shades of lime.” One audience member shared, “I loved he way ‘birdish’ words kept appearing: perch, cage. This may be Matt’s first published story, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.” Another audience member shared, “I loved the connection with the wisdom and personification of your crow.”
.
Nina Munteanu commenting on one of the readings
.
The readings generated a lot of discussion about the nature and role of eco-fiction and stories in general on how we view the world and how that, in turn, influences the choices we make in life.
Audience members shared that they found the readings inspiring. One member shared, “I find stories and poems have a more transcendent or at least deeper connection when read aloud. I wasn’t sure what to expect. So glad to be a part of this reading. The book sounds amazing.” Another member shared, “Keep hope alive!”
For more about how this anthology came about go to my previous post on Through the Portal.
.
.
Hopeful dystopias are so much more than an apparent oxymoron: they are in some fundamental way the spearhead of the future – and ironically often a celebration of human spirit by shining a light through the darkness of disaster. In Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia, award-winning authors of speculative fiction Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Nina Munteanu present a collection that explores strange new terrains and startling social constructs, quiet morphing landscapes, dark and terrifying warnings, lush newly-told folk and fairy tales.–Exile Editions
“A stunning collection of short stories and poetry that address our most existential concerns.”
“Will ingenuity, love, and respect for the earth help us work through whatever changes might lie ahead? Through the Portal offers hope that these qualities, if not enough in and of themselves, will help us find our way.”
Farmer’s field at sunset, winter in Ontario (photo and rendition 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.
In his 2006 book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Write Stories, Christopher Booker tells us that there are seven types of plots in story. One is entitled “Overcoming the Monster,” an underdog story where the hero sets out to destroy an evil to restore safety to the land. It is a story I admire and never tire of. The evil force is typically much larger than the hero, who must find a way, often through great courage, strength, inventive cunning—and help from her community—to defeat the evil force. This is the story of David and Goliath, of Beowulf and Grendel, of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in Star Wars, of Jake Sully and Miles Quaritchs in Avatar—notice, all men who, for the most part, do their hero-ing alone. I may get to that later (in another post)…
The “Overcoming the Monster” plot, whether told literally or through metaphor, reflects an imbalance in the world—usually of power—that the hero must help right.
Enter the “Monster” DuPont…
DuPont Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia
The true story of DuPont’s decades-long evil maleficence reflects the great power imbalance of many large corporations and the evil they enact through willful deception and mischief to increase profit, their god.
This brings me to my heroic journey. For in some terrible way, the story of DuPont is also my story. One of power imbalance, of deception and ignorance. Their deception; my ignorance:
.
In 1954, the year I was born, during the ramp up for the Teflon rollout at DuPont’s Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, toxicologist R.A. Dickison noted possible toxicity of the surfactant C8 (PFOA or Perfluorooctanoic Acid) used to make Teflon. DuPont ignored the warning and proceeded to roll it out for mass use.
1950s DuPont ad for the Teflon “Happy Pan”
.
In 1961, while I was contending with recess bullies in grade two, DuPont rolled out their Teflon-coated “Happy Pan” with the full knowledge that C8 was a toxic endocrine disruptor and caused cancer. DuPont’s chief toxicologist Dorothy Hood cautioned executives in a memo that the substance was toxic and should be “handled with extreme care.” She explained that a new study had found enlarged livers in rats and rabbits exposed to C8, confirming that the chemical was toxic. It didn’t stop the roll out.
In 1962, while I was exploring my artistic talents at school,DuPont scientists conducted tests on humans, asking a group of volunteers to smoke cigarettes laced with C8. Nine out of ten people in the highest-dosed group were noticeably ill for an average of nine hours with flu-like symptoms that included chills, backache, fever, and coughing. Further experiments by DuPont linked C8 exposure to the enlargement of rats’ testes, adrenal glands, and kidneys.
In 1964, I was ten years old and struggling with my Grade 5 teacher who was trying to curb my unique self-expression. I was already aware of environmental imbalance and destruction in the world. My pet peeve was littering because it demonstrated great disrespect for others and the environment. I told environmental stories. That year DuPont had already begun its great deception; having confirmed the toxicity of C8, they simply watched (and recorded) as this cancer-causing endocrine disruptor injured, maimed and killed their own workers. The company did nothing to prevent it and they told no one.
