May Reading; “We are the Asteroid; We are Bruce Willis”

This month’s reading was born of an unexpected chance to jump in with some other great Philly artists at the FringeArts/Obvious Agency Scratch Night which happened early this week. If you’re unfamiliar with one or both of those organizations, FringeArts is galactic in size on the Philly scale, and Obvious Agency has an incredibly ambitious and awesomely inter-planetary new piece called Space Opera that will be making its debut this June; if you like role playing games, this is your chance to play at a scale you never before imagined, in a story that (true to this month’s theme) challenges players to work as communities and collectively address massive impending catastrophe. I highly recommend checking it out!

Falling into the chance to playtest, I opted to finally put some water through the pipes of a project I’ve been toying with for a long time: “Funeral Parlor for a Species (working title) tackles the terrifying possibility of extinction by taking a page from end of life care and applying it on a grander scale. The Center for End of Species Care (CESC) invites you to join a focus group to consider the history of species becoming history, and to look at species currently at risk and image: what would a considered end be for an entire kind of entity?” This is actually the first of two new pieces I’m playing with this year (because I have peace, apparently), and while I wasn’t expecting it to be the first that patrons would get a chance to explore, folks at the “Get Hands On” tier and above can expect to see me putting together a few Zoom playtests in the coming months as I continue to tool with it. 

But for now, here’s some of the reading I absolutely chugged in early May to get my brain ready for this thing.*  

The Sixth Extinction; an Unnatural History

Elizabeth Kolbert 

This is one of those books that has loomed in my awareness for literal years, and so it was particularly good fortune that when I finally actually cracked into it it had perhaps the perfect format to help me speedrun the draft 1.0 of this piece. A story told in 13 species and their extinctions, I was impressed at how Kolbert managed to weave through the narrative of how drastically (and recently) our conception of extinction has evolved. Like all climate science, and perhaps pop-science especially, brace yourself for the moment the stats drop and you check contemporary sources to find much worse news.

Related Readings

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

by Peter Brannen

I’ve recommended this a few time, but if you’re reading volume 6 above, Brannen remains my favorite source for volumes 1-5 of the tale of mass extinction, and his description of the KT impact is one for the ages (Patreon Telelibrary callers, you can request “Asteroid impact” if you want to experience it).

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Helps You Find Your Climate Superpower

How to Save a Planet

Again, I believe I’ve shared this before, but to counterbalance all that catastrophe, it’s useful to have a bit of hope. I myself have been making a conscious effort these past two months to microdose against despair with little actions, and however dated, I think Dr. Elizabeth Johnson’s breakdown has a really powerful clarity and ease to it that I feel can be applied to many issues one might face. What do you care about, what are you good at, and what’s the overlap? It’s a simple formula, but perhaps its most powerful attribute is that it points you towards doing something within reach.

*I’d say “Funeral Parlor for a Species” rivals IF WE WIN in the ways it needs to become a temporary pseudo-topic expert on a complicated field of ever changing science. Fortunately, my day job is pretending to be an AI assimilating information…