On the stories that consume us (and the earth)
Earth day musings, writing updates, some art for your soul
I kept my Berenstain Bears books, among others, into adulthood. I figured when I had children, I would want to share the stories that shaped me with them. When I reread them years later with fresh eyes, I was surprised at how many of them felt ... wrong. The first book in the series has Mama and Papa Bear preparing Brother for a move. The family needs a larger garden because Sister is on the way. And also Papa Bear has chopped down all the big trees near their house; he needs to move to where there are more trees to chop down to make more furniture.
There are good messages in the book about adjusting to change, for sure. But the message I’m thinking about today is the background message about the forest and Papa Bear’s work. One sentence at the beginning plunked down without examination or thought: I used up all the resources here, time to move on.
There are other criticisms you could make of children’s books from that era, but since it’s Earth Day I’m thinking about the consumption, the earth and us. All of the stories I grew up on treated the earth as an endless resource - we can take as much timber, water, fish, gold, etc. as we can mechanically extract. The mechanical costs for extracting these resources are solely how much gas we need to run the machines, how many people hours it takes to run those machines. But these costs are short-term. The long-term costs are almost never counted.
There is no line-item on water bills in Southwest to measure the impact and ground sinking as our water use shrinks the underground aquifers. There is no line-item on your gas bill to reflect the pollution someone else inhales. Right now, business leaders are tripping over themselves to build AI data centers. As communities have objected to data center projects driving up their utility bills, companies have pivoted to plans for generating their own power by burning natural gas.
You could say that no energy source is free - there’s always a downside. This is true but deceptively framed, of course we need reliable energy. But how is that energy used and who benefits? In many cases, shareholders distant from the communities harmed reap the benefits. We accept this arrangement as normal and natural. For those of use with more privilege, the downsides are forgettable. Our communities aren’t used to store nuclear waste. Coal burning power plants aren’t built upwind of our schools.
I don’t mean this to be doom-and-gloom. We have agency here. Collectively, individually, an awareness of what our consumption costs will lead us to better decisions. I’m thinking of Naomi Alderman’s novel Future here, a book that felt gritty and hopeful all at the same time. Somehow it’s comforting to know the battles we’re fighting now aren’t unique to our time. We can use the wisdom of others to choose our next steps. We can improve on that wisdom for the people that come after us.
Okay. Writing updates! Umm, some more planning for the next novel has been done. Not much more has been written. I’ll get there, I promise. Unrelated, I’m thinking about putting out the ‘Blessed by the Algorirthm’ collection as a book. I have a couple more stories I’d like to add, but everything else is already edited. (Blessed by the Algorithm is where this newsletter started, btw.)
The illustrator that made the cover art for Liar, Cheater, Sinner, Saint is doing an art-themed roadtrip where he makes one character a day, inspired by something from the day’s travels. I’m inspired by this art, maybe you will be? Also, I will recommend (again) KathleenIllustrated’s YouTube videos as a good destresser. Yep, I’m declaring destresser is a word. I’m an English major, I can do that.
Links below.
p.s. If you’d like to get more frequent updates, you can find me on Bluesky, Instagram, or Mastodon. And, of course, all book details are at https://www.megancarney.com
Kathleen Illustrated - YouTube
we thrift, we craft, we stink. https://www.instagram.com/kathleenillustrated/