In 1965, I was in the process of figuring out my heroic self and my unique gift to the world in Grade seven: was it in fine arts and advertising? Writing and storytelling? Environmentalism and law? Internal DuPont memos revealed that preliminary studies showed even low doses of a related surfactant to Teflon could increase the size of rats’ livers, a classic response to poison.
In the mid- to late-60s, I became an environmental activist, putting up posters and writing in the school paper. I wrote letters to industry and politicians, trying to incite interest in being good corporate citizens and promoting global environmental action. I remember a well-meaning teacher chiding me for my extravagant worldview. “Stick to little things and your community—like recycling,” he suggested patronizingly. I remember the shock of realizing that not everyone felt the planet like I did. Perhaps it was a teenage-thing, or a girl-thing, or a nina-thing. I prayed it wasn’t just a nina-thing…
I started writing stories in high school. Mostly eco-fiction, though I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. There was no genre called eco-fiction back then. It all went under the umbrella of scifi.
In 1969, at fifteen, I wrote my first dystopia, Caged in World. The eco-novel was about a subway train driver and a data analyst caught in the trap of a huge lie. The story later morphed into Escape from Utopia. Several drafts and years later the novel became the eco-medical thriller Angel of Chaos, published in 2010. The story is set in 2095 as humanity struggles with Darwin’s Disease—a mysterious neurological environmental pandemic assaulting Icaria 5, an enclosed city within the slowly recovering toxic wasteland of North America. The city is run by deep ecologists who call themselves Gaians, and consider themselves guardians of the planet. The Gaians’ secret is that they are keeping humanity “inside” not to protect humanity from a toxic wasteland but to protect the environment from a toxic humanity.
Lawyer Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) investigates leachate-infected cows from nearby DuPont landfill (photo from film “Dark Waters”)
.
In the early 1970s, I entered university and contemplated becoming an environmental lawyer; I wrote short stories, mostly eco-fiction, and joined marches protesting environmental destruction by large corporations. DuPont confirmed that C8 not only persisted in the environment; it bioaccumulated in animals. In 1979, when I graduated with a Master of Science degree in limnology/ecology, DuPont circulated an internal memo in which humans exposed to C8 were referred to as “receptors,” describing how scientists found “significantly higher incidence of allergic, endocrine and metabolic disorders” as well as “excess risk of developing liver disease.” DuPont kept this knowledge to themselves and withheld it from EPA.
In the late 1970s early ‘80s, while I was addressing local environmental issues as a practicing limnological consultant, DuPont was dumping 7,100 tons of PFOA-laced sludge into unlined ‘‘digestion ponds’’: open, unlined pits on the Washington Works property, from which the chemical could seep straight into the ground. PFOA entered the local water table, which supplied drinking water to the communities of Parkersburg, Vienna, Little Hocking and Lubeck — more than 100,000 people.
Effects of PFOA (birth defect in Bucky Bailey whose mother was on the Teflon line without protection during her first trimester; blackening teeth from the excessive fluoride, from scene in “Dark Waters”)
.
In 1981, when I got my first job as a limnologist and environmental consultant in Vancouver, DuPont confirmed that C8 caused birth defects in its own workers—and did not warn its workers. A DuPont pathologist confirmed that the observed fetal eye defects were due to C8. With that confirmation the pregnancy study was quietly abandoned and a decision made not to inform EPA. Less than a year later DuPont created false data for EPA then moved women of childbearing age back into areas with C8 exposure. Many in the company coined the term “Teflon flu” to describe the ill-effects of working close to the compound. By 1982, DuPont had confirmed the high toxicity of C8/PFOA in humans.
In 1984, a year after I formed my own consulting company Limnology Services in Vancouver, DuPont staffers secretly tested their community’s drinking water and found it to contain alarming levels of C8. Deciding that any cleanup was likely to cost too much and tarnish their reputation, DuPont chose to do nothing. In fact, they scaled up their use of C8 in Teflon products and bought land to dump their toxic sludge in unlined landfills. Deaths in DuPont workers from leukemia and kidney cancer climbed.
