INTRODUCTION

Summer nights in Kansas used to be so alive with the sounds of insects and animals that, if you wanted to tell a story, you had to shout to be heard. The trees vibrated with the droning of locusts; the weeds shook with crickets. Frogs bellowed up and down the creeks. The Brady family spent most summer evenings in the backyard, where we sat on torn folding chairs beneath a flickering porchlight, hollering at one another to be heard over the night’s wild buzzing.

The kids, myself included, would chase fireflies. In those days, the darkness out in rural Kansas was still complete, an inky black pierced only by the porchlight and the blinking bugs and the headlights of the occasional car that zoomed down the distant I-70. In all that darkness, the fireflies were a cloud of light. When they swerved so did I, an open glass jar held tightly in one hand, a metal lid with three tiny holes in the other. Once, I tripped on a twig and went crashing down into the grass. Knees burning, I rolled over and stared up at the night sky, the fireflies and stars so thoroughly blended that I couldn’t tell when a stream of light was a bug or a shooting star. It never occurred to me that nights like those wouldn’t always be possible.

These days, summers in Kansas have changed. Thermometer readings now regularly reach the upper nineties. Corn and milo crops are suffering, and some people without air-conditioning are routinely hospitalized with heat stroke.

Now a New Yorker, I recently visited my family back in Kansas. The old house has been sold, but my father still lives in Topeka. The silence of the animals and insects on this trip was unsettling. Owing to the development of more grocery stores and restaurants, the darkness was gone as well. Here was a landscape so familiar I could draw a map from memory, and yet it felt strange to me.

That peculiar feeling has become recognizable to many people around the world. In 2022, we are witnesses to one of the most transformative moments in human history: a time when climate change is altering life on Earth at an unprecedented rate, but also a time when the majority of us can still remember when things were more stable. We are among the first—and perhaps one of the last—human populations to have memories of what life was like before. To us, the “new normal” is not yet how it’s always been. Our lives jostle against incongruous memories of familiar places. We are forced to confront, in strange and sometimes painful ways, how much those places have changed.

When we think of environmental crises our minds might go first to extreme weather events, like Superstorm Sandy, whose size and scale were amplified by climate change. At approximately 8:00 p.m. on October 29, 2012, Sandy struck Atlantic City, New Jersey. That night, a full moon hung in the turbulent sky, pulling the ocean tides a full 20 percent higher than normal and increasing Sandy’s storm surge. Seawater rose along the Eastern Seaboard toward New York City and then poured into Manhattan, flooding subways and sidewalks. More than six hundred thousand people lost power throughout the five boroughs; many would be without electricity for more than a week. The years since Sandy have seen an escalating series of even larger events. In 2020, there were so many tropical storms that the World Meteorological Organization nearly ran out of names for them.

But the connections between humans and the natural world go beyond extreme weather events. As the Earth warms, other devastating phenomena continue to thrash the planet: invasive species migrate to cooler climates, choking off local wildlife and creating potentially threatening moments of contact between animals and humans. Wildfire “seasons” are now year-round. Low-lying nations threatened by sea-level rise, like the Marshall Islands, are being forced to consider a terrifying, almost inconceivable choice: relocate the entire population or elevate the land. For the Marshallese, the latter would involve raising 1,200 islands scattered across 750,000 square miles of ocean. Early in 2020—and partway through compiling this anthology—the COVID-19 pandemic encircled the world, altering our lives in ways that are by now familiar. The catastrophic novel coronavirus was borne out of humanity’s complex and unsustainable relationship with wildlife. The way things are headed, this pandemic likely won’t be the last.

To use a metaphor that has grown uncanny, these visible effects of global warming are just the tip of the iceberg. In the public conversation about climate change, macro change tends to take center stage, and for good reason: it impacts the lives of millions and serves as an increasingly urgent reminder of the need for decisive action. But less told among the literature of climate change are the stories of individuals—how they’re coping (or not) with the changes occurring in their own lives. That’s the scale that The World as We Knew It seeks to highlight—not by turning away from global events, but by emphasizing the links between the individual, the collective, and the environmental. Sometimes the connections between the personal and the planetary can be hard to see, but once we start looking, we notice that they’re everywhere.

“At a time when our planet is experiencing terrifying and unprecedented levels of change, what corresponding transformations have you witnessed in your own lives, yards, neighborhoods, jobs, relationships, or mental health?” That’s the question that Tajja Isen and I asked our contributors to this anthology. We wanted to hear their personal stories, allow them to serve as witnesses of this increasingly complex moment in history. We encouraged them to take the theme in any direction they desired, and indeed, they did.

Some of the pieces were written and edited before the appearance of COVID-19 and reflect a world that hadn’t yet been altered by it. For other pieces, the pandemic erupted partway through the editorial process, requiring editors and contributors alike to consider new approaches to storytelling that could account for yet another kind of global upheaval. Others still were assigned after our world had irrevocably changed, and were drafted and revised through civil unrest, a harrowing election, insurrection, police violence—an absurd number of converging crises that demanded our attention and commitment. Out of those various disruptions, though, The World as We Knew It has become a kind of living document—a record of things as they were, a testament to living and writing through tragedy, and an exercise in envisioning the life that might await us on the other side. The events of the past few years have forced us to consider an entirely new set of connections between the individual and the global. We’re grateful to our contributors for persevering with this project alongside us.

