What is late-staged, middle-aged, white male environmental activism but ending up in a ridiculous shouting match about native plants? That’s how it worked out for me, at least. But long before I found myself screaming, “What if this were your front yard?!” at a guy operating heavy machinery, I was just a writer forging a path into the environmental movement—by way of the popularity of a novel I wrote with the cheery title of Annihilation.
Annihilation of what? Of a certain sense of self? So a different self can emerge? Wandering college campuses in the aftermath of that novel in 2014, flooded with invitations to speak on climate change, I realized I knew fuck all about the subject from a drilled-down, personal angle. For years, I’d contributed to causes. And yes, I’d hiked through the wilderness to report back on the particular tilt of a bobcat’s head taking in a backdrop of blue teal ducks rising from a lake. Who cares? But then I wrote a book that made people come up to me and say it’s why they entered environmental science or became a biologist. Annihilation also spawned a thousand takes on topics ranging from “global weirding” to the permeability of organisms to plastic. Every possible ecological metaphor, washing up like sea wrack.
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