In 1989, at 35 years old, and still blissfully unaware of DuPont’s nefarious activities, I continued consulting for my own company Limnology Services, addressing mostly local environment issues with communities and local governments. By that year, DuPont employees found an elevated number of leukemia deaths at the West Virginia plant, followed by an inordinately high number of kidney cancers among male workers. Earl Tennant, whose farm was close to the DuPont landfill at Dry Run creek, sent videos of foamy water and diseased cows to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection; state regulators documented “numerous deficiencies in the landfill operation and erosion gullies that funnelled waste into Dry Run creek; DuPont made a deal with the department: the company paid a $250,000 fine and the department took no further action against the landfill. (The official who negotiated the deal later became a DuPont consultant.)
Throughout the 90s, I started teaching college biology and university environmental education courses in Vancouver. The magazine Shared Vision Magazine published my first article “Environmental Citizenship” in 1995. Meantime, DuPont’s Washington Works plant pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds of PFOA sludge, powder and vapor through stacks into the atmosphere and outfall pipes into the Ohio River.
In 1996, I was consulting for local industry and municipalities. By then, C8 was in the drinking water of Parkersburg and other communities. Despite what they knew of C8’s toxicity, DuPont kept it a secret (no one else was testing for PFOA because it was unregulated).
Farmer Tennant and lawyer Rob Billot encounter a leachate-infected mad cow in the 2019 film “Dark Waters”
.
In 1999, still serving as environmental consultant to mining and pulp mill companies, I still knew nothing about DuPont’s duplicitous environmental atrocities. 3M—troubled by its studies on C8 with monkeys—notified EPA and phased out PFOS and PFOA; DuPont started producing its own PFOA. On behalf of Earl Tennant whose cattle were dying adjacent to DuPont’s landfill site, lawyer Rob Bilott filed a small suit against DuPont to gain legal discovery and starting the decade-long process of finally unravelling the buried truth of their insidious criminality–over thirty years after DuPont knew and did nothing.
In 2003, I continued consulting as an environmental scientist in ignorance of DuPont’s misdealings, though by now much had come out in the press. By that year, DuPont had knowingly dispersed almost 2.5 million pounds of harmful C8 from its Washington Works plant into the air and water of the mid-Ohio River Valley area.
DuPont’s Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia
.
In 2004, DuPont agreed to settle the class-action suit filed by lawyer Rob Bilott. Under the terms of the settlement, the company was not obliged to pull C8 from the market. The best the EPA could negotiate was a voluntary phase-out by 2015. That same year There It Is reported on how DuPont denied poisoning consumers with Teflon products. The dangers and spread of PFOA and other forever chemicals appeared more and more in the scientific literature (see the reference list below, which is by no means exhaustive).
In 2007, Darwin’s Paradox, my eco-fiction novel about an environmental pandemic, was published by Dragon Moon Press in Calgary, Alberta. Four years earlier, the law had finally caught up to DuPont, but not before they had dispersed 2.5 million pounds of harmful C8 from their Washington Works plant into the air and water of the mid-Ohio River Valley area. It would be another twelve years before DuPont would stop making C8 (in 2015) and another four years after that when C8 would be banned from use globally (2019). PFOA is still unregulated by EPA; the best they can do is issue a non-enforceable health advisory set at 70 parts per trillion.
In 2012, shortly after I moved to Nova Scotia to write for a living (having quit environmental consulting due to disillusionment with integrity of companies I worked for), the C8 Science Panel, tasked to study the possible health effects of PFOA in a highly exposed population in the mid-Ohio Valley, determined a probable link between C8 exposure and six disease categories: kidney cancer, testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, preeclampsia, and high cholesterol.
In 2015, two years after I began teaching writing at the University of Toronto, DuPont began a series of complex transactions that transferred its responsibility for environmental obligations and liabilities associated with PFAS (C8) onto other entities such as Chemours, Corteva, and NewDupont. A year later New York Times Magazineran a story “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” and Sharon Lerner of The Intercept ran an in-depth series on DuPont’s duplicitous criminality: “The Teflon Toxin: DuPont and the Chemistry of Deception.”