The works collected in The World as We Knew It reflect these various states and times as they explore the relationships between humanity and our environments. Emily Raboteau’s essay, “How Do You Live with Displacement?,” is a polyvocal record of the first three months of 2020, charting the dual threats of climate change and the novel coronavirus. Raboteau chronicles the voices of her community when New York City was the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, shedding light on the virus’s disproportionate impacts on Black and brown people—a form of inequality replicated by the effects of climate change. Porochista Khakpour’s “Season of Sickness” traces the connections between an ailing climate and human diseases, especially the ways that the former can aggravate the latter. As Khakpour struggles with her own Lyme disease, trying to find a home that doesn’t worsen her condition, the pandemic casts its first shadow in the United States. Meera Subramanian’s essay, “Leap,” set primarily on Cape Cod, focuses on a similar intersection of climate change and sickness through the figure of the tick. Subramanian poignantly illustrates how a growing awareness of the natural world’s dangers can alter our once-idyllic relationship with it.

Other writers figure their relationship to the planet through lenses like nuclear testing, anti-Black racism, and international travel. Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s “A Brief History of Breathing” takes place in Bangkok, Saudi Arabia, and New York City in the immediate aftermath of 9/11—a haunting triptych of air pollution. In “Walking on Water,” Rachel Riederer brings to life a debate between two indigenous leaders in Uganda over how best to move ancestral spirits living at the construction site of a new dam. The essay drives home how colonial development alters more than just ecosystems—it destroys the homes and histories of indigenous people. Lidia Yuknavitch’s “Unearthing” offers a chilling account of the Hanford Site in Washington State, a longtime site of violence done to the land—and its generations of inhabitants—by nuclear production, weaving its histories of destructive experimentation with vignettes of childhood life. In “Iowa Bestiary,” Melissa Febos charts her changing relationship to her new home through interactions with its wild inhabitants. Taking us to the Arizona desert, Lydia Millet elegizes the plants and animals of Saguaro National Park, describing the bittersweet sense of loss that accompanies putting down roots in the midst of a declining ecosystem. Mary Annaïse Heglar points out that Hurricane Katrina eerily coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder. She goes on to describe how Katrina shaped her understanding of the connections between environmentalism and racism in the United States.

In other essays, contributors explore how their personal histories continue to shape their contemporary understanding of climate change. Lacy M. Johnson’s incantatory “Come Hell” finds surprising links between childhood memories of church, floods, and coal mining. Remembering her family home in Dominica, Gabrielle Bellot ponders the arrival of an invasive fish species before considering the tiny animal’s planet-sized connection to Hurricane Maria. The novelist Omar El Akkad writes about how the Persian Gulf—his childhood home—is no longer recognizable to him, and how, as a writer, the obliteration of his home means he’s also losing the wellspring of his art. Tracy O’Neill remembers fondly a childhood spent in New Hampshire, only to wonder now whether bringing a child of her own into the world makes moral sense. Nickolas Butler likewise considers the impact of climate change on young people. Thinking of lessons he learned from his disaster-prepper father, he wonders what to impart to his own children to prepare them for a climate-changed future.

Wonder is another recurring theme in this collection. In “Signs and Wonders,” the Australian writer Delia Falconer compares life in an age of climate change to that of ancient Rome, when priests would look to wild animals and the weather for clues about what the future might bring. Alexandra Kleeman writes about falling in love with a most surprising sight—an apple tree on a slip of green near her newly purchased home on Staten Island—only to learn of its planned removal to make way for a new shoreline development. In “Cougar,” Terese Svoboda is motivated by the alarming sight of a wildcat on a highway to learn more about how climate change has reshaped the bounds of the animal’s territory. What she learns forces her to consider how an altered world might also shape the future of her family. In “Moments of Being,” Kim Stanley Robinson writes about three camping trips he took with friends in the Sierra Nevada, during which he experienced firsthand the awesome power of extreme weather—weather rarely seen in that range before our climate went haywire. Pondering the wondrous sight of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, Elizabeth Rush reminds us that women weren’t welcome during the continent’s first two hundred years of exploration. Only now, at a time when the continent is hemorrhaging ice, are women allowed to visit what’s left.

Taken together, the essays in The World as We Knew It create a timely, haunting mosaic of life in the age of climate change. They also emphasize that the most astonishing transformations happening on our planet are the result of our own actions. Scientists have known about human-driven climate change since the late nineteenth century, and politicians have been aware of it since at least the 1970s. But despite these warnings, neither governments nor large corporations have taken aggressive action. Whether we act more responsibly in the future remains to be seen, but for now, the changes continue. By turning their focus inward, our contributors reveal the psychological impacts of climate change, an emphasis that Tajja and I hope will encourage a humble and humane dialogue; one that inspires reflection on the changes one can make at the level of a life. Given the scale of our present situation, we understand that individual experiences like the ones described here aren’t the most intuitive ways to think about climate change. But we believe they are among the most powerful.

Amy Brady and Tajja Isen

Co-editors

2022