It is a universally respected truth that a mama bear may rip you apart if you step between her and her cubs. This folio takes the climate crisis as its theme, filtered through the lens of motherhood. Anger unifies and underscores these diverse offerings by writers from nations around the world, including Afghanistan, the Dominican Republic, Pakistan, and the United States. The reason for the anger in these pages is obvious. Between us and our cubs is climate change. Not just between us but all around us, and in us too. The climate crisis poses clear and present danger to our children’s health and future prospects, no matter where we live. Our children, whom we are hardwired by biology and conditioned by cultural norms to love and protect, are suffering and will suffer. From air pollution. From hunger. From displacement. From despoilment. From fires. From smoke. From storms. From war.
I am struck, reading these works as a whole, by the many gradations, forms, and consequences of maternal anger under the dire circumstances of the Great Acceleration—from the fatigue expressed by Aliyeh Ataei at routine school closures in Tehran owing to the smog that causes her son’s asthma, to the basic inadequacy felt by the protagonist of Laura Picklesimer’s sci-fi short story, to the listlessness described in Erika Meitner’s poem “Gnostic Spring, or That New York Times Article on Languishing,” to the rage expressed by Anya Kamenetz after a brutal regimen of in vitro fertilization in the Anthropocene: “Now I have to mother through a mass extinction.”
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