In 2017, DuPont and its spinoff company Chemours agreed to settle a lawsuit with roughly 3,500 people living near the Parkersburg plant in both West Virginia and Ohio and many ailing from toxicity-related problems. The company agreed to pay $671 million. That’s one day’s sales in a $27 billion annual profit stream. The Fayetteville Observer reported that this “Discontinued chemical [was] still in well water” after DuPont agreed in 2009 to stop using C8. They noted that the company was facing a class action lawsuit from thousands of people in Ohio and West Virginia for discharging the toxic chemical into the Ohio River since the 1950s.
In 2019—sixty-seven years after DuPont knew PFOA was toxic and did nothing—this forever chemical was finally banned globally under the Stockholm Convention. Unfortunately, by 2019, PFOA was already literally everywhere on the planet in concentrations considered unsafe. Given its high water-solubility, long-range transport potential, and lack of degradation in the environment, PFOA persists in groundwater and is ubiquitously present in oceans and other surface water around the globe. It is found in remote areas of the Arctic and Antarctic (where it was not used or manufactured), no doubt transported there through ocean currents and in the air, bound on particles. NBC Newsran a news piece about ‘forever chemicals’ contaminating drinking water near military bases. The Guardian ran a news article: “Companies deny responsibility for toxic ‘forever chemicals.’” In Maine, The Portland Press Herald ran a story: “Households are awash in ‘forever chemicals’.”
In 2020, NBC News revealed that DuPont was still avoiding its responsibility to clean up its C8 mess and compensate those harmed by DuPont’s negligence.
In 2022, I finally learned about DuPont’s decades-long environmental dispersal of toxic PFOA (C8) and their criminal deception throughout this life time. I’d lived through DuPont’s entire six decades of deception in ignorance.
Poster for the 2019 film “Dark Waters” on DuPont’s criminal activities and the lawyer who exposed them
.
In 2022, three years after its release, I chanced upon “Dark Waters,” the 2019 film starring Mark Ruffalo who plays lawyer Robert Bilott, the man who took DuPont to court in 2002. I found out seven years after DuPont was forced to stop using PFOA and a lifetime after they started their egregious pollution and deception in the 1950s. For over six decades, from when I was born to well into my sixties, DuPont executives chose to:
Below are the faces of the DuPont men and women who sanctioned–encouraged–the willful harm of other life. Despite knowing the danger posed by exposure to PFOAs to people, these DuPont CEOs chose to: 1) continue to poison the environment and people, 2) cover up their actions from authorities, and 3) fight the courts and regulators from doing the right thing when they were caught. No one went to jail. No one was fired. They just paid $$$ and shamefully kept going. These people are criminals.
DuPont CEOs from 1950-2019 who sanctioned release of PFOA into the environment then covered it up: Crawford H. Greenewalt, Lammot Copeland, Charles B. McCoy, Edward G. Jefferson, Richard E. Heckert, Edgar S. Woolard, John A. Krol, Charles O. Holliday Jr., Ellen Kullman, Edward D. Breen
.
It’s not over either; DuPont currently uses other PFAS compounds that are unregulated but whose toxicity is being found to be as potent. And, of course, these other ‘forever chemicals’ are finding themselves everywhere. I was ignorant of all this the whole time. Meantime, I am drinking DuPont’s forever chemicals, I am eating DuPont’s forever chemicals, and I am feeling DuPont’s forever chemicals falling on my face in the rain.
My hard lesson: Ignorance breeds complacency and hubris; both will lead to downfall.
To return to the “Overcoming the Monster” story plot and the monster archetype, I’m convinced that it isn’t the Darth Vaders or Miles Quaritchs we must overcome. Yes, they are monsters, but they serve a greater monster. For Vader it was Emperor Palpatine and for Quaritch it was the executives of the RDA Corporation. While Vader and Quaritch may be the face of evil, true evil lurks behind them, orchestrating, in the shadows. It is an evil we must fight internally, because each of us carries that potential evil inside us—in the urge to cheat on our taxes; in looking for the free ride (there are no free rides); in coveting what others have when what we have is enough; in embracing self-deception through unsubstantiated narratives and confabulation; and in choosing to remain ignorant to suit a short-sighted and self-serving agenda. I’m guilty too.
