The World As She Knew It

Thanks for being a paid member and making The Planet You Save newsletter happen each week. This month’s members reading club selection is a short essay by climate activist Mary Annaise Heglar in the collection The World As We Knew It.

Edited by Tajja Isen and Amy Brady, The World as We Knew it: Dispatches from a Changing Climate is a collection of essays considering climate change’s impact on our natural world, especially the writers’ lived experience of it. This is not about global temperature mean or wildfire probabilities, but the odd temperatures and dangerous storms that these writers’ experience; noticing how trees in their neighborhood bloom differently, and how their local produce is changing.

Heglar, a writer and one-half of the recently-ended Hot Take podcast, is especially focused on how global warming’s impacts fall unevenly on to Black and brown Americans and how climate action often follows the same trend. In the essay, you’ll see how a very personal story set her down this path.