I hope some aspects of the hero that live in me, as with everyone, are helping to overcome the monster by writing about it in articles I share here and elsewhere and by presenting a different narrative—one of resistance and hope—through my fiction.
In a post on The Meaning of Water, I list which CEO was on watch and responsible for each criminal atrocity enacted. The post also goes into more detail on the six decade history of DuPont’s criminal atrocities and great deception. For more detail on each decade of atrocity and deception, check out my posts by decade: 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. What follows into the present day is perhaps even more atrocious, given that all is supposedly out in the open. This predatory company continues to bribe officials, lie and deny, threaten the weak, and so much more.
p.s. To understand the nature of industrial duplicity of large corporations such as DuPont, I highly recommend reading the 2023 study by Nadia Gaber and colleagues in the Annals of Global Health. The authors evaluated previously secret industry documents on PFAS to understand the significant delayed disclosure of harm posed by PFAS: from its production in the 1940s, to suggestions of toxicity in the 1950s, to irrefutable knowledge of PFAS toxicity in the 1960s, and–due to lack of transparency and suppression of scientific findings–public knowledge of this only arising in the late 1990s (mainly because of legal suits and discovery).
.
References:
Ahrens L. 2011. “Polyfluoroalkyl compounds in the aquatic environment: a review of their occurrence and fate.” J Environ Monit 13: 20–31. 10.1039/c0em00373e
Barton CA, Butler LE, Zarzecki CJ, Laherty JM. 2006. “Characterizing perfluorooctanoate in ambient air near the fence line of a manufacturing facility: comparing modeled and monitored values.” J Air Waste Manage Assoc 56: 48–55. 10.1080/10473289.2006.10464429
Barton CA, Kaiser MA, Russell MH. 2007. “Partitioning and removal of perfluorooctanoate during rain events: the importance of physical-chemical properties.” J Environ Monit 9: 839–846. 10.1039/b703510a
Busch J, Ahrens L, Xie Z, Sturm R, Ebinghaus R. 2010. “Polyfluoroalkyl compounds in the East Greenland Arctic Ocean.” J Environ Monit 12: 1242–1246. 10.1039/c002242j
Gaber, Nadia, Lisa Bero, and Tracey J. Woodruff. 2023. “The Devil they Knew: Chemical Documents Analysis of Industry Influenc on PFAS Science.” Ann Glob Health 89(1): 37.
McMurdo CJ, Ellis DA, Webster E, Butler J, Christensen RD, Reid LK. 2008. “Aerosol enrichment of the surfactant PFO and mediation of the water-air transport of gaseous PFOA.” Environ Sci Technol 42: 3969–3974. 10.1021/es7032026
Paustenbach, Dennis, Julie Panko, Paul K. Scott, and Kenneth M. Unice. 2007. “A Methodology for Estimating Human Exposure to Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA): A Retrospective Exposure Assessment of a Community (1951-2003)” Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health
Prevedouros K, Cousins IT, Buck RC, Korzeniowski SH. 2006. “Sources, fate and transport of perfluorocarboxylates” Environ Sci Technol 40: 32–44. 10.1021/es0512475
Velez, M.P., T.E. Arbuckle, W.D. Fraser. 2015. “Maternal exposure to perfluorinated chemicals and reduced fecundity: the MIREC study.” Human Reproduction 30(3): 701-9.
Vierke, Lena, Claudia Staude, Annegret Biegel-Engler, Wiebke Drost, and Christoph Schulte. 2012. “Perflurorooctanoic acid (PFOA)–main concerns and regulatory developments in Europe from an environmental point of view.” Environmental Sciences Europe 24: 16
Yamashita N, Kannan K, Taniyasu S, Horii Y, Petrick G, Gamo T. 2005. “A global survey of perfluorinated acids in oceans.” Mar Pollut Bull 51: 658–668. 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2005.04.026
.
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 